Freelander suggested, “Maybe it’s a plane that went down. Spy plane with all kinds of secret stuff on it. They’d want it back pretty bad, wouldn’t they?”
“You’d think there’d be a lot of military hanging around if that was the case,” Lane said.
Jacobs looked around at the horizons. His range of visibility was limited to perhaps a mile. “There’s certainly no Navy presence.”
Overton seemed to have not heard him. He had a firm grip on the railing that ran along the stern gunwale. The pitching of the deck had made him a little pasty-faced.
“Brande’s always been good about talking to me in the past,” Overton said. “The fact that he won’t talk now is suspicious in itself.”
Jacobs recalled his earlier conversation with Brande. “I don’t think he lied to me, either. He just didn’t give me everything he knew. We need more information, and we need it right away.”
“I’ll call the Navy,” Overton said. “If I ask a direct question, they’ll have to answer.”
“And then I’ll call Hap Wilson on the Oriental Rose,” Jacobs said. “Hap has some expertise in subsurface issues.”
Avery Hampstead had watched part two of Lonesome Dove, and his dream was pleasantly nostalgic until it was jarred by the clang of the telephone. There shouldn’t be telephones in West Texas.
Muttering to himself, and trying to not wake Alicia, he rolled his legs to the floor and fumbled for the receiver in the blue light of the radio dial on the nightstand.
“Hampstead.”
“Avery, this is Kaylene Thomas.”
“Kaylene.” He forced the sleep out of his voice and eyes. “Is something wrong?”
“No. I needed someone to talk to.”
Hampstead sighed to himself and decided not to tell her that it was after midnight in Maryland.
“Let me get to another phone,” he whispered.
He shoved the telephone under the pillow and walked to the kitchen to pick up.
“I’m here.”
“Sorry for waking you up. I tried to call Adrienne, but she wasn’t back at her hotel, yet.”
Hampstead felt a kinship. Whenever he was troubled, he called Adrienne, too.
“Where’s Dane?”
“They’re about an hour away from reaching Site Number Ten. After they come back up, I want you to talk to him.”
“About what, Kaylene?”
“About Svetlana. I think he’s very angry, deep inside, and I think he might take some unnecessary risks.”
“I don’t know what I could tell him, Kaylene.”
“For one thing, you could tell him that revenge belongs to the Justice Department.”
“Uh….”
“Uh, what, Avery?”
“Well, so far, Justice has declined to act.”
“What!”
“It has something to do with a lack of sufficient evidence,” he said.
“Evidence! Damn it, Avery! I was there. I know. I’m an eye witness, for God’s sake.”
“Well, there’s the matter of intent, Kaylene.”
“Goddamn it, Avery! I know they intended to ram us, and they did.”
“Kaylene, dear, listen. I know….”
She hung up on him.
Leaving Hampstead with the thought that he wasn’t very good at solace, not like Adrienne was. And wondering what might happen if he ended up with a whole bunch of Marine Visions scientists mad at both AquaGeo and their own government. He dialed information and asked for the number of Adrienne’s hotel in Seattle.
“I’ve found a signal,” Otsuka said.
“What kind of signal?” Brande asked her from his place in the left controller seat.
“I was scanning the acoustic spectrum. I’ve located the frequencies on which they’re transmitting, but all both of them are scrambled. However, on another frequency, I also hear a steady Morse code transmission. I think they’ve planted a signal device.”
“Locator beacon,” Dokey said. “I’ll bet it’s a homing device.”
“For construction or mining crews, you think?” Brande asked him.
“You give me the odds, I’ll tell you whether I’d bet on it or not, Chief.”
“I’ll pass, Okey.”
Brande leaned forward to peer through his port. Without Sarscan in tow, they were able to “fly” closer to the bottom terrain. Dokey was piloting, using the forward-scanning sonar and the six-million candlepower floodlights, which gave them about fifty feet of visibility, to warn him of eminent obstructions. The audio output from the sonar was linked into Dokey’s headset.
They were twenty feet off the bottom, following a down-sloping ridge, moving along at nine knots of speed. Under the lights, the seafloor looked barren and lunaresque. The projections of rock created utterly black shadows which would have been excellent hiding spots, if there were any living organisms which wanted to hide from them. At 18,600 feet of depth, though, anything living that was large enough to see would be in a pressure hull.
The whole panorama was stark and gray.
“We should see something in a couple minutes,” Otsuka said. “We’re coming up on the coordinates.”
They had descended from the surface in a wide spiral, finding the bottom several miles east of the location of the seabed disturbance. The compass showed that they were aimed along a 281 degree axis.
“How we doing, systems-wise, love?” Dokey asked.
“Everything in the green. She is staying together quite well,” Otsuka told him.
Brande felt pretty good about the repairs they had made, though he found himself scanning the readouts more frequently than he normally would and eyeing them with suspicion. He felt they were more untrustworthy than they were supposed to be. He felt colder than usual, too.
“What’s the temp, Kim?”
“Balmy, Pacific day, Dane. Thirty-eight degrees, Fahrenheit.”
“I was thinking about shedding a couple of these sweaters.”
“Uh, uh, Chief. No floor shows, please.”
“You can give them to me,” Otsuka told him.
Changing clothes would be awkward. On top of their warming layers, they were each wearing a white anti-radiation suit. The suit was bulky and hampered movement.
Brande glanced at Dokey. His concentration seemed almost total. He was relatively relaxed in the controller’s seat, and his gloved fingers gripped the joysticks with apparent tenderness, but his eyes flicked rapidly between the port view and the sonar readout on the center monitor.
DepthFinder rose and fell with the terrain, a roller coaster going downhill.
Until a tall escarpment abruptly showed itself on the screen, long before they would have had visual contact.
“The top of that thing’s about three hundred feet above us,” Brande said.
“The mother of all obstructions,” Dokey said, but he already had turned left, and hauled the diving planes into the extreme “up” position.
The sub spiraled upward, climbing, and had achieved sufficient altitude by the time Dokey returned to his original heading.
Having topped the blockade, the sonar was able to pick out a moving blob.
“Floor crawler,” Brande said. “I’m going to release the guard dog.”
“Go,” Dokey said.
“Let’s put the hoods on,” he said.
“Sadist.”
The radiation hoods of their suits were made of coated fabric, and they had clear Plexiglas visors, but once in place, peripheral vision was restricted. Brande felt like he was turning his head on a lazy Susan to keep himself aware of the instrumentation and other activities.