oriented law practice.
She came in alternately damning a recalcitrant senatorial aide with whom she was forced to have dealings and crowing over the successful completion of another case in which an out-of-court settlement had saved their client the embarrassment of a court appearance. She elaborated on these developments in a keyed-up, stream-of- consciousness flow as she mixed herself a drink at the bar and sat alongside her husband. As she chatted, Isaacs half-listened, nodding and responding with appropriate monosyllables on occasion. Muriel realized he was down and covered for him for awhile, but finally inquired.
“You’re quiet tonight. How was your day?”
Isaacs smiled tiredly at his wife, then looked down at his drink. He sat up and tried belatedly to brush some of the collected moisture off the sofa arm.
He smiled again, more genuinely, at his gloomy forgetfulness.
“I shouldn’t let him get under my skin. McMasters outflanked me this afternoon. A petty move on his part, but I had to put aside a potentially significant project that is only in the early stages. One of my young people was pretty disappointed. She’d put a lot of good work into it.”
“Can’t you go over his head?”
“No, it’s not that kind of thing. He put me on the spot before enough evidence was in to make a rigorous case. That’s one thing that bothers me, though. Now we won’t know. If it is serious, it’ll catch us by surprise later.”
“I don’t suppose you can continue surreptitiously?”
Isaacs chuckled.
“You’ve got too many clients who spend their lives going back on campaign promises. No. It would be hard to do and hell to pay if I got caught. He gave me an order as a senior officer. Even if it’s stupid, I’d be putting my job on the line and jeopardizing a lot of programs of proven importance. The Director would rule against me unless I had an overwhelming motivation for my insubordination.”
Muriel grinned and raised her glass in a mock toast. “So you’re going to eat it?”
He returned the gesture.
“I can assure you I’ve already done so in my most humble and cooperative way.”
Chapter 6
The USS Seamount, out of Pearl Harbor, sailed steadily toward the Bering Sea carrying a cargo of sixteen nuclear- tipped missiles. Her blunt hull cut cleanly through the water at four hundred fathoms, maintaining a steady twenty-five knots.
Lt. J. G. Augustus Washington sat at the controls of the sophisticated computerized sonar, his consciousness merged with the surrounding sea, as it would be eight hours a day for the next three months. Half his mind tuned to the sounds coming through his headset and to the green glow of the twin display screens in front of him. He automatically registered the turning of the screw on a distant Japanese tanker bound for Valdez, a school of whales somewhere to the west, and the anonymous squeals, rattles and clicks that characterize the undersea world. The other part of his mind wandered to his recently ended shore leave, to his wife. His quarterly sessions at sea were rough and lonely for a young woman married only a couple of years, but if she couldn’t be home in Little Rock, Hawaii was not bad duty for her. At least blacks were not the bottom of the heap. There were always the native Hawaiians. And their reunions—oooeee! Almost worth three months of nothing doing. He swore it would be another two weeks before he would even begin to think about sex, then recognized that he had already succumbed and laughed softly to himself.
He began to form an image of his woman standing on the bed in the moonlight, naked and spread-eagled over him when the angry boiling broke forth from the earphones. Tension seized his gut and left his heart pounding. He jerked upright in his seat, his eyes fixed on the brilliant dot on the right hand screen that passively recorded incoming signals. His gaze whipped to the left screen that registered the reflection of the active signals the submarine emitted and saw only the faintest reading.
“Holy Christ!”
His exclamation cut through the cabin, violating the hush of routine.
“What have you got?” inquired the duty officer, moving to his side.
Washington’s eyes remained fixed on the screens before him. He reached to flip on the external speaker and the bizarre hiss filled the cabin. He hit another switch and the right screen shifted to the target Doppler indicator mode. Off-scale! He twisted a knob.
“Somethin’s comin’ at us like a bat outa hell! Five thousand—shit! No!” He looked at the right screen again. “Coming on four thousand meters already—goddamn! I can’t even get a reading on it. Closin’ fast. From directly beneath us! And I can’t even see it in active mode! Sucker must be small!”
“That’s absurd,” retorted the officer, “nothing moves that fast,” but his ears heard the noise and his eyes read the screens; his shaken voice belied the conviction of his words. He stepped quickly to the ship’s phone.
Washington began expertly to assimilate the flow of information from the panel before him. He switched the left screen for a brief moment to the target noise indicator display and mumbled to himself, “white noise, no sign of a screw frequency.” He switched the screen to the target data and track history mode, fed from the computer memory. “Now at three thousand meters,” he sang out. The noise from the speaker grew steadily. The knot in his stomach tightened with each fraction of a decibel. He reached to turn down the volume and spoke over his shoulder.
“It’s not coming right at us. It should pass us about eleven hundred meters off the port bow.”
The duty officer repeated the message to the captain.
They listened, unmoving, as the sound peaked and then diminished slightly with a perceptible change in pitch. Washington noted its passage through the ship’s depth level, headed for the surface.
Abruptly the noise ceased, to be replaced with an almost painful silence as saturated ears tried to adjust. Active dials lapsed into quiescence and the bright blip on the screen disappeared. Washington swiveled in his chair to exchange wide-eyed looks of surprise with the duty officer who reported once more to the captain.
Washington returned his attention to his instruments. Ten, fifteen seconds went by. Slowly he turned up the sensitivity of the device and the volume on the speaker and earphones. Only the routine sounds of the sea issued. After twenty-five seconds the duty officer still stood with the phone clamped in a sweaty hand, but others in the cabin began to shuffle in relief. Washington increased the gain a bit more and concentrated his trained ear to detect any hint of abnormal sound. He systematically switched display modes but found no clue to the thing that had just assaulted them.
With the suddenness and impact of a physical blow, the cabin filled with the sound again. Washington shrieked, ripped off his earphones and slapped a palm over each ear. He slipped off his chair and knelt in a daze of confusion, his body pumped with adrenalin, his ears ringing with an intense hollow echo. Several figures rushed to the sonar console. Two friends bent to Washington. Someone fumbled, then found, the volume control. The frightening hiss dropped to a muted roar and the duty officer was left in the new quiet, shouting hoarsely into the phone.
The noise dropped gradually, and then just before it faded below a perceptible level it ceased abruptly once more. Silence fell in the cabin, broken only by the chatter of the sonar and the quiet moan of the man who remained on the floor, rocking gently, his hands over his ears and his eyes squeezed shut.
Several days after the cancellation of Project QUAKER, Isaacs played a closely fought game of handball with a friend and colleague, Captain Avery Rutherford, one of the senior officers in Naval Intelligence. Rutherford was three years older than Isaacs, but in excellent shape. They split the first four games and went to a tie breaker on the match game. Isaacs scored once and served at game point. After several volleys, Isaacs took a shot in front court. Calculating to catch his opponent off guard, he hit the ball softly to the front wall, but it went a bit too high and gave Rutherford time to cover it. With Isaacs in the front court, Rutherford played a favorite shot that came off the front wall as a lob calculated to land in the rear corner, a troublesome left hand return at best. He then retreated rapidly to center court just behind the service area to await the return, hoping to hear the satisfying
