The Seventh Angel - Страница 14

On the ship’s fantail, a large hydraulic winch turned steadily, reeling in a long cable of braided steel at the painfully slow rate of fifty feet per minute. The winch had been designed to launch and retrieve a towed acoustic sensor array known as SURTASS. But the object hanging from the end of the submerged cable was not an underwater listening device. It was the deep water submersible Nereus, and within its pressure hull were three human beings.

No one knew the nature of the accident that had trapped the submersible on the slope of the Aleutian trench, under three thousand feet of water. There had been no communication with the Nereus since the little submarine had declared a mission abort more than twenty-four hours earlier. No one knew whether the crew of the Nereus were alive, or dead. This might be a rescue operation, or it might be nothing more than the recovery of three bodies.

The retrieval crew was composed of five workers: a winch operator, two riggers to attach tag-lines to the miniature submarine and guide it onto the deck of the ship, and a pair of divers in insulated wetsuits — standing by to go into the water if anything went wrong. In warm weather, there would sometimes be a few spectators, out on deck to enjoy the sunshine and watch the mini-sub come out of the water. When the weather was cold or the seas were rough, the spectators tended to stay inside the ship, where they could keep warm and dry.

This close to Alaska, the weather was much too cold for casual onlookers. If this had been a routine operation, no one but the retrieval crew would have turned out to watch. But this was not a routine retrieval operation, and there were nearly twenty people on the fantail. Two of them were medical personnel, ready to render emergency treatment if required. The rest of the crowd were there to watch, and to add their silent moral support.

Every man and woman not actively engaged in the safety and navigation of the ship was present. No one had called for them. There had been no announcement over the ship’s public address system. They had been drawn to the fantail by instinct, and by unspoken common consent.

At fifty feet per minute, the slowly-turning winch had taken almost exactly an hour to haul in three-thousand feet of cable. The onlookers had stood the entire time, braving the cutting cold of the Aleutian wind as foot-after-foot of dripping steel cable was reeled in.

They were coming to the end now. The damaged submersible was nearing the surface. In a minute or so, the Nereus would break through the wave tops — hauled unceremoniously back from the dark ocean depths.

The winch operator watched the cable meter on his control console scroll slowly, like the odometer of a car. “One hundred feet!” His words seemed to hang in the cold bright air. No one else made a sound.

“Fifty feet.” His voice was softer this time, as if he were a little unnerved by the oddly persistent ring of his own words.

“Twenty feet.” It was the last depth report he gave.

The water surrounding the cable was beginning to bubble and churn. The crowd held its collective breath as the water heaved and frothed. Almost without warning, the Nereus broke the surface.

The winch continued to turn, lifting the little submarine free of the water. The hull of the submersible was streaked with the sticky dark silt of the sea bottom. The orange and blue paint scheme of her hull looked almost toy-like, as if this were the plaything of some spoiled child. It suddenly seemed ludicrous to entrust human lives to such a frail and silly machine.

The riggers moved forward, attaching their tag-lines, and swinging the submersible into her cradle. The divers were moving almost before the sub was firmly seated, scrambling up the curved silt-covered sides of the hull to the hatch at the top. They spun the handle furiously, and the pressure seal relaxed with an audible hiss.

The hatch swung up and open, and one of the black-suited divers lowered himself through the opening immediately. His head and shoulders reappeared through the hatch a few seconds later. He raised his hands into the air, and pointed both of his thumbs toward the sky. “They’re alive!”

He said something else, but his words were lost in a roar of shouts and laughter.

They were alive!

CHAPTER 11

21 SPACE OPERATIONS CENTER

ONIZUKA AIR FORCE STATION

SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA

TUESDAY; 26 FEBRUARY

1238 hours (12:38 PM)

TIME ZONE -8 ‘UNIFORM’

Technical Sergeant George Kaulana looked at the two oblong smears of video on the display screen of his SAWS console and raised his eyebrows. “Where are you guys going?” The SAWS console — short for Satellite Analyst Workstation—was receiving an imagery download from Forager 715, a U.S. Air Force Oracle III series surveillance satellite currently passing over southeastern Russia. Forager’s primary surveillance mission was the nuclear reactor facility in Brushehr, Iran, so the perigee of the satellite’s elliptical orbit was designed to bring it to an altitude of only about 280 kilometers during passes over the Middle East. The digital cameras built into the satellite’s 2.4 meter mirror telescope were designed to take their best pictures from that altitude.

At the moment, Forager was on the outbound leg of its transit, heading toward apogee, the farthest reach of its orbit, 1,005 kilometers above the earth. The altitude of the satellite as it passed over southeastern Russia was about 500 kilometers and increasing steadily. Its camera’s were still functional at that altitude, but they were operating well outside of their optimum focal length. The images scrolling across the screen of Technical Sergeant Kaulana’s console were of significantly lower resolution than images shot from Forager’s preferred altitude, but the satellite analyst had no trouble identifying the two blurred oblongs as ships.

Kaulana’s job for this particular satellite pass was to count the number of submarines tied to the pier at the Russian naval base at Petropavlosk, Kamchatka. The ballistic missile submarines based in Petropavlosk represented a sizeable fraction of Russia’s nuclear strike capability. The movement of those subs was an ongoing concern. The United States and Russia might not be enemies anymore, but it wasn’t smart to lose track of another country’s nuclear arsenal if you could avoid it.

The two blurry shapes on Kaulana’s screen were obviously not submarines and the Russian Navy didn’t maintain surface warships in Kamchatka, so the two unidentified ships were probably nothing to worry about. If they’d been following the shipping lanes toward the West Coast of the U.S., he wouldn’t have given them a second look. But both of the unidentified ships were well north of the shipping lanes, and based on the orientation of their hulls, it looked like they were heading toward Petropavlosk. There wasn’t necessarily anything unusual about that. Avacha Bay, the harbor at Petropavlosk, got quite a bit of merchant shipping. But the destination of the ships was cause enough to give them a closer inspection, just to verify that they weren’t military vessels. If Kaulana let a couple of warships slip unnoticed into Petro on his watch, the Lieutenant would skin him alive. Better to check them out.

He used his trackball to pull a wireframe cursor around one of the shapes and keyed the SAWS console for image enlargement and digital enhancement. The video display flickered briefly as it reacted to the increased demand for processing power. A few seconds later, the enhanced image appeared on Kaulana’s screen.

He looked at the blocky white superstructure that ran most of the length of the ship. It wasn’t a tanker or a container ship, but it was definitely some kind of merchant vessel.

He shifted his cursor to the other shape on his screen and repeated the enlarge and enhance process. A few seconds later he was looking at another merchant vessel with the same sort of blocky white superstructure, an apparent duplicate of the first ship.

He increased the image contrast to make the details of the ship’s structure stand out more clearly, and then spent nearly a minute using his cursor to carefully tag points along the outline of the hull and the corners of all visible topside features. When he thought he had given his console’s computer enough clues about the shape of the vessel, he pressed a key to activate a silhouette recognition module in the system’s software.

He got a match in seconds. His unknown ships were 20,000-ton Ro-Ro vessels, built by HuangHai Shipyard in China.

Kaulana drummed his fingers on the gray steel shelf that housed the SAWS console’s keyboard. He could identify nearly every class of warship in the world by sight, but he wasn’t very well versed when it came to merchant ships. What in the heck was a Ro-Ro?

He punched a few keys to query the computer, and was rewarded with a brief explanation. Ro-Ro was the common abbreviation for Roll-on/Roll-off. Ro-Ro ships were vehicle carriers, designed to transport cars or other vehicles from one seaport to another. The Roll-on/Roll-off designation referred to built-in hydraulic ramps that could be lowered to allow a vessel’s cargo of vehicles to drive onto the ship at loading, and drive off when the ship reached its destination. According to the computer summary, the two Ro-Ros on Kaulana’s screen were capable of carrying about 2,000 cars each.

He whistled through his teeth. That was a lot of cars. He shrugged and released the images from his console’s processing queue. As long as the ships weren’t military, it didn’t really matter where they were going. The destinations of a couple of Chinese car carriers could hardly be considered a matter of national security.