Authors: Michael McBride
Kress paused, studied the sonar readings on the navigation unit, then turned and pointed to his right. The silt formed what almost looked like a cyclone, through which Mitchell could see a section where the mountain appeared to have collapsed in upon itself. Giant rocks and sheared metal stood from it like a crown. The slope was strewn with rocks and metallic shrapnel. The body of a man was pinned beneath the rubble, his torso and face alive with crabs.
The current increased as they neared. Mitchell could only imagine how strong it must have been when the tunnel first collapsed. Strong enough to inhale an entire ship, by the looks of it. The vessel had been crumpled like a tin can and crammed into a crevice maybe half its width. Its bow was broken, and it had folded in upon itself in a manner that left little doubt as to the fate of its crew. The wheelhouse was flattened against the deck. Antennae and hoists protruded from the mess like the legs of a stomped spider. There was shattered glass and broken wood everywhere. A ribbon of fuel twirled around the fuel tank.
There was a triangular hole in the hull, fringed with steel that glinted in the light like scalpels. The swirling silt funneled down through it and into darkness so deep it resisted their beams from a distance.
Kress turned and looked at him. Bubbles rose from his regulator and passed his eyes. Mitchell recognized the complete and utter determination inside of them. The message was clear; they were on their own. Choppers from every district would soon converge upon the Bering and Chukchi Seas, performing shallow-water rescues and extractions from disabled ships, but the two of them were the only hope for anyone trapped down inside that tunnel. Whatever air the survivors might have was finite and diminishing by the second.
Mitchell nodded solemnly. Even if they were able to negotiate passage through hundreds of feet of rock and debris, there was a good chance they might not be able to find their way back out. That is, if the entire mountain didn’t come down on them first.
This was what they’d trained for, though. These were the risks they’d accepted. As one of his instructors used to say, “There are old divers and there are bold divers, but there are no old bold divers.”
Mitchell steadied his nerves and swam carefully into the ruined ship behind Kress. The navigation device’s digital display cast an eerie blue glow over the inside of the engine room. Pipes and conduits had been ripped from the walls and formed a veritable maze through which they had to twist and contort their bodies to pass. The engine, generators, pumps, and everything from staircases to bunk beds and refrigeration units had been sucked down into the crevice, nearly blocking their passage. Several bodies were pinned in the rubble. Their hair wavered on the current like kelp. Mitchell tried not to look at their faces.
The sonar guided them through the wreckage and ultimately into a network of fissures in the sandstone that charted their course deeper into the earth. There were points where the passages constricted to such an extent that they could barely squeeze through. Several times Mitchell feared he was stuck, but he detached his dive tank and wriggled through the narrowing behind it. The depth gauge registered 256 feet by the time the passage opened wide enough to allow them to use their flippers. Rocks fell all around them and the sediment was so thick in spots it was like swimming through mud. The tons of rock precariously balanced above them made audible groaning sounds.
They might not have recognized their destination were it not for the framework of the tunnel-boring machine protruding at odd angles from the rocks. The cutting wheel appeared relatively unscathed. It was wedged in the end of the tunnel, standing sentry over the remains of its body, which were nearly invisible beneath tons of granite, migmatite, and concrete.
A hand protruded from the rubble, moving on the gentle current as though waving at them. A hardhat tumbled down a catwalk, miraculously bracing the earthen roof.
The divers split up and swam in opposite directions. Mitchell swam across the rubble using his hands, shining his light through gaps and crevices in search of any sign of life. There were several men pinned under there, but they were beyond his help.
Kress found a pipe and wedged it into the doorway of what looked like a control room of some kind, or at least what was left of it. It was always possible that there was someone inside, treading water with his face thrust into a tiny sliver of air trapped against the ceiling. He pried the door open and revealed an empty room. The men hadn’t even had time to seek cover.
Mitchell flattened his body to the ground and squirmed under the massive drive shaft until he reached the cutting wheel. He tilted his head and shined his beam into the holes through which the pulverized rock passed. The light didn’t terminate against solid stone as he’d expected but rather diffused into a cavern of indeterminate size, where there was room to swim above the fallen rocks. If Mitchell had been trapped down there, that’s exactly where he would have gone.
The gap underneath the chisel array was barely wide enough to accommodate his shoulders. He pulled himself through and into a cavern that reminded him of the cave diving he’d done down in Mexico years ago. The walls and ceiling were coarse and unadorned by any kind of speleothem. They didn’t exhibit any of the same characteristics as the recently opened fissures he and Kress had used for their descent. This was a natural formation.
He swam deeper into the cavern. There were no pockets of air. If any survivors had by some slim miracle made it this far, it was only a matter of time before he found their bodies. Another thirty feet and he’d reach a point beyond which even an experienced diver would be unable to swim without additional air, especially at this depth.
Mitchell squeezed through the narrow gap between the rubble and the earthen roof. This was it. No man could have made it beyond this point. He swept his light through the dark, murky water and was just about to turn around when something caught his eye.
There was a section of the wall that didn’t match the surrounding rock. It was roughly oval in shape and lacked the texture and contour of the sandstone. It was somehow too straight, too smooth. And the color was several shades lighter.
His light constricted on it as he swam closer. The transition wasn’t as seamless as it had looked from a distance. The edges were uneven and ragged, almost as though some foreign material had been stretched across an orifice in the wall. It was fibrous and composed of distinct strands that connected it to the rock in a manner similar to a spider’s web. Only the slightest amount of light passed through it, barely enough to see the vague, dark outline of something on the other side.
Mitchell pressed his hand against it and felt it give. It was almost like cellophane. He pushed harder and it tore straight down the middle, admitting a sliver of light that reached several feet back into the concealed recess. Unlike the cavern, the formation wasn’t natural.
He leaned closer in an attempt to better see what was inside, but the seam was too narrow to grant him a clear view. He took hold of either side, pulled the edges apart, and shined his beam onto—
Mitchell threw himself backward. Bubbles erupted from his regulator. His light cut wildly through the darkness, illuminating the sandstone walls deeper in the cavern. They were positively riddled with identical camouflaged recesses, and the remains concealed within them.
Tulum
Quintana Roo, Mexico
20°12′53″ N, 87°25′44″ W
The
Tiburón
bobbed on the waves a quarter mile east of the Mexican mainland. Even from this distance, Dr. Brooke Calder could clearly see the carcasses strewn across the rocky shoreline. She felt the kind of complete and utter helplessness that made her want to scream and lash out at everyone nearby. Instead, she stood on the deck of the chartered fishing boat and did her best not to let her graduate students see her cry. She’d spent the better part of the last five years tagging and tracking more than two thousands sharks, groupers, and rays as part of the Caribbean Predators Project, a multidisciplinary effort to better understand the evolving nature of the reef system and identify hot spots threatened by commercial overexploitation and offshore drilling operations.
And now they were all dead.
No one spoke to her, likely because none of them knew what to say. Even the captain, an affable local from Tulum named Esquibel, whose wardrobe consisted exclusively of Speedos and tanning oil, refrained from making his customary jokes and awkward advances. He just sat in the pilot’s chair on the flybridge with his bare feet resting on the wheel, staring off toward the sun rising from the aquamarine sea.
She shielded her emerald eyes from the glare, pulled her auburn hair into a ponytail, and squirmed into her wetsuit, which clung to her lithe form like a second skin.
Her students dutifully followed her instructions without complaint. Calder hadn’t shared her theory with them in so many words, but considering the qualifications necessary to even land an interview, let alone secure one of the rolling, semester-long internships, they had to have a pretty good idea.
Remy Wells, the surfer kid from Huntington Beach via Stanford, had established an uplink to the European Space Agency’s SMOS—Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity—satellite, which monitored circulation of water between the oceans. There were only a handful of anomalies, none of which manifested as anything more than subtle alterations of current and water temperature, but the data wasn’t delivered in real time and might take days to demonstrate what Calder suspected.
Crystal Levin, the brunette from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography with the nasally voice and the short shorts, had collected samples of both surface and deep seawater and was logging the temperature and specific gravity.
Calder was confident she already knew the results, but she needed to see the proof with her own eyes.
She sat on the port gunwale, lowered her mask, and bit down on her regulator. This was probably the moment when she was supposed to say something motivating, but she could think of nothing positive to say, so she leaned backward and fell into the water. It felt cooler than usual, although that could have just been a case of her expectations informing her reality. The reef below would offer more conclusive evidence.
The dead marine life on the beach wasn’t a true cross-section of endemic species, as one would expect to find in the aftermath of an oil spill or other human-caused disaster. There were no fowl or crustaceans, no bony fish or mammals. Only sharks and rays—species from the
Chondrichthyes class of cartilaginous fishes—had been washed ashore by the tide. Physiologically, they were unique from the vast majority of sea life in one critical way: they were osmotic conformers, which means they had no physical means of adapting to changes in salinity. Their cells had the same salt content as their specific habitat. In that way they remained in a perpetual state of equilibrium with their environment, and people could sleep well at night knowing there would be no sharks swimming upstream into estuaries and rivers, like their similarly vicious predatory brethren, the crocodilians.
The carcasses had demonstrated no evidence of cellular lysis—which occurs when water rapidly enters cells by osmosis, causing them to swell and pop—as one would expect to find with a dramatic increase in salinity. There had been a degree of plasmolysis—the result of water moving out of the cells—although that could have been caused by the ordinary dehydration of being on dry land. Not that she would have expected to find anything so overt with animals as large as the nurse and lemon sharks she’d first seen on the beach, but with other osmoconformers, especially those as delicate as coral, the physical expression would be unmistakable.
Schools of damselfish and
Chromis
swirled around the reef in a gold-and-blue cloud. Groupers and bass squatted low to the ground, their wild patterns camouflaging them in their surroundings. Squirrelfish and wrasses darted in and out of the gaps between hard corals, while gobies and lizardfish kicked up bursts of sand as they scooted along the sea floor.
From a distance, everything appeared normal. Octocorals stood from the reef like underwater cacti amid forests of wavering kelp. It wasn’t until she was nearly upon it that she saw the film of sludge on the live rock and the biological matter clinging to it like gobs of snot.
The arms of the anemones had shriveled and become brittle. The tiny polyps living inside the coral protruded stiffly from their holes. The ordinarily green and gold brain corals were already turning brown. Crabs plucked the remains of dead fan worms and feather dusters from their tubes.
It was exactly as she’d feared. There must have been an abrupt decrease in both salinity and temperature to cause such rapid and extensive desiccation of the reef. She’d never seen anything like it and couldn’t think of a single reason for such a startling climactic change.
She took pictures for documentation’s sake, and then swam back to the boat. Surely by now her students had gathered the necessary data to corroborate her observations. And she needed the European Space Agency to update its SMOS imagery if she hoped to determine if this was a local phenomenon or if the other aberrations suggested a broader global problem. If that were the case, the implications would be terrifying.
Calder breached the surface and climbed up the boat’s ladder. She was already talking when she removed her regulator.
“Tell me you have my data.”
Remy stared at her with a curious expression she couldn’t interpret. He inclined his head to his left, toward where a man she’d never seen before stood next to Crystal, watching her make notations on her tablet. He wore a custom-tailored black suit and Italian-leather shoes. His hair was so blond it looked silver and was slicked back from his angular forehead. He had eyes so blue they drew the attention from his hawklike nose and thin lips.
A much larger yacht was moored beside the
Tiburón
. The captain wore a crisp white uniform and stood like a statue on the flybridge with his hands clasped behind his back. She’d been so focused on the reef that she’d been oblivious to its approach.