Deep Fire Rising Page 15

She appraised him for a moment. “That was quite an entrance.”

  “The helicopter?”

  “That, too.” The flirtation went from her voice. Her eyes hardened. “I’m Spirit Williams, one of the scientists who’s losing their opportunity to work because of you.”

  “I—”

  “There’s nothing you can say, so don’t. I’ve spent a lifetime to get aboard this ship, and I wanted to say thanks for screwing it up for me.” She wheeled away and was down the hall before Mercer fully grasped what she’d said.

  He didn’t go after her. It would be a waste of time. He knew the type. A scientist, probably still working toward her doctorate, so dedicated to her work that anything, no matter how serious or important, was a distraction she refused to tolerate. Such narrow-minded focus served scientists well in their own world, yet made many insufferable to the rest of society. He expected the rest of the science staff on the Sea Surveyor would treat him in a similar fashion. With any luck he’d complete his mission before seeing her or any of the others.

  Ten minutes later, Mercer found the mess hall and saw his luck had already run out. Spirit Williams was in the mess hall with Jon Carlyle and a young blond man in diving trunks and a garish Hawaiian shirt. Her leg was pressed against his, and she was drinking orange juice from a glass in front of him. Noticing the ring on his hand, he assumed they were married, although she wore no jewelry.

  “Ah, Mercer.” Carlyle stood. “Let me introduce one of our sub drivers, Charlie Williams.”

  The tanned surfer stood. “Call me C.W. This is my wife, Spirit.”

  “I’ve had the pleasure.” Mercer took the fourth chair at the table. A mess steward asked if he wanted anything. Mercer took coffee.

  “I met Mr. Mercer earlier and told him I didn’t appreciate his presence on the Surveyor,” Spirit said acidly. “I suspect he’s here as part of a government cover-up. The navy was probably doing some illegal research, killing whales with sonar like they did a few years ago off Long Beach, and something went wrong. Now he’s going to hide the truth.”

  “He’s here to find out why a lot of brave sailors died two nights ago,” Jon retorted. He’d had his fill of Spirit’s rancor. The vessel’s crew had no real interest in what the ship did once she was at sea, but the researchers had tight funding and guarded their time on board jealously. Even a few days’ delay was a colossal waste of their time and resources. They hadn’t stopped griping since getting the news, and C.W.’s wife had been the most vocal.

  “Their souls have crossed,” Spirit replied. “They should be left to rest. Sending people down there to gloat over their remains is ghoulish.”

  “Mr. Mercer isn’t here to gloat. He’s here to get answers so more sailors aren’t lost.”

  “They knew the risks when they joined the navy. Dying’s part of their job.”

  Carlyle’s face grew red. “Defending our country is their job.”

  “Oh, I see.” She became even more sarcastic. “Dying is just a fringe benefit.”

  Mercer caught C.W.’s eye. The submersible operator showed no interest in restraining his wife. He’d heard her in action before and knew to stay out of the line of fire.

  “Now, see here,” the normally unflappable officer thundered. Since the loss of the Smithback, his admiration for the navy and its men had been rekindled. Before he could continue, four other men entered the mess room.

  Carlyle glared at an unrepentant Spirit, wiped his brow with a handkerchief and made the introductions. One of the newcomers was a second sub pilot. The other three headed the support staff.

  “You’ll have to go, sweet,” C.W. told his wife.

  Like flipping a switch, her temperament did a complete reversal. She smiled at the assembled men and gave C.W. a long kiss on the mouth. “Come get me at the lab if you’re diving today. I want to be in the van. Love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  If Jon expected C.W. to apologize for his wife’s behavior, he had a long wait coming. The seconds grew.

  Mercer realized no one would cut the silence, so he cleared his throat. “Okay, down to business. Jon may have told you I’ve been sent here to discover what happened to the Smithback. It seems we’re all under the same impression that she struck a container that split and whatever was inside burned. The navy wants me to verify this hypothesis by physically inspecting the wreck. Have you pinpointed it on the seafloor?”

  Jim McKenzie, who headed the team, spoke up. “We found her on side-scan sonar about ten hours after reaching the area. She’s directly below us now in nine hundred eighty-eight feet of water.”

  “That seems kind of shallow,” Mercer said. “We’re in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.”

  “We’re atop a subsea plateau that rises from the abyssal plane. Had the Smithback sunk fifty miles to the north, she’d be two miles down and unreachable by anything we have on board. Bob’s rated for two thousand feet, and our two ADSes can safely operate at one thousand. Just so you know, Bob is the name of our submersible. It’s what she does when she resurfaces. Just bobs in the ocean.”

  Mercer smiled. “I have a friend who named his dog Drag because that’s how he takes his walks. What’s an ADS?”

  “Atmospheric Diving Suit. Also called a NewtSuit. Think of it as a one-man submarine with arms and legs. It keeps the operator at sea-level pressure so we don’t have to bother with decompression but gives a freedom of movement we can’t get from a larger sub or even an ROV. C.W. helped in their development and is about the best operator in the world.”

  “Jim’s exaggerating,” C.W. said to Mercer. “In college I worked part-time in the factory watching a computer-controlled lathe form the suits’ torsos out of aluminum blanks.” He gave a lopsided grin. “But I am the best.”

  “How many men can Bob carry?”

  “Three,” McKenzie answered. “Pilot and two observers. We do have a problem. We fried one of Bob’s banks of lights doing a test a week ago. At this depth you can’t see an inch beyond the porthole, and our ROVs operate with low-light cameras so they can’t provide enough backup illumination.”

  “The solution,” C.W. interrupted, “is that I go down with you in an ADS and use it as a mobile lighting platform.”

  “Are the ADSes autonomous?”

  “They’re tethered to the Surveyor by a lifting cable and communications lines but don’t rely on the ship for air. Don’t worry,” C.W. added, “we’ve run the NewtSuit and sub together quite a few times.”

  Mercer turned to McKenzie. “How long before we can dive on the wreck?”

  “Weather isn’t a problem. No storms predicted for days. Batteries are all fully charged and we just replaced the CO2 scrubbers. We need to fit new ballast plates and charge the O2 tanks, then run a few tests. Say, five hours.”

  “Are you going to want to see the tower too?”

  This was the first Mercer had heard of any tower. “What are you talking about?” he asked Carlyle.

  “The underwater tower about a mile to the west of us. We found it on sonar when we were searching for the Smithback.”

  “What is it?”

  “We’re not sure,” McKenzie answered. “It appears to be some kind of underwater oil- or gas-drilling platform. From its sonar image, it stands about eight hundred feet tall and is about a hundred wide at the base. It tapers as it rises. The top is about forty feet square.”

  “And it’s completely underwater?”

  McKenzie nodded. “The bottom there is deeper than here, about thirteen hundred feet. The top of the tower rests five hundred feet down.”

  Mercer had never heard of such a structure. He was familiar with deep-sea drilling even though he wasn’t an oil geologist. An eight-hundred-foot platform wasn’t all that unusual anymore. Some in the North Sea stood over a thousand feet, but all of them were serviced by modules constructed above sea level. What McKenzie and Carlyle were talking about was something entirely new. And as he thought about it further, something else came to mind.
As far as he knew, there weren’t any oil deposits within two thousand miles of their current position. One mystery at a time, Mercer decided. He was sure there was a connection between the enigmatic structure and the Smithback accident, but he wanted to see the ship before investigating the tower.

  “Let’s check the ship first. What’s Bob’s range?”

  “She can stay down for thirty hours or more, but at a top speed of three knots she isn’t exactly mobile.” This came from Alan Jervis, the submersible operator who would actually take Mercer down to the wreck. Jervis was about Mercer’s age, with dark receding hair and gold-framed glasses. “If you want to remain on the bottom and reach the tower, it’ll take us an hour or more because we’ll be bucking a two-knot current the whole way.”

  “We’d have to move the Surveyor,” Carlyle said. “C.W. will be tethered to us. To get him over there, we have to reel him up, steam over to the tower, then lower him down again.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “No. And with your slow speed, he’d be in position before you.”

  “Then that’s what we’ll do,” Mercer announced. No one questioned his authority. “We’ll drop down to the ship first and then check out this tower of yours.”

  Mercer tried to catch a nap after the meeting, but the strong coffee and a rattling air-conditioning fan kept him awake. After the first hour of staring at the ceiling, he admitted his insomnia had nothing to do with caffeine or noise. The image of Tisa Nguyen kept sleep out of his grasp. It was her eyes he kept seeing, their depth and their pain. He didn’t believe it was personal trauma. That was something people kept better hidden, at least from strangers.

  She reminded him of the subject of a religious painting, a Madonna and Child perhaps, where the beatific Mary looks lovingly at her infant yet in her eyes is the knowledge he would have to die for the world’s sins. Did Tisa know of such sin? Was that why she was convinced the world was ending?

  He wondered what she had witnessed to make her believe that. Hers wasn’t general angst about the state of a world racked by wars, famines and other sundry catastrophes the media reported so cheerfully. He was convinced it was something specific, something she and her group alone knew had happened or was about to happen.

  She’d all but admitted her group’s involvement with the sinking of the Smithback. No, that wasn’t true, he recalled. She’d only said that something unusual was going to happen in the Pacific.

  He had never felt so unbalanced. He felt like he was walking through a minefield holding the wrong map. In the past weeks he’d been tossed a dozen lies, survived two murder attempts and met a woman he couldn’t stop thinking about. Connecting all this was a fiber too thin for him to see, let alone grasp.

  Did Tisa Nguyen know about the Smithback being in the vicinity of the tower? Had she not warned him in time and allowed it to sink the way she’d not prevented the death of the woman at the Luxor Hotel? Or was the sinking an unintended consequence? What if the Smithback had wandered into some type of experiment that her group was conducting. Did it have anything to do with Dr. Marie’s experiment in optoelectric camouflage?

  He could only hope that some of the answers lay a thousand feet below where he tossed on his bunk.

  An hour later, bound by frustration, Mercer gave up on trying to sleep. He donned the coveralls Alan Jervis had provided earlier, used the head as the sub pilot had requested and made his way to the Surveyor ’s fantail.

  Bob sat in a cradle under the A-frame derrick. The submersible was painted bright yellow and its hull was studded with auxiliary oxygen tanks, small thruster nacelles and a pair of heavy-duty manipulator arms ending in wicked-looking pincers. Her bow was a single piece of curved Lexan six inches thick. Through the tough acrylic dome, Mercer could see the cramped cockpit. Alan would sit behind and a little above the two observer seats. The interior walls were covered with dials and banks of switches and several flat-screen computer monitors. The little sub was the pinnacle of high-tech deep-sea technology.

  Nearby, C.W. worked on an even more unusual piece of equipment, the ADS. The suit was also painted yellow, and the twenty rotator joints made it look segmented, like the body of a corpulent caterpillar. The helmet had a wide faceplate for good visibility, and at the end of the arms were nimble three-finger grapplers.

  “What do you think?” C.W. asked with obvious pride.

  “Damn amazing. What does it weigh?”

  “Over five hundred pounds empty, but the way the suit’s balanced and the fluid in the joints work, it’s almost weightless below thirty-five feet. It’s the next best thing to scuba diving, provided you’re not claustrophobic.”

  “How do you work it?”

  “Nothing to it.” C.W. snapped open the back of the suit. “I was about to do a systems check. You can do it with me. Hop in.”

  It was like stepping into a pair of steel pants. Mercer used a bar attached to the ADS’s lifting cradle to heave himself through the opening. He lowered his feet down into the legs and thrust his arms into the appropriate openings. His head came up inside the domed helmet. When he was settled, he could feel large rocker switches under his feet and several control buttons and toggles next to his hands. The suit smelled of electronics and disinfectant with just a trace of the previous user’s sweat.

  “Do you feel the foot pads?” Even with the access hatch open, C.W.’s voice was muffled and distant.

  “Yes.”

  “They control the thrusters. Put pressure on the back right and the suit moves backward. Try it now.”

  Mercer pressed down on his heel and a pair of thrusters attached to his shoulders began to whine.

  “Press forward and you go forward.”

  He tried it and the small propellers stopped in an instant and began turning the opposite direction.

  “Your left foot controls rotation,” C.W. explained. “Back spins you right and forward spins you left.”

  Mercer applied pressure and other thrusters mounted on the exoskeleton spooled up to a high-pitched buzz. He then tried out the arms. He’d had thousands of hours operating heavy mining equipment that used joysticks similar to those inside the suit’s arms. It took him just a few minutes to get the feel of the ADS’s controls.

  “Shit, man, you’re a natural,” C.W. exclaimed when Mercer reversed himself out of the aluminum suit.

  “The controls are pretty logical.” Mercer was impressed. “And you said at thirty-five feet you don’t even feel the mass?”

  “It’s amazingly flexible.” C.W. patted the suit’s metal hide. “Muscle power alone moves the arms and you can bend through forty-five degrees. NASA astronauts who’ve tried one of these say it’s better than their space suits, and the pressures we work in are a hell of a lot stronger than the vacuum they experience. If you have the time while you’re aboard, I’ll let you try one on a test dive.”

  Mercer smiled. “I’d love to take you up on that, but I don’t think it’ll happen. I expect to be out of here as soon as possible.”

  C.W.’s normally easygoing expression faded. “What’s really going on?” he asked. “Are you allowed to say? Was Spirit right about a government foul-up?”

  “No, there isn’t any kind of cover-up, though I doubt my word will convince your wife.”

  The former surfer chuckled. “It took me all of five minutes to learn that if she says the sky is green, I’m better off not debating her.”

  “You must be a slow learner,” Mercer teased, comfortable with C.W.’s mellow demeanor. “I figured that out in five seconds.”

  “She is something, huh? I met her at a beach party. I had just convinced this other girl to go back to my place when Spirit walked up behind me. She said that I was a sexist pig and that I had no interest in the other girl beyond her silicone boobs. I turned around to call her a dyke or something, and man, I just stopped cold. I think she felt it too. The only other thing I remember about that night was later, we were in bed and she said something like ‘Better than silicone
, aren’t they?’ ”

  Mercer smiled at the story, at some level envious that Charlie had been able to transform lust into love. He’d felt that momentary jolt of desire many times, but for one reason or another nothing developed much past a casual affair. Harry White had once told him that getting married is equal parts the person and the timing. One without the other just won’t work. Of course taking marital advice from an eighty-year-old bachelor wasn’t the best idea in the world, but Mercer couldn’t deny the truth in his words.

  Many women had come into and out of his life. He didn’t think the problem was with them, so it had to be the timing. Or with himself.

  His atypical train of thought was interrupted by the approach of Alan, the sub pilot, and Jim McKenzie, the topside coordinator. Alan tossed a sweatshirt to Mercer. “It gets cold at a thousand feet and we can’t afford the battery power for a heater.”

  As Mercer slipped into the garment, the three men went over their predive checklists and made last-minute adjustments with a team of hovering technicians. He noticed Spirit standing on the helipad above the deck. If he wasn’t mistaken, she was staring at him and not her husband. Then their eyes met. Spirit shot him a contemptuous look and retreated into the superstructure. The intensity of her anger was out of proportion with the delay he was causing her research. It felt almost personal.

  “We’re all set,” McKenzie announced. “Let’s get you into the can and buttoned up.”

  Mercer climbed the ladder leaning against Bob’s curved hull and carefully lowered himself through the hatch, mindful of the thick grease smeared around the coaming to help maintain a tight seal. He stepped first on the pilot’s seat, then contorted himself all the way in so he slid into one of the cramped observers’ positions. In front of him was an array of dials and switches Alan had assured him he needn’t worry about. From his seat, the pilot could control everything except the manipulator arms. A moment later, Alan eased into the sub. He donned a headset and began another predive checklist with McKenzie, who’d already moved into the control van with a handful of others. To Mercer it was like listening to the arcane language of a pilot talking to the control tower, just a series of numbers and indecipherable acronyms.