The Jennifer Morgue Read online

  Nettled, Murph glares at him. “What’s your problem?” he demands.

  “You’re messing with something below a thousand meters, in strict contravention of Article Four,” says the Brit. “I’m here as a neutral observer in accordance with Section Two—”

  “Fuck you and your neutral status, you’re just sore because you guys don’t have the balls to stand on your waiver rights—”

  Cooper gets between them before things can escalate again. “Cool it. Murph, how about checking with the bridge again to see if there’s been any sign of the commies taking an interest? They’ll twig when they see we’ve stopped lowering the string. James—” He pauses. Grimaces slightly. The Brit’s alias is transparent and, to a Company man, borderline insulting: Cooper wonders, not for the first time, Why the fuck does he call himself that? “—let’s go take a hike down to the moon pool and see what they’ve found.”

  “Suits me.” The Brit stands up, unfolding like a stick-insect inside his badly fitting gray suit. His cheek twitches but his expression stays frozen. “After you.”

  They leave the office and Cooper locks the door behind him. The Hughes GMDI ship may be enormous—it’s bigger than a Marine Corps assault carrier, larger than an Iowaclass battleship—but its companionways and corridors are a cramped, gray maze, punctuated by color-coded pipes and ducts conveniently located at shin-scraping and head-banging heights. It doesn’t roll in the swells but it rocks, weirdly, held solidly on station by the SKS thrusters (a new technology that accounts for a goodly chunk of the cost of the ship). Down six flights of steps there’s another passage and a bulkhead: then Cooper sees the dogged-back hatch leading out into the moon pool at the level of the fifty-foot catwalk. As usual it takes his breath away. The moon pool is just under 200 feet long and 75 feet wide, a stillness of black water surrounded by the gantries and cranes required for servicing the barge. The giant docking legs are fully extended below the waterline at either end of the pool. The drill string pierces the heart of the chamber like a black steel spear tying it to the ocean floor. The automatic roughneck and the string handling systems have fallen silent, the deafening clatter and roar of the drill system shut down now that the grab has reached its target. Soon, if all goes well, the derrick above them will begin hauling up the string, laboriously unbolting the hundreds of pipe segments and stacking them on the deck of the ship, until finally Clementine—also known as the HMB-I “mining barge”—rumbles to the surface of the pool in a flurry of cold water, clutching its treasure beneath it. But for now the moon pool is a peaceful haven, its surface marred only by shallow, oily ripples.

  The engineering office is a hive of activity in contrast to the view outside the windows, and nobody notices Cooper and the British spook as they slip inside and look over the operations controller’s shoulder at his screens. “Left ten, up six,” someone calls. “Looks like a hatch,” says someone else. Strange gray outlines swim on the screen. “Get me a bit more light on that . . .”

  Everyone falls silent for a while. “That’s not good,” says one of the engineers, a wiry guy from New Mexico who Cooper vaguely remembers is called Norm. The big TV screen in the middle is showing a flat surface emerging from a gray morass of abyssal mud. A rectangular opening with rounded edges gapes in it—a hatch?—and there’s something white protruding from a cylinder lying across it. The cylinder looks like a sleeve. Suddenly Cooper realizes what he’s looking at: an open hatch in the sail of a submarine, the skeletonized remains of a sailor lying half-in and half-out of it.

  “Poor bastards probably tried to swim for it when they realized the torpedo room was flooded,” says a voice from the back of the room. Cooper looks around. It’s Davis, somehow still managing to look like a Navy officer even though he’s wearing a civilian suit. “That’s probably what saved the pressure hull—the escape hatch was already open and the boat was fully flooded before it passed through its crush depth.”

  Cooper shivers, staring at the screen. “Consider Phlebas,” he thinks, wracking his brain for the rest of the poem.

  “Okay, so what about the impact damage?” That’s Duke, typically businesslike: “I need to know if we can make this work.”

  More activity. Camera viewpoints swivel crazily, taking in the length of the Golf-II-class submarine. The water at this depth is mostly clear and the barge floodlights illuminate the wreck mercilessly, from the blown hatch in the sail to the great gash in the side of the torpedo room. The submarine lies on its side as if resting, and there’s little obvious damage to Cooper’s untrained eye. A bigger hatch gapes open in front of the sail. “What’s that?” he asks, pointing.

  The kid, Steve, follows his finger. “Looks like the number two missile tube is open,” he says. The Golf-II class is a boomer, a ballistic missile submarine—an early one, diesel-electric. It had carried only three nuclear missiles, and had to surface before firing. “Hope they didn’t roll while they were sinking: if they lost the bird it could have landed anywhere.”

  “Anywhere—” Cooper blinks.

  “Okay, let’s get her lined up!” hollers Duke, evidently completing his assessment of the situation. “We’ve got bad weather coming, so let’s haul!”

  For the next half hour the control room is a madhouse, engineers and dive-control officers hunched over their consoles and mumbling into microphones. Nobody’s ever done this before—maneuvered a 3,000-ton grab into position above a sunken submarine three miles below the surface, with a storm coming. The sailors on the Soviet spy trawler on the horizon probably have their controllers back in Moscow convinced that they’ve been drinking the antifreeze again, with their tale of exotic, capitalist hyper-technology stealing their sunken boomer.

  The tension in the control room is rising. Cooper watches over Steve’s shoulder as the kid twiddles his joystick, demonstrating an occult ability to swing cameras to bear on the huge mechanical grabs, allowing their operators to extend them and position them close to the hull. Finally it’s time. “Stand by to blow pressure cylinders,” Duke announces. “Blow them now.”

  Ten pressure cylinders bolted to the grab vent silvery streams of bubbles: pistons slide home, propelled by a three-mile column of seawater, drawing the huge clamps tight around the hull of the submarine. They bite into the mud, stirring up a gray cloud that obscures everything for a while. Gauges slowly rotate, showing the position of the jaws. “Okay on even two through six, odd one through seven. Got a partial on nine and eight, nothing on ten.”

  The atmosphere is electric. Seven clamps have locked tight around the hull of the submarine: two are loose and one appears to have failed. Duke looks at Cooper. “Your call.”

  “Can you lift it?” asks Cooper.

  “I think so.” Duke’s face is somber. “We’ll see once we’ve got it off the mud.”

  “Let’s check upstairs,” Cooper suggests, and Duke nods. The captain can say yes or no and make it stick—it’s his ship they’ll be endangering if they make a wrong call.

  Five minutes later they’ve got their answer. “Do it,” says the skipper, in a tone that brooks no argument. “It’s what we’re here for.” He’s on the bridge because the impending bad weather and the proximity of other ships—a second Russian trawler has just shown up—demands his presence, but there’s no mistaking his urgency.

  “Okay, you heard the man.”

  Five minutes later a faint vibration shakes the surface of the moon pool. Clementine has blown its ballast, scattering a thousand tons of lead shot across the seafloor around the submarine. The cameras show nothing but a gray haze for a while. Then the drill string visible through the control room window begins to move, slowly inching upward. “Thrusters to full,” Duke snaps. The string begins to retract faster and faster, dripping water as it rises from the icy depths. “Give me a strain gauge report.”

  The strain gauges on the giant grabs are reading green across the board: each arm is supporting nearly 500 tons of submarine, not to mention the water it contains. There’s a loud
mechanical whine from outside, and a sinking feeling, and the vibration Cooper can feel through the soles of his Oxford brogues has increased alarmingly—the Explorer’s drill crew is running the machines at full power now that the grab has increased in weight. The ship, gaining thousands of tons in a matter of seconds, squats deeper in the Pacific swell. “Satisfied now?” asks Cooper, turning to grin at the Brit, who for his part looks as if he’s waiting for something, staring at one screen intently.

  “Well?”

  “We’ve got a little time to go,” says the hatchet-faced foreigner.

  “A little . . . ?”

  “Until we learn whether or not you’ve gotten away with it.”

  “What are you smoking, man? Of course we’ve gotten away with it!” Murph has materialized from the upper decks like a Boston-Irish ghost, taking out his low-level resentment on the Brit (who is sufficiently public-school English to make a suitable whipping boy for Bloody Sunday, not to mention being a government employee to boot). “Look! Submarine! Submersible grab! Coming up at six feet per minute! After the break, film at eleven!” His tone is scathing. “What do you think the commies are going to do to stop us, start World War Three? They don’t even goddamn know what we’re doing down here—they don’t even know where their sub went down to within two hundred miles!”

  “It’s not the commies I’m worried about,” says the Brit. He glances at Cooper. “How about you?”

  Cooper shakes his head reluctantly. “I still think we’re going to make it. The sub’s intact, undamaged, and we’ve got it—”

  “Oh shit,” says Steve.

  He points the central camera in the grab’s navigation cluster down at the seafloor, a vast gray-brown expanse stirred into slow whorls of foggy motion by the dropping of the ballast and the departure of the submarine. It should be slowly settling back into bland desert-dunes of mud by now. But something’s moving down there, writhing against the current with unnatural speed.

  Cooper stares at the screen. “What’s that?”

  “May I remind you of Article Four of the treaty?” says the Brit. “No establishment of permanent or temporary structures below a depth of one kilometer beneath mean sea level, on pain of termination. No removal of structures from the abyssal plain, on pain of ditto. We’re trespassing: legally they can do as they please.”

  “But we’re only picking up the trash—”

  “They may not see it that way.”

  Fine fronds, a darker shade against the gray, are rising from the muddy haze not far from the last resting place of the K-129. The fronds ripple and waver like giant kelp, but are thicker and more purposeful. They bring to mind the blind, questing trunk of an elephant exploring the interior of a puzzle box. There’s something disturbing about the way they squirt from vents in the seafloor, rising in pulses, as if they’re more liquid than solid.

  “Damn,” Cooper says softly. He punches his open left hand. “Damn!”

  “Language,” chides Duke. “Barry, how fast can we crank this rig? Steve, see if you can get a fix on those things. I want to peg their ascent rate.”

  Barry shakes his head emphatically. “The drill platform can’t take any more, boss. We’re up to force four outside already, and we’re carrying too much weight. We can maybe go up to ten feet per minute, but if we try to go much above that we risk shearing the string and losing Clementine.”

  Cooper shudders. The grab will still surface if the drill string breaks, but it could broach just about anywhere. And anywhere includes right under the ship’s keel, which is not built to survive being rammed by 3,000 tons of metal hurtling out of the depths at twenty knots.

  “We can’t risk it,” Duke decides. “Keep hauling at current ascent rate.”

  They watch in silence for the next hour as the grab rises towards the surface, its precious, stolen cargo still intact in its arms.

  The questing fronds surge up from the depths, growing towards the lens of the under-slung camera as the engineers and spooks watch anxiously. The grab is already 400 feet above the seafloor, but instead of a flat muddy desert below, the abyssal plain has sprouted an angry forest of grasping tentacles. They’re extending fast, reaching towards the stolen submarine above them.

  “Hold steady,” says Duke. “Damn, I said hold steady!” The ship shudders, and the vibration in the deck has risen to a tooth-rattling grumble and a shriek of overstressed metal. The air in the control room stinks of hot oil. Up on the drilling deck the wildcats are shearing bolt-heads and throwing sixty-foot pipe segments on the stack rather than taking time to position them—a sure sign of desperation, for the pipe segments are machined from a special alloy at a cost of $60,000 apiece. They’re hauling in the drill string almost twice as fast as they payed it out, and the moon pool is foaming and bubbling, a steady cascade of water dropping from the chilly metal tubes to rain back down onto its surface. But it’s anyone’s guess whether they’ll get the grab up to the surface before the questing tentacles catch it.

  “Article Four,” the Brit says tensely.

  “Bastard.” Cooper glares at the screen. “It’s ours.”

  “They appear to disagree. Want to argue with them?”

  “A couple of depth charges . . .” Cooper stares at the drill string longingly.

  “They’d fuck you, boy,” the other man says harshly. “Don’t think it hasn’t been thought of. There are enough methane hydrates down in that mud to burp the grand-daddy of all gas bubbles under our keel and drag us down like a gnat in a toad’s mouth.”

  “I know that.” Cooper shakes his head. So much work! It’s outrageous, an insult to the senses, like watching a moon shot explode on the launch pad. “But. Those bastards.” He punches his palm again. “It should be ours!”

  “We’ve had dealings with them before that didn’t go so badly. Witch’s Hole, the treaty zone at Dunwich. You could have asked us.” The British agent crosses his arms tensely. “You could have asked your Office of Naval Intelligence, too. But no, you had to go and get creative.”

  “The fuck. You’d just have told us not to bother. This way—”

  “This way you learn your own lesson.”

  “The fuck.”

  THE GRAB WAS 3,000 FEET BELOW SEA LEVEL and still rising when the tentacles finally caught up with it.

  The rest, as they say, is history.

  1.

  RANDOM RAMONA

  IF YOU WORK FOR THE LAUNDRY LONG ENOUGH, eventually you get used to the petty insults, the paper clip audits, the disgusting canteen coffee, and the endless, unavoidable bureaucracy. Your aesthetic senses become dulled, and you go blind to the decaying pea-green paint and the vomit-beige fabric partitions between office cubicles. But the big indignities never fail to surprise, and they’re the ones that can get you killed.

  I’ve been working for the Laundry for about five years now, and periodically I become blasé in my cynicism, sure that I’ve seen it all—which is usually the signal for them to throw something at me that’s degrading, humiliating, or dangerous—if not all three at once.

  “You want me to drive a what?” I squeak at the woman behind the car rental desk.

  “Sir, your ticket has been issued by your employer, it says here und here—” She’s a brunette: tall, thin, helpful, and very German in that schoolmarmish way that makes you instinctively check to see if your fly’s undone. “The, ah, Smart Fortwo coupé. With the, the kompressor. It is a perfectly good car. Unless you would like for the upgrade to pay?”

  Upgrade. To a Mercedes S190, for, oh, about two hundred euros a day. An absolute no-brainer—if it wasn’t at my own expense.

  “How do I get to Darmstadt from here?” I ask, trying to salvage the situation. “Preferably alive?” (Bloody Facilities. Bloody budget airlines that never fly where you want to go. Bloody weather. Bloody liaison meetings in Germany. Bloody “cheapest hire” policy.)

  She menaces me with her perfect dentistry again. “If it was me I’d take the ICE train. But your ticket—�
� she points at it helpfully “—is non-refundable. Now please to face the camera for the biometrics?”

  Fifteen minutes later I’m hunched over the steering wheel of a two-seater that looks like something you’d find in your corn flakes packet. The Smart is insanely cute and compact, does about seventy miles to a gallon, and is the ideal second car for nipping about town; but I’m not nipping about town. I’m going flat out at maybe a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour on the autobahn while some joker is shooting at me from behind with a cannon that fires Porsches and Mercedes. Meanwhile, I’m stuck driving something that handles like a turbocharged baby buggy. I’ve got my fog lights on in a vain attempt to deter the other road users from turning me into a hood ornament, but the jet wash every time another executive panzer overtakes me keeps threatening to roll me right over onto my roof. And that’s before you factor in the deranged Serbian truck drivers, driven mad with joy by exposure to a motorway that hasn’t been cluster-bombed and then resurfaced by the lowest bidder.

  In between moments of blood-curdling terror I spend my time swearing under my breath. This is all Angleton’s fault. He’s the one who sent me to this stupid joint-liaison committee meeting, so he bears the brunt of it. His hypothetical and distinctly mythological ancestry is followed in descending order by the stupid weather, Mo’s stupid training schedule, and then anything else that I can think of to curse. It keeps the tiny corner of my mind that isn’t focused on my immediate survival occupied—and that’s a very tiny corner, because when you’re sentenced to drive a Smart car on a road where everything else has a speed best described by its mach number, you tend to pay attention.

  There’s an unexpected lull in the traffic about two-thirds of the way to Darmstadt, and I make the mistake of breathing a sigh of relief. The respite is short-lived. One moment I’m driving along a seemingly empty road, bouncing from side to side on the Smart’s town-car suspension as the hair-dryer-sized engine howls its guts out beneath my buttocks, and the next instant the dashboard in front of me lights up like a flashbulb.