William H. Lovejoy
Ocean Black
CHAPTER ONE
“She’s just too damned pretty for my likes, Chief.”
Orville “Bull” Kontas, captain of the Mighty Moose, didn’t care for the new paint scheme on his workboat, an ex tugboat converted to new uses by the Marine Visions Unlimited crews.
Kaylene Thomas had sold the other two workboats, Priscilla and Cockamamie, and used the proceeds to drydock and fully refit the Mighty Moose. In addition to her new engines and refurbished living and working spaces, she sported the company’s recognizable theme of white paint with a yellow stripe rising diagonally on each side of the pilot house.
“You’ve sailed prettier, Bull,” Dane Brande told him.
“Maybe. But not on a damned tugboat.”
Brande had to cede the point. The workboat’s captain had probably sailed every classification of boat and ship in every sea and ocean available. Kontas was over seventy, with no documented evidence of his true age. His black market purchased papers birth certificate and passport reported that he had been born in Shanghai of a Greek father and a Chinese mother, but the data was based primarily on hearsay. His bald pate had a rusty edged fringe of white hair, and the lines of his weather and sea beaten face were deep. His ears were huge and blistered. Whatever his age, his strength seemed undiminished, and his loyalty would never be faulted. He had been with MVU from soon after the start up.
It wasn’t until after the Moose came out of drydock that Brande realized how much pride Kontas had taken as master of a boat that didn’t fit into a corporate scheme. Her decrepit state of repair had not meshed with the MVU ideology, but it had meshed perfectly with Bull Kontas.
“Would you like it better without the yellow stripe, Bull?”
“Ah, Chief….”
“Go ahead and paint it out.”
“Well, shit. I mean, it’s your boat and all.”
“I don’t care, Bull. I just like to come and ride with you.”
And that was true. He liked almost any form of marine transport. After Brande’s parents died in an automobile accident, and while he was being raised on the farm by his grandparents, Sven and Bridgette, he had learned to like more water than wheat farmers generally appreciated. With his fifteen foot aluminium boat, he had sought adventure on Tenmile Lake, then Leech Lake, then Lake Superior. Obtaining scholarships where he could and working the summer wheat harvests, Brande had accumulated enough cash to get him to the University of California at San Diego, then on to graduate schools.
Though he had left the wheat farm, Brande carried much of his Swedish heritage with him. Henning Sven Brande’s wide shoulders and barrel chest were apparent in Dane, disguising the fact that he weighed 215 pounds. He was six four, and that too was a reflection of both Sven and his father, Stephen. Henning Sven’s antecedents, confused by the tradition of differing surnames Brandeson, Svenson, Petterson all had identifiable blue eyes, and Brande carried that trait forward. He had been unable, or unwilling, however, to continue plowing the ground that Henning Sven had broken in Minnesota in 1917.
Brande sported the hands of his grandfather, large with blunt fingers, but they displayed the scars of contact with coral reef and sharp edged equipment rather than John Deere tractors and harrows. His blond hair was bleached to near whiteness by sun and salt water, and his face was deep sea tanned and weathered, with early crow’s feet at the corners of his blue eyes.
Keeping his private life private wasn’t an obsession, but it was a habit. While his professional successes were the fodder of boasting, he didn’t bother. Brande’s quiet demeanor and self-confidence gave outsiders the impression of arrogance, but his employees, whom he considered more as colleagues than employees, accepted his indirect style of leadership without question. Except, perhaps, for Bull Kontas.
Stepping to the back of the pilot house, Brande poured two mugs full of coffee from the cradled pot and took one forward to Kontas.
Keeping one gnarled hand on the helm, Kontas accepted his mug with the other and said, “Miss Kaylene, she won’t like that.”
“You take care of the paint, Bull. I’ll take care of Rae.”
In the nearly five years that she had worked for him, Brande had always called Kaylene Rae Thomas by her middle name. He knew it was an avoidance trait. His wife, Janelle Kay, had died on their honeymoon trip to the azure depths of the Caribbean, pinned beneath the broken crane boom of a sunken Liberty ship. His frantic and unsuccessful attempts to free her before her oxygen ran out had partially set the course of his career.
He preferred to call the president of his company, for which he was still chairman of the board, Rae.
Brande stood next to Kontas and watched the endless blue sea rolling toward them. The waters off Southern California were calm and smooth. Off the stern, North Island disappeared behind Point Loma, and San Diego Bay faded.
Two hours later, the chronically taciturn Kontas, after a silence of nearly an hour, said, “There she is, Chief.”
Brande scanned the sea and found the buoy. It was a beatup, steel concoction emplaced for the duration of the construction phase of Ocean Deep, which was two hundred feet straight down. They had come today to replace it.
Bending toward the low placed PA microphone on the side bulkhead, Brande pressed the switch and yelled, “Both hands on deck!”
Several minutes later, Darby Jones appeared. He was Bull Kontas’ entire crew.
A minute later, Maynard Dokey followed him into the pilot house, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Okey Dokey was short of stature and hated dentists so much that he went through life with a chipped front tooth. At sea, he rarely combed his hair, which was a tangled mass of dark curls. He was wearing cut off jeans and a bright yellow tee shirt with the boldly printed legend, “Save the mammals? I thought you said mammaries.”
Dokey designed his own shirts and coffee mugs, in addition to intricately plotted electronics circuits and massively complicated software programs. When he felt like it, he could be a genius with a machine tool, fabricating intricate components for mechanical monsters. Despite his sea bum appearance, he was a graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he carried the Marine Visions Unlimited title of Chief Robotics Operations Engineer. Robots being the prime concern of the company, Dokey and Brande were frequently in one another’s company.
He clomped into the pilot house and stopped in front of Brande. “The next time, Chief….”
Kontas had learned to call Brand, “Chief,” as a result of Dokey’s example.
“…I prefer to be awakened gently, preferably by someone with long, blond hair, swishing it lightly across my face. There should be coffee at hand, perhaps a warm croissant….”
“Coffee’s on the hot plate,” Brande grinned at him. “Maybe Darby has a croissant in the galley.”
“What’s a croissant?” Jones asked.
“God,” Dokey complained, “there’s got to be a better outfit somewhere, like the Navy.”
“The Navy didn’t have croissants,” Jones told him. He had retired as a chief petty officer.
Kontas reduced speed as he neared the buoy, saying, “Let’s hop to it.”
“I didn’t get my coffee,” Dokey said.
“Get up earlier,” Kontas told him.
Dokey grinned and headed for the afterdeck, followed by Jones.
Brande moved to the rear bulkhead, now outfitted with state of the art radar, sonar, and radio equipment, including an acoustic phone. Radio waves tended to bend in the wrong directions in water, and most of their subsurface communications were accomplished with acoustic transmissions.