Ultra Deep (37 page)

“Let me see.” She reached for it.

“You’re not cleared.”

“Neither are you, damn it!”

“Oh. That’s right.”

He gave her the bundle and she thumbed through it. There were lots of diagrams and schematics.

“I’m lost already,” she said.

“It’s straightforward stuff. Our people just copied down what they found on the Topaz Two.”

“Is it a good design?”

“From a robot engineer’s point of view? It looks pretty efficient, but there are a few things I don’t like.”

“Like?”

“Like the operations module for the control rods.”

“Don’t get technical on me, Okey.”

“Jesus, hon! I’ll let you know if I get technical.”

“What don’t you like?”

“If they used the same design on this Topaz Four down there, I think we’ve got a problem.”

She studied his face carefully.

“There’s an integrated circuit that trips switches based on the information it gets from different sensors. Like a sensor that tells it the damned thing has crashed. I think it’s wired wrong. If it trips, it opens the control rods, rather than closes them.”

“Not good?” she asked.

“Disastrous”

“And no one has raised this issue?”

“Not that I know about,” Dokey said. “I don’t know why the nuclear experts haven’t mentioned anything. It’s a question I’d like to pose, anyway.”

Thomas slid out of the booth, went back to the last booth, and picked up the phone. Dokey followed her.

It took three minutes to track down Hampstead.

“Good afternoon, Kaylene.”

“We’ll know in a minute.”

“Uh-oh.”

She told him about the control module, the integrated circuit, and the wiring problem.

“Yes?” Hampstead said.

“Find out about it, goddamn it!”

“Yes, ma’am,” he told her.

*

1640 HOURS LOCAL, 26° 20' 8" NORTH, 176° 10' 33" EAST

Brande was at the controls of
DepthFinder
and Kim Otsuka was in the right seat, ʻflyingʼ SARSCAN with the controls in front of her. Connie Alvarez-Sorenson sat in the right-angled jumpseat behind them, monitoring the environmental and sonar recording systems.

SARSCAN did not have a great deal of maneuverability. Towed a couple of hundred feet behind and below them, it could be encouraged to climb or dive a little, or to draw off to one side or the other.

Alvarez-Sorenson’s primary job was to keep Brande aware of his altitude above the bottom, which he tried to maintain at a thousand feet. Otsuka’s primary goal was to fly SARSCAN at about 800 feet above the bottom, allowing the sonar to overlap the path of their last leg.

SARSCAN had been designed for intensive bottom searching, and the sonar did not have a lot of range, but it was very powerful and very accurate downward for a thousand feet and sideways for three thousand feet. The images it picked up were transmitted through the fiber-optic towing cable and displayed on the starboard screen in front of Otsuka. She had squelched down the audible ʻpingʼ sonar returns so they only sounded off if SARSCAN was within thirty feet of colliding with something solid and hard.

Her job included not letting SARSCAN hit anything.

They had just passed westward over the seamount that Captain Gurevenich had first reported. Its highest point was 6,011 feet below sea level, and a steep slope on the western side was falling rapidly. Brande had been slowly taking on ballast in order to descend with the slope.

The view through the forward portholes, lit by the floodlights, was limited to about thirty feet. All they saw at shallower depths was the occasional darting of a fish avoiding the strange new monster, imitated on the center CRT by the submersible’s video camera. On the port screen was the waterfall display of the
DepthFinder
\s forward-looking sonar.

The sonar outline of the sea bottom terrain ahead of them suggested an undulating landscape, getting lower on the left, or south, side.

“Report time, Connie,” he said.

“Right, Dane.” She picked up the acoustic telephone and spoke into it. “Who’s on the desk?”

The response could be heard on the instrument panel speaker. “Hey, darlin’, it’s me.”

“You’re the one who’s supposed to be guiding the ship, Mel. Remember?”

Her husband said, “With NavStar and with Kenji on the wheel, who needs me? I’m giving someone a break.”

“Okay, update time. We’re descending the western slope of the seamount. Position same latitude, longitude now three-three seconds. Depth one-one-six-seven-seven. We’re showing a high ridge, maybe two-zero-zero higher, to the northeast. We got an outline of a possible wreck three thousand feet behind us and a thousand feet south. Magnetometer results were negative. We’ll check it on the next pass, but we don’t believe it ever flew before.”

Brande leaned back and Connie held the phone to his lips. “Mel, let’s mark that contact on our own chart, but keep it to ourselves, if it doesn’t prove out.”

“You thinking about our future, Dane?” Sorenson asked. “A possible dive site?”

“I haven’t got Rae here to do it for me,” Brande said, “so I’m playing goals-and-objectives.”

Alvarez-Sorenson took the phone back and said, “We’re out for now.”

Brande was starting to get cold again. It was never possible to find a comfortable temperature. They dove wearing two pairs of woolen socks, a pair of long johns, and the standard jumpsuits. As the temperature cooled off at depth, they donned thick sweaters.

Everyone looked bundled up and warm, but appearances were deceiving. The chill of the water at depth transferred through the pressure hull and fought the feeble efforts of the cabin heater.

“How are you doing, Kim?” Brande asked.

“I’m fine, Dane.”

Flying the sonar array took a great deal of concentration and could fatigue operators quickly.

“You get tired,” Alvarez-Sorenson said, “just let me know, and I’ll switch places with you. I need to learn how to fly that baby.”

“You giving up surface travel, Connie?” Brande asked.

“I’m expanding my horizons downward.”

“All right. We’ll get you some time in the right seat.”

Brande scanned the ship control panel directly ahead of his joysticks — which were properly called the translation hand controller and the rotational hand controller. The panel contained a variety of readouts and gauges which translated the status of the vehicle for the operator.

Magnetic and gyro compasses kept him oriented in a horizontal direction. The depth readouts — distance to surface, altitude above bottom, rate of change, and depth of

vehicle — kept him aware of his vertical position and how fast he was changing it. There were tachometers for the port and starboard propellers, readouts for vertical thrust forward and aft in RPM and pounds, forward and aft lateral thrust in pounds, lateral speed through the water based on RPM, and Doppler speed over ground. Additional indicators monitored the pitch rate and pitch angle of the vehicle, the turn rate, the angle of the rudder and stem planes.

That was one instrument panel. Considering that there were fifty-five small and large panels in the forward end of the submersible, there were enough readouts, monitors, light-emitting diode indicators, switches, cathode ray tubes, and rheostats to keep a Boeing 747 pilot happy for hours.

Since they continued to dive, following the slope, Brande reset the trim tabs on the diving plane.

Though he knew that Connie Alvarez-Sorenson was watching the warning light panels, Brande automatically scanned them every couple of minutes. It was habit.

An hour later, they were at 17,000 feet of depth, and Alvarez-Sorenson had made four more reports to the
Orion
. They had encountered nothing particularly startling. Brande likened it to driving across Iowa and Nebraska, a rather monotonous landscape. Or seascape.

Occasionally, SARSCAN pinged them when it picked up a small peak or rock outcropping that entered the thirty-foot range of the sonar. Then Otsuka would lean forward, concentrating on her video screen, easing the hand controller back or to one side as she dodged the obstruction.

He stabilized the sub for a few minutes while Otsuka and Alvarez-Sorenson changed places. In the confines of the pressure hull, the exchange was the major feat of their dive so far. He got back under way, and Otsuka spent thirty minutes supervising the new operator in the handling of SARSCAN.

Brande thought that Alvarez-Sorenson was something of a natural with the remote controls. In the back of his mind, he was already setting up a training schedule for her, working next into Sneaky Pete, who was a great deal more maneuverable and sensitive to the controls since the ROV had its own propulsion systems. Then Turtle,
Atlas
, and Gargantua.

The big ROV would require a Great Debate, of course. To date, only Dokey and Andy Colgate, back at Harbor One, had gotten their hands on Gargantua.

During the routine of following the search pattern, Brande’s training and automatic reflexes piloted the
DepthFinder
. Part of his mind was devoted to worry, and that was a first.

No previous dive had ever had a deadline placed on it, beyond perhaps that of encroaching weather or season changes or the condition of batteries. He was acutely aware that, in two days, the Topaz reactor could begin its deterioration into meltdown.

He would have a decision to make then. And he had pretty much decided that, no matter how the team might vote, he would not subject them to the risk.

Two days to find an elusive rocket.

He was also acutely aware of the limitations of sonar. If the rocket body had dropped into a depression, the sonar would never pick it out.

The odds were slightly better, of course, because the A2e would certainly have broken up after impact, perhaps into three or four large pieces. Not all of it would be hidden from the sonar.

He hoped.

“Kim, would you see if you can get hold of Dokey?”

Four minutes later, she handed him the phone.

“What’s happening, Chief?”

“Okey, you think you could fly both Sneaky and SARSCAN at the same time?”

“Rugged terrain, huh?”

“Yeah, there’s lots of hiding places. I think it might be a good idea to get both sonar and visual, if we can.”

“This calls for SARSCAN II,” Dokey said.

“Which we don’t have yet.”

“Who’s piloting?”

“Rae convinced me she’s supposed to take her turn. And Bob Mayberry is in the third seat,” Brande said.

“I’d use the portable joystick panel on SARSCAN, and if I got in trouble, I could pass it back to Bob. Yeah, hell, let’s try it.”

“Go ahead and set it up, then, Okey. What’s the weather like up there?”

“We picked up a couple knots in wind speed. Rain’s holding off, though.”

“All right, let’s make the change now, before it gets worse. We’re coming up.”

Brande reduced power on the propellers until the
DepthFinder
slowed to a stop, slewing sideways as it did. Then he reached forward, raised the plastic flap, and toggled the port weight release.

The sub lurched and felt more buoyant. It began to rise slowly.

He raised the other flap and flipped the switch for the starboard weight release.

Nothing happened.

*

1950 HOURS LOCAL, PEARL HARBOR NAVAL BASE, HAWAII

Almost eight hours went by before Unruh called him back.

“What the hell’s going on, Carl?” Hampstead demanded.

“Well, Avery, I had to clear some things with some people, and most of the people didn’t want them cleared. It took a while.”

“Talk English.”

“Yeah. Dokey’s right on that control module. The Soviets call it the F-two-six module, and the same one is being used in the Topaz Four.”

“How do you know all of this, Carl?” 

“Oh, we’ve picked up a few bits and pieces out of Plesetsk,” Unruh admitted.

He looked over at the nuclear experts, all bunched up around their own table in the corner.

“Do the NRC people know about this?”

“Well, yes, of course.”

“And they haven’t raised hell?”

“No one knows what will really happen, Avery.” Hampstead stood up, taking the phone with him. He arched his back to stretch the tired muscles and then began to pace around one end of the table, at the full extension of the phone’s cord.

He was suddenly damned sure he had not been getting the full story out of Washington, but he did not know how long it had been going on.

“I’m going to recommend to Admiral Potter that we order all ships out of the target zone,” he said.

“What!”

“All civilian, naval, and research ships. Along with the submersibles, robots, everything.”