Текст книги "Medusa"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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CHAPTER 8

ZAVALA LAY ON HIS SIDE, HIS RIGHT ARM PINNED UNDER his hipbone, his left curled up to his chest. His legs were immobilized by a soft weight. Ignoring the jagged shards of pain stabbing under his ear, he lifted his head and saw Kane stretched belly down across his knees.

In the dim, battery-powered light, Zavala saw that the cabin was littered with papers, ditty bags, clothing, bottles of water, seat cushions, and other loose items. Zavala reached for his headset and held it to his ear. Silence.He tested Kane’s headset. Not even a hint of static.

The loss of communication was ominous, but Zavala’s optimistic nature would not let him dwell on such bad luck. He wiggled one leg, freed his foot, and used it to shove Kane’s body off the other leg. Kane rolled onto his back, and a low groan escaped his lips.

The painful exertion triggered waves of nausea in Zavala. He unclipped the first-aid kit from the wall and broke open an ampoule, waving it under his nostrils. The acrid odor snapped him to alertness.

He removed the good-luck cap. Gingerly probing his scalp with his fingertips, he found a lump that felt as big as an egg. He poured water from a canteen on a compress bandage and held it lightly against his head. Even the slight pressure was painful, but the throbbing eased.

Zavala tucked a seat cushion under Kane’s head. He removed Kane’s skullcap and applied the compress. Kane winced, and his eyes blinked wide open.

“Ow!”he said. A good sign.

Zavala lightened the pressure but kept the compress in place.

“Sorry, Doc, Florence Nightingale couldn’t make it, so you’re stuck with me,” Zavala said. “Try moving your toes and fingers.”

Kane flexed his hand and foot joints, then bent his legs at the knees, grimacing in pain. “Nothing seems broken.”

Zavala helped Kane sit up and handed him the canteen. He waited until Kane had slugged down a couple of gulps, then said, “What do you remember, Doc?”

Kane pursed his lips in thought. “I was looking out the window, broadcasting my observations.” He glanced at his headset.

“Don’t bother,” Zavala said. “The headsets don’t work.”

Kane’s face turned the color of oatmeal. “We’re not connected to the surface?”

“Temporarily . . . Keep talking.”

Kane took a deep breath. “We saw some kind of weird big fish or whale. Next, I remember heading for the moon. Then blotto. What about you?”

Zavala jerked a thumb upward. “Same scenario. I went airborne and slammed against the roof. I put my hand out to soften the blow, but all I got for the effort was a sore arm. Good thing I’ve got a hard head.”

“From the sounds of it, the cable probably slipped on the winch drum.”

Zavala said nothing.

“I don’t get it,” Kane said. “Why haven’t they winched us up by now?” He noticed that the bathysphere was perfectly still, and he seemed to catch his breath. “We’re not moving, Joe. What’s happened to us?”

Zavala wanted to avoid panic, but there was no sugarcoating their situation. “We seem to be sitting on the bottom, Doc.”

Kane looked at the instrument panel and saw that the systems were operating on batteries. “If we were still attached, we’d have power. Oh, hell! The cable must have snapped.”

“That’s almost impossible. And there could be other reasons for the breakdown. We’re talking about maintaining contact over a cable through more than a half mile of ocean. Remember Beebe comparing the bathysphere to a pea on a cobweb? No man-made system is flawless, but this isn’t the Titanic.Even if we were no longer connected to the surface, we’ve got other options.”

Kane brightened. “Duh, of course! Your flotation system.”

Zavala managed a smile. “What do you say we pop up to the Beebe lounge and mix a pitcher of margaritas?”

“What are we waiting for?” Kane was as ebullient as a condemned man given an eleventh-hour reprieve.

Zavala unclipped a nylon bag from the wall and asked Kane to clean up the cabin. Busywork would lift Kane’s spirits as well.

“The compressed-air tanks are in the center of the platform, and they feed into flotation bags that are stuffed into the skids,” Zavala explained. “When the GO switch is activated, doors open in the sides of skids, compressed air fills the bags instantly, and they lift us to the surface, where the ship can snag us.”

Kane rubbed his palms together in anticipation. “Margaritaville, here we come.”

Zavala slid over to the instrument panel. “Funny, isn’t it? We go through all sorts of trouble to get to the bottom of the sea, and, when we finally make it, we want to go home.”

“We can discuss the philosophical implications on the deck of the Beebe,” Kane said. “I’d be happy just to be able to stretch out my legs.”

Zavala turned his attention to a plastic box attached to the wall next to the instrument panel. He unsnapped the box’s cover to reveal a red button emblazoned with an arrow pointing up.

“This is a two-step process,” he explained. “This button arms the system, and that identical button on the control panel activates it. When I say go,you hit the switch, and I’ll do the same with mine. Then hold on. There’s a ten-second delay.”

Kane put his finger to the button Zavala had indicated. “Ready.”

“Go,”Zavala said.

Zavala had tested the escape system in a water tank and prepared himself for a muted bang and a whoosh, but nothing happened at the end of ten seconds. He told Kane to try again. Again, nothing happened. Zavala checked a troubleshooting display that would have indicated a system malfunction but saw nothing amiss.

“Why won’t it work?” Kane asked.

“Something must have gotten banged around when we hit bottom. Don’t worry, I programmed in a backup system.”

Zavala tapped a keypad to reroute the signal and told Kane to try again. Again, there was a failure to inflate. They would have to go with the manual switch. Zavala opened another plastic-covered panel and looped his fingers through a handle attached to a cable. Pulling the cable, he explained, would produce a small electrical current that would trigger the flotation mechanism.

He clenched his teeth and yanked. Nothing happened. He tried several more times, but it was no use. The manual trigger failed to activate.

Kane watched these fruitless attempts with growing apprehension. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

Zavala’s hand dropped from the manual switch. He stared into space, letting his mind’s eye travel through the workings of the flotation system. His gaze wandered to the window.

He flicked the searchlight on and was puzzled when he didn’t see a glimmer. He moved closer to the window. Sliding a flashlight from its wall rack, he pointed the light out the window, cupping his eyes to prevent reflection. The light failed to penetrate the darkness.

He passed the flashlight to Kane. “Take a look.”

Kane peered through the porthole. “Hell, there’s black mud against the windows.”

“We came down hard. There’s nothing wrong with the system. The mud is blocking the flotation doors.”

Kane was silent for a time. When he did speak, it was almost in a whisper. “We’re screwed, aren’t we?”

Zavala reached out and gripped one of Kane’s wrists tightly. “Calm down, Doc,” he said evenly.

Their eyes locked for a second, and Kane said, “Sorry, Joe, your call.”

Zavala loosened his grip. “I don’t mean to sound casual. We’re in a tough spot, yes, but it’s far from hopeless. The folks on the Beebemust know something has happened, and they’ve got our position.”

“What good will thatdo if the cable is broken? They still have to haul us up somehow.”

“I’m sure Kurt will figure it out.”

Kane snorted. “Austin’s an impressive guy, but he’s not a miracle man.”

Zavala thought about the countless times Austin’s courage and resourcefulness had snatched them back from the edge of disaster.

“I’ve worked with Kurt for years, and he’s as close to a miracle worker as I’ve ever seen. If anyone can get us out of here, he can. We’ve got more than three hours of air and enough power to give us light and heat. Our biggest problems will be boredom and el bano.” He picked up a plastic bag. “This should take care of our sanitary needs .Since we’ve been thrown together by the fates, maybe we should know more about each other. Tell me about your work,” Zavala said.

Kane’s face lit up, and he seemed to forget his claustrophobic surroundings. “My specialty is the phylum Cnidaria, which includes the class commonly known as jellyfish. Many people don’t find jellyfish terribly exciting.”

“I think jellyfish are veryexciting,” Zavala said. “I was zapped once by a Portuguese man-of-war. The encounter was extremely painful.”

“The man-of-war is not considered a ‘true’ jellyfish but rather a colony of different organisms living in symbiosis. The tentacles are equipped with thousands of nematocysts-the venom apparatus-and grow as long as sixty-five feet. Size isn’t everything, though. You’re lucky you didn’t encounter the little sea wasp. That critter’s string could have landed you in the morgue.”

“I didn’t consider myself lucky at the time,” Zavala said as he recalled the burning sting. “What’s the focus of your research?”

“My lab has been looking into ocean biomedicine. We think the ocean will be the most important future source of pharmaceutical compounds.”

“Like the Amazon rain forest?”

“There’s been a lot of interest in the Amazon, but we think the ocean will far surpass anything that’s been found in the jungle.”

“You’re talking jellyfish instead of jaguars?”

“There are more similarities than differences between the land and the sea. Take curare, for instance. The Amazon Indians used it as a paralyzing poison on their arrow tips, but its muscle-relaxant properties make it useful as a medicine.”

“And you see similar potential for jellyfish?”

“That and more.Jellyfish, squid, octopi, snails-seemingly simple creatures with complex systems for feeding and defense.”

“What sort of work were you doing in the Pacific Ocean?” Zavala asked.

“I was working on a project that could affect every man, woman, and child on this planet.”

“Now you’ve reallygot my attention. Tell me more.”

“Can’t,”Kane said, “top secret. I’ve already said too much. If I told you more, I’d have to kill you.”

He realized the absurdity of his threat, given their dire circumstances, and began to giggle uncontrollably. Zavala choked back his laughter. “Laughing uses up too much oxygen.”

Kane became serious again. “Do you really think Austin is going to come to our rescue?”

“He’s never failed before.”

Kane pretended he was zipping his mouth shut. “Then the nature of our work will have to remain classified in case there is a slim chance that we’ll get out of this damned hollow steel ball.”

Zavala laughed softly. “I guess your romance with Beebe’s world is over.”

Kane managed to eke out a smile. “Your turn, Joe. Tell me how you came to NUMA.”

“Admiral Sandecker hired me right out of college. He needed a good mechanic.”

Zavala was being typically modest. The son of Mexican immigrants, he had graduated from New York Maritime College with a degree in marine engineering. He had a brilliant mechanical mind and expertise in every known kind of propulsion, able to repair, modify, or restore any engine-automobile, ship, aircraft-be it steam, diesel, or electric.

Sandecker had heard reports about the bright young student and recruited him before he received his diploma. He was NUMA’s top submersible designer of manned and unmanned vehicles. And he was a skilled aircraft pilot as well.

“You make it sound like NUMA hired you to change tires in the agency’s motor pool,” Kane said. He glanced around the interior of the bathysphere. “We wouldn’t be alive if it hadn’t been for the modifications you installed in the B3.”

Zavala shrugged. Despite his reassurances, he knew that their rescue was problematic. Using less air would only prolong the inevitable. He glanced at the display panel: slightly more than two hours of air left. Sleepy from the effects of stale atmosphere, he closed his eyes and tried not to think about the air supply ebbing away.

CHAPTER 9

ONCE AGAIN, AUSTIN WATCHED, TIGHT-LIPPED, AS THE dripping tether snaked from the ocean without its payload. He swore a sailor’s oath at the loss of the ROV, and called the captain in the bridge.

“The ROV cable’s been sheared off just like the bathysphere’s,” Austin said. “Looks like someone worked it over with a pair of hedge clippers.”

“This is crazy!” Captain Gannon said. He calmed down, and asked, “Should I send down another ROV?”

“Hold off for now,” Austin said. “I need a couple of minutes to think this through.”

Austin stared at the heaving sapphire surface of the sea. He pushed aside thoughts of the two men locked into a steel ball half a mile below the ship’s hull and focused on the retrieval of the bathysphere as a salvage problem. His nimble mind began to formulate a rescue plan and assemble the equipment he would need to carry it out.

He called the captain back. “I’ve got an idea, but I’ll need your help.”

“Tell me what you want and it’s yours, Kurt.”

“Thanks, Captain. I’ll meet you in the machine shop.”

The Beebe’s machine shop, below the main deck, was a vital component of the ship’s operation. A research vessel is basically a platform that allows scientists to plumb the depths with instruments or underwater vehicles. Powerful ocean forces constantly battered the vessel. The Beebe’s shop kept the ship operational with a crew of only three, including the chief mechanic, and an array of tools to cut, grind, turn, mold, mill, and press.

Austin had until then kept the shop busy tending to the specialized needs posed by the bathysphere’s launch. As project director, he had developed a close professional relationship with the chief machinist, a burly, troll-like man named Hank, who liked to wrap up a project with the words, “Good enough for government work.”

Hank must have heard about the B3 because he greeted Austin with a somber face. “What can I do to help, Kurt?”

Austin unfolded the diagram of the B3 and spread it out on a table. He pointed to the horseshoe-shaped metal swivel that joined the cable to the top of the sphere.

“I need to snag the bathysphere here.” Austin sketched out a hook attached to the end of a cable and showed it to Hank. “Can you put this setup together in less than an hour?”

“Forty-five minutes, tops,” Hank said. “I’ll splice the cable to a spare hook. But, I’ll be honest, I can’t give you something that is likely to last for the half-mile haul back up to the surface.”

“I’m only interested in the first ten or twenty feet,” Austin said. “Once the B3 is clear of the muck, it can trigger its own flotation system.”

“Getting the hook attached to the swivel is going to be tough at this depth,” Gannon said. “The gap between the swivel and the top of the B3 is only a few inches.” He held his thumb and forefinger up. “Like trying to snag something this size from a helicopter half a mile in the air. It would be almost impossible, in my opinion.”

“I disagree,” Austin said. “It would be absolutelyimpossible. That’s why I’m not going to do it from the surface.”

“How are you . . . ?”A thoughtful look came to the captain’s face. “Bubbles?”

“Why not? She’s been tested to five thousand feet.”

“But . . .”

“Let’s talk about it in the control van,” Austin said.

The box-shaped, twenty-foot-long atmospheric-diving-suit control van was next to the ship’s garage, where the ship’s underwater vehicles and other deep-ocean hardware were housed. The van had a console that was separate from the controls for the ship’s submersibles, and it had a workshop where Bubbles was stored.

Austin and Gannon stood in front of a puffy-limbed, anthropomorphic metal figure that resembled the Michelin man. The transparent dome capping the figure could have come from a bubblegum dispenser.

Bubbles’s technical name was atmospheric diving suit, or ADS, but it was considered an anthropomorphic submersible. A diver using the ADS could go to great depths without having to worry about the killing water pressure or the need to decompress. The bulky life-support system on the back of the aluminum body, or hull as it was known, could sustain the pilot for six to eight hours, or for more time in an emergency.

Bubbles was an experimental ADS owned by the U.S. Navy. It was a successor to the Hardsuit 2000, which had been developed for submarine rescue. The research vessel was transporting Bubbles as a courtesy, then rendezvousing with a Navy ship near Bermuda after the B3 expedition.

Gannon stood with his hands on his hips, vigorously shaking his head.

“I can’t let you do this, Kurt,” said the captain. “Bubbles is a prototype.She hasn’t been field-tested yet. Last I heard, she’s got a for-sure depth limit of only twenty-five hundred feet.”

“Joe would tell you that any engineer worth his salt builds in a huge safety factor,” Austin said. “The Hardsuit 2000 made it to three thousand feet in test dives.”

“Those were testdives, not operational dives. That’s a fact.”

Austin pinioned the captain with his coral-blue eyes. “It’s alsoa fact that Joe and Kane will freeze to death or die from lack of air if we don’t do something about it.”

“ Damnit,Kurt, I know that! I just don’t want someone else dying senselessly.”

Austin realized he had come down too hard and backed off.

“Neither do I,” he said. “So here’s my offer: you get Bubbles gussied up for a dive, I’ll get an opinion on dive limits from the Navy and abide by whatever they tell me.”

Gannon had learned a long time ago that Austin was a primal force, as unstoppable as the east wind.

“What the hell,” the captain said with a lopsided grin. “I’ll get Bubbles ready to go.”

Austin gave him a thumbs-up, and hurried to the bridge. A satellite phone connected him with the Navy’s Deep Submergence Unit in California. He listened with mounting impatience to a recorded directory and spoke with several people before he landed on a junior officer in the unit’s Diving Systems Support Detachment. Austin quickly laid out his predicament.

The officer let out a low whistle.

“I sympathize with your problem, sir, but I can’t give you permission to use the Hardsuit. That would have to come from higher up. I’ll connect you.”

“I’ll deal with the Navy brass,” Austin said with thinly veiled annoyance. “I just want to know if the new Hardsuit can dive a half mile.”

“That’s what the tests were supposed to determine,” the officer said. “The weak spots in an ADS have always been the joints. With the new joint design, theoretically it’s possible to go deeper, maybe to five thousand feet. But if there is one tiny flaw, you could have a massive failure.”

Austin thanked the officer and said he would clear the dive with the officer’s superiors, although he didn’t say when. He hoped to be unavailable by the time the Navy bureaucracy reacted.

While Austin had been discussing the Hardsuit with the officer, a nagging thought had been buzzing around in his head like a hungry mosquito. Heading back down to the ROV control center, he found the young woman who had tracked the ROV still sitting at her station. He asked her to rerun the last sixty seconds of its video. She clicked her mouse and the sea bottom a half mile down appeared on the screen. Once again, Austin watched the ROV soar like a bird over the undulating vegetation covering the seafloor. Its camera soon picked up the splatter from the B3’s impact, then the bathysphere’s dome protruding from the crater.

“Freeze the image right there,” Austin said. He pointed to a dark area in the upper-left-hand corner of the screen. “Now, run it in slow motion.”

The shadow moved off the screen.

The ROV operator stared at the screen, jutting out her lower lip. “I don’t remember seeing that.”

“It was easy to miss,” Austin said. “We were all focused on finding the bathysphere.”

She sat back, folded her arms, and focused on the oblong shape that was barely visible at the edge of the searchlight beam.

“Might be a fish or whale,” she said, “but something about it isn’t quite right.”

Austin asked the operator to enlarge the image. It broke apart as it was blown up, but Austin nonetheless detected a vague manta-ray shape to the shadow. He asked her to print the image, and to play back the final transmission from the bathysphere.

The operator ran off a printout, then reduced the shadow image and tucked it in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen, which now displayed a picture of Kane. He was rattling off an excited description of the luminescent fish swimming around the bathysphere when suddenly he stopped short and pressed his face against the window.

“What was that?”Kane said.

The voice-activated camera switched to Zavala.

“You see a mermaid, Doc?”

Back to Kane.

“I’m not surewhat I saw, but I know one thing: it wasbig !”

Austin snatched up the printout and headed for the aft deck. The big double doors on the garage were wide open, and the Hardsuit had been wheeled out under the crane that would lift it off the deck.

Austin showed Gannon the ROV printout.

“This object was nosing around the B3 when both cables were cut,” he said.

The captain shook his head. “What isthat thing?”

“Got me,” Austin said. He glanced at his watch. “What I doknow is that the B3 will soon run short of power and air.”

“We’ll be ready in a few minutes,” the captain said. “Did you contact the Navy?”

“A Navy engineer told me that, theoretically, Bubbles could dive to five thousand feet.”

“Wow!” the captain said. “Did you get an okay to use the ADS?”

“I’ll work on it later,” Austin said with a quick smile.

“Why did I even ask?” the captain said. “Hope you realize that you’re making me your accomplice in hijacking Navy property.”

“Look on the bright side. We can be cell mates at a federal country-club prison. Where do things stand?”

Gannon turned to the head machinist, who was standing by.

“Hank and his crew did a hell of a job,” the captain said.

Austin inspected the machine shop’s work and gave Hank a pat on the back.

“Good enough for government work,” he said.

The severed end of the bathysphere’s cable had been looped through a hook and then laid back along itself in a classic sailor’s eye splice and wound dozens of times with thin steel wire. Austin thanked the rest of the shop crew for their good work, then asked them to attach the hook to the ADS frame.

While the crew tended to his request, Austin hurried to his cabin and exchanged his shorts and T-shirt for thermal underwear, a wool sweater, and wool socks. He zipped himself into a crew coverall and pulled a knit cap down over his thick mane of hair. Although the Hardsuit had a heating system, the temperature inside could drop to forty degrees or less at depth.

Back up on deck, Austin quickly explained the rescue plan. Making a silent plea to the gods of dumb luck to look approvingly on this venture, he climbed up a stepladder and eased his muscular body into the lower half of the Hardsuit, which separated into two parts at the waist. Once the top half of the suit was on, he tested the power, communications link, and air supply. Then he gave the order to launch.

The frame and Hardsuit were lifted from the deck and lowered into the water. Austin called for a halt at thirty feet down to retest the systems. While everything was in working order, he was sobered by the fact that the Navy’s record-breaking two-thousand-foot dive had taken years of planning and teams of specialists to pull off. It was a far cry from the mad dash to the bottom he was about to undertake.

The Hardsuit helmet’s digital time display told him that the bathysphere had less than an hour’s supply of air left.

He reached out with his hand-pod clamp and detached the hook from the frame. First making sure the hook was clamped tightly, he gave the order to send him to the bottom of the sea.

The cable winches for the suit and hook worked in tandem to lower Austin. The quick descent kicked up bubbles that obscured his view of his surroundings. As the minutes ticked away on the digital clock, he kept a close eye on the depth gauge.

After passing two thousand feet, Austin was aware that the suit now had entered uncharted territory, but his mind was too busy with other things to contemplate the possibility that it might have been pushed beyond its limits. At twenty-eight hundred feet, still with no discernible problem, he felt a change in the speed of his descent.

Gannon’s voice came on the intercom.

“We’re slowing you down so you don’t drill a hole through the bottom, Kurt.”

“Appreciate that. Hold at three thousand.”

The winch soon slowed to a stop.

The curtain of bubbles cleared around the dome that encased his head. Austin switched on lights that would have been useless during descent. Their pale yellow shafts accentuated blackness so devoid of color that any attempt to describe it in words would be doomed to fail.

All systems were working, and the joints were still watertight. Austin called for more slack on the cable. The winch slowly lowered him more until he was fifty feet off the bottom.

“You’re on your own from here on,” the captain said. “We’ll let out cable as you move.”

Scattered groupings and pinpoints of phosphorescence could be seen beyond the range of the searchlights, and odd-looking luminescent fish nosed up to the faceplate of Austin’s helmet.

He pressed down with his left foot and two vertical thrusters whirred, raising him up a yard or so. He next used his right foot to activate the horizontal thrusters, moving him forward several feet.

Austin tried moving his arms and legs and found that, even with the tremendous water pressure, the suit’s sixteen well-oiled joints allowed for an amazing range of movement.

He activated the suit’s camera zoom and focused on an anglerfish attracted by the light.

“Picture’s coming through,” the captain reported. “Good definition.”

“I’ll see if I can find something for the family album. Moving out.”

Skillfully handling the thruster controls, Austin piloted the Hardsuit horizontally, tilting forward slightly, cable trailing behind.

The seven-hundred-pound ADS lost its clumsiness and moved through the water as if on wings. Austin focused on a small sonar screen glowing wheat-colored yellow. Employing a range of fifty feet to either side of the suit, it cut a swath a hundred feet wide. It tracked his position, heading, speed, and depth as it read the bottom.

A dark object appeared on the screen, approximately twenty-five feet to his right and down.

Austin maneuvered the Hardsuit into a sharp right turn and descended until the searchlights reflected off the gleaming plastic-and-metal surface of the ROV. It was lying on its back like a dead beetle.

Gannon also saw it. “Thanks for finding our ROV,” his voice came over the communicator.

“My pleasure!” replied Austin. “B3 should be within spitting distance.”

He extended the range of his search a hundred feet, then spun around slowly. The sonar picked up another object close by. Accelerating too quickly, he overshot the bathysphere and, turning sharply, had to come around again.

Austin hovered some twenty feet over the B3. The temperature inside the Hardsuit had dropped, yet sweat beaded his forehead. The difficulty of the task in this hostile environment having dawned on him, he knew that a mistake made in haste could be fatal. He took a deep breath, pressed the vertical-control pedal, and began his descent to the bathysphere entombed in mud below.