Deep Fire Rising

Mercer turned to McKenzie. “How long before we can dive on the wreck?”

“Weather isn’t a problem. No storms predicted for days. Batteries are all fully charged and we just replaced the CO₂ scrubbers. We need to fit new ballast plates and charge the O₂ tanks, then run a few tests. Say, five hours.”

“Are you going to want to see the tower too?”

This was the first Mercer had heard of any tower. “What are you talking about?” he asked Carlyle.

“The underwater tower about a mile to the west of us. We found it on sonar when we were searching for the Smithback.”

“What is it?”

“We’re not sure,” McKenzie answered. “It appears to be some kind of underwater oil- or gas-drilling platform. From its sonar image, it stands about eight hundred feet tall and is about a hundred wide at the base. It tapers as it rises. The top is about forty feet square.”

“And it’s completely underwater?”

McKenzie nodded. “The bottom there is deeper than here, about thirteen hundred feet. The top of the tower rests five hundred feet down.”

Mercer had never heard of such a structure. He was familiar with deep-sea drilling even though he wasn’t an oil geologist. An eight-hundred-foot platform wasn’t all that unusual anymore. Some in the North Sea stood over a thousand feet, but all of them were serviced by modules constructed above sea level. What McKenzie and Carlyle were talking about was something entirely new. And as he thought about it further, something else came to mind. As far as he knew, there weren’t any oil deposits within two thousand miles of their current position. One mystery at a time, Mercer decided. He was sure there was a connection between the enigmatic structure and the Smithback accident, but he wanted to see the ship before investigating the tower.

“Let’s check the ship first. What’s Bob’s range?”

“She can stay down for thirty hours or more, but at a top speed of three knots she isn’t exactly mobile.” This came from Alan Jervis, the submersible operator who would actually take Mercer down to the wreck. Jervis was about Mercer’s age, with dark receding hair and gold-framed glasses. “If you want to remain on the bottom and reach the tower, it’ll take us an hour or more because we’ll be bucking a two-knot current the whole way.”

“We’d have to move the Surveyor,” Carlyle said. “C.W. will be tethered to us. To get him over there, we have to reel him up, steam over to the tower, then lower him down again.”

“Is that a problem?”

“No. And with your slow speed, he’d be in position before you.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do,” Mercer announced. No one questioned his authority. “We’ll drop down to the ship first and then check out this tower of yours.”

Mercer tried to catch a nap after the meeting, but the strong coffee and a rattling air-conditioning fan kept him awake. After the first hour of staring at the ceiling, he admitted his insomnia had nothing to do with caffeine or noise. The image of Tisa Nguyen kept sleep out of his grasp. It was her eyes he kept seeing, their depth and their pain. He didn’t believe it was personal trauma. That was something people kept better hidden, at least from strangers.

She reminded him of the subject of a religious painting, a Madonna and Child perhaps, where the beatific Mary looks lovingly at her infant yet in her eyes is the knowledge he would have to die for the world’s sins. Did Tisa know of such sin? Was that why she was convinced the world was ending?

He wondered what she had witnessed to make her believe that. Hers wasn’t general angst about the state of a world racked by wars, famines and other sundry catastrophes the media reported so cheerfully. He was convinced it was something specific, something she and her group alone knew had happened or was about to happen.

She’d all but admitted her group’s involvement with the sinking of the Smithback. No, that wasn’t true, he recalled. She’d only said that something unusual was going to happen in the Pacific.

He had never felt so unbalanced. He felt like he was walking through a minefield holding the wrong map. In the past weeks he’d been tossed a dozen lies, survived two murder attempts and met a woman he couldn’t stop thinking about. Connecting all this was a fiber too thin for him to see, let alone grasp.

Did Tisa Nguyen know about the Smithback being in the vicinity of the tower? Had she not warned him in time and allowed it to sink the way she’d not prevented the death of the woman at the Luxor Hotel? Or was the sinking an unintended consequence? What if the Smithback had wandered into some type of experiment that her group was conducting. Did it have anything to do with Dr. Marie’s experiment in optoelectric camouflage?

He could only hope that some of the answers lay a thousand feet below where he tossed on his bunk.

An hour later, bound by frustration, Mercer gave up on trying to sleep. He donned the coveralls Alan Jervis had provided earlier, used the head as the sub pilot had requested and made his way to the Surveyor ’s fantail.

Bob sat in a cradle under the A-frame derrick. The submersible was painted bright yellow and its hull was studded with auxiliary oxygen tanks, small thruster nacelles and a pair of heavy-duty manipulator arms ending in wicked-looking pincers. Her bow was a single piece of curved Lexan six inches thick. Through the tough acrylic dome, Mercer could see the cramped cockpit. Alan would sit behind and a little above the two observer seats. The interior walls were covered with dials and banks of switches and several flat-screen computer monitors. The little sub was the pinnacle of high-tech deep-sea technology.

Nearby, C.W. worked on an even more unusual piece of equipment, the ADS. The suit was also painted yellow, and the twenty rotator joints made it look segmented, like the body of a corpulent caterpillar. The helmet had a wide faceplate for good visibility, and at the end of the arms were nimble three-finger grapplers.

“What do you think?” C.W. asked with obvious pride.

“Damn amazing. What does it weigh?”

“Over five hundred pounds empty, but the way the suit’s balanced and the fluid in the joints work, it’s almost weightless below thirty-five feet. It’s the next best thing to scuba diving, provided you’re not claustrophobic.”

“How do you work it?”

“Nothing to it.” C.W. snapped open the back of the suit. “I was about to do a systems check. You can do it with me. Hop in.”

It was like stepping into a pair of steel pants. Mercer used a bar attached to the ADS’s lifting cradle to heave himself through the opening. He lowered his feet down into the legs and thrust his arms into the appropriate openings. His head came up inside the domed helmet. When he was settled, he could feel large rocker switches under his feet and several control buttons and toggles next to his hands. The suit smelled of electronics and disinfectant with just a trace of the previous user’s sweat.

“Do you feel the foot pads?” Even with the access hatch open, C.W.’s voice was muffled and distant.

“Yes.”

“They control the thrusters. Put pressure on the back right and the suit moves backward. Try it now.”

Mercer pressed down on his heel and a pair of thrusters attached to his shoulders began to whine.

“Press forward and you go forward.”

He tried it and the small propellers stopped in an instant and began turning the opposite direction.

“Your left foot controls rotation,” C.W. explained. “Back spins you right and forward spins you left.”

Mercer applied pressure and other thrusters mounted on the exoskeleton spooled up to a high-pitched buzz. He then tried out the arms. He’d had thousands of hours operating heavy mining equipment that used joysticks similar to those inside the suit’s arms. It took him just a few minutes to get the feel of the ADS’s controls.

“Shit, man, you’re a natural,” C.W. exclaimed when Mercer reversed himself out of the aluminum suit.

“The controls are pretty logical.” Mercer was impressed. “And you said at thirty-five feet you don’t even feel the mass?”

“It’s amazingly flexible.” C.W. patted the suit’s metal hide. “Muscle power alone moves the arms and you can bend through forty-five degrees. NASA astronauts who’ve tried one of these say it’s better than their space suits, and the pressures we work in are a hell of a lot stronger than the vacuum they experience. If you have the time while you’re aboard, I’ll let you try one on a test dive.”

Mercer smiled. “I’d love to take you up on that, but I don’t think it’ll happen. I expect to be out of here as soon as possible.”

C.W.’s normally easygoing expression faded. “What’s really going on?” he asked. “Are you allowed to say?