“Keep in mind, these are highly complex devices, not to mention valuable. I trust you’ve made plans as to how you’ll handle them once they’re yours?”
Al-Quatan answered. “We have made all the arrangements. Security and technical help will be the best.”
Roth nodded and Khalif raised his voice to summon the two guards. “Escort Sergeant Roth to his quarters. He will return to Tripoli in the morning.”
As he left, Khalif reminded him, “Nine days, Mr. Roth. Nine days.”
The makeshift control room was set up in the officers’ mess aboard Hanit. The room had been chosen for logistical reasons — adequate electrical supply, good ventilation, and right next door was the ship’s hardened Weapons and Maneuver Control Center. The ship’s officers were not consulted, most finding out at the evening meal that their lone retreat had been commandeered by the annoyingly chipper little man who had boarded two days earlier in Marseille. Paul Mordechai had transformed the dark, formally decorated dining area into an entropic scattering of equipment and wires.
The ship’s captain looked over Mordechai’s shoulder as he sat glued to a video monitor. The sprightly engineer had been in the same seat for over three hours, yet showed no lack of patience or enthusiasm. He wore a headset with a boom microphone and his face was illuminated by the machine’s flickering glow.
The ROV was a “fly out” model. Sent to the bottom on an umbilical, it then separated and took guidance signals out to two hundred meters. A 50-watt quartz halogen light was boresighted to track the digital camera, and images were transmitted to the docking rig, then relayed topside by way of the umbilical.
To the uninitiated, the pictures might have seemed relentlessly monotonous. The flat mud on the ocean floor had almost no contour, like the moon without craters. The highlights for the last hour had included a crumpled beer can that looked like it might have been there since World War II, and a pair of undulating worms who poked their heads out of the muck, miniature cobras swaying to the song of some unseen charmer.
“Shouldn’t we have found something by now?” the captain asked.
“Needle in a haystack, Captain.”
“But we’re still getting two good signals from those beacons. Strong signals.”
Mordechai manipulated a joystick and the view on the monitor began a shift to the right. “Just makes the haystack smaller, needles don’t get any bigger.”
The captain frowned.
“Our biggest problem is stability.” Mordechai pointed to the display. “Your ship is drifting. Not much, but enough to screw up our search matrix. We can only use the engines to adjust forward and aft. I could make a better system. Put a differential GPS on the drone, something to compare its exact position and drift relative to the ship. Then we’d install some side thrusters with digital control on Hanit and write up software to automate the corrections. The way it is now, with everything done manually and only one axis of movement, by the time we correct one way, the drone is drifting to the other. Ends up with divergent oscillations. Same thing can happen in aircraft flight control software.”
“How comforting,” the captain deadpanned, obviously lost.
Mordechai smiled and keyed his microphone, “Ten forward.”
In the adjoining control room a lieutenant engaged the screws to push a thousand tons of warship gently ahead, then reversed them momentarily to stop.
“Still seems to me we should have found something by now. Polaris Venture was 150 feet along the waterline. Even if she broke up, there ought to be some pretty big pieces down there.”
Mordechai had no reply, primarily because he was more and more bedeviled by the same question. They had locked onto both beacons, getting good signals every thirty minutes. By his own calculations, considering antennae errors and thermal deviations, there was a ninety percent chance that Polaris Venture was within a two-square-kilometer area on the ocean floor below. They had covered that entire search box once already and found nothing. The other ten percent was weighing greatly on Mordechai when he finally saw something.
“There!” he shouted.
A grainy, squarish image appeared on the monitor.
Mordechai yelled into his microphone, “Mark one!” He worked the joystick furiously, repeatedly pressing a button that took magnified pictures of the image almost two miles below. Rocking nervously in his chair, he now understood why Polaris Venture had been so hard to find. “Where’s the other one? Where’s the other?” he mumbled.
“I don’t know what that is you’ve found,” the captain said, “but it’s not part of a ship. At least not any part I recognize.”
Mordechai held his drone directly over the small box, then tilted upward so the camera and beam of light spread out level across the bottom. He then slowly rotated to the left. The small cone of illumination arced across a barren submarine landscape, a tiny lighthouse in one of the world’s darkest corners. After ninety degrees of rotation he stopped and zoomed in.
“There,” Mordechai said.
Another object, a twin to the first, came into view.
“Mark two, bearing three-three-zero, ten meters from mark one. Captain, have the radio operator stand by for a secure uplink. We’ve got a very important message to send.”
“That’s it? I thought we were looking for a ship.”
“We are,” said a dispirited Mordechai. “But we won’t find it here.”
Chapter Twelve
Christine guided the small Ford through Dorset countryside as they made their way back to the region where the odyssey had begun, the rural Celtic counties of the southwest coast. They had abandoned the rented Peugeot in Southampton, leaving it a few blocks from The Excelsior in a crowded lot. How David had acquired this car was a mystery to Christine. It seemed mechanically sound, but was frightful to look at. Probably twenty years old, it seemed held together by an amalgam of rust and putty. The back window was plastered over with stickers, supporting the likes of the Green Party and a musical group called Throbbing Gristle. The odometer had simply stopped working at 217,768 and both rear fenders displayed damage from what looked like two separate incidents, although Slaton had assured Christine that all required lights and vital moving parts were functional. She guessed that he’d stolen the car, hoping no one would miss it, or perhaps figuring the owner was likely a budding criminal or an anarchist, the type of person who would avoid any intentional contact with the police.
David was asleep in the passenger seat. Christine had offered to drive, knowing there was no way she’d be able to get any rest. The image of two masked men and the flashes of their weapons kept flooding her thoughts. Once again her protector seemed to be a step ahead of these madmen, but how long could it last? She heard David rustle, as he’d done time and again over the last two hours. He wasn’t sleeping well, but Christine suspected it had nothing to do with what had gone on at The Excelsior. His eyes opened groggily.
“Where are we?” he asked, with a glance at his watch.
“Almost to Dorchester.”
He straightened up and stretched. “You made good time.”
“Feel any better after the rest?”
“Sure.”
Christine thought he still looked tired. In the days she’d been with him he’d never slept more than a few hours at a time. That wasn’t good. She’d worked enough twenty-four hour shifts in her residency to know that recurring lack of sleep could seriously cloud a person’s judgment.