by Tom West
‘That is very cool,’ Lou added. ‘How long does it take to do the job?’
‘That depends upon a few factors – the material of the hull, the stability of the vessel, the depth at which we use the tube. But for this mission, we estimate no more than ten minutes.’
‘To build the tunnel from nanocarbon, cut the portal and seal it?’
‘Yes.’
Lou looked at Kate. They had both experienced deep ocean nanotechnology at work before during the mission to try to retrieve documents from a storage facility that was part of the Titanic wreck eighteen months earlier, but this seemed to be in a different league.
‘OK, any questions?’ Lamb asked.
‘Security,’ the CIA officer Jeanette Schmidt stated. ‘I’m assuming HMS Gladstone will have a full escort?’
Sir Donald’s senior assistant Seth Wilberforce spoke for the first time. Leaning forward, he gazed around the room. ‘We have liaised with both the Royal Navy and the US military. Phoenix is a US Navy asset, but the operation is being led by the Royal Navy and of course Norway is also a member of NATO so there should be no serious conflict of interest. We are all on the same side, are we not?’ He spread his fingers on the wood of the conference table and held Jeanette Schmidt’s hard face for a moment.
‘But that’s not my point,’ she said.
Wilberforce had a hand up and glanced at Sir Donald before speaking. ‘However . . . as much as the Norwegians have been extremely cooperative, they do not want a foreign fleet in their waters, just a few miles from their coast. It is of course a political matter and we are onto it, but, as I’m sure you will agree, time is of the essence. We know we are not the only ones interested in this whole business.’ He paused for dramatic effect and fixed Schmidt with an intense look.
‘While the diplomats and ministers sort out the Norwegians, we have to tread carefully. Gladstone will be the only vessel in the zone of the wreck.’
‘Crazy!’
‘We feel it is essential that we keep this a low-profile operation.’
‘You Brits and your low-profile this and your low-profile that!’
‘Would you suggest going in with all guns blazing, Ms Schmidt?’ Sir Donald asked calmly. ‘You chaps have a penchant for that.’
Jeanette Schmidt exhaled loudly but decided not to pursue the matter.
‘Any further questions?’ Sir Donald surveyed those around the table.
‘When do we start?’ Lou asked.
‘Gladstone sails from Portsmouth at 17.00 hours today. A helicopter is waiting for you on the roof.’
50
North Sea. 6.21 a.m.
HMS Gladstone was a small naval vessel. But it was one of the most modern in the fleet. Commissioned only a year earlier, it was a Type-7 nuclear-powered stealth multi-purpose vessel. For the past six months it had been the primary ship used to transport and maintain two Jules Verne subs now in their final month of trials with the Royal Navy.
Gladstone had a full complement of thirty-four crewmen commanded by Steve Windsor, who had been its captain since its maiden voyage twelve months ago. During that time Gladstone had been on exploratory missions as far afield as the Gulf of Mexico, the Great Barrier Reef and the Bering Strait. After the Israeli attack on the Iranian nuclear plant at Bushehr, it had also seen action as part of the British Task Force in the military stand-off in the Persian Gulf.
From the bridge the view was one of the most striking Kate had ever seen. The water, grey and violent, absorbed snowflakes as though the sea was vacuuming them from the air. To the east lay the icy snow-encrusted Norwegian shoreline: sheer cliffs fading into fog that crept over the water towards the ship. The panorama was bleak and mean.
‘We will be directly over the wreck in under ten minutes,’ said a young officer facing a U-shape of flat screens, lines and patches of numbers darting across the glass.
‘Very good, Thompson.’ Captain Windsor scanned the horizon. ‘The fog is moving in fast,’ he said, lowering his binoculars and turning to Lou and Kate standing a few feet back from the manned control consoles. ‘Fortunately, our radar will give us an image almost as clear as a visual.’
The door to the bridge slid open, Derham and Fleming stepped inside. They were wearing white fur-trimmed parkas. The door closed automatically.
‘Fog’s getting up,’ Jerry said.
‘Just been talking about it, Captain Derham,’ Windsor said. ‘It’s a nasty one all right.’
The drop in the engine tone was almost imperceptible as the ship slowed and closed in on the site region.
‘Prepare to all-stop,’ Windsor said quietly to one of the men at an array of screens to his left. Beyond the windows, the cliffs had vanished from view. It was impossible to tell sky from water except for a shimmering and heaving of the North Sea below the fog-bruised grey sky.
‘Can we see anything of the wreck?’ Fleming asked, taking a step over to where Windsor leaned in towards one of the operatives.
‘Over here,’ Windsor said and paced over to a man seated in front of a large flat screen.
‘Anything coming through, Taylor?’ Windsor asked him.
‘It’ll take a moment, sir.’ The operator tapped at a keyboard and the image on the screen shifted from a featureless dark blue to a flash of shifting patterns. The picture flickered and a blurred patch of black appeared to the left of centre. The officer ran his fingers expertly over the controls and the smudgy image began to sharpen.
‘There she is,’ Windsor said matter-of-factly.
‘Just trying to clean it up, sir.’ The officer kept his eyes on the screen, his fingers dancing over the keys. The dark patch on the monitor skittered left, then right. For a second the picture flickered then, taking them all by surprise, a perfect, clear image of the wreck emerged from the confusion.
51
North Sea. 8.15 a.m.
‘We good to go, guys?’ Jerry Derham asked and looked around the table at Kate, Lou and Commander Ester Lamb. They were in the Ready Room of Gladstone two hours after arriving at the site of the wreck.
‘Well I am!’ Lou replied.
Derham turned to Lamb. ‘JV3 prepped and ready, Commander?’
She nodded. ‘Absolutely, Captain.’
‘You wanted to go through the plan with me first, yeah?’
‘Yes.’ Lamb walked over to a flat screen on the wall. An image appeared.
‘This is the internal layout of Phoenix.’
They had seen it before, in Vauxhall. It was a multicoloured and meticulously labelled schematic. A series of rectangles represented the various sections of the submarine.
‘As I said at the meeting in London, we cannot be sure where the case containing the documents may be found, or even if they are still in it but we have to start somewhere.
‘We’ve worked out that the best entry point for the Portable Access Tube is here, close to the base of the conning tower where it connects to the main body of the sub. You can see there is a small, roughly spherical, chamber here where two crewmen operated the periscope. A ladder leads down to the control room directly beneath the conning tower.’
As she spoke and clicked the remote, different areas of Phoenix lit up. ‘Next to the control room, towards the bow, are the officers’ quarters; the crew mess and quarters lie aft. The rest of the vessel is taken up with machinery, torpedoes, engines, batteries, storage areas. We are very hopeful the attaché case will be in one of these rooms.’
‘And if it isn’t?’ Kate asked.
‘It won’t be far!’ Lou responded.
‘It’s hard to imagine how this metal can could accommodate . . . how many crew?’ Kate turned from the screen to Lamb.
‘Up to eighty; the living and working areas are tiny. Phoenix is three hundred and twelve feet long, but has a beam of just twenty-seven feet. On top of that, a good seventy per cent of the internal space is taken up with machinery and storage.’
‘Do you have any idea what condition Kate and Lou might expec
t to find the interior to be in?’ Derham asked. He was tapping a pencil on a pad in front of him.
‘We’ve just got back a series of images from a probe,’ Lamb replied.
A cloudy, ill-defined image replaced the schematic on the screen. ‘Not that brilliant to be honest,’ she said. ‘But there is no clear access point to get a probe inside, so these pictures had to be taken through the hull.’
‘Couldn’t you have used a PAT for the probe?’ Lou asked.
‘I’m too worried we might compromise the integrity of the hull if we make more than one opening. Which brings me to another thing to consider.’ Ester Lamb scanned the faces of Lou, Kate and Jerry. ‘We have no way of telling just how stable the structure will be once we disturb the wreck. Our techs have made the PAT as efficient as it can be, but, as you will appreciate, wrecks are unpredictable.’
‘So, what are you saying?’
‘We’ll monitor the structure with thermal imaging from the moment the PAT connects with the hull. We’ll keep you constantly informed. But we have to put a time limit of forty minutes’ search time once the PAT is connected. First sign of trouble you must get out asap.’
Derham turned to Kate and Lou. ‘Any questions, guys?’
Kate nodded. ‘Yes. How long do your Liquid Metal Carbon dive suits last now? Has the design been improved since we explored the Titanic?’
‘You won’t be needing them on this trip. The PAT is completely sealed, and besides, there is simply no room inside the sub for you to wear them. Instead, you’ll be using highly advanced thermal suits.’
‘Oh,’ Kate said. ‘I don’t know how I feel about that.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The LMC suits always worried me . . .’
‘Because they could not be used for very long?’
‘Yeah, but on the other hand, they did make you feel protected.’
‘The fact is, though, the section of the sub you’ll be going into is completely sealed. If it weren’t, the external pressure of the North Sea at that depth would have crushed Phoenix long ago.’
Sure, I get that,’ Kate said. ‘What sort of protection do we have then?’
‘The thermal suits will keep your core temperature up. It will be very cold inside the sub; we estimate about minus twenty Celsius.’
Lou whistled.
Lamb nodded. ‘The atmosphere will also be unbreathable and almost certainly toxic because the huge batteries may have leaked and . . .’
‘And?’
‘Well, before the temperature dropped to preserve the bodies of the crew, they may have decayed. There will be dangerous levels of ammonia, sulphur dioxide, and methane.’
Kate looked pale. ‘Fantastic.’
52
‘This vessel is pretty much the same as the one used on the Titanic mission,’ Commander Ester Lamb called back to Lou and Kate as they buckled up and sat back in their seats aboard JV3. ‘We’ve made a few modifications, but nothing you would notice.’
‘As comfy as ever,’ Lou quipped.
Lamb laughed. ‘Believe me, I’ve been in worse.’
They descended rapidly, the external view through the remote cameras quickly turning dark. The powerful beams of the sub criss-crossed through the North Sea water picking out the occasional large fish, rocky projections, and once, a swirling vortex of herring.
The wreck came into view, an indistinct black cylinder at first, but as they drew within twenty yards of Phoenix the image on the cabin screen showed a sharp outline.
The old sub lay almost level on its belly, wedged between some lumpy rock formations shaped as a V. These held the dead vessel in a rigid cradle. Phoenix’s conning tower tilted at a slight angle and the matt-black hull, with lines of rust and patches of algae spreading along its flanks, had started to merge with its surroundings. Looking at it now, some sixty years after it fell, stricken to the bottom of the North Sea, Kate could see this melding process had only just begun. But how would it look in a millennium? Or in a million years from now? Phoenix would become a fossil deep inside the sediment and the rock.
Lamb spoke through the comms to the bridge of Gladstone. ‘We’re at designated docking coordinates, control. Twenty-seven point three feet NNW of the conning tower.’
‘Copy that, JV3.’
‘Prepping support nanobots.’
Lou and Kate unbuckled and came forward to the main control panels and guidance modules where Commander Lamb sat. She manipulated the controls, talking as she worked. ‘You won’t see much at first.’
Punching a series of pads, a sharp cracking sound came through the speakers. ‘Bots launched,’ she announced through the comms.
On the wreck of Phoenix nothing appeared to have changed. Lou scrutinized the image on the screen and glanced at Kate, who was watching intently.
Gradually, a faint pattern appeared as almost a visual glitch, a faint shadow on the metal of the conning tower. As they watched, it grew like a time-lapse film of bacteria in a Petri dish. A faint orange circle appeared and from its rim four steel-coloured lines stretched out from the skin of the wreck and started to grow. The leading edge moved towards JV3.
From descriptions offered by techs on Gladstone, the scientists knew roughly what to expect. But seeing a nano system grow before their eyes was far removed from any academic translation. It was like an embryo developing in a womb. Four nanocarbon struts grew several inches per second. Within two minutes, they had reached out from the hull of the wrecked Phoenix to join up with JV3.
‘Unbelievable!’ Kate exclaimed.
‘You used nanotechnology on the Titanic mission, didn’t you?’ Lamb said as she manipulated a set of controls and made fine adjustments to the settings.
‘Yeah,’ Lou said, ‘but it was a lot less sophisticated than this.’
‘The technology is developing fast.’
‘No kidding.’
Through the remote cameras they could all see the nanostruts reach the hull of JV3. There was no sound, no vibration or jolt as the bots made contact and begun to construct a link to the skin of the vessel around the airlock to the starboard side of JV3.
‘Excellent,’ Ester Lamb said, turning to Kate and Lou for a second before devoting her attention back to the controls in front of her. ‘The superstructure is there. That’s half the battle over. Now we have to construct the skin.’
The commander ran her fingers over a plastic panel of flashing lights and touchpads, turning from the screen to the controls and back again. On the monitor, they could see fingers of orange stretching out in all directions, starting from the circle attached to Phoenix and moving outwards to form a tunnel around the struts. It looked for all the world like a playground tunnel. In the light beams of the Jules Verne, the surface shimmered like the scales of a fish. Ten minutes later, the skin was complete.
Lamb leaned back and they all looked at the image on the screen. Between Phoenix and JV3 stretched a twenty-foot-long connecting tunnel. It was about a yard across and gave slightly, swaying gently with the current. Through the almost translucent skin could be seen the outlines of the four nanocarbon support struts.
‘Control. The PAT is complete. Testing integrity.’
‘Copy that, JV3.’
Lamb adjusted a few more settings and watched a digital display on the panel in front of her. Numbers and symbols skittered across the monitor.
‘How we doing?’ Kate asked.
Lamb ignored her for a moment as she concentrated on calibrating a series of parameters. ‘Not bad . . . Just need to . . .’
On the screen they could see coloured lines dash left to right. Lamb made a few alterations to the controls, a green line and red line merged. She hit a plastic pad and the lines locked in.
‘Done.’ She clicked on the comms. ‘Integrity green 100, control. All systems check positive.’
‘Copy that, JV3.’
They could hear a cheer in the background as the voice from Gladstone came over the speakers.
> ‘Is that Captain Jerry Derham we hear?’ Kate asked, grinning.
‘It is he.’ Jerry’s voice boomed through the speaker. ‘Well done, Commander. Now, Lou and Kate – your turn to shine, guys.’
53
The PAT swayed almost imperceptibly as Kate and Lou edged along it. They took it slowly. All they could see was orange nanofibre and, up ahead, the grey rusted metal of Phoenix, a circle of hull about a yard across.
Kate was leading the way and as she reached the point where the PAT connected to the sub she removed a small device from a pouch in her suit. The micro-laser was about six inches long, barrel-shaped with a half-hemisphere at the end. Holding it out, she checked a control on a rectangular panel to one side.
‘JV3, we are at the hull, calibrating the laser.’
‘Copy that, Kate. Your vitals are all fine. PAT integrity one hundred per cent.’
‘Fully charged,’ Kate said to Lou as he pulled up beside her in the narrow tunnel, ‘. . . and set.’ She pressed the micro-laser against the metal of the hull. ‘Here we go.’
A muffled throb came from the device and it started to vibrate. Kate held it steady and an intense narrow red pinprick of light came from the end just below the metal hemisphere. The two scientists watched fascinated as a line appeared in the metal surface of the old sub. Kate moved the laser slowly and the line, a deep cut in the hull, moved with her. The beam was cutting through more than two inches of steel as though the sub were made of candyfloss. As the metal dissolved and cooled, wafer-thin curls of metal slithered away and were sucked into the hemispherical end of the device.
It took no more than sixty seconds for the laser to cut a hole two feet wide in Phoenix. As the last of the metal vaporized, the section of hull slipped away, tumbling into the sub. It hit the floor of the chamber directly beneath the conning tower.
