Giordino flicked on a bank of external floodlights as they sank past the hundred-foot mark. The descent felt painfully slow. As men who worked in and around the sea, they felt an affinity for the unknown divers lost on the seafloor. Several minutes later, the taupe-colored bottom materialized.
“The current pushed us east during our descent,” Giordino said. “I suggest a heading of two hundred and seventy-five degrees.”
“On it.” Pitt engaged the Starfish’s thrusters.
The submersible skimmed over the bottom, driving against a light current. The seafloor was rocky and undulating but mostly devoid of life.
Pitt noticed the terrain change a short distance ahead. “Something coming up.”
A parallel band of rippled sediment appeared, stretching across their path like a recessed highway.
“Tread marks,” Pitt said. “Somebody had some heavy equipment down here.”
Giordino peered into the depths. “That says we should be close to the wellhead.”
They traveled a short distance before the hulk of the Alta appeared in the murk. The bow was crumpled from hitting the seafloor, but the ship was otherwise intact, sitting upright at a slight list. Pitt wasted no time inspecting the ship’s damage and circled around its stern. He was immediately met by an underwater junkyard.
Debris from the Alta was scattered across a rocky shallow, joined by a conglomeration of pipes, compressors, and cables jarred free at impact. There were large steel gas cylinders, most containing helium or oxygen in support of the Alta’s saturation chamber. Dozens of the green, brown, and black cylinders lay scattered across the bottom.
As they glided over a buckled tin shed, Giordino called out. “Strobe light, off to the right.”
Pitt turned the submersible toward the flash. A raised structure, sprouting pipes from its center, partially blocked the light. Pitt navigated around the wellhead riser and blowout preventer to find the diving bell wedged against the structure, jammed at an obtuse angle, with one of its drop weights still in place.
Giordino shook his head. “They sure got themselves into a nice pickle.”
A small light wavered in one of the bell’s viewports. Pitt flashed the submersible’s lights as he eased closer, cautious of the wellhead’s protruding fittings.
“I think I see two men in there,” Giordino said.
“Let’s see if we can raise them on the emergency channel.”
Pitt activated the emergency transponder that operated on the same frequency as the diving bell’s. “Submersible Starfish to Alta diving bell. Do you read me?”
A high-pitched, garbled voice replied in the affirmative.
“Their helium-speech unscrambler must have been topside,” Giordino said. “Hope you watched a lot of Disney cartoons growing up.”
The voice of Warren Fletcher blared over the speaker in a Mickey Mouse tenor. Pitt lost much of the verbiage but made out that one man was injured and that the bell had lost most of its emergency gas. He slid the submersible to the side and saw for himself. A half-dozen gas cylinders were piled on the sand below the bell, a large gash evident in the bottles’ storage rack.
Pitt eyed the spent tanks. “They have a serious air problem.”
“Somebody just held up two fingers to the glass,” Giordino said. “Two hours.”
It was a problem they hadn’t expected to confront. Pitt’s objective had been to find the bell and give the men encouragement until a deep-sea rescue team could arrive. But those resources were at best eight hours away. By the time outside help arrived, the men in the bell would be long dead.
“Poor buggers,” Giordino said. “The Navy’s hours away. Those boys will never make it.”
“They can if they swim to the surface.”
Pitt radioed the bell. “Alta divers, can you abandon the bell and dive to the surface? We have a deco chamber topside. Repeat, we have a deco chamber topside.”
Fletcher replied in the negative, explaining that the hatch was blocked from the outside.
Pitt and Giordino surveyed the exterior and saw the hatch was blocked shut by the bell’s bent base frame, which had also jammed the ballast weight in place.
Pitt studied the heavy-gauge steel. “No way we can straighten that out. Do you think we can pull them off the riser?”
“It’s worth a shot. We can’t access the lower frame, where they’re pinned. Of course, the bell won’t ascend far dragging all that cable.”
“They’ll have to break free sooner or later.” Pitt moved the submersible around the diving bell. Approaching from above, he hovered the Starfish just above the bell.
Giordino went to work, extending an articulated robotic arm and grasping a secondary lift eye on the bell. “Got it.”
Proceeding gently, Pitt angled the thrusters down and tried lifting the diving bell. The dive capsule rocked but refused to budge. Pitt tried adjusting the angle of lift, but each time the bell remained fixed to the wellhead riser.
Pitt eased the submersible lower and Giordino released the grip on the lift point.
“That bell probably weighs as much as our submersible,” Giordino said. “We just don’t have enough horsepower to pull it off.”
“She just needs a good tug from above.”
“I agree, but it ain’t going to come from us.”
“That’s right,” Pitt said. “It will have to come from the lift cable.”
“You mean raise the cable? There’s over six hundred feet of steel cable. It probably weighs ten times as much as the bell. No way we could drag that to the surface.”
“Not drag. Float,” Pitt said with a twinkle in his eye.
Giordino studied his partner. He had seen that look before. It was the never-say-die gaze of a man who had cheated death many times over. It was a look of determination that spouted from his friend like Old Faithful. Pitt didn’t know the men in the diving bell, but there was no way he would stand by and let them die.
Giordino rubbed his chin. “How can we possibly do that?”
“Simple,” Pitt said. “We just raise the roof.”
9
Feeling as if he had been abandoned to die in a cold steel coffin, Fletcher watched the lights of the NUMA submersible recede across the seafloor.
“They’ll be back,” he said, trying to convince himself.
He could do little but focus on his breathing, every inhalation a reminder of their limited air. Like most professional divers, he wasn’t prone to claustrophobia, but little by little the diving bell seemed to compress around him.
He gazed at Tank, who had slid to a sitting position beside him and stared at the floor in resignation. To lessen his own anxiety, Fletcher remained standing, his face pressed against the viewport while tracking the submersible. What was it up to? The vessel seemed to be just moving back and forth, stirring up silt. Whatever they were doing, it seemed to have nothing to do with saving him and his partners.
But saving the men’s lives was exactly what Pitt was up to.
“Short of a granny knot, that’s the best we can do,” Giordino said, sweat dripping off his brow.
He was operating the robotic arm, or manipulator, which was again clutching a strand of the diving bell’s lift cable. Leaving Fletcher and the bell in the shadows, Pitt had traced the length of the cable until finding the frayed end near the sunken Alta.
He had Giordino grab the cable end and drag it to the metal shed they had passed in the debris field earlier. The prefabricated welder’s shed had stood on the ship’s deck but was sheared off when the Alta struck bottom. The shed had somehow landed upright. Although heavily dented, it stood fully intact in the soft sand.