“Well I’ll be,” he whispered to himself.
“What?” Djemma said. “What are you talking about?”
Shrinking back into the kiosk that held the pay phone and turning away, Andras ignored them as they passed on the far side of the street.
“Andras,” Djemma said. “What the hell is going on?”
Andras returned to his phone call, calculating a new play. “This NUMA is not as toothless as you might think,” he said. “My concern is that they will interfere again. One of their members in particular. It would be best if I take them out.”
“Don’t antagonize them,” Djemma warned. “You’ll only draw attention to us at the wrong time. We are very close to making our move.”
“Don’t worry,” Andras said. “It’ll go off without a hitch, I promise you.”
“I’m not paying you for revenge,” Djemma said.
Andras laughed. “Don’t worry,” he said. “This one’s on the house.”
Before Djemma could reply, Andras slammed the heavy plastic receiver back onto its metal cradle. The sound it made and the sensation left him grinning maniacally, so much more satisfying than pressing a red button on a cell phone.
20
GAMAY TROUT TRIED HER BEST TO REMAIN CALM, to control her breathing and her emotions. Beside her, Paul continued a useless attempt to raise the Matador on the underwater transceiver.
“Matador, this is Grouper. Do you copy?”
No response.
“Matador, this is Grouper . . .”
He’d been at it for thirty minutes. What else could he do? Their only hope was for the Matador to send down the ROVs and try to dig them out. That is, if they could be found and if they weren’t under a hundred feet of sediment.
So Paul continued to try. Matador, this is Grouper. Matador, please respond. And each time he spoke the words, the sound grated on her nerves like some form of Chinese water torture.
There had been no response for thirty minutes. There would be no response in the next thirty, or the next thirty thousand, if he tried. Either the antenna had been torn off in the landslide or they were buried too deep for any signal to get out.
Taking another calming breath, she rubbed his shoulders.
“They might be able to hear us,” Paul told her. “Even if we can’t hear them.”
She nodded, twisted herself around in the other direction, and checked on their air status. They had nineteen hours of air left. Nineteen hours of waiting to die. In a manner she’d never felt before, Gamay was suddenly aware of how tight the confines of the Grouper were. It was a coffin. A tomb.
A wave of claustrophobia swept over her so powerfully that she began to shake, began to wish they’d been killed in the landslide or that she could just open the hatch and let the water pour in and crush them. It was irrational, it was panic, but it was astoundingly real to her.
“Matador, this is Grouper . . . Do you read?”
She held herself together, fighting back tears that were threatening to break through.
Uncomfortable sitting with her head bowed in the cramped vehicle, she lay down and closed her eyes, resting her face against the cold metal of the floor like one might rest on the tiles of the bathroom after a heavy night of drinking.
It calmed her nerves a bit, at least until she opened her eyes and noticed something she hadn’t seen before: a drop of water trickling down the side of the metal plating. Any hope of it being condensation was erased as another drop quickly followed, and then another.
Drip . . . Drip . . . Drip . . .
Perhaps they wouldn’t have nineteen hours after all.
“Matador, this is Grouper . . .”
There was no point in telling Paul. He would know soon enough, and there was nothing they could do about it anyway. At 16,000 feet, the pressure outside was almost 6,800 pounds per square inch. The slow little drips would quickly become faster drips as the water forced the plates apart, and at some point it would start spraying, blasting them with a jet of ice-cold water powerful enough to cut a person in half. And then it would all be over.
Gamay glanced around the cabin for other leaks. She saw none, but something new caught her eye: light emanating from the tiny screens in her virtual reality visor.
She grabbed it. The screens were still functioning. She saw a metallic wall and sediment floating around. The particles swirled and caught the light.
“Rapunzel survived,” she said quietly.
“What was that?” Paul asked.
“This is a live shot,” she said. “Rapunzel ’s still functioning.”
Gamay pulled the visor on and then her gloves. It took a moment to orient herself, but she quickly realized that Rapunzel was floating freely. She had the little robot do a 360-degree turn. Open water beckoned through the same gaping hole that Rapunzel had used to enter the ship.
“I’m bringing her out.”
“How are we still in contact with her?” Paul asked.
“Her umbilical cables are eight feet long where they hit the Grouper. They must be sticking out of the sediment.”
“That means we’re not buried too deep,” Paul said. “Maybe she can dig us out.”
Gamay maneuvered Rapunzel out of the ship, while Paul began to watch the monitor on his control panel.
“Take her up,” he said. “We need a bird’s-eye view.”
Gamay nodded and had Rapunzel ascend. She rose vertically for a hundred feet, high enough to get a better view but still close enough that her lights and her low-light camera could make out the ship and the seafloor.
The avalanche had changed everything. The Kinjara Maru now rested on her side like a toy that’d been knocked over. The bow was almost buried in sediment, and the ground underneath was flatter and smoother. Gamay guessed that the avalanche had moved the ship a hundred yards or so.
“Any idea where we are?” she asked.
“We were headed to the bow,” he said. “No idea what happened after the landslide hit.”
Gamay guided Rapunzel toward the bow of the ship and then out over the field of sediment. After ten minutes of up-and-back passes, neither she nor Paul had seen any sign of themselves.
In some corner of her mind, the oddness of the situation struck Gamay. How strange, she thought, to be consciously looking for yourself with no idea where you might be.
After another pass she asked. “You see anything?”
“Nothing.”
The cables that were signaling Rapunzel and receiving her signal had to be sticking out, but a foot or two of cable would be hard to spot on a seafloor now littered with debris.
Still lying on her back, Gamay started Rapunzel on another pass. As she did, the touch of icy water reached her elbow. She lifted the visor for a second. A small pool was forming beside her, maybe two tablespoons’ worth. The drip was coming faster.
She pulled the visor back down. They had to hurry.
“Maybe if you were closer to the seafloor,” Paul said.
It would increase the resolution but narrow the field of view, the difference between looking for a contact lens that had fallen out of your eye from a standing position or crawling around on the floor, scanning the tile inch by inch. She didn’t think they had that much time.
“I’m taking her higher,” she said.
“But we can barely see as it is.”
“Blow some of the air,” she said.
Paul did not immediately answer.
“I don’t know,” Paul said. “Even if they didn’t hear us, the Matador knows were in trouble. They’ll have ROVs down here pretty soon.”
“It will help us,” she said.
Still, he hesitated.
“Even if they send ROVs, they’re going to need to know where we are,” she said.
“Okay,” he said finally, perhaps responding to the desperation in her voice, perhaps realizing that she was right.
“Get Rapunzel to whatever depth you think is best,” he added. “Tell me when, and I’ll vent
the cylinder we’ve been drawing off of. It’s half empty.”
Gamay guided Rapunzel back out over the sunken freighter’s bow and let her rise to the very brink of visibility. It gave them the widest field of view.
“Ready,” she said.
Paul turned a lever and locked it. With his other hand he reached over and pressed the emergency vent switch. There was a hiss of air through the lines, the sound of bubbles exploding and then turbulent water churning. It lasted for about fifteen seconds and then slowly waned. The silence that followed was eerie.
“Do you see anything?” he asked.
Gamay was guiding Rapunzel forward, turning her head left and right, looking for what should have been a telltale rush of bubbles catching the light. It should have been easy to see and unmistakable, but neither she nor Paul caught it.
“It has to be there.”
“I don’t see anything,” Paul said
“Vent another bottle,” she said.
He shook his head. “Two cylinders is a quarter of our air.”
“It’s not going to matter,” she said.
“Of course it matters. If we’re buried, it’s going to take a while for them to dig us out. I don’t want to suffocate while they’re still digging.”
For the first time she heard real stress in his voice. So far, he’d been business as usual. The strong, silent Paul she knew. Perhaps that was for her. Perhaps he was as afraid as she was. She had to tell him the truth.
“We’re leaking back here,” she said.
Silence first, and then, “Leaking?”
She nodded.
“How bad?”
“Not bad yet,” she said. “But we’re not going to last long enough to worry about the air.”
He stared at her for a moment and then finally nodded his agreement. “Tell me when.”
She pulled the visor back down and brought Rapunzel back to the bow of the freighter. This time, she picked the port side to scan.
“Okay,” she said.
Paul turned the lever on cylinder number 2, locked it, and vented the second air tank. The turbulent sound of escaping air shook the Grouper again, and Gamay strained her eyes looking for any sign of it. She turned, stared, and turned again.
Nothing. Nothing in any direction.
A new fear crept in. What if they weren’t near the bow at all? What if the avalanche had swung the Kinjara Maru around or taken them so far from the ship that they’d be virtually impossible to find? The freighter could even be sitting on top of them at this point.
The view screens in front of her eyes flickered and shook. For a second she feared that they were about to lose the video feed. But then the screens stabilized except for one area near the very top. Something was distorting the camera’s picture.
She hoped it wasn’t a crack in the glass, which would be as fatal to Rapunzel as the leak in the Grouper’s side would soon be to them. But the camera continued to operate, and Gamay realized the distortion wasn’t a crack. It was caused by something else: a bubble that had been caught on the lens.
She played back the video of the flicker and slowed it down. Sure enough, it was a rush of bubbles passing by Rapunzel. She rotated the small ROV to look straight down. There, almost directly below, sat the oblong shape of the Grouper. Not buried, as they’d suspected, but planted facedown in the silt, with metal debris from the Kinjara Maru piled on top.
Paul saw it too. “Have I mentioned how much I love my wife?” he said excitedly.
“I love you too,” she said, already guiding Rapunzel down toward them.
“Does Rapunzel have a cutting torch?”
She nodded, and as the small robotic machine reached them Gamay snapped the acetylene torch on and began slicing through one of the metal beams that had landed on top of the Grouper.
The torch burned through the beam in two minutes flat. It broke in half and fell away with a resounding clang. The Grouper, now at full upward buoyancy, shifted as the weight was released.
It felt as if the little sub was trying to float free. But something still held them.
“You see the cables near our tail?” Paul asked. “Were tangled in them.”
Gamay saw the cables, maneuvered Rapunzel one more time, and brought the torch to bear. This section of debris was lighter but more cumbersome. As Rapunzel’s torch cut through each length of steel cable, she had to pull them away to keep them from entangling the Grouper again.
As the last section of cable was dragged away, the Grouper twisted and began to rise. Sliding through the rest of the loose debris, it moved upward.
Inside, it sounded like metal garbage cans being knocked about in the middle of the night. But as the last clang died away and strands of cable slid off them with a scraping sound, they were free.
“We’re ascending,” Paul shouted.
Gamay put Rapunzel into auto surface mode and flipped her visor up.
To see water streaming past the view port instead of a pile of sand and silt was beautiful. To feel the vertical acceleration as the little sub rose was intoxicating.
She took a deep breath, relaxed for a second, and then heard a crack, like a plate of glass had been snapped in two. She turned her head.
The trickle of water forcing its way in had suddenly become a steady stream.
21
THE RESTAURANT WAS NAMED ESCARPA, which was a way of saying “cliff top” in Portuguese. The name fit, as the low, wide building made of mortar and native stone sat high up in the hills above Santa Maria, three-quarters of the way to the top of the Pico Alto. An eight-mile drive on a twisting mountain road had brought Kurt and Katarina to its doorstep.
On the way, they’d passed open fields, tremendous views, and even an outfit that rented hang gliders and ultralights to tourists. Only a dozen times during the ride had Katarina put the wheels of her small rented Focus onto the gravel during a turn. And if Kurt was honest, only three of those times seemed likely to end in certain death, as the guardrails, which had been intermittent the whole way up, were nowhere to be seen.
But having watched the young woman shift and break and mash the gas pedal at just the right moments, Kurt had decided she was an excellent driver. She’d obviously been trained, and so he figured she was just trying to test his nerve.
He chose not to react, lazily opening the sunroof and then commenting on how incredible the valley looked with nothing standing between them and a trip down into it.
“Enjoying the drive?” she’d asked.
“Immensely,” he’d said. “Just don’t hit any cows.”
Having gotten no reaction out of him only seemed to make her drive harder. And Kurt could barely contain his laughter.
Now at a table, watching the sun drop over the island and into the ocean, they had an opportunity to order. She deferred to him and he chose the island specialty: Bacalhau à Gomes de Sá, Portuguese salt cod with potato casserole, along with fresh, locally grown vegetables.
Kurt took a look at the wine list. Despite several excellent French and Spanish choices, he believed a local dish was best accompanied by a local wine. The Azores had produced wine since the sixteenth century, some of it known to be very good. From what he’d been told, most of the grapes were still picked by hand. He felt it a shame to let such work go to waste.
“We’ll take a bottle of the Terras de Lava,” he said, picking a white to go with the fish.
Across from him, Katarina nodded her approval. “I get to choose dessert,” she insisted, smiling like a trader who’d just gotten the best part of the deal.
He smiled back. “Sounds fair.”
Guessing he would be finishing that dessert before he learned her secret, he chose a different subject.
“So you’re here on behalf of your government,” he said.
She seemed a little prickly about that. “You say that like it’s a bad thing. As if you’re not here on behalf of your government.”
“Actually, I’m not,” he said. “Joe and I were he
re for a competition. We just stuck around at the request of the Portuguese and Spanish governments. To keep the peace between them.”
“Quite a distinction,” she said, taking a bite from one of the appetizers. “I believe the last time they got in an argument it took the Pope drawing a line across the world to settle it.”
Kurt had to laugh. “Unfortunately, we have no such powers.”
The wine came. He tasted it and nodded his approval.
“Why did they send you here?” he asked.
“I thought you’d be more discreet,” she said.
“Not my strong suit.”
“I work for the Science Directorate,” she explained. “Of course they’re interested in this discovery. A dozen wrecks believed to be dragged down to the depths by the powerful magnetism of this rock. Who wouldn’t be?”
That made sense, even if some of her other actions didn’t.
“No one’s suggesting they were dragged to the bottom by the magnetism,” he said. “Only that during and after their sinkings, the current and the magnetism combined to slowly draw them in.”
“Yes,” she said. “I know. But isn’t it more romantic to imagine this place like the sirens of Greek mythology?”
“More romantic,” he said. “But less accurate.”
The gleam of adventure shone from her eyes. “Are you sure? After all, this part of the ocean has claimed an inordinate number of ships and planes over the years.”
Before he could interject she began a list. “In 1880, the HMS Atalanta went down in these waters. The survivors reported waves of dizziness and sickness and seeing bizarre things. These sights were later called hallucinations and attributed to a shipboard epidemic of yellow fever. But as it was 1880, and the diagnosis was made well after the fact, no one really knows.
“In 1938, a freighter named the Anglo-Australian and its crew vanished within sight of the island chain. No wreckage was ever found. In 1948, an airliner known as the Star Tiger disappeared after taking off from here. There was no Mayday or distress call issued. No wreckage was ever found. In 1968, after having unexplained radio troubles, one of your submarines, the USS Scorpion, vanished not far from here. As I understand it, the wreckage suggested she exploded from within.”