Submerged

By Alton Gansky

As senior project manager for his father's construction firm, Perry Sachs has helped build top-secret military installations around the world. Now he learns a secret beyond his imagination--one on which his father's life depends.

Forty years before, Henry Sachs and a small group of scientist had studied a mysterious underground bas not built by the U. S. Government--nor any other country, as far as they experts could tell. Concerned by the unexplainable complex on American soil, authorities flooded the site to prevent its creators from every returning.

Now, Henry and members of his team are falling, one by one, to a strange, deadly illness. When Perry hears his father whisper the name "Lake Lloyd," he and his team begin a desperate search--for the exact location of Henry's secret mission, for the cause and the cure of his condition, for answers to the decades-old questions Henry has kept hidden inside.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alton Gansky
• Release date: Dec 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301689514

Alton Gansky

Alton Gansky: Alton Gansky is the author of twenty published novels and six nonfiction works. A Christy Award finalist (for A Ship Possessed) and an Angel Award winner (for Terminal Justice), he is a frequent speaker at writer's conferences and other speaking engagements. Alton brings an eclectic background to his writing: he has been a firefighter, and he spent ten years in architecture and twenty-two years in pulpit ministry. He now writes full-time from his home in southern California where he lives with his wife.

Book preview

Prologue

It was a small boat and an old one. Matthew Bear Barrett sat on the middle seat, his six-foot-four frame, 270-pound bulk pressing the hull of the rowboat deep into the cool, blue-green water. It creaked when he shifted his weight, as if the little vessel had grown weary of supporting the big man on its wood back. But it continued to hold him, just as it had for the last twenty years. Bear had every confidence that it would once again return him to the shore as it always had and as it had for his father who built it. His father was dead and long gone now, yet his memory hovered around Bear in the house he called home. A hundred mementos were there, with stories at the ready anytime Bear found himself longing for the man who had brought him up in a stern but loving fashion.

It had been Bear’s father who had taught him to fish for bass and trout at the lakes and man-made reservoirs around Nevada and California. Honest to a fault, Bear was now involved in a bit of criminal activity. This, too, he had learned from his carpenter father. Bear had adopted his father’s sense of justice, and it was unjust for the gov’ment to snatch from the hands of its citizens what was rightfully theirs. Fishing was a right protected by the Constitution. Bear had once tried to convince his father that the Constitution nowhere mentioned fishing. The logic was faulty as far as his father was concerned.

You expect me to believe that Jefferson didn’t dip a line and pull in his share o’ bluegill? Ol’ Georgie Washington wouldn’t have been much of a president if he didn’t bring home a mess o’ catfish from time to time. Bear’s father had never lost his Arkansas way of talking or thinking.

An uneducated man, he drew his degrees from the school of life; from sweating in the Las Vegas sun, building one casino after another; driving one more of the million sixteen-penny nails of his life; erecting one more wall, laying one more header. Like Bear, his father’s shoulders had been wide, his back strong, and his heart good. But such qualities were useless in the face of skin cancer left undiagnosed for too long.

Bear shook his head and drove from his mind the last painful days of his father’s life. Death had quieted his father’s agony but had done nothing for Bear. He lived with the memory of it every day.

Unlike his father, Bear didn’t swing a hammer or wield a saw. Instead, he sold houses to the hundreds of people who moved to the Las Vegas area, making it one of the fastest-growing cities in the country. It struck Bear as odd that people would choose the desolate terrain of the Mojave Desert to be home. He was ready to move any place that had more green on the ground and more cool in the air. But he was stuck in the desert with a wife who refused to move from her roots. So he lived in a two-thousand-square-foot house in Henderson, Nevada, with a wife who loved him and two teenage children who tolerated him.

All of Las Vegas and Henderson were well over three hundred miles south. Tonopah, the town where he would sleep tonight before returning home, was miles to the west. The roar of an F/A-2 Raptor sounded overhead, a reminder that Nellis Air Force Base was not far south of the lake in which Bear and his boat sat. Hearing and seeing jets was nothing new. He had been sneaking up to this lake for as long as he could remember. Nellis had over three million square miles of airspace they called their own. Seeing jets was just part of the entertainment.

Working his reel, Bear pulled his lure into the boat for what must have been the one hundredth time. No fish trailed from its treble hook. Bear didn’t much care. A day skunked while fishing was better than any day selling real estate to demanding young couples who wanted champagne on a beer budget.

He raised the tip of his rod, took aim at a promising patch of reeds, and let the lure fly. It plopped softly in the water. Bear began the ritual reeling, hoping to tempt some widemouth bass out of its hiding place. He laughed to himself. He was floating in the deep water and casting to the shallow. His father had always laughed at men who stood on shore and cast deep while men in a boat sat over the deep and cast back to shore. Now Bear was doing the same. Perhaps he would change tactics soon, leaving the bass alone and turning his sights on trout. He had Velveeta cheese to tempt the little buggers.

A soft string of popping caught his attention. The noise was familiar, yet impossible to place. He reeled the lure in and once again sent it flying. A second after it dropped in the water, Bear heard another plop. Then another.

He stopped reeling. It sounded close.

Plop, plop.

With a practiced eye he scanned the surface of the water. The rising sun bejeweled the surface, forcing Bear to squint. Were the fish feeding off the surface? That wasn’t unusual, but it was an odd time of day for it.

Plop, plop, plop, plop, plop.

What the . . . It was close all right. Bear looked over the edge of the rowboat and gazed at the bubbles that were surrounding its hull. At first it was just a few bubbles, but they were large, some the size of a grapefruit. No lake creature made bubbles that large. One bubble followed another, and soon they broke the surface in a frothy mass.

It took a moment for Bear to realize that something else was different about these bubbles. The froth they formed on the surface was brown, not white. Then he noticed the smell. The air began to reek of spoiled oranges. He pulled back, trying to gain a little distance between the foul air and his nose.

He grimaced, then sneezed. It was time to move and time to do it fast. Bear began to reel as fast as his big hands would allow. The air might stink to high heaven, but the lure on the end of his line had been his father’s favorite. He wasn’t going to risk losing it on the bottom of Lake Lloyd.

The lure rose from the depths and hit the surface, skipping along the water as Bear reeled for all he was worth. His eyes began to sting, and unbidden tears flowed. The lining of his nostrils seemed ready to combust, and his lungs were beginning to ache.

The instant the lure touched the rod’s tip, Bear set the gear down on the bottom of the boat, letting it rest against the craft’s front seat. He reached for the oars.

The bubbling was increasing, and spurts of foul water were becoming an airborne mist. Brown lake water was dropping inside the boat in tiny splatters. Bear had no idea what was going on, but he didn’t intend to stay around to figure it out.

He dipped the oars in the water and pulled. He repeated the action several times before he realized something else was wrong. He had used these oars on this boat more times than he could count, and they didn’t feel right. They weren’t sitting in the water the way they always did. His weight pushed the boat lower than most people found comfortable, but he had become accustomed to it. Now, however, the boat was riding deeper than he had ever seen and much more than when he had rowed out on the lake two hours earlier.

Again he dug the oars into water that boiled like a witch’s brew in an iron cauldron. They slipped through the surface as if it weren’t there, as if Bear were rowing in the air. He peered over the edge and saw that the brown froth was now a mottled mix of brown and black.

The smell was putrid. Bear gagged and fought down the rising gorge in his belly. A dead rainbow trout rose to the surface, its eyes curtained in cataract white. Another fish followed, this time a large catfish. He looked to the other side, and more fish percolated to the top. A couple twitched in death throes.

This time Bear rowed with an urgency fired by fear. His first desire was to move from the rancid air. Now he knew something was very, very wrong. What killed the fish might just kill him. He had no desire to spend his last moments alive floating in a private lake where his body might never be found.

He pulled hard. The boat moved a foot but no more. He pulled the rough handles of the oars again and again but made little headway. The sight over the stern of the boat sent ice water coursing through his veins. What had begun as a few bubbles, then a stream, had extended out from his location in a wide disk of putrid, boiling, churning froth.

Bear had never been a spiritual man and couldn’t recall ever having prayed. Until now. He yanked at the oars in a panic, replacing the rhythmic stroking he’d learned as a boy with terror-filled jerks. He coughed and tasted copper. His mouth was bleeding. Something trickled from his nose, but he was too busy rowing to wipe it away. He knew what it was. He’d had enough bloody noses in his youth to be certain.

Stroke. Pull. Yank.

He looked to the side and saw his worst fear—the water was just an inch below the gunwales. To dip the distal end of the oar in the water, Bear had to level them until they were almost horizontal. He was sinking. His heart was pounding without regularity. It skipped. It paused. It fluttered. The exertion demanded more air, but every breath made Bear more sick and weak.

He was sinking. The cascade of bubbles eroded the surface tension and water density. A boat could float in water but not on something as thin as soapsuds.

Bear pulled at the oars as the first trickle of water crawled over the edge of the boat and poured into its bottom, settling at his tennis-shoe-clad feet.

Reason floated away from Bear’s mind like the bubbles floated to the surface. He pulled on the oars a few more times but knew he was making no progress. When the water that was invading the boat grew from trickle to cascade, carrying several dead fish with it, Bear did a desperate thing. He jumped into the water and tried to swim through the stew.

The water that could not hold his boat could not hold him. Dead fish might cling to such a nebulous surface; a man of Bear’s bulk stood no chance. He flailed at the water, grasping for a shore that was still a hundred yards away—a shore that might as well have been a hundred miles distant.

He slipped beneath the surface but kicked his way back up for another breath. Something was wrong with his eyes; the shore he had seen clearly seconds before now seemed draped in milky white. He thought of the first dead fish with its white eyes.

Against his will, contrary to his desperate fear, water entered his nose and poured into his mouth. He retched and doubled over.

A roar filled his ears, and he squinted through hazy eyes to see another fighter jet shoot overhead. He waved at it. He reached for it. He knew that the pilot was too high and moving too fast to see him.

Matthew Bear Barrett slipped beneath the surface of the private lake he had loved.

Chapter1

They don’t have a power tool for this?

Perry Sachs looked at his friend Jack Dyson and laughed. Is that your solution to everything—power tools?

Since you put it that way—yes. Jack hunched over a wide board and pushed a flat piece of metal along its surface. For a man as tall and as broad as Jack, bending over for extended of periods could be painful. He pushed the scraper forward again, and the burr on the edge of the rectangular piece of metal peeled up shreds of wood and glue.

Woodworking is about more than power tools, Perry said. It’s about crafting something that will live long after you’re gone; it’s about pouring yourself into the work, feeling the wood beneath your fingers, smelling the unique aroma of the wood as you sand and scrape. Woodworking is about inserting yourself into the object you make.

Yeah, very poetic. You got anything nice to say about my aching back?

Perry drew a dusty arm across his forehead, pushing back black hair that had just begun sporting some gray, diverting sweat from his blue eyes. It was a warm August day in Seattle, warmer than most residents cared for. He finished seating a long plank of wood in the lathe. He would have to put the turning off just a little longer.

Let me show you. Perry walked to the wide assembly table, where Jack was struggling with his task. Since we milled the wood ourselves, we’re left with machine marks. Add to that the glue that squeezed out when we built up the tabletop. All of that has to be removed before we can get down to the serious task of sanding.

Jack relinquished the scraper, his black face a mask of innocence. Teach me, oh wise one.

Perry always felt tiny next to his friend who was large enough to make linebackers look at him twice. Perry was trim and six-foot-two, not small by any means, but size was relative. Jack cast a wide shadow. He was also one of the brightest men Perry had ever met. He was not a dumb jock. In fact, he wasn’t a jock at all. Despite his size, he had only a passing interest in sports and preferred the Discovery Channel to a football game.

Watch and learn. Put just a slight bend in the scraper, then push it along the grain. Don’t dig the edges into the wood’s surface. Quality hardwood is expensive. With practiced hands, Perry pushed the scraper over the rough surface, and the Honduras rosewood yielded to him. He repeated the action, loving every minute of it.

Perry was in one of his favorite places. When not working in some far-off corner of the world for his father’s firm, Sachs Engineering, he spent as much time as possible in his wood shop. This shop was new. Six months ago, he had bought a home with a great view of Lake Washington, but the view was secondary. The previous owner had added a shop to the side of the house to work on his car collection. The shop was large enough to accommodate the man’s vintage cars. Perry had no interest in classic automobiles, but he did need a large place for his hobby of furniture making.

Jack had helped him fix up the house and move in. As a reward, Perry promised to make Jack’s mother a new dining room table. Jack volunteered to help. So began the lessons.

Perry stroked the wood in smooth, rhythmic motions, and his mind began to wander. The woodshop was where his best ideas germinated.

He stopped and looked at Jack. This is a trick, isn’t it?

Trick? Me, trick you? Jack struggled to fend off an insistent smile. Why, you’re far too clever to fall for a trick from a simpleminded man like me.

MIT doesn’t give civil engineering degrees to simpleminded men.

Perry and Jack had attended MIT together. Perry earned a degree in architecture. It was his love for structure that made him excel at his work and also gave him a love for smaller structures like dining room tables.

The phone began to ring. Jack jumped a foot. Whoa! Is that thing always that loud?

It’s hard to hear a phone when a table saw is running. Here, get back to work, or I’ll tell your mother that you held up the delivery of her table. And remember, you asked to help. Perry handed the scraper back to Jack and moved to a phone mounted on the wall near one of the workbenches. Hello. He could hear Jack mumbling and the soft scratching of metal against wood.

Perry, it’s Mom.

Hi, Mom. You should be here. I got Jack to do some meaningful work.

Perry . . .

Do you and Dad want to do dinner tonight? My treat. We could go for steaks or fish if you like.

Perry, it’s your father.

Perry’s heart stumbled to a stop, and his stomach pulled into a knot.

They’ve taken him to the hospital in an ambulance.

Perry could hear tears in her voice. When? Where are you? What happened?

The scraping stopped, and Perry turned to Jack. The big man had picked up the urgency in Perry’s voice.

They wouldn’t let me ride in the ambulance. They took him to Seattle Medical Arts Hospital. He just collapsed. I was cleaning up after lunch and . . . oh, Perry, his eyes—his eyes.

I’m coming for you, Mom. You stay right there. Perry looked at Jack. They’re taking my father to the hospital.

Jack approached, shaking his head. You go to the hospital. I’ll get your mom.

Jack tried to take the phone from Perry. He was reluctant to release it, as if holding on to the receiver was the same as holding his mother.

Go, pal, Jack urged. I’ll lock up and get your mother. Go. Get out of here. And don’t drive stupid. One Sachs man in the hospital is enough.

Perry Sachs, forty-year-old architect and engineer, fought back tears as he ran for his car.

The irony wasn’t wasted on Perry as he pulled his black BMW 760Li sedan into the parking structure of Seattle Medical Arts Hospital—Sachs Engineering had provided structural consultations on the hospital and parking structure. Now the man responsible for the work was somewhere inside the walls he helped design.

Perry yanked the steering wheel to the right and pressed the gas pedal. He reminded himself that speeding through a parking structure was unwise and illogical. He didn’t want to be wise or logical; still, he reigned in his urge and focused on finding a parking place. The structure was packed. In the past Perry would find the most distant parking place, believing that it provided him some exercise and a little extra protection for a car he had possessed for a mere three months. This time he took the first spot he found.

With head down, his pace just a stride less than a trot, Perry walked toward the hospital. The image of his father came to mind: gray hair combed back in easy waves; sun-browned face that wore new wrinkles well; and a mouth that preferred smiling. Two inches shorter than Perry’s six-foot-two, Henry Sachs was still broad in the shoulders and strong in the back. Sixty-three years of life had bleached the color from his hair and lined his face but had not been able to touch his spirit, resolve, or drive.

The parking structure gave way to an open, planted courtyard. Trees, bushes, and flowering plants reached out from their planters as if driven to touch each passerby. Perry knew the hospital well, not because he had worked on it—he had been absorbed in another project overseas—but because he came here every year for a physical. All executives of Sachs Engineering were required to take annual physicals paid for by the company. As the vice president of the firm and the director of field operations, Perry fell into that category.

He marched through glass doors that opened as he approached and entered the realm of the sick. The smell of antiseptic cleansers assaulted his nose. He passed the main lobby and turned left down a wide, pale green corridor. His sneakers squeaked on the polished floor. Plastic engraved signs told what lay behind each door. Perry ignored them and headed for the area where he was certain his father would be—the emergency room.

Uncounted steps later, he pushed through a pair of doors and entered another waiting room. Light blue paint dressed these walls, and pastoral landscapes hung unnoticed by a dozen people waiting their turn to see the ER docs. Some slumped in chairs, their eyes closed, fighting off whatever pain or discomfort had moved them from their homes or jobs to come here. A few watched a small television mounted high on one wall. It was Saturday, and some home improvement show was on.

To Perry’s right was a window with a view to another room. The room was barely larger than a closet and seated inside, behind the pane of glass, was a young man with a shaved head and a patch of beard on the end of his chin. He appeared bored. A sign above the window read: Triage Nurse. A round hole in the glass allowed conversation between attendant and patient.

Perry approached. My name is Perry Sachs. My father was brought in by ambulance.

The young man looked up. He had weary brown eyes and an expressionless face. Pain and illness and worried family members no longer affected him. Patient’s name.

Henry Sachs. He would have arrived within the last twenty minutes—

One moment, please. The young man turned to his computer and fingered a few keystrokes. A second later he shook his head. I don’t show him in the computer.

Not here? Had he heard his mother wrong? Had the ambulance not arrived yet? That didn’t seem possible. That can’t be. Henry Sachs—S-A-C-H-S.

He’s not in the computer.

Perry noticed the man was chewing gum. For some reason that irritated him.

Are you sure you have the right hospital? Sometimes when people panic they get confused.

Panic? Perry resisted the urge to tell the pup that in the last year and a half he had been lowered through two miles of Antarctic ice and left afloat in an under-ice lake or that a year ago he had almost been buried alive in the Tehachapi mountains of California. There had been no panic then, and there was none now. Perry leaned closer to the opening in the glass window. Perhaps you’re too young or inexperienced to distinguish between a panicked man and determined one. Your computer is wrong, so I would like to suggest that you haul your skinny fanny out of that squeaky chair and walk back to the ER and check for yourself. And when you find my father, you will tell his doctors that Henry Sachs’s family is in the waiting room.

The man stopped chewing. Anger flared in the male nurse’s eye but evaporated a second later. Without a word, he rose and left the security of the cubicle.

An eternity of seconds chugged by before the nurse returned. His attitude had softened, and some of the color had drained from his face. He cleared his throat. A nurse was just posting your father’s admittance into the computer. That’s why I couldn’t find him. I, um, I told the doctors you were here. I can’t let you back there. It’s against hospital policy, but the doctor said he would be out to talk to you just as soon as he can.

Perry had expected this. There was nothing to do now but wait and pray. He was used to doing both. He started to turn away but stopped. We okay?

Yeah, the young man said. We’re okay. I had it coming. It was clear he was upset.

Perry nodded. Thank you. He then moved to the corner formed where corridor met lobby and leaned against the wall. He crossed his arms and bowed his head, pushing back emotions that threatened to burst free with Krakatoan intensity. Minutes oozed by at glacial speeds. Seconds seemed like hours and minutes like days. Perry tried to lose himself in prayer for his father, but intercession was crowded out by memories of Little League games with his father in the stands telling him to choke up on the bat; of birthday parties; of trips taken overseas while he was still a boy; of hearing his father tell him that hard work built character as well as muscles.

Did recollections count as prayer? He hoped so.

Perry?

He glanced up and saw the normally smiling face of Jack drawn tight with concern. Next to him was Perry’s mother. Jack had his big arm around her shoulders. His eyes met hers, and silent words were uttered through their gaze.

Anna Sachs was a stout woman with dark hair that gray had avoided and blue eyes that could dance the tango when joy filled her heart. Today her eyes didn’t dance. Instead, they radiated fear like an oven pours out heat. Oh, Perry.

She stepped to him, and he took her in his arms. He said nothing. Their communication was beyond the scope of words. They spoke the language of souls. Anna—as strong a woman as Perry had ever met—crumbled into tears, and her tears became

Reviews for Submerged

[msh09_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Love, love, love Gansky's Perry Sachs series. A touch of sci-fi with great characters and mystery. In #3, Perry must solve the mystery behind his father's sudden illness that is bringing him close to death. He uncovers a mysterious and unexplainable location that causes many wonderings. I highly recommend the entire Perry Sachs series. Gansky weaves Christian faith through his fun and interesting characters as they deal with the various predicaments they find themselves in. I love their faith and their raport with each other.