“One more item.” Brande told him about it, and he added to his notes.
“I’ll get back to you, Dane.”
“Soon, Avery. I may need some official guidance on this thing, much as I hate to admit that.”
He hung up and called Unruh at CIA headquarters in Langley, who wasn’t in, but the duty officer promised that he’d find him somewhere.
When the navigational display indicated she had the proper coordinates, Penny Glenn retarded the throttles and shifted to neutral.
The Phantom Lode wallowed in the troughs as she slid out of the helmsman’s seat.
Billy Enders hung up the acoustic telephone. They’re on their way up, Miss Penny.”
“How long?”
“He said maybe two-and-a-half hours.”
“All right. I’m going to take a long, hot shower and pack my bag.”
“Will you be wanting us to hang around here for you?” Enders asked.
Glenn looked around at the horizons. She saw no lights indicating a ship in the vicinity. High to the east were the running lights of some airliner. Still, it wouldn’t be prudent to mark the spot for anyone.
“No, Captain Billy. We want to keep the area clear. Take her to, oh, San Diego, and wait for me there.”
Though he tried not to show it, Enders looked pleased at the news. He would get his boat back for awhile.
And the choice of San Diego gave Glenn a reason for visiting Brande sometime in the near future. She was looking forward to that.
By the time Gary Munro brought the submersible to the surface and they rendezvoused with it, she was showered, had wolfed down some lasagna, and had packed the few things she intended to take with her. She was also impatient, and Glenn was never impatient. In was an unaffordable luxury when dealing with the sea.
The sea was becoming more unruly by the time she transferred to the sub, and she was thoroughly splashed with cold, salty water.
Without waiting to watch the Lode pull away, Glenn slipped through the hatch, dogged it behind her, and settled into one of the passenger seats behind the two controller seats.
In the dim light of the sphere, Munro looked back over his seat at her, infatuated silliness plastered on his face.
“Good to have you back, Penny.”
“Just get us down, will you, Gary?”
He blew ballast, and the sub settled below the surface. AquaGeo’s submersibles were designed with large ballast tanks and the ability to accept three sets of weights. They could make three dives before having their weights replaced, which could be accomplished from either a support ship or by one of the floor crawlers.
“Is something wrong?” Munro asked. “I didn’t expect you back so soon.”
Glenn had been considering her options. She could suspend activities until Brande lost interest, if indeed he had an interest, or she could continue on schedule because it was a free ocean.
“There’s nothing wrong that I know about Gary,” she told him.
Svetlana Polodka and the two graduate students, along with Kaylene Thomas when she popped into the lab now and then, had been conducting the tests on the samples that Dokey had brought up from the bottom.
They were not really equipped to deal with radioactive samples, but they were taking as much care as possible, having placed the four chunks of rock in a glass-fronted enclosure and handling them only with rubber gloves and tongs.
They had chiseled off chunks and soaked them in a variety of solutions, and they had run spectrographic analysis. Weights and measures. She was glad she was a computer person.
Behind them, the door to the stern deck opened and closed irregularly as people came in and went out, servicing the submersible. In the aft portside corner of the lab, the battery chargers hummed incessantly, recharging the packs for DepthFinder and the ROVs.
Polodka was overseeing the kids, who knew more about what they were doing than she did, and entering the data from the tests into a report form now on the monitor of her computer terminal.
On the other side of the lab, at another terminal, Larry Emry was plotting the excavation sites on his maps. The undersea charts were becoming more detailed, now that he had the sonar and video tapes from the first two dives.
The pitch and roll of the Orion, with the cycloidal propellers retracted, was more noticeable as Sorenson moved them toward the next site.
Dokey strolled into the lab, carrying a mug of coffee. The mug was adorned with the legend, “Carry me back to the Old Lusitania.” His sweatshirt was adorned with a colorful picture of a penguin in an orange and green tuxedo and was labeled “Psychedelic Penguin.” In his right hand, he carried a large Danish, and he stopped to hold it over the glass box containing the samples.
“This hot enough to heat my roll, Svet?”
“I don’t think so, Okey.”
“Damn. I was hoping to come up with a substitute for microwave ovens.”
He used his toe to snag the leg of a chair and pull it over next to her, and then sat down. He looked at the rows and columns of figures she had entered into the report.
“That tell you anything?” he asked, taking a big bite out of his Danish.
“Not really.”
“Me, either. Dana, help us out.”
Dana Fullerton, a senior at the University of Southern California, leaned over Polodka’s chair and scanned the information on the screen. She was a pretty girl, and in the good old days, before Dokey had become so involved with Kim Otsuka, she would have been a target of some of his more risqué wit.
“Most of it is what we might expect to find,” she said. “There seems to be a higher than normal concentration of pyrolusite ore.”
“Is that significant?” Dokey asked. He was talking with his mouth full.
“This sample might be. It’s loaded with manganese.”
“Well, big damned deal. What am I going to do with a bunch of hot manganese?”
“Usually, they make steel with it. It’s supposed to harden the steel.”
“Is it rare?”
“No,” Fullerton told him.
“There must be something else there,” he said. “One doesn’t go wasting expensive nuclear explosives on common metallic elements.”
“That’s all we’ve found, so far,” Fullerton said.
“What do you think, Svet?”
Polodka thought about it. “Maybe they didn’t find exactly what they were looking for. Perhaps that is why the site is abandoned.”
“Good point, love. That’s probably the most obvious, and best, answer.”
Wilson Overton was on the ship-to-shore phone, arguing with his editor. Jacobs couldn’t hear all of the words, but he guessed the subject would be money. Most people in the civilized world of business seemed to argue about money more than anything else.
There were so many more important things to debate, Jacobs thought.
Finally, Overton replaced the receiver, though with more force than Jacobs thought necessary. He walked back across the salon, a little unsteady, but that was because he was not a sailor. He had yet to learn how to time his movements with those of the sea.
Sliding into the banquette across from Jacobs, he picked up his coffee cup and drained it.
“Problems at home, Wilson?”
Overton made a face. “Damned editors sit at a desk and think they know what’s going on in the world. They wouldn’t know anything if it weren’t for the people like me, who wear out shoe leather.”