The Chamber at Three Hundred
A Saturation Diving Thriller

About this book:

Three hundred meters down, the air is thick enough to drink. In a steel chamber eight feet wide, four men live under thirty atmospheres of helium-oxygen mix, their voices stripped to chipmunk squeaks, their joints grinding with the "helium shakes," their taste buds deadened to warm lard and wet cardboard. They have twenty-eight days before they can see the sun again. But the pipeline they're sent to repair didn't just rupture—it was cut clean across. And the new man, Thorne, doesn't tremble, doesn't joke, doesn't sleep. He takes notes.

Keith Vance has spent twenty-two years in saturation. He knows the physics: one wrong gas mix, one spark in thirty bars of pressure, one failed umbilical on the seabed, and they all become pink froth in seconds. He knows the politics: oil companies count share prices while divers count decompression days. What he doesn't know is why the company man brought his own ultrasonic scanner in a Pelican case handcuffed to his wrist—or why the fracture pattern looks less like metal fatigue and more like a message.

As the *Aegir Discoverer* fights North Sea swells sixty feet above them, something is moving in the dark water three hundred meters down. The bell drops at eighteen hundred hours. The manifold waits. And inside the chamber, the saboteur has already locked the door from the inside.