The controller was silent for a moment, as if he were checking and rechecking. “No,” the man said finally. “But we are picking up a vibration. It sounds like…” The controller’s words trailed off, an act that concerned Paul. A vibration. What did he mean?
As Paul waited for clarification he began to feel something. Where his hand rested on the control panel he could feel a tremor of some kind. At first it was subtle, but then the Grouperbegan to shake and slide to the side as if some force or current was pushing it out of position. In seconds the tremor became a deep rumbling, like a freight train approaching.
“What is that?” he asked.
“We’re reading a massive signal up here. I’ve never seen anything like it. All kinds of movement.” “Where?”
“Everywhere,” the voice said, sounding panicked.
There was a terrible pause as the rumbling increased and then their controller spoke again.
“Good Lord!” the controller shouted. “There’s an avalanche coming your way.”
17
THE RUMBLING IN THE DEPTHS shook the Grouper. Sliding rock and sediment from the slope that the Kinjara Marusat on was tumbling down at an accelerating pace, released by the exploding torpedoes.
As the avalanche came on, it forced the water out of its way, creating its own current and stirring up the sediment. Clouds of silt engulfed them, lit up by the submersible’s lights. The world outside the view port became a swirl of brown and gray.
“Get us out of here,” Gamay shouted.
Paul intended to do just that, but whatever vessel had fired the torpedoes at them was probably still waiting out there. And, in all honesty, being blown to bits seemed just as ghastly as getting buried alive.
He flipped the ballast switch and dumped the rest of the iron that held them down. He pushed the throttle back to full and angled the nose of the Grouperupward, but the Grouperwas too underpowered to overcome such a current, and it banged against the Kinjara Maru’s hull once again.
Gamay put her hand on his arm as they began to rise. Then suddenly they were yanked to a stop.
“We’re caught on something,” Gamay said, craning her head around, desperately trying to see what it might be.
Paul threw the motor into reverse, backed up for a few feet, and then went forward at a different angle. Same result: a steady acceleration followed by sudden stop that twisted the Grouperaround like a dog being yanked backward on its leash.
Through the dust and silt Paul could see items tumbling across the deck and bits of the Kinjara’s superstructure being torn away. The rumbling sound reached a deafening pitch.
A wave of thicker sediment hit the sub, and all went dark. Something metallic snapped, and then the Grouperstarted to tumble.
Gamay’s visor and a couple of other items slid to one side and then toppled over and up the wall and then onto the ceiling. Paul held on but saw his wife was unable to brace herself. She hit the side wall and then banged against the ceiling two feet above them and then came back down.
He realized they’d rolled over, becoming momentarily inverted. He reached out, pulling Gamay to him.
“Hold on to me,” he shouted.
She wrapped her arms around him as they continued to bang and twist at the mercy of the current and the landslide. Something slammed against the view port for a second, racing out of the murky water, hitting it hard, and then being swept away. The lights failed, and the wrenching sound of something being torn off the outside of the Grouperended with a snap.
And then it stopped.
The rumbling sound continued for another minute or so, dissipating into the distance like a herd of buffalo had stampeded past.
Paul held his breath. Amazingly, incredibly, they were still alive.
In the darkness, he felt his wife breathing hard. His own heart pounded, and his body prickled with adrenaline. Neither of them said a word, as if the mere sound of their voices might set off another landslide. But after a full minute of silence, and no further sounds of danger, Paul felt his wife move.
She looked up at him through the dim illumination of the emergency lighting, She appeared as surprised to be alive as he was.
“Any leaks?” she asked.
He looked around. “Nothing up here.”
She eased off him. “When we get home, I’m finding out who built this thing and I’m buying him a bottle of scotch.”
He laughed. “A bottle of scotch? I might put his kids through college if he has any.”
She laughed too.
As Gamay moved back, Paul eased over to the control panel. They were obviously resting at an odd angle, maybe forty-five degrees nose down, and rolled over thirty degrees or so.
“The main power is out,” he said. “But the batteries look fine.”
“See if you can get them back online,” she said, pulling on the headset that their tumble had ripped off.
Paul went through the restart, got most of the systems back online, and then rerouted the lights through the backup line. The lights came back on. “Let’s see if we can—”
He stopped midsentence. Gamay was staring past him, a hollow look in her eyes. He turned.
Packed sediment had pressed itself against the glass of the view port. It looked almost like a sand painting, with a few swirls and striations.
“We’re buried,” Gamay whispered. “That’s why it got so quiet all of a sudden. We’re buried alive.”
18
KURT FOUND THE FIRST SEVENTY-TWO HOURS as chaperone of the sea to be twice as bad as he’d expected. No, he thought, that was an understatement, it was at least three times as bad as he’d feared.
Every group of researchers wanted special treatment, every group seemed to question the rules and his decisions, even his authority.
A team from Iceland insisted that an experiment by one of the Italian groups would interfere with the baseline data they were trying to collect. A Spanish group had been caught trying to plant a flag on the tower of rock in strict contravention of the agreed-to plan. And while Kurt found their boldness somewhat endearing, the Portuguese were ready to duke it out over the incident. He half expected pistols at dawn, the way they spoke.
Meanwhile, the Chinese were complaining about the presence of threeJapanese teams, to which the Japanese responded that the Chinese didn’t need anyone there as they would just steal all the data in a cyberattack once it was downloaded anyway.
Dealing with enough squabbling to make the UN jealous was not the only problem. Along with Joe and the rest of the Argo’s crew, Kurt also had to act as lifeguard.
Most of the science teams had only rudimentary training in the ways of the sea, either on the surface or below. Two of the teams had already collided head-on. Their small boats suffered only minor damage, but it was enough to send them back to Santa Maria for repairs.
Others had issues diving. One team narced itself by using the wrong mixture, and two of the Argo’s rescue divers had to corral them before they lost consciousness. Another member of a different team had to be forced to take a decompression stop he didn’t think necessary, and a French scientist almost drowned when an inexperienced divemaster put too much weight on the man’s belt and he sank to the bottom like a stone.
In full gear, Kurt and Joe dove down and rescued the scientist, only to surface and find another team with an engine fire aboard their rented vessel. It was enough to make Kurt wish they’d never found the damn tower in the first place.