“Talk about cost-efficiency,” Dokey said. “These accidents are going to eat into their profit margins.”
“What now?” Otsuka asked.
As an answer, Brande activated his headset. “Larry, you standing by?”
“Got me,” Emry said. “How’s it going?”
“Quite well.”
“See anything interesting?”
“Only that they seem to be using larger explosive devices. they’re leaving bigger holes behind.”
“And more radiation,” Otsuka said after checking the radiometer.
“That’s not good,” Emry said.
“Maybe they’ll change their minds. Anyway, Larry, take a look at your chart.”
“I’m looking.”
“You see a pattern there? In the distance between detonations?”
“I do.”
“Where do you think the next one will take place?”
“Oh. Hold on. I see what you mean.”
A few minutes later, Emry continued, “There’s not an exact spacing, Dane. But if I follow the arc, I would expect to see something happen between eighty and a hundred miles northwest of where you are now.”
“Give me a heading.”
“Ah, Dane, hang on a minute. Someone else wants to get in a word while we’ve got you on the line.”
“What do you think you’re going to do?” Thomas asked.
“Preventative medicine,” he replied.
Before she could respond to that, a new voice broke into the channel. “Brande, what are you doing?”
“Ah, Penny,” he said. “How nice to finally hear from you.”
“What have you done to my crawler?” Glenn asked.
She was furious, and the fury edged her voice.
“Crawler?” Thomas asked.
“I believe,” Brande said, “that the vehicle may have had a malfunction. You ought to send somebody out to check on it, Penny.”
“Damn you! You’re interfering with a legal enterprise, Brande. I want you to stay away from my operations, and I want you to do it, now!”
“It’s a free ocean, Penny.”
Abruptly, she cut off the circuit and turned to Conroy. “What have you got?”
“They lost control of one track, Penny. We’re going to have to send someone out to tow them in. We’ll also have to raise it for repairs, no doubt.”
“Damn, damn, damn!”
The Outer Islands Lady, AquaGeo’s surface maintenance ship was already enroute. She had ordered away from its station off Alaska as soon as she knew they would have to raise the Melbourne to replace the propulsion unit.
Every contact with Brande had resulted in delays. She was losing equipment so fast she’d never complete the program in time.
Time was the problem. She was closing in on Deride’s final solution, and she was going to run out of time before it was achieved.
“What about Sydney, Penny?” Bert Conroy asked. “In another couple of hours, she’ll be ready to supervise Team Three’s placing of charges. I’d better recall her and send her to watch over the crawler.”
Glenn had heard Brande talking to Emry on the Orion. She knew he was going to go searching for Site I.
He might even find it before the charge was set off.
Or just as it was set off.
God, and he was such a find, too.
“Bert, you just let Sydney and FC-9 do what they’re supposed to do.”
“Penny.”
“All right, send Sydney.”
An Airborne Warning and Control (AWACS) aircraft enroute from Japan to Travis Air Force Base had helped them out a little by making an earlier radar contact, and the Orion and some other, smaller vessel had appeared on the California’s radar screens about forty minutes before.
Commander George Quicken, who had the conn, was standing on the port side of the bridge, scanning the angry seas with binoculars.
“There we go, Captain Harris,” he said. “Four points to port.”
Mabry Harris trained his own binoculars in the direction indicated and saw the two vessels. Their navigation lights made it possible to discern them through the scud that clung to the surface of the sea.
“All right, Commander. We’ll want to take up a position south of them.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Mr. Evans,” Harris said.
“Sir.”
“Message to CINCPAC. We have made visual contact with the Orion. Awaiting further instructions.”
Harris didn’t know why he was there, and he wasn’t sure that Commander, Pacific Fleet did, either. Maybe someone in Washington had a clue.
But he doubted it.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
For the last two hours, the seabed had been steadily rising, but not so much that anyone on the surface would know, or maybe care. Brande had been feeding altitude data into the submersible’s on-board computer, thereby updating Emry’s current mapping information on the Orion via the Loudspeaker telemetry data link.
On the left monitor, Brande had a copy of Emry’s map, with DepthFinder’s current position superimposed as a yellow square. On the small keypad, he tapped in the current depth reading: 18,214 feet. It was a pretty dismal map, showing almost no prominent features for the surrounding twenty miles of its scale. There was one seamount which rose to within 14,000 feet of the surface. If one could see through transparent water, looking down on its top would be similar to viewing one of Colorado’s “fourteeners” from sea level at Los Angeles. Colorado peaks were impressive, but they were normally seen from the spectator’s stance, which was already at least a mile up.
On the feedback link, Brande also had Orion’s position shown as a yellow circle; she was some fifty miles behind them on the surface. Mel Sorenson was staying way back, so that his location didn’t necessarily betray that of the submersible. He was constrained to a degree by the range of the Loudspeaker acoustic system. They had voice over a longer range, but lost data transfer capability at around fifty-five miles.
Over the last six hours, they had steadily moved north-northwest, travelling at a conservative cruise speed of ten knots in order to preserve their battery charges. Kim Otsuka had passed around their lunch boxes, and they had consumed every last bologna sandwich, potato chip, and apple. Brande was getting hungry again, but he suspected it would be another six hours before they resurfaced.
He was also certain they were on the right course. Over an hour before, they had detected the high-speed cavitations of propellers on the sonar, and Dokey had immediately settled DepthFinder on the seabed and shut down the lights and noise-making systems.
Brande had gone passive with the sonar to avoid giving away their location, but not before determining a bearing on the alien sub. After waiting twenty minutes, he activated the sonar briefly and took another reading on the sub, which was then six thousand yards behind them. From the two readings, he extrapolated its heading and track.
“If it were up to me, Okey, and if that thing was coming from where we’re heading, I’d want to bear right a trifle, to a heading of three-two-five.”
“Those guys will be going to help out a floor crawler, I’d bet,” Dokey had said. “and they’re flat moving out. Roughly, I calculate their speed at fifteen knots.”
“Given their lack of aerodynamics, that’s probably their top end, Okey.”