by John Shirley
His eyes widened. He looked at her with his head tilted. “Now you’re really full of shit. Satellite!”
“No, it is! And there’s like military choppers and stuff. Just ask Mason, he was there!”
“ ’Kay, I’m gonna go check this out. But you better be right about the job. There goes Dad in his truck.”
She sat down on the glider swing, which was broken; she could sit on it, but it didn’t glide anymore. She shook her head.
“They chased us out, though, Cal. They won’t even let the TV news van in there now.” Something occurred to her then, and she looked anxiously after Dad’s truck. “I dunno, that thing down there could be radioactive. They’ll give Dad a protective suit or something, won’t they?”
“I don’t know. Most likely.” His voice was husky with excitement as he gazed off toward the bay. “Suisun Bay . . .”
She chewed her lip, thinking about Dad down there. “It’s the access road to that closed-down restaurant, where there used to be a dock—”
“Oh, hell yeah!” He snapped his fingers, on his left and right hands at once, the way DJ MixLord did when he was about to scratch some old vinyl. “I know that place! We used to go to that dock at night to smoke pot and listen to our boxes. Fuck it—I’m gonna check it out, too. So they chase me off, so what.”
“I did see a guy with a Geiger counter.”
“Radiation. Yeah, right. It’s a chunk of metal that fell in a hole. I mean, come on, bee-atch? How dangerous could it be?”
3
November 19, night
Nick knew at a glance he’d have to bluff his way past the U.S. Marines standing on the other side of the yellow tape. But they looked as puzzled as everyone else about all the hubbub that surrounded the ruins of the dock. Sometimes, clueless people were a way in.
“Boys,” Nick said, approaching, carrying his light diving gear. Taking in the soldiers, the Coast Guard, the chopper; feeling excitement rise in him. “I’m the salvage crew, at least for starters. I’ve got to have a look before I decide if I need to bring in the rest of my people.” Sure, like he had employees anymore.
He glanced past them. A couple of guys in white lab coats, one with a Geiger counter, stood at the stoved-in dock.
Where were the local cops? Left, already? The Feds must’ve chased them off.
A few coastguardsmen stood by the dock wreckage, a few more watching, leaning on the rail of the white boat chugging in idle, just offshore. He might be too late; the coasties had their own divers.
The taller of the two young jarheads scratched his crew cut and put his helmet back on. His friend had a big, slightly crooked nose. Both of them had carbines slung over their shoulders on straps. “I’ll have to get that cleared through channels. This is DIA territory now—NSA, the whole route.”
The shorter marine, a stocky guy with a self-important expression, turned the other a stern look. “Yo, bud, can that DIA talk— that’s need-to-know shit, man.”
Nick thought, DIA? The Defense Intelligence Agency. That’s the military’s CIA. And they’re keeping it quiet.
“Anyway,” the taller marine said, irritated with his pal’s reproach, “I’ll have to run it by Sergeant Dirkowski. They put him in charge till—”
Nick snapped his fingers just as if he really recognized the name. “Dirkowski! That’s who I’m supposed to talk to.” Nick patted his pockets. “Shit! I’ve got a fax here somewhere. Maybe I left it on my desk.”
A stocky man in a Green Beret uniform—ruddy-faced guy with pale blue eyes, pig-shaven under the beret—strode over to them, looking sharply at Nick as he came. A sergeant, Nick noticed. He took a chance, and said, “Ah, Sergeant Dirkowski!” The sergeant carried something that seemed a cross between a little walkie-talkie and a cell phone. Plunging ahead with his bluff, Nick went on briskly, “I’m your salvage diver.” And handed him a card.
Dirkowski looked at the card. His thin lips flickered a smile. “You are, huh. Well, Mr. Leverton? I’m afraid this is a government operation.”
Nick wasn’t going to give up easily. This thing looked like a decent payday. He needed to show his family he could do something right again. Hell, he needed to show himself. “Sergeant, I do government contracting all the time. They don’t have enough trained deep-water guys. Now this looks shallow to me, here, but I’m still your best man—”
“Sorry—” Dirkowski broke off as a voice crackled from the small walkie-talkie thing in his hand—a new model to Nick. He gestured “wait” and put the little instrument to his ear. “Dirkowski. Yeah, do tell. What do you mean, am I surprised? Never surprised by snafu, just surprised when there isn’t one. Well, two hours is no good. Waitaminnut, I might have something else here.” He lowered the walkie-talkie and looked appraisingly at Nick. “So you’re a salvage diver? We don’t have a diver on the boat we have here, and the boat coming with a diver doesn’t have working grapples—not that’ll work on something heavy as a satellite. How soon could you get down there?”
“I, uh . . .” Nick cleared his throat, playing for time till he could think this out. A satellite? “You sure there’s anything left to pull up? I mean, if it came from space—and hit a dock . . .”
“Tell you something I don’t want to hear repeated—it hit the water out there first, at an angle, almost like you’d skip a rock. It went under, came up again—one of the orbital control rockets must have refired—and smashed down here from about, maybe, a hundred yards up. So, could be it’s partly intact.”
Nick stared. Was that possible? For it to hit the water and then jump up and—
“Well?” Dirkowski snapped, looking at his watch. “Can you do the job or not?”
“Uh, yeah! Anytime you want. In a hot minute. Once I’ve got my boat here, I mean—” Except for the uniform, Dirkowski looked more like a hungry plainsman than a spit-and-polish Green Beret. “I—I have to do that, if you don’t have a crane with salvage grapples. I’ve got a small crane, the hooks, everything you need but—”
Dirkowski shook his head. “No time. I’m going to have to—who the hell is that?”
The Green Beret was glaring toward a converted fishing trawler easing up to the remains of the dock. The coastguardsmen were shouting, waving for it to move off. But the boat, with only two running lights, came on anyway.
Nick knew the boat by its silhouette. “Actually, that’s my boat, Skirmisher. My son’s at the wheel, I expect. The kid’s thinking ahead.”
He smiled at Dirkowski, who nodded. “Okay, I’ll call Washington, authorize your craft.”
Nick ducked under the yellow tape, thinking, All this security. What the hell is down there?
“I should be pissed off, Cal,” Nick was saying as he adjusted his mask, preparing to step backwards off the deck of the Skirmisher.
Shooting some lube into the winch, Cal grinned at him. “Hey, Dad, I got here when you needed me here. I got the instincts, man. I got skills.”
They were on the deck of Skirmisher and Nick was feeling too good about getting this job to give the boy hell for running his boat behind his back. It had worked out, and it felt good to be on a deck with Cal again. Last two years, Cal hadn’t shown much interest in anything except DJ culture and raves.
“Yeah, well, you’re never again to run my boat without asking me. This time it worked out. But listen, you don’t talk about this shit. You signed that paper, too, Cal. You’re eighteen now, you swore, when you signed that paper, you’d keep your mouth shut about this. Nondisclosure. It’s not that big a deal, it’s not like the public doesn’t know but—they take it seriously.” He gestured toward the sergeant.
“Dad? I’ll be frosty.”
“All right, get that winch going. I want to take the hook down with me, in case it’s an easy rig-up—which isn’t likely, but—the hell with it. Here goes.”
And with that, he stepped off backwards and dropped into the water, his head tilted so the water pressure didn’t pop his mask off.
Cool darkne
ss closed over Nick, shutting off the surface sounds. Now there was just the sound of his exhalations bubbling, the background rumble of two idling boat engines.
Then there was the light, shoreward, maybe twenty yards off, where the coasties’ searchlight sliced the water under the smashed dock.
He’d been a little stunned when Dirkowski had confirmed the thing was a satellite. It could’ve hit all that ocean, all that bay— even his own house.
But it had hit this little dock, right in the middle. Like it wanted something to break its fall at the end; something near the shore.
Funny how inanimate things seemed to take on a life and destiny of their own. When you were in salvage, hoisting safes and barrels and classic cars up out of the water, you thought about those things.
He looked up expectantly and there they were: Above, in black silhouette, hung the three big, blunt-point, jointed metal hooks on the line lowering toward him like some sea creature reaching down.
He took a small flashlight from his belt, switched it on, grabbed the nearest hook, and swam, towing it behind him, toward the crash site.
He angled himself downward, almost burrowing into the old familiar pressure, till he was a few yards over the bottom. A kind of foul gray glaze of processed sewage and boat-spew clung to things down there, making the sand striations on the bottom aluminum-washboard colored, sealing a sunken tumble of old truck tires into the muck. Even a living crab, sidling out from under some drunken boater’s sunken beer cooler, was coated with the drab fuzz—like the bay’s bottom was moldy.
That was Suisun Bay. It made him want to get out to the Channel Islands with Cal again, where the water, at least, was honest seawater.
He was a few yards from the leaning pylons that stood like damaged church pillars, with those lights shining down from above.
He shivered in his wetsuit. A ruined church? Odd, the thoughts he was having. Like some part of his mind, equally submerged, was trying to tell him something.
Closer . . . He reminded himself to try not to touch the pylons and beams leaning over the crashed thing; the wood had been cracked, smashed open, and he could see the yellow wood bright beside a tarry black coating. The beams had to be precarious. This was a lot more dangerous than he’d let on to Cal and Dirkowski. But risk was why he got paid pretty well—when he could get the work.
Kicking down into a deeper, heavier coldness. Bubbles streaming. There, a gleam of metal under the wooden wreckage—an irregular oval in the sand. A few angular projections thrust out of the grimy sediment on one side.
Closer. The exposed part of its curved hull was like a giant cracked metal eggshell, silvery and blackened, mostly buried in the sand, with the pylons and splintery beam ends and depth-muted lights all around it.
He squinted along the beam of his own flashlight. The satellite might be thirty feet long, all told. Nothing much to hook on in the exposed surfaces. Dirkowski had said it was shaped like a cylinder, with communication extrusions and rocket vents. The parts projecting out of the sand looked fragile, like they’d just break off. He was going to have to dig out around it, find something sound to grapple. Maybe have to loop some chain over those pylons first, pull them away from the thing for clearance. He hoped he didn’t have to use a sand sucker. He’d have to borrow one from the Maritime School.
Nick swam closer, into another, heavier fold of water pressure, and into colder water, within reach of the bottom. A single, sickly, hand-size fish darted past his mask.
He thought he saw a bright metallic movement within the jagged crack along the top of the satellite’s hull. His light flashing off its parts, he supposed.
All in all, though, it was surprisingly intact. But from what they’d told him, it’d come down at a shallow angle. Maybe this satellite had sort of chosen this place—because he’d heard Dirkowski say something about “firing orbital control rockets” as it came down. And how it hadn’t received orders to do that.
Nick had heard that a lot of the more expensive satellites had small rockets on them, used for correcting orbital position. But from what he’d read, the correctional rockets weren’t designed for atmospheric reentry. Weird that the satellite had “decided” to fire rockets to slow an entry it probably wasn’t designed to make.
Questions rose in his mind like the streams of bubbles around him. Had the DIA themselves fired those rockets remotely, brought it to this spot? Had they slowed its descent so it’d come down intact? Was it even an American satellite, or some kind of stolen Russian bird?
But then he saw the markings. Those weren’t Cyrillic letters. He could make out some of the part that wasn’t hidden by sand and cloudiness:
NATIONAL AERONAUTIC S
Below that:
DEPARTMENT OF DE
And the usual enigmatic array of numbers and letters that must mean something to some bureaucratic bean counter somewhere.
So this is one of those NASA-military collaborations.
As he thought all this he flippered close enough to brush sand away from the edges, looking for a fixture to hook. Just pulling it out of the sand might tear off any part he grappled to, though. Sand liked to hold on to things, once it had them. No, they’d have to dig it out.
He was floating almost upside down, angling his feet upward over the satellite, kicking now and then to keep from being nudged back up by water pressure. The lights from above danced around him, wavering in surface moil and splitting on the sand, on the metal edges of the satellite’s shining fracture.
Dirkowski had said the radiation level was negligible, but best not to touch the thing with his bare hands.
Still, he could save time if he could get the grapple into that crack, grip some of the superstructure under the hull. He reached into the crack.
He felt around. Something . . .
It felt like something was reaching up, in response, from inside the satellite. A string of bubbles, maybe—but like it was feeling around. And its touch stung very slightly. Could be he was feeling some sort of residual electric charge.
The stinging passed. Then he felt something else, almost like a girl touching his palm teasingly with her soft fingers.
Testing, tentative, almost playful.
A second dark helicopter, marked only with D-23, had to wait for the first to take off before it could land. Major Stanner jumped down before the Blackhawk had quite set down, and—instinctively ducking under the whipping blades, one hand securing his hat against the rotor blast—he jogged over to the ruined docks.
Sergeant Dirkowski was there, talking into a cell phone. Stanner knew him from the DIA; he’d gone out on some black ops in Pakistan Stanner had helped plan.
The Green Beret broke the cell phone connection and saluted as Stanner approached. Stanner returned the salute. “Sergeant. That doesn’t look like a Navy SEAL vessel.”
“No, sir, the SEALs couldn’t get a man here with the equipment in time. This man said someone had called him to replace the SEAL diver—”
“What man, where?”
Dirkowski nodded toward the water. “He’s already down there, sir.”
Stanner’s mouth went dry. “Dirkowski . . . you tell this man that there was . . .” He couldn’t remember if Dirkowski had been briefed on this bird. He thought not.
“I warned him there was some radiation danger—not to touch the thing directly.”
Stanner grunted, shaking his head. So he hadn’t been briefed. Great.
Stanner walked over to the gently lapping shingle by the wrecked dock. He watched the diver’s bubbles on the water. As he watched, the bubbles stopped coming up.
Standing at the rail on the deck of the Skirmisher, Cal squinted down into the murky water. He couldn’t make out much of anything, despite all the light from the surface. Sometimes he saw his Dad’s spotlit shape, in wallowy outline, but then he lost it again as the light broke up on the dark waves.
Cal had let Skirmisher drift in the rising tide toward the crash site, so he was nearly over the
top of it, as Dad had instructed him. Dad’s cable had paid out for a while, and then stopped moving.
Minutes passing.
More minutes. Nothing from below.
He’d been waiting too long, hadn’t he? He tugged on the cable, sharply, two times, to let Dad know he was asking if all was well.
He waited, his hand on the cable, so he could feel the slightest twitch of response.
Still nothing.
Dad had geared up with only a single tank of air. It was one of the small tanks—an inspection tank, he called it—for ease of movement. For a quick look around. Fifteen minutes. It had been that already, hadn’t it? And he couldn’t see Dad’s air bubbles anymore.
That Air Force officer seemed concerned, too. The guy who’d come on the second chopper. “Hey, kid!” The officer shouted at him, from the shore. Looked like a captain or a major or something. “He supposed to be down there that long for a first inspection?”
“Uh, no! You got any divers here?”
“We got a rescue diver over here!” one of the coastguardsmen yelled from the boat. “You want him to suit up?”
Cal hesitated. It would tick Dad off big-time if Cal sent a rescue down when Dad didn’t need it. He looked down into the water— just darkness and wavering light. He wished Dad had taken a mask with a headset in it, so they could stay in radio contact—but theirs was broken, and they couldn’t afford to get it fixed. And Dad had wanted to get down there fast, to make the job his own.
He looked at his watch. Definitely—he was down there at least two minutes past his tank’s capacity.
“Fuck,” he muttered, looking around for a mask and tank. He was going to have to go down himself.
He figured he knew what’d happened. The satellite had smashed into the dock, which meant a lot of heavy broken timbers down there—shit too heavy and waterlogged and mired in the muck to float up. Some beam from the dock might’ve fallen in on Dad.