by David Wood
Bones shook his head and laughed quietly, muttering something about Streib.
“What made you think it was something more than that?”
Dane felt a tinge of embarrassment. “We spoke to a guy who said they might have some meaning, something about proving that the mission was a lie and a fake and how they never really went into space at all.”
“Ah, so you’ve had a run-in with a space conspiracy theorist!”
“Well, this person seemed like they could be knowledgeable…”
“Right up until the part about the dime symbols constituting a coded message?”
“I guess so. This individual also seemed to think that the Russians somehow could have been interested in the dimes, if they did carry a message, which I guess they don't.”
Letson's voice seemed to perk up. “Well, now actually there might be something to that aspect of it. That’s the thing about these conspiracy theorists. They tend to take two different issues and conflate them to create meaning that isn’t there.”
Dane frowned. “So you mean the Russians would be interested in the dimes?”
“What I mean is that the Russians would be interested in anything that proves the mission was faked in some way, or was somehow misrepresented, since it marked a pivotal moment in the early Cold War space race. But forget about the coins. There was a living, breathing person more than willing to talk. He was a backup astronaut for the Mercury-Redstone 4 mission who trained right alongside Grissom leading up to the launch. I forget the man’s name. But he later became an outspoken opponent of NASA and was sued at one point, I believe, for violating confidentiality clauses related to the Mercury program.”
Dane and Bones traded glances, recalling the documents they had signed.
Letson went on. “My point being that for anyone really interested, there’s no need to puzzle over some scratched up dimes, if you could even locate them all—the capsule sank in the deep ocean, I believe—when you have, or at least had for many years, one of the astronauts more than willing to tell his side of the story. In fact…” They heard Letson tapping on a computer keyboard. “Hold on, here it is…Yes. I saw a news piece a year or so ago about how this Mercury astronaut said he was taking a trip to Star City, Russia to meet with Soviet space officials there.”
“And what happened in that meeting?” Dane wanted to know.
“Nothing. The meeting never occurred. The guy was killed in a freak accident. It says here he was hit by a train, just a few days before he was to leave for Russia.”
“Who the hell gets hit by a train?” Bones said. “My cousin Elijah did, but he was drunk on really cheap moonshine…”
Dane waved him into silence. The gears of his mind were spinning fast. He recalled aloud how Streib told them that Grissom had been killed in a fire.
“That's also true,” Letson said. “But again, it doesn't mean it wasn't an accident. Fires and rocket launches unfortunately go hand in hand. But there is something else that is a bit unusual about this particular period of the NASA space program.”
“I'm all ears.”
Dane heard Letson clacking away on a keyboard before his voice returned. “There are some back page reports of a Mercury-era plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon.”
Dane was stunned for a moment but recovered quickly. “What's the point of bombing the little green men?”
“You got me. But the thinking at the time was that it would intimidate the Russians as some kind of display of space weapons power. But keep in mind that this operation is pretty much just hearsay and was probably never run.”
“Weird.” Dane ran a hand through his hair, mulling over this new information. “Well, I guess I’d better let you get back to your friends.”
“Are you kidding? I lied. I’m playing by myself. Besides, this is more fun. I might keep digging just for the heck of it.”
“In that case, I’ll let you get on with it. You can call me at this number if you learn anything interesting. Thanks for your help.”
“You can thank me with drinks and a good meal next time you’re in town.” In typical Jimmy fashion, he ended the call without saying goodbye.
Dane looked at Bones, who was flipping one of the dimes again and again.
“This,” Dane began, “is turning out to be one weird mission.”
Dane climbed back into the cockpit of Deep Black and ran through some diagnostic checks on the sub in preparation for another dive on Liberty Bell 7.
“What if Streib was lying about giving us a window to work alone down there, and he attacks us with ROVs?” Bones asked from his position at the moon pool crane.
In answer, Dane’s arm reached across the instrument console and the externally mounted missile pod swiveled in Bones’ direction.
“Five left,” Bones said, referencing the missile they used on Streib. He went to the same manipulator arm he’d grabbed the nuke with and fully examined it. Satisfied it was undamaged, he gave Dane a thumbs up and went to the crane.
“One way or another, we need to go back down there and grab that Cold War artifact,” Dane said, looking up from the cockpit. “Space Boy said his team plans to attempt to raise the capsule later this afternoon, so we need to use this window to snatch the thing.”
“Nothing else to do out here in the middle of the night,” Bones said. He lowered the sub to the water with the crane and climbed into the co-pilot seat.
“So the plan is to drop down on the wreck site and then cover the quarter mile to the capsule on the seafloor. If we do that, according to Streib, we’ll come up on the capsule shortly after their ROVs are called back to the ship for maintenance.”
“And if anyone from the expedition has figured out that we have a sub, they’ll think we’re just diving for the treasure ship,” Bones said.
Dane nodded in agreement. “Then we grab Little Fat Girl or whatever cutesy name somebody probably thought up for that A-bomb, and head for the hills.”
He pulled the hatch over them and Bones latched it in place.
Four hours later, as dawn approached three miles above, Dane and Bones reached the seafloor once again.
“This looks sort of familiar, “Dane said, staring out at the featureless mud flat. “Having some real de ja vu, here, how about you?”
“I would be, if it weren’t for this sonar reading I’m getting.” He tapped a small screen with some squiggly yellow lines on it.
“How far out?”
“Maybe a hundred yards, dead ahead.”
Dane locked their course into the sub’s navigation system and they scooted across the deep sea plains toward the reading. A few minutes later a structure appeared out of the gloom.
“Spanish frigate,” Dane observed, hovering the submersible a safe distance away and above.
The two operatives marveled at the pristine condition of the aged sailing ship.
“Thing is in outstanding shape,” Bones commented, his eyes tracing the distinctive outline of the bow.
“Low oxygen content in the water down here preserves the wood.”
“That means the crew…” Bones trailed off as he gazed at a ship more than a half millennia old.
“In there, maybe even with skin still on their bones,” Dane said.
A soft beeping emanated from Bones’ side of the cockpit, and the Cherokee focused his attention on one of the instruments in his charge.
“This is funny. I’m getting a reading on the Geiger counter.”
Dane brought the sub in a smooth arc around the ship’s broken forecastle, coasting over a debris trail that seemed to spill from the wreck. As he did, the frequency of beeps from the Geiger counter increased.
“What’s so funny about that?” Dane said. Was it possible the Admiral and the General had not told them the complete truth regarding the role of nuclear weapons on the Mercury mission? They were, after all, only SEALs—tools of force used by the powers that be to carry out their directives. Dane was under no illusion that they were told not
hing more than the bare minimum of what they needed to know in order to complete their objectives.
“We’re way too far from the capsule to be getting a reading from its nuke,” Bones stated matter-of-factly.
“Right, so does that mean there are more nukes that were dumped down here they didn’t tell us about?”
Bones fiddled some more with the radioactivity meter’s settings, alternately looking down on the debris trail and back to the Geiger counter’s screen.
“Do me a favor and drop down a little closer to that field of rocks over there.”
Dane eyed the rubble field and eased the sub closer to it. Bones’ eyes were locked to his device display. “I think it’s coming from those rocks.”
Dane eyeballed the dull-looking stones skeptically. “You sure it’s not from inside the wreck?”
Bones shook his head. “Readings get weaker closer to the shipwreck, stronger toward this trail of rocks.”
“Maybe there’s a device hidden under them?” Dane piloted the sub around the perimeter of the rocky pile.
“I think it’s just the stones, dude. Readings are pretty equal all the way over this mound. But I’ve got an idea.”
“You’ve got an idea that doesn’t involve either women or dive bars?”
Bones snorted. “Yeah, I guess I do. I say we take a sample of these rocks, check ‘em out later back on board the boat.”
“What for? We need to get over to…”
“Chill. It’ll only take a couple of minutes. And look, these things look like they spilled out of the ship. A Spanish frigate was pretty much always a treasure ship, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know. They don’t look like gold or silver or anything valuable, really.”
“Such a pessimist, Maddock. After five hundred years, they could be all encrusted over, couldn’t they?”
Dane frowned. “But what’s with the radioactivity? I guess we could collect some and show them to the wreck divers up there, but they’d probably just get into a territorial pissing contest with us.”
“Enough with the thinking ahead. Let’s just get us some and we’ll figure out what to do with them later.”
Dane dropped the submersible to within a couple of feet of the mound of rocks. Bones used the long grab arm to transfer a pile of the geological specimens into a collection box stored outside the sub.
“Happy?” Dane asked. He pressed a button and they heard the soft hiss of compressed air venting into the sub’s buoyancy tubes. “These things are weighing us down. Let’s head to the capsule.”
“Always with the negatives.”
Dane checked the compass and set off in the direction of the space wreck. They coasted across the bare seafloor, Bones occasionally spotlighting a strange denizen of the deep.
“Freaky down here, man. I hope we can grab that nuke this time so we can get back to base tomorrow. I got this chick’s number and I was supposed to call her last night.”
“I’ll put you on the capsule, Bones. You just grab that thing.”
“Slow out this time, too.”
“You got it. No ROV is going to scare me this time, if we see it, I’ll…”
“Whoa!” Bones interrupted him to point at his sonar display.
Dane turned his head sharply to look. He saw only an empty readout and Bones’ confused face.
“What is it?”
“It’s...gone.”
Something in Bones’ voice set Dane on edge. “What’s gone?”
“I don’t know. It was there for a second, I swear. A large signature, then it squiggled off the field.”
Dane knew that as a sonar specialist, Bones had received specialized training in recognizing undersea sonar signatures. “Well, what was it?”
“It was big. Sort of looked like a...well never mind.”
“No really, what did it look like?”
“Like a warfare-class submarine.”
Chapter 10
Dane roved around a tall stalk-like life form growing out of the bottom and lined up his compass course toward the capsule.
“Streib said something about the Russians,” Dane said.
“Look, Maddock, I’m not sure yet, okay? It was only there for a second, and up a few thousand feet higher, too. I’m trying to remember all those signatures they showed us in training…” Bones rubbed his temples as if to coax the memories to the forefront of his mind. “It could have been a giant sea creature, an oarfish, maybe?” he hoped aloud.
“Don’t worry about it for now. Whatever it was, you said it’s up higher. I’ll boost our speed a little so we get there faster. Let’s do this thing.” Dane put the submersible’s thrusters on high and their craft accelerated over the deep mud flats.
Bones kept his eyes glued to the sonar monitor while they traversed the distance to the spacecraft, but the next thing to show up on his display was Liberty Bell 7.
“Capsule up ahead on the right,” seventy-five yards,” Bones said.
Soon they saw the looming form of the space capsule. Dane and Bones kept a sharp eye out for ROVs but for the moment, at least, they were alone.
“You know the drill,” Dane said. Bones began testing the manipulator arm he would use to grab the nuclear bomb while Dane maneuvered the sub next to the tilted capsule.
“It’s all good, ready when you are,” he said, flexing his fingers in preparation for the precision movements he would need to perform.
“Copy that, moving in.” Dane repeated the maneuvering he’d done on their first trip to the capsule, and in a few minutes he had the sub hovering once again over Liberty Bell 7’s open hatch.
Bones aimed the external spotlight into the sunken space relic, probing for the bomb. The sub lurched and they almost knocked into the capsule, but Dane corrected for the movement with a quick burst of reverse thrust.
Bones looked his way. “What’s up?”
“Sorry, got caught in some kind of downwelling. Weird. It’s been totally calm down here until now.”
Bones turned back to the window, peering inside the capsule. For one heart-stopping moment he thought the nuclear device was no longer there, but then he spotted the cylindrical form.
“There it is! It’s to our lower left.” He pointed. “I’ll need to come in from higher and to the right.”
Dane positioned the craft accordingly and Bones aimed his light again.
“Better?”
“Good as it gets,” Bones said, already priming the grab arm. “I’m going in.”
Dane kept his hands poised and ready over the sub’s controls, giving brief bursts of thrust every few seconds in order to maintain position.
They heard the mechanical whirring of the specially outfitted manipulator arm as Bones extended it into the downed spaceship. Dane could hear the Cherokee SEAL mumbling unintelligibly as he concentrated on dropping the claws around their prize. Then he heard Bones curse, mumble some more, followed by, “Got it! Do not move the sub!”
Dane complied while Bones withdrew the arm until the nuke was clutched in front of the open hatch. There, he turned the arm to orient the nuke so that it would fit through the opening. He retracted the grab arm.
“It’s out!”
“Do you drop it in a sample box or keep it in the grabber?”
“Box. In case we lose momentary power to the arm and the grabber releases. And so no one can see it when we surface.”
“I’ll hold position while you park the car in the garage.”
Bones opened the sample bay on the outside of the sub. He had just started moving the manipulator arm toward the box when they saw lights from above.
“Bones, is that your spotlight?”
Bones did not look up from his controls. “Negative.”
“Then we’ve got company again. Looks like Streib lied to us. When I get hold of him this time, I'm…”
Suddenly the light shining on the seafloor next to the sub began strobing, lending a surreal quality to this underwater world, as if Dane was watch
ing a very old silent film. He squinted against the flashes.
Bones shielded his eyes with the hand not on the controls. “Deep sea disco time.”
“That strobe is disorienting. I need to go before I knock into the capsule. You got the nuke?”
Bones pressed a button with a flourish. They heard the sample bay door click into place. “We got it, man!”
“Say goodbye to Liberty Bell 7.” Dane pulled the joystick all the way back and the sub pointed toward the distant surface. He activated the thrusters and Deep Black shot upward.
“Watch out!” Bones warned. But it was too late.
The impact was sickening— a jarring crunch to the top of their acrylic dome—the only thing separating them from the bone-crushing pressures of the deep ocean.
“What is that?” Dane yelled. But as he craned his neck to look up, he had his answer before Bones said, “Submersible.”
Dane executed a downward thrust maneuver that should have sent the sub skittering back to the bottom. But instead he only heard the grinding of metal on metal. He tried the controls again to no avail. So focused was he on this effort that he almost didn’t register the meaning of what Bones had said.
“Did you say submersible? Not ROV?”
“Yeah! I’m looking up at a mini-sub with two dudes in it! One of them has got us snagged in his grab arm.”
“Is it Streib?” Dane’s fist clenched as he suddenly imagined breaking Streib’s jaw.
“Nope. Never seen ‘em before. White dudes, military haircuts. And they look pissed off.”
Dane again tried a combination of control jockeying that turned out to be futile. “Damn! No good.”
“Maybe someone is after this nuke after all,” Bones said, still looking up at the undersea craft they grappled with. “The capsule’s down there, free for the taking. But they want us.”