Ultra Deep (3 page)

His jowls wiggled comically when he spoke.

TIME TO LAUNCH: 00:03:51.

On the main floor of the launch control center, the overhead lights had been fully dimmed. Still, with the diffused light from monitors, digital readouts, and LED indicators, the center was bright enough. Every console was manned, and from his view from the rear, Oberstev was aware of the tension in each set of shoulders. It was the same with every launch, though launches had become so much a routine. If there were an added zest to the electrical aspect of the environment, Oberstev thought it resulted from the fact that this was not quite a normal launch. The additional mass of the pay-load and the presence of the twin boosters on the A2e made a palpable difference.

He himself had to consciously revolve his shoulders to ease the tightening muscles. He found himself taking a deep breath from time to time.

He concentrated on details to pass the time. He glanced at the main screen, squinted at the smaller screens focused on exhaust nozzles, umbilical cables, and exhaust deflectors. He tried to follow the complicated wording — rows and columns of numbers — on computer screens, but got lost immediately.

He surveyed his people.

The group of technicians was somewhat diverse. The military men were in uniform blouses, and the civilian scientists and technicians wore white laboratory coats.

The launch director was seated at an oversized console centered in the back row. He was smoking a cigarette and speaking over his headset to someone. Oberstev would have a word with him later about smoking in the center.

On the right side of the room, in a straight chair backed up to the wall, was Lt. Col. Janos Sodur.

Pod
-
Palcovnik
Sodur had once been a political officer, one of the toads assigned to a command to ensure conformity with the ideals of the Communist Party. While no longer carrying such a title, Sodur was now an aide to Yevgeni and had been assigned to Oberstev. Less interested in liaison between the space program and the aerospace committee, Sodur was intent upon discovering philosophical meanderings among the men of the
Red
Star
program. His outlook on life was bleak, and his attitude was instantly suspicious. Oberstev detested the man and frequently went out of his way to make his life uncomfortable. Right now, he sat on the floor of the control center, rather than, as he had requested, up in the observation room with the visiting Yevgeni — an idol, no doubt — because Oberstev did not want to listen to the prattle of two right-wing, righteous zealots during the final countdown. Oberstev’s loyalties were aligned more carefully with the
rodina
, the motherland, than they were with the waning ideologies of the Party.

Also on the main floor, in an extra chair pulled up close to the technician manning the motor control console, was the director of the Flight Data Control Center. Normally, Pyotr Piredenko would have remained in the computer center.

The man was worried, and that worried Oberstev.

TIME TO LAUNCH: 00:03:02.

An overhead speaker blurted the launch director’s voice. “Three minutes to ignition. Primary controllers, report.”

“We have excellent fuel status. We are showing full tanks, and the pressures are in the green.”

“Electrical systems are on-line. Vehicle batteries are fully charged.”

“The gantry umbilicals are prepared for separation.”

“The payload status is within parameters, showing subcritical.”

“Gyros are now spinning.”

“The navigation computers are two-point-two minutes off the launch, but still within the launch window, Director. We can make corrections during the first orbit.”

“The valve sequence is aligned for ignition, high-speed turbopumps beginning to rotate,” the motor control technician reported.

They waited, expectant and tense.

Oberstev expected to have the telephone buzz at any moment, General Burov calling for a situation report.

TIME TO LAUNCH: 00:02:12.

“Launch Director, we have a malfunction.”

Oberstev recognized Piredenko’s voice.

“What is the nature of the malfunction?” the launch director asked.

“The primary motor control computer has gone down. It is self-protective.”

Oberstev leaned forward in his seat and looked down at the launch director, who had turned around and peered up at him.

“General, we are almost too late to abort.”

“Director Piredenko, do we still have the secondary computer operational?” Oberstev asked over his intercom.

“That is correct, General. Along with the tertiary. However, I still recommend abort…”

“Proceed with the launch,” Oberstev ordered.

TIME TO LAUNCH: 00:01:43.

*

0859 HOURS LOCAL, 30 KILOMETERS SSE OF PLESETSK COSMODROME

Maj. Viatcheslav Mirakov maintained his banked turn at 500 knots. The twin Tumansky turbojets, each of which could produce over 12,000 kilograms of thrust, consumed fuel like sponges when the throttles were mishandled. The MiG-25 had an operational radius of only 1,450 kilometers.

Both aircraft were stripped of armament, flying ʻcleanʼ They were each equipped with video cameras and video transmitters, as well as the NATO-named ʻFox Fireʼ fire control radar. The radar had been modified by the addition of a rear-facing antenna in order to provide a full 360-degree sweep. The radar range was eighty-three kilometers, and the pilots would use it to follow the A2e.

Mirakov’s wingman orbited in a lazy oval four kilometers to Mirakov’s west.

When he heard the launch director announce one minute to ignition on his secondary radio, Mirakov depressed the transmit button on the inboard throttle handle. “Condor Two?”

“I am prepared, Condor One.”

“Take up a heading of one-one-zero degrees. Now.”

“Confirmed. One-one-zero.”

Mirakov rolled out of his bank as he came around to the compass heading.

The A2e was programmed to lift from the pad, then rotate to the east-southeast, climbing toward the rotation of the earth which assisted it in achieving escape velocity. With the solid-rocket boosters, the A2e would generate a total of nearly thirty million newtons of thrust. It would accelerate quickly, though Mirakov had been told that the thrust profile had been designed to keep acceleration loads at close to three gravities. The engineers did not want to put undue stresses on the payload component.

The launch profile called for the A2e to achieve an orbital velocity of 28,000 kilometers per hour in fourteen minutes. That was over twenty times the speed of sound, and seventeen times faster than the speed of the MiGs. Mirakov and his wingman would have the A2e on their cameras for less than four minutes.

“Ignition confirmed.”

The launch director’s voice was almost bored. He had done this many times before.

Mirakov shoved both of his throttles outboard and forward, engaging the afterburners. The sudden acceleration depressed his body into the parachute and survival pack cushions of his seat. As he eased the stick back until he had a sixty-degree climb, the positive G-forces increased. The skin of his face sagged.

“The vehicle has cleared the gantry tower.”

Several whoops of elation could be heard in the background.

Forty seconds later, Mirakov’s wingman said, “Condor One, I have a contact.”

“Affirmative, Two.”

The small radar screen emplaced in his instrument panel next to the centered video screen showed him three blips, those of his wingman, an aerial fuel tanker orbiting twenty kilometers to the south, and the A2e. The rocket had already passed through Mach 2 and achieved an altitude of 8.000meters. It would pass over his left shoulder within seconds.

“On track, on course. Velocity Mach two-point-three,ˮ a controller on the ground intoned.

Mirakov activated his nose camera. The screen flickered to life and showed him an unending panorama of hazy blue. Two green LEDs reported that the video recorders were turning.

His Mach readout indicated 2.7.

A glance at the radar screen.

He depressed the transmit button. “Two, I show target range at fifteen kilometers, closure rate thirty meters per minute and increasing.”

“Affirmed, One.”

Mirakov searched his rearview mirror and found the white plume erupting from a small black dot. As he watched, the dot grew into a soccer ball. It would pass over him by half a kilometer.

He eased the stick back to increase the angle of his climb.

“Closure rate about one hundred meters per minute,” Condor Two radioed.

The altimeter readout flickered. He was passing through 22,000 meters.

The rocket passed overhead like a shadow through life. 

“On course, on track, velocity Mach four-point-nine,” the controller reported.

Again, he tugged back on the stick. The climb angle increased to 67 degrees. The image of the A2e appeared on his screen, and Mirakov immediately used the thumb wheel on the head of his control stick to zoom the telephoto lens to a magnification of fifteen. The rocket jumped in size until it filled his screen. The white-hot exhaust of the main engine and the two solid rocket boosters were almost blinding.

Mirakov hoped that those on the ground appreciated the view.

As the A2e increased the distance between them, Mirakov kept increasing the magnification until he had reached its maximum of twenty.

The rocket was quickly diminishing in size on the screen.

“Twenty-five thousand meters,” Condor Two said.

They had reached their maximum ceiling. His controls felt sloppy in the thin atmosphere. Without directional thrusters to augment the control surfaces, flying at such altitudes was extremely dangerous. Any abrupt deflection in the line of flight could cause the MiG to begin tumbling and spinning.

At this point in their chase flights, the MiGs went into a shallow descent, easing their passage back into thicker atmosphere, while the cameras began to nose up in order to keep the rocket in view.

“Initiate your recovery,” Mirakov ordered.

He eased the stick forward while simultaneously using another thumb wheel to angle the camera upward. With his left hand, he pulled the throttles out of afterburner.

Major Mirakov had already begun to think of this as yet another routine flight when something on the screen changed.

What was it?

The right booster exhaust seemed brighter than that of its twin, or of the main rocket motor.

There. It flared again.

“Launch Control,” Mirakov called on his secondary channel, “we have an anomaly.”

“Report it, Condor.”

Before he could depress the transmit stud, the A2e abruptly rolled on its longitudinal axis and nosed down, turning slightly to the north. The exhaust trail of the main engine winked out.

“Out of control,” a ground controller said. “We have lost altitude.”

“Main engine shut down,” another controller said.

“Jettison rocket boosters,” the launch controller said.

“Jettisoned,” another voice reported.

Mirakov could see the image on the screen. He thumbed the transmit button. “Negative jettison.”

The well-known voice of Colonel General Oberstev came on the air. “Range officer, destroy the vehicle.”

That did not work, either.

Mirakov watched as the A2e slowly accelerated away from the camera’s eye.

Losing altitude.

He estimated that he was 1,600 kilometers east of Moscow, and he wondered if the rocket would impact in any populated area on the eastern coast of the Commonwealth.

Chapter Three

0004 HOURS LOCAL, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

“Son…of a…BITCH!”

Carl Unruh thought that Jack Evoy came out of his chair rather involuntarily, almost like his exclamation. Evoy rounded the big table, headed for the consoles, his eyes staying on the colorful lines streaked across the screen.

“Mark that,” Unruh called to the technician at the console. “Get the coordinates.”

He pushed himself away from the table in the castered chair, reaching for the phone on the cabinet behind him. Lifting the receiver, he punched the buttons for the night duty officer at Langley.

When the man answered, Unruh identified himself and said, “Get me the DCI. Urgent.”

While he waited to talk with the Director of Central Intelligence, he studied the plotting board. From Plesetsk, a dotted purple line emerged, aimed toward the east-southeast. A heavy yellow line and two thinner orange lines also traveled in the same direction. Every few inches along the way, a rectangular box enclosed pertinent data — altitude, velocity.

The two orange lines, representing the Foxbat chase planes, had achieved almost 83,000 feet before curling back and heading for their base.

The yellow line separated from the dotted purple line — the expected track into orbit — at 186,000 feet and almost directly over the Russian Republic city of Prokopyevsk. Abandoning the track the CIA and DIA experts thought the A2e most likely to follow, it had veered eastward.

Worse, it had begun to lose altitude.

The rectangular boxes showed a successive deterioration in both altitude and velocity. As the rocket kept diving, Unruh had been praying the damned thing would burn up, though he did not know whether or not that was a wise hope. What happened to a nuclear payload burned by friction in the atmosphere?

The booster rockets had apparently been expended shortly before the vehicle had passed over the Chinese border.

Unruh wondered if the Japanese Air Defense Force had scrambled. They would have been watching the launch, too, and for a few minutes, the track looked exactly like an incoming ICBM. Panic time.

The rocket was down to 90,000 feet when it passed south of Tokyo.

On the map, the yellow line stopped abruptly at a serene place in the northern Pacific Ocean.

The map suddenly looked quiet.

On the plotting board, the technician labeled in:
POINT OF IMPACT-26° 20' 22"N, 176° 10' 23"E
.

Evoy was standing over the second console, a spare headset clamped over his ears as he listened to the communications from Meade.

He turned around to face Unruh and called across the room, “They’ve intercepted some television shots. It was being telecast live.”

“Wonderful,” Unruh said, though he did not much care. “Just tell me what the hell happened.”

“The main engines flamed out. That’s what cost them velocity. It sounds like they lost all control.”

“What else is going on?”

“The people at NSA are trying to sort it out,” Evoy said. “It’s a bit like July Fourth in hell. The radio frequencies are chaotic.”

After a moment, Evoy added, “They tried to destroy the vehicle by remote control, but it didn’t happen.”

“Anyone mention the payload?” Unruh asked.

“Not on the air in the clear. They’re trying to decode some encrypted messages aimed for Moscow.”

Unruh told the operator of the first console, “Call Defense Intelligence Agency and tell them to get their aerospace and nuclear experts out of bed. We want them standing by. Get someone from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission also.” The technician nodded and began to dial the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Unruh held his phone against his ear and waited. His ear was sweating.

“Stebbins,” the Director of Central Intelligence said, from wherever the duty officer had found him. He did not sound as if he had been asleep. “My line is not secure.”

“Mark, this is Carl.”

“Problem?”

“A big one, maybe. The
Red
Star
package didn’t make orbit.”

“This is the one we’ve been concerned about?”

“Yes.”

“Burn up, did it?”

“No. It didn’t achieve the altitude or speed for that.” Unruh glanced at the screen. “Maxed out at Mach five-point-six.”

“It didn’t break up? Didn’t tumble?”

“No, not from what we’re reading. Took a clean dive into the Pacific.”

“Shit. Where?”

Unruh again looked to the screen. “It looks to be some two thousand miles east of Japan.”

“Put me in an American perspective.”

“Southwest of Midway, fifteen hundred miles west of Honolulu.”

There was a pause while Mark Stebbins digested that. Then he said, “I’ll call the National Security Advisor. You get together whatever data you can grab and meet me at the White House.”

Mark Stebbins hung up abruptly. He was not big on lingering goodbyes.

Unruh replaced his own phone in its cradle. “Jack, we want a videotape of the tracking screen data, plus audiotape of all the voice transmissions. Copies of the TV coverage. Tell the people at Meade to concentrate on this event.”

“Are we worried yet?” Evoy asked.

“I don’t know about the people across the Potomac, but I am.ˮ

*

0044 HOURS LOCAL, COLLEGE PARK, MARYLAND

When the phone rang, Avery Hampstead’s eyes fluttered open. He lost whatever dream had been showing that night, and he could not recall one fragment of it, though he thought it must have been pretty good. He had an erection.

The phone rang again.

He looked at the clock. 12:44.

It was not a good sign.

He shoved the covers back and rolled upright, trying to not wake Alicia and to get the phone before it rang again.

He just made it. The telephone tingled as he lifted it.

“Hampstead.”

“Avery, this is Carl Unruh.”

They had gone to Princeton together, graduate school in international affairs. Unruh had gone spooky, while Hampstead went bureaucratic. It did not mean that Unruh was entitled to middle-of-the-night calling privileges.

“Can’t recall the name, this time of night,” Hampstead said, prepared to hang up.

“Avery, hold on! I’m sorry about the hour.”

Hampstead sighed.

“I’d like to have you get dressed and go over to the White House.”

“This is College Park. We don’t hang around the White House.”

“Please. I think I’m going to need you.”

“What’s this about, Carl?”

“I can’t tell you. I don’t even know if I’ll get to use you, but I’d like to have you standing by.”

“You know what time it is? They don’t offer tours at night.”

“I’ll clear the way. Go to the East entrance.” Unruh hung up.

“Who’s that?” Alicia asked. Her voice was muffled by the pillow.

“White House calling. I’m invited to breakfast.”

“Sure.” She went back to sleep.

Which was almost what Hampstead did.

*

2247 HOURS LOCAL, SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

In the headquarters of Marine Visions Unlimited, one section of fluorescent lights burned in one corner of the office. There was only one office. Except for partitioned-off restrooms, a kitchenette, and a couple of storage areas, the open space was a jumble of surplus navy gray steel desks, black, gray and beige filing cabinets, and desk, straight, and easy chairs in a rainbow of woods, fabrics, and Naugahyde. There did not seem to be any logic involved in the placement of work areas. Charts, diagrams and schematics were pinned to the walls in every place possible. For lack of wall space, one blueprint was taped to a window. There were plenty of windows in the perimeter walls, probably all destined for blueprint draperies.

If a new person came on board, a desk and chair were located in some thrift shop and inserted somewhere on the floor. At last count, there were twenty-seven desks scattered around. They butted up to each other head-on, at right angles, and at oblique angles. From the suspended ceiling, cables drooped to computer terminals and telephones.

Nor was there a functional division within the office. Oceanographers, biologists, computer specialists, civil and structural engineers, environmental engineers, robotics experts and propulsion designers were scattered like birdshot. During daylight hours, when the place was thriving, people called across the room, telephoned each other, kept three and four different technical conversations going. In comparison, Babel was a city where everyone spoke the same language.

The whole place was symbolic of MVU’s organization.

Kaylene Thomas thought that it was very antinaval. She was accustomed to neatness. Everything in its place. A tool for every job readily to hand. It drove her batty.

MVU’s office was on the second floor of an ancient, red brick warehouse off Dickens Street in the Roseville area. The streets were all named, in alphabetical order, for writers and poets — Addison, Byron, Carleton, Dickens, Emerson, working up to Zola, then starting over with Alcott.

The street names offered the only order Thomas could see in the immediate vicinity.

The ground floor of the warehouse was not much better. It was the manufacturing facility for MVU robotic creations, and it was a jungle of machine and hand tools, computers and exotic machines for casting and forming custom-designed parts in stainless steel, bronze, arcane alloys and carbon-embedded plastics. If someone got a hot idea, the various parts of one project were shoved aside, and the hot idea evolved into another mess of copper, brass, fiberglass, and fiber-optic components spread over workbenches, the tops of lockers, and the concrete floor.

From her desk jammed against an outside wall, under a window that needed washing, Thomas could view the Commercial Basin below and to the north. There was not much activity tonight. MVU’s dockside building, a half block away, was dark. Lights on a dock across the basin illuminated a dozen men operating forklifts and cranes, loading a small freighter. Farther to the northeast, a steady stream of airliners launched themselves from San Diego International Airport, climbing westward toward the prevailing winds.

There was no wind tonight. One of the ceiling-mounted air conditioners chattered irregularly, but it always did.

If she leaned back and looked to her right, a window in the end wall gave her a view across the bay of the U.S. Naval Air Station on North Island, also launching a few aircraft, though they were probably more lethal than a Boeing 767. Throughout the bay, she could see the lights of freighters, pleasure craft, and several navy warships that were underway.

The night lights of the city all but washed out the stars in a clear sky.

Thomas’s computer terminal, on the left of her desk, was alive with numbers, and she was getting tired of them. They were all pessimistic numbers.

Kaylene Rae Thomas had a master’s degree in geology and had devoted her doctoral program to oceanography, halfway expected from the daughter of a U.S. Navy admiral, now retired. She had spent two years at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography before being lured away by Dane Brande.

The bait had been his reputation for creativity and her directorship of Harbor One, a seabed laboratory that was only a seedling idea at the time. Five years later, as she neared her thirty-fourth birthday, Harbor One had been operational for two years and had spawned subcolonies. Experiments in resource mining, in food production, and in fish breeding were being conducted in their own self-contained modules located on the ocean floor within a mile of Harbor One. Nearing completion were three connected and oversized domes that would compete with Sea World, Universal Studios, and Knott’s Berry Farm for tourist dollars. She called it Disneyland West.

Brande called it revenue.

At her desk in Hoboville — another of her coined titles — with depressing numbers covering her computer screen, Thomas was busy doubting her future. She was afraid that the time was fast approaching when she should make a change.

She was still young enough, and had built enough of an academic reputation, to find a position with a decent university. Her looks were holding, though she expected to begin finding gray among the platinum blond daily. She kept her hair short, just below the level of her earlobes, for the sake of easy maintenance. Her eyes were those of her father, a pale, iridescent blue, and she suspected that tomorrow or the next day, if she kept reading numbers on computer screens, she would be wearing the admiral’s bifocals. At five-ten, she was tall, and her mostly active work kept her fit, perhaps a bit too lean. Colleagues kept telling her she needed to eat more. Her skin was pale as a result of so much time spent below the surface of the Pacific, and her complexion was not yet ravaged by weather or sun.

Brande never noticed. When she joined Marine Visions, she had halfway expected to find her attraction to its president reciprocal, but Dane kept his personal and professional lives separated. If he had a personal life. He seemed always to be at work on one project or another, and though she had never met a girlfriend, there were rumors of many.