He picked up the microphone, shoved it under the hood, and said, “Pyotr, we’ve got it. You want to come to one-nine, four-seven, one-oh, two-eight?”
“We are on the way, Dane.”
“I’m looking it over,” Roskens said. “Okey, you want to circle it, maybe get in a little closer.”
“Anything for you, sweetheart,” Dokey said, taking the mike from Brande.
For ten minutes, Dokey and Roskens talked back and forth, and he poked Gargantua in closer and closer to the depleted rocket.
The skin was pretty banged up, crumpled in places, creased in others. The whole thing looked to be bent along its length. The two fins that could be seen were mangled badly.
The Soviet Seeker swam into Gargantua’s view, also probing. “You here, Pyotr?”
“Yes, Dane. We are behind and above you. Now moving to your right side.”
From the Olʼyantsev, Oberstev, who was viewing the Seeker pictures, said, “It is in a dangerous position. If we try to cut the payload module away, the rocket may push it further down.”
“Also, General,” Brande said, “directly above us is a rock ledge that extends partway over the wreckage.”
“General,” Roskens said, “do you have drawings of the rocket? At least of the payload module?”
Oberstev did not hesitate. “I will send Colonel Cherbykov to get them from my cabin, and we will transfer them to you by photo scanner.”
They waited fifteen eternal minutes.
The digital readout that he had been ignoring read: 1915. Four hours and forty-five minutes to meltdown, if the Commonwealth nuke people were right.
Four hours to the surface.
“Pyotr,” Brande asked, “any radiation readings?”
“None, but our sonar picks up a hissing. I think it is freon boiling.”
Brande gulped and turned up the squelch on the sonar. “Definitely hissing,” Dokey said.
“You mind if we don’t listen to it?”
“Not a damned bit.”
Brande squelched the sonar down.
“Got it!” Roskens said. “Okey, move Gargantua forward, extend the cutting torch, and go where I tell you.”
“Tell me fast.”
She directed him, and Brande watched the monitor as Gargantua’s cutting torch appeared, then touched several places on the side of the payload module before Roskens told him, “Start there, Okey, and cut straight forward.”
The manipulator went down, slapped the side of the module, and…
The whole damned thing started to slide.
Three feet.
Four feet.
And stopped.
Dokey said, “In my next life, I’m going to be a neurosurgeon. It’s a damned sight easier.”
Brande went to the acoustic phone. “Pyotr, can you go sit on the rocket?”
“Keep pressure against it? Yes. But please hurry. We do not want to use up electrical power too quickly.”
The Sea Lion moved into view, coming from the right side, eased in against the rocket, and added power to its propellers.
A cloud of dust rose, blinding nearly all of them.
Dokey moved the ROV in again, found his starting place, and started cutting the thin aluminum skin with the electrode cutting tip.
Brande called Oberstev, “General, can we access the switch module from down here?”
“I have an open line to the nuclear people, Mr. Brande. I will ask.”
A few moments later, he said, “It would be difficult. They do not know what tools you have available, but the reactor is in a sealed container. Access doors would have to be removed, as would a large computer component, before the switch module could be reached. They are sending me complete instructions.”
Brande sighed. A lot of this could have been taken care of a lot earlier.
“All right, General. Once weʼve cut away the side of the pay-load bay, what then?”
“The reactor is secured to the framework inside the module by four bolts. They could be unbolted or simply cut.”
“Weʼll cut them.”
Dokey had completed a thirty-foot cut along one side and a sixteen-or seventeen-foot cut around the bottom circumference of the payload module. He was starting up the near side, working close to the seabed.
“Mel?” Brande asked.
“He’s coming,” Rae Thomas responded. She sounded breathless.
Brande wanted to see her pretty badly.
“What you got, babe?” Sorenson asked.
“How much cable do we have?”
“We’re lifting about three tons?”
“General?” Brande asked.
“I am converting the measurement. Less than that. Four thousand, two hundred pounds.”
“I can run out the port-side winch, then hook it into the starboard, then into the’midships, and get you thirty thousand feet, Dane. Do the reverse coming back up.”
“Do that, Mel. Use four or five of the sub weights to get it down here fast, and we can cut them away. Better put a sonar reflector on it so we can locate it.”
“What kind of connection you going to make?”
“There are two lift rings on the reactor,” Roskens said.
“Hook then?” Sorenson asked.
“That’ll do,” Dokey said, “And I’ll weld the son of a bitch in place. It’s not coming off.”
Brande passed that message.
At 1942 hours, Dokey used Gargantua’s manipulator with the claws and peeled the skin from the module. He then had to cut away three interior structural members at Rosken’s direction.
It took four minutes for Gargantua, guided by Dokey’s interpretation of the sonar readout, to locate and latch onto the cable suspended from the research vessel. It did not look very substantial, but Brande knew it was tested to five tons.
After glancing at the chronometer readout, Dokey was surprisingly quick in cutting away the weights, fastening the hook to the lift ring, then welding it in place with two spot welds. Gargantua backed away, keeping an eye on everything. Brande spoke into the mike, “Mel, take up slack.”
“Keep in mind, Dane, that we’re bouncing ten or twelve feet. That slack is going to come up unexpectedly.”
“Let’s everyone back off a bit. Pyotr, take it up. You can head for the surface.”
The Sea Lion rose from her perch on the rocket body, and it started to slide, then roll down the slope.
It went twenty feet, the cable jerked taut, and the reactor came free of the module, swinging freely to the south.
Brande turned DepthFinder to follow it.
It went nearly a hundred yards into yet deeper water, following the only guide it had, the position of the Orion on the surface, and then slowed to a standstill for a moment, then abruptly jumped as the wave action above tugged at it.
“I hope to hell that cable can take the stress,” Dokey said.
Brande turned up the sonar, heard the awful hiss, and closed it down again.
“Dumping weights,” he said.
The lieutenant commander named Acery had lent Overton a set of binoculars, and from the bridge of the Bronstein, he had been scanning the seas on a regular basis for the last two hours.
They all knew it was coming up.
Every warship in the cordon had moved in, tightening the circle, and every searchlight available was trained on the two ships in the center of the circle, the Orion and the Timofey Ol’yantsev. The circle seemed a lot tighter than it was since the turbulent seas kept each ship quite a ways apart.
Overton guessed the circle was a mile in diameter. Even with the searchlights and the binoculars, it was difficult for him to see the Olʼyantsev, some 400 yards away.