Mirage

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“You are the very picture of boredom,” Max said, stepping off the elevator at the rear of the op center.

Cabrillo settled his coffee cup into a holder built into the Kirk Chair, the central command platform in the middle of the electronics-packed, low-ceilinged space. On the main view screen was a murky video feed coming up from a tethered probe poking around the bottom of the Atlantic nearly three hundred feet down. Details were hard to come by as the unmanned submersible ran its cameras over the hull of an unidentified ship.

“Got that right,” he replied. “Twenty-two wrecks checked and twenty-two consecutive goose eggs.”

“So what are we looking at?” Max asked as he crossed the room with a plate of food in his hand. He set it next to Cabrillo’s elbow. “Fish tacos, by the way. Fresh pico de gallo, but the chef hid a ghost chili in there, so watch yourself.”

“Thanks. I’m starved.” Cabrillo ate half of a taco in a single bite, managing to not ruin his shirt when the shell inevitably collapsed. “What we are seeing, if my five days of experience has taught me anything, is a Boston long-liner that sank in 1960 or so.”

“Not our target?”

“Not even close. Do you know how many wrecks there are off the East Coast?”

“About thirty-five hundred,” Max replied. “And most of them are clustered between Richmond, Virginia, and Cape Cod. Less than a quarter of them are identified. Which leaves us searching a lot of haystacks for a single needle.”

“You are the paragon of the understatement.”

In the days since Cabrillo’s return to the ship after his ill-fated meeting with Wesley Tennyson, the Oregon had been scouring the seafloor with side-scan sonar looking for the mysterious mine tender that the professor said had been modified by Nikola Tesla. Murph and Stone had worked out the search parameters and overlaid it with a grid of shipwrecks in the region. There was good news. Since these waters were so heavily fished, all bottom obstructions, like boulders, outcroppings, and sunken ships, were clearly marked, though rarely identified by name.

That left them with forty possible candidates to explore with their remotely operated vehicle, named Little Geek after a similar-looking ROV from the movie The Abyss. They could safely ignore wooden-hulled ships and natural rock formations by first verifying each target with a magnetometer to detect the presence of metal. Once they did have a steel-hulled wreck, it was a laborious process of lowering the suitcase-sized robot through the moon pool to the bottom and visually inspecting each wreck. Identification was more difficult because many of the vessels were festooned with nets torn off fishing trawlers as they plied the seas. Nets that not only obscured the wrecks but made it easy for an ROV to get trapped.

Juan hit a button on the arm of his command chair. “Cabrillo to Moon Pool. This one’s a bust, Eric. Reel in Little Geek, and we’ll check out target twenty-three.”

“Roger that, Chairman.”

“Helm, as soon as the ROV’s aboard, steer one eight-five at twenty knots.” That was far below the ship’s best speed, but with the waters so busy, it wouldn’t do to show off the Oregon’s true potential. In fact, twenty knots seemed out of reach for a rust-streaked old tramp like her, but that was all part of her elaborate deception. “Next potential target is twenty miles away.”

Juan rubbed his eyes. “I can’t believe Dirk Pitt did this kind of stuff for a living. Talk about boring.”

“Different strokes,” Max replied. “And you and I both know there isn’t a whole lot of boring on that man’s résumé.

“By the way, how is it that the Emir isn’t screaming his head off that we’re not there to protect him?”

“We lucked out. He’s rafting with a Saudi prince and some Mexican telecommunications billionaire, if you can call three mega-yachts lashed together rafting. Linda tells me they’re trying to outdo each other on hosting lavish dinners. She says each of them has had chefs and food flown into Hamilton and choppered out to them. She Googled one of the wines and saw it sold at auction four years ago for ten grand.”

“Per case?”

“Bottle. And the three of them and their nubile guests went through eight of them at dinner.”

Max cocked an eyebrow. “‘Nubile’?”

“My adjective. Linda’s description of them was less kind. I think she even used the word ‘floozy.’”

Hanley chuckled. “There aren’t too many women who can make her jealous in the looks department.”

“Well, six of them are with her now and she’s not too happy about it. She says we have two more days before they break up their little party and the Emir heads to Bermuda. If we don’t find the wreck by this time tomorrow, we’ll call off the search, nursemaid our esteemed friend on one of the safest islands in the world for two weeks, and then head back here to keep looking.”

“What do you think we’ll find?”

“I have no idea, but if Pytor Kenin is interested, it can’t be good.”

Eric Stone’s voice came over the speakers built into the ceiling. “Little Geek’s back aboard, and the keel doors are closed.”

“Helm,” Cabrillo prompted.

“On it, Chairman.”

Juan flipped the main view screen to the bridge cameras and expanded it so he had an almost panoramic view of the ocean. The seas were choppy and leaden under a gray sky, and in the distance there were dark curtains of rainsqualls. He could see the silhouettes of two ships along the horizon, one heading north and the other south. As the Oregon picked up speed, her ride stabilized, and the constant rolling she’d endured while hovering over the old sunken trawler faded away.

He wolfed down the second taco and gave a sudden gasp. His face reddened, and he began panting.

“Ghost chili?” Max asked mildly.

“Yes,” Cabrillo managed to wheeze with tears streaming from his eyes.

“I hate to be the one to tell you this,” Hanley breezed, placing a hand on Cabrillo’s shoulder as the Chairman tried to suck air past his tortured tongue, “but this is payback for adding salt and pepper to your meat loaf last night. Chef said it was seasoned perfectly, and if you want his food spicier, he’s more than happy to oblige. Enjoy.”

He sauntered from the op center, leaving the Chairman literally unable to reply.

An hour later, they were over the spot where the charts indicated an obstruction on the seafloor. They lowered the side-scan sonar, a towed array that hovered just above the seabed, and took acoustical pictures of its surroundings. More often than not, the obstruction, whether man-made or natural, was exactly where the charts said it would be, but ocean-floor mapping wasn’t the Oregon’s primary, secondary, or even tertiary mission. As a result, their sonar unit wasn’t up to par when compared to outfits like NOAA or NUMA, and it took time to find the target. In this case, they spent an hour running lanes north and south over a swath of the sea, much like a weekender mowing the lawn. It was this tedious back-and-forth scanning that tested Cabrillo’s patience.

Finally, after their second hour of fruitless search, the display screen showed an object that began reflecting sonar waves back to the array.

Juan felt the initial spike of adrenaline that any hunter does at the first sign of the quarry. It turned to bitter disappointment when the sonar revealed an object at least five hundred feet long and so oddly shaped that it could only be a stone outcropping on the otherwise barren continental shelf.

Another bust, he said to himself. He keyed the intercom. “Eric, to paraphrase Charlie Brown on Halloween, we got a rock. Go ahead and leave the sled deployed, our next target is only five miles away.”

The cable for the towed sonar was much stronger than the ROV’s umbilical, so they could leave it in the water as they transited to the next grid mark, but they would need to keep their speed below fifteen knots so as not to stress it too much.

“Okay.”

“Helm, next target is five miles away on two nineteen.”

“Making my course two nineteen at fifteen knots.”

Mark Murphy strolled out of the elevator wearing a seemingly blood-stained T-shirt with the words “I’m fine” written out over his chest. The young tech genius had his face buried in an iPad as he walked.

“About time,” Juan said. “You were supposed to spell me ten minutes ago.”

“You and I both know you weren’t going to leave the op center until you identified this latest target, so I monitored communications and came up when you pegged it.”

Juan frowned at being so easily read. “All right. I’ll give you this one. Just so you know, the array is still deployed.”

“Hello. Monitored communications. I knew that.”

“You’re in a mood,” Cabrillo remarked.

“Sorry, boss. I’ve been asked to peer-review an article by a friend at UC Berkeley and his conclusions are all wrong, and no matter how I try to help him see his mistakes, he’s just not getting it.”

“He doesn’t like being out-nerded?”

Murph grinned. “Nobody does.”

Juan spent the rest of the day on paperwork, had dinner with Eddie Seng and Franklin Lincoln, and watched a movie in his cabin before turning in for the night. They’d checked five more targets during Mark’s watch, and, like all the others before, they hadn’t found Tesla’s ship.

They had one more day before heading south for Bermuda. In the great scheme of things, a two-week hiatus guarding the Emir wasn’t a big deal, but Juan felt the specter of time looming over him. Kenin was covering his tracks, first in Kazakhstan, and again with Professor Tennyson. It followed that he would try to destroy Tesla’s experimental ship, if he knew about it, which Juan felt sure the Russian admiral did.

It was little wonder his sleep was restless.

The ringing of his bedside telephone roused him.

“H’lo,” he muttered. Cleared his throat and tried again. “Hello. This is Cabrillo.”

“Chairman, it’s Eric.”

“Yeah, Stoney. What have you got?”

“I think we found her.”

Juan noted it was five o’clock. Weak sunlight spilled around the curtains drawn over his cabin’s portholes.

“What time did you guys start this morning?” he asked, swinging his legs out of bed.

“We ran all night. Figured we’re searching so deep that we need halogens on the ROV anyway, and shipping traffic’s been light.”

“Where are we?”

“Target thirty-two.”

Juan knew that put them about twenty miles due east of Ocean City, Maryland. Almost the exact center of the search grid Eric and Murph had drawn up.

“Nicely figured,” he said.

Stone knew what Cabrillo meant. “Truth told, it wasn’t rocket science, but thanks.”

“You’ve got a visual?” Juan had clamped the phone with his shoulder and was working the sock of his prosthetic leg over his stump.

“Little Geek’s down there now, and it looks to be a small, thirties-era warship, with some weird modifications. It looks like a cage was built over the entire deck up to and over the superstructure and bridge.”

“What’s the condition of the wreck?”

“She’s sitting pretty much upright on the bottom. There’s been some collapse, but, on the whole, she’s in better condition than you’d expect. Only problem is, she’s got a couple of nets snagged over her, so I don’t want to get Little Geek in too close and snarl the umbilical.”

“Okay. Alert the moon pool that I’m coming down, and wake Mike Trono.” Trono was the butt of a lot of jokes on the Oregon because he was the only ex — Air Force member of a crew dominated by Navy veterans. He’d been a pararescuer, one of those tasked to go behind enemy lines to save downed airmen, and he’d made his bones first in Kosovo and later in Iraq. He was also the only diver besides the Chairman certified to dive on trimix gas, which they would need to reach the mine tender’s depth.

“You’re going swimming?”

“Can’t risk Little Geek, but we can risk me. Also roust Eddie. I want him down there with us in the Nomad.” Cabrillo hung up the phone, threw on yesterday’s clothes, and made a quick pit stop in his bathroom.

The largest single space aboard the Oregon other than the main hold is the sub bay, where they stored the two submersibles, and the moon pool, where they were launched through large doors cut into the ship’s keel. It was lit with stark-white lights that flashed reflections on the surging black water sloshing in the swimming-pool-sized hole. A prep crew was working on the Nomad 1000, the larger of the two mini-subs and the only one equipped with an air lock. The Nomad looked like a white lozenge with three small, forward-looking portholes mated to an industrial framework of ballast tanks, thrusters, battery packs, and a pair of nasty-looking mechanical arms equipped with feedback pincers that could collect the most delicate sea fan or rip apart a sheet of steel. The mini was rated to carry six people and could dive to a thousand feet. The smaller Discovery submarine was a sports car compared to its delivery-van cousin and could make this dive depth, but Cabrillo wanted the air lock as a contingency if anything went wrong. He and Mike could lock into the chamber and decompress inside if the sub had to make a quick ascent. Cabrillo’s natural pessimism was what made him an excellent contingency planner. Max always liked to tease him about his plans C, D, and E, and a lot of them were nuts, but they’d saved more operations than Hanley would ever admit.

Off in a corner of the cavernous room, engineers readied the most high-tech dive gear in the Oregon’s inventory. The more dangerous the environment, the more equipment man needs to survive. Put someone on a tropical isle and he can get away with little more than a grass skirt. Where Cabrillo was headed was as inhospitable to human life as the hard vacuum of outer space. Because of the increased pressure below a depth of about four hundred feet, the nitrogen that makes up the vast majority of air would saturate the blood and cause nitrogen narcosis, or rapture of the deep. It was a debilitating sense of euphoria that made even the simplest tasks impossible. To counter this, most of the nitrogen in the air Cabrillo and Trono would breathe had been replaced with undissolvable helium gas. The mix was called trimix because it did contain some nitrogen to prevent another debilitating problem called High Pressure Nervous Syndrome.

On top of that they would carry small cylinders of argon gas to inflate their dry suits. Argon conducted heat much more slowly than either helium or regular air, and the bottom temperature was less than forty degrees, so hypothermia was always an issue. All told, each man would be burdened with over a hundred fifty pounds of gear.

“Morning, Juan,” Mike Trono greeted. Trono was in his mid-thirties, with a slender build and thin straight brown hair. “I haven’t had a chance to ask, how’d you like Vermont?”

Trono was a native of the Green Mountain State.

“Beautiful, but the roads are atrocious.”

“Ah, potholes and frost heaves — oh, how I don’t miss thee.”

“You up for this?”

“Are you kidding me? I live for wreck diving. I spent my last vacation exploring the Andrea Doria.”

“That’s right. Didn’t Kurt Austin lead that trip?”

“Yeah. It was his second time down to her.”

A new voice, one with a refined English accent, intruded. “There are simply too many type A personalities aboard this ship.”

“Hello, Maurice,” Juan greeted the Oregon’s chief steward.

It didn’t matter that it was barely past five in the morning or that news of the discovery was less than fifteen minutes old, the retired Royal Navy man was dressed as elegantly as ever in razor-creased black slacks, a snowy white button-down shirt, and shoes so polished, they’d shame a Marine honor guard.

He had a white towel draped over one arm and carried a domed silver serving tray. He set down a carafe of black coffee and removed the dome. The tempting odor of scrambled eggs and country sausage beat back the briny scent of the sea that permeated the sub bay.

After they ate, both men stripped down and donned thermal diving underwear and socks. Then came the Ursuit Cordura FZ dry suits. These suits were of one-piece construction that left only the face exposed. That would be covered with dive helmets outfitted with integrated communications gear. A computerized voice modulator would null some of the effects of breathing helium, but both men would still be left sounding like an alto-voiced Mickey Mouse.

While they were suiting up, Eddie had performed his pre-dive checks, and the Nomad submersible was lowered into the water. Additional trimix tanks were attached to hard points on the hull so the two divers wouldn’t need to use their own supply until they were on the bottom.

“How you coming?” Cabrillo asked his dive partner.

“Good to go.”

Juan flashed Mike the universal OK sign for divers, pressing index finger to thumb, and pulled his helmet over his head. Mike did the same. The two took a couple of tentative breaths and made adjustments as needed.

“And a very good morning to the Lollipop Guild,” Max Hanley called from his station in the op center.

“Very funny,” Juan retorted, but his irritation went unheard because of his comical voice.

“Just so you know, the forecast is for light wind, and a sea running barely two feet. But be advised, you’ve got a five-knot current out of the south on the bottom. Get careless and you’ll be gone.”

“Roger that,” the two men acknowledged at the same time.

“Bus driver, you ready?” Cabrillo asked Eddie Seng.

“Say the word.”

“We’re going in.”

Juan and Mike threw each other another OK sign and unceremoniously rolled into the Atlantic’s cool embrace. Both were quick with inflating their suits and adjusting their buoyancy so they hovered like dark jellyfish just below the surface. They found handholds along the side of the Nomad and switched their air feeds to the spare tanks attached to her.

“Let’s go.”

“Hold on tight. Nomad, release.” A pause. “We are clear.”

Bubbles erupted around the submersible as Eddie purged her tanks and the thirty-foot mini-sub began its descent to the seafloor and whatever lay hidden on the derelict mine tender.

Cabrillo could feel pressure building on his suit and knew it would approach two hundred pounds per square inch when they reached the wreck. He continuously added argon gas to keep the material from crushing in on him. The cold temperature wasn’t a problem now, but it would eventually start seeping through the protective layers and leach heat first from his skin and then his very core.

Down they dropped, the blue-gray water of a dawn dive giving way to midnight blue and finally true black as they settled deeper and deeper. There was no sense of movement to their descent except for the steadily building current that swept tropical waters out of the Caribbean along the East Coast and eventually to Northern Europe.

Juan kept a constant vigil over his equipment, checking valves and his dive computer for time and depth and other details. He also checked in with Max and Eddie at regular intervals and maintained visual confirmation that his dive partner was okay. Laxity anywhere is dangerous. On a dive, it is deadly.

“Bottom coming up in fifty feet,” Eddie announced. “I’m going to switch on the lights.”

As powerful as they were, the xenon lamps mounted on the forward part of the submarine could throw a corona of light only twenty feet. It showed the ocean was full of snow — tiny particles of organic matter that continuously rained down from the surface, only this was much worse because of the current. Cabrillo had experienced this phenomena many times, but this trip was like trying to peer through a blizzard.

“Visibility sucks,” Mike complained.

“Say again,” Max radioed.

“No visibility,” Juan enunciated slowly.

“Copy that. Poor vis.”

“We’re coming down about fifty feet off the ship,” Eddie said. “I’ve got it on lidar. The vessel itself is eighty feet long, but she’s trailing a good two hundred feet of old fishing nets that’re snagged around her hull.”

A burst of silt erupted around the hull when Eddie gunned the sub’s motors a bit too hard. “Oops. Sorry about that.”

The submersible crawled out of a billowing cloud of sand that seemed to be flushed away by the Gulf Stream. Cabrillo got his first look at the wreck with his own eyes. The old Navy ship appeared as haunted and forlorn as any wreck he’d seen, and with the rotting nets waving in the current, she looked like an old castle draped in cobwebs. He felt a shiver run up his spine that had nothing to do with the temperature.

The ship itself was a slender, arrow-bowed craft, with good proportions to her superstructure and a single up-and-down funnel placed just aft of amidships. She had no name, but under the accumulated rime of sea growth the number 821 could be seen painted next to her main anchor hawsehole. It appeared that she’d settled evenly. There were no crushed hull plates, but the superstructure was showing signs of decay as portions of some decks had collapsed after nearly seventy-five years of the ocean’s corrosive assault.

“Would you guys turn on your helmet cams so we can get a visual up here?” Max prompted.

Juan turned on both his camera and his own lights while Mike Trono did the same.

As they edged closer, more details emerged, and Juan saw the odd frame built around the ship that Eric Stone had mentioned. The metal trusswork looked like it extended to just below the waterline and covered the entire ship in what was essentially a cage with openings of about two feet square. It was going to be a tight fit to get through the frame and actually explore the ship.

There was something really strange about the structure, whose purpose he couldn’t begin to guess. And then it occurred to him. While the rest of the ship was rust-streaked and matted with marine growth, the frame was shiny, and not a single organism had tried to make it their home. No clams grew there, like the colonies infesting the ship’s deck, no starfish clung to it, not even a stray coral polyp. It was as if the sea creatures shied away from the metal scaffold.

“Mike,” Juan called, “take a sample of that frame. Priority one.”

“Copy. You want a sample of the frame,” Trono repeated back so there was no confusion.

Eddie settled the Nomad onto the seafloor about ten feet from the wreck. Cabrillo and Trono switched over to their own trimix tanks, waiting a minute to make certain they had regular airflow, then they pushed off from the mini-sub.

Eddie had positioned them so that the Nomad’s hull blocked the worst of the brutal current, and it was an easy swim over to the wreck. While Mike got busy with a diamond-toothed saw on one of the frame members, Cabrillo managed to ease himself through one of the square openings by first taking off his main tank and pushing it through ahead of himself. Once he had the tank strapped back in place, he swam over the open aft deck, where the ship had once deployed and repaired mines. Now that he was out of the Nomad’s protection, he kept one hand on part of the ship at all times. The cage would prevent him from being carried clear off the ship, but impacting the trusswork, should he slip up, could damage equipment or break bone.

He reached a door that led into the ship’s interior. Before doing anything, he rapped on it with the steel butt of his handheld dive light to test the metal’s strength. Near the edge of the door, the door flaked some, but its integrity seemed good.

“I’m going in,” he announced.

“Roger,” Max said. Standard procedure would have been to have Mike stationed at the door should anything go wrong, but the Chairman’s dive partner was only seconds away.

The passage was a standard hallway, with doors leading left and right. Each room was inky black until Cabrillo swept his light across the walls. It looked as though the ship had been completely stripped as part of her being scrapped. There was no furniture in any of the rooms, and he could tell by the plumbing that toilets and sinks had been removed from the enlisted men’s head.

He came to a stairwell, and his light caught a sudden movement that made him rear back. A silver fish, he had no idea what species, blasted past him in a blur of fins and tail.

“What happened?” a concerned Hanley asked. As bad as it was for Juan, the jerky video wouldn’t have shown what had so startled him.

“Just a fish.” Normally, Juan would have made a lame joke, but communicating humor in a helium-induced falsetto was next to impossible.

He figured that whatever equipment Tesla installed would be on a lower deck rather than up above, near the bridge. He swam down the stairs — really, a steeply canted ladder — and came upon a room where mines had once been stored. Rather than being empty as he’d expected, most of the compartment was taken up by an odd piece of machinery. Juan snapped some pictures with his high-res camera.

“What am I looking at?” Max asked in frustration because of the poor video quality despite the equipment’s expense.

“A machine,” Juan told him. “Never seen anything like it.”

It was a boxy contraption, with wires running from various parts in a dizzying whirl of loops. Some of the machine had been attacked by sea life, while other parts, much like the cage surrounding the ship, hadn’t been touched. Thick cables ran out of the top of the machine and up through the ceiling where they probably attached to the frame. Behind the machine was an electrical dynamo with exposed copper coils now rendered to verdigris-colored ruin. He could see no evidence of what Professor Tennyson said transpired in this room nor did he really expect to.

And while he was no engineer, Cabrillo was versed enough in technology to know he was looking at something completely new. That this was Tesla’s work wasn’t in doubt, but its purpose certainly was. Optical camouflage? Teleportation? Death ray? Rumors all, but this thing had definitely scared people enough to see it buried in a watery grave. He also saw evidence that someone had dived this wreck before because it looked as though parts of the machine were missing.

It was at that moment when he realized that his mind was drifting from the technical aspects of the dive that he heard a shrill alarm over the comm. It was coming from the Oregon.

“Max?” Seconds passed and there was no reply. So again he cried in his helium-altered voice, “Max!”