“We could also estimate the source of the heated water itself, right?” Garner asked.
“Right. If we know the decrease in temperature with distance, and the angle at which the heated water is rising toward the surface, we can estimate where it’s originating.”
Over the next several minutes, this information was added to the computer model, constructing the hypothetical origin of the slick. The PATRIC program dutifully stepped back the plot in quarter-mile increments until it hit a digital brick wall.
??? MULTIPLE POINT SOURCES WITH EQUIVALENT PROBABILITY [p o.ooi] ??? the model spat out, then stopped its calculations.
“Multiple point sources?” Garner asked. “Can you plot them on a map?”
“I’m afraid not,” Junko said. “The program doesn’t have the actual maps we need in its database. The best I can do is track each possibility individually and get an approximate set of coordinates. Then we’ll have to translate those to a chart.”
“Do what you can,” Garner said. “See what you can come up with while Roland and I try to find a few hundred acres’ worth of Ulva.”
Junko checked her watch.
“How much time do we have?” she asked.
“Little to none,” Garner said. “But you can keep trying calculations on the flight back, if you need to.”
“Gee, thanks,” she said. “Am I looking for anything in particular? I mean, besides a needle in a stack of needles?”
Garner turned back to the unrolled charts. The cruise track of the Phoenix over the past four days was marked on one of them. He compared this information to the PATRIC plot, then used a set of calipers to walk across the chart, moving west and north from Foxe Basin through Fury and Hecla Strait. The calipers now stood in the middle of the Gulf of Boothia.
“Here,” he said finally, using a pencil to lightly trace an elongated oval on the chart and showing it to Junko. “If you get anything in this area, that’s our best guess.”
Junko noted the approximate coordinates of the area.
“What’s’t there?” she asked.
“A little-known hole in the seafloor called Thebes Deep,” Garner said.
Garner recalled Scott Krail’s insistence that the canyon would be a waste of their time. Krail’s brash claim had struck an uneasy chord then, but Garner had ignored it. Now, looking at the mark he had just drawn on the map, Garner’s concern began to build in earnest.
Aboard B-82, Lucas Stimson jumped back when the hatch leading to the riser shaft popped open from the other side just as he was about to open it himself. He was even more startled to see that it was Charon coming the other way.
“Oh! Hey, boss,” Stimson said.
“Lucas.” Charon nodded once, then started to close the hatch again in front of his second-in-command.
“What are you doing way down here? Slumming?” Stimson meant it as a joke, though the question was a valid one. The riser shaft housed the pipes of the OLS — the offshore loading system that carried the rig’s oil from the fuel reservoirs to the docking station for the transfer tankers. The shaft was packed with pipes and conduits with hardly room for a service ladder between them; Stimson could think of no reason for Charon to be wasting his time down there.
“Last time I checked, I didn’t need your permission to inspect my own rig,” Charon said, hostility brimming in his voice. “Who made you the fucking hall monitor? I told Krail that I would supervise the offloading to the Voyager, and that’s what I’m doing.”
The Global Voyager was one of two shuttle tankers built especially for B-82. At full capacity, the OLS could off load nearly five thousand barrels of oil an hour to the Voyager’s carrying capacity of 850,000 barrels.
The deck supervisor seemed stung.
“Okay, Matt, but it’s my job—”
Charon wheeled on Stimson, his face flushed.
“I said I’ll handle it,” he spat. “We’ve all got a shitload of work to do before the Voyager gets here and then it’s gonna take eighteen mother-humping hours to drain this pig into that pig.”
“I know—” Stimson began.
“Do you?” Charon’s face was only inches away from his own. “I don’t think you do. Because if you did, you’d know we haven’t got time for you following along behind me. This platform is gonna get crowded enough without you standing on my head in the goddamn riser shaft.”
Stimson took a step back from the unfounded assault. “Whatever you say, Matt. I was just going to save you some work.”
“I didn’t ask you to do that.”
“And you didn’t tell me you were gonna come down here and—”
Charon’s entire body seemed to clench.
“Is there an echo in here?” he asked. “I thought I just told you I’m handling the oil transfer. And it’s handled. Go play air hockey or watch the tube or, better yet, get some sleep. You’re gonna need it and I’m gonna need you.”
The sudden shift in direction broke the tension between the two men.
Stimson, at least, managed to exhale.
“Good night then. Matt. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Oh-five-hundred,” Charon agreed. He watched his deck supervisor make his way back to the service ladder, then climb back up to the topsides.
When the sound of Stimson’s steps had receded into the general din of the rig’s machinery, Charon turned back the other way and headed for the utility shaft.
There was a shitload of work to do. That much was the truth.
15
With Junko’s departure, Susan Conant reluctantly reclaimed her role as the Phoenix’s first-aid technician and principal medical officer. The duties were intimidating for her to accept at any level; after all, she had joined the expedition as a whale biologist with an academic interest in Carol’s work on acoustics. Now she was the best thing they had for a doctor, though she still could not imagine how a two-month community college course in industrial first-aid could have prepared her for such responsibility. Carol and Byrnes also had IFA training, not to mention a lot more political clout aboard the Phoenix, but she was the one who’d been volunteered to be the crew’s nursemaid.
It wasn’t the responsibility that unnerved her as much as the fact she felt woefully unprepared to take proper action if anything really did go wrong. She could handle burns and scrapes. She could tape an ankle, splint a leg, or perform CPR — anyone on board could handle those things. She could even handle the crew’s daily exams. But no one left aboard really knew how to handle radioactivity if it breached their fragile cocoon. In the meantime, she was in charge of maintaining the Phoenix’s internal environment. And for her, the only thing more unnerving than the dry, mechanical cricking of the dosimeters was the dit-dit-dit when they detected nothing. For all she knew, the damn things probably didn’t even work.
The only way to stave off disaster was to take the proper precautions, and Junko had written out all of these in detailed longhand before she and Garner left for Halifax. The procedures seemed to be a study in contradiction: rinse well but conserve water, give nasal swabs regularly but don’t exhaust the supply of cotton swabs, bag anything that had been exposed but keep finding equipment with which to work, watch what you’re doing but watch what everyone else is doing too. No one knew how much of anything would be enough; no one knew how much longer it would be before they could just go home. That was the most disheartening feeling of all.