Atlantis: Bermuda Triangle

Chapter 9

Dane was impressed with the efficiency of the Glomar crew. They could snatch a new section of pipe off the wall of the pool, use a crane to pull it up to the top of the derrick, then two men would clip safety lines around the pipe itself and bolt it to the section below while the entire thing was moving down at a steady rate. Just before the pipe went into the water two other man clamped the power, oxygen and communications cables to the side of the pipe, continuously unreeling the cables while making sure there were no snags.

Two hours earlier, Deeplab IV had been attached at the bottom of the very first section of eighteen inch pipe. Lieutenant Sautran had waved once before disappearing into the hatch at the top of the central corridor. The hatch was screwed shut, final checks were made and Deeplab IV disappeared beneath the waves.

As the pipes continued to be connected and push Deeplab IV deeper and deeper, Dane noticing something strange- the thick pipe that extended down from the derrick, was moving up and down very slowly, independent of the ship. It was mesmerizing to watch.

Captain Stanton caught the look and explained. “It gets to you doesn’t it. We have to keep Deeplab stable- can’t have it bobbing like a cork on the end of the pipe. So we use an inertia dampener.” He pointed to where the pipe was clamped between several rollers. “The ship is what is actually moving with the swell- the pipe is staying perfectly still. You should see that when we get rough water. The hydraulics attached to those rollers can move the pipe over thirty feet vertically if necessary. What feels weird is that you think you’re standing still and its moving, but somewhere in your mind your body knows it’s moving.”

Dane’s attention was diverted as a large navy helicopter appeared on the southern horizon, something large slung load below it.

“Deepflight II is arriving,” Ariana said. She turned for the rear of the ship. “Let’s go check it out.”

Dane followed her and Sin Fen across the gantry and through the passageways until they reached the edge of the large helipad. By that time the chopper had arrived, hovering fifty feet above the deck. Dangling below, attached by two cables, was the deep sea submersible.

It was long and looked more like a plane with two bulging bubbles, one at the front and one in the middle, than a submarine. Several Glomar crewmembers ran out and insured the submersible touched down gently on the deck, then unhooked it. The helicopter moved away while they hooked Deepflight’s harness rig to the ship’s rear crane. It was lifted once more, and swung around the side of the ship. Dane and the others waited as the helicopter came back and settled down on the helipad. A man got off and the chopper lifted and was gone.

Ariana led the way to greet the new arrival, a young-looking man in a bright red jumpsuit. He was tall and well-built, with thick black hair. Besides the jump suit, he wore a New York Yankees baseball cap, bill back, on his head.

“Jimmy DeAngelo at your service,” he stuck his hand out to Dane, and then each woman as they introduced themselves to him.

All the while his eyes kept shifting to the submarine teetering in the air, following it until it disappeared into the well. “How soon are we going down?”

Dane glanced at Ariana who shrugged. “As soon as you’re ready to take us.”

DeAngelo nodded. “I’d say in forty-five minutes. I did all my checks prior to coming here, but I want to make sure all the handling hasn’t damaged anything.”

Three hundred and fifty feet below the lowest level of the Pentagon proper was the Joint Chiefs of Staff's National Military Command Center, commonly called the War Room by those who worked there. It had been placed inside a large cavern carved out of solid bedrock. The complex could only be entered via one secure elevator and was mounted on massive springs on the cavern floor. There was enough food and supplies in the War Room for an emergency crew to operate for a year. Besides the lines that went straight up to the Pentagon's own communications system, a narrow tunnel holding back-up cables had been laboriously dug at the same depth to the alternate National Command Post at Blue Mountain in West Virginia.

When it had been built in the early sixties, the War Room had been designed to survive a nuclear first strike. The advances in both targeting and warhead technology over the past three decades had made that design obsolete. There was no doubt in the minds of anyone who worked in the War Room that they were high on the list of Russian and Chinese nuclear targeting and that they would be vaporized atoms shortly after any nuclear exchange. Because of that, it had been turned into the operations center for the Pentagon.

The main room of the War Room was semi-circular. On the front, flat wall, there was a large imagery display board, over thirty feet wide by twenty high. Any projection or scene that could be piped into the War Room could be displayed on this board, from a video of a new weapons system, to a map of the world showing the current status of US forces, to a real-time downlink from an orbiting spy satellite.

The floor of the room was sloping from the rear to the front so that each row of computer and communication consoles could be overseen from the row behind. At the very back of the room, along the curved wall, a three foot high railing separated the command and control section where the Joint Chiefs and other high ranking officers had their desks. A conference table was off to the right side of that. Supply, kitchen and sleeping area were off the rear of the room, in a separate cavern. The War Room had had its first taste of action during the Gulf War when it had operated full-time, coordinating the multi-national forces in the Gulf.

Since the gates had activated, the War Room had been the central clearing point for all information regarding them. Foreman found that ironic given that for over fifty years he had been the voice that cried in the wilderness against the danger he saw posed by the gates. Of course, he had not known they were gates, or what the danger was for many of those years.

Foreman had been forced to use guile, deception and even blackmail at times to keep his small section in the covert ops section of the CIA alive. In the beginning it had not been so hard as he was one of the founding members in 1947. But as the years went on and the old guard retired or died, it had become more of a struggle.

Claiming that Earth was being invaded by a strange force through gates he could not explain had caused many doors to be shut in Foreman’s face and he had learned to use deception more often than the truth, especially given he didn’t know exactly what the truth was. As one of the founding members of the CIA Foreman was an expert in the covert world, able to manipulate government agencies and millions of dollars of black budget money to support his activities over the years.

The activation of the gates and the nuclear attack out of the Bermuda Triangle gate had been a double-edged event for Foreman. The threat had been real and disaster narrowly averted by Dane destroying the propagating Prang in Angkor Kol Ker. On the more positive side, Foreman was finally being taken seriously.

As he sat at one end of the War Room conference table, Foreman realized being taken seriously had its drawbacks. He was now part of the 'system’ and as such there were a lot of people asking a lot of questions and the information flow had increased very dramatically to the point where he wasn’t sure he was getting what he needed. And while he was expert at manipulating and operating in the gray covert world, Foreman knew he was not as adept at dealing with the massive bureaucracy of official Washington when it was brought to bear on a problem.

At the present moment, he was listening to the various services argue about the best way to stop a Trident if another was fired out of the Bermuda Triangle gate.

Half-listening to the military men argue, Foreman checked the computer display that was inset into the table in front of him. All seemed to be progressing well at the Glomar. Deeplab had passed through 10,000 feet.

On the other side of the world Professor Nagoya had been underground for over twenty-four hours. It simply consumed too much time to go back to the surface and all the work he needed to do could be done at the Super-Kamiokande control center. Ahana and the rest of the crew also remained there. Several bunks were attached to the wall in the outside corridor and each person snatched sleep when they absolutely couldn’t keep going any longer.

Several things were going on at once and since there was only one Can, each series of experiments and surveillance data gathering had to be perfectly planned so that when time was allocated, the task could be accomplished in the most efficient manner so that the next task could begin as quickly as possible.

Besides monitoring the Bermuda Triangle gate every fifth task, the scientists under Nagoya’s leadership were checking the other gates, trying to determine their exact configuration and whether they also had traces of muon activity extended outward in any form. Besides that, there was the basic research of trying to figure out what exactly the fact that the gates and gate-affected places outside of them gave off muon activity meant.

Nagoya believed that if he could figure out how the gates worked, he could figure out how to shut them.

The simple fact, which irritated Nagoya to no end, was that even though the gates emitted muons, the Can shouldn’t be able to pick them up. A muon had a life span of only 2.2 microns when measured in a reference frame that was at rest with respect to them. Even given that the Can wasn’t in rest- moving at the speed of Earth’s rotation- the life span of the muon wouldn’t be much longer even in relative terms. They should be able to travel only about 600 meters before decaying into something else.

Yet, here, thousands of miles away, the Can was able to trace out muon images from the Bermuda Triangle gate and other gates as they were scanned. Scientists Nagoya consulted with were struggling with issues like this that didn’t neatly fit into hard physics. Quantum and wave physics had begun to explain some of this strange data, and Nagoya felt the key to understanding the gates, the essence of them, was to understand the physics surrounding them.

Nagoya was studying the data they’d accumulated in just the past few days, comparing it to the little they knew about muons. He’d been one of the members of a team that in 1976 at the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva that had tried to determine why even muons that were caused by the sun’s rays hitting the atmosphere traveled further than their life span indicated they should. Muons were injected into a large ring, reaching speeds of.999 the speed of light. At the time the muons themselves could not be detected, but the electrons produced when the muons decayed could be and thus the distance and rate of travel of the muons prior to the decay could be deduced.

The first thing they discovered was that moving muons had a lifespan almost thirty times longer than stationery muons. The reason for that lay in time dilation according to the theory of relativity. Simply stated, time dilation meant that from a stationery observation point, a moving clock ran more slowly than an identical stationary clock.

That old data, combined with the new data Nagoya was now looking at, suggested several things to him. First he assumed that the gate-emitted muons were not a cause, but a by-product of some other action at the sub-atomic level. Second, whatever that action was, it was continuous as all the gates they were now checking showed muon emission.

The problem Nagoya faced was analyzing real data as opposed to data generated under the controlled condition of a laboratory- on top of the rather large problem of possibly dealing with a totally new world of physics from the other side’. He had to work his data while taking into account the Earth’s rotation, mass of the Earth between the Can and the target site, distances; the list went on and on to the point where Nagoya almost despaired of coming up with anything coherent.

Because of his strong background in research, Nagoya had slanted the use of the Can to gathering data than surveillance of the gates. Because of that, despite the fact that Foreman was launching a mission near the site, the Can oriented on the Bermuda Triangle gate only once every six tasks, meaning there could be over two hours between ‘peeks’.

The Can had just finished a peek at the Bermuda gate, noting nothing out of the ordinary. It moved on to a peek at the Russian gate under Lake Baikal to gather data. It would not reorient on the Bermuda Triangle area for two hours, six minutes and thirty-four seconds.

The rays of the sun are no longer visible to the unaided human eye deeper than 1,600 feet below the surface of any ocean. Even in the clean, blue water north of Puerto Rico, this law of the sea and evolution held true. Just over one quarter of a mile below the surface of the ocean, darkness ruled.

Humans, of course, have always found ways around the laws nature tries to impose on them.

During World War II, submarines went no deeper than 400 feet, well within the range of the sun’s rays, in what oceanographers called the sunlit zone, extending to 600 feet. Next was the twilight zone which went from 600 to 3000 feet. Then came the midnight zone, where darkness ruled.

Technology had come a long way since the diesel fueled submarines of the Second World War in allowing man to penetrate the ocean depths. Modern military submarines now could go down to 3,000 feet and remain submerged for months at a time. Exploration submersibles had been used to photograph the wreckage of the Titanic in over 12,500 feet of water. The Japanese had sent a remotely piloted vehicle to the very bottom of the Earth’s surface, the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean, at a depth of 10,911 meters or over 33,000 feet down. Deepflight was the cutting edge of the next generation of vehicles designed to explore the depths of the world’s oceans.

Dane was in the front sphere with DeAngelo while Sin Fen and Ariana had crawled into the rear one. There were no seats, but rather an inclined, padded frame on which Dane and the pilot lay stomach-down. Tethers went around their bodies, giving them some freedom but preventing them from hitting the walls around the couches.

The curved wall directly in front of their faces was a series of flat TV screens that showed the view outside. Other flat monitors gave instrument readings so DeAngelo could pilot the craft. Right now they were still on the surface of the ocean next to the Glomar.

Besides numerous gauges and displays surrounding his position, DeAngelo had two levers in front of him with a short bar between them. He turned to Dane.

“It’s really very easy. Each lever controls the propeller on that side. Pull back and that blade goes faster, pull back and slower. There’s a point right about here-” he pulled back both levers- “where the blade stops, then as you go further back it reverses direction, so if you want to pull a hard right turn, you max forward speed on your left, and max reverse on your right.

“You have to be careful though,” DeAngelo added. “Deepflight’s center of mass is determined by the computer. It’s checking right now and we’ll make trim as soon as we’re released. This thing turns on a dime. It doesn’t take much to flip her. Which is why you really need to make sure you tether in or drive very carefully.

“Then this center bar is ascent or descent. It controls the horizontal plane between the two propellers. Push forward and you go down. Pull back and you go up.”

“And what if we lose all power?” Dane asked.

DeAngelo pointed to his right to a red cover, about two inches square. He lifted it up. A keyhole was underneath. “Put the key in, turn it, and we drop enough weight that we will go up.”

“Who has the key?” Dane asked.

“It’s around my neck on a chain.”

“Can we talk to Ariana and Sin Fen in the rear sphere?”

DeAngelo flipped a switch. A view of the inside of the second sphere, Ariana and Sin Fen on their stomachs, looking up, appeared. Dane noted that there was a small camera above the screen that showed them, so he imagined they had the same view in reverse. DeAngelo handed Dane a headset and put one on himself.

“How are you ladies doing?” DeAngelo asked.

Ariana looked at them. “We’re fine.”

DeAngelo checked one of his displays. “We’re in the water, but still slaved to the ship. The divers will release us in a minute or so. I’ll get us trimmed, and then we’ll start heading down.

“Deepflight is the most advanced submersible in the word,” DeAngelo said as he checked instruments and threw switches. “It’s more like flying an underwater plane than the traditional concept of a submersible. We also have redundancy on every major system, so it’s extremely safe.”

Dane felt the absence of Chelsea very keenly. DeAngelo’s confidence did little to allay Dane’s concerns about the upcoming mission. The thought of being cooped up in a confined space- whether in the submersible or the habitat- he found less than appealing. After returning from Vietnam and before being found once more by Foreman, Dane had spent over twenty years working in search and rescue. He had an uncanny ability to sense out people who were trapped, whether it be inside of destroyed buildings or someone lost in the woods. The former had always been his least favorite missions while the latter what he lived for.

He’d been in many confined areas while crawling through the ruins of buildings, but always with Chelsea. She was supposed to be the search & rescue dog and find the bodies, but in reality it had been Dane’s uncanny mental sense that allowed him to find those still alive. He’d relied on Chelsea for emotional support to get him through those difficult rescues.

He tried to block out his growing anxiety by studying the information packet on Deeplab IV Lieutenant Sautran had given them before departing for the depths.

The habitat was configured in three pressure resistant modules connected by a center, vertical corridor. Each module was actually three pressure resistant spheres set inside the outer protective cylinder wall, so there were a total of nine spheres, each independent of the others as far as pressure integrity goes. The only way into each sphere was through a hatch oriented toward the main corridor. The bottom of the main corridor had a hatch in it, allowing access to the ocean and submersibles.

Total living space was about 4,000 square feet. which when Dane divided by 9, didn’t make him feel any better. And square was the wrong term to use as there seemed to be an obsession for round shapes in all the designs from habitat to submersible. Dane understood that was the best shape to handle the enormous pressures they would encounter but understanding didn’t necessarily entail happiness.

A new voice came through the headset- Captain Stanton. “Deeplab is in place at seventeen thousand feet. They report everything is working fine. You’re cleared to descend and link up.”

“Roger that,” DeAngelo said.

“Godspeed and good luck,” Stanton said. The cable link- their only means of communication, went dead as the divers on the outside disconnected it.

There was sudden movement.

“All right, we’re free,” DeAngelo hands were wrapped around the two levers. “What you’re feeling is the swell. That will be gone in a minute.” He let go of the right lever and pushed the center bar up. Dane felt out of balance, as if his head were lower than the rest of his body.

“We’re going down,” DeAngelo said. “I want to get clear of surface effect, then I’ll trim us out.”

A minute passed and the bobbing motion was gone. “OK,” DeAngelo said. “I’m getting us balanced.” He continued speaking as he worked. “The ship has several small ballast tanks placed around the hull. I’m shifting air to give us neutral buoyancy and also to balance us exactly, fore and aft.” He held a hand over the mike. “I could have done it by computer, but I’ve learned never to ask a lady their weight- it’s easier to do it manually.”

Dane glanced up at the screen showing the rear sphere. Sin Fen and Ariana were trying to get as comfortable as possible.

“Done,” DeAngelo said. “We’re heading down.” He pressed forward on the center bar, then pulled back on both levers, the right one further back than the left. “We’re going down in a half-mile left turn spiral.”

“How long until we’re there?” Dane asked. The only sound since they slipped under the surface of the water had been the hum of the engines and DeAngelo’s running commentary. At least there was none of the creaking and cracking noises Dane associated with going deep underwater, a legacy of too many World War II submarine movies.

“We’re going down at four hundred feet a minute,” DeAngelo said. “To get to seventeen thousand feet will take about forty-five minutes.”

“Have you been in the lab before?” Dane asked.

DeAngelo shook his head. “I didn’t even know something like Deeplab IV existed before Foreman lined all this up. The military must have kept it deep in the black.” He smiled. “No pun intended.”

“None taken,” Dane said. He studied the outside camera view relayed on the screens in front. The blue water quickly became dark green, then began fading to black.

“Lights on,” DeAngelo flipped a switch and a halo of light surrounded the sub. To Dane it felt as if they were suspended in a black void, with no sense of movement, totally cut off from the rest of the world.

“The pipe is off to our left,” DeAngelo said. “I’m going to spiral down around it, but keep it at a safe distance.”

On the surface above Deepflight, Captain Stanton was settled into his command chair, a large, deep leather seat bolted to the deck directly behind the helmsman station. There was the traditional wheel at the station, but more importantly, an extremely accurate ground positioning receiver currently getting input from five GPS satellites. Next to the GPR was a series of controls for the thrusters that kept the Glomar in position. They were run by computer, insuring that the large ship stayed within half a foot of the same spot on the surface of the ocean.

With the automated positioning system and the automated dampening system on the pipe there was little for those on board the Glomar to do other than wait. It was a situation Stanton was used to. He reached into the pocket on the side of his chair and pulled out a paperback. He had just opened it to the first page when his radar man broke the silence.

“Sir, I have a contact!”

Stanton put the book down. “Where?”

“Directly below. Depth twenty-seven thousand feet.”

Stanton stood and walked over to the radar console. “That can’t be.”

“It just appeared on-screen, sir.”

“What is it?”

“It doesn’t fit any known profile, sir. It’s big!”

“What about the profile we were given from the Scorpion?” Stanton asked. The thought of something six times the size of a Soviet Typhoon class sub staggered even the captain of a ship the size of the Glomar.

“It could be, sir. Matches up in size. It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before.”

“Where did it come from? How come you didn’t pick up something that big earlier?”

“I don’t know, sir. It just appeared.”

“What’s it doing?” Stanton asked as he went over to the communications array.

“Ascending, sir. Toward Deeplab.”

Stanton picked up the phone that linked the Glomar to Deeplab through the cable attached to the pipe. “How quickly?”

“Very fast, sir! Depth twenty thousand feet and rising!”

Stanton picked up the phone. “Deeplab, this is Glomar.”

The phone crackled with static. Stanton thought he heard something, a voice, but he couldn’t be sure. “Deeplab, this is Glomar,” he repeated.

“Eighteen thousand feet and rising!”

Stanton’s hand tightened on the phone. “Deeplab, this is Glomar.” He pointed a finger at his communication’s officer. “Get me Foreman.”

“Seventeen thousand feet. Holding.”

“Deeplab, this is Glomar.” The only sound in the receiver of the handset was static.

“I’ve got Foreman on SATCOM,” the com officer held out another phone.

Stanton paused as he grabbed the phone- the entire ship shook and there was a loud screeching sound from the derrick.

“We’re deeper now than the Titanic,” DeAngelo said.

“Is that supposed to cheer me up?” Dane asked. He shook his head, trying to ease a pounding in his left temple. “Sin Fen?” he said into the boom mike.

“Yes?”

Dane looked up at the screen displaying Ariana and Sin Fen. “How are you feeling?”

“My head hurts.”

“Mine too,” Dane said. “Something’s not right.”

DeAngelo scanned his gauges. “Everything’s reading correctly.”

“Not here,” Dane said.

“Deeplab,” Sin Fen said.

Dane nodded. “Something’s wrong.”

“Should I turn back?” DeAngelo asked.

Dane closed his eyes and was silent for a few seconds. “No. We keep going.”

“Get me Nagoya!” Foreman ordered. He turned back to the microphone that linked the War Room with the Glomar Explorer. “Status?”

“The contact is descending,” Captain Stanton’s voice echoed out of the speakers that lined the roof of the cavern. “Twenty thousand feet and going down as quickly as it came up.”

“Deeplab?” Foreman asked.

“Read-outs from the umbilical say everything is functioning fine but no one is answering the phone. It’s stable now.”

“Deepflight?”

“We have it on radar,” Stanton said. “Passing through fifteen thousand and still descending on the planned glide path.”

“There’s no way to communicate with it?” Foreman asked.

“No, sir,” Stanton replied.

An air force officer thrust a SATPhone at Foreman. “We have commo with Doctor Nagoya.”

Foreman took the phone. “Nagoya, what readings do you have in the Bermuda Triangle gate?”

“We’re not currently oriented toward the Bermuda Triangle,” Nagoya replied.

“Damn it!” Foreman slapped his hand against the top of the conference table. “I’ve got people down there. Reorient now!” He hit the off button for the phone as Captain Stanton’s voice echoed out of the speakers.

“Object is gone. It just blinked out at twenty-seven thousand feet.”

“What about Deeplab?” Foreman asked.

“Still there. Still no communication.”

“Nagoya,” Foreman yelled into the radio, “get me some readings!”

Deeplab reminded Dane of a hornet’s nest, hanging from a thin branch. The sub’s lights highlighted the lab against the surrounding dark ocean. A single lamp glowed where the pipe was bolted into the top of the lab.

“Shouldn’t there be more lights?” Dane asked.

“Why?” DeAngelo had brought them out of the spiral and was slowly approaching the habitat dead on. “They have no windows. They do have cameras and infrared imagers but there’s usually no need to have them on- what are they going to see at this depth any way?”

Dane glanced up at the screen showing the interior of the rear sphere. Sin Fen had her hands against the side of her head, eyes closed in concentration. Dane closed himself off to the space around him and opened his mind as Sin Fen had taught him.

The habitat was less than forty feet in front of them, DeAngelo going into a slight dive to come up under the central access.

“Something happened,” Dane said.

“What?” DeAngelo was concentrating on piloting, eyes shifting between the forward display and his radar which was counting down the feet between them and the habitat.

Dane opened his eyes. Sin Fen was staring at him in the screen. “Do you know?” Dane asked her.

“No.”

“What’s going on?” Ariana asked.

“I feel something very strange,” Dane said.

“Hold on,” DeAngelo warned as shifted the imager view to the top camera. They were directly below the habitat, the bottom hatch less than five feet away from the top of the forward sphere and closing. With a slight thud, they made contact and came to a halt.

“We’ll go in first,” DeAngelo said, “make sure it’s secure, then I’ll come back in, move forward, let you out, go back and anchor us in. I’m pressurizing the lock,” he added.

The difficulty of even the slightest maneuver or operation at deep pressure reminded Dane of the missions he had conducted in Special Forces in extreme cold weather environments. There every little task had to be thought out thoroughly before being attempted, and then it would take two to three time as long to conduct than it would in a more temperate zone. A mistake that would normally cause no more than a minor inconvenience could be fatal in such an environment.

“I’ve got a seal,” DeAngelo was reading his gauges.

For the first time since they were lowered into the water, he let go of the controls and turned onto his back, then sat up. He reached up and slid open a control panel on the side of the hatch.

“I confirm a seal,” DeAngelo said as a green light came on in the panel. He looked at Dane over his shoulder and smiled. “If we open this thing without a seal- well, we wouldn’t even know what killed us.”

Dane heard him, but he was concentrating, trying to get a feel for what lay above. When he had searched for people, Dane had always been able to pick up people’s auras, the projections from their conscious- and even at times, subconscious- minds. Now he was reading nothing other than a vague sense of shock and fear.

“Releasing secondary lock,” DeAngelo threw a switch.

Dane reached out to Sin Fen with his mind. He felt her presence and she reacted to his probe, confirming she was picking up the same disturbing impression from the habitat.

“Do we have a weapon on board?” Dane asked.

“A weapon?” DeAngelo was momentarily confused. “Why would we carry a weapon? You shoot a gun down here, it’s the opposite of shooting one in an airplane with a hundred times worse results. You puncture or even weaken the hull around us, we don’t depressurize, we pressurize, which means we implode. Besides, what do we need a weapon for?”

Dane shook his head. “Forget it.”

DeAngelo went back to his checklist. “Secondary lock disengaged. Equalizing pressure.” He hit a button.

Dane felt his ears pop.

“Primary lock disengaging.” DeAngelo hit a red button.

There was a solid thud sound as the locks in the hatch cycled back. DeAngelo unbuckled his harness and Dane did the same.

“Give me a hand,” DeAngelo was now on his knees, hands on the hatch handle. “Push.”

Dane did as instructed and with a slight hesitation, the hatch swung up into the lock. A splash of water came in, hitting both DeAngelo and Dane.

DeAngelo now used the handle as a step to get into the lock. Five feet above their heads was the bottom hatch for DeepLab IV.

“We’re here guys!” he yelled. He looked down. “They’ll open as soon as they’re sure we’re open and secure.”

Dane looked up. “No, they won’t.”

DeAngelo frowned. “Why not?”

“Because there’s no one alive in there.”