Colgate closed the doors, depressurized the chamber, opened the outer doors, and lowered the robot to the ocean floor. By remote control, Colgate released the hook, then retracted the cable.
When Neptune’s Daughter returned to the chamber, they spent two hours detaching Turtle from the sub and installing the Atlas ROV in her place. The robot, with her 250-foot tether wound onto the reel, fit snugly into a nest suspended beneath the bow of the sub.
With Dot moved out of the way, Turtle was then lowered to the seabed. Dot returned to the chamber, and with one of the sub pilots at the controls, took Brande back to the surface.
Mighty Moose, one of the three workboats — old and refurbished tugboats — owned by Marine Visions was waiting for him. With Dot handling the cable-attaching chores on the sea bottom, Gargantua and Turtle were soon winched aboard the workboat.
The three-man crew of the boat; captain, mate and one seaman, helped Brande tie down the robots.
“Okay, Captain Kontas, let’s head for San Diego.”
“Commercial Basin, Chief?”
“No. We’ll visit the Navy.”
Chapter Eight
“Our Candid put down at Vladivostok twenty minutes ago, boss,” Jack Evoy said.
Unruh looked at his watch, just then realizing that he had been napping upright in his chair for some time. He was not entirely certain how long he had been out of contact with the room around him.
He did not remember picking up the phone. One of the aides had handed it to him, perhaps.
The activity around him in the Situation Room seemed to have taken on a sluggishness. People had disappeared. The DCI had left the White House right after lunch, headed for his district office. He had told Unruh, “You stay on top of the operational details, Carl. Let me know if there’s any abrupt change. In the meantime, I’ll see if I can’t coordinate the mess I think is brewing.”
The DCI was responsible for all of the intelligence community, not just the CIA, and all of the intelligence community was hopping at the moment. The FBI was gathering information on internal problems, particularly the rallies erupting near CIS installations. Charts on easels displayed the locations and the intensity of protests that were taking place around the nation. A quick glance told him that the clamor was spreading, working its way eastward from the West Coast.
The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research was collating data transmitted from foreign embassies and forwarding it to the Situation Room. More charts depicted the rallies, protests, and near-riots under way, not only in the Pacific-proximity cities of Tokyo, Hong Kong and Shanghai, but also in Paris, London and Cape Town.
The world was pissed off, Unruh figured.
No one really knew what the consequences might be. He supposed some people thought they would see a mushroom cloud erupt over the Pacific, spreading death and mutations from the international date line eastward. That did not happen in a meltdown, but the results were no less tragic in terms of marine ecology. And people would die, no doubt about it.
Shaking the curtain of uneasy sleep from his head, Unruh picked up the coffee mug in front of him and took a sip. It was cold and bitter.
“You still there, boss?”
“Yeah, Jack. Trying to get my head going. The Sea Lion has arrived, huh?”
“Right. And they were waiting for it. Our Keyhole got some shots of the off-loading before it went over the horizon. I imagine they took it right to the port. It’s probably going aboard the Olʼyantsev as we speak.”
“If they were thinking ahead, they’d have done it like Brande’s doing it,” Unruh said.
“No imagination over there,” Evoy concluded.
“We need imagination, as well as luck.”
“So. You want me to stay with what we’re doing?”
The NPIC was monitoring every movement in the region of the downed rocket.
“Sure do.”
“What else is going on? I get to see all the pictures, but I think I’m missing out on something.”
“You’re safe where you are,” Unruh told him, rescanning the charts. “DC and San Francisco police have quadrupled the guard contingents at the CIS embassy buildings and the consulate. There’s nearly five thousand people outside the embassy on Tunlaw Road. It looks as if Americans want justice in the good old lynch mob fashion. We’re not alone, though, Jack. CIS embassies all around the world are under siege”
“With some very good justification. Did you see the press statement?”
“Yes. It fell far short of expectation,” Unruh agreed, “though probably not my expectation.”
The evening newscasts had all repeated the statement released by the CIS President. He mentioned only that a CIS rocket had crashed at sea and that Soviet naval forces were about to recover it. There was no mention of the nuclear reactor contained in the payload module.
The DDO — the Deputy Director for Operations — at the CIA, Oren Patterson, had all of his Russian-based assets attempting to uncover information about the Topaz Four reactor, but so far, Unruh had not heard of any developments.
“How about the other people going to this party?” Unruh asked.
“We’re tracking the same bunch as before, except that we’ve added the Japanese to our list, Carl. They’ve put a research vessel to sea.”
“Okay, babe. Keep me posted.”
Unruh replaced the phone in its cradle on the table. He picked up his coffee mug and carried it to the cart that had been wheeled in early that morning and urged a stream of hot, black juice from the urn. There were a few sandwiches left on a platter, but the bread looked stale, and he could swear the ham was turning green.
He turned and surveyed the room while he tried to coax his nerves to life.
The big electronic plotting board was still tracking the major players, now with the addition of the Japanese vessel, identified as the Eastern Flower.
The population of the Situation Room had begun depleting as soon as the President left early in the morning. Chief of Naval Operations Ben Delecourt and most of the military people had gone back to the Pentagon or Arlington Hall — home of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Bob Balcon, the Chief of Staff, was in and out, checking the plotting board. The National Security Advisor, Warren Amply, was napping in an office across the hall. Everyone was in touch by telephone, beeper or courier.
The State Department bunch had begun arriving in mid-afternoon. After Unruh’s conversation with Hampstead about committees and fact-finding groups and summit meetings, Unruh had begun to worry that diplomacy would get in the way of decisions and action, and he had raised the issue with Balcon. The Chief of Staff, after a tête-à-tête with the President, had called the Secretary of State and asked him to put together a team to deal with negotiations if the need arose.
The State Department negotiation team, eight members strong, sat around the Situation Room, at the table and in chairs along the walls, not doing much of anything that Unruh could see. He was afraid he had started things off in the wrong direction, creating a pre-committee committee.
There was now a representative from the Department of Energy present, and he had been on the phone most of the day, talking to the experts at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which was based in Vienna. Unruh, who had once been posted to Vienna, thought that, if an international commission needed a home somewhere, Vienna was the place to choose.