The next day Vlade paid a visit to his friend Rosario O’Hara, one of the old veterans of the city’s subway squad. In the years when Vlade had worked for her they had done all the usual subway work, which in those years included extending their operational reach into the drowned parts of the subway, slow work that mostly consisted of using the train tubes as giant water-filled utilidors, and laying within them things like conduit pipe for power lines, sewage pipes, tracks for robotic supply submersible capsules, comm cables, and so on, all the while keeping passage in them clear for maintenance access by city divers. The old Metropolitan Transit Authority and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had long ago split up the old jurisdictions and responsibilities, but not in any sane way, and one thing happening in the sixty percent of the subway system that was underwater was an ongoing power struggle between the successors to the two agencies, which also created zones of dispute and uncertainty in which more informal alliances between working teams could be created. Thus Vlade had spent ten years of his youth working for the LMMTA, and had strung a million miles of submersible line during that time, among other more interesting chores. All that work had been done in teams, and there was enough danger involved to make the teams like family for the time they were working together; and that feeling persisted long after the work was done.
So he felt safe in calling on Rosario and asking her to meet on a taqueria raft outside the Port Authority’s building on the Hudson, where they could talk as they ate, sitting at the edge of the raft.
“Have you heard of the Cypress station being put to use lately? Anyone blowing it out and squatting down there?”
“Not that I’ve heard. Why do you ask?”
“Well, I was up there with some friends the other day, and their infrared caught a hot spot on the bottom, and it seemed to be coming from out of the Cypress hole, and I thought it might be heat coming up from that stairwell.”
It was a common signal; most of the drowned subway stations lofted plumes of heat up from the underworld. Submarine New York was a busy place. “I don’t think there’s anything going on there,” Rosario said. “It was industrial around there, as I recall. Parking lots for cars, containers, buses, pallets. Also that row of oil tanks on the old shore.”
“That’s what I thought. But this was a hot spot. I’ve got a feeling that something might be going on down there.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. There’s some people from my building missing, and some sabotage of the building too, and it’s made me spooky. Anyway I’d like to take a look. And I think it’s tricky enough I need to buddy-dive it.”
Rosario nodded. “Okay. Trina Dobson and Jim Fritsche okay with you?”
“Of course. Just who I was hoping for.”
“I’ll see when they’re available. How about you?”
“I can get free when they can.”
The group convened later that week at Eighty-sixth, a station on the number 6 line up to Pelham. Vlade had been worried about surveillance of the site, and Rosario had suggested they come at it from the side, as they might have done if it were one of their old work projects in the tunnels. Vlade liked that, and Trina and Jim did too; clearly they were all happy to have an excuse to do the stupid thing again. No one dove the tunnels for fun, but it was fun.
Eighty-sixth was one of the few stations on the 6 line to remain aboveground, and it gave them a place to gear up and check each other’s suits. Vlade and Jim had worked together in the old days, and Vlade knew Jim was a great diver; it was good to see him again. Trina was Rosario’s old partner. When they were ready, they clomped down the stairs and dove down to tube level, then got themselves arranged on the sides of a rail sled and sent it humming north.
Rail sleds moved through the black water of the tunnels much more slowly than the subway trains used to, but they were still much faster than people could have swum. Rosario had all the codes and the right to log on and take a ride. They had to make sure their time at this depth was short, in order to avoid having to decompress when they came up. So being able to catch a ride like this was good.
It was an eerie journey, a kind of submarine dream of an old subway ride, with all of them hanging on to the sled and exposed to the hard push of black water. They looked around in different directions and their headlamp beams fenced as they struck the tiled walls of the stations they passed through, making the walls gleam. The water in the tubes was clearer than in the rivers, and their lights hit the walls between stations and clarified the cylinder shape they were moving through. A weird sight, no matter how many times you saw it.
In half an hour the sled pulled them under the Harlem River and the Bronx Kill. Rosario stopped it in the Cypress Avenue station, and cautiously they swam up the black depths of the stairwell, the water getting murkier as they ascended.
There in the big room just under the old street level, they saw it: a shipping container, dark with crud, scarred by the lighter marks of ropes and hoist belts recently applied to its sides. It had been dropped down one of the holes that led up to the street level of old.
Vlade swam toward the container and scoped it with an infrared scope they had brought along for this purpose. Yes, it was hot. When he got close he stopped kicking and used his hands to wave himself to a stop. At one end of the container was an assemblage they all recognized, an inflatable airlock and tube staircase, covering the end of the container and standing out in the mucky surroundings because it was clean. These assemblages consisted of tubes attached to an adhesive airlock door. When the tube’s walls and its interior stairs were inflated, it would rise to the surface at about a forty-five-degree angle, where it could be opened at the top and any water inside pumped out, thus providing a dry descent to the airlock door, which could be glued to any kind of opening. A boat or dock on the surface could then grab the free end of the tube stairs and haul it up, and by using the stairs inside the tube, make a dry entry to whatever the bottom end of the tube was glued to. A standard piece of equipment all over the harbor, very familiar to them.
Rosario swam up to Vlade and spoke through their suits’ walkie-talkie system. “Check it out, there’s an air tank on the top, next to the airlock. Water units, air and sewage, the whole shebang.”
“Yep.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I’m going to knock on the side and see if anyone knocks back. If that happens I want to call the police, and stay here on guard until they get here.”
“We should have brought our water pistols.”
“We did,” Jim and Trina said, pointing to their swim bags.