Meg: Hell's Aquarium (44 page)

“Roger that, James.” Kaylie stares at David, her pulse pounding in her slender neck. “David . . . yes or no?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Then go with your gut. I trust you.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.” David increases the air pressure within the sub’s cockpit, adding enough positive buoyancy to cause the Manta Ray to float straight up into the hangar.

Surrounded by thick titanium oval walls, they stare at their bizarre surroundings, praying it will not become their tomb.

Kaylie presses the red switch on the docking station controls, holding her breath.

Rusty metal grinds against barnacle traces scattered along the docking station’s titanium tracks as the horizontal doors seal shut beneath the submersible.

The internal lights flicker, then extinguish.

Darkness.

Silence, save for their heavy breathing.

David and Kaylie hold hands in the claustrophobic pitch, waiting for something, anything to happen. David’s skin tingles, beads of sweat trickling down his face, the tiny hairs along the back of his neck standing on end.

Come on . . . come on!

A heavy generator jumps to life . . . then dies.

A yellow warning light flashes on the docking station’s remote control.

Kaylie flicks it with her index finger. Presses the green button. No response. Presses the red button . . . nothing. “Shit! It’s jammed!”

The blood rushes from David’s face. “The system’s stuck in the middle of its cycle.”

“Then how do we get out of here?”

We don’t. We’re going to die down here, trapped in this titanium coffin.
“Give the generator a chance,” he rasps.

Long minutes pass.

Sweat pours down David’s face, his pounding heart shaking his entire body.
Was it a set-up? Allison Petrucci’s revenge against dad for killing Maren? Why the hell did you trust them? Dad said not to go, he
said it was a suicide mission. Why didn’t you fucking listen!

Clunky mechanical noises echo all around them as the backup generator kicks in. The lights return, the walls humming with life as powerful pumps activate, causing the titanium oval walls to shudder.

Water drains from the chamber.

The Manta Ray comes to rest on a porous secondary floor.

David is about to begin the process of unsealing the cockpit when Kaylie grabs his arm. “Not yet.” She points to a red warning light in the hangar, indicating the docking station has not pressurized.

They unhook their harnesses and stretch, the two of them shaken from the harrowing descent and what may lie ahead.

“No telling if the life support systems in Maren’s lab are functioning. Kaylie, reach under your seat. You’ll find a pony bottle and breather.”

A loud humming sound fills their ears as pressurized air is pumped inside the chamber.

The docking station’s warning lights turn green.

David holds his breath, his hand trembling over the cockpit release control.
Please God, don’t splatter our brains across the windshield.

The hatch pops open twenty seconds later with a suction-like hiss.

David lies back in his seat. “Let’s make this fast.”

Gently, they climb out of the cockpit, sliding down the sub’s wings to the wet floor. Situated overhead and welded to the oval hangar is the lab’s immense titanium sphere, its rounded bottom serving as the docking station’s ceiling.

A ladder leads up to a hatch.

Kaylie ascends the ladder and begins turning the hand wheel to open the watertight door—

—while David inspects the damaged starboard propulsion unit, surprised to find the deflector tunnel protecting the drive shaft and prop has cracked, wedging a section of the four-inch shattered acrylic against the prop blades.

Kaylie loosens the hand wheel and tugs open the hatch—

—the pressure differential between the docking station and the interior of the lab causing the chamber’s titanium oval walls to shudder.

David and Kaylie stare at one another as if caught in an earthquake. “Go! Do what you have to do. I’m needed here!”

She nods. Fixing the pony bottle’s mask over her face, she crawls up into the lab, sealing the hatch behind her.

The docking station stops trembling.

David sets to work on the propeller.

Motion sensors activate the lab’s interior lights and life support system. A
whoosh
of stale air pushes out from dozens of vents, filling the habitat.

Kaylie peels off her mask and looks around.

The sphere is divided into two floors, the lower level containing two bunk beds, a port-o-potty and shower, kitchen area, water heater and cooling system, and a life support system plumbed into a large water tank and two generators. Lights on the backup unit indicate it is functioning.

Living quarters. Keep going.
She climbs an aluminum ladder to the upper deck.

Work stations divide the area into a lab, sonar station, radio, and a computer. Shelves are lined with books, the walls covered in maps and drawings of assorted prehistoric sea creatures. She glances at a few then pauses to look out the dark viewport.

Come on, you’re wasting precious time. . . .

Opening a file cabinet, she searches for Maren’s charts of the Panthalassa Sea.

David squats by the starboard prop, using a monkey wrench to pry loose the damaged acrylic housing—

—pausing as he feels a low, rumbling tremor. Standing, he reaches out to touch the oval wall, his bones registering the thick double layers of titanium as they buckle within their structural frame.

“Jesus.”

He rushes back to the prop, tearing and twisting the hunk of shrapnel with every ounce of strength.
Two minutes . . . three tops . . . or maybe seconds! Make it a minute . . . finish in one minute before these walls crush you like a beer can.

Kaylie locates two charts in a bottom filing cabinet. She rolls them up, turns to leave, then feels the low rumble coming from inside the docking station, building like an approaching tsunami.

David tears off the loosened debris. Climbs the ladder. Bangs on the lab’s hull with his wrench. “Kaylie! Now!”

The hatch pops open, causing the chamber floor to rumble, the porous secondary floor twisting beneath the sub. Kaylie tosses him the charts and slides down the ladder.

David hurtles over the Manta Ray’s wing, falling feet-first into the cockpit. He shoves the charts behind Kaylie’s seat as she flops inside, pressing the green switch on the docking station control. Nothing happens.

The infuriating yellow warning light blinks.

Metal groans. The oval wall before them indents for a frightening second then pops back into place, the depths demanding entry.

“David, we need to get inside the lab!”

He turns to look at the sphere, his mind debating—

—his eyes spotting the open hatch.
A trip switch?

“Wait here!” He leaps out of the cockpit, races up the ladder and slams the hatch shut, spinning its hand wheel tight—

—causing the yellow light to cease blinking.

Kaylie presses the green button, sending fountains of seawater shooting up from the floor, soaking David as he leaps back inside the cockpit. She seals the hatch and they wait, the process taking a good twenty seconds—

—the titanium walls bowing inward, then out again, the battle tenuous, the chamber lights blinking, the water level rising fast over the Manta Ray.

David powers up the submersible, the two of them quickly strapping in as the chamber goes dark and the water level kisses the ceiling—

—opening the horizontal doors, offering the sea’s 14,031 pounds per square inch of pressure a toe-hold that crushes the titanium docking station as if it were made of aluminum.

The flooded chamber minimizes the pressure differential between the abyss and the hangar, staving off the implosion—

—the temperature differential inhaling ocean like a vacuum.

David jams both feet to the pedals, empowering the Manta Ray’s twin propellers. For a frozen moment technology battles Nature to a draw, the sub held in place against the incoming torrent—

—the propulsion units cavitating, creating its own vacuum.

The stressed titanium buckles, the chamber walls collapsing around them—

—the sudden shift in volume equalizing the pressure, releasing the sub.

The revving propellers catch the sea, hurtling the vessel down into the darkness! The sea floor leaps at them. David pulls back hard on both joysticks too late.

The burst of forward thrust burying the submersible bow-first in the silty bottom in bone-jarring silence.

27.

Tanaka Oceanographic Institute
Monterey Bay, California

The hopper dredger,
McFarland
, is a 319-foot-long monstrosity of steel, its rusted hull painted red below the waterline, black trim above, its white superstructure towering five stories in the stern. Built by the Bethlehem Steel Shipbuilding Corporation back in 1967, the boat was originally owned and operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as part of their hopper dredger fleet—ships designed to clear sand from the bottom of the main shipping channels.

Operating like a giant vacuum cleaner, the
McFarland
incorporates two large, trailing suction drag arms that inhale slurry—a water and sand mixture. In turn, the slurry passes through a drag head and pipelines on its way to the hopper. The hopper is a massive hold that runs through the middle of the ship like a giant Olympic-size swimming pool. So large is the
McFarland’s
hopper that, at full capacity, it can hold more than six thousand tons of slurry. Once the ship reaches its designated dump site, the slurry is released through giant steel doors located along the bottom of the keel.

Despite its prodigious size and ten-thousand-ton displacement, the hopper dredger is a fast, maneuverable ship, powered by two 3,000-horsepower screws, and a 500-horsepower bow-thruster.

After four decades of service, the
McFarland
had been decommissioned following cutbacks by the GAO to the Federal Government’s hopper fleet. For years the ship had sat, slowly rotting in a Philadelphia shipyard, until a private entrepreneur had rescued it from the scrap heap.