Robin Cook: Abduction

The first to appear was Louis Mazzola. He was almost a head shorter than Richard, who stood six feet. Richard thought of Louis as a bowling ball kind of guy. He had meaty features, an omnipresent five o’ clock shadow, and short dark hair that lay flat on his round head. He appeared to have no neck; his trapezius angled out from his skull without any indentation.

“What’s the hurry?” Louis whined.

“We’re going on a dive!” Richard said.

“So what else is new?” Louis complained.

Michael’s door opened. He was somewhere between Richard’s rawboned silhouette and Louis’s stockiness. Like his friends he was well muscled and in obviously good shape. He was also equivalently slovenly, dressed in the same baggy long johns. But in contrast to the others he had on a Red Sox baseball cap with the visor angled off sideways. Michael hailed from Chelsea, Massachusetts, and was an avid Sox and Bruins fan.

Michael opened his mouth to complain about being awakened, but Richard ignored him and set out for the main deck. Louis did likewise. Michael shrugged and then followed. As they descended the main companionway, Louis called ahead to Richard: “Hey, Adams, you got the cards?”

“Of course I got the cards,” Richard shot back over his shoulder. “Have you got your checkbook?”

“Screw you,” Louis said. “You haven’t beat me in the last four dives.”

“It’s been a plan, man,” Richard returned. “I’ve been setting you up.”

“Screw the cards,” Michael said. “Have you got your porno mags, Mazzola?”

“You think I’d go on a dive without them?” Louis questioned. “Hell! I’d rather forget my fins.”

“I hope you checked to make sure you’ve got the mags with the chicks and not the dudes,” Michael teased.

Louis stopped abruptly. Michael bumped into him.

“What the hell are you saying?” Louis growled.

“I’m just checking to make sure you brought the right ones,” Michael said with a wry smile. “I might want to borrow them, and I don’t want to find myself looking at any shlongs.”

Louis’s hand shot out and he grabbed a handful of Michael’s long johns top. Michael responded by grabbing Louis’s forearm with his left hand and balling his right hand into a fist. Before it could go further, Richard intervened.

“Come on, you dorks!” Richard yelled, inserting himself between his two friends. With an upward blow he knocked Louis’s arm aside. There was a tearing sound, and Louis’s hand came away with a torn swatch of Michael’s undershirt clutched in his fingers. Like a bull seeing red, Louis tried to push past Richard. When that didn’t work he tried to grab Michael’s top over Richard’s shoulder. Michael howled with laughter and ducked away.

“Mazzola, you meathead!” Richard yelled. “He’s just trying to pull your chain. Chill out, for chrissake!”

“Bastard!” Louis hissed. He threw the swatch of torn fabric he’d yanked out of Michael’s undershirt at his tormentor. Michael laughed again.

“Come on!” Richard said with disgust as he continued down the passageway. Michael reached down and picked up the piece of fabric. When he pretended to stick it back onto his chest, Louis laughed in spite of himself. Then they ran to catch up to Richard.

When the divers emerged onto the deck they could see that the derrick was raising the pipe.

“They must have broken the bit again,” Michael said. Both Richard and Louis nodded. “At least we know what we’ll be doing.”

They entered the diving van and draped themselves over three folding chairs near the door. This was where Larry Nelson, the man who ran all the diving operations, had his desk. Behind him, on the right-hand side of the van and extending all the way down to the far end, was the diving console. Here were all the readouts, gauges, and controls for operating the diving system. On the left side of the van’s dash were the controls and monitors for the camera sleds. Also on the left side was a window that looked out on the central well of the ship. It was down this central well that the diving bell was lowered.

The diving system on the Benthic Explorer was a saturation system, meaning the divers were expected to absorb the maximum amount of inert gas during any given dive. That meant that the decompression time required to rid themselves of the inert gas would be the same no matter how long they stayed at pressure. The system was composed of three cylindrical deck decompression chambers (DDC), each twelve feet wide and twenty feet long. The DDCs were hooked together like enormous sausages with double pressure hatches separating them. Within each were four bunks, several fold-down tables, a toilet, a sink, and a shower.

Each DDC also had an entrance port on the side and a pressure hatch on the top where the diving bell, or personal transfer capsule (PTC), could mate. Compression and decompression of the divers took place in the DDC. Once they had reached the equivalent pressure of the depth where they were to work, they climbed up into the PTC, which was then detached and lowered into the water. When the PTC reached the appropriate depth the divers opened the hatch through which they’d entered the bell and swam to the designated workstation. While in the water the divers were tethered with an umbilical cord containing hoses for their breathing gas, for hot water to heat their neoprene dry suits, for sensing wires, and for communication cables. Since the divers on the Benthic Explorer used full face masks, communication was possible, although difficult, due to voice distortion in the helium-oxygen mixture they breathed. The sensing wires carried information about each diver’s heart rate, breathing rate, and breathing-gas oxygen pressure. All three levels were monitored continuously on a real-time basis.

Larry looked up from his desk and regarded his second team of divers with disdain. He couldn’t believe how slovenly, brazen, and unprofessional they invariably appeared. He noted Michael’s jaunty baseball cap and ripped shirt, but he didn’t say anything. Similar to the Navy, he tolerated behavior in the divers that he would not tolerate with other members of his team. Three other divers who were equally aggravating and obstreperous were still in one of the DDCs, decompressing from the last dive on the well head. When diving to almost a thousand feet, decompression time is measured in days not hours.

“I’m sorry to have awakened you clowns from your beauty sleep,” Larry said. “It took you long enough to get down here.”

“I had to floss my teeth,” Richard said.

“And I had to do my nails,” Louis said. He flapped his hand in a swishy, loose wrist fashion.

Michael rolled his eyes with mock disgust.

“Hey, don’t start!” Louis growled while eyeing Michael. He poked one of his meaty fingers in his friend’s face. Michael batted it away.

“All right, listen up, you animals!” Larry yelled. “Try to control yourselves. This is going to be a nine-hundred-and-eighty-foot dive to inspect and change the drill bit.”

“Oh, something new, eh, chief?” Richard said in a high, squeaky voice. “This is the fifth time this dive’s been done and the third time for us. Let’s get on with it.”

“Shut up and listen,” Larry commanded. “There’s something new involved. You’re going to be piggybacking a corer on the diamond bit so that we can see if we can get a decent sample of whatever the hell we’re trying to drill into.”

“Sounds good,” Richard said.

“We’re going to speed up compression time,” Larry said. “There’s some brass aboard who’s in a hurry for results. We’re going to see if we can get you down to depth in a couple of hours. Now I want to hear immediately if there’s any joint pain. I don’t want anybody playing macho diver. Understand?”