Jennifer Morgue (2 page)

The ship's crew has a vessel to run: an unholy huge behemoth, 66,000 tons of deep-ocean exploratory mining ship, 400 million bucks and seven years in the building. The CIA dudes are keeping a wary eye on the Russian trawler that's stooging around on the horizon. And as for the Texan wildcat drilling guys, for the past couple of days they've been working ceaselessly on the stabilized platform, bolting one sixty-foot steel pipe after another onto the top of the drill string and lowering it into the depths of the Pacific Ocean.

But the "A" and "B" teams have been sitting on their hands for weeks with nothing to do but oil and service the enormous mechanism floating in the moon pool at the heart of the ship, then twiddle their thumbs nervously for eighty hours as the drill lowers it into the crushing darkness.

And now that Clementine is nearly on target, there's a storm coming.

"Language." Duke is a tight-ass. "How bad can it get"

Milgram brandishes his paper, the latest chart to come out of the weather office on C deck where Stan and Gilmer hunch over their green-glowing radar displays and the telex from San Diego. "Force nine predicted within forty-eight hours, probability sixty percent and rising. We can't take that, Duke. We go over force six, the impellers can't keep us on station. We'll lose the string."

The kid, Steve, crowds close. "Anyone told Spook City yet?" The guys from Langley hang out in a trailer on E deck with a locked vault-type door. Everyone calls it Spook City.

"Nah." Duke doesn't sound too concerned. "Firstly, it hasn't happened yet. Secondly, we're only forty fathoms up from zero." He snaps his fingers at the curious heads that have turned in his direction from their camera stations: "Look to it, guys! We've got a job to do!"

Clementine — the vast, submersible grab at the end of the drill string — weighs around 3,000 tons and is more than 200 feet long. It's a huge steel derrick, painted gray to resist the corrosive effects of miles of seawater. At a distance it resembles a skeletal lobster, because of the five steel legs protruding from either flank. Or maybe It's more like a giant mantrap, lowered into the icy stillness of Davy Jones's locker to grab whatever it can from the sea floor.

Duke runs the engineering office from his throne in the center of the room. One wall is covered in instruments; the other is a long stretch of windows overlooking the moon pool at the heart of the ship. A door at one side of the window wall provides access to a steel-mesh catwalk fifty feet above the pool.

Here in the office the noise of the hydraulic stabilizers isn't quite deafening; there's a loud mechanical whine and a vibration they feel through the soles of their boots, but the skull-rattling throbbing is damped to a survivable level. The drilling tower above their heads lowers the endless string of pipes into the center of the pool at a steady six feet per minute, day in and day out. Steve tries not to look out the window at the pipes because the effect is hypnotic: they've been sliding smoothly into the depths for many hours now, lowering the grab toward the bottom of the ocean.

The ship is much bigger than the grab that dangles beneath it on the end of three miles of steel pipe, but it's at the grab's mercy. Three miles of pipe makes for a prodigious pendulum, and as the grab sinks slowly through the deepocean currents, the ship has to maneuver frantically to stay on top of it in the six-foot swells. Exotic domes on top of the vessel's bridge suck down transmissions from the Navy's Transit positioning satellites, feeding them to the automatic Station Keeping System that controls the ship's bow and stern thrusters, and the cylindrical surge compensators that the derrick rests on. Like a swan, it looks peaceful on the surface but under the waterline there's a hive of frantic activity.

Everything — the entire 400-megabuck investment, ten years of Company black operations — depends on what happens in the next few hours. When they reach the bottom.

Steve turns back to his TV screen. It's another miracle of technology. The barge has cameras and floodlights, vacuum tubes designed to function in the abyssal depths. But his camera is flaking out, static hash marching up the screen in periodic waves: the pressure, tons per square inch, is damaging the waterproof cables that carry power and signal. "This is shit," he complains. "We're never going to spot it — if..."

He trails off. Good-time Norm at the next desk is standing up, pointing at something on his screen. There's a whoop from the other side of the room. He squints at his screen and between the lines of static he sees a rectilinear outline.

The public address system crackles overhead: "Clementine crew. K-129 on screens two and five, range approximately fifty feet, bearing two-two-five. Standby, fine thruster control."

It's official — they've found what they're looking for.

The atmosphere in Spook City is tense but triumphant.

"We're there," announces Cooper. He smirks at the hatchetfaced Brit in the crumpled suit, who is smoking an unfiltered Camel in clear violation of shipboard fire regulations. "We did it!"

"We'll see," mutters the Brit. He stubs the cigarette out and shakes his head. "Getting there is only half the struggle."

Nettled, Murph glares at him. "What's your problem?" he demands.

"You're messing with something below 1,000 meters, in strict contravention of Article Four," says the Brit. "I'm here as a neutral observer in accordance with Section Two — "

"Fuck you and your neutral status, you're just sore because you guys don't have the balls to stand on your waiver rights — "

Cooper gets between them before things can escalate again. "Cool it. Murph, how about checking with the bridge again to see if there's been any sign of the commies taking an interest? They'll twig when they see we've stopped lowering the string. James — " He pauses. Grimaces slightly. The Brit's alias is transparent and, to a Company man, borderline insulting: Cooper wonders, not for the first time, Why the fuck does he call himself that? " — let's go take a hike down to the moon pool and see what they've found."

"Suits me." The Brit stands up, unfolding like a stick insect inside his badly fitting gray suit. His cheek twitches but his expression stays frozen. "After you."

They leave the office and Cooper locks the door behind him. The Hughes GMDI ship may be enormous — it's bigger than a Marine Corps assault carrier, larger than an Iowa-class battleship — but its companionways and corridors are a cramped, gray maze, punctuated by color-coded pipes and ducts conveniently located at shin-scraping and head-banging height. It doesn't roll in the swells but it rocks, weirdly, held solidly on station by the SKS thrusters (a new technology that accounts for a goodly chunk of the cost of the ship).

Down six flights of steps there's another passage and a bulkhead: then Cooper sees the dogged-back hatch leading out into the moon pool at the level of the fifty-foot catwalk. As usual it takes his breath away. The moon pool is just under 200 feet long and 75 feet wide, a stillness of black water surrounded by the gantries and cranes required for servicing the barge. The giant docking legs are fully extended below the waterline at either end of the pool. The drill string pierces the heart of the chamber like a black steel spear tying it to the ocean floor. The automatic roughneck and the string handling systems have fallen silent, the deafening clatter and roar of the drill system shut down now that the grab has reached its target. Soon, if all goes well, the derrick above them will begin hauling up the string, laboriously unbolting the hundreds of pipe segments and stacking them on the deck of the ship, until finally Clementine — also known as the HMB-1 "mining barge" — rumbles to the surface of the pool in a flurry of cold water, clutching its treasure beneath it. But for now the moon pool is a peaceful haven, its surface marred only by shallow, oily ripples.

Strange gray outlines swim on the screen. "Get me a bit more light on t h a t ..."

Everyone falls silent for a while. "That's not good," says one of the engineers, a wiry guy from New Mexico who Cooper vaguely remembers is called Norm. The big TV screen in the middle is showing a flat surface emerging from a gray morass of abyssal mud. A rectangular opening with rounded edges gapes in it — a hatch? — and there's something white protruding from a cylinder lying across it. The cylinder looks like a sleeve. Suddenly Cooper realizes what he's looking at: an open hatch in the sail of a submarine, the skeletonized remains of a sailor lying half-in and half-out of it.

"Poor bastards probably tried to swim for it when they realized the torpedo room was flooded," says a voice from the back of the room. Cooper looks around. It's Davis, somehow still managing to look like a Navy officer even though he's wearing a civilian suit. "That's probably what saved the pressure hull — the escape hatch was already open and the boat was fully flooded before it passed through its crush depth."

Cooper shivers, staring at the screen. "Consider Phlebas," he thinks, wracking his brain for the rest of the poem.

"Okay, so what about the impact damage?" That's Duke, typically businesslike: "I need to know if we can make this work."

More activity. Camera viewpoints swivel crazily, taking in the length of the Golf-II-class submarine. The water at this depth is mostly clear and the barge floodlights illuminate the wreck mercilessly, from the blown hatch in the sail to the great gash in the side of the torpedo room. The submarine lies on its side as if resting, and there's little obvious damage to Cooper's untrained eye. A bigger hatch gapes open in front of the sail. "What's that?" he asks, pointing.

The kid, Steve, follows his finger. "Looks like the number two missile tube is open," he says. The Golf-II class is a boomer, a ballistic missile submarine — an early one, dieselelectric.

It had carried only three nuclear missiles, and had to surface before firing. "Hope they didn't roll while they were sinking: if they lost the bird it could have landed anywhere."

"Anywhere — " Cooper blinks.

"Okay, let's get her lined up!" hollers Duke, evidently completing his assessment of the situation. "We've got bad weather coming, so let's haul!"

For the next half-hour the control room is a madhouse, engineers and dive-control officers hunched over their consoles and mumbling into microphones. Nobody's ever done this before — maneuvered a 3,000-ton grab into position above a sunken submarine three miles below the surface, with a storm coming. The sailors on the Soviet spy trawler on the horizon probably have their controllers back in Moscow convinced that they've been drinking the antifreeze again, with their tale of exotic, capitalist hypertechnology stealing their sunken boomer.

The tension in the control room is rising. Cooper watches over Steve's shoulder as the kid twiddles his joystick, demonstrating an occult ability to swing cameras to bear on the huge mechanical grabs, allowing their operators to extend them and position them close to the hull. Finally it's time.

"Stand by to blow pressure cylinders," Duke announces.

Ten pressure cylinders bolted to the grab vent silvery streams of bubbles: pistons slide home, propelled by a three mile column of seawater, drawing the huge clamps tight around the hull of the submarine. They bite into the mud, stirring up a gray cloud that obscures everything for a while.

Gauges slowly rotate, showing the position of the jaws.

"Okay on even two through six, odd one through seven. Got a partial on nine and eight, nothing on ten."

The atmosphere is electric. Seven clamps have locked tight around the hull of the submarine: two are loose and one — appears to have failed. Duke looks at Cooper. "Your call."

"Can you lift it?" asks Cooper.

"I think so." Duke's face is somber. "We'll see once we've got it off the mud."

"Let's check upstairs," Cooper suggests, and Duke nods.

The captain can say "yes" or "no" and make it stick — it's his ship they'll be endangering if they make a wrong call.

Five minutes later they've got their answer. "Do it," says the skipper, in a tone that brooks no argument. "It's what we're here for." He's on the bridge because the impending bad weather and the proximity of other ships — a second Russian trawler has just shown up — demands his presence, but there's no mistaking his urgency.

"Okay, you heard the man."

Five minutes later a faint vibration shakes the surface of the moon pool. Clementine has blown its ballast, scattering a thousand tons of lead shot across the sea floor around the submarine. The cameras show nothing but a gray haze for a while. Then the drill string visible through the control room window begins to move, slowly inching upward. "Thrusters to full," Duke snaps. The string begins to retract faster and faster, dripping water as it rises from the icy depths. "Give me a strain gauge report."

The strain gauges on the giant grabs are reading green across the board: each arm is supporting nearly 500 tons of submarine, not to mention the water it contains. There's a loud mechanical whine from outside, and a sinking feeling, and the vibration Cooper can feel through the soles of his Oxford brogues has increased alarmingly — the Explorer's drill crew is running the machines at full power now that the grab has increased in weight. The ship, gaining thousands of tons in a matter of seconds, squats deeper in the Pacific swell.

"Satisfied now?" asks Cooper, turning to grin at the Brit, who for his part looks as if he's waiting for something, staring at one screen intently.

"Well?"

"We've got a little time to go," says the hatchet-faced foreigner.