Deep Fire Rising Page 19

  “Holy shit. You did it.”

  “Resecure that ballast plate or we won’t be able to help C.W.,” Mercer warned.

  “Done.” Alan clamped the heavy plate in position and spooled up other thrusters to back the sub from the bottom. In seconds he had her righted and hovering five feet from the bottom, a few yards from the cloud of silt drifting slowly on the current. Smears of mud dribbled from the hull.

  “That was the closest I’ve ever been,” Jervis said after a minute. “I’ve never had a problem on a dive, never even been in a car accident. Jesus. How did you stay so . . . ? I mean, you’ve never been down before and I was about to piss my pants.”

  Mercer smiled over his shoulder. “Don’t sweat it. If that trick didn’t work I’d have joined you on the panic parade. Now, let’s go see if C.W. needs help.”

  “Right.”

  The gas explosion had all but ended; only a few desultory bubbles drifted toward the surface, silvery balls that looked like enormous jellyfish in the weak light thrown from the sub. They backtracked to the tower and made a sweeping circle around the structure. Mercer didn’t ask why Alan performed the maneuver. He knew the pilot was searching for the crushed remains of C.W.’s NewtSuit. Heartened they found nothing, they slowly began their ascent, keeping to the western side of the structure, where they’d left the diver clinging precariously to a stanchion.

  And that’s where they found him, only he was past precarious. During the eruption he must have lost his footing. He’d fallen only a few feet before banging into the tower and wedging an arm where two crossbeams joined. He hung there in a near horizontal position, like a flag in a stiff breeze.

  C.W. had been forced to cut his cables to get free of the Surveyor so there was no way to communicate, but he must have seen the sub’s lights because he began to bicycle his legs.

  “What’s your status down there?” The call came over the comm gear from the surface. It was Jim McKenzie. He’d been out of range when the Surveyor made her desperate race to avoid the eruption, but now he’d brought the ship back into position.

  “Glad to hear your voice, Jim,” Alan breathed.

  “It was a close thing. I didn’t think this old girl could move that fast. How are you guys?”

  “Other than the bit of paint we scraped off Bob’s nose, we’re okay. We’re at the tower with C.W. His arm is wedged.” Jervis swung the sub next to the diver as he spoke.

  “Can you get him out?”

  “We’re working on it. What do you think, Mercer? Any more brilliant ideas?”

  “Sorry, one per day’s my limit. Are the manipulators strong enough to pull him free?”

  “I doubt it. They’re built for delicacy, not strength.”

  “All right. Then we’ll have Jim send down the lifting cable and a welding rig and we’ll put Humpty-Dumpty back together again.”

  “Pretty tricky job. Want me to handle it?”

  Mercer shrugged. “I’d love for you to, only I can’t fly this oversized septic tank. And you need to keep it steady against the current.”

  Alan switched on his microphone. “Jim, we’ve got a plan. Can you send down C.W.’s cable and some welding gear?”

  “I think I know what you have in mind. Give us ten minutes.”

  They had the cable down to the sub in eight. Alan talked Mercer through the procedure and an hour later the cable was securely welded to the back of the NewtSuit. The trickiest part of the operation was directing the topside winch engineer. One false move, or an ocean swell hitting at the wrong time, could tear the arm from the suit, killing the diver inside. After several tense minutes, the suit came free and C.W. dangled at the end of the cable like a fish. They began to reel him in. Alan took up a position directly below C.W. as he was hauled to the surface in case the weld failed and the suit dropped free.

  Nearing the surface, the sub peeled away, as Jim McKenzie had ordered several boats into the water to secure the Advanced Diving Suit. It took a further half hour for scuba divers to sling a net under the suit so C.W. could be safely hauled onto the Sea Surveyor. And only then did they lift the submersible from the sea.

  When the hatch swung open and Mercer took his first breath of clean air in more than five hours, he realized how foul the atmosphere in the sub had become. The bright sunlight was painful to his eyes, but he turned his face toward it as if waiting for a long kiss.

  Technicians had gotten the back of C.W.’s suit opened by the time he joined them. The lanky Californian eased himself from the armored rig. No one commented on the smell of urine. Spirit Williams pushed through the crowd, shouldering aside workers like a halfback, and crashed into her husband, almost knocking them both to the deck. She was laughing and crying at the same time and smothered his mouth with hers. The assembled men roared their approval.

  With his wife clinging to his arm, C.W. shook first Alan’s and then Mercer’s hand. “Man, that was something, you two. I thought I was a goner when a gas burst knocked me off the tower. Then I got stuck, but the methane was blowing by so fast I was sure it’d knock me off again. When the gas finally stopped I thought you’d be right there, only you weren’t. Dude, it’s a good thing I lost communications ’cause I was cursing you something fierce.”

  “We ran into a little difficulty of our own,” Alan deadpanned.

  “It felt like an hour later when I saw Bob’s lights. Jesus, I’ve never been so relieved in my life. What took so long with the welds?”

  “We had to use oxyacetylene,” Mercer answered. “You weren’t grounded so an electric arc welder would have fried you in the suit.”

  “Oh. Good thinking. Thanks.”

  Mercer and Alan exchanged a guilty glance. “Thank Jim. We hadn’t even considered it. How are you feeling?”

  He gave Spirit a quick squeeze. “Better now.”

  Spirit turned from her husband to Mercer. “I suspect you’re waiting for me to thank you for saving him.”

  Jesus, she is one hard bitch, Mercer thought. “Not at all.” He smiled.

  “Well, I won’t. Rather than thank you, I blame you. If you hadn’t ordered him to dive today, none of this would have happened.”

  Jim McKenzie stepped up, saving Mercer from telling Spirit where she could shove her blame and how far up it could go. “Nice job. All three of you. That was one hell of a thing.”

  He didn’t sound too overjoyed. In fact, to Mercer he sounded distracted, worried. They chatted for a few more minutes before Spirit led C.W. back to their cabin and Alan went to find a shower. Mercer and McKenzie were left alone at the rail looking out over the horizon. McKenzie’s thin sandy hair rippled in the breeze.

  A silent minute passed.

  “You going to tell me what’s on your mind, Jim?”

  “You don’t strike me as the kind of guy who believes in coincidences.” McKenzie lit a cigar after offering one to Mercer, who refused.

  “Like how that machine down there kicked on during our dive? Nope.”

  “Yeah, me either. While we were waiting to hear back from you, I double-checked our logs from radar, sonar, acoustical gear and every other piece of science gear we run twenty-four/seven.”

  Mercer’s heart tightened. “And?”

  “And I think we’ve stumbled onto something big.”

  Mercer didn’t correct him that they hadn’t stumbled onto anything. They’d been deliberately lured here by the sinking of the USS Smithback.

  McKenzie continued, “We got a signal off the passive sonar suite a minute before C.W. reported the blades on the current turbines began to turn.”

  “What kind of signal?”

  “A series of tones, something nonrandom. It only lasted a couple of seconds. If I’d have to guess it was an acoustical activation code sent to switch that thing on and release the gas. Someone was trying to sink us.”

  Or sabotage the dive, Mercer thought. “Could you tell where the signal came from?”

  “It didn’t last long enough to triangulate. The way sou
nd travels through water, it could have been anywhere. Our radar coverage only goes out eighteen miles. There could be a ship sitting twenty miles away listening to everything we said when you were on the bottom. They could have transmitted an activation code at the critical moment.”

  Mercer scanned the horizon again, an unconscious check to see if they were being watched. Of course, there was nothing out there but what his imagination conjured. Tisa had said their organization was huge, numbering in the millions, though many didn’t know they even belonged. It was a secret core that ran things, and within the inner circle was a faction that had gone rogue. Up until this moment he wasn’t sure if he believed her. As far as he had seen, her group was just a handful of gunmen who had no compunction about murder. She could belong to any number of fringe groups with a couple of guns and an excess of hatred. But now he had proof of something else. And not just the tower itself, which was an expensive undertaking beyond the scope of all but the largest multinational companies. No, what he saw as proof was the activation signal sent from another ship. That meant they had access to an oceangoing vessel of some kind and a sophisticated network of informants to let them know when to power up the machinery.

  Tisa had sought him out and sent him here so he could see for himself what her group was capable of, and what presumably she was trying to stop. Mercer tried to put his mind around what exactly that was. He couldn’t. She’d made the tower, which must have cost tens of millions of dollars, sound like a small part of what her people could accomplish. This was a mere demonstration. He felt adrift. If this was a sideshow, how much bigger could their main goal be?

  “Are you okay?” Jim asked. “You went pale there for a minute.”

  “I’m fine,” Mercer said slowly, unable to convince himself or McKenzie that he was okay.

  “Something big’s happening, isn’t it? Like maybe what Spirit was talking about. A government conspiracy?”

  Mercer tried to shake off the feeling of being overwhelmed. “This is one time I think Uncle Sam’s innocent, but we are in the middle of something big.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  “Get pissed.” Jim gave him an uncomprehending look. “You don’t need to know any of the details, but since this whole thing started I’ve been a step behind, reacting rather than taking the initiative. It’s like I’m being led around like a bull with a ring through its nose. I get shown clues that only lead to more questions. I’ve got to find a way of taking charge.”

  McKenzie still didn’t understand what Mercer was saying, not that it mattered. Mercer knew his feelings. Ira had withheld truths from him and so had Tisa, both using him for their own purposes. He’d forced Lasko to finally come clean, and when he reached Greece, he’d have to do the same with Miss Nguyen.

  HONOLULU, HAWAII

  A light drizzle fell across the tarmac as Mercer stepped from the air force cargo jet with two dozen rowdy marines ready for their first night on American soil in six months. They’d been part of a counterterrorism team assigned to the Philippine Islands. Mercer had gotten a lift on their flight to Hawaii with a little help from Ira Lasko.

  Standing at the bottom of the ramp, Mercer paused as the men filed past, a few he’d spoken with on the plane wishing him well, the rest eager to use up everything in their wallets. A flight-line technician wearing a shiny rain slicker and commercial-quality ear protectors approached.

  “Dr. Mercer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could you come with me, please? Admiral Lasko is waiting for you.”

  Mercer was led to an open-topped utility tractor. The technician hopped behind the wheel, leaving Mercer a tiny perch on the back of the vehicle. He held his bag on his lap as the tractor lurched across the parking apron. Hangars and a control tower lined one side of the vast expanse, while the rest was lost in the darkness.

  Twisting so he could see where they were headed, he spotted a Gulfstream jet like the one Ira had procured to fetch him to Area 51. Sheets of rain poured from the aircraft’s swept wing, but the boarding hatch was open and inviting light spilled onto the asphalt. The tractor shuddered to a stop next to the jet. Over the whine of the idling engines, Mercer heard the line worker tell him this was his plane. Mercer jumped from the tractor, gave the man a wave and hauled himself up the boarding steps. Ira was waiting for him just inside the luxury cabin.

  Mercer had expected to meet with the admiral for a debrief in Washington. He was grateful for the private plane after eleven hours cooped up with a bunch of rambunctious marines, but he would have preferred to sleep through the flight. He’d spent an additional three days on the Sea Surveyor while Jim McKenzie and his team tried to repair the submersible. Mercer had gotten some instruction on the Advanced Diving Suit from C.W., but in the end they decided that it wasn’t the optimal platform to study the mysterious tower and abandoned the idea of a tandem dive. It would be a week or more before Bob was functional again and a team could continue their investigation.

  “Almost a week at sea and no tan?” the admiral teased.

  Mercer was pale, drawn and exhausted. “Damn ship was dry. I’ve lost my alcohol flush.”

  “I made sure this bird’s stocked. First round’s on me.” They shook hands and Ira became serious. “How’d it go? Really?”

  Mercer tossed his bag into an overhead and dropped into a plush leather captain’s chair. Ira had the ingredients for a vodka gimlet waiting on the table between them. Mercer mixed them each a drink, took a quick appreciative sip, then downed it. “The more I think about this situation, the worse it gets. I can’t figure out exactly who we’re up against. In Vegas they were a handful of armed goons and a woman with a strange story to tell. Now I see them as a damned army with some serious funding. There was a naval architect on board the Surveyor. He and I went over the video we’d managed to shoot. He estimates that tower cost at least a hundred million dollars.”

  “Any ideas about what it’s designed to do?”

  The aircraft commander came over the intercom to tell his two passengers to strap in, they had clearance to take off. The jet engines’ pitch became a shriek as they rolled across the taxiways. Mercer waited until the sleek aircraft had lifted from the ground before answering Ira’s question.

  “Obviously it was sited over a previously undiscovered methane hydrate deposit.”

  “You were rather circumspect when you called me from the ship,” Lasko interrupted. “What is this stuff? I’ve never heard of it.”

  “First, the reason I couldn’t give you any details is that I think that someone was monitoring the Sea Surveyor’s communications. That’s how they knew when to turn the tower on.”

  “I can check with the navy. They might have had that area under surveillance by then. If there was a ship close enough to eavesdrop, maybe they have a few pictures of it.”

  “Good. Now methane hydrate is nothing less than the future of fossil fuel energy on the planet. It’s basically ice that has trapped methane gas within its crystal lattice. I’m not an expert, but I’ve read there’s more than enough energy locked in these benthic hydrocarbon deposits to fuel our power needs for centuries. In fact, hydrate reserves are larger than coal, oil, and natural gas combined. The best part is the lion’s share is found right off our own coastlines. The major oil companies are scrambling to develop the technology to tap these reserves, but it’s still years away.

  “The problem is that these deposits can be unstable. An undersea landslide or an earthquake can cause billions of tons of methane hydrate to vaporize and erupt. That’s what makes exploiting it so difficult. A drill rig could upset the hydrates’ equilibrium and cause an eruption that destroys the rig and releases tons of greenhouse gas. Environmentalists are currently doing everything in their power to prevent further exploration.”

  “Figures,” Ira muttered.

  “The danger’s real. About eight thousand years ago, a massive deposit off the coast of Norway was released by an undersea avalanche. The thr
ee hundred fifty billion tons of hydrates that reached the atmosphere raised temperatures about twelve degrees all over the world and helped bring a swift end to the last ice age.

  “I don’t know how this group found a deposit of hydrates so far out in the ocean. As far as I know no one’s ever looked there before. As for the tower itself? It’s either designed to keep the hydrates chilled by pumping cold brine solution into the seafloor or it was built to heat the hydrates and cause a catastrophic eruption.”

  “But why? Why would someone do either?”

  “No clue. If they wanted to sink ships, it would be cheaper just to blow them out of the water, so I don’t think that’s it. My money’s on it being built to keep the hydrates stable. When she got the distress call from the Smithback, the Sea Surveyor was performing research on deep-ocean currents. I interviewed a few of the scientists. It appears they were tracking a jet of warm water that hugged the ocean bottom. It runs from the Philippine Sea toward the Aleutian Islands. This stream wasn’t there a decade ago according to data from a previous NOAA expedition. They hypothesize that global warming is what’s caused this current to develop. I believe that Tisa Nguyen’s group discovered it years ago, knew about the hydrate deposit and realized that if they didn’t do something to prevent the heat from melting the deposit we’d have a potential environmental catastrophe.”

  “Could this have been as bad as the one in Norway?”

  “Don’t know yet. When I left, they were hanging a magnetometer off the stern of Sea Surveyor to determine the extent of pipework buried under the mud. So far they’ve found that three square miles of the bottom are rigged with cooling pipes. The ROVs on the Sea Surveyor can’t accurately measure the depth of the hydrate layer, but it’s pretty clear the field is extensive and only a fraction of the gas was released when they hit the Smithback and the Surveyor. Jim McKenzie, who heads the submersible team on the ship, plans to stay in the area until they can get their sub running again.