Outside the dome window, a pair of scuba divers waved at Jayden and Hunt. Each swam up to the submersible and unclipped the lines that tethered it to the ship. They gave Jayden an okay sign, thumb and forefinger in a circle, indicating they were clear to begin their dive.
“Here we go, Carter.” Jayden then flipped a switch on the control panel and they heard the hiss of air escaping. “Don’t worry, it’s just the air bladders in the buoyancy tubes.” Water sluiced over the acrylic bubble dome as the craft lowered itself into the sea.
“Gravity will take us down until we get near the bottom,” Jayden explained to Hunt as they sank below the waves. The pair of support divers stayed with them until they reached a depth of 100 feet, then they waved goodbye and began their slow ascent back to the ship while the sub continued on its way down into the ocean depths.
“Only nineteen hundred feet to go,” Hunt said. “You got an in-flight movie in this thing?”
“Even better.” Jayden pointed out the front of the window, where a large sea turtle glided past, chasing a school of silvery fish. The two friends passed the next few minutes in silence while they drifted deeper into the sea. The surrounding light changed color, the reds and yellows filtering out first, until gradually only blue was left, then even that faded to black around the 1,000-foot mark.
Jayden flipped on the sub’s external halogen lights and the powerful beams stabbed through the inky darkness. Tiny particles floated in the light, and there was less life down here; no more large schools of fish or large animals. Still, there was life. A jellyfish with long, flowing tentacles drifted past them. Soon after that the brown mud of the sea bottom came into view.
“If you were wondering what the bottom of the Mediterranean looked like at 2,000 feet, now you know.” Jayden gripped a joystick to level the sub out just above the bottom.
“Pretty boring,” Hunt said, looking out to his right.
“Good thing we’re not here for sightseeing, then, “ Jayden said, activating the sub’s thrusters to glide over the bottom. “We’ve got a submarine cable to inspect, but first we’ve got to find it. Should be right around here somewhere, the ship is anchored over the spot.”
Hunt pointed off to his right. “I see something over there.” Jayden looked over and nodded. A section of black pipe was visible on the bottom of the ocean, stretching out of sight in both directions.
“That’s it, all right.” He guided the sub over to it, until they hovered directly over the pipe.
“I don’t see anything wrong with it,” Hunt said.
“Based on where the signal loss is happening, we know there’s about a two-mile section where some kind of malfunction occurred. We just need a direction to go in first. Right or left?”
Hunt looked both ways before answering. “Water clarity looks a little crappier off to the right, so maybe we should try that way first. It could mean something happened to disturb the sediments on the bottom.”
“I knew there was a reason to bring you along.” Jayden picked up the radio transmitter. “Deep Challenger to Topside: “We’re at the pipe almost directly underneath the ship. It looks fine right here, so we’re going to head along the pipe to the northeast and take a look, over.”
The radio reply was immediate. “Copy that, Deep Challenger. We’re standing by if you need us.”
Jayden eyed his intended course along the pipe for a moment before putting his hands into motion on the controls. The submersible followed the pipe about five feet above it. In addition to Jayden and Hunt watching from the sub, cameras mounted outside the sub provided a live video feed to the ship’s control room, so that even more eyeballs were on the pipe.
Hunt watched the black metal tube pass by beneath them. “So the pipe is just the outer covering, and the actual cables are inside that, right?”
“That’s correct,” Jayden said. “Fiber optics. The metal pipe is just to protect them from the elements.”
“Or maybe a curious shark that has the munchies.”
“That too.”
They continued to follow the cable pipe as it snaked off into the gloom. Occasionally a crab or small fish would scuttle out from beneath the pipe, but mostly they saw a hard-packed mud bottom. The electric whir of the sub’s thrusters was the only sound while the two men concentrated on visually scouring the pipe for breaks or anomalies. As they progressed, the water grew increasingly cloudy, but they were still able to see the pipe as long as Jayden slowed the sub to stay close to it.
Jayden was about to suggest they turn around and try in the other direction when Hunt tapped on the bubble dome in front of him. “Hold up, got something here.”
“Hold up?”
“Yeah, careful, it’s real silted up, but there’s something different going on there.”
Jayden slowed the sub to a crawl, inching them toward the anomaly. Clouds of brown silt swirled around their little craft as they crept along the bottom, just over the pipe.
“Right there, see that?” Hunt pointed into the gloom in front of them. Jayden put the craft into a hover and looked out along the pipe.
“There’s the break! What happened to that thing?”
Hunt shook his head as he looked at the mangled section of pipe. A section was completely missing, but they couldn’t see how much because the water wasn’t clear enough. Bits of metal lay on the seafloor nearby, and a protruding snarl of cabling was visible from the wrecked end of the pipe they could see. “No shark did that.”
Jayden picked up the radio transmitter and informed the ship that they had located a break and were conducting an inspection.
“Let’s see if we can find the other side of the pipe, see how much has been taken out,” Hunt suggested. Jayden agreed and put the sub’s forward thrusters into low power so as not to stir up the silt on the bottom and reduce their visibility even further. They passed over the broken end of pipe and then scuttled over the muddy bottom, looking for the pipe’s other end.
After a couple of minutes, they had still not found it. “I hope we haven’t drifted off of the pipeline,” Jayden said. Hunt pointed to the compass on the instrument console. “No, you’re good. I took note of our heading. Stay on 210 degrees and we should hit the other side of that pipe.”
Jayden looked over at his acting co-pilot. “Once again, Carter, you’re proving yourself worthy of that seat. Will miracles never—”
“Whoa! Right there!”
Jayden turned off the thrusters, putting the sub into a controlled hover. “What is it?” Unlike Hunt, who had no piloting duties to occupy his attention, Jayden’s focus was divided between driving the sub and also looking at what was outside. But before Hunt could answer, the radio crackled on the sub’s console.
“Topside to Deep Challenger: we have a visual on the other end of pipe. Almost an eighth of a mile of destroyed cable….”
The radio operator continued to transmit, but Hunt pointed ahead, to where the other side of the pipe lay in ruin. “Jayden. Hey Jayden, we’ve got something up here that I don’t like the looks of. Out to the right from the pipe. Be careful, slow down!”
Jayden looked out at the mangled pipe, then to the right on the mud plain, he saw what Hunt was talking about. “What is that?” Even as he asked the question, the sub pilot put the craft into reverse.
At the same time the radio chatter grew more urgent, with the topside crew also commenting on the object Hunt had pointed out, the speculation running rampant.
“Shipping container that fell overboard off a cargo ship and knocked out the pipe?”
“Is it a repeater or some kind of infrastructure? Where’s our rep from Telecom? Get her on the horn.”