A minute later, the platform creaked to a stop at deck level. Giordino gathered up the crab with an irksome look and stomped onto the deck. He froze at the sight of the crewman who had raised the platform. It was Dirk Pitt.
Giordino grinned at the sight of his boss and old friend. “Escaped from the tower of power again, I see.”
“Just making sure the NUMA technology budget isn’t being spent on cheap rum and dancing girls.”
Giordino shot Pitt a pained look. “I told you, I’ve sworn off cheap rum since my last pay raise.”
Pitt smiled as he helped Giordino remove his tank and weight belt. Friends since childhood, the two had worked together for years, forging a bond tighter than brothers. As founding employees of NUMA, their underwater scrapes were legendary within the agency. Giordino now headed up NUMA’s Underwater Technology division, spending much of his time field-testing new remote sensing devices and submersible vehicles.
Pitt nodded toward the mechanical crab. “So who’s your arachnoid friend?”
“We call it the Creepy Crawler.” Giordino placed it on a workbench and began stripping off his wetsuit. “It’s designed for extended deepwater survey duty.”
“Power source?” Pitt asked.
“A small fuel cell, which processes hydrogen from seawater. We designed it to crawl across the bottom of the murky depths for upward of six months. We can deploy it from a submersible or even drop it over the side of a ship. With preprogrammed guidance, it will crawl along a directed path until reaching a designated end point. Then she’ll float to the surface and emit a satellite signal that tells us where to pick her up.”
“I assume she’s recording her travels?”
Giordino patted the mechanical creature. “This one’s loaded with a battery of sensors and a video camera, which is activated at periodic intervals. We have a half dozen more in the lab that can be configured with a variety of sensing devices, depending on the mission.”
“Might come in handy when we get to the Cayman Trench.”
Giordino arched a brow. “I figured you didn’t come down to Key West for lunch and a drink at Sloppy Joe’s. Why the Cayman Trench?”
“It’s near the heart of a string of dead zones that have cropped up in a line between Jamaica and the western tip of Cuba.” Pitt summarized his meeting with Gunn and Yaeger in Washington.
“Any idea of the source?” Giordino asked.
“None. That’s why I want to get on-site and have a look.”
“If it’s man-made, we’ll find it,” Giordino said. “When do we leave?”
“Captain says we can shove off in an hour.”
Giordino gave a wistful gaze toward Duval Street and its line of raucous bars, then tucked the Creepy Crawler under his arm.
“If that’s the case,” he said with a disheartened tone, “I’d better find my friend a new brain before he’s cast to the depths again.”
He walked across the deck, leaving a trail of wet footprints behind him.
5
The suffocating darkness six hundred feet beneath the surface of the ocean had vanished. Banks of LED lights, encased in titanium housings capable of withstanding the crushing pressure, cast a bright glow on the undulating seafloor’s stark landscape. A silver-scaled tarpon swam by and eyed a curious array of scaffolding that towered under the lights before darting into the more familiar blackness.
The structure resembled a lighted Christmas tree that had toppled to one side. Or so thought Warren Fletcher, who peered through a small acrylic window that was as thick as his fist. The veteran commercial diver was perched in a large diving bell that was suspended fifty feet above the seabed by a cable from a support ship.
Working in the alien world at the bottom of the sea fascinated Fletcher. He found an odd tranquility working in the cold dark deep. It kept him active in the grimy, dangerous business of commercial diving years after his original dive partners had retired. For Fletcher, the siren of the deep still summoned.
“You ready for your next dive, Pops?” The helium-rich air circulating through the diving bell gave the voice a high-pitched warble.
Fletcher turned to a walrus-shaped man named Tank who was coiling an umbilical hose across a rack. “There ain’t a day I’m not, Junior.”
Tank grinned. “Brownie’s on his way back, should be up in five.”
As the designated bellman, Tank was responsible for assisting his two divers with their equipment and for manning their life-sustaining umbilicals. The trio would work an eight-hour shift before being hoisted to the surface ship Alta. There they were transferred to prison-like living quarters in a steel saturation chamber that maintained the pressure of the seafloor.
Keeping the divers under constant pressure avoided the need for decompression cycles after every dive. Captives of deep pressure, the men were disciples of saturation diving, where their bodies adjusted to an infusion of nitrogen that might last for days or even weeks. At the end of the job, the men would undergo a single extended decompression cycle before seeing the light of day again.
The purpose behind their dives was the age-old quest for oil. Fletcher and his crewmates were several days into a weeklong project to fit a test wellhead and riser onto the seafloor. A drill ship would then hover over the site and bore through the sediment in hope of striking oil. Fletcher and his cohorts were laying the foundation for the third test well their Norwegian employer had attempted in the last six months.
Under license from the Cuban government, the exploration company had been given the right to explore a promising tract of territorial waters northeast of Havana. Petroleum experts believed a huge, untapped trove of oil and gas reserves lay off the Cuban coastline, but the Norwegian firm was batting zero. Its first two test wells had come up dry.
“You think the Alta will run us into Havana when we pop the chamber?” Tank asked.
Fletcher nodded but was only half listening. His attention focused on a faint light that appeared beyond the wellhead site. He turned and looked down the diving bell’s trapdoor, spotting the light of Will Brown working his way up to the chamber. He turned back to the viewport as the other light grew closer, splitting into two beams. As the object approached the base of the wellhead riser, Fletcher could see it was a small white submersible.
The submersible slowly ascended, traveling close enough that Fletcher could see its pilot. The submersible carried a thick plate-shaped disk on its articulated arm like a waiter carrying a tray.
As the vessel rose out of view, Fletcher cocked his head toward the ceiling. “Shack, who just did a drive-by?”
An unseen voice from the Alta replied, “You got company down there?”
“Just got buzzed by a submersible.”
There was a long pause. “It’s not ours. You sure you ain’t seeing things, Pops?”
“Affirmative,” Fletcher said, annoyed.
“We’ll keep our eyes open to see if anyone comes ’round to collect her.”
Tank kept reeling in the umbilical as Brown swam closer. The open floor hatch fed through a short tube to a second external hatch, also open. The pressurized interior, fed oxygen and helium from the surface, matched the pressure of the water depth and kept the chamber from flooding.
With his helmet-mounted dive light leading the way, the shadowy figure of Brown approached and popped his head through the interior hatch.
Tank and Fletcher pulled Brown up through the hatch, setting him on the deck with his feet dangling in the water. The diver carefully removed his fins while Tank unhooked his umbilical, which had provided Brown a cocktail mixture of breathing gases and also cycled a stream of hot water through his drysuit.
Removing his faceplate, the diver took a deep breath, then spoke through chattering teeth. “Cold as penguin crap down there. Either there’s a kink in the hot-water line or the boys upstairs turned down the thermostat.??
?
“Oh, you wanted hot water through there?” Tank pointed at the umbilical. “I told them you needed some air-conditioning.” He laughed and handed Brown a thermos of hot coffee.
“Very funny.” The diver unclipped a large wrench from his weight belt and handed it to Fletcher. “I almost have the base flange mounted. You won’t have any problem finishing up.”
A loud rumble rattled through the diving bell. A second later, Tank and Fletcher were thrown off their feet as a concussive blast rocked the bell. Tank yelled as Brown’s coffee scalded his neck. Fletcher grabbed the umbilical rack and hung on while the diving bell swayed. It felt like a giant hand had grabbed the bell and was shaking it like a snow globe.
“What’s going on?” Brown yelled as the other two fell across his prone body.
“Something on the surface,” Fletcher muttered, still gripping the wrench. He felt an upward jerk, then the lights went out and the shaking stopped. His face was near a viewport and he instinctively looked out. For an instant, the wellhead lights were strangely bright, then they blinked out. It took him a second to realize what was wrong. The bell had been jerked toward the wellhead and was falling forward.
“Seal the hatch! Seal the hatch!” he yelled, dropping to his knees.
A small red auxiliary light popped on, providing dim illumination, as an emergency alarm wailed. Brown’s legs were still dangling through the exterior hatch.
Fletcher grabbed the diver and pulled him to the side. Tank had regained his senses enough to slam down and tighten the interior hatch. An instant later, the diving bell struck a hard object. A groan of stressed metal beneath their feet reverberated through the interior.
The diving bell hesitated, then jerked to one side. Inside, human bodies, heavy dive equipment, and strands of umbilical cords lay crumpled in a heap. An anguished moan was barely audible over the beeping alarm.
“You boys okay?” Fletcher asked, worming his way through a pile of umbilical cord and easing himself to his feet.
“Yeah.” Tank’s voice was shaky. The dim light couldn’t hide the unadulterated fear in his eyes. He reached up and felt a bloody gash on the top of his ear. “Brownie, you okay?”
There was no response.
Fletcher groped through the tangle of debris until touching Brown’s drysuit. He gripped the material and pulled the diver clear. Brown slumped over, unconscious.
Fletcher pulled down the diver’s hoodie and felt for a pulse, feeling a faint flutter. He heard a groan and saw his chest heaving. A golf-ball-sized lump protruded from his forehead, and something about his feet didn’t look right.
Pulling away his fins, he could see Brown’s left foot dangled at an awkward angle. “I think he broke his ankle—and got knocked cold in the tumble.”
The two men cleared a space on the sloping deck and stretched Brown out. Tank produced a first-aid kit, and they wrapped his ankle and bandaged his head.
“That’s about all we can do until he regains consciousness,” Fletcher said.
Trying to find his bearings, he pressed his nose to the acrylic porthole. The sea was as black as coal, but the interior light cast a faint glow around the bell. They had collided with the riser or its blowout preventer and appeared to be hung up on one of the two structures. A long, slender object wavered in the current, and he shielded his eyes against the porthole to discern what it was.
He tensed in sudden recognition, feeling like a wrecking ball had slammed into his belly. It was a portion of the diving bell’s umbilical. Several long coils of it dangled from a riser crossmember. While it was possible the support ship had inadvertently released a length of their drop cable and umbilical, he instinctively knew otherwise. Both lines to the surface had been severed.
Fletcher stepped to a control panel and studied the dials tilted before him. Confirmation came quickly. Electrical power, helium and oxygen gas, communications, and even hot water for the dive suits—all provided from the Alta through a jumble of hoses and wires in the umbilical—had ceased. The crew of the diving bell had been abandoned.
Tank started calling the support ship, which could normally hear their every utterance via an open communication system.
“Save your breath,” Fletcher said. “They’ve lost the umbilical.” He pointed out the viewport toward the tangled pile of hose.
Tank stared for a moment as the words penetrated his battered skull. “Okay,” he muttered. “Are the scrubbers on? How’s our air?”
Fletcher took command, activating an emergency transponder, a top-mounted flashing strobe, and a backup carbon dioxide scrubber, all operated by battery. At a small control panel, he opened the valve on several gas tanks mounted on the bell’s exterior and adjusted the breathing mixture. Provided they could keep warm, the bell carried sufficient power and emergency gas for two to three days. Given their proximity to Florida and the Gulf, it was plenty of time for a saturation-equipped rescue ship to reach the site.
“Scrubbers are on. Air mix looks good.” He eyed a mechanical gauge. “Pressure stable at six hundred and twenty feet.”
During normal operations, the bell’s atmospherics were managed by a dive supervision team on the Alta. A measured mixture of gases was pumped through the diving bell’s umbilical, carefully adjusted as the bell reached operating depth. Helium, rather than nitrogen, was the primary inert gas fed to the divers, as it eliminated the effect of nitrogen narcosis, a dangerously intoxicating effect that can occur deeper than a hundred feet. The bell was fitted with its own external tanks filled with helium, oxygen, and nitrogen, for just such an emergency.
Fletcher motioned toward the viewport. “Since I’m already suited, I’ll inspect the exterior.”
“Without any heat, you better make it quick.”
While Fletcher reconfigured his umbilical to operate off the emergency gas supply, Tank slipped into the lockout to open the exterior hatch. The hatch moved only a few inches before striking something metallic. Tank put all his weight against the hatch, but it wouldn’t budge. Slipping his hand through the gap, he reached into the water and groped around.
“Best scrap your dive plans, Pops. The bell frame must have bent when we hit bottom and is blocking the hatch. No way we’re going to get that open.”
Fletcher had a sinking feeling the dive gods weren’t finished invoking payment for some past sin. “Okay. I’ll try raising the ship on the subcom. Why don’t you pull out the Mustang suits and see if you can get Brownie into one.”
Tank pulled open a side compartment that contained thick, rubberized survival suits designed for cold-water immersion. He slipped into a cumbersome suit, then tried pulling another onto Brown’s inert body. Fletcher activated an emergency radio configured with an external transponder mounted on the exterior of the bell. For the next several minutes, he tried hailing the Alta. He got only static.
Without the radiant heating from the surface umbilical, the temperature in the bell quickly cooled. Feeling the chill even in his dry dive suit, Fletcher abandoned the radio to help Tank squeeze Brown into the survival suit. “They must have their hands full topside,” he said. “I’ll try calling again in a minute.”
“There’s no sense in waiting around,” Tank said. “You saw the slack in the umbilical. The lift line is severed. They’re not going to be able to pull us up, but they can certainly acquire us if we make the surface on our own.”
Fletcher considered Tank’s words. He was inclined to wait until reestablishing communications with the surface before initiating an emergency ascent, but the silent response from above likely meant a serious situation aboard the Alta. Tank was probably right. With Brown injured, there was no point in hanging around the depths.
“All right. Prepare to drop the weights. I’ll radio up that we’re engaging in an emergency ascent—in case someone can hear us.”
While Fletcher made the call, Tank opened a floor panel
. Inside was a pair of T-grips fashioned to a set of external weights clamped beneath the bell. He waited until Fletcher turned from the radio and gave him a nod, then twisted the grips.
There was a slight clink as a pair of lead weights dropped from the bell housing. But only one of the weights fell free to the seafloor. The other remained wedged in place by the bent frame. With a slight shift in balance, the diving bell started a crooked ascent. Fletcher winked at Tank but stiffened when a horrendous screeching echoed through the bell. A rush of turbulence appeared out the side viewport as the bell jolted to a stop.
“We’re snagged on the BOP!” Tank shouted.
Both pressed their faces to the port. All they could see was a cascade of bubbles rushing past with the roar of a Boeing 747 at takeoff.
Ascending at an angle, the bell had caught a protruding elbow from the blowout preventer. The steel extension had sliced into the rack holding seven of the diving bell’s nine emergency gas tanks. As the bell rose, the blowout preventer severed the tanks’ valve connections before jabbing into the base of the rack and snaring the bell in a vise-like grip.
Fletcher jumped to the console and checked the pressure gauges. The normally stoic diver turned gray as he watched eighty percent of their emergency atmosphere disappear to the surface. Trapped inside the bell ensnared on the bottom, they were now at the complete mercy of a surface rescue.
Tank looked to his partner. “How bad?”
Fletcher turned slowly but said nothing. The look in his eye told Tank all he needed to know. They had only a few hours to live.
6
Six hundred feet above the diving bell, the Norwegian ship Alta was in the throes of death. Thick black smoke covered her forward deck, streaked by sporadic bursts of flame. A large derrick used to feed drill pipe over the side lay collapsed across the deck. Waves came close to washing over the rail as the ship listed deeply at the bow.
Kevin Knight, the Alta’s captain, stared out the bridge window at the carnage. Minutes before, he had been monitoring a weather report when a deep rumble sounded in the bowels of the ship. The deck flexed beneath his feet. An instant later, a forward fuel tank erupted in a blistering explosion that engulfed the vessel.