The president spoke first. “So, that confirms it. The USS Omega Deep did reach the Pacific.”
Woods cocked an incredulous eyebrow. “You’re not surprised, Mr. President?”
“No. Far from it,” the president replied. “I would have been, but some recent information has come to my attention, and we were already just about certain the Omega Deep was now in the Pacific.”
“What news, sir?” Woods asked.
“I believe Mr. Reilly requested one of the tech engineers to locate the Russian-owned spy vessel, the Vostok?”
“That’s right,” Sam confirmed.
The president expelled his breath. “Well, it was found.”
That came as no surprise to Sam. The Russian intelligence gathering vessel disguised as a fishing trawler was a poor national secret. He had no doubt that the U.S. Navy would make short work of finding its present location.
“Where is it, sir?” he asked.
“The South Pacific, roughly two hundred miles south of the Galapagos Islands.”
Sam made the connection immediately. Could it be that their Russian counterparts had achieved what the entire U.S. Navy couldn’t, and located the USS Omega Deep? The thought intrigued him as well as terrified him.
“Have they found the Omega Deep?” Sam asked.
“No,” the president replied. “We’re unsure what they were doing there, but it’s almost a certainty they’ve had contact with our missing submarine.”
“Why?”
The president addressed the secretary of defense. “Perhaps you had better explain it to him, ma’am.”
The secretary nodded. “The Vostok appears to have succumbed to an accident, rendering it lifeless. The entire ship is currently drifting helplessly.”
“Any survivors?” Sam asked.
She shook her head. “It doesn’t look like it from any satellite images, but we’ll find out as soon as we put someone on board.”
“What did the Russians say?”
“Nothing.”
Sam’s eyes narrowed. “You haven’t told them?”
“No.”
“You going to tell the Russians?”
“Hell no.”
“Why not?”
She bit her lower lip. “We want to work out what went wrong first.”
Sam stared at her, noticing her tentative response. “What’s wrong with the ship, ma’am?”
“Everything.” She smiled. “The entire ship’s turned to ice.”
“You mean it’s crashed into an iceberg?”
“No. I mean, the entire thing’s been turned into ice. Like someone picked it up as they would a toy and left it in the freezer for a month until it became a block of solid ice.”
“You’re kidding me?”
“No.”
Sam expelled a deep breath but kept his mouth shut firm, his mind, pensive.
The secretary was the first to break the silence. “You know exactly what this means, don’t you?”
Sam nodded. “It means the Vostok has been experimenting with blackbody.”
“Exactly,” the secretary said.
The president said, “So you see now why we weren’t surprised to discover the Omega Deep had crossed the Panama Canal and entered the Pacific.”
Sam asked, “But where did the Russians get another piece of blackbody from? I thought the last of it had been used on the Omega Deep’s hull?”
The general answered that question. “The Omega Deep kept a single block of the unique material as a back up to power part of its redundancy sound absorbing system. It would appear that someone from the Omega Deep has been in contact with the crew from the Vostok. Maybe they dived the stricken submarine and salvaged the blackbody, which someone on board the Vostok used to experiment with, resulting in their deaths.”
Sam recalled how the original experiments with blackbody proved the material to be highly unstable, causing nearby subatomic particles to compress on themselves, becoming denser and in the process, colder. If the chain reaction was left unhindered, it would ultimately end in freezing everything around it — and in the ocean, that would most likely lead to ice and snow.
He said, “When will your team leave?”
“Any minute now. We’re still gathering the members of an elite team to investigate the Vostok. Also, we’re taking no chances of someone else finding the Omega Deep, so we’ve deployed an aircraft carrier to the region — the USS Gerald R. Ford.”
Sam asked, “Who were you thinking of sending to investigate the Vostok?”
The president leveled his gray eyes at him and said, “You.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Sam chartered a private aircraft — a Cessna Citation CJ3 — from Hawaii to the Galapagos Islands. The aircraft banked to the south, revealing an island surrounded by azure waters, as the pilots set up for their final approach onto San Cristóbal. It was the easternmost island in the Galápagos archipelago, as well as one of the oldest geologically.
According to his briefing notes, the island’s official Spanish name, “San Cristóbal" comes from the patron saint of seafarers, St. Christopher.
The reference made Sam feel that it was a good omen in their quest for the lost submarine, Tom’s father, and 192 U.S. submariners.
The Cessna landed on the short runway, its pilots easing her gently onto the blacktop and braking hard, before taxiing to the newly built hangar.
Across from him, Tom remained sound asleep.
Sam waited until the pilots shut down the engines and then woke Tom up. “We’re here.”
Tom sat up, unclipped his seatbelt, and glanced out the window. It was a warm day, with a crisp blue sky, but the ocean breeze kept the temperature to a balmy 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Tom smiled with appreciation. “Nice place.”
“Don’t get too enamored with it. We’ve got a pleasure cruiser waiting for us at the beach to take us away from the Galapagos Islands, due south, to the Vostok.”
Tom shrugged. It wasn’t the first time Sam had teased him with a nice work environment only to be torn away to the middle of nowhere. “Tell me again, why the USS Gerald R. Ford is en route to the location, but we have to hire our own yacht to get there?”
“Plausible deniability,” Sam said. “The secretary wants us to investigate without involving the U.S. Navy.”
Tom nodded. “That way if the Russians discover their vessel’s been damaged, the secretary doesn’t have to explain why she kept it secret.”
“Exactly.”
“How long until the Maria Helena gets here?”
“Another two days.”
Sam grabbed his gear, and he and Tom made their way through the airport. Outside, a local tour guide met them with his Jeep and drove them the short distance to the harbor.
“San Cristóbal Island,” the guide said, “is composed of four fused volcanoes, all extinct. It is home to the oldest permanent settlement of the islands and is the island where Darwin first went ashore in 1835.”
The Jeep took them east along the coast to Puerto Chino. Sam took in his environment, devouring the sights like a Thanksgiving feast. The island was host to a number of unique flora and fauna, including, frigate birds, Galápagos sea lions, Galápagos tortoises, blue and red-footed boobies, tropicbirds, marine iguanas, dolphins and swallow-tailed gulls. Some of its more famous flora included the Galapagos rock-purslane and cut leaf daisy.