Of course that was an illusion. All he had to do was turn one knob on his belt and he would fall upward instead, dragged up by his own buoyancy. His body didn’t want to be down here, and only constant effort and high-tech engineering made it possible to fight his way down through the dense ocean at all.
The water down there was murky and thick with marine snow — a constant cascade of organic debris, the bodies of dead plankton settling slowly to the seafloor. There were fish down there who lived on that snow, but he saw few of them. They had evolved to live in an environment of perfect darkness, and his lights probably confused the hell out of them.
A hundred and forty meters down he saw what he’d come for, a long, tapered shadow at the very limit of his light.
“I’ve got it,” he told Angel. They had agreed in advance not to talk about the mission during his descent, except in the vaguest of terms. The odds of anyone listening in to their frequency were remote, but you couldn’t be too careful when you were working an illegal operation. “Right where we expected.”
The yacht’s anchor had fallen not half a dozen yards away from the wreck. The satellite data was spot-on. Now that his light touched the seafloor, it was safe for him to let go of the cable, but he found himself reluctant to do so. Once he let go, he would be out of communication with Angel, for one thing. But he knew his hesitation was more psychological than practical.
He indulged himself for a few seconds, under the pretense that he was scoping out the wreck before proceeding.
What lay before him was a wrecked submarine about two hundred and twenty feet long and thirty feet wide. It lay on its side, its long sail pointing away from him, its underslung tail fin sticking up in his general direction. A Kilo class sub, one of the old workhorses of the Russian navy.
For twenty years it had rested down here undisturbed by the world above. Coral had begun to grow over its tail and up its sides, while countless barnacles broke up the curve of the hull. Mud and drifts of marine snow obscured much of its skin, but he could still see the rivets that held the hull plates together.
He couldn’t see any names or designator numbers painted on its side, but he knew what he was looking at: the B-307 Kurchatov. Maybe the last submarine in history to fly the flag of the Soviet Union.
The Kurchatov had been built in the early 1980s as an attack sub, designed to search out and destroy enemy shipping. As far as anyone knew, it had never fired one of its torpedoes, though, or seen any kind of real action. Like most of the world’s military submarines, it was more important as a deterrent than an actual weapon. It did possess one claim to fame, though — or rather, it would have if anyone had ever been allowed to know about its final mission.
In August 1991, when it became clear the Soviet Union wasn’t going to last, a bunch of Kremlin hard-liners attempted a coup d’état against Gorbachev in a last-gasp effort to hold on to power. After months of planning, they flooded Moscow with tanks and paratroopers and the world held its breath, but after only two days the coup failed. All the plotters were either arrested or committed suicide, and it was clear that the old USSR was finished.
The plotters must have known there was a chance they would fail, because they had given very special orders to the captain of the Kurchatov. He was to put in at the closest convenient port to Moscow and take on passengers, specifically the wives and children of some of the coup plotters, who might become victims of mob retribution during the coup. Originally the captain’s orders had simply been to take that human cargo out to sea and keep them safe until the coup succeeded and they could come home.
Chapel had learned all this from his boss, Rupert Hollingshead, who had it from the CIA. The information the American government possessed did not indicate what the Kurchatov’s captain was supposed to do if the coup failed. It was known that the captain was fanatically loyal to his superiors in the Kremlin, a member of the Communist Party, and a personal believer in state socialism. Perhaps when he realized that his homeland failed to share his beliefs, he decided to go somewhere where people still did. So he’d set course for Cuba, a voyage that would have strained his overcrowded vessel to the very limits of its fuel and supplies.
The captain signaled ahead of his intentions and had received an offer of asylum from the government of Fidel Castro. He’d been ordered to bring his vessel into the port of Havana where he would be welcomed as a hero of the socialist revolution. Why he failed to obey those instructions was unknown — maybe he didn’t trust Castro as much as he’d trusted his Soviet superiors, or maybe he was simply out of fuel. For one reason or another, just after Christmas in 1991, he had come to a dead stop in the water twenty miles from Cuba and ordered everyone to abandon ship.
The sub’s crew had intentionally scuttled their boat, opening all its hatches and letting it sink gracefully while they fled in lifeboats. Most likely the captain had intended for the submarine to sink to the very bottom of the ocean, but instead it had come to ground on the sloped side of the Cay Sal Bank. The crew and passengers had all disappeared into the Cuban population. And that was the last anyone had heard, or probably thought, about the Kurchatov until now.
Until Jim Chapel was ordered to disturb its decades-long sleep.
Through the murky water Chapel could only get a rough idea of how the submarine had fared after being scuttled, but it was obvious right away that it hadn’t come through unscathed. It must have struck the rocks several times as it sank, judging by the massive dents on the hull. Worse, it had been torn open toward its rear half where it had scraped up against a long spar of hard coral. A boat like the Kurchatov was built with two concentric hulls to withstand oceanic pressures. Both hulls were made of thick reinforced steel, but the coral had cut through them like a ceramic knife through a tin can, leaving the whole interior of the sub open to the seawater. That might actually be a good thing. Chapel hadn’t relished the prospect of trying to muscle open the heavy pressure hatches in the sail, normally the only way inside. The tear in the hulls might give him a better access point.
“Angel,” he said, “I’m going off radio now. Everything good up top?”
“There’s a little movement about twenty miles from you. Looks like a fishing boat. Nothing to worry about.”
“Okay. Talk to you in a few.”
“Be careful, sweetie,” she said. “I’ll be here, waiting.”
Chapel let go of the anchor cable and kicked away from it, using just his flippers to propel him toward the sub. He swam down toward the crack in its side and reached out to touch the place where the hulls had been cut through. The tear was pretty rough, and when it first happened the edges of the opening might have been razor sharp, but time and salt water had smoothed them down until he was pretty sure he wouldn’t rip his drysuit crawling through. He peered in through the rent, letting his lights play over the big boxy shape of the engines, then pushed inside.
Tiny fish darted away from Chapel’s lights as he pushed his way through the cramped engine compartment, gingerly crawling along using his hands to keep from colliding with any sharp or rusted surface. It wasn’t easy. Submarines were cramped by design, cluttered by nature, and the crushing, tearing impact that tore the Kurchatov open had crumpled much of its hull, reducing further the room he had to maneuver. It felt more like he was spelunking than diving as he had to consider each move, work out in advance where his legs and arms would fit. Everything around him was pitch-black until he looked directly at it. But this wasn’t like the darkness outside, when he’d felt like he was drifting through outer space. Chapel was constantly aware that he was surrounded on every side by metal, by ton after ton of Soviet-era military equipment, and the thought of pushing himself deeper inside the crumpled tin can was daunting.