“No.”
“Good. You’re not only wrong, but you’ve grievously underestimated the man in the Oval Office.”
“Yeah? What does he plan to do, welsh on his promise? That should win him a lot of votes come November.”
“Your memory must be failing, Rip,” chided Benson. “His promise was exactly what the Congress had demanded, but he made a condition. Remember?”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought. The condition was that if, by some miracle, the Sun King and the Alamo did get through without the Air Force dropping the bomb, then the promise was null and void.”
“Come on, Pat,” said Forte angrily, “he can’t get away with that. There were a couple of thousand witnesses aboard Admiral Hodge’s task force.”
“Right. And what do you think they saw?”
“They saw a B-2 drop an A-bomb–that’s what they saw.”
“They didn’t. They saw an A-bomb burst, all right. But it wasn’t a B-2 that dropped it. In fact, it wasn’t dropped at all. It was an air burst, at 1,500 meters altitude, of a Nagasaki-grade atomic missile launched from a submarine. A Russian submarine.”
That the Russian premier had been able to have an A-bomb delivered at the right time, on short notice, by a submarine, was to Ripley Forte more than providential. It seemed merely part of a gigantic conspiracy between the President and the Congress, the Russian premier and the Russian navy, to manage the Alamo project without reference to Ripley Forte. Things were happening as the result of invisible forces he didn’t begin to understand. He had lost control.
That ego-shattering realization plunged him into black
depression. He still went through the motions, but the sharp bite of command became toothless. From that fourteenth day of March, Jennifer Red Cloud watched–at first with disbelief, then with alarm, finally with compassion–as Ripley Forte slowly sank into apathy. He spent most of his time alone in his office performing meaningless paperwork, as if motion were somehow a measure of accomplishment. That Forte, a man of quick decision and resolute action, might have a breaking point was an idea that had never occurred to Jennifer Red Cloud. That he might already have gone beyond it she steadfastly refused to consider.
Fortunately, the state of Ripley Forte’s mind had no observable effect on the operation of Triple Eye. So thoroughly had he indoctrinated the men, and so much experience had they accumulated in handling the Sun King and the Alamo during the previous six months, that his abdication of active command little affected the operation.
The Flettner sails, with a slight nudge from the Sun King and its tugs, eased the Alamo out of the South Equatorial and into the Guiana Current on schedule on 1 April, 18 days after they had pierced the triangle of fire. On 2 April they made fast to Anchor No. 497, which would pull them into the New World. On this leg of the voyage, with generally fine weather, they made the best progress of the voyage. The Guiana Current carried them along at twenty nautical miles per day, to which was added another forty-eight, on an average, by means of kedging. With an average of sixty-eight miles a day being made good, Forte’s engineers were able to shut down the Flettner sails in order to replace their roller bearings, which were suffering the effects of metal fatigue under the immense weight of the great steel sails.
For twenty-nine days Forte’s flotilla sailed northwest along the slanting northeast coast of Brazil and then, casting off from AN-899, again became free-floating in the Caribbean Current, where the sea was too deep to use anchors. From the continental slope of the northeast coast of Venezuela, the Alamo now traversed the warm Caribbean, still traveling in a northwesterly direction, to a point
midway between Cuba and the Yucatan peninsula. During this leg, where the current provided twenty and the Flettner sails sixteen nautical miles of the distance made good, they made the slowest progress of the entire run, an average of only forty-three miles a day for thirty days.
Meanwhile, the waters had been getting progressively warmer. The Benguela’s 12-degree Centigrade waters had given way to the 20-degree temperatures of the eastern portion of the South Equatorial. Midway across the Atlantic, the South Equatorial rose to 24 degrees, which held for both the Guiana and Caribbean. But on Day 159, as they prepared to swing southwest around the Yucatan peninsula into the Gulf of Mexico, the temperature shot up again, to 28 degrees centigrade, where it would remain until the Alamo reached its berth. Each increase in water temperature required a corresponding increase in maintenance refrigeration to preserve the structural integrity of the iceberg as well as to keep melting at a minimum. As foreseen, the Sun King’s wave-actuated generators and solar panels provided the needed power, although the refrigerating crew had to be more than doubled to keep up with the work.
The accelerated pace of work aboard the Alamo was more than matched by the U.S. Navy’s activity close in, beyond the horizon, in the sky overhead, and in the deep waters beneath it.
President Turnbull had staked his political survival on the successful docking of the Alamo and the production of household, industrial, and irrigation water that would soon flow from it. Vice-Admiral Hodge was promised a fourth star on his shoulder boards if he succeeded in delivering the Alamo safely to port.
With his Task Force 71-Able of twenty-six ships augmented by a battle group from the Pacific Fleet, Hodge constructed two concentric rings of steel around the Alamo and the Sun King, one at a distance of five miles, the other a hundred miles away. No craft of any type was allowed within those concentric rings of ceaselessly patrolling ships.
Still, Admiral Hodge was too wise an old salt to let his guard down. Ahead of them lay the most difficult leg of
the journey, the sixteen days and 1,100 nautical miles between the tip of Yucatan in southern Mexico and Matagorda Bay. Leaving the deep Caribbean, the Alamo would again be kedging along the continental slope. Anchors No. 900 to 1118 lay between them and their goal. Each was to be temporarily disarmed and inspected by Navy frogmen before the Sun King was made fast for its fivemile haul. The thousands of tiny inlets and river mouths along the Mexican shore would have to be inspected, double-checking on the puppet Mexican government whose Russian masters had issued stern orders to see that no harm to the Alamo came from its shores. And finally, a small flotilla of minesweepers was to clear the path in advance of the Sun King and the Alamo of any obstructions that might harbor an explosive device.
Admiral Hodge had done all he could do except pray. He wasn’t a praying man, so as he always did when he wanted something done right, he called in professionals: the chief chaplains of Task Force 71-Able. He told them what he wanted and confidently left them to it: the odds were that at least one of them had a direct line.
On the morning of 6 June the Sun King tied up with AN-900 on the Yucatan peninsula’s continental slope. Two hundred and seventeen more repetitions of the now-familiar routine would bring them into port in Matagorda Bay, and Forte would take his place in the books along with Magellan, Vasco da Gama, and Columbus for an historic feat of seamanship and discovery.
The last leg of the trip would be in the weak embrace of the Gulf Current, which flowed clockwise in the basin of the Gulf of Mexico at a leisurely six miles per day. To this would be added approximately forty-eight miles a day by kedging. Another seven mpd would be picked up by the Flettner sails rotating against the lighter winds of the gulf. Barring accidents, they could expect to arrive in Matagorda Bay on 24 June after a passage of 178 days, about a week better than Forte’s scientists had originally anticipated. In all, they would have covered 9,200 nautical miles, a distance equal to three crossings of the Atlantic from New York to England.
The sixth of June–eighty-four days after the atom bomb had blown out Oyo’s fire–started like any other for Ripley Forte. He had awakened at 0600, shaved and bathed with slow deliberation, read the overnight reports from the captains of his various craft, and ordered breakfast, which these days he took at his desk. When it arrived, he poured a cup of coffee and opened the folder of operations reports on the Alamo for the past twenty-four hours. The log was routine stuff: ice melt rate, fissure and fracture estimate, linear meters of refrigeration shaft excavated and filled, condition of the Flettner sails, harness, towing cables, and Ultravac sealing, personnel changes, sick list, and the like. He went systematically through the log, initialling each page until he came to the place where the accident report should have been. In its place was a brief typewritten note.