Titanic 2012 (inspector alastair ransom) Read online

  David went to his knees to help her pick up her runaway items.

  “Hello, Dr. Ingles,” she said from her kneeling position, hardly able to turn and twist in the narrow passageway. “I heard there was breakfast in the galley,” she continued as she replaced everything in her pack.

  “No one calls me Doctor, Dr. Irvin,” he countered. “It’s David. As to breakfast? Sounds good.”

  Her eyebrows lifted, her smile widened, and she offered her hand but quickly realized she needed it back before he could take it. “Kelly then it is, David. I didn’t know you were—well you—unitl I saw you in the debriefing room with the other divers.”

  “Oh yes, well I read your file sometime back and assumed you were Dr. Irvin when I saw you topside. Remembered you from your photo.”

  “I should hope not! Oh my God, that mug shot? Say, David, why don’t you join me for ham and eggs?”

  “I’ve just begun unpacking,” he lied, noticing that Bowman smirked at this, “but I am hungry… so what the hell, sure.”

  Bowman closed the door on the couple with a little shake of the head. With the door closed, they could not make out his final remark, but the laughter was clear.

  “Thought we oughta get to know one another to some degree,” she said. “This notion we should have absolutely no concern for one another—to act like, I dunno, cyborgs on the job—I just don’t fully agree with those damn shrinks. Do you?”

  “Have you told that to Lou?”

  “Course not, but you’re dodging the question.”

  A pair of crewmen squeezed past them, which gave David time to consider this question in more depth. “It’s probably a good policy—to be honest.”

  “I suppose so.” Still she frowned, started to add a word, hesitated, and put hand to mouth as if to stop herself.

  “Up to a point, you mean?” he said and laughed. “They haven’t been able to completely brainwash the idea into your head, eh?” He opened his cabin door and gestured for her to lead the way.

  She moved along the tight corridor and spoke over her shoulder. “Well, you of all people, Dr. Ingles—David—you can’t completely agree with the notion, can you? That to be efficient in our jobs, we have to give up being human?”

  “Well it is 2012, you know, and any ahhh… human foul up could bring on the earth falling off its axis and a collapse of the entire world according to Vice President Reardon and Wall Street insiders. I mean now that we’re no longer as ready to believe ancient Mayan beliefs and that fellow Nostradamus.”

  This got a laugh out of her that reverberated up and down the corridor, and he reacted with a smile. “There… there it is, a human moment between us. Frankly, I don’t think even Lou Swigart can enforce what they’re talking about to begin with, but that’s just me.”

  David nodded. “There is that little thing called trust; kinda necessary and absolutely human.” They continued along the corridor single file, when he asked, “So how do you like sucking down liquid air?” He used the crude Navy term for the use of oxygenated perflourocarbons. Cutting edge applied research, the end result of experiments and failed attempts at finding breathable liquid for divers, research begun in Jacque Cousteau’s day.

  “That stuff may not taste like Champaign, but damn it’s miraculous once you get there.”

  “But getting there is hell.”

  “Yes—no matter how many times I do it,” she confessed, “I’m sure it’s my last breath. How ’bout you?”

  “It sucks—literally! But miraculous, it is. Makes me feel like Aquaman or Cousteau’s dream of a race of fish-men!” It was not entirely a lie. But each time he used the OPFC back-pak of breathable liquid, which had replaced failed heavy oxygenated liquids of previous years, results of which had given a diver less than an hour and made movement and work underwater nearly impossible. The problem had always come down to failure to ventilate carbon dioxide, and to marry the oxygen levels in the bloodstream with temperature and pressure levels—and using humans in experimentation.

  For generations, the US Navy had kept such experiments under wraps.

  David thought of Terry Wilcox, and how this new technology—had they had it in Japan—would have saved his life, and he wondered too, how many anonymous sailors had given their lives for this step in human evolution that would return mankind to the deepest, darkest depths of the ocean.

  His friend Terry had suffocated in his suit as his air ran out, and David had been unable to get to him in time on the return down after getting Peterson and DeVries out and up. Although David had risked his own life doing a second dive too soon, leaving him with the bends, it simply had not been enough. Time itself killed Terry.

  Nowadays, with the new technologies at hand, the bends were no longer a worry during a dive. No matter how fast one descended or ascended. The new lightweight tanks and what they carried did indeed return a man to his origins once the ‘death grip’ was reached and suppressed and gotten past. With ‘liquid air’ as it was called, your mask filled with liquid that covered mouth, nose, eyes, and ears. You were literally ‘drowned’ inside your Cryo-suit, your every pore and orifice in the “pour” house, taking in the liquid oxygen.

  Many a rat and monkey before human experiments had also given their lives in the effort to get the formula right—413 attempts since the 1960’s in an on-again, off- again set of trials. Years of tests went into OPFC-413 even after proven until now that divers using the stuff confidently knew they’d be coming out on the other side with eyes open, heart beating, brain functioning, while the skin crawled. But you were alive, and soon your eyes cleared, brain fog lifted, and your heart rate sought its rhythm. And that horrible feeling that you were being turned inside out like some sort of garment, finally dissipated, replaced by a sense of power that reflected the simple notion of normalcy in one’s bodily functions. The huge surprise too was the freedom—absolute freedom in the salt water.

  But it had to be harnessed and controlled. Thus the 4-hour OPFC-413 square-pak had been developed with the backing of the US government, and now it was being tested by private industry and expeditions such as the Titanic 2012 Expedition.

  “Frankly,” Kelly said to him, “I’m more worried about the drugs they have us on in order to endure breathing that 413th cocktail.”

  David nodded, understanding. “Steroids can have strange side-effects.”

  “Not just steroids, hell—the leukotriene blockers, anticholinergics, the beta antagonists.”

  “Gotta dilate those air passages and ventilate the lungs of carbon dioxide buildup every way possible.”

  They had all been fitted with custom Cryo-suits, much like HAZMAT suits with built-in venting of the deadly gases that would otherwise build up in the lungs to poison the diver. “Truth is,” she confessed, “I’m off those damned drugs.”

  “What? Are you crazy? You’ll need that extra edge below.”

  David knew that working and moving would be as much of an effort as any faced by astronauts in space.

  “Those bloody drugs mess with my thinking, and I’ve got to be one hundred percent clear, David, for reasons that are my own.”

  “You’re not likely to find much in the way of biological specimens in or around that shipwreck, Dr. Irvin, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You might be surprised,” she mysteriously replied. “I’m going for the galley; you coming?”

  David watched her saunter away, again somewhat mesmerized by her beauty. He looked about after a moment to see if anyone noticed him noticing her as she disappeared below decks. He rushed after, trying to convince himself he was hungry so as to have a reason to chase after this woman.

  If David expected an intimate moment at breakfast with the lovely Dr. Irvin, he was immediately disappointed when she opened the galley entryway. There they found some dozen or so members of the crew, a few other divers, a number of the scientists, and a cook, a ship’s dog that looked a mix of lab and shepherd, and a galley boy who looked from his day’s old bear
d to be perhaps eighteen. Rather than doing introductions at this time, everyone just cheered in a group welcoming of the two newcomers.

  That is, all but one fellow had cheered.

  At the far end of the tight galley room, a sullen fellow kept his own counsel, eyes on his food, fork pushing scrambled eggs around on his plate. A big man with huge hands, this fellow had looked up at David and Kelly for the briefest moment, averting his eyes, which to David appeared silver grey with the intensity of lightning. He recalled Jacob Mendenhall from the earlier meeting, another member of the dive squad.

  While he seemed cold, Mendenhall might simply be taking to heart the planned protocol to have as little contact as possible with fellow members of the dive assigned to. It would explain his seeming rudeness. David noticed that Kelly also seemed disturbed by the silver-eyed fellow the other end of the table.

  “Sit, eat!” said the cook like a captain giving orders.

  “Sit where?” asked Kelly, shrugging when two of men in the room rushed to their feet, saying they’d finished, and rushed off topside with their dishes still half full.

  David and Kelly sat side by side in the noisy atmosphere unconsciously pulling in their shoulders to make room for themselves. They were soon eating and listening to the talk. Someone had brought up how few funds went into ocean exploration and the safety of aquanauts as opposed to space and astronauts. David quickly agreed, punctuating with his fork to say, “Take the mid-ocean ridge, a 40,000 mile long seam that goes around the globe like a baseball seam—biggest geological feature on earth—the oceans—and it’s ignored while people need to be made aware of it—just how big it is and how little exploration’s been done.”

  “Exactly what I’ve been saying for years. People don’t know for instance there’re more volcanoes under the sea than on land—active volcanoes.” This fellow introduced himself as Steve Jens—one of the other aquanauts.

  “It’s sad how little we know about the ocean,” agreed Will Bowman, who was paired with David as a roommate but not for the upcoming dive to and through Titanic.

  Kelly piped in, adding, “I’ve read where the volume of water our oceans are made up of has, over the last eight million years, seeped down into the Earth’s crust and returned through hydrothermal vents—and that, gentlemen, is a lot of water.”

  “Yeah, and what about all those new life forms Robert Ballard discovered at the East Pacific Rise—life forms that exist on sulfides instead of sunshine and chlorophyll?” asked Bowman. “All that life needs to be studied.”

  “That kind of life form… damn alien to us,” added Steve Jens, his baritone voice filling the room. “Could, you know… could be out there in space on another planet for all we know.”

  “Who knows,” said David, smiling. “Maybe our little mission to Titanic will revive interest in oceanic exploration—get up some funds and fans.”

  “Fans? You mean groupies? I hope you’re not in this for glory, Ingles,” said Will Bowman, eyeing his dive partner and leaving more unsaid than said.

  “Fans of oceanography, Will; that’s all I meant.”

  “Eat, eat!” shouted the head cook, a fellow everyone called Cookie. Then before Kelly knew it, the men were talking first about how the Air Coast Guard plied the North Atlantic to safeguard ships from icebergs since Titanic’s demise. But soon their talk turned to guns that might or might not be found on Titanic, and what sort of weapon would Will Murdoch have used to mercy kill a passenger and then shoot himself in the head?

  “In 1912 semi-automatics were rare as hell,” David replied to someone who suggested such a thing. “The Browning Colt 1911 .45 automatic was only manufactured the year before—1911.”

  Mendenhall added, “Ingles is right. I mean, a handful of the original prototypes were available in 1911, but not to the public—and surely they weren’t likely to be available to the Titanic crew in 1912.”

  “No, the British would’ve been using a Webley MKIV break top revolver in .455 Webley caliber,” added David and displaying with his fingers in pinch-fashion the size of the bullet, he added, “Big chunk of lead throwing 6 shooter—that mother.”

  A crewman named Ford got into the fray, saying, “They would have had a lot of weapons being transported from one side of the pond to the other in her cargo holds—no telling what prizes are still down there.”

  “Packed alongside ammo and caps, no doubt—I mean for the breach loaders like the Sharps rifles.”

  “According to the cargo manifest no, but sometimes in those days they had a code for weaponry onboard,” put in Alandale. “Calling it crates of wine instead, and according to the manifest, there was a boatload of crated up wine going to New York.”

  Kelly had too much on her mind to listen to this. She wanted another cup of coffee though and Cookie had promised more eggs, so she suffered through.

  FOUR

  The Harland & Wolff Shipyards, Belfast, April 3, 1912

  Veteran shipyard watchman, Anton Fiore had, seconds before, seen what appeared to be a drunken sod in miner’s apparel mucking about below. Anton had just stepped out of his small office atop a scaffolding some twenty-five feet from the ground, not even close to Titanic’s second level. Anton had stepped outside in hopes of having a quiet smoke on his pipe and a gander at the stars overhead. As always, he didn’t look forward to a slow night going by in painful boredom with little more to do than play chess with himself.

  Anton once had a second man on duty but those in charge had unreasonably deemed a second man suddenly to be an unnecessary extravagance. The poor fellow, George Pines, was unceremoniously let go—fired. So now Anton played the game alone until his replacement at daybreak should relieve him. Pines had, been an awful opponent anyway… still the place was lonely without him.

  Now Anton’s star gazing was interrupted by the sight of the stumbling miner or derelict far below. The man was extremely near the new ship the builders were talking up as an ‘unsinkable’ ocean liner, its hull made of the finest ore to be double-plated, its compartments built so as to cut off any flooding from one another. The thing was mammoth—gargantuan in fact to the point it could not be exaggerated. To be sure it was beyond anything Anton Fiore had ever seen in the shipyards; in fact, it had humbled him on the one hand and made him proud of mankind at the same time.

  He hoped the figure he’d seen at the base of the ship stumbling about was just a derelict, but suppose he was one of those madmen with an incendiary device—an anarchist who lived to terrorize god-fearing people, a fellow who lived to disrupt normal society and progress. What a headline it would make to blow up Titanic before she even got out of dry dock.

  Anton rushed to catch up to the man and to apprehend him if need be. He had a club, and he knew how to use it. They did not give him a firearm. After all, he was no Pinkerton agent. He had read something in the papers about the shipyard hiring private security in the form of Pinkertons; their reputation had spread far and wide since the days of their having broken up so many strikes across the globe, and having been the model for the US Secret Service since Lincoln’s presidency. Every Irishman afoot was proud that Alan Pinkerton was one Irishman who’d made something of himself and his now famous two sons as well. They’d made something of a dynasty of their agency with the motto: We Never Sleep. All due to an Irish trait—an innate sense of intuition and tracking.

  As he worked his way down from his perch, athletically scaling down the stairs like a circus performer, the strong, muscular Anton did his level best to keep the intruder in his sights. So he saw when the fellow entered Titanic at her still gaping hatch where cargo would one day be taken aboard at someplace like Southampton, England—so far the only port mentioned around Anton.

  Thus far, the retractable gangplank-like gigantic door to this hold had not been attached, riveted, and sealed. Anton wondered how they hoped to have it ready for her scheduled launch. However, he hadn’t time to do any ciphering. Instead, he rushed for the black passageway. The passageway was so la
rge that Anton imagined the wagons in Southampton loaded with supplies able to pass side by side twice over.

  He wondered why this figure had chosen to duck into the ship. If not up to some mischief, then what purpose had he? Who was he? The fellow and his dress marked him as a local for sure. For a moment, Anton thought it might be the disgruntled, fired Pines but no, this fellow was shorter, stockier than Pines. Anton knew that some of the lads here, once liquored up, were capable of some madness. A sure thing that.

  Titanic’s monstrous size created a black, sleeping giant of a backdrop for Anton here in the dimly lit shipyard that had given birth to her. An eerie fog that seemed like so many ghosts at play added to the creepiness of this night. Anton was used to the fog but hardly the gigantic ship or strange men stumbling in from nowhere. He had lived in France, Canada, and now Belfast—all shipbuilding countries. After he’d given up the physically draining work of a shipwright to take on the job of watchman here at the yards, he’d become bored but it got him home most nights in safe and sound fashion.

  The wife was far happier as he spent less time drinking and in taverns only to wind up in fights and eventually jails. Being chief night man at the yards was a safe life to be sure. As safe and as boring as what he imagined milking cows would be. Before taking on this job, he’d taken great pride in his work. Although forty-two now, he’d been only a boy of thirteen when he took his first job in a shipyard, carrying a rivet bucket as an apprentice. He’d heard Harland and Wolff used the best ship builders in the business, and so he migrated to Belfast years before, but when an accident left him with a perpetual limp, and the limp had taken its inevitable toll, he had to step away from the hard work and heavy lifting; still he had not stepped off too far—accepting the watchman’s post. A post he took seriously, and so he entered Titanic in pursuit of the intruder.