The Seventh Angel - Страница 10

She swallowed, took a deep breath, and tried to will her body to relax. Forget about the Navy boneheads. They don’t matter. Watch the screen. Do the job. Pretend they’re not even here.

The cool semi-darkness of CIC made it a little easier to ignore the unwanted onlookers. As long as they remained relatively quiet, she could mostly tune them out.

Someone tapped Ann on the left shoulder. She flinched at the unexpected contact, and whipped her head around see the newcomer. It was that captain guy, Brodie, or whatever.

The man held out a ceramic mug and smiled. “Coffee?”

Ann took the offered cup. “Thanks.” She turned back to the screen. Still no sign of Mouse’s updated position report. Had the robot stopped communicating altogether? Could her program patch have caused some unexpected side-effect that made the mode transition problem worse rather than better?

“I’m Captain Bowie,” the man said, apparently oblivious to the fact that Ann was attempting to ignore him. “We met briefly when you came on board, but I haven’t really gotten around to chatting with you yet. It’s Ms. Roark, right?”

Ann nodded. “Just Ann, sir.”

She kept her voice carefully polite. It was a simple matter of self preservation. There were not exactly an infinite number of job opportunities in the robotics industry, and fewer still in Ann’s area of specialty: underwater robotics. If she wanted to keep paying the rent, she had to be civil to the uniforms.

Anything beyond courtesy was Sheldon’s responsibility. Sheldon was the talker. It was his job to shake hands, answer stupid questions, and generally keep people too busy to bother Ann. A job at which he was failing miserably at the moment.

The captain stepped closer and leaned over to look at the screen. “How are things looking?”

Ann suppressed a sigh. This guy wanted to make small talk.

“I’m waiting for an updated position report,” she said. “Mouse is coming up on his last navigational waypoint. We should be getting a fix on his position any time now.” She paused for a second, and decided to be honest. “He’s actually a little bit overdue. I expected to hear from him almost a minute ago.”

“Is there a problem?”

Of course not, Ann thought. Everything is just fine. I’ve got three lives depending on an untested code patch that I wrote at three in the morning, when I was practically cross-eyed from sleep depravation. But everything is peachy here, Mr. Captain, Sir. Just freaking peachy.

She glanced up at Captain What’s-his-name, and wondered for a second if she had said some of that last bit out loud. More than likely not, because he didn’t seem to be ramping up to indignation. His brown eyes looked tired, but not angry.

Ann returned his stare with one of her own. From a strictly physical perspective, she liked what she saw. He was in his late thirties or early forties, about six feet tall, and almost good looking in a nerdy clean-cut sort of way. His black hair was too short to have any real character to it, and his narrow face seemed slightly out of proportion to his neck and body. Still, the overall package wasn’t bad, if you were into overgrown Eagle Scouts.

Looking beyond the physical was another matter. Whatever points he picked up in the looks category were far outweighed by his non-physical deficits. The man obviously bought into that whole bullshit warrior-Zen thing. Ann could see it in everything about him, from his body language to the starched creases in his uniform. He was a card carrying member of the ‘Defenders of Freedom Club,’ just like Ann’s father had been.

She caught herself and mentally shifted gears before she could say anything stupid. This was not the time for a drive down that particular stretch of Memory Lane. “Where’s Sheldon?” she asked.

The captain shifted his gaze to the laptop screen. “I believe he’s up in the wardroom, talking to your company on the satellite phone. COMPACFLEET is busy signing promissory waivers, to make sure that you guys get paid in case we break your Mouse prototype, or lose it somehow in the rescue attempt.”

Ann nodded and turned back to the laptop.

“You didn’t sign on for any of this,” the captain said. “We understand that. You come out here to run some tests, and the Navy shoves a rescue mission in your face. We know you’re not ready, and we know that your equipment isn’t ready either.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “But, right now, your Mouse Mark-I is the only game in town.”

Ann nodded absently. “I understand, Captain.”

“I’m sure you do,” said the captain. “But I’d like to hit one more quick point before you get too far into this.”

Ann looked up and found that he was staring at her again.

“I know you’ll do your best,” he said. “But there are a lot of ways that this operation could go sour. There hadn’t been any communication with the Nereus for hours. The guys on that submarine might already be dead.”

Ann nodded slowly. This was not quite turning into the Go-Navy pep talk she’d been expecting.

“We don’t know what kind of damage that submersible has taken,” the captain said. “They could be flooding, or running out of breathable air. If their electrical system has failed, they could die from hypothermia. The ocean temperature at three thousand feet is just a hair above freezing. Twenty four hours is a long time to go without heat, especially when your only clothes are light duty coveralls.”

He looked back to the laptop screen. “If they had an electrical fire, they might even have burned to death, or died from smoke inhalation.”

Ann rubbed her eyes and blinked several times. “Are you trying to cheer me up, Captain?”

The corners of his mouth turned up — the ghost of a rueful smile. “No. I’m just telling you that the odds of success are not in our favor. Everyone in the chain of command knows that. The Navy will take the heat if things don’t work out. You’re not going to be left holding the bag.”

Ann nodded. “Thank you, Captain. I appreciate that.”

She turned back to the laptop. Yeah, right. For all of his noble words, Captain Eagle Scout would throw Ann and Sheldon to the wolves about two milliseconds after the shit hit the fan. That was the way these guys worked. When something went wrong, they went hunting for a scapegoat.

She scanned the screen. Mouse still hadn’t reported in. She’d give it another minute or so, just to be sure. But she was grasping at straws. This rescue, if you could even call it that, was over.

CHAPTER 7

NOAA SUBMERSIBLE NEREUS

NORTHERN PACIFIC OCEAN (SOUTH OF THE ALEUTIAN ISLANDS)

TUESDAY; 26 FEBRUARY

1006 hours (10:06 AM)

TIME ZONE -10 ‘WHISKEY’

The flashlight shook in Charlie Sweigart’s hand, the dull circle of yellowish light bobbing and jittering spasmodically as another uncontrollable wave of shivers wracked his body. He tried to thumb the off switch, to conserve the little remaining battery power until the worst of the spasms had passed. But his hands were too numb from the cold to properly obey his commands.

The batteries rattled inside the body of the flashlight. The light grew marginally brighter for a few seconds, and then dimmed again. The glow seemed pitifully small and weak in the tomblike blackness of the submersible. The Nereus carried three emergency flashlights, and this was the last of them. Charlie had already worn out the batteries in the other two, fruitlessly searching for the electrical fault that had robbed the submersible of power.

The submersible lay on its starboard side, heeled over about thirty degrees, its bow slightly elevated by the rising slope of the Aleutian trench. The odd tilt put the chairs at the wrong angle for sitting. The only stable position was sort of a leaning crouch, with feet braced against the deck for support.

The angle of the deck wasn’t just a matter of discomfort. The fifteen hundred pound lead ballast plate built into the bottom of the submersible was designed to drop vertically from a form-fitted recess in the keel. But the canted deck pushed the weight of the ballast plate to one side, putting some massive amount of lateral torque on the emergency release mechanism.

Charlie had fought with the release handle until his hands were raw. The latches were too far out of alignment. The release mechanism was hopelessly jammed, and — along with it — their chances of getting the Nereus back to the surface.

The shakes running through Charlie’s body were nearly convulsive now. His teeth were chattering so hard that he thought they might shatter. He clamped his jaw shut and forced himself to override the tremors in his muscles.

When he had regained a measure of control, he pointed the dwindling beam of the flashlight toward the open faceplate of the secondary electrical bus. Like every other surface in the cockpit of the little submarine, the open doors of the access panel were beaded with moisture — water vapor from their breaths, condensed out of the air by the cold.

That was how they were going to die. Charlie knew that now. The cold. Of all the ways they could die down here … drowning … asphyxiation … implosion … they were going to freeze to death. He would never have predicted that.

At the current rate of consumption, the emergency air flasks would probably last another two days. The hull was holding pressure. There were no leaks, and no escaping air. But the heaters had died along with the electrical system. Without the heaters, the cold water surrounding the Nereus had gradually leached away all the warmth in the submersible. The temperature of the air in the cockpit had reached equilibrium with the temperature of the water outside the hull: just a couple of degrees above freezing.