Over the radio link Carlyle and the others could hear alarms wailing and the frantic voices of panicked men on the floundering ship. Carlyle got busy computing an intercept course.
“I’m sorry about the misunderstanding, Captain,” Carlyle replied. “We are seven hours from your position and are getting under way now. What is your situation?”
“At first the damage didn’t appear that severe. Our pumps can handle the inflow of seawater, and emergency crews already have the hole repaired with timbers and plates, but we still appear to be sinking. We’re down four feet in the past thirty minutes. If this continues, your seven hours will be too late.”
In the minute the Surveyor’s officer took to consider the situation, three other ships in the area — two container ships heading to Los Angeles from Japan and a small tanker ferrying gasoline to Wake Island — responded to the distress call. None was closer than the research ship, although their captains had ordered detours to offer assistance. A navy patrol plane from Midway Island was en route.
Carlyle didn’t question the impossibility of what Galloway was telling him. If he said his ship was sinking despite effecting repairs, then that was exactly what was happening. He considered that they had missed another spot where their ship was holed, but it didn’t seem likely. Repair teams on navy ships were well trained. They wouldn’t make such an elemental mistake.
“What does this mean?” C.W. asked the officer. Spirit was at his side, holding his hand.
Carlyle had almost forgotten their presence. “I don’t know.”
“Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” It was the radioman again and his voice was a shriek over the radio. “We’re sinking fast. Down at the head. The bow’s awash. This is the USS Smithback. Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. The sea. The sea is starting to burn.”
A muffled explosion rumbled from the bridge speakers. Another scream and then the roar of water. And then silence.
For the six hours and forty minutes it took the Sea Surveyor II to reach the Smithback’s last known coordinates, Jon Carlyle continued to radio and received no replies. The P-3 Orion antisubmarine warfare plane out of Midway had already reported in by the time they reached the site. That had been an hour after the last call from the Smithback. The Orion found no wreckage, no debris, not even an oil slick.
It was as if the navy cargo ship had never been.
DS-TWO MINE AREA 51, NEVADA
Ira Lasko wasn’t waiting in the cave when Mercer and Sykes emerged from the flooded mine. He wasn’t in the control van either. Mercer, still wearing his borrowed wet suit and oblivious to the sharp stones that cut into his bare feet as he searched the camp, found his friend in the rec hall. Dr. Briana Marie was with him, her lab coat tossed over a sofa as she and Ira conferred over a thick binder.
Both simply glanced up when he crashed through the door. Dr. Marie closed the file and leaned back in her chair. Ira ran a hand across his bald head. The only sound was a steady whir from an air conditioner and the drip of seawater off Mercer’s body. He threw his flippers into a corner.
“Nuclear physicist?” he taunted Briana. “How about Harry fucking Houdini?”
“You were told not to enter the cavern,” she snapped back.
“Easy, Doctor,” Ira said.
“He isn’t cleared for this project, Admiral. You assured me he could complete the tunnel to the cavern and not ask questions.”
Ira shot her a hard look. “I don’t like lying to my friends and I’ve done it long enough. It’s over.” He turned to Mercer. “I didn’t have a choice. The orders came straight from the secretary of defense and the president’s office.”
Mercer heard the sincerity in Ira’s voice, saw the shame in his eyes. This was the Ira he’d known and agreed to work for. The tension lines that had etched his face seemed to be relaxing with each passing second. Mercer unzipped his wet suit and used a handful of paper napkins stored in a sideboard to wipe water from his eyes and dry the hair on his chest. Whatever he was about to hear, he knew he’d need to sit for it. He’d probably need a drink too, but the camp was dry.
“That cavern,” he said, “it’s not natural, is it?”
“No,” Ira replied, “it’s not. It was formed when the submarine refocused.”
“Refocused? What does that mean?”
Ira hesitated. “I think it’s best if Dr. Marie explains it.”
For a moment she seemed to struggle between the need to keep her project secret and the desire to brag about her work. And then it came in a rush of pride.
“How much do you know about quantum physics, Dr. Mercer?”
“It’s the realm of the subatomic, where the rules we live by, like gravity and magnetism, no longer apply. Most everything I’ve read about it is so counterintuitive that I tend to ignore it.”
She nodded. “A reasonable and honest answer. There are only a handful of scientists in the world who wouldn’t give that exact same response. And yet what you don’t know is that it is the branch of physics that will one day revolutionize the way we live our lives.”
“I don’t think the ability to move a submarine into a mountain is going to better my life any time soon,” Mercer said sarcastically, still riled by all the lies he’d been told.
She didn’t like his flippant comment and her tone became brusque. “Well, then how is this for counterintuitive, Doctor — we didn’t move the submarine into the mountain. In fact, the sub never moved at all.”
Mercer held up a supplicating hand. Antagonizing her wasn’t going to get the answers he wanted. “Could you start from the beginning, please? In laymen’s terms.”
“All right. What is the fastest possible speed in the universe?”
“The speed of light. One hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second.”
“Newton’s second law of thermodynamics basically states that all systems decay into chaos, right?”
“I believe so.”
“Does a tree falling in the forest make a sound?”
“What does this have to do with that submarine?”
“Please answer the question.”
“Sure, why wouldn’t it?”
“In the quantum world, you just gave three wrong answers. The study of the subatomic came about from the work of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. One of the principles all subsequent research has been based on is called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. In the simplest terms it means that observing an event alters its outcome. Therefore nothing in the universe happens without direct observation. It sounds arrogant, I know, that we, the observers, make things happen by our very presence, but it has been proven in the lab dozens of times. That means the tree in the forest can’t make a sound because it never fell.
“And in the world of the subatomic, both in time and in space, order can spontaneously arise from chaos. Albeit for fractions of a second, but even that short time span refutes Newton’s second law.”
“And the galactic speed limit?” Mercer pressed. “The speed of light?”
“What if I told you I’ve seen an experiment where a beam of laser light that was shot through a gas medium at extremely low temperatures actually came out the other side of the chamber before it was fired. Effect came before cause. Somehow in the quantum world, a message traveling faster than the speed of light was relayed to the detector that the laser beam was coming.”
Mercer didn’t doubt her claims. He was more aware than most that the immutable laws of the past were falling to scientific breakthroughs at an ever-accelerating pace. Yet he couldn’t fully grasp the implications, or how this got a submarine weighing a thousand tons or more into a mountain hundreds of miles from the sea.