Ocean Black (Sub Zero Book 2) Read online

  OCEAN BLACK

  WILLIAM H. LOVEJOY

  © William H. Lovejoy 1995

  William H. Lovejoy has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1995 by Pinnacle Books.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Tables of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER ONE

  NOVEMBER 11

  NUCLEAR DETONATION: 32°39’ 26” North, 137° 32’ 16” West

  1020 HOURS LOCAL

  SAN DIEGO BAY, CALIFORNIA

  “She’s just too damned pretty for my likes, Chief.”

  Orville “Bull” Kontas, captain of the Mighty Moose, didn’t care for the new paint scheme on his workboat, an ex tugboat converted to new uses by the Marine Visions Unlimited crews.

  Kaylene Thomas had sold the other two workboats, Priscilla and Cockamamie, and used the proceeds to drydock and fully refit the Mighty Moose. In addition to her new engines and refurbished living and working spaces, she sported the company’s recognizable theme of white paint with a yellow stripe rising diagonally on each side of the pilot house.

  “You’ve sailed prettier, Bull,” Dane Brande told him.

  “Maybe. But not on a damned tugboat.”

  Brande had to cede the point. The workboat’s captain had probably sailed every classification of boat and ship in every sea and ocean available. Kontas was over seventy, with no documented evidence of his true age. His black market purchased papers birth certificate and passport reported that he had been born in Shanghai of a Greek father and a Chinese mother, but the data was based primarily on hearsay. His bald pate had a rusty edged fringe of white hair, and the lines of his weather and sea beaten face were deep. His ears were huge and blistered. Whatever his age, his strength seemed undiminished, and his loyalty would never be faulted. He had been with MVU from soon after the start up.

  It wasn’t until after the Moose came out of drydock that Brande realized how much pride Kontas had taken as master of a boat that didn’t fit into a corporate scheme. Her decrepit state of repair had not meshed with the MVU ideology, but it had meshed perfectly with Bull Kontas.

  “Would you like it better without the yellow stripe, Bull?”

  “Ah, Chief... .”

  “Go ahead and paint it out.”

  “Well, shit. I mean, it’s your boat and all.”

  “I don’t care, Bull. I just like to come and ride with you.”

  And that was true. He liked almost any form of marine transport. After Brande’s parents died in an automobile accident, and while he was being raised on the farm by his grandparents, Sven and Bridgette, he had learned to like more water than wheat farmers generally appreciated. With his fifteen foot aluminium boat, he had sought adventure on Tenmile Lake, then Leech Lake, then Lake Superior. Obtaining scholarships where he could and working the summer wheat harvests, Brande had accumulated enough cash to get him to the University of California at San Diego, then on to graduate schools.

  Though he had left the wheat farm, Brande carried much of his Swedish heritage with him. Henning Sven Brande’s wide shoulders and barrel chest were apparent in Dane, disguising the fact that he weighed 215 pounds. He was six four, and that too was a reflection of both Sven and his father, Stephen. Henning Sven’s antecedents, confused by the tradition of differing surnames Brandeson, Svenson, Petterson all had identifiable blue eyes, and Brande carried that trait forward. He had been unable, or unwilling, however, to continue plowing the ground that Henning Sven had broken in Minnesota in 1917.

  Brande sported the hands of his grandfather, large with blunt fingers, but they displayed the scars of contact with coral reef and sharp edged equipment rather than John Deere tractors and harrows. His blond hair was bleached to near whiteness by sun and salt water, and his face was deep sea tanned and weathered, with early crow’s feet at the corners of his blue eyes.

  Keeping his private life private wasn’t an obsession, but it was a habit. While his professional successes were the fodder of boasting, he didn’t bother. Brande’s quiet demeanor and self-confidence gave outsiders the impression of arrogance, but his employees, whom he considered more as colleagues than employees, accepted his indirect style of leadership without question. Except, perhaps, for Bull Kontas.

  Stepping to the back of the pilot house, Brande poured two mugs full of coffee from the cradled pot and took one forward to Kontas.

  Keeping one gnarled hand on the helm, Kontas accepted his mug with the other and said, “Miss Kaylene, she won’t like that.”

  “You take care of the paint, Bull. I’ll take care of Rae.”

  In the nearly five years that she had worked for him, Brande had always called Kaylene Rae Thomas by her middle name. He knew it was an avoidance trait. His wife, Janelle Kay, had died on their honeymoon trip to the azure depths of the Caribbean, pinned beneath the broken crane boom of a sunken Liberty ship. His frantic and unsuccessful attempts to free her before her oxygen ran out had partially set the course of his career.

  He preferred to call the president of his company, for which he was still chairman of the board, Rae.

  Brande stood next to Kontas and watched the endless blue sea rolling toward them. The waters off Southern California were calm and smooth. Off the stern, North Island disappeared behind Point Loma, and San Diego Bay faded.

  Two hours later, the chronically taciturn Kontas, after a silence of nearly an hour, said, “There she is, Chief.”

  Brande scanned the sea and found the buoy. It was a beatup, steel concoction emplaced for the duration of the construction phase of Ocean Deep, which was two hundred feet straight down. They had come today to replace it.

  Bending toward the low placed PA microphone on the side bulkhead, Brande pressed the switch and yelled, “Both hands on deck!”

  Several minutes later, Darby Jones appeared. He was Bull Kontas’ entire crew.

  A minute later, Maynard Dokey followed him into the pilot house, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Okey Dokey was short of stature and hated dentists so much that he went through life with a chipped front tooth. At sea, he rarely combed his hair, which was a tangled mass of dark curls. He was wearing cut off jeans and a bright yellow tee shirt with the boldly printed legend, “Save the mammals? I thought you said mammaries.”

  Dokey designed his own shirts and coffee mugs, in addition to intricately plotted electronics circuits and massively complicated software programs. When he felt like it, he could be a genius with a machine tool, fabricating intricate components for mechanical monsters. Despite his sea bum appearance, he was a graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he carried the Marine Visions Unlimited title of Chief Robotics Operations Engineer. Robots being the prime concern of the company, Dokey and Brande were frequently in one another’s company.

  He clomped into the pilot house and stopped in front of Brande. “The next time, Chief... .”

  Kontas had learned to call Brand, “Chief,” as a result of Dokey’s example.

  “... I prefer to be awakened gently, preferably by someone with long, blond hair, swishing it lightly across my face. There should be coffee at hand, perhaps a warm croissant... .”

  “Coffee’s on the hot plate,” Brande grinned at him. “Maybe Darby has a croissant in the galley.”

  “What’s a croissant?” Jones asked.

  “God,” Dokey complained, “there’s got to be a better outfit somewhere, like the Navy.”

  “The Navy didn’t have croissants,” Jones told him. He had retired as a chief petty officer.

  Kontas reduced speed as he neared the buoy, saying, “Let’s hop to it.”

  “I didn’t get my coffee,” Dokey said.

  “Get up earlier,” Kontas told him.

  Dokey grinned and headed for the afterdeck, followed by Jones.

  Brande moved to the rear bulkhead, now outfitted with state of the art radar, sonar, and radio equipment, including an acoustic phone. Radio waves tended to bend in the wrong directions in water, and most of their subsurface communications were accomplished with acoustic transmissions.

  Lifting the phone from its cradle, Brande said, “Ocean Deep, anyone listening? This is the Mighty Moose.”

  “Voyager Two here, Dane. I’m surfacing.”

  The captain of Voyager II was Ron Zendl. Eventually, there would be six Voyager submarines, passenger carrying vessels accommodating thirty two tourists. That was two more subs than originally planned, but expectations had risen. They were designed to operate at depths of less than two thousand feet, carrying visitors from San Diego and Los Angeles to Ocean Deep.

  “We’re watching for you, Ron. How about Dot?”

  “They’re loading her up now,” Zendl said.

  “Dot,
” was short for Neptune’s Daughter, a two man mini sub utilized for undersea chores. Her sisters were Neptune’s Niece and Neptune’s Wife, known as “Nice” and “Wifey,” and the three subs, like the Voyager class, were designed for relatively shallow waters.

  “All right. We’ll have a package for her in about twenty minutes,” Brande said.

  He replaced the telephone, slipped out onto the sidedeck, and walked aft to join Dokey and Jones.

  Dokey had pulled the tarpaulin from the new buoy. It was, naturally, finished in white and yellow. It was eight feet in diameter, and it was not intended to serve any useful purpose for seafarers. Rather, it was Ocean Deep’s communication link. On top of the globular buoy was a fiberglass housing protecting a wide array of antennas and a video camera. A small radar dish provided a twenty mile scan of the area around it, triggering radio warnings to ships that might collide with the buoy.

  Microwave antennas connected Ocean Deep with the mainland, and a satellite uplink provided a route for more heavenly communications. Rae Thomas frequently complained about the cost of MVU’s satellite communications subscription.

  Another set of sensors for wave motion, wind direction and speed, temperature, salinity, and the like in addition to the video, provided inputs to the consoles on board Ocean Deep. The technicians and the tourists could monitor conditions on the surface. Those conditions were often a stark contrast to the seemingly motionless serenity at depth.

  Dokey and Brande released the tiedowns, then Brande signalled Jones, who was operating the controls of the crane. The boom’s line went taut, stretched a tad, then eased the buoy from its cradle on the deck. When it was six feet above the deck, Jones stopped the lift, and Brande took some strain on a guideline to steady it. He studied all of the lines and cables, looking for undue stresses before he nodded an okay to Dokey.

  Dokey slipped beneath the buoy with the end of a thick umbilical cable that was coiled high on the deck and began to fasten the connector in place. The cable was Kevlar shielded, strong as steel and contained as an inner core a bundle of fiber optic fibers.

  Marine Visions utilized a cable of the single mode fiber type. The diameter of the filament was small enough to force a single beam of light to stay on a direct path. Lasers generated light signals in binary code pulsing on for 1 and off for 2 that zipped along the fiber at tremendous speeds. The high frequency of light waves allowed the transmission of thousands of times more information than was permitted by current flowing in a copper wire. The speed and data capacity of fiber optic cables reduced immensely the thickness of the cable required. A quarter inch thick fiber optic cable could handle telecommunications, computer data transfer, electronic mail, and image transfer with ease, and with space left over. This cable, because it would also anchor the buoy, was two inches in diameter, the additional bulk made up of carbon reinforced strands of fiberglass.

  The laser light generators and receivers on both ends of the cable had to be correctly aligned. A cable inserted into a connector with a 1/64 inch twist off alignment would scramble all communications between the host vehicle and the sensors and antennas. Dokey inserted the male connector into the female receptor, levered the locking ring into place, and bolted it down. Or up, since he was working on the bottom of the buoy.

  Backing out from beneath the slightly swinging buoy, he said, “I must have designed this, Chief. It fit.”

  Dokey had helped, but the team had also included Kim Otsuka and Bob Mayberry, the respective directors of computer systems and electronic technology.

  Brande released his guideline, disconnected it from the buoy, then waved at Jones.

  The crane boom moved outboard, carrying the buoy with it, dragging its cable behind, and lowered the sphere to the sea.

  As Jones released the crane line’s lift hook remotely, Dokey said, “I’ll be damned. It floats.”

  “This stuff won’t,” Brande said, referring to the coil of cable. It was six hundred feet long, with a fitting 250 feet from the buoy which would fasten to the concrete anchor pier imbedded in the sea bed. The remaining length would snake across the sea floor and be attached to an exterior connector on the dome.

  With Jones’s assistance on the crane, they lifted the coil from the deck, swung it over the side, and lowered it to water level.

  Then they waited for the subs. When both Dot and Voyager popped their sails above the surface, out of harm’s way, Jones released the coil from the crane line.

  Brande watched as it began to unfurl, disappearing into the depths.

  Dot immediately submerged again, chasing after the fitting she would attach to the pier.

  Zendl cautiously brought Voyager alongside the workboat, and Brande and Dokey leaped from the low gunwale to the tower of the sub, which was located well forward on the hull. The sail tilted back and forth in the wave action, and Brande kept a firm grip on the exposed hand railing. The access hatch popped open, and Zendl stuck his head out. Boyish and charming, the thirty year old had an adolescent’s cowlick at the back of his head, completely uncontrollable.

  “Going my way?” he asked.

  “Forgot our tickets,” Dokey told him.

  “We’ll bill you.”

  Brande followed Dokey through the hatch, then closed and dogged it tight. Descending an eleven-foot-long ladder brought him to the main deck of the sub, in the control cabin. The smooth, well illuminated sea was visible through the four large ports over the instrument panel, which was a Boeing 747 pilot’s dream. Red, green, and blue digital readouts monitored the submarine’s performance and position. There were two comfortable seats for the pilot and his assistant, though Zendl was the only operator on board just now. When they started carrying passengers, they would have a full crew of two operators and two stewards.

  The first Voyager was already back in drydock, her interior being fitted for the expectations of the traveling public airline type seats, carpeting, laminated bulkhead panelling. Voyagers III and IV were in the final stages of construction in Bremerton, and III would undergo sea trials within the month.

  Zendl offered Brande the pilot’s seat, but he shook his head, and the captain settled into his seat.

  Brande often felt the pangs of jealousy in such encounters. He had been the primary designer of this sub, which was based on the configuration of the submersible Ben Franklin, but he was reticent about taking the controls from the people he had designated as captains of his vessels, whether it was Bull Kontas or Ron Zendl.

  Voyager II was seventy feet long, and almost all of her operating systems were below the passenger deck. Water, trim, ballast, and waste tanks took up the most space, followed by the four gigantic sets of battery banks which powered the twin electric motors. The liquid oxygen tanks and the electronic components were mounted in an aft compartment.

  He dipped his head and passed though the hatchway into the main cabin, which could seat thirty two people. Each pair of seats had its own porthole, the better to view the trip through Southern California seas. The Voyager craft had been given much thinner hulls than other submersibles since they would travel in shallower water. Additionally, they had sleeker shapes in order to increase speed. The interior of Voyager II had exposed electrical and hydraulic conduits along the sides and ceiling. The floor was steel, and the seats were covered in canvas. The utilitarian decor, finished in gray speckled paint, did not bother the work crews who were transported daily to Ocean Deep.

  The submarines made their ways out of San Diego Bay on the surface, and the first leg was generally rough. Once into open sea, and submerged to a level of one hundred feet, most impressions of motion disappeared. The submersibles could make almost thirty knots subsurface, and the trip to Ocean Deep was usually accomplished in about an hour. Out of Los Angeles, whenever they arranged for porting facilities, it would be seventy minutes.

  He and Dokey flopped into seats on the opposite sides of the narrow aisle as Zendl took on ballast and the sub began to settle into the sea. The relatively mild wave motion decreased, and Voyager II felt increasingly stable.

  “The trouble with this job,” Dokey said, “is the more we accomplish, the less we get to do.”

  “Agreed, Okey. Figure out another project for us.”