The Ant Hill’s radio operator, Sec. Lt. Eddie Kilbourn, was seated at the eastern side of the operations center, facing the wall. In addition to the satellite uplink, he had several systems at his post, including a ham radio and a CB system. One thing the twenty-eight-year-old had learned in his years as a radio devotee was that you never knew where messages would come from. As a young teenager in Milwaukee, he had once intercepted an early cell phone message on his ham radio, two guys plotting to rob a convenience store in Winnipeg, Canada. He had notified local authorities, who were waiting for the would-be thieves.
The hardware that he was listening to now was a thousand-channel receiver that scanned between 100 kHz and 3,000 MHz. Attached to a dedicated antenna that was keyed to signals from the south polar region, it was picking up two emergency signals. The first beacon, which had started coming in nearly ninety minutes before, was a gray box “condition red” scatter signal employed by the Chinese navy. It was the equivalent of an SOS that was designed to alert any ships, planes, or receiving stations that might be in the region. The DOD confirmed that the emergency signal had been received in Ningbo, south of Shanghai. Satellite surveillance and coded radio communications intercepted in Taiwan suggested that a 737 surveillance craft had been dispatched to the region along with a naval recovery crew. The DOD decided not to ask the Chinese directly for recon information since that would open a dialogue about why the Pentagon was asking about a science ship, and why that science ship had gone to the region twice in one month. Such an exchange could provide little information. The U.S. military would have its own team in the region within hours of the Chinese flyby.
The more recent signal, and of even greater interest to the Ant Hill, was a beacon that had been activated just a few minutes earlier. It was coming in through the main satellite uplink on the frequency specifically assigned to the Abby. Triangulation from military and weather satellites in the region showed that the signal was stationary and coming from what appeared to be several meters inland from the Weddell Sea. That was a good sign. Someone would have had to hand-activate the emergency beacon for it to broadcast.
Someone was alive out there.
Second Lieutenant Kilbourn informed Dr. Carr, who informed Admiral Grantham. Yet the grim mood in the Ant Hill did not change appreciably. The science ship’s two emergency beacons were located in the dinghies. Since the signal was coming from the shore, it suggested that one or more individuals had abandoned the Abby. To have done so in Antarctica, in the middle of the night, meant the situation on board must have been desperate.
That the Ant Hill was receiving no signals, emergency or otherwise, from the D was also disturbing as well as perplexing. The D ’s “Citrus” emergency signal was located in the nose of the ship, with the sonar array. The yellow, grapefruit-sized device—hence the nickname—was self-contained and designed to activate automatically if the vessel lost main systems. Like the black box of an airplane, it was designed to survive cataclysmic events including explosions—it could take a direct hit from a torpedo—fires, and up to five thousand pounds per square inch of pressure at two thousand feet underwater. Nothing in this area was that deep. That it was not functioning suggested one of five things. First, that Citrus had malfunctioned. That was everyone’s best guess, except for Kilbourn. He had tested it himself. It had been working when the D left port. Second, it could be buried. The signal was designed to broadcast underwater, even under the ice shelf, but there were limits to how much rock and ice it could penetrate. Third, the collision may have triggered a blast more significant than the designers had anticipated, possibly the explosion of several torpedoes on board the Chinese submarine. That shouldn’t have made a difference, however, since the magnitude of the blast would not have been intensified, only the radius. Fourth, perhaps there had been a nuclear core breach on the Chinese submarine. Intense radiation released into the sea could theoretically disrupt the signal.
It wouldn’t have done the crews of any of the ships much good either, Kilbourn thought.
Of course, there was also a fifth possibility: that the Tempest D was fully functioning and for whatever reason the telemetry simply wasn’t getting through. The only explanations the Ant Hill brain trust could come up with were that the submarine had been crippled and gone into a deep trench, which were plentiful in the region; or else it had collided with the polar ice shelf and been partly or fully buried as a result.
In either case—in any case—Kilbourn and the others knew just one thing for certain.
None of this was good news for the crew of the D.