He crossed the room twice more, thinking.
'He's right that there's no obvious reason to consider this Agency business. But dammit! It's got to be somebody's business.'
Rutherford rubbed his chin. 'Is this thing dangerous?'
Isaacs stopped pacing and faced the man seated at the desk. 'Not clear, is it? Whatever it is, it makes a lot of noise that travels through rock and water. But noise alone doesn't make it dangerous.' He resumed his pacing.
'The scary part is that something is moving through that rock and water, making the noise. We haven't the faintest idea what. That doesn't make it a threat, but it sure as hell makes me nervous!'
Rutherford leaned forward on his desk, watching Isaacs perform his epicycles. 'Listen. Your seismic data were ideal to track this thing over large distances coherently and establish that it moves along a fixed direction. But with your hint of where and when to look, our sonar detections should give a higher precision. We could put a ship right on top of it and find out what we're actually up against.'
Isaacs sprawled stiffly in a chair, as if he might leap out of it again at a moment's notice. 'Actually, we could do something like that on land, too, if McMasters hadn't tied my hands,' he responded. 'You're right, though, you're in a position to proceed, and I'm not.
'There is a practical point,' Isaacs continued. 'As it stands now, you don't formally have enough information to move on your own. You need our knowledge that it behaves in a systematic way.'
Rutherford nodded his assent.
'But I can't give it to you officially because of this roadblock McMasters has thrown up.'
Isaacs smiled and leaned forward in his chair. 'I think you're going to have to wake up in the middle of the night with a sudden insight. Your past brilliant record would presage such a breakthrough.'
Rutherford gave an exaggerated 'aw shucks' gesture. 'Actually, it might be better if it didn't come directly from me. McMasters knows we're friends, and he might fit things together and give you a hard time for leaking information. I think I can handle it so that one of my associates has the inspiration.'
The two men grinned at one another and then lapsed into a contemplative silence. After several minutes, Rutherford stirred and walked over to a window and looked out.
He turned and asked, 'What in hell are we getting into here, Bob?'
Isaacs returned his look, unspeaking.
Rutherford continued, 'I keep coming back to the fact that this flung is locked to a fixed direction in space. That must be a crucial hint. And the fact that it moves easily through solid earth and miles of water. What does that mean?' He turned to the window again, anxious to express disturbing thoughts, but subconsciously unable to face his friend at the same time.
'You know the image I get? A beam. A beam of some kind, focused into the earth and playing back and forth.'
He turned suddenly, angry at a situation that departed so profoundly from his experience, forcing him to strange, uncomfortable extrapolations.
'Damn it, Bob, you know I'm a hard-nosed, practical man. But don't we have to face up to the idea that something is out there? Doing this to the earth?'
Isaacs ground his right fist into his left palm. 'I confess, Av, when I first heard about the selective orientation in space, I found myself toying with such a notion. I put it out of my mind as idle fantasy. Now I don't know. I do know the more I learn about this thing, the more scared I am.
Avery Rutherford stood next to the captain of the USS Stinson and gazed out across the ocean as it reflected the early morning sun. Rutherford delighted at being able to spend these long days of mid-June where he loved to be the most. His job was challenging and important, but it kept him behind a desk far too much. He had grown up in boats of all sizes in the waters off Newport and the only time he felt fully alive was at sea. A hectic week had been required to feed Isaacs's hint to his aide, Szkada, then to work up a plan and arrange for the ship, but it was worth it. Rutherford felt great!
The captain barked commands as they closed on the chosen position. Finally, the trim craft lay dead in the water, and they waited and watched and listened. The ship, a Spruance class destroyer, was designed for intelligence work and bristled with sophisticated tracking and detection devices. At last, word came up from the sonar room that their target had appeared, moving incredibly rapidly, headed for the surface in a scant thirty seconds. Rutherford gritted his teeth and framed his field glasses on the water a thousand yards away where they had calculated the influence would reach the surface.
The sonar data were automatically fed into the ship's computers to plot the trajectory. He listened to the tense messages on the intercom from the sonar room, the voice clipped, rapid, hurrying to keep up with something moving too fast. The new prediction showed the point of surfacing to be several hundred yards further from the ship than originally estimated, but still very close. Ten seconds. Rutherford felt a knot of tension as beads of sweat grew on his forehead. He tried to keep his mind neutral, but an image kept intruding, that of a ray guided by an unseen hand. He could sense that ray arcing through space like nighttime tracer bullets, then cutting a swath through the earth.
Over the intercom came the tinny squawk as the sonar operator counted down the time to contact with the surface:
'Five.'
'Four.'
'Three.'
'Two.'
'One.'
Rutherford held the binoculars tightly to his face, the magnified image of the water welded in his brain. He braced himself for the shock, either physical or mental.
'Zero.'
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing happened except for a small splash at the margin of his field of vision. Then he blinked and even that was gone. Faintly over the water a strange hissing carried, but that, too, quickly faded.
Rutherford and the captain exchanged amazed looks.
The captain punched a button on a console.
'What have you got?'
'Nothing, Captain, it's gone,' came the negative reply. He turned to Rutherford.
'If it's like the Seamount event, sonar should pick up something going down after some delay.'
Rutherford nodded.
The sonar man had been alerted not to increase the gain on his instrument in the interlude.
Again came the faint hiss. Rutherford raised his glasses too late to see a second rise of spray some distance from the first splash.
'Whup! There it is!' came the report of reacquisition from the sonar room. They listened as the relayed reports followed the acoustic noise to the sea bottom far below.
Rutherford spent the next two hours in the computer room overseeing the analysis of the tapes of the sonar signal. His examination of the previous underwater events suggested to him that the phenomenon did not move along precisely the same line. This data supported that view. There was a certain erratic behaviour superposed on the basic fixed direction of motion. They would never be able to tell exactly where and when the surfacing would occur. He thought to himself, so your aim's not perfect, you bastards, and took some satisfaction in that.
The estimate of the next nearest surfacing was refined on the computer and Rutherford reported that to the captain. After some discussion they agreed that for all the furore underwater, whatever it was seemed to lose potency at the surface. They agreed to get as close as possible to the next event. The destroyer headed for a spot about a hundred and ninety miles west which, in a little more than twenty-four hours, would fall along the right path at the proper phase so that the phenomenon should approach the surface.
They arrived in late afternoon and spent the remainder of the daylight hours cruising the area obtaining comparison data on the sonar background and checking for anything which could represent a precursor to the expected event. There was none.
Rutherford turned in early. He spent a restless night and dropped into sound sleep only shortly before daybreak when a young crewman awakened him.
Two thousand miles west of where the Stinson made slow circles in the mid-Atlantic, Robert Isaacs roused from a troubled sleep, carrying his dreams with him. He was watching the tops of the heads of figures as they roamed the flat terrain of satellite photos. One figure tried to turn its face upward to be recognized. Isaacs could feel the strain of its effort, and head swivelling backward, the forehead tilting upward, upward, upward, but never enough to reveal the face.
Then, there — Not a Russian! Rutherford !
Isaacs jerked awake, staring at the ceiling, his pulse racing. His twitch disturbed Muriel. She snuggled over to him, cupped a bleep in her hand, and pushed her nose into his shoulder.
'You all right, honey?'
'Uumph. Just a dream.' He turned towards her and threw a comforting arm over her hips. Soon she was breathing deeply again. He lay awake, slowly relaxing back towards sleep. Rutherford Ship Water Sonar.
The Novorossiisk!
This time he sat bolt upright. No dream. Dear god! How could he be so dense? The Novorossiisk was so long ago, succeeded in his attention by the attack on FireEye, the shuttle mission, the feverish developments at Tyuratam. But this had to be it! The Novorossiisk had been in the Med, near thirty degrees latitude. The Seamount had reported something going up and something going down. Rutherford had radioed the same behaviour yesterday. The Novorossiisk had reported something going down. Why not up? Lost in the shuffle? Who knows? Must check that out. Was the Novorossiisk in the right place? Check that out. Oh goddamn, Rutherford said he was going to sit right on
He rolled out of bed.
'Bob?'
'I think Av Rutherford is in danger. I've got to make some calls.'
'Do you want me to get up?'
'No, that's crazy; you've got to be fresh in court at nine.'
He pulled on some sweatpants in lieu of a robe and fumbled out the door to the stairs. In the kitchen he blinked in the glare as he tripped the light. He punched the familiar number into the phone, missed the next to last digit in his bleariness, swore, and punched it again. He requested the night radio operator to call him on a secure line. As he awaited the call, he grabbed a note pad and tried to figure out if the Novorossiisk had been right on Danielson's magic trajectory. He was still too befogged and the numbers too cumbersome. But it was plausible. Too plausible! This thing they chased not only moved through the earth and oceans, it punched holes in ships!
As he stared at his scribbled notes on the pad, he slowly became aware of the smell of fresh coffee permeating his nostrils. He looked up to see Muriel fetching cups and saucers out of the cabinet. She caught his mixed look of guilt and irritation that she should be up tending to him and headed him off.
'I can use an early start, too. I need to polish my strategy.'
Her husband still looked disgruntled.
'Besides,' she continued, 'if I beat my minions in to work on a Monday morning it will fire them with such defensive zeal that we'll just blow the opposition out of court.'
Isaacs smiled wanly at this image and rose to hug her from behind.
'All right, counsellor, you win. Let's have some coffee.'
He broke off his embrace suddenly at the sound of the telephone, whirling to grab it in mid ring. He sat and hunched over the receiver as if to make it part of him.
'Hello? Yes?' He repeated a sequence of code numbers. 'Right. I want you to patch a call through the Navy. Top Priority. For Captain Avery Rutherford on the Destroyer USS Stinson. It's on patrol in the Atlantic. Yes, I know what time it is. What's a satellite link for? It's two hours later on that ship. Yes, I understand, but this is extremely urgent.' He glanced at his watch. 4:38. Nine minutes until contact. 'Yes, I know you will. Yes, immediately please. Thank you.'
He hung up the phone. 'Problem?'
'Not in principle, it's just that our vaunted instantaneous satellite communication net is designed to function from various war rooms, not from cosy Georgetown kitchens.'
He lapsed into tense silence, glancing at the coffee pot, his watch, the phone. Time dragged slowly. After an excruciating interval, the coffee maker stopped gurgling, sighed its readiness. He looked at his watch for the tenth time. 4:40. Seven minutes. How long would it take to move the ship if they did get through? Several minutes? When would it be too late? He did not look up when Muriel put the coffee in front of him. He took a few sips and then watched it steam away its heat, its life force. 4:44. Three minutes, probably too late, anyway. He felt ill.
The phone rang. He jerked the receiver to his ear.
'Mr Isaacs?'
'Yes!'
'I've got the Stinson. They're looking for Captain Rutherford. Will you hold on?' 'Yes, of course. He'll be on the bridge.'
Isaacs could hear the operator relay this message to the radio man on the Stinson. Then he spoke to Isaacs again.
'Bit of a crunch there, sir. They seem to be in the middle of an operation.'
'Yes, I know.'
There was a long pause.
'Sir?' The voice sounded worried.
'What is it?'
'There seemed to be some kind of ruckus there, and then I lost contact.'
'You what?'
'I'm sorry, sir. I lost contact with the Stinson.'
Isaacs remained silent a long moment.
'Sir?'
'Okay. Try to get them back. Call me when you do.'
'Yes, sir.'
Isaacs hung the receiver on its wall cradle and then slowly lowered his head onto his hands. Seated next to him, Muriel reached a hand to his bare shoulder, her face drawn with concern.
The sea lay calm and the rising sun burned along the gentle swells.
The routine of the previous session repeated. Rutherford took a position on the bridge and stood checking the liquid crystal digits as they swapped on his watch. As the time counted down to scarce minutes, an orderly stepped onto the bridge.
'Captain Rutherford?'
Rutherford swivelled to face the young man.
'Yes? What is it?'
'Sir, you have a call on the radiophone.'
'I can't take it now! Tell them if it's important to hold on for a few minutes.'
The orderly sensed the tension and stepped back against the bulkhead to watch as Rutherford turned to scan the ocean. Within seconds of the predicted time, the sonar room reported.
'Here she comes!'
Allowing for the inaccuracies in the calculations, Rutherford had stationed the ship precisely at the point where surfacing was most probable. These inaccuracies plus the intrinsic meandering of the position convinced him they would be very lucky to be within several hundred yards of the event. He hoped they would be able to see something to help clear up the mystery.
'Coming straight up! Right underneath us!'
Just so, ruminated Rutherford. At great depths, small lateral offsets in position were difficult to detect. On his watch, the minute digit shifted up by one. Ten seconds.
'Two thousand metres!' squawked the sonar room link. 'Uh, Captain? It's still headed right for us!'
In a corner of his mind, a thought began to dawn on Rutherford. Maybe they had been too brash, forsaking a second distant observation. Our measurements aren't exact, he thought, the thing does wander a little erratically. How confident can I be that our best estimate is wrong, that it will surface nearby, but not exactly where I predicted? What if the small random motion just offsets our position errors and we are correct by blind luck? Even worse, what if many periods are required before the random motion causes an appreciable change in the position of surfacing? Suppose over the small time span since the last event there has been negligible change and my predictions are precisely correct?
He wanted to be nearby, but, with a sinking feeling he knew he did not want to be exactly on the point of surfacing.
The sonar room began the final countdown. There was no time to move the ship anyway.
'Five.'
'Four.'
'Three.'
'Two.'
'One.'
'Ze-'
Chapter 7
'He's right that there's no obvious reason to consider this Agency business. But dammit! It's got to be somebody's business.'
Rutherford rubbed his chin. 'Is this thing dangerous?'
Isaacs stopped pacing and faced the man seated at the desk. 'Not clear, is it? Whatever it is, it makes a lot of noise that travels through rock and water. But noise alone doesn't make it dangerous.' He resumed his pacing.
'The scary part is that something is moving through that rock and water, making the noise. We haven't the faintest idea what. That doesn't make it a threat, but it sure as hell makes me nervous!'
Rutherford leaned forward on his desk, watching Isaacs perform his epicycles. 'Listen. Your seismic data were ideal to track this thing over large distances coherently and establish that it moves along a fixed direction. But with your hint of where and when to look, our sonar detections should give a higher precision. We could put a ship right on top of it and find out what we're actually up against.'
Isaacs sprawled stiffly in a chair, as if he might leap out of it again at a moment's notice. 'Actually, we could do something like that on land, too, if McMasters hadn't tied my hands,' he responded. 'You're right, though, you're in a position to proceed, and I'm not.
'There is a practical point,' Isaacs continued. 'As it stands now, you don't formally have enough information to move on your own. You need our knowledge that it behaves in a systematic way.'
Rutherford nodded his assent.
'But I can't give it to you officially because of this roadblock McMasters has thrown up.'
Isaacs smiled and leaned forward in his chair. 'I think you're going to have to wake up in the middle of the night with a sudden insight. Your past brilliant record would presage such a breakthrough.'
Rutherford gave an exaggerated 'aw shucks' gesture. 'Actually, it might be better if it didn't come directly from me. McMasters knows we're friends, and he might fit things together and give you a hard time for leaking information. I think I can handle it so that one of my associates has the inspiration.'
The two men grinned at one another and then lapsed into a contemplative silence. After several minutes, Rutherford stirred and walked over to a window and looked out.
He turned and asked, 'What in hell are we getting into here, Bob?'
Isaacs returned his look, unspeaking.
Rutherford continued, 'I keep coming back to the fact that this flung is locked to a fixed direction in space. That must be a crucial hint. And the fact that it moves easily through solid earth and miles of water. What does that mean?' He turned to the window again, anxious to express disturbing thoughts, but subconsciously unable to face his friend at the same time.
'You know the image I get? A beam. A beam of some kind, focused into the earth and playing back and forth.'
He turned suddenly, angry at a situation that departed so profoundly from his experience, forcing him to strange, uncomfortable extrapolations.
'Damn it, Bob, you know I'm a hard-nosed, practical man. But don't we have to face up to the idea that something is out there? Doing this to the earth?'
Isaacs ground his right fist into his left palm. 'I confess, Av, when I first heard about the selective orientation in space, I found myself toying with such a notion. I put it out of my mind as idle fantasy. Now I don't know. I do know the more I learn about this thing, the more scared I am.
Avery Rutherford stood next to the captain of the USS Stinson and gazed out across the ocean as it reflected the early morning sun. Rutherford delighted at being able to spend these long days of mid-June where he loved to be the most. His job was challenging and important, but it kept him behind a desk far too much. He had grown up in boats of all sizes in the waters off Newport and the only time he felt fully alive was at sea. A hectic week had been required to feed Isaacs's hint to his aide, Szkada, then to work up a plan and arrange for the ship, but it was worth it. Rutherford felt great!
The captain barked commands as they closed on the chosen position. Finally, the trim craft lay dead in the water, and they waited and watched and listened. The ship, a Spruance class destroyer, was designed for intelligence work and bristled with sophisticated tracking and detection devices. At last, word came up from the sonar room that their target had appeared, moving incredibly rapidly, headed for the surface in a scant thirty seconds. Rutherford gritted his teeth and framed his field glasses on the water a thousand yards away where they had calculated the influence would reach the surface.
The sonar data were automatically fed into the ship's computers to plot the trajectory. He listened to the tense messages on the intercom from the sonar room, the voice clipped, rapid, hurrying to keep up with something moving too fast. The new prediction showed the point of surfacing to be several hundred yards further from the ship than originally estimated, but still very close. Ten seconds. Rutherford felt a knot of tension as beads of sweat grew on his forehead. He tried to keep his mind neutral, but an image kept intruding, that of a ray guided by an unseen hand. He could sense that ray arcing through space like nighttime tracer bullets, then cutting a swath through the earth.
Over the intercom came the tinny squawk as the sonar operator counted down the time to contact with the surface:
'Five.'
'Four.'
'Three.'
'Two.'
'One.'
Rutherford held the binoculars tightly to his face, the magnified image of the water welded in his brain. He braced himself for the shock, either physical or mental.
'Zero.'
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing happened except for a small splash at the margin of his field of vision. Then he blinked and even that was gone. Faintly over the water a strange hissing carried, but that, too, quickly faded.
Rutherford and the captain exchanged amazed looks.
The captain punched a button on a console.
'What have you got?'
'Nothing, Captain, it's gone,' came the negative reply. He turned to Rutherford.
'If it's like the Seamount event, sonar should pick up something going down after some delay.'
Rutherford nodded.
The sonar man had been alerted not to increase the gain on his instrument in the interlude.
Again came the faint hiss. Rutherford raised his glasses too late to see a second rise of spray some distance from the first splash.
'Whup! There it is!' came the report of reacquisition from the sonar room. They listened as the relayed reports followed the acoustic noise to the sea bottom far below.
Rutherford spent the next two hours in the computer room overseeing the analysis of the tapes of the sonar signal. His examination of the previous underwater events suggested to him that the phenomenon did not move along precisely the same line. This data supported that view. There was a certain erratic behaviour superposed on the basic fixed direction of motion. They would never be able to tell exactly where and when the surfacing would occur. He thought to himself, so your aim's not perfect, you bastards, and took some satisfaction in that.
The estimate of the next nearest surfacing was refined on the computer and Rutherford reported that to the captain. After some discussion they agreed that for all the furore underwater, whatever it was seemed to lose potency at the surface. They agreed to get as close as possible to the next event. The destroyer headed for a spot about a hundred and ninety miles west which, in a little more than twenty-four hours, would fall along the right path at the proper phase so that the phenomenon should approach the surface.
They arrived in late afternoon and spent the remainder of the daylight hours cruising the area obtaining comparison data on the sonar background and checking for anything which could represent a precursor to the expected event. There was none.
Rutherford turned in early. He spent a restless night and dropped into sound sleep only shortly before daybreak when a young crewman awakened him.
Two thousand miles west of where the Stinson made slow circles in the mid-Atlantic, Robert Isaacs roused from a troubled sleep, carrying his dreams with him. He was watching the tops of the heads of figures as they roamed the flat terrain of satellite photos. One figure tried to turn its face upward to be recognized. Isaacs could feel the strain of its effort, and head swivelling backward, the forehead tilting upward, upward, upward, but never enough to reveal the face.
Then, there — Not a Russian! Rutherford !
Isaacs jerked awake, staring at the ceiling, his pulse racing. His twitch disturbed Muriel. She snuggled over to him, cupped a bleep in her hand, and pushed her nose into his shoulder.
'You all right, honey?'
'Uumph. Just a dream.' He turned towards her and threw a comforting arm over her hips. Soon she was breathing deeply again. He lay awake, slowly relaxing back towards sleep. Rutherford Ship Water Sonar.
The Novorossiisk!
This time he sat bolt upright. No dream. Dear god! How could he be so dense? The Novorossiisk was so long ago, succeeded in his attention by the attack on FireEye, the shuttle mission, the feverish developments at Tyuratam. But this had to be it! The Novorossiisk had been in the Med, near thirty degrees latitude. The Seamount had reported something going up and something going down. Rutherford had radioed the same behaviour yesterday. The Novorossiisk had reported something going down. Why not up? Lost in the shuffle? Who knows? Must check that out. Was the Novorossiisk in the right place? Check that out. Oh goddamn, Rutherford said he was going to sit right on
He rolled out of bed.
'Bob?'
'I think Av Rutherford is in danger. I've got to make some calls.'
'Do you want me to get up?'
'No, that's crazy; you've got to be fresh in court at nine.'
He pulled on some sweatpants in lieu of a robe and fumbled out the door to the stairs. In the kitchen he blinked in the glare as he tripped the light. He punched the familiar number into the phone, missed the next to last digit in his bleariness, swore, and punched it again. He requested the night radio operator to call him on a secure line. As he awaited the call, he grabbed a note pad and tried to figure out if the Novorossiisk had been right on Danielson's magic trajectory. He was still too befogged and the numbers too cumbersome. But it was plausible. Too plausible! This thing they chased not only moved through the earth and oceans, it punched holes in ships!
As he stared at his scribbled notes on the pad, he slowly became aware of the smell of fresh coffee permeating his nostrils. He looked up to see Muriel fetching cups and saucers out of the cabinet. She caught his mixed look of guilt and irritation that she should be up tending to him and headed him off.
'I can use an early start, too. I need to polish my strategy.'
Her husband still looked disgruntled.
'Besides,' she continued, 'if I beat my minions in to work on a Monday morning it will fire them with such defensive zeal that we'll just blow the opposition out of court.'
Isaacs smiled wanly at this image and rose to hug her from behind.
'All right, counsellor, you win. Let's have some coffee.'
He broke off his embrace suddenly at the sound of the telephone, whirling to grab it in mid ring. He sat and hunched over the receiver as if to make it part of him.
'Hello? Yes?' He repeated a sequence of code numbers. 'Right. I want you to patch a call through the Navy. Top Priority. For Captain Avery Rutherford on the Destroyer USS Stinson. It's on patrol in the Atlantic. Yes, I know what time it is. What's a satellite link for? It's two hours later on that ship. Yes, I understand, but this is extremely urgent.' He glanced at his watch. 4:38. Nine minutes until contact. 'Yes, I know you will. Yes, immediately please. Thank you.'
He hung up the phone. 'Problem?'
'Not in principle, it's just that our vaunted instantaneous satellite communication net is designed to function from various war rooms, not from cosy Georgetown kitchens.'
He lapsed into tense silence, glancing at the coffee pot, his watch, the phone. Time dragged slowly. After an excruciating interval, the coffee maker stopped gurgling, sighed its readiness. He looked at his watch for the tenth time. 4:40. Seven minutes. How long would it take to move the ship if they did get through? Several minutes? When would it be too late? He did not look up when Muriel put the coffee in front of him. He took a few sips and then watched it steam away its heat, its life force. 4:44. Three minutes, probably too late, anyway. He felt ill.
The phone rang. He jerked the receiver to his ear.
'Mr Isaacs?'
'Yes!'
'I've got the Stinson. They're looking for Captain Rutherford. Will you hold on?' 'Yes, of course. He'll be on the bridge.'
Isaacs could hear the operator relay this message to the radio man on the Stinson. Then he spoke to Isaacs again.
'Bit of a crunch there, sir. They seem to be in the middle of an operation.'
'Yes, I know.'
There was a long pause.
'Sir?' The voice sounded worried.
'What is it?'
'There seemed to be some kind of ruckus there, and then I lost contact.'
'You what?'
'I'm sorry, sir. I lost contact with the Stinson.'
Isaacs remained silent a long moment.
'Sir?'
'Okay. Try to get them back. Call me when you do.'
'Yes, sir.'
Isaacs hung the receiver on its wall cradle and then slowly lowered his head onto his hands. Seated next to him, Muriel reached a hand to his bare shoulder, her face drawn with concern.
The sea lay calm and the rising sun burned along the gentle swells.
The routine of the previous session repeated. Rutherford took a position on the bridge and stood checking the liquid crystal digits as they swapped on his watch. As the time counted down to scarce minutes, an orderly stepped onto the bridge.
'Captain Rutherford?'
Rutherford swivelled to face the young man.
'Yes? What is it?'
'Sir, you have a call on the radiophone.'
'I can't take it now! Tell them if it's important to hold on for a few minutes.'
The orderly sensed the tension and stepped back against the bulkhead to watch as Rutherford turned to scan the ocean. Within seconds of the predicted time, the sonar room reported.
'Here she comes!'
Allowing for the inaccuracies in the calculations, Rutherford had stationed the ship precisely at the point where surfacing was most probable. These inaccuracies plus the intrinsic meandering of the position convinced him they would be very lucky to be within several hundred yards of the event. He hoped they would be able to see something to help clear up the mystery.
'Coming straight up! Right underneath us!'
Just so, ruminated Rutherford. At great depths, small lateral offsets in position were difficult to detect. On his watch, the minute digit shifted up by one. Ten seconds.
'Two thousand metres!' squawked the sonar room link. 'Uh, Captain? It's still headed right for us!'
In a corner of his mind, a thought began to dawn on Rutherford. Maybe they had been too brash, forsaking a second distant observation. Our measurements aren't exact, he thought, the thing does wander a little erratically. How confident can I be that our best estimate is wrong, that it will surface nearby, but not exactly where I predicted? What if the small random motion just offsets our position errors and we are correct by blind luck? Even worse, what if many periods are required before the random motion causes an appreciable change in the position of surfacing? Suppose over the small time span since the last event there has been negligible change and my predictions are precisely correct?
He wanted to be nearby, but, with a sinking feeling he knew he did not want to be exactly on the point of surfacing.
The sonar room began the final countdown. There was no time to move the ship anyway.
'Five.'
'Four.'
'Three.'
'Two.'
'One.'
'Ze-'
Chapter 7
A small hole appeared in the thick plate of the hull just to the port side of the keel. A disturbance winked through the fuel oil stored in the large ballast tank shaped to the hull. Brief instants later similar holes were created in the top of the fuel tank and then in the floor of the engine room. In the next moment a deep score ran across the shaft atone of the four large General Electric gas turbines. A crack sprang out from this defect augmented by the huge centrifugal force, and the multibladed shaft went careening like a rip saw towards the turbine casing as yet another hole penetrated the ceiling of the engine room. On went the succession of holes as if on a rising plumbline, through decks, furniture, equipment, until a last long gash ripped through the floor of the helicopter pad.
' — ro!'
The damaged turbine exploded, filling the engine compartment with high velocity titanium'-blade shrapnel and burning fuel. Weakened by the small incident hole, the floor buckled under the disintegrated turbine. Flame leapt down along the vapours leading to the fuel tank. After the briefest hiatus, the fuel tank exploded. The force of this release was directed upward along the rising line of perforations. The penetrated structural members gave way, and a violent stream of shredded metal and superheated gas blew a cavity upward into the guts of the ship. The explosion also tore like a rocket into the surrounding water. In reaction, the destroyer listed rapidly and severely to starboard. As the ship pendulumed back to port, water rushed into the new gaping hole and splashed upward following the path of the blast into the ship. Great portions of the upper midship sections filled with water. The ship was rendered top-heavy. As it rebounded, its natural capacity to right itself was destroyed, and it carried on over. In the space of a minute the Stinson capsized, floating bottom up, the ragged hole in the hull aimed at the sun, narrowly above the horizon. A handful of men survived. Avery Rutherford was not among them.
That evening, still numb from loss, Isaacs stared at the draft of the memo he had carefully composed. He was reticent to commit himself to writing, but he could not just go bursting into McMasters's office and demand that Project QUAKER be reinstated. McMasters would never hear him out. Instead, he had put all the arguments he could muster into the memorandum. McMasters would not want to read anything from him, but he would read it, out of selfdefence.
Memorandum
To: Kevin J. McMasters,
Deputy Director of Intelligence
From: Robert B. Isaacs,
Deputy Director for Scientific Intelligence
Subject: Connection between the loss of the USS Stinson, the Novorossiisk, and Project QUAKER
On June 14, the Navy Destroyer USS Stinson was lost at sea while on a mission indirectly related to our now inactive Project QUAKER. The circumstances bear marked resemblance to those involving the Soviet carrier Novorossiisk. In this memorandum, I set forth the case linking the USS Stinson, the Novorossiisk, and Project QUAKER and call for the immediate reactivation and vigorous prosecution of Project QUAKER.
Isaacs pictured McMasters resisting the urge to scrunch the memo into a ball and toss it in the can.
As you will recall. Project QUAKER produced evidence for a source of seismic waves which moved in a regular pattern through the earth. The trajectory of this motion is fixed in space independent of the rotation of the earth or its motion in orbit around the sun. The source of seismic waves always approaches the earth's surface at 32° 47' north latitude. Approximately forty and one— quarter minutes later it has passed through the earth and approaches the surface again at 32° 47' south latitude. It then returns to the northern hemisphere nearing the surface at a position about 1170 miles west of the previous location of surfacing, due to the rotation of the earth in the intervening eighty minutes and thirty seconds.
One day later, the source of the seismic signal will return to the surface about 190 miles west of the point where it surfaced at nearly the same time the previous day. The source of the seismic waves has approached the surface about 2000 times since it was first detected. Because of the incommensurate motion of the seismic source and the rotation of the earth, however, the probability of the source returning to the surface within even a few miles of any previous point of surfacing is very small. Despite the underlying regularity of the motion of the source of the seismic waves, the effects manifested at the surface will be perceived to be highly irregular.
Isaacs paused at this point. McMasters presumably knew the basic facts and he did not want to overdo here nor delay getting to the meat of his argument, but he felt compelled to summarize the issues to provide a context for the pitch to come. His mind whirled with details which he would have added for someone who wanted to really know what was going on, but he pictured McMasters' sneering scepticism and decided for the fifth time that this was the best he could do.
I have learned through informal sources
Ha! Let the bastard chew on that one, thought Isaacs. He'll discover that Rutherford was on the Stinson and dig like a dog to find some proof I violated his stricture. Well, let him dig! I don't confess to any active role for either me or the Agency, so he'll stew, but there's not much he can do. Except summarily reject the proposal. Damn!
that the Navy has sonar data which correlate with the motion of the seismic source. The source of the seismic noise apparently
Apparently. He pondered whether to leave that word to honestly portray the possibility, remote to his mind, that the strong circumstantial evidence had not been rigorously confirmed, that there was no case in which both seismic and sonar detectors picked up the signal of a single event to prove they were related. McMasters might seize on such a subtlety. Isaacs sighed and opted for honesty.
proceeds into the ocean. The source of the sonar signal goes to the surface, ceases for about forty seconds, then proceeds back to the ocean bottom. There is a strong presumption that the source of seismic and sonar waves is in the atmosphere for those forty seconds. The seismic and sonar waves generated by the source of energy propagate over great distances, contributing to their detect— ability. The lack of above-surface confirmation suggests that the effects there are very localized.
Now for the pitch, if he hasn't set fire to it by this time.
To conclude from the evidence that the phenomenon is innocuous at the surface would be a grievous error. The fates of the Novorossiisk and the Stinson show that this phenomenon is destructive and must be understood and eliminated. The Stinson was on a mission to investigate the sonar signals which are the counterpart of the seismic signals tracked under Operation QUAKER. On June 13, the Stinson witnessed the rising and falling sonar signal from a thousand yards, with no appreciable surface effect. An associated hissing noise was reported. On June 14, it was stationed directly on the path of the rising sonar signal. The ship exploded, capsized and sank with the loss of all but 23 of her crew of 259. Fragmentary evidence from the survivors suggests that the fuel tanks exploded.
I believe the facts show that the Novorossiisk suffered a similar fate. The Novorossiisk was at 32° 47' when the incident occurred. Within the accuracy of our records, she was at a location that would have been in phase with the rising of the seismic/acoustic phenomenon. A hissing noise was reported on the Novorossiisk before the fires broke out. A sonar signal was reported afterwards.
The similarities between the Stinson and the Novorossiisk events and the relations to the signal of Operation QUAKER are too striking to be coincidence. There is every reason to believe that the phenomenon that made the holes in the Novorossiisk and triggered the fires on board had a similar, but unfortunately more destructive, effect on the Stinson. This phenomenon also generates the signals studied under Operation QUAKER.
The present facts are disturbing enough. Men have died, equipment has been destroyed and we have drawn closer to war. Even more troubling is that the underlying phenomenon is completely without precedent, and its nature totally unknown. In our present state of ignorance we may have no inkling of the true magnitude of the problem that besets us.
We must take immediate action to discover the nature of this phenomenon. I strongly recommend two steps. One is the reinstatement of Project QUAKER and the enactment of similar projects in all relevant agencies of the government. The second is to communicate these findings to the Soviet Union to forestall the developments which have succeeded the Novorossiisk event. In this regard, I recommend a query to the Soviets regarding the detection of a rising sonar signal just prior to the Novorossiisk event. Confirmation of this prediction would help to convince the Soviets of the innocence of the United States in the Novorossiisk affair and tie together more firmly the disparate phenomena described here.
When he finished reading the draft, Isaacs stared at the last page, his eyes defocused, straining with his mind's eye to see where this attempt would lead. Despite himself, his mind filled with an image of Rutherford , those last seconds, desperately trapped in the submerged bridge. He shook his head and rose from his desk. Something fearful was at work here. McMasters had to free his hands to go after it. Kathleen was gone for the day. He unlocked a cabinet and placed the clipped sheaf of paper in the front of her work file.
In the parking lot he unlocked the door of the car and half-tossed his briefcase into the passenger seat. He sat behind the wheel a moment, feeling like driving, but with no particular place to go. Finally, he wheeled out of the lot to the rear exit from the grounds, past the guardhouse and down the long leafy lane. He turned right on Route 123, but the traffic heading into McLean was still fairly heavy, the driving unsatisfactory. He joined the throng on the throng headed north. He took the first turn-off after crossing the Potomac and headed home, still frustrated and deeply troubled.
A week later, Isaacs stood with his back to the wall, away from the early Sunday crowds beginning to fill the Air and Space Museum. He came here sometimes for the pleasure of it, sometimes to think. This was a thinking time. His eyes caressed the old F-86 Sabrejet. It was his favourite craft in the whole place. The first grace of swept-back wings and tail. The captivating curve of the intake maw, surmounted by the subtle outward swell of the radar housing, a puckered lip to kiss the wind. With none of the venomous dihedral of today's fighters, the Sabrejet gave him the profound feeling of inner peace that came from witnessing perfect design.
He could not hold it. The peaceful feeling slipped, shattered and fell away from him. Rather than despoil his favoured icon with secular thought, he wandered back towards the main rooms. Starting with the loss of Rutherford and the Stinson, the last week had been horrendous. Just like a roller coaster, Isaacs had known what was coming as the chain ratcheted him towards the top, but that did not keep his stomach from leaping as the dizzying fall began.
The Soviets had completed preparations at Tyuratam and launched their second laser flawlessly at midweek. The President immediately put the armed forces on full alert. Around the world, attack submarines encircled Soviet flotillas and Russian and American aircraft flew sorties eyeing one another on radar. A hundred hair triggers waited for the slightest pressure.
Drefke had returned from the NSC meeting nearly hysterical. Hysteria may have been the only sane response. Myriad alternatives sifted, the President had chosen the one he felt most appropriate. Specifically targeted to the task. Limited enough not to demand full-scale war if implemented. Stark enough to be impossible to ignore. The US spelled out its position in graphic detail to the Soviets at all diplomatic levels. If they used the laser, retaliation would be swift and sure, treaties to the contrary notwithstanding.
Isaacs stood looking up at the Mercury capsule. Is this where it began? he wondered. Or maybe with his Sabrejet out in the far wing. Or, over there, with the Wright brothers. Or with the goddamned wheel! He gritted his teeth in despair and frustration and wandered up the stairs towards the Saturn booster. The new plateau of crisis had made him easy pickings for McMasters. He reached in and felt the letter from McMasters folded in his jacket pocket. Coincidence. No proof. Crisis. No time. The fool! McMasters couldn't, wouldn't see the truth. Of course the Agency was in overdrive, with no resources to spare. But the root of the crisis was not in the White House, or even in the Kremlin. It hurtled through the earth, a sly unknown enemy that had us at each other's throats. If the world proceeded to nuclear holocaust would this thing care? Would it continue to sift through the seared rubble?
Isaacs followed the crowd into the auditorium and sat, his eyes blitzed by the recorded history of the air, his mind in its own warp. Subconsciously, he had known it would come to this. His alternatives were sorted and banded up to him even as he read the letter from McMasters. Someone had to focus on this evil in the earth. He had to go it alone. His career, his rapid rise to authority, all his hard work, seemed like a fragile bird in his hand. So easily it could die, or fly away. But what alternatives did he have? To watch the world careen to disaster? A disaster that might be forestalled if only they knew the true origin of this thing? He thought of Muriel, her successful career built on the precarious sands of political influence. If he failed, were found out, disgraced, she'd have a lot at jeopardy as well. They would go down together. Would they go down together? Would they be together? Would she forgive him for sacrificing her to a cause of which she was ignorant? What of his daughter? How would she take the news of her father's ejection from the Agency for wilful violation of policy? What would she think of a father in a unique position to stem the rush to war who lacked the courage to act? Disgrace or the prospect of nuclear war. Could there be any real choice?
One step at a time. He fumbled his way out of the auditorium, the aisle sporadically lit by the flashing screen. He pulled up his steep driveway twenty minutes later and stared for a moment at the house, picturing the occupants, before getting out of the car. As he closed the front door behind him, he could hear the perpetual music from Isabel's room and the rustle of paper from the front room, Muriel digesting the Sunday Post. She looked up as he came in.
'Hi!' she said cheerily. 'Have a nice drive?'
He sat on the edge of a chair next to her. 'I worked some things out.'
She sobered at his look.
'I need to talk to you. Can you get some clothes on? I'd just as soon get out of the house.'
'Well, sure.' She pinched at the lapels of her robe. 'I'll just be a few minutes.' She gave him a perplexed look and headed up the stairs. Five minutes later, he heard her knock on Isabel's door and announce they were going for a ride.
'My hair's a mess. We're not going anywhere in public are we?' she asked as he joined her in the hallway.
'No, you look fine. I just want to find a quiet place to talk.'
In the car he headed them towards the Naval Observatory grounds and found an empty turnoff where they could park. He turned off the ignition and looked out over the rolling lawns.
Muriel broke the silence.
'This is a little frightening, you know.'
'I am frightened,' he said with a shy grin. He half turned in his seat to face her. 'I'm about to take a big step. I've never involved you in Agency business, but if I miss my footing here, it could be very bad.'
'You know I trust you.'
'You trust a guy who has always played by the rules. I have to break some rules now.'
'Maybe I shouldn't know.'
'According to the rules you shouldn't. That's one of the rules I need to break. I can't go into this leaving you in the cold.'
'It's got to do with Avery, doesn't it?'
He nodded. 'You read about the alert?'
'What there is to read,' she said, befuddled. 'Rumours of a full alert, unconfirmed by the White House. Official mumblings about routine training exercises.'
'And you remember my last dust-up with McMasters.'
'Humble pie.'
'They're all tied in together. I don't have to tell you the details, but I need to sketch it for you, to explain what I'm going to do.
'There's some influence moving through the earth. We picked it up by seismic signals, microscopic earthquakes. Avery stumbled onto it by sonar signals. We have no idea what causes the noise as it goes, but, whatever it is, it moves back and forth through the earth. No one seems to have noticed it above the surface, but Avery was on a mission to investigate that, and I'm convinced it sank his ship.'
'It? You mean you have no idea what sank a ship?'
'That's right. Incredible as it seems, there's something deadly out there, down there, and we have no clue to what it is. Last spring a Russian aircraft carrier was damaged in a mysterious way. All the evidence points to the same phenomenon. The carrier was in the right place at the right time to have run into this flung. They blamed us, thought we had some mystery ray. They zapped one of our spy satellites with a laser satellite; we snatched their laser with the shuttle.'
'Oh, yeah.' Muriel wagged a finger in memory. 'There were some reports of skullduggery with the shuttle. Someone high up sat on that one very hard.'
'Right. Well, it's continued to escalate. The Russians have launched another laser. That's led to the alert.' He paused. 'I know you realize that this is all confidential, but what I'm going to tell you next, you really have to regard in the strictest confidence. If it gets out, then the whole works go down the drain.'
'Don't tell me.'
'This is the crux. You won't understand my motivation otherwise.'
'It seems pretty clear. Something strange is going on. You've lost a good friend to it. We and the Russians are at odds over it, without even knowing it. That neanderthal McMasters has blocked your way, and you're going to defy him by continuing to dig when he has forbidden you to. If he catches you, he skins you and makes a gift of your tanned hide to the Director, no matter the motivation.'
Isaacs smiled. 'An admirable summary, counsellor. You're right. It was the investigation of these seismic signals that McMasters squelched. I appealed to him last week, but with this alert on he just slapped me down, got to tend to the business in hand. The problem is, of course, that I think the business at hand is the outgrowth of this mystery noise. We must understand that.'
'Then go after it.'
'If I'm wrong, or if I'm found out mucking around before I can come up with incontrovertible proof, I'll be kicked out, disgraced. I'm worried about your position, about what Isabel would think. It wouldn't be worth the risk if all that was at stake was my concern for what happened to Avery.'
'No, not just for a personal question,' Muriel agreed, 'but other men have died. This thing sounds dangerous on its own, even if it didn't lead to lasers and shuttles having at it in space.'
'Muriel, men die all the time, and we and the Russians are always involved in some skirmish or other, some of which I can influence, others I can't. The stakes are a lot bigger here.'
She looked thoughtful for a long moment. 'Okay, tell me if you have to. But for your sake, not mine.'
'We launched a nuclear device this morning. It'll track the laser. If the laser is used, we explode it.'
'Oh, Bob. Oh, my god. What would the. Russians do?'
'Who knows? That's just the worry. What would we do if they used a nuclear device against us in space? We'd retaliate somehow. Two things frighten me. That unknown flung in the earth, and the knowledge that we're as close to the brink as we have ever been.'
'Bob, this is insane. You have the key to defuse this, and only McMasters in the way. Can't you go to the Director? Go to the President, for god's sake!'
'I have a pile of circumstantial evidence, no real proof. I think that with some thought and work the connection can be established, but doing that in an open fashion, never mind with the full-scale interagency cooperation that's required, is just what McMasters has blocked. If I get myself sacked, then I really am useless. Somehow, I've got to assemble a stronger case so I can circumvent McMasters. And I've got to do it in the midst of this goddamned fullscale alert, when they want to know everything that's happening, and why — yesterday.'
She reached over and touched his arm. 'Bob, you do what you have to do. Take me home.'
He started the car and drove, barely seeing the road. He slowly realized that he had, besides Muriel, two possible allies. Maybe there was hope.
Korolev sat at his desk and stared at the incredible document in his hand. It was postmarked from New York , a simple attempt at subterfuge. Naive? Or sophisticated in its attempt to hide in plain sight? The fact that this letter was mailed to him just like any other piece of scientific correspondence that he received regularly from colleagues worldwide appealed to him greatly. What was the chance that this piece went unscreened by the authorities? Small, regrettably.
What a delight to see his confidence in this American vindicated. In the letter he confesses to pushing the meteorite idea, even as his confidence waned. Here is a man of conscience, trying honestly to struggle with forces beyond his control. How clearly he sees the disaster that has followed like night the day from the damage to the Novorossiisk.
And what a bizarre case he has compiled! A seismic signal that traverses the earth every eighty and one half minutes. The Novorossiisk in the way. This destroyer of theirs also in the path, and sunk! Could we have such seismic data? Korolev sighed. Probably far inferior, and locked in tight bureaucratic compartments. Could he prise it out? What an effort to ask of an old man. Expend much of the capital of his prestige in an effort like that. But this Isaacs fellow had now neatly forced his hand. He must try.
What a nice touch, the straw on the camel's back that would force him into action. Why, he queries, did the Novorossiisk not report a rising sonar signal? Ah, the subtleties of Soviet militarism. Isaacs must know that we do not keep tapes of sonar signals. There would be no point, without the ready computer power to analyse them. Our records are in the memories of men and the written page. What Isaacs does not know is that one of those memories was erased. The sonar man, not so far from retirement, had finally worked his way up to chief sonar officer on the Novorossiisk. No one was surprised at the heart attack that felled him. Until now, no one had questioned why his collapse had preceded the emergency, the fires on the ship. His second had taken over and had heard the descending signal. What had the first man heard that instigated his attack? Isaacs had asked a key question. Korolev was convinced he knew the answer.
Two problems. Could the disastrous chain of events be broken? From the Novorossiisk to the FireEye, the Cosmos, the shuttle, the new Cosmos, and now this evil new device of the Americans. Did this linkage have a momentum of its own that could not be stopped? Could he make a case that would cause his government to defuse the issue, to look to the common problem? If he could get independent evidence, beyond this document, to whom would he turn? Who in his stolid conservative government would respond to this outrageous tale?
And what was this common enemy? This motive force within the earth, that punched holes in ships, and frightened men to death? What could be so omnipresent and yet so surgically precise that death can come and go and leave scarce a trace?
Korolev wrote a word in heavy blunt pencil in the margin Isaacs's letter: TUNGUS.
On the following Saturday the precious morning slipped away, but Pat Danielson still wore her nightgown and robe. She had worked late the night before, responding to the crisis atmosphere that gripped the Agency, trying to monitor and anticipate the Soviet response to the orbiting nuclear device. She was due back by two in the afternoon. Now she kept that tension at bay by methodically devouring the morning paper. The condominium ads had caught her attention. After a brief stay with friends of her father upon her arrival in Washington , she had moved into the present high-rise apartment. She shared the rent with her roommate, Janine Corliss, a secretary in the FDA, an amicable arrangement, but looked forward to the independence and tax advantage of owning her own dwelling and had nearly accumulated a down payment.
A key rattled in the lock and Janine came in clutching a tennis racquet and a handful of mail, sweaty from an early match with the young lawyer from down the hall. She threw the mail on the coffee table and extracted one piece. She walked down the hallway and into Pat's room and tossed the letter on the stack of discarded newspaper sections.
'A letter for you.'
She bustled into her own room and then into the shower. Danielson picked up the envelope and examined the address written in a strong hand. She ran through her brief list of friends, unable to place the writing. She opened the envelope and looked at the terse message in surprise:
Pat,
Please meet me at the Olde English Pub, 87412 Wisconsin in Bethesda tomorrow (Sunday) at 3:00 P.M. Please do not mention or show his note to anyone.
Bob Isaacs
Danielson read the message three times quickly and then stared at it. They had ample opportunity every day of the week, and then some lately, to discuss Agency business. She had spent a half hour with Isaacs the previous Wednesday and their interchange had been routine, although he had been more preoccupied than usual. The message was so oddly clandestine; that wasn't even their branch of the " Agency. That it represented the prelude to some romantic entanglement seemed preposterous. Not that it couldn't happen, but there would have been some other clue. She thought back to their conversation after the cancellation of Project QUAKER. The question of her social life, or lack of it, had come up. Had she sent him some kind of false signal? Had she misread him so badly? He seemed straightforward and sincere, but how could you ever tell what people were thinking?
Whatever its motivation, the request put her on the spot. She realized after some reflection that she would keep the appointment, but knowing she would have a few more hours off tomorrow afternoon, she had accepted a rare date for a concert at Wolf Trap. How did Isaacs know she wouldn't be working? Easy enough for him to check the roster, she supposed. Anyway she would have to break the date. The easiest flung would be to claim that something had come up at work, but especially if it were true, that would violate the spirit of Isaacs's request for discretion. Maybe Janine would get sick, and she would have to stay home with her.
Janine came into Pat's room dressed in her robe and wringing her hair in a towel. Danielson recognized that to ignore the note would be the best way to arouse her roommate's interest. She waved the letter by one corner and then tossed it into the wastebasket.
' — ro!'
The damaged turbine exploded, filling the engine compartment with high velocity titanium'-blade shrapnel and burning fuel. Weakened by the small incident hole, the floor buckled under the disintegrated turbine. Flame leapt down along the vapours leading to the fuel tank. After the briefest hiatus, the fuel tank exploded. The force of this release was directed upward along the rising line of perforations. The penetrated structural members gave way, and a violent stream of shredded metal and superheated gas blew a cavity upward into the guts of the ship. The explosion also tore like a rocket into the surrounding water. In reaction, the destroyer listed rapidly and severely to starboard. As the ship pendulumed back to port, water rushed into the new gaping hole and splashed upward following the path of the blast into the ship. Great portions of the upper midship sections filled with water. The ship was rendered top-heavy. As it rebounded, its natural capacity to right itself was destroyed, and it carried on over. In the space of a minute the Stinson capsized, floating bottom up, the ragged hole in the hull aimed at the sun, narrowly above the horizon. A handful of men survived. Avery Rutherford was not among them.
That evening, still numb from loss, Isaacs stared at the draft of the memo he had carefully composed. He was reticent to commit himself to writing, but he could not just go bursting into McMasters's office and demand that Project QUAKER be reinstated. McMasters would never hear him out. Instead, he had put all the arguments he could muster into the memorandum. McMasters would not want to read anything from him, but he would read it, out of selfdefence.
Memorandum
To: Kevin J. McMasters,
Deputy Director of Intelligence
From: Robert B. Isaacs,
Deputy Director for Scientific Intelligence
Subject: Connection between the loss of the USS Stinson, the Novorossiisk, and Project QUAKER
On June 14, the Navy Destroyer USS Stinson was lost at sea while on a mission indirectly related to our now inactive Project QUAKER. The circumstances bear marked resemblance to those involving the Soviet carrier Novorossiisk. In this memorandum, I set forth the case linking the USS Stinson, the Novorossiisk, and Project QUAKER and call for the immediate reactivation and vigorous prosecution of Project QUAKER.
Isaacs pictured McMasters resisting the urge to scrunch the memo into a ball and toss it in the can.
As you will recall. Project QUAKER produced evidence for a source of seismic waves which moved in a regular pattern through the earth. The trajectory of this motion is fixed in space independent of the rotation of the earth or its motion in orbit around the sun. The source of seismic waves always approaches the earth's surface at 32° 47' north latitude. Approximately forty and one— quarter minutes later it has passed through the earth and approaches the surface again at 32° 47' south latitude. It then returns to the northern hemisphere nearing the surface at a position about 1170 miles west of the previous location of surfacing, due to the rotation of the earth in the intervening eighty minutes and thirty seconds.
One day later, the source of the seismic signal will return to the surface about 190 miles west of the point where it surfaced at nearly the same time the previous day. The source of the seismic waves has approached the surface about 2000 times since it was first detected. Because of the incommensurate motion of the seismic source and the rotation of the earth, however, the probability of the source returning to the surface within even a few miles of any previous point of surfacing is very small. Despite the underlying regularity of the motion of the source of the seismic waves, the effects manifested at the surface will be perceived to be highly irregular.
Isaacs paused at this point. McMasters presumably knew the basic facts and he did not want to overdo here nor delay getting to the meat of his argument, but he felt compelled to summarize the issues to provide a context for the pitch to come. His mind whirled with details which he would have added for someone who wanted to really know what was going on, but he pictured McMasters' sneering scepticism and decided for the fifth time that this was the best he could do.
I have learned through informal sources
Ha! Let the bastard chew on that one, thought Isaacs. He'll discover that Rutherford was on the Stinson and dig like a dog to find some proof I violated his stricture. Well, let him dig! I don't confess to any active role for either me or the Agency, so he'll stew, but there's not much he can do. Except summarily reject the proposal. Damn!
that the Navy has sonar data which correlate with the motion of the seismic source. The source of the seismic noise apparently
Apparently. He pondered whether to leave that word to honestly portray the possibility, remote to his mind, that the strong circumstantial evidence had not been rigorously confirmed, that there was no case in which both seismic and sonar detectors picked up the signal of a single event to prove they were related. McMasters might seize on such a subtlety. Isaacs sighed and opted for honesty.
proceeds into the ocean. The source of the sonar signal goes to the surface, ceases for about forty seconds, then proceeds back to the ocean bottom. There is a strong presumption that the source of seismic and sonar waves is in the atmosphere for those forty seconds. The seismic and sonar waves generated by the source of energy propagate over great distances, contributing to their detect— ability. The lack of above-surface confirmation suggests that the effects there are very localized.
Now for the pitch, if he hasn't set fire to it by this time.
To conclude from the evidence that the phenomenon is innocuous at the surface would be a grievous error. The fates of the Novorossiisk and the Stinson show that this phenomenon is destructive and must be understood and eliminated. The Stinson was on a mission to investigate the sonar signals which are the counterpart of the seismic signals tracked under Operation QUAKER. On June 13, the Stinson witnessed the rising and falling sonar signal from a thousand yards, with no appreciable surface effect. An associated hissing noise was reported. On June 14, it was stationed directly on the path of the rising sonar signal. The ship exploded, capsized and sank with the loss of all but 23 of her crew of 259. Fragmentary evidence from the survivors suggests that the fuel tanks exploded.
I believe the facts show that the Novorossiisk suffered a similar fate. The Novorossiisk was at 32° 47' when the incident occurred. Within the accuracy of our records, she was at a location that would have been in phase with the rising of the seismic/acoustic phenomenon. A hissing noise was reported on the Novorossiisk before the fires broke out. A sonar signal was reported afterwards.
The similarities between the Stinson and the Novorossiisk events and the relations to the signal of Operation QUAKER are too striking to be coincidence. There is every reason to believe that the phenomenon that made the holes in the Novorossiisk and triggered the fires on board had a similar, but unfortunately more destructive, effect on the Stinson. This phenomenon also generates the signals studied under Operation QUAKER.
The present facts are disturbing enough. Men have died, equipment has been destroyed and we have drawn closer to war. Even more troubling is that the underlying phenomenon is completely without precedent, and its nature totally unknown. In our present state of ignorance we may have no inkling of the true magnitude of the problem that besets us.
We must take immediate action to discover the nature of this phenomenon. I strongly recommend two steps. One is the reinstatement of Project QUAKER and the enactment of similar projects in all relevant agencies of the government. The second is to communicate these findings to the Soviet Union to forestall the developments which have succeeded the Novorossiisk event. In this regard, I recommend a query to the Soviets regarding the detection of a rising sonar signal just prior to the Novorossiisk event. Confirmation of this prediction would help to convince the Soviets of the innocence of the United States in the Novorossiisk affair and tie together more firmly the disparate phenomena described here.
When he finished reading the draft, Isaacs stared at the last page, his eyes defocused, straining with his mind's eye to see where this attempt would lead. Despite himself, his mind filled with an image of Rutherford , those last seconds, desperately trapped in the submerged bridge. He shook his head and rose from his desk. Something fearful was at work here. McMasters had to free his hands to go after it. Kathleen was gone for the day. He unlocked a cabinet and placed the clipped sheaf of paper in the front of her work file.
In the parking lot he unlocked the door of the car and half-tossed his briefcase into the passenger seat. He sat behind the wheel a moment, feeling like driving, but with no particular place to go. Finally, he wheeled out of the lot to the rear exit from the grounds, past the guardhouse and down the long leafy lane. He turned right on Route 123, but the traffic heading into McLean was still fairly heavy, the driving unsatisfactory. He joined the throng on the throng headed north. He took the first turn-off after crossing the Potomac and headed home, still frustrated and deeply troubled.
A week later, Isaacs stood with his back to the wall, away from the early Sunday crowds beginning to fill the Air and Space Museum. He came here sometimes for the pleasure of it, sometimes to think. This was a thinking time. His eyes caressed the old F-86 Sabrejet. It was his favourite craft in the whole place. The first grace of swept-back wings and tail. The captivating curve of the intake maw, surmounted by the subtle outward swell of the radar housing, a puckered lip to kiss the wind. With none of the venomous dihedral of today's fighters, the Sabrejet gave him the profound feeling of inner peace that came from witnessing perfect design.
He could not hold it. The peaceful feeling slipped, shattered and fell away from him. Rather than despoil his favoured icon with secular thought, he wandered back towards the main rooms. Starting with the loss of Rutherford and the Stinson, the last week had been horrendous. Just like a roller coaster, Isaacs had known what was coming as the chain ratcheted him towards the top, but that did not keep his stomach from leaping as the dizzying fall began.
The Soviets had completed preparations at Tyuratam and launched their second laser flawlessly at midweek. The President immediately put the armed forces on full alert. Around the world, attack submarines encircled Soviet flotillas and Russian and American aircraft flew sorties eyeing one another on radar. A hundred hair triggers waited for the slightest pressure.
Drefke had returned from the NSC meeting nearly hysterical. Hysteria may have been the only sane response. Myriad alternatives sifted, the President had chosen the one he felt most appropriate. Specifically targeted to the task. Limited enough not to demand full-scale war if implemented. Stark enough to be impossible to ignore. The US spelled out its position in graphic detail to the Soviets at all diplomatic levels. If they used the laser, retaliation would be swift and sure, treaties to the contrary notwithstanding.
Isaacs stood looking up at the Mercury capsule. Is this where it began? he wondered. Or maybe with his Sabrejet out in the far wing. Or, over there, with the Wright brothers. Or with the goddamned wheel! He gritted his teeth in despair and frustration and wandered up the stairs towards the Saturn booster. The new plateau of crisis had made him easy pickings for McMasters. He reached in and felt the letter from McMasters folded in his jacket pocket. Coincidence. No proof. Crisis. No time. The fool! McMasters couldn't, wouldn't see the truth. Of course the Agency was in overdrive, with no resources to spare. But the root of the crisis was not in the White House, or even in the Kremlin. It hurtled through the earth, a sly unknown enemy that had us at each other's throats. If the world proceeded to nuclear holocaust would this thing care? Would it continue to sift through the seared rubble?
Isaacs followed the crowd into the auditorium and sat, his eyes blitzed by the recorded history of the air, his mind in its own warp. Subconsciously, he had known it would come to this. His alternatives were sorted and banded up to him even as he read the letter from McMasters. Someone had to focus on this evil in the earth. He had to go it alone. His career, his rapid rise to authority, all his hard work, seemed like a fragile bird in his hand. So easily it could die, or fly away. But what alternatives did he have? To watch the world careen to disaster? A disaster that might be forestalled if only they knew the true origin of this thing? He thought of Muriel, her successful career built on the precarious sands of political influence. If he failed, were found out, disgraced, she'd have a lot at jeopardy as well. They would go down together. Would they go down together? Would they be together? Would she forgive him for sacrificing her to a cause of which she was ignorant? What of his daughter? How would she take the news of her father's ejection from the Agency for wilful violation of policy? What would she think of a father in a unique position to stem the rush to war who lacked the courage to act? Disgrace or the prospect of nuclear war. Could there be any real choice?
One step at a time. He fumbled his way out of the auditorium, the aisle sporadically lit by the flashing screen. He pulled up his steep driveway twenty minutes later and stared for a moment at the house, picturing the occupants, before getting out of the car. As he closed the front door behind him, he could hear the perpetual music from Isabel's room and the rustle of paper from the front room, Muriel digesting the Sunday Post. She looked up as he came in.
'Hi!' she said cheerily. 'Have a nice drive?'
He sat on the edge of a chair next to her. 'I worked some things out.'
She sobered at his look.
'I need to talk to you. Can you get some clothes on? I'd just as soon get out of the house.'
'Well, sure.' She pinched at the lapels of her robe. 'I'll just be a few minutes.' She gave him a perplexed look and headed up the stairs. Five minutes later, he heard her knock on Isabel's door and announce they were going for a ride.
'My hair's a mess. We're not going anywhere in public are we?' she asked as he joined her in the hallway.
'No, you look fine. I just want to find a quiet place to talk.'
In the car he headed them towards the Naval Observatory grounds and found an empty turnoff where they could park. He turned off the ignition and looked out over the rolling lawns.
Muriel broke the silence.
'This is a little frightening, you know.'
'I am frightened,' he said with a shy grin. He half turned in his seat to face her. 'I'm about to take a big step. I've never involved you in Agency business, but if I miss my footing here, it could be very bad.'
'You know I trust you.'
'You trust a guy who has always played by the rules. I have to break some rules now.'
'Maybe I shouldn't know.'
'According to the rules you shouldn't. That's one of the rules I need to break. I can't go into this leaving you in the cold.'
'It's got to do with Avery, doesn't it?'
He nodded. 'You read about the alert?'
'What there is to read,' she said, befuddled. 'Rumours of a full alert, unconfirmed by the White House. Official mumblings about routine training exercises.'
'And you remember my last dust-up with McMasters.'
'Humble pie.'
'They're all tied in together. I don't have to tell you the details, but I need to sketch it for you, to explain what I'm going to do.
'There's some influence moving through the earth. We picked it up by seismic signals, microscopic earthquakes. Avery stumbled onto it by sonar signals. We have no idea what causes the noise as it goes, but, whatever it is, it moves back and forth through the earth. No one seems to have noticed it above the surface, but Avery was on a mission to investigate that, and I'm convinced it sank his ship.'
'It? You mean you have no idea what sank a ship?'
'That's right. Incredible as it seems, there's something deadly out there, down there, and we have no clue to what it is. Last spring a Russian aircraft carrier was damaged in a mysterious way. All the evidence points to the same phenomenon. The carrier was in the right place at the right time to have run into this flung. They blamed us, thought we had some mystery ray. They zapped one of our spy satellites with a laser satellite; we snatched their laser with the shuttle.'
'Oh, yeah.' Muriel wagged a finger in memory. 'There were some reports of skullduggery with the shuttle. Someone high up sat on that one very hard.'
'Right. Well, it's continued to escalate. The Russians have launched another laser. That's led to the alert.' He paused. 'I know you realize that this is all confidential, but what I'm going to tell you next, you really have to regard in the strictest confidence. If it gets out, then the whole works go down the drain.'
'Don't tell me.'
'This is the crux. You won't understand my motivation otherwise.'
'It seems pretty clear. Something strange is going on. You've lost a good friend to it. We and the Russians are at odds over it, without even knowing it. That neanderthal McMasters has blocked your way, and you're going to defy him by continuing to dig when he has forbidden you to. If he catches you, he skins you and makes a gift of your tanned hide to the Director, no matter the motivation.'
Isaacs smiled. 'An admirable summary, counsellor. You're right. It was the investigation of these seismic signals that McMasters squelched. I appealed to him last week, but with this alert on he just slapped me down, got to tend to the business in hand. The problem is, of course, that I think the business at hand is the outgrowth of this mystery noise. We must understand that.'
'Then go after it.'
'If I'm wrong, or if I'm found out mucking around before I can come up with incontrovertible proof, I'll be kicked out, disgraced. I'm worried about your position, about what Isabel would think. It wouldn't be worth the risk if all that was at stake was my concern for what happened to Avery.'
'No, not just for a personal question,' Muriel agreed, 'but other men have died. This thing sounds dangerous on its own, even if it didn't lead to lasers and shuttles having at it in space.'
'Muriel, men die all the time, and we and the Russians are always involved in some skirmish or other, some of which I can influence, others I can't. The stakes are a lot bigger here.'
She looked thoughtful for a long moment. 'Okay, tell me if you have to. But for your sake, not mine.'
'We launched a nuclear device this morning. It'll track the laser. If the laser is used, we explode it.'
'Oh, Bob. Oh, my god. What would the. Russians do?'
'Who knows? That's just the worry. What would we do if they used a nuclear device against us in space? We'd retaliate somehow. Two things frighten me. That unknown flung in the earth, and the knowledge that we're as close to the brink as we have ever been.'
'Bob, this is insane. You have the key to defuse this, and only McMasters in the way. Can't you go to the Director? Go to the President, for god's sake!'
'I have a pile of circumstantial evidence, no real proof. I think that with some thought and work the connection can be established, but doing that in an open fashion, never mind with the full-scale interagency cooperation that's required, is just what McMasters has blocked. If I get myself sacked, then I really am useless. Somehow, I've got to assemble a stronger case so I can circumvent McMasters. And I've got to do it in the midst of this goddamned fullscale alert, when they want to know everything that's happening, and why — yesterday.'
She reached over and touched his arm. 'Bob, you do what you have to do. Take me home.'
He started the car and drove, barely seeing the road. He slowly realized that he had, besides Muriel, two possible allies. Maybe there was hope.
Korolev sat at his desk and stared at the incredible document in his hand. It was postmarked from New York , a simple attempt at subterfuge. Naive? Or sophisticated in its attempt to hide in plain sight? The fact that this letter was mailed to him just like any other piece of scientific correspondence that he received regularly from colleagues worldwide appealed to him greatly. What was the chance that this piece went unscreened by the authorities? Small, regrettably.
What a delight to see his confidence in this American vindicated. In the letter he confesses to pushing the meteorite idea, even as his confidence waned. Here is a man of conscience, trying honestly to struggle with forces beyond his control. How clearly he sees the disaster that has followed like night the day from the damage to the Novorossiisk.
And what a bizarre case he has compiled! A seismic signal that traverses the earth every eighty and one half minutes. The Novorossiisk in the way. This destroyer of theirs also in the path, and sunk! Could we have such seismic data? Korolev sighed. Probably far inferior, and locked in tight bureaucratic compartments. Could he prise it out? What an effort to ask of an old man. Expend much of the capital of his prestige in an effort like that. But this Isaacs fellow had now neatly forced his hand. He must try.
What a nice touch, the straw on the camel's back that would force him into action. Why, he queries, did the Novorossiisk not report a rising sonar signal? Ah, the subtleties of Soviet militarism. Isaacs must know that we do not keep tapes of sonar signals. There would be no point, without the ready computer power to analyse them. Our records are in the memories of men and the written page. What Isaacs does not know is that one of those memories was erased. The sonar man, not so far from retirement, had finally worked his way up to chief sonar officer on the Novorossiisk. No one was surprised at the heart attack that felled him. Until now, no one had questioned why his collapse had preceded the emergency, the fires on the ship. His second had taken over and had heard the descending signal. What had the first man heard that instigated his attack? Isaacs had asked a key question. Korolev was convinced he knew the answer.
Two problems. Could the disastrous chain of events be broken? From the Novorossiisk to the FireEye, the Cosmos, the shuttle, the new Cosmos, and now this evil new device of the Americans. Did this linkage have a momentum of its own that could not be stopped? Could he make a case that would cause his government to defuse the issue, to look to the common problem? If he could get independent evidence, beyond this document, to whom would he turn? Who in his stolid conservative government would respond to this outrageous tale?
And what was this common enemy? This motive force within the earth, that punched holes in ships, and frightened men to death? What could be so omnipresent and yet so surgically precise that death can come and go and leave scarce a trace?
Korolev wrote a word in heavy blunt pencil in the margin Isaacs's letter: TUNGUS.
On the following Saturday the precious morning slipped away, but Pat Danielson still wore her nightgown and robe. She had worked late the night before, responding to the crisis atmosphere that gripped the Agency, trying to monitor and anticipate the Soviet response to the orbiting nuclear device. She was due back by two in the afternoon. Now she kept that tension at bay by methodically devouring the morning paper. The condominium ads had caught her attention. After a brief stay with friends of her father upon her arrival in Washington , she had moved into the present high-rise apartment. She shared the rent with her roommate, Janine Corliss, a secretary in the FDA, an amicable arrangement, but looked forward to the independence and tax advantage of owning her own dwelling and had nearly accumulated a down payment.
A key rattled in the lock and Janine came in clutching a tennis racquet and a handful of mail, sweaty from an early match with the young lawyer from down the hall. She threw the mail on the coffee table and extracted one piece. She walked down the hallway and into Pat's room and tossed the letter on the stack of discarded newspaper sections.
'A letter for you.'
She bustled into her own room and then into the shower. Danielson picked up the envelope and examined the address written in a strong hand. She ran through her brief list of friends, unable to place the writing. She opened the envelope and looked at the terse message in surprise:
Pat,
Please meet me at the Olde English Pub, 87412 Wisconsin in Bethesda tomorrow (Sunday) at 3:00 P.M. Please do not mention or show his note to anyone.
Bob Isaacs
Danielson read the message three times quickly and then stared at it. They had ample opportunity every day of the week, and then some lately, to discuss Agency business. She had spent a half hour with Isaacs the previous Wednesday and their interchange had been routine, although he had been more preoccupied than usual. The message was so oddly clandestine; that wasn't even their branch of the " Agency. That it represented the prelude to some romantic entanglement seemed preposterous. Not that it couldn't happen, but there would have been some other clue. She thought back to their conversation after the cancellation of Project QUAKER. The question of her social life, or lack of it, had come up. Had she sent him some kind of false signal? Had she misread him so badly? He seemed straightforward and sincere, but how could you ever tell what people were thinking?
Whatever its motivation, the request put her on the spot. She realized after some reflection that she would keep the appointment, but knowing she would have a few more hours off tomorrow afternoon, she had accepted a rare date for a concert at Wolf Trap. How did Isaacs know she wouldn't be working? Easy enough for him to check the roster, she supposed. Anyway she would have to break the date. The easiest flung would be to claim that something had come up at work, but especially if it were true, that would violate the spirit of Isaacs's request for discretion. Maybe Janine would get sick, and she would have to stay home with her.
Janine came into Pat's room dressed in her robe and wringing her hair in a towel. Danielson recognized that to ignore the note would be the best way to arouse her roommate's interest. She waved the letter by one corner and then tossed it into the wastebasket.