Mirage

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Panic kills divers. That was the first lesson from his crusty dive instructor when Juan had earned his scuba certification as a teenager. That was the last too. Panic kills divers.

He and Mike and Eddie had between six and eight minutes to get away. Plenty of time. No need to panic.

Cabrillo shoved his camera back into the dive bag strapped to his waist, took one last glance at Tesla’s remarkable contraption, and headed back toward the staircase.

“Mike, are you on your way to the Nomad?” Cabrillo asked, irked that the helium made him sound like a little girl.

“Yes. I even got a sample from the frame.”

“Good. Eddie, we’re going to have to jam ourselves into the air lock. Once we’re in, emergency ascent.”

“Roger. Emergency blow once you and Mike are aboard.”

That’s going to cost me, Juan thought.

In an emergency ascent, the cylindrical hull of the submersible disconnected from the rest of the craft, all the motors, battery packs, and ancillary equipment. The crew compartment would shoot to the surface like a cork, taking them out of the blast range, but it also meant that about a million dollars’ worth of sub components would be left behind to be blown into oblivion.

Cabrillo misjudged as he moved up the staircase and bumped his trimix tank into a bulkhead. It wasn’t much of a hit, but to the old derelict it was a deadly punch. Steel bracings, weakened by decades of immersion, gave way, and the walls around the staircase collapsed in a slow pirouette of destruction. The water filled with an impenetrable cloud of rust particles that turned the light from Cabrillo’s lamps into a meager brick-colored glow.

He managed to push himself away from the worst of the collapse, saving himself from being sliced apart by the avalanche of plate steel.

His careless action had to have caused a chain reaction because he could hear additional rumblings as the old wreck tried to find some new equilibrium.

He remained curled in a ball until everything finally settled down. A piece of steel had landed across his back. His tanks had protected him, but now as he tried to push it off he realized it was either heavier than its impact indicated or it was wedged in place.

“Chairman? Are you there? Juan?”

“I read you, Mike. I might be in trouble.”

“What happened?”

“A wall gave way when I hit it. I’m in a stairwell and I might be trapped.”

“I’m coming.”

“Negative. Get to the Nomad. I’ll get myself out.”

“We’ve got five minutes.”

Cabrillo ran the odds through his head. “Okay. I’ll give you three. If you can’t reach me, get the hell away from here.”

Eddie Seng had been monitoring the divers and knew what he had to do. He powered up the Nomad and swung it around so that he was facing the wreck. He eased in closer, reaching across the tight cabin to switch on the manipulator arms at the copilot’s station. He could see Mike, working to remove his tank so he could fit through the frame surrounding the wreck, and radioed to him.

“Hold on, Mike. I’ve got a better idea.”

Trono had to have seen the sub’s dive lights shift toward him. He looked up and saw the craft practically looming over him, its arms outstretched like skeletal limbs. He quickly got out of its way.

With a deft hand on the thruster controls to keep the Nomad in place against the current, Eddie grasped one of the metallic bars with a manipulator hand and tore it completely free. He backed off to allow Mike to swim through the larger aperture.

Mike swam across the aft deck and reached the door Cabrillo had entered only minutes earlier. Rust particles billowed from inside the ship like smoke from a burning building. It only cleared when it was borne away by the current, again like smoke on the wind.

He groped like a sightless man along the passageway, sensing that there wasn’t much he could do until visibility improved.

“The stairwell is the fourth door on the right,” Juan said as if reading his mind.

Mike counted doors, and when he’d shown his light in through the correct door, he saw an open shaft that had once been a stairwell. The steps themselves had collapsed, and steel plating had peeled away from its internal structure. He realized that the rivets that had once held them in place had failed, allowing the plating to fall free.

The rust was settling out of the water, and he could just see Cabrillo’s leg peeking from the debris one deck down. The leg moved when Juan tried to free himself, but each upward thrust locked the tangle of junk even tighter.

“Hold on,” Mike said.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Cabrillo replied.

Trono swam down, careful not to tear his gloves, and began moving some of the plating. The sections weren’t large, but it was like the old game of pick-up sticks. He didn’t want what he was doing to cause additional cave-ins. He tore into the pile with repressed frenzy, wanting to work faster but knowing he had to be careful. All the while, he knew that Juan would order him away at any second.

He shoved away enough of the old bulkheads for Cabrillo to try to free himself one last time.

“It’s up to you.”

Juan gathered his energy, channeled it, and pushed with everything he had. Mike had done just enough so that the plate that had kept him pinned shifted and ground against the others but didn’t jam up. He heaved again and finally dragged himself out of the pile.

Mike was there with a hand to steady him.

“I owe you.” Juan meant it to sound solemn, but the helium lessened the sense of import. “Now, let’s get out of here.”

The two men swam back up to the main deck and finned down the corridor. They burst out of the superstructure to see that Eddie had used the manipulators to tear apart more of the old framework and had the submersible practically parked on the deck.

Mike reached the air lock door first and spun open the wheel lock. The space was tight — a phone booth, really — and he and Cabrillo would need to stay in it for quite some time. They’d been at depth long enough to need almost two hours to decompress. The cramped space would act as a decompression chamber once they reached the surface, but they would need the Oregon supplying power since the Nomad’s batteries would be left behind.

Getting away from the wreck was only the first part of their ordeal. If they didn’t link up with the Oregon in time, both divers would run out of trimix, and the Nomad had no internal supplies of the gas. To make matters worse, Juan and Mike had to be decompressed before Eddie could leave the sub via the air lock.

Trono dove headfirst through the hatch and disappeared inside. Juan waited a beat, letting his dive partner get settled, before he swam into the air lock chamber. His feet were on Mike’s tanks and his head was still outside the sub when he felt a vibration through the water. He knew immediately what it was and ducked at the last second.

He managed to get the hatch closed but not fully secured when the torpedo slammed into the old mine tender up near her bow. Nearly a thousand pounds of high explosives detonated in a blast of energy that swept through the uncompressible water and pummeled the mini-sub so that she crashed into the remains of the metal framework. Steel tore and shrieked. The ship’s superstructure was peeled back and collapsed at the same time.

Inside the air lock, the Chairman and Mike Trono were so tightly wedged that neither man was injured but both were severely disoriented as the sub tumbled end over end. Yet even before they had settled, Juan was working to secure the hatch’s lock. His head rang with the concussive force of the explosion, and his hands felt leaden, but he managed to spin the lock down, sealing the two of them in the tight chamber.

“Eddie, emergency blow.”

Seng had already seen the indicator light in the cockpit telling him that the hatch was secure. He’d hit the button even as the Chairman’s voice came over the radio.

With a clunk, the Nomad detached from its lower frame and began a wild rise to the surface. Only it didn’t. It rose less than two feet before it became enmeshed in the mine tender’s dislodged radio mast and an old, rotted fishing net.

Juan knew he should feel the cylindrical hull rocketing up from the depths the way one feels in a high-speed elevator. That wasn’t happening. They had cut loose the heavy sled but weren’t rising.

There was at most thirty seconds between the torpedoes, and he reacted without thought.

“Seal the hatch after me,” he said to Mike Trono and opened the air lock.

Cabrillo launched himself out of the mini-sub, flashing his light along its length, searching for whatever had snagged it and prevented its ascent. He saw the mast that had fallen across the sub’s hull, but it wasn’t big enough to have stalled their rise. Instead, it was the tangled mass of fishing nets that kept them stuck in place.

His titanium dive knife was honed to a razor’s edge, and the buoyancy of the submersible cabin kept the net’s lines taut. He attacked them like a ninja wielding a samurai sword, slashing and hacking the lines with abandon. The mini-sub rose fractionally as more of the tendrils binding it fell free. Cabrillo kept at it. The water filled with tiny bits of old sisal and a maelstrom of disturbed marine growth.

Then all at once, as he knew it would, the submersible erupted from the net, freeing itself of the last of the ropes and vanishing upward in the blink of an eye.

Cabrillo wasted no time watching it. He swam over to the far side of the wreck, dropped down to the bottom, and crawled as far from the ship as he could. He had to thrust his hands into the silt to keep from being blown away by the current.

The second torpedo augured into the seafloor well short of its target. Because he was shielded by the ship’s hull and was lying flat on the bottom, the pressure wave mostly expanded over him, but he still caught enough to have the air forced from his lungs in an explosive breath that almost unsealed his dive helmet.

He thought he’d survived the worst of it when a second pressure wave hit, and this time it peeled him off the bottom and sent him tumbling. The current grabbed at him immediately, and he was soon bouncing along the bottom at a stiff four knots.

If he had any chance of being rescued, he needed to stay with the wreck. It was the only logical place Max would search for him. If he tumbled past it, there was no way he’d be able to fight the current to return. He didn’t have anywhere near enough air to surface using proper decompression stops. And an ascent without them would lead to a fatal dose of the bends. His joints would constrict as the nitrogen in the tissue dissolved out, and he would die in unimaginable agony.

He managed to flatten himself into a proper swimming position. He knew he couldn’t fight the current, so he didn’t even try. Like someone caught in a riptide, he swam at an angle to the current instead of fighting it directly, vectoring off some of the brute force of the water rushing past him. He was certain that the current had already kicked him north of the hulk, but he had a slim chance of finding the wavering remains of the fishing nets that trailed off the ship like a bride’s train.

His legs began to burn as he kicked with everything he had. He wouldn’t let himself consider that the nets had been ripped clean off the old wreck by the second torpedo. He swam hard, battling a current he couldn’t defeat, burning through his supply of trimix at a prodigious rate. He fought the growing agony of cramped muscles filling with lactic acid, groaning aloud inside his helmet. The rip and saw of his breathing filled his head with the sounds of desperation.

This was how he would die, clawing his way across the bottom, sensing the net was just outside of his visual range and feeling that if he could just keep going another handful of seconds he would reach it.

And then he actually saw it, waving in the current like the arms of a giant jellyfish. He could also see that he was approaching the very end of the ensnared mass of nets. He had only fifteen feet to swim, but there was only ten feet of net before he was swept past it. If he missed, death was the only option.

Cabrillo doubled down. His feet kicked in a flurry of motion, but not giving up any efficiency. He thrust with his arms, his gloved hands curled into perfect paddles that pulled him against the Gulf Stream. He adjusted his angle slightly, forcing himself to fight even harder in the face of the current but knowing he’d been coming in too shallow and would miss.

He reached out. Inches. That was all he needed. He roared as the tips of his fingers brushed the old netting just at its very end. They scrambled to find purchase, but the net was covered in marine slime that was as slick as grease.

There, he finally grasped the second-to-last opening in the net only to have the rotted line snap off in his hand. He clutched at the last bit of rope and prayed, because he could swim no more. The net would either support the extra drag of his body clinging to it or it wouldn’t and he’d be lost.

He stopped kicking, and the old fishing net held his weight. He pulled himself up so he could grip it with both arms and willed his breathing to slow, and the adrenaline began to filter out of his bloodstream. He clung there, panting, knowing he was still in a precarious position but unable to find the strength to move. The net was floating, gently undulating, in the current, so when he felt a sudden jolt he knew something was wrong. He grabbed his more powerful handheld light and flashed it up the net. The lamp revealed it was tearing. His weight was too much for the rotten old sisal lines.

He started climbing up the net against the current, his head down and his shoulders and arms doing all the work.

The net lurched again as more of it parted. He was scrambling now. He recalled climbing cargo nets at the CIA’s training facility as part of an obstacle course, but it was nothing like this. The press of the current against his body and bulky gear dwarfed the gravity he’d fought back then. And unlike those training sessions, he couldn’t use his feet because his flippers would get in the way and he couldn’t afford the seconds it would take to slip them off.

The net tore completely free just as he reached a still-stable section. The current sucked the detached piece out from under him. It snagged against his weight belt, and for a moment it pulled on him with the strength and tenacity of a pit bull. His grip was just about to slip when the net unsnagged and vanished behind him.

Not allowing himself time to recover, he continued climbing up the net, scrambling in a mad dash to the safety of the wreck’s shattered remains. It was a two-hundred-foot climb. Once he felt the net was safe enough, he removed his flippers and clipped them to his dive harness and took a few moments to let his feet take the strain off his arms.

He gave himself just three minutes’ rest before continuing on, though now it was his legs providing most of the heavy lifting and he made good time.

The mine tender was unrecognizable as a ship. The glow from his headlamp and his dive light revealed the ship had been blown into scrap by the first Russian torpedo, and a lot of its remains had been buried under a blanket of sand kicked up by the second. Chunks of hull plating lay strewn across the seafloor. He identified part of the ship’s funnel only because of its distinct stovepipe shape. He saw no sign of the cage Tesla had enshrouded the ship with or the strange machine he’d discovered in the vessel’s hold.

It was a miracle that the net had remained snagged on what little of the superstructure survived the explosion. He found a spot in the lee of a ruined boiler and settled to the bottom, finally able to take a proper rest.

Because the submersible acted as a relay for their communications, he knew it was pointless to try to raise the Oregon. The distance to the surface was just too great for his gear, but the main problem was that the mini-sub’s hull section became deaf and mute once it detached from the propulsion sled.

He powered down his helmet light to conserve the battery. He was trapped on the bottom of the sea, as unable to change his predicament as an astronaut who becomes separated from his space capsule. Juan could do nothing but rely on his crew to save him. His faith in them was boundless, but rescues take time. They would need to recover the submersible first, and only then would Max discover that he was still down here. Next they would need to organize recovery gear and send down either Little Geek or the Discovery 1000, the second, smaller mini-sub the Oregon carried. It all took time.

The vast ocean crushed down on him from above, a lone man sitting on the seafloor among the rusted ruins of a dead man’s dream, a lonely pinprick of light in a stygian darkness as vast as the cosmos. Juan, feeling the cold start to seep into his skin, finally looked at his remaining trimix supply, nodded grimly, and put out his dive light so that the black crushed up against his dry suit.

He had ten minutes to live.