Albinski agreed, but he’d lost colleagues to this “pretty” stuff. Like fishing line that could entrap divers, he’d seen this mesmerizing ballet of giant shadow and light turn ugly, the vertical forest breaking up in intertidal flux, collapsing in a morass of interweaving vines. It could be a huge mesh in which men had became quickly entangled, their air used up much faster than normal if they’d succumbed to panic, and then ended up suffering, gasping as hopelessly as a fish trapped in a net.
But they passed through the kelp, turning their mikes’ volume down to drown out the irritating abrasive sound of the kelp chafing itself. The immediate drop in the noise level was a welcome respite, so much so that when Albinski felt a juddering sensation against his umbilical air hose, he assumed he’d merely swum against an unseen stalk on the kelp perimeter, and guessed that the impact registered all along the snaking air hose, communication wire, and rope to Petrel’s compressor, over 180 feet above them. Then he felt a tug, more like a yank, on his umbilical, causing him to rise several feet before descending again.
Something also sent a shudder down Dixon’s air umbilical, but it had not been nearly so strong. “You feel that, Rafe?” Dixon asked his dive buddy. But all he heard was a faint noise like a tap left running. Remembering that he’d squelched the volume button against the kelp, he turned it up. Now he heard a roaring sound as if a dam had burst — perhaps the noise of a bubble cascade picked up by Albinski’s mike — so loud it would surely drown out any sound of Albinski confirming a sudden and potentially fatal imbalance of pressure caused by whatever had whacked his umbilical and been thwarted by his helmet’s nonreturn valve automatically shutting off, preventing a surge of water into his air hose.
The vibration in Albinski’s umbilical’s communications wire was so intense that Frank Hall, standing on Petrel’s aft deck, saw the A-frame’s block bucking violently. He could also hear the splitting of individual strands of the umbilical’s tether rope, throwing off droplets from the visible part of the tether line with such force that the shower of water particles hissed as they peppered the waves. The tension meter needle on the A-frame’s block was shivering ominously, its point in the red “overload” zone.
Hall turned to Albinski’s winch man. “Bring him up!” Dixon’s umbilical looked all right.
The fact that Albinski didn’t answer Hall’s radio call wasn’t necessarily conclusive, because Hall knew that Albinski was a pro and might be breathing in air from his Bail bottle, the small, one-hour auxiliary tank that working divers strapped to their back. But without the insulation of air that kept Albinski warm earlier in the dry suit, there was a pressing danger of irreversible hypothermia.
“Rafe!” Frank shouted again, trying to penetrate any semiconscious barrier that might be closing in on the diver, the ex-SEAL oceanographer thinking reflexively to give the diver that extra shot of hope that sometimes made the difference of a few lifesaving seconds.
“All right, Pete,” Frank informed Dixon. “We’re bringing you up too.”
“Copy that.”
Petrel’s officer of the watch turned the vessel further into the wind to prevent her from rolling too much in the “ball-freezing wind,” as the bosun referred to the easterly.
Fourteen miles to the west, Captain Rorke was overseeing his deck party, including Alicia Mayne, carefully descending Utah’s vaneless sail down to its base from which to take the water sample requested by Admiral Jensen. It would show no unusual seasonal temperature variation, confirming Jensen’s hypothesis, at least in his own mind, that the problem had been current-driven kelp beds, the huge sea plants’ own salt and other chemical constituents causing both anomalies sighted by Darkstar.
“Son of a—” began Dixon, abruptly cut off in mid-sentence during his ascent by the noise that, to Frank Hall’s ears, sounded like the sustained hiss of a water jet. He heard Dixon gasp, “Flooding!” followed by a gurgled “Got it! Nonreturn valve closed. Thank Christ!”
“You on Bail bottle?” came Frank’s anxious inquiry.
“No. I’m sucking my dick!”
“Didn’t know you had one,” riposted Frank. It eased the tension momentarily, but why did both divers have trouble with the supposedly foolproof nonreturn valve? Damn thing should have closed immediately when water tried to enter the air lines.
Hall raised his canvas-gloved right hand, moving his forefinger quickly clockwise through the salt air in the seaman’s traditional “up fast” signal to the hoist men, both winches now singing in unison. It would be six minutes till Albinski and Dixon were up, water spitting from the A-frame’s block and winch drum alike.
Then, suddenly, both winches began to labor, the umbilicals of both divers under enormous strain, the tension meter needle on each winch having swung hard right into the red, quivering. The winch man for Albinski’s line donned protective goggles. If the line broke above the surface under the strain, it would come across the deck like a bullwhip. “We’re near overburn, Frank,” the winch man warned.
Frank’s hand was still circling furiously. “Then fucking overburn! Go till there’s smoke!” He switched channels to the dry lab. “Lab, you getting this on the trace?”
“Yes, sir. Sonar’s recording.”
“Well?”
“Two suits in a huge tangle.”
“Both hoses severed?”
“Can’t tell in all this kelp shit.”
“As high density profile as you can.”
“We’re on it, Captain.” The shift from “Hall” or “Frank” to “Captain” measured the mood of urgency that had taken over Petrel’s crew of sixteen. Several of them in off-duty wet gear, now that it had begun to rain, coffee mugs in hand, were gathering at center deck aft of the dry lab’s overhang, from where they could keep one eye on the A-frame’s two blocks and one on the stylus racing across the sonar trace paper. The glacially slow reverse spin of the depth meter told them the two SEALs should reach surface in about five minutes, a few grim side bets being made on Dixon’s and Albinski’s chance of survival. The onlookers tried to make some sense of the sonar image, but like untrained eyes looking at aerial recon photos, the black and gray shadings against the white paper seemed nothing more than that.
“Smoke!” It was Dixon’s winch man. Everybody had expected Albinski’s winch to be the first to evidence malfunction since he’d been the first in trouble, but Frank recalled that the Dixon winch was older. The winch man slammed his foot down hard on the brake pedal.
The A-block’s depth needle stopped abruptly and Frank screamed, “Slower, you idiot! Tap it!”
Given the enormous weight of the kelp that had wrapped itself around the umbilical, such a sudden brake could exert enough torque to snap the cord as easily as an impatient fisherman jerking his line against a snag.
Albinski’s winch man was standing up now in his tractor spring seat for a better view of the A-block meter.