Medusa

CHAPTER 12

CAPTAIN GANNON FURROWED HIS BROW AS HE GAZED OUT the bridge windows at the restless sea. The weather had changed for the worse in the hours since the B3 had dropped into the depths. Gray slabs had replaced the puffy white clouds of morning. The easy breeze that had greeted the ship’s arrival had freshened, puckering the heaving sea. The water gained a dark, leaden cast as the sun lowered, and foam crested the corrugated wave tops.

The rugged research vessel had been built to take the worst kind of weather imaginable, but retrieving the bathysphere and an exhausted Hardsuit diver would have been delicate operations even without dicey conditions.

Gannon had moved the ship back from the bathysphere’s last known position to give the B3 room to surface. The starboard crane was still hauling up the Hardsuit, and Austin would not appreciate being dragged all over the ocean, so the ship could only move a short distance.

If anyone can survive this ordeal, the captain thought, it would be Austin. Hell, the man’s a perpetual-motion machine!

Having dived a half mile to the bottom of the ocean to free the bathysphere, Austin was keeping in constant touch with the ship, reporting his ascent to the bridge at regular intervals, relaying vivid descriptions of the sea life he observed.

Lookouts lined the railings or were gathered on the bow and fantail. A Zodiac inflatable boat sat on the slanting stern ramp under the A-frame. Two divers in neoprene wetsuits were perched on the pontoons waiting for the signal to push the Zodiac into the water.

The diesels rumbled in the engine room, waves slapped against the hull, and the rising wind thrummed through the rigging. But otherwise, an eerie stillness had descended over the ship.

The quiet was broken by a lookout yelling over the bridge intercom.

“She’s up!”

Keeping his eyes glued to the newly formed patch of foam a hundred yards to port, Gannon picked up his microphone and gave the command to launch.

The divers pushed the Zodiac down the stern ramp and clambered in. It leaped over the waves as its powerful outboard motor kicked in, curving around to the side of the ship, slip-sliding over the seas, trailing the retrieval line behind it like a prehensile tail.

The Zodiac slowed to a wallowing stop near six wave-slicked orange mounds that had bobbed to the surface. The cabled hook at the end of the line was lowered into the water, and one of the divers slid off the Zodiac and disappeared beneath the waves.

Every eye on the ship watched the drama play out. When the diver popped to the surface and pumped his fist in the air, a loud cheer went up. The B3 was hooked. Winches pulled the bathysphere and its flotation air bags slowly to the surface.

The recovery crew cut the air bags away, and the crane lifted the dripping bathysphere from the sea and onto the deck of the ship. A power wrench burped, the lug nuts were quickly unscrewed, and the hatch cover clanged to the deck.

The ship’s medic stuck her head through the hatch opening and saw a rumpled pile of blankets surrounded by a loose assortment of equipment.

“Hello,” she said in a tentative voice.

Zavala pulled back the corner of the blanket and blinked his eyes against the light. He smiled.

“Hello yourself,” he said.

AUSTIN WAS STILL ON his way to the surface when Gannon called and said the bathysphere was back on board. Austin asked how Joe and Doc were doing.

“I’ve seen dead eels with more life to them,” the captain said. “But the medic says they’re suffering from the -shuns: dehydrashun, air deprivashun, and exhaustshun.”

Austin let out a groan that the captain could have heard without the need for a fiber-optic connection.

“Captain, you’re a cruel man.”

“They’ll be fine,” Gannon said with a chuckle. “They just need water and rest. I’ve notified the press that the B3 recovery was a success. No details for now, but someone on one of their boats or in a chopper must have figured out we were having problems. I’m going to have to explain what happened eventually. I’ll deal with that later . . . How about you?”

“Anxious to get out of this tin suit, but feeling good otherwise. One request, though: the classical music you’re piping down here is putting me to sleep. Got anything livelier?”

Minutes later, Austin was listening to Mick Jagger belting out “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

He smiled in full agreement with the sentiment of the Rolling Stones song, that if you try some time, you can get what you need . . . especially if you have friends.

THE B3’S PASSENGERS had been rushed into sick bay, laid out on examination tables, stripped of their evil-smelling clothes, treated for bumps and bruises, and given a rubdown to get their circulation going again. Then the medic buried them under piles of blankets and let them sleep.

When Joe Zavala awoke, the first thing he saw was Kurt Austin’s face.

“Guess I’m not in heaven,” Zavala croaked.

Austin held up a round, brown glass bottle with a wooden screw cap.

Tequila!

“Maybe you are,” he said.

Zavala’s lips parted in a cracked smile.

“A sight for sore eyes,” he said. “When did you get back on board?”

“They peeled me out of my suit around a half an hour ago,” Austin said. “Feel like telling me what happened?”

Zavala nodded.

“Let me warm my outside first,” he said, “then I’ll warm my inside.”

It took fifteen minutes under the hottest shower he could stand before warmth finally seeped into Zavala’s bones. Austin handed him a plastic cup of tequila through the shower-stall door, then went to his cabin, showered, and changed.

By the time Austin returned, Zavala had put on some clothes that Austin had left for him and was sitting in a chair sipping tequila. Austin helped him walk to the mess hall and ordered two pastramis on rye.

They devoured their sandwiches, then Zavala closed his eyes and sat back in his chair.

“That may be the best meal I’ve ever had,” he said.

“I’ll refill your cup if you tell me what happened with the bathysphere,” Austin said.

Zavala held his cup out. The tequila helped loosen his tongue, and he described the harrowing plunge to the bottom of the ocean and the problem activating the flotation bags.

“I still can’t figure out how that cable snapped,” Zavala said with a shake of the head.

“It didn’t snap,” Austin said.

Austin opened the case he’d brought with him and extracted a laptop, which he set on the table. He showed Zavala the video the Hardsuit camera had filmed of his encounter with the AUV.

Zavala uttered an appreciative Ole! as Austin dodged the deadly pincers. When the video ended with Austin disabling the AUV, Zavala said, “Nice work, but don’t quit your day job to become a matador.”

“I don’t intend to,” Austin said. “Bullfighting technique aside, how hard would it be to program an AUV to cut the bathysphere’s cable?”

“Not hard at all, Kurt, but it would take some sophistication to build the AUV in the first place. It’s a slick piece of engineering. Very agile. Learns from its mistakes and is quick to adjust. Too bad you had to mess it up.”

“You’re right, Joe. I should have let it kill me, but I was having a bad-hair day.”

“Happens to the best of us,” Zavala said.

“Any idea where it might have come from?” Austin asked.

“There were at least two dozen boats watching the bathysphere dive. That hungry critter could have been launched from any one of them. Why do you think it attacked you after scuttling the B3?”

“Nothing personal. I think I was what the military likes to call collateral damage.” He pointed at the screen. “Someone sicced Fido there on the bathysphere. It went for me because I happened to be in the neighborhood.”

“Who would want to torpedo the B3 project?” Zavala said.

“I’ve been wondering the same thing,” Austin said. “Let’s see if Doc is awake.”

KANE WAS NOT ONLY awake but quite chipper. He had showered, wrapped his body in a terry-cloth robe, and was sitting in a chair chatting with the medic.

“Now I know what it feels like to be a canned sardine,” he said. “Thanks for the rescue, Kurt. I can’t believe the cable broke.”

“It didn’t break,” Zavala said. “Kurt says that it was cut.”

“Cut?” Kane’s lower jaw dropped open. “I don’t understand.”

Austin showed Kane the video of the AUV, and said, “Can you think of anyone who would go through all this trouble to put the bathysphere on the bottom?”

Kane shook his head. “Nope. What about you?”

“Joe and I are as much in the dark as you are,” Austin said. “There’s no reason we can think of to scuttle a scientific and educational project.”

Gannon’s voice came over the ship’s intercom.

“Call coming in for Dr. Kane,” the captain said. “Can he take it?”

Austin plucked the intercom’s receiver from the wall and handed it to Kane.

Kane listened to someone on the line, and said, “That’s impossible! . . . Yes, of course . . . I’ll be ready.”

When Kane had clicked off, Austin asked, “Is everything all right?”

“Not really,” Kane said. His face had turned the color of cold ashes. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to talk to the captain.”

Kane asked the medic to help him get to the bridge.

Austin stared at the door for a moment, then shrugged and said to Zavala, “Come to the machine shop with me. I’ve got something to show you.”

The mandible Austin had wrested from the AUV had been wrapped in cloth and clamped in a padded bench vise. Using a set of thick work gloves, he removed the blade from the vise. It was about four feet long and six inches wide, curved along the inner edge and tapering to a point. He found the metal surprisingly light, and he estimated its weight at less then twenty pounds.

Zavala whistled softly. “Beautiful,” he murmured, “a metal alloy of some kind. Whoever built it didn’t expect it to be twisted where it joined the AUV. That was the weak spot. The edge on this thing is as sharp as a samurai sword.”

“You can see how a pair of these butter knives could ruin your day.”

“Too bad Beebe isn’t around,” Zavala said. “It might change his mind about the dangers of the deep ocean being exaggerated.”

“The ocean didn’t produce this thing. It’s decidedly man-made.” Austin carefully turned it over. The metal had been perfectly forged except for a single flaw the size of a pinhead a few inches from where the blade had snapped off the AUV.

Austin rewrapped the blade and clamped it back in the vise.

“You spent quality time with Doc . . . Did he say anything that might shed some light on this mystery?”

“He talked about jellyfish a lot, but one other thing stood out.” Zavala dug into his memory. “While we were stuck in the mud, I asked him about his research. He said he was working on some research that could affect every man, woman, and child on the planet.”

“Did he elaborate?”

Zavala shook his head.

“I asked him about specifics. He said that if he told me what he’d been working on he would have to kill me.”

The right side of Austin’s mouth turned up in a lopsided grin.

“He actually said that? Seems ironic, considering that you were minutes away from what the tabloids call a grisly death.”

“We had a good laugh about it, but I think he was sincere.”

Austin pondered Zavala’s reply, and said, “What do you make of that call Doc got a few minutes ago?”

“Doc looked as if a horse had kicked him in the stomach.”

“He was upset, no doubt about that.”

Austin suggested that they talk to Kane again. As they stepped out onto the deck, they saw Kane and the captain. Kane was still somewhat stiff-legged as he walked in their direction with Gannon by his side and he was carrying his duffel bag.

“We were on our way to see you folks,” said the captain, pointing to the lights of the approaching vessel. “That’s a U.S. Coast Guard cutter coming in for Dr. Kane.”

The cutter stopped around a hundred yards from the ship. Austin helped Kane put his flotation vest on and walked him to the ramp at the stern, where the Zodiac crew was waiting. He thanked Austin, Joe, and the captain for all their help.

“Sorry you have to leave, Doc,” Austin said.

“Not as sorry as I am to go.” He smiled, and added, “Beebe’s adventures pale by comparison to our dive.”

“Going back to Bonefish Key?”

“No, not for a while . . . I’ll be in touch.”

Kane got into the Zodiac. The inflatable pushed off into the chop and bounced over to the Coast Guard vessel, Kane was helped aboard, and it started to move away even before the inflatable made it back to the ship.

Austin, Gannon, and Zavala watched the cutter until it was out of sight, then Gannon turned to Austin and asked if he wanted to head back to port in the morning. Austin suggested that they try to retrieve the lost ROV. Gannon said the forecast called for fair weather after the gale blew itself out. He’d plan a salvage operation using the ship’s largest ROV, a mechanical monster nicknamed Humongous.

“We don’t really know very much about Doc,” Zavala said after the captain had left.

“It’s time we remedy that situation. I’ll ask the Trouts to check into Bonefish Key. In the meantime, British Navy regulations allow a second shot of grog.”

“This is NUMA, not the British Navy,” Zavala said. “And, technically speaking, tequila is not grog.”

“May I point out that we are in Bermudan waters and thus in British territory.”

Zavala slapped Austin on the back and said something in Spanish.

“My Espanol is a bit rusty, pal,” Austin said. “Please translate.”

Zavala lifted his chin and sniffed the air, as if he had smelled something unpleasant.

“I said, ‘Jolly good show, old chap.’”