Rawl. Everybody on a dive crew was called something for short. Zak liked to joke that they all might as well be baseball players. Andrew Rawlings was his partner and the man in the diving bell. After a month in storage breathing heliox instead of normal air, they both sounded like ducks in some old cartoon. In Rawl’s case, a duck with a noticeable Southern twang. His hometown was Bartlett, Tennessee, and he still lived there between gigs.

Zak continued to descend on his umbilicals. The bell—known as Beebe after the famed inventor of the bathyscaphe—hung from a cable about three hundred feet closer to the surface. As it had neared its working depth minutes ago, he’d exited the floor hatch, taken a short ride on the guide weight beneath it, then jumped clear and dropped toward the seabed.

Now he could no longer see its egg-shaped contours. He was descending through a pitch-black void, with only the faint, smeary glow of Beebe’s exterior lights above and the blue ghosts flitting around him. Bursts of luminescence emitted by various deep-sea creatures, they were like living fireworks, sparking and curling and braiding out in every direction. They had no pattern, no predictability. Without visual landmarks for reference, it was impossible to even guess their distance from him. The blue ghosts could be ten feet away or a hundred. A hundred or a thousand. They were hypnotic, beautiful and very dangerous if he let them become distractions.

He shot a quick glance down at the bottom. He had two head mounts: a high-intensity LED underwater lamp on one side of his hat, and a digital video camera on the other. Both were powered by his umbilical lines and would run without interruption throughout the dive. The digicam feed was streaming up to Rawl and the support crew on the Stalwart’s deck, so they could inspect the site in real time.

Below Zak, clear in the light beaming from his helmet, was the thirty-foot-wide trench Stalwart’s sea tractor had recently plowed into the sea bottom. The trench had yet to be backfilled by the tide, leaving its excavated center—where the cable was buried—lower than its margins.

“I’m right above the cable trench,” he said. “Eyes wide open.”

He wasn’t expecting any problems. The site had been chosen for its geological stability. There were no underwater canyons, no slopes, no reefs or fault lines. Just mud and gravel, the terrain a flat, level expanse running off toward the Spratly Islands... China’s Dangerous Ground. So named because that was where the aquatic terrain got rough.

Zak descended a little further. His augmented reality HUD said he was at exactly two hundred seventy-three meters—almost nine hundred feet. Which put him just west of the exposed cable connection and about a mile upstream from the landing station at Palawan.