Havana Storm (Dirk Pitt 23)

“Tread marks,” Pitt said. “Somebody had some heavy equipment down here.”

Giordino peered into the depths. “That says we should be close to the wellhead.”

They traveled a short distance before the hulk of the Alta appeared in the murk. The bow was crumpled from hitting the seafloor, but the ship was otherwise intact, sitting upright at a slight list. Pitt wasted no time inspecting the ship’s damage and circled around its stern. He was immediately met by an underwater junkyard.

Debris from the Alta was scattered across a rocky shallow, joined by a conglomeration of pipes, compressors, and cables jarred free at impact. There were large steel gas cylinders, most containing helium or oxygen in support of the Alta’s saturation chamber. Dozens of the green, brown, and black cylinders lay scattered across the bottom.

As they glided over a buckled tin shed, Giordino called out. “Strobe light, off to the right.”

Pitt turned the submersible toward the flash. A raised structure, sprouting pipes from its center, partially blocked the light. Pitt navigated around the wellhead riser and blowout preventer to find the diving bell wedged against the structure, jammed at an obtuse angle, with one of its drop weights still in place.

Giordino shook his head. “They sure got themselves into a nice pickle.”

A small light wavered in one of the bell’s viewports. Pitt flashed the submersible’s lights as he eased closer, cautious of the wellhead’s protruding fittings.

“I think I see two men in there,” Giordino said.

“Let’s see if we can raise them on the emergency channel.”

Pitt activated the emergency transponder that operated on the same frequency as the diving bell’s. “Submersible Starfish to Alta diving bell. Do you read me?”

A high-pitched, garbled voice replied in the affirmative.

“Their helium-speech unscrambler must have been topside,” Giordino said. “Hope you watched a lot of Disney cartoons growing up.”

The voice of Warren Fletcher blared over the speaker in a Mickey Mouse tenor. Pitt lost much of the verbiage but made out that one man was injured and that the bell had lost most of its emergency gas. He slid the submersible to the side and saw for himself. A half-dozen gas cylinders were piled on the sand below the bell, a large gash evident in the bottles’ storage rack.

Pitt eyed the spent tanks. “They have a serious air problem.”

“Somebody just held up two fingers to the glass,” Giordino said. “Two hours.”

It was a problem they hadn’t expected to confront. Pitt’s objective had been to find the bell and give the men encouragement until a deep-sea rescue team could arrive. But those resources were at best eight hours away. By the time outside help arrived, the men in the bell would be long dead.

“Poor buggers,” Giordino said. “The Navy’s hours away. Those boys will never make it.”

“They can if they swim to the surface.”

Pitt radioed the bell. “Alta divers, can you abandon the bell and dive to the surface? We have a deco chamber topside. Repeat, we have a deco chamber topside.”

Fletcher replied in the negative, explaining that the hatch was blocked from the outside.

Pitt and Giordino surveyed the exterior and saw the hatch was blocked shut by the bell’s bent base frame, which had also jammed the ballast weight in place.

Pitt studied the heavy-gauge steel. “No way we can straighten that out. Do you think we can pull them off the riser?”

“It’s worth a shot. We can’t access the lower frame, where they’re pinned. Of course, the bell won’t ascend far dragging all that cable.”

“They’ll have to break free sooner or later.” Pitt moved the submersible around the diving bell. Approaching from above, he hovered the Starfish just above the bell.

Giordino went

to work, extending an articulated robotic arm and grasping a secondary lift eye on the bell. “Got it.”

Proceeding gently, Pitt angled the thrusters down and tried lifting the diving bell. The dive capsule rocked but refused to budge. Pitt tried adjusting the angle of lift, but each time the bell remained fixed to the wellhead riser.

Pitt eased the submersible lower and Giordino released the grip on the lift point.

“That bell probably weighs as much as our submersible,” Giordino said. “We just don’t have enough horsepower to pull it off.”