Valhalla Rising (Dirk Pitt 16)

" 'Us'?" queried Giordino, surprised the ship's captain would not send a subordinate on the dive. "You're going, too?"

Turner nodded, and his friendly smile vanished. "It won't be the first time I've taken the Mercury down to a sunken vessel filled with people whose only hope of survival was our vehicle."

Prior to launch, the Mercury, painted yellow with a diagonal red stripe across its hull, hung poised over the work deck of the Falcon like a modern artist's interpretation of a huge banana with all kinds of strange protrusions overhanging its skin. She measured thirty-eight feet in length by ten feet in height by nine feet wide, and displaced thirty tons. Her maximum operating depth was twelve hundred feet and her speed was two and a half knots.

Captain Turner boarded a ladder to the main hatch, followed by a ship's crewman. He introduced his copilot, Chief Warrant Officer Mack McKirdy, a gray-haired, grizzled sea dog with a beard like that of a sailor on an old clipper ship. He acknowledged Giordino's presence with a curt nod and a wink of one blue eye.

"I hear you're an old submersible man," said McKirdy to Giordino.

"I've spent a fair amount of time in them."

"Word's out that you probed the wreck of the Emerald Dolphin at twenty thousand feet."

"Yes, that's true," admitted Giordino. "Along with my good friend Dirk Pitt and NUMA marine biologist Misty Graham."

"Then this dive to only five hundred and fifty feet should be a piece of cake."

"Not unless we can hook up with the rescue hatch."

McKirdy read the gravity in Giordino's eyes. "We'll set you right on top of it." And then he said as if to reassure him, "Don't worry. If anyone can open a jammed hatch, it's me and the Mercury. We carry the necessary equipment to do the job."

"I hope so," Giordino murmured. "Oh, how I hope so."

The Mercury, with Chief McKirdy at the control console, reached the sunken boat in less than fifteen minutes. The chief steered the rescue vehicle along the hull. It looked like some immense dead animal. All three men felt an eerie sensation at gazing through the view ports and seeing faces inside the Golden Martin gazing back. At one port in the boat, Giordino thought he saw Pitt waving at him, but the vehicle passed by too quickly to be sure.

They spent three hours making a thorough inspection of the boat lying in the bottom silt. Their cameras kept videotape rolling and still shots clicking at two-second intervals.

"Interesting," Turner said quietly. "We've been over every square foot of the hull and I saw very few bubbles."

"That is unusual," McKirdy agreed. "Thankfully,

we've only had to perform rescue operations on two submarines. The German Seigen and the Russian sub Tavda. Both vessels went down after collisions with surface ships. In each case, air bubbles cascaded from the gashes in their hulls long after the collisions."

Giordino stared out the view port at the morbid scene. "The engine room and baggage compartments were the only two where water gushed in. They must be completely flooded, with no more air to release."

McKirdy steered the submersible closer to the damaged areas blown inward by the explosions. He pointed through the port. "Amazing how small the actual wounds are."

"Large enough to sink her."

"Were the ballast tanks ruptured?" asked Turner.

"No," answered Giordino. "They maintained their integrity. And even though Captain Baldwin blew them empty, the boat was still dragged down by the flow of water entering through the breaks in the hull. The pumps could not keep up with the flow and lost ground. What saved the boat was the closing of the watertight doors, keeping the flooding in the cargo compartment and engine room."

"A great tragedy," said Turner slowly, motioning out the port at the two breaks in the hull. "A foot or two smaller and she might have made it to the surface."

"Sir, I suggest we check out the escape hatch," said McKirdy, "before we have to head topside."

"Affirmative, Chief. Sit us down on top of it, and we'll see if we can't make a seal. If we're lucky, we can come back with a work crew and go to work freeing it."

McKirdy guided the rescue vehicle over the top of the Golden Martin and eased to a stop just above and off to the side of the hatch. Both he and Turner studied the damage from the explosives.

"Doesn't look encouraging," said McKirdy.

Turner didn't look hopeful. "The sealing flange around the bottom of the hatch is ripped to shreds. There's no way we can use the air lock in the rescue chamber to make repairs, because the hull is too damaged to make an airtight seal, pump out the water and have a crew go to work with cutting torches."

"What about divers?" asked Giordino. "It's not rare for them to work at these depths."

"They'd have to work in shifts around the clock while living in a decompression chamber. We'd need at least four days to get a chamber on site and complete the repairs. By then . . ." His voice trailed off.