The dream which had haunted his childhood had returned just last year in the office of Ivan Kerikov, a man whom Valery had never heard of, but who seemed to know everything about him. Valery learned that this man was the current head of the department that had employed his late father. Kerikov calmly explained that Scientific Operations had watched Valery with interest over the years and in fact helped him along at times. As Valery incredulously tried to digest this piece of information, Kerikov dropped another bombshell.
He pressed a signal buzzer on his desk and a man walked into the room. Valery barely heard Kerikov introduce Dr. Pytor Borodin. Thirty years had aged his father, filling out his body and silvering his wild hair and beard, but he was still the man who stared from the photograph hanging over the dinner table in his mother’s apartment.
That night Valery had the dream for the first time since his early teens.
It wasn’t until their next meeting that Valery had recovered enough to actually listen to the things his father and Kerikov were discussing.
The elder Borodin had faked his own death so many years ago as a security precaution. His work at the time had been so secret that only such drastic measures would ensure protection. After most of Borodin’s coworkers were summarily executed in the summer of 1963, Borodin had worked alone monitoring his secret project, nurturing it along to its now fast approaching conclusion.
Kerikov explained that they needed a new staff of scientists to see the project concluded. Would Valery be interested in joining as second-in-command?
At the time Valery was working for the State Energy Bureau, investigating the potential of Russia’s tremendous methane hydrate reserves, which were locked in the permafrost of western and central Siberia. His background in geology was as strong as any of the new breed of Russian scientists, men and women whose worth was valued by results rather than the ability to regurgitate party dogma.
Valery only agreed to join after being assured that his consideration was based on his merits, not on the family connection. Pytor Borodin’s casual dismissal of such a notion was terribly painful, as if Borodin wasn’t even acknowledging his own son.
Two weeks after those early meetings, Valery was given a holiday in Mozambique under the cover of a marine biology mission, a chance to defrost his body after so many months in Siberia and prepare himself for the work ahead.
Since then, the work had been nothing short of incredible. Kerikov had managed to assemble some of the sharpest minds in the Russian Federation and place at their disposal the latest cutting edge technology.
Valery pulled on a pair of American denim jeans and a military green T-shirt. It was just past midnight, but he knew trying to go back to sleep would be futile.
The ship’s galley, one deck below his cabin, was deserted, but a large urn of coffee was kept warm on a side table. Valery filled a white mug and took a cautious sip of the strong, bitter brew. He nodded to the kitchen hand noisily cleaning pans in the scullery before leaving for the nerve center of the August Rose.
Built as a bulk carrier designated UT-20 by Hitachi-Zosen in 1979, she had been converted to a refrigeration ship in 1983 when she had been bought by Ocean Freight and Cargo. The 1.13 million cubic feet of bulk storage area had been reduced by nearly thirty percent to make room for massive Carrier refrigeration units and the special cargo-handling equipment needed to transport frozen goods.
That refitting was well documented by the Japanese shipyard that carried out the work, by Continental Insurance, and by the Finnish bank which floated most of the loans held by Ocean Freight and Cargo. The August Rose’s next refit was kept much more secret.
She spent seven weeks in a secure drydock in Vladivostok in the spring of 1990. Cosmetically she still resembled the vessel she had always been: 20,000 deadweight tons and 497 feet long, with a sharply raked bow and an aft-positioned superstructure that resembled a four-story steel box. But within her steel-plated hull she was transformed into the most unique scientific vessel ever built.
The cavernous main hold was turned into a geophysics laboratory augmented by smaller labs, offices, and data storage rooms. The refrigeration units were left in place, but now they worked to keep the sophisticated computer system at a constant temperature.
The computers themselves were huge, taking up nearly two thousand square feet of space for the main-frames and half again as much for the peripherals. There was more computing power aboard the August Rose than at Baikanor, Russia’s equivalent of Cape Canaveral. Enough cargo space remained for the August Rose to operate under the cover of a refrigerator ship, though she could no longer haul enough frozen goods to ever turn a profit, yet the ruse allowed her to sail the Pacific unimpeded.
Valery reached the main laboratory through a torturous maze of bulkhead doors and narrow companionways. The final door was secured by a magnetic keycard lock. A guard noted his time of entry on a log sheet and took custody of his card, which would have been erased by the magnetic fields created by the equipment in the lab.
It was past midnight, but nearly a dozen scientists, technicians, and assistants were at work, monitoring the numerous sensors that hung from two towed arrays beneath the vessel’s keel. A large metal plotting table dominated the center of the room. Above it, on an articulating arm, a holographic laser projector hung down like some monstrous dentist’s drill. Bundles of fiber-optic cables ran from the projector to the mainframe computer and to the table itself.
Pytor Borodin was seated at the console nearest the projection table, his slim body hidden under a voluminous white lab coat. Valery took a deep breath of the filtered, sterilized air and strode across the rubber-tiled floor.
“Working late again, Father?”
He might have been the oldest member of the scientific team by twenty years, but Pytor Borodin kept a pace that far surpassed that of all his staff, including his second-in-command. He usually spent thirty-six hours in the computer room before taking a grudging six-hour break for sleep. His crumpled appearance alarmed his son.
“Father, have you been taking your medication?”
“No,” the elder scientist fired back irritably. “That Coumadin is nothing more than rat poison and Vasotec, the beta blocker, affects my breathing because of the air-conditioning. Now don’t bother me again about my heart. Have a look at this; we’ve gotten the cameras back on line.”
Valery glanced at the monitor and saw a close approximation of hell on earth. Dangling from a Kevlar cable and encased in carbon fiber with a thick artificial sapphire lens cover, the camera hung directly above the central vent of the fastest growing volcano in the world. Molten rock, forced upward by the tremendous heat engine of the earth’s core, poured through the narrow rent in the crust in a never-ending stream, amid billowing clouds of noxious gas and dissolved minerals. There was no microphone attached to the camera, but Valery could almost hear the protesting moans as the earth vomited up her guts.
“The rate has increased again,” Valery remarked.
“And?”
“The flow is forming more westerly now.”
“Right, it’s caught in the North Equatorial Gyre, just as I’d predicted.”
“But that current only moves maybe three miles per day. Surely that can’t cause a shift in the formation of the cone.”
“It wouldn’t normally, no, but the rate of ejection from the volcano is so great that the two forces create a skew in the lava flow. It’s a simple matter of vectors. I’m glad you’re here, Valery, the computer is about finished with the past day’s data and is ready for a growth projection.”
Because of the massive amount of raw data gathered by the sensors and the inherently chaotic movement of anything within nature’s realm, the August Rose needed huge computers in order to create a reasonable prediction of the volcano’s future growth. Even with the gigabytes of power, the computers needed a full twenty-four hours to remap, down to the millimeter, the thrusting cone below the ship and then to predict where the cone would broach the surface of the Pacific Ocean.