SECRET MSG 11-76423/11/18/1321 HRS ZULU
FR: CINCPAC
TO: COMMANDER, CALIFORNIA
CALIFORNIA ORDERED TO SEA ASAP,
ACCOMPANIED BY MAHAN AND FLETCHER.
CAPTAIN JONATHAN F. HARRIS
DESIGNATED COMMANDER, TASK FORCE 36.
RPT DIRECTLY TO CINCPAC.
PROCEED ON HEADING 245, CONTACT
CINCPAC 1900 HOURS ZULU FOR FURTHER
ORDERS.
After reading the skimpy words from the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, who was Admiral David Potter, twice, Harris looked up and through the windshield at the people waving frantically from the pier, the families eagerly welcoming their men and women home from the sea. It was a large crowd.
And it would be a disappointed one.
Commander George Quicken, his first mate, was supervising the mooring, and he turned away from his post beside the helm when Harris called to him.
“Captain?”
“Read this, Commander.”
Quicken frowned when he was through. “Not very timely, is it, Captain?”
“Not at all. Let’s go to sea, Commander. Mr. Evans, contact the captains of the Mahan and the Fletcher for me, please.”
“You’re sure you got the numbers right, Wilson?” Mark Jacobs asked.
Overton flipped through his notebook and compared the coordinates written there with the readout on the Loran.
“They’re correct, Mark. One thing I always do, I always get my facts straight.”
Jacobs gave him a skeptical look.
“There’d be no reason for the Earthquake Information Center to give me the wrong coordinates.”
Jacobs waved his arm expansively toward the sea outside the windows. For as far as they could see, there was only ocean, and it wasn’t a particularly gentle ocean from Overton’s point of view. He had a sensitive stomach when it came to oceans. Only Jacobs’s seeming unconcern about the height of the waves reassured him.
They were on the bridge of the yacht, and the rain thrummed steadily on the overhead canvas. Both the glass windshields and the plastic side curtains were faintly fogged over. Visibility through them wasn’t all that great, and the overcast skies and rain limited it further, perhaps to two miles, though Overton’s visual perceptions got all screwy when he was the center of nothingness.
With the engines almost at idle, the pitching of the boat was more pronounced, and Overton stayed close to the passenger seat, where he could hang onto its back cushion.
“Brande’s got to be out there somewhere,” Overton said. “I know it.”
“Uh huh.”
Overton showed Jacobs the second of the three sets of coordinates he had gotten from Golden. “Where’s this?”
“North and west.”
“Let’s try there.”
Jacobs leaned toward the Loran and dialed in the numbers. He shoved the throttles forward, and when he engaged the autopilot, the bow of the boat came around a few degrees to the north. It took several minutes to come up to speed, and then the pitching subsided.
Overton felt a little better about it.
“If we don’t find him in the next couple hours, Wilson, we’re going back to San Francisco.”
“We’ll find him,” Overton said.
“It’s a big, big, ocean.”
“I’m going down and call the Earthquake Center. Maybe they know something more.”
They weren’t getting oral reports from the submersible, but the telemetry readouts had been telling the same monotonous story for some time. The life support systems were all operating normally, and reserves were more than adequate. Electrical energy was in good shape. In the last couple hours, the depth had changed only a few hundred feet either way of 18,500 feet as they followed the rise and fall of the seabed. They were on the correct heading and would soon be approaching the site of the seventh detonation.
Brande had often thought that a deep dive was as tough on the support personnel aboard the mother ship as it was on the crew of the submersible. The level of anxiety, anticipating some minor or major mishap or system failure, was high. One waited in silence with crossed mental fingers.
Worse, the monotony of sitting at the command console had given him time to think. He thought about what he had seen the day before, the people he thought were behind it, and what the future days might bring. He thought about the options he had.
And the options he should have.
Swinging around in his chair, he spotted Dokey at one of the other terminals, playing with the instructions for some computer program. It was one of the ways in which he passed time. Otsuka was the same way.
“Okey?”
“Yeah, Chief?”
“You want to take over here for awhile?”
“Sure thing.” Dokey saved whatever it was he was doing and picked up a mug sporting a picture of Neptune’s Daughter. The miniature sub had a frown painted on her face, and she was frantically eluding an amorous whale.
Dokey stood behind him and studied all of the telemetry for a minute, to get his mind wrapped around the current status.
“Okay, got it, Chief. All normal.”
“All normal,” Brande repeated, rising from his chair.
Brande left the command center in the lab and climbed to the bridge where he found Connie Alvarez-Sorenson keeping an eye on both the ship and Fred Boberg.
The bridge had an overhead speaker monitoring the few conversations between the ship and the submersible, but she asked, anyway, “Everything all right, Dane?”
“Right on track, Connie. How about you?”
She smiled. “Despite the weather, we haven’t drifted out of position more than ten or fifteen feet at any one time.”
Brande glanced through the windshield. The wind had picked up, and the spume off the wave tops pelted the hulls of the ship. Whitecaps dotted the ocean’s surface, and the lower levels of the overcast skies rolled and twisted.
“What’s the prognosis,” he asked.
“It’s not going to get better, but I don’t think it’ll get a lot worse in the next twenty-four hours.”
“I’ll keep my fingers crossed,” he said, heading for the radio shack.
Sanders was on duty.
“Bucky, see if you can’t raise Bull Kontas for me.”
“Coming right up, Chief.”
Sanders used their satellite channel, and it only took about two minutes since Kontas was never far from his pilot house.
Sanders exchanged positions with him, and Brande shut the door behind him and sat in the operator’s chair.
“Good morning, Bull.”
“Hey, Chief.”
“Where are you.”
“Just left the Bay, headed for Ocean Deep.”
“Precious cargo?” Brande asked.
“Buncha crates for some of the sub-contractors.”
“Turn her around and head in, Bull. I want you to pick up some stuff for me.”
“O… kay, Chief. You want it out there?”
Brande gave him the coordinates. “That all right with you, Bull?”
“Damned right. I haven’t been in deep waters in a long time. What’d you need?”
Brande read off the list he had formulated in his mind.
“Jesus, Chief! I know where Gargantua is, but this other crap?”
“I trust to your knowledge of the waterfront, Bull. You know the right kind of people.”
“Maybe. What do you need this for, Chief?”
“I’m preparing for a rainy day. For eventualities that may never come to pass.”
“How much do I spend?”
“Whatever you need to spend. You go see Ingrid for the cash, and tell her to call me if she has any reservations. Don’t tell her what we’re buying.”