Deep Fire Rising

degrees. The teeth bit into the rubber, tearing at it until the bag split. The gust of CO₂ spewed from the cut like champagne from a shaken bottle. The sub pitched slightly, just enough to break the vacuum seal it had formed with the silt. Slowly, slowly, the bow began to slide free of the mud as the stern dropped to the right. Silt oozed across the Lexan dome to settle once again on the seafloor.

“Holy shit. You did it.”

“Resecure that ballast plate or we won’t be able to help C.W.,” Mercer warned.

“Done.” Alan clamped the heavy plate in position and spooled up other thrusters to back the sub from the bottom. In seconds he had her righted and hovering five feet from the bottom, a few yards from the cloud of silt drifting slowly on the current. Smears of mud dribbled from the hull.

“That was the closest I’ve ever been,” Jervis said after a minute. “I’ve never had a problem on a dive, never even been in a car accident. Jesus. How did you stay so…? I mean, you’ve never been down before and I was about to piss my pants.”

Mercer smiled over his shoulder. “Don’t sweat it. If that trick didn’t work I’d have joined you on the panic parade. Now, let’s go see if C.W. needs help.”

“Right.”

The gas explosion had all but ended; only a few desultory bubbles drifted toward the surface, silvery balls that looked like enormous jellyfish in the weak light thrown from the sub. They backtracked to the tower and made a sweeping circle around the structure. Mercer didn’t ask why Alan performed the maneuver. He knew the pilot was searching for the crushed remains of C.W.’s NewtSuit. Heartened they found nothing, they slowly began their ascent, keeping to the western side of the structure, where they’d left the diver clinging precariously to a stanchion.

And that’s where they found him, only he was past precarious. During the eruption he must have lost his footing. He’d fallen only a few feet before banging into the tower and wedging an arm where two crossbeams joined. He hung there in a near horizontal position, like a flag in a stiff breeze.

C.W. had been forced to cut his cables to get free of the Surveyor so there was no way to communicate, but he must have seen the sub’s lights because he began to bicycle his legs.

“What’s your status down there?” The call came over the comm gear from the surface. It was Jim McKenzie. He’d been out of range when the Surveyor made her desperate race to avoid the eruption, but now he’d brought the ship back into position.

“Glad to hear your voice, Jim,” Alan breathed.

“It was a close thing. I didn’t think this old girl could move that fast. How are you guys?”

“Other than the bit of paint we scraped off Bob’s nose, we’re okay. We’re at the tower with C.W. His arm is wedged.” Jervis swung the sub next to the diver as he spoke.

“Can you get him out?”

“We’re working on it. What do you think, Mercer? Any more brilliant ideas?”

“Sorry, one per day’s my limit. Are the manipulators strong enough to pull him free?”

“I doubt it. They’re built for delicacy, not strength.”

“All right. Then we’ll have Jim send down the lifting cable and a welding rig and we’ll put Humpty-Dumpty back together again.”

“Pretty tricky job. Want me to handle it?”

Mercer shrugged. “I’d love for you to, only I can’t fly this oversized septic tank. And you need to keep it steady against the current.”

Alan switched on his microphone. “Jim, we’ve got a plan. Can you send down C.W.’s cable and some welding gear?”

“I think I know what you have in mind. Give us ten minutes.”

They had the cable down to the sub in eight. Alan talked Mercer through the procedure and an hour later the cable was securely welded to the back of the NewtSuit. The trickiest part of the operation was directing the topside winch engineer. One false move, or an ocean swell hitting at the wrong time, could tear the arm from the suit, killing the diver inside. After several tense minutes, the suit came free and C.W. dangled at the end of the cable like a fish. They began to reel him in. Alan took up a position directly below C.W. as he was hauled to the surface in case the weld failed and the suit dropped free.

Nearing the surface, the sub peeled away, as Jim McKenzie had ordered several boats into the water to secure the Advanced Diving Suit. It took a further half hour for scuba divers to sling a net under the suit so C.W. could be safely hauled onto the Sea Surveyor. And only then did they lift the submersible from the sea.

When the hatch swung open and Mercer took his first breath of clean air in more than five hours, he realized how foul the atmosphere in the sub had become. The bright sunlight was painful to his eyes, but he turned his face toward it as if waiting for a long kiss.

Technicians had gotten the back of C.W.’s suit opened by the time he joined them. The lanky Californian eased himself from the armored rig. No one commented on the smell of urine. Spirit Williams pushed through the crowd, shouldering aside workers like a halfback, and crashed into her husband, almost knocking them both to the deck. She was laughing and crying at the same time and smothered his mouth with hers. The assembled men roared their approval.

With his wife clinging to his arm, C.W. shook first Alan’s and then Mercer’s hand. “Man, that was something, you two. I thought I was a goner when a gas burst knocked me off the tower. Then I got stuck, but the methane was blowing by so fast I was sure it’d knock me off again. When the gas finally stopped I thought you’d be right there, only you weren’t. Dude, it’s a good thing I lost communications ’cause I was cursing you something fierce.”

“We ran into a little difficulty of our own,” Alan deadpanned.

“It felt like an hour later when I saw Bob’s lights. Jesus, I’ve never been so relieved in my life. What took so long with the welds?”

“We had to use oxyacetylene,” Mercer answered. “You weren’t grounded so an electric arc welder would have fried you in the suit.”

“Oh. Good thinking. Thanks.”

Mercer and Alan exchanged a guilty glance. “Thank Jim. We hadn’t even considered it. How are you feeling?”

He gave Spirit a quick squeeze. “Better now.”

Spirit turned from her husband to Mercer. “I suspect you’re waiting for me to thank you for saving him.”

Jesus, she is one hard bitch, Mercer thought. “Not at all.” He smiled.

“Well, I won’t. Rather than thank you, I blame you. If you hadn’t ordered him to dive today, none of this would have happened.”

Jim McKenzie stepped up, saving Mercer from telling Spirit where she could shove her blame and how far up it could go. “Nice job. All three of you. That was one hell of a thing.”

He didn’t sound too overjoyed. In fact, to Mercer he sounded distracted, worried. They chatted for a few more minutes before Spirit led C.W. back to their cabin and Alan went to find a shower. Mercer and McKenzie were left alone at the rail looking out over the horizon. McKenzie’s thin sandy hair rippled in the breeze.

A silent minute passed.

“You going to tell me what’s on your mind, Jim?”

“You don’t strike me as the kind of guy who believes in coincidences.” McKenzie lit a cigar after offering one to Mercer, who refused.

“Like how that machine down there kicked on during our dive? Nope.”

“Yeah, me either. While we were waiting to hear back from you, I double-checked our logs from radar, sonar, acoustical gear and every other piece of science gear we run twenty-four/seven.”

Mercer’s heart tightened. “And?”

“And I think we’ve stumbled onto something big.”

Mercer didn’t correct him that they hadn’t stumbled onto anything. They’d been deliberately lured here by the sinking of the USS Smithback.

McKenzie continued, “We got a signal off the passive sonar suite a minute before C.W. reported the blades on the current turbines began to turn.”