Deep Fire Rising

ABOARD THE PETROMAX ANGEL OFF LA PALMA

A deckhand approached hauling a small winch on wheels. Together he and Mercer slung a cradle under the nuclear bomb and lifted it from the MMU. The weapon swung and twisted on the end of the cable in a way that reminded Mercer of an obscene piñata. The absurdity of his observation brought a smile to his face.

“What’s so funny, Doctor?” the crewman asked.

“Just that it’s a good thing I don’t have a blindfold and a stick.”

They wheeled the bomb across the slick deck to the container at the stern of the service boat. The ashfall had smothered the waves so the ship sat as solidly as if she were in drydock. Fire hoses had been directed over the fantail to open a spot in the muck so the divers could be safely lowered into the sea. Gantry lights showed the pace of the ashfall was slowing, as was the rain. The sky had even brightened to a dull pewter.

Mercer passed his side of the winch dolly to another crewman to answer his vibrating phone. The signal was the clearest it had been since the eruption four hours ago.

“You must pull some serious weight with the president,” Ira said without preamble.

“What happened?”

“I’ve been trying to get through to tell you that he decided to wait until morning on the East Coast to make the announcement.”

“I doubt it was my influence,” Mercer said, overjoyed by the news. “Waiting until daylight to start the evacuation makes better sense than starting it at eleven o’clock at night.”

“Either way you have five hours. If you can set off that nuke and prevent the avalanche he won’t call for the evacuation. Has it arrived?”

“About two minutes ago. Good thinking using an MMU.”

“Thought you’d like that,” Ira said. “We’ll make sure that anyone on the western sides of the other islands will be above the surge line of any wave created when that bomb goes off. The navy is pushing out their quarantine zone. An Aegis cruiser is going to remain inside the cordon if you need it.”

“What about the North African coast?” Mercer asked, still amazed by the level of coordination even though he was at the center of it.

“Even more deserted than normal. The UN has done a good job there. Are the divers set to go?”

Just as Mercer didn’t need to know the details of the world reaction to the crisis, he wouldn’t bother Ira with the attack on Charlie Williams or how he would be making the dive. “Ready and willing.” Mercer didn’t know how to ask the next question. It wasn’t in his nature to question success, but he had to make plans. “Listen, Ira, I’d like you to do me a favor.”

“Name it.”

“If this doesn’t work and they call for a full evacuation I want you to look after Harry.”

“Already taken care of. He and Tiny have your car gassed and loaded, and a hotel reservation near Lynchburg, Tennessee.”

Their choice of destination was no surprise.

Lynchburg was the home of the Jack Daniel’s distillery. “Just make sure they leave.”

“I will but you shouldn’t worry. I think they’re going whether the president makes the announcement or not.”

That brought a smile to Mercer’s face. “Then tell him if his dog scratches my leather seats I’m going to reupholster them with his wrinkled hide.”

“You got it. I have to go, Mercer. Keep me posted.”

“I might be out of touch but I’ll make sure Jim McKenzie or Tisa are available.”

“Okay. Good luck.”

Mercer returned the phone to the pocket of the overalls he’d been given by Scott. Glass stood by his ADS talking with Spirit. “How’s C.W.?” Mercer asked.

Spirit glowered at him and said nothing.

“Still unconscious,” Scott answered, not understanding the animosity. “The engineer pumped a third IV into him. Spirit says his color is better and the bleeding has stopped.”

“That’s good.”

Tisa stepped through the open container doors. Spirit shot her a sharp glare and wheeled on Mercer. “I see you’re not man enough to use Charlie’s suit.” Then she stormed out.

“Told you,” Tisa said to Mercer.

“I’m afraid you’re way off base about her. If possible she hates me even more.”

She stroked his arm. “You don’t know much about women. Bad for you. Good for me.”

“How is that bad for me?”

“You’ll never see my feminine tricks coming.”

Of all the burdens and distractions Mercer was shouldering, all the directions he was being pulled in, all the demands that were draining him down, only Tisa, and the promise of their relationship, gave him sustenance and the strength to carry on. Sometimes all it took was a sly comment to make him forget everything else. He reached for her hand as he addressed Scott. “We have five hours before the president orders the evacuation of the eastern U.S. and causes a panic that will claim thousands. The bomb has a three-hour delay timer once it’s set and I want at least an hour after the blast to evaluate the results.”

“Leaves us an hour to pull Conseil out of the vent and place the bomb,” Scott grunted. “Not a whole lot of time.”

“All the more reason to get going. How are we going to carry the weapon?”

“My suit will take the brunt of the weight from the towline. We’ll mount the bomb to yours in a quick-release harness. Onboard gyroscopes will compensate for the added weight and keep the ADS trimmed.”

“Okay then.” Mercer shook Scott’s hand.

Two Petromax workers helped Mercer and Scott Glass climb into the NewtSuits. Before sealing the back, Mercer motioned Tisa over to him. “I’ll see you soon.”

“What time is it?”

“Ah, eight thirty. Oh God! Did the oracle predict something else for today?”

“No. I was just curious.” She smiled and kissed his cheek. “If I hadn’t lost it on the ferry, I think I’d start wearing the watch you gave me.”

“I’ll get you another,” he promised.

Tisa stepped back and Mercer’s suit was closed and the seals engaged. The ventilation fans were already working, but he needed several deep breaths to feel his lungs fill with air.

“Can you hear me, Mercer?” Scott called from his own suit.

“Loud and clear. Jim, are we on-line in the van?”

“I read you both. Everything looks good from my end. Say the word and they’ll maneuver the cradle to the stern and lower you in.”

“Give us a minute,” Scott requested. “Mercer, do one more check of your motors. Make sure everything’s okay.”

Mercer rocked his feet on the large toggle switches in the base of each leg and was rewarded with the buzz of the appropriate propeller. Outside the thick faceplate, Tisa gave Mercer a thumbs-up, then pretended to be impressed with the size of his biceps by squeezing the suit’s armored skin. In the air, the suit was too heavy to move so he couldn’t respond other than to flash a smile she couldn’t see.

“We’re ready, Jim.”

Mercer watched one of the technicians motion Tisa away from the heavy steel cage that would lower the divers to the tunnel entrance. Before she would allow him to vanish, Tisa stepped forward, leaning over the bomb strapped to the suit’s torso, and left a lipstick kiss on Mercer’s helmet. With her face inches from his there was no mistaking the words she mouthed.

“I love you.”

Adrenaline surged through Mercer’s heart. But before he could react the A-frame crane hanging over the stern took up the slack and the cradle rolled back on tracks embedded in the deck. The drizzling rain couldn’t smear the impression of her mouth from the plastic.

He shook thoughts of her words, and his reply, from his head and concentrated on the task at hand. With a quick glance he checked the electronic monitors ringing the bottom of his helmet. Power, oxygen and coolant levels were all in the green. Condensation formed on his faceplate. Mercer used the finger controls to adjust the ventilator and concentrated on slowing his breathing. He had more than enough air for the dive, but Scott, and his scuba instructor months earlier, cautioned about taking nothing for granted.

The cradle reached the end of the track and the crane lifted the large basket into the air. Mercer and Scott stood solid as statues as the heavy-duty hydraulics raised them up and over the crane’s apex and held them suspended over the scummy water. With the suits in a neutral hunched position, Mercer could just see the ocean under his feet.

“Okay, Jim, we’re set,” Scott radioed. “Lower away. Just keep an eye on the tow spool.” The drum of thick cable was bolted just below the crane’s legs.

“Here you go.”

The crane unwound its line and the basket sank past the deck height. In a moment they could see where the service boat’s name had been painted on her stern and then the top few inches of her rudder. Inside the armored suits there was no sensation when water began to fill the lifting basket and surge around their legs. Mercer watched it climb higher, past the bomb on his chest and up his torso. A weak wave splashed filthy water against his helmet. Tisa’s kiss washed away.

And then they were submerged. The water was completely black, choked with sediment. The lights atop the cradle gave them barely two feet of visibility.

“It’ll clear when we get under the layers of ash,” Scott remarked.

The cradle and crane acted like an elevator, dropping the divers into the abyss without them having to rely on their suit’s batteries. When the mission was over they’d be able to climb into it again for the ride to the surface.

The descent took ten minutes, but with no references it felt much longer. The water was as cloudy at this depth as it was near the surface. Mercer and Scott would have to work virtually blind.

“Jim, we’re here,” Scott reported after turning on his suit’s powerful halogen lamps. “I can see the vent opening. It’s right in front of us. Only problem is the water temperature is up to ninety degrees.”

“The suits can take it,” Jim reassured.

“I know the suits can, but I just don’t want to get cooked alive in this thing.”

“We’ll serve you like lobster with drawn butter and corn on the cob. We’ll even put your picture on the little plastic bibs.”

“You’re one sick man.”

McKenzie knew how to banter to keep his people from thinking too much about their jobs, but not too much to lose their concentration. “We’ve got five hundred fifty feet of cable stripped from the drum and enough floats to keep it neutrally buoyant. Proceed when you’re ready.”

“Roger,” he replied. Then to Mercer he said, “I’ve got the end of the tow cable. Take your grip about ten feet back. Don’t forget the thumb toggle lets you lock the pincer so you don’t need to maintain pressure.”

Impossible to move on the boat, the NewtSuit’s joints were amazingly flexible underwater, thanks to their ingenious fluid-filled design. Mercer raised his arm and took hold of the inch-thick cable where Scott had requested then locked the mechanical claw so it wouldn’t slip. “Got it.”

“Let’s go.”

Propellers on Scott’s suit burst into life and he lifted himself from the cradle before pitching the swivel nacelles back and moving off into the gloom.

Mercer applied pressure with the toes of his right foot. Like the rocket packs worn by shuttle astronauts, the NewtSuit gently skidded from the cradle and entered the realm for which it was designed, indifferent to the hundreds of pounds of pressure bearing down on its thick aluminum skin.

The water cavitated off the multiple propellers on the back of Scott’s ADS as Mercer followed him into the volcanic conduit. The bubbles seemed sluggish as they rose through the soupy water.

“I’m in,” Scott said when the glow from his lights was swallowed by the cave.

Mercer followed him, trailing the long tether behind him. Scott’s suit was taking the strain of dragging the cable through the water. Mercer was there only if he needed a bit of extra leverage.

“The temp’s up to one ten.”

Mercer couldn’t feel the heat. His suit had an integrated meshwork of water pipes that circulated either cold or warm water depending on the conditions. C.W. had said it could keep a diver comfortable in temperatures up to two hundred degrees. In fact, the climate-control system could take more than that; it was the plastic faceplate that began to melt above two hundred.

“How you doing, Mercer?”

“No problems.” With gyroscopes keeping the ADS upright, and Scott steering their little train, all Mercer had to do was keep even pressure on the foot switch. This dive was far easier than his foray into the flooded DS-Two mine with Booker Sykes.

“We’re in two hundred feet.”

McKenzie’s reply was garbled.

“Say again, Jim.”

Static filled Mercer’s helmet.

Scott wasn’t concerned. “Interference from the rock. We planned on this.”

At three hundred feet from the vent opening the temperature had climbed to one hundred thirty degrees and the cave had constricted. Scott walked Mercer through the procedure for adjusting his trim so the NewtSuit floated at an angle to reduce its height. Before Mercer got it right he flew into the floor of the cave, grinding the warhead against the rock.

“Takes a licking and keeps on ticking,” he said.

“That thing better not be ticking.”

Their pace into the volcano had slowed because of the weight and drag of the towline. Motors on Scott’s suit were overheating, but rather than wait to let them cool, they switched positions on the cable so Mercer had the lead and his suit did the lion’s share of the work. His steering lacked Scott’s finesse, but he managed to keep the suit from scraping the side of the tunnel again.

They rounded the first gentle bend in the otherwise straight shaft and found Conseil resting forlornly in the dark. With its camera eyes opaque in the wavering light of their lamps, the ROV looked dead.

“And that’s why we brought the tow cable.” There was about three feet of clearance from the top of the robot to the cave roof, almost but not quite enough to climb over in the bulky suits. “It has to get dragged back until the cave is wide enough for us to get past.”

“We’ve been down twenty minutes,” Mercer said. “Wouldn’t it be quicker if we smashed off the top struts and removed some of the gear to climb over right here.”

Glass didn’t answer.

“Scott, I said wouldn’t it be—” Mercer stopped talking when he heard the dive leader make a wet choking sound. “Scott? Scott?”

It took a minute to swivel the suit in the tunnel so he could face his partner. Mercer beamed his lights into Scott’s helmet but could not see the man’s face. The suit had filled with some dense white gas.

“What the—?”

Suddenly Scott pressed his face to the thick plastic. His eyes were smeared with bloody tears and his tongue was swollen to twice its size. “Something shorted,” he croaked. “I can feel wires burning.”

Scott Glass’s greatest fear was being realized as he was parboiled in the suit. His skin turned red and began to blister as the fire grew at his feet. His suit jerked spastically with his frantic attempts to stamp out the flames. Mercer had to turn the volume on his underwater phone down to its minimum setting. He couldn’t bear to listen to the agonizing screams, though he did not pull away from Scott’s suit until the last gasping cry.

Mercer’s anger built until he almost couldn’t see. Something in Scott’s suit hadn’t shorted. It had been tampered with. The saboteur had struck again and this time he had a good idea who that person was.

Later, he seethed and turned from Scott’s inert form.

Conseil was basically a strut framework around an inner body housing its cameras, sensors and propulsion nacelles. Mercer gripped the top of one cross support and tore it bodily from the ROV. He slashed and tore at the robot, scissoring wires with the pincers and using the suit’s tremendous weight as leverage to rip it apart.

His frantic efforts were fueled partly by hatred but mostly by fear. He would be a fool to think his suit hadn’t been tampered with. But he would not turn back. The bomb needed to be another three hundred feet deeper into the mountain in order to collapse the water-trapping dikes that threatened to split the island in half. Considering the yield of the nuclear device, a hundred yards didn’t seem like much, but the explosives experts had been adamant. They were trying to implode the mountain the way demolition experts took down a building. Placement of the device was everything.

The pincers could snip through pipes up to an inch in diameter. He used them to sever Conseil’s bracing and literally peel the top off the ROV. He shoved the tangle of metal and wire behind him and climbed on top of the robot. The back of his suit wedged against the vent’s roof, forcing him to twist violently, clawing to get past, his feet dancing on the pedals to eke out that last bit of momentum.

He popped free and drifted to the floor. His efforts had whipped up a storm of sediment and his faceplate was fogged by his heavy breathing. Uncaring, he powered up his thrusters and advanced deeper into the volcano.

An alarm in his helmet went off. He scanned the LEDs. The water temperature had shot up to a hundred and eighty degrees.

“Jesus, not now.” He killed the shrill horn and pushed on, unwilling to admit he was beginning to feel heat seeping into the suit despite its cooling system.

He had no idea what had been done to Scott’s suit to cause the fire. It probably wasn’t on a timer or both suits would have shorted at the same time. Something else had triggered it. Mercer remembered that Scott had overheated his motors. Could that have been it? Had the strain of dragging the towline activated some device that caused the fire? He checked the status board for the six motors on his suit. All of them were green.

“No, damn it. That isn’t it,” he said aloud.

During their training session he and Scott had switched suits. The saboteur knew Mercer would be carrying the bomb, but couldn’t have known that he’d be using Scott’s suit and not the one left available by the attack on Charlie Williams. By tampering with C.W.’s ADS, the saboteur thought he would kill Mercer and prevent him from delivering the bomb. There would have been no need to damage the suit they believed Scott Glass was going to dive in.

No less pressed for time, Mercer figured he no longer had to fear immolation. He continued down the tunnel, his heart a little slower, the sweat bathing his body a little less oily.

When he was well past what he knew to be the eight-hundred-foot mark, he shut down the suit’s motors and allowed himself to settle on the bottom. The temperature outside his ADS hovered just below the two-hundred-degree mark. Inside the suit it hadn’t grown uncomfortable yet, but Mercer was well aware of the heat. He was also noticing that the plastic faceplate was losing a little of its clarity.

It was awkward to unclip the bomb from the shackles on his chest, and when they finally released the weapon dropped to the floor with a dull thunk. He flipped it onto its back. A bolt had been hastily welded to the timer’s access panel so he could open it with the unwieldy pincers. Scott was supposed to have done this.

Gently, Mercer snapped the claw around the bolt and tried to expose the timer. The panel flew open. He looked and saw that the timer was still sealed. It was the bolt that had snapped off. He muttered a curse and tried to grab the bead of weld still attached to the bomb, but the pincer couldn’t get a tight grip. He strung his next curses into a long sentence.

He had no tools.

“Think, damn it, think.”

He needed something strong and flat to wedge into the seal and pry the lid open. The folding knife he always carried in his pocket would be perfect. It had the perfect blade.

Blade, he thought. One of his suit’s propeller blades.

He reached for one of the nacelles on his shoulder and came up far short. The ADS didn’t have that degree of flexibility. There wasn’t enough time to go back and snap a blade off of Scott’s suit.

Mercer settled across the narrow shaft, braced his feet against the wall and shoved back as hard as he could. The impact rattled him in the suit and the power failed for a second as a wire jarred loose. In the momentary flash of darkness he saw a muted glow emanating from deeper inside the volcano. Molten rock was entering the vent. It couldn’t have been much or the water would have boiled away by now, but it was enough. He slammed the back of his suit into the rock again and again. His head caught a sharp edge at the back of his helmet, opening a trickling wound.

The seventh time did it. He felt one of the main motor housings pop loose from the suit. It drifted on the minute current until coming up against the bundle of wires acting as an umbilical. He reached into the nacelle’s throat and ripped the prop off its shaft.

Each of the three blades was about two inches long and made of tungsten steel. It was a miniature work of art in a way, its delicate curve designed for maximum thrust with minimum resistance. He unceremoniously jammed it against the timer panel and heaved open the thick lid.

Inside the small compartment was a single red button. Mercer pressed it, giving no consideration that he had just unleashed four and a half thousand tons of TNT. His suit’s electronic display recorded the temperature as two hundred and ten degrees. At this depth it would need to be much higher to boil the water, but it was slowly dissolving the faceplate. Already Mercer’s view had the same murky blur as trying to open his eyes in a chlorinated swimming pool.

He could also see the glow of lava even with his lights on.

Mercer closed the bomb’s lid and started back the way he’d come. Even if the lava flowed over the weapon, its casing would protect it from the thermal onslaught.

With one main thruster trailing uselessly behind him, steering the NewtSuit became a challenge, especially when he realized the other primary motor had been damaged and ran out of balance. The suit wanted to veer left, then down. He adjusted his trim so the ADS was horizontal, allowing him to use the directional nacelles to push him forward. He felt like he was barely creeping along the tunnel, and with his pincers dragging along the floor he was blinded by sediment.

Behind him magma continued to drip into the tunnel, and no matter how fast he struggled forward he couldn’t escape the envelope of scalding water. The digital thermometer read two hundred eighteen degrees. Mercer’s face mask had become a wavy prism. The cooling system was struggling to keep pace. A hot spot had developed at his elbow that blistered his skin. The inside of the suit smelled of cooked meat.

His helmet clanged against Conseil’s ravaged carcass. It had taken fifteen minutes to cover the three hundred yards. The Petromax Angel had a top speed of twelve knots. He had to give them at least two hours to get clear of the bomb blast and the inevitable tsunami to follow.

He climbed over the ROV, snagging the detached motor in the tangle of braces. He snipped the wires and pulled himself free. More than anything he wanted to take Scott’s body back to the surface, but there was no way he could do it. Without an operator in control, the suit could easily jam in the narrow vent and trap them both.

Mercer laid a hand on the suit’s chest. “I’m sorry,” he muttered and cut the tow cable out of Scott’s grip. He took a firm hold on the cable and tapped it with his pincer.

Nothing happened. He rapped it again, harder, and suddenly he was being pulled from the tunnel. He skipped and bounced against the shaft as the topside crane operator recovered what he thought was the ROV.

It took a few minutes but he finally saw that he had outpaced the temperature spike. The thermometer was down ten degrees. And not a moment too soon. It was hard to be certain, but it looked like half the thickness of his faceplate had been dissolved.

Three minutes later the cable drew him out of the vent and into cold water. The plastic gave a sickening pop as it cooled, but it did not crack. Mercer was in the clear. He allowed the cramped muscles in his back and shoulders to relax for the first time since entering the volcanic shaft.

“Jim, can you read me, over? Jim, it’s Mercer, can you read me?”

“I read you. What the hell happened down there? We expected to pull out the ROV a half hour ago.”

“I’ll explain everything in a minute. I’m holding on to the end of the towline. That’s me you’re pulling up.”

“What? Where’s Scott?”

“He didn’t make it. Please, Jim, just pull me up. I’ll tell you everything.”

“Ah, okay.”

“And Jim. Find Spirit Williams and keep an eye on her.”

“Why?”

“She wears wooden shoes.” Mercer hoped McKenzie knew the apocryphal story about the origins of the word “sabotage,” which supposedly came from a revolt during the Industrial Revolution in which the French workers threw their wooden shoes, or sabots, into factory machinery to shut it down.

He continued upward like a fish on the end of two hundred feet of line. As soon as he surfaced he’d have them recover the lifting cradle or maybe just cut the thing loose. It didn’t matter.

At fifty feet the water was still as black and ominous as it had been near the vent. The blanket of ash cut all the sunlight and particles seemed to fill the sea. When he reached thirty feet he felt the tow cable slow. The workers were preparing for the delicate operation of slinging him onto the service boat. Mercer still couldn’t tell where the surface began, let alone see the Angel’s outline.

Finally at fifteen feet he could see the vessel’s deep keel and the shadow of something next to the ship, but he lost his vantage as he was drawn ever closer to safety.

He was pulled through an eight-foot-thick layer of volcanic ash and mud, a cloying mess that slowed his progress for a moment as the crane operator adjusted to the added weight. He double-checked that the hydraulic pressure on the claw gripping the cable was at maximum. He chuckled at the irony if the suit fell free. To get this far he’d destroyed the motors, and if he did plummet back into the water he’d have no way to save himself.

His head broke the surface and mud oozed off the suit, obscuring his view entirely. Even when it cleared, he could barely see through his damaged visor. The crane pulled him higher still and started to swing him over the transom. The suit’s grip on the cable felt secure.

He could just make out Jim McKenzie on the deck and Spirit and what looked like Charlie, or at least someone with their head swathed in bandages. There was no sign of Tisa.

His feet came level with the stern railing when he realized Jim, Spirit and Charlie were arguing. And then he saw that there was another boat tied up to the Petromax Angel. He looked down. He didn’t recognize the man operating the winch.

“Mercer!” Tisa’s scream burst over the communications line.

“Tisa?” he shouted back.

She burst from the control van, two men giving chase. Both appeared armed, but Mercer couldn’t tell. His faceplate was too distorted.

Jesus, the Angel had been hijacked. They had just been waiting for the chance. Mercer understood too that they’d recovered the ADS so they could return to the vent and remove the bomb.

One of the men reached Tisa and cut off her charge with a flying tackle. Both tumbled across the deck. The second man rushed to her side. Mercer recognized the way he moved, so much like her lithe rhythm. Luc Nguyen.

Trapped in the armored suit dangling from the crane just inside the railing, there was nothing Mercer could do as Luc helped Tisa to her feet and tenderly wiped her hair off her face.

“Come on, Jim,” Mercer shouted, though he couldn’t be heard. “Do something!”

And Jim did. The argument reached a fever pitch. Charlie and Spirit were screaming. From under his untucked shirt, McKenzie pulled a snub-nosed revolver and pumped three shots into Charlie’s stomach. The bullets were hollow points and the spray of blood from his back was a hovering cloud of carmine mist.

Even inside the NewtSuit, Mercer could hear the triple blasts. He had no idea what he’d just witnessed. Spirit dropped to her knees next to her dead husband. Tisa appeared catatonic. Luc Nguyen left his sister’s side and padded over to Jim. The two embraced like long-separated friends.

The moment their backs were to her, Spirit leapt from where she’d fallen and raced at Mercer, her face a twisted mask of anguish and determination. One of the terrorists who’d boarded the Angel had reactions as quick as hers. He had his rifle up to his shoulder by the time she’d covered ten of the twenty feet separating her from Mercer.

Her strides were impossibly long, like those of a gazelle. She managed two more before the rifle cracked. The shot tore a chunk out of her shoulder and still she came.

The next bullet hit her square in the back and exploded out her stomach, carrying enough velocity to ricochet off the NewtSuit. Her mouth flew open and still she ran, born by momentum until she slammed into the ADS.

Spirit’s impetus pendulumed the five-hundred-pound suit over the rail with her clinging to its body. As soon as it cleared the ship, she mouthed, “Let go.”

At the apex of the swing, Mercer didn’t hesitate. He released the lock holding his pincer closed and the suit plummeted from the ship. Spirit lost her grip as they plunged into the water. Mercer fell through the layer of ash and dropped like a stone into the inky blackness, leaving Spirit to die in the ooze.

He was too stunned for several seconds to do anything but ride the NewtSuit as it sank ever deeper. When he finally broke free of his daze and activated the motors to arrest his descent, he found they didn’t have the power. The battered ADS was out of trim and negatively buoyant.

The fall seemed to go on forever, an endless slow-motion journey into the depths. The NewtSuit could take the pressure of a thousand feet, but Mercer knew the ruined visor would implode long before that. According to his gauge he’d already sunk five hundred feet. He hadn’t forgotten that La Palma was one of the steepest islands in the world. Its submerged buttresses would likely be even sheerer. For all he knew there was a mile of water under his feet.

He passed through eight hundred feet, a tiny figure outlined in the glow of his own lamps. He had been sure Spirit was the saboteur. Her New Age philosophy fit perfectly with the Order’s beliefs, and she had had the opportunity on the Surveyor and here. After being with C.W. for so long, she’d have known how to tinker with an ADS. But what had clinched it for him was how she’d been dressed during the eruption. Moments earlier she’d been arguing with C.W. Mercer had heard them in their cabin. She had run out as soon as she’d heard the blast. Charlie was taking his time getting dressed. He’d already put on his jeans and shoes. Mercer had been certain that was when she’d hit him, to prevent him from making the dive.

But he knew now that wasn’t how it was. She really had just run out. It was Jim who’d gone in when Charlie was dressing and bashed him with something. Her comment about him not being man enough to use C.W.’s suit hadn’t been made in a panic when she’d realized she’d damaged the wrong one. It was a possessive expression of love for C.W. She’d lashed out because she did have feelings for Mercer and hated herself for it.

He checked the gauge. A thousand feet. Around him was nothing but darkness.

Goddamned Jim McKenzie. He’d had more than enough opportunity and an obvious motive if he was a member of the Order. He’d done just enough to gain Mercer’s confidence. He’d stayed close enough to the center of things to make himself indispensable. He’d planned this setup since his admission on the Surveyor about a rogue signal activating the tower.

“Damn!” Mercer shouted aloud. The suit had an emergency lift bag. C.W. had referred to it as the antichute, joking that parachutes slow your descent, the antichute reverses it.

Mercer fumbled with the control pad in his right arm, lifting the safety catch off the antichute’s release button. He hit the switch and shouted with relief as the sounds of the bag inflating over his head filled the helmet. His descent came to a gradual halt.

But that was it. He didn’t start rising as he should have.

“Come on.” He hit the button again. The bag had deployed as far as it would. He’d damaged the cylinder of gas when he’d smashed away the engine back in the vent. Like someone trapped in the basket of a runaway hot air balloon, he started drifting with the benthic currents.

“No. No way.” Mercer put everything out of his mind. He spooled up the few working thrusters and took a compass bearing.

The Petromax Angel had been a mile from shore. Mercer factored in the angle of the undersea cliffs and estimated he was no more than a quarter mile from the island’s submerged flank. He checked the suit’s digital chronograph. He’d set the nuke thirty-two minutes ago, leaving him two hours and twenty-eight minutes before it detonated.

With the half-inflated bag acting as a sail, Mercer worked with the current as best he could and squeezed a half knot from the roughed-up ADS.

For the next thirty minutes Mercer wouldn’t let himself think about anything but keeping his body as still as possible and the pressure on the foot pedal constant, although thoughts of Tisa swirled at the periphery of his concentration.

The ash had yet to penetrate this deep, leaving Mercer almost fifteen feet of visibility even with his warped visor. The cliff seemed to build itself as he approached, first just a suggestion, then a solid segment and finally a towering wall that had no end. He reached out and touched one rocky projection, reassuring himself that it was real. Making it this far was a victory, but now the real work began. He checked his depth. He’d drifted down another two hundred feet, well past the suit’s limit.

The emergency bag afforded him almost neutral buoyancy, otherwise what he had in mind would have been impossible. He didn’t have the strength and the suit certainly didn’t have the flexibility. He jammed his foot against the cliff, searching for a toehold. Once he was reasonably stable he kicked upward, scrabbling along the rough stones for a place to grip with his pincer. His kick rose him eight feet but he fell back four until the claw found purchase.

He found another foothold and kicked upward again, gaining only six feet but losing nothing when his pincer closed around a narrow ribbon of ancient lava. Just two awkward lunges in the bulky suit already cramped his legs. Mercer checked his oxygen. He had plenty so he made the mix a bit richer, giving his muscles more of what they needed.

In short fits and starts Mercer scaled the cliff. Sometimes he’d gain ten feet with a single lurch; other times he’d lose five. It was frustrating and agonizing. His body ran with sweat and with his arms trapped in the suit he couldn’t wipe the salt from his eyes. His shoulders and thighs were on fire yet he steadily gained. And as he climbed higher the pressure on the gas in the lifting bag decreased. When it expanded it increased his buoyancy, making each halting leap that much easier.

After a half hour he had to rest. He could barely fill his lungs and his heartbeat was out of control, hammering so hard it was almost arrhythmic. His feet were sodden with the sweat that had pooled in the suit’s lower extremities.

Five minutes before he felt he could go on, Mercer leapt again, clambering to find a handhold for his mechanical claw. He didn’t dare look at his depth gauge. He didn’t want the disappointment of discovering he hadn’t climbed as far as he thought or the encouragement that he’d climbed farther. He continued his measured pace, taking the good jumps with the bad but always ascending.

He checked the time again and was dismayed to see another thirty minutes had passed. The surrounding water was still black, the cliff face as featureless. He hadn’t seen a single fish or aquatic plant. He couldn’t stop himself from looking at his depth.

Two hundred fifty feet.

He’d climbed almost a thousand in an hour, but his pace had slowed. Those final two hundred fifty feet would take an hour all by themselves. The damaged bag had expanded as far as it would twenty minutes ago so it wasn’t providing any additional lift. The rest would be up to him.

He kicked off again, gaining a dozen feet, but couldn’t find anything to grab on to. He started to fall away from the cliff and punched up the motors, thrusting the suit back into the mountain. His helmet hit with an ominously soft plink. He’d scratched a deep gouge into the faceplate. Tiny fissures grew off it like crystals under a microscope.

His foot connected with the rock and even before he was sure he had solid footing Mercer thrust himself upward, grabbed an outcrop and used just his arm to keep climbing.

More cracks appeared in his visor.

He found a rhythm, an exhausting series of movements that taxed him and the suit to the extremes of their capabilities. But he did not stop. And when he found a plateau that ran along the cliff in a shallow incline he bounced along it like Neil Armstrong had bunny-hopped on the moon, his boots kicking up gouts of mud with each heavy impact. His cracking visor pinked and tinged with every step.

At fifty feet the shelf petered out and he was tempted to set the emergency release that would open the suit and let him swim free. Instead he turned back to the cliff, methodically planted his foot and kicked upward.

Mercer didn’t sense daylight until he was twenty feet from the surface and his suit was being battered by wave action. It was time.

He found a secure perch on the cliff and locked the claw around a rock. He took a deep breath and in one sudden snap wrenched his left arm out of the suit’s sleeve. The pain of the near dislocation was like a knife under his shoulder blade and across the top of his back.

When the agony turned into numbness, he reached into the pocket of his overalls. By feel he flipped open his cell and dialed Ira’s direct line. He brought the phone as close as he could to his mouth. He was just shallow enough for the signal to bounce off one of the nearby cell towers.

“Ira, listen to me,” he shouted when the ringing stopped. “It’s Mercer.”

“Mercer? Where are you? You sound like you’re talking from the bottom of a barrel.”

“Close enough. The bomb is planted. It goes off in, shit, fifty minutes, but I have a problem. Luc Nguyen has taken over the Petromax Angel. They boarded from another boat that either came from the island or broke the quarantine. Jim McKenzie is part of his group. He’s the one that turned on the hydrate pump in the Pacific.”

“Where’s that ship now?”

“I assume they took off. I don’t know. I jumped — well, I was pushed overboard.”

“Are you on La Palma?”

“Not quite. I’m calling you from one of the diving suits. I’m about twenty feet under the surface.”

“What?”

“I don’t have time to explain it. Right now I’m directly above the nuke. You have to get a chopper off that Aegis cruiser you said was standing by.”

“It’s going to take a few minutes to coordinate.”

“I’m not going anywhere. In case we lose this signal I’m going to pop to the surface in exactly thirty minutes. Tell the pilot I’ll be the guy holding the cell phone. Can’t be too many of them around here.”

Ira smiled. “I’ll tell him the model in case there are more than one of you out there. Don’t worry, Mercer. We’re coming for you.”

Ira kept his line open, but as Mercer suspected he lost the signal a few minutes later and couldn’t get it back.

Now that he’d stopped climbing, he shivered in the suit, his sodden clothes and hair sticking to his body like a clammy skin. He played with the climate system but couldn’t get heat. All his exertion had nearly drained the suit’s batteries. He just stood slumped in the aluminum shell and waited for time to trickle by. He was too wasted to even worry about Tisa at the moment.

She’d said she loved him. It wasn’t an ambiguous moan at the height of passion. She’d said the words to his face. Mercer knew he’d get her back, if for no other reason than for him to tell her he loved her too.

When his deadline approached, he began to hyper-extend his lungs, building up oxygen to the point he felt he was going to pass out. Then he hit the emergency release located awkwardly along his right wrist where it couldn’t be accidentally activated.

The suit split along the back and filled in a rush of frigid water that momentarily pinned Mercer. He kicked free and stroked for the surface, allowing a trickle of air to escape his lips as he rose.

Ash formed a thick ceiling at the surface. He hit it and began to claw his way through, kicking frantically as mud closed in around him. It was like struggling through quicksand. He fought and twisted and was certain he was sinking. His chest burned. There was no way to know if he was one inch or ten feet from the top.

He forced himself to calm and took even, measured strokes. The ash tried to draw him back into the depths but he refused to succumb until at last he shot out of the morass. His first breath drew a mouthful of dust that he coughed and spit back into the sea. He could barely keep his head above the quagmire, but it didn’t matter.

As soon as he’d surfaced, the sharp-eyed pilot of the Seahawk off the cruiser spotted him struggling in the otherwise placid curtain of debris. A few seconds later he had his chopper hovering over Mercer and a pararescue jumper ready to haul him aboard. A basket was lowered.

Mercer was able to use the undulating mass of ash and pumice as a springboard to roll himself into the basket, eliminating the need for the PJ to leap to what would have been a broken leg. Mercer was winched into the chopper even as the pilot opened the throttle. They had seventeen minutes to get clear of the blast and the electromagnetic pulse that would wreck the chopper’s avionics.

The PJ threw a blanket over Mercer’s shoulder. “Are you hurt?”

“No,” Mercer said unconvincingly. “I’m fine.”

“I think you’d better lay back until we get back to the ship.”

Mercer shrugged off the blanket. “I need to speak to the pilot.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, sir,” the burly PJ advised. “If you don’t mind my saying so, I’ve seen drowned rats who’d win a beauty contest over you.”

Mercer grabbed a headset from the bulkhead dividing the cockpit from the cargo hold. “Any chance you noticed a ship inside the cordon on your way to get me?”