Splashdown

Chapter 1

U.S. Navy SEAL Dane Maddock tightened his grip on the submersible’s control joystick as he eased the Deep Surveyor III into a narrow crevice nearly a mile beneath the Pacific. His co-pilot in the two-person craft, fellow SEAL Uriah “Bones” Bonebrake, pointed off to their right where the rock wall of the submarine canyon they’d been following slid past them mere feet away.

“Easy bro, maybe two feet clearance on this side,” Bones warned.

“That’s more room than I usually have to park at those sleazy clubs you drag me to.”

Surprisingly to Dane, Bones remained silent. The six-and-a-half foot tall Cherokee rarely worried about anything, a testament to the fact that he did not consider being a mile underwater in a plastic bubble to be the time or place for levity. Dane cast a sideways glance to Bones’ side of their acrylic sphere, where he kept a sharp eye on the irregular canyon wall.

This outing was to be their checkout dive for an intensive program that capped four straight weeks of submersible pilot training. Completing the dive’s objective would earn them a new qualification, and Bones in particular was not looking forward to failing.

“Just stay focused, man. This isn’t really a course I want to repeat.”

Dane looked over at his co-pilot. “You mean you don’t think this is fun?”

“Never been this deep in one of these things. Plus, I have to trust your driving.” He let out a loud sigh. “I’m sure I’ll get used to it sooner or later.”

“You wound me. I thought we were like two peas in a pod in here!”

“I’d sell all my naked photos of your mom if it would buy me the amount of room a pea must have compared to this. And you’ve got quite a bit more legroom than me.”

Just shy of six feet, Dane did in fact have more space to maneuver within the racks of electronic equipment that guided the craft and allowed it to do useful work. For Bones, on the other hand, although he was, like all SEALs, a superb swimmer, scuba diver and all-around naval warrior, being cramped in the close confines of an underwater vehicle for hours at a time was losing its luster.

Still, he was here for a reason, and that reason was that while Dane had qualified as an ace submersible pilot, Bones had excelled at manipulating the sub’s grab-arms and other specialized payload equipment in the simulation testing and training sessions with remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs. Dane had been taken aback when he read the duty assignment roster and saw Bones’ name beside his own. The big Indian was always surprising him. Somehow he just kept showing up, which meant that somebody with a higher pay grade than Dane’s saw something in the guy. Bones had a certain directness about him, a no-nonsense approach to everyday life situations that sometimes rankled the more reserved Dane, but by now the two had worked together enough that their professionalism had begun to overcome the irritations that initially flared up between them. Most of the time.

“Hey, where you going, Maddock? Our target’s down there.” Bones pointed down between his feet into the abyss that seemed to stretch below them into Hell itself. Their sonar told them, though, that the canyon’s bottom lay “only” another mile deeper. Fortunately to both of them, they were not required to go that far.

“You sure?” Dane manipulated the ship’s controls so that they were poised between two rock walls, awaiting confirmation. Bathed in the harsh artificial light of the sub’s halogen floodlights, the walls revealed their true colors in a world normally immersed in total blackness. Strange blue sponges that resembled lichens, vertical fields of white anemones, and myriad other creatures Dane couldn’t identify somehow eked out a living down here in this freezing world of immense pressure. But as unique as it was, most of it looked the same to him.

Bones interrupted his thoughts. “In the briefing I was actually awake for, they said the target was ‘at lower depth than where the canyon wall convergence narrows to less than three meters.’ I did some checking and found that the target usually lives on a flat area. So we go down from here and look for a rocky shelf, I guess.”

In response, Dane shot Bones a grudging look of respect and tilted their craft downward, activating the forward thrusters. For all his boisterousness, Bones somehow also found a way to pay attention, no matter how much he pretended otherwise. And theirs was definitely a line of work where not paying attention could get you killed.

They dropped down through the narrow crevice, Dane tweaking the sub’s controls to make sure they didn’t scrape the walls while Bones directed a movable spotlight to their surroundings while also monitoring their depth and sonar readouts.

“Coming up on something,” Dane said, easing back on the thrusters.

“Rocky shelf. This could be it. Look for the… There it is!” Bones adjusted the angle of his high intensity beam until it illuminated a whitish stalk towering perhaps ten feet, its red tip a few feet below their submersible’s belly. “Take us down a few feet; then we curve with the wall to the right.”

Dane executed the delicate maneuver until they hovered over a flat expanse of rock that reminded him of a stairway landing — a brief interruption of the vertical plunge the canyon took for yet another mile. There, in the center of the platform, grew a massive tubeworm. Pale crabs scuttled out of reach of the craft’s floodlights, pouring off the rocky shelf into the water column beneath them like lemmings from a cliff.

“Are we sure this is the right tubeworm?” Dane’s careful attention to the controls didn’t allow him the luxury of taking in the details of their surroundings to the degree that Bones could.

“Surer than you were about that dude in a dress who hit on you last weekend. I’m looking at the marker right next to it.”

Dane took his co-pilot’s word that the small cement block that had been previously placed there by their sub instructors lay at the foot of the towering invertebrate.

“Roger that. The marker; not the guy in the dress. And, for the record, it was a girl, she was just…”

“A big, hairy dude?”

Ignoring Bones’ jibe, Dane brought their submersible closer to the base of the creature, which swayed slightly with the vehicle’s prop-wash.

Bones leaned forward, pressing his head against the sub’s acrylic dome as he stared intently at their target. “Okay, stop. I’m within range of the manipulator arm.”

Dane let up on the thrusters. “Do your thing.”

Clutched in the metal claw at the end of an extensible arm outside the sub was a tubular metal object. Bones delicately pressed buttons that rotated the claw as well as the arm itself in different directions. “I wish we were placing some C4 explosives instead of this boring contraption,” he said, referring to the scientific instrumentation package they were supposed to deploy. “That would be much more awesome.” He deftly placed the device on the ledge next to the cement marker and released it from the sub’s grab arm.

“That’s why this is practice, Bones. We screw up with this thing and some eggheads don’t find out what the temperature variations are down here when that worm farts. Make a mistake with C4 and maybe these canyon walls come…”

A gruff, all-business voice issuing from their communications channel interrupted him. “Topside to Deep Surveyor III, you are ordered to report immediately to Base Command. Proceed to support ship at once, do you copy?”

Dane looked over at Bones, who was still retracting the now empty manipulator arm back to the sub. When Bones completed that task he looked over at Dane, raising his eyebrows.

Dane said to Bones, “What’d you do, drop the science package over the cliff?”

Bones shook his head and pointed down at the metal cylinder, where a green LED glowed next to the worm. “It’s all good.”

Dane responded over the radio that he acknowledged the order, then put his hands to work on the sub’s controls.

“Let’s go find out what they want.”

An hour later Dane and Bones strode into the lobby of SEAL Base Command, Monterey Station. Dane addressed a female receptionist in uniform seated behind a horseshoe shaped desk. He started to explain who they were when she waved him down.

“In here now, gentlemen!” a male voice pre-empted from the office, the door to which was open but the man out of sight. The young woman raised an eyebrow and tilted her head in the direction of the office, her meaning clear. You’d better go.

Bones gave her his most lascivious smile which she returned before swiveling in her chair to answer a phone call. Dane reached the doorway to Senior Commander Douglas Lawhorne’s private office first, where he gave a salute.

“Close the door behind you, and at ease.”

As soon as Bones stepped inside, Dane shut the door and then the two of them took seats in front of the commander’s desk, which was set off to the left of the well-appointed room. Scale model ships and submarines decorated the walls behind the desk, while the fourth floor floor-to-ceiling windows afforded a magnificent view of Monterey Bay and the waters from which they had just returned. But it wasn’t often a newly minted SEAL was summoned directly to a commander’s office in the middle of a training exercise, so for the moment Dane refrained from absorbing the atmosphere. He noticed that even Bones, whom he considered a good ADHD candidate, was so far affording the commander his undivided attention.

“Congratulations on earning your Deep Manned Submersible Rating, you two. Well done.” Lawhorne’s smile did not reach his eyes.

Dane and Bones exchanged quizzical looks that said, we passed? But then the commander, a balding man in his early fifties with a chest full of medals, spoke again.

“Your instructor tells me that you both scored highly throughout the exercises. I’m sorry that I don’t yet have your detailed evaluations ready for review, or your new pins, but you’ll receive them as soon as you get back.”

Dane let the obvious question go unspoken, as he felt it was not his place to question a man of the commander’s rank unprompted.

“Get back from where?” Bones asked.

Dane did his best to suppress an involuntary cringe. He looked over at his partner in war, who sat casually in his jeans and wool pullover — the same outfit he’d had on in the sub to ward off the chill. A small abalone shell hung around his neck, a nod to the native tribes who once lived in California for whom the shiny-shelled mollusk was an important food source. Dane expected Lawhorne might rebuke Bones for speaking out of turn, but if the officer was irritated he didn’t let it show.

“The two of you have been placed on special assignment to the east coast of Florida, effective immediately. That’s all I know at this point.”

Lawhorne paused to look at his two SEALs as if he expected questions, so Dane ventured, “Pardon me, Sir, but are you going to brief us?”

The man on the other side of the desk shook his head emphatically. “Negative. I am not privy to the details of your assignment because I do not have sufficient clearance.”

Dane’s mouth started to drop open before he pulled it together. Bones also said nothing, an indicator that he too was stunned by the implications of their superior officer’s words.

If he didn’t have clearance, then how high-level must this assignment be?

The commander checked his watch. “You board a plane in fifty-three minutes. I’m told you’ll be briefed en route. Get back to your quarters. Pack your bags, wait for ground transport. Dismissed.”

Dane shot to his feet and saluted. Bones ambled up from his chair, saluting with a confused look on his face. Then he said, “Excuse me, Sir, but does this mean we’re going to miss the submersible class graduation party that was supposed to be tonight, or will it be rescheduled?”

Dane rolled his eyes and rubbed his temples.

“Son, you’re going to miss that party but from the way it seems, if you have success on this mission I expect you’ll be coming home to the biggest damn bash you’ve ever had in your life.”

Lawhorne saw the grin forming on Bones’ face and held up a hand before continuing. “Listen to me. Like I said, I don’t have the details. But this much I do know: your country needs you. Do not let her down.”