Dragon (15 page)

He could hear a sharp hiss above the hum of the steam turbine but couldn’t see where it was coming from. Already there was a quarter meter of water covering the steel walk matting. He paused and listened, trying to locate the sound. It wouldn’t do to rush blindly into the razor-slashing stream.

“See it?” Plunkett shouted at him.

“No!” Pitt snapped nervously.

“Should I stop?”

“Not for anything. Keep moving toward the summit.”

He leaned through the floor opening. There was a threatening terror, a foreboding about the deadly hissing noise, more menacing than the hostile world outside. Had the spurting leak already damaged vital equipment? Was it too strong to be stopped? There was no time to lose, no time to contemplate, no time to weigh the odds. And he who hesitated was supposed to be lost. It made no difference now if he died by drowning, cut to ribbons, or crushed by the relentless pressure of the deep sea.

He dropped through the trapdoor and crouched inside for a few moments, happy to still be in one piece. The hissing was close, almost within an arm’s length, and he could feel the sting from the spray as its stream struck something ahead. But the resulting mist that filled the compartment prevented him from spotting the entry hole.

Pitt edged closer through the mist. A thought struck him, and he pulled off a shoe. He held it up and swung it from side to side with the heel out as a blind man would sweep a cane. Abruptly the shoe was nearly torn from his hand. A section of the heel was neatly carved off. He saw it then, a brief sparkle ahead and to his right.

The needlelike stream was jetting against the mounted base of the compact steam turbine that drove the DSMV’s huge traction belts. The thick titanium mount withstood the concentrated power of the leak’s spurt, but its tough surface had already been etched and pitted from the narrow onslaught.

Pitt had isolated the problem, but it was far from solved. No caulking, no sealant or tape could stop a spewing jet with power to cut through metal if given enough time. He stood and edged around the turbine to a tool and spare parts cabinet. He studied the interior for a brief instant and then pulled out a length of high-pressure replacement pipe for the steam generator. Next he retrieved a heavy sledge-type hammer.

The water had risen to half a meter by the time he was ready. His makeshift scheme just had to work. If not, then all hope was gone and there was nothing he and Plunkett could do but wait to either drown or be crushed by the incoming pressure.

Slowly, with infinite caution, he reached out with the pipe in one hand and the hammer in the other. He lay poised in the rapidly rising water, inhaled a deep breath, held it a moment, and then exhaled. Simultaneously he shoved one end of the pipe over the entry hole, careful to aim the opposite end away from him, and immediately jammed it against the angled slope of the thick bulkhead shield separating the turbine and reactor compartments. Furiously he hammered the lower end of the pipe up the angle until it was wedged tight and only a fine spray escaped from both top and bottom.

His jury-rigged stopgap may have been clever, but it wasn’t perfect. The wedged pipe had slowed the incoming flood to a tiny spurt, enough to get them to the summit of the guyot, hopefully, but it was not a permanent solution. It was only a matter of hours before the entry hole enlarged itself or the pipe split under the laserlike force.

Pitt sat back, cold, wet, and too mentally drained to feel the water sloshing around his body. Funny, he thought after a long minute, how sitting in ice water he could still sweat.

Twenty-two grueling hours after struggling from its grave, the faithful DSMV had climbed within sight of the seamount’s summit. With Pitt back at the controls, the twin tracks dug, slipped, then dug their cleats into the silt-covered lava rock, struggling up the steep incline a meter at a time until finally the great tractor clawed over the rim onto level ground.

Only then did Big John come to a complete stop and become silent as the surrounding cloud of ooze slowly settled on the flattened top of Conrow Guyot.

“We did it, old man,” laughed Plunkett excitedly as he pounded Pitt on the back. “We jolly well did it.”

“Yes,” Pitt agreed tiredly, “but we’ve still one more obstacle to overcome.” He nodded at the digital depth reading. “Three hundred and twenty-two meters to go.”

Plunkett’s joy quickly vaporized. “Any sign of your people?” he asked seriously.

Pitt punched up the sonar-radar probe. The display revealed the ten-kilometer-square summit as empty and barren as a sheet of cardboard. The expected rescue vehicle had failed to arrive.

“Nobody home,” he said quietly.

“Hard to believe no one on the surface heard our blasting music and homed in on our movement,” said Plunkett, more irritated than disappointed.

“They’ve had precious little time to mount a rescue operation.”

“Still, I’d have expected one of your submersibles to return and keep us company.”

Pitt gave a weary shrug. “Equipment failure, adverse weather, they might have encountered any number of problems.”

“We didn’t come all this way to expire in this hellish place now.” Plunkett looked up toward the surface. The pitch-black had become a twilight indigo-blue. “Not this close.”

Pitt knew Giordino and Admiral Sandecker would have moved heaven and earth to save him and Plunkett. He refused to accept the possibility they hadn’t smelled out his plan and acted accordingly. Silently he rose, went aft, and raised the door to the engine compartment. The leak had enlarged and the water level was above a meter. Another forty minutes to an hour and it would reach the turbine. When it drowned, the generator would die as well. Without functioning life-support systems, Pitt and Plunkett would quickly follow.

“They’ll come,” Pitt said to himself with unwavering determination. “They’ll come.”

17

T
EN MINUTES PASSED
, twenty, as the dread of loneliness fell over them. The sense of being lost on the sea bottom, the unending darkness, the bizarre sea life that hovered around them—it was all like a ghastly nightmare.

Pitt had parked Big John in the center of the seamount and then programmed the computer to monitor the leak in the engine compartment. He peered warily at the display screen as the numbers showed the water level creeping to within a few centimeters of the generator.

Though the climb to a shallower depth sharply relieved the outside water pressure, the entry flaw had enlarged, and Pitt’s further efforts could not stem the growing flood. He evacuated air to offset the increased atmospheric compression caused by the rising flood.

Plunkett half turned and studied Pitt, whose strong craggy face was quite still, as firmly set as the eyelids that never seemed to flicker. The eyes seemed to reflect anger, not at any one person or object, but anger simply directed at a situation he could not control. He sat frighteningly remote from Plunkett, almost as if the British oceanographer was a thousand kilometers away. Pitt’s mind was armored against all sensation or fear of death. His thoughts sifted through myriad escape plans, calculating every detail from every angle until one by one they were all discarded in the shredder inside his brain.

Only one possibility stood a remote chance of success, but it all depended on Giordino. If his friend didn’t appear within the next hour, it would be too late.

Plunkett reached over and thumped Pitt’s shoulder with one big fist. “A magnificent try, Mr. Pitt. You took us from the deep abyss to almost within sight of the surface.”

“Not good enough,” Pitt murmured. “We came up a dollar long and a penny short.”

“Mind telling me how you planned to do it without the convenience of a pressure lock to escape the vehicle and a personnel transfer capsule to carry us to the surface?”

“My original idea was to swim home.”

Plunkett raised an eyebrow. “I hope you didn’t expect us to hold our breath.”

“No.”

“Good,” Plunkett said, satisfied. “Speaking for myself, I’d have expired before ascending thirty meters.” He hesitated and stared at Pitt curiously. “Swim, you can’t be serious?”

“A ridiculous hope bred of desperation,” Pitt replied philosophically. “I know better than to believe our bodies could survive the onslaught of extreme pressure and decompression.”

“You say that was your original idea. Do you have another—like trying to float this monster off the bottom?”

“You’re getting warm.”

“Lifting a fifteen-ton vehicle can only be accomplished in a vivid imagination.”

“Actually, it hinges on Al Giordino,” Pitt answered with forbearance. “If he’s read my mind, he’ll meet us in a submersible equipped with—”

“But he let you down,” said Plunkett, sweeping an arm over the empty seascape.

“There has to be a damn good reason for it.”

“You know and I know, Mr. Pitt, no one will come. Not within hours, days, or ever. You gambled on a miracle and lost. If they do come to search, it’ll be over the wreckage of your mining community, not here.”

Pitt did not reply but gazed into the water. The lights of the DSMV had drawn a school of hatchetfish. Silver with deep bodies and flattened on the sides, slender tails wavered in the water as rows of light organs flashed along their lower stomachs. The eyes were disproportionately large and protruded from tubes that rose upward. He watched as they swirled gracefully in lazy spirals around the great nose of Big John.

Slowly he bent forward as if listening, then sank back again. “Thought I heard something.”

“A mystery we can still hear over that blaring music,” Plunkett grunted. “My eardrums have ceased to function.”

“Remind me to send you a condolence card at a later date,” said Pitt. “Or would you rather we give up, flood the cabin, and end it?”

He froze into immobility, eyes focused on the hatchetfish. A great shadow crept over them, and as one they darted into the blackness and vanished.

“Something wrong?” asked Plunkett.

“We have company,” Pitt said with an I-told-you-so grin. He twisted in his seat, tilted his head, and looked through the upper viewing window.

One of the NUMA Soggy Acres submersibles hung suspended in the void slightly above and to the rear of the DSMV. Giordino wore a smile that was wide as a jack-o’-lantern’s. Next to him, Admiral Sandecker threw a jaunty wave through the large round port.

It was the moment Pitt had wished for, indeed silently prayed’, for, and Plunkett’s great bear hug showed how gladly he shared the moment.

“Dirk,” he said solemnly, “I humbly apologize for my negative company. This goes beyond instinct. You are one crafty bastard.”

“I do what I can,” Pitt admitted with humorous modesty.

There were few times in his life Pitt had seen anything half as wonderful as Giordino’s smiling face from inside the submersible. Where did the admiral come from? he wondered. How could he have arrived on the scene so quickly?

Giordino wasted little time. He motioned to a small door that shielded an exterior electrical receptacle. Pitt nodded and pressed a button. The door slipped open into a hidden slot, and in less than a minute one of the articulated robotic arms on the submersible connected a cable.

“Am I coming through?” Giordino’s voice burst clearly over the speakers.

“You don’t know how good it is to hear your voice, pal,” answered Pitt.

“Sorry we’re late. The other submersible swamped and sank on the surface. This one shorted its batteries and we lost time in repairs.”

“All is forgiven. Good to see you, Admiral. I didn’t expect your honored presence down here.”

“Cut the apple-polishing,” Sandecker boomed. “What’s your status?”

“We have a leak that will close down our power source within forty or fifty minutes. Beyond that we’re in good shape.”

“Then we’d better get busy.”

With no more wasted conversation, Giordino maneuvered the submersible until its bow was on the same level and facing the lower broadside of the DSMV. Then he engaged the manipulator arms mounted on the front below the control sphere. They were much smaller than the arm system on Big John and more intricate.

The sub’s modular arms were designed to accommodate several types of hand mechanisms and operate them hydraulically. The left hand was attached to the arm by a rotating wrist, which in turn was connected to three fingers with sensors in their tips that could identify any material from wood and steel to plastic, cotton, and silk. Under the operator’s delicate touch, enhanced by a computer sensory system, the fingers could dexterously thread a small needle and tat lace or, if the occasion demanded, crush rock.

Smoothly the robotic arm unraveled a hose running from a small tank to a large rod with a hole running through its center core.

The right arm’s wrist was fitted with a series of four circular metal-cutting discs. Each disc was serrated with a different edge and could be interchanged depending on the hardness of the material it was slicing.

Pitt peered at the left-hand assembly curiously. “I knew the discs were stored on board the submersible, but where did you find the oxygen cutting equipment?”

“I borrowed it from a passing submarine,” Giordino answered without elaboration.

“Logical.” There was a tired acceptance in Pitt’s voice, unsure whether his friend was stroking him.

“Beginning separation,” said Giordino.

“While you’re cutting us free I’ll pump up our air volume by a couple of atmospheres to compensate for the extra weight from the leakage flow.”

“Sound idea,” agreed Sandecker. “You’ll need all the buoyancy you can build. But mind your pressure safety limits or you’ll run into decompression problems.”

“Decompression schedules will be monitored by our computer,” Pitt assured him. “Neither Dr. Plunkett nor I look forward to a case of the bends.”

As Pitt began pumping compressed air into the control and engine compartments, Giordino jockeyed the submersible so that both arm and hand manipulators could operate independently. The hand with the three articulated fingers positioned the fat welding rod against a bolt that ran through a mounting brace. The rod held a positive charge while the DSMV was negative. A bright arc suddenly flared when contact was made between the rod and bolt. As the metal glowed and melted, oxygen spurted through the hole in the rod, dispersing the buildup.