Devil's Gate (NUMA Files 9)

“Forget the race,” Kurt said, and he banked the Barracuda into a wide right turn, slowing her pace and manually taking over depth control. Throwing on the Barracuda’s lights, he searched for the trail of bubbles.

“What’s the XP-4 made of?” he asked. Joe knew the other competitors far better than he did.

“She’s stainless steel like us,” Joe said.

“Maybe we could use the magnetometer to help find her. A thousand pounds of steel ought to get us a reading from this distance.” Kurt spotted what he thought was the line of bubbles. He turned to follow the curving, descending trail. Behind him Joe booted up the magnetometer.

“Something’s wrong,” Joe said, fiddling with the controls.

“What’s the problem?”

“See for yourself.”

Joe pressed a switch, and the central screen on Kurt’s display panel changed. The lines of azimuth and magnetic density should have been a relatively clear display, but the various lines were spiking and dropping, and the directional indicator was pivoting like a compass needle just spinning in circles.

“What the heck’s wrong with it?” Kurt mumbled.

“Don’t know.”

The radio buzzed with static again and this time a voice cut through it.

“… continued problems… smoke in cabin… possible electrical fire… shutting down all systems… please—” The transmission ended abruptly, and it chilled Kurt’s blood.

He looked through the curved Plexiglas windshield of the Barracuda, slowing the small submarine even further. As the speed bled off, he pitched the nose over until they were angled almost straight down.

Dropping slowly through the water, he scanned the bottom. At one hundred fifty feet, light from the surface still filters through, but the surrounding color is a pure dark blue, and the visibility is limited to somewhere around fifty feet.

Increasing that visibility were the Barracuda’s lights. Since seawater scatters and absorbs longer wavelengths of light rapidly, Joe had installed special bulbs that burned in a bright yellow-green part of the visible spectrum. The lights helped cut through the gloom, and as the Barracuda approached the bottom Kurt spotted what looked like a gouge in the sandy sediment.

He turned to follow it.

“There,” Joe said.

Up ahead, a tubular steel shape that looked more like a traditional submarine lay on its side. The designation “XP-4” could be seen, painted in large black letters.

Kurt circled around it until he reached a spot from which the canopy could be viewed. Bubbles were pouring slowly from the tail end of the sub, but the cockpit seemed intact.

He shut the lights off and tried to hover alongside, though the current was making it difficult.

“Signal them.”

As Kurt struggled to keep the Barracuda in position, Joe grabbed a penlight, aimed it out the window at the XP-4, and tapped out a message in Morse code.

Kurt could see some movement inside, and then a message came back.

“All… elec… pwr… out,” Joe said, translating.

Kurt felt them drifting again and tapped the thruster.

“They have to have oxygen,” Kurt said, reviewing in his mind the safety rules the event’s organizers had put in place. “Can they pop the canopy?” Joe flashed the light on and off, putting the message through. The response dashed those hopes.

“Canopy… elec… trapped.”

“Who ever heard of making your canopy electric?” Kurt mumbled. Then he looked back at Joe.

“Ours has a manual release,” Joe assured him.

“Just checking.”