

Lindsey Brigman, designer of the rig and Bud's estranged wife.

Monk guides him in successfully disarming it. Bud begins his dive, assisted by Lindsey's voice to keep him coherent against the effects of the mounting pressure, and reaches the warhead. One SEAL, Ensign Monk, helps Bud use an experimental diving suit equipped with a liquid breathing apparatus to survive to that depth, though he will only be able to communicate through a keypad on the suit. It is decided that the warhead needs to be disarmed, which is more than 2 miles below them. Bud swims back to the platform with her body there, he and the crew use a defibrillator on her and administer CPR, and after awhile they successfully revive her.

Bud's mini-sub is inoperable and taking on water with only one functional diving suit, Lindsey opts to enter deep hypothermia and trigger her mammalian diving reflex when the ocean's cold water engulfs her. Coffey is able to launch the warhead into the trench, but his sub drifts over the edge and implodes from the pressure, killing him.

To try and stop him, Bud fights Coffey but Coffey escapes in a mini-sub with the primed warhead Bud and Lindsey give chase in the other sub, damaging both. Realizing that Coffey is suffering paranoia from high-pressure nervous syndrome, the crew spies on him through an ROV, finding him and another SEAL arming the warhead to attack the NTIs. Though they treat it with curiosity, Coffey is agitated and cuts it in half by closing a pressure bulkhead on it, causing it to retreat. As they struggle against the cold, they find the NTIs have formed an animated column of water to explore the rig, which they equate to an alien version of a remotely operated vehicle. The crew waits out the storm so they can restore communications and be rescued. The rig is partially flooded, killing several crew members and damaging its power systems. The cable crane is torn from the ship and falls into the trench, dragging the Deep Core to the edge before it stops. Hiram Coffey, the SEAL team leader, is ordered to accelerate their mission and takes one of the mini-subs without Deep Core 's permission to recover a Trident missile warhead from the Montana just as the storm hits above, leaving the crew unable to disconnect from their surface support ship in time. Lindsey Brigman, insists on going along with the SEAL team, despite her estranged husband Virgil "Bud" Brigman being the current foreman.ĭuring the initial investigation of the Montana, a power cut in the team's submersibles leads to Lindsey seeing a strange light circling the sub, which she later calls a "non-terrestrial intelligence" or "NTI". government sends a SEAL team to Deep Core, a privately owned experimental underwater drilling platform near the Cayman Trough to use as a base of operations. With Soviet ships moving in to try to salvage the sub and a hurricane moving over the area, the U.S. Ohio-class submarine USS Montana has an encounter with an unidentified submerged object and sinks near the Cayman Trough.
