“Oh for chrissakes. You didn’t even—”
“Hey,” a tall bearded man standing by the doorway said, interrupting them. He was one of the tenders, the junior divers-to-be who were looking after them. “You guys are needed at Conference Room A. The meeting’s on.”
Gordon quickly got up and grabbed the beer can that O’Keefe was about to sip from. “Come on, you goddamn drunk. We’ve got a meeting to attend to.”
“Hey!” O’Keefe protested. “That was just my number six.”
Placing the beer can back onto the table, Gordon moved beside the other man and helped him up. “You want to get kicked off the team? Come on.”
O’Keefe burped loudly as he was being led out of the mess hall. “Oh, so you’re trying to be the next supervisor or something now?”
THEY JOINED BILL LANGLEY and Haakon Rasmussen inside the ship’s main conference room. Exchanging handshakes and high-fives, all four commercial divers seated themselves as Mullins entered through the back door and sat down at the other end of the table. A thin, bespectacled man wearing a dark business suit suddenly appeared and took a seat beside the dive supervisor. Gordon leaned forward in curiosity. The short guy in the suit was completely unfamiliar to him.
“Before we start the briefing, I’d like to introduce someone from corporate to you guys,” Mullins said, gesturing at the man sitting beside him. “This is Mr. Sandor, who represents the top management, and he has something to tell you.”
Sandor had dark, slicked back hair. He nodded while staring at the four divers in turn, and his voice had a syrupy tone. “Thank you, Mullins. I’m sure you are all aware of your signed non-disclosure agreements, yes?”
All four divers looked at each other in confused silence before they all nodded.
“Good,” Sandor said. “I would just like to remind you all of the sensitive nature of this construction project. You cannot disclose the details of this job to anyone, is that understood?”
O’Keefe had a bellyful of beer with his dinner, and his inhibitions and tact had been affected. “Well, we can’t exactly say anything since we don’t know what the hell it is we’re even supposed to do, right?”
Gordon clenched his jaw as he silently reached underneath the table and held on to O’Keefe’s right kneecap. He needed this job, and the last thing he wanted was for the team to get into any kind of trouble.
“We’ll get to that,” Mullins said tersely. “For now, what is discussed in this room stays in here, okay? This is not a joke. Any or all of you could get in some serious legal crap if anything we discuss here becomes public. You might even make the list. Understood?”
The entire dive team nodded once more. They knew the corporate blacklist was real, and no one wanted to lose their job.
Turning around, Mullins picked up a remote control from the table and activated a wall screen behind him. The image being shown elicited a few muted exhales from the four veteran divers.
The monitor displayed a computer generated image of what looked like an undersea base. Composed of joined capsules that looked very similar to their hyperbaric chambers, the habitat section was held together by a foundation of concrete blocks on the sea bed, along with solid metal struts and support beams.
Mullins waited for about a minute before he started speaking again. “The company calls it Typhon, and before you ask, I have no idea why they named it so.”
Haakon was the first to speak for the group. “How deep is it?”
“A little over a hundred fifty meters, give or take,” Sandor said.
Gordon immediately did some mental calculations, converting the metric units into imperial. It was a habit born of dealing with different measurements when it came to reading indicator gauges from countries that used either standard. That’s like, five hundred feet down, he thought.
O’Keefe gave a low whistle after doing his own math. “Whoa. More than six days of decompression time.”
Gordon narrowed his eyes and pointed towards a large structure near the bottom that looked like an enclosed aircraft hangar. “What’s that?”
“That is what you’ll be working on,” Mullins said. “The building was… damaged by a freak storm, so you need to seal the breaches. The ROVs will do most of the heavy lifting, so we’ll just need you guys for the finer stuff like precision welding and that sort of thing.”
Haakon had his arms folded across his chest. “It looks huge, like you could fit a whole boat inside of it. And those look like doors along the side. What’s in it?”
Mullins was about to answer, but Sandor cut him off with a wave of his hand and did the talking instead. “I’m afraid that’s classified. Your team will strictly be outside. You need to check the structure for any stresses and breaches and repair them.”
“So there’s no one inside that base?” O’Keefe asked.
Mullins shook his head. “The personnel were all evacuated before the storm hit. We’ll need you all to check for damage in the other modules as well and repair those too. But the big building is your priority.”
Gordon frowned. Why the hell would they build a complex undersea habitat all the way out here, and why so deep? “Can I ask what this whole sea base is for?”
“Scientific research,” Mullins said. “That’s all I can tell you.”
The four divers looked at each other again in silence.
Mullins glanced at Sandor, who nodded. The diving supervisor’s serious demeanor then changed into a smile. “Would you like to hear the good news?”
“Please,” Haakon said.
“The job isn’t going to be easy, and there’s a time crunch too,” Mullins said. “You’ve got to get everything done in about two weeks.”
O’Keefe snorted. “That’s the good news?”
Mullins chuckled. “I’m getting to that. If the job gets done you’ll be paid a full month underwater, and if it gets done ahead of schedule, there’ll be a hundred percent cash bonus for each of you, provided you don’t blurt out any of this to the rest of the world.”
The four divers looked at each other again, only this time they were grinning.
O’Keefe stood up and saluted. “Hell, let’s get it on right now!”
11
AFTER BREAKFAST, ALL four divers made it down to the Skandi Aurora’s lower deck to gather up and personally test their equipment. They would be sealed up inside the hyperbaric chamber for at least three weeks, and they needed to make sure whatever gear they brought in with them would be functioning properly.
Walking over and going through a half dozen sets of yellow colored Kirby Morgan dive helmets lying on the floor, Gordon picked one up and ran his hand along its outer shell, checking for cracks. After fitting it onto his head with the neck dam, he took it off again before grabbing one of the chin cushions from a plastic container on the ground and snapping the device into the inside of the headgear. He wanted to make sure his face would be snug while wearing it.
O’Keefe sat on a nearby folding chair as he used a screwdriver to check and make sure all the rivets and O-rings on his own helmet were sealed properly. After twisting the defogging and emergency valves back and forth to make sure they were working, he placed the helmet over his head and spoke into the microphone attached to the inner oral mask. “Testing. Bill, do you hear me?”
Langley’s voice answered. He was standing several compartments away inside the unused control room, working the intercom system. “Yes, I can hear you. Loud and clear.”
Due to the intense pressure of the ocean floor, any sort of breach in the helmet’s outer shell meant almost certain death, and it was imperative that they thoroughly double check everything now, for they would be on their own once they were sealed inside the hyperbaric chamber within the vessel.