Deep Fire Rising

“There it is,” the navy pilot said over the intercom, pointing to a lone ship several miles south of town.

The ship was the one-hundred-foot Petromax Angel, a sturdy service boat belonging to Petromax Oil. With her blunt bows and extreme width in the beam, she wasn’t an attractive vessel, but she’d been designed to maintain the oil rigs and production platforms in the near-Arctic conditions of the North Sea. She personified function over form and came equipped with twelve-thousand-shaft horsepower, dynamic positioning systems, a submersible, saturation diving chambers, and two ROVs. The Angel also came with the compliments of the company’s president, Aggie Johnston, a woman out of Mercer’s past who had donated the boat despite, or maybe because of, his involvement. He didn’t know which.

It took Mercer several moments to spot the ship. Her hull was painted vivid red, her deck was clear green and her superstructure was covered in safety yellow. Even these garish colors were obscured by the ash and smoke that filled the air and wreaked havoc with all the machines in operation around the island. Each morning everyone on La Palma woke to the daily ritual of shaking out their clothes no matter how tightly sealed their bedrooms.

The sky was a constant overcast of putrid greens and grays. The satellite pictures Mercer had seen showed the sickly plume spreading eastward from the prehistoric ax-shaped island. No matter how often he brushed his teeth or how much water he drank, Mercer’s mouth always felt gritty. The only place safe from the ash was upwind in a helicopter, and even there the air was heavy with the stench of sulfur.

The pilot brought the Seahawk over the Petromax Angel’s fantail, flaring the helo over a clear spot on the deck. The navy chopper was too large to land on the workboat’s pad so he hovered just above the deck. Mercer opened the copilot’s door, tossed his duffel to the metal deck and leapt the four feet. He paused as a crewman slid open the rear door and helped Tisa make the jump. Mercer caught her and the two remained crouched until the Seahawk peeled away.

Charlie Williams and Jim McKenzie were the first to greet him. They’d boarded the Angel at Cherbourg, France, along with their gear, which had been flown in from Guam on an air force C-5 Galaxy. It was the first he’d seen of the two since the dive on the USS Smithback.

“I don’t know whether to thank you or curse you for calling us in,” Jim greeted, shaking hands.

“It all depends if we succeed.”

“He’s only speaking for himself,” C.W. said. “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in the world right now. Talk about your opportunity of a lifetime.”

“I bet even your wife approves of this one.”

“Only after she conned Jim into letting her come.”

That surprised Mercer, but he let it pass. Her presence here didn’t matter. He introduced Tisa to the two marine scientists and asked, “You guys have everything you need?”

“What we didn’t bring,” McKenzie said, trying to light his cigar against the wind, “the folks here on the Angel have. But with an entire cargo jet to fill, we stripped about everything but the plumbing out of the Surveyor.”

“And the second diver? Alan Jervis?”

C.W.’s typical jovial expression faded. “He won’t be diving again. Kind of delayed shock or something. The night after you left he woke up screaming. The docs had to dope him up just so he could sleep. He’s still in a hospital in Guam.”

Mercer was shaken. Jervis had seemed fine the few extra days Mercer had spent on the Sea Surveyor. “I had no idea.”

“Neither did we,” Jim agreed, puffing on his Cuban. “But it does happen.”

“You’re okay, aren’t you?” Mercer asked C.W.

The lanky Californian grinned. “Taking risks is why they pay us. Seriously, I’m fine. Spirit and I talked a lot about it. I think what happened down there scared her more than it scared me. That’s why she insisted on coming. We have a backup diver. Scott Glass. He’s damned good.”

“And your team is settled here on the Angel? No problems with the regular crew?”

Charlie dismissed the notion. “Are you kidding? Underwater technology is one of the few areas where academia leads industry in having the latest and greatest. Their guys would love to get their hands on my suits. As we sailed down from France we already decided to use Conseil, the ROV we brought, rather than the two owned by Petromax. We finished the software download this morning.”

Jim cut in, “Besides, we all know what’s at stake here. No one is going to fight a turf battle with so much on the line.”

Mercer nodded. “All right. Les Donnelley spent last week talking with every local diver still left on the island and has taken temperature readings all the way around La Palma. He’s pinpointed three volcanic vents along the eastern coast below the Cumbre ridge that may suit our needs. Two of them show a steady rise in temperature so we think they are active. The third has remained dormant. It’s down a hundred eighty feet so few have dived into the tunnel. We don’t know what to expect.”

“How hot is the water around the other vents right now?”

“At their mouths, about eighty-four degrees. That’s twenty above the ambient water for their depths.”

“My ADS can take temperatures up to two hundred,” C.W. stated.

“We may need that capability if this last vent pans out. For now we’ll check the dormant tunnel with the ROV before committing anyone to the water.” Mercer handed Jim McKenzie a notebook opened about halfway. “Here are the coordinates. Get these to the captain and let’s get to it.”

C.W. and Jim left Mercer and Tisa alone at the rail of the stubby workboat. A half mile from shore the island didn’t look dangerous. They could almost pretend the pall was just smoke from a forest fire and not the sulfurous discharge from deep within the earth.

“I find it interesting,” Tisa noted, looking up at him. Even in the ruddy glow of the near-eclipsed sun, her dark hair shimmered. “People take orders from you as though they’ve worked for you for years.”

Mercer demurred. “The three of us shared a pretty wild experience.”

“Not just Jim and C.W. Others too, even your boss, Admiral Lasko.”

Mercer looked out across the waters to the island. “I never really thought about it. I see something that needs to be done and if I can’t do it I find people who can. I think the trick is finding the right people. Any idiot can manage a group who knows what they’re doing.” He smiled. “All I have to do is make sure I surround myself with experts and I get to look good.”

She slapped him playfully on the arm. “Fool.”

Six hours later, the Petromax Angel was in position near where Les Donnelley, the chief volcanologist on La Palma, had thought there was a suitable vent. The boat’s bow and stern thrusters were slaved to the dynamic positioning computer that was receiving updates every half second from global positioning satellites. She was as stable as if she’d been anchored to the seafloor.

Jim McKenzie sat in the glow of several video monitors, his hands on the joysticks that controlled Conseil, their ROV, which they’d named after the assistant to Professor Aronnax in Jules Vernes’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Behind him in the control were Mercer, Tisa, Charlie and Spirit Williams, and a mix of people from Petromax and the crew Jim had brought from the Sea Surveyor. The control van bolted to the Angel’s deck hummed with computers and the hiss of air purifiers. The doors had to remain closed because of the dust and the air-conditioning labored to dispel all the body heat.

Outside of the steel box, workers were monitoring Conseil’s umbilical as it unreeled from the huge stern-mounted spool. The bug-eyed ROV sank deeper into the waters.

Jim had a well-chewed cigar clamped between his teeth and a fresh pitcher of ice water at hand. His fingers were light on the controls, and the cameras on the unmanned submersible had become his eyes.

The ROV was the size of, and roughly the same shape as, a queen-sized bed but was made of high-strength steel, carbon fiber and composite ceramics. It carried four sets of extreme-low-light stereoscopic cameras, as well as a manipulator arm, pressure and temperature gauges, and a chemistry suite that allowed it to analyze water on a continuous basis.

“Okay, boys and girls,” Jim said without looking at his audience. “We’re dropping through one fifty. Connie’s board shows green.”