Deep Fire Rising

Was Spirit right about a government foul-up?”

“No, there isn’t any kind of cover-up, though I doubt my word will convince your wife.”

The former surfer chuckled. “It took me all of five minutes to learn that if she says the sky is green, I’m better off not debating her.”

“You must be a slow learner,” Mercer teased, comfortable with C.W.’s mellow demeanor. “I figured that out in five seconds.”

“She is something, huh? I met her at a beach party. I had just convinced this other girl to go back to my place when Spirit walked up behind me. She said that I was a sexist pig and that I had no interest in the other girl beyond her silicone boobs. I turned around to call her a dyke or something, and man, I just stopped cold. I think she felt it too. The only other thing I remember about that night was later, we were in bed and she said something like ‘Better than silicone, aren’t they?’ ”

Mercer smiled at the story, at some level envious that Charlie had been able to transform lust into love. He’d felt that momentary jolt of desire many times, but for one reason or another nothing developed much past a casual affair. Harry White had once told him that getting married is equal parts the person and the timing. One without the other just won’t work. Of course taking marital advice from an eighty-year-old bachelor wasn’t the best idea in the world, but Mercer couldn’t deny the truth in his words.

Many women had come into and out of his life. He didn’t think the problem was with them, so it had to be the timing. Or with himself.

His atypical train of thought was interrupted by the approach of Alan, the sub pilot, and Jim McKenzie, the topside coordinator. Alan tossed a sweatshirt to Mercer. “It gets cold at a thousand feet and we can’t afford the battery power for a heater.”

As Mercer slipped into the garment, the three men went over their predive checklists and made last-minute adjustments with a team of hovering technicians. He noticed Spirit standing on the helipad above the deck. If he wasn’t mistaken, she was staring at him and not her husband. Then their eyes met. Spirit shot him a contemptuous look and retreated into the superstructure. The intensity of her anger was out of proportion with the delay he was causing her research. It felt almost personal.

“We’re all set,” McKenzie announced. “Let’s get you into the can and buttoned up.”

Mercer climbed the ladder leaning against Bob’s curved hull and carefully lowered himself through the hatch, mindful of the thick grease smeared around the coaming to help maintain a tight seal. He stepped first on the pilot’s seat, then contorted himself all the way in so he slid into one of the cramped observers’ positions. In front of him was an array of dials and switches Alan had assured him he needn’t worry about. From his seat, the pilot could control everything except the manipulator arms. A moment later, Alan eased into the sub. He donned a headset and began another predive checklist with McKenzie, who’d already moved into the control van with a handful of others. To Mercer it was like listening to the arcane language of a pilot talking to the control tower, just a series of numbers and indecipherable acronyms.

“Okay,” he announced. “Everything checks out. We’re good to go. We’ll launch first and then they’ll send down C.W. in the NewtSuit.”

“How long’s the descent?”

“Shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes. It’s only a thousand feet. And just so you know, the pressure’s something in the neighborhood of five hundred pounds per square inch.”

“Remind me not to buy property in that neighborhood.”

With a jolt, the A-frame lifted the eleven-ton submersible from its cradle and gently transferred it toward the fantail. Beyond the ship’s stern, the sea was calm and a deep blue found only far from shore. The sky was cloudless. Bob was slowly lowered into the water. Mercer unconsciously took a deep breath when the first waves lapped against the Lexan bubble.

“Never been down like this before, huh?”

“Is it that obvious?”

“Not really,” Alan replied. “Most first-timers are so nervous they don’t stop talking. But no matter what, everyone takes a deep breath when the sub starts to sink.” The pilot switched on his headset. “Jim, my board is clear, go ahead and release.”

There was another jolt as the cables securing Bob to the cradle let go and the submersible floated free.

“And down we go,” the pilot said.

Negatively buoyant because of the ton of iron plates attached to the underside of her hull, the sub slipped beneath the waves. Mercer craned his head to peer upward as water covered the top of the Lexan bubble. The surface of the ocean reflected a wavering mercury sheen. The surface receded from view as the submersible slipped into the depths. For many minutes there was enough light filtering from above to see the surrounding water. Food scraps dumped from the scullery had attracted schools of scavenger fish and the predators that preyed on them. A few of the braver ones paused long enough to determine if the submersible would be their next meal before disappearing into the thickening gloom.

The water acted as a prism the deeper they dropped, cutting the light’s spectrum so that the colors began to separate and fade away. Yellows and oranges vanished first, then reds, until their view was a violet void. And even that faded to blue and finally to black.

“Think we’re alone?” Alan asked after ten minutes.

“I would assume so,” Mercer said, sensing he was being set up by the experienced pilot.

Alan hit a switch to turn on the working set of lights. The sea came alive. The water was far from clear. It almost looked like a snowstorm outside the sub’s protective cocoon. The bodies of tens of millions of tiny creatures slowly drifted toward the abyssal plain where bottom feeders would eventually assimilate them back into the food chain. Fish that had kept their distance from the gawky interloper rushed at the lights. They were still shallow enough for Mercer to recognize the shape of the fish if not the species. The sea’s truly bizarre creatures, the vampire squids, the gulpers, the angler fish, and the others, lived far below Bob’s crush depth.

“I’ve logged more than six thousand hours down here,” Alan said with a trace of reverence. “I never tire of it.” He killed the lights again. “Sorry, got to conserve batteries. I know this won’t be a long dive, but it’s SOP.”

“Thanks for the glimpse. It’s a hell of a place you work in.”

“Depth is eight fifty,” Alan called out, both for Mercer and the men anxiously watching their monitors on the Surveyor.

“C.W.’s on his way down,” Jim McKenzie announced over the directed laser pulse communication set.

“Roger, Jim. We should be on the bottom in six minutes.”

“Confirmed.”

Jervis activated the bottom search sonar, a weak acoustical pulse that rang like an accelerating electronic chime the deeper they fell. Mercer’s chest tightened in time with the tones. He was getting closer to an answer, he knew, only he wasn’t sure what the question had been.

“Bottom in fifty feet,” Alan murmured, his fingers flying over control knobs and switches as he began to trim the sub.

“We’re showing you one hundred ninety feet due east of the wreck,” McKenzie announced over the radio.

A drop of condensation dripped onto Mercer’s face. He’d known to expect it — there was a sixty-degree temperature difference between Bob and the ocean — yet any water inside the sub with so much pressure against her steel hull made his heart jump.

Alan activated the forward thrusters and kicked on the lights once again. Had they not been reduced to half capacity, they still couldn’t have revealed much beyond twenty feet. The water appeared as dense as ink. Mercer peered into the murk, straining to be the first to spot the wreckage of the USS Smithback. The bottom was sandy and showed the undulating ripples of a steady current. It was also entirely featureless. The moon showed more topographic variance.

“There!” Alan said. Experienced in deep dives, he spotted the hulk a minute before Mercer could see the vessel emerge from the darkness.

The wreck of the Smithback rose from the seafloor like the ruins of a Moorish fort long abandoned in the Sahara. She’d sunk only days earlier yet looked decades old, forlorn, forgotten, haunted.