Deke did not sleep well, and he kept an eye on the doings at the White House. He also kept a quarter in his shoe so that he would have the wherewithal for a phone call that could bring him twenty bucks.
Deke had called Wilson at three-thirty in the morning.
“What have you got, Deke?”
“They’s people arriving.”
“Like who?”
“Like the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the CNO, the DCI, the DIA director, a guy I seen before I know is with CIA. Senator Escobets, Senator Hammond. Representative Moore.”
Deke prided himself on knowing who was who in the District.
“This sounds like double-bonus time, Deke.”
“Thass what I thought, Mr. Will.”
Overton dressed, took a cab, and was outside the White House fence forty minutes later, but all he saw were several limos and military sedans parked near the East Wing entrance. The lights were on in the Chief of Staffʼs and the National Security Advisor’s offices, but not the Oval Office.
He guessed the bunch of them were meeting in the basement, probably the Situation Room. That meant crisis, and that meant a story.
He went in search of a public telephone booth and set up his remote office, stacking a roll of quarters on the shelf in front of him.
He started making phone calls.
It was eight-fifteen before he connected with a woman he knew out at NSA in Fort Meade. She had some of it, and she led him to a technician at the National Photographic Interpretation Center who did not seem to think that any of it was classified, including the approximate crash coordinates. He got those to the degree and minute, but not to the second.
Each call led to more calls, and during all of his conversations, Overton made hasty, indecipherable notes in a steno notebook. They were almost indecipherable to him as he thumbed through them while talking to the rewrite woman, Carla Ammons, at the Post, composing as he spoke.
He was almost finished when Nelson, the city editor, came on the line.
“I’m reading over Carla’s shoulder, Will.”
“So, what do you think, Ned?”
“Dynamite. This could affect the whole Pacific Rim?”
“That’s what I’ve got.”
“And it’s down ten thousand feet?”
“I got that from a guy at NPIC. He seemed to know what he was talking about.”
“Sources?”
“I’ve got at least one on each point, two on most of them. I’m going to start calling bigwigs now and ask for confirmation.”
“Okay. I’ll get this over to the international desk, and we’ll go to work. Keep in touch.”
Overton was not about to lose touch at this point.
Not with an item hot enough to wipe out every living fish, mammal, and fern in the northern Pacific Ocean.
Chapter Five
DepthFinder II surfaced two hundred yards south of her mother ship and almost half a mile east of the site of the wreck on the sea bottom.
Capt. George Dawson of the salvage ship Grade had not been born the day before. He had established his holding position on the surface some distance from the actual recovery area, to throw the scavengers who followed him around off the scent.
The scavengers, in fact, had been disheartened by the arrival of Brandeʼs Research Vessel Gemini. If extremely deep diving submersibles were required for this project, then, on their limited budgets and equipment, they were not going to be able to reach any scraps left over, if indeed, anything remained when the MVU crews were finished. Brandeʼs reputation had arrived along with the Gemini, and most of the hangers-on had headed for more promising waters.
When the sub reached the surface, Brande stood up in a crouched position and undogged the hatch, then shoved the heavy cylinder upward and to the side. While Dokey and Anderson shut down most of the systems, Brande stepped up on a seat back and pulled himself up into the sail, trying to avoid the grease that coated the edges of the hatchway. The grease was painted around the joint to ensure a good seal.
The sail was four feet high, constructed of fiberglass, and useful only in preventing waves from splashing through the hatchway when the DepthFinder was moving on the surface. The top of the hull stood barely a foot above the surface of the sea. Mounted on the sail behind him were the transponder interrogator, a UHF antenna, and the depth sonar. There were no remote operational controls, and Brande called navigation instructions down to Dokey.
“Come about to oh-one-oh, Okey. Full speed ahead.”
“Aye aye, Chief,” Dokey yelled back at him.
While the submersible could achieve twenty knots of forward propulsion when submerged, full speed on the surface was about five knots on a windless day and in smooth seas.
The Gemini, the Grade, the Justica, and a dilapidated cruiser manned by aged hippies with scuba gear racked on the stern deck, were the only boats in sight.
The sub turned to its new heading and the twin electric motors whined as Dokey revved them up. Wavelets crashed against the base of the sail. The morning sun was already warm, blazing in a blue sky. There was not a cloud in view, but Brande figured that would change by noon. The heat felt good on his face after the chilling temperatures at depth. The air was warm and salty, but fresh. It tasted good.
“Dane? Iʼm coming up.”
Brande extended a hand, grasped Brandie Anderson’s wrist, and pulled her up and out of the pressure hull. She brought a dab of grease with her, smeared on the left front of her NO! T-shirt, and Brande tried not to notice it. Tried not to obviously notice it, anyway.
There was room for the two of them within the sail, but not much room. They stood on the edge of the hatchway, their bare feet attempting to keep a grip on the fiberglass decking.
The outer hull of the DepthFinder II was constructed of carbon fiber-reinforced plastic and fiberglass. On the surface, she appeared rather sleek, the outer hull disguising the round ball of the pressure hull. Overall, she was thirty-eight feet long, with a beam of eleven feet, and she weighed in at forty-three tons.
The outer hull, however, was just a pretty box that contained the important component, the spherical pressure hull that protected humans from the crushing pressures in the ocean depths. The outer hull was not subjected to the same pressures, but it also contained spherical tanks used for variable ballast, high-pressure air, hydraulic power supplies, and fore and aft mercury trim. Within the outer hull forward of the pressure hull were 35- and 70-millimeter still cameras, video cameras, halogen lights, ballast tanks, and the forward-looking sonar. Aft were altitude and side-looking sonars, the magnetometer gear, weight droppers, the massive propulsion motors, controller and junction boxes, and the three banks of batteries. Anything that might have been considered empty space was filled with syntactic foam.
When the sub was cruising on the surface, only a six-foot width of the rounded top of the hull, the sail, and the twin fins extending aft were visible. As with all of Marine Visions’ craft, the sub was finished in glossy white. The sail and the fins had a single, wide diagonal of bright yellow painted on each side, to aid visual identification.
As they motored past the old cruiser, whose name was indecipherable under the green scum that covered her stern, a bearded wild man with a two-foot halo of blond hair called out to them.