Billy started forward, but Charlie grabbed his arm and yanked him backwards.
“Steve! Stay in the bell!” Billy yelled. With the communications cable coming down around them, his transmission went nowhere.
With the loss of the lines holding the dive bell, it started to tilt. With the change in angle, the pressure changed and seawater exploded up through the open base of the metal chamber.
Charlie and Billy could only stare helpless, as Steve’s shocked face swept across the porthole view and the foaming water smashed him into the steel walls.
CHAPTER 5
Chatham Rise. South Pacific Ocean, Longitude 44° S, Latitude 176° W. Commercial dive vessel: Waitangirua
Casey had sat hunched over the dive control and monitoring station for the past hour. The computer screens in front of him communicated data via a clip-on unit attached to the dive computer connected to each crewmember’s BCD. After watching Tyler like a hawk, Casey decided that the kid might be okay. He took his job seriously and kept his breathing under control even when things got tense.
The hand-held radio on the narrow table beside him squawked. “Yeah?” Casey replied into it.
“Docs are ready to go,” Billy said.
“Take ‘em down, Billy. I’ll bring the rest of the team once you are on the bottom.”
“No worries.” The camera view from inside the dive bell came online and showed him the people inside were making a smooth descent to into the dark abyss.
*
“Get back!” Billy ordered. The comms units worked wirelessly over a short-range, but for communication to the surface, they needed the wired connection in the cable that was now piling up on the silt around them.
Charlie hesitated, transfixed by the coiling line crashing down. High above, the water flashed with lightning in streaks of orange and yellow. Seconds later, a massive shockwave of bubbles sent a mass of twisted metal chunks and debris tumbling downwards.
Billy charged forward, crashing into Charlie. The impact sent the other man sprawling backwards as an L-shaped piece of steel, at least twenty feet long and weighing a ton, slammed into the silt behind them. Billy let out a grunt, and stood, almost floating over the engineer as the storm of disturbed silt engulfed them.
The wave of expanding pressure rippled through the water. Unable to compress the liquid, the explosion travelled like a hurricane wind and threw everything in its path spinning into chaos.
Charlie’s view vanished in a cloud of dark silt. His first instinct was to rise to the surface, to get back to the ship and to breathe fresh air. The panic that surged through him made his fingers numb. He scrambled for the inflator valve on his buoyancy compensator.
The ocean around him roared as if he had plunged over a waterfall and was now at the mercy of gravity and the raging current. More flashes, and a rolling boom of thunder pitched low and slow by the pressure of the cold water washed over him. The noise vibrated Charlie’s internal organs and he struggled to keep his nausea in check.
The third explosion sent him rolling over the soft silt of the seabed. Charlie saw flickering lights and a rain of falling debris. It seemed the entire world was coming down on his head in spiraling stars of shattered steel.
*
Casey ignored the shouting; on a ship like this one, someone was always yelling. When the first gunshot sounded, he lifted his head and yanked the headphones down to his neck.
What the hell? He listened hard. More shouts and then the staccato hammering of automatic weapons fire. Such weapons were strictly illegal in New Zealand and the waters around the country. The sound filled Casey with cold dread.
When the door handle twisted and the recessed steel door burst open, Casey had vanished. The laughing faces of the oil company cinematographer and his assistant had changed to hard expressions of cold determination as they looked around for anywhere the dive leader could have taken refuge.
The muzzles of their SMGs swept the room, ready to fire at the slightest sign of threat.
“Clear, Vlok” the leaner of the two announced. His South African accent was quite different from the Irish brogue he had spoken previously.
“Three minutes,” Vlok, the heavier of the two, said, glancing at the watch on his wrist. “Find Carl,” he continued.
“Make sure the charges are set.” Vlok’s accent had changed, too. The working class London English of it now strongly Afrikaans.
The second gunman nodded and stepped out of the room.
“You in here, mate?” the remaining South African asked. “There’s nowhere you can fuckin’ hide. You best come out and get this over with.” He stepped further into the dimly lit room. On the narrow desk, the computer screens still showed the steady descent of the dive team. The South African ducked and peered under the furniture, finding no sign of his elusive prey.
“It’s nothing personal mate,” Vlok said. “There’s people out there who take the environment very seriously is all. They pay bloody well, too. Me, I don’t give a shit. You can mine every strip of sand there is for all I care. But, these fellas, they want to send a message. And in this case, that means shootin’ the bloody messenger.” Vlok almost laughed at his own joke.
Casey’s muscles screamed and his palms started to sweat as he pressed himself against the steel beams of the ceiling. The room was only eight feet from floor to roof and the un-insulated frame wore a thick coat of protective cream paint that felt slick under his damp hands.
The assassins had only missed him by sheer luck in the gloom. Casey let go and dropped, belly-flop style, straight onto the bigger man’s shoulders. His fists crashed down on the man’s neck and drove him to the floor. The diver had never fired anything more than a hunting rifle in his life. He swept the automatic weapon aside, sending it skating across the floor and sliding under a cabinet as he grappled with the gunman.
Vlok writhed like a snake, his body twisting under Casey and throwing him clear. Casey rolled to his feet and bolted for the room’s only exit. The man behind him was some kind of mercenary terrorist, which meant he probably knew how to kill people with his bare hands.
The narrow corridor that ran the length of the lower deck felt like the inside of a narrow train carriage. Casey sprinted towards the stairs, the skin between his shoulder blades writhing in anticipation of a killing blow. Bounding up the stairs, Casey threw open the door that led outside. The wind had picked up, and dark clouds were forming on the southern horizon, a clear indication of bad weather coming in off the Antarctic ice.
Ahead of the approaching storm, a ship could be seen, similar in size to the Waitangirua and bearing down on them. Casey felt a flood of relief. It might be a naval ship, or even a fishing trawler responding to a distress call Mac had made.
The diver headed up the outer stairs, approaching the bridge from the rear.
Tommo, one of the ship’s crew, lay in a spreading pool of his own blood on the metal landing. His corpse blocked access to the wheelhouse. Casey ducked down as he heard a shout from below. The South African he had tackled earlier came out on to the back deck and yelled at another armed man who emerged through a hatch in the rear.
{Did you see where that bastard went?} “Het jy gesien waar daai donner heen verdwyn het?”
{Which one?} “Watter een?” the second man said, his SMG pointed skywards.
{The bloody diver.} “Die donnerse duiker.”
{No, but the crew’s been taken care of.} “Nee, maar die bemanning is na gesien.”
{Good. Now find that fucker. I’m going to gut him.} “Goed so. Kry nou daai fokker. Ek gaan sy derms uitsny.”
Casey crawled on his belly to the edge of the wheelhouse landing and around the corner. The narrow walkway here circled the bridge and gave him a place to remain unseen unless they came up and looked.
The wide windows of the bridge had shattered in a hail of bullets. Casey could see splashes of blood on the walls and he hoped that Mac had gone down fighting.
The second ship rose and
fell on the building swell a hundred feet from the Waitangirua. The armed men below Casey didn’t seem concerned about the anonymous ship’s presence. After a moment, figures appeared on deck, and an inflatable Zodiac boat lowered into the surging water.
“Vlok?!” a man with grey hair and a beard yelled from the small boat as it rode the sea between the two ships.
The South African went to the rail and peered over the side. “Hold your fuckin’ horses, man!” he yelled.
Vlok’s team secured a rope ladder and lowered it over the side. Casey watched as the grey-haired man and a younger woman climbed on to the ship.
“Is it done?” the grey-haired man asked, his accent American.
“Of course. You hired me to do the bloody job, it’s bloody done,” Vlok snapped.
“Good man. The bombs in place?”
“Jah. The timer starts when I click this.” Vlok lifted a khaki-green plastic handle from his pocket.
“Outstanding, man.” The grey-haired man beamed. “We have to make a statement that they will hear around the world.”
“Sure.” Vlok looked neither impressed nor interested in what the older man was saying.
Two more gunmen converged on the three of them. Casey recognized them as the technical assistants on the video crew. Company men, he had assumed. Sent here to document and record the findings of the science team. Someone was going to be in deep shit when they learned their contractors were in fact South African mercenaries working for some old nutter.
“Let’s go,” Vlok ordered. The armed men went over the side with the practiced ease of professional soldiers. The grey-haired man and the silent woman went next. Vlok climbed over the rail and then paused, his cold blue eyes sweeping the deck one last time.
“You hear me fucker?!” Vlok called out. “You’ve got maybe five minutes to get off this ship before it goes down. You and your friends are dead! Fish are gonna eat your fuckin’ eyeballs!” Satisfied that he had the last word, Vlok went down the ladder, and a moment later, the Zodiac buzzed away from the condemned ship.
Casey sprang to his feet and made his way to the deck. The inflatable lifeboats hung in ragged tatters of heavy florescent plastic from their cabinets. Even the flare guns and ammunition were missing. Fear gripped Casey as he ran to the first of the ship’s two exploration submersibles. He peered through the thick Perspex windshield and narrowed his eyes. Resting on the narrow pilot’s seat was an orange plastic case, about the size of a lunchbox with a red digital readout counting down, 00:00:07… 00:00:06…
“Shit!” Casey ran for it. The reinforced steel of the sub’s hull contained the explosion, but the interior controls and systems disintegrated in a storm of compressed fire and pure oxygen. If Vlok was right, then there were other devices on the ship; enough to scuttle the boat right out from under him. Casey weighed up his choices. He could try to get to the communications room and send out a mayday. If Vlok’s men hadn’t destroyed the radios, then they weren’t as smart as they looked.
After an agonizing moment of indecision, Casey headed for the dive locker. He suited up in record time. An internal voice was counting down, how long? Five minutes Vlok had said. What if he was lying? How long had it been? Three minutes? Four?
Casey strapped on the Trimix air-tanks and BCD. The movements were automatic, the same sequence had been through thousands of times, each step important for safety and efficiency. Clips clicked and zippers ran. He grabbed a pair of fins and a heavy-duty torch from the cabinet and ran for the dive platform. The hydraulic arm and metal grille at the end were designed to raise and lower divers from the surface to the deck. With the weight of all his gear on, and no one to help work the controls, Casey worked fast.
The platform winch moved with agonizing slowness away from the ship. Casey left it running and ran. Taking an oversized step, he grabbed the winch line and felt the metal platform rattle and sway under his feet. With one hand gripping the metal cable, he worked his neoprene boots into the fins. With his mask and respirator in position, he took a breath of Trimix. All good.
It would be a long drop to the water from here, but he could do it. Better than staying—
The ship shuddered and the water boiled in a sudden froth of released energy. Under the surface, lightning flashed and the ship groaned as steel tore open under the assault of the demolition charges.
Everything tilted and Casey grabbed on to the steel rope with both hands. The stricken ship pitched over to the port side. In high seas, it could right itself from such an angle, but as the cold ocean water poured in through the torn hull, the ship rolled further and started to sink.
Casey’s feet slid off the platform as everything turned on its side and he hung over empty space. Below him, the side of the ship shuddered and swayed. What had been the starboard side of the ship was now pointing towards the sky. The winch frame swung like a pendulum and ripped the cable out of the pulley system as the unexpected angle took the fittings beyond their tolerances.
Fuck! Under his fins, the ocean boiled and the ship started dropping fast. A door had broken away under the explosive pressure of rising water and compressed air. Directly below Casey, the dark doorway churned with floating debris and surging seawater.
Hang on… he told himself. Once the ship sank, he could let go of the winch cable and swim for his life. Just a few more seconds.
The crane arm gave way as the deck plate buckled and the bolts sheared off. The jarring shock shook Casey off the line, and he barely had time to cross his arms and make his body as straight as possible before he dropped into the maelstrom of the sinking ship.
CHAPTER 6
Chatham Rise, South Pacific Ocean, Longitude 44° S, Latitude 176° W. 400 meters below the surface.
When the lightning flash of the explosions hit Tyler, he thought it must be one of the submarines coming down. Holding on to the safety line, he tilted the heavy dive suit back and stared up to the surface.
A moment later, the shockwave hit, sending Tyler tumbling deeper, the safety lines collapsed around him.
“Casey!” he called. “What’s going on?”
He heard nothing but static in reply. The cables that secured the dive bell and his communications lines wrapped around the rigid dive-suit and the added weight pushed Tyler into the depths faster.
The suit had been made to dive deeper than any regular drysuit. The increasing pressure of rapid descent would cause all kinds of problems if he was not protected in a ceramic and steel shell. What happens when it goes beyond the depth limits? Tyler asked himself. They always bullshit about the safe depths of these things. He would be safe, he had to be safe. Dying like this was not an option. In spite of his desperate confidence, Tyler felt a growing terror. Panic would do nothing. He just had to ride it out. Focusing his attention on the controls, he used the suit’s inbuilt propulsion and tried to turn himself up the right way.
The growing weight of the cables that had tangled around the armored suit made it difficult to get any traction on the water.
An alarm beeped a depth warning, and a moment later, the suit’s lights flickered and went out. Plummeting in pitch darkness, Tyler gave into the flaring sense of panic and screamed.
A few seconds later, lights appeared from below. A steady glow flickering through the flashes from above and the dark shapes already clouding the water around him. The habitat! Tyler barely had time to register what he was seeing before the grey ocean floor rushed up and hit him like a concrete wall.
*
Charlie struggled against the forces that dragged him down into the cold mud. He wanted to go up, rise and feel the warmth of the sun on his face again. Not stay down here in the cold, dead darkness. Thrashing his arms to tear free, he opened his eyes. Nari’s face stared at him, her own eyes wide in fright, her skin toned yellow by the floating silt and scattered light of her helmet dive lamp.
“Can you hear me?” she said, her voice crackling in his ear.
“Yeah,” Charlie replied.
“We need to get into the habitat. It is not safe out here.”
Charlie curled his legs and regained his footing. Standing, he felt more in control, even though the vis was down to only a few feet.
“Where’s Billy?” he asked.
“He’s inside.”
“Steve?”
Nari shook her head. “The habitat is at the end of this line. I’ve been looking for you for a while now.” She held up a cord wrapped securely around her hand.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Nari held his hand and took up the slack of the cord as they headed down its length.
The seabed around them was a battlefield of torn metal. Some parts were recognizable; others were broken pieces of larger equipment. “What happened?” Charlie asked.
“We think there was an explosion on the ship. It sank, a few hundred meters that way.”
Charlie missed where Nari was indicating. “Anyone else injured?”
“Yes,” Nari said simply.
They made their way across the broken ground in silence, stepping as lightly as lunar explorers over the debris field.
The habitat had taken a direct hit. The upper sphere lay crushed by a chunk of ship steel that had torn through it before rolling away into the darkness.
Nari led Charlie under the ring of spheres. She climbed a short ladder and vanished through a shimmering surface in a round hatchway. Charlie climbed after her and they emerged out of the water into a cold, circular chamber.
Hooks around the walls held suits of gear. Air tanks stood in metal cages, and Charlie sighed in relief as he took the respirator out of his mouth and inhaled a deep breath of the cold air that smelled metallic but breathable.
“Where’s everyone else?” he asked.
“Aroha, Arthur, and Billy are in the central chamber,” Nari replied, her voice muffled by the tight neoprene hood she was pulling over her head.
Hell's Teeth: A Deep Sea Thriller Page 3