“Damned place is getting overcrowded,” Dokey said. “I don’t like working around people I don’t know.”
“Move to the suburbs.”
“I thought I was in the suburbs.”
What he was looking for was further away than he thought it would be. At their top speed of twenty knots, it took them over five hours. One hundred and twenty-four miles over the seafloor. Brande broke his communications silence three times to reassure those on the surface about their condition and to direct Mel Sorenson to bring the Orion along with them.
They had slowly gained altitude, and were at 13,000 feet below the surface when Dokey yawned and said, “Metallic mass, dead ahead, fourteen hundred yards.”
Brande said, “Battery charges, Bob?”
“We’re okay. Got about forty percent left.”
“Let’s go easy on the systems draw, then.”
Brande pulled off some power, and they drifted in on the target.
Sarscan picked up on it a few minutes later.
“Big devil, isn’t she?” Dokey asked.
It was a typical arrangement for a seabed habitat at this depth, pressure hull mounted on sealegs. It was difficult to judge the size from the video image, but Brande agreed with Dokey. It was larger than he had thought it might be.
“Sub in attendance,” Dokey said.
“And another crawler,” Mayberry added.
Attached to the bottom of the pressure hull was the top mating hatch of a submersible, and attached to an elongated tube extending from the base of the pressure hull was another of the floor crawlers.
“Home sweet home,” Brande said. “Let’s get lots of pictures — video and still.”
“Underway, Chief.”
“You pick up anything on the acoustic, Bob?”
“Some babble on one frequency, but nothing else.”
“Let me have the controls, Chief,” Dokey said, “and I’ll move right in and knock on their door.”
“I think we’ll telephone before our first visit, Okey. Let’s just get our pictures and go home.”
They circled the sea station slowly, snapping photographs from different angles. Brande was certain the station had sonar tracking them, but they saw no signals of greeting, nor any movement.
The station seemed innocuous enough.
And simultaneously sinister.
CHAPTER TEN
Except for Otsuka and Brande, everyone filtering into the wardroom appeared as sleepy as Thomas felt. Larry Emry was rubbing his eyes with gnarled knuckles. His moustache was in disarray. Polodka and Mayberry were arguing about something. As usual, Dokey was the last one to arrive. They should have named him “Pokey” instead of “Okey”.
The two early risers, Otsuka and Brande, were sitting at a pair of the central tables that they had pulled together. He was munching on a thick fried egg sandwich — leaning forward so that it dripped on his plate, but though dripping egg-and-mayonnaise sandwiches were his favorite fast food, he didn’t seem particularly pleased about his world this morning.
Thomas went into the galley, poured herself a tall glass of orange juice from the pitcher in the big refrigerator, turned the spigot on the famous coffee urn — the Orion’s coffee was as strong as antifreeze — for a mug of coffee, then carried both back into the wardroom and sat next to Otsuka.
“You’ve been up most of the night,” she accused Brande.
“Making phone calls,” he said. “Getting people out of bed in Washington. They didn’t want to get out of bed.”
“And?”
“Wait until everyone gets some breakfast.”
Nearly fifteen minutes went by before Dokey emerged from the galley carrying a tray heaped with burritos, pancakes, eggs, and sausage.
“I’m here,” he said. “Let the games proceed.”
Thomas had been watching Brande closely, and she had noted the fire in his eyes. They got that glint when he became overly zealous about some project. He could become totally focused on an objective that no one else saw. Infrequently, when his dander was up, his eyes took on the same quality of hardness. The other giveaway was his mouth. It assumed a straight line that no humor or change of subject could bend.
Brande sipped from his mug — one of Dokey’s, but she couldn’t see the caption from where she sat.
“First,” Brande said, “is something wrong, Svetlana?”
Brande still surprised Thomas at times. He noticed the little things that were going on around him, especially with his people. She had thought him so involved with his inner vision that he’d have missed Svetlana’s debate with Mayberry.
“There is nothing wrong,” Polodka insisted.
“The hell there isn’t,” Mayberry said. “She got a nine hundred dollar phone bill, but she wouldn’t tell me about it until last night.”
“How’d that happen, Svet?” Dokey asked. “You only call me a couple times a month.”
“It is all right,” Polodka said.
“She found herself a nine-hundred number consultant, quote, unquote,” Mayberry said.
Polodka glared at him.
“What kind of consultant?” Emry asked.
“We don’t need to get into that,” Mayberry said. “I told her not to pay it.”
“Give the bill to our lawyer,” Brande said. “We do still have a lawyer, don’t we, Rae?”
She nodded. “Jim Wray. Give me the bill, Svetlana, and I’ll see what we can do about it.”
Thomas doubted that much could be done. “Let the buyer beware,” still prevailed, even though the buyer might not fully understand or appreciate the culture or read the fine print on the TV screen.
Polodka looked a little relieved, and Brande went on, “I talked to Unruh….”
“He’s that CIA guy?” Dokey asked.
“Yeah. I don’t know how he wormed his way into this operation, but apparently he’s fully involved, according to Hampstead. Anyway, Washington is moving at lightning speed on this thing.”
“That means they set up a committee,” Emry said.
“A task force, Larry, a task force. It is, however, a presidential task force, so they should have influence if not warp speed. So far, our orders are to stand by.”
“We could be standing by until March,” Emry told them, “and it might be a cold winter.”
“True. So, while we’re waiting, we want to do a little reconnaissance.”
“What kind of reconnaissance?” Thomas asked. She didn’t want Brande to get carried away, mounting some kind of paramilitary operation. He wasn’t a fanatic about environmental and historical issues; he wouldn’t go so far as to say that artifacts on a sunken ship were fated to stay sunken, though he would say they should be in the proper museums. He had never believed in sabotaging industrialists or spiking trees in a forest to prevent environmental pollution, but she knew he could be very concerned about ecological balances.
“Today, we’ll go look at yesterday’s blast site. I’d like to get a count on the number of floor crawlers or any other vehicles down there.”
“And we stay far away from their subsurface habitat?” she asked.
“Until we learn more about it, like who it belongs to,” Brande said.
“My money’s still on AquaGeo,” Dokey said.
“Larry, you studied the footage,” Brand said. “Find anything relevant?”
Emry nodded and finished chewing a piece of toast. “I think so. Starting with the station itself, I figure it at seventy feet in diameter. It could house about fifteen people on a regular basis. Perhaps a few more. And there’s something you people didn’t see, but that I picked up on the video tape. About a hundred yards from the station, due north, is another pressure hull, maybe twenty feet in diameter. It’s connected to the main station by a thick umbilical cable laid directly on the seabed. I think it’s a nuclear reactor.”