by P D Singer
The three of them took turns on a visual inspection, though what they could see and what was there might differ. The viz was much better than yesterday’s; the tiny particles of mud, rust, and shrimp shit settled back to a carpet on the lowest surfaces. Bobby would buy a lot of dives if he disturbed it, but staying off the bottom was a skill as ingrained as eating. His GoPro would record his debt and his disgrace, should it happen, but not a fin would descend to silt levels. Unless everything went to hell.
If that happened, owing his buddies was the least of his problems. Bobby didn’t give it another thought.
The jacks remained as they’d left them—the opening in the hull still measured twenty-eight and a fraction inches. Enough—more than enough, and with strobes mounted on the jacks, he’d have beacons calling him back out. He clipped his reel to a jack, turning himself into a modern-day Theseus with a string to find his way out of the maze. Bobby flashed his companions the A-OK sign and wriggled through the hull.
He had to pull himself through the opening, not swim. The scrrrrrtch of his tank against the hull drowned out his breathing, or he was forgetting to inhale.
In. He was in. Inside a U-boat that had not seen a living man for more than seventy years. The dead were all around him, long since gone back to dust. He knew their names—or he would know their names once he knew their boat. Help me to honor you.
His wrist lamp showed him the bunk beds, their frames twisted crazily in pipes and fragments of S-springs. Hazards, every one. A man should stay out of other men’s beds; it only led to trouble.
One touch and a troublesome S-spring gave way. Had it waited only for his touch before collapsing? He hadn’t planned to hasten it on its way, but the fragility of the metal….
Bobby used the frames to turn, keeping his fins out of the silt zone. Even his slow movement roiled the waters: old oil and nameless particles swirled around him. Careful, careful….
He wouldn’t try for the wooden cubbies over his head, no matter how many boots or shirts or razors they held, marked or not with the names of their lost owners. Every one of those cubbies was a hazard waiting to fall on his head, in bits or pieces or chunks of something sharp, stringy, or heavy enough to pin him until his air ran out. Nope, not trying the uppers, nor the lowers, bathed as they were with the fine mud that would cost him visibility, if not his orientation, in the U-boat. Bobby knew where he was right now and wouldn’t willingly test that knowledge in zero viz.
Bobby pulled air in through his mouthpiece, the hiss much louder in this death-quiet space. Horribly conscious of being the first man in decades to breathe aboard the U-boat, he turned in place, picking out the shapes of familiar objects and more he couldn’t identify. A boot, half out of the silt, a mug. Another boot, with something long inside. Bobby wouldn’t disturb it, on this dive or any. What was your name? Were you Konrad or Hans-Georg or someone else?
He could spend his allotted minutes in here, in a chamber that deserved careful inspection, or he could proceed to his target. Identifying this boat had to be top priority, and his best hope lay on the other side of a closed door, in the radio room.
The hatch in the pressure bulkhead still bore its white paint, showing pale between the few sponges and anemones to make their home inside the boat. His target, then—would it still open? Pressure on either side would be equal; the latches and hinges would define success.
Had the pressure door even latched? No harm trying. Bobby braced himself and pulled against the round wheel in the center of the door. Nothing moved.
Of course, that would have been too easy.
Mind the silt.
Please let the Germans subscribe to the theory of “Righty tighty, lefty loosey.” Prepared for massive exertion, he nearly slipped and tumbled when the remains of the grease in the mechanism let the wheel slip. Just a quarter turn—was that enough?
No. The door remained stubbornly in place. Bobby hauled again, and with a grinding protest, the wheel turned. He hauled until he’d spun it another turn and a half and it would go no farther.
The meter-diameter entryway had been placed for a man standing on the deck to pass through. The deck was currently serving as a vertical surface to Bobby’s left. The hatch would open down now, not to the side. Gravity would help, if the hinges hadn’t rusted into immobility.
Come on, hinges, do your stuff. Oh yeah, come on, come to daddy! Bobby heaved, and heaved again. His time was running short—not for bottom time, but to be fair in letting his companions in. Inches at a time, the hatch swung down. A third of the way down, it stopped.
Cursing used air and mental clarity, Bobby used his frustration as fuel. If he rose relative to the hatch, he could get his hands in and lever the door open. A deep breath adjusted his buoyancy upward. He braced, and heaved.
Something clanged behind him, something that had to be unstable already, not his doing. This hatch was designed to open, it shouldn’t flex anything, even in a rusty vessel, but still his heart thumped. Whatever fell could block his way, though he’d come less than six feet aft of the rent in the hull. He swung his lamp through the crew cabin and upward—his companions waved. Bobby gave an A-OK.
Well, there wasn’t a lot of room, but he wasn’t taking it all up. He gestured for one to come in—Chuck could investigate the other direction. There certainly wasn’t enough room for him to help.
Setting his finned feet against the bulkhead-turned-ceiling, he could pit his strength against the hinges. He coiled up, set his grasp, and straightened. His thighs trembled, his abs screamed. Chuck watched from a safe distance while the cords in Bobby’s neck tightened and his vision went dim.
You’re being stupid. This isn’t safe.
Yeah, I’m the guy who pushes the boundaries.
The hinges gave. Bobby tumbled from pulling against resistance no longer there, but he righted himself, going horizontal in the water. A moment to control his breathing ate into his bottom time, but he forced himself to inhale at a measured pace, not burn through his tanks.
The pressure hatch was open, and the radio room lay beyond.
Back to caution, Bobby swung his light around. A cabinet hung at a crazy angle, its drawers open downward. Empty. Another cabinet, turned ninety degrees with the boat, lay ajar. All the time spent in the U-995 led to this moment. The hours in the museum with Lee and Felix drew him to his prize.
A smashed mechanism remained bolted to the counter. Something like a crazy typewriter. Half a keyboard lay skewed, the guts showing crushed and mangled. The rest of it lay somewhere in the silt below, the keys and reels he couldn’t search for.
His dive computer peeped. Bobby was running out of time.
Pulling his haul bag from his dry suit pocket, he reached into the skewed drawers. Papers, fragile from their long submersion, something with a cover. He couldn’t take the time to look. Something in this drawer would hold the answer. Shoving handfuls of maps, books, signals, hell, maybe love letters from the radioman’s sweetheart into his mesh bag, he took what he could, emptying the drawer.
Something square stuck up out of the silt. To the increasingly quick beeps from the timer, he snatched the object out of the debris, raising a puff of silt. Not enough to trip his wager with his companions if it didn’t grow, but the camera mounted on his mask wouldn’t be around to record the cloud. Someone else’s would have to. Bobby needed to ascend.
He pulled himself through the circular opening, back into the crazed lighting from the strobes marking his exit point. Bobby gave thumbs up to Chuck, and clutched his haul bag. He’d have to shove that through the hull first, and then draw himself out of the sub. His tanks scraped the edge, but no gear hung him up from below, and he was out.
He swapped A-OKs with Kent, who slipped through the gap between the jacks. Bobby would wait here, backup for men he couldn’t rescue, but that was the plan. They were good divers, careful. More careful than Bobby. They’d be okay.
Ten minutes. Ten minutes in the find of a lifetime, and a full hau
l bag. The strobes flashed out of synch, lighting his precious plunder. He wouldn’t know what he had until he surfaced, but the identity of this boat lay in there. He knew it, he just knew it.
The answer had to be in there, because he had only one more chance to find out for himself. One more dive on this mystery wreck, and then he wouldn’t be back until some other dive captain found the coordinates. He couldn’t come back with the Tech Tach, and he wouldn’t come back with Lee.
“WILL YOU quit pacing? You’re making us fucking nervous,” Darrell snarled. Not that he wasn’t checking his pockets over and over, making sure his slate, marker, and safety sausage bounced on the end of their elastics.
Bobby went into the water without any discussion, nor any acknowledgment of Lee’s “Good luck.” He hadn’t said much all morning after frying up a couple of eggs, at least not to Lee. The other divers clustered around Bobby’s table of diagrams and notes to discuss staggering their dives. Everyone wanted to get into the U-boat through the newly expanded entry, and making sure the other six divers knew the interior layout was reason enough to exclude a captain who wasn’t diving.
The four who waited on deck didn’t need him either and wouldn’t until it was time to hoist their tanks to their shoulders.
Lee made another circuit to the wheelhouse, where no, the three men below didn’t show on the bottom finder. Maybe he could see what was going on down there by staring directly into the water from the stern. His yellow slicker flapped around his knees, batting at the waterproof britches, mocking him for not being in a dry suit. He should be down there. He would be down there with Bobby if he’d left the bottle alone.
“Hey, Lee.” Wes stopped him on his way to the dive platform. “I—I didn’t mean to start something bad. I just thought…. You liked the Irish coffee last time.”
He had. And the Scotch, and the gin, and even the vodka was okay with a mixer. Wes never knew Lee any other way than with a glass in his hand. “You didn’t know, and I should have known. Stopping is harder than not starting.”
“Bobby’s really pissed.” Guess the cold shoulder had been apparent to everyone, even a man who’d only seen them together a few times. “Do you want me to tell Bobby it wasn’t your fault?”
Yes, yes he did. Yes, yesyesyesyes, then maybe he could have another chance…. Lee had burned through so many chances. But one more, he just needed one more. “Not sure it will help. But thanks for offering.”
Darrell checked his dive computer. “Saddle up,” he called, squatting to get his arms through the straps. Tip gave him a lift up, letting him jounce his equipment into place.
The three divers below would be heading upward to their first decompression stop while the other four divers headed down to see the inside of their find. Tip checked a seal on one black-suited figure’s arm, tucking his glove securely. The diver stepped off the platform, the last to go in. The current had pushed his companions away from the boat, but they could find the anchor lines, no problem.
That left forty minutes before Lee had to face Bobby. Forty minutes to find some words to keep him from leaving for good.
Forty years might not be long enough to find those words, and Lee would spend every one of them alone.
“You were doing so good.” Tip left off watching the waves lap where divers had been. “What happened?”
He could explain, but it would sound like excuses. Even he was tired of his excuses. “I fucked up. Had a little. It turned into a lot.”
The ocean picked them up and dropped them again, its waves passing endlessly under the hull. Seawater splashed over the dive platform, running between the wooden slats. Forty minutes from now, Bobby would fling his haul bag on the platform, all stuffed with whatever he found, hand over his tanks, and climb up the ladder to regale them with what he’d seen and salvaged.
That would be a great return, if he were actually talking to Lee and not around him.
“Think Bobby might stay with the boat?” That was a dumbass question for Lee to ask a man who got paid out of the commercial and charter fees his boat’s divers generated. Tip might not see a reason to stick around if Bobby didn’t.
“I’m kind of surprised he came back at all.” Tip left Lee standing at the stern, waiting for his fate to surface.
LIKE BLACK seals, three divers surfaced, all barking madly. Words weren’t involved, more like whoops and whistles, quickly halted when the ocean punished them for dropping their mouthpieces too soon. Kent and Chuck scrambled aboard, snorkels in their teeth, leaving a clear platform for Bobby, who fought to stay near the boat. His suit puffed up around the shoulder straps where he’d inflated himself for buoyancy.
“Keep this wet!” he yelled, hoisting his haul bag onto the bucking platform.
Lee snagged the bag, water gushing out of the mesh. The stuff was pretty damned wet already. But there was a lot of it, and Bobby thought it was worth bringing up. Woo-hoo!
He pivoted to hand the haul bag to Tip and turned around to take Bobby’s tanks out of the rising swell.
The sea used the boat for a bludgeon.
On Bobby’s head.
Lee dropped to his knees, grabbing after Bobby.
His fucking arms were too short. Bobby was already out of reach. His head lolled back as the current swept him away. A wave crested—Bobby was gone.
“Man overboard!” Lee screamed. “Bobby’s drifting!”
No question of moving the Bottom Hunter—she was anchored and there were men below who would die if they surfaced to an empty sea.
They had another boat.
Tip flung the Zodiac to the deck, furiously spreading it open. Lee had the CO2 gun out almost before the rubber boat landed, jamming the big cartridges into the multirack. Pow! Pow! Pow! wasn’t a joke this time—every cartridge Stuart hadn’t wasted blew the side of the boat out. Another side, the front…. Lee would scream, but it would slow him down. Pow! Pow!
Tip slapped the tank into the back of the Zodiac, coupling it with the small outboard they never took off, and strapped it in. Lee blasted the prow into a point.
Two minutes from blob to boat, and they were too slow. Two seconds was too slow—Bobby drifted farther with every rat-a-tat of Lee’s heart.
They shoved the gray boat off the stern into the hostile sea. Lee leaped into the Zodiac, scrambling to start the outboard. The 25 HP motor roared into life on the second rip. Lee twisted the throttle and roared out after his lost diver.
THE COLD water slapped his face, over and over. Bobby came to, choking and spluttering.
Alone.
Alone in a deep blue sea, sixty miles from land. Alone, who knew how far from the Bottom Hunter.
Alone and festooned with survival equipment. A full dry suit, a whistle, a safety sausage. He wouldn’t sink, short of Moby Dick biting holes in the neoprene. Might get real cold, though. And thirsty. And cold—he was cold already. Not just his hands and feet, but all over: his shoulders, his chest, his back.
The ocean was halfway to claiming him.
Lee wouldn’t let a man die easy.
Bobby didn’t intend to die at all. Besides, he’d made some promises about getting old and dying in bed.
Which wasn’t gonna happen unless he got his ass in gear and started acting like he wanted to live.
Tanks and rebreather—buckle that crap back on; it was valuable and it floated. Fill the buoyancy compensator wings and his equipment would stay on the surface, him with it. Bobby hit the inflator button, puffing out the red ruff buckled to his tanks, but not so much it would push him face-first into the water. He’d inflated his suit enough to stay on the surface before that shiteater of a boat smacked him upside the head. Damn dive platform.
Swimming back, what a joke. First, where was “back”? The surface current had been running around four knots that morning, faster than he could swim. He could exhaust himself into sinking, all for getting swept away more slowly.
Fuck, he was cold. Colder than he should be, and it took a minute fo
r his muzzy brain to supply why.
He’d inflated his suit with trimix. Just a couple of puffs, for the minute or two he meant to be at the surface. The breathing mix that kept him clearheaded and safe at 140 feet would kill him now. The helium stole heat, bad as lying naked on an iceberg.
He held the deflator tube high as he could, letting the ocean squeeze the air from his suit. Puffing into the tube lifted him higher in the water. Twice more, he deflated and inflated, mixing warm breath in with the frigid helium, diluting it down.
He’d do that again in a couple of minutes, just to be sure he’d eliminated the threat. First things first. Bobby fumbled his safety sausage out and groped for his mouthpiece. He unleashed a rush of trimix through the valve. The sausage bloated into a neon orange tube, six feet long, tight as a drum.
He’d make it easy to be found, easy as it could be to find a speck of a man in the open Atlantic where the waves were higher than he was tall. Lee would come after him, he just knew it. Bobby waved his orange beacon and blew three shrill blasts from the whistle he’d tested but never used.
He waited a few seconds, listening for an answering blast or the rumble of a motor. A slow ten count, and he blasted again.
And again.
And again.
An hour later, he lost track of how many times he’d piped his SOS. He blew again, through lips too cold to feel the plastic or the rattle of the sounder ball.
His dive computer taunted him, running the clock into negative ranges—he should have zeroed it out when he surfaced, but why bother now when his hands were too cold to hit a button. Dive time: minus 2:17 and climbing.
Bobby ran out of prayers, falling back to Please, God, please, God, let Lee find me between whistles. The sea licked him with its icy tongue, promising to swallow him whole.
He’d be a spiky mouthful—he waved the sausage and shrilled again, with only the waves to hear him.
Chapter 20