Текст книги "Mirage"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

Соавторы: Jack Brul
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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Panic kills divers. That was the first lesson from his crusty dive instructor when Juan had earned his scuba certification as a teenager. That was the last too. Panic kills divers.

He and Mike and Eddie had between six and eight minutes to get away. Plenty of time. No need to panic.

Cabrillo shoved his camera back into the dive bag strapped to his waist, took one last glance at Tesla’s remarkable contraption, and headed back toward the staircase.

“Mike, are you on your way to the Nomad?” Cabrillo asked, irked that the helium made him sound like a little girl.

“Yes. I even got a sample from the frame.”

“Good. Eddie, we’re going to have to jam ourselves into the air lock. Once we’re in, emergency ascent.”

“Roger. Emergency blow once you and Mike are aboard.”

That’s going to cost me, Juan thought.

In an emergency ascent, the cylindrical hull of the submersible disconnected from the rest of the craft, all the motors, battery packs, and ancillary equipment. The crew compartment would shoot to the surface like a cork, taking them out of the blast range, but it also meant that about a million dollars’ worth of sub components would be left behind to be blown into oblivion.

Cabrillo misjudged as he moved up the staircase and bumped his trimix tank into a bulkhead. It wasn’t much of a hit, but to the old derelict it was a deadly punch. Steel bracings, weakened by decades of immersion, gave way, and the walls around the staircase collapsed in a slow pirouette of destruction. The water filled with an impenetrable cloud of rust particles that turned the light from Cabrillo’s lamps into a meager brick-colored glow.

He managed to push himself away from the worst of the collapse, saving himself from being sliced apart by the avalanche of plate steel.

His careless action had to have caused a chain reaction because he could hear additional rumblings as the old wreck tried to find some new equilibrium.

He remained curled in a ball until everything finally settled down. A piece of steel had landed across his back. His tanks had protected him, but now as he tried to push it off he realized it was either heavier than its impact indicated or it was wedged in place.

“Chairman? Are you there? Juan?”

“I read you, Mike. I might be in trouble.”

“What happened?”

“A wall gave way when I hit it. I’m in a stairwell and I might be trapped.”

“I’m coming.”

“Negative. Get to the Nomad. I’ll get myself out.”

“We’ve got five minutes.”

Cabrillo ran the odds through his head. “Okay. I’ll give you three. If you can’t reach me, get the hell away from here.”

Eddie Seng had been monitoring the divers and knew what he had to do. He powered up the Nomad and swung it around so that he was facing the wreck. He eased in closer, reaching across the tight cabin to switch on the manipulator arms at the copilot’s station. He could see Mike, working to remove his tank so he could fit through the frame surrounding the wreck, and radioed to him.

“Hold on, Mike. I’ve got a better idea.”

Trono had to have seen the sub’s dive lights shift toward him. He looked up and saw the craft practically looming over him, its arms outstretched like skeletal limbs. He quickly got out of its way.

With a deft hand on the thruster controls to keep the Nomad in place against the current, Eddie grasped one of the metallic bars with a manipulator hand and tore it completely free. He backed off to allow Mike to swim through the larger aperture.

Mike swam across the aft deck and reached the door Cabrillo had entered only minutes earlier. Rust particles billowed from inside the ship like smoke from a burning building. It only cleared when it was borne away by the current, again like smoke on the wind.

He groped like a sightless man along the passageway, sensing that there wasn’t much he could do until visibility improved.

“The stairwell is the fourth door on the right,” Juan said as if reading his mind.

Mike counted doors, and when he’d shown his light in through the correct door, he saw an open shaft that had once been a stairwell. The steps themselves had collapsed, and steel plating had peeled away from its internal structure. He realized that the rivets that had once held them in place had failed, allowing the plating to fall free.

The rust was settling out of the water, and he could just see Cabrillo’s leg peeking from the debris one deck down. The leg moved when Juan tried to free himself, but each upward thrust locked the tangle of junk even tighter.

“Hold on,” Mike said.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Cabrillo replied.

Trono swam down, careful not to tear his gloves, and began moving some of the plating. The sections weren’t large, but it was like the old game of pick-up sticks. He didn’t want what he was doing to cause additional cave-ins. He tore into the pile with repressed frenzy, wanting to work faster but knowing he had to be careful. All the while, he knew that Juan would order him away at any second.

He shoved away enough of the old bulkheads for Cabrillo to try to free himself one last time.

“It’s up to you.”

Juan gathered his energy, channeled it, and pushed with everything he had. Mike had done just enough so that the plate that had kept him pinned shifted and ground against the others but didn’t jam up. He heaved again and finally dragged himself out of the pile.

Mike was there with a hand to steady him.

“I owe you.” Juan meant it to sound solemn, but the helium lessened the sense of import. “Now, let’s get out of here.”

The two men swam back up to the main deck and finned down the corridor. They burst out of the superstructure to see that Eddie had used the manipulators to tear apart more of the old framework and had the submersible practically parked on the deck.

Mike reached the air lock door first and spun open the wheel lock. The space was tight – a phone booth, really – and he and Cabrillo would need to stay in it for quite some time. They’d been at depth long enough to need almost two hours to decompress. The cramped space would act as a decompression chamber once they reached the surface, but they would need the Oregonsupplying power since the Nomad’s batteries would be left behind.

Getting away from the wreck was only the first part of their ordeal. If they didn’t link up with the Oregonin time, both divers would run out of trimix, and the Nomad had no internal supplies of the gas. To make matters worse, Juan and Mike had to be decompressed before Eddie could leave the sub via the air lock.

Trono dove headfirst through the hatch and disappeared inside. Juan waited a beat, letting his dive partner get settled, before he swam into the air lock chamber. His feet were on Mike’s tanks and his head was still outside the sub when he felt a vibration through the water. He knew immediately what it was and ducked at the last second.

He managed to get the hatch closed but not fully secured when the torpedo slammed into the old mine tender up near her bow. Nearly a thousand pounds of high explosives detonated in a blast of energy that swept through the uncompressible water and pummeled the mini-sub so that she crashed into the remains of the metal framework. Steel tore and shrieked. The ship’s superstructure was peeled back and collapsed at the same time.

Inside the air lock, the Chairman and Mike Trono were so tightly wedged that neither man was injured but both were severely disoriented as the sub tumbled end over end. Yet even before they had settled, Juan was working to secure the hatch’s lock. His head rang with the concussive force of the explosion, and his hands felt leaden, but he managed to spin the lock down, sealing the two of them in the tight chamber.

“Eddie, emergency blow.”

Seng had already seen the indicator light in the cockpit telling him that the hatch was secure. He’d hit the button even as the Chairman’s voice came over the radio.

With a clunk, the Nomad detached from its lower frame and began a wild rise to the surface. Only it didn’t. It rose less than two feet before it became enmeshed in the mine tender’s dislodged radio mast and an old, rotted fishing net.

Juan knew he should feel the cylindrical hull rocketing up from the depths the way one feels in a high-speed elevator. That wasn’t happening. They had cut loose the heavy sled but weren’t rising.

There was at most thirty seconds between the torpedoes, and he reacted without thought.

“Seal the hatch after me,” he said to Mike Trono and opened the air lock.

Cabrillo launched himself out of the mini-sub, flashing his light along its length, searching for whatever had snagged it and prevented its ascent. He saw the mast that had fallen across the sub’s hull, but it wasn’t big enough to have stalled their rise. Instead, it was the tangled mass of fishing nets that kept them stuck in place.

His titanium dive knife was honed to a razor’s edge, and the buoyancy of the submersible cabin kept the net’s lines taut. He attacked them like a ninja wielding a samurai sword, slashing and hacking the lines with abandon. The mini-sub rose fractionally as more of the tendrils binding it fell free. Cabrillo kept at it. The water filled with tiny bits of old sisal and a maelstrom of disturbed marine growth.

Then all at once, as he knew it would, the submersible erupted from the net, freeing itself of the last of the ropes and vanishing upward in the blink of an eye.

Cabrillo wasted no time watching it. He swam over to the far side of the wreck, dropped down to the bottom, and crawled as far from the ship as he could. He had to thrust his hands into the silt to keep from being blown away by the current.

The second torpedo augured into the seafloor well short of its target. Because he was shielded by the ship’s hull and was lying flat on the bottom, the pressure wave mostly expanded over him, but he still caught enough to have the air forced from his lungs in an explosive breath that almost unsealed his dive helmet.

He thought he’d survived the worst of it when a second pressure wave hit, and this time it peeled him off the bottom and sent him tumbling. The current grabbed at him immediately, and he was soon bouncing along the bottom at a stiff four knots.

If he had any chance of being rescued, he needed to stay with the wreck. It was the only logical place Max would search for him. If he tumbled past it, there was no way he’d be able to fight the current to return. He didn’t have anywhere near enough air to surface using proper decompression stops. And an ascent without them would lead to a fatal dose of the bends. His joints would constrict as the nitrogen in the tissue dissolved out, and he would die in unimaginable agony.

He managed to flatten himself into a proper swimming position. He knew he couldn’t fight the current, so he didn’t even try. Like someone caught in a riptide, he swam at an angle to the current instead of fighting it directly, vectoring off some of the brute force of the water rushing past him. He was certain that the current had already kicked him north of the hulk, but he had a slim chance of finding the wavering remains of the fishing nets that trailed off the ship like a bride’s train.

His legs began to burn as he kicked with everything he had. He wouldn’t let himself consider that the nets had been ripped clean off the old wreck by the second torpedo. He swam hard, battling a current he couldn’t defeat, burning through his supply of trimix at a prodigious rate. He fought the growing agony of cramped muscles filling with lactic acid, groaning aloud inside his helmet. The rip and saw of his breathing filled his head with the sounds of desperation.

This was how he would die, clawing his way across the bottom, sensing the net was just outside of his visual range and feeling that if he could just keep going another handful of seconds he would reach it.

And then he actually saw it, waving in the current like the arms of a giant jellyfish. He could also see that he was approaching the very end of the ensnared mass of nets. He had only fifteen feet to swim, but there was only ten feet of net before he was swept past it. If he missed, death was the only option.

Cabrillo doubled down. His feet kicked in a flurry of motion, but not giving up any efficiency. He thrust with his arms, his gloved hands curled into perfect paddles that pulled him against the Gulf Stream. He adjusted his angle slightly, forcing himself to fight even harder in the face of the current but knowing he’d been coming in too shallow and would miss.

He reached out. Inches. That was all he needed. He roared as the tips of his fingers brushed the old netting just at its very end. They scrambled to find purchase, but the net was covered in marine slime that was as slick as grease.

There, he finally grasped the second-to-last opening in the net only to have the rotted line snap off in his hand. He clutched at the last bit of rope and prayed, because he could swim no more. The net would either support the extra drag of his body clinging to it or it wouldn’t and he’d be lost.

He stopped kicking, and the old fishing net held his weight. He pulled himself up so he could grip it with both arms and willed his breathing to slow, and the adrenaline began to filter out of his bloodstream. He clung there, panting, knowing he was still in a precarious position but unable to find the strength to move. The net was floating, gently undulating, in the current, so when he felt a sudden jolt he knew something was wrong. He grabbed his more powerful handheld light and flashed it up the net. The lamp revealed it was tearing. His weight was too much for the rotten old sisal lines.

He started climbing up the net against the current, his head down and his shoulders and arms doing all the work.

The net lurched again as more of it parted. He was scrambling now. He recalled climbing cargo nets at the CIA’s training facility as part of an obstacle course, but it was nothing like this. The press of the current against his body and bulky gear dwarfed the gravity he’d fought back then. And unlike those training sessions, he couldn’t use his feet because his flippers would get in the way and he couldn’t afford the seconds it would take to slip them off.

The net tore completely free just as he reached a still-stable section. The current sucked the detached piece out from under him. It snagged against his weight belt, and for a moment it pulled on him with the strength and tenacity of a pit bull. His grip was just about to slip when the net unsnagged and vanished behind him.

Not allowing himself time to recover, he continued climbing up the net, scrambling in a mad dash to the safety of the wreck’s shattered remains. It was a two-hundred-foot climb. Once he felt the net was safe enough, he removed his flippers and clipped them to his dive harness and took a few moments to let his feet take the strain off his arms.

He gave himself just three minutes’ rest before continuing on, though now it was his legs providing most of the heavy lifting and he made good time.

The mine tender was unrecognizable as a ship. The glow from his headlamp and his dive light revealed the ship had been blown into scrap by the first Russian torpedo, and a lot of its remains had been buried under a blanket of sand kicked up by the second. Chunks of hull plating lay strewn across the seafloor. He identified part of the ship’s funnel only because of its distinct stovepipe shape. He saw no sign of the cage Tesla had enshrouded the ship with or the strange machine he’d discovered in the vessel’s hold.

It was a miracle that the net had remained snagged on what little of the superstructure survived the explosion. He found a spot in the lee of a ruined boiler and settled to the bottom, finally able to take a proper rest.

Because the submersible acted as a relay for their communications, he knew it was pointless to try to raise the Oregon. The distance to the surface was just too great for his gear, but the main problem was that the mini-sub’s hull section became deaf and mute once it detached from the propulsion sled.

He powered down his helmet light to conserve the battery. He was trapped on the bottom of the sea, as unable to change his predicament as an astronaut who becomes separated from his space capsule. Juan could do nothing but rely on his crew to save him. His faith in them was boundless, but rescues take time. They would need to recover the submersible first, and only then would Max discover that he was still down here. Next they would need to organize recovery gear and send down either Little Geekor the Discovery 1000, the second, smaller mini-sub the Oregoncarried. It all took time.

The vast ocean crushed down on him from above, a lone man sitting on the seafloor among the rusted ruins of a dead man’s dream, a lonely pinprick of light in a stygian darkness as vast as the cosmos. Juan, feeling the cold start to seep into his skin, finally looked at his remaining trimix supply, nodded grimly, and put out his dive light so that the black crushed up against his dry suit.

He had ten minutes to live.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Max Hanley continued to issue orders while Eric adjusted their heading once again.

“Mark, I want you and MacD down in the boat garage ready to launch a RHIB at a moment’s notice. That means I want the outer door open and the engines warmed.” He keyed in the intercom to reach the techs in the sub bay. “This is Max. Prep the Disco for SAR, and make sure Little Geek’s ready as well.”

The Oregontore across the sea at a near-racing-boat’s pace, driven as much by her engines as by Hanley’s determination to rescue his people.

Mark Murphy was swinging out of his chair when he spotted something on his console.

“Max, I’m picking up the automated beacon from the Nomad. She’s surfaced.”

“Over the wreck?”

“Negative. They’ve drifted almost two miles north.”

Eric Stone asked, “Should I alter course?”

“Negative,” Max replied after a thoughtful pause. “Keep us headed for the wreck site. Mark, get moving. Tell me when you and Lawless are ready to go. We’ll slow the ship and you guys head out for the mini-sub.”

“We’re on it.” He raced from the bridge while Max put out a shipwide bulletin for MacD Lawless to report to the boat garage.

A mile from their destination, Murph reported they were ready to go. Max gave the order to back off on their speed, and when he deemed it safe, he told them to go.

Powered by a pair of massive outboards, the RHIB was an open-cockpit rocket ship for the water. Its sleek black hull and ring of inflated pontoons allowed it to survive in virtually any sea, and it could be configured for any number of missions.

The RHIB sliced through waves, bouncing and hammering over the taller swells while a white rooster tail erupted from her stern. It wasn’t built for comfort – the two men stood behind the main controls on flexed knees, their bodies absorbing the shock of the rough ride.

Where Mark was nerdy and a bit doughy when he didn’t focus on fitness, MacD Lawless looked like an underwear model, with a chiseled physique and a movie star’s face. He was the newest member of the Corporation, having been rescued by them from Taliban kidnappers in northern Pakistan. He’d more than proved his worth in the ensuing months, and with his easygoing New Orleans charm and melodious Southern accent, he’d ingratiated himself with the crew.

Like a stone across the surface of a pond, they skipped their way across the Atlantic, pushing the RHIB past fifty knots. Behind them, the Oregonwas just a dot as she raced to her own rendezvous. MacD steered the boat while Mark navigated using a tablet computer displaying a satellite relay of the Nomad’s location.

It took them just a few minutes to reach the drifting hull, which to both men looked like a railroad tank car far, far from home. MacD sidled up to the mini-sub, and Mark leapt over with a painter in hand to tie them off. Lawless didn’t wait for Mark to finish before he grabbed a swim mask, kicked off his Nikes, and dove into the water. Mark watched him go over with a slow shake of his head, not understanding why Lawless would do that when they could access the sub through the rear-mounted air lock.

Lawless had been hit by enough spray on their mad dash here to know the water was shockingly cold, yet he still gave an involuntary gasp as it leached through his clothes. He sucked in a deep breath and dove down and swam toward the front of the submersible. He pressed his mask to one of the three small portholes. The interior of the sub was pitch-black. Not a good sign.

He rapped on the glass with his LSU class ring, and, within seconds, a figure threw itself into the pilot seat and a light flipped on, revealing Eddie Seng. He had a bruise near his temple that was starting to swell up like a pigeon’s egg. He quickly reached a piece of paper from a stack next to his control panel and held it up for MacD to read.

Lawless blew out his breath when he saw what Eddie had written and scrambled to the surface as fast as he could.

The instant his face cleared the water he shouted, “Mark, stop!”

He heaved himself out of the water and up onto the bobbing hull in one powerful lunge. Lawless saw Mark kneeling over the air lock hatch, his bands poised to crack the seal. “Don’t open it.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s fully pressurized, and, if you do, not only will it blow the hatch into your skull but it’ll turn Mike Trono into a meat bomb.”

Murph carefully pulled his hands away from the locking wheel and let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. “What about Juan?”

“No idea. Eddie just held up a note saying Mike is in the air lock. It’s got to be pumped up to about two hundred psi.”

“Hold on.” Mark leapt back over to the RHIB and grabbed another piece of electronics he’d taken from the Oregon. He uncoiled a length of wire from the device and handed its end to Lawless.

“There’s a communications port directly above the auxiliary electrical port. Both are near the large external air intake port. Can’t miss it,” Mark said with a grin and shoved MacD in the chest so that he tumbled back into the water.

MacD gave him a scowl and duck-dove with the cable in his hand. He surfaced thirty seconds later and shoved the swim mask up onto his forehead. “Give it a go.”

“Eddie, can you hear me? It’s Murph.”

“Never been so glad to hear your voice,” Eddie responded. “You got the message?”

“Yeah. What’s Mike doing in the air lock? And where’s the Chairman?”

“Long story. As for the Chairman, he’s still down on the wreck.”

“He was outside when the torpedoes hit?”

“Not the first one, but he went out to free us just before the second one exploded.”

“Is he alive?”

“Don’t know. Listen, we don’t have time for this. Mike’s breathing off his own tanks. We need to get this tub back to the Oregonand get him some trimix so we can start decompressing him out of there.”

“Right. MacD and I are out here on a RHIB. The Oregonshould be over the wreck by now. We’ll tow you over and lift you aboard with the deck crane.”

“That’s good. Mike and I have been chatting, using Morse code. He’s kept his breathing shallow and figures he’s got another half hour or so.”

“Tell him he’ll be fine. Talk to you later.” Mark gave MacD a look, and the newest member of the team knew what he had to do. He pulled his mask back over his eyes and went to retrieve the cable.

Just a minute later, they took the Nomad under tow. The RHIB was designed for speed rather than torque, but they still managed to get up to fifteen knots pulling the ungainly hull through the water. Mark had radioed ahead, so when they motored under the shadow of the Oregon’s lee side, the most powerful of the ship’s forward derricks had been swung out and lifting hooks lowered to the water.

The mini-sub was pulled from the Atlantic as easy as a babe from a cradle, water sluicing off its sides, dousing the two men in the RHIB.

Lawless gunned the motors to steer them into the boat garage as the mini-sub cleared the rail and was lowered into the main cargo hold. Once they were aboard, Murph grabbed a towel from a storage bin, dried his hair and face as best he could, and headed for the hold, figuring Max would handle the Chairman’s rescue while he figured out how to open a particularly dicey can of worms.

Down in the moon pool, Hanley was securing two spare trimix tanks to Little Geekwith nylon webbing.

“Okay,” he said at last, “try it.”

A tech at Little Geek’s controls spooled up its three propellers and maneuvered them on their gimbals to make certain they didn’t become fouled by the extra burden the ROV would carry.

“Looks good,” Hanley said, getting to his feet. “Give me a hand.”

The two men lifted the two hundred pounds of robot and air tanks and lowered it on its umbilical down into the moon pool itself. It vanished as soon as they let go of the thick armored cable, dropping down in an arc that swept it northward thanks to the Gulf Stream. The little robot would need to fight the current the whole way, but since she was tethered and being supplied power by her mother ship, it wouldn’t be an issue.

The only issue now was if they’d gotten here in time.

* * *

Cabrillo couldn’t believe the cold. It had crept up on him so insidiously that it was in his bones before he realized it. He had remained perfectly still, not generating any body heat – that was the culprit. In order to stretch out his air supply, he had to sit as quietly as possible, and yet that allowed in a killer just as deadly as asphyxia.

His hands shook so badly that it took three attempts to flip on his dive light. Its glow made the loneliness somehow more tolerable. Humans were, after all, a social animal. And to die alone was one of our species’ innate fears. He turned his gaze onto his air readings. The ten minutes he’d given himself were up. He was breathing gas that was so amorphous that it couldn’t be read by the tank’s monitors.

He was feeling it too. Each breath seemed thinner, less substantive. No matter how deeply he tried to fill his lungs, he just couldn’t get enough air. Again, panic gnawed at the edges of his mind, but he beat it back and tried to keep his breathing steady. Max just needed him to hold out for another couple of minutes.

The light dropped from his icy fingers, and he was so cold he’d gone beyond shivering. He kept trying to breathe air that simply wasn’t there, and no amount of mental trickery could negate that fact. He’d rolled the dice and come up short. Juan never pictured it like this. He’d always assumed he’d die in a gunfight. Statistically speaking, he should have been shot down years ago. But of all the bullet scars his body carried, not one was in a critical area. It was funny. To survive all that and die while on a dive.

He wanted to laugh at the irony, but there wasn’t enough air, so he settled for an enigmatic grin and slowly lost his grip on consciousness.

* * *

“Come on, damnit!” Max barked. “We should see it by now.”

He stood over the tech’s shoulder, and both men watched the video feed from Little Geek. So far, they saw nothing but the barren plain of the seafloor. They were in the right position, but the wreck seemed to be gone.

“Are you sure you’re on-station?”

“Yes, Max. I don’t get it.”

The images were grainy, ill lit, and wavering but unmistakable in that there seemed to be no sign of the old mine tender. Both men stared until their eyes watered, trying to make out details that just weren’t there.

“There, there!” Max shouted. “Turn Little Geek, twenty degrees starboard.”

The tech worked the joystick while, four hundred fifty feet below them, Little Geekturned nimbly.

“Aha!” Max cried. Around the ROV was a debris field stretching far beyond the lights’ perimeter. They had been off by a few feet, but in this kind of work that could be the difference between success and failure. “Juan’s around here someplace.”

“Won’t he swim to the light?”

“If he can. Don’t know what shape he’s in.”

The little ROV threaded its way around the shattered wreckage, and this time it was the tech who saw a weak glow emerging from behind an old boiler. He guided the robot around the piece of machinery, and the light revealed the Chairman slumped up against the boiler, his hands resting palm up next to his dive light on the bottom. His head was canted over onto his shoulder in the unnatural pose of death. There were no bubbles emerging from his regulator.

“No,” Max whispered, and then repeated it a second time even softer. The third time he barely made a sound. “No.”

He couldn’t accept what he was seeing. He couldn’t believe Juan was dead. That he’d failed his best friend.

This time he shouted, “No!”

He reached over the tech’s shoulder and grabbed Little Geek’s joystick and used it to ram the ROV into the Chairman as hard as its little motors could push.

Rather than fall over from the impact, Cabrillo’s corpse straightened. His head rose off his shoulders, and an arm came up to grasp the micro-sub.

The tech gasped. “Was he asleep?”

“Judging by how thin the bubbles are coming from his regulator, I think he passed out.” Max couldn’t contain the smile plastered across his face.

* * *

Juan had been dreaming of his late wife, killed in a single-car crash while he was away on a mission for the CIA. He knew in his heart that her loneliness had turned her to drinking. Her blood alcohol level that night was twice the legal limit. It didn’t matter that she’d been out with friends. And that they hadn’t stopped her from getting behind the wheel. Her death was his fault. Period. And when he was especially down, her memory haunted his dreams.

Cabrillo jolted awake to a blinding light shining into his eyes. His predicament rushed in on him a moment later, but it took his air-starved brain another few seconds to understand what had happened. It was Little Geek. That was the source of the light. He reached out for the small ROV and felt the extra tanks Max had secured to it like a pack mule’s panniers. Hanley had even positioned them so their umbilical air feeds were within easy reach.