Ultra Deep (43 page)

“Like the Atlantic Ocean?” Brande asked.

Brande used the acoustic microphone. “Pyotr?”

“I am here, Dane.”

“How about some coordinates?”

They did not have the luxury of Emry’s search program on screen, so Brande had to form his own mental pictures. The CIS submersible was nearly a mile west of them and 800 yards south. It had found a slanting bottom at 23,500 feet of depth. The terrain was rugged and steep, and according to Rastonov, looked fragile where they had seen it in their video relay from
Seeker
.

When the depth readout read 23,675, the altitude indicator kicked in, showing 56 feet.

“Easy up,” Dokey said.

Brande blew off more ballast, and the sub slowed its descent.

“Where’s Gargantua?” Brande asked.

“Two hundred feet in front of us, and about thirty feet lower.”

“Let’s watch the movies.”

They routed power to the cameras and floodlights on both vehicles.

There was nothing to be seen.

“All right, Okey, you do the snooping, and I’ll follow you around.”

“Gotcha.”

Using
DepthFinder
ʼs downward-looking sonar as his guide, Dokey began making wide sweeps to the left and right with Gargantua, moving down toward the slope of the canyon until they had a picture on the starboard VDT.

It was a bleak, dull gray place, a steep slope with rocky outcroppings and what could have once been a lava flow. There was no life that could be seen.

“This is as deep as we’ve ever been,” Brande said.

“Better report it, then.”

“They’re supposed to be able to see it.”

“Yeah, but it’s a new system,” Dokey said.

Brande reported to the surface.

“Is Dokey awake yet?” Rae asked. Trying to be light about it, Brande was sure.

“I’ll pinch him in a minute and find out.”

Emry broke in, “Dane, why don’t you head out west for a bit?”

“You think so, Larry? That would be a hell of a curve for the rocket to take.”

“I’m the one who said it didn’t rotate. You gave me fifty-fifty on that, remember?”

“Heading west”

Dokey put Gargantua into a long, sweeping curve, and Brande followed along.

The bottom dipped away, disappearing from the robot’s camera.

“Jesus.” Dokey dove the ROV, and the bottom reappeared.

Down 24,056 feet.

Brande fought off thinking about the immense pressure of all that water trying to get inside his tiny sphere.

Ping!

The sonar volume, set low, sounded off.

Brande glanced at the waterfall display, saw the slope of the canyon rising to the right. Outcroppings above them. He would have to watch out for that, warn Rastonov.

Small ridge coming up, still below them.

Ping, ping.

Not a ridge.

“Right there, Dane.”

Brande switched his attention to the starboard display and saw what Gargantua was seeing.

Soviet A2e rocket.

The top stage, with stabilizing fins, was still connected to the payload stage, the pointed module end lower on the slope. It was a hell of a lot bigger than he had expected it to be. He had seen the recorded video pictures of the boosters and first stage, but with only the perspective offered by the sea floor, he had not gotten a feeling for the size of the thing.

“Hot damn!” someone from above shouted.

“Let’s get the hoods on, Okey.”

They donned the protective hoods, and Brande immediately felt handicapped. The big glass plate visor restricted his vision to the side.

Easing the power stick forward, and nosing down with the right stick, Brande moved the submersible in until the cliff and the rocket body became visible under
DepthFinder
’s floodlights.

He picked up the microphone, shoved it under the hood, and said, “Pyotr, we’ve got it. You want to come to one-nine, four-seven, one-oh, two-eight?”

“We are on the way, Dane.”

“I’m looking it over,” Roskens said. “Okey, you want to circle it, maybe get in a little closer.”

“Anything for you, sweetheart,” Dokey said, taking the mike from Brande.

For ten minutes, Dokey and Roskens talked back and forth, and he poked Gargantua in closer and closer to the depleted rocket.

The skin was pretty banged up, crumpled in places, creased in others. The whole thing looked to be bent along its length. The two fins that could be seen were mangled badly.

The Soviet
Seeker
swam into Gargantua’s view, also probing. “You here, Pyotr?”

“Yes, Dane. We are behind and above you. Now moving to your right side.”

From the
Olʼyantsev
, Oberstev, who was viewing the
Seeker
pictures, said, “It is in a dangerous position. If we try to cut the payload module away, the rocket may push it further down.”

“Also, General,” Brande said, “directly above us is a rock ledge that extends partway over the wreckage.”

“General,” Roskens said, “do you have drawings of the rocket? At least of the payload module?”

Oberstev did not hesitate. “I will send Colonel Cherbykov to get them from my cabin, and we will transfer them to you by photo scanner.”

They waited fifteen eternal minutes.

The digital readout that he had been ignoring read: 1915. Four hours and forty-five minutes to meltdown, if the Commonwealth nuke people were right.

Four hours to the surface.

“Pyotr,” Brande asked, “any radiation readings?”

“None, but our sonar picks up a hissing. I think it is freon boiling.”

Brande gulped and turned up the squelch on the sonar. “Definitely hissing,” Dokey said.

“You mind if we don’t listen to it?”

“Not a damned bit.”

Brande squelched the sonar down.

“Got it!” Roskens said. “Okey, move Gargantua forward, extend the cutting torch, and go where I tell you.”

“Tell me fast.”

She directed him, and Brande watched the monitor as Gargantua’s cutting torch appeared, then touched several places on the side of the payload module before Roskens told him, “Start there, Okey, and cut straight forward.”

The manipulator went down, slapped the side of the module, and…

The whole damned thing started to slide.

Three feet.

Four feet.

And stopped.

Dokey said, “In my next life, I’m going to be a neurosurgeon. It’s a damned sight easier.”

Brande went to the acoustic phone. “Pyotr, can you go sit on the rocket?”

“Keep pressure against it? Yes. But please hurry. We do not want to use up electrical power too quickly.”

The
Sea
Lion
moved into view, coming from the right side, eased in against the rocket, and added power to its propellers.

A cloud of dust rose, blinding nearly all of them.

Dokey moved the ROV in again, found his starting place, and started cutting the thin aluminum skin with the electrode cutting tip.

Brande called Oberstev, “General, can we access the switch module from down here?”

“I have an open line to the nuclear people, Mr. Brande. I will ask.”

A few moments later, he said, “It would be difficult. They do not know what tools you have available, but the reactor is in a sealed container. Access doors would have to be removed, as would a large computer component, before the switch module could be reached. They are sending me complete instructions.”

Brande sighed. A lot of this could have been taken care of a lot earlier.

“All right, General. Once weʼve cut away the side of the pay-load bay, what then?”

“The reactor is secured to the framework inside the module by four bolts. They could be unbolted or simply cut.”

“Weʼll cut them.”

Dokey had completed a thirty-foot cut along one side and a sixteen-or seventeen-foot cut around the bottom circumference of the payload module. He was starting up the near side, working close to the seabed.

“Mel?” Brande asked.

“He’s coming,” Rae Thomas responded. She sounded breathless.

Brande wanted to see her pretty badly.

“What you got, babe?” Sorenson asked.

“How much cable do we have?”

“We’re lifting about three tons?”

“General?” Brande asked.

“I am converting the measurement. Less than that. Four thousand, two hundred pounds.”

“I can run out the port-side winch, then hook it into the starboard, then into the’midships, and get you thirty thousand feet, Dane. Do the reverse coming back up.”

“Do that, Mel. Use four or five of the sub weights to get it down here fast, and we can cut them away. Better put a sonar reflector on it so we can locate it.”

“What kind of connection you going to make?”

“There are two lift rings on the reactor,” Roskens said.

“Hook then?” Sorenson asked.

“That’ll do,” Dokey said, “And I’ll weld the son of a bitch in place. It’s not coming off.”

Brande passed that message.

At 1942 hours, Dokey used Gargantua’s manipulator with the claws and peeled the skin from the module. He then had to cut away three interior structural members at Rosken’s direction.

It took four minutes for Gargantua, guided by Dokey’s interpretation of the sonar readout, to locate and latch onto the cable suspended from the research vessel. It did not look very substantial, but Brande knew it was tested to five tons.

After glancing at the chronometer readout, Dokey was surprisingly quick in cutting away the weights, fastening the hook to the lift ring, then welding it in place with two spot welds. Gargantua backed away, keeping an eye on everything. Brande spoke into the mike, “Mel, take up slack.”

“Keep in mind, Dane, that we’re bouncing ten or twelve feet. That slack is going to come up unexpectedly.”

“Let’s everyone back off a bit. Pyotr, take it up. You can head for the surface.”

The
Sea
Lion
rose from her perch on the rocket body, and it started to slide, then roll down the slope.

It went twenty feet, the cable jerked taut, and the reactor came free of the module, swinging freely to the south.

Brande turned
DepthFinder
to follow it.

It went nearly a hundred yards into yet deeper water, following the only guide it had, the position of the
Orion
on the surface, and then slowed to a standstill for a moment, then abruptly jumped as the wave action above tugged at it.

“I hope to hell that cable can take the stress,” Dokey said.

Brande turned up the sonar, heard the awful hiss, and closed it down again.

“Dumping weights,” he said.

*

2351 HOURS LOCAL, 26° 19' 50" NORTH, 176° 10' 29" EAST

The lieutenant commander named Acery had lent Overton a set of binoculars, and from the bridge of the
Bronstein
, he had been scanning the seas on a regular basis for the last two hours.

They all knew it was coming up.

Every warship in the cordon had moved in, tightening the circle, and every searchlight available was trained on the two ships in the center of the circle, the
Orion
and the
Timofey
Ol’yantsev
. The circle seemed a lot tighter than it was since the turbulent seas kept each ship quite a ways apart.

Overton guessed the circle was a mile in diameter. Even with the searchlights and the binoculars, it was difficult for him to see the
Olʼyantsev
, some 400 yards away.

The yacht with all of the radio, television, and newspaper reporters had been told to stay out of the cordoned-off area, and Overton felt, probably excessive, glee at that. There would not be video at eleven.

He thought that his manner aboard ship — staying out of the way, being polite — had paid off. Most of the officers were almost cordial to him now.

Between scans of the sea, Overton had been jotting on a yellow pad, writing the start of what was going to be an in-depth story on the amazing cooperation between the Russians and Americans in this time of crisis.

It was shaping up.

He raised the binoculars and looked toward the research and patrol ships again. Scanned the raging waters near them.

Nothing.

He took a quick look to the right, toward the
Kane
.

Nothing.

On their left was the CIS cruiser
Kynda
, and Overton checked it with the glasses.