White Death (NUMA Files 4)

It took awhile to round up the suits, which were scattered through- out the cabin in bags, and to get the injured men into them. They slipped on their gloves and pulled down the hoods. Then they rounded up spare blankets and clothes and wrapped themselves in several layers.

With the cold temporarily held at bay, Petersen turned his efforts to the air problem. One of the aluminum lockers held breathing de- vices to be used in case of fire or other emergency. These were passed around. They, too, would buy time. Petersen decided to use up their canned air first because it was purer than the air in the cabin, which was making the men sick.

Petersen formed tapping crews for the same reason POW officers allocate duties to maintain morale. The men took turns using a wrench to rap SOS on the hull. As one man after another tired of the job, Petersen continued to tap away, although he wasn't sure why. Bored with the SOS, he began tapping out messages describing their plight. Eventually, he tired and rapped the bulkhead whenever strength allowed, which wasn't often. Then he stopped altogether. His thoughts turned from rescue, he shut his eyes, and once more he began to think of death.

Using the marker buoy line as his guide, Austin sank into the depths feet-first and slightly angled forward, like an old hard-hat diver being lowered at the end of an invisible air hose. Dancing rainbow shafts lanced the water like sunlight streaming through stain-glass windows. As Austin plunged deeper, the water filtered out the col- ors and the twilight abruptly turned into a violet night.

The powerful halogen lights mounted on the front of the Hard- suit caught snowy motes of marine vegetation and nervous schools offish in their beams, but before long, Austin was dropping into the benthic levels, where only the hardiest offish lived. At two hundred feet, his lights pick out the cruiser's masts and antennas, then the ship's ghostly contours materialized.

Austin hit the vertical thrusters and slowed to a stop at deck level. Then the horizontal thrusters whirred, and he cruised along the hull, rounded the stern and came back to the bow. The ship lay as shown in the sonar picture, at a slight angle on the slope, with the bow higher than the stern. He studied the ship with the intensity of a medical examiner inspecting the autopsied body of a murder victim, paying particular attention to the triangular gash in the side. No vessel could have survived the giant bayonet wound.

Seeing only twisted metal beyond the jagged opening, he moved toward the bow again. He approached within inches of the hull, feel- ing as dwarfed as a fly on a wall, leaned his helmet against the steel plating and listened. The only sounds were the hollow noise of his breathing and the whirr of thrusters as they kept the suit at a hover. Austin pushed off several feet, came around, goosed the horizontal thrusters and let his metal knees slam into the ship.

On the other side of the hull, Petersen's half-closed eyes blinked fully open. He held his breath.

"What was that?" a hoarse voice said in the darkness. Lars had been huddled on the bunk next to the captain's.

"Thank God you heard it, too/' Petersen whispered. "I thought I was going mad. Listen."

They strained their ears and heard tapping on the outside of the hull. Morse code. Slow and measured, as if the sender were struggling with each letter. The captain's eyes widened like those of a cartoon character, as he translated the rough taps into letters.

P-E-T-E…

Austin was cursing the awkwardness of communicating. At his di- rection, one of the crew had attached a specially adapted ball-peen hammer to his right hand manipulator. The mechanical arm moved with agonizing slowness, but by concentrating all his resources, he finished tapping out one word in Morse code.

…ERSEN

He stopped and put his helmet against the hull. After a moment, he heard dots and dashes clunked out in reply.

YES

STATUS

AIR BAD COLD

HELP SOON

A pause. Then, HURRY

SOON

Petersen called out to his men that rescue was imminent. He felt guilty lying. Their time was about to run out. He was having a prob- lem focusing. It was getting harder to breathe, and soon it would be impossible. The temperature had plunged to below zero, and even the immersion suit couldn't keep out the cold. He had stopped shiv- ering, the first sign of hypothermia.

Lars interrupted Petersen's drifting thoughts. "Captain, can I ask you a question?"

Petersen grunted in the affirmative.

"Why the hell did you come back, sir? You could have saved your- self."

Petersen said, "I heard somewhere a captain is supposed to go down with his ship."

"This is about as far down as you can go, Captain." Petersen made a gargling sound that was as close to laughter as he could muster. Lars did the same, but their strength soon left them. They made themselves as comfortable as they could and waited.

6

THE BOAT CREW was watching for Austin to pop out of the