Chapter 1 – Chap 1

“Get your fingers out of there!” was the last thing I ever said to my son. Davey was dipping his hand in the tank, letting reef-fish peck at his fingertips. I should’ve told him to carry on. Returned his sheepish grin with my own. But I scowled at him and left. How long will he repeat that moment? As long as he lives, probably. But if you’re reading this, and my story is out, he might live long enough to forgive me.

I was stressed. That’s a reason for yelling at a nine-year-old, not an excuse. But I’d been out of the water for two-years. Retired in Florida at the age of forty-eight. Pretty old for a saturation diver. If you think your job is high-pressure, try working in three-hundred meters of pitch-black water with your lungs crushed to the size of a soda can.

“It’ll be alright,” my wife said, with a smile sweeter than the freshly-baked muffin she offered me. Heather is a stress-baker. I’ll always remember coming back from a rough dive. My buddy, Andy, was helping repair a section of pipeline buried under thirty-feet of mud. He was using a high-pressure hose to blast a ditch down to it. I was up top, in a sediment white-out, when I felt the silt shift beneath my feet.

The trench caved in and encased Andy eight meters below. My coms channel was open, but all he could do was gasp for air. We could’ve got him out, if he’d listened to me. But when fear reaches into your chest down there, its grip is all-consuming. He lasted ten-minutes. I rang Heather afterwards. She was strong for me, as always. But when I got back, the kitchen was a fat kids dream.

“Maybe,” I replied to her reassurance. Maybe!? … What a prick I am. She put on brave face and I might as well have spat in it. Looking back, that was me all over. Everything was about me. The pressure on me to provide. When she had three jobs. She had to be a mother, a father in my absence, and she volunteered to clean local beaches up. While I was crapping on the world, she was wiping it up. And I never thanked her. Never.

*

“Luther! Good to see you again,” said the helicopter pilot, whose name I forget.

“Likewise,” I lied cheerfully. I can be a prick to my family, but as soon as a virtual stranger says hello, I’m shitting peaches and pissing cream.

The chopper was taking me into the Gulf of Mexico, to a subsea manifold I’d installed two-hundred miles offshore. It was a structure that monitors and distributes oil on the seabed. Lucky for you, I haven’t got time to go into technical details, but there’s a few things you need to know. One: it’s big. About the size of a five-story office block. Two: it’s deep. A record breaker for me and the team. Three: it’s malfunctioning. This is bad. Very bad.

The manifold was five-years away from scheduled maintenance, so its owners, OmCo, were unprepared. Hence why they sent a flustered rep to my door in Sarasota, FL. I could’ve said no. But this could make the Deepwater Horizon look like a spilt coffee.

As we approached the diving support vessel (DSV), I could see a pod of bottle-nose dolphins circling the boat. Strange, I thought. They often bow-ride ships, surfing the wake. But when a DSV has dynamic positioning thrusters engaged, the noisy engines keep it motionless above the dive-site. Dolphins usually stay away.

We landed on the helipad in calm seas and the captain watched from the bridge. A burly but jolly Norwegian called Arvid. In tense situations, he was usually welcome relief, so I expected a grin. But Arvid’s features were set like the ice he’d usually break.

I’d worked on this boat, The Horseman, many times. Like all DSVs, from front to back, it was a helipad, bridge, and deck packed with cranes for lowering equipment and ROVs. That’s Remotely Operated Vehicles, or subs. I apologise for all the acronyms. But if subsea workers said everything in full, we’d waste time. Seconds save lives out here.

“There’s been a development,” Arvid said as I got to the bridge. “I need you in dive control.”

“I have to blow-down, Arvid” I replied urgently. Even at emergency speed, it would take twelve hours in a pressurization chamber until it was safe to dive. Twenty times that to depressurize afterwards.

“No time. Follow me.”

Arvid was tight-lipped until we got to a small room with a wall of gauges, controls and screens. Deep-sea suits are fixed with cameras, so the supervisor sees everything divers see and more. Sensors monitor their vitals and there’s even a mini-cam pointing inside the helmet. If a diver gets narcosis or hyperthermia, you might see it in their eyes or skin before they say anything. From here I could see it all. A privilege I’d soon regret.

“You’re relieved,” Arvid said to the lone dive supervisor. And he looked relieved as he got the hell out.

“Why are we here, Arvid?”

“You’re supervising this dive.”

“What?” I said with a mixture of incredulity and relief.

“I meant for you to lead a six-man dive team. Some of the guys that helped install the manifold with you. Then we lost the manifold’s transponder.”

“It can’t be out of power,” I said in disbelief.

“It isn’t. At least … not the last time we picked it up,” Arvid said uncomfortably. The acoustic transponder was a sonar location device installed inside the manifold. A failsafe in case the GPS system crashes. “When we got here, there were all sorts of crazy readings coming up,” he continued. “Too much pressure. Valve failures. Then there was vibration detected in the foundations.”

“The foundations?” I scoffed. Those sensors were set in a concrete base, so far beneath the seabed you’d have to shake the world to get a reading.

“The foundations,” Arvid confirmed. “Then just as we were close enough to read the transponder … it started moving.”

“Arvid … If you’ve brought me out here for a few phantom readings.”

“Not phantom. Unexplained. I saw it for myself.” His dulcet Norwegian accent dropped to a conspiratorial level. “And now we are getting no readings at all, Luther. The only way to know if we have a spill is to look out the window.”

“Okay. Launch the ROV and let’s take a look.”

“We did. It’s gone.”

“Gone where?”

“Damned if I know. The camera went black and we wound a loose umbilical back.”

“A twenty-million-dollar sub cut loose? OmCo are going to be pissed.”

“Fuck OmCo.” This took me aback. Arvid was a company man. “I have fifty billion barrels ready to redecorate the coast from Florida to Mexico.”

Arvid turned cameras in the SAT chamber on. Saturation divers live in this claustrophobic accommodation in the belly of the ship. We have to live at pressure equal to the sea-bed, so we can commute to the bottom in a pressurized diving bell.

You’ve probably heard of “the bends”. For saturation divers it’s next level. Imagine shaking a Coke can and opening it. Now imagine that explosion happening inside every artery and vein until you pop. Sounds dramatic, but you have to understand the amount of pressure involved.

In a SAT chamber, atmospheric pressure can be fifty-times greater than the air outside. To compare, atmospheric pressure is only five-times greater than the air outside in a cruising aircraft, and look at what happens to that when a window goes. In short, Saturation divers live in giant bomb. If it depressurizes instantly, anyone inside is disintegrated.

“These guys aren’t the team I would pick. But they were here and already blown-down for a training dive. I knew that by the time you arrived, I could have them ready to work at three-fifty. And I need to know what’s happening down there immediately.”

“A training dive?”

“Like I said. Not the team I would have picked.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Jesus is a land-lubber, Luther. The bastard performed a miracle to avoid getting his feet wet. And speaking of bastards, look who the instructor is.”

Before leaving, Arvid pointed to a face beaten by worse conditions than weather. A Scot called Barclay. Still diving at fifty-five, Barclay cut his teeth in the North Sea and calls hurricanes a ‘wee breeze’. He was sat on a low bunk, a preoccupied stare set on two sleeping bodies.

“Barclay,” I said, opening the coms channel.

“Luther,” he replied. “You’re just in time, my lad. I need a shite.”

Barclay left the two boys I didn’t know, and within seconds, he was in the wet-room. The little space tripled up as the shower, toilet and airlock into the diving bell.

Barclay dropped his pants and smiled into the camera. Divers were monitored in every room, especially the bathroom, because the flush was a two-man job. The supervisor had to approve every crap for ejection. You know that urban myth about your insides being sucked out by an airplane toilet? It’s not a myth in a saturation chamber.

“I hear you’re the boss-man on this job,” Barclay said.

“I’m as surprised as you are.”

“Aye well. Better you than one of the comfy-chair cock-jockeys we normally get. But I need to tell you about my little lads in there.”

“If it’s the fact they’re toe-dippers, I already know.”

“Aye, they’re green as fuck. But it gets worse. See the laddy with the blonde hair?” I picked him out on the monitor. “He’s a fail.”

“A technical fail or a fail fail?”

“An epic fail, man. He had a panic attack during blow-down. And by the time the bell had dropped us to the bottom, his eyes were wider than your arsehole in the blue oyster club. I didn’t let him in the water.”

“Shit, Barclay. I can’t do this with two.”

“Just don’t put him in the water. He’ll have to be bellman.”

A bellman is the diver that goes down but stays in the bell. He has control over the life support systems. It’s a job that needs a steady hand, because the divers’ lives are in the palm of it.

“What about the other one?”

“Totally the opposite. But so cocky he’s almost as dangerous.”

The situation was far from ideal, but I needed divers in the water. The bell was mated to the airlock at the top of the wet-room. Barclay squeezed his little lads into it, all dressed in deep-sea suits that have more in common with space-suits that normal dive equipment. And it’s like going into space. Except astronauts on the space station can get home in two hours. It would take these guys twelve days to decompress if something goes wrong.

I disengaged the pressurized bell, lifted it clear of the SAT chamber, and moved it along a pulley-system in the ceiling. The little accommodation was bolted onto the hull of the ship, in an unpressurized room called SAT control. It was sealed off from the upper decks, because of the moon-pool, the entry point to the sea. It’s a twenty-foot wide hole in the base of the hull. Leave the wrong door open down there and the ship sinks.

My divers were silent as I lowered the bell into the moon-pool. Usually, I’d have days in the chamber getting to know new divers. Now I had six minutes of descent to see who I was working with. I started with fail-boy. He was from some shit-kicker village in the North of England. When he told me his name, Stewart Salter, I had a flicker of recognition. His accent and sandy hair seemed familiar, but it didn’t click until later.

As the bell passed fifty meters, light faded from the porthole and Stewart’s face drained of colour. I needed occupy his mind before it wandered to bad places.

“Why saturation diving, Stewart?”

“The money,” he replied instantly. But most people say that at first. I probed deeper as the bell dropped past one-hundred meters into pitch-black.

“You can live on less that SAT wages.”

“Yeh,” he mumbled, leaving a pondering pause. “But it’s my mother.”

“Your mom?”

“She’s got Parkinson’s and bugger-all else. I need to look after her … But I’ve fucked that now, haven’t I?”

“Not at all,” I lied. “Plenty of people wig out on their first sat dive. Including me. You remember that, Barclay?”

“Oh aye,” Barclay said, winking to me through his helmet-cam. “Your man up there shit his suit.”

“What about you, Porter?” I said to the guy trying hard to look relaxed. He’d shaved his head, but a crown of hair follicles exposed his premature balding.

“Cows,” he said with a Southern drawl. “And call me Po.” I was about follow up when there was a sharp thud. It silenced the divers. They crammed to look through the porthole while I boosted the outside lights. Stewart had his face pressed on the glass when bam.

He fell back, muffling a scream with his hand. All I saw were flashes of silver as the bell was hit again and again. Tunk-tunk-tunk – like bullets hitting a tank.

“Wind us back,” Stewart whispered.

“Stay cool,” I replied, pausing the external camera footage. “It’s just a shoal of yellow fin.”

“Holy shit, boy,” said Po, laughing at his fallen comrade. “How about you get some us some mayo on rye?”

“Luther, hull integrity?” Barclay barked, silencing Po with a look.

“No damage,” I said, as the last of the tuna bounced away. “Just fish attracted to the lights. Now test the umbilcals, please.”

Each diver had a 200-meter umbilical from the bell to their suit. It supplied gas, power and heat. If the umbilical was cut, they’d have about fifteen minutes of air through an emergency mouthpiece and back-up batteries for light. But without heat, they’d probably die of hyperthermia anyway.

“What about cows, Po?” I said.

He bit a candy bar and chewed right into my ear before adding, “I hate the big dumb bastards is all. Unless they’re in a brioche. But it’s the family business, see? And where I come from, cows and oil is about it.”

“You got a wife or kids?”

“Hell no.”

“So why do you need the money?”

“I don’t,” he said smugly, and my heart sank deeper than the bell. Po was the worst kind of diver to control. Someone doing it to swing his macho-balls around.

They reached depth and Barclay opened the hatch in the floor, unveiling the bell’s little moon-pool. Just big enough for a diver loaded with kit. Spread between them were various tools, including a weld-kit, drill and divers’ knives.

“Sit tight, my little lad,” Barclay said to Stewart. “Keep an eye on the air. And if anything happens, pull these hoses with more gusto than your first wank of the day.”

Barclay dropped into the black hole. He drifted slowly through the silent dark, and for a moment, I envied him. The rush of weightlessness in the void. Not knowing exactly what you’ll land on. His helmet-light showed nothing but the occasional flake falling with him. Everything ends up down here eventually. Barclay was watching the ever-lasting snowfall of life. Until a half-eaten candy bar dropped past.

“Are we go?” Po demanded, chewing impatiently.

“You’re go,” I sighed.

When they were both on the seabed, I instructed them towards the structure. While they did the Neil Armstrong across barren sand, I was relieved to see good visibility. That’s still zero visibility without light, but their beams lit a ten-meter path with no trace of an oil leak. And the divers were calm. Even Stewart seemed okay in the bell, making sure the loops of umbilical fed off the racks without a hitch.

“What’s all this, then?” asked Barclay, spotting a jumble of metal ahead. He got closer and showed me the serial numbers on twisted poles.

“That can’t be right,” I pleaded.

“The camera doesn’t talk shite, my lad,” Barclay replied

“What is this junk?” said Po.

“That junk,” I clarified. “Is supposed to be supporting the structure. Now keep going,” I urged, unable to comprehend what could do this damage.

“Well if you didn’t like that, my lad …” Barclay said, as the structure came into view. Yellow-painted metal was scattered everywhere. Girders thicker than your thigh were snapped. It was like a house after a tornado. I just had to hope the basement stayed intact. If not, Heather would be busy cleaning beaches for the next few millennia.

“What’s going on,” asked Stewart, his pulse racing. The bell can be a scary place when things go wrong. You can hear everything but don’t get a camera feed. It’s like being blind with intruders in the house.

“Nothing for you to worry about, Stewart. Just make sure the hoses feed out smooth. Barclay, circle right of the manifold. They’ll be a big pipeline rising from the sand into the base of the structure.”

“If it’s still there,” Barclay said, already on the move.

“It’s the well-pipe. If it wasn’t there, you’d be swimming in oil.”

“Looks like sabotage to me, boys,” Po said, leap-frogging a block of metal. I’d thought the same thing, but who the hell would do that?

“Here it is,” Barclay said, approaching a head-high pipe that fed the manifold all its oil.

“Check the pressure gauge.”

Barclay wiped some sediment from a dial and read, “Two thousand P.S.I.”

“Shit … The manifold isn’t controlling the flow. We have to take it out of the equation. I need an emergency shut-off on the well-pipe. It’s strong enough to hold the well-pressure until we to get support out here and cap it.”

“Cap the well?” Barclay said with mischievous glee.

“Fixing the manifold has hundreds of variables. Fifty-thousand tons of concrete has very few.”

“My first working SAT dive and I’m the guy that capped OmCo’s most productive well?” Po interjected. “You’re going to put me on the shit-list, buddy!”

“I’m not your buddy. I’m your dive supervisor. And your D-S is saying fuck OmCo.”

“Well it’s taken thirty years,” laughed Barclay. “But I finally have an order I’ll enjoy following. C’mon, my little lad. Fuck OmCo! We need to remove the lock-bolt.”

The bolt was at the centre of a valve the size of a truck-wheel. Barclay got a spanner fixed on and Po mumbled protest as he lent his weight to the cause. But just as the bolt started loosening, Po and Barclay stopped.

“You didn’t tell me you had an ROV down here, Luther,” Barclay said.

“I haven’t. The boat lost its sub before I arrived.”

“Well I think I’ve just found it.”

Then I saw what he meant. A distant white ROV light. I didn’t understand how that could be possible. The ship’s lost ROV had back-up power, but it should auto-pilot to the surface.

“Keep working, Barclay,” I said firmly. “That manifold could fail any second.”

“Aye,” he said and removed the bolt. He started tugging on the valve-wheel. But it was a two-man job and Po was just staring at the light.

“Keep your mind on the job, Po.”

“It’s coming right at us,” he shot back

“Emergency battery probably has it swimming circles down there.”

“I can’t budge this on my own!” Barclay insisted.

“But it ain’t swimming in circles. It’s coming right at us.”

Barclay looked up from his job, his forehead creasing in concern. The ROV light was stronger now. And there was no deviation in its course.

“Alright. Move off and let it go past,” I ordered.

Barclay led them away from the manifold. After twenty meters, they turned to watch the ROV go past, but it wasn’t there.

“Maybe the power died,” Barclay reasoned. I stayed quiet. What if it was sabotage? There could be a sub down there and my divers were lit up like flares.

“Up there!” Po shouted. There was falling star coming right for them.

“Run!” I commanded, but didn’t have to. Their pulses rocketed as they bounded as fast as they could. In a weighted suit, with hose-drag, it’s like moving in molasses down there.

“What’s happening?” Steward pleaded.

“Stay off the coms until I say,” I barked, no time to babysit him.

Then Po looked up and gasped. The ROV was tracking them. And the light wasn’t distant anymore. They changed course again and the ROV followed.

“Split up!” I ordered. Two targets were better than one.

Each of them kept eyes front to move as fast as they could. But the first one to look up was Po and he saw nothing.

My eyes darted to Barclay’s cam. He looked up and the light was right on top of him. Barclay raised his arm and snap. I couldn’t believe what I saw. His wrist was clamped in the cavernous mouth of a Warty Seadevil. A freakishly big species of Angler Fish, and this one was a freak in its own right. Ten-feet long and almost as wide. Its cutlass teeth were for killing, not chewing, as it swallows prey whole. The Seadevil’s brightly-lit lure swayed hypnotically, protruding between dead-white eyes.