would need to keep reminding himself to never look up and send the beams flashing toward the surface.
Linda would pilot the minisub while Eddie Seng would be Juan's dive master.
As soon as they launched, Linda guided them to the Oregon's stern. Just below the naked flagpole, a hatch had been opened to reveal a huge drum of tow cable. Rather than steel, it was made of woven carbon fiber, with a quarter of the weight and five times the strength of a traditional line. As an added bonus, it was neutrally buoyant. Linda grabbed the end with the Nomad's powerful mechanical arm and fitted it into a slot where it couldn't come loose.
Then they started making their way to the Argentine base. The drag of line wasn't bad at first, but the three of them knew by the time they had enough played out the submersible would be struggling. They had timed their launch so the Nomad would ride into the bay with the tide.
It took more than an hour to reach the pylons supporting the gas-processing plant that Juan and Linc had spent so much time studying the night before. Because the bay was kept artificially warmed, sea life teemed around the thick ferroconcrete piers. Dull-brown crabs scuttled along the bottom and fish darted between the columns, which were encrusted with barnacles and shellfish.
The Nomad was sixty-five feet long, but with multiple thrusters placed strategically on her hull she was wildly maneuverable. Linda had her bottom lip pinched between neat white teeth as she moved them under the industrial complex and around one of the columns. There she lowered them to the bottom.
She switched over to the arm once again. While the carbon-fiber cable was strong, it remained susceptible to abrasion, and being scraped across the rough surface of the pier would weaken it substantially. To protect it, she used the arm to scrape away the accumulation of mussels. The small bivalves snapped their shells violently when dislodged and propelled themselves into the gloom.
Next, she swiveled the grasping hand to pull a bundled length of commercial plastic pipe from a storage bin. It was the same material used in domestic plumbing and would be a common item found anywhere at the base. Their presence, in the unlikely event they were ever found, would not raise suspicion. They would just be other pieces of junk that had fallen into the sea. The pipes had been glued together to form a semicircle that fit around the back of the pier. It would be the smooth plastic that the cable rubbed against and not the cement.
She fitted the protective half sleeve into place and looped the submersible around the far side of the column.
Good job, Juan said as they slowly backed away. The black towline slid easily over the bundle of PVC pipes. One more stop to go.
She pivoted the Nomad and started back across the bay. The weight of the line and the need now to fight the tide, which had yet to slacken, strained the submersible's engine. The batteries drained almost twice as fast as normal, and their speed was down to a crawl, but they still made headway.
Twenty minutes later, they were under the Admiral Guillermo Brown. Her anchor was paid out and rested on its side on the rocky seabed, its heavy chain rising up to the surface. Less than twenty feet of water separated her keel from the bottom.
Strange name for an Argentine ship. Brown, Eddie said as he handed Juan his helmet.
His name was really William Brown, and he was born in Ireland and then emigrated to Argentina. He's credited with forming their Navy in the early 1800s to fight the Spanish.
How could you possibly know that? Linda asked from the cockpit.
What? I Googled him when we first saw the cruiser. I thought it was an odd choice of name, too.
Juan waddled to the tiny air lock, laden with a belt from which he hung his tools. Strapped to his back like a World War II flame-thrower were two cylinders. Once he was in and the door secure, he jacked his umbilical into a port and checked over his connections, making certain that warm water was flowing through his suit and that he had good airflow and good comms with the sub. Only when Eddie was satisfied did he open the valve that flooded the closet-sized compartment.
Water foamed and hissed as it climbed his body, pressing the rubber suit against his legs when the pressure grew. It was a comfortable temperature, but he wouldn't discount running into icy pockets once he was outside. He could see Eddie watching him through a small window in the air-lock door. Juan gave him the traditional divers signal that everything was okay. Eddie returned it.
Moments later, the water had closed in on the ceiling. Juan reached overhead to open the outer hatch. A few stray bubbles burst free as it swung up. He climbed out of the sub, making sure to keep his head down and his lights pointed away from the surface. He felt reasonably confident that the Argentines didn't have lookouts posted in such freezing conditions, but he hadn't thought he and Linc would run into a guard last night either.
The low vibration in the water came from the cruiser's secondary power plant, which produced enough energy to run the ship's systems and keep the men warm. The main engines were off. He knew this already by observing that only a small amount of smoke escaped the warship's single raked funnel.
He jumped free of the sub, floating down to the bottom in a graceful arc. His boots hit and kicked up a little silt that drifted gently away. One of the six-inch-thick conduits for the bubbler was to his left. Air rose from its length in thin streams of silver.
Juan turned his attention to the Admiral Brown's anchor. It looked to be about eight feet long and would probably weigh in at about four tons more than enough to keep the ship stationary against the tides. A small pile of extra chain lay next to it in a rust-colored heap.
How are you doing out there?
No problem so far. I'm looking at the anchor now.
And?
I should be able to unshackle it from the chain. The lynchpin is held in place with bolts.
Cabrillo bent over the anchor and pulled an adjustable wrench from his belt. He fitted it over the first bolt and used his thumb on the oversized adjusting wheel until it was snug. It fought him the entire way. Tiny bits of paint lifted from the bolt head when it first moved an eighth of a turn, and it would turn no more than that. Juan heaved on it until finally bracing his legs against the anchor and pulling until he though he was going to pass out. The bolt gave another eighth turn. It took ten backbreaking minutes to remove that first bolt, and Juan was bathed in sweat.
Shut down the hot suit, Eddie. I'm dying out here.
It's off.
The next bolt spun out so easily that, once he had it started, he could twist it with his fingers. The third and fourth weren't quite as easy, but nowhere near as bad as the first. He clipped the wrench back to his belt and grabbed a rubber mallet. He used rubber to avoid making any noise.
He swung at the lynchpin, the water hindering his actions, but the blow was enough to knock it an inch out of alignment. Three more shots, and it was almost free of the anchor. It would still hold the ship in position against the normal flow of water into and out of the bay, but any hard jolt would slip the pin entirely, and the Admiral Brown would be left to the vagaries of the sea.
That's it. Oh, man!
What?
I was just hit by a pocket of cold water. Damn, that is brutal.
Want the hot suit back on?
No. It drifted away.
Juan started walking across the seafloor for the minisub, gathering up loops of his umbilical as he went so it wouldn't tangle.
He unclipped the carbon-fiber tow cable from its slot and dragged it back to the anchor. He added a little air to his buoyancy compensator to make his ascent easier and, hand over hand, he climbed the chain. For now, he left the cable on the bottom.
He paused when he reached the underside of the four-hundred-foot warship. Her bottom was coated with red antifouling paint and was remarkably free of marine buildup. His next task was to spot-weld eight metal pad eyes to the bow. That's what the two tanks he carried were for. They were high-capacity batteries for a handheld arc welder. The gear was normally used to make quick repairs to the Oregon.
He adjusted his buoyancy again and slid eye protection over his helmet so he could work comfortably next to an electric spark brighter than the sun. The curvature of the cruiser's hull shielded him from above, and in twenty minutes he had all eight welds completed. There were so many in case one or more of the welds failed. Juan
