“It would seem,” Pitt said, “at least from outward appearances, that the Starbuck sank no more than yesterday.”
Boland wearily rubbed a hand across his forehead. “Let’s go topside,” he said, “and discuss this in the fresh air.”
Upon the port wing of the bridge Boland turned and gazed out over the sea. Another two hours and it would be sunset and already the blue of the water was beginning to darken as the sun struck the waves on an oblique angle. He was tired, and his words when he spoke, were low and spaced apart.
“Our orders were to find the Starbuck. We’ve accomplished the first step in our mission. Now comes the job of raising her to the surface. I want you to fly back to Honolulu for the salvage crew.”
“I don’t think that would be wise,” Pitt said quietly. “We’re not out of the woods yet. It’ll be dark soon. And that was when the Starbuck vanished.”
“There’s no reason for panic. The Martha Ann has enough detection equipment to spot danger from any direction, from any distance.”
“You carry only hand guns,” Pitt came back. “What good is detection if you have no defense? You may have found the graveyard of the Vortex, but you don’t have the vaguest idea of who or what caused the wrecks.”
If the devil and his fleet of ghosts haven’t made an appearance by now,” Boland persisted, “they’re not going to.”
“You said it yourself, Paul. You’re responsible for this ship and its crew. Once I lift off, you can kiss your last avenue of escape good-bye.”
“Okay, I’m listening,” Boland said evenly. “What do you have in mind?”
“You’ve damned well guessed the answer to that,” Pitt said impatiently. “We dive on the submarine. Instruments and TV cameras can only tell us so much. A firsthand eyeball inspection is imperative. It’ll be dark soon and if there’s something rotten in Denmark, we’ve got to find out damned quick.”
Boland casually gazed at the lowering sun. “Not much time.”
“Forty-five minutes is all the time we’ll need.”
“We?”
“Myself and one other man. A former submariner if you’ve got such an animal.”
“My navigation officer, Lieutenant March, served four years in nuclear subs and he’s a skilled scuba diver.”
“He sounds fine. I’ll buy him.”
Boland stared at Pitt thoughtfully. “Not good.”
“Problem?”
“I’m not too keen on sending you down. Your Admiral Sandecker would have my ass if something happened.”
Pitt shrugged. “Not likely.”
“You act pretty confident.”
“Why not? I’m backed by the most sensitive detection instruments known to man. Nothing reads on or around the Starbuck’s hull. Where’s the risk?”
“I’ll have Lieutenant March help you with the diving gear,” Boland gave in. “We have a diving hatch just above the waterline starboard amidships. March will meet you there. But remember, only a visual survey. After you see whatever there is to see, you get back up.” Then he turned and stepped into the pilothouse.
Pitt remained behind on the bridge wing, fighting to keep a grim expression. He felt a touch of guilt, but shook it off. “Poor old Boland,” Pitt said softly to himself. “He hasn’t the vaguest notion of what I’m up to.”
Diving on a sunken ship is both exciting and frightening; it has been compared, by the more superstitious souls, to swimming through the rotting bones of Goliath’s corpse. The diver’s heart begins to pump at a terrifying pace; his mind becomes numb with unwarranted fear. Perhaps it’s the romantic visions of ghostly old bearded captains pacing the wheelhouse deck; or sweating, cursing stokers shoveling coal into fiery ancient boilers; or even tattoo-chested deckhands drunkenly staggering back to the fo’c’s’le after a wild night spent in a backwater tropical port
Pitt had felt all these eerie sensations before on wreck dives. This time it was different The Starbuck looked perfectly natural lying on the bottom. If the underwater world was foreign to a surface ship, it was surely the natural habitat of a submarine. At any second Pitt half expected ballast bubbles to burst from the main vents and the huge bronze propellers to begin turning as the long black shape came to life.
He and March swam slowly along the hull, just inches above the bleak seafloor. March carried a Nikonos underwater camera and began punching the shutter lever, the strobe light flashing like sudden shafts of lightning through an overcast sky. Only the release of air bubbles broke the stillness. Shoals of brightly colored fish glided around the two creatures who had invaded the privacy of their backyard.
A black and yellow angel fish approached out of curiosity. At least forty parrot fish meandered past, flicking their tails. A brownish shark, about six feet long with white tips, swam above the men and paid them no attention. There was such an oversupply of tasty gourmet morsels, the thought of dining on man couldn’t have been farther from the shark’s pea-sized brain.
Pitt shook off his desire to admire the scenery. There was too much to accomplish and too little time. Pitt took a firmer grip on the long, aluminum shaft in his right hand.
Barf the Magic Dragon, March had called it The three-foot cylindrical tube with the needlelike muzzle reminded Pitt of the tool park cleanup men use to spear paper trash. It was, in fact, the deadliest shark killer yet devised. Spear guns, repellents, bang sticks firing shotgun shells; all worked with varying degrees of success on man’s hated enemy. But none were as safe and sure as Barf the Magic Dragon. Pitt had seen commercial models of the shark killer; they were smaller and packed less punch than the Navy’s version. Basically, it was a gun, and in spite of its deceptive nonlethal appearance, it would literally turn a shark inside out If one of the razor-toothed monsters came too close, the diver simply jammed the needled muzzle into the sandpaperlike hide and pulled a trigger, causing a canister of carbon dioxide to discharge into the shark’s body. The resulting explosion of gas would then blow the vital organs of the boneless villain through its gaping mouth while inflating them like balloons. Even that wouldn’t kill the beast. Only after the gas had forced it to rise to the surface would it then drown. Sharks have no air bladders or gills like other fish. They cannot float; they must keep on the move every second so they can pass oxygen through their mouths and out their gill-shaped clefts. If a shark doesn’t move, it can’t breathe.
March clicked the camera shutter, wound forward the film, and clicked one more. Then he motioned Pitt upward. They swam slowly over the level deck, past the closed messenger-buoy hatch, past, the ballast vents, and the mooring cleats.
Pitt looked at March’s expression througnhis face mask; fear was welling in the young man’s eyes-of what lay on the other side of the pressure hull. March held up his camera and pointed toward the surface; he was running out of film. Pitt shook his head. He took a small rectangular board that was attached to his weight belt and wrote two words on it with a grease pencil: ESCAPE HATCH.
March stared at the message board and pointed a finger at the underwater watch on his wrist. Pitt didn’t have to acknowledge; he already knew they were down to their last twenty minutes of air. He held up the board again and gripped March tightly by the arm, digging his fingers into the flesh so the young lieutenant would get the urgency of Pitt’s command. March’s eyes widened in his face mask. He looked up at the shadow of the Martha Ann’s hull, knowing they were being watched by the television cameras. He hesitated, killing time, trying to run out the clock.
Pitt wasn’t fooled. He dug his fingers into March’s arm and squeezed tighter. That did the trick. March nodded in understanding and quickly turned and swam toward the forward bow of the Starbuck. Pitt hardly expected the younger man to do otherwise.
Pitt stayed almost on top of March’s web-footed fins, swimming into the stream of bubbles that trailed from the lieutenant’s exhaust valve. It took only a few seconds before their shadows crept over the hull and they were hovering again above the deck of the Star-buck, A c
rab rudely interrupted during its promenade across the forward walkway, scurried in a crazy sideways movement until it skidded down the rounded hull and sideslipped to a perfect eight-legged landing on the sand below. If the crab was frightened, so was March. Pitt clearly saw him shudder involuntarily as he stared down at the escape hatch, envisioning the grisly scene below.
OPEN IT, Pitt wrote on his message board. March looked at him, shuddered again, and slowly bent down and knelt over the hatch as he applied pressure to the handwheel. Pitt rapped the muzzle of Barf lightly on the hatch cover, the metallic sound amplified by the water. Spurred into action, March twisted the handwheel until the veins in his neck became taut. It wouldn’t budge. He relaxed and looked up at Pitt with questioning eyes tainted with anger. Pitt held up three fingers and pointed at the handwheel, signaling a third try. He moved opposite March and shoved the butt of Barf under the handwheel quadrants as a lever. Then he nodded at March.
Together they twisted. Finally the handwheel gave, but only a bare half inch at first, but since that cracked the seal, it became easier with each succeeding inch until it spun easily and knocked against its stop. March swung the hatch cover open and stared straight down into the air lock. The equal pressure between the lock and the outside was a bad sign. Pitt saw his grand plan beginning to crack, but there was one more card left to play and only one minute left to play it.
Pitt wiped off the lettering on the board and then wrote: CAN YOU OPERATE?
March nodded, shivered inwardly at the ghostly suggestion behind Pitt’s question, took his own message board, and replied: NO GOOD WITHOUT POWER.
Pitt simply scribbled: WE TRY!
March, deciding that opposition was useless, hesitated a moment to screw up his courage, and then plunged into the forbidden gloom of the air lock compartment. Pitt waited outside until March could get his bearings from what little light filtered in from above. When he had his hands firmly on the air valves, March nodded and Pitt dropped beside him and tightened down the hatch.
The escape compartment was a tubelike chamber built right into the hull of the submarine. It could hold six men and was designed so that the crew, escaping from their stricken ship, could enter, seal the interior hatch, and then flood the chamber by way of an air-release valve. When the water pressure outside equaled the pressure inside and the remaining air was dumped off, the escaping men merely opened the exterior hatch and rose to the surface. In the case of Pitt and March, they were going to reverse the process by draining away the water and then entering what Pitt hoped would be a dry interior.
Madness was the only way March could describe it, sitting in the total blackness of the chamber, pure madness. It would have been much simpler to open the interior hatch without screwing around in the dark confines of the chamber. Why waste time in the useless exercise of trying to pressurize, when the sub was filled with water? All they were going to find was a murky interior filled with bloated, rotting corpses. They’d both be dead too if they didn’t hurry; he expected to go on his short supply of reserve air any second now. Madness, he thought despairingly again. It seemed impossible, but he imagined himself sweating. Then he turned the valve.
The air hissed softly into the chamber and water began draining away. It must be a dream, March told himself. It couldn’t possibly be happening. His body let him know of the drop in pressure and, even though he couldn’t see it, he knew his raised hand had passed above the water level. Then he could feel slight waves gently lapping at his face. If the mouthpiece from his regulator hadn’t been clenched between his teeth he would have gaped in speechless bewilderment. Fighting off the shock and taking a firm grasp of his senses, he fumbled for the waterproof switch he was certain was in the vicinity of the air-release valve. He skinned his knuckles in hurried groping before his fingers touched the rubber switch. Then he raised it, throwing light into the escape compartment.
March was numbed at what he saw. Pitt stood in front of him, leaning against the bulkhead in relaxed indifference to his surroundings, his face mask already tilted up over his ebony hair, his mouthpiece hanging across his broad chest. He stared back at March through green eyes that seemed to twinkle in the glare while the lips beneath the hardened bronze face twisted at the corners in a grin.
March spit out his mouthpiece. “How could you have known?” he gasped.
“An educated guess,” Pitt said casually.
“The lights, the pumping pressure,” March said dazedly. “The nuclear reactor must still be operating.”
“It would seem so. Shall we have a look?”
To March, Pitt’s glacial calm was astounding. “Why not?” he said. He tried to sound casual but his words came out like a hoarse croak. The water was completely drained away now and he gazed downward at the interior hatch of the Starbuck.
They removed their air tanks, face masks, and fins in the certainty that if there was breathable air in the escape chamber, there had to be breathable air in the sub itself. March got down on his knees in the inch or so of water left on the interior hatch, and began twisting the handwheel. This one gave easily; tiny air bubbles foamed around the lip of the cover as air vented from within the sub. He leaned down and sniffed the escaping air.
“It’s okay.”
“Crack it some more.”
March spun the handwheel until a small rush of air splashed through the puddle at their feet. Then the pressure equalized and water gurgled away beneath the hatch. March felt a despairing apprehension; there was no mistaking this time the icy sweat that seeped from his pores. He eased the hatch cautiously up on its hinges and quickly turned aside. There was no way that he was going to enter that unholy crypt first. He needn’t have worried. Pitt rapidly slipped past and dropped down the ladder and disappeared from view.
Pitt found himself in the well-illuminated, cramped, and empty forward torpedo compartment. Everything seemed neatly in place as though the owners had temporarily left to play cards in the ward room or grab a late afternoon snack in the crew’s mess. The bunks tiered aft of the torpedo storage were tightly made up; the brass plaques on the circular rear doors of the tubes shined brightly; the ventilation blower hummed at normal speed. The only sign of movement was Pitt’s shadowy form making its contorted way across a bulkhead wall. He stepped back to the escape hatch and looked up.
“Nobody’s home. Come on down and bring Barf.”
He could have saved his breath. March was already descending the ladder carrying both Barf and the camera case. He handed Pitt the carbon dioxide gun and furtively glanced around the compartment. His fear gave way to astonishment when he saw that Pitt wasn’t fooling about the vacant compartment.
“Where is everybody?”
“Let’s find out,” Pitt said quietly. He took Barf from March’s hand and nodded at the camera. “That your security blanket?”
March finally forced a tight smile. “I’ve got eight more shots left on the roll. Commander Boland might like to see what we’ve discovered. He’s not going to be too happy about our breaking and entering.”
“Hell hath no wrath like a commander scorned,” Pitt said. “I’ll take full responsibility.”
“They must have seen us enter the escape hatch from the TV monitors,” March said uneasily.
“First things first. I’m counting on you for a personally guided tour.”
“I served on an attack sub. The Starbuck is an engineering marvel none of us even dreamed about five years ago. I doubt if I could find the nearest john.”
“Nonsense,” Pitt said loftily. “If you’ve seen one submarine, you’ve seen them all. Where does this lead?” He pointed at an aft bulkhead door.
“Probably a companionway running past the missile tubes to the crew’s mess.”
“Okay, let’s go.”
Pitt unlatched the bulkhead door and stepped over the sill into a compartment with seemingly the same dimensions as the Carlsbad Caverns. It was vast-at least four decks high, a labyrinth of heat exchanger tubes, drive syst
ems, generators, boilers, and two monstrous turbines. A powerhouse, Pitt thought; one of those gas and electric company powerhouses that burst at the seams with nightmare upon nightmare of piping and machinery. As he stood there amazed at the immensity of the room, March brushed past him and slowly, almost hypnotically ran his hands over the equipment.
“My God,” March exclaimed. “They did it. They actually combined the engine room with the reactors and set them in the forward part of the ship.”
“I thought nuclear reactors had to be mounted in isolated compartments because of radiation danger.”
“They’ve improved the control, so that a man working in or around a reactor for nearly a year, will receive less radiation than a hospital X-ray technician in a week.”
March walked over to a large boilerlike piece of machinery that rose nearly twenty feet high and studied it carefully. He followed the heat exchanger tubes to where they finally merged with the main propulsion turbines.
“The starboard reactor is shut down,” he said softly. “But the rods are pulled on the port reactor. That’s why the system is providing power.”
“How long could it sit unattended like this?” Pitt asked.
“Six months, maybe a year. This is a brand-new system, pretty advanced. Might even go longer.”
“Wouldn’t you say this is an exceptionally clean engine room?”
“Somebody’s kept it up, that’s for sure,” March said, looking uneasily behind him.
“We’d better push on,” Pitt said briefly.
They climbed a ladder to another door and stepped over the sill. They found themselves in the crew’s messroom; a large, spacious compartment brightly decorated with long wide tables covered in dark blue vinyl. It looked more like a Holiday Inn Coffee Shop than a dining compartment of a submarine. The grills on the galley stoves were cold and again everything was neat and orderly. No stacked pots and pans, no dirty dishes. Pitt didn’t even find so much as a tiny crumb laying about anywhere. He couldn’t help but smile as he moved past a thirty-two-inch color TV console and a mammoth stereo. Something didn’t jell in the back of his mind. In fact, nothing jelled in this whole crazy, uninhabited vessel. Then he had it- a small piece of the baffling puzzle.