Zubov choked back his emotions, his glassy eyes gaining a steely resolve.
“It’s a little hard for me to see that right now, Brock.”
“Get some rest,” Garner said. “Susan can give you a sedative.”
“No, dammit!” Zubov bellowed. “I’ve got to get back out there.”
“Serg, don’t push it “
“Don’t push me.” Zubov’s eyes blazed. “We’re not out of this yet. You need me. And we still need to set things right out there. For Junko. For Byrnes and those pilots. For Victor and his family and everyone else. But right now first, for Junko.”
“You got it,” Garner replied quietly. “Let’s get to work, my friend.”
27
As the last vestiges of the slow-moving storm moved off to the northeast, full communication was finally reestablished between the ships involved in the containment effort and those charged with cleaning up the broken remnants of B-82. Krail radioed the Phoenix from the Hawkbill the moment a secure channel could be established.
“Good to hear your voice again, Scott,” Garner said, taking the call.
He relayed the account of what had happened aboard the helicopter and the likely location of the wreckage. Krail confirmed they had located the downed Sikorsky that morning and shared Garner’s despondency about the lost pilots.
“Happens to the best of us,” Krail said. “Maybe a few more, unless we can put the lid on this box once and for all. What’s the status of the containment?”
The storm front and the severe wave disturbance had diffused the head of the slick, but in the hours that followed, the surface currents continued pulling the radioactive debris east through Fury and Hecla Strait. The ice-wrangling ships regrouped and began moving the Ulva-laden chunks through the slick once again. Meanwhile, the icebreakers holding the containment booms waited for further instructions thirty miles to the east, where the Villager was now dredging in Foxe Basin.
Beyond the most optimistic projections of even a day ago, Garner mused, the combined effort should still come together, but, responding to Krail’s question, Garner said, “The Villager is still digging and the icebreakers here are still practicing with positioning the booms on demand.”
“That’s what you get when you ask a herd of elephants to roll a marble around,” Krail replied.
“Good analogy,” Garner said. “At least they’re rolling in the right spot.” With a greater depth and more sediment than anywhere in Fury and Hecla Strait, the revised locations were looking even more suitable than the original ones.
“So far your sediment profiles are right on the money. The Villager has moved a hell of a lot of mud in the past two days.”
“That’s us: Global Moving and Storage,” Krail quipped.
“Don’t get cocky,” Garner warned. “So far I’d say you’re better at moving than storage.”
“Ouch — sometimes you know how to hurt a guy, buddy.”
Krail confirmed that the Hawkbill’s gamma spectrometers were showing null values all along the Devil’s Finger and the corridor leading back to the pit below B-82. For all their calamitous aftermath, the detonations in the canyon did exactly what they were intended to do: cut off the leak of radioactive waste at its source. Although the water bombers ultimately did not have enough fuel to provide assistance, the fire aboard the oil rig was contained with virtually no spillage from the reservoir in the GBS.
“What about this Plasroc?” Krail asked. “Still think it’ll do the job?”
“We don’t know yet,” Garner admitted. “Macadam is concerned that the water may be too cold for the compound to gel properly.”
“Too cold? In the Arctic? I wish that’d occurred to someone sooner,” Krail said sarcastically. “What can we do about it?”
“Cross our fingers and hope he’s wrong. The Plasroc berg should be forming by this time tomorrow. Once the polymer is activated, it’ll be on its way to the bottom.”
“What do you need from us in the meantime?”
“More sounding of the dredge site,” Garner suggested. “I want to be absolutely positive the hole we dig is big enough to contain the Plasroc boulder.”
“You’ve got it,” Krail added. “Once that’s confirmed I guess we’ll need to bring in more fireworks to bury the whole shebang.”
Garner could almost hear the grin on his friend’s face with the word fireworks.
In Garner’s fatigued state, Krail’s enduring exuberance for blowing things up seemed less disconcerting than amusing.
“Tomorrow, Scott,” Garner said with a chuckle. “Not until tomorrow.”
“You gonna get some rest until then?” Krail asked. “You sound beat.”
“Tomorrow,” Garner repeated. “Then we can all get some sleep. Phoenix out.”
In the Phoenix’s ward room, the PATRIC plotter continued to receive and translate the latest satellite data. It efficiently rendered an updated, color-enhanced image of the sea surface between Thebes Deep and the eastern terminus of Fury and Hecla Strait. The abbreviated tail of the slick, the last vestiges of radiation leaked from the seafloor, appeared on the surface nearly ten miles away from the canyon before being carried east by the current, through the strait to where the containment pen had been rebuilt. The angry red swath of computer-generated pixels representing the slick showed it was now just twenty miles long and half a mile wide, and even these dimensions would decrease as the icebreakers converged on it. Meanwhile, the Hawkbill’s instruments confirmed little if any radioactive debris in the slick’s wake. One of the team’s two headaches indeed had been solved; the rest was up to Garner and Macadam.
Garner was still studying the plotter, nearly forgotten since the death of Junko and her expertise. Zubov joined him.
“The speed and direction of the slick is almost an exact match with the surface currents,” Zubov noted, studying the latest oceanographic data. “No surprise there — the currents have always been our best indication of where the radioactive debris will go.”
“The plot shows us where the contamination is,” Garner agreed, “but not how the plankton are reacting to it. We need to take a closer look.”
Anticipating the resistance from his friend, he held up his hand.
“Better to find out now than later, right? We’ll be busy enough when the Villager finishes digging.”
“Medusa’s still cooked,” Zubov pointed out, trying to avoid the inevitable request.
“Not the cameras and the bottle samplers. We’ve got all the radiation data we can handle now. What we need now is a few plain of plankton samples, and Medusa’s still the best way to get them.”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t say that,” Zubov said. “That means we’ll have to take the ice nets off the A-frame. Again.”
“It’s only a mile or two of rigging.” Garner grinned.
“And two thousand feet of net. You make it sound like such a chore.”
They suited up and returned outside. As Zubov directed the crew on the A-frame, Garner prepared Medusa for what might well be her final use.
He removed the remnants of the gamma spectrometer harnesses, then cocked and calibrated the bottle samplers to collect surface water from the slick. Last, he adjusted the cameras and reprogrammed the sampler’s computerized species identification subroutine to look specifically for cells matching the appearance of Ulva morina. Once the Phoenix released its tether to the other two vessels, Medusa was let out from the A-frame and towed slowly through the slick behind the ship.