Deep Fire Rising

“Then tell me why that volcano’s erupting as we speak.”

“I can’t,” Mercer admitted. “Not until I talk to her.”

“And if Tisa can’t explain it either?” Mercer had no reply. “I’m sorry. He’s not going to have a choice about ordering the evacuation tonight. And I think I back him on this one.”

“All right, do what you have to, but get me that bomb.”

“That I can promise.”

“I’ll be in touch.” Mercer folded the phone into his pocket. Jim and Tisa stood at the back of the bridge. Tisa’s face reflected anguish as she looked at the towering ash cloud spreading over the dark island. Yet her voice was resolute when she said, “This isn’t the eruption from the prophecy. This is just a prelude.”

“I believe you.” Mercer touched her shoulder. “Unfortunately no one else does.”

“They’re going to try to evacuate the East Coast?” Jim asked.

“The president will probably make the announcement tonight.”

“What are we going to do?”

Mercer’s reply was never in doubt. “Finish what we started.” Jim nodded. “The bomb will be here in four hours. We need to pull Conseil from the vent so we can set it as soon as it arrives. We have to implode the mountain and stabilize the ridge in the next few hours. Where are C.W. and Scott?”

“I saw Scott heading for the control van,” Tisa said. “I haven’t seen Charlie.”

Spirit raced onto the bridge at that moment. She was nearly hysterical, sobbing and trying to catch her breath at the same time. She hadn’t yet put on anything to cover her near-naked body. “C.W.’s hurt. His head is bleeding bad and he won’t wake up.”

The pieces fell into place. “Jim, get down to the van and prep for the dive,” Mercer snapped the order. “Tisa, stay with him.” He addressed Seamus Rourke. “Are there any firearms on this ship?”

“Firearms? Why?” And then Rourke had the same thought as Mercer. The saboteur. “No, nothing. I’ll call the crew together and sweep the ship.”

“Good. Lock up everyone who came aboard with the Surveyor team except Jim here and Scott Glass. Put them in the mess hall.”

“What are you doing?” Jim protested.

“C.W. was attacked.”

“What?!” Spirit and McKenzie cried.

“The signal to turn on the turbines when we were on the Sea Surveyor, the glitch in the GPS yesterday that cut the cable to the ROV and now C.W., the best diver we’ve got, is hurt. It’s not a coincidence. Someone you brought with you has been sabotaging our work.”

“It could have been…” Jim’s voice trailed off as he made the connection, and came to the same conclusion. “Son of a bitch!”

“Tisa warned me that the Order had thousands of members and potentially millions of sympathizers. There’s no way we could have known they already had an agent in place.”

“I left him alone,” Spirit wailed, making no attempt to wipe at the tears pouring down her cheeks. “They could come back to attack him again.”

“Come on,” Mercer pulled her along as he rushed from the bridge, calling over his shoulder to Jim, “Prep both suits. Maybe C.W.’s okay.”

They ran down to the second deck. Mercer threw open the door to C.W.’s cabin. The young diver lay on the floor at the foot of their bunk, wearing jeans and shoes but no shirt. Around his upper body was a pool of his own blood. His blond hair was matted to his head, and his normal tan had faded to a ghostly white.

Spirit couldn’t enter the room. She stood at the door, her fist jammed against her mouth to keep from crying out. Her whole body trembled. Mercer knelt next to C.W. and felt for a pulse. It was there, but weak. Next he felt along Charlie’s head until his fingers sank into a sticky dent above his temple. Bits of bone grated as he pulled his fingers from the wound.

“Is he-?”

“He’s alive, but this is serious.” Mercer checked Charlie’s eyes. One pupil was dilated, the other just a black point. “His skull is fractured and he has a concussion. He needs medical attention.” There were twenty Ph.D.’s on the ship but not one medical doctor. “I don’t want to move him, but we have to cover him up. Give me a hand.”

Together Mercer and Spirit stripped the bed and tucked the blankets under and around Charlie so he wasn’t lying on the linoleum floor. Mercer turned up the cabin’s heat and found more blankets in a storage closet.

By the time they finished, the ship’s second engineer arrived with a hard plastic medical chest. “What happened?”

“It looks like someone hit him over the head,” Mercer said, kneeling back to let the engineer, who obviously knew what he was doing, make his own examination. “Good job with the blankets,” he said in a rich Scottish accent. “He’s in shock. Hold this.” He handed Mercer a plasma bag and inserted the needle into Charlie’s muscled arm. “Blood loss is just as dangerous as the head trauma.”

“Are you a doctor?” Spirit asked, heartened by the man’s efficient manner.

“No, ma’am. I cross-trained as a corpsman in the Royal Navy.” He used scissors and a razor to get rid of the hair around Charlie’s wound. Then he cleared away the blood with a lavage of warm saline. “Okay, let’s see here. It’s deep and the bone is broken, but this part of the skull’s pretty lean so that doesn’t mean anything.” He removed some of the bone chips with a pair of tweezers. He looked at Mercer then Spirit, noticing for the first time she was barely dressed. She quickly wrapped one of Charlie’s corduroy shirts around her torso. “I’ll bandage his noggin and it’s just wait and see. He’s young, and looks fitter than an ox, so I think he’ll be okay. He’ll have a hell of a headache when he wakes and will be more than a wee bit tired for a few days. Keep an eye on him and I’ll check back in an hour or two.”

Spirit threw her arms around the engineer. “Thank you.”

“I’m going to ask if a crewman can keep watch on your door, if that’s all right,” Mercer said to Spirit after the engineer had left.

“Bit fucking late, isn’t it? His head’s already bashed in.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t think it would go this far.”

“Didn’t think it would go this far?” she shouted back. “It went this far when someone tried to kill him on the Sea Surveyor. And what would have happened if he’d been in that lava tube when the ship drifted? You really are a conceited bastard, you know that? You don’t care about anyone or anything so long as you get the glory.” She began to sob. “Just leave.”

Mercer backed out of the cabin, knowing in his heart this wasn’t about glory. Maybe Tisa had gotten her wrong.

On deck, a blizzard of ash swept the ship in unending waves. Even with all the lights ablaze, the workboat was nearly blacked out by the ashfall. A resourceful officer had ordered the vessel’s water cannons to sweep the upperworks and deck, turning the ash into mud that drained from the scuppers. The rain that had begun to fall stung when it touched Mercer’s skin, made acidic by sulfur belching from the volcano.

He found Jim, Scott Glass and Tisa in the control van. “How’s Charlie?”

“Someone hit him over the head,” Mercer said, wiping the grime from his face with the towel Tisa had handed him. “He has a concussion, but the ship’s engineer was a corpsman and seems to think he’ll be fine.”

“What about the dive?” Scott asked. He was younger than Charlie, dark-haired and sporting a goatee and a nearly shaved head. Where C.W. was laid back and casual, Glass had an intensity and an attentiveness that Mercer appreciated. “One man can’t tow the line in alone.”

“Do any of the Petromax people have experience in the ADS?”

“No. There’s only the one pilot for their minisub. He might be able to do it, but he’s only five two. The suit’s too big.”

Jim added, “Most of the work Petromax does in the North Sea is done with saturation divers.”

“Can we use them?”

“It would take days just to set the diving bell and allow the divers enough time for their pre-breath on gas.” Jim shook his head. “Conseil’s stuck more than five hundred feet inside the vent and we have to go even deeper to place the bomb. It’s the suits or nothing.”

“I don’t know if he was bragging,” Scott put in, “but C.W. says that Mercer was pretty good in the suit when