Chapter 3
Artificial light and the echo of conversations refracted off of the vaulted ceiling of the sea deck.
"Nervous?" Katie ran through their pre-dive buddy checks. She did everything by the book and then some, the result of having so many lives in her hands for so many years.
"Not about the mission," said Alex, "I've worked with radioactive sources all my career - "
"I understand you're quite accomplished in your field," she tugged at his BCD, "check."
"A fact that got me assigned to the seaQuest in the first place. No, uh, it's you making me nervous."
"I'm sorry?"
"I want you to know that I really admire what you do. I mean, you are probably the hardest working person on the boat. I've garnered a new respect for the military by watching you work."
She tried to ignore that, grasping his wrist in a business-like manner, "computer."
"Check," he said.
"O-ring."
He unscrewed one of the stages to his tanks and examined the washer. "Check."
"Regulator." She hated that word.
He checked. "Check."
"Three millimetres of oh-so flattering neoprene."
"I don't know about that, Commander; I've never seen a better dressed frog."
"First names are fine. You can call me Katie."
"Alex." He held out his hand to shake, as if it was the first time they had met.
"Anyway," she reached down to pull on a fin, "I'm not a maverick. I can't do this without a solid team of techs behind me. We don't often get the appreciation we deserve. We're asked to do the impossible on practically a daily basis but no-one notices unless something goes wrong."
"We're not all that dissimilar, you and I," Alex began to pull his own fins on, "the only difference is that I work with hypotheticals, and you work with harsh reality."
Katie's eyes settled on the tattoo of a girl's name on his upper arm. "Who's Gwen?"
"My ex-wife," he raised his eye brows, "you married?"
Katie coughed a little. "You obviously don't listen to the scuttlebutt around here."
"Should I?"
"Probably not," she smiled.
"Fancy going out for a drink next time we're in port? Not often I come across someone who isn't bored silly by my rambling on about the intricacies of nuclear reactors."
Katie licked her lips, making him wait. Oh, what the hell, "sure."
They smiled at each other for the briefest of moments, before Alex seemed to remember why he was there. "We should get going, it's nearly eight o'clock."
"Oh eight hundred."
"Whatever," Alex positioned his mask.
They slipped into the pool.
"Open the sea doors, dive team compressed to outside equivalence and ready to depart," Tim spoke into his headset but was greeted only by static interference. "Great, don't tell me the blackout's started to affect the inside of the ship."
Miguel came over and helped him test all the frequencies they used for ship-wide communications. "I'm telling you, nothing's happened for at least two weeks. Nothing bad, anyway. Something's gotta go wrong with this mission..."
"Is this your stupid theory-of-probability-curse-theory-thing?"
"Law of Averages," Miguel corrected him, "out of a hundred missions, at least three have to get fubar."
"Sounds dangerously close to Krieg's scatter technique."
"That actually works, you know - "
"Um, not good," Tim pressed buttons, ignoring Miguel, "very not good." He had no joy, so he called Phillips over from the engineering station.
"Have you tried switching it off and then on again?" No-one was amused. Phillips exhausted every avenue of investigation. "Better let the Captain know," he said.
Tim started to use the PA, but realised they would all have to switch to wired systems. "Damn, welcome to the dark-ages, everyone." It was going to be odd for the crew to have to do without the high technology they were used to. Talk about fish out of water, he thought. "Captain, we're experiencing more technical difficulties. Recommend we get a work-group on this stat."
"I'll be up in just a moment, Lieutenant," Bridger's voice floated back to him.
Phillips began wiring up the key stations on the bridge all the headsets.
Five minutes later and the Captain and Commander Ford were crowded around Tim's station with Doctor Westphalen and Doctor Levin, brainstorming an action plan.
"It's one of the classified weapons systems the scientists were developing." Westphalen couldn't disguise her distaste for the military. Tim had heard her lay into Bridger before, when she'd been rather vocal about the UEO taking attention away from their scientific mandate to pursue war errands, as she put it.
"There are several systems already in use across the military that can produce a similar effect," Phillips chipped in from across the bridge, "E-bombs, EMP pulses, but they're all one-shot techniques; this is like a sustained barrage."
"Maybe they came up with a way to cause deconstructive interference across a broad spectrum of electromagnetic frequencies," Levin volunteered, his brow furrowed.
"Either way, we'll know a helluva lot more when the salvage team return," said Ford, "then we can retreat to a safe distance to work this thing out. ETA on Commander Hitchcock, Mr O'Neill?"
"They had one hundred minutes on the clock. I'll put the count down on the main screen for you."
They were all grateful for a visual reminder to focus their efforts, it was difficult working with phenomena you couldn't see. Tim offered up a silent prayer for Hitchcock and Ćaćić.
At three-hundred and fifty feet long, the Kasimira was dwarfed by the seaQuest, yet she still had an imposing presence, looming up out of the depths. Once the pride of the Russian fleet, she was now a crippled wreck lying two thirds buried on the coral like a lethargic whale. The black hull was dappled with sunlight, filtered through more than seventy-five feet of equatorial waters. Down here, there was little differentiation between colours; red and green looked the same, and most of the detail was lost. There was little margin for error.
Katie shone her flash-light on the hull. She'd always believed that ships had a soul and that, once they were wrecked, they lived on in the hearts and minds of those who sailed in them. Unfortunately, no one aboard the Kasimira had survived to tell the tale.
She looked back at Alex, with the bulk of the equipment strapped to his backpack, the DVP pulling him along.
She waited for him, signing, Okay? when he'd caught up.
Yes, I'm Okay, he signed back.
Up, she gestured.
They left the DVP on the sea bed and followed the curve of the conning tower up to the bridge. Of course, when the Kasimira was built, a bridge was still called a bridge and the command centre was the conn. At least that's what they were in English, she had no idea what the Russians called them.
The Kasimira was an Akula Class Attack submarine, pretty archaic by Katie's standards. Taking the hypersonic welding torch from Alex, she got to work on the hatch. It took longer than MIG welding, but they couldn't take any chances. Any gases would have become extremely volatile during the four decades they had been trapped inside.
Surprisingly little air escaped. The bubbles warped and drifted on their way to the surface, free after decades trapped below with the dead.
The dead.
She had already prepared Alex for what they might encounter. A boat that size would've had up to a hundred personnel, and as far as they knew they would all still be down there. It didn't worry Katie in the slightest, she had seen her fair share of death, but she hoped Alex would be able to focus on the task at hand.
Get in. Get the black box and the Captain's log. Check the weapons and the reactor. Take pictures of everything. Get out. Simple.
They began to descend the conning tower, switching up their flash-light beams as the visibility reduced.
Okay? Katie signed.
Still Okay, Alex replied, smiling under his regulator.
She cycled open the sea door at the bottom of the tower. Finally, they were inside. Crabs scuttled out of the way of the flash-light beams. The torpedo tubes were open. Someone had messed up pretty badly. What was it Doc always said? Made a 'Boo Boo'. She signed to Alex how to get to the reactor. Left. Down one level. Look for hazard signs. She hoped he had memorised the schematic half as well as she had. It was a pain in the ass not having radios, but signing was quicker than writing a note. He made his way aft, passing door after barnacle covered door, taking Geiger counter readings on the way.
Katie swam into the command centre. She quickly located the black box, otherwise known as the performance data recorder, or 'holy grail' of salvage operations. She unscrewed the communications console fascia and pulled out a briefcase sized box. Orange, of course, not black.
As she moved towards the Captain's quarters, immediately adjacent to the conn, she had an overwhelming sense of unease. She did a sweep of the room. Bodies. There were no bodies. There should at least be something. The crabs couldn't munch their way through an entire ship's compliment. But she couldn't waste time figuring it out right now.
The captains log was exactly where she thought it would be, still in pristine condition. She opened it. It was all in Cyrillic.
She checked the time on the dive computer. They had better bug out. But where was Alex? He knew the timescale they were working to. She would have to go find him, and this irked her somewhat.
The corridors were only a third of the size of seaQuest's and Katie's tanks bumped dangerously on the ceilings, however, she managed to navigate more easily once she had left the 'black' box and other equipment at the bottom of the conning tower.
Where the hell is he? She had been on enough technical dives to know the error margins were very small.
She rounded a corner and found herself staring into a bloated face, rotten and waterlogged, half the flesh hanging off and bared teeth grinning a savage snarl.