Robin Cook - Abduction

“Ah, it’s only a Greenland shark,” Richard said to Louis, who made sure Michael had heard it as well. Now Richard was even less concerned. It was a big shark, but not dangerous. He knew that another name for the monster was sleeper shark because of its sluggish habits.

After Michael made his adjustments Richard pointed toward the ridge. Michael nodded and the two started off. Both held their lights in their left hands and the rebars in their right. As accomplished swimmers they covered the distance in a short time without rushing. At a pressure of almost thirty atmospheres the sheer work of breathing the viscous, compressed gas sapped their energy.

Inside the diving bell Louis was frantically playing out both sets of tethers. He didn’t want to restrict the divers or give them too much slack lest they get tangled up. Until the divers got down to work the bell diver was a busy man. The job required concentration and quick reflexes. At the same time Louis was handling the lines, he had to keep his eye on the pressure gauges and the digital oxygen percentage readout. On top of that he was in constant communication with each diver and with diving control up in the diving van. To keep his hands free, a headset kept a tiny speaker in his ear and a microphone positioned over his mouth.

Out in the water the two divers swam to the top of the ridge and paused. At that distance from the diving bell the amount of illumination fell off sharply. Richard motioned to his flashlight and both turned them on.

Behind them, the diving bell glowed eerily like an orbiter nesting in a rocky, alien landscape. A stream of bubbles issued from the bell and dribbled toward the far-off surface. Ahead, the divers faced darkness fading to indelible blackness with only a faint hint of a glow when they looked up toward the surface almost a thousand feet above. In the back of their minds they knew the huge shark was somewhere just beyond their vision. Shining their lights forward provided meager cones of light that penetrated the icy darkness only forty to fifty feet ahead.

“There’s a drop-off beyond the ridge,” Richard reported. “This must be the scarp.”

Louis relayed the information up to the dive station. Although the dive control could listen to the divers and talk to them, Larry preferred to use the bell diver as an intermediary. The combination of the helium voice distortion and the noise of the divers’ breathing gas flow made comprehension by those up in the diving van extremely difficult even with the helium unscrambler on-line. It was much more efficient to use the bell diver since he was more accustomed to the speech distortions.

“Red diver,” Louis called out. “Control wants to know if you see any sign of the Oceanus. ”

“That’s negative,” Richard said.

“How about a crevice or a hole?” Louis relayed.

“Not at the moment,” Richard reported, “but we’re about to start down this rock wall.”

Richard and Michael swam over the edge and down the face of the cliff.

“The rock is as smooth as glass,” Richard commented. Michael nodded. He’d run his hand along it briefly.

“You’re coming up on your last one hundred feet of hose,” Louis said. He quickly took the last loops down from their storage hooks, already cursing under his breath. Soon he’d be coiling it all up again. Divers rarely wandered this far from the diving bell, and it was just his luck to be assigned as the bell diver when they did.

Richard stopped his descent. He grabbed Michael to stop him as well. Richard pointed to his wrist thermometer. Michael looked at his and did a double take.

“The water temperature just changed,” Richard reported. “It just went up almost one hundred degrees. Shut off our hot water!”

“Red diver, are you shitting me?” Louis asked.

“Michael’s reads the same,” Richard said. “It’s like we’ve climbed into a hot tub.”

Richard had been shining his light down as they descended, searching for the base of the scarp. Now he shined it around. At the very periphery of illumination he could just make out a wall opposite the one they were descending.

“Hey! Apparently we are in some kind of huge crevice,” he said. “I can just barely see the other side. It must be about fifty feet wide.”

Michael tapped Richard on the shoulder and pointed off to their left. “There’s an end to it as well,” he said.

“Michael’s right,” Richard said when he’d looked. Then he swung around and pointed the light in the opposite direction. “I guess it’s like a box canyon ’cause I can’t see a fourth side, at least not from where we are.”

“Hey,” Michael said. “We’re sinking!”

Richard looked at the wall behind him. It was true they were sinking-more quickly than he would have thought possible. There was little sensation of resistance against the water.

Richard and Michael gave a few powerful kicks upward. To their astonishment there was little effect. They were still sinking. With a mixture of confusion and alarm, both responded by reflex and inflated their buoyancy vests. When that seemed to have little effect, they released their weight belts. Still significantly negatively buoyant, they jettisoned their rebars. Finally with some continued kicking their descent slowed and stopped.

Richard pointed upward and the two started swimming. Despite the heavy work of breathing they were swimming hard. The strange sinking episode had unnerved them, and to make matters worse, they were beginning to feel the heat through their suits.

The two were even with the top of the cliff when a sudden sustained vibration swept up from the depths like a shock wave. For a few seconds both men were mildly disoriented. They had trouble breathing and swimming at the same time. The shaking was similar to what they had experienced in the diving bell on the descent, only much worse. They realized this was an underwater earthquake, and both of them intuitively sensed they were at or near the epicenter.

For Louis, the quake was even more violent. At the moment of impact he’d been frantically hauling in the tethers, which had gone suddenly slack. He’d been forced to let go of the lines to keep himself from being impaled on one of the many wall-mounted protrusions.

Richard recovered enough to take a breath although doing so was painful. The pressure wave had bruised his chest. As an experienced diver, his first response was to check on his buddy, and he frantically searched by spinning around. For a heart-stopping second he could not find Michael. Then he looked down. Michael appeared to be clawing his way up through the water. Richard reached down to lend a hand. When he did, he realized that they were both sinking-and sinking fast.

With no other way to decrease his weight Richard joined Michael in an attempt to swim upward. In desperation they even discarded their lights to free their hands. But they made no progress. If anything, they seemed to be going down. Then they plummeted, caroming off the rock wall as they were inexorably sucked into the abyss.

Inside the bell Louis had recovered his balance enough to grab the tethers, which were still slack. Quickly he pulled in a loop, but before he could get it over the rack, there was a sudden tug in the opposite direction. At first he tried to hold the lines from going out, but it was impossible. Had he held on, they would have pulled him from the bell.

Louis cursed as he frantically got out of the way of the hoses, which were now being yanked out of the bell at a furious rate. It was as if Richard and Michael were lures that had been taken by a gigantic fish.

“ Bell diver, are you all right?” Larry’s voice asked.

“Yeah, I’m all right!” Louis yelled. “But something crazy is going on! The hoses are going out at a hundred miles an hour!”