Deep Fire Rising m-6

by Jack Du Brul

  “All right, I see the cliff.”

  On the screen a murky shadow resolved itself into a jagged promontory of solidified lava. As he nosed the craft forward for a better look, the team could see the lava had formed in long ropes that had once shot from the vent like toothpaste. This pillow lava, as it was called, was what they all expected. To Mercer it looked like the ruins of a Greek temple, with the longer, straighter pieces of lava resembling fallen columns.

  “Judging by the size of that lava,” he said, “I’d say our vent is big enough.” The shafts of rock were easily fifteen feet in diameter.

  “We’re below the vent.” Jim brought Conseil up ten feet, then another thirty.

  They lost sight of the pillow lava but didn’t spot the vent opening. He swiveled the ROV, searching along the dark cliff for the blacker spot of the volcanic vent. Nothing. He dropped Conseil back to their original starting point, moved ten feet to the left and allowed the robot to ascend. The dozen pairs of eyes watching the screen all thought they saw the vent, but it was their desire, not reality. Once the ROV had risen above the layer of pillow lava, Jim sank her again and started a new search lane another ten feet to the left.

  They ran fifty vertical lanes before the area of lava ended entirely. Four painstaking hours had been wasted.

  “No one said this was going to be easy,” Jim opined, undaunted by the job. He maneuvered Conseil to where they first encountered the lava and methodically started the next stripe ten feet to the right.

  “I thought I put us right on the spot,” Les Donnelley said miserably.

  “Don’t sweat it, man,” Charlie offered. “We learned a long time ago that you can’t find anything underwater until it wants to be found.” He turned to his wife. “Any dowsing tricks you can use to help?”

  Spirit squeezed his hand. “Sorry, lover, that only works when you’re looking for water. How about you, Dr. Mercer? You always seem to have a bag of tricks up your sleeve.” Her voice dripped sarcasm.

  Mercer didn’t notice. “Not this time.”

  “Oh, that’s right. You only perform miracles when your own ass is on the line.”

  He shot her a look, but let it pass.

  After another hour and ten more search lanes, the lava field petered out once again.

  “Damn.” The mild expletive was the most emotion Jim McKenzie had shown since starting the search while the others were showing signs of their anger and frustration. “The vent that spewed this stuff must have been sealed sometime in the past. So now what?”

  They’d covered a mere thirty-five hundred square feet, a tiny fraction of the cliff face. Without a more precise idea of the vent’s location, they could spend the next week scouring the undersea wall without finding it.

  “I am so sorry, guys,” Les kept repeating. “The divers I talked to were certain there was a vent here.”

  “Go back to our original starting point,” Mercer ordered, “and let Connie descend.”

  “Why down and not up?” Spirit Williams challenged. “The vent could be above where we’ve searched just as easily as below.”

  “It’s a guess,” Mercer admitted. “But an educated one. Charlie can back me on this. He’s a more experienced diver than I am. I think the answer is nitrogen narcosis, also called rapture of the deep. It’s a feeling that can overwhelm a diver working at depth not unlike drunkenness. You get impaired judgment, lack of motor coordination and feelings of euphoria. Now suppose the divers Les talked to had been affected by nitrogen narcosis when they discovered the vent. Chances are they would have been deeper than they thought, not shallower.”

  C.W. nodded. “Makes sense to me.”

  “And what if they were a mile south of here, or a mile north when they dove?” Spirit countered.

  “They were on the surface when they fixed their position,” Charlie answered her challenge. “I’m sure they could read a handheld GPS.”

  Spirit didn’t like that her husband defended Mercer and shook off the hand he had around her waist. She crossed her arms over her chest and stormed out of the control van.

  Jim ignored her outburst. “I think Mercer’s on to something. I’ll let Connie sink down to three hundred and see what we see.”

  “That’s way below how deep a diver can go on scuba gear.”

  “Better safe than sorry.”

  Jim backed Conseil away from the cliff and let the ROV slowly drift deeper into the abyss. He kept the cameras pointed straight down so he could avoid any rock outcrops as the little robot sank.

  At two hundred seventy feet they found another platform covered in ropes of pillow lava. “Bingo!”

  The cell phone in the pocket of Mercer’s khakis vibrated. Rather than disturb the others, he stepped out of the control van. The air was crisp but heavily laden with fine ash particles. It had a metallic taste and Mercer couldn’t take deep breaths without the urge to cough.

  The sun was setting beyond the Cumbre ridge. It silhouetted the volcanic formation, creating an undulating line of darkness and light. Because of the ash in the atmosphere, the color was more melon than yellow. To the south, where molten rock fountained from the Teneguia volcano, the sky’s glow was unworldly and hellish.

  He fished the phone from his pocket and flipped it open. The caller-ID feature showed Ira Lasko’s number. They spoke at least ten times a day. “What’s the latest?” Mercer answered.

  “I’ve got something for your file of the most ridiculous things you’ve ever heard. The North Korean delegation to the United Nations is willing to drop their objections to us using a nuke on La Palma if we give them permission to test one of their own. Get this — they say that a detonation on the island is a peaceful use of nuclear weapons and that their test would also have a beneficial purpose.”

  “Yeah, beneficial in scaring the crap out of Japan and South Korea. What’s the UN’s reaction?”

  “Publicly they don’t have much choice but to allow it. The way the resolution was drafted every nation has to agree for us to get permission. Privately, as soon as they run their test, the germane countries are going to sanction them even further into the Stone Age.”

  Mercer snorted. “What else is going on?”

  “The team at Lawrence Livermore have come up with the weapon you need. It’s an old W-54 SADM.”

  “Saddam?”

  “Small Atomic Demolition Munition. It was developed in the fifties to be fired from the Davy Crockett recoilless rifle. The engineers have modified its plutonium implosion core to push up the yield. Originally it was a one-kiloton warhead. They’ve brought it up to four and a half, which Dr. Marie says should be sufficient.”

  “Provided we can find the vent,” Mercer said.

  “No luck yet?”

  “We’re closing in,” was all Mercer would give. “How big is the bomb?”

  “Ah, hold on. About two feet square.”

  “Sounds like the legendary suitcase bomb.”

  “It is, or was. When they increased the yield they had to add shielding. It weighs in at two hundred sixty pounds.”

  By attaching lifting bags to the warhead, Mercer was confident that the ROV could position it in the vent.

  “Can I call you back in a minute?” Ira asked suddenly. “My boss is on the other line. I think it’s important.”

  “Sure.” The call had already been cut.

  Mercer stayed at the rail, leaning far over to watch the occasional boil of water when the thrusters kicked on to keep the Petromax Angel in position. The control van door opened. Tisa stood poised until she spotted him. As project director Mercer rarely slept in the same place on two consecutive nights so they’d had very little time together since their arrival in the Canaries.

  Yet even these absences, and the shadow of the impending cataclysm, couldn’t spoil their budding relationship. She made every second magical, like the candlelight bath in his hotel room, or the midnight stroll she’d taken him on through gnarled olive trees. In the very heart of the grove, she�
�d erected a tent for them.

  She smiled as she sidled up to him, slipping her arms over his shoulders and drawing his mouth to hers. “I think I should be jealous,” she said.

  “Jealous, why?”

  “That woman, Spirit. I think she’s in love with you.”

  Mercer was even more confused. “What?”

  “You have to admit she is beautiful.” He could tell she was teasing him.

  “I suppose so,” he said, as if giving the question serious consideration, “if you’re one of those guys who goes for women with long legs, a big chest and dark smoldering eyes,” inviting a quick slap to the hip.

  She massaged the spot in widening circles until she had a firm grip on his backside. “I’m not kidding about her. She’s attracted to alpha males. I bet back home she and C.W. are the center of their social group. Out here her husband looks to you for leadership. She doesn’t like it, while at the same time she’s also attracted to you. That’s why she’s always nasty.”

  “You got all this from the tone of her voice?”

  “Oh, she’s not that subtle. When you’re not looking she can’t take her eyes off you. And since I don’t think she owns a bra, her arousal can be obvious.”

  Mercer burst out laughing and it took several moments for him to catch his breath.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “My life is starting to sound like a cheesy potboiler. Pretty soon you and Spirit will get into a catfight and then Charlie and I will have to defend the honor of our women or something.”

  “Won’t happen that way. If she tried to fight me, C.W. would be busy planning her funeral. You know, it’s funny how people can adapt to anything. Here we all are, standing at the edge of disaster and we all continue to act on our basest emotions.”

  “That’s part of being human. We can adapt to any misery, our capacity for it sometimes seems bottomless. I read someplace about romances between inmates in the Nazi concentration camps. If people can retain their humanity there, it can endure anywhere.”

  “You think we will recover if we can’t prevent the avalanche?”

  “As a species, absolutely. As a civilization, who knows?” Mercer’s phone jiggled.

  “I’m back,” Ira said, his tone ominous.

  Mercer caught it instantly. “What happened?”

  “That was Kleinschmidt. He just came back from a meeting with the president’s national security council. As you can imagine, the president is under tremendous pressure to order an evacuation of the East Coast. Some say the order should have been given weeks ago. The idea of impeachment’s been floated. Meanwhile every senator and representative from Maine to Florida is clamoring for federal aid.”

  “I told you I don’t care about the squabbles in Washington.”

  “This one affects you. Originally you were given four weeks to stabilize the western side of that volcano and detonate the nuke, leaving one week for an evacuation if it doesn’t work. The president has decided to bump that up by a week in order to give people fourteen days to hightail it out of the danger zones.”

  Mercer couldn’t respond.

  “I’m sorry to hit you with this. It came right from the Oval Office. There was nothing I could do to stop it.”

  “They call this a compromise, right? Jesus. Ira, if what we’re doing here fails, even those towering intellects on Capitol Hill have to understand an evacuation won’t mean shit. Taking away that week kills my chances while gaining almost nothing on the other end.”

  “I argued that point, John Kleinschmidt argued that point and so did the vice president. On the other side were about fifty politicians representing forty million frightened Americans. We didn’t stand a chance. If it’s any consolation, the situation is much worse in Spain and Portugal. Both countries’ prime ministers have stepped down. And some of the Caribbean islands are in full-out revolt. Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic are about the only places where people have a chance to survive and even there it’s chaos.”

  “Are we doing anything to help?” Mercer asked, disregarding his own edict about not paying attention to world reaction.

  “People who have their own boats have been arriving in Florida and a few in Texas. The Immigration Department’s not even bothering to count them. As for the rest, Christ, even if we wanted to we couldn’t save a fraction of the millions of people living down there. If we had every cruise ship and freighter in the world ready to take them off, we could maybe evacuate one of the smaller islands.”

  “I shouldn’t have asked,” Mercer said, feeling the anguish in Ira’s voice. “I knew the answer already.” He put his arm around Tisa’s slim body, needing her warmth to soak into him. She snuggled close.

  “Mercer?” Les Donnelley called from the control van. “We found the vent! You were right.”

  “Ira, we found the vent,” Mercer said into the phone. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  Mercer folded the cell back into his pocket and strode to the van. “Great news.” He gave Les a congratulatory high-five.

  “It was right below where we first looked, like ten feet to the left.”

  Back in the control room, Mercer looked over Jim’s shoulder. The lava tube was almost perfectly round and about eight feet in diameter. The high-intensity lamps attached to Conseil could penetrate only twenty feet into the aperture before their glow was absorbed.

  “Looks pretty clear,” Mercer said. “Our first lucky break of the day.”

  “We found it in a day,” Jim replied. “I call that lucky too.”

  Mercer put his hand on McKenzie’s shoulder. “I’ll tell you the rest after we explore the tube. Any change to the temperature?”

  “Nope. Nice and cool. The vent’s still dormant.”

  “All right, send in the ROV.”

  Jim pulled a microphone to his mouth to talk to the men on deck manning the spool. “We’re about to enter the vent. Spool out three hundred extra feet of cable so it doesn’t snag.” He looked over his shoulder at Mercer. “The cable’s armored, but…”

  With gentle touches on the joysticks, he eased Conseil into the tube, keeping the robot exactly centered. The rock had been polished glassy smooth by the tremendous heat and pressure of the lava it once discharged, and it ran as straight as a sewer pipe, but he was careful not to scrape the tunnel lining and damage the ROV.

  After the first three hundred feet, the team was starting to feel they had found what they needed. More cable was stripped from the reel and Jim sent Connie deeper under the volcano.

  At five hundred feet the tunnel had shrunk so there was only a few inches’ clearance on each side of the ROV. The temperature was also on the rise, up to eighty-four degrees. This in itself wasn’t an issue, but it meant that magma was heating the water. Somewhere deep in the volcano, lava was boiling near the tube.

  “I still think we’re okay,” Jim said. “We can strip Conseil when we make the run with the bomb. There are a few struts and sensors we don’t need that’ll reduce her width. I’m just worried about the heat.”

  Without warning the lights on the ROV went dark.

  “What the…?” Jim checked his console. “We’ve got a problem.”

  “The lights?” Tisa asked.

  “Across the board. Connie just went dead. I’ve got zero telemetry.” He continued to scan his computer readouts, searching for the problem. “Goddamn it!” he roared. He grabbed for the microphone. “Bridge, this is McKenzie. What the hell are you doing up there? We’re drifting.” He pointed to the screen where it showed their coordinates. They were more than five hundred feet from where they were supposed to be.

  “Hold on, Mr. McKenzie,” the officer on watch called back. “I’m checking right now. Yes, I see we have drifted. I don’t know what happened. It must be a computer glitch.”

  “Glitch my butt. Were you even watching the screens?”

  “Of course. Everything was fine but now we’re off course. I can’t explain it.”

  “I can. You were
n’t doing your job.” Jim switched channels on the PA system, uninterested with the man’s excuses. “Deck, this is the van. The ROV is down, reel her back in. Nice and slow. No more than twenty feet a minute. She’s in the tube and I don’t want her banged up.”

  It took an agonizing hour to retrieve the cable. While the others went to dinner, Mercer and Jim stood shoulder to shoulder at the rail to watch the operation. And when the last of the cable appeared their worst fears were realized.

  They’d recovered a thousand feet of armored data line but no ROV. When the Petromax Angel drifted from her assigned position Conseil’s tether had snapped.

  “We have to send in C.W. to attach a towline,” Jim said in a defeated monotone. “Connie’s blocking the pipe and we need to get her out of there.”

  “We can still use it to insert the bomb, right?”

  McKenzie shook his head and spat into the sea. “When that cable snapped, it opened a conduit to the sea. Right now water’s wicking through the tether and slowly filling the interior of the Conseil’s interior. It’s cooked.”

  “Okay, we’ll use one of Petromax’s ROVs.”

  “They’re camera platforms only, half of Connie’s size. What does the bomb weigh?”

  “Two hundred sixty pounds.”

  “With that kind of payload, they’d sink like a stone.”

  “What about attaching air bags?”

  “I won’t take the chance of a bag hooking on something and deflating. We have to insert the bomb with the NewtSuits. Besides, those ROVs can’t function at temperatures above a hundred and twenty.”

  “The water’s eighty-four.”

  “Right now. Tomorrow it’ll be a hundred. The day after, who knows?”

  “So we do it with the Advanced Diving Suit,” Mercer stated. “It’s not our first option, but we knew there was a chance.”

  “I know. I just don’t like it. If something goes wrong, Conseil can be replaced. Divers can’t.”

  Later that night, Mercer lay in his bunk beside Tisa. He was going over in his head how the ship could have drifted from its position and caused them to lose the ROV. He and Jim had confronted the watch officer and the helmsman on duty. They insisted neither had left their posts in the minutes leading to disaster. Two off-duty crewmen had vouched for them as well. They’d been on the bridge wing photographing the lava glow to the south. That left a computer glitch, an unlikely explanation since the GPS worked fine now and the chances of it failing when the ROV was most vulnerable stretched credibility.