One man said, “Hi, Lois. Touchdown is in forty-five seconds.” He pointed to a television screen set into the instrument panel.
The cluster of sparkling lights displayed on the control-room monitor had materialized into a submersible vehicle slowly descending through the murk. It resembled a large utility helicopter that had been stripped of its main rotor and was powered by variable-thrust turbines on the fuselage. Two figures were silhouetted in the bubble cockpit.
The room reverberated with the hum of motors. A diagram of the lab on the control panel began to blink, indicating that the airlock doors were open. After a few moments, the display stopped blinking, signifying that the doors had closed. The floor vibrated with the thrash of powerful pumps. When the water had been expelled from the airlock, the pumps went silent, and a green light flashed over the doors. At the push of a button on the control panel, the doors opened, and a briny smell rushed out. The submersible rested in a circular domed chamber. Curtains of seawater rolled off the fuselage and swirled down gurgling drains.
A hatch slid open in the side of the submersible, and the pilot got out. The men at the control panel went to help unload cartons of supplies from a cargo space behind the cockpit.
Lois strode over and greeted the man emerging from the passenger’s side. He was a couple of inches taller than she was and wore blue jeans, sneakers, and a windbreaker and baseball cap both emblazoned with the logo of the company that provided security for the lab.
She extended her hand. “Welcome to Davy Jones’s Locker. I’m Dr. Lois Mitchell, assistant director of the lab while Dr. Kane is away.”
“Pleased to meet you, ma’am,” the man said in a deep-voiced Southern drawl. “My name is Phelps.”
Lois had expected to see a quasi-military type like the tough-looking guards she had glimpsed on trips to the surface ship, where lab staff could take a break from the seafloor, but Phelps looked as if he had been assembled from spare parts. His arms were too long for his body, his hands too big for his arms, his head too big for his shoulders. With his sad-looking dark eyes and large mouth accented by drooping mustache, he had a hound-dog quality about him. He wore his dark brown hair in unfashionably long sideburns.
“Did you have a pleasant shuttle ride, Mr. Phelps?”
“Couldn’t have been better, ma’am. The best part was seeing the lights on the ocean bottom. Kept thinking this must be Atlantis.”
Lois cringed inwardly at the overblown comparison to the lost city.
“Glad to hear that,” she said. “Come to my office and we’ll chat about how we can help you.”
She led the way from the airlock along another tubular passageway, then up a spiral staircase to a low-lit, circular room. Fish nosed against the room’s transparent domed ceiling, creating the illusion that the sea was pressing in.
Phelps swiveled his head in wonder. “Talk about a water view! This is unbelievable, ma’am.”
“People find it hypnotic at first, but you get used to it. This is actually Dr. Kane’s office. I’m using it while he’s away. Have a seat. And please stop calling me
“You sure look pretty good for a hundred years old, ma’am . . . I mean, Dr. Mitchell.”
Lois cringed again, and turned up the lights in the room so that the marine life was less visible and distracting. She opened a small office refrigerator, extracted two cold bottles of spring-water, and gave one to Phelps. She settled herself behind a plastic-and-chrome desk of starkly simple design.
Phelps pulled up a chair. “I’d like to thank you for your valuable time, Dr. Mitchell. You must have lots better things to do besides talking to a boring old security guy.”
“My company sent me to probe for weaknesses in the sea-lab security.”
Lois wondered what kind of an idiot had sent Phelps to waste her time. She leaned back in her chair and pointed toward the transparent ceiling.
“We’ve got three hundred feet of ocean separating us from the surface, and it’s better than any castle moat. There’s a patrol ship up there with heavily armed guards from your company, backed up, if necessary, by the on-call resources of the U.S. Navy. How could we be any more secure than that?”
Phelps furrowed his brow. “With all due respect, Dr. Mitchell, the first thing you learn in this business is that there is
Lois ignored the condescending tone. “Very well, then, let’s start with a virtual tour of the facility,” she said.
She swiveled her chair and tapped a computer keyboard. A three-dimensional diagram that looked like a series of globes and connecting tubes appeared on the monitor.
“The lab consists of four large spheres, arranged in a diamond shape and connected by tubular corridors,” Lois began. “We’re at the top of the administrative pod . . . here. Below us is the crew’s quarters and mess hall.” She manipulated the cursor to highlight another globe. “There’s a control room and some labs and storage in this pod. This pod contains the small nuclear plant. Air is supplied through a water-to-oxygen setup, with backup tanks for emergencies. We’re a few hundred yards from the edge of a deepwater canyon.”
Phelps pointed to a hemispheric shape in the center of the rectangle. “Is this where the surface shuttle came in?”
“That’s right,” Lois said. “The minisubs attached to the underside of the transit module are used for specimen collection in the canyon, but they can be used to evacuate the lab, and there are escape pods available as a last resort. The shuttle airlock is connected by reinforced passageways that give the staff access from any module and contribute to the structural strength of the complex.”
“What about the fourth module?” Phelps said.
“Top secret.”
“How many folks work in the complex?”
“Sorry, top secret again. I don’t make the rules.”
“That’s okay,” Phelps said with a nod. “This is one hell of a job of engineering.”
“We’re fortunate that the Navy had the facility readily available. The lab was originally planned as an undersea observatory. The components were built on land, fully equipped, and towed out here in special barges. The barges were then rafted together, and the setup was fitted together like an old-fashioned Tinkertoy and lowered into the sea in one piece. Luckily, we’re not at great depth, and the sea bottom is fairly level. It’s what they call a turn-key operation. The complex was not meant to be permanent, so it has compressed-air capabilities that allow it to attain negative buoyancy. It could be retrieved and moved to another location.”
Phelps said, “If it’s not too much trouble, I’d like to see the nonrestricted areas.”
Lois Mitchell frowned, signaling that she was doing this under protest. She picked up the intercom phone and called the control room. “Hello, Frank,” she said. “This is going to take a little longer than I expected. Anything new with Doc? No? Okay, I’ll keep in touch.”
She replaced the phone with more force than was necessary, and stood to her full height. “C’mon, Mr. Phelps. This is going to be fast and furious.”
FIFTY MILES FROM Davy Jones’s Locker, the rolling surface of the dark sea erupted in an explosion of foam and spray. A twenty-foot-long aluminum tube burst from the center of the churning geyser, sped skyward at a sharp angle, leaving a white fan-shaped trail behind it, and quickly dove back toward the waves in a curving trajectory.
Within seconds, the cruise missile had leveled out, until it was traveling twenty-five feet above the wave tops, so low that its passing left a wake in the water. Powered by its solid-fuel rocket booster, the missile quickly accelerated, and by the time it had shed its rocket and the fan-jet engines had kicked in it had achieved its cruising speed of five hundred miles per hour.
A series of sophisticated guidance systems kept the cruise missile on track as unerringly as if it were being steered by a skilled pilot.
The speeding missile’s unsuspecting target was a large, gray-hulled ship anchored near the red-and-white buoy that marked the location of the undersea lab. The name on the hull was PROUD MARY, and it was registered in the Marshall Islands as a survey ship. The
