Deep Fire Rising

THE PACIFIC NORTH OF GUAM

The eruption of methane hydrate gas continued into its tenth minute. Despite Alan Jervis’s expertise and coaxing, Bob still remained negatively buoyant and sank ever deeper. Even out of the direct path of the gas plume, the water barely maintained enough density to keep the submersible from plummeting like a stone.

“We have to drop the rest of the ballast,” the pilot said grimly. Once they did, there would be no reserves. It was a make-or-break maneuver, and if C.W. got into trouble, they wouldn’t be able to come to his aid.

“What’s our rate of descent?”

“Almost a hundred feet a minute and accelerating.”

“And our distance to the bottom?”

“Two hundred eighty feet.”

“Can we survive the impact?”

“I don’t know. It depends on bottom consistency. If we hit rock, we’re finished. If we hit silt, maybe we’d be okay, but there’s a chance we might get stuck.”

“It’s your call,” Mercer said. “You know your boat, but if you dump the last iron plates, C.W. is as good as dead.”

Jervis was quiet for a moment, watching his dials. “Rate’s slowing. Eighty feet a minute. Damn. Okay, we’ll ride it out.”

“Provided we survive the impact, what’s the best attitude to prevent us from getting stuck?”

“Optimist?”

Mercer smiled around his anxiety. “Always.”

“Landing on our belly is standard procedure, but I’ve had a theory that if we hit on the bow at an angle, the sub would tip slowly and wrench the nose out of the mud. ’Course, if there’s something on the bottom, a boulder, for example, we’d crack the dome.”

“We’d never know until it was too late so let’s give it a try. I’ll extend the manipulator arms to cushion the blow.”

“Blow? Why didn’t I think of that? Mercer, you’re a genius. There are lifting bags kept in a storage tray under the manipulators. They’re filled by releasing high-pressure CO₂ from a cylinder. We use them to haul artifacts and samples to the surface while we remain below. They’re not large enough to provide any buoyancy for us and they won’t inflate even halfway at this depth, but they will act like air bags to protect the bubble.”

“Tell me what to do.”

Jervis talked Mercer through the necessary steps. Mercer’s hands were sure on the manipulator controls — tension made him forget all about the chill in the little sub. He tried not to think about the pressure either — not the psychological stress, but the tons of water pressing against the craft’s steel shell. At sea level there were fourteen pounds per square inch. That doubled at thirty-three feet, tripled at sixty-six. Quadrupled at… He forced himself not to run the numbers in his head.

“Six hundred fifty psi,” he muttered without realizing he’d done the calculations.

He’d swiveled an exterior closed-circuit video camera so he could see the equipment tray under the sub’s nose and eased one of the pincers into position to grab a deflated lift bag. It came out smoothly. The yellow balloon was neatly folded into a tight bundle. Attached to it were large clips for securing it to mesh baskets also stored in the tray. The gas cylinder was a foot long and had a lanyard that could be easily grasped with the other manipulator.

“What’s our depth?” he asked.

“Don’t worry,” Alan replied. “You’ve got time. Nice and steady now. I’m about to put us on our nose.

He used attitude thrusters to raise the stern. Mercer was forced to brace his knees against a console to keep from sliding out of his seat.

“Okay, pull the cord.”

Because of the gas still boiling out of the earth, the lanyard flapped like a pennant in a high wind. Mercer missed grabbing it with the left set of pincers on his first two tries and finally got it on the third. Next, he gently pulled the cord. They couldn’t hear the gas release into the balloon, but they saw it begin to expand, swelling slowly as the CO₂ pushed against the crushing pressure of water. After a moment, it had filled as far as it would, about a quarter of its six-foot diameter. They wouldn’t know if it offered enough protection until the sub hit the bottom.

“Forty feet. Our descent’s still slowing.”

Mercer maneuvered the arm so the half-inflated bag was in front of the Lexan view port. It blocked most of his view, which in a way wasn’t a bad thing.

“Twenty feet.” The roar of erupting methane hydrate faded as the pocket of gas was depleted.

“Ten feet.”

Mercer willed his body to go slack. Either they would survive the impact or they’d be crushed instantly. He thought about the wall of water that had chased him through the DS-Two mine shaft. If the Lexan shattered, at least this time he’d never see it coming.

“Two feet.”

At the last second, a corner of the lifting bag folded on itself. Through the turbid silt Mercer saw the bottom was flat and blessedly free of rock. The sub hit. A cloud of mud billowed from the seafloor, enveloping the small craft. Bob shuddered at the impact. A clipboard and a thermos clattered past Mercer and fell to the Lexan bubble. The sub continued to settle, but her stern refused to drop from its near vertical position.

“Come on, Bob,” Alan whispered. “Fall, damn you, fall.”

Her nose appeared buried. The impact had driven her too deep into the mud for her to right herself. Alan fought with the thrusters trying to get Bob to move, but nothing worked. He even dumped the last ballast plate, but at their angle, the chuck of pig iron wouldn’t slip free. They’d gambled and lost, and rather than the quick death of an implosion, they were now trapped fifteen hundred feet from the surface facing the long agony of asphyxiation.

Jervis began to hyperventilate. “What are we going to do?”

“Stay calm,” Mercer said. “I’ve got an idea.”

“I know what you’re thinking. Forget it,” Alan panted. “The manipulators aren’t strong enough to lift the sub clear. They won’t even move.”

Mercer ignored the dire prediction and tried anyway. But Jervis was right. Neither of the two manipulator arms would budge, trapped as they were between the bottom and the sub. He had only a little movement on the wrist actuator on the arm holding the lifting bag.

With the submersible pointed straight at the bottom, Mercer couldn’t even lean back in his chair to rethink the situation. Above him in the pilot’s seat, Alan used the thrusters to try to rock the sub free, slamming the lateral controls from lock to lock. His efforts did nothing but drain their precious battery reserves. After three fruitless minutes he gave up and shut down everything but the atmosphere scrubbers. He punched a console several times and kicked at another before jamming his knees against the back of Mercer’s seat and sitting quietly. Mercer was thankful for the silence.

All but a tiny crescent wedge at the top of the Lexan dome was buried in silt, affording a narrow view of the black ocean beyond. Closer in, Mercer could see the half-inflated lifting bag wedged between Bob and the seafloor and the mechanical pincer still holding it tight. To the right of the bow, a single exterior lamp cast a sullen glow through the mud, like a flashlight through thick burlap. And then it faded as its circuit closed and the darkness became complete. A drop of condensation fell from the back of the sub and hit Mercer’s ear. His heart tripped.

A few minutes later Alan asked, “Do you have a family?”

“No,” Mercer said, knowing where this conversation was heading and not wanting any part of it.

“I’ve got two kids. They live with their mother. She left about six years ago. Said she couldn’t stand me being away so much. She married her divorce lawyer about a year after she left me.” He chuckled without humor. “I found out later they’d been together since before we split. But my kids are something else. Two girls. Twelve and eight. Karen is the captain of her soccer team and Ashley’s learning to play the violin. She can—”

Mercer cut him off. “Alan, stop it. I know what you’re doing and this isn’t the time. We’re not dead yet.”

“What’s the difference? Now or hours from now when the air becomes unbreathable, we’re just as dead. And if you don’t want to hear me talk about my kids, well, tough shit. I was about to say that Ashley can already play ‘Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star.’ ”

“If you’ll stop talking and give me a second I think I might have an idea.”

“What?”

“I said I think I have an idea of how to get us out of here. Can you turn on that outside light again.”

“Okay. Give me a second.” Jervis powered up the sub’s systems again. Consoles and display panels came alive. A moment later, Mercer saw the umber light diffused through the silt.

“It’s like I remember. The air bag is trapped between us and the seafloor. It’s only half inflated, but if I release what little air’s in it, we should have a moment when the sub is unstable again.”

“What do you need me to do?” Alan’s professional tone had returned.

“The bag is sitting left of center. When I cut it I want you to hit the right-hand thrusters with everything they’ve got. With any luck, Bob will tip to the right enough to free us.”

“Tell me when.”

Mercer used the manipulator controls to open the pincer. Pressure forced the bag to shift and slide between the steel fingers. “Okay. Hit it.”

The thrusters wound up to their maximum setting. The hull vibrated but remained stuck in the ooze. Mercer jammed the pincer closed. The serrated edges clamped tight onto the bag and he managed to twist the wrist a few degrees. The teeth bit into the rubber, tearing at it until the bag split. The gust of CO₂ spewed from the cut like champagne from a shaken bottle. The sub pitched slightly, just enough to break the vacuum seal it had formed with the silt. Slowly, slowly, the bow began to slide free of the mud as the stern dropped to the right. Silt oozed across the Lexan dome to settle once again on the seafloor.

“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 sound 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.