12
AS IT RACED THROUGH
THE WATER a hundred feet below the surface, the Barracuda looked more like a manta ray with stubby
wings than a submarine—or even a barracuda, for that matter. About
half the size of a compact car, her wedge-shaped snout narrowed,
both horizontally and vertically, with a slightly bulbous expansion
at the very tip.
This was a
hydrodynamic feature that got the water moving smoothly around and
over the vessel, reducing the drag and increasing both her ability
to accelerate and her top-end speed.
In addition, her
stainless steel skin was covered in microscopic V-shaped grooves,
too small to be seen from a distance except as a sort of haze on
the finish. The grooves were similar to the coatings used on the
hulls of racing yachts, and they too added speed by reducing the
drag.
Because she was
eventually expected to do salvage work, an enclosed bay in the root
of each wing held assorted equipment: cutting torches, grappling
claws, and other tools. In truth, the Barracuda had been designed more like a stealth
fighter than a submarine. The question was, could she fly like
one?
With Kurt and Joe
sitting in tandem, Kurt at the controls and Joe just behind him
monitoring all the systems, the Barracuda surged through the water at 34 knots. Joe
insisted she could make 45, but that would rapidly drain the
battery. To make two laps around the race’s fifty-mile course, 34
would be the best they could do.
“Coming up on a depth
change,” Joe mentioned.
The race was not just
a horizontal affair, where the submarines could run at top speed
and come home. It required maneuvers to be fulfilled: depth
changes, course changes, even a section that required them to weave
through a group of pylons, charge forward to a certain point and
then back out, before turning around and racing off to the next
buoy.
The competition
itself was a three-stage process, with a hundred-thousand-dollar
prize being offered to the winner of each stage and a cool ten
million to the overall victor.
“Can you believe
these guys are offering ten million to the winner?” Joe said
excitedly.
“You realize NUMA
gets that money if we win,” Kurt replied.
“Don’t depress me,”
Joe said. “I’m dreaming. Gonna get a ranch in Midland and a truck
the size of a small earthmover.”
Kurt laughed. For a
moment, he considered what he might do with ten million dollars,
and then he realized he would probably do exactly what he was doing
right now. Work for NUMA. See the world. Sometimes save an ocean or
two.
“Again, who put up
the money?”
“African Offshore
Corporation,” Joe said. “They’re big into continental-shelf
drilling.”
Kurt nodded. The
supposed point of the whole competition was to develop submersibles
that could be used to operate quickly, safely, and independently at
depths of up to a thousand feet. Kurt guessed that publicity had
more to do with it than anything else.
Still, even if he
wouldn’t get the money, Kurt liked to win.
“In fifteen seconds,
begin descent to two hundred fifty feet,” Joe said.
Kurt put his hand to
a keypad, typed in 2-5-0, and held his finger over the “Enter”
button. Either Kurt or Joe could change the depth manually if they
wanted, but the computer was more precise.
“Three . . . two . .
. one . . . mark.”
Kurt hit “Enter,” and
they heard the sound of a small pump as it pushed oil from the rear
into a forward chamber of the sub. This caused the nose to grow
heavier and pitch down. With no need to take on water, to angle
dive planes, or to adjust power, the Barracuda continued at flank speed, descending, and
actually accelerating as it dove.
Around them the light
began to fade, the color changing from a bright aquamarine to a
darker blue. Up above, it was a beautiful sunny day, with high
pressure all around.
“How we doing?” Kurt
asked.
“Four miles to the
outer marker,” Joe said.
“What about the other
contestants?”
It was a timed race,
the subs having left at ten-minute intervals to keep them apart,
but Kurt and Joe had already passed one vessel. Somewhere up ahead
they would catch another competitor.
“We could ram them if
they get in our way,” Joe said.
“This isn’t NASCAR,”
Kurt replied. “I’m thinking that would be some kind of points
deduction.”
As Kurt kept the
Barracuda precisely online, he heard
Joe tapping keys behind him.
“According to the
telemetry,” Joe said, “the XP-4 is a half mile ahead. We should see
his taillights in about ten minutes.”
That sounded good to
Kurt. The next depth change was in seven minutes. They would come
up to one hundred fifty feet, cruise over a ridge, and race along
near the top of an underwater mesa—a flat plain that had once been
an underwater lava field.
“Easier and more fun
to pass people when they can see you go by,” he said.
Seven minutes later,
Kurt put the Barracuda into a climb,
they zoomed up over the ridge and leveled off at one hundred fifty
feet. A moment later the radio crackled.
“. . . experiencing
elec—. . .—blems . . . batteries . . . system malfunc—. .
.”
The garbled
low-frequency signal was hard to make out. But it rang alarm bells
in Kurt’s mind.
“You get
that?”
“I couldn’t make it
out,” Joe said. “Someone’s having problems though.”
Kurt grew quiet. All
the subs had been equipped with a low-frequency radio that,
theoretically, could reach floating buoys along the race path and
be retransmitted to the referee and safety vessels stationed along
the route. But the signal was so weak, Kurt couldn’t tell who was
transmitting.
“Did he say
electrical problems?”
“I think so,” Joe
said.
“Call him out,” Kurt
said.
A moment later Joe
was on the radio. “Vessel reporting problems. Your transmission
garbled. Please repeat.”
The seconds ticked by
with no response. Kurt’s sense of danger rose. To make the
submarines fast, most had been built with somewhat experimental
technology. Some even used lithium ion batteries that, in rare
circumstances, could catch fire. Others used experimental
electrical motors and even hulls of thin polymers.
“Vessel reporting
problems,” Joe said again. “This is Barracuda. Please repeat your message. We will
relay to the surface.”
Up ahead, Kurt saw a
trail of bubbles. It had to be the wake of the XP-4. He’d forgotten
all about it and was now driving right up its tailpipe. He banked
the Barracuda to the left and then
noticed something odd: the trail of bubbles arced down and to the
right. It didn’t make any sense, unless . . .
“It’s the XP-4,” he
said. “It’s got to be.”
“Are you
sure?”
“Check the
GPS.”
Kurt waited while Joe
switched screens. “We’re right on top of him.”
“But I don’t see him
anywhere,” Kurt said.
Joe went right back
to the radio. “XP-4, do you read?” Joe said. “Are you reporting
trouble?”
A brief burst of
static came over the radio and then nothing.
“We’ll lose if we
turn,” Joe said.
Kurt had considered
that. The rules were strict.
“Forget the race,”
Kurt said, and he banked the Barracuda
into a wide right turn, slowing her pace and manually taking over
depth control. Throwing on the Barracuda’s lights, he searched for the trail of
bubbles.
“What’s the XP-4 made
of?” he asked. Joe knew the other competitors far better than he
did.
“She’s stainless
steel like us,” Joe said.
“Maybe we could use
the magnetometer to help find her. A thousand pounds of steel ought
to get us a reading from this distance.”
Kurt spotted what he
thought was the line of bubbles. He turned to follow the curving,
descending trail. Behind him Joe booted up the
magnetometer.
“Something’s wrong,”
Joe said, fiddling with the controls.
“What’s the
problem?”
“See for
yourself.”
Joe pressed a switch,
and the central screen on Kurt’s display panel changed. The lines
of azimuth and magnetic density should have been a relatively clear
display, but the various lines were spiking and dropping, and the
directional indicator was pivoting like a compass needle just
spinning in circles.
“What the heck’s
wrong with it?” Kurt mumbled.
“Don’t
know.”
The radio buzzed with
static again and this time a voice cut through it.
“. . . continued
problems . . . smoke in cabin . . . possible electrical fire . . .
shutting down all systems . . . please—”
The transmission
ended abruptly, and it chilled Kurt’s blood.
He looked through the
curved Plexiglas windshield of the Barracuda , slowing the small submarine even
further. As the speed bled off, he pitched the nose over until they
were angled almost straight down.
Dropping slowly
through the water, he scanned the bottom. At one hundred fifty
feet, light from the surface still filters through, but the
surrounding color is a pure dark blue, and the visibility is
limited to somewhere around fifty feet.
Increasing that
visibility were the Barracuda’s lights.
Since seawater scatters and absorbs longer wavelengths of light
rapidly, Joe had installed special bulbs that burned in a bright
yellow-green part of the visible spectrum. The lights helped cut
through the gloom, and as the Barracuda
approached the bottom Kurt spotted what looked like a gouge in the
sandy sediment.
He turned to follow
it.
“There,” Joe
said.
Up ahead, a tubular
steel shape that looked more like a traditional submarine lay on
its side. The designation “XP-4” could be seen, painted in large
black letters.
Kurt circled around
it until he reached a spot from which the canopy could be viewed.
Bubbles were pouring slowly from the tail end of the sub, but the
cockpit seemed intact.
He shut the lights
off and tried to hover alongside, though the current was making it
difficult.
“Signal
them.”
As Kurt struggled to
keep the Barracuda in position, Joe
grabbed a penlight, aimed it out the window at the XP-4, and tapped
out a message in Morse code.
Kurt could see some
movement inside, and then a message came back.
“All . . . elec . . .
pwr . . . out,” Joe said, translating.
Kurt felt them
drifting again and tapped the thruster.
“They have to have
oxygen,” Kurt said, reviewing in his mind the safety rules the
event’s organizers had put in place. “Can they pop the
canopy?”
Joe flashed the light
on and off, putting the message through. The response dashed those
hopes.
“Canopy . . . elec .
. . trapped.”
“Who ever heard of
making your canopy electric?” Kurt mumbled. Then he looked back at
Joe.
“Ours has a manual
release,” Joe assured him.
“Just
checking.”
Joe smiled. “Can we
tow them out?”
“Looks like we’ll
have to,” Kurt said. “Use the hook.”
Behind him, Joe
activated the controls for the grappling system, and a panel on the
right wing of the Barracuda opened. A
folded metallic apparatus emerged. Once it was locked into place,
it unfolded into a long metallic arm with a claw on the
end.
Even as the claw
extended, Kurt realized they were drifting away from the
XP-4.
“Get me closer,” Joe
said.
Kurt nudged the
thrusters again, and the Barracuda
angled toward the rear section of the XP-4 to a point where a
handle extended from its hull. On the surface, the XP-4’s mother
ship would lock onto this handle with a crane to hoist the sub out
of the water. Kurt and Joe would try to do the same down
below.
“Maybe this could
help our salvage grade,” Joe said.
“Just grab the sub,”
Kurt said.
The claw extended and
missed. Kurt adjusted their position, and Joe tried again and
missed again.
“Something’s wrong,”
Joe said.
“Yeah, your aim,”
Kurt said.
“Or your driving,”
Joe said.
Kurt didn’t want to
hear that, but it was true. And yet each time he adjusted for the
current, the Barracuda seemed to get
pulled off-line again. He glanced outside at the sediment in an
attempt to get the best read on the current.
“Ah, Kurt . . . ?”
Joe said.
Kurt ignored him.
Something definitely was wrong. Unless
his eyes had been damaged somehow, the Barracuda was drifting in the opposite direction of
the current. And, strangely enough, the XP-4 was moving as well,
albeit at a slower rate as she was dragging along the
bottom.
“Kurt,” Joe said with
more urgency.
“What?”
“Look behind
us.”
Kurt turned the sub a
few degrees and craned his neck around. The sandy bottom gave way
to darkness. They were drifting toward a cliff of sorts. On the
charts it appeared as a deep circular depression with a rise in the
middle: the caldera of a volcano that had once been active here
thousands of years before.
Thoughts of the
damaged XP-4 tumbling down the edge of that caldera with two men
trapped inside were enough to make Kurt forget about the strange
movements of both subs. All he wanted to do was grab the XP-4 and
get out of there.
He pressed forward
until they were nose to nose with the other sub. Joe stabbed at the
small handle with the grappling claw but could not catch it.
Sediment began to stir up around them as Kurt goosed the
thrusters.
They’d reached the
point where the ground had started sloping away.
Whatever was going
on, they were being dragged toward the caldera. Kurt used main
power, blocking the XP-4, pumping the throttle, in an attempt to
hold them back.
The XP-4 began to
swing, pivoting against the nose of the Barracuda . It was being pulled past her. The
caldera yawned behind them.
“It’s now or never,
Joe.”
Joe grunted as he
worked the controls. The arm extended, and the claw locked
on.
“Got him,” Joe
said.
The XP-4 had reached
the edge and was tumbling; Kurt had no choice but to let the
Barracuda fall with it for a moment. If
he gunned the throttle, the arm would bend and snap under the
load.
They slipped off the
edge, drifting backward and out into the dark. Kurt turned the nose
of the Barracuda away from the XP-4.
The grappling claw pivoted until it was pointing to the rear, and
the two subs fell sideways as Kurt brought the main thruster slowly
up to power.
Slowly, the
Barracuda pulled the XP-4 away from the
caldera’s wall and began to level off. Both vessels were still
sinking, still being strangely drawn toward the center of the
volcano.
The Barracuda began to accelerate, with the XP-4’s
torpedo-shaped body trailing behind them. As long as Kurt towed
them and didn’t twist or bend the arm, he was fairly confident it
would hold.
“We’re still
descending,” Joe said.
Kurt was aware of
that but couldn’t explain it.
“Maybe they took on
some water,” he guessed. He added more power until the thruster was
almost fully on. The descent slowed, and they began to pick up
speed, speed they would need to climb.
A shape loomed up
ahead, a hundred-foot column of rock that rose up from the center
of the caldera like a chimney. If he had to guess, Kurt would have
said it was the volcanic plug that cooled and hardened when this
particular vent for the earth’s heat had gone dormant. Problem was,
it lay directly in their path.
“Should I blow the
tanks?” Joe asked.
“No, we’ll lose
them,” Kurt said. He went to full power and slowly pulled the nose
up. They were approaching the tower of rock awfully
fast.
“Come on,” Kurt
urged.
It felt as if the
tower of rock was drawing them in like a black hole. And with the
weight they were towing, they seemed almost incapable of rising at
anything more than the slowest of speeds.
“Climb, damn it,”
Kurt grunted.
They were heading
right into it, like a plane flying into a cliff. All light from the
surface was cut off by the shadow of the rock. They were rising but
not fast enough. It looked like they were going to hit it
head-on.
“Come on,” Kurt
said.
“Kurt?” Joe said, his
hand over the ballast control.
“Come on,
you—”
Suddenly, they saw
light again, and at the last second they rose up over the tower.
Kurt leveled off, allowing their speed to increase.
“Think we scraped the
paint,” Kurt said.
Behind him, Joe
breathed a sigh of relief. “Look at the magnetometer,” he
said.
Kurt didn’t really
hear him.
“It’s pointing dead
aft, right at that tower of rock. This is some kind of
high-intensity magnetic field,” Joe said.
At any other time,
Kurt would have found that interesting, but ahead of him, lit up by
the blazing yellow-green lights, he gazed upon a sight he found
hard to believe.
The mast of a great
ship sprouted from the ocean floor like a single limbless tree.
Beyond it lay a smaller fishing vessel, and just to the left of
that was what might have once been the hull of a tramp
steamer.
“Joe, do you see
this?” he asked.
As Joe angled for a
better view, Kurt took the Barracuda
right over the three vessels. As he did, they spotted several more.
Cargo vessels that looked like the old Liberty ships, rusting hulks
covered in a thin layer of algae and sediment. All around them,
boxy containers lay strewn about as if they’d been dumped over the
side of some ship at random.
He saw the wing of a
small aircraft, and four or five more unrecognizable objects that
appeared to be man-made.
“What is this place?”
Kurt wondered aloud.
“It’s like some kind
of ship graveyard,” Joe said.
“What are they all
doing here?”
Joe shook his head.
“I have no idea.”
They passed over the
wrecks, and the ocean bottom slowly returned to normal, mostly
sediment and silt, with plant life and bits of coral here and
there.
Wanting to go back
but realizing they had a more important rendezvous with the
surface, Kurt put the Barracuda into a
nose-up climb once again. Slowly, the seafloor began to
recede.
Then, just before
their lights lost contact, Kurt saw something else: the fuselage of
a large aircraft, half buried in the silt. Its long, narrow cabin
swooped back in graceful flowing lines until it ended in a
distinctive triple tail.
Kurt knew that plane.
When he was younger, he and his father had built a model of it,
which Kurt and a friend had blown to pieces with fireworks they’d
found.
The aircraft with the
sweeping lines and the triple tail was unique. It was the beautiful
Lockheed Constellation.