The electric motors whined and Hansen shifted the Sea Otter slightly. The hook dragged back so it was flopping over the U-bolt. Pulling the winch cable up a few inches, the hook lazily slipped over the U-bolt and broke free.
‘Fuck,’ said Gallen, lowering the hook once more.
‘You’re almost there,’ said Hansen, peering into the TV monitor.
Gallen breathed through his nose and gently eased the hook down through the illuminated water. Letting it flop on the U-bolt, he then raised it slightly. The thin point of the steel hook touched on the side of the U-bolt and he thought it was going to slide off again. But the torsion of the winch cable made the hook twist slightly and it slipped under the U-bolt as Gallen raised the winch.
Breathing out, realising he’d been clenching his jaw, Gallen pulled back on the winch controller. ‘Do we have enough power to raise this?’ he asked Hansen.
‘No point in saving power now, Gerry,’ said the master. ‘Where do you want it?’
‘On the sea bed, standing upright,’ said Gallen, and the Sea Otter started squealing with the strain of lifting the nuclear reactor.
Five minutes later, Hansen put the Sea Otter on the sea floor, the pale blue reactor sitting beside it like an outhouse.
‘Now what?’ said Aaron.
‘We gotta talk to Mr Technician,’ said Gallen.
‘It muggy in here?’ said Aaron, rubbing his neck. ‘Or is it just me?’
‘Oxygen levels are coming down.’ Hansen pointed at the emergency tank gauge. ‘Another ten minutes and then we go to BIBS.’
‘Can we scan all the radio frequencies?’ Gallen asked.
‘Only the low frequencies work in water,’ said Hansen. ‘And even then, that technician can receive but not transmit.’
‘We can’t have a two-way conversation?’
‘No,’ said Hansen. ‘We do all that with umbilicals.’
‘Umbilicals?’ said Gallen. ‘You mean, like a line plugged in?’
Hansen nodded.
Aaron sparked up. ‘The reactor had comms when it was on the Ariadne. It must have a plug in.’
They looked out to where the reactor sat in the Sea Otter’s lights. If someone was inside that capsule, he was the only chance to correct any sabotage.
‘We got a comms line that could plug into that reactor?’ said Gallen.
Hansen nodded. ‘Sure. We have a line that plugs into the junction box on the top of this sub — it would fit in the box on the reactor.’
‘But how are we going to connect them?’ said Aaron, who’d unzipped his coveralls.
Gallen wondered about the technician; the Israelis’ covert operatives — even the pointy-heads — usually had some military background. Some of Israel’s best scientists and engineers may have taught in the universities, but they were attached to the IDF.
He looked at Hansen, whose face was glowing red. ‘You got a hammer, or a spanner?’
‘Sure,’ said the Swede.
‘Why not bang out one of your morse signals on the hull?’
‘Think the technician will understand?’
Gallen smiled. ‘He’s sitting in a capsule with a malfunctioning nuke at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, and his friends have split. I think he’ll want to talk.’
‘What’s the message?’ said Hansen, folding down a bulkhead-mounted tool box.
‘Try something like: Mission’s over — restore reactor to safety.’
Hansen crawled forward with a large crescent wrench and looked out one of the four portholes at the reactor capsule. Then he started tapping.
‘What now?’ Aaron rasped.
‘We’re gonna work out how to get into that thing,’ said Gallen.
Aaron’s eyes widened. ‘Are you mad?’
‘Maybe,’ said Gallen, the idea forming as he spoke. ‘But that thing’s not twenty feet away. Can’t just let it blow, can we?’
Aaron looked away, a beaten man. ‘We’re all gonna die, way down here where no one even knows where we are, and you still want to fight? Shit, Gerry! ‘
Gallen smiled. ‘Like my daddy said: never stay down on the ice.’
‘Spare me the hockey homilies. What are we gonna do?’
‘If I can get into that reactor, can you tell me what I have to do?’
‘Depends on what the technician’s done,’ said Aaron. ‘If they took Negroponte’s security card, then my guess is they’ve made a manual override.’
‘To stop it cooling itself?’
Aaron shrugged. ‘It’s what I would do.’
‘How do I undo it?’
‘You’ll need the card.’
‘And then?’
‘Do another manual override.’
‘And if the card isn’t there?’
‘We’ll need manual override codes, which are probably held in one of the security safes on the Fanny Blankes-Koen. I’d say Florita’s state room.’
‘It would be too complicated for me,’ said Gallen, giving Aaron a look.
‘No way,’ said the spook, realising what Gallen was thinking. ‘I can’t go out there.’
‘I’d be with you, Aaron.’
‘No, you don’t get it,’ said Aaron, eyes pleading. ‘I’m phobic. Just the sight of all this water and the darkness — I couldn’t do that.’
A big Swedish hand swung back and grabbed Gallen’s shoulder. They all froze: in the silence of the deep, the faintest sound of tapping bounced against the steel hull.
For thirty seconds they waited as Hansen pushed his ear to the hull between the forward-facing portholes.
‘He’s telling us he wants to get out of there. He wants to know where’s the take-off?’
‘Tell him to revert the reactor to safety,’ said Gallen.
Hansen tapped on the hull with the wrench, a mournful rhythm between two vessels of doomed men.
The taps came back, more urgent than before. ‘He says he doesn’t have the card. He doesn’t have codes for a manual override.’
‘Well—’ started Gallen, but Hansen’s hand went up for silence as another, longer message was tapped out.
Hansen sat back, wiped sweat from his glowing face. ‘The meltdown has started. He’s roasting alive, the equipment is too hot to touch.’
‘Okay, I’m going in,’ said Gallen. ‘Let’s brainstorm a bunch of ideas for the manual override codes. What would a dude like John Negroponte use as the security codes?’
‘You think it’s his?’ said Aaron. ‘Why not Florita? It was her baby Negroponte was the help.’
‘Okay,’ said Gallen. ‘How long’s the code?’
‘Eight digits, typically,’ said Aaron.
‘Aren’t we overlooking something?’ said Hansen, who looked like a man on the verge of angina pectoris.
‘Like?’
‘Like, there’s no divers lock on the Sea Otter,’ said the old mariner. ‘There’s no way out there. Even if there was, there’s dry suits and helmets, but no scuba rigs. I told you, there’s only the BIBS.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t tell you how this is going to happen,’ said Gallen, looking out at the reactor, seeing shimmers of heat coming off the top. ‘We’d have to vote. And it would have to be unanimous.’
‘Vote on what?’ said Hansen.
‘On turning this Sea Otter into the divers lock,’ said Gallen. ‘We flood her slow, equalise the pressure, and then I go over there with as many extensions on the BIBS as we can find, and I shut that sucker down.’
Aaron and Hansen stared at him like men who’d finally seen a pig fly
‘You want to flood this submersible?’ said Aaron in disbelief. ‘So we all die?’
‘Yes, but we stop that reactor melting down.’
‘Holy shit, Gerry,’ said Aaron. ‘You’re not in the Marines now.’