Chapter 7 — The Cable Splicer Beneath the Sea

Erecting Reef

In the decompression chamber, the final stages of returning the body to water surface pressure happen so slowly that time seemed to freeze. Sơn lay on the narrow bed, eyes closed but not sleeping, his ears still clearly hearing the steady hiss of compressed air through the ventilation system. For the past three years, quiet moments like this had always been the time when old memories found a gap to creep in, and tonight, after seeing a flash of light in the rock crevice on the bottom of the sea, that gap opened wider than ever.

Three years ago, also during a stormy season, Sơn's team took on the task of repairing an old cable line in an area called Đá Dựng reef, where the seabed rises steeply into cliffs as high as city walls, with unusual swirling currents following each wave of water. At that time, Sơn was thirty-two years old, had been a team leader for two years, and was famous in the industry for his speed and almost absolute confidence in his judgment underwater. Lê Anh Duy was the person diving with him that day, the person who taught Sơn most of the basic skills when he was a newbie, and has now become the best partner in the team.

The diving case that day was not particularly dangerous compared to hundreds of previous cases. The weather window was narrow not because of the storm, but because of an unusually strong northeast monsoon that was forecast to keep the entire region off-shore for nearly two weeks. The company that operated the old cable, a different entity, not Liên Hải, pressed for completion before that monsoon hit, because that cable served an offshore rig that could not be shut down for too long.

"There's one last joint left, it'll be done in about forty minutes," Duy spoke through the contact at that time, his voice always had a bit of a joke even in the most tense moments, as a way to reassure himself and his teammates. "When you're done with this, go take a hot bath and I'll treat you to a round of beer."

They were in the ninetieth minute of the dive, nearing the allowable bottom time limit, when Bằng, then a rookie ROV technician, reported over the comm that the current in the area was increasing unusually, possibly due to a sudden tide combined with winds that were strengthening earlier than forecast.

"The flow increased slightly, within the threshold it can still work." Sơn assessed at that time, looked at the bottom timer, saw that there were still fifteen minutes left before it had to end. "There's one last joint. It's almost done. It's not worth stopping halfway."

That was the statement he remembered most clearly, more clearly than anything else that followed, because it was the statement that marked the moment the decision was made—not an explicitly reckless decision, but one that made sense on paper, based on numbers that were still within the safe margin. That's what makes it more dangerous than any obvious mistake: it doesn't feel like a mistake, until the consequences happen.

Ten minutes later, when the two were completing the final protective layer for the joint, the flow suddenly strengthened into a local vortex, carrying a large piece of sediment down from above the cliff. Duy's umbilical cord, which was lying across a narrow rock crevice so he could reach the working corner more conveniently, was crushed by a piece of sediment and a small rock, jamming into the rock crevice in an instant.

"My umbilical cord is stuck." Duy's voice remained calm as he reported, as if it was just a small incident that could be resolved in a few minutes, which they both believed was true in that moment. "Come over here and give me a hand."

Sơn swam over immediately, trying to remove the rock pressing on the umbilical cord with his bare hands, then with a metal pry bar he carried in his tool bag. But the vortex has not stopped, continuing to sweep more sediment, causing the rock to sink deeper instead of loosening. With each passing minute, the amount of gas stored in Duy's auxiliary tank gradually decreased, while the main source of gas through the blocked umbilical cord became increasingly weaker.

"Cut the umbilical cord, switch to the backup air tank, I'll pull you out with the extra seat belt." Sơn gave that order, based on the emergency procedures they were both trained in, a procedure that was theoretically correct. But when Sơn cut the umbilical cord and tried to pull Duy out of the rock crevice, the rock moved again, this time pressing directly on the shoulder and one side of the backup air pipe, tearing a small line in the protective shell.

The next few minutes were a series of intense efforts that even now, three years later, Sơn can still recount each movement in the correct order, as if his body had memorized them forever at a level deeper than conscious memory: trying to pry the rock a second and third time, calling the ROV to move the light to better see the stuck corner, trying to transfer air from his own tank to Duy through an emergency distributor valve. But the gap between effort and results, under the sea, cannot always be bridged by determination alone.

When the rescue team from the ship, urgently mobilized as soon as the incident was reported, reached the location and together with Sơn removed the last rock, it was too late. Duy had stopped breathing a few minutes earlier, while Sơn was still trying, still holding tightly to the torn backup air tube, as if he just held on a little tighter, everything could turn around.

The post-accident investigation concluded that it was an objective technical problem, a rare local vortex that could not be predicted by monitoring equipment at the time, combined with the area's unstable rocky terrain. The official report does not attribute responsibility to Sơn's decision to continue the dive, because at the time that decision was made, all indicators were within industry standard safety thresholds.

But Sơn never really accepted that conclusion, not because he didn't believe in the objectivity of the investigation, but because he knew something that no report could capture: in the moment when the flow of reports increased abnormally, there was a very small part of him that realized it was time to stop, and that part was overwhelmed by another part — the part that wanted to get the job done, wanted to not disappoint the trust of a rushing company, wanted to prove that his team could handle it. for all situations. He chose to believe in numbers that made sense on paper, instead of believing in vague hunches with no basis for measurement.

Duy's family lives in a small town more than a hundred kilometers from Vũng Rạng. Sơn attended the funeral, stood in the last row throughout the ceremony, not daring to get close to Duy's mother even though she did not blame him a word. After that, he still sent part of his monthly salary to his family, silently, through an account without the sender's name, until Duy's mother found out and called him to ask him to stop, saying that she did not need the money, she just needed to know that her son had lived a meaningful life, and that Sơn did not need to pay in money to prove. That call ended in silence from both sides, and since then Sơn has no longer contacted Duy's family, not because of coldness, but because he didn't know what else to say without making their pain revive again.

In the team, no one mentioned that accident in front of Sơn, even though everyone knew about it. It was a tacit agreement that formed naturally, no one discussed it, everyone simply learned to avoid the topic like an invisible whirlpool. Newcomers who later joined the team, like Bách, only heard the story through other people's fragmentary accounts, pieced together into an incomplete version, enough for them to understand that something serious had happened, not enough for them to understand why Sơn became a completely different person after that.

Sơn had never told anyone the whole story in the exact order he just remembered now, not because he wanted to hide it, but because every time he tried to rearrange the events into words, he encountered the same unanswered question: if he had stopped as soon as Bằng reported the unusual flow, instead of trying to complete the last piece, would Duy still be alive? No one, including himself, can answer that question with certainty, and it was that uncertainty, more than the pain of loss, that had haunted him for the past three years.

In the decompression chamber, Sơn opened his eyes and looked up at the curved steel ceiling above. The sound of compressed air was still hissing, the pressure figure on the control panel was still gradually decreasing patiently, not paying attention to anything going on in the head of the person inside. He reached out and touched the small metal link on his wrist — a piece left over from the same extra seat belt he had used to try to pull Duy out that day, the only thing he kept from that day, not to remind himself of the pain, but to remind himself of the question he had never stopped asking himself: how to recognize the line between reasonableness and recklessness, when the two sometimes looked exactly the same until it was too late.