Harbison took another few seconds, then turned back to the instrument panel.
Alvin rose from the rock face and moved forward.
Harbison had spent months after returning from Spain asking questions, making inquiries, calling in favors. Never saying exactly what it was he was looking for, or why, but learning all he needed to know by the end. Doing what he did for a living, he’d met a lot of people who could answer his questions.
Finally he knew enough to pay a visit to Christopher Stephens.
The headquarters and laboratories of Vision Industries, the company that built the CARV, were located in a corporate park near the New Jersey Turnpike. Just another set of long, low buildings made of yellow-gray stone and glass, with the future being created inside.
You never knew what was going on inside those anonymous buildings. Or wanted to know, if you were most people.
When he walked in the door of the corner office, its windows overlooking a pond with geese floating in it, the old man looked up at him but did not bother to stand.
“I heard you’ve been sniffing around,” he said. His voice was deep and gravelly, his eyes cold behind the fleshy ridges that bracketed them. “Now I’m guessing you’ve come to threaten me.”
Harbison glanced around. “Anyone listening in on us?”
“Of course not.” Stephens steepled his fingers. “So talk.”
Harbison talked. He told about what he’d overheard when Stephens had gotten sick onboard Alvin, what he’d suspected, what he’d learned since coming back home. What he believed Stephens’s ultimate plans were.
As he listened, Stephens relaxed, tension leaving the line of his jaw and the furrowed skin above his cheekbones. “Ah,” he said at last. “I see. Not threats. Blackmail.”
“No,” Harbison said. “Teamwork.”
At last the old man seemed surprised. His gaze grew cold again. “You want to… work with me?” he said cautiously.
“Yes.”
“Why should I believe that?”
“Because if I didn’t want something, I would just have turned you in.”
Stephens shrugged, though his expression was angry. “I’m not afraid of that. I’m… well protected.”
“Maybe you are. But it would be a terrific pain in your ass, wouldn’t it?” Harbison drew in a breath. “You’re right. I’m here because I want something in return. But it’s not money.”
“What, then?”
Harbison didn’t answer directly. “If something like Palomares happens again—”
“Oh, it will.” The old man’s eyes gleamed. “There’s always a next time.”
“Bring me in on it.”
For a long moment Stephens stared up into his face. “If it’s not for money,” he asked again, “then why?”
Harbison didn’t reply.
Stephens straightened in his chair. “For me to believe you, you must tell me.”
Still Harbison hesitated. Then, at last, voice harsh, breath short, he began to speak.
Telling the story he’d never told to anyone before.
In Palomares, the only bomb Harbison had cared about was the one that had fallen into the water, the one he waited weeks to retrieve.
The three that hit land didn’t concern him.
It was only later that he heard what had happened to them. None had been fully armed, meaning they couldn’t explode with five times the power of the bombs that had flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki just twenty-one years earlier. The bombs that had started the arms race and the Cold War.
Small favors. But that didn’t mean that the citizens of Palomares were free and clear. The reason: Every nuclear weapon came packed with conventional explosives as well as nuclear material. When two of the Palomares bombs hit the ground after a six-mile free fall from the doomed jet, their explosives detonated.
The military claimed that no one was killed by the explosions themselves. What came out later was the fact that a cloud of radioactive material—plutonium dust—was blown hundreds of feet in the air by each exploding bomb and dispersed by the wind over the surrounding farmland.
While farmers, unaware of the dangers, unprotected, continued to till their poisoned fields, teams of American scientists and soldiers in hazard suits dug up countless tons of tainted dirt, which was then shipped to a plant in South Carolina for decontamination.
Of course the residents of surrounding areas were alarmed. Who wouldn’t be? But scientists claimed that the level of exposure couldn’t possibly be harmful. To prove it, the Spanish minister for information and the U.S. ambassador even went swimming off a nearby beach for newspaper and TV reporters.
By the time the first reports of radiation sickness came in, it was too late.
Harbison had met Adriana in the café where she worked in Palomares. Perhaps thirty, she was dark, pretty, lively, with a mass of black hair that she wore pulled back, revealing her high forehead and eyes full of intelligence and merriment.
Adriana knew enough English that, alongside his workmanlike Spanish, they could converse. And she seemed to like him, a rare enough occurrence to be worth noticing.
If he’d told anyone about her, they would have laughed. A summer-camp romance, they would have called it. A fling. Something to enjoy, then forget as soon as you went home.
But for the Alvin pilot, condemned to spend eight or nine months a year out at sea, it was much more.
Day after day, waiting for his mission to begin, he hung around the café, drinking coffee, watching the people come and go, and grabbing Adriana’s few free moments to chat. As the days passed, she took to spending her breaks with him, and then they started to meet in the evenings as well.
They never spent a night together, though. Not once. Every evening she went home to her parents’ farm outside of town. A farm located just two miles from where the explosives on one of the hydrogen bombs had detonated, spewing a plume of radioactivity into a stiff wind.
By the time the lost bomb was found, and Harbison was called to work, Adriana was looking thin and feeling unwell.
By the time he returned, she was in the hospital, already a grotesque scarecrow version of the plump, talkative girl she’d been.
And by the time he was called back to the United States for debriefing, she was dead.
No one ever made the news public, or took responsibility.
Harbison guided Alvin closer to the wreck, which lay between two of the twisted spires. The floodlights showed that its nose, still mostly intact, was pointing upward, while the rest, a jumble of jagged shards, lay around and beneath it.
Something caught his eye. Motion. A human arm and hand, the bones of the fingers and forearm protruding through gray ragged skin, waving in the slight current. Below lay the white blur of a half-skeletal, eyeless face.
The B-52’s pilot.
Harbison saw a sudden, slithering movement. A hagfish rose into the light, the heavy slime that coated its snakelike body catching Alvin’s floodlights. It stared through the porthole with eyes like holes, and its nightmare mouth, a black cavern ringed by gleaming teeth, gaped at him.
Other hagfish moved in the shadows beneath it. Perhaps a dozen more, writhing in the dead pilot’s midsection, gorging on the unexpected deep-sea bounty of flesh.
Alvin moved forward, leaving the feast behind. Ahead lay the rest of the wreckage and the bomb. It was shaped like a torpedo and composed of black steel that absorbed the light and reflected nothing.
And beyond it, behind one more line of rocky spires, lay the black abyss of Monterey Canyon.
“Okay,” Stephens said, gesturing. “Pick it up.”
But before Harbison engaged the thrusters, he felt an odd vibration tickling the front of his spine. It grew stronger, still not quite a sound, more like the throbbing at the onset of a migraine headache.