“I’ve had the pleasure.” Mercer took the fourth chair at the table. A mess steward asked if he wanted anything. Mercer took coffee.
“I met Mr. Mercer earlier and told him I didn’t appreciate his presence on the Surveyor,” Spirit said acidly. “I suspect he’s here as part of a government cover-up. The navy was probably doing some illegal research, killing whales with sonar like they did a few years ago off Long Beach, and something went wrong. Now he’s going to hide the truth.”
“He’s here to find out why a lot of brave sailors died two nights ago,” Jon retorted. He’d had his fill of Spirit’s rancor. The vessel’s crew had no real interest in what the ship did once she was at sea, but the researchers had tight funding and guarded their time on board jealously. Even a few days’ delay was a colossal waste of their time and resources. They hadn’t stopped griping since getting the news, and C.W.’s wife had been the most vocal.
“Their souls have crossed,” Spirit replied. “They should be left to rest. Sending people down there to gloat over their remains is ghoulish.”
“Mr. Mercer isn’t here to gloat. He’s here to get answers so more sailors aren’t lost.”
“They knew the risks when they joined the navy. Dying’s part of their job.”
Carlyle’s face grew red. “Defending our country is their job.”
“Oh, I see.” She became even more sarcastic. “Dying is just a fringe benefit.”
Mercer caught C.W.’s eye. The submersible operator showed no interest in restraining his wife. He’d heard her in action before and knew to stay out of the line of fire.
“Now, see here,” the normally unflappable officer thundered. Since the loss of the Smithback, his admiration for the navy and its men had been rekindled. Before he could continue, four other men entered the mess room.
Carlyle glared at an unrepentant Spirit, wiped his brow with a handkerchief and made the introductions. One of the newcomers was a second sub pilot. The other three headed the support staff.
“You’ll have to go, sweet,” C.W. told his wife.
Like flipping a switch, her temperament did a complete reversal. She smiled at the assembled men and gave C.W. a long kiss on the mouth. “Come get me at the lab if you’re diving today. I want to be in the van. Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
If Jon expected C.W. to apologize for his wife’s behavior, he had a long wait coming. The seconds grew.
Mercer realized no one would cut the silence, so he cleared his throat. “Okay, down to business. Jon may have told you I’ve been sent here to discover what happened to the Smithback. It seems we’re all under the same impression that she struck a container that split and whatever was inside burned. The navy wants me to verify this hypothesis by physically inspecting the wreck. Have you pinpointed it on the seafloor?”
Jim McKenzie, who headed the team, spoke up. “We found her on side-scan sonar about ten hours after reaching the area. She’s directly below us now in nine hundred eighty-eight feet of water.”
“That seems kind of shallow,” Mercer said. “We’re in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.”
“We’re atop a subsea plateau that rises from the abyssal plane. Had the Smithback sunk fifty miles to the north, she’d be two miles down and unreachable by anything we have on board. Bob’s rated for two thousand feet, and our two ADSes can safely operate at one thousand. Just so you know, Bob is the name of our submersible. It’s what she does when she resurfaces. Just bobs in the ocean.”
Mercer smiled. “I have a friend who named his dog Drag because that’s how he takes his walks. What’s an ADS?”
“Atmospheric Diving Suit. Also called a NewtSuit. Think of it as a one-man submarine with arms and legs. It keeps the operator at sea-level pressure so we don’t have to bother with decompression but gives a freedom of movement we can’t get from a larger sub or even an ROV. C.W. helped in their development and is about the best operator in the world.”
“Jim’s exaggerating,” C.W. said to Mercer. “In college I worked part-time in the factory watching a computer-controlled lathe form the suits’ torsos out of aluminum blanks.” He gave a lopsided grin. “But I am the best.”
“How many men can Bob carry?”
“Three,” McKenzie answered. “Pilot and two observers. We do have a problem. We fried one of Bob’s banks of lights doing a test a week ago. At this depth you can’t see an inch beyond the porthole, and our ROVs operate with low-light cameras so they can’t provide enough backup illumination.”
“The solution,” C.W. interrupted, “is that I go down with you in an ADS and use it as a mobile lighting platform.”
“Are the ADSes autonomous?”
“They’re tethered to the Surveyor by a lifting cable and communications lines but don’t rely on the ship for air. Don’t worry,” C.W. added, “we’ve run the NewtSuit and sub together quite a few times.”
Mercer turned to McKenzie. “How long before we can dive on the wreck?”
“Weather isn’t a problem. No storms predicted for days. Batteries are all fully charged and we just replaced the CO2 scrubbers. We need to fit new ballast plates and charge the O2 tanks, then run a few tests. Say, five hours.”
“Are you going to want to see the tower too?”
This was the first Mercer had heard of any tower. “What are you talking about?” he asked Carlyle.
“The underwater tower about a mile to the west of us. We found it on sonar when we were searching for the Smithback.”
“What is it?”
“We’re not sure,” McKenzie answered. “It appears to be some kind of underwater oil- or gas-drilling platform. From its sonar image, it stands about eight hundred feet tall and is about a hundred wide at the base. It tapers as it rises. The top is about forty feet square.”
“And it’s completely underwater?”
McKenzie nodded. “The bottom there is deeper than here, about thirteen hundred feet. The top of the tower rests five hundred feet down.”
Mercer had never heard of such a structure. He was familiar with deep-sea drilling even though he wasn’t an oil geologist. An eight-hundred-foot platform wasn’t all that unusual anymore. Some in the North Sea stood over a thousand feet, but all of them were serviced by modules constructed above sea level. What McKenzie and Carlyle were talking about was something entirely new. And as he thought about it further, something else came to mind. As far as he knew, there weren’t any oil deposits within two thousand miles of their current position. One mystery at a time, Mercer decided. He was sure there was a connection between the enigmatic structure and the Smithback accident, but he wanted to see the ship before investigating the tower.
“Let’s check the ship first. What’s Bob’s range?”
“She can stay down for thirty hours or more, but at a top speed of three knots she isn’t exactly mobile.” This came from Alan Jervis, the submersible operator who would actually take Mercer down to the wreck. Jervis was about Mercer’s age, with dark receding hair and gold-framed glasses. “If you want to remain on the bottom and reach the tower, it’ll take us an hour or more because we’ll be bucking a two-knot current the whole way.”
“We’d have to move the Surveyor,” Carlyle said. “C.W. will be tethered to us. To get him over there, we have to reel him up, steam over to the tower, then lower him down again.”
“Is that a problem?”
“No. And with your slow speed, he’d be in position before you.”