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  “My ‘sniffer’ is going crazy. I set it to tell me when there’s a high level of methane in the seawater, because that’s one sign there might be an HTV nearby.” He leaned forward to examine a different display. “The seawater temperature right here is definitely warmer than normal.”

  “How much?”

  “Three degrees Fahrenheit. Not much, but it’s significant. Fluids pour out of the HTV at nearly seven hundred degrees and diffuse into seawater that’s just above freezing. Readings I’ve taken before near the mouths of small vents have been less than one half a degree warmer than normal seawater at the same depth.” Drake craned his head to peer through the dome. “I’m going to start a search pattern and watch for an increase in temperature.”

  Jack felt something—the hull shuddering. It wasn’t more bumps. It felt like Pegasus was being blasted with a pressure washer. He strained to see beyond the lights into the darkness. The strength of the vibrations increased.

  Drake looked up from his instruments. “Earthquake.”

  “Good God. Where?”

  “Could be right under us.”

  We have seventy-two hundred feet of water overhead and an earthquake under our butts.

  He’d spent most of his life around San Francisco, so he knew the primal fear that welled up each time the earth shook, even after years have passed since the last time. Those had only lasted seconds, and he knew how to try to protect himself. This felt very different, partly because Pegasus seemed as fragile as a soap bubble.

  Suddenly, the sub was knocked on its side, and he was staring down at the gravelly seabed. Pegasus hung for seconds at its tipping point but couldn’t hold and rolled farther, both wings on her starboard side stabbing into the seafloor.

  “I’ll be damned,” Drake said almost inaudibly. “If those wings get stuck, Pegasus can’t free herself.” He leaned toward the screen. “Computer. Reverse engine.” The sub did not move.

  There was a slight rise in the level of mechanical noise in the cockpit, but it didn’t drown out the sound Jack dreaded. Bump. Then another, two more. Within a few seconds, most of the surface of the dome became opaque. Looking up, countless wide-open jaws blocked his view. The isopod swarm had caught up with them. This time, Pegasus was helpless.

  Drake’s lips were tight as he poked the control panel. “Our lights don’t scare those bastards a bit. The only chance we have is in the ultra-low frequency vibrations I’m pumping out. If that doesn’t drive them away, we’re finished.”

  These isopods weren’t computer-generated giant octopuses out of Hollywood. They were a pack of scavengers whose weight pinned Pegasus to the bottom. He watched the creatures completely cover the dome. Countless jaws clattered against the quartz, trying to break through to gnaw on the succulent soft parts of their quarry inside. Sweat broke out. He’d never before been the prey.

  In the dim cockpit, Drake’s blue eyes glowed intensely against his tan skin. Jack couldn’t tell if he was still trying to think of some way to escape or if he’d given up. Then Drake turned and slowly shook his head.

  Until that moment, Jack hadn’t believed it would end here. His mind filled with Debra, her image, her voice, her passion. She filled him with a rush of energy. He wouldn’t let their relationship end.

  He beat on the dome with both fists. The scraping and groping of the isopods intensified as though he’d angered them. The ultra-low frequency blasts weren’t working, but . . . what if?

  “Steve, turn those vibrations off, then on, then off. Alternate. Make the intervals and volume erratic.”

  “I don’t see why”—but he did it.

  Nothing happened. He stopped.

  “Unless you have something else, keep doing it.”

  Plop. A sound so indistinct he wasn’t sure he’d heard anything. Plop. There it was again, but nothing changed overhead on the dome. Then the sounds came more often as isopods dissolved the adhesive binding them to Pegasus and drifted away.

  Were they fleeing? Had the erratic vibrations confused them? Had they collectively decided they’d wasted enough time? He’d never know.

  “Unbelievable,” Drake said calmly. “Smart call.”

  Jack sucked in deep breaths of the oxygen-enriched air. He felt Pegasus, with the great weight off her back, wobble and lift slightly.

  “Computer, turn port,” Drake ordered. After five seconds, “Computer, turn starboard.” Another five seconds. “Computer, turn port.” Drake kept reversing the rudders until they heard the unmistakable scraping of the hull along the bottom. He coached Pegasus into stability and then into forward motion. Visibility returned. He leveled her out fifty feet above the floor.

  “I guess that wasn’t a close call either,” Jack said.

  “Couldn’t be closer, that one. Between here and the west coast, there’s a lot of seismic activity, swarms of earthquakes, even some minor tectonic plate movements. The small quake we just felt shook part of the seabed loose and started a landslide. That’s called a ‘slump.’ It displaced the wall of water that knocked us over. But there’s a bright side. It must have played hell with Barbas’s robot Tinkertoys.”

  Damn little comfort.

  He wasn’t going to let Drake know about his deep-rooted fear of getting trapped underwater. He’d been ten years old when his sea kayak was flipped by a speeding power boat. His paddle had been torn away, so he couldn’t execute an Eskimo Roll to right the boat. Then the spray skirt snagged, trapping him in the cockpit. About to suck in seawater, he finally kicked his way out and thrust to the surface, gagging.

  To try to erase the fear, he’d made water a second home by swimming, scuba diving, rowing for the Stanford crew, and racing his sailboat. He’d suppressed the fear but couldn’t get rid of it. Years later he’d figured out why. After he’d gotten home from being trapped in his kayak, his father had ridiculed him for having been frightened. That nailed the fear deep in his emotions.

  “Let’s hope there aren’t any aftershocks,” Drake said, “and I can find what I’m after.” He looked to his left. “Oops, I spoke too soon. Look over there. That’s a methane eruption coming from beneath the seabed. Must have been set off by that quake.” At the outer edge of their lights, a column of water was violently disturbed.

  “Is that what’s called a ‘methane burp’?”

  “Yep. If more methane cuts loose, the force will probably toss us up for a few hundred feet and . . . hell, I don’t know what will happen. I hope I haven’t used up all my luck.”

  As quickly as champagne that’s blown its cork, it quieted down.

  “My luck held,” Drake said. “Time to get back to business. I’m starting the search pattern.”

  Jack tried to shift his shoulders and legs, but there was less room than in a seat in economy class. More than ever he felt the unseen squeeze of thousands of pounds pressing on every square inch of the dome. His brainstem was screaming to head up, but Drake would never turn back now.

  Drake cut the lights and turned on a different array. “Instead of a globe of light, I’ve focused all lights in a wedge ahead of our port bow toward where the water temperature is warmest. I’ll look at the lighted sector. You watch the right side, just in case.”

  Pegasus cruised forward slowly, minute after minute. With nothing to do but stare into pitch blackness, Jack felt like a dope.

  “It can’t be,” Drake breathed. He directed one powerful light back and forth in an arc. “This isn’t possible.”

  Through the dome on Drake’s side, Jack saw they were passing what looked like a steep wall rising beyond the range of the lights.

  Drake feverishly made data entries on the touchscreen as Pegasus slid forward. When the wall finally fell behind them into the darkness, Drake turned Pegasus to starboard and into a wide circle that brought him back alongside the wall.

  “Now we�
��ll see,” Drake said, putting Pegasus into an ascending course for another pass.

  At three hundred, six hundred, then nine hundred feet above the seabed, the stony slope continued upward, narrowing slowly. The temperature inside the little capsule kept rising.

  “Do you have any idea what you’re seeing?” Drake’s hoarse voice was near a shout. “The tallest HTV chimney ever discovered, named Godzilla, is 150 feet tall. This one is almost exactly a thousand feet. This is it, my hydrothermal vent.” Years had dropped from Drake’s leathery features. He looked gleeful. “This baby has been pumping for millennia.”

  Drake slowly circled the HTV, regularly entering coordinates and dimensions into the digital log.

  During the fourth trip around the HTV, Jack thought of Devil’s Tower, the core of a volcano exposed by erosion and made famous in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. That tower was the site of vision quests for the Kiowa. Maybe Drake felt that way about this one.

  “Are you going to take Pegasus across the top of it?”

  “Hell, no. I haven’t survived this long by being stupid. We’ve been circling the cone, but the vent at the top is where the action is. Picture a perpetual eruption blasting a screaming hot concoction into icy seawater. In that instant, the precious metals and valuable minerals precipitate out, spread like a fan, and settle on the seabed. That’s what Barbas is mining. Before I take Pegasus close to that, I have to measure the velocity and density and temperature of what’s shooting up from the guts of the Earth. As soon as I know what’s a relatively safe distance, I’ll start takings samples for my own research.”

  Jack nodded and recalled fiery craters of active land-based volcanoes he’d looked down into from the rim or a plane. He guessed Drake would be doing his research much closer and wasn’t tempted to join him.

  He thought he had the big picture now, but had to make sure. “So what’s going on inside this HTV,” he said, “has nothing to do with the forces that cause methane burps, right?”

  “Of course not.” Drake shook his head in disgust. “One last swing around the base,” Drake said, “and I’m done.”

  “Did you get all you need?”

  Drake guffawed. “I’ll be back here many, many times.”

  Soon after Drake had guided Pegasus down to just above the seafloor, Jack thought he saw a shadowy form close to the sub on his side.

  “Steve, you almost hit something, but it was too dark over here to see what. It’s behind us now. Put Pegasus in reverse and give me more light.”

  “I told you this was my trip, my decisions. No more detours after this.” He shifted into reverse.

  Seconds later, Jack saw a ghost from the Iraq War. “It looks like an M1 Abrams on steroids, twice the size of a regulation tank. It’s on rolling tracks and has a long snout like a 120mm cannon barrel. There’s no way that thing is used for mining metals.”

  Drake used thrusters to maneuver Pegasus so he could see it too. “Damn!” he said. “It does look like a tank, but that makes no sense.”

  “Shoot some pictures.”

  “Yeah and then we’re out of here.” He angled Pegasus to point at the tank-thing and touched the screen in front of him. There was a soft whirring sound. He touched the screen again, and then several more times. “I’ll be damned.”

  “What’s wrong? Isn’t the camera working?”

  “Working fine, but we’re not getting any images. Something must be—I know what the problem is. The glue from those isopods has coated the lens. The camera can’t see anything. You’ll have to remember what you saw. I still say—” He was interrupted by an urgent series of pings. He jerked his head around and scanned his gauges. The sound changed to a low whoop—whoop—whoop. “I have to start for the surface. You’ll hear scraping sounds when I release the baskets.”

  “Baskets?”

  “Pegasus carries ballast that looks like lead washers in four wire mesh baskets. Ballast makes it easier to descend. Releasing it saves a lot of energy going back up.”

  As the baskets fell free, Pegasus leapt upward.

  “Feels good. I guess we’re home free.”

  “We’re all right as long as neither of the starboard wings that got stuck in the gravel break away and rip the fuselage. As we get closer to the surface, we have to watch out for lines and nets dumped by fishing fleets, and floating islands of plastic and other crap.”

  Drake was exhilarated with his discovery, chattering away about trivia. Twice, Jack tried to break in and start a conversation about the sort-of drill rig, but Drake had no interest in anything other than the HTV. As they continued the long trip back to the surface, Jack blocked out Drake’s rambling. His mind was racing, trying to set priorities, make decisions.

  Barbas had already declared war on Strider & Vanderberg and would order Stan Simms to escalate his attacks. As a result of this dive, Drake now considered Barbas and Renatus to be his enemies. And he’d gone from being suspicious to being committed to going after Barbas. Waiting was not an option. The battle was on.

  He turned to Drake. “Could Barbas be doing anything that caused the methane burp we think sank Aleutian? And the methane burp we just saw?”

  “Don’t see how. Those burps, and the shock wave that hit us, are probably all related to methane hydrate under the seafloor that contains extremely compressed methane gas. That gas escapes when pressure is reduced and the methane hydrate destabilizes. Imagine an earthquake under the seabed that lifts millions of tons of rock off a huge deposit of methane hydrate. The pressure drop would destabilize it. Another way to do that is to heat the stuff and—bang!—it releases the compressed gas. But that would be way too dangerous for Barbas or anyone else to do on purpose. In fact, I don’t think anyone even knows how. I’m afraid you can’t pin those things on Barbas.”

  Drake was an expert, so he was probably right. Now that he’d made contact with his HTV that’s all he would care about. He didn’t need Jack and would dump him as soon as they got back to the surface. But Jack needed Drake and his resources badly. That meant he had to goad Drake into forming an alliance.

  “I see what you mean,” he said. “What’s your opinion of that tank-like thing we saw?”

  “Damned mystery.”

  “Maybe not. It has no hatches and no crew, so it must be remotely controlled from the platform. Here’s the most important part. To me, what looks like the barrel of a cannon is actually a drill.”

  Drake looked pensive. “A horizontal drill. Yeah, that’s possible.”

  “And since it’s positioned right next to the HTV, it’s logical that it’s there to drill into it. What would happen if it did?” He waited for the concept to hit Drake’s hot button.

  “They’d be out of their minds to do something that might release the forces inside. They could even cause a blowout vent in the side that could collapse the whole thing.” His face was stern. “Barbas’s platform is in international waters, so I’ll report him to the International Seabed Authority. They’ll stop him.”

  “The ISA can’t touch Barbas.”

  “Bullshit. Just wait until—” He stopped and rubbed the stubble on his cheek. “I get it. It’s because the U.S. has refused to ratify the Law of the Sea treaty.”

  “Steve, I showed you photographs of equipment on the platform that have nothing to do with mining. You’ve just seen a big drill butted up against the side of the HTV. You know that Renatus is an expert on HTVs, and Barbas will stop at nothing to get to the gold. Add it up before it’s too late. You say you want to protect that HTV, but you’re outmanned and outgunned. So am I. The only chance we have is to fight them together.”

  After a long silence, Drake said, “Just sitting in that seat is going to put your name in the history books, because I’ve just discovered a geological Rosetta Stone. Before I let Barbas and Renatus turn it into a pile of gravel, I’
ll shoot them down like rabid dogs—with or without you.”

  Chapter 19

  July 23

  6:00 p.m.

  Northeast Pacific Ocean

  PEGASUS BROKE THE surface as gracefully as a seal, and the cockpit flooded with natural light. For the first time in hours, Jack relaxed a little. That lasted for about three heartbeats.

  The sea was angry. Eight-foot waves jerked Pegasus up and down like she was riding a barroom bull. Shouting a raucous string of seafarer’s curses, Drake tried to wrestle her into the sling hanging from the A-frame on Challenger’s deck. Every time he got close, the sea threatened to smash her into Challenger’s steel hull.

  During each emergency at the seabed, Drake had been calm, even fatalistic. Here on the surface, he was in a rage. Finally, by force of will, Drake drove the sub roughly into position, and two crewmen in a Zodiac muscled the sling into the right spot. As Pegasus came out of the water and her full weight shifted to the sling, she slipped forward, about to take a twenty-foot nosedive into the ocean. Jack’s stomach lurched. The lift stopped, leaving the sub dangling just above the waves.

  Jack noticed one crewmember pointing skyward. The outside receivers were on, so he heard the man shouting to his mates. Two more crewmen arrived at the ship’s railing, carrying handguns. A shadow swept across the surface of the sea ahead of the ship, immediately replaced by a black shape swooping like a hawk. Jack recognized Barbas’s Kamov Ka-52 helicopter, so close that its mission had to be more than surveillance.

  The sub’s cockpit filled with the whoomp—whoomp—whoomp of the rotors and then the hammering racket of two machine guns firing long bursts. Hanging in midair, the sub was nakedly vulnerable. If the helo had come to punish rather than intimidate, he and Drake were about to be shredded.

  In seconds, the helo was on the other side of the ship, out of his sight. The sounds grew fainter and then vanished.

  The crew scrambled into action, getting more lines attached to Pegasus. Finally, they hauled the sub up in its tilted position, leveled it, and secured it to the davits.