Mirage

Murph carefully pulled his hands away from the locking wheel and let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. “What about Juan?”

“No idea. Eddie just held up a note saying Mike is in the air lock. It’s got to be pumped up to about two hundred psi.”

“Hold on.” Mark leapt back over to the RHIB and grabbed another piece of electronics he’d taken from the Oregon. He uncoiled a length of wire from the device and handed its end to Lawless.

“There’s a communications port directly above the auxiliary electrical port. Both are near the large external air intake port. Can’t miss it,” Mark said with a grin and shoved MacD in the chest so that he tumbled back into the water.

MacD gave him a scowl and duck-dove with the cable in his hand. He surfaced thirty seconds later and shoved the swim mask up onto his forehead. “Give it a go.”

“Eddie, can you hear me? It’s Murph.”

“Never been so glad to hear your voice,” Eddie responded. “You got the message?”

“Yeah. What’s Mike doing in the air lock? And where’s the Chairman?”

“Long story. As for the Chairman, he’s still down on the wreck.”

“He was outside when the torpedoes hit?”

“Not the first one, but he went out to free us just before the second one exploded.”

“Is he alive?”

“Don’t know. Listen, we don’t have time for this. Mike’s breathing off his own tanks. We need to get this tub back to the Oregon and get him some trimix so we can start decompressing him out of there.”

“Right. MacD and I are out here on a RHIB. The Oregon should be over the wreck by now. We’ll tow you over and lift you aboard with the deck crane.”

“That’s good. Mike and I have been chatting, using Morse code. He’s kept his breathing shallow and figures he’s got another half hour or so.”

“Tell him he’ll be fine. Talk to you later.” Mark gave MacD a look, and the newest member of the team knew what he had to do. He pulled his mask back over his eyes and went to retrieve the cable.

Just a minute later, they took the Nomad under tow. The RHIB was designed for speed rather than torque, but they still managed to get up to fifteen knots pulling the ungainly hull through the water. Mark had radioed ahead, so when they motored under the shadow of the Oregon’s lee side, the most powerful of the ship’s forward derricks had been swung out and lifting hooks lowered to the water.

The mini-sub was pulled from the Atlantic as easy as a babe from a cradle, water sluicing off its sides, dousing the two men in the RHIB.

Lawless gu

Down in the moon pool, Hanley was securing two spare trimix tanks to Little Geek with nylon webbing.

“Okay,” he said at last, “try it.”

A tech at Little Geek’s controls spooled up its three propellers and maneuvered them on their gimbals to make certain they didn’t become fouled by the extra burden the ROV would carry.

“Looks good,” Hanley said, getting to his feet. “Give me a hand.”

The two men lifted the two hundred pounds of robot and air tanks and lowered it on its umbilical down into the moon pool itself. It vanished as soon as they let go of the thick armored cable, dropping down in an arc that swept it northward thanks to the Gulf Stream. The little robot would need to fight the current the whole way, but since she was tethered and being supplied power by her mother ship, it wouldn’t be an issue.

The only issue now was if they’d gotten here in time.

Cabrillo couldn’t believe the cold. It had crept up on him so insidiously that it was in his bones before he realized it. He had remained perfectly still, not generating any body heat — that was the culprit. In order to stretch out his air supply, he had to sit as quietly as possible, and yet that allowed in a killer just as deadly as asphyxia.

His hands shook so badly that it took three attempts to flip on his dive light. Its glow made the loneliness somehow more tolerable. Humans were, after all, a social animal. And to die alone was one of our species’ i

He was feeling it too. Each breath seemed thi

The light dropped from his icy fingers, and he was so cold he’d gone beyond shivering. He kept trying to breathe air that simply wasn’t there, and no amount of mental trickery could negate that fact. He’d rolled the dice and come up short. Juan never pictured it like this. He’d always assumed he’d die in a gunfight. Statistically speaking, he should have been shot down years ago. But of all the bullet scars his body carried, not one was in a critical area. It was fu

He wanted to laugh at the irony, but there wasn’t enough air, so he settled for an enigmatic grin and slowly lost his grip on consciousness.

“Come on, damnit!” Max barked. “We should see it by now.”

He stood over the tech’s shoulder, and both men watched the video feed from Little Geek. So far, they saw nothing but the barren plain of the seafloor. They were in the right position, but the wreck seemed to be gone.

“Are you sure you’re on-station?”

“Yes, Max. I don’t get it.”

The images were grainy, ill lit, and wavering but unmistakable in that there seemed to be no sign of the old mine tender. Both men stared until their eyes watered, trying to make out details that just weren’t there.

“There, there!” Max shouted. “Turn Little Geek, twenty degrees starboard.”

The tech worked the joystick while, four hundred fifty feet below them, Little Geek turned nimbly.

“Aha!” Max cried. Around the ROV was a debris field stretching far beyond the lights’ perimeter. They had been off by a few feet, but in this kind of work that could be the difference between success and failure. “Juan’s around here someplace.”

“Won’t he swim to the light?”

“If he can. Don’t know what shape he’s in.”

The little ROV threaded its way around the shattered wreckage, and this time it was the tech who saw a weak glow emerging from behind an old boiler. He guided the robot around the piece of machinery, and the light revealed the Chairman slumped up against the boiler, his hands resting palm up next to his dive light on the bottom. His head was canted over onto his shoulder in the u

“No,” Max whispered, and then repeated it a second time even softer. The third time he barely made a sound. “No.”

He couldn’t accept what he was seeing. He couldn’t believe Juan was dead. That he’d failed his best friend.

This time he shouted, “No!”

He reached over the tech’s shoulder and grabbed Little Geek’s joystick and used it to ram the ROV into the Chairman as hard as its little motors could push.

Rather than fall over from the impact, Cabrillo’s corpse straightened. His head rose off his shoulders, and an arm came up to grasp the micro-sub.

The tech gasped. “Was he asleep?”

“Judging by how thin the bubbles are coming from his regulator, I think he passed out.” Max couldn’t contain the smile plastered across his face.