“It’s all clear down there,” Carter said, aiming his light down into the shaft for a moment. Get us in there.”
Jayden hastily lowered the sub into the shaft, and it was all going well until the two extended grab arms reached the top of the shaft walls, halting their downward progress. The port side impacted slightly before the starboard, and so the Deep Voyager tipped up to the left before settling back down, where the right safe caught on the edge of the shaft, too. Jayden activated the vertical thrusters, raising the sub higher as it rotated, until the safe in Carter’s grab arm was clear of the lip.
“You got it, take us down!” Carter shouted.
Jayden complied, jamming the joystick all the way forward until they could hear the high-pitched whinny of the motors straining against their own design limitations. Carter heard a dull scraping sound as the safe hit something. He turned around in time to be blinded by dual halogen spotlights from the intruder sub that had run dark and silent up from below, until now.
“They’re here!” Carter warned his friend, who still wrangled with the controls to angle the Deep Voyager down into the shaft.
“I have the angle, thrusters are on, but we’re not moving, Carter!”
The Omega founder took a look behind and below them. “That’s because the other sub latched onto us again. They’ve got a hold of the grab arm on your side, with their grab arm. They can’t get to mine from this angle, though, but they’re trying.” Carter’s voice rose in volume and intensity. “This is as good as it’s going to get. Try and drag them up and over. My hunch is something’s gonna break.”
Jayden’s hands stabbed at buttons on the console as he coaxed the craft down into the elevator shaft, nose first. “Feel like I’m on the Matterhorn at Disney World!” he said as they stared straight down the elevator shaft into the darkness below. Carter swiveled his spotlight so that it shone away from their combatant sub, and straight down into the shaft. “Let’s turn off our flood lights and just use the one spot. It’ll give them less light to see by.”
Jayden agreed and killed the floodlights that provided general light in a short radius out from the entire sub. The latched-on submersible was cast into relative darkness. Carter tried to get a glimpse of the two figures inside, as he had done a couple of times during the dive over here, but could make out only a pair of silhouetted heads-and-shoulders.
“Now just take us down as fast as you can. Vent everything out of the bladders.”
“I’m already on full thruster power. I can vent the air, but why?”
“The faster we head down, the more force it’s going to put on their little grab arm that’s latched onto ours. I’m hoping it’ll just snap off.”
They heard the shriek of bending and scraping metal. “Something’s going to snap off, that’s for sure,” Jayden said, pressing the button to vent air from the buoyancy tubes. “But we’re not moving any further down… seem to be stuck… maybe just — whoa!”
They lurched forward in their bucket seats as the craft suddenly moved straight down after being freed from whatever had been holding it back. Carter aimed his spotlight back up to see if the sub still followed, but it was gone.
“It worked!” he said gleefully. “Snapped it off!”
Jayden looked out the acrylic dome on his side. “Uh, we snapped an arm off, all right, Carter. But guess what? It wasn’t their arm, it was ours. We’re missing the entire external grab arm assembly on my side of the sub.”
Carter swore under his breath as the Deep Voyager plunged down the elevator shaft. “That means we lost the safe.”
“Wow, you’re a sharp one!” Jayden chided. “No arm, no safe that was being held in the claw grabber at the end of the arm. Your analytical abilities are nothing short of amazing.” He looked over at Carter to see how he was taking the ribbing, but the historical analyst was facing away from him, looking out his side of the acrylic dome.
“We still have the safe on this side, just don’t go too far to the right.”
“Want me to take us back up and fight those guys for the other one?” Jayden said, smiling because he knew it was out of the question.
“Not unless you want to die with it down here. Speaking of which,” Carter added, “how’s our battery life?”
Jayden glanced at his gauges and shook his head. “You don’t want to know.”
Chapter 7
Jayden slowed the sub as they neared the bottom of the elevator shaft. He would need to level the craft out at the bottom and maneuver it into a tight turn to exit the shaft out into the cargo hold area. But the sudden explosion of light from above told them their adversaries were in pursuit and that there would be less time than preferred for the tricky maneuvering.
“They’re coming down after us!” Carter said, craning his neck to look straight up. “And they’ve already got the one safe, I can see it in their grab arm!”
“Greedy bastards,” Jayden grunted, putting the one of the sub’s thrusters into reverse for a couple of seconds to turn it, then putting both thrusters into forward. Like parallel parking a car into a tight space, he moved forward and back, turning a little more with each pass, until the sub’s nose was facing the open side of the shaft.
“They’re almost down to us, let’s go!” Carter coaxed.
Jayden scooted the sub out of the elevator shaft into the cargo area. Carter swung the spotlight around to the front to aid with navigating the treacherous area with its jumbles of debris piled everywhere in random fashion. “Hopefully they take at least as long as we did to get out of—”
“Nope, here they come, they’re already out!” Carter informed Jayden.
“Great. They’re sub is smaller, otherwise—”
“This isn’t a sub pilot competition, Jayden. These guys are out to take the safe we still have, and no doubt don’t care if we live or die in the process. Step on it!”
“Which way?”
“Right, turn right!”
The radio crackled with Johnny’s voice requesting a dive status update. “I’ll handle it,” Carter said, snatching up the transmitter.
“What’s up Johnny, we’re almost out of the wreck, over.”
“Almost out of it? What’s your battery situation look like?”
“We’re gonna have dead batteries in a few minutes,” Jayden said nonchalantly.
Carter continued into the radio, “Almost dead, we’ve been using a lot of juice for the lights, grab arms and pulling the other sub that latched onto us like a barnacle,” Carter said into the microphone.
Johnny sounded flabbergasted. “Jesus, you’ve absolutely got to get outside the wreck before they run out. If you do that, the air system is mechanical and you can use it to inflate the buoyancy tubes to rise to the—”
“We know, Johnny. Listen, that other sub is still in pursuit. If they grab onto us again, we won’t make it out of here, and I have a feeling they know that.”
“We tried to board their ship, but were repelled by force. We radioed the Canadian Coast Guard, but no telling how long they’ll be to get here.”
“Okay, listen, I’ve got to focus here, we’ll see you up top in a couple hours, I hope. Over and out.”
“This is going to have major ramifications, you guys. Godspeed, over and out.”
They reached an obstruction requiring a turn of either left or right. “Which way, you think?” Jayden said before they got to it.
“Left, left — take the left!”
“You got it.” Jayden took the sub around the pile of debris and then straightened out on the other side. Both of them were used to looking for daylight when seeking the exit of a wreck or cave, but of course this deep down, it was black everywhere so there was no such advantage. Only the reach of the sub’s own lights offered any kind of advance look.