A broad grin spread over Pitt's face as he recognized the bulky object twisting beneath the helicopter. He had nearly tripped over it while leaving the Vereshchagin just a short time ago. It was the research ship's decompression chamber, on board as a security measure in case of a diving accident. Giordino had hastily realized it could act as a submersible for the fishing boat's crew to take haven in. Jumping to his feet, Pitt waved at Giordino to lower the chamber to the boat's stern deck.
With the seiche wave bearing down on the boat, Giordino moved in rapidly, hovering high over the stern until the swaying chamber stabilized. With a sudden dip and a crunch, the one-ton chamber descended from the sky and collided with the deck. The four-person hyperbaric chamber took up the entire rear deck space and pushed the boat's stern down several inches deeper into the water.
Pitt quickly unhooked the attached cable then jumped to the side rail and waved a thumbs-up gesture toward the helicopter. Giordino immediately swung the helicopter up and away from the boat, settling in a hover a short distance away to observe the impact.
"Why did he dump that here?" Tatiana asked.
"That big ugly bobber is your ticket to safety," Pitt replied. "Everybody in, there's no time to lose."
Glancing forward, Pitt could see that the fast-moving wave was just a mile away. He quickly unhinged the sealed lock and swung open the heavy circular door to the chamber. Theresa was the first to climb in, followed by Wofford and Roy. Tatiana hesitated, grabbing a leather satchel before stepping in behind Roy.
"Hurry up," Pitt prompted. "There's no time to check luggage."
Even the brash captain, staring awestruck at the looming wall of water, abandoned the wheel and scrambled into the chamber after the others.
"Aren't you joining us?" Tatiana asked as Pitt began to close the door.
"It will be tight enough with five people in there. Besides, someone's got to seal the chamber," he replied with a wink. "There's blankets and padding in the rear. Use them to protect your heads and bodies. Brace yourselves, it will be here quick."
With a metallic clang, the door clapped shut and Pitt twisted the locking mechanism closed. A strange silence suddenly enveloped the occupants, but it lasted for less than a minute. Then the wave was upon them.
Theresa sat opposite a thick porthole window and looked out at the mysterious man who had arrived from nowhere to save them. She saw Pitt reach into his duffel bag and remove a dive faceplate and backpack with a small tank attached. Quickly strapping the equipment on, he stepped up onto the side gunwale before a deluge of water obscured the viewport.
The chartered fishing boat was still fifteen miles from Listvyanka and the western shoreline when the seiche wave hit. Those aboard had no way of knowing that they were struck by the leading force of the rolling wave, its peak cresting as high as a three-story building at impact.
From his perch two hundred feet in the air, Giordino looked on with a sickening helplessness as the wave piled into the black fishing boat. Its throttle was still set at full, and Giordino watched as the aged boat tried valiantly to climb up the vertical wall of water. But the rolling force of the water overpowered the rotted hull timbers and the old wooden boat seemed to
melt away, disappearing completely under the tall wave.
Giordino desperately scanned the surface for signs of Pitt or the decompression chamber. But as the waters fell to a subtle calm again, only the bow section could be seen floating on the surface. The old fishing boat had split in two from the force of the wave and only the bow section had survived the initial onslaught. The stern deck, with the compression chamber, had vanished from sight. The black-hulled wreckage of the bow bobbed only momentarily, its masthead swaying across the sky before it, too, disappeared in a gurgle of bubbles to the bottom of the frigid lake.
-4-
"HANG ON!" Theresa called over the sudden roar from the wall of water. Her words echoed in the chamber as its occupants were violently tossed about. The entire chamber jerked upright as the striking wave lifted the fishing boat on end. The three men and two women clung frantically to the welded railings of twin bunks, trying to keep their bodies from becoming flying missiles inside the chamber. Time seemed to stand still as the boat stalled in its attempt to climb the face of the wave. Then a loud cracking noise reverberated beneath their feet as the fishing boat broke in two. Free of the lighter and more buoyant bow, the stern section slowly slid back vertically into the trough of the wave just as the brunt of its force rolled onward.
For Theresa, the impact seemed to occur in slow motion. The initial sensation of sinking on end predictably gave way to the tumbling force of the wave thrusting the chamber over on its back. Arms, legs, and torsos flailed about the chamber as it flipped over amid a chorus of cries and gasps. The minimal light that flared through the view port quickly dimmed, then vanished altogether, thrusting the interior into a frightening blackness.
Unseen by its victims, the wave had flipped over the entire stern section of the fishing boat, pinning the chamber beneath it. The flooded engine compartment, aided by the weight of the engine and driveshaft, easily drove the inverted chamber toward the lake bed. Though the force of the wave surged past above them, the wreckage and chamber continued to descend under its own weight. Instead of becoming a life preserver, the decompression chamber had turned into a coffin, plunging its victims toward the cold depths of the Siberian lake.
The heavy steel chamber was built to withstand the force of thirty atmospheres, or the pressure found at a depth of one thousand feet. But the lake depths exceeded three thousand feet where the fishing boat broke up, which would cause the chamber to implode before ever reaching the lake floor. Under its own weight, the encapsulated chamber would float freely on the surface and would be still buoyant even with five people inside. But pinned against the inverted stern section, the chamber was headed to the bottom.
As the light dimmed from the view port, Theresa knew that they were sinking deeper into the lake. She recalled Pitt's words at the last minute, calling the chamber a "bobber." It must float, she deduced. There was no apparent water leakage in the chamber, so another force must be driving them to sink.
"Everybody to this end of the chamber, if you're able," she shouted to the others after groping her way to one end. "We must shift the weight."
Her dazed and battered companions crawled their way to Theresa, huddling together quietly while trying to aid one another's injuries in the dark. The thousand pounds of shifted weight alone might not have set them free, but Theresa had guessed right and placed everybody adjacent to what had been the stern edge of the boat. Above their heads now was the boat's engine, the heaviest part of the stern section. The combined concentration of weight was focused just off of dead center, and slight enough, to create an angular imbalance in the sinking wreckage.
As the plunging boat drove deeper, the pressure from the depths increased. Creaking sounds wafted through the chamber as the pressure limits were approached in its welded seams. But the shift in ballast gradually weighed on the angle of descent, tipping the stern section of the boat slightly steeper. Inside the chamber, nobody could feel the shift, but a slight scraping sound was heard as the chamber began sliding across the angled deck. The movement accelerated the imbalance until the chamber perceptively tipped upward. The gradient increased to almost forty degrees before the decompression chamber finally rattled off the stern edge and broke free of the sinking wreckage.
To those inside the chamber, it felt like a roller-coaster ride in reverse, as the buoyant capsule shot to the surface like a bullet. To Giordino, who scanned the lake surface high above in the Kamov, the sight reminded him of a Trident missile being launched from a submerged Ohio-class nuclear submarine. After watching the wave pass and the bow section sink, he'd noticed a large surge of bubbles nearby. At a depth of eighty feet, he perceived, the white decompression chamber accelerating toward the surface. Released from the depths at a tilted angle, the chamber broke the surface nose first and shot completely out of the water before slamming down violently onto the surface. Hovering closer, Giordino could see that the chamber appeared airtight and floated easily in the light choppy waves.
Despite a severe battering, Theresa could hardly contain her relief at seeing blue sky again out the chamber's porthole window. Peering out the view port, she could see that they were floating steadily on the water. A shadow passed by overhead, and she caught a reassuring glimpse of the silver helicopter. With newfound light illuminating the interior again, she turned and surveyed the tumbled mass of bodies crowded around her.
The tumultuous ride had bruised and battered everyone, but amazingly there were no serious injuries. The fishing boat's captain bled from a nasty gash to the forehead, while Wofford grimaced over a wrenched back. Roy and the two women managed to escape lasting injuries. Theresa wondered how many concussions and broken bones would have occurred had they not insulated themselves with the bed mattresses just before the wave struck. As she regained her senses, her thoughts drifted back to Pitt, wondering whether the man who had rescued them had himself survived the maelstrom.
The veteran head of NUMA had figured he could best beat the wave in open water. An experienced body surfer since his childhood days growing up in Newport Beach, Pitt knew that diving under the approaching wave would let it roll over him with minimal surge. After securing the survey team inside the decompression chamber, he'd quickly strapped on his faceplate attached to a Drager rebreather system and dropped over the side of the fishing boat. Hitting the water, he kicked and pulled hard, attempting to swim away from the fishing boat and dive beneath the wave before it struck. But he'd been just a few seconds too late.
The seiche wave broke over him just as he cleared the surface. Rather than escape under the passing wave, he was positioned too shallow and found himself being drawn up the face of the wave. The sensation was of riding an ascending elevator at high speed and Pitt felt his stomach drop as his body was sucked upward. Unlike the fishing boat, which rode the external surface of the wave before breaking up, Pitt was embedded within the mass of water and became part of the wave itself.