As he tried to control his breathing he felt a sudden wave of dizziness, a sure sign of oxygen depletion. His body’s craving for nourishment after losing so much blood was not being satisfied. He began to hyperventilate.
Not again.
He went rigid as the water seethed up and enveloped him. He felt a clawing need for space as the gap above the water diminished, a rising fear as claustrophobia began to take hold.
He desperately needed to convince himself it was physiological, a natural reaction as his body struggled to adjust, not blind panic.
Relax. Let it go.
His breathing was coming in ragged gulps as he knelt on the floor, his arms hanging and his head bowed as the noise of his regulator was drowned out by the seething cauldron around him. He was only just conscious of Katya and Costas in front, seemingly oblivious of him, their bodies swathed in white water as they watched the surface level rise.
He closed his eyes.
A surge of water suddenly pushed him back, encircling his body as if he were in the vortex of a whirlpool. On either side it seemed to caress him as the weight in front pressed down hard, a cloying mass that pinned him against the membrane.
He opened his eyes onto horror.
All he could see was a hideous visage pressed up against him, its eyeless sockets and leering grin rebounding like a demented puppet, its ghostly arms flapping as it tried to encircle him in a deathly embrace. With each surge the water clouded with flecks of white and grey that seemed to detach from the apparition like snow.
Jack was powerless to resist, caught in a nightmare of paralysis with no escape. It bore down on him relentlessly, overwhelmingly.
He stopped breathing, his mouth frozen in mid-scream.
It was a hallucination.
His rational mind told him he was in the grip of narcosis. The man they had killed in the gun battle. The hanging corpse in the sonar room. It was the ghosts of the submarine, wraiths who had stayed on to haunt them.
He closed his eyes tight, all his reserves fighting the slide into darkness.
In a flash he was back in the mineshaft five months ago, in the place of his nemesis. Once again he felt the shock as the gas surged up the shaft and slammed him against the beam, severing his air supply and extinguishing all light. The choking suffocation in the pitch darkness before Costas found him and buddy-breathed him back to life. The horror as the second surge blew him out of Costas’ grasp and towards the surface. The hours in the recompression chamber, hours of crushing exhaustion punctuated by moments of sheer terror as consciousness sent him back to the instant of panic over and over again. It had been the experience all divers dread, the one that shatters the confidence built up precariously over the years, toppling him into a world where all the controls, all the parameters, had to be painstakingly rebuilt from scratch.
And now it was happening again.
“Jack! Look at me. Everything’s all right. It’s gone.”
Costas stared into Jack’s wide-open eyes and gripped him by the shoulders. As the noise of the water jet subsided and he began to hear his exhaust again, Jack heaved a shuddering breath and began to relax.
It was Costas. He was still in the chamber.
“It must have been one of the bodies Kuznetsov ejected from the torpedo tube. Got lodged in the rock niche and was then blown out by the water jet. Not a pretty sight.” Costas gestured towards the white-flecked form now wafting in the water towards the submarine’s casing, its torso obscenely mangled where Costas had punched it aside, causing the adipose tissue that still clung to the skeleton to disintegrate.
Instead of revulsion Jack felt an enormous elation, the exhilaration of the survivor who has faced oblivion and beaten it. The rush of adrenaline would propel him through whatever lay ahead of them.
Katya had been blown back by the force of the water against the membrane and had been oblivious to his panic. Jack looked up at her and spoke hoarsely through the intercom, his breath still coming in ragged bursts.
“My turn for a shock, that’s all.”
She could never know the demons that had haunted him, the force that had beckoned him on and nearly spelled the end for him.
The swirling maelstrom ended and the water attained a limpid clarity soon after the turbulence had ceased. Costas’ eyes remained locked on Jack’s until he could see he had fully relaxed. After a moment Costas reached down and undid the Velcro straps that held Jack’s fins to his legs, pulling the silicon blades over his feet and snapping them in place.
Jack rolled over and watched the bubbles from his exhaust coalesce into little pools of translucence that wobbled and shimmered into each other on the ceiling of the membrane. He felt his cylinder pack scrape along the bottom and quickly injected a blast of air into his suit to achieve neutral buoyancy.
Costas swam from the casing towards the rock face. As he reached it an incomprehensible high-pitched noise filled their earphones. Jack found himself shaking uncontrollably, the terror of the last few minutes having transformed into delirious relief.
“Hey, Mickey Mouse,” he said. “I think you should activate your voice modulator.”
The combination of extreme pressure and helium distorted the voice to a comical degree, and IMU had developed a compensating device to avoid precisely the response Jack was finding so difficult to control.
“My apologies. I’ll try again.” Costas turned a dial on the side of his visor. He found a best-fit frequency and switched to automatic, ensuring the modulator would respond to changes in pressure and gas make-up as their depth altered.
“Andy has relaxed the magnetization to make the membrane semi-flexible, allowing the ambient pressure of the sea to pass through into this space and match the pressure of the water behind that door. It’s 9.8 bar, almost 100 metres. At this depth the trimix only gives us half an hour.”
With their headlamps reduced to half-beam to limit the reflection, they could make out more features of the entranceway. On each panel was the magnificent bull’s horn symbol which had been visible in the hologram, life-size forms, beaten in gold, which stood out in low relief.
Costas extracted another contraption from his tool belt.
“Something I knocked up in the geophysics lab at IMU,” he said. “Ground penetrating radar, generating broadband electromagnetic waves to reveal subsurface images. We call them acoustic flashlights. The GPR signal only goes five metres but should tell us whether there’s solid obstruction on the other side.”
He extended the transducer antenna and swam to and fro along the base of the entraceway, eventually coming to rest beside the crack between the doors.
“It’s clear,” he announced. “No resistance after half a metre, which must be the thickness of the doors. I looked closely along the lower jamb and there’s nothing that should cause us trouble.”
“Metallic corrosion?” Katya enquired.
“Gold doesn’t corrode perceptibly in seawater.”
Costas replaced the unit in his belt and arched his fingers over the sill below the doors. He pulled his body back and forth a few times, then rested.
“Here goes,” he said.
In a sudden frenzy of finning he rocketed himself forward, bringing the full force of his body to bear on the door. He continued heaving for a few moments before settling down exhausted. The doors seemed like solid rock, the two-metre-high outline mere etchings on the cliff face.