“Actually, what I need is to have you put all my hot appointments on the back burner.”
“What about the stuff that’s already on the back burner?”
“It goes on the backest back burner.”
“How about your wife?”
“Fortunately, Angie, I already called her.”
He brought her up to date on his activities and his plans, and then he told her to screen all of his calls. He wanted nothing forwarded to him that did not pertain to the downed rocket. “So I’m stuck in the office?”
“You can take long lunches,” he told her.
Then he called Carl Unruh, who was out of the office, but the call was bounced forward to the Situation Room.
“Brande’s on his way, Carl”
“Okay, good. How long?”
“It’s going to be tight as hell. If I’ve got my numbers right, they’ll hit the area on the seventh.”
“Jesus. That doesn’t give them much time before meltdown day.”
“If your experts have their numbers right.”
“They’re still working on it. The President asked them to re-crunch.”
“Yeah, well, that’s just dandy.”
“You didn’t mention the deadline to Brande?” Unruh asked him.
“To one of his people.”
“And they’re still going?”
“Give them some credit, Carl. Marine Visions is loaded with competent people.”
“Still, you shouldn’t have mentioned the deadlines.”
“I’m not good with classified crap,” Hampstead said. “I never know why it’s supposed to be classified. You have anything new?”
“Where are you?”
“CINCPAC.”
“You’ve seen the plotting board?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’ve got the latest on ship movements. Except, we think there might be a CIS sub or two closing the area. One of our Ohio-class subs got a sonar signature on the Winter Storm. She was going gangbusters for Midway.”
“I don’t think she can do much when she gets there,” Hampstead said.
“She can start looking. Hell, that’s why we’ve got subs on the way, too.”
“I suppose.” The decision to send subs had not been Hampstead’s.
“Next item, Avery. Half an hour ago, a Candid took off from Murmansk with the Sea Lion aboard. She’s headed for Vladivostok.”
“What will they put her on?”
“One of our KH-1 1s got a few pictures of the port. It looks to us as if the Timofey Ol’yantsev is undergoing a quick retrofit.”
“That’s a destroyer?” Hampstead asked.
“It’s classified as a patrol ship.”
“That would probably work in a bind,” Hampstead said. “Do we know if they shipped any ROVs out of Murmansk along with the submersible?”
“No. Then again, they may have some on hand in Vladivostok.”
“Yes, true. How about the Navy’s deep-diving robot?”
“They flew it out of England this morning, but I think they’re still trying to round up enough cable,” Unruh said. “Another item. A Frenchman named Henrique d’Artilan, who is on the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, with a group including some of our own Nuclear Regulatory Commission people, is on the way to Hawaii. Weʼve told them to check in with CINCPAC at Pearl. I guess you can tell Admiral Potter that he’s hosting the mission control for this.”
“He’ll be happy to hear that, I’m sure.”
Hampstead looked at the plot, visualizing, not only the ships, but aircraft converging on the scene. It was going to be a busy scene.
“What happens, Carl, when all these people, ships, planes, and motor scooters show up in the crash zone at practically the same time?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are we going to have some arguments?”
“Hell, Avery, I’d think everybody would cooperate in the recovery.”
“After setting up a committee, a fact-finding group, and a summit meeting?”
“I’ll mention the possibility to the august group sitting around here,” Unruh said.
From inside Harbor One, the view of the sea was one of murky twilight. At 600 feet of depth, not many of the sun’s rays penetrated.
The view was almost unobstructed for 360 degrees. Harbor One’s construction, similar to that of Ocean Deep, was that of an inverted bowl. It was raised on steel pillars eighty feet above the uneven seabed, and the bowl had a diameter of 100 feet. Within the bowl were three decks. The first, or lowest, deck contained engineering spaces, including the highly important electrolysis unit which extracted oxygen from seawater to feed Harbor One’s atmosphere. Chemical filters cleaned the air, and a very efficient distilling plant provided pure drinking water.
The second deck housed the residential, recreational, sanitary and eating quarters. The top deck, with twenty feet of dome over its center, was an open-space conglomeration of biological, psychological, engineering and oceanographic experiments. Twelve people of the fifteen currently assigned to Harbor One were busily engaged in formulation, testing, or assessment of on-going projects. They hovered over hydroponic tanks, pressure chambers, and computer terminals, performing their complex and, Brande hoped, progressive tasks.
Federal and state funds supported the projects, flowing through the departments of agriculture, commerce, and education, in addition to universities located in California, Massachusetts, Washington, Florida, Texas and Colorado.
He had arrived fifty minutes before by way of Voyager, and he had spent his first twenty minutes saying hello to everyone and checking on their projects, then the next thirty minutes bringing them up to date on what he knew of the CIS rocket disaster.
It was the selected topic of conversation, of course. People who spent a fair share of their working lives on the bottom of the ocean could be expected to be interested in the composition of that ocean.
At the moment, the interior lights were on, and the exterior lights extinguished, so very little of the sea environment was visible. Outside the dome, scenes were viewed through a blue-gray haze. Two sea bass passed directly overhead, and Brande could see a moray eel sniffing the ocean floor some fifty feet to the north. A bluefin tuna that had hung around for nearly a year and was, quite naturally, named Charlie, coasted along behind the bass.
To the northwest, the lights of the small dome of the mining project were dimly visible. It was about 200 yards away, and the agricultural project dome was another quarter-mile beyond it. Both of the smaller domes were connected to Harbor One by thick, Kevlar-shielded cables and tubing that rested on the seabed and carried electrical power and communications links. Both of the smaller domes had their own atmospheric and water-distillation plants.
The larger dome also had a link to the surface, in a Kevlar-shielded fiber-optic cable that rose to a massive, anchored buoy. The buoy sported bells and strobe lights that identified the site of Harbor One to surface vessels and also mounted the radio and satellite antennas necessary to communication between the sea lab and the mainland. Radio waves did not travel beneath the surface very well. They were erratically bent, just as light was bent upon penetrating the surface. For shorter distances, acoustic telephones were adequate for through-the-water conversations, but for long-distance communications, the signals had to be beamed from above the surface.
To the east of Harbor One, Brande saw what he was looking for. A two-man mini-submarine, devised and built in the San Diego shops by Marine Visions and dubbed Neptune’s Daughter, called Dot for short, was hovering a hundred feet away, above the turbine farm.