Ian Sales: Then Will the Great Ocean Wash Deep Above

There’s a clatter of heels on the concrete, and Hart walks up and stands beside her.

We did it, Jerrie, Hart says. By God, we did it. We get to go way up there, where no man has gone before. Well, no American man anyway.

She flings up a hand, gesturing at the night sky and the stars sparkling like diamonds in it.

Cobb says nothing. When she sees a rocket launch, and a woman atop it, then she might start to relax. But not now, not yet.

Who will be first? she asks Hart. Who do you think?

You mean us or the Russian woman?

No, among us, out of the thirteen of us.

Hart shrugs and takes a sip of her martini. She plucks out the olive, eats it and then flicks the toothpick out onto the beach. You, she tells Cobb, you should be first, Jerrie. You did all this, you put us here.

They both know it’s not so simple. Yes, Cobb first handed a list of candidates to Dr Lovelace; but Jackie Cochran put her own names in as well and she paid for all the medical testing, so there’s some of the thirteen who think Cochran is the right woman to lead them. And now NASA has officially put her in charge. There’s going to be a game of favourites in the weeks ahead, Cobb can see that.

You’ll get to fly, Jerrie, Hart assures her. No matter what Jackie does or says, you’ll get to fly.

Lieutenant Commander John Grover McIntyre leans on the rail, draws on his cigarette, and gazes west toward Hispaniola. Ribbons of sunlight dance across the swell and the sky is heart-achingly blue, but he’s thinking about being pulled from the Navy Experimental Diving Unit at the Washington Navy Yard. They flew him to Roosevelt Roads Naval Station, Puerto Rico, on a Grumman C-2 Greyhound, and then three hours cleaving the restless sea in a 65-foot utility boat out to the USS White Sands … and there in the ship’s aft dock well is the white torpedo-shape of the Trieste II . As soon as he spots the bathyscaphe he knows what he’s doing here 1,600 miles south of home.

He’s going to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

As near as he can figure it, they’re some seventy-five miles north of San Juan, somewhere above the Puerto Rico Trench, and there’s around 27,000 feet of water under the USS White Sands ’ keel. McIntyre is not happy. The Terni pressure-sphere is only rated to 20,000 feet and he’s wondering if the guy running this operation knows that—

Which would be Commander Brad Mooney, commander of the Integral Operating Unit, and all he’s told McIntyre is that the USNS De Steiguer found the target weeks ago after ten days steaming up and down the search zone, while the IOU was making test dives off San Diego; and they got to move fast as the deep ocean transponder batteries have a guaranteed life of only one month. No one’s said what the “target” is yet, what it is McIntyre’s supposed to be bringing up from the sea-bed. The Rube Goldberg contraption Perkin-Elmer have bolted to the front of the Trieste II —he’s heard it called a “hay hook” and a “kludge”—looks like it might work, but McIntyre’s sceptical, he knows the bathyscaphe; and for something that’s as simple as a steel ball hung beneath a float filled with gasoline, she’s temperamental and fragile and she knows how to make her commander’s life hell. He thought he’d given her up back in 1967, when he transferred out to NEDU but here he is again, two years later, flown in because the bathyscaphe’s current commander busted a leg on the journey bringing Trieste II from San Diego to Puerto Rico. So he guesses she’s not ready to say goodbye just yet.

McIntyre was all over the bathyscaphe the day before, reminding himself of her systems and workings, and she looks pretty goddamn shipshape, but they need to get her out into the water. They’ve got a week of fine weather forecast and maybe it will hold. McIntyre holds out a hand and feels the sun beating down on his palm; and there’s not a breath of wind, the sea surface is a gelid swell lapping noisily against the hull of the auxiliary repair dock.

Earlier, he spotted a pair of suits lurking about, so he’s guessing this is some CIA operation. Maybe the flyboys went and lost another H-bomb, a “Broken Arrow” type thing; or perhaps a Soviet sub sank here, one of their nuclear attack ones, a “Victor”. Cuba is only five hundred miles north east, and McIntyre is reminded of October 1962…

He flicks his cigarette out into the sea, checks the Omega Seamaster on his wrist, and then settles his cap more firmly on his head. This is where he gets to learn what he’s diving for: the suits have scheduled a briefing. He’s looking forward to it, he likes the idea of pulling the CIA’s nuts out of the fire.

There’s six of them gathered in the ward room, it’s hot and the two open scuttles are doing nothing to stir the still air. The two spooks have ditched their jackets and their white shirts don’t look so starched now. One has loosened his tie, the other slips off his spectacles every few minutes and polishes them with a handkerchief. Both have buff folders on the table before them. McIntyre and the two bathyscaphe crew, Lieutenants Phil C Stryker and Richard H Taylor, take seats alongside Mooney, across from the CIA guys.

What do you know about spy satellites? the one with glasses asks.

Nothing, says McIntyre. They’re secret, right?

The spook gives an unamused smile. The KH-4B Corona, he says, is what we use to keep an eye on the bad guys, on the things they don’t want us to see and we don’t want them to know we can see. Let’s just say you don’t need to know more than that.

He pulls a piece of paper from his folder and slides it across the table. This, he tells them, shows how we get the film down from orbit.

The piece of paper is a diagram in colour: a rocket above the earth, a line of capsules falling from it in an arc and sprouting a parachute, while beneath waits a plane trailing a hook.

We send out a C-130 from the 6549th Test Group out of Hickam AFB and they catch the bucket, says the guy with glasses.

You lost one of them buckets, says McIntyre.

The other spook nods. We think maybe a malfunction kicked it out early, he says. We didn’t get a plane in the air in time.

From Hickam? McIntyre asks. Hawaii, right? Dropping it in the Atlantic instead of the Pacific is some malfunction. So now it’s below us? In the Puerto Rico Trench? You know that’s 27,000 feet deep, right? The Trieste can only dive to 20,000 feet. We go any deeper than that— He forms a sphere with two cupped hands and then suddenly, and loudly, claps his palms together: crack! — Deeper than 20,000 feet and we go like that.

The guy with the tie at half-mast answers, It’s on a shelf about 19,500 feet down, it’s pretty flat and level—

He opens his folder and pulls out half a dozen black and white photographs. The USNS De Steiguer took these, he says, with the camera on the search fish.

He slides the photographs across to McIntyre, who fans them out across the tabletop. The bucket is a circular metal structure, surrounded by a halo of debris. To the right, a light on a cable illuminates the object and throws a pencil line of shadow off the left edge of the picture. The sea-bed looks flat and smooth, like a powdery desert.

It’s intact? McIntyre asks.

We think so, the spook says. It hit the sea at a pretty good clip but we think it held together.

And that contraption you’ve bolted on the front of the Trieste, that’s supposed to just scoop up this bucket from the sea-bed? McIntyre asks.

Mooney speaks up: You’re in on this late, John. Phil and Dick already ran a bunch of test dives back in San Diego. The hay hook works.

The other spook adds, The USNS De Steiguer dropped a transponder about eight feet from the bucket so it should be easy to find.