The monstrous robot appeared to be almost an inquisitive sea creature, perhaps a whale. With his floodlights illuminated, he had very bright eyes.
The video view from the ROV gave them a picture of themselves, peering intently from the submersible’s portholes.
Beneath Gargantua’s “chin” was a wire basket used for holding samples or relics from undersea wrecks. It was crammed with the crude packages that Dokey and Otsuka had devised. Each fragmentation grenade had had its pin pulled and replaced with a fusible link attached to a nine-volt battery. Applying power was supposed to melt the fusible link, allowing the grenade to perform the action for which it had been designed. The circuit was controlled by a coded signal from the sub, utilizing revamped circuitry in the telemetry system. The black box Dokey had plugged into the loudspeaker mounted a rotary switch for selecting up to twenty-five grenades whose receivers were controlled by discrete codes, an arming switch, and a pushbutton.
The problem was a matter of selection.
Selecting number nine, if number nine were still in the basket, arming it, and firing it, would blow Gargantua into tiny bits and pieces.
For that reason, the operators had to visually check each “package.” As she watched, Brande activated the manipulator arm. It extended slowly, the reached back underneath the robot. The thumb and fingers parted, reached into the basket, and clamped on one of the packages.
“Light touch here would be nice, Chief.”
“I know I don’t have your sensitivity, Okey.”
The robotics engineer was capable of tying a shoelace neatly or hoisting a full fifty-five gallon drum with the same manipulator.
When the arm pulled out of the basket, Thomas saw that it was gripping the awkward-appearing, plastic tape-wrapped bundle. The handle of the grenade was exposed, and in this case, because of the way Brande had grabbed it, upside down. Each unit contained a grenade, a receiver, a battery, and a magnet. The ROV’s fingers and thumb had been changed out, switched to a reinforced carbon-carbon (RCC) set so that the magnet would not adhere to them. A big white vinyl number was glued to each package.
“For our test shot,” Brande said, “I happened to draw number eight from the lottery basket.”
“Looks like an eight to me, too, Chief.”
“Damn, I hope so. You put the numbers on.”
“I tried not to lose track,” Dokey said.
Thomas’s anxiety increased dramatically. She leaned forward between the seats and watched Dokey as he fiddled with the black box resting in his lap. He clicked the rotary dial until he found number eight and lined it up under an arrow etched into the box.
“The next time,” Dokey said, “Kim and I will make this digital.”
“There’s never, never going to be a next time,” Thomas told him.
“Right. I forgot. Okay, number eight.”
“Nine hundred and twenty-five feet above the seabed,” Brande said. “You want me to drop it before you arm it?”
“Damned right. This is all new technology, Chief.”
Brande released the black bundle.
It dropped away slowly, spinning away from their view.
Dokey counted aloud, “Five… four… three… two… one, armed.”
“Didn’t hear anything,” Brande said.
“Good. You’re not supposed to. Five… four… three… two… one, boom!”
The concussion, from probably a hundred yards away, was only enough to slightly rock the sub. Thomas heard a mild thud as the shock wave slapped the sub.
“Registered on the sonar,” Dokey said. “Test one hundred per cent successful.”
“You only get a score of zero or one hundred on this test,” Brande told him, then added, “Damn, Okey. This seems kind of haphazard.”
“It’s definitely a Rube Goldberg getup,” Dokey said. “I hope to hell they all work.”
Which didn’t help Thomas’s anxiety in the least.
Kim Otsuka sat at the computer console next to Emry, who wouldn’t give up his spot, with her feet up on the desktop. She had wrapped an old comforter around her legs.
Some of the crew members and scientific personnel had headed for their bunks, but most were gathered in the lab waiting for something, anything, to happen. An odd collection of chairs drawn from the lab and the wardroom were aligned randomly behind Emry’s command console.
Through the porthole above the console, Otsuka was shocked to suddenly see stars. It was a brief glimpse, then the hole in the cloud cover closed up, and they were gone.
“I wonder if the weather is lifting, finally,” she said to Emry.
“Doubt it, with my luck,” he said. “I’m supposed to be in Tahiti.”
She glanced at his screen. With no telemetry feedback, he seemed like a lost man. He had his map on the screen, and he was adding a dotted line to it for DepthFinder’s projected course. It was mostly guesswork.
“How long, do you think, Larry?”
“I’m estimating them twenty-five nautical at the moment. Couple more hours, Kim.”
She wondered if they had conducted the ordnance test, yet. The more she thought about it, the more she worried. What if she had put the dash under the “nine,” rather than the “six?” Was “sixteen” really “nineteen?”
She couldn’t remember, and it bothered her that such simplistic math was so troublesome when she could remember the exact sequence of numbers in a three-line, fifteen-element computer instruction.
She knew it was just her nerves.
Had to be.
She stared out the porthole, hoping against hope to see more stars.
And the night suddenly erupted in white glare.
“Goddamn!” Emry yelped.
“What’s that!” she echoed.
“The damned California has put her lights on us,” he said, scrambling out of his chair.
“What are they going to see?”
“That’s not the problem, Kim. It’s what they’re not going to see that’s the problem.”
Carl Unruh was on his way to work, sailing along a nicely auto-free George Washington Memorial Parkway in a light snowfall when his cellular phone buzzed.
He figured the news wasn’t going to be good as he searched for the phone with his free right hand, found it, and clicked it on.
“Unruh.”
“Ben Delecourte, Carl.”
“What’s up, Admiral?”
“Not up. Down. I just got word from the California that Brande’s submersible, along with a large robot that was in a cradle, has disappeared from the deck of the Orion.”
“Maybe they pulled it inside?”
“Captain Harris talked to Lawrence Emry, who said he could not tell a lie — the DepthFinder was undergoing tests on its repaired systems.”
“Sounds logical to me, Ben.”
“In the middle of the night, where they are? Damn it, Carl, you know Brande as well as I do. He’s not above telling the Navy, or even the President, to go to hell if they interfere with his concept of what’s right or wrong.”
“Is he wrong on this, Ben? I mean, you and I and Avery put him out there in the first place. Time’s running out.” Unruh took the exit for CIA Headquarters, slowing rapidly as he realized that what looked like clear highway was black ice. His Dodge did a little tango dance which he corrected with his left hand.
“I’m on his side,” Delecourt said, “but there are just a few problems. State and Justice say we do it right, through the courts. Plus, I don’t know what the hell he’s got planned. I hate it when I don’t have all the data.”