He leaned back against the wall. “Our problem is that McMasters scuttled our operation, claimed it wasn’t Agency business.” He paused for a moment. “Damn, it’s hot in here! Let’s go someplace where we can do a little serious talking. Better make it your office, since the subject is officially ‘verboten’ on my turf.”
As Rutherford steered his staff car through the prerush hour traffic, Isaacs explained animatedly how his interest in the seismic signal became aroused during his duty at AFTAC. He then outlined the progress Danielson had made, culminating in her conclusion that the phenomenon followed a trajectory fixed in space. They finished the drive in silence while Rutherford ruminated on this new information.
A half hour later they entered Rutherford’s office. Rutherford ordered up the Navy file on the acoustic phenomenon. He sat behind his desk while Isaacs remained standing, rocking nervously on the balls of his feet. Rutherford spoke first.
“Boy, I’m really having trouble absorbing this. I had a notion of a random, infrequent occurrence, and now you describe something punching through the surface like clockwork, every eighty minutes or so. I guess I still don’t get the picture. Tell me again how this fixed motion works.”
“Let me use this globe,” Isaacs said as he lifted a fancy relief model of the Earth off its shelf and put it on Rutherford’s desk. He grabbed a pencil and held it pointed toward the surface of the globe, about a third of the way above the equator. “The thing always moves along a line, like this.” He moved the pencil in and out, parallel to itself, “Zipzip, zipzip. But as the Earth turns,” he spun the globe slowly with his free hand, “the thing always comes up in a different place.” He tapped the pencil rhythmically as he spun the globe, each tap hitting it an inch further on than the last.
“Let me see that,” said Rutherford, reaching for the pencil. He held it alongside the globe so that he could project it in his imagination into the center of the globe. Then he moved it back and forth along its length as he spun the globe slowly, eraser to the northern hemisphere, then point to the southern, eraser to the north, point, south. “Okay, I think I get the picture, but what could possibly do that? Through the center of the Earth? Jesus Christ!”
He jerked his head up as a knock sounded at the door.
“Come in.”
An aide came in bearing a file folder.
“Bob, Lieutenant Szkada. Lieutenant, Bob Isaacs, Central Intelligence.”
Isaacs nodded at him.
“Sir.” The young man placed the folder on Rutherford’s desk.
“That’ll be all,” Rutherford said to him with a note of paternalism.
“Yes, sir.” The lieutenant turned and left.
“Sharp young man, that,” Rutherford confided. “My right arm.” He pulled the file toward him. “Let’s see what we have here.” He extracted a list of reported detections and handed it to Isaacs. Rutherford leafed through the corresponding write-ups, looking for ones that were not hopelessly sketchy.
As Isaacs scanned down the list of sonar reports, he let out a loud exclamation.
“I’ll be damned!”
“What?”
“One of life’s little ironies. Several of these reports are from the undersea arrays of acoustic monitors.”
“Sure, we have those babies all over, bound to pick up something like this. So?”
“That system is also operated by AFTAC. The whole ball of wax was right under my nose, both seismic and sonar data. I’m kicking myself, I was so hung up on the seismic signal propagating through the Earth. I had my people trying to put together a puzzle with half the pieces missing.”
Isaacs threw the list on the desk and pulled a chair around beside Rutherford. They spent fifteen minutes checking the time and position on Earth for each of the reports and converting that data into a projected position on the celestial sphere, to see what stars were overhead. As near as they could tell, it was always the same patch of stars. All the sonar events fell on the path predicted by the seismic data. Trying to estimate whether the influence was precisely at the phase that brought Danielson’s seismic signal to the surface was more difficult, but the evidence they had seemed damning enough.
“So what did you say you are doing about all this?” Rutherford wanted to know.
“Not jackshit.” Isaacs described his skirmish with McMasters.
When he finished, Rutherford inquired, “Can’t you get McMasters to reopen the file, now that you have this confirmation from our data?”
“I doubt it.” Isaacs frowned in concentration and rubbed his prominent nose. He got up and paced the room. Post handball thirst nagged at him. He wished he had a cold beer.
“You’ve told me something new. The source of energy driving the seismic waves somehow proceeds into the ocean. That banishes my lingering suspicion that we were dealing with an ordinary, if highly regular, seismic phenomenon. But we’re no closer to understanding what’s really happening. Without a more substantial change in the situation, McMasters would stand to lose face if he backs down. I’ve got to have something beyond the fact that this thing is amphibious before I can go back to him and convince him to reopen our investigation.”
He crossed the room twice more, thinking.
“He’s right that there’s no obvious reason to consider this Agency business. But dammit! It’s got to be somebody’s business.”
Rutherford rubbed his chin. “Is this thing dangerous?”
Isaacs stopped pacing and faced the man seated at the desk. “Not clear, is it? Whatever it is, it makes a lot of noise that travels through rock and water. But noise alone doesn’t make it dangerous.” He resumed his pacing.
“The scary part is that something is moving through that rock and water, making the noise. We haven’t the faintest idea what. That doesn’t make it a threat, but it sure as hell makes me nervous!”
Rutherford leaned forward on his desk, watching Isaacs perform his epicycles. “Listen. Your seismic data were ideal to track this thing over large distances coherently and establish that it moves along a fixed direction. But with your hint of where and when to look, our sonar detections should give a higher precision. We could put a ship right on top of it and find out what we’re actually up against.”
Isaacs sprawled stiffly in a chair, as if he might leap out of it again at a moment’s notice. “Actually, we could do something like that on land, too, if McMasters hadn’t tied my hands,” he responded. “You’re right, though, you’re in a position to proceed, and I’m not.
“There is a practical point,” Isaacs continued. “As it stands now, you don’t formally have enough information to move on your own. You need our knowledge that it behaves in a systematic way.”
Rutherford nodded his assent.
“But I can’t give it to you officially because of this roadblock McMasters has thrown up.”
Isaacs smiled and leaned forward in his chair. “I think you’re going to have to wake up in the middle of the night with a sudden insight. Your past brilliant record would presage such a breakthrough.”
Rutherford gave an exaggerated “aw shucks” gesture. “Actually, it might be better if it didn’t come directly from me. McMasters knows we’re friends, and he might fit things together and give you a hard time for leaking information. I think I can handle it so that one of my associates has the inspiration.”
The two men grinned at one another and then lapsed into a contemplative silence. After several minutes, Rutherford stirred and walked over to a window and looked out.
He turned and asked, “What in hell are we getting into here, Bob?”
Isaacs returned his look, unspeaking.
Rutherford continued, “I keep coming back to the fact that this thing is locked to a fixed direction in space. That must be a crucial hint. And the fact that it moves easily through solid Earth and miles of water. What does that mean?” He turned to the window again, anxious to express disturbing thoughts, but subconsciously unable to face his friend at the same time.
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br /> “You know the image I get? A beam. A beam of some kind, focused into the Earth and playing back and forth.”
He turned suddenly, angry at a situation that departed so profoundly from his experience, forcing him to strange, uncomfortable extrapolations.
“Damn it, Bob, you know I’m a hard-nosed, practical man. But don’t we have to face up to the idea that something is out there? Doing this to the Earth?”
Isaacs ground his right fist into his left palm. “I confess, Av, when I first heard about the selective orientation in space, I found myself toying with such a notion. I put it out of my mind as idle fantasy. Now I don’t know. I do know the more I learn about this thing, the more scared I am.”
Avery Rutherford stood next to the captain of the USS Stinson and gazed out across the ocean as it reflected the early morning Sun. Rutherford delighted at being able to spend these long days of mid-June where he loved to be the most. His job was challenging and important, but it kept him behind a desk far too much. He had grown up in boats of all sizes in the waters off Newport and the only time he felt fully alive was at sea. A hectic week had been required to feed Isaacs’ hint to his aide, Szkada, then to work up a plan and arrange for the ship, but it was worth it. Rutherford felt great!
The captain barked commands as they closed on the chosen position. Finally, the trim craft lay dead in the water, and they waited and watched and listened. The ship, a Spruance class destroyer, was designed for intelligence work and bristled with sophisticated tracking and detection devices. At last, word came up from the sonar room that their target had appeared, moving incredibly rapidly, headed for the surface in a scant thirty seconds. Rutherford gritted his teeth and trained his field glasses on the water a thousand yards away where they had calculated the influence would reach the surface.
The sonar data were automatically fed into the ship’s computers to plot the trajectory. He listened to the tense messages on the intercom from the sonar room, the voice clipped, rapid, hurrying to keep up with something moving too fast. The new prediction showed the point of surfacing to be several hundred yards further from the ship than originally estimated, but still very close. Ten seconds. Rutherford felt a knot of tension as beads of sweat grew on his forehead. He tried to keep his mind neutral, but an image kept intruding, that of a ray guided by an unseen hand. He could sense that ray arcing through space like nighttime tracer bullets, then cutting a swath through the Earth.
Over the intercom came the tinny squawk as the sonar operator counted down the time to contact with the surface:
“Five.”
“Four.”
“Three.”
“Two.”
“One.”
Rutherford held the binoculars tightly to his face, the magnified image of the water welded in his brain. He braced himself for the shock, either physical or mental.
“Zero.”
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing happened except for a small splash at the margin of his field of vision. Then he blinked and even that was gone. Faintly over the water a strange hissing carried, but that, too, quickly faded.
Rutherford and the captain exchanged amazed looks.
The captain punched a button on a console.
“What have you got?”
“Nothing, Captain, it’s gone,” came the negative reply.
He turned to Rutherford.
“If it’s like the Seamount event, sonar should pick up something going down after some delay.”
Rutherford nodded.
The sonar man had been alerted not to increase the gain on his instrument in the interlude.
Again came the faint hiss. Rutherford raised his glasses too late to see a second rise of spray some distance from the first splash.
“Whup! There it is!” came the report of reacquisition from the sonar room. They listened as the relayed reports followed the acoustic noise to the sea bottom far below.
Rutherford spent the next two hours in the computer room overseeing the analysis of the tapes of the sonar signal. His examination of the previous underwater events suggested to him that the phenomenon did not move along precisely the same line. This data supported that view. There was a certain erratic behavior superposed on the basic fixed direction of motion. They would never be able to tell exactly where and when the surfacing would occur. He thought to himself, so your aim’s not perfect, you bastards, and took some satisfaction in that.
The estimate of the next nearest surfacing was refined on the computer and Rutherford reported that to the captain. After some discussion they agreed that for all the furor underwater, whatever it was seemed to lose potency at the surface. They agreed to get as close as possible to the next event. The destroyer headed for a spot about a hundred and ninety miles west which, in a little more than twenty-four hours, would fall along the right path at the proper phase so that the phenomenon should approach the surface.
They arrived in late afternoon and spent the remainder of the daylight hours cruising the area obtaining comparison data on the sonar background and checking for anything that could represent a precursor to the expected event. There was none.
Rutherford turned in early. He spent a restless night and dropped into sound sleep only shortly before daybreak when a young crewman awakened him.
Two thousand miles west of where the Stinson made slow circles in the mid-Atlantic, Robert Isaacs roused from a troubled sleep, carrying his dreams with him. He was watching the tops of the heads of figures as they roamed the flat terrain of satellite photos. One figure tried to turn its face upward to be recognized. Isaacs could feel the strain of its effort, the head swiveling backward, the forehead tilting upward, upward, upward, but never enough to reveal the face.
Then, there—Not a Russian! Rutherford!
Isaacs jerked awake, staring at the ceiling, his pulse racing. His twitch disturbed Muriel. She snuggled over to him, cupped a bicep in her hand, and pushed her nose into his shoulder.
“You all right, honey?”
“Uumph. Just a dream.” He turned toward her and threw a comforting arm over her hips. Soon she was breathing deeply again. He lay awake, slowly relaxing back toward sleep. Rutherford. . . Ship. . . Water. . . Sonar. . .
The Novorossiisk!
This time he sat bolt upright. No dream. Dear god! How could he be so dense? The Novorossiisk was so long ago, succeeded in his attention by the attack on FireEye, the shuttle mission, the feverish developments at Tyuratam. But this had to be it! The Novorossiisk had been in the Med, near thirty- three degrees latitude. The Seamount had reported something going up and something going down. Rutherford had radioed the same behavior yesterday. The Novorossiisk had reported something going down. Why not up? Lost in the shuffle? Who knows? Must check that out. Was the Novorossiisk in the right place? Check that out. Oh goddamn, Rutherford said he was going to sit right on it!
He rolled out of bed.
“Bob?”
“I think Av Rutherford is in danger. I’ve got to make some calls.”
“Do you want me to get up?”
“No, that’s crazy; you’ve got to be fresh in court at nine.”
He pulled on some sweatpants in lieu of a robe and fumbled out the door to the stairs. In the kitchen he blinked in the glare as he tripped the light. He punched the familiar number into the phone, missed the next to last digit in his bleariness, swore, and punched it again. He requested the night radio operator to call him on a secure line. As he awaited the call, he grabbed a note pad and tried to figure out if the Novorossiisk had been right on Danielson’s magic trajectory. He was still too befogged and the numbers too cumbersome. But it was plausible. Too plausible! This thing they chased not only moved through the Earth and oceans, it punched holes in ships!
As he stared at his scribbled notes on the pad, he slowly became aware of the smell of fresh coffee permeating his nostrils. He looked up to see Muriel fetching cups and saucers out of the cabinet. She caught his mixed look of guilt and irritation
that she should be up tending to him and headed him off.
“I can use an early start, too. I need to polish my strategy.”
Her husband still looked disgruntled.
“Besides,” she continued, “if I beat my minions in to work on a Monday morning it will fire them with such defensive zeal that we’ll just blow the opposition out of court.”
Isaacs smiled wanly at this image and rose to hug her from behind.
“All right, counselor, you win. Let’s have some coffee.”
He broke off his embrace suddenly at the sound of the telephone, whirling to grab it in mid ring. He sat and hunched over the receiver as if to make it part of him.
“Hello? Yes?” He repeated a sequence of code numbers. “Right. I want you to patch a call through the Navy. Top Priority. For Captain Avery Rutherford on the Destroyer USS Stinson. It’s on patrol in the Atlantic. Yes, I know what time it is. What’s a satellite link for? It’s two hours later on that ship. Yes, I understand, but this is extremely urgent.” He glanced at his watch. 4:38. Nine minutes until contact. “Yes, I know you will. Yes, immediately please. Thank you.”
He hung up the phone.
“Problem?”
“Not in principle, it’s just that our vaunted instantaneous satellite communication net is designed to function from various war rooms, not from cozy Georgetown kitchens.”
He lapsed into tense silence, glancing at the coffee pot, his watch, the phone. Time dragged slowly. After an excruciating interval, the coffee maker stopped gurgling, sighed its readiness. He looked at his watch for the tenth time. 4:40. Seven minutes. How long would it take to move the ship if they did get through? Several minutes? When would it be too late? He did not look up when Muriel put the coffee in front of him. He took a few sips and then watched it steam away its heat, its life force. 4:44. Three minutes, probably too late, anyway. He felt ill.
The phone rang. He jerked the receiver to his ear.
“Mr. Isaacs?”
“Yes!”
The Krone Experiment Page 13