She asked, “Uncle Paul?”
Glenn knew that Deride was still angry about the damaged floor crawler, about the damaged sub, and about how much those repairs were going to cost in time and money.
“Jesus Christ!” he said. “I suppose we ought to give them some kind of warning.”
“I can reach them on their acoustic frequency,” Glenn told him. “It would certainly be more than they did for Eddie and Hank when they attacked FC-4.”
“That’s true,” Deride said.
“Then again, Brande’s violating the injunction you just told me about.”
“That’s also true.”
“And we may go a day or two over schedule on the project. You realize that?”
Deride nodded.
“The Outer Islands Lady will be here shortly, to make repairs on Melbourne and FC-4. The loss of those vehicles has also eaten into the project schedule,” Glenn reminded him.
“How much?”
“It’ll go over a million.”
“To hell with Brande,” he said. “Blow it.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A ridge six hundred yards ahead effectively blocked the scan of the forward-looking radar. It looked like a solid granite wall on the water-fall display, like that of a prison, Otsuka thought.
She was perched on the edge of her seat, leaning forward against the back of Dokey’s and Brande’s seats. They were at 18,900 feet of depth and twenty-five feet off the bottom. Through the portholes, the seabed appeared forlornly beautiful, almost a Japanese rock garden in monochromatic grays. The floodlights made the rock sentinels stand out in stark poses of military attention. The silt swooped up against their bases on the north sides, pushed there by the strong current that flowed north to south.
She could tell that Dokey was fighting the current, leaning into it, by the position of the controller handle under his fingers. Occasionally, the submersible felt as if it were sliding to the left.
“Kim,” Brande said, “do me a favor. Check on the times of the detonations.”
“Time of day, Dane?”
“Please.”
She leaned back against the seat cushion and swiveled the keyboard mounted to the chair arm into place in front of her. With a few keyed commands, she linked into Emry’s mapping program, peering across Brande’s face at the display on the left monitor. The detonation locations were indicated on the map, with the coordinates printed alongside each. Emry had also stored the times in his database, though they were not shown on the display. She called up the file, losing the map for the time being.
After a quick search, she found the sub-file, then keyed in the command to display the time of detonation alongside each coordinate.
The map reappeared on the screen, and she pushed the keyboard out of the way and rested her elbow on Dokey’s seat as she studied the screen.
“We want to climb this ridge, Chief?” Dokey asked.
Brande was scanning the map, also. “We’re ninety-two miles from the last site, Okey. I’d have thought we’d run into a floor crawler by now.”
“Maybe on the other side of the ridge.”
“Let’s go over. I read it as three hundred and twenty feet high.”
Dokey eased the bow up with the joystick, and DepthFinder began to rise.
“Dane,” Otsuka said, “I don’t see a pattern, as far as time-of-day goes. There’s been a detonation almost every day, but they have taken place anywhere from four in the morning until nine-thirty at night.”
“I was afraid of that,” Brande said. “It doesn’t leave us a way to predict the future.”
“Just whenever they reached the site and got their charge buried,” Dokey said.
Otsuka felt her level of anxiety increasing. If they were in the right area, something devastating could happen at any moment.
Dokey had gone into a right turn, climbing along the face of the cliff which was now in the fringe of the floodlights and visible on their left. It appeared massive and strong. Both Brande and Dokey were leaning forward, close to the ports, to examine the rugged face.
Otsuka switched her attention to the sonar display. The top of the ridge was coming up. The crest was saw-toothed, with lots of depressions and rises. Her eyes were drawn to an especially strong return hidden in one gulley along the lip of the ridge. Automatically, she switched on the magnetometer.
“Dane! We’re showing a heavy magnetic field!”
Brande glanced at the readout. “Where?”
She reached between the seats and tapped a finger on the screen.
“Probably the floor crawler,” Dokey said.
“He’s protected himself well,” Brande said. “Gotten down in the rocks. Oh, shit! Dive, Okey!”
Dokey didn’t ask for reasons. He slapped the stick forward and ran the electric motors up to full power.
The submersible nosed over and headed for the bottom.
And they almost reached it before the concussion wave hit them.
And this time she heard it, a crescendo of deep-throated thunder that hit in one loud clap.
DepthFinder rolled over.
Otsuka was tossed out of her seat, hitting the overhead, bouncing into Dokey.
For some reasons, she recalled how idyllic and sun-filled her days at Stanford now seemed.
“Nuclear detonation,” Emry said calmly.
Thomas rose from her chair involuntarily. She rushed across the lab and leaned over Emry’s shoulder.
“Where, Larry.”
“Same coordinates.”
He didn’t have to say, “same as DepthFinder’s.”
Mayberry, at the next console, said, “We’ve lost the telemetry.”
The others in the lab abandoned what they were doing and hurried to gather around Emry’s console.
Without asking permission of anyone, Bull Kontas reached around Emry and picked up the microphone. He had been aboard for several hours, after transferring his six huge crates and the robot Gargantua from the Mickey Moose to the research vessel. His crewman was keeping the workboat in trail a few hundred yards behind the Orion.
Nobody had bothered telling Kontas that radio silence had been imposed, and no one was going to tell him now. He keyed the mike. “DepthFinder, this is Orion.”
Released the transmit button.
Dull undertone of static.
“Hey, Chief, come back to me, damn it!”
Nothing.
Kaylene Thomas collapsed onto her knees next to Emry’s chair.
“Could be anything,” Emry said. “Electromagnetic Pulse, EMP. Might have knocked out the electronics.”
“Goddamn,” she said.
“Take it easy, Kaylene,” he said, putting an arm around her shoulders. “Give us some time.”
She reached over and pressed an intercom button.
“Bridge,” Connie Alvarez-Sorenson said.
“Full speed, Connie. Heading two-two-five.”
“Full turns coming up,” she said.
Mayberry got out of his chair, got his hands under Thomas’s arms, and eased her up into the chair.
She couldn’t believe it had ended so abruptly.
She felt dead inside.
The missile cruiser had her engines at dead slow, the screws turning just enough to maintain her heading into the on-coming seas. Life aboard had been dead slow, also, for almost eight hours now, since they had located the research ship. Not much had changed in that time, including the fact that Mabry Harris had not yet received his requested briefing from CINCPAC relative to his mission.