Medusa

CHAPTER 7

AUSTIN LEANED AGAINST THE SHIP’S RAILING AND SAW THE B3’s tether cable oscillating like a plucked violin string. He spoke into the headset microphone that connected him with the bathysphere. “What’s going on, Joe? The cable is going crazy.”

Austin heard garbled voices, the words inaudible against a background of metallic clanging. Then the cable abruptly stopped its wild gyrations, and the line went dead.

Austin strained his ears. Nothing. Not even a whisper of static. He removed the headset and examined the connections. Everything was in place. He unclipped his belt radio and called the captain in the ship’s bridge.

“I’ve lost voice communication with the B3. Is the video transmission coming through?”

“Not since it was cut off,” the captain reported.

“Have you checked the redundant systems?” Austin asked.

Unlike the original bathysphere, which was connected to the surface with a single telephone line, the B3’s hauling cable incorporated several different communications routes in case one went out in the hostile deep-sea environment.

“Ditto, Kurt, nothing. All systems are out.”

A frown crossed Austin’s tanned face. It made no sense. If one system failed, another system should have taken over. Zavala had bragged that the instrumentation he’d designed for the B3 equaled that of a jetliner.

Austin instructed the crane operator to reel the cable in. As it slithered out of the water and around the drum, the operator’s voice came over Austin’s headset.

“Hey, Kurt, something’s wrong. There’s no weight resistance at the other end. The cable’s coming up too fast and easy. It’s like cranking a spinning reel after you’ve lost your fish.”

Austin asked the crane man to speed up the retrieval of the bathysphere, and the cable slinked from the sea at an even faster rate. The launch crew was pressed against the railing, silently watching the streaming cable. The NUMA film crew, sensing the tension in the air, had stopped filming.

“Almost at the surface,” the crane operator warned. “Heads up!”

The operator slowed the winch, but still the cable snapped like a bullwhip when it came out of the water, the bathysphere no longer attached. He swung the dangling cable over the ship and put the winch in reverse, letting several yards of the cable coil on the deck. Austin went over to the coil and picked up the end of the cable.

A cameraman standing nearby saw Austin holding the free end of the cable. “Damned thing snapped!” he said.

Austin knew that the cable could hold ten times the weight of the B3. He examined it closely. The strands were as even edged as the bristles of a paintbrush. He turned to the NUMA oceanographer who had chosen the dive site.

“Is there any feature down there, a coral ridge or overhang, that could have snagged the cable?” he asked.

“The bottom is as flat as an ironing board,” the oceanographer said, almost insulted at the question. “There’s a carpet of marine growth, but that’s it. Nothing but mud. That’s why we selected this spot. We did intensive bottom profiling before we made our recommendation.”

Watching from the bridge, Captain Gannon had seen Austin examining the cable. He hustled down to the deck, and he swore lustily when Austin showed him the sheared-off end. “What the hell happened?”

Austin shook his head. “I wish I knew.”

“The press boats have been calling in,” the captain said. “They want to know what happened to the video transmission.”

Austin scanned the cordon of encircling boats being kept away from the area by a Coast Guard patrol. “Tell them that there was a problem with the fiber-optic cable. We need time to figure this thing out.”

The captain called the bridge, relayed Austin’s suggestion, and snapped the radio back onto his belt.

“It’s going to be all right, isn’t it, Kurt?” Gannon asked with worry in his eyes. “The B3’s flotation bags will bring them to the surface, right?”

Austin squinted against the glare coming off the surface of the water. “The bathysphere is a long way down; let’s give it a while. But we should ready an ROV in case we need to take a look.”

Despite his apparent serenity, Austin knew that each passing minute diminished the possibility of a flotation-bag ascent. The bathysphere could rely on battery power for light, but its air would eventually peter out. He waited a few more minutes, then called the captain and recommended that they launch the ROV.

The remotely operated vehicle, or ROV, has become the workhorse of undersea exploration. Controlled by means of a tether, an ROV can dive deep, maneuver into the tightest spaces, and transmit television images, allowing the operator to travel to the depths without leaving the dry comfort of the ship.

The captain had chosen a medium-sized vehicle, about the size and shape of an old steamer trunk, that could operate at a depth of six thousand feet. Six thrusters positioned the vehicle with pinpoint accuracy; it was equipped with two manipulators for collecting samples, and several cameras, including high-resolution color video.

A telescoping starboard boom swung the ROV off its cradle and lowered it into the sea. Austin watched it sink under a mound of pale green bubbles, trailing its tether behind it, then stepped into the remote-sensing control center located in a cargo container on the main deck.

The video feed through the ROV’s tether was connected to a console from which the remote’s movement was controlled by a pilot with a joystick. Images from the feed were transmitted to a big screen above the console. The ROV’s heading and speed were displayed in combination letters and numbers at the top of the screen, along with elapsed time.

Moving in a descending spiral, the ROV traveled in minutes the same distance it had taken the bathysphere hours. The remote blasted through schools of fish, scattering them like leaves, as it corkscrewed into the sea.

“Leveling out,” the pilot said.

She put the remote into a shallow-angled dive like an airplane preparing to land. Its twin searchlights picked out brownish green bottom vegetation that looked like leaves of spinach undulating in the current. There was no sign of the Bathysphere 3.

Austin said, “Start searching, in parallel passes, a hundred feet long.”

The ROV cruised about twenty feet over the vegetation. It finished its first hundred-foot pass, then traveled back with fifteen feet separating it from the first pass. The speed indicator showed the ROV was doing five knots.

Austin clenched and unclenched his fists, impatient with the glacially slow pace. Other crew members now gathered around the screen, but no one spoke except for the quick communication between Austin and the ROV pilot. Austin mentally excluded everything in the room, pouring himself into the monitor as if he were riding atop the ROV.

Five more minutes passed.

The ROV’s methodical back-and-forth movement was similar to that of a lawn mower. The picture transmitted by its electronic eye was the same unchanging monotonous carpet of brownish green.

“Wait,” Austin said. He had seen something. “Go to the left.”

With a jiggle of the joystick, the pilot pivoted the vehicle so that it was perpendicular to its original path. The twin searchlights picked up mud splatter around the rim of a crater. A mud-covered, domelike shape protruded from the center of the crater. Now Austin saw why the B3 hadn’t surfaced; its flotation bags were buried deep in the mud. He asked the pilot to blow mud away from the bathysphere. The ROV’s thrusters kicked up a thick brown cloud that hardly made a dent in the heavy muck.

At Austin’s request, the pilot put the ROV on the bottom and pointed its searchlights at the sphere. Austin stared at the image, plumbing his training and experience.

He was pondering the technical challenge involved in freeing the B3 from the clutches of the sea when a shadow appeared on the right-hand side of the monitor. Something was moving. It was there for an instant, then gone.

“What was that?” the pilot asked.

Before Austin could venture a guess, the screen went blank.