As powerful as they were, the xenon lamps mounted on the forward part of the submarine could throw a corona of light only twenty feet. It showed the ocean was full of snow — tiny particles of organic matter that continuously rained down from the surface, only this was much worse because of the current. Cabrillo had experienced this phenomena many times, but this trip was like trying to peer through a blizzard.
“Visibility sucks,” Mike complained.
“Say again,” Max radioed.
“No visibility,” Juan enunciated slowly.
“Copy that. Poor vis.”
“We’re coming down about fifty feet off the ship,” Eddie said. “I’ve got it on lidar. The vessel itself is eighty feet long, but she’s trailing a good two hundred feet of old fishing nets that’re snagged around her hull.”
A burst of silt erupted around the hull when Eddie gunned the sub’s motors a bit too hard. “Oops. Sorry about that.”
The submersible crawled out of a billowing cloud of sand that seemed to be flushed away by the Gulf Stream. Cabrillo got his first look at the wreck with his own eyes. The old Navy ship appeared as haunted and forlorn as any wreck he’d seen, and with the rotting nets waving in the current, she looked like an old castle draped in cobwebs. He felt a shiver run up his spine that had nothing to do with the temperature.
The ship itself was a slender, arrow-bowed craft, with good proportions to her superstructure and a single up-and-down funnel placed just aft of amidships. She had no name, but under the accumulated rime of sea growth the number 821 could be seen painted next to her main anchor hawsehole. It appeared that she’d settled evenly. There were no crushed hull plates, but the superstructure was showing signs of decay as portions of some decks had collapsed after nearly seventy-five years of the ocean’s corrosive assault.
“Would you guys turn on your helmet cams so we can get a visual up here?” Max prompted.
Juan turned on both his camera and his own lights while Mike Trono did the same.
As they edged closer, more details emerged, and Juan saw the odd frame built around the ship that Eric Stone had mentioned. The metal trusswork looked like it extended to just below the waterline and covered the entire ship in what was essentially a cage with openings of about two feet square. It was going to be a tight fit to get through the frame and actually explore the ship.
There was something really strange about the structure, whose purpose he couldn’t begin to guess. And then it occurred to him. While the rest of the ship was rust-streaked and matted with marine growth, the frame was shiny, and not a single organism had tried to make it their home. No clams grew there, like the colonies infesting the ship’s deck, no starfish clung to it, not even a stray coral polyp. It was as if the sea creatures shied away from the metal scaffold.
“Mike,” Juan called, “take a sample of that frame. Priority one.”
“Copy. You want a sample of the frame,” Trono repeated back so there was no confusion.
Eddie settled the Nomad onto the seafloor about ten feet from the wreck. Cabrillo and Trono switched over to their own trimix tanks, waiting a minute to make certain they had regular airflow, then they pushed off from the mini-sub.
Eddie had positioned them so that the Nomad’s hull blocked the worst of the brutal current, and it was an easy swim over to the wreck. While Mike got busy with a diamond-toothed saw on one of the frame members, Cabrillo managed to ease himself through one of the square openings by first taking off his main tank and pushing it through ahead of himself. Once he had the tank strapped back in place, he swam over the open aft deck, where the ship had once deployed and repaired mines. Now that he was out of the Nomad’s protection, he kept one hand on part of the ship at all times. The cage would prevent him from being carried clear off the ship, but impacting the trusswork, should he slip up, could damage equipment or break bone.
He reached a door that led into the ship’s interior. Before doing anything, he rapped on it with the steel butt of his handheld dive light to test the metal’s strength. Near the edge of the door, the door flaked some, but its integrity seemed good.
“I’m going in,” he announced.
“Roger,” Max said. Standard procedure would have been to have Mike stationed at the door should anything go wrong, but the Chairman’s dive partner was only seconds away.
The passage was a standard hallway, with doors leading left and right. Each room was inky black until Cabrillo swept his light across the walls. It looked as though the ship had been completely stripped as part of her being scrapped. There was no furniture in any of the rooms, and he could tell by the plumbing that toilets and sinks had been removed from the enlisted men’s head.
He came to a stairwell, and his light caught a sudden movement that made him rear back. A silver fish, he had no idea what species, blasted past him in a blur of fins and tail.
“What happened?” a concerned Hanley asked. As bad as it was for Juan, the jerky video wouldn’t have shown what had so startled him.
“Just a fish.” Normally, Juan would have made a lame joke, but communicating humor in a helium-induced falsetto was next to impossible.
He figured that whatever equipment Tesla installed would be on a lower deck rather than up above, near the bridge. He swam down the stairs — really, a steeply canted ladder — and came upon a room where mines had once been stored. Rather than being empty as he’d expected, most of the compartment was taken up by an odd piece of machinery. Juan snapped some pictures with his high-res camera.
“What am I looking at?” Max asked in frustration because of the poor video quality despite the equipment’s expense.
“A machine,” Juan told him. “Never seen anything like it.”
It was a boxy contraption, with wires running from various parts in a dizzying whirl of loops. Some of the machine had been attacked by sea life, while other parts, much like the cage surrounding the ship, hadn’t been touched. Thick cables ran out of the top of the machine and up through the ceiling where they probably attached to the frame. Behind the machine was an electrical dynamo with exposed copper coils now rendered to verdigris-colored ruin. He could see no evidence of what Professor Tennyson said transpired in this room nor did he really expect to.
And while he was no engineer, Cabrillo was versed enough in technology to know he was looking at something completely new. That this was Tesla’s work wasn’t in doubt, but its purpose certainly was. Optical camouflage? Teleportation? Death ray? Rumors all, but this thing had definitely scared people enough to see it buried in a watery grave. He also saw evidence that someone had dived this wreck before because it looked as though parts of the machine were missing.
It was at that moment when he realized that his mind was drifting from the technical aspects of the dive that he heard a shrill alarm over the comm. It was coming from the Oregon.
“Max?” Seconds passed and there was no reply. So again he cried in his helium-altered voice, “Max!”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The alarm’s wail was followed up with red flashing strobes as the Oregon’s automated systems went into combat mode. A sultry female voice came over the intercom. “All crew to battle stations. All crew to battle stations.”
“Report,” Hanley barked from the command chair.
Mark Murphy was seated at his normal position toward the front of the room, where his primary job was to monitor the ship’s vast array of weaponry. He was there this morning to watch the dive.
“Second.” He typed furiously, his skinny fingers moving with the virtuosity of a concert pianist. “Oh damn.”
“What is it?”
“Passive sonar detected the sound of a submarine opening two of its outer hull doors.”
“Distance and bearing?”