Higher Cause

by John Hunt

  “Let’s get going, Khamil.”

  “You know I do not like to swim, Akheem. Should I stay here with the boat? We don’t want to be suspicious.”

  “Get your suit on.”

  Khamil frowned, and then struggled to get his thick body into the short wetsuit. “Assist me, please,” he said to Azid and indicated a black scuba tank attached to a small buoyancy compensation vest. The vest pockets were filled with bags of stainless steel pellets to keep a diver from bobbing on the surface like a duck, but the whole apparatus was difficult for one man to manage while out of the water.

  They helped each other don their equipment, briefly checked it all for function, and then they dropped over the side into the darkness. Hand in hand, they dove ten meters and swam in the direction they hoped was correct. Shortly, Azid could make out the dim glow of the Elijah Lewis’s spotlights, which reflected off the metal of the OTEC. Khamil saw it too, and together they moved to the light.

  They soon found themselves along the submerged portion of the immense cylinder. Shy of the light, the two men worked their way around to the side invisible to the men on the tug, and then moved upward.

  It was almost completely dark where they broke the surface. Azid was again grateful, for now and then one of the spectator boats might circle around the OTEC, but the darkness would keep them hidden.

  A metal staircase circled the cylinder like the threads of a screw. It was the only way up. If they were to use it, that would mean three times crossing the brightly lit side. Azid had prepared for this; he lifted a rope and small, rubberized grappling hook out of the water. With a quick throw, he snagged the hook onto the metal grating of one of the stairs about ten meters overhead. With a smaller piece of line, he tied his tank, vest, fins, mask, and snorkel to one of the eyebolts that was placed evenly around the cylinder at water level. Khamil did the same but held onto a black nylon bag tied around his waist.

  Now unfettered by his heavy scuba equipment, Azid began pulling himself, hand-over-hand, up the dangling rope. At the top, he swung himself over a rail and onto the stairs. Khamil was right on his heels, and in a moment he had joined Azid ten meters above the water. That was the easy one. He looked upward at the next spiral of metal stairs. It looked to be another twenty meters. Azid coiled the line they had ascended and swung the grappling hook in ever-widening arcs. Then he released the line and upward the hook went into the dark night. But he missed, and the hook fell with a terrific splash.

  “Good try, my weak friend,” whispered Khamil. Even in the dark, Azid had enough light to see the sly grin on his friend’s face. “My turn.”

  Khamil succeeded, and in a few minutes the two men were together again, now halfway up the cylinder. It took three throws to get the next successful hook, and with one of the misses the grappling hook swung hard into the side of the cylinder below. To the men standing next to the hollow tube, the reverberation sounded like Big Ben, but no one on the surrounding water took any note at all.

  Azid looked up as he climbed. There was nothing but blackness above, for the large disk on the top of the monstrosity shielded what starlight tried to squeeze through the encroaching clouds. It took them eight minutes to scale the tower. By luck, the door to the control section was on the dark side. It was also unlocked. Khamil coiled the rope, and attached it to his waist in place of the black nylon bag that he had just removed. They stepped through the heavy metal door, securing it behind them, into the pitch-black darkness of the OTEC’s lower control deck.

  “Flashlight,” whispered Azid, unnecessarily. Khamil was already fumbling through the bag. In a moment he retrieved a sealed plastic bag with two small cylinders. He pulled the bag open and handed one of the lights to his friend.

  Now gently illuminated, their environment was revealed. They were in a short hall, which connected the outside with a gently curving corridor that paralleled the circumference of the power station’s control decks. It was carpeted and lined with closed doors. There was no way to tell that they were not in a darkened office building in the middle of New York City.

  Khamil removed three more plastic bags from his nylon sack. One contained two small-caliber pistols, one of which he handed nonchalantly to his partner. Another bag contained two small canisters of blue liquid. The last had one tube of yellow liquid, and some electronic apparatus.

  Through the hallways, dimly lit by Azid’s small flashlight, the two men reconnoitered. They had perhaps only a few minutes to do what they needed and get out before men from the tug would be over.

  Heinrich Poll was waiting by the inflatable boat. “Two of you now, is it?”

  Jeff nodded while Petur replied humbly, “If that’s okay.”

  “All right. But stay out of the way of my men.” For a moment he looked like Mr. Clean, with his arms akimbo and his bald head reflecting the glare from the spotlights.

  Petur and Jeff stepped gently into the large inflatable along with several other men. The boat rocked and tilted with every little move, which did not give Petur much confidence in the design. There was not a lot of space left for Heinrich, but he sat on one of the pontoons contentedly.

  “Lower us down!” Poll called to two crewmen on the tug. Then, down they went into the water.

  As the metal portion of the hull settled into the sea, Petur could tell that the boat was back in its element. The instability was gone, and the little craft was firmly held in the water by its two inflatable pontoons.

  They loosed the cables bow and stern, and started the forty-horsepower Mercury outboard motor with a single pull on the cord. The Elijah Lewis’s second mate held the control arm of the motor, and expertly guided them away from the tug’s hull and back around toward the OTEC. In less than a minute, they were landing alongside a small metal platform that lay at water level at the base of a long stairway.

  Petur looked up the stairs as they wrapped their way around the tall cylinder. They turned around the backside and disappeared. Far above him they reappeared. In a few minutes he would be up there.

  They had tied the boat to the tiny dock. Jeff loaded a heavy satchel over his shoulder, and Heinrich handed Petur a sizable metal toolbox.

  “Since you are here, you are going to have to work,” Poll said in his thickly accented English. “You cannot be tourists, you know!”

  Jeff and Petur were the first to start up the stairs. They were made of anodized steel in a rough grated pattern — not the kind of thing one would want to walk on in bare feet. The two men quickly reached the dark side of the OTEC. It took them each a minute for their eyes to adjust to the darkness before either was ready to continue.

  Within four steps, Petur’s foot slipped on a wet area of grating, and he smashed his knee hard on the sharp metal edge of a stair. The toolbox was wrenched from his hand and clattered down the steps behind.

  “Damn! That hurt!”

  “Are you broken?”

  Petur rubbed his knee. “No, just embarrassed. I’ll be fine.” He stood up and hobbled back down to recover the tools.

  “I bet your friend Heinrich would have been ticked had that thing gone for a swim!” commented Jeff.

  “I’d have had to go in after it, I bet.”

  Jeff asked, “How deep is it here, again?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Petur acknowledged the sarcasm. He pointed upward. “Let’s go.”

  In another thirty steps they were back in the light and looking down upon the engineers who had yet to even begin the steep ascent. Six men gathered on the small platform below, still trying to figure out how they could get all the supplies up in one trip. Petur, not particularly fond of heights, leaned back against the wall of the cylinder. He felt the handle of a heavy metal access door indent the small of his back. He wished they could just enter the OTEC here, but knew they had to go in near the top.

  Two more uneventful but exhausting laps upward brought Petur and Jeff to the thick metal hatch — the entrance to the inside of the OTEC. Petur looked down through the grated stairs to
ward the dark ocean far below. He could see nothing but blackness. Jeff reached down into his pocket and removed a small penlight. With a twist, it cast a bright glow on the dark door. He grasped the metal handle and gave it a heave. It moved easily and the door swung outward.

  They were met with darkness and stale air. Jeff walked down the short hall. He shined the light down on the carpeted floor, and then, aiming the light at the ceiling, he noted the sleeping fluorescent bulbs that would brightly light the place when the OTEC began operations. At the corner, where the hall intersected a wide corridor, lay a box with two spotlights — obviously emergency lighting. These would run off the gasoline generator or their own batteries. Jeff flipped a switch on the battery box with no response. With no power, they had not kept their charge. For now, they would have to wait in the corridor until one of Heinrich’s men arrived to start up the generator.

  “Where are we?” Jeff asked.

  “This is the lower operations deck.” Petur turned on his own flashlight and shined it down the circular corridor. “Those outboard doors lead to offices, computer rooms, a small lounge, and the berthing quarters for workers who stay overnight here. There are also emergency supplies stored in several lockers.” He paused. “Well, at least there will be when the stuff is brought aboard. For now, those rooms are mostly empty.”

  “How about inside this ring?” Jeff asked, smacking his hand against the corridor’s inner bulkhead.

  “In there is the meat of the place: the pumps that move the water and ammonia around, three large turbines connected to generators, and a rather extensive condensing chamber.”

  “Just how does this thing work?” Jeff asked. “No one on the Elijah Lewis had much of a handle on it.”

  “Pretty simple, really. The water at a thousand meters here is fifty degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the water at the surface. The temperature at the surface is warm enough to turn ammonia into a gas, and the water from depth can condense it back into a liquid.”

  “So, you’ve got yourself a great big steam locomotive here, haven’t you?”

  Petur nodded, although Jeff couldn’t tell in the dim light. “Essentially. It is just like most other techniques to generate electricity, including nuclear power plants. They all use steam turbines. We just use a different steam.”

  “It does seem pretty simple. So, you pump the cold water up from depth then?”

  “Well, mostly it comes up on its own. We only have to add a little pump pressure to help it.” He moved up in front of Jeff to draw with his finger on a bulkhead.

  “See here,” Petur continued. “Here is the long cylinder. When extended, it goes down a thousand meters. That’s what Poll and his men are setting up to do tonight. It gets all filled with water, warm surface water initially, to prime it. Then the bottom of the cylinder is opened up. The warm water at the top is pumped off, and the cooler water is pushed in the bottom by the weight of the ocean. Pretty soon the cool water is up at the top, with just a little bit of help from some more pumps, and we are rolling. Warm surface water makes the ammonia into steam, turbines turn and make electricity, and then the ammonia is recondensed with the cool water. It’s simple.”

  “But impressive. How much electricity can this thing generate?”

  “It is supposed to produce more than one hundred and fifty megawatts, with the temperature gradient we have here. Enough to power a small city.”

  “Damn. How come no one has done this before?”

  “Who knows? People have been working on it for years. There was even a working prototype in Hawaii — a small one — but no one has gone out and done it big until now. We just did it.”

  There was distant clank of metal hitting metal. Jeff’s ears perked up immediately.

  “Shhhh, Petur. Did you hear that?” whispered Jeff.

  “Yes. One of the engineers slipped on the steps.” He grinned. “Happens to the best of men.”

  “No. It was inside. Turn off your light.”

  “Jeff. This place is going to echo sounds all around. There is no way to tell where the sound came from. I am sure it’s from the stairs outside.”

  “Turn off your flashlight, Petur. Now.” Jeff was insistent.

  Petur obeyed this time. The corridor quickly became totally dark.

  Jeff came over closer to Petur. He whispered a question. “Why did you slip on those stairs, Petur?”

  “I’m a klutz. There was a wet area. I didn’t see it in the dark, and it was slippery.”

  “Has it been raining today?” Jeff whispered, even more silently.

  “You know it hasn’t.”

  “Then why was one stair, fifteen meters above the waterline, wet?”

  Petur did not answer. Jeff took him by his elbow slowly down the corridor, feeling his way along cautiously and silently.

  Jeff whispered in Petur’s ear. “How do you get inside to the ammonia tanks?”

  “Any of the doors on the inner bulkhead here will lead into the condenser level,” Petur replied quietly. “That’s where the ammonia is.”

  “Good. Let’s just take a look in there.”

  They were soon at a door, and Jeff silently turned the latch and opened it. A faint light came from within. Fifteen meters above, a row of portholes circled around the top of the cylinder. Beams from the Elijah Lewis’s spotlights shined through a few of those portholes and reflected off the shiny metal surfaces of the machinery within the guts of the OTEC. Some, but very little, of this light trickled down through the apparatus above, and even less made it through the metal-grating-style floor that supported that machinery and constituted the ceiling of the level they were on. It was just enough to cast shadows, but not enough to see any dark lurking figures who might be inside.

  There were indeed two dark figures inside the guts of the OTEC. Azid heard Petur and Jeff talking outside in the corridor and quickly silenced Khamil’s incessant chattering. The two Iraqi men switched off their flashlights and quietly nestled close to the wall of the condenser level.

  Azid whispered into his friend’s ear, “Go quickly to the other side. If they come in, we can hit them from two angles, if we need.” And then, “But remember, we want to leave here undetected if we can.”

  Khamil nodded and felt his way through the unfamiliar machinery around the circumference of the cylinder.

  Working in the dim light that came through the windows above, Azid used duct tape to attach a small canister full of blue liquid explosive behind a thick insulated pipe. The pipe led directly into the ammonia storage tanks. He flipped a switch on a small plastic box that was wired into both ends of the tube. He then slid in behind a large ventilation duct, removed his gun from his dive belt, and crouched low.

  Khamil felt ahead into the dark shadows. His eyes were just now beginning to adjust to the absence of the flashlights, and his hand found the safety rail designed to protect the OTEC workers from falling to their deaths below. He slid his hand along the rail and it guided him around. At one point he stepped on a slightly bent grating. It felt loose to Khamil, who picked his foot up as slowly as he could. Despite his effort to the contrary, the lifting of the foot caused the grating to settle back into its place with the loud and recognizable sound of metal scratching against metal.

  It had taken Khamil two minutes to move around to the far side of the room, during which time the voices outside in the corridor faded. Removing items from his bag, he worked expeditiously to connect three thin wires to the ends of the yellow canister, which was taped to the remaining tube of blue liquid. If used correctly, even this small explosive could destroy the OTEC, which had been designed to survive mighty thirty-meter waves, not carefully planted bombs.

  In the inadequate light, Khamil struggled to connect the trigger wires. He reached into the tight pocket of his wetsuit to remove his flashlight. Just as he was about to turn it on, he heard a gentle click immediately to his right. He turned silently and held his breath as two ghostly figures emerged out of the black doorway less than three
steps away. He looked down at his flashlight to assure himself that the silver mirror inside would not reflect the minimal ambient light and give him away. When he looked back up, the two ghosts had melted into the shadows.

  Khamil looked over to where his friend had been. Between them was the whole diameter of the central column. Immediately adjacent to him was a three-meter ring-shaped swath that had been cut out of the floor and that went all around the cylinder. The chest-high metal guardrail fenced off this ring. The inner circle of floor was connected to the outer circle by four short bridges that spanned the swath at the four points of the compass. To fall through this gap in the floor would lead to certain death.

  He knelt on the floor and gently slipped the wires through their receiving clamps on each end of the yellow canister. A gentle tug assured him that they were secure. Silently, he reached into his black nylon bag and slowly withdrew a spool of fishing line. It took him a moment to find the free end in the dark, but then he grasped it between his little finger and his thumb. Tying a double-clove hitch, he secured the yellow and blue canisters tightly. He toggled a switch on the small electronics box and slid the apparatus through the guardrails. Then, careful to keep it from knocking into the walls, he lowered it into the dark hole in the floor.

  He spooled out the fishing line carefully at first. Then, impatient, he grasped the center of the spool between his thumb and middle finger and let the combined weight of the canisters pull down on the line, causing the reel to spin sluggishly in his grasp. He let up his hand pressure slightly and the line sped forth as the intensely powerful explosive device dropped rapidly but silently downward. Tightening, he slowed the fall, and in thirty seconds, there was a distant thud and the weight on the line was gone. The deadly liquid was now armed and ready to explode, at the bottom of the OTEC’s not-yet-extended massive pipe, 160 meters straight down below the surface of the water that splashed gently against the outside of the giant machine.

  Khamil tried to break the eighty-kilo test fishing line, but even with his great strength he could not. If he dropped the spool over the side, it would crash and fall all the way down. The faint noise of the gently lowered bomb might go unnoticed by the men who had intruded on them, but the loud crash of the spool falling at near-terminal velocity would further arouse suspicions. He did not want anybody looking down there.