That would still happen. Jim Dorsey and Team Three would see to it.
She turned to a visibly shaken Bert Conroy. “Bert, let’s get everyone off. It’s going to be crowded in the sub, and it’ll be a long ride, but I don’t think we have a choice. Start shutting down the systems.”
DepthFinder was using her acoustic voice system freely now, and Kim Otsuka was thrilled to hear Dokey’s voice.
“You didn’t use….”
“Hey, babe, we’re skipping your magic numbers.”
Brande came on. “Kim, get on the horn and call the Arienne, will you?”
She jotted down the message Brande wanted to pass on, then called the Greenpeace ship on UHF channel nine. Wilson Overton must have been right next to the receiver.
“Let’s see,” he said, “you’re Kim Otsuka?”
“That’s right.”
“I keep running into new names. I don’t suppose Dr. Brande is available?”
“Not just now, but he has told me to tell you that he’ll talk to you in the morning.”
“It’s morning, now.”
“Later in the morning. Right now, he’d like to know how many boats you have in your group.”
“Boats? I don’t… well, I think there’s maybe eight, nine with us. There’s more coming.”
“All right,” she said, “here’s the deal….”
“I should have rigged up something to make these things go simultaneously,” Dokey said.
“You don’t think it’ll work?” Thomas asked him.
“Well, it should work out okay, but it’s a hell of a lot of wear-and-tear on my finger, pressing the button three times when one would do it. That’s what we computer people are all about, Kaylene. Avoiding repetition of simple tasks.”
Thomas shook her head in resignation. Brande and Dokey seemed entirely too glib sometimes, especially in crucial situations. She supposed it was a male reaction to stress, but she just wanted to get it over with.
“They’re slow as hell, aren’t they, Chief?” Dokey asked.
“It may be time to spur them on, yes.”
The Beta sub was in view of Gargantua’s camera, still mated to the station’s port on the bottom of the sphere. They couldn’t tell what was taking place inside the station or the sub, but she could tell that Brande was getting impatient.
“Let’s take it out, Okey.”
“Back off, then.”
Brande reversed the ROV out of range, and Thomas saw the station’s leg, with four grenades adhered to it, slip out of sight. One of the grenades was number nine. Dokey didn’t know whether or not it would go off in sympathetic detonation, but he had suggested that the attempt was his contribution to Thomas’s cost-efficiency program—”I don’t know how much you paid for that grenade, Kaylene, but we’ll try to make use of it.”
He spun the rotary dial three times, armed each charge, and set it off. The series of explosions came to them in small vibrations against the hull.
Then Brande eased in power, and Gargantua closed in for an evaluative look at the stainless steel leg of the station. Dokey followed with the submersible, and the station was visible through the ports. It appeared to tilt slightly.
The leg was buckled, but not entirely severed.
“Going to take one more,” Dokey said.
“I hope we don’t run out of Mark One, mod one’s,” Brande told him.
Dokey brought the submersible in closer, and while the two of them set up the ROV with two more grenades, Thomas watched the station on DepthFinder’s camera view.
The explosion and sudden settling of the station had prompted the people inside to greater speed. As she watched, the Beta sub released its grip on the mating collar and backed away from the station.
“She’s going,” Thomas said.
The two men stopped what they were doing to watch, and possibly, to make certain the sub didn’t counterattack them.
She didn’t. After reversing clear of the habitat, she dropped her weights and began to rise.
“That’s something of a relief,” Brande said.
“Let’s just get on with it, please,” she said.
It took them forty minutes to cut all three legs, and when they were done, the sea station had settled partially on its side, moving slightly in the bottom current.
“By the way she’s moving around,” Brande said, “I think she’s as close to neutral buoyancy as we’d hoped.”
“Twenty minutes,” Dokey said, “and we’ll know for sure.”
“Optimist,” Brande accused Dokey this time.
Brande brought Gargantua back toward them, then raised the ROV to sail above DepthFinder. The robot’s video picked out the four folded rubber bladders secured to the afterdeck of the submersible.
Because it required his precise hand on the manipulators, Dokey said, he and Brande exchanged piloting chores. Still, it took nearly an hour for Dokey to release the bladders, one by one, from the sub and attach their securing lines to anchoring points on the sphere. When all four were in place, he moved Gargantua from one to the next, pulling the release valves on the stainless steel bottles of carbon dioxide. The bladders filled infinitely slowly, Thomas thought, but knew that if they just got a little upward movement going, the bladders would get larger as the exterior pressure on them lessened.
Dokey finally brought the ROV back, reeled in his tether, and parked him in the sheath.
“How’s the power supply, Rae?”
“We’ve been using it up fast, Dane, but we’re still in the green.
They waited.
And ever so slowly, through the portholes, they saw the habitat begin to right itself.
Then there was a foot of space between it and the seabed.
Then two feet.
Then ten.
Brande keyed his headset microphone.
“Bull, are you listening?”
“Got me, Chief.”
“What are you going to be doing in, say, six hours?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Paul Deride and Anthony Camden had ordered a large brunch delivered to the suite in the Fairmont. The remnants of scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, oranges, and pineapples dried on their plates as they sat at the dining table and attempted to calculate the damages.
The reports were still coming in by phone and fax, and it was taking an effort on Deride’s part to assimilate them. He had left the area of the sea station by way of his Canadair almost as soon as the Brisbane had surfaced after a three-hour, intensely uncomfortable ascent, but the effects of the experience would be with him for a long time.
“The Justice Department has said nothing yet, Paul.”
“But they will.”
“Yes. I suspect they’ll find where we’ve made some shortcuts. There’s the wetlands we filled in Oregon, the unreported spills in the northern Pacific…”
“Don’t catalog it for me, Anthony.”
“It’ll take some time to recover,” the lawyer said. “These cases will be with us for years.”
“Hell, we don’t care about that, do we, now? The longer, the better.”
The telephone at buzzed.
He picked it up. “Deride.”
“Hello, Uncle Paul.”
“Good morning, love. Are things looking better this morning? Something for which to give thanks?”
“We’ve lost FC-9 and Team Three.”
“What?”