"Providing you could scoop it up from the surface, five and a half kilometers away," Plunkett added.
Salazar instructed Plunkett on what direction to explore as Old Gert soared silently over the nodule-carpeted sand. Then something gleamed off to their port side. Plunkett banked slightly toward the object.
"What do you see?" asked Salazar, looking up from his instruments.
Stacy peered downward. "A ball!" she exclaimed. "A huge metal ball with strange-looking cleats. I'd guess it to measure three meters in diameter."
Plunkett dismissed it. "Must have fallen off a ship."
"Not too long ago, judging from the lack of corrosion," commented Salazar.
Suddenly they sighted a wide strip of clear sand that was totally devoid of nodules. It was as though a giant vacuum cleaner had made a swath through the middle of the field.
"A straight edge!" exclaimed Salazar. "There's no such thing as prolonged straight edges on the seafloor."
Stacy stared in astonishment. "Too perfect, too precise to be anything but manmade."
Plunkett shook his head. "Impossible, not at this depth. No engineering company in the world has the capability to mine the abyss."
"And no geological disturbance I ever heard of could form a clean road across the seabed," stated Salazar firmly.
"Those indentations in the sand that run along the borders look like they might match that huge ball we found."
"Okay," muttered Plunkett skeptically. "What kind of equipment can sweep the bottom this deep?"
"A giant hydraulic dredge that sucks up the nodules through pipes to a barge on the surface," theorized Salazar. "The idea has been tossed around for years."
"So has a manned flight to Mars, but the rocketry to get there has yet to be built. Nor has a monster dredge. I know a lot of people in marine engineering, and I haven't heard even a vague rumor about such a project. No mining operation of this magnitude can be kept secret. It'd take a surface fleet of at least five ships and thousands of men working for years. And there is no way they could pull it off without detection by passing ships or satellites."
Stacy looked blankly at Salazar. "Any way of telling when it happened?"
Salazar shrugged. "Could have been yesterday, could have been years ago."
"But who then?" Stacy asked in a vague tone. "Who is responsible for such technology?"
No one immediately answered. Their discovery did not fit accepted beliefs. They stared at the empty swath with silent disbelief, a fear of the unknown trickling down their necks.
Finally Plunkett gave an answer that seemed to come distantly, from outside the submersible. "No one on this earth, no one who is human."
<<4>>
Steen was entering into a state of extreme emotional shock. He stared numbly at the blisters forming on his arms. He trembled uncontrollably, half mad from the shock and a sudden abdominal pain. He doubled over and retched, his breath coming in great heaves. Everything seemed to be striking him at once. His heart began beating erratically and his body burned up with fever.
He felt too weak to make it back to the communications compartment and warn Korvold. When the captain of the Norwegian ship received no replies from his signals to Steen, he would send another boarding party to see what was wrong. More men would die uselessly.
Steen was drenched in sweat now. He stared at the car with the raised hood and his eyes glazed with a strange hatred. A stupor descended over him, and his crazed mind saw an indescribable evil in the steel, leather, and rubber.
As if in a final act of defiance, Steen took vengeance against the inanimate vehicle. He pulled the Steyr automatic he'd found in the captain's quarters from under his waistband and raised the barrel. Then he squeezed the trigger and pumped the bullets into the front end of the car.
Two kilometers to the east, Captain Korvold was staring through his binoculars at the Divine Star when she blew herself out of existence, vaporizing in the final blink of his eyes.
A monstrous fireball erupted with a blue brilliance whose intensity was greater than the sun. White hot gasses instantly burst over an area four kilometers in diameter. A hemispherical condensation cloud formed and spread out like a vast doughnut, its interior quickly burned out by the fireball.
The surface of the sea was beaten down in a great bowl-like depression three hundred meters across.
Then an immense column consisting of millions of tons of water rose into the sky, its walls sprouting thousands of horizontal geysers, each as large as the Narvik.
The shock wave raced from the fireball like an expanding ring around Saturn, speeding outward with a velocity approaching five kilometers a second. It struck the Narvik, pulping the ship into a formless shape.
Korvold, standing in the open on the bridge wing, did not see the holocaust. His eyes and brain had no time to record it. He was carbonized within a microsecond by thermal radiation from the explosion's fireball. His entire ship rose out of the water and was tossed back as if struck down by a giant sledgehammer. A molten rain of steel fragments and dust from the Divine Star cascaded the Narvik's shattered decks. Fire burst from her ruptured hull and engulfed the shattered vessel. And then explosions deep in her bowels. The containers on her cargo deck were tossed away like leaves before a gust from a hurricane.
There was no time for hoarse, tortured screams. Anyone caught on deck flared like a match, crackled, and was gone. The entire ship became an instant funeral pyre to her 250 passengers and crew.
The Narvik began to list, settling fast. Within five minutes of the explosion she rolled over. Soon only a small portion of her bottom was visible, and then she slid under the agitated waters and vanished in the depths.
Almost as suddenly as the Divine Star evaporated, it was over. The great cauliflower-shaped cloud that had formed over the fireball slowly scattered and became indistinguishable from the overcast. The shimmering fury of the water calmed, and the surface smoothed but for the rolling swells.
Twelve kilometers across the sea the Invincible still floated. The incredible pressure of the shock wave had not yet begun to diminish when its full force smashed into the survey ship. Her superstructure was gutted and stripped away, exposing interior bulkheads. Her funnel tore from its mountings and whirled into the boiling water as the bridge disappeared in a violent shower of steel and flesh.
Her masts were bent and distorted, the big crane used to retrieve Old Gert was twisted and thrown on one side, the hull plates saucered inward between her frame and longitudinal beams. Like the Narvik, the Invincible had been beaten into a formless shape that was almost unrecognizable as a ship.
The paint on her sides had blistered and blackened under the fiery blast. A plume of black oily smoke billowed from her smashed port side and lay like a boiling carpet over the water around her hull. The heat bored right through anyone exposed in the open. Those below decks were badly injured by concussion and flying debris.
Jimmy Knox had been thrown violently into an unyielding steel bulkhead, bouncing backward and gasping for air as if he was in a vacuum. He wound up flat on his back, spread-eagled, staring up stunned through a gaping hole that appeared as if by magic in the ceiling.
He lay there waiting for the shock to pass, struggling to concentrate on his predicament, wondering in a fog what had happened to his world. Slowly he gazed around the compartment at the bent bulkheads, seeing the heavily damaged electronic equipment that looked like a robot with its guts pulled out, smelling the smoke from the fires, and he felt the hysteria of a child who had lost his parents in a crowd.
He looked through the slash above into the bridge housing and chart room. They had been gutted into a tortured skeleton of deformed beams. The wheelhouse was a smoldering shambles that was now a crypt for burned and broken men, whose blood dripped into the compartments below.
Knox rolled to his side and groaned in sudden agony caused by three broken ribs, a twisted ankle, and a sea of bruises. Very slowly he pushed himself to a sitting position. H
e reached up and adjusted his glasses, surprised they had remained perched on his nose during the incomprehensible devastation.
Slowly the dark curtain of shock parted, and his first thought was of Old Gert. Straight from a nightmare he could see the submersible damaged and out of contact in the blackness of the deep.
He crawled across the deck in a daze on hands and knees, fighting back the pain, until he could reach up and grasp the receiver to the underwater telephone.
"Gert?" he burst out fearfully. "Do you read?"
He waited several seconds, but there was no reply. He swore in a low monotone.
"Damn you, Plunkett! Talk to me, you bastard!"
His only answer was silence. All communications between the Invincible and Old Gert were broken.
His worst fears were realized. Whatever force had battered the survey ship must have traveled through the water and mangled the submersible that was already subjected to incredible pressures.
"Dead," he whispered. "Crushed to pulp."
His mind suddenly turned to his shipmates, and he called out. He heard only the groan and screech of metal from the dying ship. He moved his eyes to the open doorway and focused on five bodies sprawled in untidy, stiff attitudes like cast-off display mannequins.
He sat fixed in grief and incomprehension. Dimly he felt the ship shudder convulsively, the stern slipping around and sliding beneath the waves as though caught in a whirlpool. Concussions reverberated all around him. The Invincible was about to take her own journey to the abyss.
The urge to live surged within him, and then Knox was scrambling up a slanted deck, too dazed to feel the pain from his injuries. Charging in panic through the door to the crane deck, he dodged around the dead bodies and over the devastated steel equipment that sprawled everywhere. Fear took the place of shock and built to a tight, expanding ball inside him.
He reached the twisted remains of the railing. Without a backward glance, he climbed over and stepped into the waiting sea. A splintered piece of a wooden crate bobbed in the water a few meters away. He swam awkwardly until he could clasp it under one arm and float. Only then did he turn and look at the Invincible.
She was sinking by the stern, her bows lifting above the Pacific swell. She seemed to hang there for a minute, sailing toward the clouds as she slipped backward at an ever increasing speed and disappeared, leaving a few bits of flotsam and a cauldron of churned water that soon subsided into a few bubbles tinted in rainbow colors by the spilled oil.
Frantically Knox searched the sea for other members of the Invincible's crew. There was an eerie hush now that the groans of the sinking ship had passed. There were no lifeboats, no heads of men swimming in the sea.
He found himself the only survivor of a tragedy that had no explanation.
<<5>>
Beneath the surface, the shock wave traveled through the incompressible water at roughly 6,500
kilometers per hour in an expanding circle, crushing all sea life in its path. Old Gert was saved from instant destruction by the canyon walls. They towered above the submersible, shielding it from the main force of the explosive pressure.
Yet the submersible was still whirled about violently. One moment it was level, the next it was tumbled end over end like a kicked football by the turbulence. The pod containing the main batteries and propulsion systems struck the rocklike nodules, cracked and collapsed inward from the tremendous pressure. Fortunately, the hatch covers on each end of the connecting tube held, or the water would have burst into the crew's sphere like a pile driver and mashed them into bloody paste.
The noise of the explosion came over the underwater telephone like a thunderclap almost in unison with the express-train rumble from the shock wave. With their passing, the deep returned to a beguiling silence. Then the calm was broken again by the screech and groan of tortured metal as the ravaged surface ships fell through the deep, buckling and compressing before plunging against the seafloor in great mushroom clouds of silt.
"What is it?" Stacy cried, clutching her chair to keep from being thrown about.
Whether from shock or radical devotion to his work, Salazar's eyes had never left his console. "This is no earthquake. It reads as a surface disturbance."
With the thrusters gone, Plunkett lost all control of Old Gert. He could only sit there in helpless detachment as the sub was tossed across the field of manganese nodules. Automatically he shouted into the underwater telephone, skipping all call sign formalities.
"Jimmy, we're caught in unexplained turbulence! Have lost our thruster pod! Please respond."
Jimmy Knox could not hear. He was fighting to stay alive in the waves far above.
Plunkett was still trying desperately to raise the Invincible when the submersible finally ended her erratic flight and struck the bottom at a forty-degree angle, coming to rest on the sphere surrounding the electrical and oxygen equipment.
"This is the end," Salazar murmured, not really knowing what he meant, his mind mired in shock and confusion.
"The hell it is!" snapped Plunkett. "We can still drop ballast weights and make it to the top."
He knew as he spoke that releasing all the iron ballast weights might not overcome the added weight of the water within the shattered pod, plus the suction from the muck. He activated the switches, and hundreds of pounds of dead weight dropped free from the submersible's underbelly.
For a few moments nothing happened, then centimeter by centimeter Old Gert pulled herself up from the bottom, rising slowly as if pushed by the hushed breaths and pounding hearts of the three people inside her main sphere.
"Ten feet up," announced Plunkett after what seemed an hour but in reality was only thirty seconds.
Old Gert leveled out and they all dared to breathe again. Plunkett futilely kept trying to contact Jimmy Knox. "Jimmy. . . this is Plunkett. Talk to me."
Stacy stared so hard at the depth meter she thought the glass over the dial would crack. "Go. . . go,"
she pleaded.
Then their worst nightmare burst on them without warning. The sphere holding the electrical and oxygen equipment suddenly imploded. Weakened by its impact into the seafloor, it gave up its integrity and was crushed like an egg by the merciless pressure.
"Bloody hell!" Plunkett gasped as the sub dropped back into the silt with a jarring bump.
As if to drive home the terrifying reverse, the lights blinked out and snapped the sphere into a world of pure ebony. The malignancy of the stygian blackness is a horror only the totally blind experience. To those with sight the sudden disorientation curses the mind into believing unspeakable forces are approaching from beyond in an ever tightening circle.
At last Salazar's hoarse voice broke the silence. "Mother of Jesus, we're finished for good."
"Not yet," said Plunkett. "We can still make it to the surface by jettisoning the control sphere." His hand groped over his console until his fingers touched a particular switch. With an audible click the auxiliary lights came on and refit the interior of the sphere.
Stacy sighed with relief and briefly relaxed. "Thank heaven. At least we can see."
Plunkett programmed the computer for an emergency ascent. Then he set the release mechanism and turned to Stacy and Salazar. "Hold tight. It may be a rough trip topside."
"Anything to get the hell out of here," grunted Salazar.
"Whenever you're ready," Stacy said gamely.
Plunkett removed the safety peg from the release handle, took a firm grip, and pulled.
Nothing happened.
Three times Plunkett feverishly ran through the routine. But the control sphere stubbornly refused to detach from the main section of the sub. In desperation he turned to the computer to troubleshoot the cause of the malfunction. An answer came back in the blink of an eye.
The release mechanism had been twisted and jammed by the angled impact with the seabed, and there was no way to repair it.
"I'm sorry," Plunkett said in frustration. "But it looks like we st
ay until rescued."
"Fat chance of that," snapped Salazar, wiping the sweat that poured from his face with the sleeve of a down ski jacket.
"How do we stand on oxygen?" asked Stacy.
"Our main supply was cut off when the pod imploded," replied Plunkett. "But our emergency canisters in this unit and the lithium hydroxide scrubber to remove our exhaled carbon dioxide should keep us sucking air for ten to twelve hours."
Salazar shook his head and gave a defeated shrug. "Every prayer in every church of the world won't save us in time. It'll take a minimum of seventy-two hours to get another submersible on site. And even then it's doubtful they could lift us to the surface."
Stacy looked into Plunkett's eyes for some small sign of encouragement, but she found none. He wore a remote and distant look. She got the impression he was saddened more by the loss of his precious submersible than he was at the prospect of dying. He came back on track as he became aware of her stare.
"Raul is right," he said tautly. "I hate to admit it, but we'll need a miracle to see the sun again."
"But the Invincible," said Stacy. "They'll move heaven and earth to reach us."
Plunkett shook his head. "Something tragic happened up there. The last sound we heard was a ship breaking up on her way to the bottom."
"But there were two other ships in sight when we left the surface, Stacy protested. "It might have been either one of them."
"It makes no difference," Plunkett said wearily. "There is no way up. And time has become an enemy we cannot defeat."
A deep despair settled in the control sphere. Any hope of rescue was a fantasy. The only certainty was a future salvage project to retrieve Old Gert and their bodies long after they were dead.
<<6>>
Dale Nichols, special assistant to the President, puffed on his pipe and peered over his old-style reading spectacles as Raymond Jordan entered his office.