Brande sighed. “Two more things, Avery.”
“There would be.”
“There was another detonation in late afternoon. Mel got the direction and range pretty well pinpointed with the ship’s sonar.”
“I’ll check with Golden. What else?”
“The Washington Post is here.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Not at all. Wilson Overton is on board a Greenpeace boat a half mile off our starboard.”
“You didn’t talk to him?”
“No. I’ve refused three requests for interviews, but he knows that something is going on. They saw Svetlana fall into the sea, and they saw our rescue efforts. Mark Jacobs brought his boat in close and offered to help.”
“What about the other stuff, the encounter? Does Overton know about it?”
“I don’t think so. It was all subsurface. But if Mark Jacobs learns what’s going on, he could call in some friendly environmentalist buddies, and we might end up in a real brouhaha.”
“This is getting out of hand, Dane.”
“It’s past that,” Brande said.
After he hung up, he called up to the bridge on the intercom.
“Bridge,” Mel Sorenson answered.
“Mel, where are we?”
Sorenson gave him the coordinates. “We’ve been holding station where we picked up DepthFinder.”
“Let’s get on a northwest heading and look for Site Nine, the one you picked up yesterday. Contact Bull Kontas and let him know about our position and course.”
“We’re continuing with this, Dane?”
“If DepthFinder is repairable at sea, I’m damned sure going to find out what’s going on.”
Kaylene Thomas didn’t sleep, though she stayed in her bunk for six hours. When she got up and showered and checked the mirror, she saw the black smudges under her eyes. She had done some crying, too.
There was a void in her life.
She and Polodka had not been particularly close, but they had been friends. She had respected Svetlana’s mind and abilities. Like others, she had been amused and empathetic as she watched the Russian woman learn about western culture. Most of Thomas’s night had been spent with recriminations. If she had exhibited some leadership, told Svetlana to stay put, told Larry to hold on to her, done almost anything….
The tears began to well in her eyes once again. Wiping her eyes with a towel, she dressed in long johns and a jumpsuit. It took a few seconds to locate her running shoes, which she had kicked into two different corners of the cabin. Had he known, the admiral — her father, would have raised hell about the sloppy behavior.
She went down to the wardroom for coffee, stopping on the bridge for long enough to find out that Brande had told Sorenson to get underway. The Orion had her bows into the waves, and the deck felt more stable. It had stopped raining, but in the darkness beyond the windshield, she detected low-hanging clouds that were blotting out the stars.
“The Arienne is still with us, darlin’,” Sorenson pointed out.
She saw the navigation lights off to the starboard by a quarter-mile.
“Reporters are tenacious, Mel.”
“Not to mention Greenpeace people.”
In the wardroom, she found Brande stretched out on one of the bench seats in the first booth, his long legs hanging over the end. He was sound asleep, and she nearly woke him in order to find out what he had been doing all night.
Instead, she filled a mug with coffee and carried it across the corridor to the lab.
The submersible nearly filled the lab. The top of her sail was within six inches of the overhead, and her broad hull didn’t leave much room for people to move between the sub and the computers and workbenches. One had to be careful to dodge the tiedowns; someone was always tripping over them.
She saw that somebody had mopped the deck of the water that had dripped from the sub, and someone else had used a power saw to cut away the ripped fiberglass on the starboard side. She moved around the hull to her left and peered into the exposed cavity.
Dokey was sitting in a castered chair backed up to a computer console, studying the inside of the hull. He didn’t look happy.
“What have we got, Okey?”
He pulled another chair over for her to sit in and turned so that their knees almost touched. He searched her eyes.
“How are you doing, Kaylene?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“That’s what all the old hands say.”
“Really.”
“Just remember that the Fates are involved, love. Not much you can do to change their minds.”
She gave him a weak smile. “I’ll remember.”
“All right, then. Back to your question. We’ve got a mashed submersible, and that pisses me no end.”
“Can we make her operational? And safe?”
“I’ll know in a little while. The main concern is the pressure tank for the oxygen. I’ve got a couple of the guys testing it for integrity right now. It was shoved sideways a couple inches, but I think the oxygen feed problem you encountered had to do with a crimped supply line to the main pressure hull. That, we can replace easily. The tank, we can’t.”
“Batteries?” she asked.
“Not as bad as I thought. The starboard battery tray was mangled, along with the cells of seven batteries. The center tray was bent up a little, and we lost a couple batteries there, too. Mainly, the cable connections were snapped, and that’s why you lost so much of your electrical reserve.”
“I know we’ve got replacements for the batteries. What about the trays?”
“That grad student, Alicia Walters? You ought to see her at work with an acetylene torch. She’s a sculptor.”
“Sculptress.”
“Not in my world,” Dokey said.
Thomas had to grin at him. “Oh, hell! All right.”
“Then, there are the other little things.”
“Such as?”
“The impact must have been a hell of a lot stronger than I imagined. We’ve got some electronic components inside the hull that were damaged by vibration or overloaded when an electrical surge hit. That’s why so many of the circuit breakers tripped. We’re checking out each, and we may not have replacements for everything.”
“We won’t deploy unless every system is perfect, Okey.”
“That’ll be up to Dane, love.”
“Not necessarily,” she insisted.
“Up to Dane and you and me, then.”
“That could come up two votes to one, Okey.”
“That’s the way it might be, yes.”
“Damn it, Ned, that’s all I’ve got for now.”
Overton’s editor said, “An unidentified person fell into the sea and was not rescued. Man or woman, Wilson?”
“I couldn’t tell at that distance.” Overton shifted the phone to his left hand.
“We don’t have much here,” Nelson said. “Try to talk to Brande, again.”
“He’s adamant. No interviews.”
“We can’t go with what we’ve got.”
“You’ve got the fact that MVU is diving on a Pacific site that the Navy’s interested in….”
“From unspecified sources.”
“…and at a time of year that’s not normal for deep submergence expeditions. Plus, there’s the hard data from the Earthquake Center. Brande’s going to have to file a report on the accident with some agency. Send someone out to check on that.”
Overton heard Nelson’s pencil scratching on paper. “What do you think is down there, Wilson?”
“I don’t have the foggiest.”
“It’s too thin. I need a kicker.”