“Coming straight up! Right underneath us!”
Just so, ruminated Rutherford. At great depths, small lateral offsets in position were difficult to detect. On his watch, the minute digit shifted up by one. Ten seconds.
“Two thousand meters!” squawked the sonar room link. “Uh, Captain? It’s still headed right for us!”
In a corner of his mind, a thought began to dawn on Rutherford. Maybe they had been too brash, forsaking a second distant observation. Our measurements aren’t exact, he thought, the thing does wander a little erratically. How confident can I be that our best estimate is wrong, that it will surface nearby, but not exactly where I predicted? What if the small random motion just offsets our position errors and we are correct by blind luck? Even worse, what if many periods are required before the random motion causes an appreciable change in the position of surfacing? Suppose over the small time span since the last event there has been negligible change and my predictions are precisely correct?
He wanted to be nearby, but, with a sinking feeling he knew he did not want to be exactly on the point of surfacing.
The sonar room began the final countdown. There was no time to move the ship anyway. “Five.” “Four.” “Three.” “Two.” “One.” “Ze—”
Chapter 7
A small hole appeared in the thick plate of the hull just to the port side of the keel. A disturbance winked through the fuel oil stored in the large ballast tank shaped to the hull. Brief instants later similar holes were created in the top of the fuel tank and then in the floor of the engine room. In the next moment a deep score ran across the shaft of one of the four large General Electric gas turbines. A crack sprang out from this defect augmented by the huge centrifugal force, and the multibladed shaft went careening like a rip saw toward the turbine casing as yet another hole penetrated the ceiling of the engine room. On went the succession of holes as if on a rising plumbline, through decks, furniture, equipment, until a last long gash ripped through the floor of the helicopter pad.
“—ro!”
The damaged turbine exploded, tilling the engine compartment with high velocity titanium-blade shrapnel and burning fuel. Weakened by the small incident hole, the floor buckled under the disintegrated turbine. Flame leaped down along the vapors leading to the fuel tank. After the briefest hiatus, the fuel tank exploded. The force of this release was directed upward along the rising line of perforations. The penetrated structural members gave way, and a violent stream of shredded metal and superheated gas blew a cavity upward into the guts of the ship. The explosion also tore like a rocket into the surrounding water. In reaction, the destroyer listed rapidly and severely to starboard. As the ship pendulumed back to port, water rushed into the new gaping hole and splashed upward following the path of the blast into the ship. Great portions of the upper midship sections filled with water. The ship was rendered top-heavy. As it rebounded, its natural capacity to right itself was destroyed, and it carried on over. In the space of a minute the Stinson capsized, floating bottom up, the ragged hole in the hull aimed at the Sun, narrowly above the horizon. A handful of men survived. Avery Rutherford was not among them.
That evening, still numb from loss, Isaacs stared at the draft of the memo he had carefully composed. He was reticent to commit himself to writing, but he could not just go bursting into McMasters’ office and demand that Project QUAKER be reinstated. McMasters would never hear him out. Instead, he had put all the arguments he could muster into the memorandum. McMasters would not want to read anything from him, but he would read it, out of self-defense.
Memorandum
To: Kevin J. McMasters,
Deputy Director of Intelligence
From: Robert B. Isaacs,
Deputy Director for Scientific Intelligence
Subject: Connection between the loss of the USS Stinson, the Novorossiisk, and Project QUAKER
On June 14, the Navy Destroyer USS Stinson was lost at sea while on a mission indirectly related to our now inactive Project QUAKER. The circumstances bear marked resemblance to those involving the Soviet carrier Novorossiisk. In this memorandum, I set forth the case linking the USS Stinson, the Novorossiisk, and Project QUAKER and call for the immediate reactivation and vigorous prosecution of Project QUAKER.
Isaacs pictured McMasters resisting the urge to scrunch the memo into a ball and toss it in the can.
As you will recall, Project QUAKER produced evidence for a source of seismic waves that moved in a regular pattern through the Earth. The trajectory of this motion is fixed in space independent of the rotation of the Earth or its motion in orbit around the Sun. The source of seismic waves always approaches the Earth’s surface at 32° 47’ north longitude. Approximately forty and one-quarter minutes later it has passed through the Earth and approaches the surface again at 32° 47’ south longitude. It then returns to the northern hemisphere nearing the surface at a position about 1170 miles west of the previous location of surfacing, due to the rotation of the Earth in the intervening eighty minutes and thirty seconds.
One day later, the source of the seismic signal will return to the surface about 190 miles west of the point where it surfaced at nearly the same time the previous day. The source of the seismic waves has approached the surface about 2000 times since it was first detected. Because of the incommensurate motion of the seismic source and the rotation of the Earth, however, the probability of the source returning to the surface within even a few miles of any previous point of surfacing is very small. Despite the underlying regularity of the motion of the source of the seismic waves, the effects manifested at the surface will be perceived to be highly irregular.
Isaacs paused at this point. McMasters presumably knew the basic facts and he did not want to overdo here nor delay getting to the meat of his argument, but he felt compelled to summarize the issues to provide a context for the pitch to come. His mind whirled with details that he would have added for someone who wanted to really know what was going on, but he pictured McMasters’ sneering skepticism and decided for the fifth time that this was the best he could do.
I have learned through informal sources
Ha! Let the bastard chew on that one, thought Isaacs. He’ll discover that Rutherford was on the Stinson and dig like a dog to find some proof I violated his stricture. Well, let him dig! I don’t confess to any active role for either me or the Agency, so he’ll stew, but there’s not much he can do. Except summarily reject the proposal. Damn!
that the Navy has sonar data that correlate with the motion of the seismic source. The source of the seismic noise apparently
Apparently. He pondered whether to leave that word to honestly portray the possibility, remote to his mind, that the strong circumstantial evidence had not been rigorously confirmed, that there was no case in which both seismic and sonar detectors picked up the signal of a single event to prove they were related. McMasters might seize on such a subtlety. Isaacs sighed and opted for honesty.
proceeds into the ocean. The source of the sonar signal goes to the surface, ceases for about forty seconds, then proceeds back to the ocean bottom. There is a strong presumption that the source of seismic and sonar waves is in the atmosphere for those forty seconds. The seismic and sonar waves generated by the source of energy propagate over great distances, contributing to their detectability. The lack of above-surface confirmation suggests that the effects there are very localized.