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 you were together a few weeks ago. If you’re willing to risk it, I’ll dive with you as my backup.”
Mercer hesitated. “Look, we only made a couple of dives. I have maybe three hours in the suit. And that was in open water. Forget it. What about you, Jim?”
“It’s ironic, but I’ve never even snorkeled.” Another resounding explosion echoed across the water. “We don’t have time to get someone else. We have to do this in one dive as soon as the bomb arrives.”
Mercer knew this was too important to risk on his limited skills. He would jeopardize everything if he made even a simple mistake. He shouldn’t do it, but what were the alternatives? He looked to Tisa. She understood how the decision tore at him. She gave him an imperceptible nod, not of consent but of compassion.
Scott would lead. Mercer’s role would be support if Scott needed something. All he’d really have to do is hang back and not be in the way. He could handle that, he thought. But what if he messed up? Mercer couldn’t let himself think about it. Glass needed someone to help haul the tow cable into the vent and there was no one else and no time to find someone.
“Okay. We’ll go as soon as the bomb’s delivered. That gives Scott four hours or so to teach me everything C.W. missed.” Mercer gave Glass a lopsided smile. “I hope you know what the hell you’re doing.”
“I was about to say the same to you.”
Before heading for the suits, Jim convinced Mercer that he needed at least one of his technicians with him to monitor the dive and personally vouched for the man.
“Just him,” Mercer agreed, but not liking it. “I don’t want the others released from the mess hall until they can be vetted.”
Mercer wanted an update on the bomb’s ETA and tried Ira on the cell phone but couldn’t get a signal again. He was able to radio Bill Farley, the supervisor over on the eastern side of the volcanic ridge.
The evacuation had been ordered, but no one was leaving their posts. In fact, Farley reported that the first- and second-shift workers were showing up by the hundreds, eager for an all-out assault to keep the Cumbre Vieja from slipping. He said the men would only leave the danger zone and head to the north of the island when the bomb was in the ground and the clock was ticking.
Mercer couldn’t have been more proud.
Crossing from the amidships control van on the Petromax Angel to where the NewtSuits were housed in a container at the Angel’s stern was like a walk across a newly turned field in the middle of a cyclone. Wind and rain lashed the ship, and the best efforts of the crew couldn’t keep up with the swampy mud that had grown a couple of feet thick in some areas. Layers of ash and sizzling bits of pumice blanketed the sea.
The bright yellow NewtSuits stood on their wire-frame lifting cradles and were cracked open ready for the men. They resembled the discarded carapace of some science fiction insect. The technician Jim had vouched for was installing extra lights to the shoulders and forearms and a secondary battery pack.