“If the payload remained intact, it should be somewhere within that box,” he told Pitt as they chugged back to sea, pointing to a nine-square-mile grid penciled on the chart. “Though we're probably dealing with a scattered debris field.”
"Whatever is left has only been sitting on the bottom a few hours,
so we'll have a fresh profile at least," Pitt replied, studying the chart. Burch guided the Deep Endeavor to a corner of the grid, where they began running north south survey lanes. Just two hours into the search, Pitt identified the first scattering of debris visible against the rolling bottom. Pointing to the sonar monitor, he fingered a cluster of sharp-edged objects protruding in succession.
“We've got a string of man-made objects running in a rough line to the east,” he said.
“Either a local garbage scow spilled her goods or we've got a pile of rusting rocket parts,” Giordino agreed, eyeing the data.
“Kermit, why don't we break off the lane and run a tack to the east. Let's see if we can follow the debris trail and see where it leads.”
Burch ordered the ship about and they followed the trail of wreckage for several minutes as it intensified in quantity before slowly petering out. None of the debris appeared larger than a few feet long, however.
“That's one heckuva jigsaw puzzle someone's gonna have to piece together,” Burch said as the last of the wreckage fell away from the screen. “Shall we resume the survey lane?” he asked Pitt.
Pitt thought for a moment. “No. Let's hold our course. There's got to be more substantial remains.”
Pitt's years of underwater exploration had refined his senses to almost psychic ability. Like an underwater bloodhound, he could nearly sniff out the lost and hidden. There was a lot more of the Zenit still out there and he could feel it.
As the sonar monitor reeled off nothing but flat bottom, the men on the bridge began to have their doubts. But a quarter mile later, a few small pieces of ragged-edged debris crept onto the screen. Suddenly, the silhouette of a large rectangular object filled the monitor lying perpendicular to the other debris. As it rolled off the screen, a new image crawled into view. It was the shadow of a large, high cylinder.
“Boss, I think you've just found the whole enchilada,” Giordino grinned.
Studying the image with a nod, Pitt replied, “Let's go have a taste.”
Minutes later, the Deep Endeavor fixed its position by engaging its side thrusters and lowered a small remote-operated vehicle over the stern railing. A large winch unrolled the ROV's power cable as the machine sunk to the seafloor nine hundred feet beneath the surface. In a dimly lit electronics bay beneath the wheelhouse, Pitt sat in an oversized captain's chair where he controlled the unmanned submersible thrusters with a pair of joysticks. A rack of video monitors lined the wall in front of him, displaying multiple images of the sandy bottom fed from a half-dozen digital cameras mounted on the ROV.
Adjusting the thrusters so that the ROV hovered a few feet above the bottom, Pitt gently guided the submersible toward a pair of dark objects nearby. Protruding from the sandy bottom, the cameras revealed, were two jagged pieces of white metal several feet long, which were clearly chunks of skin from the Zenit rocket. Pitt kept the ROV moving past the debris until the initial sonar targets materialized in the inky water, two unmistakable sections of the launch vehicle rising high off the bottom. As the ROV moved closer, Pitt and Giordino could see the first section was nearly fifteen feet long, and almost as high, but flattened on one side. The rocket section had tumbled before impact, smacking the water lengthwise in a jarring blow that had given it the rectangle shape identified by the sonar. Guiding the ROV to one end, the cameras showed a large thruster nozzle protruding from a mass of pipes and chambers that constituted a rocket engine.
“An upper stage engine?” Giordino asked, eyeing the image.
“Probably the Zenit's third stage motor, the uppermost propulsion unit designed to drive the payload section into final orbit.”
The unfueled section appeared to have broken cleanly from the lower Stage 2 component during the explosion. But the payload section that rode above it had separated also and was no longer attached.
A few yards away, a large white object stretched into the murky range of the camera lens.
“Enough with the preliminaries. Let's go take a look at that big boy,” Giordino said, pointing to the edge of one of the video monitors.
Pitt guided the ROV toward the object, which quickly filled the video screens with white. It was clearly another section of the Zenit rocket, even more intact than the Stage 3 section. Pitt estimated it was about twenty feet long, and noticed that it appeared to have a slightly larger diameter. The nearest end was a mangled mass of carnage. Twisted and jagged edges of the white metal skin jutted inward as if mashed by a giant sledgehammer. Pitt maneuvered the ROV to peer inside but there was little to be seen besides mashed metal.
“This has to be the payload. It must have struck the water on its end,” Pitt remarked.
“Maybe there's something exposed on the other side,” Giordino said.
Pitt quickly guided the ROV along the length of the horizontal rocket section until reaching the opposite end, then glided the submersible around in a wide U-turn. Shining the ROV's illuminating lights into the exposed end, Pitt and Giordino craned at the monitor to get a closer look. The first thing that Pitt noticed was an inward-flared ring around the interior edge. It was apparent that the smaller-diameter Stage 3 rocket section had been mated to the section at this end. Inching the ROV closer, they could see that a vertical piece of fairing had been stripped off the rocket along the exposed top side. Raising the ROV until it hovered just above the prone rocket, Pitt guided the submersible along its upper side, following the open seam with the cameras pointed inside. After viewing a maze of tubes and wiring, Pitt stopped the ROV as the video image suddenly displayed a flat board that glistened under the submersible's high-power lights. A wide grin quickly spread across Pitt's face.
“I do believe that there's a solar panel shining back at us,” he said.
“Well done, Dr. von Braun,” Giordino replied, nodding.
As the ROV inched forward, they could clearly see the folded wings of the solar panels and the cylindrical body of the mock satellite through the open seam. Though the nose cone had been mashed at impact, the satellite payload inside had survived intact, and, with it, the deadly cargo of virus.
After carefully studying the integrity of the entire payload section with the remote video, Pitt returned the ROV to the Deep Endeavor and directed the vessel into salvage mode. Though Deep Endeavor was primarily an exploration vessel, she was equipped to handle light salvage with the help of her onboard submersibles. Despite the loss of the Badger, Pitt and Giordino employed a backup submersible to affix a sling support around the payload and slowly bring the rocket section to the surface with the aid of large lift bags. Under cover of darkness and away from the prying eyes of the occasional media boat, the pay-load was hoisted out of the water and onto the deck of the Deep Endeavor. Pitt and Giordino looked on as the rocket piece was secured and covered under a shroud of canvas.
“That'll give the intelligence boys something to chew on for a while,” Giordino said.
“It will certainly prove that the attack was not attempted by an amateur group of terrorists. Once the lethality of the payload is revealed to the public, the ignoble Mr. Kang will wish he was never born.”
Giordino waved an arm toward a fuzzy glow of light on the eastern horizon. “All things considered, I'd say the good people of Los Angeles owe us a beer for protecting their fair city ... and maybe the keys to the Playboy Mansion.”