Medusa (NUMA Files 8)

“How are you . . . ?”A thoughtful look came to the captain’s face. “Bubbles?”

“Why not? She’s been tested to five thousand feet.”

“But . . .”

“Let’s talk about it in the control van,” Austin said.

The box-shaped, twenty-foot-long atmospheric-diving-suit control van was next to the ship’s garage, where the ship’s underwater vehicles and other deep-ocean hardware were housed. The van had a console that was separate from the controls for the ship’s submersibles, and it had a workshop where Bubbles was stored.

Austin and Gannon stood in front of a puffy-limbed, anthropomorphic metal figure that resembled the Michelin man. The transparent dome capping the figure could have come from a bubblegum dispenser.

Bubbles’s technical name was atmospheric diving suit, or ADS, but it was considered an anthropomorphic submersible. A diver using the ADS could go to great depths without having to worry about the killing water pressure or the need to decompress. The bulky life-support system on the back of the aluminum body, or hull as it was known, could sustain the pilot for six to eight hours, or for more time in an emergency.

Bubbles was an experimental ADS owned by the U.S. Navy. It was a successor to the Hardsuit 2000, which had been developed for submarine rescue.

The research vessel was transporting Bubbles as a courtesy, then rendezvousing with a Navy ship near Bermuda after the B3 expedition.

Gannon stood with his hands on his hips, vigorously shaking his head.

“I can’t let you do this, Kurt,” said the captain. “Bubbles is a prototype. She hasn’t been field-tested yet. Last I heard, she’s got a for-sure depth limit of only twenty-five hundred feet.”

“Joe would tell you that any engineer worth his salt builds in a huge safety factor,” Austin said. “The Hardsuit 2000 made it to three thousand feet in test dives.”

“Those were test dives, not operational dives. That’s a fact.”

Austin pinioned the captain with his coral-blue eyes. “It’s also a fact that Joe and Kane will freeze to death or die from lack of air if we don’t do something about it.”

“Damnit, Kurt, I know that! I just don’t want someone else dying senselessly.”

Austin realized he had come down too hard and backed off.

“Neither do I,” he said. “So here’s my offer: you get Bubbles gussied up for a dive, I’ll get an opinion on dive limits from the Navy and abide by whatever they tell me.”

Gannon had learned a long time ago that Austin was a primal force, as unstoppable as the east wind.

“What the hell,” the captain said with a lopsided grin. “I’ll get Bubbles ready to go.”

Austin gave him a thumbs-up, and hurried to the bridge. A satellite phone connected him with the Navy’s Deep Submergence Unit in California. He listened with mounting impatience to a recorded directory and spoke with several people before he landed on a junior officer in the unit’s Diving Systems Support Detachment. Austin quickly laid out his predicament.

The officer let out a low whistle.

“I sympathize with your problem, sir, but I can’t give you permission to use the Hardsuit. That would have to come from higher up. I’ll connect you.”

“I’ll deal with the Navy brass,” Austin said with thinly veiled annoyance. “I just want to know if the new Hardsuit can dive a half mile.”

“That’s what the tests were supposed to determine,” the officer said. “The weak spots in an ADS have always been the joints. With the new joint design, theoretically it’s possible to go deeper, maybe to five thousand feet. But if there is one tiny flaw, you could have a massive failure.”

Austin thanked the officer and said he would clear the dive with the officer’s superiors, although he didn’t say when. He hoped to be unavailable by the time the Navy bureaucracy reacted.

While Austin had been discussing the Hardsuit with the officer, a nagging thought had been buzzing around in his head like a hungry mosquito. Heading back down to the ROV control center, he found the young woman who had tracked the ROV still sitting at her station. He asked her to rerun the last sixty seconds of its video. She clicked her mouse and the sea bottom a half mile down appeared on the screen. Once again, Austin watched the ROV soar like a bird over the undulating vegetation covering the seafloor. Its camera soon picked up the splatter from the B3’s impact, then the bathysphere’s dome protruding from the crater.

“Freeze the image right there,” Austin said. He pointed to a dark area in the upper-left-hand corner of the screen. “Now, run it in slow motion.”

The shadow moved off the screen.

The ROV operator stared at the screen, jutting out her lower lip. “I don’t remember seeing that.”

“It was easy to miss,” Austin said. “We were all focused on finding the bathysphere.”