Pandemic (23 page)

The mood had changed, to say the least. In the extravagant briefing room, he’d sensed Margaret’s subdued elation — she thought they had the infection beat. Not today, of course, but so soon that a few more weeks would make no difference. Now, however, the infection had spread to the general crew. Three positives would quickly multiply. Yasaka’s best efforts couldn’t stop the spread, not with so many people packed on the
Brashear
and nowhere to send them. The captain could only hope to slow the contagion, give Margaret and Tim time to come up with a solution.

And if they didn’t find that solution? This would end with an F-27 Eagle
dropping a firebomb on the entire task force.
Carl Brashear
would join the
Forrest Sherman
, the
Stratton
and the
Los Angeles
at the bottom of Lake Michigan. Would Clarence and Margaret still be aboard if that happened? Maybe. If Murray Longworth wasn’t sure that he and Margaret were clean, he’d torch them without a second thought.

Clarence couldn’t do anything to help Tim and Margaret. What he could do was pay attention to the diver entering the wreck of the
Los Angeles
.

On the counter in front of him, Clarence had diagrams of the
Los Angeles
’s layout. He watched the diver’s progress on the console’s small screens. It was quite different from the deep-water dives he’d seen on the Discovery Channel: no rust, no colorful clusters of barnacles and anemones, no schools of bright fish. The
LA
had sunk only three days earlier — just a broken, gray hull sitting on a lifeless lake bottom.

The control room’s speakers carried the chatter between the diver and the
Brashear
’s crew.

“Diver One, status? How you doing, Tom?”

“Diver is okay,” came back the answer. “Goddamn cold down here, feeling it in my joints right through the suit. Request permission to start cutting.”

“Permission granted, Diver One.”

Seconds later, the screen blared brightly. Clarence looked away.

The diver’s awkward high-pressure diving suit made him look like a cross between a morbidly obese man and a heavily armored beetle. Five round, blue segments made up each arm, connected together by oscillating rings that allowed limited movement. There weren’t even hands, just blue spheres tipped by black pincers.

The legs were similar to the arms, all connecting to a white, hard-shelled torso, as did the bulbous helmet. A boxy red backpack housed the oxygen supply and CO
₂
scrubber, which could give the diver up to forty-eight hours of life support. An ADS rig was one of the few things that could make a space suit look dainty by comparison.

The suit was far too bulky to fit through any of the
Los Angeles
’s external hatches. Cutting directly into the nose cone might put the alien artifact at risk. The diver would use an underwater torch to cut through the hull of the torpedo room, then move through that wider space into the nose cone.

The bright light faded from the screen.

“Diver One, cut complete. Removing hull.”

Clarence saw a large, oval piece of metal drop away from the submarine’s curved hull and
thump
into the lake bottom, kicking up a slow-motion cloud of flotsam.

“Diver One, proceed into the torpedo room.”

“Roger that, Topside. Moving into the torpedo room.”

Clarence inched closer to the screen.

Almost immediately, the diver’s light revealed three uniformed corpses that hung motionless in the water. Rigor held arms away from bodies, as if the dead were waiting to give someone a hug. There was at least
some
animal life at this depth — even though no fish were visible, the ripped flesh of hands and faces betrayed their presence.

“Topside,” the diver said, “you seeing this?” His voice sounded tinny. Clarence could hear the man’s breathing increase.

“Roger that, Diver One,” the dive master said. “Nobody said it was going to be pretty. You’re almost there. Just get the job done.”

“Roger,” the diver said. “Moving in.”

Clarence could imagine the diver’s stress. Nine hundred feet below the surface — a depth that would kill him without the suit — he was surrounded by corpses while violence and uncertainty swept across the ship above him. The diver,
Tom
, he had to have giant balls of steel.

Technically, Clarence was the current representative of the scientific team. If needed, he had an override button he could hit and speak directly to the diver. If any major issues popped up, Clarence could route the diver-cam view to Margaret’s heads-up display, let her decide what needed to be done.

The dive master’s voice sounded loud and clear in the speakers. “Diver One, move forward through the torpedo room to the nose-cone airlock.”

“Roger that, Topside.”

“Diver Two,” the dive master said, “position yourself at the entrance point and maintain safety of Diver One’s umbilical.”

“Diver Two, confirmed,” came a third voice, the voice of a woman.

Of course they were using a safety diver. Oddly, that made Clarence nervous — the
Brashear
only had two ADS 2000 rigs. If something went very wrong on this dive, there was no way to get another person down to the wreck without flying in additional suits. Even on a rush order, that might take a day or more.

“Topside, Diver Two,” the woman said. “Feeding Diver One’s umbilical.”

The ADS onboard air meant the divers didn’t need air tubes. What they did need, however, was a communication cable a thousand feet long — if Tom cut his on some jagged piece of wreckage, the
Brashear
would lose his visual and audio signals.

On the screen, Clarence saw racks of long, gray torpedoes. A body sat there, ass on the deck, back against one of the racks, chin hanging to chest as if the man was only taking a catnap.

“Topside, Diver One,” the diver said. “I have reached the nose-cone airlock. It’s open.”

Clarence looked at the sub’s schematics. The nose cone had a small external airlock, for loading material from the outside directly into the negatively pressurized minilab, and it also had an internal airlock, allowing the science crew to enter the lab from the ship proper.

“We see it, Diver One,” the dive master said. “Proceed.”

The images on the screen blurred: the diver turning, slowly pulling in the slack on his umbilical cord. He turned again, then stepped through the airlock door into the small area beyond.

The room looked tilted, of course, about a thirty-degree slant down and to the right. Every wall had racks. Most of the racks were empty — they had been meant to hold small, airtight cases, cases that now bobbed against the ceiling. The cases held various scientific equipment: microscopes, voltage meters, hardness-testing kits and a dozen other devices that might help in identifying alien material.

“Topside, no bodies here, room is empty,” the diver said. “Moving toward the objective.”

He turned to the right, his light moving past the empty racks.

Clarence saw something. He slapped at his “override” button.

“Wait! Look left again!”

The dive master’s voice came back angry and impatient. “Who’s on this goddamn channel?”

“This is Agent Clarence Otto. Sorry. Listen, Tom … I mean,
Diver One
 … can you turn to the left again?”

The dive master spoke again. “Diver One, stand by! Agent Otto, this is dangerous work. We finish the recovery first. Diver, stay with the mission par—”

A no-bullshit female voice cut in. “This is Captain Yasaka. Facilitate any
and all requests of Agent Otto, as long as those requests do not compromise diver safety.”

Clarence waited through a short but uncomfortable pause.

“Aye-aye, Captain,” the dive master said. “Diver One, do as Agent Otto asked.”

“Roger that, Chief,” Tom said. “Diver turning left.”

The image on the screen slewed left again.

“Look down,” Clarence said.

The diver did. The image of a black shoe appeared.

“Just a shoe,” Tom said. “It’s stuck in some kind of brown stuff, looks like sediment has leaked in through a crack somewhere.”

Clarence remembered when Murray had come to his house, remembered the picture drawn by Candice Walker.

“Move closer,” Clarence said. “Pan up a little bit.”

“Diver moving closer,” Tom said. “I don’t … wait, I think there’s a foot in that shoe, and the leg is buried in the … oh my God. Are you guys seeing this?”

“Uh … roger that,” the dive master said. “Stand by.”

Clarence leaned closer to the monitor. Wedged between a pair of equipment racks was a body. Unlike the sitting-down-and-napping body in the torpedo room, however, this one was encased in something, something attached to the hull, the deck, even crusted up over the equipment racks. Tom’s light played off of a brown, bumpy surface that covered the unknown sailor’s torso and half of his face while leaving the mouth and nose unobstructed. The right eye stared, wide and forever frozen open. A left hand stuck out from the brown mass, fingers curled in a talon of death, just a bit of blue shirtsleeve still visible. Clarence saw a
second
left hand — there were two people in there. At least. Just as in the drawing made by Candice Walker.

“Diver One to Topside, what the hell is this?”

Tom’s voice sounded ragged, like he was becoming overwhelmed.

“Ignore it, Diver One,” the dive master said. “Proceed to your objective. Tom, stay cool.”

Clarence could barely blink, barely breathe. Tom again turned right, toward the room’s main storage locker. It looked like a horizontal, flat-topped freezer, the kind usually kept in a basement, only this one was military gray
instead of the white. Inside, Clarence knew, was the soda-can-sized object the
Los Angeles
crew had collected days earlier.

Tom moved slowly toward it.

On the locker, a tiny keypad glowed green — it had its own power supply, which was obviously still functioning.

“Topside to Diver One, great work, we’re almost home. Prepare to enter access codes.” The dive master read off the sixteen-digit code. Tom read it back. Clarence saw Tom extend his suit’s pincer hand. The pincer ended with a stiff rubber stud, small enough to press the keypad digits.

The last button drew a
beep
from the crate, audible over the speakers. The keypad’s glow shifted from green to orange.

The crate’s lid slowly rose on a rear hinge, pushed up by steel pistons on either end. The diver’s lights shone on a small, black, cylindrical container. It wasn’t much bigger than a travel mug.

Hidden inside of that, a piece of an alien spacecraft.

“Topside, Diver One, I see the objective.”

“Visual confirmed, Diver One. Retrieve the objective and then exit the vessel.”

The hard blue spheres — inside of which were Tom’s hands — reached into the crate, toward the objective. The black pincers opened wide, ready to grab the black tube, then paused.

“Diver One to Topside, I know I was briefed that this is safe, but … well, are you
sure
?”

“Diver One, retrieve the object,” the dive master said. “It’s safe, Tom, just don’t pretend you’re making a James Bond martini, okay?”

Tom actually laughed, a sound thinned by the electronics but still full of a grateful relief.

“Yeah,
shaken not stirred
, you got it.”

The diver’s pincers closed on the container, rubber grips locking down on the curved, black surface. He lifted it free of the storage locker.

“Topside, Diver One — objective acquired.”

Something black darted across the screen, a split-second flash that made Clarence think of snakes, worms, eels.

The image on the screen shifted, blurred, the diver turning as fast as he could.

“What the
fuck
was that?” Tom’s voiced peaked his microphone, making his words crackle with static.

“Diver One, calm down,” the dive master said, his tone cool and collected — of course it was, he wasn’t the one in a dark tomb nine hundred feet below the surface, surrounded by dead bodies.

Clarence’s hands clenched into involuntary fists. He wanted to reach down and somehow grab Tom, drag the diver to safety.

The image skewed as Tom turned, looking for the source of that unknown movement. His lights lit up the same empty shelves and slightly bobbing boxes, the same motionless dead men covered in crusty brown.

“Topside, Diver One — I think I saw something moving in here, maybe a fish. Moving to exit the … it’s on my suit! Goddamit, there’s not supposed to be—”

The screen turned to white noise.

“Diver One, status?”

No answer.

Clarence closed his eyes, tried to stay calm. So close … what had happened?

He heard the dive master’s disembodied voice in the control room’s speakers. “Diver One, status? Talk to me, Tom.”

There was no response.

“Diver Two, we’ve lost contact with Diver One,” the dive master said, his voice still supremely composed, infuriatingly so. “Proceed inside immediately to Diver One’s location. Move forward with caution — it’s possible Diver One tripped a booby trap.”

“Topside, Diver Two, entering the sub.”

The dive master continued to calmly issue orders, sending the remaining UUVs to the
Los Angeles
and getting rescue divers into the water.

The image on Clarence’s screens shifted from static to the entrance hole and then the torpedo room, the view of Diver Two’s camera nearly an exact replay of what Diver One had seen just minutes earlier.

Suddenly, the image shook violently, filled with bubbles and bits of falling metal. The diver slewed right, making the view tilt.

“Topside! Large explosion in the nose cone! Wreck is unstable!”

“Diver Two, exit immediately. Repeat, exit immediately.”

Clarence heard the diver scream, saw a flash of something coming down
from above. The image slewed the other way, the horizontal now vertical and the vertical horizontal as the diver fell to her side. He heard a
crunching
sound, painfully loud in the speakers.