Outside the waiting room, Jensen, standing with the Marine captain, watched as the other scientist, about to descend the conning tower’s ladder, his eyes shaded from the sunlit-mirrored water, glanced back at the singed and partly splintered wood of the sub’s trailer. This oceanographer, a white-bearded man in his mid-fifties — onetime mentor to Alicia Mayne, who had been so badly burned in the attack on the Utah—shifted his gaze from the trailer to the NR-1B’s superstructure and ninety-six-foot-long pressure hull.
“The blast didn’t damage the hull,” Jensen called out to reassure him. “We went over it with a fine-tooth comb. Not even a hairline fracture.”
The oceanographer, whom the Marine captain had already dubbed “Santa” because of his long white beard, waved and took a pen-size flashlight out of the pocket of his sky-blue coveralls, the latter bearing the proud sailing-ship insignia of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. “We’ll take a look anyway,” he told the admiral. With that, he and two crew members, one a female naval officer with a distinctly mannish haircut and serious demeanor, disappeared down into the super high-tech research sub whose side-scan sonar, the most sensitive in the world, was capable, according to one Marine, of detecting a safety pin on the sea bottom.
The Marine captain asked Jensen about this claim. “Is that true, sir?”
“No,” replied Jensen, the admiral’s response accompanied by a smile. “It’s like those satellites that are supposed to be able to read a newspaper in Red Square. It can spot the newspaper — not the print. Maybe a four-inch headline or a big photo, but not—”
Santa reappeared, standing waist-high in the small conning tower. “It’s buggered!”
“What d’you mean, buggered?” shot back Jensen, but he knew well enough. What the scientist was telling him was that the NR-1B was out of commission.
“The nacelle,” said the scientist, by which he meant the nose section of the sub, “has been spalled.”
Surprisingly, at least to the Marine captain, the admiral didn’t seem to understand what Santa meant by “spalled”—that while the terrorists’ explosion of C4 beneath the bitumen road hadn’t so much as scratched the NR-1B externally, the tremendous concussion of the explosive against the NR-1B’s three-inch-thick high-tensile steel had been akin to someone striking a forty-four-gallon drum with a rubber-headed sledgehammer. Minute flakes of rust from the inside wall of the drum or, in this case, flecks of paint on the inside wall of the sub’s nose cone, had broken free at supersonic speed from the impact. This spalling, red-hot, paint-flaked shrapnel had sprayed the delicate if firmly housed electronic array that was the research sub’s prized sonar.
In effect, the eyes of the NR-1B, which had so successfully searched for and recovered vital parts of the ’86 space shuttle Challenger wreckage, an Air Force Tomcat that had gone down in the sea off North Carolina, and, among its most glorious military and civilian exploits, discovered no less than twenty-six shipwrecks in twelve hours, were now blind and of no use to Freeman and his team, or to anyone else.
“Can we replace it?” Jensen called out, on realizing the damage. “The sonar?”
“Yes,” said the oceanographer.
“When?”
“Two weeks — maybe less. Then we’d need sea trials to calibrate the—”
Jensen had his hands over his face — hiding sheer frustration, or tears, or both — the Marine captain wasn’t sure.
“Same thing when a tank’s hit,” said the Marine, by way of relieving the gloomy silence that had descended like sudden rain over the sun-glinting sea. “Doesn’t matter if the round penetrates, force of the hit fills the air inside with tiny white-hot metal fragments. Like a swarm of—”
“Why the hell didn’t you think of that before?” Jensen cut in, as if it would have made a difference. The fact was, the NR-1B was effectively a write-off until the Navy and its civilian contractor could rush in a replacement sonar. And even then, the job of extracting the ruined components from the NR-1B would be a singularly time-consuming task of negotiating awkward angles in confined spaces. The tiny NR-1B, unlike Rorke’s former Virginia-class sub, did not have the advantage of add-on, take-off modular architecture, whereby whole remotely controlled or man-crewed submersible modules could easily be added or removed as needed for special missions.
“Freeman’s on his own,” Jensen said disconsolately, overwhelmed by the bitter irony that the very man who had given him the reputation-salvaging chance of helping to zero in on the cause of the U.S. Navy’s catastrophe in the Juan de Fuca Strait was now denied the assistance of the NR-1B because he — Jensen — had failed to deliver the boat safely to the Keystone dock.
“They’ll call me the ’Keystone admiral’!” Jensen told the Marine captain bitterly. But the officer, of a younger generation, failed to get the analogy to the infamously incompetent Keystone Kops of celluloid screen.
“You could send the Skate,” suggested the Marine captain.
“Yes,” agreed Jensen, wracked by indecision. He knew that to dispatch the patrol craft would leave only one to guard the Hood Canal bridge, and thus the egress of any submarine out of Bangor, which could invite further disaster.
Aussie was glad that the waterfall and environs were shrouded in fog and sea mist. He had heard about the supposed extraordinary clarity of the cold Northwest waters but had put all the reports in what he called his “Fifty PBS”—fifty percent BS — file. Even with the fog hanging over the surface above him, the water’s transparence was a shock to him, and with every breast stroke he took twenty feet down he feared being spotted by anyone high on the cliff beyond the waterfall, or, for that matter, by anyone on what was probably an apron of rocks and sand behind the crescent bay’s falls.
Peter Dixon, only a few feet away on Aussie’s right, was more comfortable, because of the frequent shower of rain that peppered the surface and the surface disturbance created by the local whirlpools from the turbulence of the waterfall. He knew that all of this would make it difficult for anyone swimming on the surface to see more than several feet below them. Once he was through the thunder and caldronlike fury of the falls churning beneath the surface, Dixon indicated they go up to recon. Aussie was unable to see his swim buddy’s arm signal at first, blocked as it was by the effusion of bubbles that momentarily rendered their bubbleless Draeger units redundant. Dixon’s signal had also been hidden by a silvery gray school of Chinook salmon, their fluid beauty pocked here and there by grumpy-mouthed rockfish who refused to move out of the way of their more numerous and streamlined cousins.
By the time Aussie saw the second signal from Dixon, whose thumbs were jerking impatiently upward, Dixon was already four or five feet above him. He broke surface first, deafened by the thundering of the waterfall about ten feet directly behind him. When Aussie surfaced, he found himself amid such a profusion of bubbles and the mist they created, it took him, like Dixon, ahead of him, a while to adjust his vision. It was as if they’d moved from a dull, winter-lit room to an even dimmer one, the water behind the falls significantly darker because of the overhang of the cliff’s face, the waterfall’s effervescent mist also “blooming” out their infrared lenses. Still, in the gloomy light between the falls and the edge of the bay, Dixon saw something few men had ever seen. Seeing it too, Lewis actually gasped in surprise.