Atlantis Gold

Chapter 1

Carter Hunt turned a skeptical gaze from behind blue polarized sunglasses to the submersible craft bobbing in the water next to the work barge. A two-person affair with an acrylic dome propped open, looking at it now didn’t exactly fill him with confidence.

“You sure this contraption keeps water out?”

Hunt’s friend, Jayden Takada, stepped up to the rail next to Hunt. “As long as we remember to close the hatch, we’ll stay dry, I promise. Over a thousand dives in these things and the only time I’ve gotten wet is when I spilled my beer.”

“You really have found a way to stay busy after life in the navy, haven’t you?”

Jayden grinned broadly. “Kidding about the beer,” he said, casting a glance about the deck to make sure no one overheard that and took it seriously. “But really, being a submersible pilot’s a good job if you have to work. Not all of us had a rich grandfather who left us a fortune. This is a vacation for you, trust fund baby, but I’ve got a job to do here first before I can have some fun.”

Hunt laughed good-naturedly at the jab. After serving alongside each other in the U.S. Navy for ten years, the two friends could get away with that kind of ribbing. Hunt couldn’t deny Jayden’s point, however. At the age of thirty-two, the ten-year veteran, eight of which were spent as a commissioned officer, suddenly found himself with a whole lot of free time stretching out in front of him. Instead of re-upping after ten years as was expected, he left the service in good standing, disillusioned with some of what he had seen. This action was made possible due to his grandfather’s sudden passing and leaving him a sizable inheritance, a fortune by most people’s standards.

Hunt didn’t intend to idle away his life in a haze of mindless leisure, though. He just didn’t know exactly what he was going to do yet. This trip to Egypt to visit Jayden was intended to be the tail end of his break after leaving the military. When he got back home to the states he was going to set his mind to starting a business of some kind that would help others while allowing him to stay productive. With a college degree in history, he wasn’t sure exactly what that would entail, but in the navy he’d been involved with safeguarding artifacts and historical treasures that had been looted during times of civil upheaval. He had been disgusted at how museums in Iraq and other middle eastern locations had been ransacked of their cultural artifacts. It saddened him that people would place their own interests above others, that they would deprive everyone of being able to see their cultural heritage in order to make a quick buck.

Hunt clapped Jayden on the back. “So, you have room for one more in that thing?”

Jayden nodded. “It’s a two-seater and I don’t need any technical specialists on this dive, so I can take you along as ballast.”

“I knew I was good for something. Run the objective by me again?”

Jayden pointed to the coast of Egypt in the distance, where a city skyline and suburban sprawl were visible on the shoreline. “There’s been a disruption of Internet service, and they suspect it has to do with the submarine cable a couple of thousand feet down here.” He looked down into the water beneath the floating submersible. “So we’re just going to dive down there and take a look, see if we can find a break in the cable.”

Hunt grinned. “Sounds like fun!”

“Remember, Carter, this sub isn’t mine — it’s owned by International Telecom, the ones who contracted me to investigate the cable problem.”

“Okay, so?”

“So don’t mess it up. Don’t touch anything — I mean anything—without asking first. Heads up, here comes the hatch.”

Hunt looked up in time to see a crew member lowering the clear plastic dome onto the sub. He felt a slight pressure in his ears as the latches were fastened in place. “Don’t worry, old friend, the last time I touched a control I wasn’t sure about—“

“Yeah, the C130 over Tikrit. Don’t remind me, okay? The guys were pissed at you for weeks after that, and I told you not to—“

Jayden was interrupted by a voice coming over the sub’s radio speaker. “Topside to Deep Challenger, do you copy, over?”

Hunt eyed Jayden as Hunt moved his hand halfway to the receiver, as if asking permission to pick it up. Jayden shook his head and grabbed it himself. “Topside, this is Deep Challenger, we read you loud and clear. Standing by for the drop, over.”

“Roger that. Support divers are in the water now.”

Outside the dome window, a pair of scuba divers waved at Jayden and Hunt. Each swam up to the submersible and unclipped the lines that tethered it to the ship. They gave Jayden an okay sign, thumb and forefinger in a circle, indicating they were clear to begin their dive.

“Here we go, Carter.” Jayden then flipped a switch on the control panel and they heard the hiss of air escaping. “Don’t worry, it’s just the air bladders in the buoyancy tubes.” Water sluiced over the acrylic bubble dome as the craft lowered itself into the sea.

“Gravity will take us down until we get near the bottom,” Jayden explained to Hunt as they sank below the waves. The pair of support divers stayed with them until they reached a depth of 100 feet, then they waved goodbye and began their slow ascent back to the ship while the sub continued on its way down into the ocean depths.

“Only nineteen hundred feet to go,” Hunt said. “You got an in-flight movie in this thing?”

“Even better.” Jayden pointed out the front of the window, where a large sea turtle glided past, chasing a school of silvery fish. The two friends passed the next few minutes in silence while they drifted deeper into the sea. The surrounding light changed color, the reds and yellows filtering out first, until gradually only blue was left, then even that faded to black around the 1,000-foot mark.

Jayden flipped on the sub’s external halogen lights and the powerful beams stabbed through the inky darkness. Tiny particles floated in the light, and there was less life down here; no more large schools of fish or large animals. Still, there was life. A jellyfish with long, flowing tentacles drifted past them. Soon after that the brown mud of the sea bottom came into view.

“If you were wondering what the bottom of the Mediterranean looked like at 2,000 feet, now you know.” Jayden gripped a joystick to level the sub out just above the bottom.

“Pretty boring,” Hunt said, looking out to his right.

“Good thing we’re not here for sightseeing, then, “ Jayden said, activating the sub’s thrusters to glide over the bottom. “We’ve got a submarine cable to inspect, but first we’ve got to find it. Should be right around here somewhere, the ship is anchored over the spot.”

Hunt pointed off to his right. “I see something over there.” Jayden looked over and nodded. A section of black pipe was visible on the bottom of the ocean, stretching out of sight in both directions.

“That’s it, all right.” He guided the sub over to it, until they hovered directly over the pipe.

“I don’t see anything wrong with it,” Hunt said.

“Based on where the signal loss is happening, we know there’s about a two-mile section where some kind of malfunction occurred. We just need a direction to go in first. Right or left?”

Hunt looked both ways before answering. “Water clarity looks a little crappier off to the right, so maybe we should try that way first. It could mean something happened to disturb the sediments on the bottom.”

“I knew there was a reason to bring you along.” Jayden picked up the radio transmitter. “Deep Challenger to Topside: “We’re at the pipe almost directly underneath the ship. It looks fine right here, so we’re going to head along the pipe to the northeast and take a look, over.”

The radio reply was immediate. “Copy that, Deep Challenger. We’re standing by if you need us.”

Jayden eyed his intended course along the pipe for a moment before putting his hands into motion on the controls. The submersible followed the pipe about five feet above it. In addition to Jayden and Hunt watching from the sub, cameras mounted outside the sub provided a live video feed to the ship’s control room, so that even more eyeballs were on the pipe.

Hunt watched the black metal tube pass by beneath them. “So the pipe is just the outer covering, and the actual cables are inside that, right?”

“That’s correct,” Jayden said. “Fiber optics. The metal pipe is just to protect them from the elements.”

“Or maybe a curious shark that has the munchies.”

“That too.”

They continued to follow the cable pipe as it snaked off into the gloom. Occasionally a crab or small fish would scuttle out from beneath the pipe, but mostly they saw a hard-packed mud bottom. The electric whir of the sub’s thrusters was the only sound while the two men concentrated on visually scouring the pipe for breaks or anomalies. As they progressed, the water grew increasingly cloudy, but they were still able to see the pipe as long as Jayden slowed the sub to stay close to it.

Jayden was about to suggest they turn around and try in the other direction when Hunt tapped on the bubble dome in front of him. “Hold up, got something here.”

“Hold up?”

“Yeah, careful, it’s real silted up, but there’s something different going on there.”

Jayden slowed the sub to a crawl, inching them toward the anomaly. Clouds of brown silt swirled around their little craft as they crept along the bottom, just over the pipe.

“Right there, see that?” Hunt pointed into the gloom in front of them. Jayden put the craft into a hover and looked out along the pipe.

“There’s the break! What happened to that thing?”

Hunt shook his head as he looked at the mangled section of pipe. A section was completely missing, but they couldn’t see how much because the water wasn’t clear enough. Bits of metal lay on the seafloor nearby, and a protruding snarl of cabling was visible from the wrecked end of the pipe they could see. “No shark did that.”

Jayden picked up the radio transmitter and informed the ship that they had located a break and were conducting an inspection.

“Let’s see if we can find the other side of the pipe, see how much has been taken out,” Hunt suggested. Jayden agreed and put the sub’s forward thrusters into low power so as not to stir up the silt on the bottom and reduce their visibility even further. They passed over the broken end of pipe and then scuttled over the muddy bottom, looking for the pipe’s other end.

After a couple of minutes, they had still not found it. “I hope we haven’t drifted off of the pipeline,” Jayden said. Hunt pointed to the compass on the instrument console. “No, you’re good. I took note of our heading. Stay on 210 degrees and we should hit the other side of that pipe.”

Jayden looked over at his acting co-pilot. “Once again, Carter, you’re proving yourself worthy of that seat. Will miracles never—”

“Whoa! Right there!”

Jayden turned off the thrusters, putting the sub into a controlled hover. “What is it?” Unlike Hunt, who had no piloting duties to occupy his attention, Jayden’s focus was divided between driving the sub and also looking at what was outside. But before Hunt could answer, the radio crackled on the sub’s console.

“Topside to Deep Challenger: we have a visual on the other end of pipe. Almost an eighth of a mile of destroyed cable….”

The radio operator continued to transmit, but Hunt pointed ahead, to where the other side of the pipe lay in ruin. “Jayden. Hey Jayden, we’ve got something up here that I don’t like the looks of. Out to the right from the pipe. Be careful, slow down!”

Jayden looked out at the mangled pipe, then to the right on the mud plain, he saw what Hunt was talking about. “What is that?” Even as he asked the question, the sub pilot put the craft into reverse.

At the same time the radio chatter grew more urgent, with the topside crew also commenting on the object Hunt had pointed out, the speculation running rampant.

“Shipping container that fell overboard off a cargo ship and knocked out the pipe?”

“Is it a repeater or some kind of infrastructure? Where’s our rep from Telecom? Get her on the horn.”

But Hunt shook his head, his simple sentence drowning out all of Jayden’s other thoughts the moment it reached his ears. “It’s C4.”

Jayden’s hands froze on the controls as he stared at the boxy, gray object. “What?”

“I think it’s a block of C4 that didn’t trigger for some reason when the rest of it took out this pipe. Look at the blast pattern. This didn’t happen from some kind of natural wave action or even a subsea earthquake. Certainly not an animal, even a very large one. This pipe was blasted apart, and for whatever reason, those bricks there were never triggered.”

The radio boomed again with the voice of a topside crewman. “Jayden, we need some better images of that breakage. Can you get closer? The footage you got of the other end is good, we know what needs to be done there, but now we need to see how we’re going to fix this side of things.”

Hunt shook his head slowly back and forth, not liking the proximity to the explosives.

Jayden eyeballed the distance from the C4 to the pipe and then spoke into his transmitter. “A little bit, but not much. Little bit of a tricky cross-current down here, but I’ll see what I can do, over.”

Hunt looked over at Jayden. “Be careful. We don’t need to bump into that C4 and maybe nudge the trigger the rest of the way.”

Jayden got an odd look on his face and then picked up the radio transmitter again. “Topside, who would put C4 down here, anyway? Was that left over from of the installation process?”

There was a few second delay before a reply came back from a senior crewman. “It was not part of the installation. We don’t know where it came from. Proceed with extreme caution, over.”

Jayden put his hand back on the joystick and inched the stick forward. The sub inched toward the broken pipe. When he eased back on the thruster, the sub would drift immediately with the current toward the stack of C4.

“Watch it, watch it!” Hunt warned.

Perspiration rolled down Jayden’s forehead despite the cool temperature in the sub’s cabin. His hands worked the controls as the sub neared the shattered pipe that spewed severed cables out of its end.

“Just a little closer should do it,” came the crewman over the radio, indicating that the video feed was not quite clear and close enough.

But Hunt shook his head as the sub started to wobble, buffeted by currents. “I don’t like it, Jayden. We don’t want to bump that thing.”

“Right. We’re outta here.” Jayden accelerated the sub while turning left, hoping to bring them closer to the broken pipe as they passed by it in a wide U-turn that would take them away from the C4. But as he swung into the turn, the voice on the radio telling them the video was great quality, a sudden downwelling of water slammed them into the bottom. As soon as they hit, billowing clouds of mud were stirred up into the water by the sub, even though Jayden turned off the thrusters so as not to make it worse.

They flipped over and around before coming to rest in a total brownout.

“Not sure which way to go!” Jayden watched the compass spin wildly from the craft’s gyrations.

“Take us straight up,” Hunt advised.

Nodding, Jayden hit the button that activated the sub’s airbags, one in each side pontoon, for sudden lift. But as he did, the sub was hit by a cross-current that turned it sideways, rocketing into the block of C4.

Hunt’s warning was drowned out by the dull boom of the detonation.

The sub’s floodlights suddenly went dark. Two seconds after that, the control panel indicator lights also blinked out. Hunt and Jayden both braced themselves by gripping the frames of their seats.

“We’ve lost power! I’ve got no control,” Jayden yelled.

“Let’s hope those airbags stay inflated and we’re rising.” Hunt squinted out the dome into the swirling blackness. He couldn’t tell which way was up. All they could do was to sit and wait.

“Spam in a can,” Hunt said.

“What?”

“We’re like spam in a can right now. It’s what test pilot Chuck Yeager said about the first astronaut to orbit the Earth. That he wasn’t a real pilot, just meat in a can.”

“Thanks, Carter.”

“Hey, you know what else pilots say?”

“I’m afraid to ask.”

“Any landing you can walk away from is a good one.”

“We’ll find out soon enough. Because if this can plops back to the bottom…” He left the sobering thought unfinished. To be powerless 2,000 feet down without even a communications link to the ship would mean a slow death by suffocation as their oxygen ran out.

But Hunt’s next words buoyed their spirits. “It’s getting lighter.”

Indeed, looking at what they now knew to be up, through the dome, they could see the barest lightening of the water, meaning they were looking towards the distant sun. It meant that the buoyancy airbags were doing their job, lifting the sub through the water toward the surface. The ride seemed to take forever, but gradually it grew brighter and brighter until it was obviously daylight, meaning they were definitely rocketing towards the surface.

A few minutes later the powerless submersible was close enough to the surface for Hunt to make out the underside of their support vessel. It occurred to him that should they come up directly beneath it, striking it, there would be nothing they could do. Without power, they had no steering, nor could they communicate with the ship to tell them to move it out of the way. But they came up almost a football field away from it, bobbing like a cork in the sunny Mediterranean. It had become stiflingly hot in the cabin and Jayden and Hunt wasted no time in popping the hatch to rejoice in the cool sea breeze. Upon spotting the bright yellow vessel, the ship’s crew deployed a tender vessel to retrieve the submersible and its crew. Knowing they had been out of contact, they wasted no time reaching them.

As the sub was tied to the tender, Jayden and Hunt were helped into the support boat. One of the boat crewman remarked how they’d seen the video feed of the broken pipe before it was disrupted. “Big section of pipe missing. We’ve got our work cut out for us to replace it, but thanks to your surveillance, we know what to expect.”

Hunt agreed before adding, “I’ll say one thing. Taking out those cables was no accident. Somebody sure wanted to knock out communications between Egypt and the rest of the world.”