Operation Siberia

by William Meikle

  “Well, we’re deep in the dysphotic zone, almost to aphotic, so if anything wants to be seen, it has to make the first move and get in front of my lights. All I have is darkness… as you’d well know if you’d been paying attention. What have you been doing up there while I’m down here? Looking for clues?”

  Clues? What the shit? He let out a strained exhalation that sounded more like he was choking on something than laughing. “What are you… clues to what?” he said, looking around like a paranoid wino at the crew on deck, a crew of which every single member spontaneously and assiduously looked anywhere else than at him. At charts, maybe, or out to sea, or just moving their eyes off of him and onto something, anything, else. His heart pounded in his ears.

  “No, silly, I mean clues about what be around the thermal vents. About your theory. You know, the whole reason we’re doing this thing?”

  The crew members laughed, but not very loudly. More of a smiling and shaking-their-heads kind of reaction. Katherine Muir was a firecracker, as the old sea dogs would say. There were other labels that might fit her, too, but Sean wasn’t about to get into it when they were supposed to be running diagnostics and such on the submersible. Besides, she was right. They were here to gather evidence that would either keep his theories afloat or sink them for good. It was a big leap to make on not much evidence, but if they could confirm it or even just find an indication he was on the right track, it would shake up all of oceanography, marine biology, land-based biology, maybe xenobiology, possibly even evolutionary-development biology. There was a lot at stake, and he couldn’t let worries about rumors and loose talk aboard ship distract him from a career-making discovery.

  He took in and let out a long breath, getting his mind back in the game. He depressed the button and said to his wife, “Right, the theory, duh. Sorry. So what do you say to giving us some readings and telling us how our little sinker is doing?”

  “Ha! Nice. All right, Sea Legs, as we continue the descent, we are now one hundred percent in the aphotic zone. It’s completely pitch-black outside. Running lighting-system test in three… two…”

  Sean remained at the monitor until his wife had thoroughly gone down the checklist, told her “Good job, Kat,” and returned to where the two crewmen were to still be waiting for him.

  Except they weren’t.

  “Goddamnit— Toro! Slipjack! Get back here now, if you please.”

  Slipjack was just around the corner, looking at the video feed where Sean himself had been standing just a moment earlier. Sean caught him in the first glance he took to look for his fugitives, then barked at him to find Toro and for both of them to get back to their earlier place of “conversation.” Less than a minute later, the two crewmen stood before him again, Toro looking a bit sulky and Slipjack just nervous.

  “Gentlemen, the decision to have my wife take the second test instead of myself was ours, mine and hers, once we knew what had happened to my hand. I couldn’t do it for now, and she knew it needed to be done, knew the job well enough to take the reins and do it herself. Okay? I understand mariners’ beliefs and superstitions; I’ve spent half my life on boats. So, as far as Kat going in place of me, you know I would never let…” He trailed off as everybody’s attention was drawn to the sound at the winch spool. “What the hell is that?”

  A tremendous slow ripping sound erupted from the winch, and all hands close enough could see that it was caused by a stripped length of iron-shrouded tether cable on the giant spool, a length that had apparently taken more abuse than it could bear. Their armored support unwoven, the fiber-optic cables were the only part of the tether holding one end to the next, and when that section moved to the top of the wheel in about fifteen seconds, those thin plastic lines would snap at the first pull of the submersible’s weight.

  Sean rushed to the controls and tried to figure out which levers and buttons would stop the spool from letting out the damaged length of cable. But it was hopeless. The half of his life he had spent on boats was as an oceanographer, not the operation of this equipment. “Where the hell are my winch men?” he shouted, hoping one of the other crew members would locate—

  “Aw, goddamnit,” Sean moaned when he remembered that his winch crew consisted of Vanessa, Toro, and Slipjack, the last two of whom he had just told not to move from their useless positions behind the winch assembly. Vanessa busted her ass to get at the cable and the winch that was slowly feeding it out, although she plainly had no idea what to do except shut it down. Which she did.

  The stripped length stopped two feet from where it would have had to bear the full weight of D-Plus. Vanessa let out a huge breath of relief, and so did Sean.

  “Toro, Slipjack,” he was able to say in a normal tone now that the loud winch was stopped, “let’s get to work. And if any of the three of you says ‘I told you so’ to me… well, I know where we keep the harpoons.”

  The two men hurried to the spool and immediately saw the issue. As long as they didn’t let any more cable out, it was possible that the line wouldn’t break. It still could, and easily, but it was also possible that it would not, and they had to be grateful for that.

  That was the good news.

  The bad news was that they couldn’t reverse the winch to haul Kat back up, because in its present position, that would put too much strain on the weak area and snap it like a piece of uncooked spaghetti. They were lucky that Vanessa got the winch stopped in time at all, but the next thing to do—if there was anything to be done—was going to prove much more daunting a task.

  There was emergency scuba gear on board D-Plus, but Kat was more than 2,800 feet down. That meant over one thousand pounds of pressure per square inch pressed on the sub. Kat had a wetsuit inside the submersible, but her hatch had all that pressure keeping it closed—and besides, she’d freeze to death even as every atom of air in her body was compressed to the point of complete organ failure. She wasn’t getting out, and even if she could, she would die within 30 seconds.

  No one could dive down in scuba gear to rescue her, either, and for the same reasons. Another sub could perhaps couple with D-Plus, but they didn’t have another sub and they were too far out to request one before Kat ran out of oxygen or that cable snapped.

  However, there was little risk of crushing: the submersible was rated for the entire 20,000 feet down. And there was a chance the whole works could be attached to a new cable and “carried” back to the surface by another submersible device.

  Sea Legs carried an old but trustworthy Johnson Sea Link knockoff that could, in an emergency, possibly go that deep. The JSL was essentially human-shaped, with a clear-mask helmet for the human occupant’s head, and then controlled external arms and hooks that could perhaps slip a sturdier cable (one without any communication lines or fiber optics) onto D-Plus, and haul her up.

  The problem—and of course there was a problem—was that the JSL had a crush depth of 3,000 feet. It used to be the vehicle for “deep-sea” exploration, but as exploration technology had improved dramatically since the mid-70s, when the university’s robotic-looking spare submersible JSL was built, the definition of “deep-sea” had also changed, or at least what it meant to science and technology.

  Two researchers had touched the bottom of Challenger Deep in 1960, but that was funded by the deep, deep pockets of several sovereign governments and wasn’t intended to do any science; it was a Cold War demonstration by the United States and France, just like the race to land on the moon. The Muir expedition could buy only what they could afford with their academic funding—barely enough for the present mission, let alone getting down to the very bottom of the entire ocean. Besides, there were no hydrothermal vents believed to be that deep, so it wouldn’t have fallen under the mission parameters anyway.

  The Muirs’ D-Plus could go to 20,000 feet (theoretically, anyway; that was what they were currently trying to test before committing to using the sub for exploration), and they were extremely lucky to have been able to afford that. Although n
ot lucky enough, apparently, to have anticipated the need for a backup cable system.

  “Guys?” Katherine called from the radio. “What’s the holdup? Traffic? Is there too much—?”

  Sean swept up the mic. “Kat, we have a situation here.”

  “Oh. I do not like situations.”

  “We read you at about 2,800 feet, sound about right?”

  “You guys are letting out the cable, you tell me,” she said with a laugh. “Yeah, looks like 2,840. The descent felt very smooth until we… well, you stopped. I have hours of air left, and I won’t try to go outside, I promise. Can we start up again? What’s the rumpus, like you always say?”

  Sean couldn’t help but look at the spool with its almost bare-naked two-foot-long stretch of cable. “We’re having some trouble with the winch—or the cable—actually, it’s both. The winch can’t move it forward or back without, um, complications.”

  “Forward or back? Those are pretty much the only options, right?” A note of concern had entered her voice, the playfulness sounding strained now. “Seriously, talk to me, honey. What’s happening?”

  “The cable,” he said. “It’s stripped almost bare in one section.”

  “I see. Boy am I really glad that’s impossible. But, just for fun, let me ask: one ‘problematic’ section is all you… we… I need to be completely screwed, isn’t it?” She was without levity in her voice now. “Sean, a thick-ass cable like that doesn’t get stripped by… I don’t even know how you could ‘strip’ that accidentally. You’d have to know a lot about how we do things and have a lot of time around the cable.”

  Without conscious intention, Sean looked over at Vanessa, Toro, and Slipjack. They were all looking at him the same way, blankly but with uncertainty in their eyes.

  Or maybe with certainty in them.

  “So, Sean, babe, what’s the plan here? The cable’s magically stripped, fine. What are we going to do about it? Can the bare area be patched?”

  Sean shook his head, even though she couldn’t see him, and said flatly, “No.”

  “Well, shit.”

  “I mean, it could, but that would take equipment, supplies, and room we don’t have. Not to mention time—that’d be a two-hour process before we even moved it onto the spool. If you weren’t attached to the other end of it, we could use the blow torch to just cut the cable off before the break and then reattach it. No worries. If we had all that, and we don’t.”

  “So helpful, thanks.”

  He loudly mumbled a string of angry-sounding almost-words; then, more clearly not much less loudly, shouted into the comm link with his wife, “These goddamn cables never just get stripped like this! They’re indestructible!”

  Kat didn’t say anything.

  He calmed himself. He took a big breath in and let it out. Then he could say with honesty, “Honey? We’ve got options. Don’t worry.”

  When she spoke, it was clear from her voice that she had gone into shock. It was almost a whisper, as if she were talking to herself: “Someone’s trying to murder me.”

  “What? No, that’s not…” He wanted to say it wasn’t possible, but she would give him the same retort as always when he said that: It doesn’t have to be possible anymore. It’s actual. “Listen, let’s just focus on getting this FUBAR situation fixed up, okay?”

  Kat had head-mounted headphones with a microphone, so her scarcely audible mumbling of “… murder… someone’s trying to murder me… someone’s trying to murder me…” continued on the radio on deck where everyone could hear it, even though she clearly was no longer conversing with her husband.

  He called to Toro: “How long do you need to get the JSL ready to launch?”

  The big Hispanic mariner looked up at where the knockoff was secured. “If I bust my ass, it could be in the water in forty-five minutes. And you bet your ass I’m gonna bust my ass, jefe.”

  “But what are we supposed to do when we get down there?” Vanessa asked, not as a challenge but as a consequence of her overflowing anxiety. “Okay, yeah, the JSL isn’t a tethered submersible, so we don’t need to use the cable on that. But the whole point would be to pull D-Plus and Kat up to the surface, and that would require the bad cable to be cut or separated, and a new one to be slipped into the place of the bad one.

  “But even if we had another three thousand feet of cable—which we don’t, since all our cable for the whole mother-loving mission is on this one useless spool because this cable is practically indestructible unless you’re trying to damage it—how would we attach it? You can’t do detail work like that with those JSL claws, Sean. And God knows it’s too damn deep for an out-of-vessel excursion. Three thousand feet in just a wetsuit isn’t even close to possible, and that means we can’t attach another cable and we can’t just spring Kat out of there and into our sub—her lungs and heart would collapse instantly.”

  Sean’s gaze remained on the deck, which is what he did when he was trying to think deeply, or when he was listening intently, or both. He nodded at everything Vanessa was saying, and it wasn’t much different from what he was already thinking. For a moment a hope came to him and he said, “What if we went down in the JSL and clamped onto the cable holding D-Plus and just dragged it back up to where she could get out? That would keep there from being any pull on the compromised cable, and the slack as she was brought up could be used to wrap the exposed cable under several more layers on the spool.”

  “That could work, but what’s the operational depth of the JSL? Didn’t it get discontinued because those poor bastards got caught on some sunken ship, and they were stuck there until they ran out of air? How deep was that?” Slipjack asked in his hint of a western-by-way-of-New Jersey drawl that usually seemed homey and ominous in equal measure but seemed neither at the moment, more like on the edge of panic as he tried to run through all the possibilities in his mind. The winch, after all, was his responsibility. Only he and Sean Muir had official access to it around the clock. The others had to be wondering how he’d let this happen right under his nose.

  Vanessa said, “That had nothing to do with crush depth, Slip.”

  “No, but I’m wondering how deep that was, ’cause obviously that dive must’ve been inside their depth comfort zone, y’know? I think its deepest rating is in the neighborhood of three thousand feet. And she’s at, what’d you say earlier, 2,800 feet? So you’d have some wiggle room to save her, boss!”

  Sean nodded. That accident killed two submariners and got the original JSL discontinued, but they lived long enough as the carbon dioxide scrubbers became inoperable that they knew they would die down there. All they could do was wait for the oxygen to run out. Vanessa was right: it was an oxygen thing, not a crush depth thing.

  But those memories came and went like vapor. Slipjack’s words barely stuck, although he understood his winch man perfectly. All he could focus on right then was his wife still repeating that she was being murdered, someone was trying to murder her. Only now she was leaving the “trying” part out: “… someone’s murdering me… why are they murdering me?… someone is murdering me…”

  “I think you got to go for it, boss,” Slipjack said, looking ill. “You got to save her somehow. She’s in danger because of you—”

  “All right. Enough!” Sean snapped at him. “You think I don’t know that, goddamnit? You and Toro break out the JSL—use the launch crane—and make it ready.”

  Slipjack and Toro moved as fast as Sean had ever seen them move. Vanessa stayed with Sean, since two deckhands with a hook and Sea Legs’ smaller winch would be enough to get the JSL down where they could prep it for a dive and get the pilot situated. An additional person would only get in the way.

  “This could work, boss,” she said as the two men wrestled the hook onto the goddamn museum piece that was their counterfeit JSL. Young oceanographers from the Institute liked to use the thing to spend some time near coral reefs or where they could set down in a couple dozen feet of water and observe turtles and interesting
fish do their thing in the light of the euphotic zone. But the Muirs had it on Sea Legs because it was always stowed on Sea Legs, the boat being used currently by the Muirs but actually the property of the Institute and thus used also by their colleagues and students. He was very glad right then that no one had ever thought it necessary to go through the pain in the ass of taking it off the boat and storing it somewhere else, just to have to haul it out and load it on the boat again the next time a grad student or postdoc wanted to use it.

  Moving to help them, Vanessa stopped next to Sean and asked quietly, “Listen, Cap—even if they can get it down and prepped in forty-five minutes, how long will it take to get it down three thousand feet? Another forty?”

  Sean looked pale but didn’t let his fear get the best of him. No effective mission leader could let anything, even something like this, get that deep under his skin. “Could be an hour.”

  Vanessa looked at the green-screen on-deck computer monitor. “She’s been down there an hour and a half, Sean. Those scrubbers work how long? I don’t know this shit, boss, you got to help me here.”

  “She’s got five hours in the sub. More than that and her brain dies from lack of oxygen.” He swallowed, shaken from listening to his wife go dissociative with talk of getting “murdered” while sitting in what could soon be her own coffin.

  “Shit. So an hour and a half, plus, let’s say, an hour to get the JSL down to D-Plus and get a good hold on her cable. How long’s it gonna take for our little JSL to pull our chunky sub to the point where Kat can get out and free swim to the surface?”

  “I have no idea, Van. I’ve never done this before. No one has. These armored cables do not—”

  “I know, Sean, I know. But there’s plenty of time for figuring that out once we have your wife back and safe. Give me a ballpark: How long?”

  “The JSL isn’t really made for towing, but since we’re pressing it into service, if I had to venture a guess—”