Renko’s blue eyes widened in shock and his mouth gaped.
“Admiral Kenin has communicated to me that following this mission you will have a boat of your own.” Patronov stood and struck his hand across the small desk that took up a quarter of his cabin’s floor space. “Congratulations.”
Renko’s face went from ashen fear to flushed jubilation in the blink of an eye. He shook his captain’s hand, his grin widening until he could no longer contain himself, and he whooped aloud.
“I can’t believe this,” he said when he could finally speak. “I didn’t know I was even up for promotion.”
“You weren’t,” Patronov said as he retook his seat. His chilly tone cooled the room by twenty degrees, and Renko’s smile turned a little sickly.
He fumbled back into his chair. “Sir?”
“Let me tell you a story,” Patronov said in a disarming tone as if the frostiness of the past few seconds had never happened. “Eighteen months ago, before you joined this crew, we were tasked to act as a dive platform on a salvage job. It took place close to the eastern seaboard of the United States, though not in her territorial waters. We were on-station for a week, and the divers recovered items of a technical nature from a sunken ship.” He forestalled his subordinate’s obvious question by adding, “Admiral Kenin never cleared me, so I have no idea what they took off the derelict. All I know is, the wreck was about a hundred years old, and Kenin felt the reward justified the risk of discovery by America’s Coast Guard or Navy.
“I just got a message from the Admiral that he’s learned that another group is showing unusual interest in the derelict and may dive on it soon.”
“Who is this group?”
“American mercenaries,” Patronov said with obvious distaste. “It was decided the first time we were there not to destroy the wreck so we wouldn’t draw attention to it. Now Kenin wants us to blow it off the bottom with a couple of torpedoes. To do that, I need your authorization as XO to fire live shots as per procedure.”
“And if I go along with this, I get promoted?”
“Quid pro quo.”
Renko rubbed his lantern jaw. “I take it neither this act nor the original dives were authorized by the Navy High Command?”
“I’m sure a few know about it, those closest to Admiral Kenin, but, no, this operation is strictly off the books.”
“What about the mercenaries?”
“According to Kenin’s source, they aren’t capable of detecting us, let alone fighting us. We’ll sneak in low and slow, pop two USET-80s into the wreck, and be gone before they know we were there. If they happen to have divers on the bottom, well, that’s just bad luck for them. So what do you say, Paulus, do you want to be a captain at the age of thirty-one? That would, by the way, give you a two-year head start on breaking my service record.”
Renko stood and reached across the desk to shake his captain’s hand. “I’m your man, sir.”
“Very good, alert the torpedo room that we will be loading two tubes with the antisubmarine fish. We have a good three days’ sailing to get into position, but I want them prepped down there.”
“Aye, sir.”
Patronov jotted some coordinates onto a piece of scratch paper. “That’s the GPS location for the wrecked ship. Refine and plot our new course. Remain at full speed.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” Renko pivoted on his heel and left the cabin.
Patronov could tell his subaltern was excited about his future prospects, but, then again, all deals with the devil promised much. It wasn’t until much later you learn the costs.
“You are the very picture of boredom,” Max said, stepping off the elevator at the rear of the op center.
Cabrillo settled his coffee cup into a holder built into the Kirk Chair, the central command platform in the middle of the electronics-packed, low-ceilinged space. On the main view screen was a murky video feed coming up from a tethered probe poking around the bottom of the Atlantic nearly three hundred feet down. Details were hard to come by as the unmanned submersible ran its cameras over the hull of an unidentified ship.
“Got that right,” he replied. “Twenty-two wrecks checked and twenty-two consecutive goose eggs.”
“So what are we looking at?” Max asked as he crossed the room with a plate of food in his hand. He set it next to Cabrillo’s elbow. “Fish tacos, by the way. Fresh pico de gallo, but the chef hid a ghost chili in there, so watch yourself.”
“Thanks. I’m starved.” Cabrillo ate half of a taco in a single bite, managing to not ruin his shirt when the shell inevitably collapsed. “What we are seeing, if my five days of experience has taught me anything, is a Boston long-liner that sank in 1960 or so.”
“Not our target?”
“Not even close. Do you know how many wrecks there are off the East Coast?”
“About thirty-five hundred,” Max replied. “And most of them are clustered between Richmond, Virginia, and Cape Cod. Less than a quarter of them are identified. Which leaves us searching a lot of haystacks for a single needle.”
“You are the paragon of the understatement.”
In the days since Cabrillo’s return to the ship after his ill-fated meeting with Wesley Tennyson, the Oregon had been scouring the seafloor with side-scan sonar looking for the mysterious mine tender that the professor said had been modified by Nikola Tesla. Murph and Stone had worked out the search parameters and overlaid it with a grid of shipwrecks in the region. There was good news. Since these waters were so heavily fished, all bottom obstructions, like boulders, outcroppings, and sunken ships, were clearly marked, though rarely identified by name.
That left them with forty possible candidates to explore with their remotely operated vehicle, named Little Geek after a similar-looking ROV from the movie The Abyss. They could safely ignore wooden-hulled ships and natural rock formations by first verifying each target with a magnetometer to detect the presence of metal. Once they did have a steel-hulled wreck, it was a laborious process of lowering the suitcase-sized robot through the moon pool to the bottom and visually inspecting each wreck. Identification was more difficult because many of the vessels were festooned with nets torn off fishing trawlers as they plied the seas. Nets that not only obscured the wrecks but made it easy for an ROV to get trapped.
Juan hit a button on the arm of his command chair. “Cabrillo to Moon Pool. This one’s a bust, Eric. Reel in Little Geek, and we’ll check out target twenty-three.”
“Roger that, Chairman.”
“Helm, as soon as the ROV’s aboard, steer one eight-five at twenty knots.” That was far below the ship’s best speed, but with the waters so busy, it wouldn’t do to show off the Oregon’s true potential. In fact, twenty knots seemed out of reach for a rust-streaked old tramp like her, but that was all part of her elaborate deception. “Next potential target is twenty miles away.”
Juan rubbed his eyes. “I can’t believe Dirk Pitt did this kind of stuff for a living. Talk about boring.”
“Different strokes,” Max replied. “And you and I both know there isn’t a whole lot of boring on that man’s résumé.
“By the way, how is it that the Emir isn’t screaming his head off that we’re not there to protect him?”
“We lucked out. He’s rafting with a Saudi prince and some Mexican telecommunications billionaire, if you can call three mega-yachts lashed together rafting. Linda tells me they’re trying to outdo each other on hosting lavish dinners. She says each of them has had chefs and food flown into Hamilton and choppered out to them. She Googled one of the wines and saw it sold at auction four years ago for ten grand.”
“Per case?”
“Bottle. And the three of them and their nubile guests went through eight of them at dinner.”
Max cocked an eyebrow. “‘Nubile’?”
“My adjective. Linda’s description of them was less kind. I thi
nk she even used the word ‘floozy.’”
Hanley chuckled. “There aren’t too many women who can make her jealous in the looks department.”
“Well, six of them are with her now and she’s not too happy about it. She says we have two more days before they break up their little party and the Emir heads to Bermuda. If we don’t find the wreck by this time tomorrow, we’ll call off the search, nursemaid our esteemed friend on one of the safest islands in the world for two weeks, and then head back here to keep looking.”
“What do you think we’ll find?”
“I have no idea, but if Pytor Kenin is interested, it can’t be good.”
Eric Stone’s voice came over the speakers built into the ceiling. “Little Geek’s back aboard, and the keel doors are closed.”
“Helm,” Cabrillo prompted.
“On it, Chairman.”
Juan flipped the main view screen to the bridge cameras and expanded it so he had an almost panoramic view of the ocean. The seas were choppy and leaden under a gray sky, and in the distance there were dark curtains of rainsqualls. He could see the silhouettes of two ships along the horizon, one heading north and the other south. As the Oregon picked up speed, her ride stabilized, and the constant rolling she’d endured while hovering over the old sunken trawler faded away.
He wolfed down the second taco and gave a sudden gasp. His face reddened, and he began panting.
“Ghost chili?” Max asked mildly.
“Yes,” Cabrillo managed to wheeze with tears streaming from his eyes.
“I hate to be the one to tell you this,” Hanley breezed, placing a hand on Cabrillo’s shoulder as the Chairman tried to suck air past his tortured tongue, “but this is payback for adding salt and pepper to your meat loaf last night. Chef said it was seasoned perfectly, and if you want his food spicier, he’s more than happy to oblige. Enjoy.”
He sauntered from the op center, leaving the Chairman literally unable to reply.
An hour later, they were over the spot where the charts indicated an obstruction on the seafloor. They lowered the side-scan sonar, a towed array that hovered just above the seabed, and took acoustical pictures of its surroundings. More often than not, the obstruction, whether man-made or natural, was exactly where the charts said it would be, but ocean-floor mapping wasn’t the Oregon’s primary, secondary, or even tertiary mission. As a result, their sonar unit wasn’t up to par when compared to outfits like NOAA or NUMA, and it took time to find the target. In this case, they spent an hour running lanes north and south over a swath of the sea, much like a weekender mowing the lawn. It was this tedious back-and-forth scanning that tested Cabrillo’s patience.
Finally, after their second hour of fruitless search, the display screen showed an object that began reflecting sonar waves back to the array.
Juan felt the initial spike of adrenaline that any hunter does at the first sign of the quarry. It turned to bitter disappointment when the sonar revealed an object at least five hundred feet long and so oddly shaped that it could only be a stone outcropping on the otherwise barren continental shelf.
Another bust, he said to himself. He keyed the intercom. “Eric, to paraphrase Charlie Brown on Halloween, we got a rock. Go ahead and leave the sled deployed, our next target is only five miles away.”
The cable for the towed sonar was much stronger than the ROV’s umbilical, so they could leave it in the water as they transited to the next grid mark, but they would need to keep their speed below fifteen knots so as not to stress it too much.
“Okay.”
“Helm, next target is five miles away on two nineteen.”
“Making my course two nineteen at fifteen knots.”
Mark Murphy strolled out of the elevator wearing a seemingly blood-stained T-shirt with the words “I’m fine” written out over his chest. The young tech genius had his face buried in an iPad as he walked.
“About time,” Juan said. “You were supposed to spell me ten minutes ago.”
“You and I both know you weren’t going to leave the op center until you identified this latest target, so I monitored communications and came up when you pegged it.”
Juan frowned at being so easily read. “All right. I’ll give you this one. Just so you know, the array is still deployed.”
“Hello. Monitored communications. I knew that.”
“You’re in a mood,” Cabrillo remarked.
“Sorry, boss. I’ve been asked to peer-review an article by a friend at UC Berkeley and his conclusions are all wrong, and no matter how I try to help him see his mistakes, he’s just not getting it.”
“He doesn’t like being out-nerded?”
Murph grinned. “Nobody does.”
Juan spent the rest of the day on paperwork, had dinner with Eddie Seng and Franklin Lincoln, and watched a movie in his cabin before turning in for the night. They’d checked five more targets during Mark’s watch, and, like all the others before, they hadn’t found Tesla’s ship.
They had one more day before heading south for Bermuda. In the great scheme of things, a two-week hiatus guarding the Emir wasn’t a big deal, but Juan felt the specter of time looming over him. Kenin was covering his tracks, first in Kazakhstan, and again with Professor Tennyson. It followed that he would try to destroy Tesla’s experimental ship, if he knew about it, which Juan felt sure the Russian admiral did.
It was little wonder his sleep was restless.
The ringing of his bedside telephone roused him.
“H’lo,” he muttered. Cleared his throat and tried again. “Hello. This is Cabrillo.”
“Chairman, it’s Eric.”
“Yeah, Stoney. What have you got?”
“I think we found her.”
Juan noted it was five o’clock. Weak sunlight spilled around the curtains drawn over his cabin’s portholes.
“What time did you guys start this morning?” he asked, swinging his legs out of bed.
“We ran all night. Figured we’re searching so deep that we need halogens on the ROV anyway, and shipping traffic’s been light.”
“Where are we?”
“Target thirty-two.”
Juan knew that put them about twenty miles due east of Ocean City, Maryland. Almost the exact center of the search grid Eric and Murph had drawn up.
“Nicely figured,” he said.
Stone knew what Cabrillo meant. “Truth told, it wasn’t rocket science, but thanks.”
“You’ve got a visual?” Juan had clamped the phone with his shoulder and was working the sock of his prosthetic leg over his stump.
“Little Geek’s down there now, and it looks to be a small, thirties-era warship, with some weird modifications. It looks like a cage was built over the entire deck up to and over the superstructure and bridge.”
“What’s the condition of the wreck?”
“She’s sitting pretty much upright on the bottom. There’s been some collapse, but, on the whole, she’s in better condition than you’d expect. Only problem is, she’s got a couple of nets snagged over her, so I don’t want to get Little Geek in too close and snarl the umbilical.”
“Okay. Alert the moon pool that I’m coming down, and wake Mike Trono.” Trono was the butt of a lot of jokes on the Oregon because he was the only ex–Air Force member of a crew dominated by Navy veterans. He’d been a pararescuer, one of those tasked to go behind enemy lines to save downed airmen, and he’d made his bones first in Kosovo and later in Iraq. He was also the only diver besides the Chairman certified to dive on trimix gas, which they would need to reach the mine tender’s depth.
“You’re going swimming?”
“Can’t risk Little Geek, but we can risk me. Also roust Eddie. I want him down there with us in the Nomad.” Cabrillo hung up the phone, threw on yesterday’s clothes, and made a quick pit stop in his bathroom.
&nb
sp; The largest single space aboard the Oregon other than the main hold is the sub bay, where they stored the two submersibles, and the moon pool, where they were launched through large doors cut into the ship’s keel. It was lit with stark-white lights that flashed reflections on the surging black water sloshing in the swimming-pool-sized hole. A prep crew was working on the Nomad 1000, the larger of the two mini-subs and the only one equipped with an air lock. The Nomad looked like a white lozenge with three small, forward-looking portholes mated to an industrial framework of ballast tanks, thrusters, battery packs, and a pair of nasty-looking mechanical arms equipped with feedback pincers that could collect the most delicate sea fan or rip apart a sheet of steel. The mini was rated to carry six people and could dive to a thousand feet. The smaller Discovery submarine was a sports car compared to its delivery-van cousin and could make this dive depth, but Cabrillo wanted the air lock as a contingency if anything went wrong. He and Mike could lock into the chamber and decompress inside if the sub had to make a quick ascent. Cabrillo’s natural pessimism was what made him an excellent contingency planner. Max always liked to tease him about his plans C, D, and E, and a lot of them were nuts, but they’d saved more operations than Hanley would ever admit.
Off in a corner of the cavernous room, engineers readied the most high-tech dive gear in the Oregon’s inventory. The more dangerous the environment, the more equipment man needs to survive. Put someone on a tropical isle and he can get away with little more than a grass skirt. Where Cabrillo was headed was as inhospitable to human life as the hard vacuum of outer space. Because of the increased pressure below a depth of about four hundred feet, the nitrogen that makes up the vast majority of air would saturate the blood and cause nitrogen narcosis, or rapture of the deep. It was a debilitating sense of euphoria that made even the simplest tasks impossible. To counter this, most of the nitrogen in the air Cabrillo and Trono would breathe had been replaced with undissolvable helium gas. The mix was called trimix because it did contain some nitrogen to prevent another debilitating problem called High Pressure Nervous Syndrome.