"We got to stow the hawser and capstan. And we got to undo the loop, and clean up the site out there, Ham. Sooner or later they're going to come back — probably sooner with a submersible. We got to make it look natural. If they figure out for certain that we did this to them, there'll be hell to pay. They'll get even somehow." I looked up to see the Skipper taking in our conversation.
"It's okay, Mac," he said with a smile. I just saved you the task of briefing me."
"I'm going to secure the Russian and leave him with Ski, since his arm is useless," Skipper. "I'm going to send the rest out to clean up the mess."
Ham looked at me a bit startled, and I realized I had forgotten one thing. "Skipper, we need to move closer to the Bell. We only have two long umbilicals."
"Okay, Mac. Get your divers out and float them. Assign one man to guide me. I'll lift the sub a couple of feet and move forward on the thrusters. Give me the word when you are ready." The Skipper paused. "I don't have to remind you that that Whiskey is probably out there with the most sensitive ears he's got, trying to find us. So you need to move fast, and keep it quiet. Make sure your men know that!"
"Aye, Skipper," I responded, and turned to Ham again.
"Get the doc on the sound-powered phone, Ham," I said.
A moment later Ham handed me the handset. "Doc," it was Chief Wesley Branson, "I need to knock out my Russian friend for about an hour. It's got to be a shot, not oral. You got something?"
"I got a sleepy shot that will put him out for about three or four hours. Takes effect in about five minutes. That good enough?"
"Bring it to Dive Control, Doc," I said. "Thanks!"
"In the Can, put the Russki in a rack and strap him down," I told the divers.
The Russian continued to cooperate, although he grumbled when he was strapped in. Ham passed the hypo through the medical lock, and when the prisoner saw the needle, he struggled. But when Bill brought his knife in front of his face, the Russian settled down. Ski jabbed the needle into his arm, and shortly, he was sleeping like a baby.
Ham explained to the guys what they needed to do, and in fifteen minutes they were exiting the Can on yet another excursion. Whitey was the mouth, and five minutes after they left the Can, he indicated they were ready to shift the Halibut. Jack patched the diver right to Conn. Bobby parked the Basketball just past Whitey, so we could see his hand signals as a backup to his voice.
I could feel the sub lift off the seafloor, but there was no sensation of forward movement. On the Basketball monitor, I saw the bottom slipping by at what amounted to a walking pace. We moved ahead about 200 feet, and then Whitey signaled stop. The Skipper put it down gently — well, actually it probably was Larry, but the Skipper gets credit for everything anyway.
I set Jer and Whitey to stowing the hawser, which was not just a simple stow, because first they had to untie the bowline, and while they were at it, undo the clamp holding the cable loop in place. When the sub moved forward, removing the tension from the hawser, the bell shifted to a more upright position. When I examined it on the monitor, it seemed to be sitting at about a thirty-degree tilt from vertical. Apparently, the base was ballasted, but the open hatch had wedged into the seafloor, preventing the bell from tilting completely upright. The dead diver's body had been partially caught under the bell when it rolled over. The result was a gruesome reminder that the seafloor at 600 feet is a hostile environment. The diver's remains were already being swarmed by dozens of small crabs about the size of a human hand. It was pretty clear that Shelikhov would leave little useable biological evidence for the submersible that was certain to be here in a month or so.
Jer and Whitey could do nothing about the explosively-cut cable and the knife-cut hose bundle, and in a month the sea would do little to soften the evidence. As I thought about it, however, I tried to picture myself on an investigative mission in a small, cramped submersible. Could I connect the dots of the sparse evidence we were leaving behind to construct a clear picture of what had actually happened? Or would I interpret what I saw by assuming that some natural tragedy had befallen the bell? I was sure it would be discussed in hushed tones in quiet corners of distant Russian bars for years to come — until the participants were scattered and no longer had contact with each other in the normal course of business.
And how would our guest fit into this picture, I wondered, and as I thought about that, I began to see some of the astonishing implications the presence of our captive placed on the table. We couldn't return him to the Soviets. That would put an end to our activities in Okhotsk. We couldn't kill him when we were through with him — we just didn't do things that way. At first glance, there seemed only two viable possibilities. Either we kept him an unannounced prisoner virtually forever, or we turned him, and set him up with a new life in America that would totally eclipse anything he had had in the Soviet Union, and that somehow would prevent him from ultimately notifying the Soviets of what had happened. The more I pondered this, the more it became obvious that we had to do some serious talking among ourselves before we got back to port and the problem was no longer ours alone.
It was a full half hour before Jer and Whitey had completely stowed the hawser, and were ready to join Bill and Harry.
In the meantime, Bill and Harry had emptied the baskets on the outside of the bell of the accumulated missile parts the Russian divers had collected. That plus our own haul from before the incident gave us more than sufficient material to justify our treasure-hunting excursion. Jer and Whitey helped them float everything back to the Halibut.
We still had to lower the sling, move the sub out of the way, load the sling, move the sub back, and raise the sling with its precious load. That was an hour or more of really hard work, and my guys had been working already for several hours, which had included a life-and-death struggle.
"Have the guys eaten anything?" I asked Ham.
"I sent in some ham and cheese sandwiches when they brought the Russkie in," Ham said. "And the Doc sent in some energy bars."
"They got an hour left in them?" I asked.
"Is the Pope a Catholic, Sir?" Ham actually sounded insulted.
"I know, Ham, but keep an eye on them anyway," I said.
The job actually took an hour and a half. One of the winches jammed halfway up, and the guys had to disassemble it on the spot to make it work. The problem turned out to be grit in the gears — apparently the self-flushing mechanism had failed. But finally the sling was snug, and all the details around the bell had been policed. For the Russians, connecting the dots to come up with us would be most unlikely.
Ham had the guys back safely inside the Can. The Russian was awake, so he and Ski gave up their racks so the other four could get some badly needed rest. Oddly enough, although Ski was the only one who sustained a wound, he seemed to have taken a liking to the Russian, whose name — Ski told us — was Sergyi Andreev. It turned out that Sergyi spoke English fairly well, but he had a bit trouble adapting to the helium speech descrambler, and I began to realize that comms in their system probably was as primitive as their equipment — hand signals and pads of paper.
That was when Sonar announced suppressed cavitation somewhere off our port bow.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Suppressed cavitation or not, the divers were still my first priority. I had six saturated divers in the Can — one of them a potential saboteur, or at least a possible troublemaker. I thought it best that we treat Sergyi with respect, but hold him at arm's length.