by Chris Howard
Laeina’s face appeared in the video’s frame, smiling. “You see, Mr. Andreden?” Her voice was coming in thin and faraway-sounding through the acoustics on the ROV. She grabbed it by the structural cage and tugged it off course, and that had set off the prox warning.
She held the ROV like one big camera, pivoting it around to show a steep slope of sand on one side of the canyon floor, and then, alternating her hold on the machine, brought the camera end around to face her. The environment numbers stood out in the lower left: pressure, temperature, depth.
Smiling at one thousand ninety-seven meters, with the pressure bobbing around one thousand six hundred pounds per square inch.
“If we find my sister and her companion Tychasis is with her, I can give this to you.” She held out one hand invitingly. “The depths of any ocean. It is beyond my abilities. Tychasis, on the other hand, is quite powerful and can give you this . . . gift.” Her voice had trailed off at the end, as if she wasn’t certain about what to call the ability to swim to the bottom of the ocean, and apparently see in darkness with almost no concern for pressure or temperature. And then there was the breathing. How did any of it work?
He didn’t know what to say, but even if he did, the acoustic equipment on the ROV was input only, for recording sounds in the deep. Not for talking to things at a thousand meters under the waves.
Laeina immediately understood. “You can hear me? Can you turn the camera lights off and on once to signal yes?”
He reached over the panel and gave her the answer, smiling to himself. She released the ROV and kicked away. “See you up in the Thin, Mr. Andreden.”
The air off the Pacific certainly felt cold and thin where he stood on a boat in the middle of the Monterey Bay.
Laeina surfaced a few minutes later, a startled look on her face. She waved to him from the crest of a wave, kicking toward the starboard side of the Janeth. Andreden was still monitoring the ROV’s ascent, just above five hundred meters and climbing.
She flew from the water, clearing the rail by a few feet, landing in a crouch on the deck, gallons of seawater spinning like a tornado around her. “Your Theo machine is here.” She pointed astern.
Andreden looked past her, crossing the deck, Theo’s streamlined speed form sliding to the surface twenty meters from the Janeth’s portside.
“Jon,” Theo called out in a loud voice as it slammed clumsily against the hull, fighting the outer bay’s currents. His arms extended to hook the rail just up from the stern. “This is an emergency. They took Martin Allievi and Rebekah Kahley. They came for you and were angry you weren’t there. Three dead in the perimeter security. There was an explosion. As many as seven in the assault team. They entered the main building, heavily armed, advanced body armor.”
Andreden spun, grabbing the binoculars. Moss Landing was just above the horizon, and a dark ribbon of black smoke rose high into the air against the summer-brown backdrop of rolling hills.
Chapter Sixteen
Curiosity
Wilraven ignored the inquiring stares, some of the crew focusing intently on his face as if there would be bruising or blood after Levesgue’s forced march up to the bridge. DuFour grumbled something supportive under his breath, but clearly didn’t want to be too open with the soldier surveying the work from the shadow of Crane One—twenty meters away.
The captain stepped into the ROV shed, handed the lift responsibilities to DuFour and Angelo—with a quick I’m okay nod—and made his way to his cabin. Goatee Boy passed him on the Marcene just before the portside stairway, giving him a creepy, complicitous smile but saying nothing else. Wilraven looked away, kept his mouth shut, and headed for his cabin.
He locked the door, slid out his workspace and pushed open the lid of his computer.
“Emails,” he said softly to himself, fingering through the interface. He entered “Nersesian” in the search box in his email and slid down through the results.
Not that many, but a couple toward the bottom of the list had attachments. He didn’t open any of these, but in among them was an email with the subject keepsafe.
That’s the one he wanted. He scrolled past the hello and Nersesian’s story about some trouble with port authorities in Venezuela, another story about the wonders of the sea—that went almost poetic toward the end, very Val Nersesian. Wilraven looked up at the email header and noticed the date was a few years old, before Nersesian had taken on the Serina. He was pretty sure things still applied.
The rest of the email was filled with rows of meaningless characters and numbers, jammed together without any spaces. That’s the part he wanted. He selected it all and then copied it into Ship-to-Sure, a secure notes app that Rusty had recommended. It was pretty standard stuff. No ship out in the world, in port or on the sea, operated in complete open communication. There were always cargo numbers, crew information, insurance, private medical details, reports on any operation that should never reach the ears or eyes of the public, or even any government. A lot of it was about complying with international privacy laws—the ocean and shipping in particular were international venues, and stepping on one country’s laws may mean you were banned from their ports.
Rusty and Wilraven kept a lot of their business communications in the dark—encrypted, but the captain regularly used the app to secure information he shared with family and old friends, some of them sea captains.
The block of meaningless characters and numbers sat in the app’s window for a moment, and then the app apparently figured out it wasn’t readable text and popped up a box asking for his pass-phrase—a whole phrase. Passwords, Rusty had told him, were usually too short, easy to guess, or forgotten and lost. A phrase was something memorable, and the app used some algorithm to generate a password—a short string of gibberish—from the pass-phrase.
Wilraven leaned over the keys and typed,
When I come to Copenhagen again I will bring a cat and show the Danes how it can cross the road without any instructions from a Policeman
He carefully capitalized Copenhagen, Danes, and Policeman, purposefully leaving off the period at the end. It was a line out of a Joyce short story, something he had read in college that had stuck with him for some reason.
His fingers shaking over the keys, he was suddenly glad he had gone with the cat for Captain Nersesian and not the pass-phrase he used for ship-to-shore communications with the Ocean Eight offices, a much shorter line out of Aristotle: “All men by nature desire to know.” But thinking of it made the hair at the back of his neck stand on end, followed by a wave of cold up his arms. The meaning of Aristotle’s words suddenly stood out in the context of everything going on with the Serina Beliz, the loss of Nersesian and his crew, and Corkran’s bizarre demand to hide everything. Who was Corkran to deny his demand “to know” what had happened to his friend?
The short block of gibberish text resolved into a set of digits, 37 18 22 09, and a couple of lines from Val Nersesian to him: Hey Jay. Things may change eventually like secrets sometimes do, but for now I use this code to key the ship’s safe on any bridge I’m commanding. If something ever happens and I am unable to provide the safe’s combination, you’re the guy I want on the salvage. –Val.
Wilraven blinked back tears when he read the lines again, knowing that he was just reading omens into them. It wasn’t that Nersesian had believed something was going to happen. If anything, it had been the other way around. Wilraven had been the first to pass his own keys for his safe and personal info to Nersesian, just a way to keep things accessible without telling the world. The ocean wasn’t always friendly, and not everyone who went to sea had good intentions. The message in front of him had simply been Captain Nersesian’s agreeable response, which Wilraven had immediately secured.
Nothing more.
Wilraven shut the lid to his Mac, shoved in the workspace, and headed back to the Irabarren, looking for his dive master, Andres Jeanpierre. Nostalgia was tugging hard on his thoughts: distant conversations with Val Nersesian, and the face o
f the Marcene’s former dive master, Regina Lowell, dead now, lost at sea on a job northwest of where they were anchored.
Andres looked up from the hardcopy scans of the Serina he was going over with his divers, Damien Faurot and Telly Halechko. He nodded to the south. “Captain. We can get at least one full dive in before we get some weather. Maybe two.”
Wilraven turned to look out at the darkening horizon. “Yup. Anything about this front from Ranav or Paulina?”
“Ranav said it’s full of holes, thin in places. We’ll get rain, not too bad unless we’re caught in the thick of things. He wasn’t clear on when. Could be tonight. Could be tomorrow night. Storm’s being a little tricky.”
Still looking at the approaching weather, Wilraven said, “It’ll give us some chop.”
He didn’t say it, but he was thinking it. That could be useful.
Levesgue, still following him around but at a distance, had moved from standing under Crane One to leaning against the welding shed, arms folded, holstered gun visible. He returned a frown when Wilraven looked his way. Then he pushed off the wall of the shed and made his way to the dive team. “Captain Wilraven? How well did you know the captain of the Serina Beliz?”
Wilraven froze, but after a moment—of clearly being distracted—he said, “We knew each other.” He wanted desperately to ask why Levesgue needed to know that—and why he was asking it now. He managed a shrug that he hoped would be read as indifference, as if ship captains were part of a small world and all of them knew each other.
Levesgue pressed him, assuming a curious expression, but there was something about the look that Wilraven didn’t like, a hint of sarcasm mixed with contempt. “What can you tell me about emails you and Captain Nersesian sent to each other?”
Wilraven looked away, his nails digging into the palms of his hands. It probably looked more like a shudder, but he shook his head, forced his face into a frown. “Not much. Nothing really.” His mouth was suddenly dry, rough, tongue sticking to his teeth. “Why do you ask?”
It was Levesgue’s turn to shrug, but it was an easy motion. “You know me. I’m curious. Sometimes too curious.” He laughed darkly. “Sometimes my curiosity gets me into trouble.”
Wilraven tried for a smooth response, but it came out choked and uneven. “You ought to see somebody about that.”
Levesgue nodded as if seriously considering the captain’s suggestion, kept the smile in place, and ambled off toward the Marcene.
Andres gave Wilraven a stern look. “What is this shit? You are trying to provoke him?” He paused to see if the captain was going to respond, and when he didn’t, he went on with a sigh. “I have known men who are killers—not men who have killed. I have known many of those.” He lowered his voice even more. “There are men who—even before they are men—are killers, and love to end life.” He looked toward the direction Levesgue had taken. “That is one.”
Wilraven followed Andres’s gaze to up to the Marcene, pinned to someone at the bow, one of Levesgue’s soldiers—the one with the squarish head. The one who had used the missile launcher.
Blockhead.
The dive master added, “And he has his little group of love-to-killers in training.”
Sighing resignedly, Wilraven scanned the rest of his ship for more soldiers and turned back toward Irabarren’s cranes to see Dewayne give him the thumbs-up and the tie-off signal, meaning the Serina was connected to the big cranes by the hoists, which in turn held up three sling bags that were being run beneath the Serina’s hull. Lifting time was approaching. When she was sitting at a little under three hundred feet, it would be time to send down the divers to cut over the hoist beam lines to the Irabarren’s “rollers”—the winch system at the fore and aft that would be used to hold the ship in place at her current depth.
The cranes were perfect for lifting things from the deep, but once you got things up to a respectable depth and wanted to keep them there, the rollers were the more stable option. And the cranes could then be deployed to bring the crawlers on deck.
Crews began to shift off lifting tasks and moved to new stations to get ready to clean and stow the machines, thousands of meters of powerline, and everything else that was currently in the water at twelve hundred meters. Irabarren suddenly seemed to be crowded with people and gear.
Even Levesgue was back, watching the crew but making his way slowly in their direction, apparently done with whatever he had gone back to Marcene for. Wilraven supposed it was to turn all the communications jamming processes back on—after Corkran’s phone call.
Ignoring everything except what he thought were the most important tasks, Andres went over the gas mix as Wilraven ran his fingers along the seals and pockets in his suit beside the French rig diver, Damien, doing the same detailed inspection.
Damien and Telly were going to do the cable cut-over operations. Andres turned to Wilraven, lowered his voice. “What are you going to do, Captain?”
With a quick look around to see that he wouldn’t be overheard, Wilraven whispered, “Get the contents of the safe. See if I can find the log, anything that might tell us what happened.”
The ship’s safe was usually one of the first tasks for any salvage team working on a grounded or capsized vessel. In most circumstances, the crew of a foundering ship hit the lifeboat first and worried about possessions later, leaving behind everything, the crew’s passports and other documents. Andres just nodded and waved over the dive techs and the support team who would keep the cables, lines, and everything else neat and separate topside while the divers went down in the cage and did their work in the deep.
Andres looked up, one eyebrow raised as if mildly surprised by Levesgue’s sudden appearance. Like the captain, he had been tracking the soldier in his peripheral vision the whole time. Wilraven was just too tired to fake a reaction, and went with a scowl.
It was clear the soldier didn’t like the two of them together. It looked too much like plotting and scheming.
“You two.” Levesgue’s voice came out cutting, angry, as he slid the gun out, gripping it tight. He used it to wave Wilraven and Andres toward the ROV shed. “Let’s see where we are with the Serina Beliz.”
Chapter Seventeen
Sifting
The submersible team on Irabarren was hovering around the bank of screens. DuFour had the ROV lead Inda continue with the operation in Wilraven’s absence, maybe just to give the teams something to do while the captain was being marched away at gunpoint. It didn’t stop them all from pausing and gaping at Wilraven and Levesgue returning—the soldier had his gun out, pointed at the deck.
Wilraven caught some of their stares, hard looks from serious people, including Andres beside him, Angelo, Inda, and others on the crews of the Marcene and Irabarren. Most of them were don’t-fuck-about kinds of people. There was a time for that, for blowing off steam, but never in the middle of a job. That was crazy. That was dangerous. Heavy metal and big machines with hundreds of meters of rolled-out steel cable, air hoses, communications and power cabling, and especially the sea: all of it could combine without warning and in an instant to kill someone.
Chaos was an anticipated component of any job.
Wilraven stumbled, caught the edge of the container’s door with one hand. A stab of emotion over the loss of his friend, dive master Regina Lowell dying in the deep. The anguish in her face—amplified by the roughness of the video feed, the coldness of her final words—slid into his thoughts and stirred them up. The mix of Clark’s fake suicide and sociopaths with guns—along with other, scarier military hardware—didn’t make it any easier.
Wilraven got ahold of his runaway feelings, firmed up what he wanted to show on the outside, and tried to present some confidence, and that he had things under control. There were a couple of nods among the crew, accepting things as they stood. Nothing any of them could do about it at the moment, and the job was still on, with million-dollar hardware in the deep.
“Let’s raise her slowly, to two-seven
ty feet. No higher than that. For now.” He glanced at Andres. “We’ll dive and inspect, see if she’s ready for . . . ” He paused for more words, and then finally came out with, “For the next phase in the plan.”
Andres’ gaze narrowed a bit, but Wilraven frowned and nodded back, hoping he took that as We’ll discuss this later when I don’t have a killer at my back.
Taketa and Jodi, the two ROV ops, hadn’t looked up more than a moment. With machines that cost more than their jobs and cables run out near to max, it was no time to lose focus.
Aro Taketa was still on starboard, skimming the sand a dozen meters away from the sling bags as they pulled tight and curled protectively around Serina’s hull—they wouldn’t be filled until they were at a respectably shallow depth. Jodi, a junior op filling Clark’s crew position, was higher in the water column, up along the Serina’s bow, cameras swiveling along the portside of the lift job.
With a soft cloud of silt, like the silent slow-motion detonation of a bomb, the Serina Beliz rose from her bed, twelve hundred meters below the surface of the Caribbean. There was some shifting in the slings, which Dewayne and Erich on the cranes anticipated; sharp directions shot between the two of them, both with the feel of the cables and cargo in the controls under their hands. The Serina wobbled a little: some side-to-side motion, motion they all felt in the resonance coming up the cables, through the Irabarren’s hull, under their feet.
Aro backed off a bit with the ROV Wendolyn. On port, Jodi did the same with Dess, both of them hovering in place as the ship floated past them, smooth curves of yellow-green hull sliding by in the screens, then a wash of silt that opaqued the cameras for a few minutes.
The ROV team, Aro and Jodi, went still, hands lifted away from the controls while the dust settled and the slashing shape of the ocean floor where the ship had been drifted into focus.
Then both of them said, “What the fuck is that?” at the same time, each pointing at their own video displays, Taketa gesturing to a band of dark across the floor in the Serina’s hull-print, and Jodi, with Dess much higher in the water column, at the lumpy, cocoon-like thing lashed to the Serina’s foredeck.