Sean’s gaze remained on the deck, which is what he did when he was trying to think deeply, or when he was listening intently, or both. He nodded at everything Vanessa was saying, and it wasn’t much different from what he was already thinking. For a moment a hope came to him and he said, “What if we went down in the JSL and clamped onto the cable holding D-Plus and just dragged it back up to where she could get out? That would keep there from being any pull on the compromised cable, and the slack as she was brought up could be used to wrap the exposed cable under several more layers on the spool.”
“That could work, but what’s the operational depth of the JSL? Didn’t it get discontinued because those poor bastards got caught on some sunken ship, and they were stuck there until they ran out of air? How deep was that?” Slipjack asked in his hint of a western-by-way-of-New Jersey drawl that usually seemed homey and ominous in equal measure but seemed neither at the moment, more like on the edge of panic as he tried to run through all the possibilities in his mind. The winch, after all, was his responsibility. Only he and Sean Muir had official access to it around the clock. The others had to be wondering how he’d let this happen right under his nose.
Vanessa said, “That had nothing to do with crush depth, Slip.”
“No, but I’m wondering how deep that was, ’cause obviously that dive must’ve been inside their depth comfort zone, y’know? I think its deepest rating is in the neighborhood of three thousand feet. And she’s at, what’d you say earlier, 2,800 feet? So you’d have some wiggle room to save her, boss!”
Sean nodded. That accident killed two submariners and got the original JSL discontinued, but they lived long enough as the carbon dioxide scrubbers became inoperable that they knew they would die down there. All they could do was wait for the oxygen to run out. Vanessa was right: it was an oxygen thing, not a crush depth thing.
But those memories came and went like vapor. Slipjack’s words barely stuck, although he understood his winch man perfectly. All he could focus on right then was his wife still repeating that she was being murdered, someone was trying to murder her. Only now she was leaving the “trying” part out: “… someone’s murdering me… why are they murdering me?… someone is murdering me…”
“I think you got to go for it, boss,” Slipjack said, looking ill. “You got to save her somehow. She’s in danger because of you—”
“All right. Enough!” Sean snapped at him. “You think I don’t know that, goddamnit? You and Toro break out the JSL—use the launch crane—and make it ready.”
Slipjack and Toro moved as fast as Sean had ever seen them move. Vanessa stayed with Sean, since two deckhands with a hook and Sea Legs’ smaller winch would be enough to get the JSL down where they could prep it for a dive and get the pilot situated. An additional person would only get in the way.
“This could work, boss,” she said as the two men wrestled the hook onto the goddamn museum piece that was their counterfeit JSL. Young oceanographers from the Institute liked to use the thing to spend some time near coral reefs or where they could set down in a couple dozen feet of water and observe turtles and interesting fish do their thing in the light of the euphotic zone. But the Muirs had it on Sea Legs because it was always stowed on Sea Legs, the boat being used currently by the Muirs but actually the property of the Institute and thus used also by their colleagues and students. He was very glad right then that no one had ever thought it necessary to go through the pain in the ass of taking it off the boat and storing it somewhere else, just to have to haul it out and load it on the boat again the next time a grad student or postdoc wanted to use it.
Moving to help them, Vanessa stopped next to Sean and asked quietly, “Listen, Cap—even if they can get it down and prepped in forty-five minutes, how long will it take to get it down three thousand feet? Another forty?”
Sean looked pale but didn’t let his fear get the best of him. No effective mission leader could let anything, even something like this, get that deep under his skin. “Could be an hour.”
Vanessa looked at the green-screen on-deck computer monitor. “She’s been down there an hour and a half, Sean. Those scrubbers work how long? I don’t know this shit, boss, you got to help me here.”
“She’s got five hours in the sub. More than that and her brain dies from lack of oxygen.” He swallowed, shaken from listening to his wife go dissociative with talk of getting “murdered” while sitting in what could soon be her own coffin.
“Shit. So an hour and a half, plus, let’s say, an hour to get the JSL down to D-Plus and get a good hold on her cable. How long’s it gonna take for our little JSL to pull our chunky sub to the point where Kat can get out and free swim to the surface?”
“I have no idea, Van. I’ve never done this before. No one has. These armored cables do not—”
“I know, Sean, I know. But there’s plenty of time for figuring that out once we have your wife back and safe. Give me a ballpark: How long?”
“The JSL isn’t really made for towing, but since we’re pressing it into service, if I had to venture a guess—”
“Which you do.”
“—I’d say at least two hours with that heavy load and the limited thrust of the JSL. Maybe more.”
“That maybe is straddling the line between saving your wife and losing her, Sean. You’ve done, what, a hundred dives in this thing? You have to be the one to go down and get her—you always find a way to keep us going. We haven’t lost a crew member yet, so let’s not start today, all right?”
He allowed himself a very small smirk and said, “When did I promote you to first mate?”
“When you lost your shit listening to Katherine. Besides, who do you want right now? Mickey is a boat chief, not a submersible expert. I’m not saying he can’t learn, but now seems an inopportune time for rookie training.
“Slipjack doesn’t dive, but he could be your right-hand man on the surface once we get the JSL ready to go. And that should be soon, once they get the batteries installed and run through the checklist.”
“Has Toro ever piloted a submersible?”
“No. He’s purely a member of the boat crew, promoted to winch team. And I’ve dived a few times, just not in the pilot’s seat.”
“Vanessa, I know all this. What are you getting at, already?”
“I’m telling you that you need to get suited up, and you need to do this. Not because she’s your wife, but because she’s part of your research crew. Your skills and experience are the only things that can save her.”
Sean took all of this in, sucked in a deep breath, then let it go. He shouted to Toro and Slipjack, “Let’s go, gentlemen! Time is short!”
“Twenty minutes,” Toro said without looking up from his work.
“Screw that. Fifteen at the most and I want this in the water.”
Slipjack muttered under his breath, but it was plenty loud enough for Toro to hear, and laugh.