Brande saw that the Beta sub had begun to slow abruptly.
The Beta sub turned completely around and headed back toward the station.
“Full speed,” Brande said.
“You’re still going to get there before I do.”
“Four hundred to target,” Thomas said.
The distance fell away rapidly.
“Floor crawler in our path,” Thomas said.
“What do you suppose the reach of that manipulator is, Okey?”
“With the crawler, maybe twenty feet of the seabed.”
“Go to forty feet.”
“Gone.”
The robot, leading by two hundred feet, and the submersible both rose higher to avoid the manipulator on the front of the floor crawler.
“Two hundred yard,” Thomas intoned.
“Beta’s been ordered to defend, at all costs,” Dokey said.
Brande glanced at the monitor. The sub had once again turned toward them.
“I wonder how brave they are?” he asked aloud, but the question was directed more to himself.
“I’m dropping number four,” he said, signaling Gargantua’s thumb to open.
“Five… four… three… two… one,” Dokey intoned, then added, “armed, blown.”
The thud of detonation sounded a moment later, and Brande worried about shrapnel from the blast — which hopefully had occurred on the seabed — severing the robot’s tether.
He wiggled the controls, and Gargantua responded immediately.
Brande had to force himself to not worry about power-usage. With the big ROV operating continuously, and despite his internal power supply, the battery drain on the submersible was substantial.
The Beta sub immediately turned off course. The opposition had no way of knowing how many bombs the robot carried. They probably thought they had just narrowly escaped death.
But Gargantua was now unarmed, though only in a manner of speaking. He still had his arms, and they were extremely powerful ones.
“Slow it down some, Okey.”
“Roger, Chief. Coming back to five knots.”
The robot was slow enough by the time the station came into its view that Brande had a chance to select his targets. He applied power to the forward up-thruster, and the robot raised his blunt nose, his video camera aiming upward toward the top of the sphere.
He steadied the flight.
Identified the sonar antenna, the acoustic antenna, and the winch that unreeled the surface antenna array.
“All stop,” he ordered.
“All stop,” Dokey echoed.
Slowing the robot to a crawl, Brande moved him in on the antennas, reached out, and found a grasp on the base of the sonar antenna. He ran in up-thrust, and the powerful motors surged, struggling with the anchoring point of the antenna. He rocked the right joystick back and forth, and the ROV responded, shifting left and right.
The antenna base snapped.
He dropped it, moved Gargantua slightly to the right, and gripped the acoustic antenna. If anything, the base broke more readily, but he had to back off six feet in order to snap the cable.
Using both manipulators, Brande grabbed the winch cable in two places, some eight inches apart. With Brande rocking the arms in opposing directions, it took less than thirty seconds to part the cable. When he released it, the cable leading from the surface immediately surged upward and out of sight.
“That was pretty good,” Dokey said with admiration. “Atlas couldn’t have done that.”
“That should make them feel isolated,” Brande said. “They’ve lost their ears and their sonar.”
“What about their eyes?” Dokey asked, pointing to the video camera on its rotatable tripod. It was now aimed at them.
“Let’s leave it.”
“Here comes Beta,” Thomas said.
“And away we go,” Dokey said.
The two of them went to full speed, headed directly west, and within five minutes, had outdistanced the pursuing submersible, which finally turned around and went back.
“Now the nuke plant?” Dokey asked.
That had been Thomas’s suggestion in their planning phase, and she said, “Now the nuclear plant.”
“Bridge, CIC.”
Harris moved to the intercom and pressed the button. “Bridge. Go.”
“We’ve detected two small detonations on the bottom. Type and strength are unknown.”
“Thank you.” Harris released the button and stood back.
He looked through the port wing window at the freighter and the maintenance ship that were holding position some two hundred yards away. The starboard crane of the maintenance vessel was lowering a gigantic seabed crawler to its well-lit deck. A dozen seamen swarmed around it.
“These guys work around the clock,” Commander Quicken noted.
“And force us to do the same, George.”
The California had been with the AquaGeo vessels for several hours now. Harris had mounted additional lookouts on his rain-swept decks, keeping an eye out for Brande’s submersible. His best sonar men were manning the warship’s sonars, told to look and listen for anything in the world that sounded suspicious. Even whale contacts had been reported, and there had been three of them.
He didn’t really think that Brande would attack the surface ships, but he also didn’t really know what to expect from the marine scientist.
“Two explosions,” Quicken said.
“Yes. I don’t imagine there’s been an accident, do you, George.”
“I doubt it, sir. Where the hell would Brande get explosives?”
“Maybe it’s AquaGeo’s people. They’ll have mining supplies.”
“I hope they didn’t get Brande.”
“Me, too, George. But I’ve got to report this to CINCPAC and Washington, and they may be hoping for the other outcome.”
“There went the first two,” Otsuka said.
She typed in “X”‘s next to the items on her checklist. As with all of MVU’s expeditions, they had set up a planning checklist, and she had been eyeing it on the monitor for quite some time.
“They’re about an hour ahead of my predictions,” Emry said. “I must be getting old.”
“Nonsense, Larry. Your mind’s just on Tahiti.”
“Not on Tahiti, Kim. On those grass skirts.”
“Quite, please,” Bob Mayberry said, “I’m trying to hear.”
Mayberry was at the command console, a headset in place.
After a few minutes, he said, “There it is. Codeword ‘Cranapple.’ Phase one complete, everyone’s in one piece.”
Otsuka felt a little bit better about her numbering system on the mines. Or maybe they hadn’t selected nine or nineteen yet.
She wanted to go on the acoustic and talk to Dokey about it, but Mayberry and Emry would think she was worrying needlessly.
“Go ahead and give ‘em a try, Bob,” Emry said.
Mayberry tried the UHF and HF radios, then several frequencies on the acoustic, asking for AquaGeo’s sea station AG-4, but he got no reply.
“Either they aren’t answering, or they’re off the air,” Emry said.
“Let’s hope it’s the second option, Larry,” Mayberry said.
“I want to talk to DepthFinder,” she said abruptly.
Emry and Mayberry exchanged a knowing look.
“Worried about your boyfriend?” Emry asked.
“I need to talk to him.”
Mayberry shrugged. “Fifty-fifty chance the station will never hear us, though the vehicles are probably still receiving.”
“Go ahead, Kim,” Emry said.