RED SUN ROGUE

by Taylor Zajonc

  “We know you make own terrible decisions,” interjected Vitaly, giving her a reassuringly condescending pat on the head. Alexis gently slapped his hand away and shot him a half-annoyed smirk.

  “You speak Japanese?” said Jonah to Sun-Hi, running a small towel through the last seawater in his dry hair. He’d need to get a shower soon—the dried salt and oil on his skin had already begun to itch.

  “A little,” said Sun-Hi. “In school. For when Democratic Republic People’s Army conquer Tokyo!”

  Marissa’s photo suddenly flashed onto the screen, a classic, full-on mug shot complete with height lines and tilted arrest placard.

  “Whoops! Looks like they weren’t quite done,” chuckled Jonah.

  “Oh hell,” mumbled Marissa. “My dad’s going to straight-up murder me when he sees this on TV.”

  Jonah cocked his head as he squinted at the mug shot. “I don’t think I remember this one,” he said. “And I thought I’d seen ’em all.”

  “It’s . . . recent-ish,” said Marissa. “From not long after you disappeared. You could say I backslid a little.”

  “Yeah? Before or after you met Mr. Accountant?”

  “He’s not an—oh, forget it.” Marissa squeezed the bridge her nose, the first sign of an early-onset tension headache. “I went out on the town with Stevie and his crew once they hit landside after the Hurricane Irene oilfield cleanup.”

  “Voodoo Stevie or Zipperface Stevie?”

  “This cannot be a real story,” said Alexis. Hassan nodded his baffled agreement.

  “Zipperface. We ended up at Dollie’s and he tried to follow one of the dancers into the bathroom—her idea, by the way. Turns out her so-called boyfriend was one of the bouncers. Things got a little out of hand from there and I had to throw down for my boys. We would have made it out home free if we hadn’t run behind the bar to grab more drinks first. Gave the cops time to set up a perimeter.”

  “Incoming fleet on radar,” said Vitaly, tapping on the flickering green display. “We will hear them on hydrophone soon.”

  Alexis nodded towards the satellite television feed. “The news story is just repeating at this point. We should dive now and get the hell out of here.”

  “Agreed,” said Marissa. “I know some local ports in Indonesia where we can lay low, maybe even do some business.”

  Jonah scratched his short beard and glanced at the navigational console as the crew waited for him to speak. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” he began.

  “Let me guess,” said Hassan, shaking his head in frustration. “Fleeing is exactly what the Japanese would expect, and we’re going to do something much more hazardous instead.”

  “I’m all for running when the time comes—but the doc is goddamn right,” said Jonah. Marissa and Alexis both groaned, rolling their eyes in hunger and frustration. “Running is what they’d expect. They’ve no doubt already encircled the area with submarines, helicopters, and satellites. They’re closing in on us as we speak, and, they’ll find us if we run for it. But the last thing they’d anticipate is for us to stay right where we are.”

  “Because it’s fucking insane,” said Alexis. “Every floating asset the Japanese have is going to converge on this location within hours.”

  “But captain has point,” said Vitaly. “Much noise when ships arrive, easy to hide. Much safer than—what you say? Run gauntlet?”

  “We couldn’t save the carrier—not with her systems turning on us—but we may be able to show it wasn’t us,” said Jonah. “Running will only make us look guilty. I want to stay, dive the carrier, and try to salvage the central hard drives. They won’t last long in these waters, and there’s no way the Japanese can mobilize a dive team in time.”

  “If running away looks guilty, staying at the scene of the crime looks straight up suicidal,” mumbled Alexis. “I can’t even imagine what they’re going to do if they find us down here.”

  “It’s settled,” boomed Dalmar, folding his arms. “We cannot win when we cannot fight. And we cannot fight when we do not know our enemy.”

  “What’s the depth of the ocean bottom?” said Jonah.

  “Maybe five hundred fifty feet?”

  “Can we risk a ping?”

  “Why not?” said Vitaly. “In for penny, in for pound.” He punched the button, a single acoustic ping erupting from the Scorpion’s bow to echo over the underwater landscape below. The computer churned through the returning data, slowly drawing a green three-dimensional digital wireframe of the upright carrier on the ocean floor deep beneath them.

  “There,” said Jonah, resting his fingertip on the top of the sunken carrier’s flight deck. “I want you to land the submarine right there.”

  Jonah secured the last zipper of his thick neoprene diving suit. He twisted the hot water supply valve back and forth with his fingers, satisfied that it turned easily. Unlike a wetsuit, which used a diver’s own body heat to warm a thin layer of water, the hot-water suit would continually inject a steady supply of electrically-heated water through a web of tubing—a necessity when breathing a heat-robbing mixture of oxygen and helium at depth. The system wasn’t perfect as there were always cold spots in the suit, but, that was diving.

  “Are you certain swimming into the carrier is the best option?” said Hassan, leaning against the hatchway as he tapped a foot in nervous anxiety. “I’ll have you know I nearly died at just half this depth.”

  “Well, you didn’t know what you were doing,” said Jonah dismissively as he pulled on one oversize Wellington boot after another over the neoprene suit feet. “I do. Plus, this isn’t scuba diving—it’s saturation diving. Sat divers don’t swim, they walk. Once under pressure, my soft tissues and bloodstream will take on dissolved oxygen and helium to the point of saturation. I’ll breathe an exotic gas mixture, mostly helium.”

  “Because helium is inert?”

  “Yep. It doesn’t make you high like nitrogen, or kill you like higher concentrations of oxygen—but it does make you cold as a motherfucker, believe me. I’ll be physically attached to the Scorpion by umbilical for my heat and air needs. The helmet has a built-in camera and microphone setup, too, so we’ll be in touch every step of the way. No sweat.”

  “I am familiar with the principles of hyperbaric medicine,” sniffed Hassan. “As well as the myriad of associated medical risks.”

  “Sure,” said Jonah as he hefted the bulky fifteen-minute emergency air tank over his shoulders and secured it with a snap. Marissa stuck her head through the hatchway, watching him as he assembled the gear. “High pressure nervous syndrome, aseptic bone necrosis, decompression sickness . . . and that’s just the obvious stuff. I’ve known guys who got crushed, froze to death, explosively decompressed. Hell, I once heard about a guy who got his intestines sucked right out his O-ring when his tender flushed the toilet at the wrong time.”

  “I’d never consider doing that to you,” laughed Marissa as she made an obscene flushing gesture with her hand.

  “Quite the ghastly image, that,” said the doctor.

  “No shit. The Scorpion is capable of supporting a saturation diver on a limited basis, but this won’t exactly be a textbook operation. We’re essentially using a converted escape trunk, not a proper diving bell, and there’s no hyper-baric lifeboat if things go tits up.”

  “I’ll make sure we have plenty of fresh water and a change of clothes upon your return,” said Hassan. “I’m not certain what else I can do to be useful.”

  “Thanks,” said Jonah as Marissa passed him a tool belt. He secured it around his waist beside a clanking rack of carabineers and nylon webbing. “And don’t forget the reading material. I’ll be decompressing at roughly six vertical feet per hour, so I’m looking at upwards of four days in the lockout chamber.”

  “Four days?” sputtered Hassan.

  “Maybe throw a couple of Cosmos onto the stack? I’ve read all the Better Homes and Gardens at least three, four times through. It’s worse than a dentist’s of
fice down here.”

  “He’s always liked the quizzes,” added Marissa.

  Jonah caught himself taking great satisfaction at Hassan’s baffled frustration. “Just be careful. Can you at least agree to that?” the doctor finally said.

  “I promise to not get killed or whatever,” said Jonah, rolling his eyes. “But only if you go worry somewhere else. Marissa and I have some pre-dive checklists to get through.”

  “Very well. Goodbye, then.”

  “Later, Doc,” said Marissa. She pulled a thirty-pound Kirby Morgan diving helmet off the shelf as the doctor ducked his head underneath the low hatch and left the armory without another word.

  “Is he always so uptight about everything?” asked Marissa, tilting her head toward the now-empty hatchway.

  “He grows on you. I wasn’t exactly the doc’s biggest fan when we met, but he’s a good man. Better than me, at least the way I figure things.”

  “Never thought I’d go back to being your dive tender,” said Marissa with a faint smile. She considered the helmet in her hands, not quite ready to pass it to Jonah.

  “You were good at it. I think we spent the better half of our relationship on opposite sides of a bariatric tank glass.”

  “It was the job. It was the life we had—until it wasn’t.”

  Jonah sighed. “I don’t want to be an asshole here, but you can’t possibly think we’d still be together if I hadn’t disappeared on you. Don’t get me wrong—when things were good, they were the best. But we also put each other through a metric ton of shit. You and I were a delayed fuse. We were always going to blow up in the end.”

  Marissa turned away for a moment before shooting him an angry look. “Maybe, maybe not. You never gave us chance to find out like a normal couple. Not to belabor a point, but you were dead as far as I knew.”

  “Yeah,” said Jonah, a faraway sadness in his eyes. “Maybe we’re both sorry about that.”

  “Come back this time,” she said as she placed the helmet over his head, ending any further exchange. She kissed her fingertips and pressed them against the thick glass. “Don’t hoover the air—and don’t fuck around when you’re in that carrier. She’s already a widow maker.”

  The temperature of the lockout chamber dipped sharply as freezing helium displaced the sea-level mix of nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. Jonah kept one eye on the gauges, watching carefully as the interior atmospheric pressure slowly increased to the sound of dry hissing air. Beginning at an ambient sea level pressure of fourteen pounds per square inch, the blowdown wouldn’t be complete until it reached over 200—the takeoff weight of a 747 pressing in on him from every direction. He slowly breathed in and out, swallowing to equalize the pressure in his ears. Pain built up deep inside his sinuses before releasing with a wet pop. The process would take only minutes. After all, pressurization was easy—it was depressurization that would kill you.

  Jonah cleared his throat, hearing the high-pitched Daffy Duck sound of his own voice in his ears. It didn’t bother him, though. Helium made even the deepest-voiced divers sound like a founding munchkin of the Lollipop Guild. He sealed the suit and began the hot water flow, bracing himself against the sudden influx of weight as it filled. The sound of air rushing through the umbilical and into his helmet soothed him with its familiarity. Most of the previous generation of divers were “deaf on the left” from too many hours with the old-style air feeds, before manufacturers started protecting hearing with new designs.

  Jonah turned to the tiny window and flipped a thumbs-up. With atmospheric pressure now equalized to 550 feet in depth, Marissa began to flood the lockout chamber. Hidden vents spilled forth brackish, frothy water into the closet-sized compartment, the cold liquid flooding into his rubber boots. The chamber was soon filled to the ceiling, gently releasing the weight of the tank, tool belt, helmet, and suit from Jonah’s waist and shoulders. He adjusted the hot water flow, the prickling warmth slowly spreading across his skin.

  The wheel to the exterior hatch turned easily, the door swinging open to the permanent night of the abyss. No subsea light could reach these depths. Jonah stepped out of the lockout chamber and onto the Scorpion’s exterior hull. Vitaly had precisely landed the submarine on the submerged helicopter carrier, planting her long, slender length across the now-empty flight deck. The submarine’s running lights illuminated a small patch of the underlying surface and the very base of the control tower, impossible blackness surrounding them, stretching in every direction. Suspended particulates hung in the waters like snow, swirling and dancing in the glare of his helmet’s built-in light.

  Jonah took a breath and leapt from the side of the Scorpion, slowly falling as the thick umbilical uncoiled behind him. His Wellington boots hit the deck, silently absorbing the impact of his near-weightless form.

  “Can you see what I’m seeing?” asked Jonah, almost unable to recognize the squeak of his own helium-altered voice.

  It took a moment for the communications descrambler to deepen and translate the transmission. Marissa answered. “We see what you see. Your onboard camera is working. All gas levels are good. I’m seeing green across the board.”

  Jonah didn’t respond. He didn’t need to. They’d be able to watch from the Scorpion’s command compartment as he approached the carrier’s flight control tower. He tried to remind himself how easy he had it, how much better things were than the old days. Less than a hundred years previous, divers went into the cold black encased in brass, rubber, and canvas, their burning lights barely able to penetrate the dark and only able to communicate with the surface by a crude systems of strings and bells. Half of them worked while narced or bent out of their minds, soaking wool their only protection against the cold. Others were so badly crippled that they begged for the deep, their fleeting moments underwater the only possible relief to the painful air bubbles permanently lodged in their joints and spine.

  And yet their underwater labors built empires—men who lived like lions, drank like fish, and too often, died like drowned rats. If Jonah’s umbilical was cut he could tap his emergency tank and make a quick escape back to the Scorpion. But the old guard didn’t have such protection. A severed surface line meant instant death by ‘the squeeze’, their entire bodies crushed into unrecognizable human gristle within instants, leaving others the grim duty of scraping pulverized remains out of their helmets and air hoses.

  The interior of the carrier’s flight control tower was a mess. The flooded main corridor was thick with floating paper, leaking oil, and debris. Air bubbles slowly trickled up from deep within the wreck, spilling across the ceiling like mirrored quicksilver. There were fewer bodies than he’d expected, most had made it to the boats or gone overboard. Those who remained were congregated in destroyed compartments, their sunken, pale corpses riddled with bullets, their joints frozen in rigor mortis, every ounce of buoyant air squeezed from their ruined lungs. The first of the scavengers had already found them, crabs and silver-fish inexorably attracted to the scent of waterborne death. Translucent crustaceans crawled across the bodies, hiding from Jonah’s light as their claws sought soft tissues.

  Jonah shuddered. He’d recovered hundreds of bodies in the warm waters of Thailand after the Indian Ocean tsunami. Most in worse shape than these, and children among them. But it never got any easier. No, the bad memories just became more crowded, one piling onto the other until they threatened to overwhelm the part of his mind where he kept things he couldn’t un-see.

  The now-familiar interior stairs of the bridge tower were a simple climb. He carefully unrolled the last long lengths of umbilical cord as he ascended straight up the railings, leaping upwards from flight to flight. The umbilical tugged at his suit just a few steps short of the command deck. He’d reached the end of the line. Jonah considered the tether for a moment before disconnecting it, cutting off his warm water, camera feed, and submarine-supplied air with a single twist.

  There was no sense in telling Marissa first—she’d just waste preci
ous time trying to talk him out of the reckless maneuver. The tank on his back would give him fifteen minutes; maybe less if he pushed himself too hard. The worst part of the disconnection was losing the warm water supply; heat had already begun to drain from his suit as though he’d eased himself into a frozen lake.

  Jonah ascended the last steps to the bridge as he began to shiver. The influx of floodwaters had thrown the uniformed bodies of the dead carrier captain and his murdered bridge staff against one wall where they now lay in a twisted pile. He aimed a flashlight at the ceiling, the harsh illumination playing across mirror-like air pockets and oil until it fell upon a thick bundle of Ethernet cord. Tracing the bundle across the ceiling and into a bulkhead, Jonah located a service hatch, pulling it open to reveal a long bank of computer servers and hard drives. If he was lucky, it’d have everything he was looking for—navigational charts, radar imagery, maybe even uncorrupted security camera footage showing the carrier’s self-destruction. Jonah unclipped a folded mesh grab bag from his webbing and shook it open. He began to pull the large removable hard drives from the server bank and stack them in the bag, one after another.

  His brain felt sluggish, limbs slow and unresponsive, his shivering now uncontrollable. He could ignore the numbness in his extremities, but his core temperature had dropped at least a couple degrees. No doubt early stage hypothermia. But nothing he couldn’t withstand for the duration of his emergency reserves. Jonah checked the tank—down by half. He should have turned around by now. He made a half-formed mental note not to flood the suit with scalding water once the umbilical was reattached. The risk of burning himself was unlikely due to updated manufacturing and safety specifications, but warming up too quickly could send a jet of freezing blood into his heart, shocking it into stopping.

  There it was—the last clunky hard drive. Jonah stood and swiveled towards the door, retracing his steps down the stairs until his light fell over the floating end of the severed dive umbilical. He paused as he reconnected it, closing his eyes as warm water washed over him once more.