Medusa Page 7

  Phelps pointed to a hemispheric shape in the center of the rectangle. "Is this where the surface shuttle came in?"

  "That's right," Lois said. "The minisubs attached to the underside of the transit module are used for specimen collection in the canyon, but they can be used to evacuate the lab, and there are escape pods available as a last resort. The shuttle airlock is connected by reinforced passageways that give the staff access from any module and contribute to the structural strength of the complex."

  "What about the fourth module?" Phelps said.

  "Top secret."

  "How many folks work in the complex?"

  "Sorry, top secret again. I don't make the rules."

  "That's okay," Phelps said with a nod. "This is one hell of a job of engineering."

  "We're fortunate that the Navy had the facility readily available. The lab was originally planned as an undersea observatory. The components were built on land, fully equipped, and towed out here in special barges. The barges were then rafted together, and the setup was fitted together like an old-fashioned Tinkertoy and lowered into the sea in one piece. Luckily, we're not at great depth, and the sea bottom is fairly level. It's what they call a turn-key operation. The complex was not meant to be permanent, so it has compressed-air capabilities that allow it to attain negative buoyancy. It could be retrieved and moved to another location."

  Phelps said, "If it's not too much trouble, I'd like to see the nonrestricted areas."

  Lois Mitchell frowned, signaling that she was doing this under protest. She picked up the intercom phone and called the control room. "Hello, Frank," she said. "This is going to take a little longer than I expected. Anything new with Doc? No? Okay, I'll keep in touch."

  She replaced the phone with more force than was necessary, and stood to her full height. "C'mon, Mr. Phelps. This is going to be fast and furious."

  Fifty miles from Davy Jones's Locker, the rolling surface of the dark sea erupted in an explosion of foam and spray. A twenty-foot-long aluminum tube burst from the center of the churning geyser, sped skyward at a sharp angle, leaving a white fan-shaped trail behind it, and quickly dove back toward the waves in a curving trajectory.

  Within seconds, the cruise missile had leveled out, until it was traveling twenty-five feet above the wave tops, so low that its passing left a wake in the water. Powered by its solid-fuel rocket booster, the missile quickly accelerated, and by the time it had shed its rocket and the fan-jet engines had kicked in it had achieved its cruising speed of five hundred miles per hour.

  A series of sophisticated guidance systems kept the cruise missile on track as unerringly as if it were being steered by a skilled pilot.

  The speeding missile's unsuspecting target was a large, gray-hulled ship anchored near the red-and-white buoy that marked the location of the undersea lab. The name on the hull was PROUD MARY, and it was registered in the Marshall Islands as a survey ship. The Proud Mary was anchored near the buoy waiting for the shuttle sub to return with Phelps.

  The ship's owner was a shadowy corporation that provided vessels to international security companies in need of naval services. They supplied everything from small, fast, and heavily armed speedboats to ships large enough to land an army of mercenaries anywhere in the world.

  Assigned to protect the undersea laboratory, the Proud Mary carried two dozen guards proficient in the use of every type of small arms as well as an array of electronic sensing gear that could pick up vessels or planes approaching the lab. The ship also served as a parking garage for the shuttle that ferried supplies and people to and from the lab.

  In its leap from the ocean, the cruise missile had blipped on the ship's radar screen for only a few seconds. Inactivity had dulled the operator's edge, and he was engrossed in a motorcycle magazine when the missile made its brief appearance, before dropping from surveillance's view. The ship also had infrared sensors, but even if the missile had been flying at altitude they would have failed to pick up the low-temperature heat from its engines.

  Undetected, the missile streaked toward the Proud Mary carrying a half ton of high explosives in its warhead.

  Lois Mitchell and Gordon Phelps were making their way along the connecting tube to the control room when they heard a loud whump that seemed to come from far over their heads. She stopped in her tracks and pivoted slowly, ears cocked, concerned that it indicated a systems failure.

  "I've never heard anything like that before," she said. "It sounded like a truck slamming into a wall. I'd better check to make sure all the lab systems are operating as they should be."

  Phelps glanced at his watch. "From the sound of it, things seem to be moving a little ahead of schedule."

  "I'd better check the situation in the control room."

  "Good idea," Phelps said amiably.

  They started walking toward the door at the end of the passageway. A few steps from the control-room module, the door hissed open, and Frank Logan burst through. His pale face was flushed with excitement, and he was grinning.

  "Lois! I was coming to get you. Did you hear that weird noise—"

  Logan stopped short, his grin vanishing. Lois turned to see what he was staring at.

  Phelps was holding a pistol in his hand, dangling it loosely next to his thigh.

  "What's going on?" she said. "We don't allow weapons in the lab."

  Phelps gave her a hangdog look. "Like I said, no security system is totally foolproof. Lab's under new management, Dr. Mitchell."

  He was still soft-spoken, but his voice had lost the obsequious quality that Lois had found so irritating and now had an edge that hadn't been there before. Phelps told Logan to stand next to Lois so he could keep an eye on him. As Logan complied, the control-room door hissed open again, and a lab technician stepped through. Phelps instinctively brought his gun around to deal with the interruption. The lab tech froze, but Logan, seeing Phelps's momentary distraction, tried to grab his gun.

  They struggled, but Phelps was younger and stronger and would have gotten the upper hand even if the gun had not gone off. The noise was muffled to a soft putt by a silencer on the pistol barrel, but a red stain blossomed on the front of Logan's white lab coat. His legs gave out, and he crumpled to the floor.

  The lab tech bolted back into the control room. Lois ran over and knelt by Logan's motionless body. She opened her mouth in a scream but nothing came out. "You killed him!" she finally said.

  "Aw, hell," Phelps said. "Didn't mean to do that."

  "What did you mean to do?" Lois said.

  "No time to talk about that now, ma'am."

  Lois stood up and confronted Phelps. "Are you going to shoot me too?"

  "Not unless I have to, Dr. Mitchell. Don't do anything crazy like your friend. We'd hate to lose you."

  Lois Mitchell stared defiantly at Phelps for a few seconds before she wilted under his unrelenting gaze. "What do you want?"

  "For now, I want you to round up all the lab folks."

  "Then what?" she said.

  Phelps shrugged. "Then we're going for a little ride."

  CHAPTER 6

  The B3 passengers had decided to report their observations like sportscasters. Joe Zavala would do the play-by-play, Max Kane would provide the color using William Beebe's writings.

  At two hundred eighty-six feet down, Kane announced, "The torpedoed ocean liner Lusitania is resting at this level."

  At three hundred fifty-three feet, he noted, "This was the deepest any submarine had ever gone when Beebe made his bathysphere dives."

  When the bathysphere reached six hundred feet, Kane slipped the lucky skullcap from his head and held it in his hands.

  "We've entered what Beebe called the Land of the Lost," he said in a hushed tone. "This is the realm that belongs to the human beings who have been lost at sea. Going back to the Phoenicians, millions of human beings have descended this far, but all of them have been dead, the drowned victims of war, tempest, or act of God."

  "Cheery thought," Zava
la said. "Is that why you said hello to Davy Jones's Locker… where drowned sailors go?"

  Zavala had rigged a switch to turn off the TV camera and microphone. Kane reached out and said, "Joe and I are taking a short break. We'll be back with more observations in a few minutes." He pushed the button. "I need a breather," he said with a smile. "You asked about the Locker… It's the nickname my colleagues gave to the lab."

  "The marine center at Bonefish Key?" Zavala said.

  Kane glanced at the camera. "That's right, Bonefish Key."

  Zavala wondered why anyone would compare a sunny Florida island on the Gulf of Mexico with the grim domain of the drowned. He gave a mental shrug. Scientists were strange birds.

  "Beebe sounds morbid, but he had a relatively benign view of the ocean," Kane said. "He knew the dangers were real, but he thought the hazards of the deep overblown."

  "The millions of drowning victims you mentioned might disagree," Zavala said. "I respect everything Beebe and Barton did, Doc, but from an engineer's point of view I'd say they were just plain lucky they didn't become part of that Land of the Lost. The original bathysphere was an accident waiting to happen."

  Kane greeted the blunt assessment with a chuckle.

  "Beebe was a realist as well as a dreamer," he said. "He compared the bathysphere to a hollow pea swaying on a cobweb a quarter of a mile below the deck of a ship rolling in midocean."

  "Poetic but not inaccurate," Zavala replied. "That's exactly why I built safety features into the new diving bell."

  "Glad you did," Kane said. He switched the microphone back on and turned his attention to the scene visible through the porthole.

  The B3 rocked slightly from time to time, but its descent was signaled more by changes in the light coming in through the portholes than by any sense of motion. The most drastic color change comes at the start of a dive. Red and yellow are wrung from the spectrum as if from a sponge. Green and blue dominate. Deeper still, the water color shifts to navy and finally becomes an intense black.

  In the early stages of the dive, pilot fish, silver eels, motelike clouds of copepods, and strings of lacelike siphonophores drifted past the windows like tiny ghosts, along with shrimp, translucent squid, and snails so tiny that they resembled brown bubbles. Long, dark shapes could be glimpsed at the extreme range of the B3's searchlight beam.

  At seven hundred feet, Zavala switched the searchlight off. He looked out the window and murmured an appreciative exclamation in Spanish. Zavala had grown up in Santa Fe, and the view through the porthole looked like a New Mexico sky on a clear winter's night. The darkness sparkled with stars, some alone, others in groups, some continuously flashing, others just once. There were floating threads of luminescence, and glowing smudges that could have been novas or nebulas in a celestial setting.

  The cabin was as hushed as a cathedral; the loudest sound was the low hum of the air-circulation motor, so when Kane saw an undulating form float by the porthole his response was like a gunshot.

  "Wow!" Kane exclaimed. "An Aurelia jellyfish."

  Zavala smiled at Kane's excitement. Although there was no denying the beauty in the jellyfish's undulating motion, the creature outside the bathysphere's porthole was only a few inches across.

  "Had me for a second there, Doc. Thought you'd seen the Loch Ness Monster," Zavala said.

  "This is so much better than Nessie. The medusae are among the most fascinating and complex animals on the face of the earth or under the sea. Look at that school of fish lit up like the Las Vegas Strip… lantern fish… Hey," Kane said, "what was that?"

  "You see a mermaid, Doc?" Zavala asked.

  Kane pressed his face against the porthole. "I'm not sure what I saw," he said, "but I know it was big."

  Zavala flicked on the searchlight, a green shaft of light edged with purple-blue stabbing the darkness, and he peered through the porthole.

  "Gone," he said, "whatever it was."

  "Beebe spotted a big fish he thought might have been a whale shark," Kane said to the camera. "Until the bathysphere's dive, his fellow scientists never believed that he had seen fish with glowing teeth and neon skin. He got the last laugh when he proved the abyss abounded with such strange creatures."

  "They're getting stranger all the time," Zavala said, pointing at himself. "The locals swimming around out there must think that you and I are pretty unsavory-looking additions to their neighborhood."

  Kane's loud guffaw echoed off the bathysphere's curving walls.

  "My apologies to the listening audience out there, hope I didn't blow out your speakers. But Joe is right: humans have no right being where we are at this moment. The pressure on the outside of this sphere is half a ton per square inch. We'd look like jellyfish ourselves if it weren't for the steel shell protecting us… Hey, there's some more lantern fish. Man, they're beautiful. Look, there's—Whoops!"

  The bathysphere's descent had been smooth and without deviation, but suddenly a strong vibration passed through the sphere as Kane was talking. The B3 first lifted up, then dropped, in slow motion. Wide-eyed, Kane glanced around, as if expecting the sea to come pouring in through the sphere's shell.

  Zavala called up to the support vessel. "Please stop yo-yoing the B3, Kurt."

  An unusually mounding sea had rolled under the ship, and the cable suddenly had gone limp. The operator of the crane noticed the change and goosed the winch motor.

  "Sorry for the rough ride," Austin said. "The cable went slack in the cross swell, and we moved too fast when we tried to adjust."

  "Not surprising, with the length of cable you're handling."

  "Now that you bring up the subject, you might want to check your depth finder."

  Zavala glanced at the display screen and tapped Kane on the shoulder. Kane turned away from the window and saw Zavala's finger pointing at the gauge.

  Three thousand thirty feet.

  They had exceeded the original bathysphere's historic dive by two feet.

  Max Kane's mouth dropped down practically to his Adam's apple. "We're here!" he announced, "more than half a mile down."

  "And almost out of cable," Kurt Austin said. "The sea bottom is around fifty feet below you."

  Kane slapped Joe Zavala's palm a high five. "I can't believe it," he said. His face was flushed with excitement. "I'd like to take this moment to thank the intrepid William Beebe and Otis Barton," he continued, "for blazing the trail for all who have followed. What we have done today is a tribute to their courage… We're going to be busy for a while shooting pictures of the sea bottom, so we're signing off for a few minutes. We'll get back to you when we're riding to the surface."

  They cut television transmission, positioned themselves next to the portholes with still cameras, and shot dozens of pictures of the strange glowing creatures that the bathysphere's lights had attracted. Eventually, Zavala checked their time on the bottom, and said the bathysphere would have time to head back up.

  Kane grinned and pointed toward the surface. "Haul away." Zavala called Austin on the radio and told him they were ready to make the ascent.

  The B3 swayed slightly, vibrated, then jerked from side to side.

  Zavala pulled himself back up to a sitting position. "Getting bounced around down here, Kurt. Sea picking up again?" he inquired.

  "It's like a mirror. Wind's died down and the swells have flattened out."

  "Joe," Kane shouted, "there it is again… the monster fish!" He jabbed his index finger at the window.

  A shadow passed near the edge of the searchlight beam and turned toward the bathysphere.

  As Zavala pressed his face against a porthole, every hair on his scalp stood up and saluted. He was looking into three glowing eyes, one of them over the other two.

  He had little time to analyze his impressions. The sphere jerked again.

  "We're seeing cable oscillations near the surface," Kurt's voice came over the speaker. "What's going on?"

  There was another jerking movement.

  "T
here's something out there," Zavala said.

  "What are you talking about?" Austin asked.

  Zavala wasn't sure himself, so he simply said, "Haul us up."

  "Hang tight," Austin said. "We're starting the winch."

  The bathysphere seemed to stabilize. The numbers on the fathometer blinked, showing that the sphere was moving up toward the surface. Kane broke into a relieved grin, but the expression on his face froze as the bathysphere jerked once more. A second later, the men in the B3 were levitating as if plunging on a runaway elevator.

  The bathysphere had gone into free fall.

  CHAPTER 7

  Austin leaned against the ship's railing and saw the B3's tether cable oscillating like a plucked violin string. He spoke into the headset microphone that connected him with the bathysphere. "What's going on, Joe? The cable is going crazy."

  Austin heard garbled voices, the words inaudible against a background of metallic clanging. Then the cable abruptly stopped its wild gyrations, and the line went dead.

  Austin strained his ears. Nothing. Not even a whisper of static. He removed the headset and examined the connections. Everything was in place. He unclipped his belt radio and called the captain in the ship's bridge.

  "I've lost voice communication with the B3. Is the video transmission coming through?"

  "Not since it was cut off," the captain reported.

  "Have you checked the redundant systems?" Austin asked.

  Unlike the original bathysphere, which was connected to the surface with a single telephone line, the B3's hauling cable incorporated several different communications routes in case one went out in the hostile deep-sea environment.