18
Garner stood on B-82’s helideck, looking out over the water and watching the sun struggle into another Arctic spring day. Despite the persistent chill of the wind, it felt good to be outside without a radiation suit. On the deck of the Phoenix, still moored a half mile away, he could see a handful of Carol’s crew clambering over the deck, wearing their leaded protection against the cooked external surfaces of the ship. Beyond the Phoenix, what the radioactive slick was doing was anyone’s guess. Garner hoped, against any common sense, for the spill to display some kind of predictable behavior.
He, Zubov, Krail, and Charon had huddled in the communications van long into the night, weighing their options and studying the latest data coming in from the Hawkbilfs radiometers. By midnight, they finally narrowed the most likely location of the seafloor leak to three possible positions within a mile and a half of each other.
Later, Garner tried to snatch a few hours of shut-eye. Sleep eventually came, though only after he fended off a flurry of calculations and contingencies that swirled in his mind. By dawn the first details of a plausible containment operation were beginning to come together. Properly prepared or not, the plan was in motion and now it was their collective task to keep the machinery moving forward.
The same could not be said for B-82 itself. Below, Charon had the wellhead stopped and called an all-hands meeting of the Global crew.
The result was an unnatural silence throughout the structure as it squatted on its steel haunches in the weak daylight. What Charon could possibly be telling his men that would make sense of all this was anyone’s guess.
Zubov stepped up onto the helideck.
“Contemplating Sophocles by sunrise, Commander?” he asked.
“With all due respect to Albert the geologist, tell me we haven’t found the “Plague of Thebes’ down there,” Garner mused. “A plague of plutonium itself named after Pluto, Roman god of the underworld, as you may know. Patron of the earth and all its dead.”
Zubov shook his head.
“Where do you get the time to do all this reading?”
“Clean living,” Garner replied with a wry smile. “Pretty quiet around here without the dynamic duo trading shots, huh?” he mused, meaning Krail and Charon.
“You don’t trust them either?”
“Are you kidding? They’re like a couple of rabid weasels thrown together in a shoebox,” Zubov snorted, then dropped his voice as if their conversation was being overheard, which it most likely was.
“So what’s the deal here? If Krail is representing the long arm of the law and they’re really freaked about this, then why isn’t half the Arctic fleet up here, not to mention the Canadian Coast Guard? Why are they willing to let the Phoenix into the game at all?”
“You heard Krail. We’ve got the data.”
“We’re willing guinea pigs, more like it,” Zubov muttered.
“Would you rather have them take what we know and use it without our supervision?”
“Of course not.”
“Me neither, so just hold on for the ride. Like it or not, they still need us. They need the information that Medusa collected and they want to know exactly what we know. We’re worth more to them than any two dozen support ships the Navy could provide, and we’re a lot less conspicuous.”
“A ship of opportunity? A decoy?”
“Probably both,” Garner admitted.
“But you might have guessed that when we were plucked from the Lansing.”
“Doesn’t mean I have to like it. My patsy suit is still at the cleaners from our last ‘favor.”
From the south, a dull thudding could be heard, growing louder in the quiet air.
Garner raised his binoculars and identified a U.S. Navy Sikorsky slowly approaching. The helicopter dangled a harness from its broad underbelly, from which hung a pallet of stout yellow canisters — containers packed with explosive, probably C-4. Farther away the Rushmore, a big, hulking Navy landing ship even larger than the Phoenix, could be seen making its way toward them through the fractured surface ice. Stowed beneath a thick tarpaulin and strapped to the deck of the Rushmore was a large package about the size of a small bus — or a sub. Garner correctly guessed that this was the advanced-prototype ASDS — Advanced SEAL Delivery System — Krail had requested to assist the Sea Sprite. A platoon from SEAL Team Two, experts in cold-water operations, was also on its way. Clearly, Krail was increasingly comfortable exercising his “situational authority.”
“There’s your answer.” Garner nodded toward the Rushmore. “We’re not the only patsies anymore. It looks like we’re finally going to get some help.”
“I wish I could believe that,” Zubov said. “It just means more chiefs to screw us out of moderation and into some kind of commando mission. The dedicated scientists find the problem, then get stampeded by the war hawks once again.”
“Not necessarily,” Garner mused. “As long as we keep that in mind, it’s less likely to happen. Not much reassurance, but it’s all we can control.”
Demolition supplies continued to arrive aboard Navy ships for the rest of the day and well into the evening. Near dusk, the Global Voyager arrived to begin offloading the oil stored in B-82’s 1.2-million-barrel fuel reservoir. As Charon continued to debrief his crew, Krail, Garner, and Zubov compared notes in the communications van. The latest sonar plots and bathymetric charts from the Hawkbill were truly astounding. The location immediately around the leak, or leaks — a craggy, hanging valley at the north end of a fault system they had come to call the Devil’s Finger — was defined and rendered in increasingly striking detail with each passing hour. Significantly, the thinner and weaker areas of the ocean floor were illustrated with enough resolution to suggest the best locations to plant the C-4 canisters. As the helicopter returned to its ship for pallet after pallet of explosives, Krail gave the pilot the best position to deposit the canisters as the SEAL platoon went to work in the submersibles.
“Global has given us the use of their icebreaker, the Global Vagabond, sister ship of the Voyager,” Krail explained to Garner. “I’ve also got the Canadians’ North Sea, the largest icebreaker I could get on short notice. The Rushmore’s got the new ASDS, which we’ll use with the Sea Sprite and B-82’s JIM suits to place the explosive.”
“What’s in those canisters?” Garner asked.
“C-4, mostly, according to Charon,” Krail said. “Packaged by the SEALS on the trip up. They prefer to work with the same explosives across the board, but I think under the circumstances they had to scrounge some TNT and HEX as well.”
Developed by the British during World War I, HEX explosive was still used in modern weapons, notably torpedoes.
“The divers will set up two different arrays of charges,” Krail continued. “The first set the C-4 will be used to fracture the rock on the canyon wall. The second an array of ammonium-nitrate cratering charges will be set to move around the debris that’s left.”
Garner let out a low whistle.
“How long will it take to place all that?”
“The charge delivery shouldn’t take more than twelve hours, then we can wire the arrays together with primacord and hook them up to an electronic trigger.”