“Yes…” Jordan said slowly. “I didn’t, but I do now. Thank you, Curtis.”
Jordan turned from a totally mystified Meeker, opened the door, and melted into the throng leaving the theater.
“We’re clear,” Plunkett cried in delight. “Jolly well done.”
“Jolly well done,” Pitt mimicked. He switched on computer control and called up a series of geographical displays on the monitor. “A miracle we broke out with no pressure leaks or mechanical damage.”
“My dear fellow, my faith in you is as deep as the sea… ah, we’re under. I didn’t doubt your fortitude for a minute.”
Pitt spared him a curious stare. “If you’re taken in that easily, I have a bridge in New York I’d like to sell you.”
“What was that about a bridge’?”
“Do you play?”
“Yes, I’m quite good. Won more than a few tournaments. And you?”
“I deal a mean hand of Old Maid.”
The exchange was slightly less than bizarre considering their predicament, but they were men absorbed in their element and well aware of the danger of being trapped in the abyssal depths. If either Pitt or Plunkett felt any fear, he didn’t show it.
“Now that we’ve escaped the landslide, what’s the plan?” asked Plunkett as calmly as if he was requesting another cup of tea.
“The plan is to go up,” Pitt answered, pointing toward the roof.
“Since this magnificent old crawler has no buoyancy and we’ve a good five kilometers of ocean above us, how do you expect to accomplish the impossible?”
Pitt grinned.
“Just sit back and enjoy the seascape. We’re going to take a little ride through the mountains.”
“Welcome aboard, Admiral.” Commander Morton gave a razor-edge salute and extended his hand, but the greeting was purely official. He was not happy and made no attempt at hypocrisy. “A rare occasion when we’re ordered to surface at sea during a cruise to take on visitors. I have to tell you I don’t like it.”
Sandecker smothered a smile as he stepped from the Shanghai Shelly’s launch onto the bridge of the partially surfaced sail tower of the
“I didn’t pull strings to have you deviate from operational procedure so I could drop in for cocktails, Commander. I’m here on presidential order. If it’s an inconvenience, I’ll be happy to return to the junk.”
A pained expression crossed Morton’s face. “No offense, Admiral, but Soviet satellites—”
“Will photograph us in vivid color for the entertainment of their intelligence analysts. Yes, yes, but we don’t really care what they see or think.” Sandecker turned as Giordino climbed aboard. “My assistant project director, Al Giordino.”
Unconsciously almost, Morton acknowledged Giordino with a half salute and showed them through a hatch down to the control center of the sub. They followed the commander into a small compartment with a transparent plotting table with a recessed interior that provided a three-dimensional sonar view of the seabed.
Lieutenant David DeLuca, the
“Not at all. Your accounts of NUMA projects were fascinating.
Morton flicked a glance at DeLuca and nodded down at the table. “The admiral is most interested in your discovery.”
“What can you show me, son?” Sandecker said, placing a hand on DeLuca’s shoulder. “The message was you’ve picked up unusual sounds on the seabed.”
DeLuca faltered for a moment. “We’ve been receiving strange music—”
” ‘Minnie the Mermaid?’ ” Giordino blurted.
DeLuca nodded. “At first, but now it sounds like John Philip Sousa marches.”
Morton’s eyes narrowed. “How could you possibly know?”
“Dirk,” Giordino said definitely. “He’s still alive.”
“Let’s hope so,” Sandecker said with mounting joy. He stared at DeLuca. “Can you still hear the music?”
“Yes, sir. Once we obtained a fix, we were able to track the source.
“It’s moving?”
“About five kilometers per hour across the bottom.”
“He and Plunkett must have survived the earthquake and escaped in Big John,” Giordino concluded.
“Have you attempted contact?” asked Sandecker of Morton.
“We’ve tried, but our systems are not designed to transmit in water deeper than a thousand meters.”
“We can contact them with the underwater phone in the submersible,” said Giordino.
“Unless…” Sandecker hesitated. He glanced at Morton. “Could you hear them if they were trying to contact a surface vessel, Commander?”
“If we can hear their music, we could hear their voice transmissions. Might be garbled and distorted, but I think our computers could piece together a coherent message.”
“Any such sounds received?”
“None,” replied Morton.
“Their phone system must be damaged,” Sandecker speculated.
“Then why are they able to transmit music?”
“An emergency amplifying system locator in case the vehicle had a breakdown,” answered Giordino. “A rescue vehicle could home in on the sound. But it wasn’t built for voice transmission or reception.”
Morton stirred in slow anger. He did not like losing control of a situation on board his own command. “May I ask who these people are in Big John, as you call it, and how they came to be traipsing over the bottom of the Pacific Ocean?”
Sandecker gave a negligent wave of his hand. “Sorry, Commander, a classified project.” He turned his attention back to DeLuca. “You say they’re on the move.”
“Yes, sir.” DeLuca pressed a series of buttons and the display recessed in the table revealed a section of the sea bottom in a three-dimensional holograph. To the men crowded around the table, it felt as though they were looking down into a submerged Grand Canyon from the top of an aquarium. The detail was enhanced by advanced computer and sonar digital mapping that showed the images in muted color heavy on blues and greens.
The Mendocino fracture zone dwarfed the famous tourist sight of northern Arizona, its steep escarpments averaging 3,000 meters high. The uneven rims along the great crack in the earth’s submarine surface were serrated with hundreds of ridges, giving it the appearance of a huge gash through a series of sand ripples.
“The latest underwater visual technology,” Morton offered proudly. “The
Morton’s face, now curiously red and sullen, looked abjectly defeated in the game of one-upmanship. But he took control and made a brave comeback. “Lieutenant, show the admiral his toy in action.”
DeLuca took a short wandlike probe and traced a light beam across the floor of the display. “Your underwater vehicle emerged at this point in a small canyon just off the main fracture zone and is now traveling in a zigzag pattern up the slopes toward the top of the fracture zone’s edge.”
Giordino stared somberly at the flattened area where the mining project once stood. “Not much left of Soggy Acres,” he said sadly.
“It wasn’t built to last forever,” Sandecker consoled him. “The results more than paid for the loss.”
Without being asked, DeLuca enlarged the display until the fuzzy image of the DSMV could just be seen struggling up the side of a steep slope. “This is as sharp as I can bring her in.”
“That’s just fine,” Sandecker complimented him.
Looking at the tiny speck against the infinite desolation, it was impossible for any of them to believe there were two living, breathing men inside it. The moving projection seemed so real, they had to fight to keep from reaching out and touching it.
Their thoughts varied to the extreme. DeLuca imagined he was an astronaut peering down at life on an alien planet, while Morton was reminded of watching a truck on a highway from an aircraft flying at thirty thousand feet. Sandecker and Giordino both visualized their friend struggling against a hostile atmosphere to stay alive.
“Can’t you rescue them with your submersible?” queried Morton.
Giordino clutched the rail around the display table until his knuckles went ivory. “We can rendezvous, but neither craft has an air lock to transfer them from one to the other under tons of water pressure. If they attempted to leave Big John at that depth, they’d be squashed to a third their size.”
“What about hoisting them to the surface with a cable?”
“I don’t know of a ship equipped to carry six kilometers of cable thick enough to support its own weight and that of the DSMV.”
“The
“At eight kilometers per hour,” Giordino calculated, “then doubling the distance to allow for uneven terrain and detours around ravines, with luck they should reach the top of Conrow around this time tomorrow.”
Morton’s eyes turned skeptical. “Climbing the guyot may bring them closer to the surface, but they’ll still be three hundred meters or nearly a thousand feet short. How does this guy—?”
“His name is Dirk Pitt,” Giordino helped him.
“Okay, Pitt. How does he expect to make it topside—swim?”
“Not from that depth,” said Sandecker promptly. “Big John is pressurized to one atmosphere, the same as we’re standing in at sea level. The outside water pressure down there is thirty-three times heavier. Even if we could supply them with high-tech dive gear and a helium-oxygen gas mixture for deep-water breathing, their chances are nil.”
“If the sudden increase in pressure as they left Big John didn’t kill them,” Giordino added, “decompression sickness on the way to the surface would.”
“So what does Pitt have up his sleeve?” Morton persisted.
Giordino’s eyes seemed to peer at something beyond the r head. “I don’t have the answer, but I suspect we’d better t of one damn quick.”
“Black smokers,” announced Plunkett, identifying them under the probing lights of Big John.
“They’ll be surrounded by communities of sea creatures,” Pitt said without removing his eyes from the navigational display on his control monitor. “We charted over a dozen of them during our mining surveys.”
“You’d better swing clear. I’d hate to see this brute run over them.”
Pitt smiled and took manual control, turning the DSMV to avoid the strange colony of exotic sea life that thrived without sunlight. It was like a lush oasis in the desert, covering nearly a square kilometer of seafloor. The wide tracks of the intruding monster skirted the spewing vents and the entwining thickets of giant tube worms that gently leaned with the current as though they were marsh reeds swaying under a breeze.
Plunkett gazed in awe at the hollow stalks as the worms inside poked their delicate pink and burgundy plumes into the black water. “Some of them must be a good three meters in length!” he exclaimed.
Also scattered around the vents and the tube worms were huge white mussels and clams of varieties Plunkett had never seen before. Lemon-colored creatures that looked like puff balls and were related to jellyfish mingled with spiny white crabs and bluish shrimp. None of them required photosynthesis to survive. They were nourished by bacteria that converted the hydrogen sulfide and oxygen overflow from the vents into organic nutrients. If the sun was suddenly snuffed out, these creatures in their pitch-black environment would continue to exist while all other life forms above them became extinct.
He tried to etch the image of the different vent inhabitants in his brain as they disappeared into the silt cloud trailing behind, but he couldn’t concentrate. Sealed tight in the lonely cabin of the mining vehicle, Plunkett experienced a tremendous wave of emotion as he stared into the alien world. No stranger to the abyssal deep, he suddenly felt as isolated as an astronaut lost beyond the galaxy.
Pitt took only a few glimpses of the incredible scene outside. He had no time for distractions. His eyes and reflexes depended on his reaction to the dangers shown on the monitor. Twice he almost lost Big John in gaping fissures, stopping at the brink of one with less than a meter to spare. The rugged terrain often proved as impassable as a Hawaiian lava bed, and he had to rapidly program the computer to chart the least treacherous detour.
He had to be especially careful of landslide zones and canyon rims that could not support the vehicle. Once he was forced to circle a small but active volcano whose molten lava poured through a long crack and down the slope before turning solid under the frigid water. He steered around scarred pits and tall cones and across wide craters, every type of texture and contour one would expect to find on Mars.