Brande moved to the right side of the bridge and stared forward through the water sluicing off the windshield.
Dismal, gray view.
Kenji Nagasaka stood near the helm, ready to grab if the autopilot let go.
Alvarez-Sorenson, wrapped in a bulky ski sweater, came over and stood beside him.
“Worried about her?”
“What?”
“Kaylene.”
“Of course not.”
“Bullshit, boss. Shows all over you.”
“You’re the resident expert, Connie?”
“Might as well be expert at something. Go ahead and bring them up.”
“Little early, yet,” Brande said.
“Hey, I’m the acting captain, right? I say, with that weather out there, we need more time.”
Brande went back to the radio shack and said, “Bucky, hook in with the acoustic, would you?”
Sanders flipped toggles and handed him the phone.
“How you doing down there, Bob?”
“We just reported. Check the screen.”
Mayberry was a little testier now, with some fatigue setting in.
“I’m not near the screen.”
“Sorry. Situation the same. We’ve prowled the edge of the canyon, peeked over it a few times. Nothing.”
“The Sea Lion? You check with them on radiation?”
“Thirty minutes ago. No radiation count to speak of. They’re on ascent now, to change crews.”
“That’s what I want you to do, too. Bring it on up.”
There was a delay while Rae wrestled the phone away from Mayberry. Brande pictured it that way.
“Not yet, Dane. We’ve still got a couple hours of shift yet.”
“Now, Rae. Connie wants more time for lift-out. And I want time to install Celebes.”
“Damn it, I was just getting comfortable. Why Gargantua?”
“So we’re ready, just in case. With time the way it is, we’ll have to make do with the submersible’s sonar.”
“All right. Let it be recorded that that’s an unwilling ‘all right’.”
“So recorded.”
He waited with the phone in hand until he heard that the weights had been successfully jettisoned, then went below to manage a final inspection of Gargantua.
He had over three hours to wait, but standing idle was not working for him.
“Everybody below is sick as a dog, Curtis. Don’t you think we should head for Midway?”
“This’ll pass over, Dawn,” Aaron told her. Besides, he was not sure he could find Midway.
When he had last talked to Mark Jacobs, earlier in the morning, Jacobs had told him that he was taking the Greenpeace boat to Midway. Aaron might have followed then, if he had known where the Arienne was.
The radar screen was just a lot of little dots appearing behind the sweep as it rotated. Some dots were brighter than others, but it was difficult to pick out which were true vessels and which were random feedback from the sea.
He had given Dawn a new heading after deciding that a circle of brighter blips was too uniform to be anything other than ships.
The trouble was, somehow they had drifted southwest of the main body of ships, and heading back to it, they were taking the swells off the left rear quarter. Not infrequently, huge waves crashed over the stern, swamping the deck.
A few more minutes, they would reach the circle of ships and could turn back to facing the waves.
Damn, if the weather had not turned so crappy, he could be in the center of those ships, spreading the word.
The closer they got, the brighter the blips looked.
Aaron sat back away from the radar hood and rotated the tension out of his shoulders.
The Queen of Liberty was rocking violently, threatening to heel over. Aaron had to keep a firm grasp on the side of his seat to avoid being spilled onto the deck.
He was mad as hell, trying not to show it to Dawn.
Nothing worked out the way he wanted. The world was going to hell in a handmade basket, and no one wanted to recognize it, to listen to the solutions. These jackasses kept screwing around with it, kept altering it, kept ignoring the signs.
They had to be stopped.
No getting around that.
Jacobs had scooted for Midway Island.
And that left Aaron on his own.
All he could do was his best.
The CIS and U.S. cordon of warships had drifted south and slightly west in anticipation of sending the submersibles into the trench.
Oberstev, partially protected from the hard rain by a gray slicker, stood on the fantail of the Timofey Olʼyantsev and watched the harried activity of the crew as they serviced the Sea Lion.
It was noon, and yet it was dark enough to require floodlights. Pyotr Rastonov scurried about, slipping on the deck, examining connections, antennas, transponders, access doors. He called for more grease for the hatch seal.
A figure clad in yellow rubber pants and shirt exited the superstructure and approached Oberstev.
“I believe I am ready, General Oberstev.”
Gennadi Drozdov was so fatigued, he appeared emaciated. His thin dark hair was plastered to his skull by the rain, and his eyes were sunken holes.
“Are you up to this?” Oberstev asked.
“Yes. Pyotr is correct, General. We must share if we hope to complete the recovery.”
“You are optimistic?”
“Very optimistic.”
Oberstev’s own pessimism had grown. It had taken days to get this far, and they had yet to discover the site of the reactor. He was also leery of what might come out of his unilateral decision to cooperate with the Americans, much less give them access to the Loudspeaker system.
He had no doubts that Chairman Vladimir Yevgeni, and perhaps Admiral Orlov, would take him to task during the subsequent hearings. And there would be hearings; there always were.
He might be relieved of his command of Red Star and forced into retirement.
And yet Red Star and enforced retirement seemed less important now. There was more at stake on his own planet. Why seek Mars when Earth was so close to hand?
“Go then, Gennadi Drozdov, and luck go with you.”
Drozdov nodded, then turned and crossed the deck uneasily, headed for the work party that had set up the breeches buoy. Two men helped the scientist up into it and secured straps over his lap. Then they loaded two medium-size, aluminum, watertight cases onto his lap and strapped them to his body.
With a signal from one of the sailors, the breeches buoy abruptly lifted off the deck, and Gennadi Drozdov went over the railing, sliding toward the sea.
Oberstev almost felt like going with him.
Valeri Dankelov, Svetlana Polodka, Kim Otsuka and Gennadi Drozdov had been working together for over two hours. Robert Mayberry assisted whenever he was called.
Brande kept coming over to check on their progress, and Dankelov would say, “Not yet,” and Mayberry would say “Fuck off, Chief.”
Mayberry was tired.
They were all tired, Dankelov thought. Little mistakes had been made, mistakes that when discovered required subsequent disassembly and reassembly of components.
Installing the physical components had been simple. One of the Loudspeaker transceivers was mounted on the workbench in the laboratory, and the other was cushioned with foam rubber and strapped to the rear seat in the submersible.
Bypassing the existing equipment, the new components had been connected to the hull-mounted transmission and receiving antennas of the research vessel and the submersible. Even tuning the antennas to the new equipment had not been difficult.