by J. G. Sandom
“I know,” said Swenson.
“Of course,” continued Speers. “The manual also says, ‘Alvin will remain clear of any explosives devices which may be sighted.’” He laughed. “I guess this nuclear bomb on the prow kind of blows that one, huh?”
Decker smiled. He looked over at Swenson. She appeared pale and tense in the dim lights of the submarine. A thin sheen of perspiration glazed her forehead. He had never seen her look so nervous, not even in the arms of El Aqrab. This dive was taking its toll. “Well, to keep your certification clean, you could always navigate with a blindfold,” Decker said. He laughed thinly but Swenson simply turned away and began to stare out through the view port once again.
Speers grinned back. He had a gap between his two front teeth that made him appear much younger than he was. “Look, ma. No eyes,” he said.
Swenson suddenly turned and glared at them. “Why don’t you save the macho crap for afterwards? The testosterone level in here is making me nauseous.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Speers. Swenson looked back out through the view port. Speers glanced at Decker, rolled his eyes and shrugged. “We should be bottom-side in ten,” he said. “I’m getting a blowout, CTFM.”
“What’s that?” Decker inquired.
“Sunwest SS300 sonar. Medium range FM. It’s what we use to search and navigate the bottom. We can track negative db targets the size of a gallon gas can at six hundred feet, a zero db object like a small boulder at fifteen hundred feet, and a plus twenty-five db feature like a ridge or slope at ranges of three thousand feet or more.” He pointed to a fifteen-inch TFT flat panel. Five range rings were marked on the display. “State of the art,” he said. “We also use acoustic pingers from twenty to fifty kilohertz. If there’s a tunnel out there, we’ll see it.”
As he talked, he began to fiddle with the forward center panel. Decker watched him as he held a switch marked ENABLE in the down position. Then he pushed another switch for two more seconds. The DSV lurched forward momentarily.
“What was that?” asked Decker.
“Two of our ballast weights,” said Speers. “We’re almost on the bottom.”
Decker studied the pilot carefully. He seemed to exude confidence. He obviously knew his ship like the back of his hand. “Hey, Speers. How come you volunteered for this duty?”
Without looking up he said, “Enlisted as a SEAL ten years ago. Been in tougher spots than this one, believe me. More than twenty of us signed up for this mission. I was lucky.”
“Lucky?” said Swenson. “Is that what you call it?” She laughed bleakly.
Speers looked at her, his face absolutely serious for the first time. “I got a wife and little girl back in Virginia. I’d like to see them again, if you know what I mean.”
Swenson glanced back out through the view port. Decker nodded.
All of a sudden Swenson said, “There’s the bottom.” She seemed excited now. She pushed her face against the Plexiglas and breathed a deep sigh of relief. “The Young Canyons.” She turned toward Decker and Speers. “Listen,” she said. “About what I said before . . . ”
“Don’t worry about it,” Speers replied.
She smiled weakly. A little color seemed to be returning to her face. “I didn’t mean–”
“As Pilot-in-Command,” Speers interrupted, “I have the authority to terminate any dive by whatever means necessary at any time I feel a hazard to the submersible or personnel exists, without regard to mission success or completion. Unquote.” He winked at Swenson. “So unless you want to go back to the surface, just forget it.”
She nodded and stared back through the view port. “There,” she said. “Off the starboard beam.”
Speers glanced at the TFT. “I see it.”
“What?” said Decker, straining at the screen. Every inch of the sphere was covered with instrumentation: buttons and dials, lights and displays. It made the cockpit of a jet look simple. “See what?” he said.
“A tunnel,” Speers replied. “A little small but serviceable.”
Swenson turned toward Decker. “Better buckle up,” she said. “We’re going in.”
Speers piloted the DSV into the opening with uncanny skill and they began to inch their way along the tunnel. When they had gone about two hundred meters, the tunnel dropped out below them, and they followed it, descending another hundred meters into the shelf. Then the tunnel straightened out, running parallel to the surface for another two hundred meters or more before narrowing. Several times, the DSV bumped walls. At one point, the tunnel veered off in a jagged dogleg. Speers asked Swenson if this was far enough, but she shook her head. After a few minutes, they managed to squeeze through.
When they could go no further, Speers finally hit the switch and turned and said, “That’s it. We’re done. It’s just too narrow.”
Swenson scanned the instruments. “Ok,” she said. “It’ll have to do.”
For a while, none of them spoke. They knew what Speers was doing at the console – trying to plant the nuclear device in the wall. He moved the instruments with care. They watched it on the monitor. The modified Tomahawk warhead appeared much bigger than El Aqrab’s small briefcase bomb. It was shaped like an artillery shell. There was a tense moment as the release caught for a second, but Speers used one of the robotic arms to push the bomb away. It wobbled, started to fall, then finally settled on a shelf carved in the tunnel wall. Speers backed the ship up slightly before using the manipulator to arm the mechanism.
Then they began to back out down the tunnel. When they had gone about a hundred meters, as they were rounding the dogleg, the ship caught against the wall, and the vessel seemed to stall.
“What’s happening?” said Decker. “What’s going on?”
“The starboard manipulator arm is caught,” said Speers. The thrusters moaned, then ground down to a halt.
“What does that mean?”
Speers shook his head. For the first time in the dive he looked worried.
Swenson sighed and said, “It means we’re stuck.”
Chapter 46
Friday, February 4 – 6:00 AM
Bermuda
The wave encroached upon the Caribbean. On a beautiful, manicured golf course on the island of Bermuda, Seamus Gallagher was enjoying an early-morning round at the Mid Atlantic Golf Club – ignoring every call from his office. He was only on the second hole, a grueling 471-yard par 5, and he was already in trouble. His ball had blown off to the side into the high rough overlooking the Atlantic. He scowled as he tried to get a good look at the pin. It was still pretty dark. He hated par 5s. His eyesight wasn’t what it had been, he recalled nostalgically. He couldn’t even see the fucking flag.
Gallagher settled into his stance, swiveled his hips and studied the ball. Remember the wind, he told himself. He looked back at the distant green. He wiggled his driver. Then he stared down at the ball again. As he began his swing, he was suddenly distracted by a thunderclap to the east. He sliced the ball.
“Fuck,” he said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He threw the club down on the ground. Then he stared up at the sky as the ball curved round and tumbled toward the sea, bouncing once on the rocks below before disappearing into the surf. He turned toward his caddy, an old black man with a lime green shirt, but – luckily – the caddy seemed distracted. He hadn’t seen him make a complete and utter fool of himself. The sound of thunder grew more intense.
Gallagher turned to follow the caddy’s gaze and, as he did so, he noticed the tide retreating from the flats at an alarming pace. Where his ball had disappeared – only a moment before, into the surf – was now dry land. “Hey, what the . . . ” he started to say when he finally noticed the wave.
It was a mile or two away. No, less. At first Gallagher thought he must be seeing things. The wave looked to be fifteen stories high. He picked up his driver. He held it against his chest. “Jesus Christ,” he said, completely stupefied. He looked up at the sky. The wave was already on him. It was already there. And
for some reason, his whole life didn’t flash before his eyes, nor did he see his family and friends, the sacred places of his heart. All that he noticed was the divot at his feet, that patch of tattered grass. He bent down to replace it as the wave washed him away.
* * *
Speers continued to struggle with the switch panel, trying to leverage the six degrees of movement in the starboard manipulator arm: the shoulder pitch and yaw; the elbow pitch; the wrist pitch and rotation. He even tried to open and close the hand, but the Alvin wouldn’t budge. He cursed and reached for the position feedback master/slave mechanism that controlled the port manipulator. He began to extend the arm. Decker could see the hand outside his view port gradually reach out until it was practically touching the tunnel wall. Then it stopped.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
Speers cursed again. “The port manipulator has a maximum extension of seventy-four inches. I was hoping to push us free.”
“No luck?”
“It isn’t long enough,” said Speers. “Hold on. I’ve got an idea.”
Speers pushed the master and the wrist began to torque. “Fully extended,” the pilot continued, “the arm has a lift capacity of only one hundred and fifty pounds. But the wrist torque is rated at thirty feet over pounds, with a rotational speed of sixty-five rpm.”
At first Decker didn’t understand. Then he realized that Speers was trying to use the port manipulator arm to lever the starboard arm away. There was the sound of metal scraping stone. The tunnel wall began to crumble and the ship finally pulled free.
“That was fun,” said Speers, looking over with a grin.
“Yeah,” said Decker, smiling back. “Let’s stay and do it again.”
Speers whooped and laughed as they continued their ascent. Within fifteen minutes, they were back out in the open water of the blowout. But they were running out of time. If they were to detonate the bomb and intercept the mega-tsunami, they’d have to do it while still dangerously close. Without saying it, each of them knew exactly what this meant. The blast would probably kill them. It would hurl the small submersible against the Continental Shelf. Unless they could initiate a considerable amount of negative buoyancy, they’d be smashed to pieces.
“Are you ready?” Speers said, reaching for the console. He had rigged up a temporary firing switch. “We’re at the point of no return.” Decker looked at Swenson. She nodded and turned away.
“Go ahead,” said Decker.
“Fire in the hole,” said Speers and pushed the button.
At first nothing seemed to happen. Not a sound. Not a ripple. Then a huge explosion reverberated through the ship. The shock wave from the nuclear explosion hurled them roughly through the water column. The sound caught up. Decker felt as if his ears were bursting, and the power suddenly cut off. The ship was thrust into darkness.
After a few seconds, the emergency battery-powered lights flashed on. Swenson moved over to assist Speers in the navigation of the ship. Decker felt completely helpless. “What can I do?” he said.
“Nothing,” said Speers, “unless you can replace these thrusters.” He slapped the console and looked up. “Three of them are fried.”
Swenson turned toward Speers and said, “They’re the ones mounted athwartships, in the stern, designed to turn the vessel sideways.”
“Plus forward and reverse,” Speers added bleakly.
“Yeah, but the thrusters amidships, the ones that enable vertical lift are still operational, right?”
“We barely have any power. Even if we could somehow generate more buoyancy, and miraculously miss the shelf, I doubt we’d have enough thrust left to make it to the surface.”
“I don’t like the way that sounds,” said Decker. “Let’s not do that.”
“It’s our only choice,” said Swenson.
They both looked at Decker. He shrugged and tried to smile. “Fine. Let’s do that then. Sounds good. Sounds like a plan.”
Speers laughed and checked the SERVICE RELEASE switch on the service bus to make sure it was in the up position. Then he released the remaining ballast weights by holding the ENABLE switches in the down position, and toggling them for two seconds. The vessel shuddered. The DSV began to climb, then stalled. The current was just too strong.
Suddenly, another noise, as loud as the explosion of the bomb, perhaps louder, echoed through the craft. Decker could feel it in his bones. The ship vibrated as though they were swimming through a kettledrum.
“The shelf-edge,” Swenson cried. “It’s beginning to collapse.”
A sound like two giant steel plates rubbing against each other reverberated through the ship. She was rocked by yet another blast. The DSV began to tumble, to freefall through the ocean depths.
“We’re going to have to blow the ballast tanks,” said Speers. “We’re being sucked down by the shelf.”
“You can’t do that,” cried Swenson. “We’re still below a thousand meters.”
“We’ve got no choice. If we don’t, we’re going to hit the wall.”
Without waiting for an answer, he checked to make sure the ballast vents were shut. Then he reached toward the lower part of the port distribution panel and began to blow the aft and forward tanks. He continued to push the switches intermittently, shooting air into the tanks. Decker couldn’t feel a thing. “Nothing’s happening,” he shouted above the din.
Speers pointed at the computer console. “Alvin says it is,” he cried. “That’s a temperature-compensated quartz oscillator pressure transducer,” he added with a smile. “Try and say that fast three times! Look out your view port. You see that Bourdon dial embedded in the housing? No, over there,” he said and pointed. “That little tube on the right?”
The entire ship was vibrating. Decker glanced out of his view port and noticed an instrument just outside the Plexiglas. He had no idea how to read it, but he was comforted by the fact that it appeared to be moving. Very slowly.
Speers continued to push the VENT switch. “We’re ascending but it isn’t fast enough. I’ll have to jettison the manipulators and the batteries.”
“Don’t we need the batteries?” asked Decker.
“They won’t do us any good if we’re in a thousand pieces on the seafloor.” Speers began to fiddle with the red-bordered emergency release switches on the dump panel located at the top of the center console. First he de-energized the “A” main battery closest to Alvin’s center of gravity by pushing the 120-volt contactor switch. Then he unfastened his safety belt. He staggered aft and port, approaching the science rack.
“What are you doing?” Swenson cried. “Sit down, for Christ’s sake!”
Speers smiled. “Got to cut the safety wire.” He reached into the science rack and pulled out a pair of wire cutters.
The air seemed to explode. Decker felt himself pitch sideways as the DSV rolled over and over, and the emergency lights went out. He felt his stomach rise into his throat. Unmoored, Speers hurtled against the bulwark. He bounced like a ball inside a lottery cage as the ship tumbled out of control. Swenson screamed. It was a loud shrill sound that seemed to pierce his heart, followed by a sickening thwack.
The ship began to finally turn as the thrusters heaved against the torque. Decker felt a freezing liquid splash his face. The emergency lights flicked on. He looked over at Swenson. Her face was pale as snow. A thin mist of water was spraying from a hole in the hull. He looked at Speers who was curled up on the deck. His head flapped back and forth as the ship continued to right herself. His neck was clearly broken. His baby blue eyes stared blankly into space.
A moment later, the “heading hold” autopilot linked to the gyrocompass kicked in, and the vessel toggled upright. Decker looked out his view port. The DSV was descending once again.
“Emily,” shouted Decker. “We’re still going down!”
She glanced blankly at him, then continued to stare at Speers. A thin stream of blood was dripping from the pilot’s mouth.
“What
happened?” Decker asked.
“The ballast tanks. Expanding air as we ascended.” Swenson shook her head. “I told him.”
Decker unfastened his seatbelt, reached out for her. He cradled her in his arms. “Are you alright?” he said. “Anything broken?” He began to pat her body.
Swenson didn’t answer. She didn’t respond at all. She had a nasty red welt on one cheek where Speers must have struck her as he bounced about the sphere. She was in shock.
“Oh, Emily,” he said. Decker pressed her against his chest. “Please, Emily, snap out of it.” He started to shake her but she barely seemed to respond. “Emily, wake up! I don’t know how to pilot this thing.”
“I told him,” she continued. Her voice was flat, robotic.
Decker continued to shake her. “We’re going to die, Emily, if you don’t help me. Do you hear me? I gave up my gun. For you, Emily, for you! I never thought I’d feel . . . ” The words caught in his throat.
She looked up at his face but her eyes remain unfocussed. They seemed to stare right through him. Then she said, “You never thought you’d what?”
“Don’t you get it?” His voice began to break. “I love you, Emily.” He started to laugh. “And I haven’t even kissed you yet,” he said. “Listen to me! I said I fucking love you.”
