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.”
On the monitor they could see virtually nothing other than the glare from lights mounted directly above the cameras. The ROV was still falling, and Jim kept it well away from the island’s underwater basalt foundation.
“What’s the temp?” asked a Petromax technician.
“A bracing sixty-two degrees,” Jim answered. “No sign of volcanic heating.”
Mercer was relieved. The San Juan volcano loomed directly above their location. While lava had begun to jet from vents on the southern part of the island, San Juan, in the island’s middle, merely rumbled and occasionally belched ash.
Designed to probe the deepest parts of the world’s oceans, Conseil had no problems as Jim brought the ROV to a hover at one hundred eighty feet, a depth that even a scuba diver could work.
“The vent should be a hundred yards ahead of us and a bit to the left,” Jim intoned as he spooled up the nimble craft’s propulsors.
He eased the ROV forward, keeping one eye on the video feed and another on the sonar screen that was mapping the irregularities of the undersea cliff. An accidental brush with the rock, even this shallow, could damage the remotely operated vehicle.
“All right, I see the cliff.”
On the screen a murky shadow resolved itself into a jagged promontory of solidified lava. As he nosed the craft forward for a better look, the team could see the lava had formed in long ropes that had once shot from the vent like toothpaste. This pillow lava, as it was called, was what they all expected. To Mercer it looked like the ruins of a Greek temple, with the longer, straighter pieces of lava resembling fallen columns.
“Judging by the size of that lava,” he said, “I’d say our vent is big enough.” The shafts of rock were easily fifteen feet in diameter.
“We’re below the vent.” Jim brought Conseil up ten feet, then another thirty.
They lost sight of the pillow lava but didn’t spot the vent opening. He swiveled the ROV, searching along the dark cliff for the blacker spot of the volcanic vent. Nothing. He dropped Conseil back to their original starting point, moved ten feet to the left and allowed the robot to ascend. The dozen pairs of eyes watching the screen all thought they saw the vent, but it was their desire, not reality. Once the ROV had risen above the layer of pillow lava, Jim sank her again and started a new search lane another ten feet to the left.
They ran fifty vertical lanes before the area of lava ended entirely. Four painstaking hours had been wasted.
“No one said this was going to be easy,” Jim opined, undaunted by the job. He maneuvered Conseil to where they first encountered the lava and methodically started the next stripe ten feet to the right.
“I thought I put us right on the spot,” Les Donnelley said miserably.
“Don’t sweat it, man,” Charlie offered. “We learned a long time ago that you can’t find anything underwater until it wants to be found.” He turned to his wife. “Any dowsing tricks you can use to help?”
Spirit squeezed his hand. “Sorry, lover, that only works when you’re looking for water. How about you, Dr. Mercer? You always seem to have a bag of tricks up your sleeve.” Her voice dripped sarcasm.
Mercer didn’t notice. “Not this time.”
“Oh, that’s right. You only perform miracles when your own ass is on the line.”
He shot her a look, but let it pass.
After another hour and ten more search lanes, the lava field petered out once again.
“Damn.” The mild expletive was the most emotion Jim McKenzie had shown since starting the search while the others were showing signs of their anger and frustration. “The vent that spewed this stuff must have been sealed sometime in the past. So now what?”
They’d covered a mere thirty-five hundred square feet, a tiny fraction of the cliff face. Without a more precise idea of the vent’s location, they could spend the next week scouring the undersea wall without finding it.
“I am so sorry, guys,” Les kept repeating. “The divers I talked to were certain there was a vent here.”
“Go back to our original starting point,” Mercer ordered, “and let Connie descend.”
“Why down and not up?” Spirit Williams challenged. “The vent could be above where we’ve searched just as easily as below.”
“It’s a guess,” Mercer admitted. “But an educated one. Charlie can back me on this. He’s a more experienced diver than I am. I think the answer is nitrogen narcosis, also called rapture of the deep. It’s a feeling that can overwhelm a diver working at depth not unlike drunkenness. You get impaired judgment, lack of motor coordination and feelings of euphoria. Now suppose the divers Les talked to had been affected by nitrogen narcosis when they discovered the vent. Chances are they would have been deeper than they thought, not shallower.”
C.W. nodded. “Makes sense to me.”
“And what if they were a mile south of here, or a mile north when they dove?” Spirit countered.
“They were on the surface when they fixed their position,” Charlie answered her challenge. “I’m sure they could read a handheld GPS.”
Spirit didn’t like that her husband defended Mercer and shook off the hand he had around her waist. She crossed her arms over her chest and stormed out of the control van.