Ultra Deep

by William H. Lovejoy

  The winch operator lowered her as deckhands shoved and pulled, guiding the sub onto the rails set in the deck. Flanged wheels were inset into the lower hull, and once they engaged the track, a cable was attached to the hull, and the sub was winched forward along the track. Finally, three lines from deck cleats were attached to the hull on either side, and she was secured in place. Maintenance people — including PhD scientists — swarmed around her, popping open access hatches to the batteries and to the subsystems that needed recharging or checking. Within MVU, everybody performed all kinds of tasks.

  Brande grasped Anderson around the waist and lifted her over the sail. She scampered away. He eased himself over, then slid down the surface of the hull to a scaffold that had been wheeled into place next to the sub. He worked his way down the aluminum-runged ladder.

  Word came to meet him.

  “Any idea about what Hampstead wanted, Jim?”

  “No. He was uncharacteristically secretive, Dane.”

  They both turned to watch as Dokey slipped under the bow of the sub and crawled toward the sheath that held Atlas in place. Minutes later, he came stumbling out from under the bow with the gold ingot cradled in his arms.

  “This one’s mine,” he said.

  “Bullshit!” yelled George Dawson from the Grade, which was tied alongside. “Get a saw and cut me off three- fourths of that!”

  “Put it in the main lab, Okey,” Brande said. “Well want to examine it for any markings.”

  Brande and Word followed Dokey forward and through the centered hatchway into the main lab. It took up most of the superstructure space on the main deck. Workbenches and test equipment were snugged against most of the bulkheads. Five computer terminals were tucked into the starboard, aft corner. The odor of chemicals was prominent. One of the battery rechargers made a humming sound.

  Brande found his deck shoes where he had left them in a computer cubicle and bent over to pull them on.

  Half a dozen people — marine biologists and scientists — gathered around Dokey as he gently settled his prize onto a workbench.

  Brande and the research vessel’s captain continued through the lab, passed through an area of storage lockers and cabins — there were more cabins a deck down, in each of the catamaran hulls — and into the large, open lounge and wardroom area. Word got them both mugs of coffee while Brande settled into the last of four booths on the starboard side — opposite the galley — and picked up a phone mounted on the bulkhead. He directed the radio operator to call the Washington number on MVU’s secure satellite channel.

  “Office of the undersecretary.”

  There were so many undersecretaries in Washington, Brande had always wondered how a caller was to know if he had gotten the right one.

  “This is Dane Brande, Angie.”

  “Oh, Dane! I’ve got a message right here. Somewhere. Here we go. Mr. Hampstead is on his way to New Orleans.”

  “Must not have been important then.”

  “And he’s sent a Navy airplane to pick you up. You’ll be meeting at the U.S. Naval Air Station.”

  “I take it back,” Brande said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, Angie. Thanks for the information.”

  Brande hung up the phone.

  Word sat down opposite him in the booth. “What’s up?”

  “I still don’t know. But I’ll be leaving soon” Brande gave him the gist of the message.

  “We’re staying on-site?”

  “Yes. You’ll need to select a couple people to replace Okey and me on the crew rotation.”

  “That’s probably better anyway, Dane. Most CEOs don’t get involved in the muck.”

  “Hell, Jim, I started this company so I could get down in the muck. Wouldn’t be any fun, otherwise.”

  Word grinned at him. “Life isn’t supposed to be fun, Chief.”

  Brande smiled back. “That’s what my grandma told me. I’m going to grab a shower. You want to tell Dokey to let go of his gold and get ready to fly?”

  “He won’t like it, but I’ll tell him.”

  Brande took his coffee mug with him, left the wardroom, and climbed the companionway to the bridge deck. Aft of the bridge were the sonar and radio cabins, then the captain’s, exec officer’s, and four small guest cabins. He refused to call them owner’s cabins, and since he owned the Gemini and her sister ship, the Orion, he figured he could call them what he wanted to call them.

  He mostly owned them. Each ship, designed with his insistent and detailed assistance, had been built by Bethlehem Steel Shipbuilding in Baltimore, and had cost $3.4 million. The monthly payments on his research vessels alone ran to $28,000 a month. Crew, maintenance, and supply costs for both ships was $225,000 a month. The luxury of owning his own cabin aboard the Gemini amounted to $4,200 a day. So he called it a guest cabin.

  In the first starboard guest cabin, he rummaged through the canvas duffle he always kept packed and in the trunk of his car. He never knew where he was going, for sure, so he was always ready to go.

  He found a clean pair of chinos, a pale blue sport shirt, and dark blue, soft-soled loafers. Setting them aside, he stripped out of his light blue jumpsuit — an MVU uniform of sorts — then headed for the attached head. He drank the rest of his coffee while standing under the steaming water. One of the details that had slipped by him during the design phase for the ship was the height of the shower head. It was not quite high enough. Brande was six-four, and the spray hit him directly in the chest.

  He weighed 215 pounds, but it would take a major expedition to locate any fat. His wide shoulders and barrel chest were direct descendants of Henning Sven Brande — once Brandeson — his grandfather. Antecedents to Henning Sven, in the Swedish tradition, were confused by differing surnames. Svenson. Petterson. There were others that he had forgotten. Henning Sven Brandeson, at any rate, was the first to land in Minnesota, in 1867. He had dug into the ground, planted wheat, and expected all those that followed him to do the same.

  Brande had respected his grandparents, Sven and Bridgette, especially since they raised him from age eight, after his parents were killed in an automobile accident, but digging in the earth had not come naturally to him. What had come naturally was his attraction for, first, Tenmile Lake, then Leech Lake, then Lake Superior. He kept hunting for larger bodies of water. Working the summer wheat harvests and gathering scholarships wherever he could, Brande managed to accumulate the cash he needed to get him to the University of California at San Diego. His graduate schools were also completed by funds from a variety of sources.

  As he stood at the basin and shaved for the second time that day — not knowing what was coming later in the day — he realized that most of his life was devoted to raising funds from various sources. He was always hitting up endowments and charitable organizations for contributions. Grant-writing for federal funding was now second nature. Infrequently, he entered into contracts for private ventures, as he had just done with George Dawson. It seemed as if half of his life was spent finding the funds necessary to fulfil the other half of his life.

  The effort had brought early crow’s feet to the corners of his blue eyes. The lines from the outside edges of his nose to the corners of his mouth had deepened. The responsibility of providing for eighty-four — he knew more of the details of his business than he let on to Kaylene Rae Thomas — employees had settled into his face, though he tried not to let others share his concerns. Additionally, the sun and the saltwater had bleached his blond hair to near-white and weathered his face into ruggedness. In the mirror, he could see his hand dragging the razor through the lather. His large and blunt fingers, those of a Minnesota wheat farmer, showed the little scars incurred by contact with coral reef and sharp equipment.

  Brande felt as if he were fit, but he was less sure of the health of MVU. If the Dawson find proved plentiful, it would help immensely. He would not count on it, however, and in the meantime, he had to mount another fund-raising campaign. He was acutely
aware of the payrolls and notes coming due, without Rae Thomas’s prompting.

  After dressing and repacking his duffel, Brande carried it out to the bridge. Okey Dokey was waiting for him, and he had abandoned his colorful T-shirt. Wearing an open-collared white sport shirt under a pale blue sport coat, he looked more like the graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology that he was. Dokey’s title was Chief Robotics Operations Engineer, and since the primary thrust of Marine Visions was robotics, Dokey was not often far from Brande’s side.

  Dokey flipped a thumb over his shoulder, toward the port side. “There’s an Albatross just now putting down, Chief. What’d we do to get Navy attention?”

  “I’m not sure I know, Okey, but it’s courtesy of Avery Hampstead.”

  “Good. Maybe he’s got a job for us. Or at the least, he’ll buy lunch.”

  They left the bridge by way of the exterior ladder and descended to the main deck. Jim Word had the launch over the side, waiting for them, and George Dawson had come aboard to say goodbye.

  “Keep careful count, George,” Brande told him.

  “Damned sure, I will. There’s a chip out of that ingot we just got up, and I thought I’d better search Dokey before he got away”

  His grin belied the accusation, and Dokey grinned back at him.

  “Captain, you don’t want to search where I hid it.”

  “You gonna play that way, I guess I don’t.”

  Brande went down the gangway and stepped into the launch. He tossed his duffel on the stern seat. Dokey followed, and the seaman manning the helm shoved in the throttles, pulled away from the Gemini, and headed toward the seaplane.

  The Grumman Albatross idled its engines a quarter-mile away. A Navy seaman stood in the open waist door, and when they drew alongside, helped them aboard.

  Brande and Dokey settled into the canvas sling seats provided in the utilitarian aircraft, and moments later, the twin radial engines were roaring, and the plane was skipping along the wave tops.

  The banging in the fuselage hull quit abruptly as the airplane lifted off. Brande watched the Gemini get smaller. Someone on the foredeck of the Justica, probably Curtis Aaron, was waving his arms wildly. Brande could not tell who he was waving at, so he waved back at the man.

  “I don’t think that was a cheerful farewell, Dane,” Dokey said. “I think he was casting a spell on you.”

  “On us.”

  “Sure, spread the blame.”

  “You brought the ingot up, Okey. You know Aaron doesn’t like that”

  “What good is all that gold doing anyone, buried on the bottom? Tell me that.”

  “You know I tend to agree with you,” Brande said.

  “You agree with Aaron, too.”

  Brande was pretty schizophrenic on the matter of deep sea recoveries. He admitted that to himself. Where the historical significance of artifacts was involved, he did not often go as far as, say, Robert Ballard, who had located the Titanic and photographed and mapped the shipwreck. Ballard’s philosophy saw the Titanic’s grave as historically important, but not archaeologically important. Salvaging the wreck would not have a scientific purpose. The subsequent 1987 French expedition — with American help — caused physical damage to the Titanic’s structure and appendages when they sought out and raised almost a thousand artifacts to the surface.

  Brande had watched the telecast in which Telly Savalas supervised the unveiling of many of those artifacts, including the opening on live TV of the second-class purser’s safe. Ballard’s earlier expedition had learned that the back of that particular safe was missing, due to rust, and it was empty. The contents pulled from it for the benefit of the television audience had come from elsewhere. It was staged for dramatic effect, no doubt, but was still fraudulent, as far as Brande was concerned.

  In twenty years of diving on wrecks, Brande had let some go by photographed but untouched, graves for those who had died. In many cases, he had brought goblets, china, buttons, belt buckles, and helmets to the surface and turned them over to the authorities with jurisdiction. He preferred to have artifacts of that nature placed in museums, where many people could view and marvel over them. Frequently, expeditions shared the spoils among museums, universities, and salvagers. And state and federal tax collectors, of course. The governmental accountants were always one step behind them. Incan gold on its way to Spain gave up a percentage to Uncle Sam.

  He and his crews had worked Department of Defense contracts, locating sunken ships and aircraft, and raising top secret components such as radios, encoding machines, radars, and armament. Brande thought it was better if Marine Visions Unlimited did it, rather than have Russian or Chinese divers combing the wreckage of gunboats and M-14 Tomcats.

  He detested the scavengers who, in effect, looted shipwrecks in clandestine dives. They avoided the tax man and the authorities, when the wreck was within state or national waters, and sold the artifacts to private collectors who hid them in their basements.

  That was as great a sin as Curtis Aaron’s zealous preaching for the opposite viewpoint. Aaron and his Oceans Free cult had started out as environmentalists, but had turned their crusade into a near religion that banned any disturbance of nature. That included the sea floor and its bounty of minerals, energy, and food sources.

  Brande had his own fears for the earth and her environs, but he also thought that there were compromise procedures available. The oceans were invaluable resources, and would become even more so, as the planet overpopulated itself. The overall goal of Marine Visions Unlimited was to develop the tools and the techniques for mining the oceans of metals, fluids, gases, and food in the most efficient and harmless manner possible.

  Curtis Aaron did not believe it for one minute. His view was that anyone diving more than one hundred feet intended to molest Mother Nature. Nature abuse.

  “I wonder if it would help if we, if MVU, donated some cash to the Oceans Free cause?”

  “You mean, would it get Brother Aaron off our backs?” Dokey asked.

  “Would I say that?”

  “Not out loud. No, I don’t think it would help. Plus, from what Kaylene says, we don’t have much spare cash.”

  “Details. You and Rae worry too much about details.”

  “She worries about details. I worry about a monthly pay-check”

  That was not true, either. Dokey worried about having enough time available to putter in the workshops in San Diego, get involved in the expeditions of Gemini and Orion, shuttle out to Harbor One, and check the progress of the mining station. His robots were operating everywhere, and he loved to see them at work or to take their controls in hand.

  For that matter, Brande had the same worries. Never enough time to do all that he wanted to do.

  The flight went smoothly. The seaman offered them coffee from a Thermos. The pilot, a Navy lieutenant, came back and talked to them for a while. A few minutes before noon, the wheels clunked out of their housings, and the ungainly Albatross landed gracefully at Callender Field, which was actually in Belle Chasse, rather than New Orleans proper.

  Toting their gear, Brande and Dokey thanked the crew, then wandered across the tarmac toward the operations building. The humidity was close to steaming. Brande noted the parked Gulfstream business jet and assumed it belonged to, or was chartered by, the Department of Commerce.

  Hampstead was waiting inside the operations building in a borrowed office. He smiled his hello and waved them to chairs. “Coffee?”

  Brande checked his watch. “How about lunch, Avery? We’ve had plenty of coffee.”

  “They’re going to bring us some sandwiches,” the undersecretary said.

  “Geez,” Dokey moaned. “No steaks? Seems to me the department could spring for something more substantial than bologna.”

  Hampstead grinned at him, his big teeth and long face giving him a horsey flavor. “Dokey, do you think about anything but food and women?”

  “You got the order wrong, Avery.”

  Ha
mpstead shut the door and went behind the desk to sit down. Brande sat in a straight chair made of gray-painted metal and gray Naugahyde. It felt like his office.

  “I bring you the President’s greetings, gentlemen.”

  “Oh, shit!” Dokey said. “We’re drafted.”

  “Not quite. But there is a problem. Somewhat of a major problem.”

  “With one of our contracts?” Brande asked. Currently, MVU held seventeen federal contracts, all for research projects. It was a substantial source of income.

  “No,” Hampstead told him.

  Then he told them about a Soviet A2e rocket and its nuclear reactor payload.

  “Jesus Christ!” Brande said. “Meltdown.”

  “Yes, we think so”

  “In the Pacific.”

  “That much we know for sure. We’re talking almost four miles down.”

  “And you want our equipment?”

  “Admiral Delecourt would like to borrow your equipment, yes.”

  “No way,” Dokey said. “My ROVs don’t go anywhere without me.”

  “I told Delecourt that’s the way it would be, but I had to make his pitch first.”

  “And the next pitch?” Brande asked.

  “Inside curve. Will you take it on?”

  Brande thought about it for a moment. “There’s no timeline on the meltdown?”

  “The nuke specialists haven’t made any guesses or promises yet. They’ll try to refine it, and we’re trying to get additional information from the Russians.”

  “I can’t risk my people,” Brande said.

  “I understand if you take that position,” Hampstead said. “In which event, would you allow the Navy to use your equipment?”

  “We get a contract out of this?” Dokey asked.

  “We can work something out, Okey. We always seem to.”

  “What I’ll have to do,” Brande said, “is get a team together and see what they say.”

  “It would have to be done quickly, Dane.”

  Brande slid his chair up to the desk and picked up the phone. He dialed the San Diego number, but Thomas was out. He asked the graduate student who answered to have her tracked down, thinking this was the one time they needed pagers.