“It’s not a bomb, Ms. Stroh. But Brande is certain that the people in the floor crawler would have had the sub on their sonar. They knew well what they were doing.”
“You’re telling me it was attempted murder.”
“Yes, I guess I’m telling you that.”
“Brande wasn’t supposed to be there,” she said. “There’s the injunction.”
“Brande didn’t know about it.”
“Oh, damn. I’ve got to talk to some people.”
She hung up on him.
After he had called Hampstead, and after they spent several hours assessing the damage to DepthFinder — Brande especially recalled Dokey’s contorted position on the floor as he repaired a damaged electrical circuit for the lithium hydroxide blower, Kaylene Thomas had ordered Brande, Otsuka, and Dokey into hot showers, so Brande figured she had overruled Sorenson’s time limit ordinance, and he took a five-minute shower. It felt damned good.
He emerged to find her waiting for him with a salami sandwich on rye and a tall mug of hot chocolate.
“Drink this,” she ordered.
He drank it down.
“Eat this.”
He took a bite out of the sandwich. “You know just what I need, don’t you?”
“You need some common sense.”
“I thought I was pretty common.”
He settled naked onto the bed, and Thomas sat beside him, snuggled up against him as he finished his sandwich.
“You also need sleep,” she said.
“We’ve got a lot of work….”
“It doesn’t matter. We’ve been enjoined from further dives.”
He pulled his head back and turned it to look her fully in the eyes. “Tell me about it.”
She related what Hampstead had told her of AquaGeo’s injunction.
“What the hell’s going on, Rae?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve been thinking about it, Dane, but the only motive I can read into it is greed.”
“It’s got to go beyond that.”
“Perhaps not. Deride has a timetable, and if we interfere with it, it costs him money.”
“He could damned well wait a few days. He could talk to people.”
“And have some international organization eventually stop his use of nuclear charges? That costs him more money,” she said. “It might be enough to close down his project.”
“I don’t know why he’s so bent on making all of these tests,” Brande told her. “He hasn’t even started mining the sites we’ve seen.”
“That we know of.”
“True. Maybe we should go back and check the earlier sites.”
“We’re not going anywhere. Except back to San Diego, maybe.”
He didn’t feel like arguing with her. Not for the moment, anyway.
Thomas said, “Deride has a reputation for this kind of strategy, you know?”
“What kind of strategy?”
“He ties his opponents up in court cases that last years, milks the resources he’s after, then settles out of court, if at all.”
“Where did you learn that?”
“Unruh told Hampstead.”
“Unruh, huh?”
Brande didn’t have a high opinion of Carl Unruh as a result of some of the decisions that had been made during the Russian missile crisis, when he had first learned of the CIA man’s existence.
He finished his salami.
Thomas stood up and slipped out of her jumpsuit.
“What are you doing?”
“Helping you sleep.”
“I need all the help I can get.”
He slid back on the bed, shunted the blanket and top sheet aside, and made room for her. Neither Brande nor Thomas slept right away.
After they made love, Brande held her close to him, her head on his arm, and twirled a lock of her blonde hair with his forefinger.
“You worry me, sometimes,” she said. “A lot of the time, actually.”
“Not intended, love.”
“I know. But you get so intent on a project that other things — like me — get pigeon-holed.”
“May I remind you that that trait is part of your psyche, also?”
“Maybe,” she said, wincing at the criticism, “but it’s not so pronounced.”
“All right, hon, I promise….”
The intercom buzzed, and when Brande got up to answer it, he found Emry on the other end.
“Dane, I made the projections you asked for.”
“What did you come up with, Larry?”
“My best guess — and it’s only a guess, but it coincides with the best guess of the seismic people at Golden and Scripps — is that a trigger could be found in the area of thirty-six degrees, fifty-eight minutes north, one-forty-one degrees, twenty-eight minutes west.”
“And where are they now?”
“At the rate they’re going, and with the current spacing of test shots, four more will do it. Call it the twenty-fourth of November.”
“Monday.”
“Monday’s the day.”
Rear Admiral David Potter, CINCPAC, finally came through with a TOP SECRET message for Mabry Harris. The captain of the missile cruiser could imagine that David Potter had had some long and involved telephone discussions with Admiral Benjamin Delecourt, the CNO.
The long message outlined the concerns of several government agencies with seabed disturbances, the contracting of Marine Visions to investigate them, the probable discovery that AquaGeo was behind them, and the subsequent injunction against Marine Visions against interfering with AquaGeo operations.
Harris read the message in his cabin, and then used the intercom to summon Commander Quicken.
When he arrived, Harris waved him to a seat on the bunk and handed him the three-page message.
“Read that, George.”
Quicken took his time going through the pages. “So that’s what it’s about.”
“I suspect we were sent to intimidate any interference by AquaGeo vessels with Brande’s examination of the bottom. No one seemed to think it would go beyond that.”
“Except that, AquaGeo’s presence must be all subsurface, sir. We can’t very well intimidate people who don’t even know we’re here.”
“That’s very likely true, George.”
“It also explains the presence of the Greenpeace people. However they got wind of it, they’re not apt to take kindly to radiation poisoning of the sea.”
“I can’t say that I don’t agree wholeheartedly with them,” Harris said.
“And in the meantime, AquaGeo went to court. So, what do we do, Captain?”
“Just as it says there, George. We stand by. We don’t allow Brande to deploy the sub again.”
“And if Brande ignores us?”
“Why don’t you give him a call? Let’s make certain we’re all operating by the same rules.”
“May I be sympathetic to his cause, sir?”
“Yes. But be firm, will you, George?”
Carl Unruh and his peers in the operations, science, and administrative directorates had been tied up most of the day in a long meeting with the Director of Central Intelligence and his executive director. They ate dinner amid a flood of paper, and with all of the issues facing the agency, the problem in the Pacific was only summarized briefly for the others by Unruh. No one, much less the DCI, Mark Stebbins, bothered going into depth on it.
When he got back to his office, he found another flood of paper, most of it telephone messages from Hampstead. Tossing his coat on the sofa, he leafed through the rest of the call-back slips while dialing Hampstead.