Bud goes to him. Gets up close to his face. Sees that he's not okay, he's hyperventilating. Fighting nausea. Bud grabs him by the shoulders. Bud decides to take him back, but Jammer assures him he is okay, he just can't go any further. Bud sees that the big diver's breathing has stabilized. Bud instructs him to stay there and stay in voice contact. Bud hands him a life line rope and to tug twice if he has any problems. Bud moves off through the center aisle of the gallery swimming between the huge cylinders.
Bud pays out the lifeline as he goes. He negotiates his way through the tangle of wreckage near the far end of the missile compartment. Jammer doesn't seem to be as calm as he let on. A hundred feet away, Jammer loses sight of Bud's dive-lights. Meanwhile, Coffey has went alone to the Communications Room. He inserts the on the wall safe and opens it. He removes a plastic binder... on the cover it reads, CRYPTO, US NAVY, USS MONTANA, SSSN 741.
Bud continues searching the missile compartment, calling back to Jammer on com to make sure he is okay. He starts to get nervous. Suddenly Jammer's lights begin to dim, flickering lower and lower. They become little orange candles, the filament barely glowing. The darkness closes in. Jammer calls out, but Bud doesn't reply. Panic time. He grabs the safety line and pulls twice. Hard. It is snagged on a sharp metal edge ten feet from him. Jammer smacks the side of his helmet. Nothing... just static.
Jammer pulls twice more on the rope, harder. The line severs. Jammer stares at the frayed end floating toward him. His eyes bug. He looks all around in the darkness. Can't see Bud. Can't decide what to do. We can see hysteria revving up inside him like a flywheel. Then he becomes aware of a faint radiance flickering over the walls. It is a cold and ethereal light, unlike the warm-white of their dive lights. It grows brighter. He turns slowly toward it.
The glow is moving beneath the steel grill of the deck, sending shafts of cold light flickering upward hypnotically, coming toward him. Jammer stares into the radiant source. Guess what, Jammer? It's not Bud. In the brightest center of the glow, something is moving, a figure casting strange inhuman shadow across the walls. Jammer blinks against the glare, his face registering total, outright astonishment melting into terror. The glare pulses subtly, hypnotically. The shifting shadow falls across Jammer.
He finally snaps out of his fixity... Screaming and gulping air he spins away and starts clawing hand over hand through the treacherous wreckage. He struggles, totally out of control... the big man reduced to a blind panic. Jammer heaves forward with all his adrenalized strength. He launches like a torpedo... slamming his backpack full force into the top sill of the hatchway.
His tri-mix regulator takes the full brunt of the impact. We see Bud swimming furiously back toward Jammer's position. The strange radiance is gone. He reaches Jammer only to find him thrashing violently in place. A seizure. Bud grapples with him. Catfish, Sonny, and Finler arrive from the corridor a moment later.
They leap into the fray. Jammer is convulsing, it's his mixture, too much oxygen. They're all yelling at once, grappling with the big man, struggling with the valves on his breathing gear. They finally get it adjusted. Jammer's convulsion ends. He goes limp. They drag Jammer's slack form into the corridor, hauling their way rapidly back along the lifeline.
In Cab One, Lindsey circles the hull, documenting, photographing. Her strobes sear the darkness, give glimpses of the dead leviathan's form as her tiny submersible circles it like a bee. Lindsey is approaching the monolith of the sail, maneuvering to clear the horizontal diving plane.
Then her lights go dim and her thrusters loose power. Suddenly a bright corona breaks around the bulk of the sail and something appears right in front of her, a glowing object moving like a bat out of hell right at her! It is slightly smaller than submersible and we only get a glimpse.
What we think we see in the diffuse glow is a translucent ovoid, open at the front with a spinning vortex of light inside... like some hallucinatory jet engine. She looks through the aft viewport in time to see the object racing away in a broad arc. It pulls a high-G turn and dives straight down.
We see the object zip behind Flatbed. One Night can't see it. The thing spirals down into the darkness like a hit-and-run drunk, diving along the wall into the abyss until it is lost to view. Her power comes back up., Lindsey is excited, amazed... dazed. Suddenly Bud's voice blares out over the open frequency. He's calling to meet him at Flatbed, a diver emergency. She has a hard time focusing on what he's saying, but finally responds she is on her way.
Later, in the Deepcore Infirmary. Jammer is unconscious on a folding cot set up in the tiny cubicle of the infirmary. Monk, who is cross-trained as a medic as well as a demolitions man, has hung an IV of something. Bud and others are in the room. Monk explain his coma could last hours or days. Bud, torn by guilt, gazes at the big man lying pathetically on the cot.
The maintenance room doubles as a camera workstation. An adjoining head serves as darkroom. Lindsey is glumly reassembling Cab One's camera housings. Bud asks if she got any images of what she saw, on camera. She didn't, and she doesn't want to talk about it. Coffey calls it a Russian submersible, she's fine with that. But Bud presses her to talk. Lindsey is wrestling with a feeling which is somehow also certain knowledge. She doesn't know what it was or what Jammer saw.
In the Console Module, the SEALs, minus Monk, are all gathered inside, debriefing with DeMarco via closed-circuit video. Coffey tells the DeMarco they didn't see it, it could have been a Russian bogey. DeMarco informs Coffey that two Russian attack subs have been tracked within fifty miles of them... and now they don't know what they are.
DeMarco orders Coffey to go to Phase Two. Wilhite and Schoenick glance uneasily at each other. Coffey is silent. He is vibrating with tension... his fists clenched to prevent the shaking. He is wrestling with the moment, knowing it is, in a way, a point of no return. Coffey takes a deep breath. Lets it out. Phase Two is clearly a big deal.
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