Medusa

CHAPTER 4

BERMUDA, THREE MONTHS LATER

THE TAXI DRIVER WARILY EYEBALLED THE MAN STANDING on the curb outside the arrival gate at Bermuda’s L. F. Wade Airport. His potential fare had an unruly ginger beard, and hair pulled back in a short pigtail that was tied with a rubber band. In addition, he wore faded jeans, high-top red sneakers, Elton John sunglasses with white plastic frames, and a rumpled tan linen suit jacket over a T-shirt with a picture on it of Jerry Garcia from the Grateful Dead.

“Please take me to the ship harbor,” Max Kane said. He opened the door, threw his duffel bag in the backseat, and then slid in beside it. The driver shrugged and put the taxi in gear. A fare was a fare.

Kane sat back and closed his eyes. His brain was about to explode. His impatience had ballooned with each mile traveled over the past twenty-four hours. The long flight from the Pacific Ocean to North America and the two-hour trip from New York were nothing compared to the dragging minutes it took for the taxi to get to the waterfront.

Kane directed the driver to stop near the gangway of a turquoise-hulled ship. The distinctive color and the letters NUMA emblazoned on the hull below the ship’s name, WILLIAM BEEBE, identified the vessel as belonging to the National Underwater and Marine Agency, the largest ocean-study organization in the world.

Kane exited the cab and shoved a wad of bills at the driver, then slung the duffel over his shoulder and briskly climbed up the gangway. A pleasant-faced young woman wearing the uniform of a ship’s officer greeted Kane with a warm smile.

“Good afternoon,” the woman said. “My name is Marla Hayes. I’m the third mate. May I have your name?”

“Max Kane.”

She consulted a clipboard and put a check mark next to Kane’s name.

“Welcome to the Beebe, Dr. Kane. I’ll show you to your cabin and give you a tour of the ship.”

“If you don’t mind, I’ve come a long way and I’m anxious to see the B3.”

“No problem,” Marla said, leading Kane toward the ship’s fantail.

The two-hundred-fifty-foot-long search-and-survey ship was the marine equivalent of a professional weight lifter. With its stern-ramp A-frame crane and wide deck, the fantail was the business end of the ship. It bristled with the winches and derricks that scientists used to launch underwater vehicles and devices that probed the depths. Kane’s eyes went to a large tangerine-colored globe resting in a steel cradle beneath a tall crane. Three portholes that resembled short-range cannons protruded from the sphere’s surface.

“There it is,” Marla said. “I’ll come by in a little while to see how you’re doing.”

Kane thanked the young woman and cautiously approached the globe, treading softly as if he expected the strange object to bolt on the four legs attached to the bottom. He walked around to the other side of the sphere and saw a man in a Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts standing in front of a circular opening slightly more than a foot in diameter. The man’s head was inside the globe, his right shoulder angled through the hatch as if he were being devoured by a bug-eyed monster. The string of salty curses that echoed from inside the globe sounded as if they were coming from a pirate cave.

Kane set his duffel bag down, and asked, “Tight quarters?”

The man bumped his head as he backed out of the opening, prompting a few more colorful oaths, and brushed away a shock of steel-gray hair from eyes that were the blue of coral under flat water. He had a broad-shouldered frame that was an inch over six feet, and he must have weighed two hundred pounds. He grinned, showing perfect white teeth against features that had been bronzed by years at sea.

“Very tight. I’d need a shoehorn and a can of grease to get me into this antiquated refugee from a marine-salvage dump,” he said.

A dark-complexioned face poked from the hatch, and its owner said, “Give it up, Kurt. They’d have to baste you with WD-40 and pound you in with a sledgehammer.”

The broad-shouldered man made a face at the unpleasant image. He extended his hand in introduction. “I’m Kurt Austin, project director for the Bathysphere 3 expedition.”

The man in the sphere wriggled out feetfirst and introduced himself. “Joe Zavala,” he said. “I’m the engineer for the B3 project.”

“Nice to meet you both. My name is Max Kane.” He jerked his thumb at the sphere. “And I’m scheduled to dive a half mile into the ocean in this antiquated refugee from a marine-salvage dump.”

Austin exchanged a bemused glance with Zavala. “Pleased to meet you, Dr. Kane. Sorry to cast doubt on your sanity.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time someone accused me of being one beer short of a six-pack. You get used to it when you’re doing pure research.” Kane removed his sunglasses, revealing eyes of Kris Kringle blue. “And please call me Doc.”

Austin gestured toward the orange globe. “Don’t pay any attention to my earlier comment, Doc. I’m nursing a serious case of sour grapes. I’d make the dive in a heartbeat if the bathysphere came in a bigger size. Joe is the best deep-sea guy in the business. He’s made the diving bell as safe as any NUMA submersible.”

Zavala cast an appraising eye on the sphere. “I used technology that wasn’t available back in the thirties, but otherwise it’s the original Beebe-Barton design that set the record by diving 3,028 feet in 1934. The bathysphere was beautiful in its simplicity.”

“The sphere design seems so obvious to us now,” Kane said. “At first, William Beebe thought that a cylinder-shaped bell might work. He was chatting with his friend Teddy Roosevelt years before the actual dive and sketched his idea out on a napkin. Roosevelt disagreed and drew a circle instead, representing his preference for a globe-shaped bell. Later, when Beebe saw the Otis Barton design based on a sphere, he realized that was the only way to deal with the pressure at great depth.”

Zavala had heard the story before. “Beebe saw that the cylinder’s flat ends would cave in,” he picked up the story, “but a sphere would distribute the pressure more evenly around its entire surface.” He squatted next to the globe and ran his hand over the thick skids that the legs rested upon. “I’ve added emergency flotation bags in the runners. There’s more than a little self-preservation involved, Doc. I’ll be making the dive with you.”

Kane rubbed his palms together like a hungry man savoring a juicy steak. “This is a dream come true,” he said. “I pulled every string I could to get on the dive list. William Beebe is responsible for my career in marine microbiology. When I was a kid, I read about the glowing, deep-ocean fish that he found. I wanted to share Beebe’s adventures.”

“My biggest adventure has been trying to stuff myself through that fourteen-inch door,” Austin said. “Try it on for size, Doc.”

Kane, who was about five foot eight, hung his jacket on the bathysphere’s frame, then poured himself headfirst into the sphere, doubled his body with the skill of a contortionist, and poked his head out the circular opening.

“It’s roomier in here than it appears from the outside.”

“The original bathysphere was four feet nine inches in diameter, and had walls one and a half inches thick made of fine-grade, open-hearth steel,” Zavala said. “The divers shared their space with oxygen tanks, filter trays, a searchlight, and telephone wires. We’ve cheated a little. The portholes are polymer instead of fused quartz. The tether is Kevlar rather than steel, and we’ve replaced the copper communications link with photo-optic fiber. We miniaturized the bulkier instruments. I would have preferred a titanium sphere, but the costs were higher.”

Kane easily exited the sphere and stared at it with near reverence. “You’ve done an amazing job, Joe. Beebe and Barton were aware they were risking their lives, but their boyish enthusiasm overcame their fears.”

“That enthusiasm must have rubbed off on you to come all this distance,” Austin said. “I understand you were in the Pacific Ocean.”

“Yeah. Contract work for Uncle Sam. Pretty routine stuff. We’re about to wrap it up, which is fortunate because there was no way I would have missed this opportunity.”

The third mate was making her way across the deck toward the bathysphere accompanied by two men and a woman carrying video cameras, lights, and sound equipment.

“That’s the NUMA film crew,” Austin said to Kane. “They’ll want to interview the intrepid divers on camera.”

A look of horror came over Max Kane’s face. “I must look like crap. Smell like it too. Can they wait until I hop into the shower and trim the porcupine quills on my chin?”

“Joe will fill them in while you clean up. I’ll see you in the bridge after you’re done with the interview,” Austin said. “We’ll go over the plans for tomorrow.”

As he headed for the bridge, Austin reflected on how Beebe’s books had stirred his own imagination when he was a boy growing up in Seattle. He recalled one story in particular. Beebe described standing at the edge of an underwater precipice at the limit of his surface air supply, looking down with yearning into the deep water beyond his reach. The scene crystallized Austin’s own tendency to push to his limits.

Born and raised in Seattle, Austin had followed his boyhood dreams, studying systems management at the University of Washington. He also attended a prestigious deepwater diving school, specializing in salvage. He worked a few years on North Sea oil rigs and put in a stint with his father’s ocean-salvage company, but his spirit of adventure needed freer rein. He joined a clandestine underwater-surveillance unit of the CIA that he led until it was disbanded at the end of the Cold War. His father hoped he would return to ocean salvage, but Austin moved over to NUMA to head up a unique team that included Zavala and Paul and Gamay Trout. Admiral Sandecker had seen the need to create the Special Assignments Team to investigate out-of-the-ordinary events above and below the world’s oceans.

After completing the team’s last assignment, the search for a long-lost Phoenician statue known as the Navigator, Austin had heard that the National Geographic Society and the New York Zoological Society were sponsoring a docudrama on Beebe’s historic half-mile bathysphere dive of 1934. Actors would play Beebe and Barton, using a prop bathysphere, with much of the action simulated.

Austin persuaded the NUMA brass to let Zavala design a state-of-the-art bathysphere. The diving bell would be launched from the agency’s research vessel, William Beebe, in conjunction with the docudrama. Like all government agencies, NUMA had to fight for its share of the federal funding pie, and favorable publicity never hurt.

Dirk Pitt had taken over from Sandecker as NUMA’s director after Sandecker became the Vice President of the United States, and Pitt was equally interested in creating favorable public awareness of the agency’s work. The bathysphere’s pressure sphere would be recycled after the expedition as the heart of a new deep-sea submersible. The diving bell was nicknamed the B3 because it was the third pressure hull using the Beebe-Barton design.

Trailed by a cameraman and sound technician, Zavala and a freshly scrubbed Kane climbed to the bridge after being interviewed in front of the bathysphere. Austin introduced Kane to the captain, an experienced NUMA hand named Mike Gannon, who spread a chart out on a table and pointed to Nonsuch Island off the northeast tip of Bermuda.

“We’ll anchor as close as possible to Beebe’s original position,” the captain said. “We’ll be about eight miles from land with just over a half mile of water under the ship’s keel.”

“We decided on a shallower location than the original so we could film the sea bottom,” Austin said. “How’s the weather looking?”

“There’s a gale expected tonight, but it should blow out before morning,” Gannon said.

Austin turned to Kane. “We’ve been doing all the talking, Doc. What do you hope to get out of this expedition?”

Kane gave the question a moment’s thought.

“Miracles,” he said with a mysterious smile.

“How so?”

“When Beebe reported hauling phosphorescent fish in his trawl nets, his fellow scientists didn’t believe him. Beebe hoped the bathysphere would vindicate his research. He compared it to a paleontologist who could annihilate time and see his fossils alive. Like Beebe, my hope is to dramatize the miracles that lie beneath the surface of the ocean.”

“Biomedicine miracles?” Austin asked.

Kane’s dreamy expression vanished, and he seemed to catch himself.

“What do you mean, biomeds?” Kane’s voice had an unexpected edge to it. He glanced at the video camera.

“I Googled Bonefish Key. Your website mentioned a morphine substitute your lab developed from snail venom. I simply wondered if you had come across anything similar in the Pacific Ocean.”

Kane broke into a smile. “I was speaking as an ocean microbiologist . . . metaphorically.”

Austin nodded. “Let’s talk miracles and metaphors over dinner, Doc.”

Kane opened his mouth in a yawn.

“I’m about to hit the wall,” he said. “Sorry to be a bother, Captain, but I wonder if I could have a sandwich sent to my cabin. I’d better get some sleep so I can be fresh for tomorrow’s dive.”

Austin said he would see Kane in the morning. He watched Kane thoughtfully as he left the bridge, wondering at his edgy response to a routine question. Then he turned back to confer with the captain.

THE NEXT MORNING, the NUMA ship followed the course Beebe’s expedition had taken, heading out to sea through Castle Roads, passing between high, jagged cliffs and old forts, past Gurnet Rock and into the open sea.

The gale had petered out, leaving a long, heaving swell in its wake. Plowing through low mounding water, the ship traveled for another hour before dropping anchor.

The diving bell had been put through dozens of tank tests, but Zavala wanted an unmanned launch before the main dive. A crane lifted the sealed bathysphere over the water and allowed it to sink to the fifty-foot mark. After fifteen minutes, the B3 was winched back onto the deck, and Zavala inspected the interior.

“Drier than an eye at a miser’s funeral,” Zavala said.

“Ready to take the plunge, Doc?” Austin asked.

“I’ve been ready for nearly forty years,” Kane said.

Zavala tossed two inflatable cushions and a couple of blankets through the door. “Beebe and Barton sat on cold hard steel,” he announced. “I’ve decided a minimum of comfort will be necessary.”

In turn, Kane produced two skullcaps from a bag and handed one to Zavala. “Barton refused to dive unless he wore his lucky hat.”

Zavala pulled the cap down on his head. Then he crawled through the bathysphere’s hatch, taking care not to snag his fleece-lined jacket and pants on the steel bolts that surrounded it. He curled up next to a control panel. Kane got in next and sat on the window side. Zavala turned the air supply on and called out to Austin, “Close the door, Kurt, it’s drafty in here.”

“See you for margaritas in a few hours,” Austin gave the order to seal the bathysphere.

A crane lifted the four-hundred-pound hatch cover into place. The launch crew used a torque wrench to screw ten large nuts over the bolts. Kane shook hands with Austin through a four-inch circular opening in the center of the door that allowed instruments to be passed in and out without having to move the cumbersome cover. Then the crew screwed a nut into the hole to seal it.

Austin picked up a microphone connected to the bathysphere’s communications system and warned the divers they were about to become airborne. The winch growled and the crane hoisted the B3 off the deck as if the fifty-four-hundred-pound steel globe and its human cargo were made of feathers, swung it over the side, and kept it suspended twenty feet above the heaving ocean surface.

Austin called the bathysphere on the radio and got Zavala’s go-ahead to launch.

Through the B3’s windows, the divers caught a glimpse of the upturned faces of the launch and film crews and slices of ship and sky before the portholes were awash in green bubbles and froth. The B3 splashed into the crystal clear waters and slipped beneath the surface in the valley between two rolling swells.

The crane lowered the diving bell until it was just under the surface.

Zavala’s metallic-sounding voice came over a speaker mounted on a deck stand. “Thanks for the soft landing,” he said.

“This crane crew could dunk this doughnut in a cup of coffee,” Austin said.

“Don’t mention coffee and other liquids,” Zavala said. “The bano is located on the outside of the bathysphere.”

“Sorry. We’ll book you a first-class cabin next time.”

“I appreciate the offer, but my main concern is making sure our feet stay dry. Next stop . . .”

The winch let out fifty feet of cable, and the bathysphere stopped for the final safety inspection. Zavala and Kane checked the bathysphere for moisture, paying close attention to the watertight seals around the door.

Finding no leaks, Zavala made a quick run-through of the B3’s air-supply, circulation, and communications systems. The indicator lights showed that all the bathysphere’s electronic nerves and lungs were working fine. He called up to the support ship.

“Tight as a tick, Kurt. All systems go. Ready, Doc?”

“Lower away!” Kane said.

The sea’s foamy arms embraced the bathysphere like a long-lost denizen, and with only a mound of bubbles to mark its descent the hollow sphere and its two passengers began the half-mile trip to King Neptune’s realm.