JW frowned. “Any change to normal recovery ops as a result?”
“Nah, we’ll do it by the book, Doc. As Crew Surgeon you’ll be on the prime helo with the Navy divers and med techs as usual. Kaz and I will stay on the ship with the attaché, getting ready to grip and grin with the crew for the Stars and Stripes cameras. The New Orleans will bring us back into Pearl Harbor, and then we’ll all fly back here Tuesday, including the attaché and the cosmonaut.” He rubbed the side of his face, grimacing like he had a headache. “We still have to inform Luke’s family, and then the media, and sort out military protocols to honor Luke, plus how to debrief lessons learned from the cosmonaut herself. But we still have a few days to set all that up.”
JW smiled. “That’s why they pay you the big bucks, Admiral.”
“Yeah, right,” Al said. “This’ll be the last Moon mission, and the end of my time at NASA. A chance to go make some real money after thirty-two years with the government.”
He tipped his head at Kaz and said, “Could you excuse us a minute, Doc?” JW nodded and wheeled his chair back over to his console.
Al moved closer to Kaz, speaking quietly below the hum of the room. “I wanted to update you on what Sheriff Heard’s found. Stuff the Air Force should have caught a long time ago. You might know that Chad was adopted, a war orphan from Germany, raised by the ex-soldier who brought him out, on their family farm in Wisconsin. But at some point, sheriff’s not sure when, it seems Chad was contacted by a surviving brother in East Berlin. Russian-born, it turns out, and a monk with the Orthodox Church there. He’s been sending him money for years. And judging by Chad’s bank accounts and the cash at his house, quite a bit more money recently.”
He paused and looked at Kaz. “You ever play poker with Chad?”
Kaz shook his head. “No, I’m not a gambler.”
“Yeah, me neither. But Chad’s been playing some, locally, back room stuff. Quite a bit of money changes hands, apparently. Makes him vulnerable.”
Kaz said nothing, thinking about what that meant.
“Bottom line, though, Heard has found no clear evidence tying Chad to the helo crash, or of him being involved in anything illegal. But several people are going to want to talk to him when he gets back. Including the Defense Intelligence Agency.”
Kaz looked around the room, his eye pausing briefly on Gene Kranz. “Anyone here know this?”
“No. I need us to focus on getting Chad and the crew safely into the Pacific and then back here. The wheels of justice can wait until then.”
55
Pacific Ocean
The radio signal began on the muddy banks of the springtime-swollen Amur River, just across from the eastern Soviet military-industrial city of Khabarovsk. The message had been coded for transmission at the Red Banner Pacific Fleet Intelligence Center just downriver, and now the pulsing electricity was traveling up 30 connected antenna towers, each nearly 800 feet tall. Like an entire orchestra of bass fiddles, the antennas throbbed deeply in unison, each vibrating, sending a low-frequency signal out into the surrounding air.
Very low.
The radio waves flowed out through the atmosphere, reflecting off the surrounding flatlands of the Amur River delta and 100 miles up to the electrically charged ionosphere, where their long wavelength bounced back down again. Trapped between the earth and sky, the Very Low Frequency signal followed the curve of the horizon across Sakhalin Island and the Sea of Okhotsk, and out over the Pacific Ocean.
Coded information, headed out to sea.
Most ships’ antennas were far too short to pick up the signal and missed it as it passed by. But 50 feet below the water’s surface, more than 6,000 kilometers away, a long trailing wire received it loud and clear. The electrical impulse passed through the deployed underwater antenna and into the ship, all the way forward to the communications chief’s station. When he saw his yellow message light come on and the VLF needle jumping on the small screen, he turned to watch as the printer chugged to life, slowly tapping out the long, decoded message onto the thin roll of paper. He scanned the Cyrillic letters as they appeared.
New orders. He sighed. The Captain would not be pleased. They were already past due returning to their home port in Vladivostok, and a quick scan of the densely worded message looked like it would add at least another week at sea, maybe two.
But it was definitely not his job to scrutinize messages for Captain Serdyukov. He waited until the printer stopped, then carefully tore the paper off the machine just under End of Message and clipped it inside a folder marked Captain’s Eyes Only. Locking the radio room hatch door, he turned up the narrow corridor towards the central post, in search of the captain of the nuclear-powered submarine K-252.