“General Oberstev, Captain Cartwright, do we know what shipping we have in the immediate vicinity?”
“Cartwright, here. We’ve got them all on our plot. There’s too damned many, from my point of view.”
“I think we need to get them out of here. What I’d like to see, if it’s possible, is a cordon around the Ol’yantsev and the Orion. Use the Commonwealth warships and whatever U.S. ships are available.”
“I believe that would be possible,” the general said.
“I’m not sure what’s going to move the civilians,” Cartwright said.
“Warn them of imminent radiation danger,” Brande suggested. “It’s not that farfetched, unfortunately.”
“We’ll try it. There’s only two who might not respond. One’s a yacht with a bunch of reporters on it, and the other is the Eastern Flower. She reports that she’s now ready to help in the recovery.”
“Not with an untested submersible and robot,” Brande said. “We don’t want to divert our time to another rescue.”
“You’d ban them?”
“Damned right.”
“Consider them banned.”
Oberstev said, “Our submarines are on standby. Perhaps they could, what do you say? nudge the smaller boats on their way.”
“Damned good idea, General. We’ll put the subs on traffic duty.”
“I’ll have to get CINCPAC’s permission for that,” Cartwright said.
“Not if you want the job done,” Brande told him.
“I can always get it later.”
The three of them agreed on stations in a large circle for the CIS warships, the Bronstein, the Kane, the Bartlett, and the Antelope. As the search moved south, if it did, the circle of protection would move with it, keeping the civilians from interfering in the recovery operations.
An hour later, Brande was back in his chair at the workbench when Rae reported in.
“Who’s there?”
“This is lover-boy, darlin’.”
“Hey, Mel, we’ve got a sonar return on a target to the east of us. We’re turning off course to investigate. How about you, Gennadi? Can you hear me?”
The two submersibles had been communicating infrequently on the acoustic telephone, and Drozdov responded from the Sea Lion. “I hear you, Miss Kaylene. What is the coordinate of your return?”
“Nineteen, fifty-three, ten, thirty-one, Gennadi.”
“We show only the outline of a large ridge,” Drozdov told her.
Brande looked up at the search monitor and pictured the bottom mentally. The DepthFinder was a half-mile farther south than the CIS sub, and three-fourths of a mile to its west. SARSCAN had picked up a return to its east side which was probably blocked from the Seeker’s sonar probes by the ridge.
Something there.
Hiding.
“What’s your depth, darlin’?”
“Twenty thousand-two, Mel. But Okey says we’re on the brink of a trench.”
“It goes deeper?” Sorenson asked, with some degree of awe in his voice.
“Okey says, ‘count on it.’”
Twelve minutes later, Dokey’s voice sounded on the speakers. “Depth two-zero-eight-five-four. Position one-nine, five- three North, one-zero, three one East.”
Sorenson yelped, “You’ve got it!”
“Shit, no! What we’ve got looks like the first stage. No second stage, no payload stage.”
There was a long collective sigh from the people behind Brande.
The Orion rocked hard to the right, making everyone scramble for balance.
Dokey said, “That son of a bitch is in the canyon, for sure.”
Through the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Ben Dele-court, the President had ordered CINCPAC to leave the searchers in the Pacific alone.
Adm. David Potter had complained about a breakdown in the chain of command.
The President said, “I don’t give a damn who’s calling the shots, as long as they’re called. Let the people on the scene share command”
Carl Unruh thought it was as good a system as any other. At least, Brande had discovered some way to get the Russians to cooperate.
Other than for that little bit of drama, nothing else was going on. The major players were on the scene in the Situation Room, but they were not saying much. The whole mood was somber and defeatist as the final deadline approached.
Others were optimistic. According to the placards on the easels, the zealous nature of protests and rallies had died away as soon as word got out that the boosters had been found. Some had been canceled, others had waned for lack of interest.
The display on the electronic board in the Situation Room was now the same as one being generated by someone named Emry on board the Orion. It was being transmitted from Brande’s ship through the RVKane to the CRITICOM satellite network, then picked up by Hawaii and Washington.
Three pieces of debris. Two boosters and the first stage were shown.
A curving dotted line showed the beginnings of a flight
path and three more lines breaking off the first indicated where the boosters and the first stage might have separated from the main body of the A2e.
Where the dotted line would end was still open to conjecture.
But they were getting there.
He kept watching the clock on the wall that was labeled Japan, but which had been reset to keep track of time in the target zone.
There was not much time left on it.
A decade before, when Unruh was part of the operations directorate, he had relished action. Always doing something, going somewhere. He thought that maybe Brande was somewhat like the younger Unruh.
But he was older now. He sat in rooms like this and waited for the actions to take place around him. It seemed like he did not have much control, but he did. He was part of the process that formed the general shape of the actions that would take place. And, distasteful or not, he was good at it.
He did not think Brande would understand or appreciate that.
Earlier, after Brande had chewed him out so thoroughly, Unruh had thought about looking Brande up after it was ail over and trying to explain the process.
Now, he did not think that he would.
He looked up at the clock mislabeled Japan, and he looked at the three pieces of debris that an electronic map said were crunched deep in the Pacific Ocean.
There was supposedly a canyon out there, deeper than deep.
And not enough time.
Unruh did not think he would ever meet Dane Brande, and he thought that that was going to be his loss.
The Orion was directly above the resting place of the A2eʼs first stage. A hundred yards off her bow, the Timofey Olʼyantsev was fighting to stay on station. Though the Commonwealth patrol ship, at 312 feet, was seventy-two feet longer than the research vessel, she did not have the stabilization of the cycloidal propellers.
When Brande visited the bridge to check on Connie Alvarez-Sorenson, she pointed out a yacht, dimly seen through the slanting rain, half a mile to the south. “Cartwright says that thing’s loaded to the gunwales with reporters. They won’t leave us alone. On the radio, the Navy’s trying to get them outside the cordon.”
“Be a shame if we lost them all, wouldn’t it?” Brande said. “I’ll plead the Fifth,” she said.
“You doing all right up here?”
“Just dandy, thanks to computers and satellites. We’re not going anywhere we don’t want to go.”