“Uh huh,” Forte said, having understood nothing. “Disengage the autopilot and I’ll take it from here.”
As she executed the order, he took the control stick to the right of his seat in one hand and brought the Mako’s nose up level. With his left hand he eased back on the throttle until the submersible was barely making steerageway.
Jennifer Red Cloud glanced down at the fathometer. It showed they were barely a meter above the seabed. Next to it the depth indicator registered 344 meters.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“About fifty kilometers off the African coast and”– he pointed at the depth indicator –“about 350 meters down.”
“On the continental shelf, then?” she asked casually.
“No, the continental shelf is behind us. We’re about seven or eight kilometers from its outer limit down the continental slope.”
“And what happens here?”
“That,” he said, pointing.
Dead ahead was what seemed to be a mammoth black cylinder extruded from the seabed at an angle of about thirty degrees. Forte pulled a red lever overhead, and two rigid arms slid out from their recesses on the bottom of the Mako and made fast with a clang that reverberated through the ship.
“Magnetic clamps,” Forte explained. “Keeps us firmly in position to use the mechanical arms and maintain leverage and equilibrium. It was either this or use torque wrenches like the astronauts.”
He depressed the red intercom button on the side of the control column. “This is Forte,” he said. “Who’s back there?”
“Hi, Mr. Forte! This is Pastorelli, and Gibbs is here with me.”
“Glad to have you aboard. How is the job shaping up?”
“A piece of cake. It took four days to get the first anchor down, but now we’re in the swing of it, eight hours is the average we’re shooting at.”
“Eight hours,” mused Forte half aloud. “Four mother ships leapfrogging. Five nautical miles between anchors.
That works out to a line of anchors sixty nautical miles a day. The Alamo needs to make fifty to stay on schedule. That leaves a cushion of ten miles… barring accidents.”
Barring accidents, thought Jennifer Red Cloud. Easier and easier. It wasn’t quite clear just what part the anchors played, but it was clear that without them the Alamo would never arrive on schedule.
“Permission to lock out,” Pastorelli was saying for the second time. Forte was looking at her.
“Permission granted,” said Jennifer Red Cloud.
In the fifth sphere to the rear, Pastorelli and Gibbs had suited up in Ultravac gear, fins, and oxygen-neon closed-circuit breathing apparatus. They wriggled through the narrow aperture into the lockout area and closed and dogged down the watertight door behind them. One after the other, they dropped through the open hatch on the bottom of the lockout sphere into the water, illuminated now by their helmet lights and the Mako’s high-intensity beams. Disengaging their big box of tools from its receptacle on the skid, they opened the compressed gas valve that blew the box’s built-in tanks just enough to provide neutral buoyancy and dragged it behind them to the base of the big cylinder. The divers then returned to the submersible to focus its spotlights on the area where they would be working.
“All set?” said Forte when they resumed their stations beside the tilted column.
“All set.”
Forte depressed a toggle switch on the instrument panel.
“Topside,” came a voice over the intercom.
“All clear below.”
“Stand by,” said Topside. And a moment later: “It’s on its way.”
Forte pointed up. Jennifer Red Cloud’s eyes followed, but she couldn’t see anything.
“Keep watching,” Forte said.
After a moment, Jennifer Red Cloud could discern a wire cable that rose vertically from the anchor.
“Guide wire,” explained Forte. “It’s lower end is attached to that semicircular arch on top of the cylinder. The other is supported on the surface by a boxcar-sized buoy. The line that is being lowered, which we are now going to attach to that arch by a mooring swivel–we first considered a large-sized bending shackle and a section of heavy-duty die-lock chain–will be supported by that buoy and a Jew’s harp.”
In the most elementary terms, Forte’s men had stuck a needle at an angle in the continental slope. Now they were going to put a thread–the anchor rode–through the needle’s eye and make it fast. The other end would be tied to a float. When the Sun King was maneuvered into position five miles away, an oceangoing tug would carry a line from the circular craft to the float, where the suspended line would be tied to it. The Sun King’s winches would take up the slack and pull the boat forward–kedging–by means of the anchor. The line to the next anchor would be made fast to the Sun King’s second winch before the first was released. The Alamo, harnessed behind the Sun King by four lines, would be dragged along behind. And so the two gigantic craft would proceed up the line of anchors like a man who hauls in his small boat by pulling on the mooring line, hand over hand.
The lines were gigantic, as big around as a barrel. In fact, the scale of everything connected with the project was gargantuan. But in essence the operation was childishly simple.
And vulnerable.
Jennifer Red Cloud considered a number of attractive alternatives. In order to sabotage the anchors, she would need only to have her men plant explosive charges; two hundred kilos would probably suffice. To destroy the shackling assembly, a thermite bomb could be used to melt the retaining pin. The braided nylon line could be fatally weakened by injecting the core with nitric acid so that it would part from the strain of pulling the Sun King and the Alamo. It was all so very elementary.
“Well, if you want my opinion,” Jennifer Red Cloud said when the operation was concluded and the two divers were on their way back to the lockout, “it’s a very uneconomical approach.”
“How do you figure?” said Forte.
“I know something about diving at these depths. It’s very, very expensive.”
That was most definitely true. Before each eight-hour
shift down below, the divers had to spend three days in a compression tank, and then on reaching the surface again, eleven days decompressing. Anchor-embedment operations were being carried out around the clock. That meant eighty-four divers for each support ship, or nearly four hundred men, counting backups for accidents, sickness, and those who couldn’t take the rigors of the deep and quit. It meant forty-five decompression chambers per ship, each at a different stage of decompression. And because the decompression took eleven days, room-sized tanks with full amenities had to be provided: bunks, exercise equipment, small galley, bathroom with shower, closed-circuit video. Servicing these men and facilities required a large medical and logistical staff. Divers’ salaries, at $900 per day, alone cost Triple Eye nearly $2 million a week. Altogether a ruinously expensive method, above and beyond the costs of the anchors and ancillary installations and supply ships and crews themselves.
“How many anchors did you say?” she asked.
“A thousand one hundred and eighteen. There are none in midocean, of course. Too deep.”
“Well,” she sighed, “I guess you know what you’re doing, but for what you’re spending you could get a hundred oceangoing tugs.”
“That’s right. But look at it this way: Once planted, these anchors will serve for years. For kedging from one to the next, the waves and sunlight supply the motive power. Once we fill the pipeline, icebergs will be coming this way every four weeks. You’d need 140 tugs to supply the same power during the year. And you’d have to pay crews, buy oil, risk them running each other down during storms, and especially worry about them tearing up the bergs through random vibration, which destroyed your Salvation off the cost of Ecuador.
“Besides, the mechanical efficiency of a winch is nearly 100 percent. And you can develop high forces with modest power. For instance, at 1 knot the pull/power ratio is about 1.944 N/W (326 Ibf/hp), or about ten times greater than the best pull/power ratios for screw-driven tugs. Moreover–”
“Spare me.”
“Sure,” said Forte, hurt that the expert knowledge he
had acquired at the cost of much study was not wanted. “It’s just that I thought you wanted to know what was going on.”
“I know all I need to know.”
“Suit yourself.” Forte lapsed into a morose silence that lasted until they were back on the surface.
By contrast, Jennifer Red Cloud was positively ebullient. On this brief dive, she had come up with no fewer than three airtight methods of sabotaging the Alamo. The steel and concrete anchor, the retaining pin, and the anchor rode to the buoy were all vulnerable. There were going to be 496 of them, Forte had said, spaced at fifty-nautical-mile intervals along the African coast as far north as the equator, and another 622 on the eastern Atlantic coast all the way to the Republic of Texas. How easy it was all going to be.