And the old man, Christopher Stephens. The minute Harbison saw him in the room, he knew what was going to happen. All he needed were the details.
“You hear about that incident in Monterey?” one of the Defense guys said.
Harbison nodded. Of course he had. Everyone had. It had been in the newspapers just a few days earlier. “Sure. That B-52 out of Travis AFB. A bird or something got sucked into the engine—”
“Or something,” the Air Force guy said.
Michaels blinked. “You talking sabotage?”
Harbison kept his gaze on the table before him.
The officials all frowned, and the Air Force guy went on. “It went down. Three of the crew ejected safely, but the pilot’s seat malfunctioned and he went down with it.”
Harbison raised his eyes, sat up a little straighter. “And they were carrying hydrogen bombs, like last time.”
“Just one,” the Defense guy said.
“Bet you’re planning on handing out medals for that,” Harbison said. “I mean, last time it was four.”
The Oceanographic’s director looked sorrowful, but the military guys all fixed Harbison with identical steely stares. He might even have been intimidated, if he’d cared.
“How big was this one?” he asked.
The Air Force guy grimaced. His face was suddenly gray, weary. “Bigger payload than the last time. A hundred kilotons.”
“How far offshore?”
“Something like three miles.”
“You might not have read this page in the search-and-recovery manual,” Harbison said in a lazy voice, “but parts of Monterey Canyon go down two miles or more out there. That bomb is likely way out of reach.”
More glares. They really hated him. Hated having to clue him in.
Only Stephens, the old man, seemed amused, looking down at his gnarled hands linked on the table before him. His lips twitched, causing the lines on either side of his mouth to deepen.
It was the Navy guy who spoke. “According to estimates taken from the testimony of witnesses, we don’t think it went down into the canyon.” He frowned. “We are having difficulty confirming that with sonar, though.”
“The deep scattering layer is getting in the way,” the director said.
Harbison nodded. Of course it was, in a place like Monterey Bay. Wherever there was nutrient-rich water, countless masses of zooplankton—tiny plants and animals—gathered. Every day, the enormous assemblage rose and fell in the water column, moving toward the surface at night, into deeper water during the day. Scientists called it the largest migration of life on earth.
Though you could pass through the deep scattering layer in Alvin without even noticing, it played hell with sonar. From the surface, you could look at the screen and think your sound waves were bouncing off the sea floor, when they were actually reflecting off the mass of plankton in the midwater.
Made searching for something little, like a crashed plane and a nuclear bomb, nearly impossible from above.
“How many ships you got looking?” Harbison asked.
“Enough.”
“And you’re hoping to keep that under your hat?” Harbison laughed. “In Monterey? You must have turned into a tourist attraction already.”
“It’s a search and recovery for the pilot, that’s all,” the Navy man said. “All anyone needs to know. And it’s no lie. We don’t leave anyone down there if we can avoid it.”
If we can avoid it. That was the important phrase. Truth was, countless pilots and officers and grunts lay in unmarked graves all over the planet, and plenty of them were American.
And not just members of the military, either. Civilians, too. Collateral damage.
Harbison looked at Michaels, who looked back at him and spoke. “Which one of us goes?”
“Both of you,” the guy from Defense said. “Just in case.”
“And Stephens here, he comes along for the ride,” Harbison said, shifting his gaze. “Like last time.”
Everyone nodded. Stephens would form the second half of the search-and-recovery mission. He was the guy who had created and built the CARV, the Cable-controlled Aquatic Recovery Vehicle, an unmanned submersible that would bring the bomb to the surface after Alvin found it.
Alvin had its robotic arms, but they’d been designed to grab comparatively lightweight scientific specimens, and (though Harbison disagreed) the military didn’t trust them to be strong enough to haul the bomb back to the surface. The CARV, on the other hand, had but one purpose: To retrieve lost torpedoes and bombs from the sea floor.
Plus, it had one other advantage: A camera that could transmit along a cable back to the surface. Once Alvin had pinpointed the bomb’s location, the CARV could swoop down, take a look, and do the rest.
Harbison had seen it in action once before, the first time he’d worked with Stephens. He hadn’t been impressed. If Alvin felt like a living creature to him, the CARV was more like a mechanical dog, programmed to fetch.
He raised his gaze and saw Stephens looking at him. There was a glint in the old man’s eyes, but it was buried deep, and no one else saw it.
The second guy from Defense, who’d been silent till now, was the one who said what they were all thinking.
“Well, gentlemen, this is a colossal fuck-up,” he said. “But we dodged a bullet that the thing didn’t hit land. Can you imagine the consequences if that had happened?”
They all could. Harbison snorted.
“I’ve been stationed out there,” the Navy man said. “The California coast. The wind always blows onshore. East.”
Everyone nodded. They all knew the direction of the prevailing winds out there.
“What’s the population within a radius of fifty miles?” Harbison asked.
No one answered. But the Navy man said, “Not to mention the Central Valley.”
Harbison thought about it. The steady winds blowing out of the west, sweeping through the mountain passes of the Coast Range and heading east into the valley.
Some of the most heavily farmed land on the continent.
He looked across the table, and saw the hidden glint again in Stephens’s eyes.
Harbison’s boss asked him to stay after the meeting ended. His expression mixed confusion, anger, and sadness.
“What on earth is wrong with you?” he asked.
Harbison was silent.
“You keep yanking on their tails, eventually they’re going to turn around and bite you.”
“Let them.” Harbison spoke in a savage tone. “Let them bite, and then they can go out and find another pilot as good as I am and ask him to find that bomb.”
“Jack,” the director said, raising his hands. “Listen. I was just—”
But Harbison had already turned his back and was heading out the door.
Twenty-two hundred feet. Still descending.
While they’d been heading down, the sun had set up above. The recovery was being carried out at night, in secret, as everything about this mission had been. Only two Navy ships on the surface, along with the CARV on its tender, all waiting for Alvin to reach its destination.
They were traveling through a dead zone now. Alvin’s lights barely penetrated the black water, illuminating only a multitude of tiny white and brown and red flecks drifting slowly downward themselves. Harbison knew what these were: The organic remains of leaves, fish, whales. Humans. Whatever had died up above.
It was a constant, endless organic snowstorm that provided a feast for the creatures that inhabited the lightless environment of the ocean floor below. The blind eels, giant white crabs, bulbous-eyed fish with shining fleshy lures where their tongues should be.