Deep Fire Rising

“Jesus. Look at her.”

The USS Smithback had been a military sea-lift vessel, a boxy cargo ship with blunt bows and a square stern. Purchased from the Maersk Line following the Gulf War, the Smithback’s job was the rapid delivery of an entire armor task force of up to sixty M1A1 Abrams tanks. At more than six hundred feet long, she’d only needed a crew of forty-eight. Although Mercer and Jervis were limited to half illumination, they could see enough detail to know that whatever happened to the Smithback could not be explained away by a collision with a shipping container. Mercer couldn’t understand what he was seeing.

The ship’s hull and superstructure had been crushed flat by the impact with the seafloor. This phenomenon wasn’t unusual. A falling vessel could approach twenty miles per hour by the time it reached the end of its plummet, and structural members weren’t designed for that kind of force. Yet the damage to the Smithback was much more severe than either Mercer or Jervis anticipated.

It was as if a giant fist had ground the vessel’s remains into the seafloor. The bow was buried deeply in the silt and her keel had fractured amidships. It was impossible to tell if she was listing because she had so completely collapsed. From the spec sheets Ira had had delivered to Mercer, he knew the Smithback had been ninety feet tall from keel to bridge. The hulk of twisted metal plates resting on the bottom of the Pacific looked no more than a quarter of that. She’d completely pancaked.

The light outside the submersible shifted as C.W. in his diving suit approached the wreck. “What happened to her?” he asked when he saw the extent of the damage.

“We’re trying to figure that out,” Mercer replied. “Let’s start with the bow and work our way back.”

“Roger.”

The nimble NewtSuit lifted away from the hull and swooped toward the front of the ship. Alan maneuvered Bob into place so the combined lights bathed the wreckage in a diffused yellow light. The two sub drivers moved as one as they made their way down the vessel’s length. The ship’s steel skin had wrinkled like an accordion and crossbeams from within the hull had punched through the metal like fractured bones. When they reached the amidships superstructure, Mercer had Alan take them as close to the ship as he dared. Every one of the six decks in the blocky superstructure had been flattened into the one below. Glass from the wheelhouse had exploded out onto the deck and glittered like gemstones. Near the stern they found where bunker oil leached from the hull in dark bubbles. There were only a couple of spots where air pockets vented into the sea.

“What do you think?” C.W. asked after they finished their inspection.

“If I had to guess,” Alan Jervis answered, “I’d say that she was fully laden when she sank and all the air escaped the hull as soon as she went under. That’s the only way she could be going fast enough to cause this much damage. What’s your take, Mercer?”

“Good theory but there’s a problem.” Mercer rubbed his jaw as he considered the implication of what he was about to say. “The Smithback was dead-heading back from Korea. She was empty. Her cargo decks encompassed more than a hundred thousand cubic feet. Even if her loading ramps had been somehow jarred open, it would take time to expel that much air. I think it was something else.”

“Like what?” C.W. asked.

“I don’t know, but I hope the answer’s over at the tower your guys found. Jim, can you hear me up there?”

“We’ve been monitoring your comms,” McKenzie said from the Surveyor.

“We’re going to head over to the tower now. Haul in C.W. and we’ll meet him there.”

“Affirmative. Alan, make your heading two hundred sixty-five degrees. We’ll correct your course for the crosscurrent en route.”

“I hear you, Jim. Two hundred sixty-five.” The pilot lifted the sub away from the wreck of the Smithback and killed the lights. The darkness became impenetrable once again as they moved steadily away from the ghostly hulk.

Alan turned on a portable tape player to drown out the incessant buzz of the forward thrusters. An up-tempo jazz song filled the cramped cockpit. “I’ve dived on about twenty wrecks,” he said after a few minutes. “You see that kind of collapse on older ships. After corrosion eats through the steel, they implode. We found a World War One freighter once off the coast of France. She’d fallen apart like that. Nothing more than a sandwich of decks and rust. But I’ve never seen anything like what happened to the Smithback.”

“I can’t explain it either.”

“But you have an idea?”

“Maybe,” was all Mercer said. Without at least a bit of evidence he wasn’t about to voice his off-the-wall theory.

Jervis flew the little sub by her sophisticated suite of sensors and didn’t seem bothered that he couldn’t see more than a half inch outside the Lexan dome. Mercer had become comfortable in the disorienting environment and settled deeper into his seat. The temperature in the cabin was down to fifty-eight degrees and he was thankful for the sweatshirt. He kept his hands clamped between his legs and still they felt frozen. Part of his chill came from what he feared he’d find at the tower.

Forty-five minutes later, Jim McKenzie called a change in course and warned them they were a thousand yards from the tower. The sonar showed the seafloor was three hundred feet below Bob’s rounded hull. Jervis nosed the little sub downward as they approached the mysterious structure.

“We’ll start at the base,” he said, switching on the external lights. “C.W. can’t dive this deep, so we’re on our own for a while.”

“Okay.”

The first of the tower’s massive legs came into view when they were fifteen feet out. The steel column was at least forty feet in diameter. There didn’t appear to be any anchor mechanisms other than the structure’s massive weight driving it into the seafloor. Fifty feet up from the bottom, bolted girders extended off the leg and presumably attached to other columns. Angled cross members completed the skeletal design. It was like finding the Eiffel Tower in thirteen hundred feet of water.

They circled the tower as they rose, spiraling upward while keeping the sub scant feet from the structure. When they were two hundred feet from the bottom and still a hundred feet below where C.W. could help them investigate, they found the first propeller. The massive five-bladed affair was stationary, but each vane was wickedly curved for maximum efficiency if it began to rotate. In the wavery light it was difficult to tell what the forty-foot propeller was made of, but it appeared to be some sort of flexible material. The navy used malleable props on its quietest submarines to reduce cavitation noises.

“What do you make of that?” Jervis asked without expecting an answer.

Nestled within the labyrinth of structural steel behind the propeller was a large enclosed capsule at least twice the size of the submersible. Mindful of the thruster nacelles attached to Bob, Alan nosed the sub between some of the larger struts to get a closer look at the strange construction. An axle ran from the propeller into the rounded box. From its bottom, several large pipes dropped into the gloom. Mercer and Alan hadn’t noticed the pipes on their way up.

“It’s like a giant windmill,” Mercer said. “Notice how the blades face into the prevailing current. Water passing over the blades makes them turn.”

“To do what? Does it pump something out of the ground, like oil?”

“I don’t know. Back us out and let’s see what’s above us.”

They found three more of the large propeller and housing assemblies as they ascended. At seven hundred feet below the surface, C.W. waited for them in the bulbous ADS.

“How many of these things are below us?” he asked through the comm link.

“Four.”

“And there’s two more above us.”

“Did you find any kind of storage tanks?” Mercer inquired.

“Just the propellers and their support mechanisms. None of them are turning right now and I think they’re all linked by pipes. One thing I did notice is the water’s colder around the thinner of the pipes.” Thinner was a relative term. The network of plumbing that connected the machines had a minimum diameter of five feet.

“How much colder?”

“Five to seven degrees, according to the suit’s sensors.”