by Bob Finley
"Are you sure you want me to answer your question?" Yoko asked in a neutral tone of voice.
"Yes!" he snapped. Then, in a more subdued voice, he again said, "Yes."
"If the VIKING is not rescued, my psychological databank on humans indicates that the food on board will eventually be used up and you will starve to death. Unless the life support systems fail first, in which case, you will suffocate to death."
Jambou's mouth dropped open but it was out of sync with his racing brain and nothing came out.
"Of course," Yoko added helpfully, "it is also possible that you could go insane before either of the other two options occurred."
Jambou looked at the depth gauge. 6300 feet. Beyond the glass spheres was complete blackness. He had no reference point to know up from down except that he was still leaning into the restraints, so he knew that gravity was still inexorably dragging him ever deeper. He struggled to think straight.
"Look," he said aloud, his voice sounding dead in his own ears, "you said the reactor had been SCRAMMED. Doesn't that mean shut down?"
"Yes. That would be one way of describing it." Yoko's own voice was soft. Detached.
"Did you shut it down? Because, if you did, then you could start it back up."
"No."
"No, what?!" he demanded, exasperated.
"No, I did not SCRAM the reactor."
"Then, who did, if you didn't?"
"Captain Justin."
"What?! How could he have done it? I was watching him!"
"He was out of your sight for...12 point 7 seconds..." she said, scanning her data banks, "...while you were pursuing him. He SCRAMMED the reactor just before you forced him to leave the ship."
Jambou wanted to scream obscenities at somebody, anybody. But there was no one to scream them at. He fought down the panic rising inside him, the panic now coming in waves, each one threatening to spill over and scald him in its hot bile.
"You know how to restart that reactor!" he hissed in a shaky voice. "Don’t you?!" There was a long pause. "DON’T YOU?!" he roared, the waves about to engulf him. There was another pause.
"Yes."
"Yes? YES?! I knew it! I knew you could!"
"I know how. But I am not authorized to do so."
"Authorized?! By who?"
"Whom," she corrected. "I require authorization codes from either Kim-san or Captain Justin. I don't know Kim-san's whereabouts and you have made Captain Justin unavailable."
"Hah! Now we're getting somewhere! All we have to do is go back and get Justin!"
"It's too late. The reactor is inoperable. Your actions have left me no choice but to set the ship down on the seabed and wait."
His heart skipped a beat. There was hope yet.
"Wait? Wait for what?" He hated the tremble he heard in his own voice.
"Death," she said matter-of-factly.
"NO!" he erupted. "There has to be another way!"
"You should be grateful, Captain Jambou. Things could be worse."
"Worse?! How could things be worse?!"
"Your death will probably only take a matter of days. Mine will probably take years."
Jambou felt a change in the pressure of the webbing across his chest. He looked at the gauge. 12,036 feet. And the digits were changing much more slowly now. He quickly calculated. Only 85 feet to the bottom. 85 feet to the bottom!
The ship groaned at the descent slowed. Slowed! Why was the ship slowing? How could... There were sounds that could only be water jet thrusters firing.
"You’re controlling the ship!!" he spat. "You said you couldn’t control the ship!"
"I'm only controlling the VIKING's attitude and rate of descent. There is just enough residual power in the back-up batteries to allow me to do that. It's an emergency procedure that prevents the ship from crashing into the bottom."
He felt the ship come level. The depth gauge crept now through the numbers. 12,098. 12,107. 12,114. The numbers almost stopped moving. If Yoko was right, the ship would come to rest on the bottom of the ocean in just moments! Water roared through pipes somewhere as thrusters eased the ship, over a third as long as a football field, gently to its landing. The roaring came now in short bursts and at seemingly random places along the hull, as Yoko eased her down the last couple of feet.
There was a prolonged grrrrinding, crunching noise, amplified throughout the ship by the brushed titanium hull and the immense pressure surrounding it, as if she had settled onto a huge gravel driveway.
Jambou gasped at the noise, fearing the ship was breaking up and terrified that icy water would come slicing through the acriliglass wall before him at any second.
But it didn’t. Gradually, the noises faded away until...there was nothing. No, not quite nothing. The faint sigh of fresh air from the vents. A gurgle of trapped air escaping somewhere.
And then the lights went out.
"Hey! HEY! What’s going on?! Turn the lights back on!!"
"I'm sorry, Captain Jambou. That isn't possible." Yoko's voice was quiet, silky, resigned.
"Yes! Yes!! You have to turn the lights back on!!"
"I’m sorry, Captain. What little emergency power there is left has been diverted to generate and purify the air supply. Otherwise you would die much sooner."
In the blackness there was a gasp and a sob. Then the click of a seat restraint being released and tossed aside. For the next two hours, noise poured from the glass and metal hull into the icy waters that held the VIKING in a death grip, as Jambou stumbled and fumbled blindly through the ship, tearing open closets and storage lockers and throwing their contents frantically to the deck and against the walls. Finally a shout, as he found his first flashlight. The other two flashlights were found much more quickly and added to his priceless trove. He searched the ship end to end for another hour for anything of value. But, finally, he found himself back in the control sphere. He wasn’t sure why, since he had no control.
Four-and-a-half hours later, the first flashlight died. As the beam dimmed slowly to its last glow, he held it reverently in his lap, nursing the last moments of its life. Snatching up the second light, reality set in. He realized he would have to conserve the two remaining lights for as long as possible. And there was only one way to do so. His phobia of darkness now in full rage, he knew that he would have to ration the light by deliberately immersing himself in darkness for as long as he could stand to do so before turning a light back on. And the self-inflicted torture ate like acid at his resolve. He must choose between his fear of rationed darkness and the far greater fear...no, not that...of eternal darkness. Darkness that would surely rob him of his sanity, as Yoko had somehow predicted.
He eased himself back into the pilot’s chair. And used the second flashlight to look at the room around himself, hungrily devouring every detail, memorizing the layout. He couldn’t even bring himself to admit the reason. It was too unthinkable. And then, holding the flashlight before him as if it were a fragile life, he turned the bevel ever so slowly. In tiny increments. Until the light went out. For a long moment he fought the choking panic that seemed to suck the very breath from his lungs. And then he slowly, gently, enfolded the flashlight to his breast and gripped it in the darkness. And waited.
Chapter 104
Keeping the lowering sun to his left and slightly behind him, Marc had been swimming steadily for just over two hours. In the relatively calm seas, he estimated that he’d covered at least five miles. He’d started strongly, hoping to cover as much distance as possible. But after twenty or so minutes he’d realized that he should concentrate instead on pacing himself in case his crackpot idea didn’t work out. So, for the last hour and three-quarters, he’d swum to a mental metronome, allowing himself to rest only twice for less than a minute.
He tried to conjure up in his mind a visual image of the map he’d seen cross his desk. The global network of NAVBUOYs had only been launched a year-and-a-half ago and the project was just now nearing completion. He had a working knowledge
of where they’d been sown, but had actually visited only a couple of the locations. This pod, along the maritime sea lanes feeding the Mediterranean, was one of the newest.
A subsidiary of Justin Oceanographics, SubCom, Inc. was in the final stages of establishing a global system of submerged communication buoys that was directed at the new multinational fleet of commercial cargo submarines that were the undersea equivalent of supertankers that had plied the world's oceans for decades. Realizing that sub-sea traffic never had to contend with crowded sea lanes and losses from hurricanes or icebergs, a dozen major players now transported high-dollar cargoes hundreds of feet beneath the surface in relative calm and safety. And operating as they did with advanced robotics, huge ships with crews of only two or three aboard had tripled the profits for their owners over the costs and risks of operating a surface fleet. Marc's financial gurus had anticipated the market and set in motion the structures that allowed them to have hardware coming off the assembly lines before anyone else had even caught the scent of money to be made. In another six months, when the installation was completed, commercial subs equipped with his navigational sensors would be able to navigate the globe totally submerged by being handed off from one NAVBUOY to the next as simply as driving from one stoplight to another. Just now, though, he was hoping to navigate just one.
He’d been swimming six feet or so below the surface since he'd left the VIKING, coming up every couple of minutes for air, like a porpoise. A strong swimmer, he knew that he could swim this way for two or three hours before he tired. He could have swum for six to eight hours on the surface, instead. But by swimming beneath the surface, and doing so at a metered pace, he knew he could avoid the noise and vibrations that swimming on the surface would create. It was really the only edge he had, considering the trail of blood he was leaving in his wake. Several times, he'd felt the cut across his back pull open again with the movement of his arms. He knew that each time it did so, a fresh supply of blood would trail out behind him. Chumming for sharks. It was a common practice of shark fishermen to lay down a trail of blood in the wake of their boat. But...it couldn’t be helped.
When the chill ran down his spine, he was surprised he’d managed to stay ahead of the pack for as long as he had. He instantly stopped and spun around to look behind him. He couldn’t see them. But he knew they were back there and closing. His instincts told him so, and he trusted them.
He turned back and, picking up the pace, began swimming again. But now he interrupted his progress every ten seconds or so, glancing behind him. The quickened pace and frequent interruptions cost him. Now he was forced to surface for breath every minute instead of every two. And the frequent stops to look back meant he was losing distance. It was then his luck changed.
The watch on his arm buzzed. Not a lot, but just enough to give him hope.
He surfaced, checking the sun's position and the time. Sundown in two hours. Dark in two-and-a-half. Not a good place to be after dark with sharks closing in.
He put his face in the water and paddled himself in a tight circle. No sharks. Yet. He raised his head and breathed, short and fast.
"I’ve got good news and bad news," he said out loud. "The good news is, there’s a NAVBUOY somewhere close by." He gulped down some more air. "The bad news is, it’s suppertime in the briny deep." He glanced once more at the sun, now beginning to soften in brightness and begin its slide toward the orange spectrum. A sure sign that sunset couldn’t be far off. He dived, looked quickly around, and began swimming hard toward the east-northeast.
The tiny buzz and vibration on his wrist was enough to spur him on. In less than five minutes, there was a regular buzz coming from the watch every three or so seconds. Every three-point-one-eight seconds, he remember from timing it earlier. How long ago that seemed!
When the buzz stopped getting stronger, he angled more to the right, hoping to head more directly toward the buoy. It worked. Within a minute, he could tell a difference. He began to swim in earnest now, pushing his already tiring muscles to the point he could sense the burning begin. Angling more toward the surface because he’d need air more often at this level of exertion, he skimmed along just two or three feet below the wave tops. He also knew that his increased motion would send a clear signal to any predator in the area that the dinner bell was ringing.
The wrist watch was fairly dancing on his arm when two things happened. He decided that he must surely be directly above the NAVBUOY. And the first shark appeared below him.
He stopped moving and allowed his body to float to the surface. But he stayed nearly vertical and pushed only his face out of the water. Rapidly hyperventilating, he eased his face quickly back into the water without splashing and, slowly using his arms, pulled his body down three or four feet below the surface. There he used his arms to pivot his body in a circle so he could see in all directions. Two things worked against him. The slanting rays of the sun couldn’t penetrate the water to any depth that was helpful. And having no face mask, his vision was blurred so that he couldn’t detect motion more than twenty feet away. An aggressive shark, moving quickly, could cover that distance in less than two seconds, not much of a reaction time.
It looked like a tiger. That was bad. But there was only one. That was good.
He began to hyperventilate, dragging long, exaggerated breaths into his lungs and rapidly expelling them in order to saturate his lung tissue with as much oxygen as possible. That buoy was a hundred feet down. Not many people could free dive to that depth. Even fewer could stay there for any length of time. He mentally counted his twentieth breath, rolled his body into a touch-the-toes attitude, and drove straight down in a controlled power dive. Kicking hard and pulling himself with both arms, he quickly passed through twenty feet, then forty. At sixty feet, without pausing, he used one hand to hold his nose so he could pressurize his ears, then drove on. Down. Down. The color of the water subtly shifted from greenish blue to bluish gray. Down. Eighty feet. Ninety feet. He was guessing. Was he deep enough? The color faded to gray. He swapped ends and glanced up. No sharks.
Spinning in a three-sixty, he searched in the gloom. Oh, for a face mask. There. Was that smudge on the far edge of his vision what he...? He swam toward it. Yes! His heart flip-flopped. It really was there!
He redoubled his efforts...and halved his remaining air. His watch was vibrating every three seconds in sympathy with the signals being generated by the buoy so that the skin of his whole forearm tingled and itched.
Without a moment’s hesitation, he dove beneath the NAVBUOY. It was a four-foot-diameter, stainless steel sphere. There were no wires leading off to some anchor in the gloomy depths, yet it hung there, suspended a hundred feet below the storm-prone surface like a satellite in space. Every three seconds it chirped its electronic song on a frequency unique to this one buoy that differentiated it from the hundreds of others like it around the world...an undersea lighthouse, with its own code of flashing ‘lights’. It maintained station by homing on a tight-beam transmitter imbedded in the sea floor two-and-a-quarter miles below it. If it drifted on either a horizontal or vertical axis from predetermined coordinates, an onboard computer fired water jet thrusters to kick it back in place.
Marc let his positive buoyancy lift him up against the underside of the buoy, his belly touching it. He didn’t like being face up underwater because he knew he had a tendency to get strangled when air escaped from his nose. Down here, that would be fatal. He mentally pinched his nostrils tightly together and stayed belly-up. He knew that he’d burn less energy...and therefore, oxygen...if he minimized his body motions by not having to struggle to maintain depth.
He peered closely through salt-burned eyes at the five-by-seven inch panel on the buoy. Five screws. Stainless steel. Thank goodness they were slotted, not Phillips head.
Screwdriver. Screwdriver. He fumbled for the zipper on the jumpsuit he had tied around his waist, twisting it until it snapped off. His lungs were already beginning to burn and he was begin
ning to feel dizzy. But he laboriously went to work on the screws.
He got three of them out before he knew he wouldn’t make it. He dropped the screws into the black abyss below him and stuck the zipper pull under his tongue. He urgently shoved himself out from under the buoy and headed desperately for the surface. Having breathed only surface, not compressed air, before making the dive, he had no constraints on how rapidly he could ascend. He kicked hard and power-stroked with his arms, knowing he was exhausting his final wisps of air. But unless he reached the surface in time, the little he still had in his body wouldn't do him any good anyhow.
With his eyes riveted on the surface above him that he couldn’t yet see, he drove upward. When he reached the fifty foot depth, even though he knew at some level of consciousness that there were now so many circling sharks that he seemed a missile passing through a cloud cover, whether the sharks attacked his frantic body at that moment was trivial compared to his need for air. His stubborn refusal to die wouldn’t let him quit, even when his efforts to swim slowed to feeble gestures. He was surprised when his head broke the surface. He was so weak that he almost couldn’t breathe, but even when he did, the rasping, gasping, effort was purely instinctive reflex and nothing that he could consciously control.
He knew for sure that at any second one or more of the sharks, sensing his distress, would tear into him and drag his helpless, oxygen-starved body beneath the waves, ending his life. But he couldn’t care. He didn't have the strength or will-power to breathe, much less fight back. So he lay in the water, awash in the sea, barely able to keep his face high enough out of the water to keep from drowning.
Minutes went by. Four. Five. His breathing slowed. The blackness that had threatened to overcome him faded away and, as if a switch had been thrown, he was suddenly aware again of the sounds of the waves washing around and over him. And then he discovered he could move. Arms. Legs. And then something under the water bumped his left shoulder.
He amazed himself by spastically jerking his body into a vertical position and slapping the water to make a loud noise. When he ducked his face under, a wide-eyed mask of fear pasted on it, he caught just a glimpse of a rapidly-moving shark’s tail fading into the blurry near-distance. First contact. Now they’d get braver. An attack, if not imminent, was at best unavoidable. And he had no illusions as to the outcome.
