In the comms shack on the Pheia, Williams had stepped out to get coffee; more for something to do than the need to drink. The technician had gone back to his book. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about the Pheia or it’s crew. He’d just spent too much time on dive missions where there were hours between communications and had learned not to expect crews to respond. They were generally busy, and as far as he could tell held a universal distain for the people who manned the surface support vessels. Sure, they’d all tell you how important you were to the mission when anyone outside was listening, but in reality they saw the surface crew as non-divers and that made them lesser entities. He flipped the page over. Just as he started reading the page, the ELF signaled the arrival of a message. He scanned it quickly. “Oh shit.” then shouted: “Dr. Williams!”
Williams was on his way back to the comms shack enjoying a few seconds in the bright Caribbean sun when he heard the shout. He threw the Styrofoam cup of coffee over the side into the calm, blue water, then felt a pang of guilt about the non-decomposable plastic going in the ocean. He reached the door of the comms shack just as the tech was coming out. The two collided. “Dr. Williams. Come and read this sir.”
Williams read the message twice. “Oh no. This can’t be. Only Dr. Moss? How can they all be dead?” He was panicking. He could feel his heart beating hard in his chest.
“Do you want to respond sir?”
“What? Oh, yes. Tell Dr Moss that we have received her message. I need to call a meeting. I’ll be in the galley. Find me if you get anything else from her.”
Williams left the comms shack in search of the barge captain.
Organizing
Kate saw the response on the ELF screen. She could imagine what was going on now. Williams would call the institute and have a meeting. That was how he worked. He almost never acted alone. He was Mr. Consensus. That would take a while. She knew that whatever the outcome of Williams’ meeting, there was nothing they could do until she got to a depth at which they could send divers down and capture the hab. Even then, she’d still need to complete the ascent before she could get out. It was going to be a while. “Time for a nap perhaps? Oh crap, I forgot to get a mattress.”
Kate was torn between crashing out on the pile of towels and getting back into her dive suit. It seemed like she was living in the damn thing. But she needed something else to do. A distraction of some kind. There had been enough tasks recently to keep her busy but now that most of them were taken care of she had endless days of boredom to look forward to.
She decided to go back to the crew quarters and get a mattress. That should be challenging for a start. And while she was there she’d look around for books, a Kindle or perhaps an iPod to bring back. “In what? The galley must have zip-lock bags. The world revolves around zip-locks. Or a plastic box?”
Kate looked at the dive checklist on the wall and remembered she had meant to add ‘knife’ to it. She checked that she had a knife and then added it to the list with the sharpie that now lived on the floor by the ladder.
On the surface barge, Williams sat in the galley with a satellite phone in one hand and an ancient fountain pen in the other. In front of him on the badly discolored and scarred table was a legal pad with several pages of notes. He was checking some of them off as he spoke into his phone and adding more to the end of the list. “We will need Dr. Morris, or if you can’t get hold of him, someone else from the psychology department…… What? Oh no, not him. I find him hard to understand…… Well, alright, I suppose he’ll have to do. How soon can he be here?…… And the others? When can they be here?…… OK, yes, that will have to do…… Yes, of course. Thank you…… Call me if anything changes.”
Williams turned off the sat phone and placed it next to the legal pad. He checked off two more items from his list, crossed out Dr. Morris and added Dr. Subramanian.
Williams really wanted Dr. Morris. He and Morris had worked on a number of projects and he trusted Morris. Morris was calm and sensitive and always enjoyed a good relationship with the subjects who volunteered for his tests. They didn’t always talk to him again after some of the tests but that was the nature of the work. He put people in stressful situations and evaluated their performance. He then tried to correlate the results with his assessment of the person before the tests. The general idea being to develop better selection methods for personnel who would be subjected to high stress situations. This kind of work had been going on for many years and Morris had reproduced many of the more bizarre tests conducted in the past including a fake airline disaster incident. Not only were some of the participants in that test not talking to him, but they were still engaged in legal action against him and the institute — despite Morris’ collection of iron-clad experiment release forms. The institute had a great legal team.
Dr. Subramanian on the other hand was a very different kind of person from Morris. Williams had initially been happy to have him on loan from the Indian Navy. Dr. Subramanian was attached to MARCOS, the Indian Navy’s Marine Commando Force where he conducted similar work to Dr. Morris, but with less regard for his test subjects. The Indian Navy had decided that its special operations forces should be selected to be on a par with the British SAS or American Delta teams. Dr. Subramanian had been recruited from academia to help devise tests that would quickly weed out candidates who were unlikely to complete the selection course. The theory being that it was cheaper to reject them earlier than later. Dr. Subramanian’s methods had proven to be effective in reducing otherwise competent, courageous, fit men, to rabid anger and in some cases, tears. When a commodore in the Indian Navy had read of Morris’ work at the institute, he had devised a plan to send Subramanian to the US and get him out of the way. They needed to develop a better commando force but Subramanian was causing them to reject almost every applicant, and in the commodore’s view that included all the men best suited to the needs of the department.
Williams had read the letter from the Indian Navy with interest. It seemed that Dr. Subramanian was doing similar work to Dr. Morris, and Williams thought Morris might benefit from an exchange of ideas and methods. In addition, the Indian government was offering to pay for Subramanian’s travel, board and including a donation to the institute.
The first meeting had not gone well. The two men disliked each other immediately. Morris thought Subramanian was a lunatic and Subramanian thought Morris’ methods were far too weak to achieve real results. Williams was stuck with Dr. Subramanian for two years — the agreed loan period (with an option to extend indefinitely). So Williams had made up a new program to keep Dr. Subramanian out of Morris’ hair. He had put him to work with Dr. Ford evaluating the correlation between psychological profiles and susceptibility to HPNS. Dr. Ford had found Subramanian to be a very diligent worker and had left him largely alone to conduct his evaluations of past data collected from years of deep dive research.
Williams underlined Subramanian’s name twice. He really needed someone to help keep Kate Moss calm over the next few days until they could get to the Pheia, but Subramanian? Williams had done a little research into Subramanian’s work in India through a friend at a university there. He had been quite horrified at some of the experiments Dr. Subramanian had conducted, and was wondering what this man would bring to the situation. He was quite certain that Kate was currently under a lot of stress and that would interest Subramanian, but would the man be able to help her or would he treat this as another of his experiments and make things worse? He was due to arrive in Georgetown in six hours with the rest of the institute staff who were coming to help with the rescue. “If you can call it a rescue,” he said to himself. He knew full well that until the Pheia reached a depth where divers could connect a winch line, Kate was on her own.