Book Review – James Rollins’s “Deep Fathom”

Today I finished reading Deep Fathom, a seafaring story by author James Rollins that takes readers to the bottom of the ocean and the brink of a global apocalypse.

First published in 2001, Deep Fathom begins on a day of a total solar eclipse.  A businesswoman in San Francisco witnesses the eclipse while in the city, a hiker escorting tourists up a glacier experiences the eclipse on an island just off the coast of Alaska, and the President of the United States of America witnesses the eclipse on the island of Guam while trying to negotiate a new trade deal with the Chinese.

And then disaster strikes.

During the moment of the total eclipse of the sun, a tremendous series of earthquakes and volcano eruptions occurs all along the Pacific Ocean’s “Ring of Fire.”  San Francisco is completely destroyed in an earthquake, the Aleutian Islands off the coast of Alaska are sunk back into the Pacific Ocean, and Guam experiences a violent earthquake.  President Bishop is quickly ordered onto Air Force One for an immediate take-off and evacuation from the island.  However, a short while later into the flight, Air Force One crashes into the Pacific Ocean, killing everybody on board.

Meanwhile, ex-Navy SEAL Jack Kirkland is in the Nautilus 2000, a brand new one-man submersible capable of diving to incredible depths in the world’s oceans.  His objective on this diving mission is the Kochi Maru, a Japanese freighter that was lost during World War 2.  Specifically, it’s a Japanese freighter that’s rumored to be packed with gold bars.  Jack is a salvage expert and he’s hunting for a way to continue to finance his operation.

During his later years in the Navy, Jack Kirkland was temporarily transferred to NASA for a joint military-civilian crew for an upcoming Space Shuttle mission.  While training at NASA, Jack met Jennifer Spangler, and the two of them quickly fell in love.  They were both members of the crew for the flight with Space Shuttle Atlantis, and while in space he proposed to her.  The mission was botched when the crew tried to launch a satellite out of the shuttle’s cargo bay.  There was a malfunction with the satellite and it went off course, damaging part of the shuttle.  When Atlantis re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere, the damaged ship caught on fire and crashed to the ground.  Jack was blown out of an opening and his parachute activated, but everybody else on board the shuttle was killed, including his fiancée, Jennifer.

After recovering from the doomed shuttle flight, there was a major lawsuit against one of the companies and Jack was rewarded with a generous amount of money.  He left the Navy and used his settlement to purchase a ship named the Deep Fathom.  He spent the rest of his money upgrading the ship’s equipment, purchasing a submersible to use for exploration and salvage missions, and he hired a crew to sail with him.  That’s how Jack ended up in the Pacific Ocean and hunting for the lost Japanese freighter.

Jack is able to locate the remains of the Kochi Maru, and he locates the cargo hold with the gold bars.  There’s trouble though as sudden magma activity is occurring in that region of the Pacific, and it’s heading straight towards the Kochi Maru.  Jack is able to grab two gold bars with his submersible’s manipulator arms, and he barely escapes as an underwater volcano literally develops and opens up directly underneath him.  It’s a violent ride back to the surface but Jack and the Nautilus 2000 both survive.  Unfortunately, the freighter and its cargo are destroyed, and the two gold bars that Jack managed to grab aren’t going to pay that many of his bills.

That’s when Jack’s crew receives a message from the U.S. Navy.  It turns out that Jack and his ship are near an important location, and that his assistance is greatly required.

Meanwhile, off the coast of Okinawa, Japan, two new islands were formed after the violent earthquake that struck during the solar eclipse.  Technically these aren’t new islands as they are actually structures that belonged to an ancient civilization.  These pyramids have been sitting on the bottom of the ocean and only been rumored to exist until this point in time.  The earthquake thrust them upwards and they rose high enough to be above water.

The discovery of the ancient pyramids draws the attention of Dr. Karen Grace, a professor visiting from Canada, and her friend, Dr. Miyuki Nakano, a Japanese professor from nearby Ryukyu University.  They hire charter a boat and verify that the pyramids are there off the coast of Okinawa.  The women then return the next day in a small boat and actually enter one of the pyramids.  Their actions are noticed by a few armed men, and the men try to attack and kill the two women.  They fail when the women discover a secret passage that leads further into the pyramid.  They follow a tunnel underground, find a passage to the next pyramid, and then climb it and are rescued by the local authorities.  While they were inside of the underground tunnel, they discovered a crystal star with strange powers.  How it works and where it came from remains a mystery.

Out in the Pacific Ocean, the Deep Fathom joins a U.S. task force and Jack Kirkland meets with Admiral Houston, an old colleague from his previous days in the Navy.  It turns out that the Navy needs Jack’s help to conduct a salvage mission on Air Force One.  They know where the airplane sank.  They also know that there are no survivors.  What the Navy needs Jack to do is to dive to the crash site and recover the aircraft’s “black boxes” so that the government can try to figure out what happened.  The American people are also going to want answers regarding the death of President Bishop.

Jack takes the Nautilus 2000 and dives to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.  He has a close encounter with a giant squid, he locates a mysterious crystal pillar on the bottom of the ocean, and he locates the wreckage of Air Force One.  When Jack floats close to the pillar, he notices that it has markings on it, like an ancient civilization wrote a message on it.  The only problem is that such a thing is impossible as this pillar is sitting underneath thousands of feet of water.  It also wasn’t dropped into the ocean from the surface.  Jack also notices that time seems to stand still for him when he’s in the vicinity of the pillar.  Seconds for him are minutes for everybody else.

After Jack locates the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder from Air Force One, he hauls them back to the surface.  Once on the surface, the two “black boxes” are quickly hauled back to the naval ships.

It turns out that David Spangler, Jack’s old nemesis and the brother of Jennifer Spangler, is running the security team on the naval ships.  He was sent there by Vice President Lawrence Nafe and CIA Director Nicolas Ruzickov.  It turns out that the covert op commander wasn’t sent there to only oversee the security of the crash site.  There’s also a more sinister reason for him and his team of commandos.  On top of his secret mission, David also holds Jack responsible for the death of Jennifer, and he intends on killing him.

When the crash data is initially analyzed and more pieces of the wreckage are hauled to the surface, the reason for the crash isn’t clear.  The aircraft seemed to be in excellent condition.  The only oddity is that now the aluminium skin of the aircraft has been magnetized.  How or why that happened isn’t clear.  Nor is the reason for the wreckage to be neatly arranged on the ocean’s floor instead of being scattered over a large area.

The situation escalates when David Spangler’s team is ordered to sabotage the wreckage.  He detonates a bomb and makes it look like the Chinese were responsible for shooting down Air Force One.  Vice President Nafe is looking for an excuse to go to war with China and showing them that the U.S. is the true (and only) superpower in the world.  The bomb was made from Chinese parts, and the sabotage works.  These findings are announced to the public and Nafe orders for the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps to head to the coast of China.  The Deep Fathom is ordered away from the crash site of Air Force One.  As far as everybody is concerned, Jack’s mission is now complete.

Meanwhile, back in Okinawa, Karen and Miyuki use a computer program to piece together the written language that they discovered in the underground tunnel between the pyramids.  They add that to other findings from around the Pacific of the ancient language.  Miyuki’s computer program is close to being able to translate it, but they’re going to need to find more of the language.  They hear about Jack Kirkland’s discovery of the crystal pillar with strange writings, and they invite him to Okinawa so they can see his information.

By the time that Jack arrives in Okinawa, the U.S. and China have entered a shooting war.  China had learned of Nafe’s plan to blame them for the sabotage, so they went ahead and launched an assault on Taiwan.  The country quickly surrendered and China continued moving to the east.  The U.S. forces moved into position to stop them from further aggression against Okinawa and Japan.  At this point it’s pretty much a draw as neither force can defeat the other.

But that’s just part of the action in James Rollins’s Deep Fathom.

By the end of the book there will be an exchange of nuclear weapons between the U.S. and China, an approaching solar storm that will cause a chain reaction and destroy the entire planet, a fight between submersibles on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, and a science-fiction ending that will change everything you know about the story.

FINAL THOUGHTS

So is James Rollins’s Deep Fathom a good book?

Yes.  This was a great story that kept me turning the pages through the night.

To me, the strongest elements of the story was with everything that happened underwater, from the submersibles operating at tremendous depths to the undersea laboratory, and of course, the giant squid.  The ending between David Spangler and the giant squid was terrifying yet highly entertaining in a sick and twisted sort of way.  Fortunately, a LOT of this story takes place underwater.

The story involving the ancient civilization wasn’t that interesting to me.  While I appreciate this angle and how much of it is based on historical research, it’s just that I have little interest in the history of places like Micronesia.  It’s one thing to have a story involving the mythology of such places, and another to write a story about the civilization itself.  In that case I prefer mythology versus the real history.  But that’s just me.  Deep Fathom goes into a great deal of details that it’s easy to picture such an ancient civilization as the one that used to live throughout the islands in the Pacific.

As far as the sci-fi elements surrounding the crystal pillar and its associated crystals, that was pretty interesting.  The time warp at the end of the book is one of those “love it or hate it” moments.  It’s great science fiction, but it also seems like Rollins took the easy way out of wrapping up the story.  At this point the U.S. and China have had a limited nuclear war, and instead of thinking of an alternate way to end the hostilities and also remove the vice president from office, the time warp simply rewound the clock and reset the events to the beginning of the book with some slight changes.

The ending to the story works but at the same time you feel a little bit cheated.  It’s like you painted yourself into a corner and somebody on the ceiling lowered you a rope.

On a side note, that is a rather eerie coincidence that part of Deep Fathom‘s plot involved a space shuttle burning up and crashing when entering the Earth’s atmosphere.  This book was published in 2001.  Space Shuttle Columbia burned up during re-entry on February 1, 2003, killing all seven of the astronauts on the spacecraft.

Nonetheless, Deep Fathom is still a really good book, especially if you enjoy oceanography.  Fans of Clive Cussler‘s works will find themselves right at home here.