On paper, the Lake Vordog op sounded like peaches and cream. It didn’t get ugly until the entire op was diagrammed out and real-time engineering was factored in. Then…Jesus, it was the biggest thing the DSU had ever undertaken. Those four divers below were what concerned him. He’d gotten them down there and now he wanted to get them back up once the op was successfully completed.

And until then, he couldn’t think of anything else.

Standing there in the comm room of the LSB which floated on the surface of Lake Vordog, he puffed on his pipe watching Anderson, his tech, monitor the activities of the dive platform on the bottom. Anderson was the quiet sort. Techies were like that, but Orr knew damn well it was more than just the man’s lack of social skills or his mind filled with data that kept him quiet. It was where they were and what was going on below.

Orr walked over to the windows that showed him the surface of Vordog. Even with the exterior lights bathing it, it looked positively black, flat as a sheet of glass. To him, it mattered not that the lake had been tucked beneath the ice for forty-million years. That was for the thinkers. He was a practical man. He saw himself as a working Joe with a job to do. A nuts-and-bolts man. He would let himself see nothing else.

God, the money that had been dumped into this. It staggered the mind.

The entire operation was classified like just about everything the DSU handled, except more so. He wondered what the taxpayers would think if they knew what their government was doing with all those tax dollars.

“Probably wouldn’t believe it anyway,” he said under his breath.

“Sir?” Anderson said.

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

It had been the engineering job of the century.

First off, the summer before, Kharkov Station had to be refitted. It had been abandoned to the elements for five years and the reason for that depended on what you wanted to believe. And even Orr didn’t know the whole truth on that one. Once the station was put back in working order, the drill tower had to be rebuilt. And not the way it was, but something much grander. The original EHWD, Enhanced Hot-Water Drill, had cut a channel through nearly a mile of ice so the ATP cryobot could be released to explore the lake. But that had only required a borehole of about three or four feet in diameter. The borehole the DSU needed had to be some thirty feet in diameter. Big enough to lower the equipment needed to set up the platform and, of course, the platform itself. Once the massive drill tower was built and the new EHWD was put in place, it took weeks to cut a channel like that through the ice.

And when that was done, the real work began.