“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 swiveled 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. Those 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 meters!” 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
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 of one 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 toward 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, tilling 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 leaped down along the vapors 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’ 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 self-defense.
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
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 that 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 longitude. Approximately forty and one-quarter minutes later it has passed through the Earth and approaches the surface again at 32° 47’ south longitude. 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
