Terminal Run

“Apparently not. Think of it being no different than trying to use our system to get the human commander of a carrier air group to launch aircraft and bomb a city — he’d be suspicious and check his orders. Same order of intelligence here. The Americans apparently refused to trust a silicon computer with a nuclear reactor and plasma weapons, and waited until they had a fully operational carbon processor. I am amazed they constructed one so quickly — I had the impression it had been ruled impossible. But what’s important is that the Snare won’t believe orders it considers inappropriate or inconsistent with its education. And the volume of communications traffic it would take to convince her remotely would be detected. No, Sergio, we have to take control of her physically, get inside of her, and to do that and make her take our orders we’ll have to get someone who designed her.”

“Do you really think you can take her over?”

“Sergio, I will have to assemble a team, a very expensive one. You did not overstate the case to Chu when you demanded a billion Euros up front. We will spend every one of them on these engineers. I will be taking a page from your book and go to bail out a brilliant computer engineer from prison, and the money will be useful for his bail. I have also heard of a fired American who worked for DynaCorp, a second-generation Chinese named Wang, who was supposedly working on submarine black projects. He might be our man.”

“When are you leaving?”

“In the morning. We should rest and enjoy the evening, and I will take the Falcon at first light.”

Sergio smiled. “I’ll call the agency and have them send over the women after supper.”

8

A little more than five hundred nautical miles east-northeast of the foamy spot in the sea where Piranha had vanished from the surface, the Atlantic was tossed in the wind of a storm that had rolled off the North American coast two days before. The sky was a leaden dark gray, the sea a darker blue punctuated by whitecaps as the wind whipped the tops of the waves. From horizon to horizon there was nothing but the clouds above, the sea below, and the wind between. No shorelines interrupted the seascape; no merchant ships’ running lights penetrated the drizzle. The clouds opened suddenly, the rain coming down in sheets, the sky darkening further, the raindrops barely visible on the surface of the running waves.

Below the surface of the stormy sea, the waves seemed less majestic. The noise was still a roar, but with the wind gone, it was a more muted sound. Light filtered down into the warm summer waters to a depth of fifty feet, and would have penetrated much deeper had it not been for the dimness brought on by the storm. The waves above could not be made out — the water was not that clear — but there was light to be able to see thirty feet in any direction. At fifty feet, the water’s temperature was still warm, the ocean filled with life, a fisherman’s dream, the light slightly dimmer. Deeper, a hundred feet beneath the waves above, the sound had calmed, the water was darker, the diffuse light from above dying steadily, perhaps only a five-foot radius discernible. At a depth of 150 feet, the ocean became much darker, but the sea life still crowded the environment and the water remained warm. But fifty feet deeper, in the complete darkness of the deeper sea, the water went from the balmy summer temperature suddenly to the refrigerated cold of the deep. This was the layer depth known to oceanographers since a thermometer had been lowered into the sea. The top two hundred feet of the vast Atlantic were stirred by the winds and the waves, the warmth added by the burning sun, the water warm enough to swim without a wet suit. But beneath the layer, as the light went out, the sea’s temperature fell to thirty degrees Fahrenheit, two degrees below the freezing point of freshwater, the salinity allowing the water to get even colder without turning into ice. From here to the ocean bottom two miles further down, the sea was uniformly frigid, the cold keeping much of the ocean’s swimming inhabitants away, the life that could survive the deep cold of a much different variety. At three hundred feet beneath the surface, the light was completely gone, the darkness profound, the same dark of a two-mile-deep mine shaft At this depth the noise from the waves above was gone, the sound bouncing off the layer above and reflecting into the warm water layer. The quiet was interrupted only by the occasional sound of the mournful howling of a whale, which could be 50 miles away or 350. Deeper still, six hundred feet beneath the waves, the weight of the heavy water above made the pressure immense, the force squeezing any surface at two tons over every square foot. Few ocean creatures could take the pressure, making the sea relatively empty. The cold, dark, silent, pressurized water waited.