Deep Fire Rising

ABOARD THE MV SEA SURVEYOR II THE PACIFIC, 500 MILES SOUTHEAST OF MIDWAY ISLAND

Charlie Williams didn’t like his position one bit. In fact, he hated it. And to make matters worse it was his own fault. He hadn’t noticed how his opponent had shifted pawns to open up his rook, and now the white castle was decimating his few remaining pieces. With his queen effectively pinned by the pair of table-hopping knights, it was inevitable that he’d lose the game. His only solace was that this was only the fifth game of chess he’d ever played and the ship’s third officer, Jon Carlyle, had needed fifteen more moves to beat him than their last game.

Charlie’s wife, Spirit, sensed her husband’s frustration and looked up from the book she’d borrowed from the ship’s small library, a biography of Alfred Watkins, the discoverer of England’s purported geomagnetic ley lines. Besides the glow of instruments and the wash from Charlie’s laptop where the game was being played out, her lamp was the only spot of illumination on the bridge of the Sea Surveyor II. Beyond the large windows, the night was starless and the ocean calm. The door to the bridge wing was open and a tropical breeze cut the ozone smell of electronics.

“C.W.,” she called in a voice that could have made her a fortune as a phone sex operator, “I hate to say this, lover, but even if chess’s most powerful piece is female, the game itself is based on misogynist ideas of class warfare in which the goal is to keep an impotent king alive while pieces get sacrificed with little regard to what they’d mean in the real world. I think it’s good that you keep losing. It means you’re enlightened.”

“It means,” C.W. answered back without taking his eyes off the computer game, “that I’m actually a died-in-the-wool monarchist who, if I were king, would think nothing of letting my queen get killed if it kept me in power for a few moments longer. What do you think, Jon?”

The watch officer was approaching fifty years old and had a daughter not much younger than Spirit Williams. He thought C.W. had gotten a handful when he married her. She was a deadly combination of hardened opinions, iron will and absolutely no patience. On the other hand, she was gypsy beautiful and obviously loved C.W. with every fiber of her being. Carlyle used the keyboard to deepen his attack on C.W.’s king by advancing his bishop two-thirds the way across the board. “I think that since you two apparently never sleep and don’t mind keeping me company on the graveyard watch, I’ll withhold an answer so you don’t abandon me.”

“Diplomacy from a chessboard warrior?” Spirit teased. “Maybe you’re a little enlightened too.”

“I’m many things” — the veteran seaman smiled across to her — “but you’re the first to call me enlightened.”

The research ship Sea Surveyor II was owned by a consortium of California universities and was used exclusively for hard science research on the world’s oceans. While many who sailed aboard her were wide-eyed grad students who knew little beyond their specialties, her crew were all experienced sailors, many with military backgrounds, who enjoyed the relaxed pace of a ship at sea nearly ten months of every year.

This was Carlyle’s fifth voyage and C.W.’s second, but for Spirit Williams, a second-year doctoral student studying the effects of global warming on deep-ocean currents, this was her first trip on the 238-foot ship. C.W. was a new member of the vessel’s support staff and was responsible for the NewtSuits, high-tech one-person submersibles that resembled a combination suit of medieval armor and the cartoon Michelin Man. He was also rated to pilot Bob, the three-man submarine, stowed in a special garage over the Sea Surveyor’s fantail.

C.W. and Spirit had met a mere six months ago and married just four weeks later. He’d grown up in Southern California and retained the toned physique and tan of a lifetime surfer. His moppy hair was just starting to lose its sun-bleached brassy sheen and return to a more natural blond while the top of his nose remained lumpy and scarred by layers of precancerous skin. He was two years shy of thirty and had gotten into the field of deep-sea submersibles because his college roommate’s father owned a company that designed and built them in a warehouse in Long Beach. During his schooling C.W. worked for him during summer vacations and was hired on full-time after graduating. Charlie had a relaxed live-and-let-live attitude, caring little beyond the immediate scope of his life. He had never voted, hadn’t been in a church since he was a kid and harbored few deeply held opinions.

Spirit Williams was opposite in nearly every way. Her hair and eyes were dark, her skin pale. Like her name implied, she was deeply spiritual. She’d grown up in a commune outside of Monterey, raised by parents who’d never accepted that the sixties had ended. Her mother, a Wicca priestess and midwife, and her father, a so-called organic farmer who grew the most potent marijuana in the state, had schooled her in the ways of the natural world. She believed that the earth was Gaia, a living spirit, and that humankind was actually at the bottom of the world social order, not the top. Unlike her husband, Spirit firmly believed in a list of tenets. Environmentalism, feminism, animal rights, children’s rights, Native American rights, prisoners’ rights, and nearly every other liberal cause fell within her interest. At twenty-five, she’d already been arrested for smashing a Starbucks window in Seattle and was pepper-sprayed at a WHO summit in Washington, D.C.

“Since you don’t know chess, I wonder, what kind of games did you play growing up?” Carlyle asked her.

Spirit marked her place in the book with an owl feather. “Your typical kid games. You know, like natives and oppressors.”

“Cowboys and Indians?”

She nodded. “If you insist on using bigoted names. Um, there was hide from the pigs.

“Hide and seek.”

Spirit smiled. “And when I was a teenager there was always medicine man.”

It took Carlyle a second to translate that one. He was aghast at her impudence. “Doctor?”

“Like your daughter never played it.”

“Maybe she did, but she had the sense not to tell me about it.”

“I bet you were one of those fathers who didn’t know when his little girl got her period, yet knew the exact day and time your son had his first hard-on.”

Jon could have been offended but knew she meant nothing by her comment. It was just her way and he threw it right back at her. “It was June eighteenth, 1997, at seven twenty-one in the morning. He seemed mighty impressed with it as I recall.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Maybe I should meet him someday.”

Jon shot an uncomfortable look at C.W., but her husband was used to her flirtations and was studying the electronic chessboard to see if there was any hope of escape.

“All ships signify, all ships signify. This is the USS Smithback. Mayday, mayday, mayday.” The voice from the speakers rang clear, and all three on the bridge could hear the fear in the sailor’s voice.

Jon Carlyle grabbed up the radio handset. “Smithback, Smithback, Smithback, this is the MV Sea Surveyor. State your location and the nature of your emergency.”

“Sea Surveyor, we’ve been authorized by Pacific Command to issue a mayday and ask for immediate assistance.”

Carlyle imagined the scenario. A U.S. Navy ship was in trouble — from the tension in the radioman’s voice, severe trouble — yet they still had to get permission to ask for help.

“Smithback, please state your location and the nature of your emergency,” Carlyle asked smoothly. Over his shoulder he asked the Filipino helmsman to alert the ship’s captain, Perry Jacobi, and have him summoned to the bridge.

“We’ve struck an iceberg. We are shipping water, but our pumps are keeping pace.”

Jesus, Carlyle thought, he must be receiving an errant signal, a radio distress from Arctic or Antarctic waters that had bounced around the atmosphere, a not uncommon occurrence. That was how ham radio operators could talk to counterparts on the opposite side of the globe. He recognized, too, that it was unlikely the Sea Surveyor was the closest to render assistance. In fact, depending on where the navy vessel was located, it might be days before a rescue ship could reach them.

“We are at 21.21 degrees north by 173.32 west…”

With an angry shake of his head Carlyle tuned out the rest of what he was hearing. This was a crank radio distress, the maritime version of yelling fire in a crowded theater. Some jerk with a powerful transceiver was pretending to be a sinking American ship, only he was too stupid to realize the coordinates put him in tropical waters a mere ninety miles from the Sea Surveyor. Struck an iceberg, my ass.

“This is Sea Surveyor,” he said tautly. “You are in violation of maritime law and are liable for prosecution if you don’t desist.”

A new voice came over the airwaves, more assured than that of the crank radio operator. “Sea Surveyor, this is Commander Kenneth Galloway, captain of the USS Smithback. This is not a joke. We are a U.S. Navy cargo ship and we’ve struck an iceberg. It didn’t show up on radar. It sort of popped out of the water just ahead of us. We didn’t have time for evasive maneuvers. We first thought we’d hit a submarine, but now there are dozens of bergs around us.”

Over the radio link Carlyle and the others could hear alarms wailing and the frantic voices of panicked men on the floundering ship. Carlyle got busy computing an intercept course.

“I’m sorry about the misunderstanding, Captain,” Carlyle replied. “We are seven hours from your position and are getting under way now. What is your situation?”

“At first the damage didn’t appear that severe. Our pumps can handle the inflow of seawater, and emergency crews already have the hole repaired with timbers and plates, but we still appear to be sinking. We’re down four feet in the past thirty minutes. If this continues, your seven hours will be too late.”

In the minute the Surveyor’s officer took to consider the situation, three other ships in the area — two container ships heading to Los Angeles from Japan and a small tanker ferrying gasoline to Wake Island — responded to the distress call. None was closer than the research ship, although their captains had ordered detours to offer assistance. A navy patrol plane from Midway Island was en route.

Carlyle didn’t question the impossibility of what Galloway was telling him. If he said his ship was sinking despite effecting repairs, then that was exactly what was happening. He considered that they had missed another spot where their ship was holed, but it didn’t seem likely. Repair teams on navy ships were well trained. They wouldn’t make such an elemental mistake.

“What does this mean?” C.W. asked the officer. Spirit was at his side, holding his hand.

Carlyle had almost forgotten their presence. “I don’t know.”

“Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” It was the radioman again and his voice was a shriek over the radio. “We’re sinking fast. Down at the head. The bow’s awash. This is the USS Smithback. Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. The sea. The sea is starting to burn.”

A muffled explosion rumbled from the bridge speakers. Another scream and then the roar of water. And then silence.

For the six hours and forty minutes it took the Sea Surveyor II to reach the Smithback’s last known coordinates, Jon Carlyle continued to radio and received no replies. The P-3 Orion antisubmarine warfare plane out of Midway had already reported in by the time they reached the site. That had been an hour after the last call from the Smithback. The Orion found no wreckage, no debris, not even an oil slick.

It was as if the navy cargo ship had never been.