“Are we doing anything to help?” Mercer asked, disregarding his own edict about not paying attention to world reaction.
“People who have their own boats have been arriving in Florida and a few in Texas. The Immigration Department’s not even bothering to count them. As for the rest, Christ, even if we wanted to we couldn’t save a fraction of the millions of people living down there. If we had every cruise ship and freighter in the world ready to take them off, we could maybe evacuate one of the smaller islands.”
“I shouldn’t have asked,” Mercer said, feeling the anguish in Ira’s voice. “I knew the answer already.” He put his arm around Tisa’s slim body, needing her warmth to soak into him. She snuggled close.
“Mercer?” Les Donnelley called from the control van. “We found the vent! You were right.”
“Ira, we found the vent,” Mercer said into the phone. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
Mercer folded the cell back into his pocket and strode to the van. “Great news.” He gave Les a congratulatory high-five.
“It was right below where we first looked, like ten feet to the left.”
Back in the control room, Mercer looked over Jim’s shoulder. The lava tube was almost perfectly round and about eight feet in diameter. The high-intensity lamps attached to Conseil could penetrate only twenty feet into the aperture before their glow was absorbed.
“Looks pretty clear,” Mercer said. “Our first lucky break of the day.”
“We found it in a day,” Jim replied. “I call that lucky too.”
Mercer put his hand on McKenzie’s shoulder. “I’ll tell you the rest after we explore the tube. Any change to the temperature?”
“Nope. Nice and cool. The vent’s still dormant.”
“All right, send in the ROV.”
Jim pulled a microphone to his mouth to talk to the men on deck manning the spool. “We’re about to enter the vent. Spool out three hundred extra feet of cable so it doesn’t snag.” He looked over his shoulder at Mercer. “The cable’s armored, but…”
With gentle touches on the joysticks, he eased Conseil into the tube, keeping the robot exactly centered. The rock had been polished glassy smooth by the tremendous heat and pressure of the lava it once discharged, and it ran as straight as a sewer pipe, but he was careful not to scrape the tunnel lining and damage the ROV.
After the first three hundred feet, the team was starting to feel they had found what they needed. More cable was stripped from the reel and Jim sent Connie deeper under the volcano.
At five hundred feet the tunnel had shrunk so there was only a few inches’ clearance on each side of the ROV. The temperature was also on the rise, up to eighty-four degrees. This in itself wasn’t an issue, but it meant that magma was heating the water. Somewhere deep in the volcano, lava was boiling near the tube.
“I still think we’re okay,” Jim said. “We can strip Conseil when we make the run with the bomb. There are a few struts and sensors we don’t need that’ll reduce her width. I’m just worried about the heat.”
Without warning the lights on the ROV went dark.
“What the…?” Jim checked his console. “We’ve got a problem.”
“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.