The pilot tried, but they found the door at the rear of the bridge jammed with a metal bar across the latches.
“Never mind. Back us out and check the portholes. Maybe we can see inside her.”
The probe ran first down the Avalon’s port side, pausing at each porthole, but they couldn’t see anything within the hull. Inside was stygian black. The operator swung around her stern and started up the starboard. The light cast a perfect circle along the black hull, and each round window glittered like a jewel. The instant it shone into one of the cabins there came the sharp sound of metal banging against metal. It was a frantic, staccato tattoo. The men monitoring the screen recoiled as a pale face suddenly appeared at the window. It was a woman. Her eyes were huge with fear, and her mouth moved as she shouted a scream they could not hear.
“Dear God! She’s alive.”
Cabrillo had already moved to a bench seat and was snugging the straps of his twin air tanks over his shoulders. Next came the buoyancy compensator that looped around his neck. He struggled to his feet to cinch a weight belt around his waist. The two other divers were quickly following suit. He snatched up a pair of swim fins and a powerful flashlight.
“Alert Huxley,” he said as he waddled to the moon pool, burdened by sixty pounds of gear. He adjusted his mask, checked his airflow, and fell back into the water.
As he dropped through a curtain of bubbles, Cabrillo slid his feet into the fins, then purged some water that had seeped in around his mask. The water wasn’t that cold, and his body heat quickly warmed the thin layer trapped inside his wet suit. He waited just long enough for the two other divers to hit the water before dumping air from his BC and dropping into the darkness, one hand on the probe’s tether as a guide.
How had she survived? he wondered. Judging by the damage fish had done to the corpse on the bridge, the pirates had scuttled the Avalon shortly after taking her. Was there that much air trapped inside her hull? Obviously, the answer was yes. The question was if it would last until they could get her out.
Below him he saw the corona of light from the probe and shadowy details of the research ship. Air spilled from at least a dozen spots around her hull, as though she were bleeding. Juan felt a superstitious chill down his spine. The Avalon had become a ghost ship, but unlike the Flying Dutchman, she’d been cursed to sail through the darkness below the seas, a forlorn wanderer on borrowed time.
When he reached the main deck, Juan checked the depth gauge on his dive computer. He was down to eighty-three feet. The Avalon was sinking faster. Her borrowed time was running out.
He finned down to where the ROV hovered motionless outside the porthole where they’d spied the survivor. When he peered in through the small, round window, the trapped woman jumped back in fright. She quickly came forward again so an inch of water and a thick pane of glass separated their faces. If Juan didn’t come up with something quick, the gulf would remain insurmountable.
She wore two jackets and several sweaters. Her hair was covered in a wool watchman’s cap. The air inside the ship would be the same temperature as the water. A quick check told him fifty-one degrees. Her eyes were bright blue, and now that he’d arrived, they had lost their edge of madness. As desperate as she was, she still retained some semblance of humor, because she tapped her watch as if to say, About time. Juan admired her courage.
Then he took in the subtle details and noticed her lips were blue and her face an unnatural white. Her body quivered with uncontrollable paroxysms. He looked deeper into the cabin. Water completely covered the small room up to the level of the bed frames. One mattress floated free while the woman kept the other anchored with her weight. Yet even her refuge hadn’t remained dry, and neither had her clothes. With her kneeling on the mattress, her weight formed a depression that pooled with seawater. No doubt her feet were soaked as well. Unable to know how long she’d been in this condition, he was certain she’d be hypothermic soon.
Juan removed his regulator and mouthed, “Are you all right?” The seawater against his lips was bitterly salty, confirming his earlier supposition about how the Avalon had delayed her plunge to the bottom.
She gave him a flat stare as if to say he was nuts to ask, given the circumstances, then nodded to tell him she wasn’t injured. He pointed at her and held up a finger, then pointed to other places on the ship, holding up more fingers. It took her a moment to realize he was asking if there were others with her. She shook her head sadly. Then she held up a finger and disappeared for a moment. When she returned she had a pad of paper and a black marker. Her hand shook so m
uch her writing was barely legible. “I’m the only one. Can you get me out?”
Juan nodded that he could, although he had no idea how. They could attach lines from the Oregon’s cranes to the research vessel and try to haul her to the surface, only the cranes had nowhere near the power to deadlift a sinking ship, and if they got the balance wrong, she could tilt and fill even faster than she was now. However, it would be worth getting some lines down to the Avalon so they could at least stabilize her for the time being.
The other divers reached Juan. He wrote out instructions on a slate one of them carried and sent the man back to the Oregon. He turned back to the trapped woman and winked. She wrote something on her pad and held it to the glass. “Who are you?”
He wrote out his name. She flashed him a look of frustration and wrote “Are you with the navy?”
Uh-oh. How could he explain their presence? He wrote back that he headed a private security company hired to bring the pirates to justice. She seemed satisfied. He asked her to describe where water hadn’t yet flooded the Avalon. She wrote that the bridge deck was flooded and the bilge and engine room. Water had been climbing her deck for the past twelve hours. He asked if there were any exterior doors that he could open that would only flood a small room, an antechamber of some sort that could be isolated from the rest of the ship.
She wrote that she wasn’t sure, then fell back onto the bed. Water welled up through the mattress around her backside and shoulders. The woman didn’t seem to notice or no longer had the strength to do anything about it. Juan pounded the butt of his dive light against the hull to rouse her. She opened her eyes but barely registered his presence. She was slipping away. He pounded his light again, and the woman crawled to the porthole once more. Her eyes were glassy, and her jaw chattered like she was holding the business end of a jackhammer. He couldn’t get her out without her help, and she was maybe five minutes away from unconsciousness.
“What is your name?” he wrote.
She stared at the words for a moment then mouthed something Juan couldn’t understand. He shook his writing slab to remind her how they were communicating. It took her twenty seconds of intense concentration to write “Tory.”
“Tory, you must stay awake!!! You sleep, you die. Is there a small room you can seal that has an exterior door?” He was afraid she was too far gone to understand the question, but her shoulders suddenly straightened, and she managed to clamp her jaw tight. She nodded and began to write. It took four minutes by Cabrillo’s stainless Concord chronograph because she had to erase many of the words and start over.
She finally held her notebook to the porthole. The letters looked like a child’s first attempt. She had written, “Tne att port doon one dek op opons to a stoinwll thot can be sealecl.” It took Juan another precious minute to decipher the illegible scrawl. “The aft port door one deck up opens to a stairwell that can be sealed.”
“You must go there and seal yourself in. Do not leave, no matter what. Trust me.”
Tory nodded and heaved herself off the bed. As she stood in the knee-deep water, agony etched itself across her features. Juan could almost feel the icy fingers of cold cramping her muscles and sending jolts to her brain. She lurched across the room, lost her balance, nearly caught herself against a bulkhead, then fell heavily. If he could have squeezed through the porthole, Juan would have done so and gathered her up in his arms. As it was, he hung helplessly in the water as Tory slowly dragged herself to her feet. She was drenched. She staggered to the door without a backward glance, moving stiff-limbed like a zombie in a horror movie.
As soon as she was out of sight, Juan swam up to find the door she’d described. As he cleared the rail he saw four other divers working to attach a cable sling to the Avalon’s stern bollards. They had set up big underwater lights and worked efficiently in their glare. He imagined a team doing the same fore. The ship had now settled to a hundred feet. Even if the cranes couldn’t lift the research vessel, having her secured to the Oregon would prevent her from sinking any deeper for a while.
But depth wasn’t the problem. Tory’s endurance was.
Unbeknownst to Cabrillo and his crew, the Avalon had large holds both fore and aft that stretched from her bilge to her main deck and almost the entire breadth of the ship. So far, they had remained dry, thanks to tightly dogged hatches and servo-controlled louvers on the ventilation system that sealed it nearly airtight. It was their buoyancy that aided in keeping the survey ship from free-falling into the depths. While Juan was scrutinizing the door, one of the tightly closed vents began to buckle under the increasing pressure of water that was bottled within the ventilation ducts behind it. A flat jet of water sprayed from a gap between two of the louvers. It fell in a fine mist almost all the way across the hold. The slit between the louver’s metal fins was tiny, and only a few gallons per minute entered the hold — but every second saw the gap widening, and it was only a matter of time before the louver failed entirely, and a three-foot-square column of water roared into the hold.