Deep Fire Rising

by Du Brul, Jack

  It took just six hours to trace the hovercraft to its manufacturer in California and determine that the vehicle had been stolen a week earlier from the company’s proving grounds. Dead end.

  On Mercer’s recommendation, half the miners assigned to the project were sent home with a fat bonus while the men from his shift remained in Las Vegas in case they were needed once the mine was drained. The only personnel left at the DS-Two site were a handful of engineers to monitor the pumps and Mercer himself. Ira and Dr. Marie remained at the main Area 51 complex and called in for daily updates.

  He was sitting in the control trailer idly thumbing through a week-old news magazine, his feet on a counter, a cup of coffee at his elbow. He was contemplating getting lunch when a noise penetrated his lazy musings. Not a noise, but rather the lack of noise. For four days he’d heard the steady background roar of water rushing through the twelve-inch pipes from the pumps. It became one of those sounds, like traffic to a city dweller, that became so pervasive he had to concentrate to hear it. When it cut off suddenly, it took a moment to realize it was gone.

  Several pairs of feet ran past the trailer as technicians raced to the mine head. Mercer launched himself out the door in their wake. The man overseeing the big cycloid pumps had already hit the master override so the diesel engines chugged in neutral and the pumps spooled to silence.

  “What happened?” Mercer snapped, already taking command of the situation.

  “Something’s clogged the intake on pump number two,” the air force staffer replied.

  “Any increase in turbidity levels?”

  “No, sir. Particle levels in the discharged water have remained constant. We’re not sucking mud.”

  That eliminated Mercer’s first idea, that the pump had been fouled with silt. “Have you tried reversing the pump to blow the intake clear?”

  “The computer does that automatically whenever there’s a jam. It didn’t work. Whatever’s in there is stuck solid.”

  Mercer went quiet for a moment. “Okay, what’s the water depth at the intake?”

  The sergeant checked a monitor slaved to the main pump station. “One hundred ten feet.”

  Not too deep that Mercer couldn’t dive it. He knew from his conversations with Sykes the first night back from Vegas that his team had brought all their equipment to Area 51, including scuba gear. It would be quicker to dive to the clogged intake than wait for an underwater camera to be shipped in.

  “Here’s what I want,” Mercer said, his plan in place. “Kill the diesels. I don’t want either pump run up again. We can’t risk the guts being torn out of them if whatever’s down there gets into the other one. While they’re down, make sure the second pump wasn’t damaged. I trust the computer override, but only so far.”

  “Yes, sir. Anything else?”

  “That should do it.” Mercer returned to the command trailer and dialed Ira on a secure phone. “Ira, we’ve hit another snag.”

  “What happened?”

  “Pump is fouled and we can’t clear it. I want to dive down there with Sykes to take a look. Can you send him over with some scuba equipment?”

  “Ah, hold a second.” Ira must have clamped his hand over the mouthpiece because Mercer couldn’t hear a thing. The pause stretched to a minute. “Ah, okay. Dr. Marie wants to know the water depth.”

  “A hundred ten feet. Shallow enough for Sykes and me to reach.”

  “Hold on again.” This time Ira was away for over three minutes. “Yeah, I’ll send him over, but I’m coming too. There are some things I need to brief you on. We’ll chopper in within an hour.”

  Forty-eight minutes later, a Blackhawk landed a quarter mile from the mouth of the box canyon that hid the DS-Two mine at the edge of the shallow lake of water pumped from the tunnel. The lake was ringed with mud where its shores receded each day through evaporation, then expanded again at night as the pumps discharged their flow. Mercer dispatched a Humvee to pick up Ira, Sykes, and the dive equipment, then ordered everyone else from the cavern. Whatever Ira had to say in his briefing would likely be secret.

  The Humvee backed into the cave and braked next to the elevator hoist. Sykes immediately began to heave the heavy dive bags from the back of the vehicle as though they were sacks of groceries. Mercer and the driver helped with the air tanks. Ira waited near the lift, peering down into the inky blackness of the shaft. The air held the tang of salty water, like a thin sea mist.

  “I guessed at the size,” Booker Sykes said as he peeled open the first bag. Inside was a black wet suit.

  Mercer held it up. It looked about right. “I’m touched you noticed.”

  “Funny. So what’s it like down there?”

  “We’ll take the elevator to the water’s surface. There’s a trapdoor on the bottom. From there it’s a straightforward dive down to the pump intakes. They’re forty feet below where we tunneled off the main shaft.”

  “Anything in the tunnel we should worry about?” Sykes continued to pull equipment from the bags: lights, regulators, weight belts.

  “I doubt it. The way the water was blowing through there, any equipment would have been shoved down into the sump.”

  Sykes took a moment to visualize the dive and nodded to himself. “And what about you? Can you handle the dive?”

  “I don’t have your experience, but I should be all right. This isn’t like diving into an unfamiliar cave. I know the shaft and we don’t need to go into the tunnel.”

  “That’s for sure,” Ira interjected.

  The two men looked up from their work.

  “Under no circumstances are either of you to enter the tunnel.” Ira’s tone was harsh.

  Mercer was about to ask why, caught the look in his friend’s eyes, and let the question die on his lips. He’d always known Ira to have a great sense of humor and an understanding of how to supervise people. He rarely gave such a direct order unless there was a compelling reason. Mercer understood enough about the world Ira inhabited to know he would never tell him what that reason was. Ira held Mercer’s glance for a moment, and Mercer let his focus drift away. It was as much of an acknowledgment as he would give.

  “That’s an order, Mercer,” Ira said. “I don’t give them very often, but when I do people had better listen. This one’s for your protection, not mine. Do not leave the main shaft.”

  “Okay,” Mercer finally said.

  “Captain Sykes?” Ira directed his attention to the Delta Force operator.

  “Sir.”

  “Mercer is not to leave your side and neither of you are to enter the tunnel. Go down, clear the intake, and come straight back up. Is that clear?”

  Even on his knees, Sykes managed to look like he’d come to attention. “Yes, Admiral.”

  He’s scared, Mercer realized. Ira’s scared of whatever’s down there. What the hell were he and Dr. Marie up to? What was it Tisa had said? A single seismic spike, like a bubble, had formed within the rock and then vanished. Her exact words were “a contained nuclear explosion.” Maybe there had been a weapon test like her group believed. Something that got out of control?

  From where he worked next to Booker, Mercer could see into the yawning mouth of the mine. It was uniformly square, darker and suddenly ominous. The damp air coming from it felt like an icy breath.

  Fifteen minutes later, after Sykes ran through a number of safety procedures Mercer already knew, they were ready for the descent. Ira sent for a crane operator to work the hoist while Mercer and Sykes shuffled into the skip and settled themselves on the floor. Standing around for the minutes it would take to reach the water level was an uncomfortable option with fifty pounds of gear on their backs. Both men had various tools linked to their weight belts for when they reached the pump intake.

  “Down and back,” Ira said as he slammed the steel gate.

  “Down and back,” Mercer echoed.

  The elevator fell from beneath them.

  “Oh, one thing I forgot to tell you, Booker,” Mercer said l
oud enough to be heard over the cage’s rattle, “the water is highly saline.”

  “People call me Doc, and how salty?” Sykes asked in the darkness. Neither bothered to turn on their dive lights or the lights on the mining helmets.

  “I’d say like seawater.”

  “We should be okay weightwise. Just don’t need to add so much air to your buoyancy compensator.”

  The temperature plunged as they dropped, the heat sucked into the millions of gallons of water still flooding the mine. Again, Mercer was reminded of a chilly breath. The car began to slow and came to a gentle stop at seven hundred sixty feet. Mercer heaved open the trapdoor cut into the floor of the car and flashed his light into the depths. The still water reflected the beam like a black mirror. He reached for the telephone built into the side of the elevator and ordered them lowered another five feet. The water was now just inches below the steel mesh floor.

  Doc Sykes reached down and brought a palmful of water to his mouth. He spat it immediately. “Shit! Tastes exactly like the ocean.”

  “Told you so.” Mercer looked closer at the water. Tendrils of something floated on the surface. He snagged one with the tip of a pry bar and brought it into the elevator. It was green and stringy, like seaweed. He smelled it. It had the same decayed fishy odor too. But this was impossible. The subterranean reservoir had been cut off from the rest of the world for tens or hundreds of millions of years. There was no way seaweed could have evolved in this isolated lightless realm so far from any ocean. He showed it to Sykes. A troubled look passed between them.

  “Let’s just do this, okay?”

  Mercer flicked the mess off the pry bar and re-clipped the tool to his belt. “Right,” he said doubtfully.

  Sykes went first. He slipped his regulator into his mouth, took a couple of breaths and eased himself through the trapdoor. He treaded water until Mercer was at his side. They took a minute to adjust their buoyancy and let the water saturating their wet suits warm against their bodies. Sykes gave Mercer the okay sign with thumb and forefinger and sank from view without a ripple.

  Mercer was much less graceful but managed to claw his way under the water, feeling it close over his body and experiencing that momentary thrill of weightlessness. If not for their powerful lights, it would have been easy to imagine they were floating in space.

  Sykes maintained an easy pace, keeping one hand on the foot-thick pipe that would lead to the clogged intake. His fins moved lazily, more for steering control than propulsion. Like any experienced diver he was letting his weight belt do the work for him. They passed the mouth of the tunnel. Sykes didn’t even flash his light toward it as they glided deeper into the depths.

  Mercer stayed five feet above the soldier, keeping Sykes centered in the cone of light from his lamp. The water was polluted with suspended particles too small to identify but too large to be silt. He’d never seen such contaminated artesian water. They should be swimming through water clearer than crystal, not this soup. Sykes didn’t seem bothered by this, but Mercer was troubled. Something was seriously, seriously wrong. He was thinking about aborting the dive and demanding answers from Ira when Sykes slowed his descent.

  Mercer checked his depth gauge. One hundred four feet. Sykes was hovering just above the clogged intake, blocking Mercer’s view of the pipe. Mercer finned down next to the soldier and trained his light on the pipe’s terminus.

  The mouth of the intake was blocked by a circular piece of white plastic about four feet in diameter, something Mercer didn’t recognize as being in the mine before the flood. In fact, he’d never seen it before. The tremendous suction from the topside pump had warped the plastic, extruding it into the coarse mesh that prevented debris from flowing up the line. The plastic was so deformed that reversing the pump had only lodged it tighter.

  Sykes pulled out his board and a grease pencil and drew a sharp question mark.

  Mercer shook his head. He had no idea what they were looking at. Both men levered their pry bars next to where the plastic had bent around the steel pipe, heaving in concert to peel an inch of the disk from the intake. They shifted the levers and repeated the maneuver, working their way around the pipe like they were opening a can. The intake mesh had gouged a waffle pattern into the plastic that locked the two like Velcro. It took several minutes of heavy work before the disk popped clear. It floated free, bobbing in the currents formed by their effort. As it slowly revolved, the side pressed into the intake danced into the beams of the lights. The lettering printed around the perimeter was perfectly legible: RYLANDER CRUISE LINES. THE HAPPY SHIPS.

  The mysterious disk was a plastic tabletop, one of several dozen usually found arranged around the swimming pool on a cruise ship. An unremarkable artifact in and of itself, something that probably gets lost at sea quite often when the weather’s rough, but how had it gotten stuck eight hundred feet under solid rock a good four hundred miles from the nearest ocean?

  Sykes didn’t need to redraw his question mark. The confusion was in his eyes.

  Mercer grabbed his own board and wrote for a moment. We’re going down the tunnel to the working face. Calculate our air time.

  Sykes shook his head. Mercer jiggled the board, emphasizing his demand. Again, the commando shook his head. Mercer erased his message and wrote another.

  I’m going with or without you.

  Wasting just another second with silent defiance, Sykes checked Mercer’s gauges and his own and typed the numbers into the dive computer strapped to his wrist. He read the numbers and wrote: We’ve got forty minutes at this depth. More where the tunnel branches off.

  Mercer used a snap clip to attach an air bag to the tabletop and pulled the lanyard that inflated the rubber sphere. The table rose into the murk. They’d haul it onto the elevator when they finished the dive. He started for the tunnel, confident that Sykes was right behind him. At sixty-seven feet they reached the tunnel. Mercer twisted in and continued on, swimming in smooth strokes that pushed him through the water with minimal effort. He didn’t even consider the last time he’d been in this tunnel was when the flood had claimed Ken Porter’s life. He focused entirely on what lay beyond the dike they’d blasted through. There had never been a subterranean lake—at least not until four months ago. The water looked and tasted like seawater because that’s exactly what it was. And the answer to how it got to the middle of the Nevada desert lay a quarter mile ahead.

  He had to force himself not to rush. In his wake he left a steady trail of bubbles as he drew deep, even breaths. His light receded from him as he swam, like the corridor from a nightmare that never ends. It took seven minutes to reach the site of the explosion. All the debris from Donny Randall’s final blast had been swept away in the flood. Most of the working face was gone too. Only jagged chunks of rock hanging from the ceiling and jutting from the floor like rotted teeth marked this as the spot where Ken had died.

  Mercer didn’t slow. But as he pushed through the shattered dike, his light vanished, the beam swallowed by an enormous chamber. Mercer stopped dead in the water, trying to adjust to the sudden change from the tunnel’s claustrophobic confines. Sykes swam up next to him. He played his light around. The water was too deep to see the floor and the walls were lost from view. He flashed his beam upward and tapped Mercer on the shoulder.

  The light bounced off the water’s surface forty feet overhead. The pumps had drained the reservoir to the same level as the main shaft where the elevator waited.

  They didn’t need to confer to know what to do. Sykes watched his depth gauge and worked his computer to calculate decompression stops. No matter what they found, they had five minutes before they had to return to the elevator car.

  A moment later they broke the surface. Mercer swept his beam around in a circle, the light penetrating much farther through air than the water. The chamber was at least five hundred feet across, and the ceiling was a dome lofting a hundred feet above them. The cave’s walls were smooth and curved, like the interior of a stone sph
ere that had been polished to perfection.

  All of this he saw in a quick glance, an impression more than an observation, because something else had caught his attention. As confused as he was about finding seaweed and as stunned as he was discovering the table, what he saw now defied all logic.

  Even in the low light of a single dive lamp, the size and silhouette were unmistakable. Floating serenely in the middle of the underground lake was the dull gray shape of a submarine.

  ABOARD THE MV SEA SURVEYOR II THE PACIFIC, 500 MILES SOUTHEAST OF MIDWAY ISLAND

  CharlieWilliams didn’t like his position one bit. In fact, he hated it. And to make matters worse it was his own fault. He hadn’t noticed how his opponent had shifted pawns to open up his rook, and now the white castle was decimating his few remaining pieces. With his queen effectively pinned by the pair of table-hopping knights, it was inevitable that he’d lose the game. His only solace was that this was only the fifth game of chess he’d ever played and the ship’s third officer, Jon Carlyle, had needed fifteen more moves to beat him than their last game.

  Charlie’s wife, Spirit, sensed her husband’s frustration and looked up from the book she’d borrowed from the ship’s small library, a biography of Alfred Watkins, the discoverer of England’s purported geomagnetic ley lines. Besides the glow of instruments and the wash from Charlie’s laptop where the game was being played out, her lamp was the only spot of illumination on the bridge of the Sea Surveyor II. Beyond the large windows, the night was starless and the ocean calm. The door to the bridge wing was open and a tropical breeze cut the ozone smell of electronics.

  “C.W.,” she called in a voice that could have made her a fortune as a phone sex operator, “I hate to say this, lover, but even if chess’s most powerful piece is female, the game itself is based on misogynist ideas of class warfare in which the goal is to keep an impotent king alive while pieces get sacrificed with little regard to what they’d mean in the real world. I think it’s good that you keep losing. It means you’re enlightened.”

  “It means,” C.W. answered back without taking his eyes off the computer game, “that I’m actually a died-in-the-wool monarchist who, if I were king, would think nothing of letting my queen get killed if it kept me in power for a few moments longer. What do you think, Jon?”