On top of that they would carry small cylinders of argon gas to inflate their dry suits. Argon conducted heat much more slowly than either helium or regular air, and the bottom temperature was less than forty degrees, so hypothermia was always an issue. All told, each man would be burdened with over a hundred fifty pounds of gear.
“Morning, Juan,” Mike Trono greeted. Trono was in his mid-thirties, with a slender build and thin straight brown hair. “I haven’t had a chance to ask, how’d you like Vermont?”
Trono was a native of the Green Mountain State.
“Beautiful, but the roads are atrocious.”
“Ah, potholes and frost heaves—oh, how I don’t miss thee.”
“You up for this?”
“Are you kidding me? I live for wreck diving. I spent my last vacation exploring the Andrea Doria.”
“That’s right. Didn’t Kurt Austin lead that trip?”
“Yeah. It was his second time down to her.”
A new voice, one with a refined English accent, intruded. “There are simply too many type A personalities aboard this ship.”
“Hello, Maurice,” Juan greeted the Oregon’s chief steward.
It didn’t matter that it was barely past five in the morning or that news of the discovery was less than fifteen minutes old, the retired Royal Navy man was dressed as elegantly as ever in razor-creased black slacks, a snowy white button-down shirt, and shoes so polished, they’d shame a Marine honor guard.
He had a white towel draped over one arm and carried a domed silver serving tray. He set down a carafe of black coffee and removed the dome. The tempting odor of scrambled eggs and country sausage beat back the briny scent of the sea that permeated the sub bay.
After they ate, both men stripped down and donned thermal diving underwear and socks. Then came the Ursuit Cordura FZ dry suits. These suits were of one-piece construction that left only the face exposed. That would be covered with dive helmets outfitted with integrated communications gear. A computerized voice modulator would null some of the effects of breathing helium, but both men would still be left sounding like an alto-voiced Mickey Mouse.
While they were suiting up, Eddie had performed his pre-dive checks, and the Nomad submersible was lowered into the water. Additional trimix tanks were attached to hard points on the hull so the two divers wouldn’t need to use their own supply until they were on the bottom.
“How you coming?” Cabrillo asked his dive partner.
“Good to go.”
Juan flashed Mike the universal OK sign for divers, pressing index finger to thumb, and pulled his helmet over his head. Mike did the same. The two took a couple of tentative breaths and made adjustments as needed.
“And a very good morning to the Lollipop Guild,” Max Hanley called from his station in the op center.
“Very funny,” Juan retorted, but his irritation went unheard because of his comical voice.
“Just so you know, the forecast is for light wind, and a sea running barely two feet. But be advised, you’ve got a five-knot current out of the south on the bottom. Get careless and you’ll be gone.”
“Roger that,” the two men acknowledged at the same time.
“Bus driver, you ready?” Cabrillo asked Eddie Seng.
“Say the word.”
“We’re going in.”
Juan and Mike threw each other another OK sign and unceremoniously rolled into the Atlantic’s cool embrace. Both were quick with inflating their suits and adjusting their buoyancy so they hovered like dark jellyfish just below the surface. They found handholds along the side of the Nomad and switched their air feeds to the spare tanks attached to her.
“Let’s go.”
“Hold on tight. Nomad, release.” A pause. “We are clear.”
Bubbles erupted around the submersible as Eddie purged her tanks and the thirty-foot mini-sub began its descent to the seafloor and whatever lay hidden on the derelict mine tender.
Cabrillo could feel pressure building on his suit and knew it would approach two hundred pounds per square inch when they reached the wreck. He continuously added argon gas to keep the material from crushing in on him. The cold temperature wasn’t a problem now, but it would eventually start seeping through the protective layers and leach heat first from his skin and then his very core.
Down they dropped, the blue-gray water of a dawn dive giving way to midnight blue and finally true black as they settled deeper and deeper. There was no sense of movement to their descent except for the steadily building current that swept tropical waters out of the Caribbean along the East Coast and eventually to Northern Europe.
Juan kept a constant vigil over his equipment, checking valves and his dive computer for time and depth and other details. He also checked in with Max and Eddie at regular intervals and maintained visual confirmation that his dive partner was okay. Laxity anywhere is dangerous. On a dive, it is deadly.
“Bottom coming up in fifty feet,” Eddie announced. “I’m going to switch on the lights.”
As powerful as they were, the xenon lamps mounted on the forward part of the submarine could throw a corona of light only twenty feet. It showed the ocean was full of snow—tiny particles of organic matter that continuously rained down from the surface, only this was much worse because of the current. Cabrillo had experienced this phenomena many times, but this trip was like trying to peer through a blizzard.
“Visibility sucks,” Mike complained.
“Say again,” Max radioed.
“No visibility,” Juan enunciated slowly.
“Copy that. Poor vis.”
“We’re coming down about fifty feet off the ship,” Eddie said. “I’ve got it on lidar. The vessel itself is eighty feet long, but she’s trailing a good two hundred feet of old fishing nets that’re snagged around her hull.”
A burst of silt erupted around the hull when Eddie gunned the sub’s motors a bit too hard. “Oops. Sorry about that.”
The submersible crawled out of a billowing cloud of sand that seemed to be flushed away by the Gulf Stream. Cabrillo got his first look at the wreck with his own eyes. The old Navy ship appeared as haunted and forlorn as any wreck he’d seen, and with the rotting nets waving in the current, she looked like an old castle draped in cobwebs. He felt a shiver run up his spine that had nothing to do with the temperature.
The ship itself was a slender, arrow-bowed craft, with good proportions to her superstructure and a single up-and-down funnel placed just aft of amidships. She had no name, but under the accumulated rime of sea growth the number 821 could be seen painted next to her main anchor hawsehole. It appeared that she’d settled evenly. There were no crushed hull plates, but the superstructure was showing signs of decay as portions of some decks had collapsed after nearly seventy-five years of the ocean’s corrosive assault.
“Would you guys turn on your helmet cams so we can get a visual up here?” Max prompted.
Juan turned on both his camera and his own lights while Mike Trono did the same.
As they edged closer, more details emerged, and Juan saw the odd frame built around the ship that Eric Stone had mentioned. The metal trusswork looked like it extended to just below the waterline and covered the entire ship in what was essentially a cage with openings of about two feet square. It was going to be a tight fit to get through the frame and actually explore the ship.
There was something really strange about the structure, whose purpose he couldn’t begin to guess. And then it occurred to him. While the rest of the ship was rust-streaked and matted with marine growth, the frame was shiny, and not a single organism had tried to make it their home. No clams grew there, like the colonies infesting the ship’s deck, no starfish clung to it, not even a stray coral polyp. It was as if the sea creatures shied away from the metal scaffold.
“Mike,” Juan called, “take a sample of that frame.
Priority one.”
“Copy. You want a sample of the frame,” Trono repeated back so there was no confusion.
Eddie settled the Nomad onto the seafloor about ten feet from the wreck. Cabrillo and Trono switched over to their own trimix tanks, waiting a minute to make certain they had regular airflow, then they pushed off from the mini-sub.
Eddie had positioned them so that the Nomad’s hull blocked the worst of the brutal current, and it was an easy swim over to the wreck. While Mike got busy with a diamond-toothed saw on one of the frame members, Cabrillo managed to ease himself through one of the square openings by first taking off his main tank and pushing it through ahead of himself. Once he had the tank strapped back in place, he swam over the open aft deck, where the ship had once deployed and repaired mines. Now that he was out of the Nomad’s protection, he kept one hand on part of the ship at all times. The cage would prevent him from being carried clear off the ship, but impacting the trusswork, should he slip up, could damage equipment or break bone.
He reached a door that led into the ship’s interior. Before doing anything, he rapped on it with the steel butt of his handheld dive light to test the metal’s strength. Near the edge of the door, the door flaked some, but its integrity seemed good.
“I’m going in,” he announced.
“Roger,” Max said. Standard procedure would have been to have Mike stationed at the door should anything go wrong, but the Chairman’s dive partner was only seconds away.
The passage was a standard hallway, with doors leading left and right. Each room was inky black until Cabrillo swept his light across the walls. It looked as though the ship had been completely stripped as part of her being scrapped. There was no furniture in any of the rooms, and he could tell by the plumbing that toilets and sinks had been removed from the enlisted men’s head.
He came to a stairwell, and his light caught a sudden movement that made him rear back. A silver fish, he had no idea what species, blasted past him in a blur of fins and tail.
“What happened?” a concerned Hanley asked. As bad as it was for Juan, the jerky video wouldn’t have shown what had so startled him.
“Just a fish.” Normally, Juan would have made a lame joke, but communicating humor in a helium-induced falsetto was next to impossible.
He figured that whatever equipment Tesla installed would be on a lower deck rather than up above, near the bridge. He swam down the stairs—really, a steeply canted ladder—and came upon a room where mines had once been stored. Rather than being empty as he’d expected, most of the compartment was taken up by an odd piece of machinery. Juan snapped some pictures with his high-res camera.
“What am I looking at?” Max asked in frustration because of the poor video quality despite the equipment’s expense.
“A machine,” Juan told him. “Never seen anything like it.”
It was a boxy contraption, with wires running from various parts in a dizzying whirl of loops. Some of the machine had been attacked by sea life, while other parts, much like the cage surrounding the ship, hadn’t been touched. Thick cables ran out of the top of the machine and up through the ceiling where they probably attached to the frame. Behind the machine was an electrical dynamo with exposed copper coils now rendered to verdigris-colored ruin. He could see no evidence of what Professor Tennyson said transpired in this room nor did he really expect to.
And while he was no engineer, Cabrillo was versed enough in technology to know he was looking at something completely new. That this was Tesla’s work wasn’t in doubt, but its purpose certainly was. Optical camouflage? Teleportation? Death ray? Rumors all, but this thing had definitely scared people enough to see it buried in a watery grave. He also saw evidence that someone had dived this wreck before because it looked as though parts of the machine were missing.
It was at that moment when he realized that his mind was drifting from the technical aspects of the dive that he heard a shrill alarm over the comm. It was coming from the Oregon.
“Max?” Seconds passed and there was no reply. So again he cried in his helium-altered voice, “Max!”
The alarm’s wail was followed up with red flashing strobes as the Oregon’s automated systems went into combat mode. A sultry female voice came over the intercom. “All crew to battle stations. All crew to battle stations.”
“Report,” Hanley barked from the command chair.
Mark Murphy was seated at his normal position toward the front of the room, where his primary job was to monitor the ship’s vast array of weaponry. He was there this morning to watch the dive.
“Second.” He typed furiously, his skinny fingers moving with the virtuosity of a concert pianist. “Oh damn.”
“What is it?”
“Passive sonar detected the sound of a submarine opening two of its outer hull doors.”
“Distance and bearing?”
“Eight thousand yards off our starboard side.”
“Whose is it?”
“Coming up now.” The United States Navy kept a database of identifiable noises made by nearly every submarine in the world so that individual boats could be identified during combat situations. Mark had happened to work with one of the data specialists who updated the lists and who had lousy computer-security skills. “It’s a Russian Akula-class. Hull number one five-four. She must be just creeping along, because there are no machinery or screw noises.”
Max glanced over at the radar plot. There were no ships within twenty miles of the Oregon. That meant there were no other targets if the submarine’s intentions were hostile. The fine hairs on the back of his neck began to prickle.
“Chairman, we’ve got a Russian sub parked about four and a half miles off our starboard beam. She just opened two torpedo tubes.”
“Get out of there,” Juan ordered.
“Shot fired!” Mark yelled. “Torpedo in the water.”
It would take a few seconds to accurately calculate the torpedo’s course, but all the men listening knew instinctively that the torpedo was on a course toward the Oregon. The only real question was whether she was the target or they were gunning for the derelict ship she was hovering over.
Max wasn’t the strategist Juan was. He was a nuts-and-bolts kind of guy who left planning to others, so he took his cue off Cabrillo’s last order. “Helm, flank speed.”
The inertia of eighteen thousand tons of steel idling on the ocean’s surface was a massive force unto itself, but it was no match for the magnetohydrodynamic engines. The cryopumps spun up and went infrasonic as they pumped liquid nitrogen around the magnets that stripped free electrons from the water forced through the drive tubes. A creaming explosion of froth erupted at the Oregon’s fantail, and within ten seconds of Max’s command the big former freighter was moving.
That they were under way also meant that within seconds they would be beyond their radio’s limited range to communicate with the divers or Eddie in the submersible.
“Max, just before you gave the order I heard a second torpedo launch,” Mark told him. With the ship under way, the passive sensors were deaf to everything except the noises the Oregon herself produced, the shriek of her engines and the building hiss of water against her hull.
“Juan, did you catch that?”
“A second torpedo.” Cabrillo didn’t hesitate before issuing his orders. The underwater radios weren’t encrypted, so the Russian captain knew there were people on the wreck. What he’d done was cold premeditated murder. “Sink ’em.”
There were only about seven minutes until impact. The Oregon would be safely outside the torpedoes’ sonar range, but the wreck was a sitting duck.
“You got it. Mark, let’s tell this guy he picked the wrong dance partner. Hit him with the active sonar, maximum gain, and keep hitting him until I tell you to stop.”
Murph gave a wicked grin and fired off sonar pings. The returns showed the Ak
ula hadn’t yet started to make her escape.
“She’s still sitting there, and her torpedoes are staying deep.”
“Waiting around to see her fish hit the wreck. Bad mistake, my friend,” Max said. “You should have hightailed it the moment you fired. ’Course, you couldn’t know that we were listening or know that we can track you.”
Eric Stone rushed into the op center and took the helm seat next to Murph. With the exception of the Chairman himself, young Mr. Stone was the best helmsman aboard and could thread the Oregon through the eye of a needle if necessary.
“Eric, bring us about and let’s get him within range of our torpedoes.” The Akula could take such a relatively long shot because she was firing at a stationary target, but to hit a moving opponent required a shortening of the distance. “Wepps, get our own fish readied.”
“Roger that. Looks like the sonar woke ’em up. The Akula’s starting to move. The continental shelf drops away about twenty miles from here, and once she goes over, she’ll dive like a stone and we’ll lose her for sure.”
The Oregon began cutting a long arc through the sea as she chased the fleeing Russian sub, and with her vastly superior speed, there was little chance the sub would get away.
“Tubes one and two are flooded,” Mark announced moments later. “Outer doors are still closed. And, just to remind you, we need to slow to twenty knots for them to open. Otherwise, we can damage the torpedoes.”
“Noted,” Max replied.
They’d cut the range down to six thousand yards, and Hanley kept at them. Five minutes had elapsed since the first shots were fired. The torps would hit the wreck in about two more. Max needed to end this quickly if he was to get back on-station and coordinate any necessary rescue operation.
“Contact!” Mark shouted. “He’s fired on us! Torpedo coming straight in.”
“Helm, full reverse. Slow us to twenty knots. Wepps, open those doors as soon as you can and fire. Eric, once the torpedo’s away, take us back up to thirty knots.”