Hell's Teeth: A Deep Sea Thriller

by Paul Mannering

  “You hear me, bro?” Billy’s voice came on the line.

  “Loud and clear.”

  “Taking you up now,” Billy replied. A moment later, the heavy suit creaked, as the steel cable attached to a hydraulic crane arm took the weight and lifted Tyler off the deck.

  With careful precision on the crane’s controls, Billy maneuvered the suit off the deck and over the open water. Tyler’s teeth tingled at the vibration from the winch motor as the metal frame descended. He slipped into the water and focused on breathing steadily. The waves rose and fell and then he was underwater and at the mercy of the currents.

  “You secured yet?” Casey’s voice growled in his ear.

  “Hang on, Jesus…” Tyler felt more confident now he was in the water and out of the direct gaze of the dive leader. He hung suspended by the crane cable in water with a visible range of about twenty feet, not bad for this part of the world. Even the halogen lights built into his suit couldn’t penetrate much further.

  Activating the inbuilt propellers, Tyler turned the suit through ninety degrees. The bundle of air, power, and communication’s cables that went to the habitat on the bottom hung like a thick jungle vine in front of him. On the surface, the cable remained secured to an anchored platform with a flashing light and a beeping radio transmitter to warn any passing boats of the hazard. The lines passed from the platform to the ship where the generators and compressor pumps hummed and whirred.

  Tyler attached a thin wire cable attached to an auto-braking descender from the armored suit to a thicker steel rope marked with an orange flag that indicated it was for equipment connections. He locked the descender on the cable; it would be strong enough to hold the suit in position until Tyler released the grip.

  “I am secured and ready to descend.” Tyler felt a rush of adrenaline. He could see his feet, the white-painted metal boots almost glowing against the dark backdrop. It was a long way down and shit was about to get real.

  “Hold your horses.” Casey could have been standing next to him given the clarity of the transmission. This time, Tyler kept his mouth shut; the communications link was always open, and it wasn’t too late for Casey to drag his ass out of the adventure.

  At the other end of the taut cable, four hundred meters down in on the cold silt, the habitat set up for the team of divers and explorers waited in the dark. The habitat was a modular construction that made for a cramped shelter with air recycling, a mechanical toilet, and little in the way of comfort or luxuries. It would keep the team safe and dry for the two days they would spend completing their survey of the seafloor.

  “Can I disconnect from the ship-line?” Tyler asked. The swirling currents this close to the surface were pushing him around like seaweed in the tide.

  “No.” Casey didn’t elaborate and Tyler resigned himself to hanging like a kid on a swing until Casey gave the order for him to disconnect.

  With his air supply coming from the surface, Tyler would spend his entire trip at normal pressure, protected by the strength of the suit from the high pressure of an ocean of water pressing in on him and dissolving gas into his blood.

  The divers in the bell were going to be out and exploring in the depths. That meant they were already breathing a cocktail of nitrogen, helium, and oxygen, called Trimix; it was the safest breathing gas mixture for deep diving.

  *

  The dive bell slipped into the water twenty minutes later. Tyler stirred and blinked away the boredom that had set in long ago.

  “We’re in the water,” Billy said into the headset. Steve, the other member of Casey’s dive crew, checked readouts and confirmed everything was in the green. Behind the two pilots, four civilians sat pressed into the curved bench seats of the diving bell. Trimix air tanks and dive gear took up the rest of the interior of the steel sphere that would deliver them to the bottom in relative comfort and safety.

  “Dive bell is ready to descend,” Steve said.

  “Dive bell, you are cleared for descent.”

  “Initiating dive bell descent,” Steve replied. Tyler watched as the gleaming yellow sphere slipped down into the darkness. A thousand facts about the dangers of diving were always lurking in the back of Tyler’s mind. His dad had been a careful diver, enforcing rules that Tyler never took for granted. Diving to this depth had its own special risks, which is why Tyler waited unmoving, staring into the darkness below.

  “Tyler, disconnect the ship line and follow them down. And watch your depth gauge.” Casey could have been ordering a pizza for all the emotion in his voice.

  Tyler unclipped the line that had lowered him from the ship’s deck, took a final breath, and let himself follow the dive bell into the dark.

  CHAPTER 3

  Chatham Rise, South Pacific Ocean, Longitude 44° S, Latitude 176° W.

  “Two hundred and seventy meters,” Tyler said into the bubble-like shell of his dive suit. The dive computer on his wrist glowed with a green luminescence as the digital read out ticked over the numbers.

  This was well beyond where the amateur divers stopped. Below 60 meters, there were no pretty fish and even less light. Deeper than 100 meters, the desert really started. At that depth, you were in the outer space of the seas, a vast empty expanse of ocean between where the light-loving plants and animals lived, and the cold, dark silt of the bottom where sea monsters lived in eternal darkness and crushing pressure.

  At this depth, most creatures were passing through; whales diving for squid, sharks and other creatures traversing the thermoclines in the constant search for food and sex.

  “Tyler, hold your position. Lock onto the safety line.” Casey’s voice in Tyler’s ear made him feel like an astronaut on a spacewalk, a human floating in an alien and deadly space, protected only by his suit and sustained by his air-supply.

  “Securing the line.” Tyler kept breathing in a slow and steady rhythm. Using a metal pincer extending from the wrist stump of the metal suit, he locked the descender brake. Now all Tyler had to do was stand here and wait in the dark for a couple of hours until the dive bell returned to the surface on its final trip. Then he would ride up with it and spend the next couple of days wishing he were on the bottom with everyone else.

  “Line secured, I think I’ll take a nap,” Tyler transmitted.

  “If I hear snoring, you’re fired,” Casey replied.

  In the crowded dive bell, the radio conversation sounded thin and tinny coming from the small speaker mounted in the control console.

  “Three hundred and fifty meters,” Billy said into his headset microphone.

  “Let us know when you see the bottom. The habitat power systems should be running,” Casey replied.

  “Everyone okay?” Billy asked. They all nodded, faces alert and excited with just a hint of terror. “Pressure will increase as we descend. Your body will adapt. Once we are on the bottom, you can go across to the habitat.”

  Charlie spoke up, his voice betraying the nervousness behind his confidence. “Being on the bottom is okay. Your body will balance the pressure of the water with internal pressure. The trick is surfacing. If we come up too fast, your body’s internal pressure will not have time to depressurize and you will rupture pretty much all your cells.”

  Billy turned his head and gave a warm smile. “It’s not that bad, eh? You just gotta go into decompression when we surface. The dive bell seals on the way up. The ship winches it on board and connects us to the decompression chamber. Couple of days, you’ll be sweet as.”

  Staring out through the nearest thick porthole window, Aroha watched the swirling mist of floating particulates; it seemed like there might be a light coming up from below.

  “Coming up on the habitat now,” Billy reported and they watched the glow become brighter and less diffused as the dive bell got closer. Nari leaned forward, her nose touching the round window. She almost jerked out of her seat when a long shadow swam through the light.

  “Sheep!” she squeaked.

  “You okay?” Steve
asked immediately.

  “Yeah, just a fish.” Nari winced and avoided eye contact with Jessie, who sat across from her and was trying not to grin at Nari’s way of turning regular words into cussing.

  “Keep cool,” Billy said with no trace of mockery in his voice. “Three hundred and eighty meters, I can see the hab. Eighty-five… ninety… ninety-five… lock the winch.”

  The wire rope took the strain and the bell swayed slightly as they came to a halt.

  “We’re here,” Billy said.

  “How’s the habitat?” Casey’s voice crackled.

  “Looks good.” Arthur Steele, the weathered geologist, grinned as he wiped condensation from his glasses and went back to staring out the small window.

  CHAPTER 4

  Chatham Rise, South Pacific Ocean, Longitude 44° S, Latitude 176° W.

  A puff of silt curled around Billy’s feet. The heavy boots he wore on his feet allowed him to walk around easily. The heavy commercial diving helmet he wore included halogen lamps and a radio communications system that could reach the dive bell’s transceiver. From there, the signal went up the wire to the ship.

  “I’m on the bottom. The hab is right next to me.”

  “Keep an eye out for descending cargo.” Casey’s voice came in a distorted echo.

  Now the ship would send down the sealed containers of gear and supplies that weren’t already in the habitat. Billy’s first job was to make sure everything landed safely and disconnect the dive bags that would act as parachutes for the boxes. A carabineer connected each crate to the cable line.

  “First crate is coming down, descent rate around forty meters a minute,” Casey reported.

  Great, Billy thought. That’s ten minutes for me to get these folks inside. He let his gaze wander over the spherical compartments of the habitat. Made from an aluminum frame, overlaid with carbon fiber and fiberglass in a similar technique to his helmet, the habitat had a pressure rating to a depth of a thousand meters. Realistically though, anyone working at that depth would be inside a submersible and wouldn’t be staying longer than the course of one dive.

  The undersea shelter had a cloverleaf shape made up of six capsules clipped onto a central column. At the top of the column was a seventh sphere. This held the communications array and emergency gear. In an emergency, the seventh sphere could be sealed and disconnected from the rest of the habitat, allowing the dive team to surface and then the entire capsule would be winched onto the deck of the support ship and attached to a decompression chamber so the occupants’ bodies could slowly return to surface pressure. The interior of the return pod was cramped, but the habitat had space for ten crew for as long as they had contact with a surface supply ship.

  *

  “First cargo is at one hundred meters,” Casey reported.

  “Roger that.” Tyler looked upwards, no sign of the crate yet. Give it a minute, he reminded himself.

  The shadow that passed through the beam of his headlamp was unmistakable; the sinuous grace of a shark passing overhead. Tyler barely breathed as he watched the predator vanish into the gloom. Thirteen feet long, at least. In his fright, he had forgotten to try to see the shape of the tail.

  Tyler let out a slow breath as a second shark swam into view, almost as large as the first one. Then another.

  Within a minute, five sharks had casually circled the cable before vanishing into the darkness.

  Tyler stared down into the abyss, feeling a crushing sense of scale and isolation pressing in on him with the weight of eternity.

  “Three hundred and fifty meters,” Casey said in Tyler’s ear. “Can you see it?”

  “Roger,” Tyler replied. The bright plastic of the descending crate was visible now, the netting around it creating a dark lattice.

  The shark charged from the darkness with singular focus at a terrifying speed. Its mouth gaped wide as the body twisted. The soft bag of air controlling the crate’s descent vanished into the shark’s mouth and tore in a burst of bubbles. The crate plummeted. Tyler flailed his arms as he tried to maneuver backwards. “Shit!” he yelped as the crate whooshed passed him.

  “What?” Casey barked immediately.

  “Fucking shark! A fucking big shark just came in and tore the bag off a crate. Nearly dropped it on my head!”

  “Is the crate okay?” Casey asked.

  Tyler calmed his breathing. The ragged gasps were a gateway to panic and panic would get you killed down here.

  “It was moving pretty fast. Billy, watch your head.”

  “I hear ya,” Billy’s voice came through the relay of comms cables.

  “Crate’s here. Hang on… I’ll check it out.” Billy moved forward, his feet raising puffs of grey silt. The crate had come to rest on the bottom with a jolt, but it seemed otherwise intact.

  “Crate’s okay. I think Tyler shit himself, though,” Billy reported.

  Casey almost chuckled. “I’ll lay out a clean pair of undies on his cot before I come down. Tyler, keep an eye out for the next crate and if you see any sharks, tell them to piss off.”

  Tyler grinned; Casey’s voice was calm and reassuring. Just another story to tell when they got home.

  The shark vanished into the dark, leaving Tyler shaken but alone.

  *

  When the last of the crates touched down, Billy reported their safe arrival up the line. He walked back to the dive bell. “Steve?” he said into his mic.

  “Swimmers are all geared up and ready to leave the bell,” Steve said.

  “Divers, can you hear me?”

  “Ah, yeah, can you hear us? Uhm, over?” Aroha sounded nervous, but excited.

  “I hear you loud and clear. If everyone is ready, then come down through the bottom of the bell, one at a time.”

  Charlie Hudson, the engineer, slipped into the water, feet first, arms extended in the cold water as he sank the last few meters to the dark silt of the bottom. Billy stood waiting with his arms folded across his chest like a genie fresh from the bottle. Aroha and Nari slid into the water next, long streams of exhaled bubbles rising to the surface. The two scientists had SCUBA diving certificates and experience, but this descent into the abyssal dark thirteen hundred feet below the surface required specialist training. Putting those freshly learned skills into practice had them both feeling excited and terrified.

  “Everyone okay?” Steve asked over the radio. Nari gave Billy the thumbs up and grinned wide enough to be seen around the silicone mask.

  “All okay,” Billy transmitted. He would have to remind the women that in diving terminology a thumbs up meant you needed to surface.

  Arthur was the last of the civilian divers to join them. His eyes crinkled with delight. “It’s like walking on an alien world.”

  “This is great,” Aroha said, turning slowly and peering into the gloom.

  “It’s a different world,” Nari said, her hands waving slowly as she turned to stare at the dark seabed.

  The pressure had built steadily as they went down; now, outside the protection of the dive bell, Aroha and Nari felt the water pressing in around them like a vice.

  Billy kept an eye on the water. He also watched the other four divers, his dive computer, the habitat, the dive bell, and its thick lines of cables that rose to the surface.

  “Look out for the sharks, eh?” Tyler’s voice came through the relay of cables and radio transmitters.

  Billy wished he wouldn’t say things like that. There was no reason to get people nervous. Sharks were harmless, unless you were a fish. “If you will all follow me, we will get you into the habitat.”

  The civilian divers formed an orderly line, and Billy escorted them the twenty meters across the ocean floor to the habitat.

  “You’ll only be in there for a couple of days. You’ll be so busy you won’t notice how cramped the habitat is, or how bad you smell,” Billy said, the humor evident in his tone.

  “Can we go inside now?” Aroha asked.

  Two hundred and thirty meters
above the divers, Tyler wanted to say something cool, like, Me Casa, Su Casa. By the time he thought of it, it would be weird, so he kept his mouth shut.

  The divers ducked under the struts buried in the silt and walked to the dive portal under the central column. A short ladder extended down, making it easy to climb inside the pressurized environment and finally stop breathing from the tanks on their backs.

  Billy climbed up and helped the others out of the supporting density of the water. The weight of the gear they wore dragged on them, and they shrugged out of their BCD’s and heavy gas tanks with audible sighs of relief.

  Billy kept his gear on. “Hey, Charlie, can you give me a hand getting the crates in, mate?”

  Charlie nodded, his face impassive. He tightened the straps on his BCD and slipped his helmet back on. Taking a deep breath through his respirator, he gave Billy an OK hand signal.

  “The rest of you, go through that door. You’ll find towels and stuff to make a hot drink. We’ll be back in a minute.”

  The Samoan climbed down the ladder, sinking out of sight and leaving a stream of bubbles in his wake.

  Outside the habitat, Billy retrieved a chemical glow stick from his vest, bent it until the glass vial inside cracked, and then gave it a vigorous shake. The chemical reaction emitted a bright red luminescence that turned most colors down here to a washed-out pink.

  Charlie joined him a moment later, and they walked across the silt to where the net-bound crates had touched down. Working together, the two divers released the last of the air from the bright parachutes. Each squeeze of the heavy plastic sent large bubbles boiling upwards. Folding the yellow sheets, they tucked them securely into the netting.

  “Hey.” Charlie jerked his head up and pointed towards the dive bell. Billy turned as fast as he could in his heavy drysuit.

  The cluster of cables rising above the dive bell went slack and started to drop. Weighing in at around a pound per foot, the line coiled as it fell, and over 1000 pounds of copper and high-density rubber tumbled out of the dark water overhead.