With a population of two thousand hardy souls, Stanley is the smallest and most remote capital city on the planet. Stone Silver had read that in the briefing book prepared by the DOD.
The rear admiral loved facts like that. He had always loved knowledge and discovery. That was how he’d ended up at the top of the Ant Hill. That was how he’d ended up in the navy.
Growing up in Vermont, not far from Lake Champlain, Silver was raised with stories about the Lake Champlain monster—Champy, the locals called it. His parents owned a small inn, and he would go through the brochures, hang out on the shores at night, even throw bait in the water hoping to see the monster. It never happened. But while he was out, he watched the currents, the fish, the nocturnal predators. They fascinated him. He thought he might one day become a scientist.
Unfortunately, Silver was a straight C student. His parents couldn’t afford college and he couldn’t get a scholarship. So he joined the navy, hoping to learn engineering or communications or something having to do with science. He was accepted into the navy’s Elint Program—created in 1958 under the banner Operation Tattletale—which designed and launched satellites to spy on the Soviet Union. Fewer than two hundred people, which included the men and women working on it, knew the program existed. The first satellite, GRAB—for Galactic Radiation and Background—was sent aloft in June 1960. That was a month after U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down flying atmospheric reconnaissance over Soviet territory. The Elint Program continued to fire satellites into orbit for two years, though the navy did not acknowledge its existence until its fortieth anniversary. In 1962, operations were assumed by the supersecretive National Reconnaissance Office. But the navy continued to create and construct the elements that went into the satellites.
Silver was good with his hands and was put to work machining and assembling components that were shipped to the NRO. He was based at the Naval Research Laboratory on the Potomac, where he put in sixteen-hour days and loved every instant of them. Just being in the nation’s capital was a thrill and a privilege. Because Silver showed an aptitude for detail work, he was moved into circuit-board construction, then design, as electronics became more and more sophisticated. Because of his top-security clearance, Silver was involved in other secret navy projects. He was moved from the Naval Research Lab to the San Francisco Naval Bay Shipyard in 1968, where he worked on the new generation of nuclear submarines. He never left that field, nor did he ever wish to. He always dreamed, in fact, that one day he would take a midget submarine back to Vermont and search for Champy.
But at the moment he was in the Falklands, on a short layover before heading to the south pole. Their destination was pretty amazing in itself, a place he had never expected to find himself. He had studied the navigation charts and geological reports, but that was sterile and intellectual. He had been too busy, too preoccupied with tests and deadlines, to take a step back to look subjectively at the reality of the journey, the place. The bottom of the world. A place still relatively unchanged from ages gone by.
Silver stood on the deck of the Abby while Angela and her crew supervised the loading of supplies. He was dressed in warm civilian clothes. All of the naval personnel were in civvies. The Falklands were still a British territory, with a significant British military presence still ready to fight off Argentine claims on the 202 islands, as they had done in 1982. Argentine operatives still watched the harbor, and the U.S. navy did not want it getting out that seamen were on board a science vessel bound for Antarctica. By treaty, the south pole was not to serve as a military base for any reason. Since the D would not be docking, the letter of the treaty was being upheld. But the navy did not want any embarrassing questions. They also didn’t want anyone going down and having a look. That would not only cause security problems, it could endanger the crew of the Tempest D as well as any observers in the test area. This was one reason the navy had chosen such a remote spot.
The Abby had arrived shortly after sunrise—at 4:30 A.M. Which was fitting, Silver felt, since they had left Kings Bay at sunrise. The morning had been overcast, mist churning low across the sea, but it had cleared by seven and the harbor was now aglow with bright sun. There were white hulls of pleasure boats and the worn hulls of fishing ships, as well as the metal hulls of freighters and tankers. Most were en route to somewhere else, stopping here, like the Abby, for supplies. The city itself—which was more like a village than a metropolis—was built on a mountainside where it was received daylong and unobstructed sunlight. It was charming and a good way to be reintroduced to civilization after more than a week at sea. Not much noise, no crowds, and everything relatively close by. Silver had just enough time to get a cab, go to the Wool Centre, and buy a sweater of unusually soft Falkland Islands wool. He bought a black one for himself, a white one for his daughter, and a green one for Sally.
The voyage itself had been unexceptional. The weather was generally good, and the hours were filled with checks of systems on board the D as well as reviews of the mission plan and emergency procedures. Most of those were the responsibility of the personnel who would be remaining on the Abby, who had equipment and gear to rescue the crew in the event of virtually any kind of accident. The team also spent time getting to know the members of the Abby crew. Captain Colon and Angela seemed to get along extremely well, but only at the outset. Tension seemed to grow between them as the journey progressed. It didn’t affect their work, so the rear admiral didn’t ask Colon about it. For all Silver knew, it was simply the pressure of replacing the top scientist at the last moment, or having zero hour so near. After all the years and all the hours that had been stuffed into them, the test was finally, literally, around the corner. People were going to be a little edgy.
So he stood on the deck, in his warm new sweater, and thought about the many ironies that had dovetailed into this moment. Interest in a sea serpent had taken him to space and then back to the sea, where he was about to launch a man-made leviathan. He had spent his career working mostly with men, yet here, in this foreign harbor, the only people on his mind were women—his wife, his daughter, and Charlotte Davies—all of whom would have reacted differently to being here. His wife would have been blissful. She would have loved the openness of everything, the freshness in each breath, the hint of deep Antarctic cold beneath the natural chill of the sea. Elizabeth would have been in professional travel-writer mode. Her microcassette recorder in hand, her eyes running over everything like little machines, she would have been reporting and enjoying the challenge of “understanding the character,” as she put it, rather than enjoying the place itself. That’s what made her work successful. She sold edge, not puff. And Charlotte—she would have been back in Kings Bay, asking for on-site temperature readings to see how they matched the climatological reports from the navy’s Fleet Numerical Meteorology Detachment, Asheville. If they didn’t match exactly, she would be riding them to check the data coming in from the Satellite Data Information/Processing Distribution Subsystem to make sure it was accurate. The one advantage the SATIPS system had was it collected data from three different satellites to make sure there was sufficient overlap and no glitches in the data. Mike Carr had sent daily summations from the multisatellite composites, but they lacked the personality of Charlotte’s communiqués. There were only facts, not evaluations.
It was strange to be thinking about the three women when both Antarctica and this momentous test loomed. But as food and water were brought aboard on hand trucks—purchased in advance by the Smithsonian Institution—maybe it wasn’t all that odd to be looking for humanity. Trying to put beloved faces on something so vast and intimidating. The rear admiral looked toward the south.
It was frightening, frankly, to think of the continent to which they were headed. More so than it ever was contemplating the lake, which seemed too large when he was a boy, or the night sky, which was infinitely greater. Maybe it was the risk, the fact that this was not a tour and they were so far from assistance on the off chance something went wrong. Maybe it was the magnetism of the south pole. This was a planetary pole, he had to remind himself. Not a street lamp or a cell phone tower. This was the big noise. For an officer who had spent most of his time in windowless buildings, not even on a boat, that was awe-inspiring.
Angela and her crew had already been here. The rest of the team from Kings Bay were all extremely focused. The rear admiral would be surprised if they felt what he did, at least now. That was one of the privileges of commanding a crack team: There were moments for reflection. But Silver was willing to bet that things would change when they got under way.
Then there was the project itself. If all went well, history was about to be written. A new form of national defense, but with applications in the civilian world. Charlotte had once written a paper suggesting other uses for supercavitation. Unclogging arteries. Turning aside flows of lava from inhabited areas. Even fishing. “Knock them out and drag them in,” she had suggested. What they did here could produce the most far-reaching spin-offs since the Apollo moon program.
And he was the man in charge. It was humbling and chest-swelling at the same time.
The rear admiral wondered if other great advances had filled their creators with the same sense of “event,” or if that had come after the fact. Perhaps—no, probably—the Wright brothers, Robert Fulton, and J. Robert Oppenheimer and the scientists of the Manhattan Project were too busy tightening bolts and soldering wires to recognize it. Afterward, they were probably too caught up in the “What hath God wrought?” stuff to savor the achievement.
Right now, Silver was somewhere in between, and liking it. For the next ninety minutes, or so. After they headed back to sea, who knew what he would think and feel.
Which was also part of the adventure.