Brande looked at his watch. “Depends on the systems checks, Kim. Mel’s changing out a Loran, right now. Probably around eight tonight.”
“Based on past performance,” Emry broke in, “add a couple hours to that.”
“Okey and I will go help. The sooner I’m at sea the better.”
“Uh, Kim,” Brande said. “I hadn’t planned on, uh, having you along this trip.”
“What!”
“It’s just a quickie. A few days.”
“Sarscan has hardware and software that hasn’t been field tested. I had damned well better be there when something goes wrong.” She felt strongly about that. They were her systems, after all. Well, Svetlana had helped with the software.
“Uh oh,” Emry said.
Dokey didn’t say anything, which wasn’t like him.
“Well, I don’t know. Rae has the crew list….”
“Then I’ll talk to her.”
Otsuka scrambled out of her seat and tromped across the carpeted deck toward the door. She was so small that tromping did not work well for her.
Wilson Overton of the Washington Post knocked twice on the frame of the door to his editor’s office.
Ned Nelson looked up from some story he was scanning on his monitor. “Come on in, Wilson. Something up?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Wilson took one of the plastic chairs, turned it around, and sat with his arms resting on the back. “I was over at the Navy’s Research and Development Center, just poking around.”
“With the Navy, isn’t ‘trolling’ a more apt description than ‘poking?’“
Overton smiled. Since his stories on the Russian missile crisis in the Pacific, when he’d come within an inch of a Pulitzer — he was certain, Nelson had pretty much given him free rein to snoop around the naval and intelligence circles of the capitol.
“Some of these guys you’ve got to poke a little. Anyway, I had an ice cream cone with a bunch of junior officers who are working on some project they wouldn’t tell me about. Has to do with sonar.”
Nelson leaned back in his thickly-cushioned desk chair. “Sonar sounds to me like a very, very dry subject.”
“Bad, Ned. Bad, bad, bad. Anyway, there’s a lieutenant j.g. visiting from the Pentagon, and maybe he’s not paying much attention to me. I don’t think he knew who I was. He wasn’t giving away much, but he wanted to know about progress on this sonar system. He wanted to recommend to his bosses that it be tested in the Pacific off San Francisco.”
“And they said?”
“They said, ‘next year, if they were real lucky.”
“Is this going somewhere, Wilson? And if it’s going toward some magnificent piece on sonar, I’ll pass.”
“Not the sonar, Ned. The Pacific.”
“The Pacific. As in ocean.”
“Right. The Navy’s got something down there that they can’t identify.”
Nelson’s eyes narrowed as he considered the implications.
“Probably just a Russian sub.”
“They can identify Russian subs. You’ve read Clancy.”
“This means your gut instincts are telling you to go to the West Coast.”
“Well, yeah,” Overton admitted.
“On my expense account.”
“That would be best, Ned.”
“Oh, hell! If you can’t pin something down in five days, Wilson, I want your butt on plane back to town.”
It was a rare Friday for Hampstead. He had gotten away from the office at three o’clock.
He surprised Alicia by showing up early, then taking her out to a tremendous prime rib dinner. They had gotten home just in time to catch the beginning segment of another rerun of Lonesome Dove.
Hampstead had seen it three time before, but he couldn’t yet predict when he might get tired of Gus McCrae and his fellow travelers. Alicia thought that he just liked all of that dust and dirt as a relief from saltwater.
He shed his business suit and donned a jogging suit Adrienne had given him for Christmas two years before. He didn’t jog, but he did wear the baggy suit. Which was not what Adrienne had had in mind, he was sure.
He got a bag of pretzels and a bottle of Michelob and the remote controls for the TV and the VCR — he was going to record it this time, for sure — and settled into his Lazy Boy.
And the phone rang.
Alicia answered the remote telephone, then came in from the kitchen and handed it to him.
“Dane Brande,” she said.
He finished chewing a pretzel and took the phone.
“This better not take long. I’m watching Lonesome Dove.”
“You miss it the first time, Avery?” Brande asked.
“Not the first, nor the second.”
“Perhaps you were born in the wrong century?”
“No doubt about it. I know I was. Tell me about it.”
“About what?”
“You’ve run into a little snag, right?”
Brande laughed. “Of course not. We’re just getting underway. I’m calling from the Orion.”
“But…?”
“But we need to alter our contract a little.”
“I haven’t even written it yet.”
“That’s why I thought I’d call now. Before you finished it.”
“You want more money.”
“When we first talked, I thought nine professional staff was going to be sufficient.”
“And now it’s up to…?”
“Thirteen.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Turns out that, since Sarscan’s undergoing her first sea trials, we need to have Svetlana, Kim, and Bob Mayberry along. Rae’s going to help out, too.”
“Sounds like a joy ride to me,” Hampstead said.
Brande laughed, confirming Hampstead’s assessment. “It’ll be a short ride, Avery. We’ll be on site in fifteen or sixteen hours.”
“While I’m paying umpteen thousand dollars an hour.”
“But you’re getting the very best, Avery.”
“We can debate that later, Dane. Right now, the pigs are on screen.”
After he hung up, it took him a little while to get into the movie. He couldn’t decide whether he would rather be living along the Rio Grande or sailing into a starlit Pacific.
CHAPTER SIX
Svetlana Polodka gripped the lifeline strung between stanchions on the port stern hull of the Orion as the vessel departed the harbor. Her feet were planted wide on the deck, anticipating an unexpected roll.
The seas were mild, and she barely felt the surge as the ship left the protection of the bay and turned into oncoming seas. The lights of the city began to flicker minutely as the distance increased. Behind her, off the bow of the ship, the last remnants of orange and red were following the sun below the horizon. There was a stiff breeze quartering off the bow, and it pressed the nylon of her windbreaker firmly against her back and whipped the ends of her short hair. In a few minutes, she would feel the chill.
She was happy to be accompanying the expedition, achieved after Otsuka interceded with Kaylene. There was an unrestrained air of excitement among the crew, revealed in their jokes and their eyes. All of them were elated at the prospects of even a short and minimum cruise after six or seven weeks of being land bound.
And yet, she felt melancholy. She had been thinking about Valeri Dankelov for much of the day, missing him. Though she knew she was a full member of the Marine Visions family, sometimes she felt the absence of a countryman with whom she could converse. No one aboard the Orion had ever experienced a Moscow winter, which could be beautiful. No one had travelled by train across the Ukraine in springtime, reveling in the rebirth of nature, lost in the lushness of greenery and the spring planting.