“Pretty much,” Chloe said as she used the controls to begin an ascent back towards the Wanderer, less than twenty meters above them.
“Well, I’d like to be in on that test!”
Chloe tilted her head back and grinned. “Might be a bit dangerous, Professor. We don’t want to be legally liable to your family in case anything goes wrong.”
When they broke the surface, Ethan and the other two Australians were standing by the ship’s aft deck, waiting for them. Chloe expertly maneuvered the submersible until her nose nearly touched the Wanderer’s stern. Seeing their austere faces, Chloe sensed something was up.
Popping open the Sedna’s bubble canopy, Chloe breathed in the salty sea air before she looked up at them. “What’s going on, guys?”
“I just got a call from my friend in the Navy,” Ethan said. “They think that sub went down with all hands.”
17
GORDON AND O’KEEFE had been awakened via the intercom by Mullins the supervisor just a little over an hour before. Breakfast was already waiting for them at the small side airlock, and they had precious little time to use the toilet, eat, and suit up for the first shift. The Skandi Aurora had made it to the specific location somewhere out in the Arabian Sea, and now they had work to do.
O’Keefe had no problem with defecating at will, while Gordon had to concentrate hard in order to push the contents of his bowels out before he could put on his hot water suit. The alternative would have been to take a dump in his gear while squatting underwater or inside the diving bell, a wholly unsavory idea. While pissing in one’s suit was a necessity, doing a number two was frowned upon.
Despite the rush, Gordon did have time to clean the toilet before calling the life support techs to help him flush the contents into a secondary sewage system, there to be depressurized before being placed into the ship’s main septic tank.
O’Keefe was laughing at him as Gordon hurriedly stuffed the remaining bits of his breakfast down his throat before jumping back into the wet pot to put his diving suit on. The two of them then climbed up through the hatch and into the diving bell with just minutes to spare.
While sitting inside the cramped confines of the capsule, Gordon continued to check and recheck his gear as he felt the entire device being detached from the junction with the hyperbaric living chamber and being brought onto the ship’s internal rail system. Entering and detaching from the main module was an extremely critical phase, for if one slipup happened, then he and his partner would surely die a gruesome death after being exposed to the outside pressure on the surface.
After making sure his harness fit snugly over his hot water suit, Gordon peered through the small porthole. Four o’clock in the morning, and it was still night outside. The Skandi Aurora had a flat-bottomed hull with a hole in the middle called a moon pool which they would go into. With the diving bell now being lowered into the water, he nodded towards his partner, silently asking for his diving helmet.
They had both agreed to split the twelve hour shift in half, and O’Keefe was to be the standby diver, staying inside the bell while Gordon went out into the water for the first six hours. After that they would switch places.
O’Keefe made eye contact with him as he held Gordon’s yellow dive helmet in both hands. They could practically read each other’s thoughts. “You up for this?”
“Of course,” Gordon said. He felt that the only way he could ever get rid of the demons plaguing his mind was to go in full speed ahead, and so he had volunteered to be the first diver, on the first shift. “Now help me put on this damn hat.”
O’Keefe chuckled as he helped the other man place the fully enclosed diving helmet over his head before locking it onto Gordon’s neck dam. Both men had to work hard just putting things on since they could barely move due to the cramped space, mostly taken up by coils of thick umbilical hoses that were essential for keeping them alive.
With the added chin pad, Gordon’s face felt snug inside the helmet. Testing the regulator, he blinked a few times as he turned the helmet’s free flow knob to get rid of the fog that had formed on the inside of the faceplate. Gordon had to resist the sudden urge to take the helmet off the moment he felt an itch just underneath his right eyelid. He knew from his own experience that these little irritants had to be endured for the sake of safety. There would be no face or head scratching until he was back inside the bell, and that would be six hours later.
Mullins’s voice came over his helmet’s intercom. “Can you hear me alright, Gordy?”
“Loud and clear,” Gordon answered, using the embedded microphone inside the inner mask. The top of his helmet had both a video camera and a head light. “Can you see through my feed?”
“Yes, all is good,” Mullins said. “Tell O’Keefe to stop grinning and waving like an idiot, please.”
Gordon extended his middle finger towards his partner, while O’Keefe continued to make faces while looking at the helmet camera. Out of all the people he worked with, Gordon considered O’Keefe to be the coolest under fire. All they had were each other if they got into trouble now, and he felt that O’Keefe was more than adequate when it came to dealing with emergencies.
Less than a minute later, he could feel the heat coursing through his body as Mullins activated the hot water feed from the control room on topside. “Okay, heat is good,” Gordon confirmed.
O’Keefe looked out the porthole, seeing the watery blackness before checking the depth gauge along the side of the wall. “We ought to hit bottom in another five minutes.”
Gordon began opening and closing his hands, indicating that he wanted his gloves on. O’Keefe grunted positively while leaning sideways before reaching towards a pair of thick gloves, and helped him put them on.
With the bailout bottle already attached to his back, Gordon twisted the emergency gas supply valve on the side of his helmet, checking to make sure he had some reserve air in case something happened to his umbilical. There was. “EGS is good.”
“Roger that,” Mullins said over the helmet intercom. “You guys still remember the briefing we did last night?”
“Yeah,” Gordon said while opening and closing his hands, feeling the thick gloves around his fingers.
“You’ll just be doing some routine welding and putting a couple of bolts into place,” Mullins said.
“Yeah, yeah, I got it.”
Both men felt the sudden stop as the diving bell now hovered just above the seabed. The diving support vessel on the water’s surface had computer-controlled side maneuvering thrusters to maintain her position at all times. In the event of an emergency, the Skandi Aurora’s bridge crew would immediately recall the divers back into the bell for a quick ascent so they wouldn’t be dragged around the bottom of the sea.
“You’re now at the site,” Mullins said over both intercom channels. “Get the door.”
O’Keefe bent over and unlocked the diving bell’s bottom hatch before lowering the ladder. Since the module’s interior pressure was already matched with the depth of the seafloor, the water’s surface didn’t shoot up into the compartment, instead it seemed like nothing more than a small entrance to an underground pool.
Gordon had thick plastic boots on, but he could already feel the numbing cold seeping into him. “I need more hot water.”
“Roger that,” Mullins said. “Increasing your hot water.”
Gordon pumped his arms, once again feeling the reassuring heat. “Okay, better.”
“You’re good to go,” Mullins said. “Check your gear for leaks as you descend.”
Gordon now gripped the sides of the hatch as he began to lower himself into the water. “Descending now.”
O’Keefe stood beside the hatch, slowly uncoiling the bundled umbilical hose to give Gordon some slack as the latter went down into the deep, dark abyss. “Give ’em hell, partner!”