Deep Fire Rising

“The lights?” Tisa asked.

“Across the board. Connie just went dead. I’ve got zero telemetry.” He continued to scan his computer readouts, searching for the problem. “Goddamn it!” he roared. He grabbed for the microphone. “Bridge, this is McKenzie. What the hell are you doing up there? We’re drifting.” He pointed to the screen where it showed their coordinates. They were more than five hundred feet from where they were supposed to be.

“Hold on, Mr. McKenzie,” the officer on watch called back. “I’m checking right now. Yes, I see we have drifted. I don’t know what happened. It must be a computer glitch.”

“Glitch my butt. Were you even watching the screens?”

“Of course. Everything was fine but now we’re off course. I can’t explain it.”

“I can. You weren’t doing your job.” Jim switched channels on the PA system, uninterested with the man’s excuses. “Deck, this is the van. The ROV is down, reel her back in. Nice and slow. No more than twenty feet a minute. She’s in the tube and I don’t want her banged up.”

It took an agonizing hour to retrieve the cable. While the others went to dinner, Mercer and Jim stood shoulder to shoulder at the rail to watch the operation. And when the last of the cable appeared their worst fears were realized.

They’d recovered a thousand feet of armored data line but no ROV. When the Petromax Angel drifted from her assigned position Conseil’s tether had snapped.

“We have to send in C.W. to attach a towline,” Jim said in a defeated monotone. “Connie’s blocking the pipe and we need to get her out of there.”

“We can still use it to insert the bomb, right?”

McKenzie shook his head and spat into the sea. “When that cable snapped, it opened a conduit to the sea. Right now water’s wicking through the tether and slowly filling the interior of the Conseil’s interior. It’s cooked.”

“Okay, we’ll use one of Petromax’s ROVs.”

“They’re camera platforms only, half of Connie’s size. What does the bomb weigh?”

“Two hundred sixty pounds.”

“With that kind of payload, they’d sink like a stone.”

“What about attaching air bags?”

“I won’t take the chance of a bag hooking on something and deflating. We have to insert the bomb with the NewtSuits. Besides, those ROVs can’t function at temperatures above a hundred and twenty.”

“The water’s eighty-four.”

“Right now. Tomorrow it’ll be a hundred. The day after, who knows?”

“So we do it with the Advanced Diving Suit,” Mercer stated. “It’s not our first option, but we knew there was a chance.”

“I know. I just don’t like it. If something goes wrong, Conseil can be replaced. Divers can’t.”

Later that night, Mercer lay in his bunk beside Tisa. He was going over in his head how the ship could have drifted from its position and caused them to lose the ROV. He and Jim had confronted the watch officer and the helmsman on duty. They insisted neither had left their posts in the minutes leading to disaster. Two off-duty crewmen had vouched for them as well. They’d been on the bridge wing photographing the lava glow to the south. That left a computer glitch, an unlikely explanation since the GPS worked fine now and the chances of it failing when the ROV was most vulnerable stretched credibility.

Staring at the ceiling, Mercer knew the only explanation was sabotage. Someone on board wanted them to fail. His suspicion turned first to Spirit Williams. Only she didn’t have a motive. As he sought one, it dawned on him that the signal Jim McKenzie had intercepted in the moments before the hydrate cooling tower had activated could have been sent from the Surveyor and not some mystery ship that no one had been able to locate. Someone on the research ship would have known exactly when to turn on the massive impellers in order to kill the divers.

That realization took Spirit off his suspect list. He could accuse her of a lot of things but she was obviously devoted to her husband. He couldn’t picture her sending the signal, knowing that C.W. was right in the path of the boiling methane hydrate.

He folded his arms under his pillow as Tisa tucked herself tighter against him, her mouth near his neck.

If not Spirit, then who? Scott Glass, the alternate diver, hadn’t been on the Surveyor. He’d joined Jim and C.W. in California. And those two hadn’t done it, he was sure. That left the five technicians who had made the trip from Guam with McKenzie.

Mercer didn’t even know their names, which he supposed made it easier for him to have them confined to their quarters until after the bomb went off. For good measure, he’d lock up Spirit too, just so he wouldn’t have to listen to her mouth. Maybe he’d ask Tisa to be her jailer.

Now that he’d satisfied himself as to the who — and the why didn’t really concern him; who knew why fanatics did anything? — he still found himself wondering about the how. How had they made the ship drift off course?

Tisa shifted. Mercer knew he’d remain awake until he solved the mystery, so he moved her a little farther and swung off the bed. She gave a soft moue of annoyance and settled back to sleep.

He dressed in the dark, not bothering with his boxers or socks, and slipped out of the cramped cabin. The corridor was deserted, but he felt the presence of the ship, the thrum of her generators and the whoosh of air through the ventilators. He passed the cabin Jim was sharing with Scott Glass. He could hear Jim’s snores through the closed door and pitied the diver. The next cabin in line was Spirit and C.W.’s. He heard voices.

He paused. It was three o’clock in the morning.

He couldn’t make out what they were saying, but it sounded like an argument. Charlie must have told her that the ROV had been lost and he and Scott were going to have to place the nuclear weapon themselves. Mercer could imagine her reaction.

He moved on, found a flight of stairs and climbed to the bridge. He didn’t know the watch officer, but the red-haired Irishman knew him and greeted him by name. “Kind of late for a stroll, Dr. Mercer. I’m Seamus Rourke.” Most of the Petromax Angel’s officers and crew were from the British Isles.

“No rest for the wicked.” They shook hands.

“I thought it was the weary.”

“Both.” He helped himself to coffee from the urn on a counter at the back of the spartan bridge. “Can you show me the GPS receivers.”

“You too, huh? I’ve been sitting here thinking about that since I heard what happened and I kind of thought sabotage. But the receivers are on the antenna mast outside. You can’t get to them without accessing a service ladder that’s kept locked. Only the captain and chief engineer have keys and I already checked the padlock. No one messed with it.”

“That blows my theory.”

“There is another way,” Rourke suggested.

“I’m all ears.”

“There is such a thing as a GPS scrambler. It’s only available to the military so they can prevent enemies from accessing the positioning satellites or at least messing with their reception.”

“That’s right! I think Saddam Hussein tried to use them during Iraqi Freedom. As I recall they didn’t work.”

“Not against the equipment used by the U.S. Air Force and Navy, but it might confuse our gear long enough for us to drift off station. The Angel’s a good boat but she was state-o’-the-art when Maggie Thatcher was hanging her girdle at Number Ten.”

Rourke’s idea had merit. “What would one of these scramblers look like?”

“Probably just a little black box. Something that could be tossed overboard. I doubt we’d ever find it even if the saboteur kept it with him. And there’s also the chance that our receivers were scrambled by somebody onshore. We’re close enough.”

Mercer hadn’t thought of that. Had there really been a ship over the horizon from the Sea