Breakthrough (8 page)

15

Caesare walked into Will Borger’s lab and found him at his desk going over the map he had seen last time he was there.  Borger looked up and nodded.  “Hi Steve.” 

“Hey Will, t
hanks for making time for me,” Caesare replied.  He walked over and handed a small storage drive to Borger.

“No problem.”  Borger gave the drive a quick once over and turned to his computer to insert it.  “Where’s Clay?” he asked while typing.

“He’s out playing with dolphins.”

Borger smiled.  “I’m not even going to ask.”  A window opened on his screen showing the contents of the drive.  “Okay so what do we have here?”

“This is the video file our friend Tay sent over from the Pathfinder.  It’s a recording the Triton submersible made during the dive…before we lost it for them.  It’s not very long but Clay and I thought we should show it to you in case there was anything helpful on it.  We’re actually hoping it might give some indication of which direction it headed off in after we lost contact.”

“Okay.”  Borger started the video in half speed.  He reached behind himself for another can of Jolt cola without looking away.  He appeared to be constructing a small tower of empty Jolt cans on his
shelf.  Judging from the number of cans Caesare wondered if Borger was a shareholder.

Borger popped the can open and watched as the Triton descended through the deep blue water.  There was no sound but the video quality was crystal clear.  At just over
three minutes in, the first signs of interference appeared with just a few tiny white dots that were barely noticeable.  As the timeline increased, the dots became larger and more frequent but were still nothing more than a minor distraction.

Suddenly the interference became noticeably worse and Borger leaned forward.  He stopped the video and rewound.  He played the same several seconds over and over repeatedly and stopped on a specific frame. 

“What is this?” he asked mostly to himself.

Caesare leaned in.  “What?”

Borger went back and forth between the series of frames.  He pointed to the screen in the upper right hand corner.  “This right here.”  

Caesare looked closer.  A subtle but lightly colored shape appeared out of the blue. As each frame was played, the shape sharpened ever so slightly and began to resemble a line with a gentle curve.  “Hmm… a reflection of light from the sub’s interior light, maybe as it hits the front Plexiglas?”

“Maybe,” Borger said pursing his lips.  He continued watching the frames again and again.  The shape grew more and more distinct until the interference finally became so bad that it overwhelmed the rest of the picture.  He backed the frames up again.  “I don’t think it’s a reflection.”  He pointed to a small speck on the screen.  “Ocean water is loaded with small pieces of debris and organic material.  Look closely here…we can see a small piece of that moving past the window in this upward direction.  And here it passes over the white shape.   If the shape were a reflection this small speck would have disappeared in the glare.”

Caesare nodded.  “Right.”

“It’s possible that it could be some other video anomaly, but I doubt it.”  He played the video forward again.  “Unfortunately right here the interference gets so strong we lose it.”  

Caesare straightened himself up.  “So we’ll never know.”

“Well not necessarily,” Borger replied closing the window on the computer and opening a program.  He typed a number of commands too fast for Caesare to follow.

“What do you mean?”

“What I mean is,” Borger said as he now moved in and out of windows and programs.  “Is that we may be able to remove some of that interference.”

“How do we do that?”  Caesare pulled up a chair and sat down.

“If we can identify the rate and degree of interference, the computer may be able to calculate for it and remove the interference from the screen.  This is a technique that astronomers use with ground based telescopes called ‘adaptive optics’.  The earth’s atmosphere distorts the light passing through it so scientists have come up with a way to use a laser to measure this distortion and allow the computer to correct for that distortion.  The result are images almost as clear as the Hubble telescope produces, orbiting far outside of our atmosphere.”

“Of course we don’t have a laser to measure with.”  Caesare pointed out.

“That true,” replied Borger.  “But we have the next best thing.”

“Which is what?”

Borger smiled.  “Mathematics.”

Clay leaned against the back wall of the bridge and waited with Alison and her team to hear back from Sally or Dirk.  Lee Kenwood sat in front of the computer and looked through some of the system’s logs.  He looked up at Clay.

“You know Mr. Clay, I mean John, I can record this session if you like.”

Alison spoke before Clay could answer.  “I’m sure they’ve been recording this from the moment we started.”

Clay looked at Alison and then at Lee with a shrug.  “She’s right.”

Lee smiled nervously.  “Ah.”

“I’m going to get some air.” said Alison as she opened
an outside door not far from where they were standing.  Chris followed her out.

Alison grabbed the rail to steady herself and looked over the side of the ship into the blue water.  “I swear these guys are all the same.”

Chris frowned looking uncertain.  “I don’t know, I’m not sure if this guy fits the mold that we’ve come to hate.”  He looked at her trying to get her to grin.

She was not biting.  “Didn’t you hear what he just said?  He admitted to recording this whole thing without us even knowing.”

“Yeah but he didn’t deny it did he?”  Chris pointed out.  “He could have just kept quiet and said ‘sure Lee that would be great if you could record it for us’.  I mean, Christ Ali, this is the military.  They pretty much record everything!”

She shook her head.  “I don’t trust him.”

Chris dropped his head.  “Ali, you don’t trust anyone.”

Her eyes widened in surprise.  “That’s not true!”

“Oh yes, it is true and you know it!  Look, we’ve been friends a long time but admit it, you keep your cards close to the vest on pretty much everything.”

Alison squinted at Chris with a look of indignation.  “Not everything!”

“Ali you’re great,” he said.  “But you’ve got to let some of this stuff go.  I don’t like the military either, and you know what, maybe they end up screwing us again somehow, but I don’t want to go through life being pissed off all the time.”  Chris looked back out on the water.  “Look, I don’t know this guy Clay, but it seems like he genuinely appreciates our help with this.  Okay, are they getting some PR out of it with the press, sure, but who cares?  They can’t get some attention without us getting it too.”

Alison stared at him for a long time and finally exhaled.  “Fine.  I’ll give him a chance.” 

“That a girl,” Chris said.  He put his arm around her and gave her a quick squeeze.  “Now let’s enjoy the view and try not to think about the fact that he’s probably going through your purse right now.”

Inside Lee looked up from his monitor again at Clay who was leaning against the wall to steady himself against the rolling of the ship
, and watching the crew members at the helm.

“So John, what is it exactly that you do for the Navy, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Clay raised his eyebrows.  “Not at all, I work for a department in the Navy called Special Investigations.”

“That isn’t one of those ‘I’d have to kill you’
type of groups is it?”

Clay laughed.  “No.  Our investigations are unique issues, usually outside of normal naval operations.”

“What kind of things do you investigate?”  Lee was curious.

“Most of it is classified but it typically has to do with system malfunctions or communication problems.  An example might be two systems using overlapping frequencies and causing problems.  Pretty boring stuff.”

Lee smiled.  “That sounds about as boring at a cocktail party as what I do.” 

Clay laughed again.  “Well if we run into each other at a party, I’ll listen to your stories if you listen to mine.”

“You’re on,” Lee said laughing along.  “Well for what it’s worth, it nice to be around another tech head for a change.  I think I bore the team a lot with my geek speak.”

“That’s understandable,” h
e nodded.  “It’s a hell of a project you’re working on.”

“That it is,
” agreed Lee.  “Things have gotten really exciting since the translations started.  We didn’t expect things to happen so quickly, but we’re certainly happy about it.  We were afraid it would be just the opposite, especially Alison.”

Clay nodded and looked out the window at Chris and Alison talking to each other.

“Listen,” Lee continued.  “About Alison, she’s a great girl.  She’s just very protective over this whole thing especially Dirk and Sally.  She had a bad experience with the Navy in the past, kinda got screwed career-wise, so she’s not too excited to go down that route again.”

“I can understand that.”

“She’s smart as a whip too,” Lee added with a wink.  “So be careful.”

Clay smiled.  “I’ll watch
myself.”

Captain Emerson approached and looked at Clay.  “We’re starting to see some chop.”  He then looked down at Lee.  “Any idea, son, on how long we might be waiting here?”

“No sir,” Lee replied.  “That would probably be a question for Ali and Chris.”

Alison checked her watch and looked at Chris.  “They
are
coming back right?”

“I sure as h
ell hope so,” he said squinting.

The door opened behind them
and they both turned around to see Emerson and Clay step outside.  Emerson glanced at the water again and approached Alison.  “Ma’am any word from your dolphins?”

“Not yet.”

“Well it looks as though we’re seeing some chop building.  If the swells increase too much, we won’t be able to stay here.”

She raised her eyebrows.  “You mean leave?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“We can’t leave without them!”

“Ma’am I understand your dilemma, but if things get too rough I have no choice but to weigh anchor.  I cannot risk the safety of the other passengers.”

“How much longer do we have?” she asked.

“It’s hard to say.  If conditions continue as they are, I would estimate we have one, maybe two hours.”

Alison was clearly starting to worry.  She nodded to the captain and turned back to the water looking for signs of Dirk and Sally.

As they stepped back into the bridge, Clay gave Emerson a curious look.  “Have you noticed anything strange about the weather?”

“What do you mean?”  Emerson asked peering back outside.

“Well the current is getting rougher, but there is no wind and not a cloud in the sky.”

16

Sitting on twenty-nine acres of land and housing over seventeen miles of corridor, the Pentagon was one of the world’s largest and most efficient office buildings.  On the bottom floor, tucked away in a tiny lab sat Will Borger toiling over a program to try to remove some of the static from the Triton’s video.  It started with a long call with one of the programmers at U.C. Berkeley who spent an hour sending over computer code and walking Borger through the logistics, including the mathematical algorithms necessary.  Since Borger was not looking for planets he had to rewrite several large sections of the program.

Behind him Caesare walked back in with an extra-large pizza and two six packs of Jolt; his payment for commandeering the afternoon of the smartest guy in the building.  Borger had been typing nonstop from the time Caesare left, and upon returning he was beginning to worry that this might take even longer, in which case he was on the hook for dinner as well.

“How are we looking?” Caesare asked sitting back down next to him.

Borger took a break and ran carefully through the syntax of the text he had just added.  “Had a couple of bugs I’ve been trying to work out.  I think we may have it.”  He switched to another window and typed a command to compile all the pieces again.  “Good, no errors this time.”  He typed one last command and slapped the enter key.  “Let’s give it a whirl.”

Borger turned around and popped open the top
of the pizza box.  He grabbed a big piece and a napkin and turned back to the monitor.  The screen filled with the video footage and advanced the frames again in slow motion.  Caesare bit into his own slice and leaned back watching.

The frames advanced quickly until the computer reached the point in which the first dots of interference became visible in the video.  Suddenly the video slowed considerably and the computer could be seen scanning the frozen picture pixel by pixel and eliminating the extra dots before moving to the next.  The two men watched silently as each picture became clearer and clearer.   By the time the program finished, both Borger and Caesare were leaning forward trying to understand what they were looking at in the final frame.  The Triton had changed direction as the object on the screen was no longer visible in the corner.  It was now stretching across most of the window.

“What in the world is that?”

Borger shook his head.  “No idea.  It looks like…an arc of some kind.”

“Is that,” Caesare asked getting even closer, “on the bottom?”

“I think so.  See some of this darker material around the outsides?  That’s coral.”  He thought a moment.  “This reminds me of the bundles of fiber optic cable that the telecommunications companies lay underwater, but this is much bigger.”

Caesare frowned.  “It’s not cable.   The ocean is not that deep here but even with this depth we should not be able to see it.  There’s not enough light that far down.  And there is no way the Triton’s lights are strong enough.”

“True,
” Borger agreed.  “But that means that whatever it is, it’s emitting its own
light
.”

“This is bizarre.  Can we determine how big it is?”

“We can do better than that.”  He began typing again.  “If we invert the color…” the object suddenly turned black while the rest of the screen inverted to white.  “…and we tell the computer to zoom out…we can have it use the current dimension to estimate what the overall shape is.”  He hit the return key again and watched the object shrink in size, and then the computer began to add in pieces to complete what it calculated the shape to be.  When it finished they were both shocked.

“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

Borger nodded.  “It looks like…a giant ring.”

Lee sat at his small table and tried repeatedly to summon the dolphins.  Every few minutes he typed
Hello Dirk
,
Hello Sally
and waited.  No reply came.  Alison stumbled in and grabbed for the wall behind him.

“Anything?”

Lee shook his head dejected.  One of the small devices on the table abruptly slid with the pitch of the ship and he quickly grabbed it before it fell off.

Alison turned around and looked at Chris who shared her worried expr
ession.  “We may have lost them,” he offered gently.

Alison shook her head.  “No.”  She looked down at Lee again who took the hint and typed another message to them.

Clay stepped into the room from the other side of the bridge.  He nodded to Captain Emerson.  “All of the passengers are in the lounge.  It’s a little tight but they should be fine, though several have gotten sick.  They’re sitting close to the door.”

Emerson nodded and they both looked over at Alison and her team.  They crossed the rest of the room before Emerson spoke.  “I’m afraid we’re out of time.”

Alison held on bracing herself against the wall.  “Just ten more minutes.  Please!  We can’t leave without them.”

“Young lady we can’t wait any longer.  If things get worse, we’re going to be in some serious trouble.  We have to leave!”

“Please!” she begged.  “You don’t know what losing them would do to us!”

Clay leaned slightly toward Emerson.  “It will take us at least five minutes to get the anchor up.”

Emerson stared at him, then at Alison.  He exhaled and looked over this shoulder.  “Officer Harris.”

The first officer quickly turned around.  “Yes sir!”

“Let’s get the anchor up.”

“Yes sir.”  He turned back to his console and picked up a phone.

A grim Emerson turned back to Alison.  “It’s going to take five or six minutes to raise that anchor.  You have until then.  But when it’s up, we’re leaving!  Understood?”

Alison gave a meek nod.  “Thank you.”

In the bow of the ship, a giant motor slowly began turning and reeling in the enormous anchor chain.  The ship was beginning to pitch wildly as huge swells rolled in under the Pathfinder.  With each swell the bow shot high into the air and crashed down on the other side.  The dolphin tank on the stern had lost almost of third of its water to the violent up and down movements of the ship.

In the lounge, purses and camera bags
fell off the shelves and tumbled across the floor.  Everyone tried to find something to hold onto and a few became frightened when they lost their hold and fell on top of the person next to them. 

Suddenly the ascending anchor chain stopped with a loud clang.

Two crewmen below deck examined the anchor windlass and tried the motor again.  Nothing moved.  They tried again with more power.  This time the motor remained frozen and started releasing a small cloud of gray smoke.  The two men quickly adjusted the controls and reversed the direction trying to unwind the chain again; still nothing.  The giant anchor was clearly wedged on the bottom.

With phone in hand, first officer Harris looked at Captain Emerson, who like everyone aboard heard the loud noise and felt the sudden jolt of the ship.  “The anchor windlass is jammed.”

Emerson’s eyes widened.  “Well get it cleared!”

“We can’t sir, we’ve tried.”

Emerson and everyone else in the bridge were struggling to maintain a solid hold on something.  He looked out the window again.  The skies were still clear but the ocean was continuing to worsen, and quickly.  He looked at Clay who gave him an almost imperceptible nod.

“Cut it!” he told Harris.

“Aye sir,
” the first officer replied.

Below deck one of the two crewmen dropped a dark mask over his face and fired up a giant torch.  He looped one arm over the large notched wheel and the second stood behind him and tried to provide support.  The torch flame touched one of the giant chain links and slowly began cutting the thick metal.

In the bridge the communication officer picked up another handset.  He listened for a moment and turned to Clay.

“Mr. Clay, you have a ship to shore call.”

Clay stumbled forward reaching for the end of the bridge’s giant console.  “Who the hell is it?”

The young man spoke into the phone and listened.  “Caller is a Steve Caesare.”

“For Christ sake,” Clay growled.  “Tell him I’ll call him back.”

He relayed the message and looked back at Clay.  “He says it’s urgent.”

Clay snatched the phone and almost yelled into the mouthpiece.  “Not a good time Steve!”

“Are you okay?” asked Caesare.

“Yeah.  Got our hands full.  Make it fast.”

Caesare’s tone was serious.  “John listen.  We found something on the video from Triton.”

“Go.”

“There is something big on the ocean floor.” Caesare said.  “Something
really
big.”

Clay looked at Emerson while he listened.  “What is it?”

“We don’t know.  It looks like a giant ring.  Borger puts it at about twenty-five kilometers across.”

Clay’s eyes widened.  “Did you say two five?”

“Yes, two five kilometers across,” Caesare confirmed.

“Good god!”

“And you’re sitting right on top of it.  You need to get out of there!”

“We’re working on that.”  Clay tossed the handset back to the communication officer and turned to Emerson.  “We need to leave right now!”

Two decks down the sailors stumbled back and forth trying to keep the torch focused on the chain.  The bow rose up again and both grasped at the giant windlass wheel to keep their footing.  Tiny pieces of steel fell to the floor as the white hot torch slowly ate its way through the giant section of metal.  Suddenly the ship rolled to port and both the crewmen fell and tumbled into the giant metal wall, smashing the head of the torch and extinguishing the flame. 

Officer Harris turned to Emerson again.  “Sir, we lost the torch.”

Emerson stared at him thinking.  “How far are we through that chain?”

Harris was not sure what the captain meant but then realized.  “Far enough!”

“Do it!”

Harris turned to the other men on the bridge.  “Engines up gentlemen!”

“They’re here!” Lee interrupted.  “Dirk and Sally are back!”

Alison lunged to his table and checked the screen.  She immediately turned back to Emerson.  “Wait!  Wait!”

Emerson gave her a hard look and held up his index finger.  “
One
minute!”

Alison typed as quickly as she could.  “
Sally are you and Dirk okay?
”

Yes
, answered Sally.

We have trouble.  We have to leave.  Follow us!
  Alison clicked the Translate button and looked around the bridge.  Everyone was holding on to a piece of the room and watching her.

An error message appeared on the screen.  “Unable to Translate.”

“Oh god,” she groaned.

Lee looked over her shoulder.  “Take out the exclamation mark.”

Alison typed it again.

After a long wait both dolphins finally responded with
Okay
.

“Go!” shouted Alison to the crew.

The Pathfinder’s giant engines roared to life and the ship pushed forward.  The chain became taut as the Pathfinder pulled hard against it.  A shudder ran through the entire hull.  Both crew and passengers held tight as the ship strained under the pull of the chain and anchor.

“Full power!” barked Emerson.

The engines roared louder.  The chain scraped loudly on the side of the ship.  Very slowly and below deck, the half-cut link near the windlass began to twist under the stress.  Inch by inch it continued to stretch and pull until the chain finally exploded sending the broken end smashing through the hull as the ship lurched forward. 

Nearly everyone on the bridge lost their hold and fell to the floor.  The Pathfinder sailed across the giant swell and smashed bow first into the next
wave.  In the lounge, passengers bounced off the bulkhead and over tables grasping for each other as they fell.