He just hoped that he would have the strength to go through with it when the time came.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Inside the command center onboard the Tahila, Elise sat monitoring an array of screens, including those that tracked the health of the three submarine occupants, who wore wristbands that monitored their vital signs as they descended.
Matthew stepped down from the helm, looking over her shoulder at the monitors. “How’s everyone doing down there?”
“Good, they’ve reached three thousand feet and for the most part their initial nerves have settled, but I’m still a little worried about James Marazzato.”
“The Major?” Matthew raised his eyebrows. “That surprises me. I would have thought with his background and training, he wouldn’t have any problems going down in the sub.”
“It happens. Some of the toughest men out there panic inside a submarine.” Elise made a half-shrug. “His heart rate, like the rest of them has been a little higher than normal — a common sign of fear, but unlike the rest of the crew, his appears to keep increasing. Any chance he suffers with claustrophobia and it wasn’t picked up before now?”
Matthew grimaced. “Take it from me Elise; everyone suffers with a certain amount of claustrophobia, no matter how many times they descend to the depths of the ocean. My bet, he’s just a bit anxious being on board the seventh submersible to ever reach the bottom of the Mariana Trench. He’ll settle.”
“I hope you’re right.”
Next to her, Veyron, an engineer and world leader on submersibles sat, studying a set of monitors that observed all technical data coming from Ursula.
“How’s our sub looking, Veyron?” Elise asked.
“She’s looking good. All systems appear to be functioning normally. They’re on track to have enough gas for life-support to continue for a total of five days.”
“Very good.”
Elise was happy with all that she saw, but despite it she could feel the sweat building on her forehead and a slight tingling sensation within her spine.
Something’s not right.
She knew it was nothing more than a sixth sense, but had learned not to dismiss its value over the years.
Elise swept an array of navigational monitors, her eyes landing on the radar. It showed a single vessel, a fishing boat six miles to their east.
“Matthew, how long’s that fishing boat been out there?” she asked.
“Nearly twenty minutes,” Matthew replied.
“Where’s it headed?”
“Nowhere. It’s at a full stop.”
Elise swallowed. “Ah crap.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“What’s it doing out here?”
“Fishing I guess.” Matthew shrugged his shoulders. “Why?”
“It’s just a hunch,” Elise said, but her heart started to race. “I need some headphones; I want to listen to the hydrophone myself.”
Veyron passed her a spare pair.
“You won’t hear much from the Ursula with that,” Veyron said. “They’re already too deep.”
“I’m not interested in what they have to say — I want to know what our fishing friends are after and I’m willing to bet money it’s not just fish.”
Elise listened for less than ten seconds and then carefully removed her earphones, taking a digital print out of the ship’s acoustics. Every ship made a unique sound. It didn’t matter if the ship appeared identical, was built in the same shipyard by the same group of construction workers and engineers, somehow, they all came out with their own independent sound signature.
She copied the digital recording into the database, and clicked on match.
She watched the read out for the ship. It was in their database. She had a length of 354 feet, a beam of 56 feet, and a hull displacement of 5,763 tons. It was registered as the Russian Navy’s Underwater Research vessel, the Yantar — but most people knew her primary purpose was maritime espionage.
Elise said, “They’re trawling all right, but not for fish.”
“What do you mean?” Matthew asked.
“I mean they almost certainly have their own hydrophones in the water, listening to what we’re doing.”
“Let’s not be too quick to give the game away. We don’t want an international crisis on our hands.” Matthew said, setting his jaw firm. “We don’t know exactly what their intentions are. They wouldn’t be stupid enough to attack us this close to our Navy base on Guam, so let’s wait and see what they want.”
“All right,” Elise said. “I’ll send Sam a digital message.”
Elise turned to the data log, which had an individual messaging system, like airline pilots used to communicate with engineers on the ground during their flights. She typed the words, SAM, WE HAVE GUESTS.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Sam Reilly glanced at the depth gauge.
They were approaching the 35, 000-foot mark. He flicked on the external lights and switched off the autopilot, taking control of the submersible with the fine and adept movements of a handheld joystick.
The bathymetric imaging showed the seafloor racing up to greet them.
Sam leveled the submarine off at 35,500 feet.
The Mariana Trench is part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, a tectonically active region where plates are colliding with each other, causing subduction — a process whereby one plate dives beneath another — and transform faulting, where plates slide by one another. The old seafloor of the Pacific Plate is subducting beneath the eastern part of the Mariana Plate, causing the mantle to melt and magma to rise, feeding the active volcanoes of the Izu-Bonin-Mariana volcanic arc system.
West of the arc volcanoes is the back-arc, a zone of extensional tectonics that causes spreading in the overriding plate and forms new oceanic crust. As seawater percolates downward through the oceanic crust, it becomes superheated and chemical-rich, eventually getting so buoyant that it comes back out at the seafloor surface. When the super-hot vent fluid meets the very cold water of the deep sea, minerals that are carried in the fluid precipitate out of solution, forming spectacular vent chimneys. This chemical-rich vent fluid is also the source of life for much of the vent biota.
It was these chemical-rich vents that now flowed upward to greet them.
Ursula’s LED beams shined down on their other-worldly environment, rich in its unique landscape. Large seamounts rose from the valley floor, like ancient buildings, intermingled with guyots — their flat-topped seamounts having been mysteriously sheered away. Dispersed between these, were row upon row of hydrothermal vents.
It was these vents that provided energy for the billions of strange marine creatures, known as extremophiles for their ability to survive in a world previously thought incapable of supporting life. The vents, like the creatures that inhabited them, were rich in their sheer diversity — there were black smokers filled with sulfide minerals, liquid carbon dioxide vents at the NW Eifuku volcano, and even craters erupting molten sulfur!
Thriving in these seemingly inhospitable environments, were throngs of organisms, including gastropods, mussels, tubeworms, galatheid crabs, and shrimp.
Sam maneuvered the submersible north, navigating through the rising seamounts. Ursula’s propellers whirred as she moved forward at a leisurely three knots. The trench dropped off into a deeper valley, and Sam shifted the joystick forward, descending to follow the natural topography of the seabed as he went.
Sam’s eyes swept the nearby landscape. He grinned. Up ahead were more than a hundred black smoker vents littering the seafloor like some sort of ancient burned out forest. Their black chimney-like structures rose upward some fifty feet above the seabed, emitting particles with high levels of sulfur-bearing minerals, or sulfides. They formed thousands of feet below the Earth’s crust, where superheated water broke through.