Abyss

She looked over her shoulder.

“We’ve lost it!”

“What are you talking about?” she called up to him. Even from here she could see that he was extremely agitated, which was completely out of character.

“The power spiked and then went to zero!”

Something at the main winch let go with a loud bang that instantly slid up into a sickening twanging noise as if a string on a huge guitar had suddenly snapped, and Eve knew exactly what it was. The eight-millimeter titanium-sheathed cable that held the impeller-generator in place and brought the power up to the ship had somehow snapped. But that was impossible.

“Get down!” she screamed, turning back in time to see the suddenly slack cable come rocketing back aboard like a deadly cobra. One of the crewmen was struck in the chest, ripping his upper torso in half, and flinging him back against the base of the derrick in a geyser of blood.

In the blink of an eye a loop of the cable tangled in the other deckhand’s legs and recoiled, lifting the man up over the stern rail and into the ocean.

“Launch the tender!” Eve screamed. Unzipping her coveralls and peeling them off, she went to the rail where she pulled off her deck shoes, and, mindless of the Fox camera trained on her nearly naked body, dove overboard.

Don had been shouting something she couldn’t quite make out as she plunged into the warm water of the Stream. She spotted the deckhand about ten feet below, moving incredibly fast to the north along the starboard side of the ship’s hull. He was frantically trying to untangle himself from the cable that was dragging him toward the sea bottom two hundred feet down.

Kicking hard toward him Eve was caught up in the powerful Gulf Stream, moving in excess of four knots, understanding that if she missed him the first time she would be swept away with no possibility of getting back to him against the current.

She was a strong swimmer, and had free dived in the U.S. Virgin Islands to the pilothouse of the Rhone in sixty feet of water. But trying to make the angle to reach the deckhand was sapping her strength, tiring her faster than anything she could ever imagine, and for a moment she was frightened for her own survival and nearly hesitated.

The deckhand looked up toward the surface, a resigned expression on his face, as he stopped struggling and allowed the cable and current to drag him farther down.

Eve got to the man and grabbed him by the collar of his coveralls. Suddenly he came alive and tried to reach for her, but she pulled out of his grasp and went to where the cable was wrapped around his knees. As the deckhand desperately clutched at her hair, her neck, her arms, she managed to undo the slack cable, and a second later they were rocketing toward the surface, her lungs burning.

The deckhand convulsed once and then went slack just before they surfaced, and Eve was able to breathe, dark spots in front of her eyes, pinpricks of light flashing off in her brain as her cerebral cortex began to feel the effects of oxygen deprivation.

Don and a pair of crewmen, as well as Stewart Melvin, their medical officer, had launched the eighteen-foot RIB, the smaller of the Big G ’s tenders, and they were alongside within ninety seconds, the Honda four-stroke holding them against the Stream until the deckhand could be pulled aboard.

Melvin immediately began CPR as Don hauled Eve aboard. She’d lost her bra and the nipples of her small breasts were so erect they ached, another effect of near drowning.

Don put a blanket over her shoulders and she looked up. “Thanks,” she said, and then she looked over as the man she’d saved suddenly coughed up a lot of seawater, his eyes fluttering.

“He belongs to you now,” Don said.

“No thanks, I’m handful enough for myself,” she said. “What the hell happened?”

“We’ll know as soon as we haul the cable in, but the impeller and generator are gone. No way we’re going to find them. And Parks is dead.”

Eve’s eyes narrowed. “He didn’t have a chance. But the cable didn’t snap from the strain.”

“Manufacturing defect?”

“I don’t think so, and neither do you.”

They approached the boat, circling around to the port side davits, which would lift the tender back aboard. The Fox crew was at the rail.

Don managed a thin smile. “You’ll make the national news. The Queen of the High Seas to the rescue. Maybe it’ll divert their attention from our failure.”

“Setback,” Eve said under her breath.

* * *

Eve had debated sending the Fox crew ashore before the cable was brought aboard and they began their search for the generator set and the answers to what had gone wrong. But science was about openness, not secrets, a creed she had lived by her entire professional career. She wasn’t about to start a cover-up now.

Bob Taylor, the rescued deckhand, was immediately hustled to the ship’s infirmary. The body of Stan Parks, the other deckhand, had been covered but not moved on the Coast Guard’s instructions. A crewman was hosing down the blood and gruesome bits of viscera, washing all of it overboard through the scuppers.

Eve hurried to her cabin to dry off and get dressed and when she got back to the winch deck the cable had been brought aboard. Hugh Banyon, the Gunther ’s captain, was holding the mangled end in one of his meaty paws. It was blackened, as if someone had taken a blowtorch to it.

“That wasn’t cut,” Eve said.

“No,” Banyon said, looking up.

“We had a power spike in the system just before it went down,” Don said.

“It’d take a hell of a power surge to fry the cable,” Banyon said.

“A direct short could have done it,” Eve said. She was sick at heart about this, especially about Parks’s death. But there was no way the system could have shorted out naturally. They’d designed too many safeguards, much like fuses, against just such an overload. But unless they could recover the impeller-generator they had no way of knowing what had failed, and why.

She stared toward the west and the smudge of Florida’s coastline. Finding the unit would be next to impossible. The Stream could have sent it almost anywhere to the north along a track that was thirty miles wide.

The thought struck her that someone had planned it that way.

She was supposed to fail here. Afterwards what little funding and support she was getting from NOAA would dry up, and it would be over.

“What do we do now?” Don asked.

The Fox camera was close, and a boom mike was just above them.

“Prove that this was sabotage, which makes Stan Parks’s death murder, and look for the money to go all the way.”

Don was shaking his head. “If you’re right, this thing is out of control. We’re done.”

“We’re just getting started,” Eve countered.

May

Anne Marie Marinaccio and her mob had been cruising southwest along the European Mediterranean coast for the past two weeks, pulling in and docking at places like Iraklion, Palermo, Sassari, Cagliari, then Palma de Majorca. Except for her homeport of Monaco, where her motor yacht Felicity was nothing more than a bit over average, the stunning 402-foot German-built Blohm & Voss was the belle of the ball in just about every marina from Cyprus off the Turkish Coast to Spain’s Costa del Sol. Every player’s dream.

Finally, two days ago at Alicante she’d gotten tired of the endless, meaningless vacation, the drinking, the outrageous gourmet meals on deck, the stream of business wannabes with their investment schemes — hands outstretched, confidential whispers in her ear, portfolios, facts, figures, projections — and then the string of pretty girls — topless or nude, flawless bodies flouncing around, seemingly everywhere aboard, mindlessly giggling from bed to bed — so she’d sent them all ashore.

Except for Captain Panagiotopolous and the crew of nine plus two bodyguards, she was alone now with her thoughts, and mostly her gut-gnawing worries. Everything she’d worked for was starting to fall apart, and she’d