Ultra Deep (7 page)

“I think we’re close enough,” Anderson said quickly.

Brande suspected that all of them were thinking about what could come tumbling down from above.
Alvin
, the submersible that had been used to locate the
Titanic
, had once been trapped in a crevice on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge for over four hours at 9,000 feet of depth. Only a successful effort by the pilot had resulted in his banging his way out of the rocky overhang.

“Let’s see what
Atlas
sees,” Brande said.

“On the way, Chief.”

Dokey took a loving grip on his controls, and the Remotely Operated Vehicle soon appeared on the center screen, moving slowly out of its sheath on the underside of the sub, trailing its Kevlar-shielded cable behind it. The cable floated in the water like a weary snake.
Atlas
looked like a small sled, a rectangular fiberglass housing mounted on a pair of steel skids. It was painted white with diagonal yellow stripes rising up its sides to aid in visibility. It maintained its position in the water with three multibladed propellers mounted at odd angles — two aimed obliquely upward, and one mounted at a 45-degree angle to its stern. Attached to the front of the sled, in addition to the fixed 35-millimeter camera and the video camera which transmitted its images to the sub via fiber-optic cables, was a manipulator arm designed by Dokey. It had six axes of movement, and the claw at the end of the arm could deposit its findings in a shallow wire basket fixed between the skids of the ROV.

Brande reached over to Dokey’s panel, flipped a switch, and the video image from the ROV’s camera appeared on the submersible’s starboard screen.

The three of them watched in near awe — the fascination never seemed to wane — as the ROV advanced slowly on the cliff face. The image on the screen danced as the robot shifted in the currents.

The face of the cliff became clearly apparent under
Atlas’
s pair of lights.

“Looks like about a fifty-degree slope,” Dokey said. 

“I agree,” Brande said. “I wouldn’t want to work it with
DepthFinder.
”

The ROV closed to within five feet of the trench side, the details standing out more clearly as the robot approached and the floodlights dissipated less energy into watery space. There was no visible life, no flora or fauna. Anything with life would be microscopic. The soil looked soft, swirled like lava where it had drifted in the currents. The rock outcroppings were jagged. Cracks and depressions in the rock were ebony where the light did not penetrate.

At moments like this, Brande always had to force himself to remember that eons might have passed since light of any kind had shown on the bottom. He felt pretty insignificant, lost in all that time and history.

Dokey reset the range on the sonar readout screen and, using the sonar signals as his guide, manipulated his controls.
Atlas
moved up and down the cliff face, sliding from side to side. The picture on the screen was monotonous until…

“There!” Anderson shouted.

“Hey, damn, Brandie,” Dokey said. “I can hear you”

It was a corner of a gold ingot, barely protruding from the soil. Dokey moved the robot in close to it. The manipulator arm appeared in the picture, twisting slightly, reaching out, opening its claw, scraping at the earth. Translated through a complex computer program, the arm was controlled from a third joystick on Dokey’s panel and the two fingers and one thumb of the claw reacted to slide switches that Dokey moved with two fingers and the thumb of his left hand.

Dokey was an expert with his toys. The arm and claw moved as if they were attached to his own nervous system.

The claw’s spatulate fingers caressed the earth and soil particles peeled away, drifting slowly down the cliff, raising a tiny dust storm. The gold gleamed under the lights. Gold does not oxidize or rust when submerged for years or centuries.

The thick fingers of the claw reached out and gripped the ingot. As the arm attempted to lift the bar from the sucking earth, the ROV tilted abruptly bow downward.

“Heavy son of a bitch,” Dokey said.

He increased the speed of the propellers to counter the 

weight he was trying to lift.

The ingot was stuck hard.

Dokey eased off on the power and went back to digging the muck from the sides of the bar.

Once again gripped it with the claw.

Applied more power to the robot’s propellers.

The bar came out of its centuries-old resting place with a jerk.

Brande could almost hear the sucking sound, though he knew there would not be one to be heard.

“Damn, I’m only going to get one or two of these in the basket, before I have to bring them home, Chief.”

“This is a job for Gargantua,” Anderson said. Gargantua was the nickname for
Celebes
, the newest, and mostly untried, heavy-lift robot. It was untried because of some problem with its manipulators.

Tve got three hundred and thirty thousand in my sweaty little claw,” Dokey said. “As of this morning’s markets.”

“Don’t drop it, then,” Brande advised.

And the speaker for the acoustic phone sounded off, Jim Word’s voice echoing hollowly as he spoke. “Dane, are you in a position to respond?”

Brandie Anderson handed him the phone set, and Brande said, “Present and pretty much accounted for, Jim.”

“You’ve got a phone call up here.”

“Transfer it to acoustic.”

“The caller says a secure channel is absolutely required.”

“Tell her I’ll call back in a few hours.”

“It’s a him, and he says it won’t wait a few hours.”

“Screw him, then.”

“I’ll pass that on, Chief.”

It did not take long to pass on. Word was back in less than a minute. “He says to tell you that he’s your money man. Or was.”

Brande looked at the chronometer readout on the instrument panel. The maximum rate of ascent was one hundred feet per minute.

“Give me fifty minutes to get to a phone, Jim.”

*

1012 HOURS LOCAL, WASHINGTON, DC

Wilson Overton had a watcher.

Overton paid somewhat below the minimum wage for his man’s services. The cost ran to about a fifth of Four Roses a week, with an occasional bonus of twenty bucks.

He did not know his employee’s full, or even real, name. The man was known on the streets of Washington as Deke. He traveled a lot, but rarely left the District. Sometimes, he would go as far north as Columbia Road, to the Soldiers, and Airmen’s Home, just to visit. Mostly, he hung out around the Mall, where the tourists were, picking up change.

Nights, Deke spent in the environs close to the White House. Alleys, cul-de-sacs, and the refuse areas behind restaurants and bars were his home, and that was what was important to Wilson Overton.

Deke did not sleep well, and he kept an eye on the doings at the White House. He also kept a quarter in his shoe so that he would have the wherewithal for a phone call that could bring him twenty bucks.

Deke had called Wilson at three-thirty in the morning.

“What have you got, Deke?”

“They’s people arriving.”

“Like who?”

“Like the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the CNO, the DCI, the DIA director, a guy I seen before I know is with CIA. Senator Escobets, Senator Hammond. Representative Moore.”

Deke prided himself on knowing who was who in the District.

“This sounds like double-bonus time, Deke.”

“Thass what I thought, Mr. Will.”

Overton dressed, took a cab, and was outside the White House fence forty minutes later, but all he saw were several limos and military sedans parked near the East Wing entrance. The lights were on in the Chief of Staffʼs and the National Security Advisor’s offices, but not the Oval Office.

He guessed the bunch of them were meeting in the basement, probably the Situation Room. That meant crisis, and that meant a story.

He went in search of a public telephone booth and set up his remote office, stacking a roll of quarters on the shelf in front of him.

He started making phone calls.

It was eight-fifteen before he connected with a woman he knew out at NSA in Fort Meade. She had some of it, and she led him to a technician at the National Photographic Interpretation Center who did not seem to think that any of it was classified, including the approximate crash coordinates. He got those to the degree and minute, but not to the second.

Each call led to more calls, and during all of his conversations, Overton made hasty, indecipherable notes in a steno notebook. They were almost indecipherable to him as he thumbed through them while talking to the rewrite woman, Carla Ammons, at the
Post
, composing as he spoke.

He was almost finished when Nelson, the city editor, came on the line.

“I’m reading over Carla’s shoulder, Will.”

“So, what do you think, Ned?”

“Dynamite. This could affect the whole Pacific Rim?”

“That’s what I’ve got.”

“And it’s down ten thousand feet?”

“I got that from a guy at NPIC. He seemed to know what he was talking about.”

“Sources?”

“I’ve got at least one on each point, two on most of them. I’m going to start calling bigwigs now and ask for confirmation.”

“Okay. I’ll get this over to the international desk, and we’ll go to work. Keep in touch.”

Overton was not about to lose touch at this point.

Not with an item hot enough to wipe out every living fish, mammal, and fern in the northern Pacific Ocean.

Chapter Five

1021 HOURS LOCAL, 26° 9' NORTH, 92° 32' WEST

DepthFinder
II
surfaced two hundred yards south of her mother ship and almost half a mile east of the site of the wreck on the sea bottom.

Capt. George Dawson of the salvage ship
Grade
had not been born the day before. He had established his holding position on the surface some distance from the actual recovery area, to throw the scavengers who followed him around off the scent.

The scavengers, in fact, had been disheartened by the arrival of Brandeʼs Research Vessel
Gemini
. If extremely deep diving submersibles were required for this project, then, on their limited budgets and equipment, they were not going to be able to reach any scraps left over, if indeed, anything remained when the MVU crews were finished. Brandeʼs reputation had arrived along with the
Gemini
, and most of the hangers-on had headed for more promising waters.

When the sub reached the surface, Brande stood up in a crouched position and undogged the hatch, then shoved the heavy cylinder upward and to the side. While Dokey and Anderson shut down most of the systems, Brande stepped up on a seat back and pulled himself up into the sail, trying to avoid the grease that coated the edges of the hatchway. The grease was painted around the joint to ensure a good seal.

The sail was four feet high, constructed of fiberglass, and useful only in preventing waves from splashing through the hatchway when the
DepthFinder
was moving on the surface. The top of the hull stood barely a foot above the surface of the sea. Mounted on the sail behind him were the transponder interrogator, a UHF antenna, and the depth sonar. There were no remote operational controls, and Brande called navigation instructions down to Dokey.

“Come about to oh-one-oh, Okey. Full speed ahead.”

“Aye aye, Chief,” Dokey yelled back at him.

While the submersible could achieve twenty knots of forward propulsion when submerged, full speed on the surface was about five knots on a windless day and in smooth seas.

The
Gemini
, the
Grade
, the
Justica
, and a dilapidated cruiser manned by aged hippies with scuba gear racked on the stern deck, were the only boats in sight.

The sub turned to its new heading and the twin electric motors whined as Dokey revved them up. Wavelets crashed against the base of the sail. The morning sun was already warm, blazing in a blue sky. There was not a cloud in view, but Brande figured that would change by noon. The heat felt good on his face after the chilling temperatures at depth. The air was warm and salty, but fresh. It tasted good.

“Dane? Iʼm coming up.”

Brande extended a hand, grasped Brandie Anderson’s wrist, and pulled her up and out of the pressure hull. She brought a dab of grease with her, smeared on the left front of her
NO!
T-shirt, and Brande tried not to notice it. Tried not to obviously notice it, anyway.

There was room for the two of them within the sail, but not much room. They stood on the edge of the hatchway, their bare feet attempting to keep a grip on the fiberglass decking.

The outer hull of the
DepthFinder
II
was constructed of carbon fiber-reinforced plastic and fiberglass. On the surface, she appeared rather sleek, the outer hull disguising the round ball of the pressure hull. Overall, she was thirty-eight feet long, with a beam of eleven feet, and she weighed in at forty-three tons.

The outer hull, however, was just a pretty box that contained the important component, the spherical pressure hull that protected humans from the crushing pressures in the ocean depths. The outer hull was not subjected to the same pressures, but it also contained spherical tanks used for variable ballast, high-pressure air, hydraulic power supplies, and fore and aft mercury trim. Within the outer hull forward of the pressure hull were 35- and 70-millimeter still cameras, video cameras, halogen lights, ballast tanks, and the forward-looking sonar. Aft were altitude and side-looking sonars, the magnetometer gear, weight droppers, the massive propulsion motors, controller and junction boxes, and the three banks of batteries. Anything that might have been considered empty space was filled with syntactic foam.

When the sub was cruising on the surface, only a six-foot width of the rounded top of the hull, the sail, and the twin fins extending aft were visible. As with all of Marine Visions’ craft, the sub was finished in glossy white. The sail and the fins had a single, wide diagonal of bright yellow painted on each side, to aid visual identification.

As they motored past the old cruiser, whose name was indecipherable under the green scum that covered her stern, a bearded wild man with a two-foot halo of blond hair called out to them.

“You bring anything up from down there?”

“We found a rock,” Brande half lied.

“How far down?”

“Looks like it’ll go to seven thousand.”

The bearded man’s significant other, her head and skinny naked torso exposed in the hatchway to the cabin, said, “Fuck it, Slick. Let’s get outta here.”

The beard watched them go by, saying, “Yeah.”

Under her breath, Brandie Anderson said, “If I had a body like that, I’d cover it up.”

“Or wash it,” Brande said, to substitute for some other repartees that had immediately jumped to mind.

“I’ve got Word on UHF,” Dokey called up.

Jim Word, aboard the
Gemini
, directed Dokey by radio into position astern of the mother ship. The sub slowed, then

turned and coasted in between the twin hulls of the research vessel. Each of the hulls extended ten feet aft of the main deck.

The whine of the electric motors died away as Dokey backed off on the motor controls, maintaining just enough forward momentum to hold her in place.

Above Brande was the massive steel yoke that lifted
DepthFinder
from the sea. The bases of its two legs rotated in mounts attached to each of the catamaran hulls. Cables stretched to winches on the main deck controlled the forward and aft movement of the yoke as well as the main lift cable suspended from the center of the yoke. Brande watched as the weighted cable descended toward him, its length creeping through the multiple block-and-tackle mechanisms that increased its lifting capability.

When it was within reach, he raised his hands to guide it aft, then leaned way over the sail and snapped it into the lifting eye. Raising his arm, he signaled reverse by circling his hand, and the winch operator braked the cable, then started it in the opposite direction.

The
DepthFinder
would be making several more trips today, with three crews rotating duty, but she had to come out of the water in order to have new weights installed and the battery trays replaced. Two weights, which fitted into recesses on the bottom of the hull, had been dropped on the bottom prior to their ascent. The batteries were submerged in protective oil in their trays, to resist the encroachment of salt water which could short them out.

With minimal use of the electric propulsion motors and energy-consuming electrical systems, the three sets of batteries could provide 150 hours of life support. Eighty hours of time was available at normal consumption rates, and thirty-five hours was the safety limit at maximum current draw. Additionally, there was a backup system within the pressure hull, good for another five hours. Brandeʼs safety consciousness, however, had dictated an MVU policy that battery packs be exchanged — one set recycling and recharging on board the research vessel — any time a submersible surfaced after more than three hours down.

Dokey shut down the rest of the sub’s systems as she broke free of the water, then clambered his way up into the sail.

“Hey!”

“’Scuse me, Brandie,” Dokey said.

“There’s only room for two,” she said.

“Yeah. Ain’t it great?”

The submersible was raised to the limits of the lift cable on the yoke, greenish water sluicing from the hull, then the yoke tilted forward, bringing the sub above the stern deck. Mostly above it. The aft third of the sub still hung out over the space between the hulls.

The winch operator lowered her as deckhands shoved and pulled, guiding the sub onto the rails set in the deck. Flanged wheels were inset into the lower hull, and once they engaged the track, a cable was attached to the hull, and the sub was winched forward along the track. Finally, three lines from deck cleats were attached to the hull on either side, and she was secured in place. Maintenance people — including PhD scientists — swarmed around her, popping open access hatches to the batteries and to the subsystems that needed recharging or checking. Within MVU, everybody performed all kinds of tasks.

Brande grasped Anderson around the waist and lifted her over the sail. She scampered away. He eased himself over, then slid down the surface of the hull to a scaffold that had been wheeled into place next to the sub. He worked his way down the aluminum-runged ladder.

Word came to meet him.

“Any idea about what Hampstead wanted, Jim?”

“No. He was uncharacteristically secretive, Dane.”

They both turned to watch as Dokey slipped under the bow of the sub and crawled toward the sheath that held
Atlas
in place. Minutes later, he came stumbling out from under the bow with the gold ingot cradled in his arms.

“This one’s mine,” he said.

“Bullshit!” yelled George Dawson from the
Grade
, which was tied alongside. “Get a saw and cut me off three- fourths of that!”

“Put it in the main lab, Okey,” Brande said. “Well want to examine it for any markings.”

Brande and Word followed Dokey forward and through the centered hatchway into the main lab. It took up most of the superstructure space on the main deck. Workbenches and test equipment were snugged against most of the bulkheads. Five computer terminals were tucked into the starboard, aft corner. The odor of chemicals was prominent. One of the battery rechargers made a humming sound.

Brande found his deck shoes where he had left them in a computer cubicle and bent over to pull them on.

Half a dozen people — marine biologists and scientists — gathered around Dokey as he gently settled his prize onto a workbench.

Brande and the research vessel’s captain continued through the lab, passed through an area of storage lockers and cabins — there were more cabins a deck down, in each of the catamaran hulls — and into the large, open lounge and wardroom area. Word got them both mugs of coffee while Brande settled into the last of four booths on the starboard side — opposite the galley — and picked up a phone mounted on the bulkhead. He directed the radio operator to call the Washington number on MVU’s secure satellite channel.

“Office of the undersecretary.”

There were so many undersecretaries in Washington, Brande had always wondered how a caller was to know if he had gotten the right one.

“This is Dane Brande, Angie.”

“Oh, Dane! I’ve got a message right here. Somewhere. Here we go. Mr. Hampstead is on his way to New Orleans.”

“Must not have been important then.”

“And he’s sent a Navy airplane to pick you up. You’ll be meeting at the U.S. Naval Air Station.”

“I take it back,” Brande said.

“What?”

“Nothing, Angie. Thanks for the information.”

Brande hung up the phone. 

Word sat down opposite him in the booth. “What’s up?”

“I still don’t know. But I’ll be leaving soon” Brande gave him the gist of the message.

“We’re staying on-site?”

“Yes. You’ll need to select a couple people to replace Okey and me on the crew rotation.”

“That’s probably better anyway, Dane. Most CEOs don’t get involved in the muck.”

“Hell, Jim, I started this company so I could get down in the muck. Wouldn’t be any fun, otherwise.”

Word grinned at him. “Life isn’t supposed to be fun, Chief.”

Brande smiled back. “That’s what my grandma told me. I’m going to grab a shower. You want to tell Dokey to let go of his gold and get ready to fly?”

“He won’t like it, but I’ll tell him.”

Brande took his coffee mug with him, left the wardroom, and climbed the companionway to the bridge deck. Aft of the bridge were the sonar and radio cabins, then the captain’s, exec officer’s, and four small guest cabins. He refused to call them owner’s cabins, and since he owned the
Gemini
and her sister ship, the
Orion
, he figured he could call them what he wanted to call them.

He mostly owned them. Each ship, designed with his insistent and detailed assistance, had been built by Bethlehem Steel Shipbuilding in Baltimore, and had cost $3.4 million. The monthly payments on his research vessels alone ran to $28,000 a month. Crew, maintenance, and supply costs for both ships was $225,000 a month. The luxury of owning his own cabin aboard the
Gemini
amounted to $4,200 a day. So he called it a guest cabin.