“We were looking for something to do, anyway,” Jacobs told him. “I guess we could waste a week, as long as you’re covering the diesel fuel.”
“I’ll be checked out of here in ten minutes,” Overton said.
“One more thing, though.”
“What’s that?”
“You have to do a favor for me.”
Paul Deride was tied up in a long meeting for the morning, which was followed by a luncheon he would just as soon have missed. When he got back to his room in the Mayflower, he called Camden.
Anthony Camden had worked for him for twenty-one years, first as an occasional contract writer, then as full-time counsel for Aqua-Geo. Like Penny Glenn, Camden was a multi-millionaire as a result of his association with Deride, and like Penny, the lawyer had never demonstrated anything but total loyalty to Deride.
He found the man in Japan, as expected, but he was in a meeting with the Matsumoto Steel people — discussing the potential and plant requirements for expanded production — and he had to wait ten minutes for Camden to call back.
He could picture the man at work. At five-two, he would fit the scale of the people he was dealing with. His steel-rimmed glasses would enlarge those big blue eyes, making him appear a little bug-eyed and perhaps less intelligent than he really was. Camden stunned his adversaries from time to time with his insights, his legal maneuvering, and his downright ruthlessness. He rarely lost a point, and when he did, it cost the opposition something — money, status, bargaining position. Deride had never seen him without a tie neatly knotted under the spread collar of his tailor-made shirt. His suits were made in England and his shoes in Italy. It was Camden who gave Deride advice on his business wardrobe.
When he called back, he said, “Yakima says he’ll need to hire a thousand people, add two furnaces, and three rolling mills.”
The two of them never bothered with the preliminaries of greetings or small talk.
“Is he happy about that?” Deride asked.
“Ecstatic. He’ll draw up preliminary plans, so we’re ready to go when the time is right. I’m also checking into leasing a refinery.”
“Good. And speaking of preliminary plans, I think you should be in San Francisco.”
“Problem?”
“There might be.” Deride explained Glenn’s chance meeting with Brande. “If the U.S. wants to raise hell about anything, I want us in a position to say, ‘bugger off.’“
“Why Brande?” Camden asked.
“They use him a lot on special projects, Anthony. This reeks of special project.”
“He sent your check back.”
“Bloody hell!”
He had been certain that Brande, or at least Thomas, would have yielded to the power of two-and-a-half million dollars. It was like a slap in the face, and no one slapped Deride and got away with it.
“Just catch an airplane, Anthony.”
Kaylene Thomas was in the left seat of DepthFinder. She had been there for nearly four hours, and she had enjoyed every minute. Seven months had elapsed since she made her last deep dive, and she vowed that that wouldn’t happen again.
The first dive had been cancelled after an hour and forty-six minutes on the bottom when two cells in the main battery pack had indicated a malfunction. After the three-hour ascent, the crew, the film packs, the video tapes, and the battery tray had been exchanged for fresh versions, and DepthFinder had immediately returned to her element.
Brande’s dive had located the sites of the first two disturbances. The sonar map record didn’t demonstrate much since they had nothing to compare it to, but the video and camera imagery had shown two craters on the seabed. Each was approximately thirty feet deep and sixty feet across. The immediate consensus of all team members was that they were man-made. Brande and Otsuka had found nothing else in the vicinity of either crater.
Over her headphones, Thomas heard Brande’s voice. He was now manning the command console on board the ship. “Svetlana, let me have a status report.”
Periodically, voice reports were issued to confirm the telemetry data.
She heard Polodka changing position to relieve cramped muscles.
“Yes, Dane. The depth: seventeen thousand, seven hundred, and twenty-six feet. The altitude above seabed is nine-one-eight.”
She and Dokey were attempting to “fly” the submersible about eight hundred feet above the sea floor. Sarscan, trailing behind them by fifty feet, and below them by two hundred feet, captured the best imagery at that distance. While her range was limited, her power gave them good readings for a thousand feet down and three thousand feet to either side. Because they were scanning the bottom, rather than searching for a single object suspended in water, Thomas had squelched out the “ping” of sonar returns so as not to drive them crazy.
“Heading, two-eight-five,” Polodka continued. “Speed, six knots.”
The submersible could easily triple that speed, but the noise produced by the electric motors and the water movement against the hull added interference to the sonar vehicle’s readings.
Polodka rattled off the current capacities on batteries and life support systems.
“Roger that, Svet,” Brande said. “Looking good.”
Through the portholes, and despite the six million candlepower of the halogen floodlights, the view ahead was limited to about thirty feet. Microscopic bacteria lived out there, but nothing else, and the waters were clear and clean.
Thomas had put the waterfall display of Orion’s forward-looking sonar on the starboard video monitor, close to Dokey. It was good for about 1500 yards, but wasn’t sounding any alarms. There was nothing of collision concern ahead of them.
The center monitor played the video image from Sarscan’s camera, relayed over the fiber optic cable, and under the robot’s powerful floodlights, the dive team had another view of endless water.
The port monitor did have a display. The seabed, as depicted by the robot’s down-looking sonar was shown as a dark green mass across the bottom of the monitor. The irregular lines and abrupt rises in the dark green suggested a rugged bottom with large outcroppings.
It seemed to be drifting away, and Thomas checked the scale imposed by the computer on the left margin of the monitor.
“Okey, the seabed’s in decline.”
“I see it, Kaylene. We’ll take a ten-degree dive.”
Dokey eased his right stick forward, and the bow aimed downward. The twin electric motors driving the propellers forced them lower.
With her own control sticks, Thomas aimed the robot downward and watched the readout until it was showing a ten-degree negative reading.
Four hundred feet farther down, they leveled off.
Polodka, who had a chart spread over her knees, said, “We’re approaching the coordinates. Okey, bear to the left two degrees.”
“Done, Svet.”
Thomas glanced at the magnetometer readout. They had crossed some heavy deposits of probable iron, but at the moment the sensor was not detecting anything out of the ordinary. No sunken ships full of gold and silver ingots.
Dokey reached over his head and pressed the “Power On” pad for the radiometer.
“We ought to see if we’re getting zapped by anything radioactive, ladies.”
Thomas had a quick flashback to the Russian missile recovery, with its Topaz IV nuclear reactor payload. “Why’d you bring that up,” she asked.
“Just curious.”
“That’s bull, Dokey. You have a theory going?”
“Those holes Dane photographed look like they could have been dug with a single nuclear charge, Kaylene. They’re sometimes used in mining.”