Jack Du Brul - Deep Fire Rising

With a jolt, the A-frame lifted the eleven-ton submersible from its cradle and gently transferred it toward the fantail. Beyond the ship’s stern, the sea was calm and a deep blue found only far from shore. The sky was cloudless. Bob was slowly lowered into the water. Mercer unconsciously took a deep breath when the first waves lapped against the Lexan bubble.

“Never been down like this before, huh?”

“Is it that obvious?”

“Not really,” Alan replied. “Most first-timers are so nervous they don’t stop talking. But no matter what, everyone takes a deep breath when the sub starts to sink.” The pilot switched on his headset. “Jim, my board is clear, go ahead and release.”

There was another jolt as the cables securing Bob to the cradle let go and the submersible floated free.

“And down we go,” the pilot said.

Negatively buoyant because of the ton of iron plates attached to the underside of her hull, the sub slipped beneath the waves. Mercer craned his head to peer upward as water covered the top of the Lexan bubble. The surface of the ocean reflected a wavering mercury sheen. The surface receded from view as the submersible slipped into the depths. For many minutes there was enough light filtering from above to see the surrounding water. Food scraps dumped from the scullery had attracted schools of scavenger fish and the predators that preyed on them. A few of the braver ones paused long enough to determine if the submersible would be their next meal before disappearing into the thickening gloom.

The water acted as a prism the deeper they dropped, cutting the light’s spectrum so that the colors began to separate and fade away. Yellows and oranges vanished first, then reds, until their view was a violet void. And even that faded to blue and finally to black.

“Think we’re alone?” Alan asked after ten minutes.

“I would assume so,” Mercer said, sensing he was being set up by the experienced pilot.

Alan hit a switch to turn on the working set of lights. The sea came alive. The water was far from clear. It almost looked like a snowstorm outside the sub’s protective cocoon. The bodies of tens of millions of tiny creatures slowly drifted toward the abyssal plain where bottom feeders would eventually assimilate them back into the food chain. Fish that had kept their distance from the gawky interloper rushed at the lights. They were still shallow enough for Mercer to recognize the shape of the fish if not the species. The sea’s truly bizarre creatures, the vampire squids, the gulpers, the angler fish, and the others, lived far below Bob ’s crush depth.

“I’ve logged more than six thousand hours down here,” Alan said with a trace of reverence. “I never tire of it.” He killed the lights again. “Sorry, got to conserve batteries. I know this won’t be a long dive, but it’s SOP.”

“Thanks for the glimpse. It’s a hell of a place you work in.”

“Depth is eight fifty,” Alan called out, both for Mercer and the men anxiously watching their monitors on the Surveyor .

“C.W.’s on his way down,” Jim McKenzie announced over the directed laser pulse communication set.

“Roger, Jim. We should be on the bottom in six minutes.”

“Confirmed.”

Jervis activated the bottom search sonar, a weak acoustical pulse that rang like an accelerating electronic chime the deeper they fell. Mercer’s chest tightened in time with the tones. He was getting closer to an answer, he knew, only he wasn’t sure what the question had been.

“Bottom in fifty feet,” Alan murmured, his fingers flying over control knobs and switches as he began to trim the sub.

“We’re showing you one hundred ninety feet due east of the wreck,” McKenzie announced over the radio.

A drop of condensation dripped onto Mercer’s face. He’d known to expect it — there was a sixty-degree temperature difference between Bob and the ocean — yet any water inside the sub with so much pressure against her steel hull made his heart jump.

Alan activated the forward thrusters and kicked on the lights once again. Had they not been reduced to half capacity, they still couldn’t have revealed much beyond twenty feet. The water appeared as dense as ink. Mercer peered into the murk, straining to be the first to spot the wreckage of the USS Smithback . The bottom was sandy and showed the undulating ripples of a steady current. It was also entirely featureless. The moon showed more topographic variance.

“There!” Alan said. Experienced in deep dives, he spotted the hulk a minute before Mercer could see the vessel emerge from the darkness.

The wreck of the Smithback rose from the seafloor like the ruins of a Moorish fort long abandoned in the Sahara. She’d sunk only days earlier yet looked decades old, forlorn, forgotten, haunted.

“Jesus. Look at her.”

The USS Smithback had been a military sea-lift vessel, a boxy cargo ship with blunt bows and a square stern. Purchased from the Maersk Line following the Gulf War, the Smithback ’s job was the rapid delivery of an entire armor task force of up to sixty M1A1 Abrams tanks. At more than six hundred feet long, she’d only needed a crew of forty-eight. Although Mercer and Jervis were limited to half illumination, they could see enough detail to know that whatever happened to the Smithback could not be explained away by a collision with a shipping container. Mercer couldn’t understand what he was seeing.

The ship’s hull and superstructure had been crushed flat by the impact with the seafloor. This phenomenon wasn’t unusual. A falling vessel could approach twenty miles per hour by the time it reached the end of its plummet, and structural members weren’t designed for that kind of force. Yet the damage to the Smithback was much more severe than either Mercer or Jervis anticipated.

It was as if a giant fist had ground the vessel’s remains into the seafloor. The bow was buried deeply in the silt and her keel had fractured amidships. It was impossible to tell if she was listing because she had so completely collapsed. From the spec sheets Ira had had delivered to Mercer, he knew the Smithback had been ninety feet tall from keel to bridge. The hulk of twisted metal plates resting on the bottom of the Pacific looked no more than a quarter of that. She’d completely pancaked.

The light outside the submersible shifted as C.W. in his diving suit approached the wreck. “What happened to her?” he asked when he saw the extent of the damage.

“We’re trying to figure that out,” Mercer replied. “Let’s start with the bow and work our way back.”

“Roger.”

The nimble NewtSuit lifted away from the hull and swooped toward the front of the ship. Alan maneuvered Bob into place so the combined lights bathed the wreckage in a diffused yellow light. The two sub drivers moved as one as they made their way down the vessel’s length. The ship’s steel skin had wrinkled like an accordion and crossbeams from within the hull had punched through the metal like fractured bones. When they reached the amidships superstructure, Mercer had Alan take them as close to the ship as he dared. Every one of the six decks in the blocky superstructure had been flattened into the one below. Glass from the wheelhouse had exploded out onto the deck and glittered like gemstones. Near the stern they found where bunker oil leached from the hull in dark bubbles. There were only a couple of spots where air pockets vented into the sea.

“What do you think?” C.W. asked after they finished their inspection.

“If I had to guess,” Alan Jervis answered, “I’d say that she was fully laden when she sank and all the air escaped the hull as soon as she went under. That’s the only way she could be going fast enough to cause this much damage. What’s your take, Mercer?”