“Nothing’s flying low in that weather you’ve got, Brande. It’s too damned risky.”
“There’s a couple hundred people taking a risk here, Unruh. What’s one more?”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Brande hung up and shoved the handset toward Emry. “The channel’s all yours, Larry.”
He checked the status of the DepthFinder on the monitor — it was 17,000 feet down with battery charges near the halfway point and all other systems in the green — then looked back to Emry’s video screen. The exploration director had narrowed the focus to an area south of the original search zone. The coordinates of the two boosters were marked with small circles, and the positions of the Sea Lion and the DepthFinder were indicated with tiny squares. The CIS sub was tinted red and the MVU submersible was yellow, naturally.
Lifting the phone from in front of Sorenson, Brande lodged it between his shoulder and his ear. “Bob, you free?”
“Hell, no, Chief. I cost money” Mayberry seemed surprisingly at ease despite not knowing whether or not he was being subjected to unplanned radiation therapy.
“What’s the situation?”
“Okey’s got Atlas out, snooping around the booster. I don’t know how they know it’s the left one, but probably by the lettering on the side. Maybe the Cyrillic lettering says ‘left side, people.’ We’re getting tremendous pictures.”
Mayberry sounded like the typical oceanographer, ecstatic with a new discovery.
Brande wished he could see the video.
“What kind of condition is it in, Bob?”
“It’s sunken a few inches into the bottom muck, and the nose is aimed to the northeast, so it must have tumbled after it broke loose. I’m guessing it was hot when it hit the cold water because the skin is buckled pretty badly. Other than that, and knowing I’ve never seen a booster rocket this close before, I think it’s a complete unit.”
Ingrid Roskens, listening to their conversation over the speaker, leaned over Brande. “Ask him when he thinks it was severed from the main rocket.”
Brande repeated the question.
“Damn,” Mayberry said. “Not from hitting the bottom, for sure. I’d guess they parted ways at impact, or shortly thereafter. The boosters don’t have fins, nothing to improve the glide.”
“And it still traveled over five miles from the point of impact. I wish I could see it,” Roskens said.
“Go get Valeri,” Brande said. “Have him talk to Rastonov and see if we can’t borrow, buy, or rent a pair of their Loudspeaker transceivers.”
“Done,” she said.
“Bob, what are you doing now?” Brande asked on the phone.
“We’re drifting over to take a look at the second booster. By then, the people on the surface should have a new search plan for us.”
“We’re working on it. Watch out for the Sea Lion. She’s southeast of the second booster.”
“Gotcha, Dane.”
Brande stood up and stretched. His muscles felt a little bunched up, but he was not tired. He was still too angry for fatigue.
At one point in the night, he had logically considered the position taken by the White House, and logically, he understood it. A few lives were expendable in the short run if they protected a few hundred thousand lives in the long run.
The logic did not matter a whit, however, when the expendables were Brandeʼs friends and colleagues. His anger manifested itself in taut neck muscles and hands that clenched into fists every now and then.
Again, he checked the status board of the submersible. The image of Rae at the controls never left his mind.
The DepthFinder did not have radiation measuring equipment, but the Sea Lion did, and Rastonov had told them that nothing above normal radiation levels had yet been encountered by the Commonwealth submersible.
That was the only reason Rae was still on the bottom.
“Take a break, Dane. I’ll sit in for a while,” Otsuka told him.
“Iʼm all right, Kim.”
“You are, now. What about later?”
Brande shrugged, then went forward to the wardroom and got himself a cup of coffee. He carried it to a forward porthole and tried to read the ocean.
The sea was difficult to read because of the hard pellets of rain pelting the glass. Fourteen-or fifteen-foot waves, he guessed, running from the northwest, forcing them to stay bow-on in the same direction. To the west were the lights of a large ship, probably one of the CIS warships. North, he saw the lights of another ship, and he thought it might be the Kane. He could not see any other lights, but knew there were ships around. Their own radar had recorded twenty-two an hour before.
Studying the wave action and thinking about the difficulties they would have in raising the submersible to the deck during the next changeover, he decided to allow more time than planned. Additionally, he thought of some other changes that should be made.
You sonovabitch! she’d say.
It’s for your own good, he’d say.
No, she wouldn’t buy that.
Because I care about you?
You sonovabitch!
Because I love you?
Maybe.
Brande spun around, left the lounge, and strode down the corridor to the lab.
Everyone on board the vessel was now in the laboratory, except, he hoped, Connie Alvarez-Sorenson and one of the helmsmen on the bridge. There was a low level of chatter, but tensions seemed to be on the rise.
He pressed through the crowd and squatted next to Emry’s chair. On the screen now were two dotted lines connecting the impact point on the surface with the identified sites of the boosters on the bottom. Emry was experimenting with another dotted line, curving it from the impact point to various spots on the sea floor.
The Orion rose and fell with a fairly steady rhythm. People crossed the deck with strange syncopation.
“Got something, Larry?”
“Maybe. Over sixty percent of the scenarios run by Piredenko’s model show the A2 hitting the surface and jamming the guidance fins into a right turn. If the boosters peel off as a result of impact and heat stress as it’s going down, and land where they are now, then the main rocket — first, second, and payload stages, with the fins still forcing the turn — probably curves back a hell of a lot farther west than we anticipated that it would.”
“If it didn’t rotate,” Brande said, playing devil’s advocate.
“Wouldn’t do it, not without two of the fins moving to opposing positions,” Emry countered. “I don’t think it rolled, since the left booster is down on the left of the path, and the right booster is on the right. If it were rotating on the way down, the booster positions could have been reversed.”
“I give you fifty-fifty on that.”
“Appreciate your confidence.”
“Are we narrowing the possibilities?” Brande asked. “Damned sure. I just told Rae and Dokey to head south and track a little more to the west, along the twenty-eight second line. Drozdov is also headed south, along the thirty-second line. Cartwright approved.”
“Good man.” Brande stood up, feeling the fuzzy anticipation of discovery. He had felt it before.
He leaned over the bench and pulled the communication net microphone close. Pressing the transmit switch, he said, “This is Dane Brande. Who’s on the net?”
“John Cartwright here.”
“Pyotr Rastonov.”
“Pyotr, is General Oberstev handy?”
After a second, he heard, “This is Dmitri Oberstev.”