4
The diver thrust his legs in a scissors kick, propelling his body swiftly through the clear water. He kept his face down to scan the sandy seafloor that stretched before him like a ragged beige carpet. Detecting a movement on the bottom, he slowed, angling toward the object. It wasn’t a fish but something resembling a huge, brightly colored crab.
The creature traveled on long, spider-like appendages that seemed to rotate along its sides. It emitted a faint blue glow from its eyes, which peered coldly ahead. The diver followed the mock crab as it crawled toward a high protrusion of coral. The crab butted against the coral, then backtracked and tried again. Once more the coral stopped its progress.
The diver watched the crab repeat the movement several times before swimming close and swatting its back. Its blue eyes turned black and its legs stopped clawing. The diver grabbed the crab, tucked it under one arm, and kicked to the surface.
He broke the water amid a gentle swell, close to a modern research ship painted bright turquoise. Side-swimming to a hydraulic dive platform off the stern, he deposited the crab and hoisted himself aboard.
Al Giordino was a short man with the burly build of a professional wrestler combined with the toughness of an elder crocodile. His muscular arms and legs fairly burst the seams of his wetsuit as he rose to his feet, spit out his regulator, and yanked off his dive mask. He brushed away a lock of curly brown hair plastered to his forehead and waved to a man on deck to raise the dive platform.
A minute later, the platform creaked to a stop at deck level. Giordino gathered up the crab with an irksome look and stomped onto the deck. He froze at the sight of the crewman who had raised the platform. It was Dirk Pitt.
Giordino grinned at the sight of his boss and old friend. “Escaped from the tower of power again, I see.”
“Just making sure the NUMA technology budget isn’t being spent on cheap rum and dancing girls.”
Giordino shot Pitt a pained look. “I told you, I’ve sworn off cheap rum since my last pay raise.”
Pitt smiled as he helped Giordino remove his tank and weight belt. Friends since childhood, the two had worked together for years, forging a bond tighter than brothers. As founding employees of NUMA, their underwater scrapes were legendary within the agency. Giordino now headed up NUMA’s Underwater Technology division, spending much of his time field-testing new remote sensing devices and submersible vehicles.
Pitt nodded toward the mechanical crab. “So who’s your arachnoid friend?”
“We call it the Creepy Crawler.” Giordino placed it on a workbench and began stripping off his wetsuit. “It’s designed for extended deepwater survey duty.”
“Power source?” Pitt asked.
“A small fuel cell, which processes hydrogen from seawater. We designed it to crawl across the bottom of the murky depths for upward of six months. We can deploy it from a submersible or even drop it over the side of a ship. With preprogrammed guidance, it will crawl along a directed path until reaching a designated end point. Then she’ll float to the surface and emit a satellite signal that tells us where to pick her up.”
“I assume she’s recording her travels?”
Giordino patted the mechanical creature. “This one’s loaded with a battery of sensors and a video camera, which is activated at periodic intervals. We have a half dozen more in the lab that can be configured with a variety of sensing devices, depending on the mission.”
“Might come in handy when we get to the Cayman Trench.”
Giordino arched a brow. “I figured you didn’t come down to Key West for lunch and a drink at Sloppy Joe’s. Why the Cayman Trench?”
“It’s near the heart of a string of dead zones that have cropped up in a line between Jamaica and the western tip of Cuba.” Pitt summarized his meeting with Gunn and Yaeger in Washington.
“Any idea of the source?” Giordino asked.
“None. That’s why I want to get on-site and have a look.”
“If it’s man-made, we’ll find it,” Giordino said. “When do we leave?”
“Captain says we can shove off in an hour.”
Giordino gave a wistful gaze toward Duval Street and its line of raucous bars, then tucked the Creepy Crawler under his arm.
“If that’s the case,” he said with a disheartened tone, “I’d better find my friend a new brain before he’s cast to the depths again.”
He walked across the deck, leaving a trail of wet footprints behind him.
5
The suffocating darkness six hundred feet beneath the surface of the ocean had vanished. Banks of LED lights, encased in titanium housings capable of withstanding the crushing pressure, cast a bright glow on the undulating seafloor’s stark landscape. A silver-scaled tarpon swam by and eyed a curious array of scaffolding that towered under the lights before darting into the more familiar blackness.
The structure resembled a lighted Christmas tree that had toppled to one side. Or so thought Warren Fletcher, who peered through a small acrylic window that was as thick as his fist. The veteran commercial diver was perched in a large diving bell that was suspended fifty feet above the seabed by a cable from a support ship.
Working in the alien world at the bottom of the sea fascinated Fletcher. He found an odd tranquility working in the cold dark deep. It kept him active in the grimy, dangerous business of commercial diving years after his original dive partners had retired. For Fletcher, the siren of the deep still summoned.
“You ready for your next dive, Pops?” The helium-rich air circulating through the diving bell gave the voice a high-pitched warble.
Fletcher turned to a walrus-shaped man named Tank who was coiling an umbilical hose across a rack. “There ain’t a day I’m not, Junior.”
Tank grinned. “Brownie’s on his way back, should be up in five.”
As the designated bellman, Tank was responsible for assisting his two divers with their equipment and for manning their life-sustaining umbilicals. The trio would work an eight-hour shift before being hoisted to the surface ship Alta. There they were transferred to prison-like living quarters in a steel saturation chamber that maintained the pressure of the seafloor.
Keeping the divers under constant pressure avoided the need for decompression cycles after every dive. Captives of deep pressure, the men were disciples of saturation diving, where their bodies adjusted to an infusion of nitrogen that might last for days or even weeks. At the end of the job, the men would undergo a single extended decompression cycle before seeing the light of day again.
The purpose behind their dives was the age-old quest for oil. Fletcher and his crewmates were several days into a weeklong project to fit a test wellhead and riser onto the seafloor. A drill ship would then hover over the site and bore through the sediment in hope of striking oil. Fletcher and his cohorts were laying the foundation for the third test well their Norwegian employer had attempted in the last six months.
Under license from the Cuban government, the exploration company had been given the right to explore a promising tract of territorial waters northeast of Havana. Petroleum experts believed a huge, untapped trove of oil and gas reserves lay off the Cuban coastline, but the Norwegian firm was batting zero. Its first two test wells had come up dry.
“You think the Alta will run us into Havana when we pop the chamber?” Tank asked.
Fletcher nodded but was only half listening. His attention focused on a faint light that appeared beyond the wellhead site. He turned and looked down the diving bell’s trapdoor, spotting the light of Will Brown working his way up to the chamber. He turned back to the viewport as the other light grew closer, splitting into two beams. As the object approached the base of the wellhead riser, Fletcher could see it was a small white submersible.