Ark Found

Chapter 4

“We’ll be entering through the rear cargo holds,” Carter said as he looked up from his diagram. Jayden propelled them slowly into the open wreck, about ten feet above the bottom. The ship lay more or less flat and upright, but at a slight angle to the left when looking into it from their vantage point. Carter’s diagram showed the Titanic to have five levels in all, including the topmost deck with the funnels, and they were entering on the bottom one.

“Plenty of room to maneuver so far,” Jayden said as he steered the sub into the center of the large opening before them.

“So this is where the ship cracked in half as it flooded and sank,” Carter pointed out as they passed through the ragged metal outline of the ship’s massive, torn hull. “The Purser’s Room should be on the third level not far past the Smoking Room.”

Jayden laughed. “Even way back then they herded the smokers into one room, huh?”

Carter was more active with the spotlight now, as there was much to see inside the ship, and obstacles in the form of loose cables and random hanging debris could be anywhere and everywhere. “As expected, it’s clear up until the end of the cargo hold, then we’re going to have to head up and see what it’s like.”

“Right.” Jayden glanced out of the dome to his left and saw piles of what looked like broken wine casks, along with other masses of unidentifiable lumber of some sort, interspersed with twisted metal beams that were part of the ship. Looking ahead, he could see a wall that prevented forward progress. It was mostly solid, but a few small jagged gaps offered glimpses into additional rooms beyond. Carter said that he believed them to be the Engineers Rooms. Jayden gave the thrusters a short burst of reverse as the sub glided toward the wall, the closest thing to brakes that he had at his disposal.

He and Carter looked all around them, carefully checking to ensure they were clear of obstructions on all sides and below. A massive turbine lay off-kilter to their right, but they were far enough from it that it did not present a navigational hazard. Then they turned their attention upward, where a rectangular shaft stretched beyond the reach of their lights.

“Elevator shaft.” Carter consulted his diagram before looking upward and back to the drawing again.

“Where’s the car?” Jayden wondered, looking around at the chaotic floor, strewn with debris both recognizable and otherwise.

“Probably smashed to bits, or disintegrated if it was mostly wood. You think we can rise vertically through that shaft? Because according to this…” He paused to squint at the diagram again. “…it leads to the hospital on the second level, and then to the restaurant on Level Three, which is not far from the Smoking Room…”

“…Which is not far from the Purser Room,” Jayden finished for him.

“Right.”

Jayden backed the sub up a bit and then adjusted one of the external halogens, trying to get a better look up into the shaft. “I don’t know. It’s a small space. I mean, we’d fit, but barely. And I don’t need to tell you that if we got snagged on anything in there, like halfway up the shaft…”

“You don’t need to tell me,” Carter said, trying to push a fate of slow suffocation while they sat trapped in the sub in the pitch dark, counting their breaths until the oxygen ran out, out of his mind.

“We could slip in there and then we’d be able to get a better look straight up the shaft,” Jayden said, adjusting one of the spotlight controls before adding, “If it looks too sketchy from the bottom, we can just back right out.”

“I’m okay with it,” Carter said. “But you’re the pilot. I want you to be comfortable. If you’re not, then we don’t do it, no questions asked, end of story. Your call.”

“Let’s have a look, then.” Jayden brought his hand up to the thruster control and nudged it up, causing the submersible to lurch forward slowly. Carter swept his spot light around, making sure they were free of obstacles as they nosed into the vacant elevator shaft. Jayden let go of the thruster control, allowing the sub’s momentum to carry it into the enclosed space.

“Hope you’re not claustrophobic, bro,” Jayden said as he nudged the left thruster to center their craft in the elevator shaft. Being over two miles deep, inside a wreck and inside what amounted to basically a vertical tunnel inside of that was enough to make even a non-claustrophobic panic. And Carter wasn’t about to lie to himself. He felt the beginnings of unease begin to creep around the edges of his consciousness. But he had been in perilous situations involving closed spaces before, such as cave diving and wreck diving with scuba gear, spelunking on land… but this… He warned himself not to think about it too much or his rational brain would tell him to get out of here right now, to do the smart thing and keep yourself alive!

“Snug as a bug in a rug,” he said to Jayden, who smiled as he aimed the spotlight on the port side of the craft up into the shaft. Carter did the same with the one on his side, and together they visually appraised what lay straight up above them while Jayden kept the craft stationary at the bottom of the space.

“It looks clear to me,” Carter announced after a minute of careful scrutiny. “I’ll continue to keep an eye out on the way up, but I don’t see any obvious blockages.”

“I’m afraid to tell Topside we’re taking the elevator up,” Jayden said, eyeing the radio.

“They would just tell us not to do it. It’s our call.”

“They’ll know anyway if we find our way in there, won’t they?”

Carter shook his head. “We can say there was a break in the wall or something and not even mention the elevator. If we’re going to do it, let’s go, though. We’re burning battery power sand oxygen.”

Without another word, Jayden’s hands flew over the sub’s controls, and the sub began a slow ascent up the shaft. With Jayden’s full attention needing to be on the controls, it was up to Carter to operate the lights and identify anything that might represent an obstacle to their upward progress. He called out when they were about halfway up the shaft, and then again at three-quarters.

“Hold up here,” he told the pilot. Jayden paused the ascent and maintained their position within the column, hovering. They had perhaps three feet of space on either side of the sub and even less than that off the bow and stern. Carter examined the remaining distance to the top of the shaft with the spotlight.

“Be quick about, would you,” Jayden said. “I can’t hold this position forever. All it would take is one freak up- or downwelling, and—”

“It’s clear, go for it!” Hunt continued to eye the rest of their path as an electronic hum signified the vertical thrusters starting up again. The sub rose slowly through the remaining elevator shaft until the top of the bubble dome was even with the opening in the shaft, where Jayden again held their craft in a tightly controlled hover.

“We’ve got room to maneuver!” Hunt said, unable to contain the excitement in his voice as he aimed the spot light around. Even the closer range floodlights allowed them to see they had reached an internal area of the ship with considerable space.

“I think….” Hunt began but then paused as he looked around some more with the spotlight. “I think we’re in the restaurant.” He pointed to an overturned round table, with a chair still mostly intact nearby.

“Yeah, holy crap, I see a bottle of wine on the floor over here! When’s happy hour?”

Carter smiled as he imagined using the sub’s robotic arm to bring back a bottle of wine from the ship, but in reality he knew better than to disrespect the site like that. They were here for one thing and one thing only. They would leave everything else as undisturbed as possible.

“Which way do we need to go from here?” Jayden asked. “Right, am I right?” He thought he was correct, but knew they had precious little room for error.

Carter was already gazing at his diagram when he answered. “Yes, on the other side of the restaurant to our right we should get to the smoking room, and then after that, the Purser’s Room on this same level. It’s not all that far from here, really.” Yet he knew that conventional terms for distance such as “not that far” down here in the middle of the Titanic shipwreck were much different than the same distances on land. The restaurant offered maneuverable space, but neither man was fooled into thinking that hazards did not abound. The water was still and relatively undisturbed inside the inner rooms of the ship. It was possible that the sub’s movement alone could move the water around enough to cause a collapse of some sort, like a cave-in.

“Heads up on that big chandelier over there,” Hunt said, directing the spotlight until the halogen revealed the glittering of crystals in the pitch dark space, “and there’s a smaller one over there.”

“Thanks.” Jayden now knew not to let the sub be too high in the room, nor too low. He activated the horizontal thrusters and sent them scooting out into the middle of the giant room, about halfway between floor and ceiling. He caught his breath as he saw a flash of white in the floodlights on the floor, realizing it was a human skull, the rest of the skeleton unseen beneath a heavy table top. A none-too-subtle reminder that this was indeed a grave site. He pointed it out to Carter, who asked in a low voice if the video system was recording. Jayden hit a button and then replied in the affirmative. Everything around the sub would be captured in high definition video from six cameras facing every direction including above and below.

The sub made its way through the sunken restaurant, Jayden’s brow beaded with sweat despite the chilly temperature inside the specialized vehicle. They came to one area where a mass of furniture was tangled in a heap on the floor, and he had to raise the sub in order to pass over it, before dropping lower again to avoid a mass of cabling or wire of some sort that dangled from the fractured ceiling.

“Got a wall coming up,” Carter announced. “This should be the other side of the restaurant. Smoking Room’s on the other side.”

“We need to find a way through.” Jayden cut power to the thrusters and allowed the sub to come to a standstill, hovering about ten feet above the floor, over a pile of dishes and glassware, some of which was still intact.

At that moment the radio crackled with Johnny’s voice. “Topside to Voyager: checking in, requesting status, over.”

Jayden snatched up the radio mic. “Inside the restaurant now, Topside. We’re fine, having a look around, over.”

“The restaurant, copy that. Wow, I do believe you two have the dubious honor of being the deepest manned penetration of the Titanic ever. Exercise extreme caution and stay in touch. I’ll let you get back to concentrating, over.”

Jayden signed off the radio and then Carter pointed to the upper right of the restaurant’s far wall, where the spotlight illuminated an irregularity. “I think we’ve got a small break there that we might be able to squeeze through.”

Jayden appeared concerned. “Squeezing is not really something subs are good at, but okay, let’s check it out. I’ll move us in for a closer look.”

He deftly adjust the thrusters so that the sub rose higher in the room while approaching the spotlighted area of wall, high up towards the ceiling. A startled fish — a large one of some unknown type, dark in color — slithered out of the floodlights along the bottom of the room as the sub neared the wall. Another skeleton made Jayden look away and focus even harder than he needed to on maneuvering the sub. It was creepy down here, he couldn’t deny it. Miles down in the freezing, dark ocean, inside a historic tomb… His mind flashed on sunny, tropical beaches and splashing in the ocean with a beautiful woman…

“Watch it, watch, Jayden!” Carter’s voice snapped him from his daydream. “Wall coming up!”

“Sorry!” He reversed on the horizontal thrusters and the submersible backed off an instant before it would have collided softly with the wall. Even at low speeds, however, the sub weighed three tons and had a lot of power behind it once put into motion. As it was, a puff of silt billowed away from the wall, high up near the ceiling. Carter gave a sigh of frustration.

“Visibility’s clouded near our opening. We’re going to have to wait it out for a couple of minutes. How’s our vitals?”

Jayden put the sub into a hover, floating there as if in space, high up near the ceiling. He took a deep breath and exhaled while he eyed the console gauges. “Everything looks good. Time to check in with Topside.”

By the time he finished the routine radio check with the support ship, the water had cleared enough for them to be able to see over the top of the wall, where an irregular rift presented itself between the wall and ceiling. ‘”Man, that is really a tight fit. I’m not sure I can pilot us through that,” Jayden said, eyeing the possible passage dubiously.

Carter’s gaze lit on one of the sub’s controls. “What if we use the grab arm to peel back some of that twisted metal up there — create a bigger opening for ourselves?”

“You crazy? Never mind that, I know you are. But it just might work. Or it could bring the entire ceiling down on us and trap us forever. Your call,” he said, turning the tables on Carter from back when he gave him the go-no-go decision on the elevator shaft.

“I’m for it if you are,” Carter said without hesitation. “You’re the pilot, so you have to be comfortable, though. I don’t want to do it if you don’t, that’s the bottom line.”

Jayden considered this for a moment while staring up at the ceiling before replying. “I think it’ll work. If it doesn’t budge at all after the first grab arm pull, we stop. If too much of the wall or ceiling starts to come down too fast, we stop and hope it’s not too late.”

“You hold the sub in place while I operate the grab arm, right?” Carter clarified.

“Right.” Jayden had confidence in Carter’s abilities on a sub. He had seen him operate a grab arm successfully before during a critical mission, and had no qualms about letting him do it now. “Just don’t ask to drive this thing.”

Carter smiled. “I won’t. Let me check the arm before we get up near the ceiling. Carter grabbed the joystick that operated the external grab arm, and tested its controls, first extending the arm, then swiveling it back and forth, rotating the finger-like hand grips. Finally, he closed and opened the hand grips. Satisfied all was in working order and that he was prepared, he nodded to Jayden. “Ready when you are.”

Jayden took the sub up to the tear between wall and ceiling and stabilized the craft until it hung motionless, poised next to the jagged window into the next room. Carter operated the spotlight to get a look into the adjacent space. “It’s a big room in there,” he said. “Not as huge as this one, but definitely big enough to maneuver in. I see a couch, some chairs… Ah, there’s an ashtray! It’s the Smoking Room.”

“Let’s give it a go, then,” Jayden said.

Carter put his hand on the grab arm control and extended the mechanical arm, which was situated on the right front of the craft, until its claw hand was adjacent to the curl of metal coming down from the wall. He opened the claw and then adjusted its position until it was open in front of the piece of metal.

“How much more room do we need, if I can pull it down some?” Carter asked.

“Two more feet would make me feel a whole lot better about this.”

“Here goes.” Carter closed the claw around the metal sheeting and tightened the grip all the way down. Then he pressed one of the buttons on the arm’s directional pad, and the arm pulled back and downward — three separate joints working together — two arm sections plus the hand.

They couldn’t hear anything outside the sub — the acrylic and steel of its construction was too thick — so Carter had to depend on sight alone to gauge whether it was working. At first he saw no movement of the metal, so he gave the arm control a couple more bursts, attempting to pull the metal down with the claw. Still nothing. Then he held the pad down, telling the arm to constantly pull down, and he saw a piece of metal about ten feet long, five on either side of the grab claw, peel back from the ceiling a couple of feet.

“It’s working!” he said to Jayden. “We need to move to the left maybe five feet and repeat the process.” Jayden adjusted the sub’s position accordingly and Carter again utilized the grab arm to pull back the loose wall sheeting until there was a larger opening. Jayden backed the sub away a few feet and examined the newly enlarged opening with a critical pilot’s eye.

“I think it’s big enough now. You aim the spotlight ahead, I’ll drive us through nose first.”

Carter complied with his pilot’s instruction as the sub crept back toward the enlarged opening, this time at a different angle of approach. “Watch my ceiling clearance,” Jayden said. Carter glanced up through the dome above them. “You’ve got a good couple of feet until we get to the opening, where you’ll have to come down about a foot.”

“Okay, here goes.” Jayden bumped the thruster control and the submersible sliced through the water toward the rift in the wall. Carter inspected the opening with the spotlight, and the area in the new room immediately beyond. Seeing nothing in the way of immediate obstacles, he told Jayden the path was clear for him to proceed.

Jayden’s face was a mask of determination as he guided the craft that was keeping them alive through the narrow aperture in the wall and ceiling. Carter swept the spotlight up on the ceiling of the new room.

“As soon as the stern clears you’re going to have to angle the nose down so we don’t hit the ceiling.”

“Got it.” Jayden’s hands were poised over the controls while his gaze flicked back and forth between the ceiling of the new room and the side of the opening the sub was passing through. The nose of the sub just barely came into contact with the ceiling about ten feet into the Smoking Room when the actions Jayden took a few seconds earlier took effect, sending the sub’s nose down at an angle into the center of the watery space. Carter spun around in his seat to watch the tail section of their craft to make sure it would clear the opening.

“You’re right on target back there,” he told Carter. “Hold it steady.”

“That’s what she said.”

“Seriously?” Carter shook his head but couldn’t stifle a laugh. He knew from their experiences in the Navy that Jayden would find a way to crack a joke even during the most stressful times.

“I got this.” Jayden continued concentrating until the craft was well clear of the opening. Then he put it into a controlled hover, sat back in his seat and exhaled. The radio crackled.

“Topside to Deep Voyager: how we doing down there, over?”

Jayden picked up the radio transmitter. “We’re in the Smoking Lounge, taking a break, you know, having a couple of cigars and some coffee, over.” Carter shook his head while the radio reply from Johnny came back.

“You’re worrying me, Jayden. You are seriously deep inside that wreck. How are your systems, over?”

Jayden’s gaze flicked over his controls for a few seconds before replying. “All systems go, Topside. Battery power and oxygen levels where they should be for this point in the dive, over.”

“Reminder to exercise extreme caution. We’ll let you get back to it. Holler if you need anything, over and out.”

Carter pointed forward out into the room. “The good thing about this place is that I think we actually have a straight shot into a hallway, which leads to…”

“The Purser’s Room. Let’s go.” Jayden activated the sub’s thrusters and they glided across the Smoking Lounge, passing over furniture that remarkably still had some upholstery on it. Sadly, Carter pointed out another skeleton underneath an upturned circular table in a corner of the room. As they neared the far end of the rectangular room, Carter illuminated the exit, which fortunately was wide enough for the sub to pass through and featured no door.

Carter examined the diagram while Jayden brought the sub up to the room exit. “Once we’re in the hallway, it should be the second room on the left.”

Jayden allowed the sub to decelerate as it coasted up to the hallway entrance. “Plenty of room over here. How am I for clearance on your side?” he asked, while looking left out of his side.

“Good on this side as well,” Carter said. He aimed the spotlight ahead into the hallway. “At least it’s not going to be a real tight fit in there. Still, I’m not sure how the turn into a room is going to go.”

“Only one way to find out.” Jayden brought the sub forward into the hallway. They passed a room on the right with a partially crumbled doorway leading into a room of complete ruin, twisted wreckage everywhere. Then on the left, a room with an open door offering a view of machinery of some sort. “Next one on the left should be it,” Carter said.

Jayden continued to push the sub forward until they saw the doorway of what should be the Purser’s Room. “Uh-oh,” Carter said, “Problem.”

“Yeah. How are we going to get in there?” Jayden brought the sub to a hover in front of the room.

The set of double doors was closed.