The Titanic Enigma (4 page)

NATO Exclusion Zone, 375 miles SE of Newfoundland. Present day.

NATO had deployed four surface warships to patrol the perimeter of the Exclusion Zone – two destroyers, the USS
Brooklyn
and USS
Toledo,
along with
the Australian ship HMAS
Darwin
and a British aircraft carrier, HMS
Ipswich.
An AWACS Boeing E-3 Sentry patrolled the skies over the region and was in constant communication with
HQs on both sides of the Atlantic. The Exclusion Zone itself was an area of twenty-seven square miles centred on the point above the wreck of the
Titanic.

All vessels were operating under Extreme Radiation Risk status, which meant that no crew were allowed on deck unless they were wearing full radiation suits. The ocean was strewn with dead and
decaying marine life ranging from a host of tiny minnows to larger fish, octopuses and plants. The stench was ferocious.

Only twenty-four hours had passed since Captain Derham had walked into Kate and Lou’s lab, and now they were inside the Exclusion Zone aboard USS
Armstrong
, the mother ship for
the
JV1
and
JV2
deep-ocean subs. The ship was a small, purpose-built vessel, with a crew of just twelve. Heavily shielded to protect it against high radiation levels, it was only
lightly armed with two 5-inch/54 calibre mark 45 guns.

‘These are the latest probe images just in,’ Jerry Derham said. He, Kate and Lou were alone in the ready room of the
Armstrong.
There was a knock on the door and a woman
wearing a naval commander’s uniform stepped in. She had short auburn hair and a hard face. Kate and Lou had met her briefly at Norfolk Naval Base. Commander Jane Milford was the navy’s
number one
Jules Verne
submarine pilot and had put in over five hundred submersed hours in
JV1
and
JV2.
She had been in the Exclusion Zone for twenty-four hours before
Derham, Lou and Kate had arrived, and she had already made a surveillance dive to the
Titanic
wreck in a conventional deep-ocean submersible.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said, ‘last-minute checks on
JV1
.’

Derham looked up. ‘Commander. Please, sit down. I was just showing these guys the latest probe images. The wreck looks kinda eerie, don’t you think?’

‘It does,’ Kate said and flicked a glance at her colleague. ‘I know Lou is a pretty hard-nosed pragmatist about it. I guess you’re used to it too, commander.’

‘I don’t think you ever get used to it, doctor, especially seeing it in the flesh.’

Lou looked up from the large colour prints. ‘The
Titanic
is different,’ he said. ‘Don’t ask me why. It’s not just the scale of it.’

‘It’s because the ship was meant to be unsinkable. It was a symbol of man’s technological prowess and it was brought down by a chunk of ice,’ Kate said. ‘I mean,
just look here.’ She pointed to an opened book close to the prints. It was an annotated collection of photographs of the interior of the gigantic liner all taken by a photographer from the
Illustrations Bureau a few days before the launch. The photo on the left-hand page showed one of the First Class lounges. It was so incredibly opulent – gorgeous cornicing, ornate brass
lamps, sumptuous chesterfields. Then she sifted the prints from the probe and found the one she was after. ‘If I’m not mistaken, this is the same room now.’

The image showed a shattered mockery of the first picture: the cornicing had crumbled, the beautiful hardwood floorboards were entirely gone, the furniture was now no more than a pile of nails
and a collection of corroded steel truss rods. A piece of brass lamp lay in the centre of the room.

‘Something like 6,000 artefacts have been removed from the wreck since its location was discovered in 1985, all retrieved by robot probes,’ Derham said, unrolling a schematic of the
ship’s interior. ‘The ocean floor is strewn with wreckage, but the source of the radiation is not there. It’s definitely inside the ship. Commander Milford has been concentrating
on narrowing down the precise location.’

‘We now think the epicentre of the radiation source is situated towards the bow of the ship beyond the forward Grand Staircase, two floors down from the boat deck.’ She pointed it
out on the diagram. ‘Our best bet is here – a First Class cabin, C16. We’ve tried, but we haven’t been able to get a remote probe that far into the ship.’

‘Isn’t that a little worrying?’ Kate said, still looking at the schematic.

‘Why? You mean, if a probe can’t get in there, how can we?’ Milford asked.

‘Precisely.’

‘I appreciate your concerns,’ Derham responded. ‘But no probe is that manoeuvrable. Also, the radiation down there interferes with the signal we use to control them.’

‘Most importantly, though,’ Milford interrupted, ‘there’s no substitute for human eyes and ears. This is the whole reason we need you both. You are world authorities in
the study of marine wrecks.’

Derham pointed to the print on the table. ‘The latest images we have show the best way to get into the wreck is close to the port anchor . . . here.’ He then found another close-up
and a computer-enhanced image of the exterior. They could make out every dent and rivet. ‘You can see here the displaced sediment rises up either side of the hull almost reaching the anchor.
It’ll be perilous, but we should be able to reach the boat deck using some of the holes and protrusions in the hull above the anchor. It’s then a question of finding an entranceway into
the ship and locating cabin C16. I can’t reiterate too many times just how dangerous this trip is going to be. The ocean floor nearly two and a half miles beneath the surface is as
inhospitable as deep space.’

‘I don’t think either of us is expecting it to be a walk in the park,’ Kate remarked.

‘You’re certainly right there,’ Milford said quietly, and she glanced round at the three of them with a very serious expression. ‘And, there is one more thing you
probably should know. The suits. We’ve just had the final tests conducted on three sets at Norfolk. The technicians have emailed over the results.’

‘When was this?’ Derham asked, suddenly concerned.

‘Just five minutes ago, sir.’

‘Is there a problem?’

‘No,’ Milford replied emphatically. ‘No problem, but the final tests show that suit integrity can only be guaranteed for up to sixty-two minutes forty-four seconds.’

Kate looked grave. ‘And what happens then?’

Milford shrugged. ‘Maybe nothing. The suit might be fine for a long time after that.’

‘But at some point?’

‘At some point, the liquid metal carbon of the suit will reconfigure.’

‘Reconfigure?’ It was Lou. He gave Milford a hard look.

‘It changes state . . . The suit becomes a solid block of carbon.’

An hour later they were pulling on thermal suits – the standard uniform while they were aboard the
JVs
where the temperature and pressure levels were
computer-controlled.
Jules Verne 1
was ready to power up, the final systems checks almost completed.

The interior of the sub was extremely cramped and utilitarian. Four seats were set out in two pairs of two. The front left was the pilot’s seat; next to that, the copilot. Two passenger
seats had been squeezed into the restricted space in the second row. The designers had packed the craft with the latest communications and navigational technology. There were no windows. Instead,
visual displays relayed images from a set of cameras mounted on the exterior of the sub. Two large control panels were in front of the pilot and co-pilot’s chairs. All the controls were
digital, touch-sensitive pads set into flat plastic.

‘You guys didn’t waste money on soft furnishings, did you?’ Lou commented dryly as the four of them buckled up.

Behind the main cabin was the airlock. Through a pair of doors lay a tiny changing room where the crew could don the LMC suits before leaving the sub. Once the integrity of the suits had been
triple-checked, the submariners could enter the airlock, and from there emerge onto the ocean floor via a short ladder that extended from the side of the sub. When they were first shown how it all
worked, Lou and Kate couldn’t get over how similar it seemed to the famous
Apollo
lunar modules. And, as the commander had reminded them, the environment 12,600 feet down on the
ocean floor was every bit as inhospitable as the lunar surface.

Final checks complete, the main door of the sub was closed and locked from the inside. Commander Milford told the bridge of the
Armstrong
they were ready. The ship’s hold began to
fill with water, the pressure was equalized and the outer door of the
Armstrong
began to slide open. They all felt
JV1
move forward, and they were in open water directly beneath
the ship.

Lou and Kate had been on countless dives, but neither of them had gone deeper than a few hundred feet. This was going to be an entirely new experience and one any marine archaeologist would give
their eye teeth to have. Little more than twenty-four hours ago, the very concept of actually walking around the
Titanic
would have been complete fantasy to them. They could still barely
believe they were here now.

Milford kept an open-mic link with the ops control room of the
Armstrong
, sharing constantly updated telemetry figures and receiving instructions to alter course where necessary. Lou
and Kate sat in silence, mulling over the task ahead of them.

Lou glanced at Kate, the outline of her features dark against the background of illuminated control panels and swathes of neon. He knew he could never grow tired of that profile. When they were
splitting up as a couple there had been times when a part of him had wished he had never applied for the job with Kate’s team. But then he had realized that it was better to have her as a
friend than not have a relationship with her at all. In fact, for him that friendship was the most precious thing in the world.

On the screens they could all see the colours change very quickly, shifting from light blue to an inky, bubbling black. By the time they reached a depth of 300 feet, sunlight had been completely
absorbed. The only source of illumination came from
JV1
’s powerful lights. At the depth of the
Titanic,
they knew the water would be absolutely black, blacker than
interstellar space. To cope with this, the
JVs
were equipped with four 100-million candlepower lamps, which in tests piloted by Milford had been capable of lighting up large portions of
the wreck.

In this region and for many miles around, the ocean was totally devoid of all life; everything had been wiped out by the radiation still leaking from the ship.

They quickly reached a comfortable cruising speed of twenty-five knots, and at 6,000 feet, they began to slow. Derham scanned the seabed with deep-ocean sonar. Images appeared on the monitors
– a poorly defined shape about 6,500 feet beneath them. Milford pulled back the speed a little more and manoeuvred the sub to descend towards a point on the ocean floor about fifty yards
north of the ship’s bow. The final thousand feet of the descent used the inertia of the sub, and as they approached the wreck Milford applied a quick burst from a set of retro jets that
slowed the machine so it could be brought down with minimum disruption.

It really is just like bringing the lunar module in close to the landing site at the Sea of Tranquillity,
Kate found herself thinking as she watched the image change on one of the
monitors.

Two hundred feet above the ocean floor Derham slowly brought up the lights, and on the screens the outline of the century-old shipwreck began to appear as though a mist was slipping away to
reveal a hidden tangle of rusted iron and steel.

They had all seen films of the wreck, read the many books about it and the accounts of other submariners who had travelled there and launched robot probes, but seeing it first-hand was almost
overwhelming. The wreck looked utterly surreal, and as they descended and the light beams picked out more details it felt as though they had been transported to a fantasy world. The sense of
isolation so far beneath the surface was all consuming. Only Milford had gone so deep before. For Kate, Lou and Derham, this was a completely alien world.

The bow section of the
Titanic,
almost 500 feet in length and the height of a twelve-storey building, lay buried in the silt and sediment at an angle of about ten degrees. Lou knew from
his reading that the bow and stern had separated as the two sections had sunk. The bow dived at about ten knots and followed a descent at an approximate angle of forty-five degrees, hitting the
ocean floor with phenomenal force. Pushed from behind by 30,000 tons of ship, the prow had sliced into the ocean floor and scythed the seabed like a plane ploughing through a runway made of butter.
Now the hull was buried in almost sixty feet of soil at the anchors, and part of the wreck some hundred feet back from the prow had fallen backwards, distorting the original shape even more. This
once glorious expression of man’s ingenuity looked like a dead animal.

Kate glanced round at Lou and was stunned to see a tear slide down his cheek. She quickly turned away and made much of studying the monitor in front of her.

‘This is just . . . God, I don’t have the words,’ Derham said. He glanced round at Kate and then at Lou, who merely shook his head slowly, looking down.

The final hundred feet of the descent took almost five minutes as Milford used the sonar to find a spot close enough to the wreck but without disturbing it. They all felt the vehicle make
contact with the ocean floor, and for a few minutes the monitors showed the silt and sand being kicked up. Milford and Derham manipulated the controls on the panels in front of them, keeping their
eyes glued to the monitors. Then the sound of the engines quietened and stopped.

‘I think this is the weirdest moment so far,’ Kate said, her voice filled with a blend of terror and excitement. ‘Listen to that.’