Mirage

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Max Hanley continued to issue orders while Eric adjusted their heading once again.

“Mark, I want you and MacD down in the boat garage ready to launch a RHIB at a moment’s notice. That means I want the outer door open and the engines warmed.” He keyed in the intercom to reach the techs in the sub bay. “This is Max. Prep the Disco for SAR, and make sure Little Geek’s ready as well.”

The Oregon tore across the sea at a near-racing-boat’s pace, driven as much by her engines as by Hanley’s determination to rescue his people.

Mark Murphy was swinging out of his chair when he spotted something on his console.

“Max, I’m picking up the automated beacon from the Nomad. She’s surfaced.”

“Over the wreck?”

“Negative. They’ve drifted almost two miles north.”

Eric Stone asked, “Should I alter course?”

“Negative,” Max replied after a thoughtful pause. “Keep us headed for the wreck site. Mark, get moving. Tell me when you and Lawless are ready to go. We’ll slow the ship and you guys head out for the mini-sub.”

“We’re on it.” He raced from the bridge while Max put out a shipwide bulletin for MacD Lawless to report to the boat garage.

A mile from their destination, Murph reported they were ready to go. Max gave the order to back off on their speed, and when he deemed it safe, he told them to go.

Powered by a pair of massive outboards, the RHIB was an open-cockpit rocket ship for the water. Its sleek black hull and ring of inflated pontoons allowed it to survive in virtually any sea, and it could be configured for any number of missions.

The RHIB sliced through waves, bouncing and hammering over the taller swells while a white rooster tail erupted from her stern. It wasn’t built for comfort — the two men stood behind the main controls on flexed knees, their bodies absorbing the shock of the rough ride.

Where Mark was nerdy and a bit doughy when he didn’t focus on fitness, MacD Lawless looked like an underwear model, with a chiseled physique and a movie star’s face. He was the newest member of the Corporation, having been rescued by them from Taliban kidnappers in northern Pakistan. He’d more than proved his worth in the ensuing months, and with his easygoing New Orleans charm and melodious Southern accent, he’d ingratiated himself with the crew.

Like a stone across the surface of a pond, they skipped their way across the Atlantic, pushing the RHIB past fifty knots. Behind them, the Oregon was just a dot as she raced to her own rendezvous. MacD steered the boat while Mark navigated using a tablet computer displaying a satellite relay of the Nomad’s location.

It took them just a few minutes to reach the drifting hull, which to both men looked like a railroad tank car far, far from home. MacD sidled up to the mini-sub, and Mark leapt over with a painter in hand to tie them off. Lawless didn’t wait for Mark to finish before he grabbed a swim mask, kicked off his Nikes, and dove into the water. Mark watched him go over with a slow shake of his head, not understanding why Lawless would do that when they could access the sub through the rear-mounted air lock.

Lawless had been hit by enough spray on their mad dash here to know the water was shockingly cold, yet he still gave an involuntary gasp as it leached through his clothes. He sucked in a deep breath and dove down and swam toward the front of the submersible. He pressed his mask to one of the three small portholes. The interior of the sub was pitch-black. Not a good sign.

He rapped on the glass with his LSU class ring, and, within seconds, a figure threw itself into the pilot seat and a light flipped on, revealing Eddie Seng. He had a bruise near his temple that was starting to swell up like a pigeon’s egg. He quickly reached a piece of paper from a stack next to his control panel and held it up for MacD to read.

Lawless blew out his breath when he saw what Eddie had written and scrambled to the surface as fast as he could.

The instant his face cleared the water he shouted, “Mark, stop!”

He heaved himself out of the water and up onto the bobbing hull in one powerful lunge. Lawless saw Mark kneeling over the air lock hatch, his bands poised to crack the seal. “Don’t open it.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s fully pressurized, and, if you do, not only will it blow the hatch into your skull but it’ll turn Mike Trono into a meat bomb.”

Murph carefully pulled his hands away from the locking wheel and let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. “What about Juan?”

“No idea. Eddie just held up a note saying Mike is in the air lock. It’s got to be pumped up to about two hundred psi.”

“Hold on.” Mark leapt back over to the RHIB and grabbed another piece of electronics he’d taken from the Oregon. He uncoiled a length of wire from the device and handed its end to Lawless.

“There’s a communications port directly above the auxiliary electrical port. Both are near the large external air intake port. Can’t miss it,” Mark said with a grin and shoved MacD in the chest so that he tumbled back into the water.

MacD gave him a scowl and duck-dove with the cable in his hand. He surfaced thirty seconds later and shoved the swim mask up onto his forehead. “Give it a go.”

“Eddie, can you hear me? It’s Murph.”

“Never been so glad to hear your voice,” Eddie responded. “You got the message?”

“Yeah. What’s Mike doing in the air lock? And where’s the Chairman?”

“Long story. As for the Chairman, he’s still down on the wreck.”

“He was outside when the torpedoes hit?”

“Not the first one, but he went out to free us just before the second one exploded.”

“Is he alive?”

“Don’t know. Listen, we don’t have time for this. Mike’s breathing off his own tanks. We need to get this tub back to the Oregon and get him some trimix so we can start decompressing him out of there.”

“Right. MacD and I are out here on a RHIB. The Oregon should be over the wreck by now. We’ll tow you over and lift you aboard with the deck crane.”

“That’s good. Mike and I have been chatting, using Morse code. He’s kept his breathing shallow and figures he’s got another half hour or so.”

“Tell him he’ll be fine. Talk to you later.” Mark gave MacD a look, and the newest member of the team knew what he had to do. He pulled his mask back over his eyes and went to retrieve the cable.

Just a minute later, they took the Nomad under tow. The RHIB was designed for speed rather than torque, but they still managed to get up to fifteen knots pulling the ungainly hull through the water. Mark had radioed ahead, so when they motored under the shadow of the Oregon’s lee side, the most powerful of the ship’s forward derricks had been swung out and lifting hooks lowered to the water.

The mini-sub was pulled from the Atlantic as easy as a babe from a cradle, water sluicing off its sides, dousing the two men in the RHIB.

Lawless gunned the motors to steer them into the boat garage as the mini-sub cleared the rail and was lowered into the main cargo hold. Once they were aboard, Murph grabbed a towel from a storage bin, dried his hair and face as best he could, and headed for the hold, figuring Max would handle the Chairman’s rescue while he figured out how to open a particularly dicey can of worms.

Down in the moon pool, Hanley was securing two spare trimix tanks to Little Geek with nylon webbing.

“Okay,” he said at last, “try it.”

A tech at Little Geek’s controls spooled up its three propellers and maneuvered them on their gimbals to make certain they didn’t become fouled by the extra burden the ROV would carry.

“Looks good,” Hanley said, getting to his feet. “Give me a hand.”

The two men lifted the two hundred pounds of robot and air tanks and lowered it on its umbilical down into the moon pool itself. It vanished as soon as they let go of the thick armored cable, dropping down in an arc that swept it northward thanks to the Gulf Stream. The little robot would need to fight the current the whole way, but since she was tethered and being supplied power by her mother ship, it wouldn’t be an issue.

The only issue now was if they’d gotten here in time.

Cabrillo couldn’t believe the cold. It had crept up on him so insidiously that it was in his bones before he realized it. He had remained perfectly still, not generating any body heat — that was the culprit. In order to stretch out his air supply, he had to sit as quietly as possible, and yet that allowed in a killer just as deadly as asphyxia.

His hands shook so badly that it took three attempts to flip on his dive light. Its glow made the loneliness somehow more tolerable. Humans were, after all, a social animal. And to die alone was one of our species’ innate fears. He turned his gaze onto his air readings. The ten minutes he’d given himself were up. He was breathing gas that was so amorphous that it couldn’t be read by the tank’s monitors.

He was feeling it too. Each breath seemed thinner, less substantive. No matter how deeply he tried to fill his lungs, he just couldn’t get enough air. Again, panic gnawed at the edges of his mind, but he beat it back and tried to keep his breathing steady. Max just needed him to hold out for another couple of minutes.

The light dropped from his icy fingers, and he was so cold he’d gone beyond shivering. He kept trying to breathe air that simply wasn’t there, and no amount of mental trickery could negate that fact. He’d rolled the dice and come up short. Juan never pictured it like this. He’d always assumed he’d die in a gunfight. Statistically speaking, he should have been shot down years ago. But of all the bullet scars his body carried, not one was in a critical area. It was funny. To survive all that and die while on a dive.

He wanted to laugh at the irony, but there wasn’t enough air, so he settled for an enigmatic grin and slowly lost his grip on consciousness.

“Come on, damnit!” Max barked. “We should see it by now.”

He stood over the tech’s shoulder, and both men watched the video feed from Little Geek. So far, they saw nothing but the barren plain of the seafloor. They were in the right position, but the wreck seemed to be gone.

“Are you sure you’re on-station?”

“Yes, Max. I don’t get it.”

The images were grainy, ill lit, and wavering but unmistakable in that there seemed to be no sign of the old mine tender. Both men stared until their eyes watered, trying to make out details that just weren’t there.

“There, there!” Max shouted. “Turn Little Geek, twenty degrees starboard.”

The tech worked the joystick while, four hundred fifty feet below them, Little Geek turned nimbly.

“Aha!” Max cried. Around the ROV was a debris field stretching far beyond the lights’ perimeter. They had been off by a few feet, but in this kind of work that could be the difference between success and failure. “Juan’s around here someplace.”

“Won’t he swim to the light?”

“If he can. Don’t know what shape he’s in.”

The little ROV threaded its way around the shattered wreckage, and this time it was the tech who saw a weak glow emerging from behind an old boiler. He guided the robot around the piece of machinery, and the light revealed the Chairman slumped up against the boiler, his hands resting palm up next to his dive light on the bottom. His head was canted over onto his shoulder in the unnatural pose of death. There were no bubbles emerging from his regulator.

“No,” Max whispered, and then repeated it a second time even softer. The third time he barely made a sound. “No.”

He couldn’t accept what he was seeing. He couldn’t believe Juan was dead. That he’d failed his best friend.

This time he shouted, “No!”

He reached over the tech’s shoulder and grabbed Little Geek’s joystick and used it to ram the ROV into the Chairman as hard as its little motors could push.

Rather than fall over from the impact, Cabrillo’s corpse straightened. His head rose off his shoulders, and an arm came up to grasp the micro-sub.

The tech gasped. “Was he asleep?”

“Judging by how thin the bubbles are coming from his regulator, I think he passed out.” Max couldn’t contain the smile plastered across his face.

Juan had been dreaming of his late wife, killed in a single-car crash while he was away on a mission for the CIA. He knew in his heart that her loneliness had turned her to drinking. Her blood alcohol level that night was twice the legal limit. It didn’t matter that she’d been out with friends. And that they hadn’t stopped her from getting behind the wheel. Her death was his fault. Period. And when he was especially down, her memory haunted his dreams.

Cabrillo jolted awake to a blinding light shining into his eyes. His predicament rushed in on him a moment later, but it took his air-starved brain another few seconds to understand what had happened. It was Little Geek. That was the source of the light. He reached out for the small ROV and felt the extra tanks Max had secured to it like a pack mule’s panniers. Hanley had even positioned them so their umbilical air feeds were within easy reach.

Juan hadn’t taken a breath in almost a minute, and his vision was narrowing to a central point surrounded by gray, but he had just enough mental capacity to unhook the air line going into his helmet and replace it with one from the fresh tank. Fifteen seconds passed and nothing happened, he still wasn’t getting air. Then for some reason Little Geek barreled into him again.

Max was trying to tell him something. What was it? He didn’t know and just wanted to go back to sleep. His head sagged, and for a third time the ROV bounced off his chest. It pirouetted so the bulky trimix tank was right in front of him.

The valve. Juan reached out a hand and cranked open the valve. With a life-giving hiss, his helmet filled with breathable air, and he took it so deep into his lungs, they felt like they would burst. His confusion began to clear as his oxygen-starved brain rebooted. He took ten, twenty deep breaths, giddy at the feeling and never so thankful. He flashed a diver’s OK sign at the camera mounted below the lights. In response, Little Geek spun three hundred sixty degrees, like a happy puppy circling after its tail.

Little Geek settled onto the ground next to him as if it wanted to be petted. It was then Juan saw the bundle Max had secured to the top of the ROV. He opened it and said a silent prayer of thanksgiving. Hanley thought of everything. His hands were numb to the point of uselessness, and he could barely guide a finger through the activation ring of a magnesium flare, but he managed.

The light was blinding white and would have scarred his retinas if he’d looked at it, but his head was turned away. He didn’t care about the light the flare threw off, only about the way it heated the water there in the lee of the mine tender’s boiler. He could feel the difference after only a few seconds. Also stuffed in the bag were chemical heat packets. He broke their seals to activate them and clamped them between his thighs and under his arms. Others he stuffed between his dry suit and buoyancy compensator directly over his heart.

He gave himself ten minutes to recover. By the time he was ready to go, the acrylic-domed Discovery 1000 with Eric Stone at the controls had joined him. Eric and Little Geek stayed with him during the mind-numbingly long ascent, hovering nearby as he went through hours-long decompression stops. Despite the cold and his exhaustion, he took it slow and safe. He knew he’d probably have to sleep in the Oregon’s cramped decompression tank with Mike, but one night was all he was willing to put in.

Most all the crew were lining the moon pool when he finally emerged from the ocean, and he was greeted with a standing ovation and wild cries and whoops. Max looked especially pleased with himself, and even the doc smiled over her professional concern for his well-being.

He was helped out of the water, and workers shucked his gear in record time.

“How are you feeling?” Julia Huxley asked, shouldering her way to his side. “Any symptoms?”

“I’m cold,” he stammered through chattering teeth. “I’m hungry, and I need a bathroom in the worst possible way.” He turned to Hanley, who was hovering right behind Julia. “I never doubted you.”

“Why would you?” Max said, all nonchalance. “I’ve never let you down before.”

“Thanks.”

“You can owe me.”

“Enough with the male bonding,” Hux cut in. “Juan, you’re going into decomp with Mike so I can monitor you both for signs of decompression sickness.”

“He and Eddie are okay?”

“Eddie has a possible concussion, and Mike’s fine. This is only a precaution.”

“Did he keep the sample of that framework or was this all for nothing?”

“I don’t know,” Hux replied, while, behind her, Max produced the sample with a conjurer’s flourish.

“Ta-da. Mark already took a quick look and says he has no idea what it is.”

Juan took the foot-long rod as he was hustled to the decompression chamber at the back wall of the sub bay. It had a rough texture, but unlike anything he’d held before. If he had to give a single-word description of its texture, he’d say “alien.”

He handed it back to Max. “Get me some answers.”

“Mark and Eric will be up all night on this one, that I guarantee. Now get into your sarcophagus with Mike, and I’ll have the kitchen send down some food. Should be interesting to see Maurice give white-glove service through an air lock.”

Juan stepped through the heavy door to the first section of the two-part steel chamber and had a seat on the thinly padded bench. The air pressure would be brought up to about half of what he and Mike had experienced on the bottom, and then he could enter the second chamber, where Trono now waited. The facilities were primitive and stark, looking like something out of a 1960s Navy training film, but, for safety’s sake, Juan didn’t mind putting himself through the tedium.

He cleared his ears as the pressure in the chamber rose, ran through what had happened over the past hours, and chalked it up as the luckiest escape of his life.