Raise the Titanic! (3 page)

The President swiveled
in his chair, clasped his hands behind his head, and stared unseeing out of the window of the Oval Office and cursed his lot. He hated his job with a passion he hadn't thought possible. He had known the exact moment the excitement had gone out of it. He had known it the morning he had found it hard to rise from bed. That was always the first sign. A dread of beginning the day.

He wondered for the thousandth time since taking office why he had struggled so hard and so long for the damned, thankless job anyway. The price had been painfully high. His political trail was littered with the bones of lost friends and a broken marriage. And he'd no sooner taken the oath of office when he had found his infant administration staggered by a Treasury Department scandal, a war in South America, a nationwide airlines strike, and a hostile Congress that had come to mistrust whoever resided in the White House. He threw in an extra curse for Congress. Its members had overridden his last two vetoes, and the news didn't sit well with him.

Thank God, he would escape the bullshit of another election. How he'd managed to win two terms still mystified him. He had broken all the political taboos ever laid down for a successful candidate. Not only was he a divorced man but he was not a churchgoer, smoked cigars in public, and sported a large mustache besides. He had campaigned by ignoring his opponents and by hitting the voters solidly between the eyes with tough talk. And they had loved it. Opportunely, he had come along at a time when the average American was fed up with goody-goody candidates who smiled big and made love to the TV cameras, and who spoke trite, nothing sentences that the press couldn't twist or find hidden meanings to invent between the nouns.

Eighteen more months and his second term in office would be over. It was the one thought that kept him going. His predecessor had accepted the post of head regent at the University of California. Eisenhower had withdrawn to his farm in Gettysburg, and Johnson to his ranch in Texas. The President smiled to himself. None of that elder-statesman-on-the-sidelines crap for him. His plans called for self-exile to the South Pacific on a forty-foot ketch. There he would ignore every damned crisis that stirred the world while sipping rum and eyeing any pug-nosed, balloon-chested native girls who wandered within view. He closed his eyes and almost had the vision in focus when his aide eased open the door and cleared his throat.

“Excuse me, Mr. President, but Mr. Seagram and Mr. Donner are waiting.”

The President swiveled back to his desk and ran his hands through a patch of thick silver-tinted hair. “Okay, send them in.”

He brightened visibly. Gene Seagram and Mel Donner enjoyed immediate access to the President at any time, day or night. They were the chief evaluators for the Meta Section, a group of scientists who worked in total secrecy, researching projects that were as yet unheard of—projects that attempted to leapfrog current technology by twenty to thirty years.

Meta Section was the President's own brainchild. He had conceived it during his first year in office, connived and manipulated the unlimited secret funding, and personally recruited the small group of brilliant and dedicated men who comprised its core. He took great unadvertised pride in it. Even the CIA and the National Security Agency knew nothing of its existence. It had always been his dream to back a team of men who could devote their skills and talents to impossible schemes, fantasy schemes with one chance in a million for success. The fact that Meta Section was still batting zero five years after its inception bothered his conscience not at all.

There was no hand shaking, only cordial hello's. Then Seagram unlatched a battered leather briefcase and withdrew a folder stuffed with aerial photographs. He laid the pictures on the President's desk and pointed at several circled areas that were marked on transparent overlays.

“The mountain region on the upper island of Novaya Zemlya, north of the Russian mainland. All indications from our satellite sensors pinpoint this area as a slim possibility.”

“Damn!” the President muttered softly. “Every time we discover something like this, it has to sit in the Soviet Union or in some other untouchable location.” He scanned the photographs and then turned his eyes to Donner. “The earth is a big place. Surely there must be other promising areas?”

Donner shook his head. “I'm sorry, Mr. President, but geologists have been searching for byzanium ever since Alexander Beesley discovered its existence in 1902. To our knowledge, none has ever been found in quantity.”

“Its radioactivity is so extreme,” Seagram said, “it has long vanished from the continents in anything more than very minute trace amounts. The few bits and pieces we've gathered of this element have been gleaned from small, artificially prepared particles.”

“Can't you build a supply through artificial means?” the President asked.

“No, sir,” Seagram replied. “The longest-lived particle we managed to produce with a high-energy accelerator decayed in less than two minutes.”

The President sat back and stared at Seagram. “How much of it do you need to complete your program?”

Seagram looked to Donner, then at the President. “Of course you realize, Mr. President, we're still in a speculative stage…”

“How much do you need?” the President repeated.

“I should judge about eight ounces.”

“I see.”

“That's only the amount required to test the concept fully,” Donner added. “It would take an additional two hundred ounces to set up the equipment on a fully operational scale at strategic locations around the nation's borders.”

The President slumped in his chair. “Then I guess we scrap this one and go on to something else.”

Seagram was a tall, lanky man, with a quiet voice and a courteous manner, and, except for a large, flattened nose, he could almost have passed as an un-bearded Abe Lincoln.

Donner was just the opposite of Seagram. He was short and seemed almost as broad as he was tall. He had wheat-colored hair, melancholy eyes, and his face always seemed to be sweating. He began talking at a machine-gun pace. “Project Sicilian is too close to reality to bury and forget. I strongly urge that we push on. We'd be playing for the inside straight to end inside straights, but if we succeed…my God, sir, the consequences are enormous.”

“I'm open to suggestions,” the President said quietly.

Seagram took a deep breath and plunged in. “First, we'd need your permission to build the necessary installations. Second, the required funds. And third, the assistance of the National Underwater and Marine Agency.”

The President looked questioningly at Seagram. “I can understand the first two requests, but I don't grasp the significance of NUMA. Where does it fit in?”

“We're going to have to sneak expert mineralogists into Novaya Zemlya. Since it's surrounded by water, a NUMA oceanographic expedition nearby would make the perfect cover for our mission.”

“How long will it take you to test, construct, and install the system?”

Donner didn't hesitate. “Sixteen months, one week.”

“How far can you proceed without byzanium?”

“Right up to the final stage,” Donner answered.

The President tilted back in his chair and gazed at a ship's clock that sat on his massive desk. He said nothing for nearly a full minute. Finally he said, “As I see it, gentlemen, you want me to bankroll you into building a multimillion-dollar, unproven, untested, complex system that won't operate because we lack the primary ingredient, which we may have to steal from an unfriendly nation.”

Seagram fidgeted with his briefcase while Donner merely nodded.

“Suppose you tell me,” the President continued, “how I explain a maze of these installations stretching around the country's perimeters to some tight-fisted liberal in Congress who gets it in his head to investigate?”

“That's the beauty of the system,” said Seagram. “It's small and it's compact. The computers tell us that a building constructed along the lines of a small power station will do the job nicely. Neither the Russian spy satellites nor a farmer living next door will detect anything out of the ordinary.”

The President rubbed his chin. “Why do you want to jump the gun on the Sicilian Project before you're one-hundred-percent ready?”

“We're gambling, sir,” said Donner. “We're gambling that in the next sixteen months we can either make a breakthrough and produce byzanium in the laboratory or find a deposit we can extract somewhere on earth.”

“Even if it takes us ten years,” Seagram blurted, “the installations would be in and waiting. Our only loss would be time.”

The President stood up. “Gentlemen, I'll go along with your science-fiction scheme, but on one condition. You have exactly eighteen months and ten days. That's when the new man, whoever he may be, takes over my job. So if you want to keep your sugar daddy happy until then, get me some results.”

The two men across the desk went limp.

At last Seagram managed to speak. “Thank you, Mr. President. Somehow, someway, the team will bring in the mother lode. You can count on it.”

“Good. Now if you'll excuse me. I have to pose in the Rose Garden with a bunch of fat old Daughters of the American Revolution.” He held out his hand. “Good luck, and remember, don't screw up your undercover operations. I don't want another Eisenhower U-2 spy mission to blow up in my face. Understood?”

Before Seagram and Donner could answer, he had turned and walked out a side door.

 

Donner's Chevrolet was passed through the White House gates. He eased into the mainstream of traffic and headed across the Potomac into Virginia. He was almost afraid to look in the rearview mirror for fear that the President might change his mind and send a messenger to chase them down with a rejection. He rolled down the window and breathed in the humid summer air.

“We came off lucky,” Seagram said. “I guess you know that.”

“You're telling me. If he'd known we'd sent a man into Russian territory over two weeks ago, the fertilizer would have hit the windmill.”

“It still might,” Seagram mumbled to himself. “It still might if NUMA can't get our man out.”