Deep Fire Rising m-6 Page 16
“I hear you, Jim. Two hundred sixty-five.” The pilot lifted the sub away from the wreck of the Smithback and killed the lights. The darkness became impenetrable once again as they moved steadily away from the ghostly hulk.
Alan turned on a portable tape player to drown out the incessant buzz of the forward thrusters. An up-tempo jazz song filled the cramped cockpit. “I’ve dived on about twenty wrecks,” he said after a few minutes. “You see that kind of collapse on older ships. After corrosion eats through the steel, they implode. We found a World War One freighter once off the coast of France. She’d fallen apart like that. Nothing more than a sandwich of decks and rust. But I’ve never seen anything like what happened to the Smithback.”
“I can’t explain it either.”
“But you have an idea?”
“Maybe,” was all Mercer said. Without at least a bit of evidence he wasn’t about to voice his off-the-wall theory.
Jervis flew the little sub by her sophisticated suite of sensors and didn’t seem bothered that he couldn’t see more than a half inch outside the Lexan dome. Mercer had become comfortable in the disorienting environment and settled deeper into his seat. The temperature in the cabin was down to fifty-eight degrees and he was thankful for the sweatshirt. He kept his hands clamped between his legs and still they felt frozen. Part of his chill came from what he feared he’d find at the tower.
Forty-five minutes later, Jim McKenzie called a change in course and warned them they were a thousand yards from the tower. The sonar showed the seafloor was three hundred feet below Bob’s rounded hull. Jervis nosed the little sub downward as they approached the mysterious structure.
“We’ll start at the base,” he said, switching on the external lights. “C.W. can’t dive this deep, so we’re on our own for a while.”
“Okay.”
The first of the tower’s massive legs came into view when they were fifteen feet out. The steel column was at least forty feet in diameter. There didn’t appear to be any anchor mechanisms other than the structure’s massive weight driving it into the seafloor. Fifty feet up from the bottom, bolted girders extended off the leg and presumably attached to other columns. Angled cross members completed the skeletal design. It was like finding the Eiffel Tower in thirteen hundred feet of water.
They circled the tower as they rose, spiraling upward while keeping the sub scant feet from the structure. When they were two hundred feet from the bottom and still a hundred feet below where C.W. could help them investigate, they found the first propeller. The massive five-bladed affair was stationary, but each vane was wickedly curved for maximum efficiency if it began to rotate. In the wavery light it was difficult to tell what the forty-foot propeller was made of, but it appeared to be some sort of flexible material. The navy used malleable props on its quietest submarines to reduce cavitation noises.
“What do you make of that?” Jervis asked without expecting an answer.
Nestled within the labyrinth of structural steel behind the propeller was a large enclosed capsule at least twice the size of the submersible. Mindful of the thruster nacelles attached to Bob, Alan nosed the sub between some of the larger struts to get a closer look at the strange construction. An axle ran from the propeller into the rounded box. From its bottom, several large pipes dropped into the gloom. Mercer and Alan hadn’t noticed the pipes on their way up.
“It’s like a giant windmill,” Mercer said. “Notice how the blades face into the prevailing current. Water passing over the blades makes them turn.”
“To do what? Does it pump something out of the ground, like oil?”
“I don’t know. Back us out and let’s see what’s above us.”
They found three more of the large propeller and housing assemblies as they ascended. At seven hundred feet below the surface, C.W. waited for them in the bulbous ADS.
“How many of these things are below us?” he asked through the comm link.
“Four.”
“And there’s two more above us.”
“Did you find any kind of storage tanks?” Mercer inquired.
“Just the propellers and their support mechanisms. None of them are turning right now and I think they’re all linked by pipes. One thing I did notice is the water’s colder around the thinner of the pipes.” Thinner was a relative term. The network of plumbing that connected the machines had a minimum diameter of five feet.
“How much colder?”
“Five to seven degrees, according to the suit’s sensors.”
Mercer felt he was on the trail of that first scrap of evidence he needed. “Can we check temperatures at the base of the tower?” he asked Jervis.
“No problem. Remember, Bob’s designed for scientific exploration. I can get temperature, pressure and salinity readings every fifteen seconds.”
“C.W., stay here,” Mercer ordered, gripped by excitement. He was pretty sure he knew what they’d found. There was a measure of risk staying this close to the tower, but he felt justified. “We’re going to need you when we come up. I want to open up one of the propeller’s housings to see what’s inside.”
“I’ll work at it while you’re down,” C.W. said in his surfer drawl.
“No. Wait for us to come back.”
“Oh, sure, man,” he said, chastened by Mercer’s sharp tone.
Alan Jervis eased the sub away from the tower and sent the craft toward the bottom again. “What are you thinking?” he asked after they’d sunk through a thousand feet.
“Turbines can be used for three things,” Mercer said. “Pumping something up, injecting something down or generating electricity. There aren’t any transmission lines so this rig isn’t producing power. We didn’t find any reservoirs to hold something being pumped from the seafloor. That leaves us something being pumped down into the ground.”
“Makes sense, but wouldn’t there be reservoirs of whatever was being injected?”
“Not if it were seawater. Or if the system was a closed loop.”
“Which one do you think it is?”
“In a sense, both.”
“You gonna explain that?”
“Ever wonder how they keep hockey rinks frozen?”
Jervis chuckled. “I grew up in Arizona. Hockey wasn’t much of a priority.”
“The Coyotes play in Phoenix,” Mercer pointed out. “It’s done by pumping salty water — brine — through a system of tubes under the ice. Because of the salt, the brine remains liquid below thirty-two degrees. The supercold pipes keep the ice frozen and voila, slap shots in the desert.”
“Hold on,” Jervis interrupted, “we’re coming up on the bottom. The water temperature’s dropping faster than it should. It’s down four degrees in just fifteen feet.”
The lattice of struts and supports near the tower’s base wouldn’t allow them to get close to the pipes coming down from the turbine housings. Instead Mercer had Jervis circle the structure in ever-widening loops. Revealed under the lights, the bottom appeared featureless. The silt had a green cast in the artificial glow, and the blizzard of drifting organic material made it impossible to see more than a few feet. Still, Alan maneuvered the sub like an expert, keeping her nose scant feet above the abyssal plain.
“What’s that?” he asked after a few moments. “A crater?”
“Not sure,” Mercer said, but he was.
It took several minutes to cross over the crater from rim to rim. The bottom-profiling sonar showed it was a hundred feet deep. Mercer did the figures in his head. The crater had a volume of almost half a million cubic feet. He asked the pilot to hover at the edge of the large pit.
“What are we looking for?”
“Just hold it steady.” Mercer took hold of the manipulator controls.
“Hey, you can’t do that!” Jervis protested as the arms unfolded from their stowed position.
Mercer flexed them out straight, testing how his movements on the joysticks affected the joints and grapplers. “I’ll pay for any damage.”
“What’s going on down there?” McKenzie called over the comm.
“I want a soil sample,” Mercer said.
He eased the grapple hand into the ooze, causing a small avalanche of mud to slide below the submersible. Although there was no feedback resistance on the joysticks, Mercer could tell the arm hit something solid. A silvery bubble burst from the mud, and in the cavity he’d excavated he could see a strange white mass.
“What is that?” Jervis asked.
“Ice.”
“What? That’s impossible.”
Mercer turned to look at the pilot. “And yet there it is. The rig is a giant heat pump.”
“What for? This thing doesn’t make any sense.”
“Hey, guys,” C.W. called from above, his voice metallic from the echo within his suit. “Something’s happening up here. The blades are starting to turn. Wow.”
“What is it?” Alan asked quickly.
“Current can’t be more than a knot or two, but this thing’s spinning like it’s in a freaking hurricane.”
It took Mercer a second too long to digest what C.W. had just said. He’d been looking at the tower one way, ignoring the implications of another point of view. As he realized his mistake, his eyes widened, and yet when he spoke his voice carried a steel edge. “C.W., secure yourself to something. Grab on to the tower. Jim, can you hear me up there?”
“I’m here, Mercer, what’s going on?”
“We’re sitting on top of a methane hydrate deposit. That’s what sank the Smithback. You guys have got to get out of there.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Methane hydrate. The last great source of fossil fuel on the planet. It’s a gas kept locked in ice by the temperature and pressure on the seafloor. It’s normally stable, but I think this tower’s designed to cause the hydrates to melt. The gas is about one hundred fifty times the volume of its solid state. If the deposit is big enough, that much methane is going to cause the ocean to bubble up like champagne. If it’s bad enough, it will reduce the water density and the Surveyor ’s going to lose buoyancy. She’ll sink like a stone.”
“Is it erupting now?” McKenzie asked, understanding the danger.
“It’s going to.” Mercer’s first assumption about the tower being a heat pump had been correct. Only now he realized it wasn’t forcing cold brine into the soil to keep the hydrate stable, it was designed to draw it up in order to dissipate the chill in the warmer shallower water and trigger a gas burst.
The Smithback must have sailed through an eruption and struck an enormous chunk of hydrate ice that hadn’t dissolved on its journey to the surface. But that damage hadn’t caused her to sink. It was the change in water density. Ships stay afloat because they weigh less than the volume of water their hulls displace. In the case of the Smithback, the frothing mix of gas and water wasn’t dense enough or didn’t weigh enough to support the vessel’s mass. She began to weigh more than the water she displaced and lost buoyancy. At some critical point she would have dropped from the surface so suddenly that no one could have saved themselves. The Smithback would have careened toward the seafloor much faster than normal. The ship could have been doing fifty or more miles per hour when she hit bottom. No wonder there wasn’t much air escaping the hulk. It had blown from her when she impacted.
And the fire reported just before she sank? Methane hydrate, even in its ice form, was extremely flammable. The air around the ship would have been saturated with gas, and even the smallest spark would have set off a catastrophic explosion. Mercer purged the horrifying image from his mind, that of a vessel engulfed in flames while her crew vainly tried to understand why the small amount of damage from the impact was causing their ship to sink. He refocused his mind on his own impending predicament.
Over the comm link, Mercer could hear hurried orders being shouted in the topside control van. “We have to haul C.W. back aboard,” McKenzie protested.
“I don’t think you have time.”
Mercer pointed to where he wanted Jervis to guide the sub, away from where he suspected the next gas eruption would take place. On a CRT screen, the bottom-profiling sonar had drawn a digital picture of the surrounding seafloor, and it looked as though the tower had been erected in the middle of a series of hills. One of the hills had already vanished in a gas explosion, leaving the deep crater in its wake.
“C.W., what’s your status?” McKenzie asked.
“Stand by,” the young Californian called back. “Ah, I think I’m okay. I can do an emergency cut on my tether as long as Alan knows to come pick me up.”
“Temperature’s up three degrees,” Jervis warned.
Mercer keyed his mike. “C.W., when this deposit erupts, you’re going to be right above it. Are you sure you can hold on?”
“Yeah, I’ve locked the arms around a strut. I’m not going anywhere.”
Outside Bob’s cocoon of steel and composite materials, the water began to vibrate, and what little visibility they had vanished in a storm of fine silt. At first there was no sound, but quickly a bass tone built into a steady roar.
“Temp’s up another three.”
“Stay up-current of the tower and bring us to seven hundred feet,” Mercer ordered, banking that the plume of gas about to explode from the seafloor would drift away from them.
“Affirmative.”
With a suddenness no one expected, the ocean bottom vanished in a billowing smog that grew like the mushroom cloud of a nuclear detonation. The methane hydrate deposit, a massive pocket of frozen hydrocarbons, vaporized in a swelling cascade as warm water pumped from the top of the tower raised it to its boiling point. The leading edge of the gas raced for the surface, spinning in a maddened burst of energy like a giant tornado.
The sub was caught at the outer limit of the diffused eruption. Jervis had dumped ballast for the ascent and had the thrusters tilted down to help propel the craft toward the surface. Her rate of climb dropped once the frothy water engulfed the little sub.
“Damn,” Alan spat and increased thrust, mindful of the electrical charge remaining in the batteries.
“C.W., you’ve got to cut your tether,” Mercer shouted. “Jim, the deposit’s erupting. Get the Surveyor away as fast as you can. Head west against the current, otherwise you’ll be engulfed like the Smithback. Alan and I are trying to get into position if C.W. gets into trouble.”
“Once I’m off the tether, I lose communications.”
“I understand,” Mercer said. “We’re pushing Bob to reach your depth.” Outside the sub’s dome, the water surged and fizzed as though boiling.
“Rate of ascent down to fifty feet a minute and slowing,” Alan said.
“Can you dump more ballast?” asked Mercer, hating that for the duration of the dive he was nothing more than a passenger.
“Not if we want to hover at seven hundred to help C.W.”
“What about getting us farther from the main part of the gas plume?”
“If I change the vector on the thrusters, we’ll probably start falling. I’m afraid we’ll have to wait it out. Shit, we’re at neutral buoyancy.”
As hellish as the view from the sub was, what C.W. saw from inside the ADS was worse. The sub had been caught at the periphery of the eruption. He was right in the middle of it. So much methane had been released that at times he was engulfed in enormous sacs of the deadly gas. Stranded inside the bubbles, he could see water sluicing from his helmet like rain from a windshield. Then the bubble would pass and he’d be slammed again by the tremendous pressure of the sea. Several times he lost his footing and the suit’s metal claws that were his hands scraped against the tower strut.
At the surface, the scene was no better. McKenzie had
relayed Mercer’s orders to the bridge with no time to spare. The helmsman had slammed the throttle handles to full ahead and twisted the ship with her dynamic positioning thrusters so she was pointed to the west, upstream from the tower. No sooner had she begun to move than the first hint of the gas reached the surface. It was just a mild disturbance of dirty water, a localized phenomenon that would have been overlooked as a downburst of wind disturbing the sea.
But then more and more methane broached. Seething geysers of water shot thirty, forty, fifty feet in the air. It was as though the sea was dissolving. A dive buoy that hadn’t been retrieved during the emergency maneuver sank away as the water lost density. The Surveyor became sluggish. Gas pockets were displacing the seawater she needed to remain afloat. She squatted low, with swells running just a few feet from her gleaming rails. More and more gas appeared. And then the steady eastward current began to carry it away. The ship found clean water and floated higher, the red stripe of her Plimsoll line clearly showing along her flanks.
Mercer’s quick warning had saved them from the same fate as the USS Smithback. For he and Alan, the dice were still rolling. And the plucky little submersible was falling deeper into the abyss.
NEW YORK CITY
The SoHo loft was on an upper story that allowed golden light to stream through the tall, arched, cast iron framed windows. The bright rays made the wooden floor look aflame. The walls were exposed brick and the furniture was kept to a minimum — a futon couch, a low table, several large pillows strewn haphazardly about. The loft was one large room. The bathroom, with its stand-up shower, was screened by swatches of fabric hanging from the high ceiling. The kitchen was little more than a nook smaller than the galley on a modest sailboat.
The figure posing in the middle of the room was covered in sweat. The thermostat was at maximum. She stood on a thin mat, her back arched until her fingertips brushed the floor behind her. She was completely nude, and her small breasts shifted as she stretched. She bent farther and could press her knuckles to the mat. She flexed the supple muscles in one leg and slowly raised it, shifting her weight to her hands. She balanced on her fingers, her body completely still, not a tremor or any other outward sign of exertion. After holding there for several seconds, she continued to slowly ease her leg around until it slid between her arms and she settled on the mat in a gymnast’s split. She bent forward, resting her head on her slick thigh.