by Jack Du Brul
“Loud and clear. Jim, are we on-line in the van?”
“I read you both. Everything looks good from my end. Say the word and they’ll maneuver the cradle to the stern and lower you in.”
“Give us a minute,” Scott requested. “Mercer, do one more check of your motors. Make sure everything’s okay.”
Mercer rocked his feet on the large toggle switches in the base of each leg and was rewarded with the buzz of the appropriate propeller. Outside the thick faceplate, Tisa gave Mercer a thumbs-up, then pretended to be impressed with the size of his biceps by squeezing the suit’s armored skin. In the air, the suit was too heavy to move so he couldn’t respond other than to flash a smile she couldn’t see.
“We’re ready, Jim.”
Mercer watched one of the technicians motion Tisa away from the heavy steel cage that would lower the divers to the tunnel entrance. Before she would allow him to vanish, Tisa stepped forward, leaning over the bomb strapped to the suit’s torso, and left a lipstick kiss on Mercer’s helmet. With her face inches from his there was no mistaking the words she mouthed.
“I love you.”
Adrenaline surged through Mercer’s heart. But before he could react the A-frame crane hanging over the stern took up the slack and the cradle rolled back on tracks embedded in the deck. The drizzling rain couldn’t smear the impression of her mouth from the plastic.
He shook thoughts of her words, and his reply, from his head and concentrated on the task at hand. With a quick glance he checked the electronic monitors ringing the bottom of his helmet. Power, oxygen and coolant levels were all in the green. Condensation formed on his faceplate. Mercer used the finger controls to adjust the ventilator and concentrated on slowing his breathing. He had more than enough air for the dive, but Scott, and his scuba instructor months earlier, cautioned about taking nothing for granted.
The cradle reached the end of the track and the crane lifted the large basket into the air. Mercer and Scott stood solid as statues as the heavy-duty hydraulics raised them up and over the crane’s apex and held them suspended over the scummy water. With the suits in a neutral hunched position, Mercer could just see the ocean under his feet.
“Okay, Jim, we’re set,” Scott radioed. “Lower away. Just keep an eye on the tow spool.” The drum of thick cable was bolted just below the crane’s legs.
“Here you go.”
The crane unwound its line and the basket sank past the deck height. In a moment they could see where the service boat’s name had been painted on her stern and then the top few inches of her rudder. Inside the armored suits there was no sensation when water began to fill the lifting basket and surge around their legs. Mercer watched it climb higher, past the bomb on his chest and up his torso. A weak wave splashed filthy water against his helmet. Tisa’s kiss washed away.
And then they were submerged. The water was completely black, choked with sediment. The lights atop the cradle gave them barely two feet of visibility.
“It’ll clear when we get under the layers of ash,” Scott remarked.
The cradle and crane acted like an elevator, dropping the divers into the abyss without them having to rely on their suit’s batteries. When the mission was over they’d be able to climb into it again for the ride to the surface.
The descent took ten minutes, but with no references it felt much longer. The water was as cloudy at this depth as it was near the surface. Mercer and Scott would have to work virtually blind.
“Jim, we’re here,” Scott reported after turning on his suit’s powerful halogen lamps. “I can see the vent opening. It’s right in front of us. Only problem is the water temperature is up to ninety degrees.”
“The suits can take it,” Jim reassured.
“I know the suits can, but I just don’t want to get cooked alive in this thing.”
“We’ll serve you like lobster with drawn butter and corn on the cob. We’ll even put your picture on the little plastic bibs.”
“You’re one sick man.”
McKenzie knew how to banter to keep his people from thinking too much about their jobs, but not too much to lose their concentration. “We’ve got five hundred fifty feet of cable stripped from the drum and enough floats to keep it neutrally buoyant. Proceed when you’re ready.”
“Roger,” he replied. Then to Mercer he said, “I’ve got the end of the tow cable. Take your grip about ten feet back. Don’t forget the thumb toggle lets you lock the pincer so you don’t need to maintain pressure.”
Impossible to move on the boat, the NewtSuit’s joints were amazingly flexible underwater, thanks to their ingenious fluid-filled design. Mercer raised his arm and took hold of the inch-thick cable where Scott had requested then locked the mechanical claw so it wouldn’t slip. “Got it.”
“Let’s go.”
Propellers on Scott’s suit burst into life and he lifted himself from the cradle before pitching the swivel nacelles back and moving off into the gloom.
Mercer applied pressure with the toes of his right foot. Like the rocket packs worn by shuttle astronauts, the NewtSuit gently skidded from the cradle and entered the realm for which it was designed, indifferent to the hundreds of pounds of pressure bearing down on its thick aluminum skin.
The water cavitated off the multiple propellers on the back of Scott’s ADS as Mercer followed him into the volcanic conduit. The bubbles seemed sluggish as they rose through the soupy water.
“I’m in,” Scott said when the glow from his lights was swallowed by the cave.
Mercer followed him, trailing the long tether behind him. Scott’s suit was taking the strain of dragging the cable through the water. Mercer was there only if he needed a bit of extra leverage.
“The temp’s up to one ten.”
Mercer couldn’t feel the heat. His suit had an integrated meshwork of water pipes that circulated either cold or warm water depending on the conditions. C.W. had said it could keep a diver comfortable in temperatures up to two hundred degrees. In fact, the climate-control system could take more than that; it was the plastic faceplate that began to melt above two hundred.
“How you doing, Mercer?”
“No problems.” With gyroscopes keeping the ADS upright, and Scott steering their little train, all Mercer had to do was keep even pressure on the foot switch. This dive was far easier than his foray into the flooded DS-Two mine with Booker Sykes.
“We’re in two hundred feet.”
McKenzie’s reply was garbled.
“Say again, Jim.”
Static filled Mercer’s helmet.
Scott wasn’t concerned. “Interference from the rock. We planned on this.”
At three hundred feet from the vent opening the temperature had climbed to one hundred thirty degrees and the cave had constricted. Scott walked Mercer through the procedure for adjusting his trim so the NewtSuit floated at an angle to reduce its height. Before Mercer got it right he flew into the floor of the cave, grinding the warhead against the rock.
“Takes a licking and keeps on ticking,” he said.
“That thing better not be ticking.”
Their pace into the volcano had slowed because of the weight and drag of the towline. Motors on Scott’s suit were overheating, but rather than wait to let them cool, they switched positions on the cable so Mercer had the lead and his suit did the lion’s share of the work. His steering lacked Scott’s finesse, but he managed to keep the suit from scraping the side of the tunnel again.
They rounded the first gentle bend in the otherwise straight shaft and found Conseil resting forlornly in the dark. With its camera eyes opaque in the wavering light of their lamps, the ROV looked dead.
“And that’s why we brought the tow cable.” There was about three feet of clearance from the top of the robot to the cave roof, almost but not quite enough to climb over in the bulky suits. “It has to get dragged back until the cave is wide enough for us to get past.”
“We’ve been down twenty minutes,” Mercer said
. “Wouldn’t it be quicker if we smashed off the top struts and removed some of the gear to climb over right here.”
Glass didn’t answer.
“Scott, I said wouldn’t it be-” Mercer stopped talking when he heard the dive leader make a wet choking sound. “Scott? Scott?”
It took a minute to swivel the suit in the tunnel so he could face his partner. Mercer beamed his lights into Scott’s helmet but could not see the man’s face. The suit had filled with some dense white gas.
“What the-?”
Suddenly Scott pressed his face to the thick plastic. His eyes were smeared with bloody tears and his tongue was swollen to twice its size. “Something shorted,” he croaked. “I can feel wires burning.”
Scott Glass’s greatest fear was being realized as he was parboiled in the suit. His skin turned red and began to blister as the fire grew at his feet. His suit jerked spastically with his frantic attempts to stamp out the flames. Mercer had to turn the volume on his underwater phone down to its minimum setting. He couldn’t bear to listen to the agonizing screams, though he did not pull away from Scott’s suit until the last gasping cry.
Mercer’s anger built until he almost couldn’t see. Something in Scott’s suit hadn’t shorted. It had been tampered with. The saboteur had struck again and this time he had a good idea who that person was.
Later, he seethed and turned from Scott’s inert form.
Conseil was basically a strut framework around an inner body housing its cameras, sensors and propulsion nacelles. Mercer gripped the top of one cross support and tore it bodily from the ROV. He slashed and tore at the robot, scissoring wires with the pincers and using the suit’s tremendous weight as leverage to rip it apart.
His frantic efforts were fueled partly by hatred but mostly by fear. He would be a fool to think his suit hadn’t been tampered with. But he would not turn back. The bomb needed to be another three hundred feet deeper into the mountain in order to collapse the water-trapping dikes that threatened to split the island in half. Considering the yield of the nuclear device, a hundred yards didn’t seem like much, but the explosives experts had been adamant. They were trying to implode the mountain the way demolition experts took down a building. Placement of the device was everything.
The pincers could snip through pipes up to an inch in diameter. He used them to sever Conseil’s bracing and literally peel the top off the ROV. He shoved the tangle of metal and wire behind him and climbed on top of the robot. The back of his suit wedged against the vent’s roof, forcing him to twist violently, clawing to get past, his feet dancing on the pedals to eke out that last bit of momentum.
He popped free and drifted to the floor. His efforts had whipped up a storm of sediment and his faceplate was fogged by his heavy breathing. Uncaring, he powered up his thrusters and advanced deeper into the volcano.
An alarm in his helmet went off. He scanned the LEDs. The water temperature had shot up to a hundred and eighty degrees.
“Jesus, not now.” He killed the shrill horn and pushed on, unwilling to admit he was beginning to feel heat seeping into the suit despite its cooling system.
He had no idea what had been done to Scott’s suit to cause the fire. It probably wasn’t on a timer or both suits would have shorted at the same time. Something else had triggered it. Mercer remembered that Scott had overheated his motors. Could that have been it? Had the strain of dragging the towline activated some device that caused the fire? He checked the status board for the six motors on his suit. All of them were green.
“No, damn it. That isn’t it,” he said aloud.
During their training session he and Scott had switched suits. The saboteur knew Mercer would be carrying the bomb, but couldn’t have known that he’d be using Scott’s suit and not the one left available by the attack on Charlie Williams. By tampering with C.W.’s ADS, the saboteur thought he would kill Mercer and prevent him from delivering the bomb. There would have been no need to damage the suit they believed Scott Glass was going to dive in.
No less pressed for time, Mercer figured he no longer had to fear immolation. He continued down the tunnel, his heart a little slower, the sweat bathing his body a little less oily.
When he was well past what he knew to be the eight-hundred-foot mark, he shut down the suit’s motors and allowed himself to settle on the bottom. The temperature outside his ADS hovered just below the two-hundred-degree mark. Inside the suit it hadn’t grown uncomfortable yet, but Mercer was well aware of the heat. He was also noticing that the plastic faceplate was losing a little of its clarity.
It was awkward to unclip the bomb from the shackles on his chest, and when they finally released the weapon dropped to the floor with a dull thunk. He flipped it onto its back. A bolt had been hastily welded to the timer’s access panel so he could open it with the unwieldy pincers. Scott was supposed to have done this.
Gently, Mercer snapped the claw around the bolt and tried to expose the timer. The panel flew open. He looked and saw that the timer was still sealed. It was the bolt that had snapped off. He muttered a curse and tried to grab the bead of weld still attached to the bomb, but the pincer couldn’t get a tight grip. He strung his next curses into a long sentence.
He had no tools.
“Think, damn it, think.”
He needed something strong and flat to wedge into the seal and pry the lid open. The folding knife he always carried in his pocket would be perfect. It had the perfect blade.
Blade, he thought. One of his suit’s propeller blades.
He reached for one of the nacelles on his shoulder and came up far short. The ADS didn’t have that degree of flexibility. There wasn’t enough time to go back and snap a blade off of Scott’s suit.
Mercer settled across the narrow shaft, braced his feet against the wall and shoved back as hard as he could. The impact rattled him in the suit and the power failed for a second as a wire jarred loose. In the momentary flash of darkness he saw a muted glow emanating from deeper inside the volcano. Molten rock was entering the vent. It couldn’t have been much or the water would have boiled away by now, but it was enough. He slammed the back of his suit into the rock again and again. His head caught a sharp edge at the back of his helmet, opening a trickling wound.
The seventh time did it. He felt one of the main motor housings pop loose from the suit. It drifted on the minute current until coming up against the bundle of wires acting as an umbilical. He reached into the nacelle’s throat and ripped the prop off its shaft.
Each of the three blades was about two inches long and made of tungsten steel. It was a miniature work of art in a way, its delicate curve designed for maximum thrust with minimum resistance. He unceremoniously jammed it against the timer panel and heaved open the thick lid.
Inside the small compartment was a single red button. Mercer pressed it, giving no consideration that he had just unleashed four and a half thousand tons of TNT. His suit’s electronic display recorded the temperature as two hundred and ten degrees. At this depth it would need to be much higher to boil the water, but it was slowly dissolving the faceplate. Already Mercer’s view had the same murky blur as trying to open his eyes in a chlorinated swimming pool.
He could also see the glow of lava even with his lights on.
Mercer closed the bomb’s lid and started back the way he’d come. Even if the lava flowed over the weapon, its casing would protect it from the thermal onslaught.
With one main thruster trailing uselessly behind him, steering the NewtSuit became a challenge, especially when he realized the other primary motor had been damaged and ran out of balance. The suit wanted to veer left, then down. He adjusted his trim so the ADS was horizontal, allowing him to use the directional nacelles to push him forward. He felt like he was barely creeping along the tunnel, and with his pincers dragging along the floor he was blinded by sediment.
Behind him magma continued to drip into the tunnel, and no matter how fast he struggled forward he couldn’t escape the env
elope of scalding water. The digital thermometer read two hundred eighteen degrees. Mercer’s face mask had become a wavy prism. The cooling system was struggling to keep pace. A hot spot had developed at his elbow that blistered his skin. The inside of the suit smelled of cooked meat.
His helmet clanged against Conseil’s ravaged carcass. It had taken fifteen minutes to cover the three hundred yards. The Petromax Angel had a top speed of twelve knots. He had to give them at least two hours to get clear of the bomb blast and the inevitable tsunami to follow.
He climbed over the ROV, snagging the detached motor in the tangle of braces. He snipped the wires and pulled himself free. More than anything he wanted to take Scott’s body back to the surface, but there was no way he could do it. Without an operator in control, the suit could easily jam in the narrow vent and trap them both.
Mercer laid a hand on the suit’s chest. “I’m sorry,” he muttered and cut the tow cable out of Scott’s grip. He took a firm hold on the cable and tapped it with his pincer.
Nothing happened. He rapped it again, harder, and suddenly he was being pulled from the tunnel. He skipped and bounced against the shaft as the topside crane operator recovered what he thought was the ROV.
It took a few minutes but he finally saw that he had outpaced the temperature spike. The thermometer was down ten degrees. And not a moment too soon. It was hard to be certain, but it looked like half the thickness of his faceplate had been dissolved.
Three minutes later the cable drew him out of the vent and into cold water. The plastic gave a sickening pop as it cooled, but it did not crack. Mercer was in the clear. He allowed the cramped muscles in his back and shoulders to relax for the first time since entering the volcanic shaft.
“Jim, can you read me, over? Jim, it’s Mercer, can you read me?”
“I read you. What the hell happened down there? We expected to pull out the ROV a half hour ago.”
“I’ll explain everything in a minute. I’m holding on to the end of the towline. That’s me you’re pulling up.”
“What? Where’s Scott?”
