“Why haven’t you shut them down?” Stimson asked.
“So far, we’ve been lucky,” Krail answered. “No one seems to believe what the Phoenix is reporting. The Phoenix doesn’t seem to believe it either without a clear-cut evaluation of the problem, they’re asking for a news blackout.”
“That won’t last,” Teller said.
“No, it won’t last. But we’ve also got one of our own on the Phoenix: Commander William Garner.”
“And he knows the score?”
“Not yet, but he will,” Krail said. “Right now the best recourse is to let his civilian investigation proceed unobstructed. If our little looksee can’t tell us where the leak is coming from, they’ll be the only ones with a handle on where it’s going.”
“But you will intervene at some point, right?” Stimson pressed.
“Of course,” Krail replied.
Stimson wasn’t convinced.
“I still can’t see why we need to risk sending divers down there for no good reason,” he said. “If you ask me, it’s a waste of time — this seems to be the one place the leak isn’t.”
“Your reservations are noted, Mr. Stimson,” Krail said. “We have our orders, and your orders are to follow my orders.” Krail glanced at Charon. “Something I’m sure Commander Charon understands fully.”
Exasperated, Stimson looked to Charon for support.
“What do you think of all this, Matt?” he asked.
Charon chose to maintain his stony silence. For the time being, this was Krail’s circus and Krail would be the one to give himself enough rope to make a noose.
Besides, it was no one’s goddamn business what Matt Charon thought of all this.
Hanging in their storage racks, the JIM suits looked like the abandoned skin of some gigantic alien insect. The carbon-fiber hulls were molded into a torso, legs, arms, and head consisting entirely of bulbous spheres attached to each other by articulating joints. The spherical form was necessary to withstand the pressures on the suit at depth, either from the crushing weight of the deep sea or the controlled, one-atmosphere internal environment that surrounded the aquanaut wearing it. Instead of gloves, which would be un-maneuverable under such pressure, the arms terminated in a pair of two-fingered hydraulic “hands” resembling an enormous set of pliers. The bulbous helmet did not rotate atop its titanium collar; rather, the diver could turn his head to look around and out through any of four, inch-thick portholes.
The customized, latest-generation suits used by Global B-82 contained a rebreathing apparatus that circulated the air in the suit, scrubbing away lethal accumulations of carbon dioxide with a battery-operated filtration system. Alternatively, the suit could be powered by a fiberoptic cable running to the surface, which was also used to control the helmet’s communication equipment.
The four-hundred-pound suits were too heavy for their occupants to don in the usual manner, so instead the diver had to climb down through the neck collar. Once the aquanaut was inside, the helmet was lowered onto the collar and attached. A crane was used to guide the suited JIM diver into the water, then lowered him on a guide wire to the bottom, a slow-motion elevator ride that could take up to fifteen minutes. On the bottom, JIM divers communicated with each other and the surface via the comm link. The climate-controlled conditions in the suit allowed JIM divers to work for up to six hours, though salvage divers typically succumbed to fatigue or boredom long before that.
Clad in B-82’s two JIM suits, Stimson and Rieger were carried through the bottom of the drilling platform and lowered past the lip of Thebes Deep to the foot of the canyon. The divers’ controlled fall came to an end 280 meters down and just thirty meters away from the plug. They switched on their helmet lights to reveal a world hardly more remarkable than the water column itself. The floor of the trench was covered only with fractured pieces of basalt that had tumbled to rest from the original walls of the canyon.
Krail followed the JIM divers to the bottom in the Sea Sprite. The blunt, one-man craft resembled a cigar with sawed-off wings and a transparent, dome-shaped end-cap that served as the pilot’s window.
Small and highly maneuverable, the Sea Sprite had been developed specifically to allow the inspection and repair of drilling platforms. It used inverted wings to “fly” underwater much like an anti-airplane, while hydraulic compression of an air chamber adjusted the buoyancy of the DSV in the same way a fish used its swim bladder. The Sea Sprite could travel nearly twice as deep as the JIM suits and could cover far more distance on the bottom, given its twin impellers and the absence of an umbilical connection to the surface; however, the vessel was more limited in its ability to pick up and manipulate objects. Krail’s task was therefore to take further photographic images of the benthic debris around the plug and guide the JIM divers to newly opened fissures and other areas of interest. If the area checked out clean, they would expand their search, moving north toward the buried wreck of Scorpion, more than two nautical miles along the canyon from B-82. Anything not immediately below the rig’s GBS would require that the JIM divers be dispatched from a modified hatch on the Hawkbill logistically very difficult but not impossible.
From his position inside B-82’s surveillance command module, Charon checked on the progress of the three submerged men. Over the Sea Sprite’s comm link, Krail continued his procedural commentary as he worked his way through the film magazines of the submarine’s high-resolution cameras and provided direction to the JIM divers.
After three hours of searching and receiving nothing more than normal background levels of radiation, the trio returned to the surface.
Wigner and Teller now donned the JIM suits and the Sea Sprite was fitted with fresh batteries and film packs. Krail remained in the submersible, returning to the bottom before either of the replacement divers had finished suiting up. By the time Wigner and Teller joined him, he had already surveyed a large portion of an elongated rise.
After two more hours they had surveyed another quarter of an acre of the canyon floor, but it quickly became apparent that the second shift of divers would find nothing more substantial than the first. “Hate to say we told you so, Commander,” Stimson said to Krail through the comm link.
“No we don’t,” Teller corrected him. “We told you so, Commander. Whatever you’re looking for isn’t coming from around here.”
“Could’ve told you that before you got your nose wet,” Charon’s voice broke in on the conversation from his perch high above on the topsides.
“I didn’t realize you had more pressing matters on your timetable, Commander Charon,” Krail said coolly.
“Congratulations,” Rieger’s voice came over the headset, defending Charon without hesitation. “You’ve reestablished the only location in the entire Arctic Circle known to be nuke free. What’s next? A task force to disprove the down ness of gravity?”
After nearly six hours in the tight confines of the Sea Sprite, Krail was too tired to fence with the men’s sarcasm. Anyone posted to B-82 had to be a tough son of a bitch, immune to chains of command, disciplinary action, or admonishment. Charon’s men responded only to Charon, and Charon himself clearly wasn’t about to give an inch in this investigation, especially if it meant he had missed a major breach of the waste facility. Charon’s corner of the universe was operating exactly as he wanted it to, exactly as it should, and Krail could go peddle his concerns elsewhere.