The rapid increase in pressure made the entire chamber hot and humid, and the life support team outside would periodically pause the blowdown to allow the module’s climate control system to catch up. Nevertheless, the low thermal properties of the mostly helium atmosphere felt chilly, and everybody continued to wear their full clothing, seemingly unconcerned by the increase in temperature.
Each man would continually equalize every now and then by pinching their noses, holding their breath, and blowing air through their ears. The ever-increasing pressure brought forth headaches and pain in their joints as the cartilage in those body parts shrank from the physics of the heliox gas mix.
A rising apprehension began to creep up in Gordon’s mind once again. The memories of what happened the last time he had been inside one of these chambers made him shudder. He recalled the torment of pulling Jesse’s lifeless body into the diving bell, and the agonizing wait of having to be brought back onto the ship. He couldn’t even look at his other teammates as they all huddled quietly inside the hyperbaric chamber during that distressing day.
He felt a hand on his shoulder. It was O’Keefe. “Hey El Gordo, you okay?”
Gordon forced a smile. They all had nicknames. His was “El Gordo,” which in Spanish meant the fat one, even though he wasn’t. “I’m good. Just thinking about what we have to do.”
O’Keefe shrugged nonchalantly. “You ought to do what I do—don’t think ahead of time.”
“I’m not even sure you have a brain in that skull of yours to think with, Pot-head,” Haakon said, invoking the other man’s nickname.
O’Keefe tapped his forehead. “I’ve got a human brain, unlike your fish brain, Herringbone.”
The jokes and insults were pretty lame, but it broke the ice. Gordon laughed as the growing fear at the back of his neck subsided, at least temporarily.
14
DESPITE THE EVER-PRESENT dread he felt, Gordon had somehow managed to get some rest. A few hours after the blowdown, they had picked out the individual meals they wanted on the menus and sent the order back through the small airlock.
The food came fifteen minutes later since divers always had priority over the rest of the ship’s crew. As expected it was tasteless, and everybody poured huge amounts of hot sauce and ground black pepper on everything just to get a little feeling on their tongues while they chewed and swallowed. Gordon ate as much as he could before settling down in his bunk and closing the curtains to give himself a bit of privacy.
He had dozed off not long after, but his rest didn’t seem very long. A burst of piercing static reverberated through the inside of the chamber, and a voice over the intercom could be heard, waking him up. “Attention, everyone. Please get to the lifeboat. I repeat, please get to the lifeboat.”
Gordon let out a pained groan while drawing back the curtains beside his bunk. The lights had come back on, and he could see everyone’s faces, looking as miserable as he felt. Haakon was already at the wet pot and had begun climbing the upper hatch. Gordon waited until O’Keefe had gotten out of the bunk underneath his before landing on the floor and putting his shoes on.
Unlike the rest of the Skandi Aurora’s crew, the divers couldn’t just walk out of the pressurized chamber to abandon ship. They all had to make their way through the side hatch and climb into a specially modified hyperbaric lifeboat with the same pressure equalization their living module had.
Gordon wasn’t particularly happy since he was scheduled to do the first shift with O’Keefe in less than eight hours, but he knew that the drills were important in order to foster a habit in case of a real emergency.
With the sealed diver lifeboat positioned above and along the port side of the Skandi Aurora, each one of them would have to climb up and make their way around a snakelike tunnel until they could reach it.
After O’Keefe slid through the side trunk and into an adjoining tunnel, Gordon looked around, but he couldn’t see Langley anywhere inside the chamber. “Hey, where’s Silent Bill?”
Haakon was already climbing up the tunnel two sections away, but he managed to shout back. “He’s over here, ahead of me!”
Gordon rolled his eyes before pushing himself through the side hatch and sealing it behind him. The snakelike shaft seemed even more confining than ever, and his doubts and fears had suddenly returned.
Then it all came back to him, the images replaying themselves in front of his eyes. The explosion on the work boat, followed by the failure of the vessel’s stabilization systems to keep herself in place. The resulting effect had begun to drag and sway the diving bell, and the clump weight had collided with one of the support struts of the undersea oil well they were trying to cap.
The resulting series of accidents proved catastrophic. His former diving buddy Jesse got his umbilical tangled up, and there wasn’t much Gordon could do about it as the diving bell tossed and turned after the damaged clump weight and the reeling vessel on the surface made it all unstable.
Gordon started to sweat and his legs felt weak. He couldn’t get the visions out of his mind. The long tunnel up above kept reminding him of what had happened just a few months before. His hands became cold and clammy, unable to grasp onto the rungs as he crouched down beside the now closed hatch leading back into the wet pot.
I need to get out. I need to get out, his mind repeated. He urgently desired to get back into the chamber, get on the intercom, and tell them he was out. With luck, they’d simply transfer him into the lifeboat and do an emergency decompression while the rest of the team would go on. The temptation was so strong, all he had to do was open the hatch and step back inside.
A squeaky voice called out from the top of the tunnel. “Yo. You okay?”
Gordon looked up. O’Keefe was standing at the top of the shaft, staring down at him. Despite a distance of almost ten meters, their eyes locked, and it seemed that O’Keefe read his mind.
O’Keefe gave a wide smile and lowered his voice. “It’s okay, buddy. Everything’s good. You’re in with a new boat, and a new team. You’ve already been hit by lightning, so it won’t happen again.”
His partner’s soothing words had an immediate effect. A smile crept over Gordon’s face. Yes, he’s right. That’s all in the past. The worst is over. Time to move on.
O’Keefe held out his hand, beckoning him. “Come on, you can do this. You’ve been doing this longer than I have.”
It felt like a slight taunt, maybe even a challenge, and it was enough. Gordon felt the strength in his limbs again. “Hang on, I’m coming.”
Placing his fingers on the rungs, Gordon began to climb up. He could hear Haakon and Langley talking too, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying.
He could hear his joints giving off audible clicks as the tightened cartilage wrapped around his bones adjusted to the intense pressure of the deep. The minor aches proved distracting, but Gordon felt better as he continued on upwards.
When he got to the top he saw O’Keefe back away down the length of the passage until his partner was just below the hatch leading up into the lifeboat.
“Watch this,” O’Keefe said, using both his hands to tuck roll upside down and pushed up with his legs instead of pulling through the hatch by his arms. He made it halfway before he let out a playful scream. “Help me, I’m stuck!”
Gordon could hear Haakon’s cursing as the giant Norwegian pulled O’Keefe up and inside the lifeboat. The whole affair seemed silly, yet it was enough to jumpstart his mind. Gordon reached the lower end of the hatch and used his arms to pull himself up and into the vessel.