The Titanic Enigma (24 page)

‘And a lot of it would have been locked away for safe keeping in security boxes in holds like this,’ Lou added.

‘It’s a miracle that this one has survived intact,’ Derham said, looking to Milford.

The commander nodded. ‘It’s bound to be fragile, though. Which, of course, presents us with yet another potential danger. Once we get inside the hold, the change in pressure and the
disturbance to what is, after all, a century-old rusted metal box is impossible to predict. OK . . .’ she added and glanced at her watch, ‘it’s 17.25; just over four hours until
launch. I suggest we get some sleep. It’s going to be a long trip and I don’t see us getting much rest once we’re underway.’

‘I wish I was coming with you,’ Derham said.

‘You’re not?’ Kate asked, surprised.

‘My orders are to stay up here to liaise with the group commander, Rear Admiral Stockton, on the
Brooklyn
. The three of you will go out to the cargo hold.’

‘I’ll be there to hold your hand,’ Milford quipped.

Four hours later.

Commander Milford had been in the sub going through system checks for an hour before Kate and Lou arrived.

The two scientists were kitted out in their thermal suits in an antechamber aboard the ship. This was hooked up to
JV1
by a concertinaed walkway a little like the movable bridges used
to connect airliners to airport gates.

They then entered the sub, the door sealing behind them with a hiss. Milford nodded to them without breaking her stream of chat with the control room on the
Armstrong.
They could hear
Captain Derham’s voice over the comms finishing up the checklist with the commander.

Buckling themselves in, they watching the screens as the displays shifted and listened in as Milford severed the cables to the ship and turned the submarine through 180 degrees close to the
keel.

Descending one hundred feet beneath the ship, the commander turned the nose of the sub downward. ‘Engaging main thrusters,’ she said through the comms.

‘Copy that,
JV1.’

They felt a slight nudge as the submarine began to accelerate and watched the water darkening rapidly on the monitors. Within a few moments the view of the ocean had become a featureless
black.

‘Accelerating to fifteen knots,’ Milford reported. ‘Depth 4,500 feet.’

Kate and Lou had become acquainted with some of the controls and displays during their first trip to the
Titanic,
so they were able to identify speed and depth figures on the main
displays close to the pilot and duplicated on the smaller screens in front of them. They watched as the speed increased and
JV1
passed through what submariners called the bathypelagic
region and on into abyssopelagic, the transition coming at about 6,000 feet beneath the surface.

For the next five minutes the descent was remarkably smooth. But then, at a depth of 12,050 feet and less than 600 feet from the ocean floor, the sub started to shake. A loud cracking sound
reverberated around the inside of the vessel. Kate shot her hand out, grabbing Lou’s wrist.

‘Nothing to worry about, guys,’ Jane Milford called back to them. ‘Just a bit of a rocky . . .’

The sub plummeted. It felt very similar to being in an airliner hitting severe turbulence.

Kate couldn’t stop a small scream and she gripped Lou’s wrist so tightly she broke his skin with her nails. He yelled and went to pull it away but Kate wouldn’t let it go. She
was staring directly ahead, eyes glazed with fear.

The sub slowed dramatically and started to rock from side to side. Another loud cracking sound reverberated around the inside of the machine.

‘You guys OK?’ It was Jerry Derham in the control room of the
Armstrong.

‘We are now,’ Milford replied. ‘Just hit a nasty patch. I think it was a vortex of some sort. I didn’t pick it up on the sensors in time. We’re fine.’

The touchdown was almost anticlimactic; a soft thud and a brief shudder and they were on the floor of the Atlantic, 12,600 feet beneath the waves. They heard the sound of the engines descend in
pitch. Milford unstrapped her safety harness and came round to the rear of the small sub just as Kate and Lou were getting up from their seats. Lou was rubbing his sore wrist.

‘Oh, stop being a baby!’ Kate said, grinning.

‘That’s rich!’

‘That had to be the trickiest landing I’ve ever had to make,’ Milford declared.

‘Did I hear you say we hit a vortex?’

‘Yeah, we just clipped the edge of it, thank God. They present just about the biggest danger down here, apart from a hull breach. OK, I don’t think we should waste any time. If you
feel up to it, let’s get suited up and out there.’

‘How close are we to the planned landing site?’ Lou asked.

‘Bang on,’ Milford responded. ‘Look.’

She pointed to a monitor. It showed a schematic of the surrounding area. ‘There’s the hold.’ She indicated a small rectangle on the right of the screen. ‘We’re
here.’ Milford ran her finger down to a spot about five hundred feet south-east of their destination. Back there is the bow section of the
Titanic.’
Then she indicated with her
thumb and nodded to port. ‘On the schematic, it’s here.’ She stabbed at a large white shape.

‘This is the fissure?’ Lou said, tracing a jagged line down the monitor. Magnified, it appeared irregular, a random gash in the ocean floor.

‘Unfortunately it’s between eighty and one hundred feet across. It doesn’t narrow very much anywhere along this stretch.’ Milford ran her finger over the ragged line
covering about ten miles within the dimensions of the schematic.

‘Sod’s Law.’

‘Yeah, maybe. But let’s hope Sod’s Law has played out enough for this mission. The problems have been stacking up. We deserve some good luck.’

Milford turned towards the locker room and the LMC suits.

JV1
’s massive lights illuminated the ocean floor in a pool of radiance that extended some two hundred feet in every direction. But even these, the three knew,
would not produce much light beyond that circle, so that by the time they reached the crevasse the only visible illumination would come from the powerful torches on the arms of their suits and
built into their helmets.

They stood outside the hatch for a few moments to get their bearings.

‘Armstrong?’
Milford called through the comms. ‘We have left
JV1.
We’re on the surface.’

‘Wilco, commander.’

‘Let’s go,’ she said to Kate and Lou. ‘Not a second to waste.’

Milford had the nano-carbon bridge in a pack on her back, her oxygen tank tucked between it and her body. Lou was carrying a pack containing cutting equipment in case they needed to break into
the hold. In Kate’s pack she had a specially designed device for retrieving the documents they hoped to find.

The ground was firm underfoot, but they were constantly aware of the fragility of this region of the ocean floor.

The light from
JV1
dimmed gradually as they progressed and after ten minutes they had reached the point where the light began to give way to darkness.

‘Time to put on the headlamps,’ said Milford.

On the right arm of their suits was a control panel. They tapped in a code and immediately the lights came on, nine between them, producing about one tenth of the luminescence they had close to
JV1.

The ocean was devoid of all marine life, just as it had been on their earlier visit. The only sign that anything had once lived here in this vast stretch of ocean was the sprinkling of dead and
rotting creatures caught in the lights.

Milford stopped suddenly and put a hand up. Lou and Kate halted immediately. ‘There,’ the commander said flatly, ‘the crevasse. About fifty feet directly ahead. See
it?’

Kate and Lou strained their eyes and could just make out a deeper blackness in the void ahead of them. It was the leading edge of the chasm.

‘Got it,’ Lou said.

‘We must proceed very carefully now.’

From the left sleeve of her suit Milford withdrew a miniature sonar device similar to the one Jerry Derham had used on the mission inside the
Titanic.
It produced a steady pulse audible
in all their headsets; a beat that would change if they encountered any subterranean irregularity close to the surface of the ocean floor.

They took it slowly, the sonar keeping up its regular comforting rhythm. As they approached the crevasse their light beams lit it up. They could barely see the other side.

‘Believe it or not, this is the narrowest point for miles,’ Milford said through the comms. She tapped the panel on her right sleeve. ‘83.67 feet.’

Lou peered over the edge and saw nothing but uninterrupted blackness; no sign of light or shade, no movement, nothing. It was like a crack leading to Hell itself. It filled him with a nameless
terror. It wasn’t just a physical fear, it was existential. Here, at the bottom of the ocean in the region marine scientists called the ‘abyssal zone’, or simply ‘the
abyss’, lay a massive crack in the earth.

He recalled the stats from the briefing. The chasm was fifty-two miles in length, and varied in width between thirty and two hundred feet. And its depth? Well, no one could be sure. Researchers
had stopped measuring after their sensors, stretched to the limit, had given up at a depth of over eleven miles.

He couldn’t help himself – he imagined falling over the edge, falling, falling for what would feel like an eternity, until something happened. What? The pressure would grow so
intense his suit would be overwhelmed and he would be crushed in an instant. Or else he would become snagged on something and die slowly. Or perhaps he would puncture his suit and simply
implode.

He shuddered, forcing the thoughts away, stepped back and glanced round at Kate. She was still staring down into the chasm. Maybe, he thought, she was as obsessed with it as he was. In fact, he
knew she was. She had the most powerful imagination of anyone he had ever met.

‘Let’s get started,’ Milford’s voice cut through the comms. She slipped the container off her back, opened the clasps and pulled out a cylinder about three feet long. She
found a zip and pulled it back to expose an odd-shaped contraption. It was spindly and shimmered in the light from the torches.

‘This,’ Milford added, ‘is the business end.’ She pointed to a small box attached to the main body then placed the nano-carbon ladder flat on the ground two yards back
from the edge of the crevasse.

‘Lou, could you secure the end for me, please? Just lean on it. I’ll set the controls.’

He crouched down and held the ladder in place as Jane Milford ran her fingers over a keypad on the rectangular box. She straightened. ‘Stand back.’

Lou and Kate complied and they heard a cracking sound. Metal bolts shot from the base of the rectangle, punching through the sand and into the bedrock beneath.

Milford ran the sonar over the box and studied the screen. ‘Excellent. Worked like a dream.’ The anchors went down three feet and now they are probing further under the surface, the
nanobots biting their way through the rock. They’ll stop at about – here they go – seven feet.’

She leaned forward and gripped the box at the end of the nano-carbon ladder, trying to dislodge it, but it was as solid as an anchor cemented into a dozen feet of concrete.

‘Now . . . stage two,’ she muttered, touching the screen on the box again and pulling herself upright. The other two just watched expectantly.

For a few seconds nothing happened. Then a chunk of solid material levered up from the strange contraption. It swept through the air, growing as it moved. In a moment it was extending over the
edge of the crevasse.

Kate and Lou looked on astonished.

‘Nanotechnology is a wonderful thing,’ Milford commented dryly.

The ladder grew before their eyes, stretching rapidly across the opening. After a few moments it stopped extending and lowered slowly into place on the ocean floor beyond the far side of the
crevasse. The end of it was just out of sight.

‘I’ve never seen anything like that!’ Kate exclaimed.

‘It’s pretty cool,’ Milford replied. ‘You two ready to crawl across?’

‘I guess,’ Lou responded.

‘Think of it as a normal ladder laid flat. Don’t look down. Just keep focused on the far end.’

She paused for a moment and opened the link to the control room on the surface.

‘Armstrong?’

No response.

‘
Armstrong?
This is Commander Milford. We have established the nano-carbon bridge and we are about to cross the crevasse.’

Nothing.

‘
Armstrong?
Captain Derham? Come in.’ She glanced at the two scientists.

Then a sound, an electronic hiss.

‘That’s odd. The line is still open.’

She gave up and stepped onto the end of the ladder, found her centre of gravity and started to move forward. ‘We have to go one at a time. Kate . . . wait until I reach the far side and
come after me. Lou . . . you go last.’

He checked his watch. They had been out for twenty-nine minutes fourteen seconds.

Looking up, he watched the commander scramble along the extended ladder. The structure was absolutely rigid. Milford moved fast. In a minute she had traversed the span and was standing up on the
other side. They could just make out the shape of her LMC suit. When her voice came over the comms she sounded slightly out of breath.

‘Made it. Kate, you go . . . keep staring ahead.’

She stepped onto the ladder, crouched and gripped the first rung with both hands. Half a dozen steps on, she started to move out over the blackness of the ravine. Staring straight ahead, she
scrambled forward with surprising speed, one hand over the other, a bit like a kid in a playground, her boots finding purchase and propelling her forward through the water.

‘Almost there,’ she declared, and with a last rush forward she was on the far side of the chasm straightening up.

‘OK, Lou,’ Milford said. ‘Go!’