Dane Brande stood spread-legged on the bridge of the Gemini, gripping the brass rail that ran across the width of the forward bulkhead with both hands. The safety glass of the windshield panes was canted forward at the top, and several sections had been cranked open at the bottom. A salt-tasting breeze whispered through the bridge area, rustling the papers clamped in clipboards hanging on the rear bulkhead.
Below him, the short foredecks of the twin hulls rose and fell with the contours of the Caribbean Sea. Brande guessed the seas were running at four feet, long and smooth swells that rolled under Gemini without bothering to whitecap. The only wind was that created by the ship’s passage. Identical fans of white spray flared from the twin bows. The water passing through the wide gap between the hulls appeared translucent, but there was nothing to be seen in the depths.
Ahead, for as far as he could see in the darkness, the ocean appeared entirely empty. When they had left Houston just after noon, a tall stand of cumulus had been building in the northwest, but nothing had come of it so far.
“We should be picking up something on radar soon, Dane,” Jim Word said. Word was the captain of the 240-foot research vessel Gemini and her sixteen-man-and-woman crew complement. He stood a few paces behind Greg Mason, who was manning the helm station located at the forward center of the bridge, three feet back from the windshield.
“What are we making, Jim?”
“Still at the top end, twenty-six knots.”
Brande went back to staring at the invisible horizon. The stars were clear and cold. A phosphorescent glow below the surface off to starboard suggested a school of fish.
“For someone who’s spent so much time at sea, Chief, you’re not very patient,” Word said.
“I hate waiting rooms.”
The theme song from the The Bridge Over the River Kwai, whistled through a chipped front tooth, announced the imminent arrival of Maynard Dokey, expectedly called ʻOkey.ʼ He emerged from the curtained hatchway to the radar/sonar room, gripping his omnipresent coffee mug. The mug sported a picture of two whales amorously eyeing each other, communicating in question marks. Okey Dokey was as well known for his personally designed mugs and T-shirts as he was for his expertise with a screwdriver, a computer, and an electronic schematic.
Today’s T-shirt was conservative. No artwork, just the motto, WANNA SCREW? Dokey was fond of questions, and many of the women working for Brande’s Marine Visions Unlimited had taken to wearing shirts that screamed, NO! in various fonts and styles.
“Ringling Brothers’ train got there ahead of us,” Dokey said.
Brande turned to look at him. “A real circus, huh?”
“Radar shows twelve boats are in the area,” Dokey told him.
“I’ve got ten bucks says eleven of them are only getting in the way.”
“That’s not a bet,” Word said. “That’s your typical moneymaker.”
“How far?” Brande asked.
“Call it nine miles to first contact, Dane.”
“Do you think George Dawson has really got something?” Word asked.
“I hope so,” Brande said. “We need the contract.”
George Dawson, who captained the salvage vessel Grade, had called Brande at his San Diego office early that morning. Brande had asked four questions, proposed a percentage, then called Dokey, then called United Airlines for reservations. Fortunately, the Gemini was in Houston for service and supply after a three-month surveying stint for the U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office. He had called Jim Word to warn him of their arrival in Houston as he and Dokey left the office for San Diego International Airport.
When the running and anchor lights of a large flotilla of vessels appeared ahead of them, Brande opened the side door and stepped out onto the small starboard bridge wing. Directly behind him, a ladder descended to the main deck. He leaned into the railing and felt the Gemini shift slightly as Mason altered course slightly to port. Crew members, male and female, appeared on the narrow side deck from cabin and work areas and moved to the railings to watch their arrival.
The open gridwork on which he stood thrummed with the vibration from the big diesel engines. The vibration died away as they neared the motionless boats and Word ordered the throttles retarded.
It looked like a small community, a village on the plains. Each of the boats in the cluster had its deck lights illuminated, along with a few searchlights, and the whole area had a moonlit quality to it. As the Gemini approached at ten knots, Brande saw people moving about on board most of them. There was a wide variety of craft represented: several salvage vessels, an oceangoing tug, and power cruisers of various length. Most of them were aged. He couldn’t miss Curtis Aaron’s Justica. It was a thirty-year-old, sixty-foot Hatteras, barely refurbished to seaworthiness. The Justica was painted white, with four-foot-high, squared-off black letters painted along each side of its hulclass="underline" OCEANS FREE. The Justica was the Atlantic and Caribbean representative of Aaron’s zealous organization. On the Pacific side, it was the Queen of Liberty.
When they were a quarter-mile away, a vessel near the center of the cluster blinked its anchor light. Mason eased off on the throttles some more and threaded his way through the gaggle of boats toward the broad-beamed salvage boat, Grade. It was 160 feet long and, though elderly, in excellent condition. The Gemini dwarfed it as she came alongside. Crew members fore and aft suspended fenders over the side to keep the hulls from scraping each other, then grabbed the lines thrown to them. The research vessel was snugged up against the salvage boat.
Captain Word deployed the cycloidal propellers. Under both bows and both sterns of the Gemini’s twin hulls, flush panels folded open and the cycloidal propellers — appearing like oversized egg beaters — were extended downward. The propulsion system, modeled after that utilized on the U.S. oceanographic research ship Knorr — which was used in discovering the grave of the Titanic — made Brandeʼs vessel one of the most stable on the seas. Governed by computer control and driven by linkage to the two diesel engines, the four cycloidal propellers allowed the helmsman to shift the ship forward, backward, sideways, or in rotation in very small increments. Tied into the NavStar Global Positioning Satellite system, the computer could maintain the Gemini’s almost-exact position in both calm and heavy seas.
Brande descended from the bridge wing to the deck, followed by Maynard Dokey.
Brandie Anderson, dressed in cut-off jeans and a NO! T-shirt, and crewing for a six-month period as an intern from Rice University, operated the winch controls which lowered the starboard gangplank to a few feet above the lower deck of the salvage ship.
Brande gave her a thumbs-up as he unhooked the safety line in the railing.
Dokey started to say something, but Brandie pointed at her shirt.
“You’re going to have to start developing a new reputation, Okey,” Brande told him.
“Hell, I’ve already got the best one there is, Chief.”
The two men made the descent and paused at the bottom landing for both ships to stabilize on the same wave for a moment before jumping the last couple of feet to the deck of the Grade.
George Dawson was waiting for them. Weatherbeaten and nearly bald under a rumpled and disreputable billed cap, Dawson had a grin that was face-wide and revealed strong and yellowed teeth. He gripped half a giant and dead cigar in one corner of his mouth. He was barrel-chested and big, standing six-four. Brande rarely met men his own height, but he thought that Dawson outweighed him by a hundred pounds. Brande weighed 215.