Dr. Hartley planted the Bell Ranger’s landing gear firmly on the rear deck helipad, and even before the rotors came to a complete halt a couple of crewmen were chocking the wheels and tying the chopper down.
“The captain’s up in the center,” one of the crewmen told them. Dr. Hartley led the way up to the research center on the bridge deck. Captain Tony Riggiro and another man were studying a large-scale chart. A half-dozen technicians and scientists were monitoring a lot of expensive-looking electronic equipment jammed into the big room.
Riggiro looked up with a big grin. “About time you finally got here.” He and Lane, who towered a full head over him, gave each other a warm hug. “How’s Frannie?”
“Fine. We missed you at the wedding.”
Riggiro was sharp, and very good looking with his dark hair and dreamy Italian eyes. “I didn’t want to give my girlfriends any ideas.” He glanced over at Dr. Hartley. “Bill and I go a long way back. He saved my life.”
“We saved each other’s lives,” Lane corrected.
“I’d like you to meet Gary Lenz, my first officer. He keeps me sober and honest.”
Lenz looked like a football halfback, with a friendly smile. “Nice to meet you,” he said, shaking hands. “But unless you’ve got jet lag or something, I think we should jump on this right now.”
“We might have some company,” Riggiro explained. “There’s been a Cuban gunboat sniffing around just over the horizon since before dawn. We picked up her lights while it was still dark, and our radar detectors have been going crazy since then.”
“I’ll get Sounder ready to dive,” Dr. Hartley said. “Is there any special equipment we’ll need?”
“That depends on how the Maria is lying,” Lane said.
Lenz pointed to a position on the chart. “She’s in five hundred-eighty fathoms of water, listing about eighteen degrees on her starboard side.” He handed Lane a couple of photographs taken yesterday afternoon from an unmanned submersible. “She looks to be pretty well intact. Whatever happened blew the bottom out of her about midships, and punched a smaller hole in her bow. The props were probably still turning as she started to go down which drove her bow first. But she somehow straightened out before she hit bottom and stayed more or less in one piece.”
“We didn’t see any bodies,” Riggiro said. “What happened to the crew?”
“I’m not sure, but I think that they were sealed in the crews’ mess, amidships, when the explosives went off.”
Riggiro and his first officer exchanged a significant look. “Whoever pushed the button was a bad man.”
“That’s why I’m here, Tony.” Lane showed one of the photographs to Dr. Hartley. “What I’m looking for is stashed in a fire equipment locker on the bilge deck just to the port of the center line aft.”
“Maybe we can get to it down one of the passageways from the main deck. What is it?”
“A metal box, about two feet on each side. Weighs about a hundred pounds.”
“Take a heli-arc torch and cut a hole in the hull,” Riggiro said. “Bill can go in with the dizzy.” The deep sea environmental suit, dizzy for short, was designed by NASA to take a man to depths of three thousand feet or more. It was constructed like a space suit, except that its rigid body was made of a super-strong and very light titanium alloy. The National Security Agency had asked for the suit to retrieve a spy satellite whose top-secret core had splashed more or less intact into the Indian Ocean.
“Have you ever used one before?” Dr. Hartley asked skeptically.
“Bill helped design it,” Riggiro said.
Dr. Hartley grinned. “Open mouth, insert foot. I believe that’s the proper phrase,” she said. “I’ll get Sounder ready.”
The Sounder was an oddly shaped submersible designed for depths well in excess of ten thousand feet. It looked like an insect with two very thick bubble eyes made of a transparent metal alloy, a number of legs which were actually sensors and tools, a pair of skids to set down on the deck, and ten electrically driven ducted propellers for maneuvering. Divided into two sections, the upper two-thirds was for the pilot, crew, and passengers. The lower section, built like a diving bell, contained two diving suits along with some other diving and emergency equipment, and a large well that could be opened to the sea.
Lane climbed into the seat next to Dr. Hartley as the hatch above them was sealed and she put pressure in the craft. They donned headsets. “We’re going to be at thirty-five hundred feet, so everything that you do has to be exactly correct. One mistake and you’re dead. No second chances. Have you been there before?”
“Once or twice,” Lane said.
“I want you to do everything exactly as I tell you. My life depends on your actions as well. Tony gives you high marks, but he’ll be safely topside.”
“I have a job to do down there, Doctor. I neither like it, nor am I looking forward to making the dive, but it has to be done. I’m not here to interfere with your science or to give you a hard time.”
“Okay,” Dr. Hartley said. “Anyway, the name is Susan.”
“Fair enough.”
Susan Hartley opened the channel that provided a comms link with the Deep Sound II via the tether. “Deep Sound, this is Sounder, how do you copy?”
“You sound good, Susie,” Riggiro came back. “I’m showing a green board.”
She scanned her instruments. “So am I. Let’s go diving.”
“Stand by.”
A big deck crane lifted the Sounder off her cradle, moved her into position over the broad slot in the hull, and lowered her gently into the water. For the first thirty or forty feet there was plenty of light, but it began to grow dim out their windows below 150 feet, and by 500 feet it was hard to see much of anything. At 1,000 feet they were in an alien world of perpetual darkness.
“We’ll be approaching the bottom in fifteen minutes,” Susan Hartley said. “I’ll wait until then to turn on the outside lights. We don’t need them now.”
“I’ll go below and get suited up,” Lane told her.
“Like I said, Bill, by the numbers. We’re not here to take unnecessary risks.”
Lane climbed down to the lower compartment, sealing the massive hatch above him. “I’m sealed,” he said into his mike. “The pressure is coming up.”
“I’m showing green,” Susan Hartley came back.
Because of the light alloy it was made of, the dizzy weighed only one hundred pounds, but it was bulky and had to be put on one section at a time, starting with the torso shell. The chamber was warm because of the increasing pressure. Lane was sweating profusely by the time he had donned all but the helmet.
“How are you doing?” Susan Hartley asked.
“I’m suited up except for the helmet. But it’s hot down here. I could use a cold beer.”
“I’ll buy you one when we get topside,” she promised. “I have the ship on sonar now. I’ll switch on the lights. You have a TV monitor in the overhead equipment bay.”
“Got it.”
“I’ll pipe the picture down to you.”
“We’re going to have company real soon,” Lenz said, looking up from the radar screen.
“The Cubans?” Riggiro asked.
“I think it’s one of their foil boats. She’s doing forty knots.” Lenz studied the horizon to the south through binoculars. “There,” he said after a couple of minutes.
Riggiro took the glasses and studied the oncoming ship. “Cuban navy all right,” he said. “She’s a Russian-made Turya-class hydrofoil cutter. Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t outrun her.”
“Guns?”
“A pair of twenty-fives forward, and a pair of fifty-seven millimeter cannons aft,” Riggiro said, lowering the binoculars. “That’s not counting four torpedo tubes and a crew of thirty.”
“Do we call in the reinforcements?” Lenz asked. The other crew members and technicians shot them worried glances.
Riggiro shook his head. “We’ll trust Bill on this one for the
moment.” He looked at the others. “We’re a research vessel doing legitimate science in international waters. Capisce?”
They nodded.
“Make sure that we’re ready to send out a distress signal the instant I give the word, though,” Riggiro said as an aside to his first officer. He picked up the mike and called the Sounder as he watched the Cuban warship closing with them. “Susie, are you at the wreck yet?”
“Just got there.”
“We have company.”
“Who is it, Tony, the Cubans?” Lane’s voice broke in.
“It’s a Turya-class cutter coming in fast on our starboard bow.”
“Have they tried to make contact by radio, or blinker lamp?”
“Not yet.”
“Okay, you know the drill. No gunplay. We’re scientists on a legitimate mission.”
“Don’t drag your feet, they might want us to get the hell out of here.”
“I’m sure that’s exactly what they’re going to want,” Lane said. “Stall them.”
“I’ll do my best.”
The light from the industrial cutting torch, along with the massive amount of gas and debris it produced, was enough to completely blot out the image on Lane’s monitor.
“The steel plate is very thick here,” Susan Hartley said.
“Not as thick as it would be if it weren’t a double hull. How much longer?”
“Five minutes, so you’d better get ready.”
Lane donned the helmet, cocking it thirty degrees to the right until the collar threads were engaged, and then he twisted it left and engaged the locking slides. The suit automatically pressurized with the same oxy-helium mixture as the Sounder was on. It made their voices sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks.
Once he left the Sounder he would not be tethered. He could still communicate with the submersible via aquaphone, but that would not work very well once he got inside the Maria’s hull. For all practical purposes he would be on his own.
The picture on the monitor cleared as the Sounder backed off, showing a man-size black hole that Susan Hartley had cut into the hull. Lane plugged in his temporary comms link.
“Good job,” he said. “Have you ever thought about going into construction?”
“Only when a paper I submit to a research journal gets rejected for another rewrite.”
“I’m told that doesn’t happen much.”
Susan Hartley laughed. “Our skids are about eight feet off the bottom, and it looks as if we got lucky—it’s sand, not much silt.”
“Don’t leave without me,” Lane said. He unplugged his comms link, grabbed the overhead hand rails, and stepped out into the well. When he was in position, he let go and sank slowly into the ink black water lit only by the powerful lights on Sounder’s bows.
His buoyancy was only slightly negative so his landing was easy, and he headed immediately for the stern of the Maria, less than thirty feet away.
When he was out from under the submersible, he looked back. Susan Hartley waved from the left bubble and he waved back.
“Copy?” he asked.
“You sound like you’re underwater,” she replied, her voice distorted but understandable.
“What was your first clue, Doc?” Lane laughed. He turned, made his way across to the ship and shone his lantern into the opening. An involuntary shiver ran up his spine. He was not particularly claustrophobic, but there were seventeen dead men entombed here. And he had come very close to being one of them. Now he was back.
The hull plate had fallen away from the ship, indicating there might have been an air bubble inside the hull, but Captain Zimmer’s body, which was on the other side of the ship, had not been forced out.
Lane gingerly jumped up to the lip of the hole, steadied himself for a moment, then ducked inside. He was on the port side of the bilge deck at the stern, his back facing the bow. He took a few moments to orient himself; his underwater light penetrated only fifteen or twenty feet and the ship was lying partially on her side. But there didn’t seem to be much damage back here, or at least none that he could see, and very little debris.
He turned to face the bow, when a hand reached out and touched his face plate. He scrambled back, his heart in his throat, and swung his flashlight in an effort to ward off the apparition floating in front of him.
It was Captain Zimmer, the back of his head partially blown away, his eyes open, his mouth gaping as if he were screaming in shock and horror.
Slowly Lane’s heart slowed down. Bile was bitter in the back of his throat. This was Speyer’s doing. The entire affair. There was no way he would let the bastard get away with it. No way in hell.
Lane eased the captain’s body aside, and the beam of his flashlight fell on the fire equipment locker where he had stashed the box.
He half shuffled, half slid down the sloping walkway to it, released the catch and opened the hatch. The box was where he had placed it, wedged behind a large coil of fire hose.
Clipping the light on his right arm, it took him only a few moments to pull the box out of the closet, turn and struggle with it back to the strong lights at the opening in the hull. He let it fall outside to the ocean floor, then jumped out after it.
He gave Susan Hartley the thumbs-up sign. “Got it,” he said.
Twenty minutes after they had first spotted her, the Cuban navy cutter with the number 193 painted on her bows was stopped one hundred feet off Deep Sound’s starboard side. Riggiro and Lenz studied her through binoculars. There were at least a dozen armed men on deck in addition to four or five they spotted on the bridge and bridge wings.
“Should we try to call them?” Lenz asked.
“Not yet. They’re here and watching us. They can see the cable so they know that we have something down. And we’re not trying to run. But we’re in international waters so we have just as much right to be here as they do.”
“Where I come from the guys with the guns usually have the most rights,” Lenz said. He was an ex-Special Forces sergeant, and he’d been born and raised in the Bronx.
Riggiro called down to the Sounder. “Susie, is Bill back aboard yet?”
“He’s under the skirt now. He’s got the box.”
“The Cuban navy is parked right next to us. We’re going to start pulling you up as soon as Bill’s aboard.”
“Give us a couple of minutes.”
“Will do,” Riggiro said, and replaced the mike. He turned to Lenz to tell him to have the winch operator stand by, when the Cuban cutter hailed them by radio.
“Deep Sound Two, this is the Cuban patrol vessel off your starboard side. We are sending a boarding party across to check your documents. Lower your ladder.”
“Negative, negative,” Riggiro radioed. “We are a scientific vessel engaged in legal pursuits in international waters. Permission to board is denied.”
“Deep Sound Two, we will fire on your vessel if you do not comply immediately. Comprende?”
“Oh, oh,” Lenz said.
Two large rubber boats were launched over the side of the warship. They both started across. In one were a half-dozen armed men and two officers in white uniforms, sidearms strapped to their hips. In the other were a man at the outboard, and two men outfitted with diving gear.
“Okay, call the Key West Coast Guard,” Riggiro told Lenz. He got on the ship’s PA. “Scotty, we’re going to have company. Lower the starboard ladder and then stand by the Sounder’s winch. We’ll be bringing them up.”
The others on the bridge and in the Research Center were looking at him.
“Nobody raises so much as a finger,” Riggiro said. “If they ask a question, answer it, and then shut up.”
They nodded.
He got on the comms link to the Sounder. “Is Bill aboard yet?”
“I’m here,” Lane came back.
“They’re sending over eight armed men to check our papers. But it looks like they mean to put a couple of divers into the water, too.”
“Susan, are we
secure to start back up, even with the lower hatch open?” Lane asked.
“My board is green,” she said.
“Okay, we’re bringing you up,” Riggiro said. “And we’re calling Coast Guard Key West.”
“Good, the timing should be just about right,” Lane said. “Listen to me, Tony. Don’t give those guys any trouble. Do exactly what they tell you to do.”
“That’s my plan.”
“And no matter what happens, keep hauling in the tether.”
“What are you talking about?”
“They want the box, but I’m not going to give it to them. Just keep hauling on the cable, no matter what.”
Sounder started up almost immediately. Riggiro was wasting no time. Down here they were vulnerable, but as Lane hurriedly stripped the diving suit from his body he understood that the captain of the Cuban warship was covering all his bases by not only sending someone aboard the Deep Sound but by sending a couple of divers down to meet the submersible on the way up.
“Are you ready to depressurize and come up here?” Susan Hartley asked.
“No,” Lane said. “Can they monitor our conversation topside?”
“Not now.”
“Good, then this is exactly what we’re going to do …”
As the Cuban boarding party came up the ladder, the two divers in the other inflatable entered the water and disappeared.
“Bill, the divers are in the water,” Riggiro phoned the Sounder. But the circuit had been switched off.
“What the hell is he up to?” Lenz asked.
Riggiro shook his head. “I don’t know, but whatever it is, it’ll be good.” He watched as the six Cuban navy ratings stayed on deck while the two officers made their way up. “Just make sure that Scotty keeps hauling on the cable.” He looked at the others. “Keep your cool, folks. Our coast guard is on the way.”
The two officers came through the door, looked with interest at the equipment and technicians in the research center, then came forward to the bridge. The taller one, lieutenant’s bars on his shoulder boards and an insolent sneer on his narrow mouth, came first.
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