“Not true, buddy. Most of the NRO satellite data we’ve been tracking began to come in only after you came through Arlington.”
“You said there wasn’t a chance in hell of anything up here being military-related,” Garner snapped.
“I lied, Brock,” Krail said matter-of-factly. “Sometimes it’s part of my job. And to be honest, at the time we spoke, I didn’t have confirmation of the size and nature of the problem, so I couldn’t know what Carol’s group had found. Since then we’ve been comparing the satellite data to your results and compiling a plot of possible scenarios.”
“Then you’ve been monitoring our communications,” Carol said.
Krail nodded without a trace of embarrassment.
“Echelon has been tracking all your communications and data transmissions. We’ve had our own nuclear specialists looking them over. But we’re missing the most essential part — the data from Medusa and your onboard radiometers.”
There was nothing especially cryptic or covert about Medusa’s treatment of data, but they were transmitted from beneath the sea’s surface through a fiberoptic cable. The rest was simply stored on board the device and downloaded directly to a computer. Echelon, the global-surveillance satellite network for monitoring electronic communications signals, was most adept at capturing messages sent via satellites or regular telephone lines. The system had been developed under the purview that it be used only on international communications, but in the corridors of Nav Intell, everyone knew the attraction of monitoring “potential domestic threats” was far too great to be ignored; it simply had yet to be properly legislated.
“What do you mean, ‘pretending’ we’re a research ship?” Junko asked. “Doesn’t everyone on the platform know why we’re here? Haven’t you briefed them?”
“In addition to its specified drilling operations, B-82 is a surveillance and listening post for the Central Arctic,” Krail explained. “That’s confidential information, and to give you an idea how confidential, only about a quarter of the men on this rig know anything about its military association, much less its specific activities. They’re rotated in on three-week tours and the crew foremen make certain they keep to the task at hand, which is exactly what it appears to be: drilling oil.”
Zubov shook his head in amazement.
“What in the hell could a listening post on top of an oil rig hope to hear? Except the drill head that is.”
“That’s not the half of it,” Krail explained. “The hydrophones are laid out across the seafloor from the hub, the rig’s GBS. Then we have a communications hub that uses shielded cables and satellite relays.”
“And it’s all paid for by the profits from the oil,” Garner surmised.
“We’re justifying our existence,” Krail said with a slight smirk. “Exactly as Congress mandated. If the CIA can operate brothels and the FBI can run casinos, we can do this. Even in peacetime, the military has to provide a service to the public in order to keep the ax off its budget. For the sake of high technology, most of these men—”
“—Most of my men don’t mind being seen as gas jockeys,” Charon finished. He was tired of having to sit through another of Krail’s open door discussions about his (formerly) top-secret facility.
“All in the name of God and country,” Krail smiled back.
“No, all in the name of me,” Charon corrected him with a fiery glint in his eyes. “God and the President are just my VPS in charge of production.”
If the visitors to the tank were mildly taken aback by Charon’s arrogance, Stimson took the remark in stride. He knew that his boss, in his own mind, meant every word of it.
Krail was less accommodating.
“Then I’ll let you all get back to your business just as soon as my situational authority here is complete,” he said to Charon.
Like the rest of the newcomers, Junko was impressed with Krail’s revelation but could not yet make sense of it.
“Hydrophones, caches of oil, the Cold War. James Bond stuff. I don’t see how this relates to Thebes Deep, much less a leak of nuclear weapons waste.”
“Me either,” Carol admitted. “You seem proud of your toys, but I don’t see how it includes us.”
Garner watched Krail as he smugly related B-82’s capabilities and secret history in tantalizing bits and pieces. But there was something insincere about Krail’s confidence. If Krail’s team was missing Medusa’s data, then they had little or no information about the composition or concentration of radionuclides in the slick but this didn’t explain their apparent lack of concern for contamination in the vicinity of B-82. Even the Phoenix’s handheld radiometers had shown a remarkable decline in the radiation levels around the ship since they left the bottleneck of Fury and Hecla Strait. According to Krail, the radio-controlled dosimeter, flown in increasingly wider circles, was also showing little atmospheric radiation and virtually nothing above normal background levels.
Krail was nervous, and with good reason: an atomic genie was out of its bottle and no one knew exactly where it was.
It had been days since they were last able to use Medusa to directly monitor the radioactivity of the water column, and it was possible that they had completely lost track of the leak. Then again, if they were very close to the source, the leaking isotopes could still be trapped in the bottom water, next to the sediment and out of reach of their surface instruments in any regard. Dredging the sediment was an option they had previously not needed to consider, since the radiation had been confined to the water column. Here, the bottom was too deep and too hard to contemplate dredging any significant amounts of sediment. This uncertainty was, in part, what led PATRIC to produce multiple, indeterminate sources for the leak.
So far, their most reliable method had been to follow the scent upstream.
Medusa’s short but valiant survey was what had brought the Phoenix here; Krail’s group was using satellite data. Neither method gave any clue as to what the source of the radioactivity could be or precisely where it was.
“Answer the question, Scott,” Garner said again. Krail’s cagey attitude was beginning to wear on him as well. “What’s with this ‘tank,” what’s with the Hawkbill, and what exactly is down there?”
Krail did not flinch. Charon and Stimson were clearly apprehensive about what he would say, but they knew that time had run out on keeping B-82’s mission a secret.
“Three hundred feet below us is the lip of Thebes Deep,” Krail began. “Another six hundred feet below that, give or take, is the bottom of the trench, which branches extensively into an elongated canyon running northwest to southeast. About two nautical miles in that direction” he pointed approximately northwest “is where Scorpion went down.”
“Scorpion was a Soviet nuclear submarine that sank here in the mid-1980s,” Zubov explained to Junko.
“And you think that’s the source of the radiation?” Junko looked doubtful. “I’d be very surprised if that’s true. The amount and composition of the isotopes we’ve seen would suggest otherwise. Not to mention the passage of time it doesn’t jibe at all with the timeline we’ve been developing.”
“We know that,” Krail said patiently. “In some ways, Scorpion is very much responsible for us being here all of us, including B-82. But no, it is not her reactors or weapons that are the problem.” He looked at Garner.
“Remember I told you one of her compact transmutation reactors had been salvaged? The other was never found and was assumed destroyed or buried by landslides. Even if that reactor was undamaged and kept chugging away on the seafloor for the past two decades, it wouldn’t produce a slick the size of what you’ve found.”