Ultra Deep

by William H. Lovejoy

  He had a bit of a head, a bulge, on the bow end. Between his eyes — huge, round floodlights, along with video and 70-millimeter camera lenses — was a small circular housing that contained a fan. That turbine blade, along with another on the stern, controlled his side-to-side rotation. Three circular wells passing clear through the body, two forward and one aft, contained three more turbines. The big blades, powered by massive electric motors, could churn out 12,000 pounds of thrust when operating without a load. A single propeller within a protective band on the stern, controlled fore-and-aft movement. Like Turtle, he had three manipulator arms extending forward from below his head, but these were heavier in appearance, made of cast titanium alloy. They were elbow-and wrist-jointed, and had seven axes of movement. The reach was eight feet.

  One of his two-fingered and one-thumbed hands could spread eighteen inches apart, and his grasp would crush Hondas. Conversely, with someone like Dokey at the controls, he could hold a butterfly without damaging it.

  Not one of his three arms moved at the moment, the reason he had been beached inside Harbor One.

  Despite his virginal white paint and yellow accent stripes, he was not very pretty. The lower life around M VU described him as an upscale cockroach. The nicer people thought he looked like a water beetle on stilts.

  Brande did not care. Like Sneaky Pete, Atlas, and Depth-Finder, he had been designed primarily by Brande, and he had a father’s blindness when it came to Gargantua’s physical faults.

  “We just haven’t had the spare hours to work on him,” Colgate said. “Dokey was planning to spend some time on it, but got diverted to something else.”

  “I know,” Brande told him. “It’s my fault.”

  Colgate called a couple of people down and the four of them went to work, first reinstalling Gargantua’s three battery packs. Because of the high electrical drain resulting from use of his big motors, he was required to have his own electrical sources.

  Manually, they retracted his arms so they did not take up so much room. Brande made the final circuit around the robot, assuring himself that all of the access doors were firmly secured.

  Colgate closed the outer clamshell doors, pumped the chamber dry, then opened the massive doors on the end of the chamber. Rolling a portable hoist into position, Brande lifted Gargantua from the floor, pushed him inside the chamber with help from the others, then attached the hook of a block-and-tackle within the chamber to his lift ring.

  Colgate closed the doors, depressurized the chamber, opened the outer doors, and lowered the robot to the ocean floor. By remote control, Colgate released the hook, then retracted the cable.

  When Neptune’s Daughter returned to the chamber, they spent two hours detaching Turtle from the sub and installing the Atlas ROV in her place. The robot, with her 250-foot tether wound onto the reel, fit snugly into a nest suspended beneath the bow of the sub.

  With Dot moved out of the way, Turtle was then lowered to the seabed. Dot returned to the chamber, and with one of the sub pilots at the controls, took Brande back to the surface.

  Mighty Moose, one of the three workboats — old and refurbished tugboats — owned by Marine Visions was waiting for him. With Dot handling the cable-attaching chores on the sea bottom, Gargantua and Turtle were soon winched aboard the workboat.

  The three-man crew of the boat; captain, mate and one seaman, helped Brande tie down the robots.

  “Okay, Captain Kontas, let’s head for San Diego.”

  “Commercial Basin, Chief?”

  “No. We’ll visit the Navy.”

  Chapter Eight

  2036 HOURS LOCAL, WASHINGTON, DC

  “Our Candid put down at Vladivostok twenty minutes ago, boss,” Jack Evoy said.

  Unruh looked at his watch, just then realizing that he had been napping upright in his chair for some time. He was not entirely certain how long he had been out of contact with the room around him.

  He did not remember picking up the phone. One of the aides had handed it to him, perhaps.

  The activity around him in the Situation Room seemed to have taken on a sluggishness. People had disappeared. The DCI had left the White House right after lunch, headed for his district office. He had told Unruh, “You stay on top of the operational details, Carl. Let me know if there’s any abrupt change. In the meantime, I’ll see if I can’t coordinate the mess I think is brewing.”

  The DCI was responsible for all of the intelligence community, not just the CIA, and all of the intelligence community was hopping at the moment. The FBI was gathering information on internal problems, particularly the rallies erupting near CIS installations. Charts on easels displayed the locations and the intensity of protests that were taking place around the nation. A quick glance told him that the clamor was spreading, working its way eastward from the West Coast.

  The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research was collating data transmitted from foreign embassies and forwarding it to the Situation Room. More charts depicted the rallies, protests, and near-riots under way, not only in the Pacific-proximity cities of Tokyo, Hong Kong and Shanghai, but also in Paris, London and Cape Town.

  The world was pissed off, Unruh figured.

  No one really knew what the consequences might be. He supposed some people thought they would see a mushroom cloud erupt over the Pacific, spreading death and mutations from the international date line eastward. That did not happen in a meltdown, but the results were no less tragic in terms of marine ecology. And people would die, no doubt about it.

  Shaking the curtain of uneasy sleep from his head, Unruh picked up the coffee mug in front of him and took a sip. It was cold and bitter.

  “You still there, boss?”

  “Yeah, Jack. Trying to get my head going. The Sea Lion has arrived, huh?”

  “Right. And they were waiting for it. Our Keyhole got some shots of the off-loading before it went over the horizon. I imagine they took it right to the port. It’s probably going aboard the Olʼyantsev as we speak.”

  “If they were thinking ahead, they’d have done it like Brande’s doing it,” Unruh said.

  “No imagination over there,” Evoy concluded.

  “We need imagination, as well as luck.”

  “So. You want me to stay with what we’re doing?”

  The NPIC was monitoring every movement in the region of the downed rocket.

  “Sure do.”

  “What else is going on? I get to see all the pictures, but I think I’m missing out on something.”

  “You’re safe where you are,” Unruh told him, rescanning the charts. “DC and San Francisco police have quadrupled the guard contingents at the CIS embassy buildings and the consulate. There’s nearly five thousand people outside the embassy on Tunlaw Road. It looks as if Americans want justice in the good old lynch mob fashion. We’re not alone, though, Jack. CIS embassies all around the world are under siege”

  “With some very good justification. Did you see the press statement?”

  “Yes. It fell far short of expectation,” Unruh agreed, “though probably not my expectation.”

  The evening newscasts had all repeated the statement released by the CIS President. He mentioned only that a CIS rocket had crashed at sea and that Soviet naval forces were about to recover it. There was no mention of the nuclear reactor contained in the payload module.

  The DDO — the Deputy Director for Operations — at the CIA, Oren Patterson, had all of his Russian-based assets attempting to uncover information about the Topaz Four reactor, but so far, Unruh had not heard of any developments.

  “How about the other people going to this party?” Unruh asked.

  “We’re tracking the same bunch as before, except that we’ve added the Japanese to our list, Carl. They’ve put a research vessel to sea.”

  “Okay, babe. Keep me posted.”

  Unruh replaced the phone in its cradle on the table. He picked up his coffee mug and carried it to the cart that had been wheeled in early th
at morning and urged a stream of hot, black juice from the urn. There were a few sandwiches left on a platter, but the bread looked stale, and he could swear the ham was turning green.

  He turned and surveyed the room while he tried to coax his nerves to life.

  The big electronic plotting board was still tracking the major players, now with the addition of the Japanese vessel, identified as the Eastern Flower.

  The population of the Situation Room had begun depleting as soon as the President left early in the morning. Chief of Naval Operations Ben Delecourt and most of the military people had gone back to the Pentagon or Arlington Hall — home of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Bob Balcon, the Chief of Staff, was in and out, checking the plotting board. The National Security Advisor, Warren Amply, was napping in an office across the hall. Everyone was in touch by telephone, beeper or courier.

  The State Department bunch had begun arriving in mid-afternoon. After Unruh’s conversation with Hampstead about committees and fact-finding groups and summit meetings, Unruh had begun to worry that diplomacy would get in the way of decisions and action, and he had raised the issue with Balcon. The Chief of Staff, after a tête-à-tête with the President, had called the Secretary of State and asked him to put together a team to deal with negotiations if the need arose.

  The State Department negotiation team, eight members strong, sat around the Situation Room, at the table and in chairs along the walls, not doing much of anything that Unruh could see. He was afraid he had started things off in the wrong direction, creating a pre-committee committee.

  There was now a representative from the Department of Energy present, and he had been on the phone most of the day, talking to the experts at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which was based in Vienna. Unruh, who had once been posted to Vienna, thought that, if an international commission needed a home somewhere, Vienna was the place to choose.

  He was pretty disenchanted with Washington.

  Unruh thought about calling Hampstead, but figured the man could calculate flight times on his own and would know that the Sea Lion was charging into the fray.

  Charging.

  It seemed as if everything moved in slow motion. A state-of-the-art rocket that moved at twenty-five times the speed of sound had triggered the movement of ships that raced along at thirty miles per hour.

  He moved to the center of the room and examined the electronic display. The U. S. military ships had been identified with blue blips. The U.S. civilian ship of importance, the Orion, was painted yellow. Someone from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had suggested the color for some reason.

  The Japanese ship was coded in green, and the CIS ships were, naturally, red. The projected course of the Winter Storm — the submarine identified by the sonar of the SLBN submarine Michigan — and her current expected position suggested that she would be the first major search vessel to reach the target zone.

  Not that there were not other vessels already in the area. A confusion of violet dots was spread over fifty square miles of simulated ocean. Overflights by Navy reconnaissance aircraft had picked out fishing trawlers, freighters, a dozen pleasure craft, sampans, junks and maybe even a canoe. Communications around the world being what they were, almost instantaneous, the word had quickly spread to marine craft, and the gawkers and curiosity seekers had responded. They had converged on the area from Midway, from planned Pacific transit routes, and probably from clandestine smuggling lanes. The Navy frigate Bronstein and the patrol boat Antelope were cruising in the region, but would not make much of a difference, other than advertising an American presence.

  The President had vetoed a suggestion to move in some big U.S. cruisers and an aircraft carrier. He did not want the Russians thinking that he was attempting to meet the Kirov and the Kynda with massive firepower. This was not to be a confrontation.

  As far as the Navy could determine, not one of the civilian vessels would be helpful in a search of the sea bottom. More than likely, they would impede the search. Adm. Ben Delecourt did not see any course of action for clearing them out of the region short of a few shots across a few bows, and that would not be good public relations for the Navy.

  For the life of him, Unruh could not figure out what they were doing there. What was the attraction of impending catastrophe?

  He did not want to be there.

  He did not want to be here, either.

  He thought he would like to be in Vienna.

  *

  1753 HOURS LOCAL, SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA

  Orville ʻBullʼ Kontas, captain of the Mighty Moose, had lost track of the times he had circumnavigated the world in one classification of vessel or another. He was not really certain how old he was, either. He had been born in Shanghai of a Greek father and a Chinese mother and, somewhere along the way, had purchased a birth certificate and passport for himself, but the data used at the time had been best guesses.

  He was at least seventy years old, Brande thought. The lines on his weathered face had deepened into canyons. The rusty-edged white hair was only a fringe around his bald pate, taking a hop over ears that were big and blistered and shaped like conch shells.

  He was strong, undeterred by any weather, and loyal to whichever master he served at the time. He had been with MVU almost since the start, seven years before.

  Kontas was at the helm of the Moose when North Island appeared off the port bow. Brande was in the pilot house with him, finishing a plate of refried beans, egg rolls zapped in a microwave oven, a turkey leg and green beans. There was pink lemonade for washing it all down.

  Either Kontas had no control over the seaman who also doubled as cook or it was just time to clean out the refrigerator. Or perhaps there was a subtle message being sent, that the operating budgets of the three workboats needed a boost.

  Brande would pass the unstated message to Rae Thomas, President and CEO of Marine Visions.

  He did, in fact, enjoy that thought. He was not going to miss dealing with some of the more mundane details.

  Kontas, not normally an outgoing personality, spoke for perhaps the fourth time in five hours. “Is it gonna be as bad as they say on the radio, Chief?”

  Brande got up from his chair, put the empty plate on it, and went to stand beside the captain. The tugboat rose and fell with the heavy swells running.

  “I don’t know how it might turn out, Bull. If it does reach meltdown, I guess it could be bad.”

  “Won’t happen all at once, will it?”

  “No. That is, there would be an explosion, probably not even noticed at the surface, but then everything would take place slowly after that.”

  “I don’t understand this atomic shit,” Bull Kontas said.

  “I never much wanted to understand it myself,” Brande told him. “The Navy gave me a cram course, but I suspect I missed most of the relevant detail.”

  “What’d they tell you?” Kontas eased the helm slightly to port. North Island moved to the right, then centered itself directly over the bow.

  “The commander who briefed us said, ‘Picture this: youʼve got two pit bulls who live in neighboring backyards, and they don’t like each other. Every time they see each other, they start growling and snarling and barking, straining to get at each other. Their tempers are rising, generating a lot of heat. So you put a chain link fence between them, maybe they bark a little less. Make it a picket fence, so they can’t see each other clearly, they bark a little less. Make it a solid fence, so they can’t see each other at all, and they quit barking and cool down.’”

  “What the fuck’s two dogs got to do with it?”

  “A nuclear reactor works the same way, Bull. In the core of a reactor is a fissionable fuel, normally Uranium-235, a nonfissionable moderator, and control structures. One fission reaction produces one more fission in a chain reaction. A steady output of energy in the form of heat is released.” Each uranium atom kicked out 2.5 neutrons, on average, during fission,
and one went on to create another reaction. Brande remembered that from some physics class he had taken.

  “Heat?”

  “That’s right. When the atom in the fissionable material splits, a neutron is absorbed in another fissionable atom to create another fission. That produces heat, and the heat is transformed into electrical energy.” Twenty-three million megawatt hours of heat energy for each kilogram of U-235, Brande had been told.

  “And this whole thing don’t go hog-goddamned-wild?” Kontas asked.

  “For two reasons. One is the moderator. To slow down the reaction, the core contains a moderator. In the United States, water is generally used. In an accident situation, such as occurred at Three Mile Island, the water tends to serve as a coolant and helps to restore stability. In Russia, Bull, the core cylinders are made of blocks of graphite which is used as the moderator. When Chernobyl Four got out of hand, the graphite moderator burned and didn’t help to cool it down.

  “Beyond the moderator, water is normally used as the coolant, and it transmits the heat to the boilers or turbines that are used to generate electricity. The old boys at Los Alamos think the Russian reactor aboard the rocket uses freon as the coolant.”

  Bull Kontas was not interested in moderators or coolants. “What about the goddamn dogs?”

  “That’s the second reason. In the reactor core are a series of control rods. When they’re raised, the reaction begins. When they’re lowered, like that fence between the dogs, the atoms can’t see each other, and the fission process cools off. The experts tell us that, when the rocket launched, the control rods were probably most of the way down, with almost no energy output. That’s what they call subcritical. When the rods are raised enough to allow one fission reaction to produce one more fission reaction, they call it critical. When the A2e crashed, the experts think that automatic controls were probably damaged, and the control rods may have been raised. That allows the reactor to go supercritical.”