Pitt was a tall man, firm muscled with broad shoulders and straight back, slightly on the lanky side, and yet he moved with a catlike grace that seemed poised for action. There was a razor hardness about him that even a stranger could sense, yet he never lacked for friends and allies in and out of government who respected and admired him for his loyalty and intelligence. He was buoyed by a dry wit and an easygoing personality-- a trait a score of women had found most appealing-- and though he adored their company, his most ardent love was reserved for the sea.
As Special Projects Director of NUMA he spent almost as much time on and under water as he did on land. His main exercise was diving-- he seldom crossed the threshold of a gym. He had given up smoking years before, casually controlled his diet, and was a light drinker. He was constantly busy, physically moving about, walking up to five miles a day in the course of his job. His greatest pleasure outside his work was diving through the ghostly hulk of a sunken ship.
There was the echo of footsteps from outside the submersible, footsteps crossing the rock floor that had been carved smooth under the curved walls of the vaulted roof. Pitt dewed around in the chair and looked at his longtime friend and NUMA associate, Al Giordino.
Giordino's black hair was as curly as Pitt's was wavy. His smooth face showed ruddy under the overhead glow from the sodium vapor lights, and his lips were locked in their usual sly Fagan-like smile.
Giordino was short, the top of his head came just up to Pitt's shoulder line. But his body was braced by massive biceps and a chest that preceded the rest of him like a wrecking ball, a feature that enhanced his determined walk and gave the impression that if he didn't come to a halt he would simply walk through whatever fence or wall happened to be in his path.
"Well, what do you make of it?" he asked Pitt.
"The British turned out a nice piece of work," Pitt replied admiringly as he exited the hatch.
Giordino studied the crushed spheres and shook his head. "They were lucky. Another five minutes and we'd have found corpses."
"How are they doing?"
"A speedy recovery," answered Giordino. "They're in the galley devouring our food stores and demanding to be returned to their ship on the surface."
"Anyone brief them yet?" asked Pitt.
"As you ordered, they've been confined to the crew's quarters, and anyone who comes within spitting distance acts like a deaf mute. A performance that's driven our guests up the walls. They'd give their left kidney to know who we are, where we came from, and how we built a livable facility this deep in the ocean."
Pitt gazed again at Old Gert and then motioned a hand around the chamber. "Years of secrecy flushed down the drain," he muttered, suddenly angry.
"Not your fault."
"Better I left them to die out there than compromise our project."
"Who you kidding?" Giordino laughed. "I've seen you pick up injured dogs in the street and drive them to a vet. You even paid the bill though it wasn't you who ran over them. You're a big softy, my friend.
Secret operation be damned. You'd have saved those people if they'd carried rabies, leprosy, and the black plague."
"I'm that obvious?"
Giordino's teasing look softened. "I'm the bully who gave you a black eye in kindergarten, remember, and you bloodied my nose with a baseball in return. I know you better than your own mother. You may be a nasty bastard on the outside, but underneath you're an easy touch."
Pitt looked down at Giordino. "You know, of course, that playing good samaritan has put us in a sea of trouble with Admiral Sandecker and the Defense Department."
"That goes without saying. And speaking of the devil, Communications just received a coded message.
The admiral is on his way from Washington. His plane is due in two hours. Hardly what you'd call advance notice. I've ordered a sub readied to head for the surface and pick him up."
"He must be psychic," mused Pitt.
"I'm betting that weird disturbance is behind his surprise visit."
Pitt nodded and smiled. "Then we have nothing to lose by raising the curtain for our guests."
"Nothing," Giordino agreed. "Once the admiral gets the story, he'll order them kept here under guard until we wrap up the project anyway."
Pitt began walking toward a circular doorway with Giordino at his side. Sixty years in the past, the domed chamber might have been an architect's vision of a futuristic aircraft hangar, but this structure covered no aircraft from rain, snow, or summer sun. Its carbon and ceramic reinforced plastic walls housed deep-water craft 5,400 meters beneath the sea. Besides Old Gert, the leveled floor held an immense tractorlike vehicle with an upper body housing shaped similar to a cigar. Two smaller submersibles sat side-by-side, resembling stubby nuclear submarines whose bows and sterns had been reattached after their center sections were removed. Several men and one woman were busily servicing the vehicles.
Pitt led the way through a narrow circular tunnel that looked like an ordinary drain pipe and passed through two compartments with domed ceilings. There were no right angles or sharp corners anywhere.
All interior surfaces were rounded to structurally resist the massive outside water pressure.
They entered a confined and spartan dining compartment. The one long table and its surrounding chairs were formed from aluminum, and the galley wasn't much larger than the kitchen on an overnight passenger train. Two NUMA crewmen stood on each side of the doorway keeping a tight eye on their unwelcome guests.
Plunkett, Salazar, and Stacy were huddled at the opposite end of the table in muffled conversation when Pitt and Giordino entered. Their voices stopped abruptly, and they looked up suspiciously at the two strangers.
So he could talk with them at their own level, Pitt planted himself solidly in a nearby chair and glanced swiftly from face to face as if he was an inspector of police examining a lineup.
Then he said politely, "How do you do. My name is Dirk Pitt. I head up the project you've stumbled upon."
"Thank God!" Plunkett boomed. "At last, somebody who can speak."
"And English at that," added Salazar.
Pitt gestured at Giordino. "Mr. Albert Giordino, chief mover and doer around here. He'll be glad to conduct a grand tour, assign quarters, and help you with any needs in the way of clothing, toothbrushes, and whatever."
Introductions and handshakes were traded across the table. Giordino ordered up a round of coffee, and the three visitors from Old Gert finally began to relax.
"I speak for all of us," said Plunkett sincerely, "when I say, thank you for saving our lives."
"Al and I are only too happy we reached you in time."
"Your accent tells me you're American," said Stacy.
Pitt locked onto her eyes and gave her a devastating stare. "Yes, we're all from the States."
Stacy seemed to fear Pitt, as a deer fears a mountain lion, yet she was oddly attracted to him. "You're the man I saw in the strange submersible before I passed out."
"A DSMV," Pitt corrected her. "Stands for Deep Sea Mining Vehicle. Everyone calls it Big John. Its purpose is to excavate geological samples from the seabed."
"This is an American mining venture?" asked Plunkett incredulously.
Pitt nodded. "A highly classified suboceanic test mining and survey project, financed by the United States government. Eight years from the initial design through construction to start-up."
"What do you call it?"
"There's a fancy code word, but we affectionately refer to the place as `Soggy Acres.' "
"How can it be kept a secret?" asked Salazar. "You must have a support fleet on the surface that can be easily detected by passing vessels or satellites."
"Our little habitat is fully self-sustaining. A hightech life-support system that draws oxygen from the sea and enables us to work under pressure equal to the air at sea level, a desalination unit for fresh drinking water, heat from hydrothermal vents on the seafloor, some food from mussels, clams, shrimp, and crabs that surv
ive around the vents, and we bathe under ultraviolet light and antiseptic showers to prevent bacteria growth. What supplies or equipment replacement parts we can't provide on our own are dropped into the sea from the air and retrieved underwater. If it becomes necessary to transfer personnel, one of our submersibles rises to the surface where it is met by a jet-powered flying boat."
Plunkett simply nodded. He was a man living a dream.
"You must have a unique method of communicating with the outside world," said Salazar.
"A surface relay buoy tethered by cable. We transmit and receive via satellite. Nothing fancy but most efficient."
"How long have you been down here?"
"We haven't seen the sun in a little over four months."
Plunkett stared into his coffee cup in wonder. "I had no idea your technology had developed to where you can tackle a research station this deep."
"You might say we're a pioneer expedition," said Pitt proudly. "We have several projects going at the same time. Besides testing equipment, our engineers and scientists analyze the sea life, geology, and minerals on the seabed and file computerized reports of their findings. Actual dredging and mining operations come in future stages."
"How many people in your crew?"
Pitt took a swallow of coffee before answering. "Not many. Twelve men and two women."
"I see your women have traditional duties," Stacy said sourly, nodding at a pretty redheaded lady in her late twenties who was dicing vegetables in the galley.
"Sarah volunteered. She also oversees our computer records, working two jobs, as do most of us."
"I suppose the other woman doubles as your maid and equipment mechanic."
"You're close," Pitt said, giving her a caustic smile. "Jill really does help out as a marine equipment engineer. She's also our resident biologist. And if I were you, I wouldn't lecture her on female rights on the bottom of the sea. She took first in a Miss Colorado bodybuilding competition and can bench press two hundred pounds."
Salazar pushed his chair from the table and stretched out his feet. "I'll wager your military is involved with the project."
"You won't find any uniformed rank down here," Pitt sidestepped. "We're all strictly scientific bureaucrats."
"One thing I'd like you to explain," said Plunkett, "is how you knew we were in trouble and where to find us."
"Al and I were retracing our tracks from an earlier sample collection survey, searching for a gold-detection sensor that had somehow fallen off the Big John, when we came within range of your underwater phone."
"We picked up your distress calls, faint as they were, and homed in to your position," Giordino finished.
"Once we found your submersible," Pitt continued, "Al and I couldn't very well transport you from your vessel to our vehicle or you'd have been crushed into munchkins by the water pressure. Our only hope was to use the Big John's manipulator arms to plug an oxygen line to your exterior emergency connector. Luckily, your adapter and ours mated perfectly."
"Then we used both manipulator arms to lock onto your lift hooks," Giordino came in, using his hands for effect, "and carried your sub back to our equipment chamber, entering through our pressure airlock."
"You saved Old Gert?" inquired Plunkett, quickly becoming cheerful.
"She's sitting in the chamber," said Giordino.
"How soon can we be returned to our support ship?" Salazar demanded rather than asked.
"Not for some time, I'm afraid," said Pitt.
"We've got to let our support crew know we're alive," Stacy protested. "Surely you can contact them?"
Pitt exchanged a taut look with Giordino. "On our way to rescue you, we passed a badly damaged ship that had recently fallen to the bottom."
"No, not the Invincible," Stacy murmured, unbelieving.
"She was badly broken up, as though she suffered from a heavy explosion," replied Giordino. "I doubt there were any survivors."
"Two other ships were nearby when we started our dive," Plunkett pleaded. "She must have been one of them."
"I can't say," Pitt admitted. "Something happened up there. Some kind of immense turbulence. We've had no time to investigate and don't have any hard answers."
"Surely you felt the same shock wave that damaged our submersible."
"This facility sits in a protected valley off the fracture zone, thirty kilometers away from where we found you and the sunken ship. What was left of any shock wave passed over us. All we experienced was a mild rush of current and a sediment storm as the bottom was stirred into what is known on dry land as a blizzard condition."
Stacy gave Pitt an angry look indeed. "Do you intend to keep us prisoners?"
"Not exactly the word I had in mind. But since this is a highly classified project I must ask you to accept our hospitality a bit longer."
"What do you call à bit longer'?" Salazar asked warily.
Pitt gave the small Mexican a sardonic stare. "We're not scheduled to return topside for another sixty days."
There was silence. Plunkett looked from Salazar to Stacy to Pitt. "Bloody hell!" he snapped bitterly.
"You can't hold us here two months."
"My wife," groaned Salazar. "She'll think I'm dead."
"I have a daughter," said Stacy, quickly subdued.
"Bear with me," Pitt said quietly. "I realize I seem like a heartless tyrant, but your presence has put me in a difficult position. When we have a better grip on what happened on the surface, and I talk with my superiors, we might work something out."
Pitt paused as he spotted Keith Harris, the project's seismologist, standing in the doorway nodding for Pitt to talk outside the room.
Pitt excused himself and approached Harris. He immediately saw the look of concern in Harris' eyes.
"Problem?" he asked tersely.
Harris spoke through a great gray beard that matched his hair. "That disturbance has triggered a growing number of shocks in the seabed. So far, most all are small and shallow. We can't actually feel them yet. But their intensity and strength are growing."
"How do you read it?"
"We're sitting on a fault that's unstable as hell," Harris went on. "It's also volcanic. Crustal strain energy is being released at a rate I've never experienced. I'm afraid we could be looking at a major earthquake of a six-point-five magnitude."
"We'd never survive," Pitt said stonily. "One crack in one of our domes, and the water pressure will flatten the entire base like leas under a sledgehammer."
`Ì get the same picture," said Harris dismally.
"How long have we got?"
"No way to predict these things with any certainty. I realize it's not much comfort, and I'm only guessing, but judging from the rate of build I'd guess maybe twelve hours."
"Time enough to evacuate."
"I could be wrong," Harris came back hesitantly. "If we actually experience initial shock waves, the big quake might he only minutes behind. On the other hand, the shocks could taper off and stop just as easily."
He'd no sooner gotten the words out when they both felt a slight tremor beneath their feet and the coffee cups on the dining table began to clatter in their saucers.
Pitt stared at Harris, and his lips pulled into a tense grin. "It seems that time is not on our side."
>
The tremors increased with terrifying swiftness. A distant rumbling seemed to move closer. Then came sharp thumping sounds as small rocks tumbled down the canyon slopes and struck against the suboceanic buildings. Everyone kept glancing up at the great arched roof of the equipment chamber, fearful of an avalanche breaching the walls. One tiny opening, and the water would burst inside with the shattering power of a thousand cannons.
All was calm, no panic. Except for the clothes they wore, nothing was carried but the computer records of the project. Eight minutes was all it took for the crew to assemble and ready the deepsea vehicles for boarding.
Pitt had known instantly that a few must die. The two manned submersible
s were each designed to carry a maximum of six people. Seven might be crammed on board for a total of fourteen-- the exact number of the project team-- but certainly no more. Now they were burdened with the unplanned presence of the crewmen from Old Gert.
The shocks were coming stronger and closer together now. Pitt saw no chance of a sub reaching the surface, unloading survivors, and returning in time to rescue those left behind. The round trip took no less than four hours. The suboceanic structures were slowly weakening under the increasing shocks, and it was only a question of minutes before they would give way and be crushed by the onslaught of the sea.
Giordino read the dire signs in the fixed expression on Pitt's face. "We'll have to make two trips. Better I wait for the next--"
"Sorry, old pal," Pitt cut him off. "You pilot the first sub. I'll follow in the second. Get to the surface, unload your passengers into inflatable rafts, and dive like hell for those who must stay behind."
"No way I can make it back in time," Giordino said tautly.
"Think of a better way?"
Giordino shook his head in defeat. "Who gets the short end of the stick?"
"The British survey team."
Giordino stiffened. "No call for volunteers? Not like you to leave a woman."
"I have to place our own people first," Pitt answered coldly.
Giordino shrugged, disapproval in his face. "We save them and then sign their death warrants."
A long, shuddering vibration shook the seabed, chased by a deep, menacing rumble. Ten seconds. Pitt stared down at his wristwatch. The shock lasted ten seconds. Then all was silent and still again, deathly silent.
Giordino stared blankly for an instant into the eyes of his friend. Not the slightest fear showed. Pitt seemed incredibly indifferent. There was absolutely no doubt in his mind that Pitt was lying. There was never any intention to pilot the second sub. Pitt was set on being the last man out.