Without remorse - Tom Clancy [181]
'Look, whatever you want to know, okay ...' Kelly heard over the intercom.
'I thought you'd see things my way.' He yanked the rope on the motor, starting the compressor. Kelly made sure that the simple spigot valve next to the pressure gauges was tightly shut. Then he opened the pressurization valve, venting air from the compressor to the chamber, and watched the needles rotate slowly clockwise.
'You know how to swim?' Kelly asked, watching his face.
Billy's head jerked with alarm. 'What - look, please, don't drown me, okay?'
'That's not going to happen. So, can you swim?'
'Yeah, sure.'
'Ever do any skin diving?' Kelly asked next.
'No, no, I haven't,' replied a very confused drug distributor.
'Okay, well, you're going to learn what it's like. You should yawn and work your ears, like, to get used to the pressure,' Kelly told him, watching the 'depth' gauge pass thirty feet.
'Look, why don't you just ask your fucking questions, okay?'
Kelly switched the intercom off. There was just too much fear in the voice. Kelly didn't really like hurting people all that much, and he was worried about developing sympathy for Billy. He steadied the gauge at one hundred feet, closing off the pressurization valve but leaving the motor running. While Billy adjusted to the pressure, Kelly found a hose which he attached to the motor's exhaust pipe. This he extended outside to dump the carbon monoxide into the atmosphere. It would be a time-consuming process, just waiting for things to happen. Kelly was going on memory, and that was worrisome. There was a useful but rather rough instruction table on the side of the chamber, the bottom line of which commanded reference to a certain diving manual which Kelly did not' have. He'd done very little deep diving of late, and the only one that had really concerned him had been a team effort, the oil rig down in the Gulf. Kelly spent an hour tidying things up around the machine shop, cultivating his memories and his rage before coming back to his fold-down seat.
'How are you feeling?'
'Look, okay, all right?' Rather a nervous voice, actually.
'Ready to answer some questions?'
'Anything, okay? Just let me outa here!'
'Okay, good.' Kelly lifted a clipboard. 'Have you ever been arrested, Billy?'
'No.' A littlе pride in that one, Kelly noted. Good.
'Been in the service?'
'No.' Such a stupid question.
'So you've never been in jail, never been fingerprinted, nothing like that?'
'Never.' The head shook inside the window.
'How do I know you're telling the truth?'
'I am, man! I am!'
'Yeah, you probably are, but I have to make sure, okay?' Kelly reached with his left hand and twisted the spigot valve. Air hissed loudly out of the chamber while he watched the pressure gauges.
Billy didn't know what to expect, and it all came as a disagreeable surprise. In the preceding hour, he had been surrounded by four times the normal amount of air for the space he was in. His body had adapted to that. The air taken in through his lungs, also pressurized, had found its way into his bloodstream, and now his entire body was at 58.8 pounds per square inch of ambient pressure. Various gas bubbles, mainly nitrogen, were dissolved into his bloodstream, and when Kelly bled the air out of the chamber, those bubbles started to expand. Tissues around the bubbles resisted the force, but not well, and almost at once cell walls started first to stretch, and then, in some cases, to rupture. The pain started in his extremities, first as a dull but widespread ache and rapidly evolving into