by Jack Du Brul
“Is that a problem?”
“No. And with your slow speed, he’d be in position before you.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do,” Mercer announced. No one questioned his authority. “We’ll drop down to the ship first and then check out this tower of yours.”
Mercer tried to catch a nap after the meeting, but the strong coffee and a rattling air-conditioning fan kept him awake. After the first hour of staring at the ceiling, he admitted his insomnia had nothing to do with caffeine or noise. The image of Tisa Nguyen kept sleep out of his grasp. It was her eyes he kept seeing, their depth and their pain. He didn’t believe it was personal trauma. That was something people kept better hidden, at least from strangers.
She reminded him of the subject of a religious painting, a Madonna and Child perhaps, where the beatific Mary looks lovingly at her infant yet in her eyes is the knowledge he would have to die for the world’s sins. Did Tisa know of such sin? Was that why she was convinced the world was ending?
He wondered what she had witnessed to make her believe that. Hers wasn’t general angst about the state of a world racked by wars, famines and other sundry catastrophes the media reported so cheerfully. He was convinced it was something specific, something she and her group alone knew had happened or was about to happen.
She’d all but admitted her group’s involvement with the sinking of the Smithback. No, that wasn’t true, he recalled. She’d only said that something unusual was going to happen in the Pacific.
He had never felt so unbalanced. He felt like he was walking through a minefield holding the wrong map. In the past weeks he’d been tossed a dozen lies, survived two murder attempts and met a woman he couldn’t stop thinking about. Connecting all this was a fiber too thin for him to see, let alone grasp.
Did Tisa Nguyen know about the Smithback being in the vicinity of the tower? Had she not warned him in time and allowed it to sink the way she’d not prevented the death of the woman at the Luxor Hotel? Or was the sinking an unintended consequence? What if the Smithback had wandered into some type of experiment that her group was conducting. Did it have anything to do with Dr. Marie’s experiment in optoelectric camouflage?
He could only hope that some of the answers lay a thousand feet below where he tossed on his bunk.
An hour later, bound by frustration, Mercer gave up on trying to sleep. He donned the coveralls Alan Jervis had provided earlier, used the head as the sub pilot had requested and made his way to the Surveyor ’s fantail.
Bob sat in a cradle under the A-frame derrick. The submersible was painted bright yellow and its hull was studded with auxiliary oxygen tanks, small thruster nacelles and a pair of heavy-duty manipulator arms ending in wicked-looking pincers. Her bow was a single piece of curved Lexan six inches thick. Through the tough acrylic dome, Mercer could see the cramped cockpit. Alan would sit behind and a little above the two observer seats. The interior walls were covered with dials and banks of switches and several flat-screen computer monitors. The little sub was the pinnacle of high-tech deep-sea technology.
Nearby, C.W. worked on an even more unusual piece of equipment, the ADS. The suit was also painted yellow, and the twenty rotator joints made it look segmented, like the body of a corpulent caterpillar. The helmet had a wide faceplate for good visibility, and at the end of the arms were nimble three-finger grapplers.
“What do you think?” C.W. asked with obvious pride.
“Damn amazing. What does it weigh?”
“Over five hundred pounds empty, but the way the suit’s balanced and the fluid in the joints work, it’s almost weightless below thirty-five feet. It’s the next best thing to scuba diving, provided you’re not claustrophobic.”
“How do you work it?”
“Nothing to it.” C.W. snapped open the back of the suit. “I was about to do a systems check. You can do it with me. Hop in.”
It was like stepping into a pair of steel pants. Mercer used a bar attached to the ADS’s lifting cradle to heave himself through the opening. He lowered his feet down into the legs and thrust his arms into the appropriate openings. His head came up inside the domed helmet. When he was settled, he could feel large rocker switches under his feet and several control buttons and toggles next to his hands. The suit smelled of electronics and disinfectant with just a trace of the previous user’s sweat.
“Do you feel the foot pads?” Even with the access hatch open, C.W.’s voice was muffled and distant.
“Yes.”
“They control the thrusters. Put pressure on the back right and the suit moves backward. Try it now.”
Mercer pressed down on his heel and a pair of thrusters attached to his shoulders began to whine.
“Press forward and you go forward.”
He tried it and the small propellers stopped in an instant and began turning the opposite direction.
“Your left foot controls rotation,” C.W. explained. “Back spins you right and forward spins you left.”
Mercer applied pressure and other thrusters mounted on the exoskeleton spooled up to a high-pitched buzz. He then tried out the arms. He’d had thousands of hours operating heavy mining equipment that used joysticks similar to those inside the suit’s arms. It took him just a few minutes to get the feel of the ADS’s controls.
“Shit, man, you’re a natural,” C.W. exclaimed when Mercer reversed himself out of the aluminum suit.
“The controls are pretty logical.” Mercer was impressed. “And you said at thirty-five feet you don’t even feel the mass?”
“It’s amazingly flexible.” C.W. patted the suit’s metal hide. “Muscle power alone moves the arms and you can bend through forty-five degrees. NASA astronauts who’ve tried one of these say it’s better than their space suits, and the pressures we work in are a hell of a lot stronger than the vacuum they experience. If you have the time while you’re aboard, I’ll let you try one on a test dive.”
Mercer smiled. “I’d love to take you up on that, but I don’t think it’ll happen. I expect to be out of here as soon as possible.”
C.W.’s normally easygoing expression faded. “What’s really going on?” he asked. “Are you allowed to say? Was Spirit right about a government foul-up?”
“No, there isn’t any kind of cover-up, though I doubt my word will convince your wife.”
The former surfer chuckled. “It took me all of five minutes to learn that if she says the sky is green, I’m better off not debating her.”
“You must be a slow learner,” Mercer teased, comfortable with C.W.’s mellow demeanor. “I figured that out in five seconds.”
“She is something, huh? I met her at a beach party. I had just convinced this other girl to go back to my place when Spirit walked up behind me. She said that I was a sexist pig and that I had no interest in the other girl beyond her silicone boobs. I turned around to call her a dyke or something, and man, I just stopped cold. I think she felt it too. The only other thing I remember about that night was later, we were in bed and she said something like ‘Better than silicone, aren’t they?’ ”
Mercer smiled at the story, at some level envious that Charlie had been able to transform lust into love. He’d felt that momentary jolt of desire many times, but for one reason or another nothing developed much past a casual affair. Harry White had once told him that getting married is equal parts the person and the timing. One without the other just won’t work. Of course taking marital advice from an eighty-year-old bachelor wasn’t the best idea in the world, but Mercer couldn’t deny the truth in his words.
Many women had come into and out of his life. He didn’t think the problem was with them, so it had to be the timing. Or with himself.
His atypical train of thought was interrupted by the approach of Alan, the sub pilot, and Jim McKenzie, the topside coordinator. Alan tossed a sweatshirt to Mercer. “It gets cold at a thousand feet and we can’t afford the battery power for a heater.”
As Mercer slipped into the garment, the thr
ee men went over their predive checklists and made last-minute adjustments with a team of hovering technicians. He noticed Spirit standing on the helipad above the deck. If he wasn’t mistaken, she was staring at him and not her husband. Then their eyes met. Spirit shot him a contemptuous look and retreated into the superstructure. The intensity of her anger was out of proportion with the delay he was causing her research. It felt almost personal.
“We’re all set,” McKenzie announced. “Let’s get you into the can and buttoned up.”
Mercer climbed the ladder leaning against Bob’s curved hull and carefully lowered himself through the hatch, mindful of the thick grease smeared around the coaming to help maintain a tight seal. He stepped first on the pilot’s seat, then contorted himself all the way in so he slid into one of the cramped observers’ positions. In front of him was an array of dials and switches Alan had assured him he needn’t worry about. From his seat, the pilot could control everything except the manipulator arms. A moment later, Alan eased into the sub. He donned a headset and began another predive checklist with McKenzie, who’d already moved into the control van with a handful of others. To Mercer it was like listening to the arcane language of a pilot talking to the control tower, just a series of numbers and indecipherable acronyms.
“Okay,” he announced. “Everything checks out. We’re good to go. We’ll launch first and then they’ll send down C.W. in the NewtSuit.”
“How long’s the descent?”
“Shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes. It’s only a thousand feet. And just so you know, the pressure’s something in the neighborhood of five hundred pounds per square inch.”
“Remind me not to buy property in that neighborhood.”
With a jolt, the A-frame lifted the eleven-ton submersible from its cradle and gently transferred it toward the fantail. Beyond the ship’s stern, the sea was calm and a deep blue found only far from shore. The sky was cloudless. Bob was slowly lowered into the water. Mercer unconsciously took a deep breath when the first waves lapped against the Lexan bubble.
“Never been down like this before, huh?”
“Is it that obvious?”
“Not really,” Alan replied. “Most first-timers are so nervous they don’t stop talking. But no matter what, everyone takes a deep breath when the sub starts to sink.” The pilot switched on his headset. “Jim, my board is clear, go ahead and release.”
There was another jolt as the cables securing Bob to the cradle let go and the submersible floated free.
“And down we go,” the pilot said.
Negatively buoyant because of the ton of iron plates attached to the underside of her hull, the sub slipped beneath the waves. Mercer craned his head to peer upward as water covered the top of the Lexan bubble. The surface of the ocean reflected a wavering mercury sheen. The surface receded from view as the submersible slipped into the depths. For many minutes there was enough light filtering from above to see the surrounding water. Food scraps dumped from the scullery had attracted schools of scavenger fish and the predators that preyed on them. A few of the braver ones paused long enough to determine if the submersible would be their next meal before disappearing into the thickening gloom.
The water acted as a prism the deeper they dropped, cutting the light’s spectrum so that the colors began to separate and fade away. Yellows and oranges vanished first, then reds, until their view was a violet void. And even that faded to blue and finally to black.
“Think we’re alone?” Alan asked after ten minutes.
“I would assume so,” Mercer said, sensing he was being set up by the experienced pilot.
Alan hit a switch to turn on the working set of lights. The sea came alive. The water was far from clear. It almost looked like a snowstorm outside the sub’s protective cocoon. The bodies of tens of millions of tiny creatures slowly drifted toward the abyssal plain where bottom feeders would eventually assimilate them back into the food chain. Fish that had kept their distance from the gawky interloper rushed at the lights. They were still shallow enough for Mercer to recognize the shape of the fish if not the species. The sea’s truly bizarre creatures, the vampire squids, the gulpers, the angler fish, and the others, lived far below Bob’s crush depth.
“I’ve logged more than six thousand hours down here,” Alan said with a trace of reverence. “I never tire of it.” He killed the lights again. “Sorry, got to conserve batteries. I know this won’t be a long dive, but it’s SOP.”
“Thanks for the glimpse. It’s a hell of a place you work in.”
“Depth is eight fifty,” Alan called out, both for Mercer and the men anxiously watching their monitors on the Surveyor.
“C.W.’s on his way down,” Jim McKenzie announced over the directed laser pulse communication set.
“Roger, Jim. We should be on the bottom in six minutes.”
“Confirmed.”
Jervis activated the bottom search sonar, a weak acoustical pulse that rang like an accelerating electronic chime the deeper they fell. Mercer’s chest tightened in time with the tones. He was getting closer to an answer, he knew, only he wasn’t sure what the question had been.
“Bottom in fifty feet,” Alan murmured, his fingers flying over control knobs and switches as he began to trim the sub.
“We’re showing you one hundred ninety feet due east of the wreck,” McKenzie announced over the radio.
A drop of condensation dripped onto Mercer’s face. He’d known to expect it — there was a sixty-degree temperature difference between Bob and the ocean — yet any water inside the sub with so much pressure against her steel hull made his heart jump.
Alan activated the forward thrusters and kicked on the lights once again. Had they not been reduced to half capacity, they still couldn’t have revealed much beyond twenty feet. The water appeared as dense as ink. Mercer peered into the murk, straining to be the first to spot the wreckage of the USS Smithback. The bottom was sandy and showed the undulating ripples of a steady current. It was also entirely featureless. The moon showed more topographic variance.
“There!” Alan said. Experienced in deep dives, he spotted the hulk a minute before Mercer could see the vessel emerge from the darkness.
The wreck of the Smithback rose from the seafloor like the ruins of a Moorish fort long abandoned in the Sahara. She’d sunk only days earlier yet looked decades old, forlorn, forgotten, haunted.
“Jesus. Look at her.”
The USS Smithback had been a military sea-lift vessel, a boxy cargo ship with blunt bows and a square stern. Purchased from the Maersk Line following the Gulf War, the Smithback’s job was the rapid delivery of an entire armor task force of up to sixty M1A1 Abrams tanks. At more than six hundred feet long, she’d only needed a crew of forty-eight. Although Mercer and Jervis were limited to half illumination, they could see enough detail to know that whatever happened to the Smithback could not be explained away by a collision with a shipping container. Mercer couldn’t understand what he was seeing.
The ship’s hull and superstructure had been crushed flat by the impact with the seafloor. This phenomenon wasn’t unusual. A falling vessel could approach twenty miles per hour by the time it reached the end of its plummet, and structural members weren’t designed for that kind of force. Yet the damage to the Smithback was much more severe than either Mercer or Jervis anticipated.
It was as if a giant fist had ground the vessel’s remains into the seafloor. The bow was buried deeply in the silt and her keel had fractured amidships. It was impossible to tell if she was listing because she had so completely collapsed. From the spec sheets Ira had had delivered to Mercer, he knew the Smithback had been ninety feet tall from keel to bridge. The hulk of twisted metal plates resting on the bottom of the Pacific looked no more than a quarter of that. She’d completely pancaked.
The light outside the submersible shifted as C.W. in his diving suit approached the wreck. “What happened to her?” he asked when he saw the extent of the damage.
&
nbsp; “We’re trying to figure that out,” Mercer replied. “Let’s start with the bow and work our way back.”
“Roger.”
The nimble NewtSuit lifted away from the hull and swooped toward the front of the ship. Alan maneuvered Bob into place so the combined lights bathed the wreckage in a diffused yellow light. The two sub drivers moved as one as they made their way down the vessel’s length. The ship’s steel skin had wrinkled like an accordion and crossbeams from within the hull had punched through the metal like fractured bones. When they reached the amidships superstructure, Mercer had Alan take them as close to the ship as he dared. Every one of the six decks in the blocky superstructure had been flattened into the one below. Glass from the wheelhouse had exploded out onto the deck and glittered like gemstones. Near the stern they found where bunker oil leached from the hull in dark bubbles. There were only a couple of spots where air pockets vented into the sea.
“What do you think?” C.W. asked after they finished their inspection.
“If I had to guess,” Alan Jervis answered, “I’d say that she was fully laden when she sank and all the air escaped the hull as soon as she went under. That’s the only way she could be going fast enough to cause this much damage. What’s your take, Mercer?”
“Good theory but there’s a problem.” Mercer rubbed his jaw as he considered the implication of what he was about to say. “The Smithback was dead-heading back from Korea. She was empty. Her cargo decks encompassed more than a hundred thousand cubic feet. Even if her loading ramps had been somehow jarred open, it would take time to expel that much air. I think it was something else.”
“Like what?” C.W. asked.
“I don’t know, but I hope the answer’s over at the tower your guys found. Jim, can you hear me up there?”
“We’ve been monitoring your comms,” McKenzie said from the Surveyor.
“We’re going to head over to the tower now. Haul in C.W. and we’ll meet him there.”
“Affirmative. Alan, make your heading two hundred sixty-five degrees. We’ll correct your course for the crosscurrent en route.”
