by Bob Finley
Wojecki looked up and down the length of the VIKING. "How are we going to do that? I mean, get aboard?"
"We're gonna dive under her. I can get us in from below."
"What?!" Wojecki's explosive reaction was so loud it startled Kim.
"Shh! What's wrong with you?! You want to bring the whole bunch of 'em down on us?!"
Wojecki looked around quickly. He paddled backwards away from the ship a few feet and turned away as if he were about to swim back to the dock. Kim suddenly noticed the man's teeth were chattering and he was almost gasping for breath. The water wasn't that cold.
"What's wrong?" Kim asked urgently. Cy didn't answer him, didn't act like he'd heard him. Kim swam to him. Wojecki backstroked, putting distance between them, and eyed him nervously.
Kim hung suspended in the water but didn't move any closer.
"Cy," he said quietly, with as much calmness as he could muster, "what's happenin'? Is there a problem?"
"Look," Wojecki said in a rush, "I don't think I can do this."
"Do what, Cy?" Kim asked evenly.
"I don't think I can, uh, can..." he shifted his eyes in a quick glance at Kim, "...can dive down under this...uh...ship." He teeth were beating a tattoo and he was shivering violently.
Kim was quiet for a moment. Finally, he said in a barely audible murmur, "What is it, Cy?"
"You know I said, I said...I had dived before?"
"Yeah, I remember you said that."
"Well, I might have...might have...exaggerated a little bit. No, no, a lot! I exaggerated a lot! Tell you the truth, I mean, diving scares the puke outta me! I mean, I've got a serious case of claustrophobia! Serious! That's why they wouldn't let me into submarines. I just don't think I can..." he voice trailed off apologetically and he just hung there, treading water and looking miserable.
Kim stroked slowly backwards and put ten feet between them. He stopped, eased onto his back, and floated. He stayed that way, motionless, for half a minute. Then, without moving, he said quietly, "Cy?"
"Ye...yeah." His teeth were still clicking.
"Cy...inside this ship I've got all the tools and materials I need to keep us alive. I have an idea. I think I can convert a hand-held circuit tester into a gadget that will beat Leo. But I can only do the gee-whiz computer parts. I don't have the electronics background or genius that you have. I need you to build the other half of the gadget. Nobody else here can do it. Just you. So, what it comes down to is, you can save us all. Maybe. But one thing's for sure...none of us can. You're our only hope."
Wojecki was shaking his head. "You could be wrong. He might let us go."
Kim rolled up to a vertical position and looked straight at Wojecki. "No, Cy," he said sadly, "he's not going to let us go. One at a time, or all together, he's going to kill us all as surely as there's fish in the sea. If this gadget works, some of us might live. Who knows, maybe we'll all make it. But if you don't help me, we're dead. Every last one of us. Today. Tomorrow. Next week. Remember a ship full of construction workers? They didn't make it home, either. It isn't a matter of whether. It's a matter of when."
Wojecki paddled in place for five seconds or more. "I don't know if I can do it."
"I'll help you, Cy. We'll do it together. You can trust me. I won't lie to you. What do you say?" Kim knew not to push it.
Finally, after another long pause, and in a quiet, hoarse voice that barely carried, he said, "What do I do?"
Kim tried not to let Cy Wojecki hear him sigh. He moved within arm's length, careful not to touch him, and skillfully herded him close to the ship. He reached out and casually put his hand against the metal skin. Never taking his eyes off Wojecki's, he kept his voice barely audible so as to force the frightened man to draw closer to him in order to hear him.
"Now, we need the door open underneath so we can get in. That way, we won't have to wait underwater while it opens, right?" The way Wojecki rolled his eyes would have been funny if the situation hadn't been so critical. Kim hurried on before Cy had a chance to dwell on ‘waiting underwater’. "So, what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna duck under the ship, open the door, and turn on the lights, okay? Then I'll come right back up and help you inside. All you have to do is just wait right here until I get back. Are you comfortable with that? With waiting here for me for just a moment?"
Wojecki wouldn't look at him, but he did manage to nod his head. Waiting where he was helped postpone the inevitable, if only for a few minutes.
"Okay. While I'm opening the door, I need you to watch my back." Cy gave him a blank, confused look. "Watch out for guards," Kim explained patiently, "up there." Wojecki's eyes followed Kim's and he suddenly seemed to remember the danger they were in.
"Good," thought Kim. "Maybe if he concentrates on not being discovered, he'll forget to be afraid of diving."
"I'm going to open the door now," Kim said conspiratorially. "You okay?"
"Yeah."
"You okay?" Kim repeated, reinforcing the thought.
"Yeah, yeah," Wojecki said again, this time with more conviction.
Kim took two deep breaths and slipped beneath the water. With his eyes open, there was just enough reflected light in the deep basin that he could make out the curving silhouette of the VIKING's hull. He swam deeper, following the contour. Eighteen feet down and twenty-five feet from where he'd dived, Kim turned right and swam another twenty or so feet along the great curving belly, toward the bow. He reached a three foot-square aluminum plate that matched the curvature of the hull. Beside the plate was a smaller, eight-inch square of a smoother texture. Kim placed his right palm flat against the small square. There was an audible chirp, a bright light flashed on for two seconds, and the larger metal plate slid smoothly aside. Finally, after an interminable ten second wait, there was a heavy clunk and a round, vault-like door dropped out of the opening, revealing the entrance to a vertical tube. A bright light almost blinded him, so acclimated had his eyes become to the dim light. He quickly swarmed up the tube, using recessed slots in its wall to pull himself up. His head broke the surface of the water and he sucked in a deep lungful of cool, pure air.
"Good evening, Kim," Yoko welcomed him languidly.
"Hello, Yoko," Kim replied for voice identification. "Turn the lights down to twenty percent lux, please." The lights immediately dimmed. Kim could just imagine that spear of light coming from beneath the VIKING beckoning to a passing guard.
"Yoko, I'll be bringing a visitor aboard. Keep the door open, please."
"Of course. I'll be waiting," Yoko politely acknowledged.
"Oh, and Yoko. We're going to need your help on a project."
"No problem."
Kim took a breath and dropped out of the tube. He followed the hull curvature and surfaced with hardly a ripple. He glanced first at the guard post which, thankfully, was empty, then twenty feet down the length of the ship at Cy Wojecki. Cy hadn't seen him.
"Cy," he whispered.
Wojecki jumped as if he been shot.
"Down here."
Wojecki looked confused and glanced at the spot where Kim had submerged.
Kim motioned with one hand. Finally Wojecki broke the spell and swam to him.
"I thought you'd come back up where you went down," he accused.
"This puts us closer to the door, so we don't have very far to go underwater," Kim tried to smooth the way. Cy didn't say anything. Kim saw the fear in his eyes and his teeth were beginning to chatter again. This had to be quick or he'd lose it.
"Cy, do you know what hyperventilation is?"
"Yes. No." Big words weren't uppermost on Cyrus Wojecki's mind right now.
"It's when you breathe really fast and deep, so you get lots of extra oxygen in your bloodstream. It helps you hold your breath longer. I want you to try that. Cy. Are you listening to me?" He got a jerky nod in response.
"Okay. Do it."
Wojecki looked confused. "What?" he said.
"Cy. Look at me. No...look at me." Wojecki finally s
eemed to focus on him.
"Take a deep breath. Deep. Do it again. Blow it out. Breathe in. Out. In. Out. Now! Hold it! That's it, hold your breath. Don't breath...don't breeeeeathe." Kim made a show of looking at his watch. "Now! Let it out! Good! Okay, get your breath. You did good. Now, listen...how long do you think you held your breath? Hm? How long?"
Wojecki shook his head. "I don't know. I don't know."
"Thirty seconds! You held your breath for thirty seconds! You've done this before, haven't you?"
Again, Wojecki shook his head. "No, I..."
Kim cut him off. "You know what that means? It means you've got it made! It only takes fifteen seconds to get from here to the inside of the ship, and you just held your breath for twice that long! Thirty seconds! Hey, if you're good, you're good, right? What can I say?" He got a weak smile in return.
"Okay, now here's what we're gonna do. When we dive I'm gonna help you get to the door by holding onto your wrist, like this, okay?" He took hold of the man's wrist for just a second, then let go. "That way, we'll team up and double our swimming strength and speed, okay? Okay. Then, after we both hyperventilate, we'll duck under, and go for the door. It's a tube with hand-holds in it. Just pull yourself up, like floating up a ladder, and climb inside the sub. Okay? Now, when we get there, you go first, okay, 'cause I can hold my breath longer, so I'll wait on you. Just one thing..." Kim tapped Wojecki good-naturedly on the shoulder and smiled lightly. "...don't forget and leave me down there. I can't hold my breath all that long!" Wojecki smiled again. A good sign.
Kim didn't give him time to backstroke. He started breathing deeply and motioned for Cy to do the same. Wojecki followed his lead and began sucking in air.
"We sound like a couple of old porpoises with emphysema," he thought, amused.
After eight or ten breaths, he said "On three!" The next breath, he held up one finger, then two, then, on three, just as he saw Wojecki's eyes go wide, he grabbed him by the wrist and put all he had into a power dive, jerking the hapless man along, ready or not. He felt Wojecki stiffen and attempt to pull his wrist away, but he hung on and dragged him ever deeper. Finally, somewhere along the way, Wojecki stopped resisting and started helping. The rest was easy. Kim guided on the dim light issuing from the hatchway, gripped the edge, and stuffed Cy up inside. Knowing what to expect, Wojecki ran his hands gropingly along the inside of the tube until he found the handholds, and practically fired himself out of the tube and into the sub. Kim surfaced just moments later.
Cy was on his hands and knees, breathing heavily. Kim exited the tube and squatted down beside him.
"You okay, buddy?" he asked, bending low and tilting his head to force eye contact. Wojecki nodded and glanced briefly at him, finally rolling over into a sitting position.
Kim smiled. "You might not make the SEALS, but you did pretty good for a swabbie," he said.
"Thanks." Cy self-consciously returned the smile.
"Why don't you take a quick look around while I grab some tools and gear," Kim suggested, to get the shaken man moving. “Just don’t go in the control room up front, ‘cause somebody might see you.” After he dumped a small armload on the lab table, including a wire stripper, soldering gun, an old FM transmitter, and other assorted junk, he went looking for Cy. He found him in the hallway peeking into the Command sphere, wide-eyed and awestruck.
"I ain't believin' this place!" the electronics whiz breathed, running his hands almost sensually over the equipment, touching this, caressing that.
"State of the art," Kim agreed with quiet pride. "When we have more time, I'll give you the two dollar tour." He dragged the man reluctantly back to the job at hand. Taking him to the lab, he explained his idea, introduced him to Yoko so she wouldn't treat him as a ‘hostile’, and the three of them went to work. At three-thirty-five, two pieces of hardware lay on the table. They had a working model. They hoped.
"I still wish we could test it," Wojecki objected.
"So do I, since it's gonna be my bacon we're trying not to fry," Kim agreed. "But, even if the field transceiver were already in place...which it's not...the first time we use it, Jambou's gonna know something's wrong."
"That's going to be the real problem," Wojecki's concern showed on his face. "Getting the transceiver installed. We've got to figure out where to put it, and then how we're going to do it."
"I think I know ‘where’," Kim said. "After I started thinking about building it, I looked around some. You said the computer room's at the other end of the penthouse catwalk, right?" Cy nodded.
"Well, as best I can tell, there's fiber optic and computer cable coming from that area and strung along the wall at the ceiling near that catwalk. All we have to do is clamp the transceiver to that bundle of cable like an electronics clamp meter and turn it on. Assuming, of course, that it works."
"’All we have to do’?" Cy interjected. "That cable's seventy-five feet off the deck, right out in the open, in full view of armed guards. And we can't exactly borrow the elevator to get up to it. How the heck are we going to get up there?"
"I don't know," Kim admitted. "Yet."
They looked at each other for a long moment. Finally Wojecki sighed. "Well, I hope you have a brainstorm, 'cause I sure don't have any ideas."
Kim glanced at his watch. "Right now," he said, "we have a more pressing problem. We've gotta get back to our quarters without the gorillas seeing us. They're due to go on break in less than twenty minutes, according to what you told me."
"Well, I hope that's right," Wojecki hedged. "That's usually what they do."
"Then let's hope they're creatures of habit," Kim observed dryly. He swept the litter they'd generated into a small container and stashed it in a locker. Then he went forward to the hallway just outside the passenger observation sphere, Cy close on his heels.
"Yoko, display video, aft stabilizer camera, on screen seven, please."
The monitor flickered, then steadied. The high resolution camera mounted in the towering stabilizer showed the whole cavern from a wide-angle perspective.
"Adjust lux." Yoko corrected for the dim cavern lighting, bringing up more detail.
"There," Wojecki pointed and touched the screen. A guard passed through a pool of light near the far side of the chamber, strolling slowly. Bored.
"Yoko, twelve power zoom and follow," Kim ordered. The tiny, motor-driven lens whined in a barely audible, one-second interval, and the image of the guard loomed larger. As he moved, the lens tracked him, keeping him in sight. He passed out of the cone of light and disappeared.
Afraid of losing sight of him, Kim ordered, "Yoko, six power zoom and follow." Again, the motor whined briefly, no more than a half-second, and the view pulled back to include the edge of the quay.
And they were looking straight at the second guard. Who was looking back at them. His eyes were roaming over the ship, and his head was cocked to one side as if he were listening. They were close enough to read the word ‘FERRELL’ on his nametag.
"Yoko," Kim said in a voice Cy had to strain to hear, "stop follow." Both men held their breath and watched the guard intently. He seemed to be looking directly into their very souls. For what seemed an eternity, he stared at the ship.
"Vinny!" the guard at the dock called loudly, apparently to the other guard across the cavern. There was a moment of echoing silence. His eyes hadn't left the ship.
"Yeah!" came the distant reply.
Kim, afraid any movement he made toward the small arms locker might cause even the slightest rocking motion of the VIKING in the water, stood rooted where he was.
"As if," he thought, "you'd have a fighting chance, anyway, against MAC-10's."
"You ready for a break?" Ferrell called out.
"...always ready for a break!" came the broken reply.
The guard abruptly turned his back to them and shuffled purposefully away, toward his long-awaited break time.
Both Kim and Cy simultaneously exhaled and looked at each other. Kim shook his h
ead slowly and pantomimed wiping sweat off his brow. Wojecki nodded in abject agreement. They waited until the guards had had time to climb the steps and enter the tunnel.
"Yoko, resume wide-angle surveillance. Screen seven off."
The next fifteen minutes were tame compared to the last five. Kim sealed the two pieces of jury-rigged hardware in plastic bags. Cy discovered that returning to the surface was far less intimidating than the ordeal of diving and almost cheerily dropped into the access tube. Kim shut the hatch and surfaced, to find Wojecki already on the dock. They both stripped, wrung the seawater from their clothing so they wouldn't leave a watery trail back to their quarters, and struggled back into the damply-clinging shirts and trousers. They retraced their path of four hours earlier, sneaked past the guards, and unobtrusively slipped into their quarters. They each stashed the plastic-wrapped hardware under their mattresses and fell into their bunks for a couple of hours of well-earned sleep. It was going to be a long day. They had no idea how long.
Chapter 34
Frank and Janese were up early and by five to seven had downed a stack of nuked pancakes and sausage and two cups of coffee each. Janese's arrival had, of course, elicited a round of appreciative rut-'n-strut from the rowdies bound for their daily grind, but Banner's appearance on the scene, hands on hips, cleared the room in under a minute.
Banner unhurriedly drew a cup of coffee from across the room and paused at their table on his way out. Sipping it, he appraised them over the steaming mug. He gave Frank a cursory glance, then locked eyes with Janese. She jerked reflexively as if someone had touched her at the base of her neck with a live wire. He emanated such a raw, commanding presence that she shrank involuntarily before it.
"We've been here almost a month. They've had no shore leave," he said by way of explanation/apology.
"Thank you," she managed feebly, nodding.
He flicked his gaze back at Frank, then to her.
"Mr. Sheppard. Ma’am." He nodded briefly and turned from them. As he walked away, he called casually back over his shoulder in a soft voice, "Ya'll stay outta trouble, now, y' hear?"
