pitching of the vehicle as it lurched over the broken terrain. Just before reaching the exit door, he leaned down and lifted a small trapdoor and switched on the lights, illuminating the small confines of the engine compartment.
He could hear a sharp hiss above the hum of the steam turbine but couldn’t see where it was coming from. Already there was a quarter meter of water covering the steel walk matting. He paused and listened, trying to locate the sound. It wouldn’t do to rush blindly into the razor-slashing stream.
“See it?” Plunkett shouted at him.
“No!” Pitt snapped nervously.
“Should I stop?”
“Not for anything. Keep moving toward the summit.”
He leaned through the floor opening. There was a threatening terror, a foreboding about the deadly hissing noise, more menacing than the hostile world outside. Had the spurting leak already damaged vital equipment? Was it too strong to be stopped? There was no time to lose, no time to contemplate, no time to weigh the odds. And he who hesitated was supposed to be lost. It made no difference now if he died by drowning, cut to ribbons, or crushed by the relentless pressure of the deep sea.
He dropped through the trapdoor and crouched inside for a few moments, happy to still be in one piece. The hissing was close, almost within an arm’s length, and he could feel the sting from the spray as its stream struck something ahead. But the resulting mist that filled the compartment prevented him from spotting the entry hole.
Pitt edged closer through the mist. A thought struck him, and he pulled off a shoe. He held it up and swung it from side to side with the heel out as a blind man would sweep a cane. Abruptly the shoe was nearly torn from his hand. A section of the heel was neatly carved off. He saw it then, a brief sparkle ahead and to his right.
The needlelike stream was jetting against the mounted base of the compact steam turbine that drove the DSMV’s huge traction belts. The thick titanium mount withstood the concentrated power of the leak’s spurt, but its tough surface had already been etched and pitted from the narrow onslaught.
Pitt had isolated the problem, but it was far from solved. No caulking, no sealant or tape could stop a spewing jet with power to cut through metal if given enough time. He stood and edged around the turbine to a tool and spare parts cabinet. He studied the interior for a brief instant and then pulled out a length of high-pressure replacement pipe for the steam generator. Next he retrieved a heavy sledge-type hammer.
The water had risen to half a meter by the time he was ready. His makeshift scheme just had to work. If not, then all hope was gone and there was nothing he and Plunkett could do but wait to either drown or be crushed by the incoming pressure.
Slowly, with infinite caution, he reached out with the pipe in one hand and the hammer in the other. He lay poised in the rapidly rising water, inhaled a deep breath, held it a moment, and then exhaled. Simultaneously he shoved one end of the pipe over the entry hole, careful to aim the opposite end away from him, and immediately jammed it against the angled slope of the thick bulkhead shield separating the turbine and reactor compartments. Furiously he hammered the lower end of the pipe up the angle until it was wedged tight and only a fine spray escaped from both top and bottom.
His jury-rigged stopgap may have been clever, but it wasn’t perfect. The wedged pipe had slowed the incoming flood to a tiny spurt, enough to get them to the summit of the guyot, hopefully, but it was not a permanent solution. It was only a matter of hours before the entry hole enlarged itself or the pipe split under the laserlike force.
Pitt sat back, cold, wet, and too mentally drained to feel the water sloshing around his body. Funny, he thought after a long minute, how sitting in ice water he could still sweat.
Twenty-two grueling hours after struggling from its grave, the faithful DSMV had climbed within sight of the seamount’s summit. With Pitt back at the controls, the twin tracks dug, slipped, then dug their cleats into the silt- covered lava rock, struggling up the steep incline a meter at a time until finally the great tractor clawed over the rim onto level ground.
Only then did Big John come to a complete stop and become silent as the surrounding cloud of ooze slowly settled on the flattened top of Conrow Guyot.
“We did it, old man,” laughed Plunkett excitedly as he pounded Pitt on the back. “We jolly well did it.”
“Yes,” Pitt agreed tiredly, “but we’ve still one more obstacle to overcome.” He nodded at the digital depth reading. “Three hundred and twenty-two meters to go.”
Plunkett’s joy quickly vaporized. “Any sign of your people?” he asked seriously.
Pitt punched up the sonar-radar probe. The display revealed the ten-kilometer-square summit as empty and barren as a sheet of cardboard. The expected rescue vehicle had failed to arrive.
“Nobody home,” he said quietly.
“Hard to believe no one on the surface heard our blasting music and homed in on our movement,” said Plunkett, more irritated than disappointed.
“They’ve had precious little time to mount a rescue operation.”
“Still, I’d have expected one of your submersibles to return and keep us company.”
Pitt gave a weary shrug. “Equipment failure, adverse weather, they might have encountered any number of problems.”
“We didn’t come all this way to expire in this hellish place now.” Plunkett looked up toward the surface. The pitch-black had become a twilight indigo-blue. “Not this close.”
Pitt knew Giordino and Admiral Sandecker would have moved heaven and earth to save him and Plunkett. He refused to accept the possibility they hadn’t smelled out his plan and acted accordingly. Silently he rose, went aft, and raised the door to the engine compartment. The leak had enlarged and the water level was above a meter. Another forty minutes to an hour and it would reach the turbine. When it drowned, the generator would die as well. Without functioning life-support systems, Pitt and Plunkett would quickly follow.
“They’ll come,” Pitt said to himself with unwavering determination. “They’ll come.”
17
TEN MINUTES PASSED, twenty, as the dread of loneliness fell over them. The sense of being lost on the sea bottom, the unending darkness, the bizarre sea life that hovered around them—it was all like a ghastly nightmare.
Pitt had parked Big John in the center of the seamount and then programmed the computer to monitor the leak in the engine compartment. He peered warily at the display screen as the numbers showed the water level creeping to within a few centimeters of the generator.
Though the climb to a shallower depth sharply relieved the outside water pressure, the entry flaw had enlarged, and Pitt’s further efforts could not stem the growing flood. He evacuated air to offset the increased atmospheric compression caused by the rising flood.
Plunkett half turned and studied Pitt, whose strong craggy face was quite still, as firmly set as the eyelids that never seemed to flicker. The eyes seemed to reflect anger, not at any one person or object, but anger simply directed at a situation he could not control. He sat frighteningly remote from Plunkett, almost as if the British oceanographer was a thousand kilometers away. Pitt’s mind was armored against all sensation or fear of death. His thoughts sifted through myriad escape plans, calculating every detail from every angle until one by one they were all discarded in the shredder inside his brain.
Only one possibility stood a remote chance of success, but it all depended on Giordino. If his friend didn’t appear within the next hour, it would be too late.
Plunkett reached over and thumped Pitt’s shoulder with one big fist. “A magnificent try, Mr. Pitt. You took us from the deep abyss to almost within sight of the surface.”
“Not good enough,” Pitt murmured. “We came up a dollar long and a penny short.”
“Mind telling me how you planned to do it without the convenience of a pressure lock to escape the vehicle and a personnel transfer capsule to carry us to the surface?”
“My original idea was to swim home.”
