Deep Fire Rising - v4 (15 page)

“Down and back,” Ira said as he slammed the steel gate.

“Down and back,” Mercer echoed.

The elevator fell from beneath them.

“Oh, one thing I forgot to tell you, Booker,” Mercer said loud enough to be heard over the cage’s rattle, “the water is highly saline.”

“People call me Doc, and how salty?” Sykes asked in the darkness. Neither bothered to turn on their dive lights or the lights on the mining helmets.

“I’d say like seawater.”

“We should be okay weightwise. Just don’t need to add so much air to your buoyancy compensator.”

The temperature plunged as they dropped, the heat sucked into the millions of gallons of water still flooding the mine. Again, Mercer was reminded of a chilly breath. The car began to slow and came to a gentle stop at seven hundred sixty feet. Mercer heaved open the trapdoor cut into the floor of the car and flashed his light into the depths. The still water reflected the beam like a black mirror. He reached for the telephone built into the side of the elevator and ordered them lowered another five feet. The water was now just inches below the steel mesh floor.

Doc Sykes reached down and brought a palmful of water to his mouth. He spat it immediately. “Shit! Tastes exactly like the ocean.”

“Told you so.” Mercer looked closer at the water. Tendrils of something floated on the surface. He snagged one with the tip of a pry bar and brought it into the elevator. It was green and stringy, like seaweed. He smelled it. It had the same decayed fishy odor too. But this was impossible. The subterranean reservoir had been cut off from the rest of the world for tens or hundreds of millions of years. There was no way seaweed could have evolved in this isolated lightless realm so far from any ocean. He showed it to Sykes. A troubled look passed between them.

“Let’s just do this, okay?”

Mercer flicked the mess off the pry bar and re-clipped the tool to his belt. “Right,” he said doubtfully.

Sykes went first. He slipped his regulator into his mouth, took a couple of breaths and eased himself through the trapdoor. He treaded water until Mercer was at his side. They took a minute to adjust their buoyancy and let the water saturating their wet suits warm against their bodies. Sykes gave Mercer the okay sign with thumb and forefinger and sank from view without a ripple.

Mercer was much less graceful but managed to claw his way under the water, feeling it close over his body and experiencing that momentary thrill of weightlessness. If not for their powerful lights, it would have been easy to imagine they were floating in space.

Sykes maintained an easy pace, keeping one hand on the foot-thick pipe that would lead to the clogged intake. His fins moved lazily, more for steering control than propulsion. Like any experienced diver he was letting his weight belt do the work for him. They passed the mouth of the tunnel. Sykes didn’t even flash his light toward it as they glided deeper into the depths.

Mercer stayed five feet above the soldier, keeping Sykes centered in the cone of light from his lamp. The water was polluted with suspended particles too small to identify but too large to be silt. He’d never seen such contaminated artesian water. They should be swimming through water clearer than crystal, not this soup. Sykes didn’t seem bothered by this, but Mercer was troubled. Something was seriously, seriously wrong. He was thinking about aborting the dive and demanding answers from Ira when Sykes slowed his descent.

Mercer checked his depth gauge. One hundred four feet. Sykes was hovering just above the clogged intake, blocking Mercer’s view of the pipe. Mercer finned down next to the soldier and trained his light on the pipe’s terminus.

The mouth of the intake was blocked by a circular piece of white plastic about four feet in diameter, something Mercer didn’t recognize as being in the mine before the flood. In fact, he’d never seen it before. The tremendous suction from the topside pump had warped the plastic, extruding it into the coarse mesh that prevented debris from flowing up the line. The plastic was so deformed that reversing the pump had only lodged it tighter.

Sykes pulled out his board and a grease pencil and drew a sharp question mark.

Mercer shook his head. He had no idea what they were looking at. Both men levered their pry bars next to where the plastic had bent around the steel pipe, heaving in concert to peel an inch of the disk from the intake. They shifted the levers and repeated the maneuver, working their way around the pipe like they were opening a can. The intake mesh had gouged a waffle pattern into the plastic that locked the two like Velcro. It took several minutes of heavy work before the disk popped clear. It floated free, bobbing in the currents formed by their effort. As it slowly revolved, the side pressed into the intake danced into the beams of the lights. The lettering printed around the perimeter was perfectly legible: RYLANDER CRUISE LINES. THE HAPPY SHIPS.

The mysterious disk was a plastic tabletop, one of several dozen usually found arranged around the swimming pool on a cruise ship. An unremarkable artifact in and of itself, something that probably gets lost at sea quite often when the weather’s rough, but how had it gotten stuck eight hundred feet under solid rock a good four hundred miles from the nearest ocean?

Sykes didn’t need to redraw his question mark. The confusion was in his eyes.

Mercer grabbed his own board and wrote for a moment.
We’re going down the tunnel to the working face. Calculate our air time.

Sykes shook his head. Mercer jiggled the board, emphasizing his demand. Again, the commando shook his head. Mercer erased his message and wrote another.

I’m going with or without you.

Wasting just another second with silent defiance, Sykes checked Mercer’s gauges and his own and typed the numbers into the dive computer strapped to his wrist. He read the numbers and wrote:
We’ve got forty minutes at this depth. More where the tunnel branches off.

Mercer used a snap clip to attach an air bag to the tabletop and pulled the lanyard that inflated the rubber sphere. The table rose into the murk. They’d haul it onto the elevator when they finished the dive. He started for the tunnel, confident that Sykes was right behind him. At sixty-seven feet they reached the tunnel. Mercer twisted in and continued on, swimming in smooth strokes that pushed him through the water with minimal effort. He didn’t even consider the last time he’d been in this tunnel was when the flood had claimed Ken Porter’s life. He focused entirely on what lay beyond the dike they’d blasted through. There had never been a subterranean lake — at least not until four months ago. The water looked and tasted like seawater because that’s exactly what it was. And the answer to how it got to the middle of the Nevada desert lay a quarter mile ahead.

He had to force himself not to rush. In his wake he left a steady trail of bubbles as he drew deep, even breaths. His light receded from him as he swam, like the corridor from a nightmare that never ends. It took seven minutes to reach the site of the explosion. All the debris from Donny Randall’s final blast had been swept away in the flood. Most of the working face was gone too. Only jagged chunks of rock hanging from the ceiling and jutting from the floor like rotted teeth marked this as the spot where Ken had died.

Mercer didn’t slow. But as he pushed through the shattered dike, his light vanished, the beam swallowed by an enormous chamber. Mercer stopped dead in the water, trying to adjust to the sudden change from the tunnel’s claustrophobic confines. Sykes swam up next to him. He played his light around. The water was too deep to see the floor and the walls were lost from view. He flashed his beam upward and tapped Mercer on the shoulder.

The light bounced off the water’s surface forty feet overhead. The pumps had drained the reservoir to the same level as the main shaft where the elevator waited.

They didn’t need to confer to know what to do. Sykes watched his depth gauge and worked his computer to calculate decompression stops. No matter what they found, they had five minutes before they had to return to the elevator car.

A moment later they broke the surface. Mercer swept his beam around in a circle, the light penetrating much farther through air than the water. The chamber was at least five hundred feet across, and the ceiling was a dome lofting a hundred feet above them. The cave’s walls were smooth and curved, like the interior of a stone sphere that had been polished to perfection.

All of this he saw in a quick glance, an impression more than an observation, because something else had caught his attention. As confused as he was about finding seaweed and as stunned as he was discovering the table, what he saw now defied all logic.

Even in the low light of a single dive lamp, the size and silhouette were unmistakable. Floating serenely in the middle of the underground lake was the dull gray shape of a submarine.

C
harlie Williams didn’t like his position one bit. In fact, he hated it. And to make matters worse it was his own fault. He hadn’t noticed how his opponent had shifted pawns to open up his rook, and now the white castle was decimating his few remaining pieces. With his queen effectively pinned by the pair of table-hopping knights, it was inevitable that he’d lose the game. His only solace was that this was only the fifth game of chess he’d ever played and the ship’s third officer, Jon Carlyle, had needed fifteen more moves to beat him than their last game.

Charlie’s wife, Spirit, sensed her husband’s frustration and looked up from the book she’d borrowed from the ship’s small library, a biography of Alfred Watkins, the discoverer of England’s purported geomagnetic ley lines. Besides the glow of instruments and the wash from Charlie’s laptop where the game was being played out, her lamp was the only spot of illumination on the bridge of the
Sea Surveyor II
. Beyond the large windows, the night was starless and the ocean calm. The door to the bridge wing was open and a tropical breeze cut the ozone smell of electronics.

“C.W.,” she called in a voice that could have made her a fortune as a phone sex operator, “I hate to say this, lover, but even if chess’s most powerful piece is female, the game itself is based on misogynist ideas of class warfare in which the goal is to keep an impotent king alive while pieces get sacrificed with little regard to what they’d mean in the real world. I think it’s good that you keep losing. It means you’re enlightened.”

“It means,” C.W. answered back without taking his eyes off the computer game, “that I’m actually a died-in-the-wool monarchist who, if I were king, would think nothing of letting my queen get killed if it kept me in power for a few moments longer. What do you think, Jon?”

The watch officer was approaching fifty years old and had a daughter not much younger than Spirit Williams. He thought C.W. had gotten a handful when he married her. She was a deadly combination of hardened opinions, iron will and absolutely no patience. On the other hand, she was gypsy beautiful and obviously loved C.W. with every fiber of her being. Carlyle used the keyboard to deepen his attack on C.W.’s king by advancing his bishop two-thirds the way across the board. “I think that since you two apparently never sleep and don’t mind keeping me company on the graveyard watch, I’ll withhold an answer so you don’t abandon me.”

“Diplomacy from a chessboard warrior?” Spirit teased. “Maybe you’re a little enlightened too.”

“I’m many things” — the veteran seaman smiled across to her — “but you’re the first to call me enlightened.”

The research ship
Sea Surveyor II
was owned by a consortium of California universities and was used exclusively for hard science research on the world’s oceans. While many who sailed aboard her were wide-eyed grad students who knew little beyond their specialties, her crew were all experienced sailors, many with military backgrounds, who enjoyed the relaxed pace of a ship at sea nearly ten months of every year.

This was Carlyle’s fifth voyage and C.W.’s second, but for Spirit Williams, a second-year doctoral student studying the effects of global warming on deep-ocean currents, this was her first trip on the 238-foot ship. C.W. was a new member of the vessel’s support staff and was responsible for the NewtSuits, high-tech one-person submersibles that resembled a combination suit of medieval armor and the cartoon Michelin Man. He was also rated to pilot
Bob
, the three-man submarine, stowed in a special garage over the
Sea Surveyor
’s fantail.

C.W. and Spirit had met a mere six months ago and married just four weeks later. He’d grown up in Southern California and retained the toned physique and tan of a lifetime surfer. His moppy hair was just starting to lose its sun-bleached brassy sheen and return to a more natural blond while the top of his nose remained lumpy and scarred by layers of precancerous skin. He was two years shy of thirty and had gotten into the field of deep-sea submersibles because his college roommate’s father owned a company that designed and built them in a warehouse in Long Beach. During his schooling C.W. worked for him during summer vacations and was hired on full-time after graduating. Charlie had a relaxed live-and-let-live attitude, caring little beyond the immediate scope of his life. He had never voted, hadn’t been in a church since he was a kid and harbored few deeply held opinions.

Spirit Williams was opposite in nearly every way. Her hair and eyes were dark, her skin pale. Like her name implied, she was deeply spiritual. She’d grown up in a commune outside of Monterey, raised by parents who’d never accepted that the sixties had ended. Her mother, a Wicca priestess and midwife, and her father, a so-called organic farmer who grew the most potent marijuana in the state, had schooled her in the ways of the natural world. She believed that the earth was Gaia, a living spirit, and that humankind was actually at the bottom of the world social order, not the top. Unlike her husband, Spirit firmly believed in a list of tenets. Environmentalism, feminism, animal rights, children’s rights, Native American rights, prisoners’ rights, and nearly every other liberal cause fell within her interest. At twenty-five, she’d already been arrested for smashing a Starbucks window in Seattle and was pepper-sprayed at a WHO summit in Washington, D.C.