“How long?” Stephens said.
Harbison took a deep breath. Even though he was wearing a wool jacket, his skin felt cold.
“Soon,” he said.
Too soon.
The last time it happened.
Another thing the innocent tourists waiting for their ferries didn’t know: The skies above them were filled with B-52s carrying nuclear weapons. These jets crisscrossed the earth at all times of the day and night, preparing for—or forestalling—the next world war.
There was one big problem, though: a B-52 couldn’t fly all the way from the U.S. to Europe on one tank of fuel. It had to refuel in mid-air, coordinating with a KCF-135 tanker jet and connecting its gas tank to a boom dangling from the tanker.
This was a delicate operation at a couple hundred miles an hour, a test of piloting skill. Two and a half years earlier, in January 1966, a B-52 pilot flying over Spain had failed the test. He’d run into the KC-135’s fueling boom, ripping his plane apart and causing the tanker jet to explode.
Everyone on the KC-135 died, as did three of the seven men on the bomber. However spectacular, none of this would have been worth remembering—military pilots and crew died all the time, after all, even when the war was cold, not hot—if it hadn’t been for the B-52’s cargo.
Four 70-kiloton hydrogen bombs had gone down with the wreckage. One of them had fallen into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Palomares, a small fishing town on Spain’s coast.
The Navy had sent thirty-three ships to try to locate the wreckage. But it was Alvin that finally succeeded in finding the bomb more than half a mile down.
Alvin and the CARV, and their pilots and designers, had their moments of fame. But what Harbison remembered most about that time was all the weeks of waiting in Palomares while the Navy narrowed down the search area.
And meeting Adriana, of course.
Depth: 4,260 feet.
They had landed on a ledge protruding from a cliff face. Lit by the beam of Alvin’s harsh floodlights, the cliff was a steep gray expanse. Here and there rocky spires emerged from the murk, looking half-melted, protean.
This was the midnight zone, where sunlight never penetrated. No plants grew. Nothing photosynthesized. Everything that lived down here ate meat.
Harbison and Michaels had located the B-52’s wreckage, half-buried in silt, three days earlier. It lay on the ledge amid half a dozen outcroppings that pointed like twenty-foot-long stony fingers toward the canyon just beyond.
Now they were back, with Stephens, to watch and wait as the CARV descended, controlled by an operator on its tender. Its cameras would allow it to spot them and then the bomb, and to do its job.
Harbison bent over the controls, maneuvering Alvin between two smokestack-shaped rock promontories. The little sub could easily get caught here, trapped, turning within a few hours into a tomb.
The downed B-52, hidden from his sight for a few minutes, came back into view. Harbison could see the tailfin of the bomb emerging from a tangle of what had once been the jet’s fuselage.
They’d been lucky. Another fifty yards or so west and the ruined jet—and its cargo—would have fallen another mile or more to the bottom of the canyon. And stayed there forever.
Stephens was staring through his porthole. “There it is,” he said.
“Yeah,” Michaels said, “we know.”
He sounded bored. There was no role for a copilot on Alvin, and there was no pilot born who enjoyed being a spare tire.
“How long till your boat shows up?” Michaels asked Stephens, “I want to get the hell out—”
He never finished the sentence. His words turned into a harsh cry of terror and pain.
Harbison couldn’t turn around. Not immediately. First he had to shut off the thrusters, or else risk running Alvin into a rock wall.
But he didn’t need to look. He knew what had just happened.
When had Harbison figured it out?
That was easy: The first time he and Stephens been together, heading down to retrieve the hydrogen bomb that had been lost off Palomares.
The seas had been rougher than usual, and the bomb, located a little more than half a mile down, was not deep enough to avoid tidal surges and strong currents.
Stephens had gotten seasick.
In the tiny cabin, this was never pleasant, either for the man suffering or for his trapped companions. The smell alone could make seasickness contagious, if you were a greenhorn.
But Harbison had seen—and smelled—it all by now. It happened often enough when scientists came down on their first descent. He didn’t particularly enjoy the experience, but he was used to it.
After twenty minutes of explosive vomiting into the sick bags Alvin always carried in abundance, Stephens fell into a doze that was more like semiconsciousness. This was typical, too, and Harbison, feeling a little sorry for the old man, let him rest as they descended. He wasn’t needed yet.
During both descent and ascent, Alvin’s journey was almost entirely silent. It used no engine in either direction. Weighted with steel ballast, it fell through the water like a stone. After its mission was complete, it dumped the ballast and popped back to the surface like a slow-motion cork.
Its only engines were the thrusters, designed for short-term maneuvering and keeping the sub in position.
After a few minutes of silence broken only by the musical sound of the water buffeting the submersible as it fell, Stephens started muttering. At first it sounded just like nonsense, random syllables, and Harbison paid it no mind.
Then the old man’s voice rose and he spoke more clearly. Harbison felt himself grow still, and inside his chest his heart thumped. He still couldn’t understand the words, but he had no problem figuring out what language the old man was using.
No adult living and working anywhere around the United States military could fail to recognize Russian when he heard it. Especially when it was coming from the mouth of a man who was about to be in close proximity to a hydrogen bomb.
A few moments later, Stephens came back to awareness. Harbison watched as his eyes went from hazy to sharp, and only looked away as the old man fixed him with a sudden, sharp stare.
But neither of them said a word. Soon afterward they got busy recovering the bomb, and it was as if the incident, the revelation, had never happened.
Except it had.
By the time Harbison was able to shut off the thrusters and turn away from his porthole, Michaels was lying on the floor. In the tight space, his kicking legs collided with the seats and thudded against the metal walls. His pale, red-rimmed eyes were glassy, and spit was flowing from his stretched-wide mouth. He was gasping loudly, the sounds echoing off the metal walls.
Stephens had a gun in his right hand, something silver, with a long barrel.
“Great idea,” Harbison said, “using one of those in a pressurized cabin a mile down.”
Stephens smiled and shrugged. “These darts won’t penetrate the walls.”
Now Harbison saw the metal shaft emerging from Michaels’s neck. The spasms coursing through the dying man’s body had diminished to deep shivers.
“That wasn’t the plan,” Harbison said.
Stephens shrugged. “He was too noisy.”
“And me?”
Stephens raised the weapon. Harbison could see the tip of the arrow resting in the barrel.
Then the old man let his arm fall. “You I trust,” he said. “Enough.”
He sat down on his stool and placed the gun on the floor beside his foot. “Fire up those thrusters again,” he said, “and I’ll tell you what we do next.”