A Ryan Weller Box Set Books 1 - 3

by Evan Graver

  “Shit.”

  “According to Ashlee’s model, that’s where the storm probably moved the Santo Domingo.”

  “Well, let’s go look for her.” Ryan stood and stubbed out his cigarette. He flipped it into an old coffee can Emery had set out for him.

  They hiked up to the bridge and spread the map out on the console. Dennis joined them, leaving Stacey and Travis at the sonar monitor.

  “Tell us what you want to do now, boss,” Dennis said.

  Ryan put his search grid over the chart. “Let’s keep running this same sweep. Instead of a box, let’s just push each leg north. That will bring us closer to this ledge, and if we can’t find her, we’ll assume Mother Nature had other plans.”

  “Roger that,” Dennis said.

  Stacey turned in her chair and hooked an arm over the back. “I once stared at a sonar screen for a whole month. I realized I needed a new job, but that’s another story. We’ll find her.”

  “What makes you so positive?” Ryan asked.

  “You said she was there, and she will be.” Stacey turned back around.

  Ryan raised an eyebrow.

  Don and Ryan stared at the computer screen. Even though Ryan had snatched a few hours of sleep between watches, his eyes were dry and his brain foggy with the need for sleep. Ryan thought about putting some of Dennis’s Jim Bean in his coffee but knew it would only make him more tired. When Greg had delivered their supplies to Stock Island, he’d brought a case of Black Rifle Company’s Silencer Smooth coffee. If they didn’t find the Santo Domingo soon, Ryan feared they’d run out of the good stuff. Of course, they could get fresh beans right from the docks in Haiti.

  Ryan sipped his hot brew. He always joked about how his coffee was like his soul, and right now it was cloaked in black. This whole trip could be for nothing if the hurricane had swept the ship over the edge of the cliff. It would be impossible to get the gold if it was thousands of feet down in a trench.

  He stared at the sonar’s waterfall as it crawled down the screen. He took another sip and watched a black shape materialize out of the gloom. He almost spit out his coffee as he cried, “Turn the laser on!”

  Don flipped on the laser. “Holy cow, is that it?”

  “It has to be, based on the size and position,” Ryan said.

  Dennis peered over their shoulders. “If that ain’t it, we’re out of luck, boys. The next pass will take us out past the ledge.”

  The laser began painting a three-dimensional model of the Santo Domingo in the corner of the computer screen as Peggy Lynn continued along her eastern track. Once the wreck was no longer visible on the monitor, Ryan ordered Dennis to turn around and make another pass. Dennis shut off the autopilot and began a long turn.

  “What’s going on?” Travis asked as he and Stacey crowded onto the bridge.

  “We found it,” Don said.

  “Hell, yes,” Travis shouted.

  Stacey let out a whoop of joy, throwing both hands in the air and shaking her hips. Her purple hair danced while she sang, “I told you we’d find it. I told you. I told you. I told you.”

  The sonar passed over the ship again. The laser scan filled in more details. Dennis kept the wheel straight and steady as they battled through the waves. “Make another pass,” Ryan ordered.

  Dennis turned Peggy Lynn and brought her over top of the Santo Domingo on a north/south course. After another trio of passes, each from a different approach, the image of the submerged ship was as complete as they could make it. Don fiddled with the image while Ryan and Travis reeled in the sonar fish.

  By the time they returned to the bridge, Don had the 3D image complete, and he’d overlaid the ship’s schematics on top. “Ashlee sent me the old blueprints.”

  “Where’d she find those?” Ryan asked, pouring another steaming cup of coffee. He was about wiped out from the lack of sleep. His muscles felt slack and his mind numb. All he wanted was to crawl into his bunk. He was in no shape to do any diving, but he wanted to.

  “I’m not sure, and sometimes it’s better not to ask,” Don responded.

  Ryan nodded. He needed to have Greg give Ashlee a bonus. Turning to the captain, he said, “Mr. Law, take us back to Luperón.”

  Dennis made a few calculations. “That’s ten hours away. Round trip will waste a day. We’ve found the wreck. You need to dive it.”

  The captain was the master of the vessel and had the final say when it came to its operation.

  Ryan asked, “What do you recommend?”

  “Emery, Don, Stacey, and I will take turns at the wheel. You and Travis get some sleep. You’ll need it for the dive. We have enough fuel and food to last another week if all we do is stabilize for dives and then run for the coast.”

  “Okay,” Ryan agreed, and sipped his coffee. “I’ll make the first dive. Travis will be standby. Grandpa will be back-up tender to Stacey if things go pear-shaped. Is everyone good with that?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Ryan twisted the demand valve on his helmet and flushed out the water that had seeped in through a small leak in the neck dam, the watertight seal around his neck. He hated having water on his face when he was diving. For as long as he could remember, his natural reflex was to breathe through his nose as soon as his mask came off. He’d almost inhaled water on numerous occasions and had a mini panic attack every time he even thought about taking his mask off underwater. He’d spent hours swimming without it during his Navy scuba diving training, and he’d had to fight the instinct through every minute of it.

  If the leak got worse, he could leave the demand valve open to pressurize the helmet and keep flushing out the water. Still, the thought of being trapped inside the Kirby Morgan while it slowly flooded was the stuff of nightmares.

  He dropped steadily through the gloom. Even though there was easily eighty feet of visibility, there was nothing to see but the dark shadows at the periphery of those eighty feet. The DAVD display gave him the approximate layout of the wreck and where he was in relationship to it. He glanced at his dive computer. The digital depth readout counted down like a New Year’s Eve clock and he was dropping like the ball. The lead weights around his waist sucked him down as fast as the crew could unwind the air hoses and safety line.

  Sinking into the gloom was unnatural. He remembered the first time he’d jumped off a boat into the ocean and stared into the vast blue. His breath had caught in his chest and he’d had to force himself to breathe. The decreasing visibility made the darkness press in on him. A shadow flashed at the edge of his visibility. Was that a shark?

  At two hundred and eighty feet, he got his first glimpse of the Santo Domingo. She was still lying on her starboard side, but her bow now faced almost due north instead of east as she’d originally sunk. When he and Mango had swum out of her hold, there was a tugboat and barges beside the cargo ship. The tugboat was a hundred yards west of the ship now, the barges had disappeared. The crane gantry had also been ripped away. Tangles of cables draped over the hold and trailed along the sea floor.

  He glanced left and right, scanning the dark water for any threats. He loved wreck diving, but every time he dove alone on a wreck, Ryan sensed an eerie presence. Out there, beyond the limits of his vision, were creatures that could kill him. The wreck had its own hazards, and on this one, there were people who had died. Davy Jones had claimed them as bounty, and their ghastly bodies would sway in the currents like lifeless ghosts. Ryan prayed he wouldn’t encounter any bodies and shuddered to think of what they looked like after months in the water.

  He kept his head on a swivel while the ground continued to rush up at him. “Slow down,” he said, and the tension in his umbilical slowed his descent rate.

  Silt bloomed off the ocean floor as he sank several inches into the mud and ooze. He stood there staring up at the massive ship. This was the deepest wreck he’d ever dove, at three hundred and fifty feet.

  It could be his last if the ship moved just right. The sonar had been correct, and now th
at he could see it with his own eyes, there was no denying the truth. The rear edge of the five-story superstructure rested in the dirt at the edge of the cliff and the stern projected over it. If the ship moved several feet, its weight would tip it over the edge, and it would plunge into the wild darkness below.

  Ryan took a deep breath and slowly exhaled.

  “Holy crap, that’s scary,” Stacey said. Ryan knew she was staring at his helmet camera footage. Emery had chosen to run the topside station. He was proficient at the gas switches they would need to do.

  “One wrong move and this whole thing is going over,” Ryan said. His thought turned to the explosively formed penetrator bombs he’d built and installed on the ship to prevent Toussaint from getting the weapons. They were still there, wired to her forward keel, one on each side, to send a slug blasting out of a pipe to rip out her guts. They weren’t needed, thanks to rival gang leader Wilky Ador’s RPG attack. If the EFPs detonated now, the whole ship would slide off the edge. He hadn’t told anyone about the EFPs, and he wasn’t worried about the C4 detonating. It was one of the most stable explosives in the world, and the remote detonation system he’d rigged would have shorted out in the water. He’d thrown away the key fob-sized remote when he’d gotten to shore.

  He stopped to stare up at the Humvees and MRAPs still held to the deck by their tie-down chains. They could fall at any moment. The ones that had fallen were in a jumbled heap against the starboard hull. A Humvee sat on its wheels on the ocean floor just outside the ship’s hold. It looked like he could get in it and drive away. Ryan walked to the back of the up-armored vehicle, the muck tugging at his boots.

  His breathing was normal, and he felt good, but he had to hurry. His time was limited here, and he wasn’t looking forward to the three hours of decompression stops for twenty minutes of bottom time.

  “Coming hot,” Travis said in his ear.

  “Roger that.” Ryan turned and stared up. He saw the cluster of tanks dropping toward the bottom.

  Their landing stirred up a cloud of silt, which bloomed several feet into the water column and hung there. Ryan looked back at his steps and saw a silt cloud around each footprint leading out of a larger cloud where he’d landed. Both the footsteps and the clouds were slowly dissipating with the slight current.

  Ryan moved into the silt bloom, unclipped the tanks, carried them two at a time to the back of the Humvee, and slid them inside. Each bottle had been clearly labeled with bright stickers indicating which gas blend the bottle held. Several contained 11/70, their bottom gas; eleven percent air, seventy percent helium, and nine percent nitrogen. If the surface supply system stopped functioning, they would have plenty of extra gas on the bottom, including the normal bailout bottle each diver carried on his back. Other bottles contained what they referred to as travel mix, the gas they would breathe on their ascent to the surface. There wasn’t enough gas to allow them to do the full in-water decompression schedule. They would surface and go straight to the chamber, where they would be able to do the full measure of stops. This would keep the nitrogen trapped in their body tissues from escaping into their bloodstream and causing decompression sickness, what everyone called, “the bends.”

  Again, he felt as if someone or something were watching him. He glanced around for signs of life but saw none. Then he checked his dive computer. Ten minutes left.

  Carefully, he edged under the serpentine crane cables and into the hold. He stepped onto the hull and used the bumper of a Humvee to climb up onto an MRAP, which lay on its side. He tried to figure out which Humvee he and Mango had ridden in while the ship was sinking. The vehicles had moved so much in the storm’s turbulence that he couldn’t tell. He clicked on a light and swept it around the hull. The narrow beam barely penetrated the darkness of the hull’s interior. Ryan grinned, fantasizing that he was holding a light saber as he slashed it across the pile of vehicles.

  He stopped wasting time and slowly moved the light along the hull and under the wreckage, searching for the two strong boxes. One, he recalled, had come open during the initial wreck. He’d seen the bars lying on the deck, gleaming gold in the weak light as he and Mango had exited the ship to begin their swim to shore. That was the wonderful thing about gold; no matter how long it was immersed in salt water, it never lost its shine.

  There were complications with the open box of gold. If the storm had moved tons of steel freighter, tugboats, barges, and vehicles, then the gold could be scattered all over the ship’s hold, or even flung over the cliff into the abyss to never be recovered. He prayed that wasn’t the case and the gold bars were still clustered around the strong box. It could take years to find the individual gold bars amid the chaos inside the wreck.

  Ryan stopped the sweep of the light, jerking it back to focus just behind the tire of an MRAP standing on its nose. The massive high-wheel base vehicle leaned against the rear of another MRAP, which lay on its side. The opening between the two massive trucks formed a V, like a teepee, with the giant tire as the circular entrance. A gold bar peeked out from under the vehicles. He scrambled across the wreckage, leaping in the weightlessness across the gaps between trucks.

  “What’s going on?” Stacey demanded. “You gotta go slow.”

  “Just a second.” Ryan bent and reached behind the truck. His fingertips barely brushed the gold bar. “Shit.”

  “What?” Stacey asked again.

  “Hold on!” Ryan inverted himself, so he could see under the truck. Water rushed across his faceplate and sloshed into his nose. He coughed and spat. Then his discomfort was forgotten as his eyes widened, and he laughed. He heard Stacey suck in a deep breath. The camera was seeing the same thing he was, a broken strong box with gold bars spilling out. They gleamed and sparkled in the beams of the dancing light.

  Emery put a stop to the jubilation. “Time’s up, Ryan.”

  Ryan glanced at his computer and muttered, “Damnit!”

  He lay on his belly and thrust his arm under the tire. His shoulder butted against the rubber, preventing him from reaching further. Ryan patted the ground until his fingers wrapped around the closest gold bar, and he started to laugh. He dragged it to him and held it up, surprised by the weight of the small brick.

  “Let’s go, Ryan,” Emery commanded.

  Ryan heard Dennis whisper, “Sweet Mary and Joseph.”

  “I’m coming.” Ryan stuffed the gold into the pocket of his BCD and made his way out of the wreck. He’d found the first strong box. Travis’s objective would be to locate the second one, and then they would devise a plan to recover the whole lot.

  Once clear of the wreck, Ryan stepped into the LARS basket which the crew had sent down after dropping the tanks, and tugged hard on his tending lines four times in addition to using the radio to say he was ready to ascend. He watched the crane cable draw tight, and slowly he lifted off the sea floor. He cracked the demand valve again to clear the water. They’d already calculated the decompression stops and the gas changes needed before the dive. Emery would use the gas control panel to change the mixtures with each stop. The initial stop was for ten minutes at one hundred and seventy-five feet. Ryan was thankful he could rest in the basket as the stops became longer the closer he got to the surface.

  With thirty-five minutes of decompression left, Ryan was ready to be out of the water. The helmet was making him claustrophobic and even with the drysuit on, he was getting cold. The water drained his body heat faster than he could produce it. A shiver racked up and down his spine. He closed his eyes and took measured breaths to calm himself. Three-second inhale, four-second exhale, pause at the top and bottom. Three in, pause, four out, pause. He began to relax, and the memory of the gold bar in his hand filled his vision.

  Then his body tensed. He cocked his head and listened to a low buzzing sound. It grew louder with each passing second. Ryan knew the sound well; it was the churning of propellers on a rapidly approaching boat.

  In the clear water, he could see the bottom of Peggy Lynn and
he kept swiveling his head to see if the other boat would pass near them. The sound came from all directions. The boat’s driver cut the throttles and the buzzing slowed. A hull drifted out of the haze, materializing as a white fiberglass V with twin sterndrives.

  “What’s going on up there?” Ryan asked.

  “We’ve got visitors,” Emery rasped.

  In the background of Emery’s transmission, Ryan could hear Captain Dennis and Stacey shouting at the other boat to keep clear. By law, the boat had to stay at least one hundred feet from any vessel displaying the international blue-and-white diver down flag.

  Ryan tracked the newcomer as it circled around to the far side of Peggy Lynn. It came alongside the salvage boat just for an instant and then idled away. When it was just out of the range of Ryan’s visibility, he heard the boat’s captain throw the throttles forward, and the boat rocketed away.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Ryan demanded.

  There was a click as the topside communication system came on and dead air for ten seconds. Then a familiar voice came through the speaker.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Joulie Lafitte’s voice filled the small helmet. “Did you find my gold?”

  My gold? Ryan thought.

  “Hello? Are you listening?” Her annoyed voice filled his helmet. Six months ago, he’d held her shaking body after she’d tried to shoot the Russian bounty hunter, Volk, and seen the puddle of vomit coating the handgun she’d used. Now, she was a warlord demanding her gold be returned.

  “I’m here,” Ryan said, “and no, I didn’t find your gold.”

  “Did you see the gold?” Joulie asked.

  “No,” he replied flatly. Ryan knew he would eventually have to talk to her. She controlled the gang activity along the northern coast and she’d probably known what was happening the moment Peggy Lynn had entered Haitian waters.