Just shy of six feet, Dane did in fact have more space to maneuver within the racks of electronic equipment that guided the craft and allowed it to do useful work. For Bones, on the other hand, although he was, like all SEALs, a superb swimmer, scuba diver and all-around naval warrior, being cramped in the close confines of an underwater vehicle for hours at a time was losing its luster.
Still, he was here for a reason, and that reason was that while Dane had qualified as an ace submersible pilot, Bones had excelled at manipulating the sub’s grab-arms and other specialized payload equipment in the simulation testing and training sessions with remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs. Dane had been taken aback when he read the duty assignment roster and saw Bones’ name beside his own. The big Indian was always surprising him. Somehow he just kept showing up, which meant that somebody with a higher pay grade than Dane’s saw something in the guy. Bones had a certain directness about him, a no-nonsense approach to everyday life situations that sometimes rankled the more reserved Dane, but by now the two had worked together enough that their professionalism had begun to overcome the irritations that initially flared up between them. Most of the time.
“Hey, where you going, Maddock? Our target’s down there.” Bones pointed down between his feet into the abyss that seemed to stretch below them into Hell itself. Their sonar told them, though, that the canyon’s bottom lay “only” another mile deeper. Fortunately to both of them, they were not required to go that far.
“You sure?” Dane manipulated the ship’s controls so that they were poised between two rock walls, awaiting confirmation. Bathed in the harsh artificial light of the sub’s halogen floodlights, the walls revealed their true colors in a world normally immersed in total blackness. Strange blue sponges that resembled lichens, vertical fields of white anemones, and myriad other creatures Dane couldn’t identify somehow eked out a living down here in this freezing world of immense pressure. But as unique as it was, most of it looked the same to him.
Bones interrupted his thoughts. “In the briefing I was actually awake for, they said the target was ‘at lower depth than where the canyon wall convergence narrows to less than three meters.’ I did some checking and found that the target usually lives on a flat area. So we go down from here and look for a rocky shelf, I guess.”
In response, Dane shot Bones a grudging look of respect and tilted their craft downward, activating the forward thrusters. For all his boisterousness, Bones somehow also found a way to pay attention, no matter how much he pretended otherwise. And theirs was definitely a line of work where not paying attention could get you killed.
They dropped down through the narrow crevice, Dane tweaking the sub’s controls to make sure they didn’t scrape the walls while Bones directed a movable spotlight to their surroundings while also monitoring their depth and sonar readouts.
“Coming up on something,” Dane said, easing back on the thrusters.
“Rocky shelf. This could be it. Look for the… There it is!” Bones adjusted the angle of his high intensity beam until it illuminated a whitish stalk towering perhaps ten feet, its red tip a few feet below their submersible’s belly. “Take us down a few feet; then we curve with the wall to the right.”
Dane executed the delicate maneuver until they hovered over a flat expanse of rock that reminded him of a stairway landing — a brief interruption of the vertical plunge the canyon took for yet another mile. There, in the center of the platform, grew a massive tubeworm. Pale crabs scuttled out of reach of the craft’s floodlights, pouring off the rocky shelf into the water column beneath them like lemmings from a cliff.
“Are we sure this is the right tubeworm?” Dane’s careful attention to the controls didn’t allow him the luxury of taking in the details of their surroundings to the degree that Bones could.
“Surer than you were about that dude in a dress who hit on you last weekend. I’m looking at the marker right next to it.”
Dane took his co-pilot’s word that the small cement block that had been previously placed there by their sub instructors lay at the foot of the towering invertebrate.
“Roger that. The marker; not the guy in the dress. And, for the record, it was a girl, she was just…”
“A big, hairy dude?”
Ignoring Bones’ jibe, Dane brought their submersible closer to the base of the creature, which swayed slightly with the vehicle’s prop-wash.
Bones leaned forward, pressing his head against the sub’s acrylic dome as he stared intently at their target. “Okay, stop. I’m within range of the manipulator arm.”
Dane let up on the thrusters. “Do your thing.”
Clutched in the metal claw at the end of an extensible arm outside the sub was a tubular metal object. Bones delicately pressed buttons that rotated the claw as well as the arm itself in different directions. “I wish we were placing some C4 explosives instead of this boring contraption,” he said, referring to the scientific instrumentation package they were supposed to deploy. “That would be much more awesome.” He deftly placed the device on the ledge next to the cement marker and released it from the sub’s grab arm.
“That’s why this is practice, Bones. We screw up with this thing and some eggheads don’t find out what the temperature variations are down here when that worm farts. Make a mistake with C4 and maybe these canyon walls come…”
A gruff, all-business voice issuing from their communications channel interrupted him. “Topside to Deep Surveyor III, you are ordered to report immediately to Base Command. Proceed to support ship at once, do you copy?”
Dane looked over at Bones, who was still retracting the now empty manipulator arm back to the sub. When Bones completed that task he looked over at Dane, raising his eyebrows.
Dane said to Bones, “What’d you do, drop the science package over the cliff?”
Bones shook his head and pointed down at the metal cylinder, where a green LED glowed next to the worm. “It’s all good.”
Dane responded over the radio that he acknowledged the order, then put his hands to work on the sub’s controls.
“Let’s go find out what they want.”
An hour later Dane and Bones strode into the lobby of SEAL Base Command, Monterey Station. Dane addressed a female receptionist in uniform seated behind a horseshoe shaped desk. He started to explain who they were when she waved him down.
“In here now, gentlemen!” a male voice pre-empted from the office, the door to which was open but the man out of sight. The young woman raised an eyebrow and tilted her head in the direction of the office, her meaning clear. You’d better go.
Bones gave her his most lascivious smile which she returned before swiveling in her chair to answer a phone call. Dane reached the doorway to Senior Commander Douglas Lawhorne’s private office first, where he gave a salute.
“Close the door behind you, and at ease.”
As soon as Bones stepped inside, Dane shut the door and then the two of them took seats in front of the commander’s desk, which was set off to the left of the well-appointed room. Scale model ships and submarines decorated the walls behind the desk, while the fourth floor floor-to-ceiling windows afforded a magnificent view of Monterey Bay and the waters from which they had just returned. But it wasn’t often a newly minted SEAL was summoned directly to a commander’s office in the middle of a training exercise, so for the moment Dane refrained from absorbing the atmosphere. He noticed that even Bones, whom he considered a good ADHD candidate, was so far affording the commander his undivided attention.