by Mims, Lee
“So what good is this altered survey going to do us?”
“Well, just hold your horses,” I said, staring at the area in question on the survey. “Let me take a look here.” After what felt like an hour of looking down at a zillion squiggly lines, I began to feel carsick. “I think I need to look at this again at the house.” I laid my head back on the headrest.
“You look green,” Viktor said.
“I’ll be okay,” I said, trying to hide my disappointment. I’d been so sure I’d be able to see some evidence of tampering.
“Chin up. We still have plan B: hope the lights and the obstacle-avoidance sonar alert us to something. Speaking of which, let’s go over what we’re going to do when we get back aboard the Magellan.”
“Okay, tell me what you’re thinking and what I can do to assist.”
“First,” said Viktor, “you’ll need to explain to the captain what I’m doing back on the ship out of rotation. Then, we’ll go down to the lab, see if the ROV’s down. If it is, we wait until right before their break time, then I go in and give Ray and the boys my story about wanting to go through some maneuvers that I had trouble with last rotation and ask if I can work with Scooter while they’re on break. You watch from somewhere close by. When break time comes and they leave without me, you’ll know I’ve got the ROV. Come on in and we’ll see what we can find.”
“And if Scooter’s not in the water?”
“We just check the schedule. With things about to wrap up on the well, they’ll have plenty to do down below.”
“You think Ray will let you practice with the ROV?”
“I think so. I mean, they’re only on break for thirty minutes, they’ll still be responsible for surfacing and docking it. I don’t know Ray very well, but he seems to be an agreeable fellow. ”
We reached the house and Viktor went to his hotel to pack a bag. I did the same, and while I waited for him to return, I looked at the seismic again. This time, however, I took a different tack and pinned it up on the wall in my office. Standing back from it about 5 feet, I squinted my eyes like I was looking at one of those trick optical illusions that hide a 3D drawing. I squinted and squinted, tilting my head this way and that, keeping in mind that I was looking at the underside of the seafloor, at indentions instead of raised areas, and just as I was about to give up in frustration: bingo.
There it was, not 300 feet from the wellhead. Of course, in the pitch blackness of the seafloor at almost 2,200 feet below the surface, it could have been a mere 50 feet away and the ROV lights wouldn’t illuminate it.
Everywhere an offset line had been removed and replaced with one indicating a flat surface with no shipwreck, a tiny blank space was left, leaving a ghost of what had previously been there. In effect, instead of a dark shadow, as the sub would have appeared to Duchamp, I saw a very faint white outline. The shape was what I would expect of a wrecked sub: an oval about 200 feet long.
The more I looked, the more I saw it. I could even detect the outlines of scattered shapes indicating a debris field. Some shapes were large, indicating that a massive explosion had sent the sub quickly to its final resting place. I was still studying the survey when I heard Viktor slam the back door.
I called him upstairs to see if he could pick out the wreck. He was much faster at seeing it than I had been. We were so elated, we could have just about flown out to the Magellan by ourselves. But we chose, instead, to hitch a ride on the helicopter that was just loading the chief accounting officer, Patrick Donovan, when we reached the airport.
Once back aboard, I filled Powell in on why Viktor had returned with me, explaining that, as a fellow petroleum geologist, he wanted to be aboard while we plumbed the depths of a reservoir so similar to the ones described in his dissertation. As we talked, I couldn’t help but notice that attention was again being focused on SunCo’s Able Leader.
“What’s going on?” I asked Powell.
“Looks like there might be a delay of some sort over there. Best we can tell, they have some type of riser problem in one of the wells. It’s serious enough that they’ve shut down progress on the other well too, to concentrate all hands on the problem.”
“Are they in danger?” Viktor asked.
“No. But they’ve definitely disconnected from the riser for some reason, so we’re keeping watch. Meanwhile, things are going smoothly here for a change. We’ve completed the turn for the new angle and cut down another four hundred feet. We’re only about two hundred feet from your target. We should be there in less than twelve hours.” He paused. “Did I see Patrick come in with you?”
“Yes,” I said. “Phil’s still here, isn’t he?”
“Yup,” Powell put the binoculars back up to his eyes. “The gang is gathering. Hope you can produce one of those rabbits you said you had up your sleeve.”
Grimacing inwardly, I closed the helm door behind us. It was actually two rabbits, he just didn’t know it. “Bad news for SunCo is good for us; something else to divert attention from what we’re doing,” I reminded Viktor.
At the ROV area, we caught another lucky break: the warning sign was posted, which meant Scooter was in the water.
“Keep your eyes peeled,” Viktor said under his breath as he headed for the van door. I kept walking, continuing along the deck to the logging lab.
A look of relief flooded Elton’s face upon my arrival. “Thank heavens you’re here,” he said. “I could use some help since things are really starting to pop around here.”
Not wanting to explain my delay as being due to a shootout at an old folks’ home, I smiled, gave him a pat on the shoulder, and said, “That’s what we’ve been waiting for. What’s the latest gas reading?”
“Well over a hundred units, but I’m fighting just to keep up with the number of samples called for in the contract”—Elton stopped to suck in a breath—“and Grant keeps making my job harder by raising the bit and mixing up the samples at the annulus.”
“Calm down, you’re about to blow a valve yourself. Try cutting your sample rate to less than six an hour. About the mixing, have you talked to Grant?”
“No.”
“What have I told you about communication? Let’s go find him,” I said, eager to get back on deck and be within sight of the ROV van. I made little progress, though. Just as I stepped out with Elton on my heels, I nearly collided with David Grant. “Ah, just the man you’re looking for, Elton,” I said. “Explain your concerns.” I stepped back from the two of them to where I could see the door to the ROV van. Pulling out my iPhone, I pretended to check for messages. Lo and behold, there was one. A text from Pierce:
Heads up. Duchamp and sons out of custody.
Great. A crazy guy and his two almost-as-crazy sons were back on the loose gunning for me. With an eye trained on the van, I hit redial for Pierce. He answered on the first ring.
“What do you mean ‘out of custody’? Did he get a lawyer?” I asked.
“Well, technically he wasn’t in our custody yet. Remember, Raleigh PD had jurisdiction. I had to wait until they charged him with the firearms violation before I could—”
Was he being intentionally obtuse? “Well, what? Didn’t they charge him? I thought it was against the law to draw a firearm on a policeman in a public place, especially after said firearm accidentally discharges. Might I remind you it was only by the grace of God that none of us were hit.”
Pierce made a little exasperated sound, then snapped, “I mean, he’s out of custody because he was never in. He … escaped first.”
Good Lord. “How?”
“That’s not important.”
“You posted a guard at his door, didn’t you?”
“I imagine Raleigh PD would have,” Pierce said. “Turns out he wasn’t as incapacitated as we thought, so he never made it from ICU to his room where the guard was.”
“Where do you
think he went?”
“I don’t think, I know,” Pierce barked.
“Okay, let’s hear it.”
“Knowing how all you oil people fly everywhere in helicopters, Myers and I checked at RDU and, sure enough, he hopped one to Morehead. We also found out through Fish and Wildlife that he recently applied for registration for a new boat, a very fancy Fountain. Turns out he keeps it in Morehead, too, so our guess is he’ll try to use it to vamoose to Louisiana and territory he’s more familiar with, where he thinks he can hide from us.”
“You don’t think he’d come out here?”
“Look, I already know he’s taken the boat and gone. It’s only a forty-minute chopper ride to Morehead from Raleigh, and the marina owner says his boat’s been gone about an hour. Left with three men aboard. Don’t worry, Ms. Cooper. We’ve called in the Coast Guard. We’ll find him, and when we do, I’m going to get to the bottom of all this.”
“I hope so, because—as I’m sure you’re aware, you being on top of this and all—the ROV team wears bright orange jumpsuits and—”
Just then, the ROV team trooped out of the van on their break. I looked back to Grant and Elton. They motioned that they were headed to the DC. I signaled back that I’d be right along.
“And …” Pierce wanted to know.
“You figure it out. Gotta go.” I hung up my iPhone and made a beeline for Viktor and the ROV van. On the way, I tried to come to grips with the thought that one or both of the handsome Duchamp twins could actually have tossed Hunter overboard. Why? Was it, as their dad had said, that he’d gotten too pushy? Was it they who’d returned my limp, unconscious body to my room, knowing it’d be easy enough to frame me for his death?
Viktor was already at Scooter’s controls as it prowled 2,200 feet below us. “Oh my God!” he exclaimed. “It is right here. Practically right under us.”
“Where?” I said, joining him in front of the monitor.
“Look how compressed it is from the pressure at this depth, and the damage,” he breathed. “God, looks like a direct hit on the port side. It literally blew part of the bow off.”
The ghostly images unfolding before me as Scooter cruised over U-498 were far different from the ones Henri and I had seen when we dove the wreck of U-352. Here, instead of the abundant marine life that had made a home in that sub, only fine barnacles, silt, and rustlicles—a type of bacteria that eats iron and creates a tube structure of rust—were present. Even knowing we only had about thirty minutes to find our treasure, the two of us stared in awe.
“Damn!” Viktor said. “The part of the bow that’s missing is the part that contained the torpedo tube we’re looking for. We have to find it to find the cylinder.”
As the robot reached the forward end of the mangled vessel, I saw an eerie sight: a boot standing upright, all alone in the far reaches of the light field about 25 feet to starboard. Just then Viktor sucked in a short breath as the ROV caught a strong current and pitched down violently. “Shit!” Clouds of sediment billowed around the ROV then quickly blew forward in the torrential currents. “Okay, let’s play
follow-the-mud-cloud. Maybe the current will lead us to where the bow landed.”
As the wrecked hull disappeared from the monitor, another shadow appeared. “Wait!” I said. “What’s that off to port about twenty feet?”
“I see it.” Viktor pushed the juice to the aft thrusters, and Scooter glided forward to illuminate a large side plate of twisted metal. Its rivets, though still in place, had been severed as cleanly as though they been made of putty.
“A little farther out,” I said, picturing the site survey in my mind. Scooter swayed in the water column as Viktor maneuvered it through the relentless snow of a miniscule percentage of the trillions upon trillions of tiny plants and animals that live and die in the world’s oceans. They sink to the seafloor every minute of every day and have since life began: fuel for another day, millions of years from now.
“I bet that’s it,” he said as another dark shape slowly became visible in the bright headlights.
“It is!” I practically shouted, recognizing the snub-nosed shape of the sub’s bow, which lay keel down. Other than being blown away from the rest of the sub, the starboard side looked remarkably undamaged. As Viktor carefully sent the robot over the remains, the light exposed the openings of the once-lethal torpedo tubes. They resembled the air scoops on a ’57 Buick, except these had square edges, not curved ones. At the severed end of the wreckage, unrecognizable debris was scattered everywhere. Once Viktor directed the lights into the opening, we could see the hatch doors to the four torpedo tubes.
Only one was open.
Twenty-Four
“The professor did say the cylinder was packed into the top starboard tube, didn’t he?”
“Sure did,” I said, surprised at the size of the tube. It was as big around as my body. I was practically salivating to somehow magically slide inside it and collect its contents.
“Only one way to tell,” Viktor said, reversing Scooter’s thrusters and backing it to a better position. “See any light coming out?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Nope.”
“Wait,” Viktor said. He flipped a switch on his control board, which turned off the starboard headlight. “What about now?”
We were squinting at the monitor when suddenly I thought to check Mickey on my wrist. Uh-oh.
“Holy crap! Twenty-eight minutes have already gone by. Ray and the boys will be back any second now! Pull away from the wreck!” I jumped up, scurried to the van door, and peeked out. They were nowhere in sight. I looked back at Viktor, saw the frustration on his face. “There’s nothing to do but come back later. I’m headed to the DC. Text me or call me when you can get Scooter again.”
Just before I left I said, “Oh, I almost forgot. I got a call from that detective that found us with Coester. He said apparently Duchamp’s head wound and concussion weren’t bad enough to slow him down much and that he and the twins had ‘left’ their custody before they could be further questioned.”
“Left. You mean they escaped?”
“Well, technically, no one has been arrested. But, yes, they left before Pierce could take their statements. It was up to him to then arrest Duchamp if he felt the incident at the nursing home justified it.”
Viktor turned back to the monitor. “Did he say where they went?”
Scanning the catwalk for the returning ROV team, I said, “He says he’s sure they’ve gone back to Louisiana because their boat is gone. I hope he’s right.”
He shook his head and said, “It would be very unlike Davy to give up without a fight.”
Then, hearing the voices of the team, I told him, “Here they come. Gotta go!”
Figuring Elton had returned to the logging lab, I was heading that way when I heard the pitch of the drill increase and I knew a break—when the rate of penetration increases—was about to occur. We were entering our reservoir, though it would be a little while before the computer printouts showed it.
Once at the lab, I wasn’t surprised to find Elton freaking out again. His eyes bulged behind his glasses, giving him the look of a lunatic. Jonathan, the mudlogger currently on duty, was watching the monitors like a coyote watching a ground squirrel. “I think we’re fixing to get a break,” he drawled.
“Uh-oh. I should recalculate lag time,” Elton said. Jonathan rolled his eyes.
“So, go do it!” I said. “They’ll be making a connection in the next few minutes.”
“Right,” Elton said and dashed off for the supply room down by the shakers.
“That boy is going to make a fair enough wellsite geologist when he learns to settle down a bit and just go with the flow,” Jonathan commented.
“He’s determined, I’ll give him that,” I said.
Just then, there was a knock at the door. Jonathan lo
oked at me and raised his eyebrows. I opened the pressurized door, saw Viktor, and stepped out to him.
“There’s good news and bad news,” he said.
“Okay, good news first.”
“In two hours, Ray and the boys have to go over some new procedures on capping off a well. He said I could continue to practice docking maneuvers while they’re gone.”
“Great,” I said, checking my watch. “The bad news?”
“They’ll only be gone for another thirty to forty minutes. Then they’re going to put Scooter up because that’s the end of their shift.”
I swallowed hard. “We’ll find it by then. I know we will.”
Just then Elton appeared out of nowhere. “We’re out of carbides!”
“How can you be out? You’re in charge of supplies for the mud-
loggers!”
“I miscalculated?”
“Well, that’s one way to learn,” I sighed.
“What should I do? If I can’t make accurate logs, we’ll have to stop drilling until I can get some flown out here from Morehead.”
Imagining all the bigwigs on board waiting for word on whether Global would survive or not, I quickly nixed that plan. “No. Don’t do that,” I said. “Go up to the galley. Ask cook to spare you a bag of rice. Put that down the well. It’ll work just as well. Then call Wanda at shorebase. You’ve established a good working relationship with her, haven’t you?” He nodded. “Good. She’ll send some carbides on the next flight out that’ll get you through until the supply boat gets here.”
He scurried off, and I turned back to Viktor, “So text me when you get access to Scooter again. Until then, hang out either here or in the DC. Of course, it’s a bit crowded in here and there’s Elton to contend with. Tell him you’ll help bag and label samples. That’ll calm him down a bit.”
“Where are you going to be?”
“I’ve got to go find Phil Gregson, the senior geologist.”