With that, the Texan walked away, the sound of her footsteps disappearing into the far end of the compartment. A few moments later, the lights flickered back on. Dr. Nassiri winced, covering his eyes with his free hands as the blinding illumination forced its way through the gaps between his fingers.
Looking down, he saw his pants askew, and the entire front of his shirt was open, buttons missing. Alexis reappeared, grinning at him as she adjusted her tank top and shorts. One of her shoes had fallen off, it lay not far from Dr. Nassiri’s feet.
They both turned as Fatima entered the compartment, rubbing her eyes against the light. Embarrassed, Alexis ducked behind a console and busied herself in a toolbox.
“Did you find it?” Fatima asked, her glance shooting between her son and the American girl. “What happened to your shirt?”
“I… caught it on something in the dark,” gulped Dr. Nassiri. “It ripped.”
Alexis stifled a snicker which she tried to mask by clattering around in a drawer. Fatima frowned and crossed her arms.
“But I think we found what we were looking for. How’s Vitaly?”
“He’s asleep,” said Fatima, scowling. “Whatever you gave him really knocked him out this time.”
“I didn’t give him anything.”
“Maybe he finally understands we won’t murder him in his sleep,” Alexis said, brandishing a particularly menacing-looking crowbar. She stood on her tip-toes and stuck the edge of the crowbar underneath the panel, carefully prying it away from the wall.
Rivets strained then popped and the panel fell free, still suspended in the air by electrical cording.
“Um,” said Alexis, emerging from behind the hanging panel. “There isn’t anything back here.”
“That’s not good,” mumbled Dr. Nassiri. He looked, and didn’t see anything either.
“What do we do?” asked Fatima. “Are you sure about the reading?”
“A hundred percent,” said Alexis. “A transmission is coming from that location, it couldn’t be anything else.”
Dr. Nassiri looked Alexis squarely in the eye and realized they were both thinking the same thing.
“It’s on the outside of the vessel’s hull,” he said. “So it cannot be accessed while submerged.”
“Can we surface?” asked Fatima.
“There’s just no way,” said Alexis. “Even if we surface, we can’t dive again, not until we’ve charged the batteries to at least twenty percent. The mercenaries will be on us like a tornado on a trailer park.”
“Charming,” interjected Fatima.
“I’ll do it,” said Dr. Nassiri.
“Do what exactly?” demanded Fatima. “What are you going to do? You said it cannot be accessed while submerged!”
“It’s obvious what has to be done. Someone has to swim out of the lockout chamber, find the transponder and deactivate it.”
“Certainly you cannot—” began Fatima.
“Your mom’s right,” said Alexis. “It’s suicide, and we — we need you.”
“Who would you have me send?” he demanded, his voice raising. “Mother, look around you. Shall I send the only man who can pilot the ship, a man who can barely get in and out of his bed? The woman who runs the engines we’ll need to escape? Or perhaps you’d have me send my own mother out with her broken wrist?”
Fatima fell silent.
“I’ll go,” said Alexis.
“You will not,” said Dr. Nassiri. “I will not further imperil your life.”
Alexis too fell silent.
“I don’t know how to dive,” he admitted, “but I paid attention when Jonah was preparing for our dive in Malta—”
“Malta?” Fatima interrupted.
“It’s a long story.” He turned back to Alexis. Just one air bottle would probably be safest. I do not intend to be outside the submarine for long. Alexis, please use a hammer and rap it against the hull loud enough for me to hear it. Mother, please go attend to the lockout chamber. It will just be matter of pressurizing the chamber until it matches the pressure of the sea outside.
“Once flooded, I can simply open the door and swim out. I will change into a wetsuit and join you shortly.”
Fatima nodded, and left the engine room without another word. Wrestling with his own fear, Dr. Nassiri stormed into the weapons locker. He found a small bottle of air — he believed he’d heard Jonah refer to it as a “pony bottle”—and a marine flashlight. He grabbed a wetsuit that appeared to be more or less his size and stripped off his shirt. He noticed that he seemed leaner somehow, tauter than he’d remembered. While this dangerous life did not suit him, his body had already begun to adapt.
“Hey,” came a voice from behind him.
Shirtless, the doctor turned towards the voice. Alexis stood in the hatchway, blocking his path. She raised one long, graceful leg and braced it against the bulkhead.
“Hello to you as well,” said Dr. Nassiri, giving her the benefit of a small smile despite his overwhelming sense of impending doom.
“I want to finish what we started,” she said. “So come back in one piece.”
Alexis turned around and with that she was gone. Her promise lingered, if in no other place than Dr. Nassiri’s vivid imagination.
Fatima was still familiarizing herself with the controls of the lockout chamber when her son climbed up the ladder to meet her.
“Lock chamber,” she whispered to herself, reading the manual, her fingers pretending to press the buttons. “Pressurize interior at a rate of no more than one atmosphere per every ten seconds. Check interior pressure against exterior pressure. When equalized, flood chamber. Open outer doors.”
“You understand what you’ll need to do?” her son asked.
“I woke Vitaly up. He gave me a brief overview,” said Fatima. “He says he has to stay in the command compartment.”
“I don’t think he can stand for any prolonged period of time yet,” said Dr. Nassiri.
Fatima nodded, opened her mouth to speak then closed it again.
“It will be okay, mother.”
“I made this for you,” said Fatima, breaking eye contact and nodding, trying to reassure herself as well. The professor reached into her pocket and drew out a small glow stick on a long shoelace. She tied it around his neck and cracked it, illuminating mother and son with a gentle yellow.
“Thank you.”
“It’s like a lamb’s bell,” she said, her eyes welling up with tears. “Please come back safe, little lamb.”
“I will.”
The doctor wasn’t certain whether to be deeply touched or mortally embarrassed. He gave his mother a light kiss on the top of her head and entered the diver’s chamber, a small compartment no larger than a shower stall. Fatima closed the door behind him. When it shut with the loud sound of bolting locks, he realized all he could hear was the sound of his own breathing.
Swim out. Get the transmitter. Swim back.
Do it, he mouthed to his mother through the tiny four-inch portal window separating them. Vents hissed loudly as tanks released air into the chamber. The compartment pressurized quickly, too quickly, forcing Dr. Nassiri to gulp air, plug his nose and violently squeeze it into his ear canals before the increasing pressure burst them. Everything hurt, his teeth, his eyes, every joint protested with pain at the rapid pressurization.
The hissing stopped. With a click, water rapidly rose through the gaps in the steel deck. He shivered from the moment it touched his toes, the cold water of this depth was only a few degrees above freezing, more than a match for his thick neoprene suit. With his last few seconds, Dr. Nassiri adjusted his swimming goggles and took two experimental breaths out of the pony bottle.
Water flowed over his face and head. For a moment, Dr. Nassiri wondered why he wasn’t floating. Between the air in his lungs and the neoprene suit; he thought he’d need to practically peel himself off the ceiling. Not at this depth, he recalled. The air in his lungs, the bubbles in the neoprene, all would be compressed by the surrounding pressure. At least that was good news, the idea of stepping out of the chamber and rocketing to the surface for crippling decompression sickness and immediate capture wasn’t appealing.