As the submarine submerged, the rolling motion created by the waves disappeared.
Deride felt the loss.
He was totally claustrophobic. Being confined in a steel can beneath an oppressive and frequently angry sea stirred heavy fears in him, probably the only fears he had ever acknowledged to himself. The irony was that so much of what he had achieved was created out of an environment which frightened him almost irrationally.
He always told himself it was irrational, and he faced the challenge each time with intrepidation and stoic silence. He would not let the fear best him, and he would never tell another about it.
As the deck inclined by about ten degrees, he stepped aft to watch at the video console. Cameras secured at various spots on the submarine’s hull fed their image to six monitors on the console. The forward camera captured only bluish green water, seemingly without life, and dimming rapidly as they descended. The aft camera’s image was marred by a white flurry created by churning propellers. A school of silvery blue fish was caught briefly in the view from the port camera.
The two screens which displayed images from the remotely controlled cameras mounted on the conning tower were currently dark.
“Depth, sir!” called the planesman, and the deck began to level.
The man tending the video console activated the movable cameras.
Two dark blobs appeared in the forward view screen.
“All stop,” Keller ordered.
“Aye aye, sir. All stop.”
The propellers stopped spinning, but the submarine continued to coast forward, closing on the blobs, which evolved into dark gray, cylindrical capsules.
Exactly like the capsules that contained cold medicine, Deride thought. He had never taken a drug or an aspirin in his life voluntarily. Only the governmental requirements for visas or ingress to a country had forced him to keep his vaccinations current.
These capsules, however, contained something far more valuable than amphetemines. They could be engorged with sixty thousand barrels of crude oil. The bullet nose housed pumps for egesting ballast as oil was sucked aboard. The exchange was carefully controlled by a computer so as to maintain the proper neutral buoyancy of the capsules.
The second capsule was connected to the first by a thirty foot long steel cable, and both capsules had four tiny fins on the aft ends, to stabilize their flight through the water.
Each capsule was, simply, a barge. Neither had motive power. Propulsion was provided by the submarine, which would tow these barges to an offshore pipeline near Equador.
Once the submarine train was underway, it could maintain eighteen knots of speed, and unlike surface tankers, it was not affected by the weather or sea conditions. While AquaGeo also kept a surface tanker fleet, the submarine transports proved fast and invaluable, and the sub-trains were gaining dominance in the fleet.
The sub-surface freighters were especially valuable when loading or unloading in privacy was desirable.
Keller ordered engines astern briefly to halt their forward movement.
The console operator increased the magnification on one of the cameras, focusing in on a small submarine. Deride likened them to worker bees. Large enough to embark three men, the miniature submarines were used for drudge work and were not named. As he watched, this one rose from the seabed several hundred feet below, trailing an eight inch-diameter hose. The other end of the hose was connected to the pumping station on the sea floor which gathered the output from six wells. All of them had been drilled nearly four years before, and all of them continued to produce copious amounts of crude oil.
His startup costs on these subsurface wells had been enormous, but more importantly, Deride did not have direct or indirect, general or limited, partners. Drilled outside of any nation’s territorial waters, he paid no land leases, no royalties, and no royalty overrides to another living soul. When the oil was sold in relative privacy, as this batch would be, he also paid no taxes to any government. Compared to his land based oil production, the offshore wells produced more than three times the income.
Payback on the drilling costs came three times faster.
The rest was gravy.
Keller came back to stand alongside him. The captain had watched this operation many hundreds of times, but part of his well paid job was to humor the boss, though not too obviously.
“Mechaum,” Keller said to the console operator, “let’s monitor the audio channel.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
He flicked a switch, and the dialogue between this worker submarine and another one operating the pumping station came over the speaker. The acoustic telephone gave voices a hollow quality.
“How you doing, Snake?” the submarine on the seabed asked.
“Another five minutes, Gorgi. Let’s not rush it.”
Time was money, but Deride refrained from saying anything about it. His head felt compressed, and the old, standard headache was coming back. It always went away when he returned to the surface.
Deride had grown up in oil fields. From his teenage years to his mid-twenties, he had worked as roustabout, roughneck, and tool pusher. He had worked the deck in snowstorms and blazing heat, and he had enjoyed every minute of it. This remote control manipulation of the earth’s treasures was not as enticing, but it was the way of technology, and he was astute enough to use the technology.
On the primary video screen, assisted by the halogen light cast by the camera’s floodlamps, he saw the small sub approach the second barge. It slowed, moving gently, its manipulator arm reaching forward to plug the hose connection into the barge’s receptacle.
“Got it, Snake?”
“Hold on a….”
Abruptly, a cloud of blue black spurted from the incomplete connection.
“Goddamn it, Gorgi!” Snake yelled. “Shut her down!”
The oil ceased to flow, but Deride watched the cloud of escaped crude slowly rise above the barge and disappear into higher waters. He estimated that four barrels about 176 gallons had been released. It would rise to the surface and create a small slick.
He was not concerned about that. If it was spotted, someone would attribute it to the offshore wells near Santa Barbara.
He turned to Keller. “Captain, you will see to it that Gorgi Whatever his name might be is charged for four barrels of crude at the spot market rate.”
“Of course, Mr. Deride.”
Harbor One, at six hundred feet of depth, where the light of the sun was almost totally diminished, was one of Svetlana Polodka’s favorite places on earth.
Her favorite place also was America, generically, and California, specifically. From the day she had arrived in San Diego to complete postgraduate work at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, she had been enamored of America and all that it meant. After she joined Marine Visions, Dane Brande had periodically assured that her and ‘Valeri Dankelov’s visas were extended whenever they came due. She and ‘Valeri had enjoyed a brief affair, but he was a true Russian, homesick, and he had returned to the rodina, the motherland.
Polodka carried a Russian surname, but not many of the other Russian stereotypical traits. She was barely five feet tall, petite, and with curves that ‘Valeri had modestly called “exponential.” Dark haired and dark eyed, she did not try to emphasize either with elaborate hair styling or makeup. Like the other women of MVU, she was so often in the sun or in the water that the expenditures would have been wasted.
She was a computer software engineer for MVU, with a special interest in fiber optics, and when Brande had told her that he wanted her to stay as long as she wanted, she had applied for American citizenship. Dankelov, she thought, had been dismayed at that news, hoping to rekindle their relationship, but he was tied to St. Petersburg, and she had new ties.