The Titanic Enigma (5 page)

‘What?’

‘Precisely. There is no sound down here. No sound whatsoever, except for the noises we make, the noises the
JV
makes.’

They fell utterly silent, holding their breath. The only sounds were non-human ones – from the computers and the engines cooling, their metal casings contracting.

Then a buzz from Derham’s control panel broke the spell. ‘
JV1
. Come in,
JV1.
What is your status?’

‘Armstrong,’
Derham responded. ‘We are on the ocean floor. All systems seem to be functioning at optimum levels.’ He glanced at Milford.

‘All systems check A1,’ the commander confirmed.

The sound of their voices was transmitted to the surface via a fibre optic. This was encased in a narrow sheathing made from carbon nanotubes. The entire 13,000 feet of cable weighed less than
twenty pounds.

‘Congratulations,’ came the response from the bridge of the
Armstrong.

‘We plan to get prepped and outside as soon as possible,
Armstrong.
’

‘Copy that, commander.’

‘We’ll make regular ten-minute call-ins, as planned. Out.’

Jerry Derham turned from the control panel. ‘OK, guys,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

*

It took more than half an hour to run the checks and get suited up. Lou, Kate and Derham stood in the stark white interior of the lock as Commander Jane Milford ran diagnostics
from the control panels on the bridge. Everything checked out: integrity for each suit was one hundred per cent, communications were functioning correctly. A radio link could be maintained over
distances of up to 300 yards thanks to another DARPA innovation – a wave booster that used ultra-short wavelength signals. This had been placed on the ocean floor by a remote-controlled probe
a few hours before the
JV1
was launched. Milford checked on this from the bridge as the other three inspected the systems on their suits.

‘OK, commander,’ Derham said through the radio link to the bridge. He glanced at Lou and Kate and they each gave him the thumbs up. ‘Suited up and ready to go.’

‘Copy that, captain. Your systems check one hundred per cent.’

They synchronized chronometers.

‘I’m limiting the time outside the sub to exactly fifty-five minutes,’ Derham said. ‘That’s well within the test parameters of the suits and gives us seven minutes
forty-four seconds’ grace.’

‘Agreed. I’m calibrating pressure,’ Milford said. ‘Helmet cameras have been switched to “auto”. We’ll be recording everything in triplicate and
I’m patching it through to the
Armstrong.
’

A hissing sound started overhead in the airlock. Kate took Lou’s besuited hand and squeezed. He couldn’t feel it through the bizarre material of the suit, but he had seen her hand
move downward and lift his. He looked into her eyes and knew she was feeling the same thing as he was. They were about to enter an utterly alien world, but they had each other. Smiling, Kate
released her grip.

‘It’ll be the most amazing experience of your life,’ Lou whispered through the comms.

The outer door slid open, and a moment later, they were stepping onto the ocean floor almost 13,000 feet below the surface of the Atlantic.

The great beams of
JV1
lit up the front of the
Titanic,
so they didn’t need their helmet lights and could save the energy for when they were inside the
wreck. The port leading edge was about fifty yards in front of them, and the bow section lay at an angle, the elaborate forestay pointing away slightly.

Stepping out onto the ocean floor was just as surreal as they had expected. No one had ever been here before. Bathyspheres had descended to release remote-controlled devices that explored the
outside of the ship and sent back images, but no human had ever walked on this ocean floor.

‘
JV1
. We’re outside,’ Derham reported back. Milford, he knew, would be able to see the same view as them from tiny cameras built into the front of each helmet and
projected onto a set of monitors on the bridge. This, along with a voice feed, was transmitted via the fibre optic back up to the
Armstrong.
Derham then checked the suit parameters
displayed on a small screen on his lower arm. Everything was as it should be. He turned to Lou and Kate. ‘You guys OK?’

‘Fine,’ Kate replied. Lou nodded.

It took a few minutes for them to adjust to the suits and the weird experience of walking on the ocean floor. They had trained for three hours in a simulator before leaving the naval base, but
as good as the simulator software had been, the real thing felt quite different. The suits were surprisingly easy to manoeuvre in, but they were hot and the noise from the internal generators and
their cooling systems was louder than they had expected.

In the light from
JV1
they could see thousands of shells, crustaceans of all shapes and sizes.

‘More corpses,’ Kate commented through the comms.

As they approached the wreck, they heard a grinding sound, a grating of metal on metal. ‘That’s the hull creaking,’ Kate said. ‘We’ve disturbed the water and the
shockwave has moved the corroded infrastructure.’

‘What are the radiation levels?’ Lou asked Derham.

The captain glanced down at his screen where a reading was displayed in the top right corner. ‘Almost thirty times the level on the surface. A touch over two times ten to the twenty
curies.’

‘Lovely.’

Derham led the way. In his left hand he had a small sonar device which he used to sweep the surface directly ahead of them. One of the greatest dangers they faced was falling into a giant hole
or a disguised crevasse. This gadget indicated how solid the ground was beneath their feet.

‘The ocean floor is composed of very pure compacted sand and silt,’ Lou said. ‘It’s amazingly uniform and regular.’

‘That’s because the water is only a little above freezing point at this depth,’ Kate commented. ‘Just a few inches under our feet the sand and silt will be mixed with ice
crystals.’

After five minutes they reached the base of the churned-up ocean floor heaped up against the sides of the hull like giant snowdrifts. On this side of the ship the sand and silt rose up almost to
the anchor and it was packed solid, as hard as rock. Looking up, they could see the hull covered with rust, a blend of coloured oxides – greens, spots of orange and yellow, smudges of
ochre.

‘I can’t get over how huge this thing is!’ Lou exclaimed, looking up at the thousands of tons of rusted steel towering over them. ‘The length of a large city
block.’

‘Yeah, and this is just two-thirds of the original vessel,’ Kate replied.

Derham had started skirting the base of the sand pile that rose up against the hull. ‘This part seems to be the most stable,’ he said, coming back to join them and pointing to a
region of the slope a few yards to their left. He twisted round and pulled a pack from his back, opened one of the compartments at the front and withdrew a palm-sized mini-harpoon. Pressing a
button on the side, a spike appeared and slithered out six inches from the base. A release switch caused the end of the spike to open up, sending out four sharp hooks. He then took a step forward
and aimed the harpoon at a point close to the anchor. The projectile shot through the water and into a hole in the hull, leaving behind an ultra-thin, but extremely strong carbon nanotube cable. He
tugged on it and tested his weight. The hooks seemed to be jammed fast inside the opening in the hull. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘I’ll go first.’

Lou and Kate watched as the captain scrambled up the slope. He had tucked the mini sonar into his backpack and pulled the bag back on. The sand and silt were indeed packed solid; his boots
barely produced a trail or raised sediment as he climbed. Reaching the top, he spoke into his radio. ‘Lou. You next.’

Lou took up position and followed the same course up the slope. He was neither as fit nor as strong as the naval officer and took a bit longer to reach the point just below the anchor where the
slope levelled off against the side of the ship. Sixty seconds later, they were joined by Kate, who was panting a little over the radio link.

‘How you feeling?’ Derham asked.

They nodded. ‘All right,’ Lou said, a little breathless.

Derham pointed to the hull above the anchor. ‘We’ll need to pick our way up . . . but be careful.’

‘We’ve been out for nearly eight minutes,’ Lou commented.

‘That’s all right,’ Derham replied. ‘We’re still finding our feet. OK, I’ll lead, then you, Kate. But watch your step. If you slip and fall, it won’t be
the same as falling through air, but you can still injure yourself or, worse, you might damage the suit. Follow my foot and handholds.’

They watched Derham get a grip on a ledge on the outside of the hull.

There was no shortage of grips and holds to get fingers and toes into because the hull was covered with gaping, rusty punctures, smashed-in portholes, and uncovered recesses. The real difficulty
was coping with the fragility of the structure.

The two researchers followed the captain, keeping to the same holds and support points. Derham reached the boat deck first, then Kate clambered up. She straightened and Lou’s cry
reverberated in their helmets. ‘Aghh!’

Kate looked down and saw him clinging to the hull with one hand. His second foothold gave and he yelled again.

‘Hang on!’ Derham ordered. He took two steps back, found some new footholds, and pulled up parallel to Lou. Grasping his arm, he helped him to find a new footing. Then Lou swung an
arm round to get a grip.

‘My God!’ he exclaimed. ‘Thanks, man.’

‘No problem. Take hold of that ledge there.’ Derham pointed to a rim of metal about two feet above Lou’s head. ‘That’s it. Good. Now there’s a footing about
eighteen inches above where you’re standing. See it?’

He peered down. ‘Yeah.’

‘Get onto that, then that window ledge – see?’

He followed the instructions and got his waist level with the top of the hull, pulled himself up and forward and hauled his body onto the boat deck. Derham clambered back up after him.

‘No time to waste,’ Derham said, pointing towards the stern. ‘According to the robot probes, there should be a blown-out hatch over there, about thirty yards towards the
stern.’

The deck was covered with sand and a slimy substance making it difficult to maintain purchase on the rusted metal. There were wires and cables strewn randomly around the deck, along with metal
rings, raised hatch doors, severed posts and bits of metal debris that had landed on the deck. All of these things offered good handholds as they made their way towards the stern.

They found two blown hatches next to each other about three feet apart. Derham crouched down at the first one and shone the beam from his helmet light into the darkness of the interior. It
illuminated slimy walls of steel. Thirty feet on lay the floor of a corridor. But there was no way down into the opening. At least one of the floors beneath the deck had collapsed inwards, leaving
behind it a jagged shaft three decks deep.

Derham pulled himself up and paced over to the second opening. He could see a ladder connected to the wall just inside. His helmet light lit up the nearest rungs and showed that the ladder
stretched downwards on the side of a shaft extending to a point two levels beneath the boat deck.

‘Good!’ he said, straightening and checking his watch. ‘Looks like this shaft goes down to the second level beneath the boat deck, and it has a ladder.’

‘C16 is on the second deck down, yes?’ Kate asked.

‘It is, and about two hundred and fifty feet that way.’ Derham pointed towards the stern.

He keyed in a link to
JV1.
‘Commander?’

‘Sir,’ came Jane Milford’s response.

‘We are –’ and he looked at his watch again‘– sixteen minutes into the mission. We’ve reached a hatch that leads down into the interior of the ship.
We’re all fine. Suit integrity one hundred per cent.’ He stopped and glanced at the other two. They nodded their acknowledgement. ‘We’re now about to proceed into the
Titanic.
I think comms may be a little intermittent once we’re inside because of the steel and the radiation level, which –’ he glanced at his screen ‘– is
now thirty-two times the level on the surface.’

‘Copy that, captain,’ Milford replied. ‘Good luck. Out.’

*

Their helmet lamps flicked on and illuminated a world of decrepitude and sadness, everything ruined, everything slowly dissolving away to nothing.

The ladder was secured to the inside of the ship’s hull by at least a dozen bolts, but many of these had corroded and three of them had crumbled to powder. To make it worse, the metal
rungs were also severely corroded and covered with slime. The ladder creaked horribly as they descended with Jerry taking the lead again and Lou at the back.

They all felt relieved when they reached the second level below the boat deck. The corridor they found themselves in was one of the service passageways. Turning left, the beams of their helmet
lights lit up a pair of steel doors a dozen feet away. One of them had fallen off its upper hinge and was poised at an angle to the floor. The captain had the sonar in his hand and was scanning the
floor. It produced an image of the topography of the ground directly ahead, its screen displaying the configuration of the floor in different colours. Red patches indicated holes, orange areas were
fragile because the floor was no more than a fraction of an inch thick, while green areas marked the safest regions.

He stopped just short of the doors and pulled on the right-hand one. It opened slowly, the sloped bottom edge scraping on the metal floor of the corridor. Then suddenly, a few inches from his
body, it dropped off the remaining hinge. He jumped and hit Kate with a glancing blow that knocked her off-balance. The door just missed the outer edge of Derham’s suit and dropped through
the water, bouncing and coming to rest.

‘You OK?’ the captain asked, spinning round quickly.

Kate had grabbed a rail to break her fall, but it had come away from the wall. She pulled herself up as Lou leaned down to help her.