“How large?”
“Not monsters. Maybe five kilotons of explosive power. Smaller than tactical nuclear weapons.”
All three of them were looking up, watching the digital numbers on the radiometer.
“Levels are normal,” Dokey said.
But he left it on.
“One more mile,” Polodka said.
“We’ll have to bear left some more,” Thomas said. “I’m reading a seamount dead ahead.”
Dokey glanced at his sonar readout, and then eased the joystick to the left, and the sub banked slightly into the turn. They bypassed a mountain peak that rose nearly five hundred feet above their level, then straightened out again.
“Down again,” Polodka said.
They descended another two hundred feet.
The first pass over the site of the Earthquake Center-provided coordinates gave them nothing extraordinary on the sonar.
Dokey turned into a spiraling descent, headed back over the area.
“We want,” he said, “to get Sarscan-baby about fifty feet off the seabed.
“Well, slow it down some,” Thomas told him.
“Slow it! Honey, we’re barely making headway at this speed.”
The sub was, in fact, headed into a current of about two knots, so the forward speed over the sea floor was about three knots.
“I don’t want to dent anything,” she told him, remembering Dane’s convertible as well as the one-and-a-half million dollar price tag on Sarscan.
Watching the robot’s sonar image carefully, Thomas increased the descent, aiming Sarscan downward until the floodlights and cameras could pick up a clear view of the bottom.
“You don’t have to be nervous, Kaylene,” Dokey said, making her nervous.
“Shut up,” she told him.
“Is there something to be nervous about, darlin’?” Mel Sorenson asked from the surface.
They had elected to keep the Loudspeaker channel open, so the ship could monitor their conversations.
“Where’s Dane?” Thomas asked.
“Went to the head. You want him?”
“No.”
“Here we go,” Dokey said. “We’ve got a picture.”
She glanced at the center screen. A murky bottom was showing up, growing clearer as the lights penetrated the darkness.
She began to level off the robot.
The scene on the monitor was almost that of a lunar landscape. Gray, shades of gray, and utter black shadows predominated. It was a little smoother than she had expected, but a low ridge on the north alarmed her, and she steered the robot to the left.
There were outcroppings covered with silt, though some faces of the rocks had been eroded by the current.
The seabed unrolled slowly on the screen. It started to fade away again, and she added angle to the diving planes to keep the robot heading downward.
“Crater,” Dokey said.
It appeared at the top of the screen.
“Rolling camera,” Thomas said, turning on the seventy-millimeter camera.
“Same as Dane saw,” Dokey said. “The dimensions are the same, too, at first guess.”
Brande’s voice echoed on the acoustic transceiver. “Rae, do a few banks left and right.”
“All right.”
She worked the controller, moving Sarscan left and right, to collect images on either side of the crater.
“Something there,” Dokey said.
She had seen it, also. A flash from a metallic object as the lights hit it, and then it was gone.
“We’ll make another pass,” she said.
THRUMMM!
“What the hell?” Dokey said.
It was just a minute suggestion of sound. A vibration ran through the submersible.
“What was that?” Thomas asked.
“What’s going on?” Brande asked.
“I don’t know, Chief,” Dokey said, his head wagging as he scanned the fifty-five instrument panels surrounding them. “We had a vibration and a kind of dull boom. Nothing showing on the instruments. No red lights.”
“Kaylene,” Brande said, “bring her up.”
“We need to make another pass, Dane. We saw something.”
“We’ll work off the tapes. Up.”
She was going to protest again, but realized he was right.
“Let’s initiate ascent, Okey.”
“Right away, boss.”
“There’s something else,” Polodka said, pointing up at the radiometer.
Thomas followed her pointing finger.
Now they were showing above-normal radiation.
“You people want to speak in full sentences?” Brande asked. “We’d kind of like to know what’s going on.”
“Remember those x-ray machines in shoes stores, Chief?”
“I do, Okey.”
“We’re showing a rad count close to maybe four or five of them. Nothing serious.”
“Hold on,” Brande said. A minute later, he said, “I want you to follow the currents on the way up. Drift with them, and keep the lights and video running, as well as the radiometer. We’ve got a record of current direction at each level, and Mel will feed it to you.”
“Do you know something we don’t?” Thomas asked.
“Just a hunch,” Brande said.
The problem with both Brande and Dokey, she thought, was that they both operated on gut instinct.
Worse, they were quite often right.
CHAPTER NINE
Avery Hampstead had been at his desk for over an hour when the phone jangled his morning nerves. Angie wasn’t in yet, and normally he wouldn’t answer it. That was how he got his paperwork done.
On the sixth ring, and since it was close to eight o’clock, anyway, he picked up.
“Avery, Dane Brande.”
“Finished already? I told you this was going to be a quick chore. You didn’t even have to go searching since I gave you the locations.”
“I don’t think we’re done with your job, Avery. We’ve looked at three of the sites, up to the one that occurred last Thursday.”
Hampstead felt his stomach sink. There was something was wrong.
“Dokey suggests, and the rest of us agree, that they’re test holes for a mining operation.”
“Test holes?”
“Right. At the third site, our video tapes show what looks like a broken piece of a test probe. That’s a device for pulling core samples out of the ground.”
“I’ve seen a test probe, Dane. You mean to tell me that someone’s working down there regularly?”
“Looks that way.”
“So they’re big blowing holes in the seabed, looking for what?”
“We’re not certain yet. Dokey used Atlas to grab a few pieces of rock before they came up. We’re analyzing those now. More important to us, Avery, is their method of conducting the tests.”
“And that is?”
“Someone’s in a hurry. Our best guess right now is that they’re using nuclear explosives.”
“What!”
“Small ones, but nuclear all the same. The appearance of the excavations suggest they were accomplished with one blast. Also, the third site had some residual radiation hanging around. Our samples are radioactive, also.”
“Goddamn. Can you telex me some pictures? And the test results?”
“I’ll do that. And there’s something you can check for me. Call your buddy at the Earthquake Information Center and find out what time, and at what coordinates, the last disturbance occurred.”
“There was another one?”
“It occurred while DepthFinder was on the bottom. It rocked her around a little, but there was no other damage that we’ve found yet.”
Hampstead found that he was jotting his typically illegible notes on a legal tablet. “Anything else?”