Medusa

CHAPTER 9

ONCE AGAIN, AUSTIN WATCHED, TIGHT-LIPPED, AS THE dripping tether snaked from the ocean without its payload. He swore a sailor’s oath at the loss of the ROV, and called the captain in the bridge.

“The ROV cable’s been sheared off just like the bathysphere’s,” Austin said. “Looks like someone worked it over with a pair of hedge clippers.”

“This is crazy!” Captain Gannon said. He calmed down, and asked, “Should I send down another ROV?”

“Hold off for now,” Austin said. “I need a couple of minutes to think this through.”

Austin stared at the heaving sapphire surface of the sea. He pushed aside thoughts of the two men locked into a steel ball half a mile below the ship’s hull and focused on the retrieval of the bathysphere as a salvage problem. His nimble mind began to formulate a rescue plan and assemble the equipment he would need to carry it out.

He called the captain back. “I’ve got an idea, but I’ll need your help.”

“Tell me what you want and it’s yours, Kurt.”

“Thanks, Captain. I’ll meet you in the machine shop.”

The Beebe’s machine shop, below the main deck, was a vital component of the ship’s operation. A research vessel is basically a platform that allows scientists to plumb the depths with instruments or underwater vehicles. Powerful ocean forces constantly battered the vessel. The Beebe’s shop kept the ship operational with a crew of only three, including the chief mechanic, and an array of tools to cut, grind, turn, mold, mill, and press.

Austin had until then kept the shop busy tending to the specialized needs posed by the bathysphere’s launch. As project director, he had developed a close professional relationship with the chief machinist, a burly, troll-like man named Hank, who liked to wrap up a project with the words, “Good enough for government work.”

Hank must have heard about the B3 because he greeted Austin with a somber face. “What can I do to help, Kurt?”

Austin unfolded the diagram of the B3 and spread it out on a table. He pointed to the horseshoe-shaped metal swivel that joined the cable to the top of the sphere.

“I need to snag the bathysphere here.” Austin sketched out a hook attached to the end of a cable and showed it to Hank. “Can you put this setup together in less than an hour?”

“Forty-five minutes, tops,” Hank said. “I’ll splice the cable to a spare hook. But, I’ll be honest, I can’t give you something that is likely to last for the half-mile haul back up to the surface.”

“I’m only interested in the first ten or twenty feet,” Austin said. “Once the B3 is clear of the muck, it can trigger its own flotation system.”

“Getting the hook attached to the swivel is going to be tough at this depth,” Gannon said. “The gap between the swivel and the top of the B3 is only a few inches.” He held his thumb and forefinger up. “Like trying to snag something this size from a helicopter half a mile in the air. It would be almost impossible, in my opinion.”

“I disagree,” Austin said. “It would be absolutely impossible. That’s why I’m not going to do it from the surface.”

“How are you . . . ?”A thoughtful look came to the captain’s face. “Bubbles?”

“Why not? She’s been tested to five thousand feet.”

“But . . .”

“Let’s talk about it in the control van,” Austin said.

The box-shaped, twenty-foot-long atmospheric-diving-suit control van was next to the ship’s garage, where the ship’s underwater vehicles and other deep-ocean hardware were housed. The van had a console that was separate from the controls for the ship’s submersibles, and it had a workshop where Bubbles was stored.

Austin and Gannon stood in front of a puffy-limbed, anthropomorphic metal figure that resembled the Michelin man. The transparent dome capping the figure could have come from a bubblegum dispenser.

Bubbles’s technical name was atmospheric diving suit, or ADS, but it was considered an anthropomorphic submersible. A diver using the ADS could go to great depths without having to worry about the killing water pressure or the need to decompress. The bulky life-support system on the back of the aluminum body, or hull as it was known, could sustain the pilot for six to eight hours, or for more time in an emergency.

Bubbles was an experimental ADS owned by the U.S. Navy. It was a successor to the Hardsuit 2000, which had been developed for submarine rescue. The research vessel was transporting Bubbles as a courtesy, then rendezvousing with a Navy ship near Bermuda after the B3 expedition.

Gannon stood with his hands on his hips, vigorously shaking his head.

“I can’t let you do this, Kurt,” said the captain. “Bubbles is a prototype. She hasn’t been field-tested yet. Last I heard, she’s got a for-sure depth limit of only twenty-five hundred feet.”

“Joe would tell you that any engineer worth his salt builds in a huge safety factor,” Austin said. “The Hardsuit 2000 made it to three thousand feet in test dives.”

“Those were test dives, not operational dives. That’s a fact.”

Austin pinioned the captain with his coral-blue eyes. “It’s also a fact that Joe and Kane will freeze to death or die from lack of air if we don’t do something about it.”

“Damnit, Kurt, I know that! I just don’t want someone else dying senselessly.”

Austin realized he had come down too hard and backed off.

“Neither do I,” he said. “So here’s my offer: you get Bubbles gussied up for a dive, I’ll get an opinion on dive limits from the Navy and abide by whatever they tell me.”

Gannon had learned a long time ago that Austin was a primal force, as unstoppable as the east wind.

“What the hell,” the captain said with a lopsided grin. “I’ll get Bubbles ready to go.”

Austin gave him a thumbs-up, and hurried to the bridge. A satellite phone connected him with the Navy’s Deep Submergence Unit in California. He listened with mounting impatience to a recorded directory and spoke with several people before he landed on a junior officer in the unit’s Diving Systems Support Detachment. Austin quickly laid out his predicament.

The officer let out a low whistle.

“I sympathize with your problem, sir, but I can’t give you permission to use the Hardsuit. That would have to come from higher up. I’ll connect you.”

“I’ll deal with the Navy brass,” Austin said with thinly veiled annoyance. “I just want to know if the new Hardsuit can dive a half mile.”

“That’s what the tests were supposed to determine,” the officer said. “The weak spots in an ADS have always been the joints. With the new joint design, theoretically it’s possible to go deeper, maybe to five thousand feet. But if there is one tiny flaw, you could have a massive failure.”

Austin thanked the officer and said he would clear the dive with the officer’s superiors, although he didn’t say when. He hoped to be unavailable by the time the Navy bureaucracy reacted.

While Austin had been discussing the Hardsuit with the officer, a nagging thought had been buzzing around in his head like a hungry mosquito. Heading back down to the ROV control center, he found the young woman who had tracked the ROV still sitting at her station. He asked her to rerun the last sixty seconds of its video. She clicked her mouse and the sea bottom a half mile down appeared on the screen. Once again, Austin watched the ROV soar like a bird over the undulating vegetation covering the seafloor. Its camera soon picked up the splatter from the B3’s impact, then the bathysphere’s dome protruding from the crater.

“Freeze the image right there,” Austin said. He pointed to a dark area in the upper-left-hand corner of the screen. “Now, run it in slow motion.”

The shadow moved off the screen.

The ROV operator stared at the screen, jutting out her lower lip. “I don’t remember seeing that.”

“It was easy to miss,” Austin said. “We were all focused on finding the bathysphere.”

She sat back, folded her arms, and focused on the oblong shape that was barely visible at the edge of the searchlight beam.

“Might be a fish or whale,” she said, “but something about it isn’t quite right.”

Austin asked the operator to enlarge the image. It broke apart as it was blown up, but Austin nonetheless detected a vague manta-ray shape to the shadow. He asked her to print the image, and to play back the final transmission from the bathysphere.

The operator ran off a printout, then reduced the shadow image and tucked it in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen, which now displayed a picture of Kane. He was rattling off an excited description of the luminescent fish swimming around the bathysphere when suddenly he stopped short and pressed his face against the window.

“What was that?” Kane said.

The voice-activated camera switched to Zavala.

“You see a mermaid, Doc?”

Back to Kane.

“I’m not sure what I saw, but I know one thing: it was big!”

Austin snatched up the printout and headed for the aft deck. The big double doors on the garage were wide open, and the Hardsuit had been wheeled out under the crane that would lift it off the deck.

Austin showed Gannon the ROV printout.

“This object was nosing around the B3 when both cables were cut,” he said.

The captain shook his head. “What is that thing?”

“Got me,” Austin said. He glanced at his watch. “What I do know is that the B3 will soon run short of power and air.”

“We’ll be ready in a few minutes,” the captain said. “Did you contact the Navy?”

“A Navy engineer told me that, theoretically, Bubbles could dive to five thousand feet.”

“Wow!” the captain said. “Did you get an okay to use the ADS?”

“I’ll work on it later,” Austin said with a quick smile.

“Why did I even ask?” the captain said. “Hope you realize that you’re making me your accomplice in hijacking Navy property.”

“Look on the bright side. We can be cell mates at a federal country-club prison. Where do things stand?”

Gannon turned to the head machinist, who was standing by.

“Hank and his crew did a hell of a job,” the captain said.

Austin inspected the machine shop’s work and gave Hank a pat on the back.

“Good enough for government work,” he said.

The severed end of the bathysphere’s cable had been looped through a hook and then laid back along itself in a classic sailor’s eye splice and wound dozens of times with thin steel wire. Austin thanked the rest of the shop crew for their good work, then asked them to attach the hook to the ADS frame.

While the crew tended to his request, Austin hurried to his cabin and exchanged his shorts and T-shirt for thermal underwear, a wool sweater, and wool socks. He zipped himself into a crew coverall and pulled a knit cap down over his thick mane of hair. Although the Hardsuit had a heating system, the temperature inside could drop to forty degrees or less at depth.

Back up on deck, Austin quickly explained the rescue plan. Making a silent plea to the gods of dumb luck to look approvingly on this venture, he climbed up a stepladder and eased his muscular body into the lower half of the Hardsuit, which separated into two parts at the waist. Once the top half of the suit was on, he tested the power, communications link, and air supply. Then he gave the order to launch.

The frame and Hardsuit were lifted from the deck and lowered into the water. Austin called for a halt at thirty feet down to retest the systems. While everything was in working order, he was sobered by the fact that the Navy’s record-breaking two-thousand-foot dive had taken years of planning and teams of specialists to pull off. It was a far cry from the mad dash to the bottom he was about to undertake.

The Hardsuit helmet’s digital time display told him that the bathysphere had less than an hour’s supply of air left.

He reached out with his hand-pod clamp and detached the hook from the frame. First making sure the hook was clamped tightly, he gave the order to send him to the bottom of the sea.

The cable winches for the suit and hook worked in tandem to lower Austin. The quick descent kicked up bubbles that obscured his view of his surroundings. As the minutes ticked away on the digital clock, he kept a close eye on the depth gauge.

After passing two thousand feet, Austin was aware that the suit now had entered uncharted territory, but his mind was too busy with other things to contemplate the possibility that it might have been pushed beyond its limits. At twenty-eight hundred feet, still with no discernible problem, he felt a change in the speed of his descent.

Gannon’s voice came on the intercom.

“We’re slowing you down so you don’t drill a hole through the bottom, Kurt.”

“Appreciate that. Hold at three thousand.”

The winch soon slowed to a stop.

The curtain of bubbles cleared around the dome that encased his head. Austin switched on lights that would have been useless during descent. Their pale yellow shafts accentuated blackness so devoid of color that any attempt to describe it in words would be doomed to fail.

All systems were working, and the joints were still watertight. Austin called for more slack on the cable. The winch slowly lowered him more until he was fifty feet off the bottom.

“You’re on your own from here on,” the captain said. “We’ll let out cable as you move.”

Scattered groupings and pinpoints of phosphorescence could be seen beyond the range of the searchlights, and odd-looking luminescent fish nosed up to the faceplate of Austin’s helmet.

He pressed down with his left foot and two vertical thrusters whirred, raising him up a yard or so. He next used his right foot to activate the horizontal thrusters, moving him forward several feet.

Austin tried moving his arms and legs and found that, even with the tremendous water pressure, the suit’s sixteen well-oiled joints allowed for an amazing range of movement.

He activated the suit’s camera zoom and focused on an anglerfish attracted by the light.

“Picture’s coming through,” the captain reported. “Good definition.”

“I’ll see if I can find something for the family album. Moving out.”

Skillfully handling the thruster controls, Austin piloted the Hardsuit horizontally, tilting forward slightly, cable trailing behind.

The seven-hundred-pound ADS lost its clumsiness and moved through the water as if on wings. Austin focused on a small sonar screen glowing wheat-colored yellow. Employing a range of fifty feet to either side of the suit, it cut a swath a hundred feet wide. It tracked his position, heading, speed, and depth as it read the bottom.

A dark object appeared on the screen, approximately twenty-five feet to his right and down.

Austin maneuvered the Hardsuit into a sharp right turn and descended until the searchlights reflected off the gleaming plastic-and-metal surface of the ROV. It was lying on its back like a dead beetle.

Gannon also saw it. “Thanks for finding our ROV,” his voice came over the communicator.

“My pleasure!” replied Austin. “B3 should be within spitting distance.”

He extended the range of his search a hundred feet, then spun around slowly. The sonar picked up another object close by. Accelerating too quickly, he overshot the bathysphere and, turning sharply, had to come around again.

Austin hovered some twenty feet over the B3. The temperature inside the Hardsuit had dropped, yet sweat beaded his forehead. The difficulty of the task in this hostile environment having dawned on him, he knew that a mistake made in haste could be fatal. He took a deep breath, pressed the vertical-control pedal, and began his descent to the bathysphere entombed in mud below.