Juan gathered his energy, channeled it, and pushed with everything he had. Mike had done just enough so that the plate that had kept him pinned shifted and ground against the others but didn’t jam up. He heaved again and finally dragged himself out of the pile.

Mike was there with a hand to steady him.

“I owe you.” Juan meant it to sound solemn, but the helium lessened the sense of import. “Now, let’s get out of here.”

The two men swam back up to the main deck and finned down the corridor. They burst out of the superstructure to see that Eddie had used the manipulators to tear apart more of the old framework and had the submersible practically parked on the deck.

Mike reached the air lock door first and spun open the wheel lock. The space was tight—a phone booth, really—and he and Cabrillo would need to stay in it for quite some time. They’d been at depth long enough to need almost two hours to decompress. The cramped space would act as a decompression chamber once they reached the surface, but they would need the Oregon supplying power since the Nomad’s batteries would be left behind.

Getting away from the wreck was only the first part of their ordeal. If they didn’t link up with the Oregon in time, both divers would run out of trimix, and the Nomad had no internal supplies of the gas. To make matters worse, Juan and Mike had to be decompressed before Eddie could leave the sub via the air lock.

Trono dove headfirst through the hatch and disappeared inside. Juan waited a beat, letting his dive partner get settled, before he swam into the air lock chamber. His feet were on Mike’s tanks and his head was still outside the sub when he felt a vibration through the water. He knew immediately what it was and ducked at the last second.

He managed to get the hatch closed but not fully secured when the torpedo slammed into the old mine tender up near her bow. Nearly a thousand pounds of high explosives detonated in a blast of energy that swept through the uncompressible water and pummeled the mini-sub so that she crashed into the remains of the metal framework. Steel tore and shrieked. The ship’s superstructure was peeled back and collapsed at the same time.

Inside the air lock, the Chairman and Mike Trono were so tightly wedged that neither man was injured but both were severely disoriented as the sub tumbled end over end. Yet even before they had settled, Juan was working to secure the hatch’s lock. His head rang with the concussive force of the explosion, and his hands felt leaden, but he managed to spin the lock down, sealing the two of them in the tight chamber.

“Eddie, emergency blow.”