“The suits can take it,” Jim reassured.
“I know the suits can, but I just don’t want to get cooked alive in this thing.”
“We’ll serve you like lobster with drawn butter and corn on the cob. We’ll even put your picture on the little plastic bibs.”
“You’re one sick man.”
McKenzie knew how to banter to keep his people from thinking too much about their jobs, but not too much to lose their concentration. “We’ve got five hundred fifty feet of cable stripped from the drum and enough floats to keep it neutrally buoyant. Proceed when you’re ready.”
“Roger,” he replied. Then to Mercer he said, “I’ve got the end of the tow cable. Take your grip about ten feet back. Don’t forget the thumb toggle lets you lock the pincer so you don’t need to maintain pressure.”
Impossible to move on the boat, the NewtSuit’s joints were amazingly flexible underwater, thanks to their ingenious fluid-filled design. Mercer raised his arm and took hold of the inch-thick cable where Scott had requested then locked the mechanical claw so it wouldn’t slip. “Got it.”
“Let’s go.”
Propellers on Scott’s suit burst into life and he lifted himself from the cradle before pitching the swivel nacelles back and moving off into the gloom.
Mercer applied pressure with the toes of his right foot. Like the rocket packs worn by shuttle astronauts, the NewtSuit gently skidded from the cradle and entered the realm for which it was designed, indifferent to the hundreds of pounds of pressure bearing down on its thick aluminum skin.
The water cavitated off the multiple propellers on the back of Scott’s ADS as Mercer followed him into the volcanic conduit. The bubbles seemed sluggish as they rose through the soupy water.
“I’m in,” Scott said when the glow from his lights was swallowed by the cave.
Mercer followed him, trailing the long tether behind him. Scott’s suit was taking the strain of dragging the cable through the water. Mercer was there only if he needed a bit of extra leverage.
“The temp’s up to one ten.”
Mercer couldn’t feel the heat. His suit had an integrated meshwork of water pipes that circulated either cold or warm water depending on the conditions. C.W. had said it could keep a diver comfortable in temperatures up to two hundred degrees. In fact, the climate-control system could take more than that; it was the plastic faceplate that began to melt above two hundred.
“How you doing, Mercer?”
“No problems.” With gyroscopes keeping the ADS upright, and Scott steering their little train, all Mercer had to do was keep even pressure on the foot switch. This dive was far easier than his foray into the flooded DS-Two mine with Booker Sykes.
“We’re in two hundred feet.”
McKenzie’s reply was garbled.
“Say again, Jim.”
Static filled Mercer’s helmet.
Scott wasn’t concerned. “Interference from the rock. We planned on this.”
At three hundred feet from the vent opening the temperature had climbed to one hundred thirty degrees and the cave had constricted. Scott walked Mercer through the procedure for adjusting his trim so the NewtSuit floated at an angle to reduce its height. Before Mercer got it right he flew into the floor of the cave, grinding the warhead against the rock.
“Takes a licking and keeps on ticking,” he said.
“That thing better not be ticking.”
Their pace into the volcano had slowed because of the weight and drag of the towline. Motors on Scott’s suit were overheating, but rather than wait to let them cool, they switched positions on the cable so Mercer had the lead and his suit did the lion’s share of the work. His steering lacked Scott’s finesse, but he managed to keep the suit from scraping the side of the tunnel again.
They rounded the first gentle bend in the otherwise straight shaft and found Conseil resting forlornly in the dark. With its camera eyes opaque in the wavering light of their lamps, the ROV looked dead.
“And that’s why we brought the tow cable.” There was about three feet of clearance from the top of the robot to the cave roof, almost but not quite enough to climb over in the bulky suits. “It has to get dragged back until the cave is wide enough for us to get past.”
“We’ve been down twenty minutes,” Mercer said. “Wouldn’t it be quicker if we smashed off the top struts and removed some of the gear to climb over right here.”
Glass didn’t answer.
“Scott, I said wouldn’t it be—” Mercer stopped talking when he heard the dive leader make a wet choking sound. “Scott? Scott?”
It took a minute to swivel the suit in the tunnel so he could face his partner. Mercer beamed his lights into Scott’s helmet but could not see the man’s face. The suit had filled with some dense white gas.
“What the—?”
Suddenly Scott pressed his face to the thick plastic. His eyes were smeared with bloody tears and his tongue was swollen to twice its size. “Something shorted,” he croaked. “I can feel wires burning.”
Scott Glass’s greatest fear was being realized as he was parboiled in the suit. His skin turned red and began to blister as the fire grew at his feet. His suit jerked spastically with his frantic attempts to stamp out the flames. Mercer had to turn the volume on his underwater phone down to its minimum setting. He couldn’t bear to listen to the agonizing screams, though he did not pull away from Scott’s suit until the last gasping cry.
Mercer’s anger built until he almost couldn’t see. Something in Scott’s suit hadn’t shorted. It had been tampered with. The saboteur had struck again and this time he had a good idea who that person was.
Later, he seethed and turned from Scott’s inert form.
Conseil was basically a strut framework around an inner body housing its cameras, sensors and propulsion nacelles. Mercer gripped the top of one cross support and tore it bodily from the ROV. He slashed and tore at the robot, scissoring wires with the pincers and using the suit’s tremendous weight as leverage to rip it apart.
His frantic efforts were fueled partly by hatred but mostly by fear. He would be a fool to think his suit hadn’t been tampered with. But he would not turn back. The bomb needed to be another three hundred feet deeper into the mountain in order to collapse the water-trapping dikes that threatened to split the island in half. Considering the yield of the nuclear device, a hundred yards didn’t seem like much, but the explosives experts had been adamant. They were trying to implode the mountain the way demolition experts took down a building. Placement of the device was everything.
The pincers could snip through pipes up to an inch in diameter. He used them to sever Conseil’s bracing and literally peel the top off the ROV. He shoved the tangle of metal and wire behind him and climbed on top of the robot. The back of his suit wedged against the vent’s roof, forcing him to twist violently, clawing to get past, his feet dancing on the pedals to eke out that last bit of momentum.
He popped free and drifted to the floor. His efforts had whipped up a storm of sediment and his faceplate was fogged by his heavy breathing. Uncaring, he powered up his thrusters and advanced deeper into the volcano.
An alarm in his helmet went off. He scanned the LEDs. The water temperature had shot up to a hundred and eighty degrees.
“Jesus, not now.” He killed the shrill horn and pushed on, unwilling to admit he was beginning to feel heat seeping into the suit despite its cooling system.
He had no idea what had been done to Scott’s suit to cause the fire. It probably wasn’t on a timer or both suits would have shorted at the same time. Something else had triggered it. Mercer remembered that Scott had overheated his motors. Could that have been it? Had the strain of dragging the towline activated some device that caused the fire? He checked the status board for the six motors on his suit. All of them were green.