“We get the picture,” said Doc.
“Actually I got some great pictures with my phone,” said Tommy.
“God bless Apple,” said Kevin Cheever and smiled. “Just her, right?”
Suddenly the entire hull shuddered as Don kicked in the big 872 diesels. Their power surged through the deck steel and you could feel the boat just itching to yank them out of the harbor.
“Okay, ya swabs!” yelled Don, grinning. “Let’s break us loose!”
Doc and Tommy jumped up and ran fore and aft to unslip the lines holding them to the dock. Mike Bielski barely looked up from the fiddling he was doing with the adjustments to his Divelink, and Andy was testing his respirator.
Dex felt the comforting rock of the deck as the Sea Dog eased out into the channel and headed for the open Bay.
“I’ll go check on the GPS,” said Kevin. “Make sure we’re headed back to the same spot.”
Nodding, Dex snugged up his suit. If it hadn’t been for Kevin’s surplus gear from NavTronics, they would’ve never found that sub. He wondered how much easier all this new gear would’ve made some of the crazy operations his Navy unit had attempted during his long hitch.
Checking his watch, Dex figured they’d be over the target in about a half hour.
And they were.
He’d divided them up into three teams — Tommy and him, Kevin and Andy, and Doc and Mike. And they would dive in that order with each team overlapping the one in front by ten minutes. That way, there would always be a window of at least four divers on the wreck at any one time — in case there was trouble. Upon hearing his plans, none of them had complained about not going down with Tommy. No kidding…
Looking off the starboard side, Dex watched the marker buoy with Kevin’s radio beacon bobbing in the light chop. The sky was high and clear which made the Chesapeake look more blue than a muddy green. In the distance, made clear by the lack of haze, the double-spanned Bay Bridge ribboned toward Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and a flotilla of sailboats speckled the seascape with brushstrokes of color.
“We’re just about on top of her,” said Don. “First team ready, Dex?”
“Just give us the word.”
Leaning over the rail outside the entrance to the bridge, Don looked down and gave a thumbs up. “Get your headgear on and we’ll go on link.”
Tommy was already twisting his mask and mic into the most comfortable position as Dex tugged his own into place.
“Mic check — one two three,” he said.
“Copy, Dex.” Don’s unmistakable drawl filled his earpiece. “Ready anytime you are.”
With a nod of his head, Tommy acknowledged he could hear everything, then both of them flipper-waddled to the aft end of the crewboat’s long flat rear deck. When they reached the gunwale, they leg-slung themselves over the side and down to the custom-built grated platform that was almost at sea level. Dex grabbed a mesh samples collection bag off the rack, and nodded to Tommy. From there, they tilted back and entered another world.
Dex watched Tommy’s red suit come clear of the impact bubbles as he drifted beyond the black hull of the Sea Dog toward the safeline. Shoulder to shoulder, Dex moved with him and grabbed the thick nylon cord — one end attached to the buoy, the other running down past the wreck’s conning tower.
“Let’s go, boss,” said Tommy.
Without a word, Dex angled down, pointing his head toward the bottom. Despite the water warming up from a high, clear sun, the Bay appeared to be almost totally algae-free. He couldn’t remember ever seeing the usually brackish water so clear, but that wasn’t saying visibility was actually good — just better than usual.
“Okay,” said Dex. “Twenty feet…”
“Pretty clean down here,” said Tommy. “You can really see today.”
“Good copy,” said Don. “Sea Dog standing by…”
Descending the rest of the safeline’s length, they reached the topmost masts of the sub within several minutes. Dex was feeling good about the increased water-clarity — that meant higher margins of safety. You were always better off when you could see more of what was going on around you.
“Clearing the con,” he said into his Divelink. “We’re ready to move clear of the safeline and check out the aft hatch.”
Dex had decided against bringing the videocam down on the first dive. When you didn’t have the diving environment down cold, it was a bad idea to be distracted with the bullshit of running a camera. The light, the focus, worrying about the width or the tightness of the shot… all the little things that can keep your attention from the primary one of staying alive.
No way.
After he and Tommy had the next phase of their exploration checked out, then he’d start recording things. Maybe Kevin and Andy could bring the cam down on their dive, but Dex would just have to see how things were going. He floated slightly ahead of Tommy who was, at least till this point, playing by the rules.
Checking his Ikelite, Dex watched the depth numbers click past sixty-six feet, and was once again reminded of how fate had a way of making things as tricky as possible. Sixty-six feet was one of those magic numbers for divers. Under water, for every thirty-three you descend, the pressure on your body increases by one atmosphere. Which meant once you passed the sixty-six foot threshold, you were subjecting yourself to three atmospheres. And that’s when things got very interesting for all those nitrogen molecules in your bloodstream, which dissolved under the pressure and worked their way into every little space in your brain, muscle, organs, joints, and everywhere you never thought of.
Two things can happen after that. One is all that nitrogen makes divers get a little less cautious or observant. If you go to four or five atmospheres pressure, divers can get absolutely loopy and start hallucinating. Second thing is you can’t head to the surface too fast, before all that nitrogen can be passed out of the system in the form of microscopic bubbles. To make this happen, divers have to pause in their ascents, and give the process time to occur naturally.
At the depths where they found the sub, nitrogen narcosis, or “the bends” remained an issue of concern, but it was not as life-threatening as deeper dives could be.
At seventy feet, Dex felt almost totally weightless and the smallest kick or arm pull changed his position in the water. He’d spent so much time under the sea, he didn’t need to consciously be aware of the endless adjustment a diver made to maintain a depth, angle, attitude. There was a serenity, a sense of powerful isolation, that made him feel so… so complete, so in control of everything necessary to stay alive. If for no other reason, Dex loved diving for that sense of being so sharply attuned to your thoughts and the sealed-off hull that defines you as an individual, a singularity in the universe.
A universe largely out to get you.
They hovered over the conning tower and the small observation bridge in front of the superstructure. “Hold on,” said Dex, as he probed the deck of the bridge with his torch beam. The hatch leading below appeared to be breached, which made sense if the boat had been sent to bottom in a controlled scuttle.
He would have liked to have tried to inspect the sub at midship, but he knew — even though nobody was saying — they all wanted to find out what Tommy thought he saw through the rear hatch.
Motioning with his torch, Dex led his dive-mate toward the aft section. “Hey,” said Tommy. “Somebody left the door open…”
His partner’s attempt to be clever pulled Dex from his concentration, and he looked ahead of them to see the aft hatch peeled back like the lid of a garbage pail. They cleared the swollen hump of the boat’s rear deck and homed in on the opening to the hull.