A Ryan Weller Box Set Books 1 - 3

by Evan Graver

  Karen cocked her hip and smiled coquettishly.

  Raul interrupted them. “Your coffee, sir.”

  “Thank you,” Jim said, taking the cup.

  After Raul stepped back into the bridge, Karen said, “Who does he care about?”

  Jim sipped the coffee and watched the Cigarette charge back the way it had come. In a soft voice, he said, “Emily Hunt.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Ryan tossed his backpack over Peggy Lynn’s rail and began handing up boxes of fresh fruit, vegetables, and canned goods, courtesy of Joulie. Then he climbed out of the Cigarette’s cockpit and shoved the sleek boat off with his foot. He hung on the rail, waiting for the Cigarette driver to maneuver the craft with its engines. The man just barely kept it from smacking into the steel hull of the salvage vessel. Ryan shoved the nose away again with his foot. This time, the driver collected his boat and raced away.

  When Ryan stepped over the rail, all hands were there to greet him. Stacey’s arms were crossed, and she was tapping her foot. Her face carried her normal air of annoyance. Travis stood with his hands in his pockets, feet braced against the chop. Captain Dennis leaned against the bridge hatch with his ever-present coffee cup in hand. Emery and Don sat on the gear bench.

  “Well?” Stacey asked.

  Ryan lit a cigarette, his first of the morning. “Did you find the other box, Trav?”

  “No,” Travis said. “I spent twenty minutes looking for it after you left, and I’ve already been down this morning while you were doing whatever it was you were doing.”

  “I was keeping the peace.”

  “Is that what you’re calling it now?” Stacey retorted. Then under her breath, she said, “Probably more like getting a piece.”

  “What did Joulie have to say?” Dennis asked.

  Ryan said, “She’s giving us protection while we bring up the gold.”

  “Protection?” Emery asked, scratching his head under the watch cap. “What for?” His ‘for’ sounded more like ‘fur.’

  “There’s other people who want the gold, and there’s pirates in these waters. Joulie sent out two boats to act as guardians.”

  Dennis pointed with his coffee cup. “That massive mothership off our starboard side isn’t one of them.”

  Ryan jumped up to the bridge and grabbed a pair of binoculars. He trained them on the ship Dennis had indicated. He recognized Northwest Passage.

  “How much is this protection costing us?” Travis asked.

  Ryan set binoculars back on the bridge console and took a long drag on the cigarette. He didn’t want to tell them. “Don, can you overlay what Travis saw on his dives with the schematics of the hold?”

  “Already have, and I uploaded it to the DAVD unit for your dive.”

  “Good, I’ll go in a few minutes. Let’s prep to dive.”

  Dennis interrupted them. “There’s a high-pressure ridge pushing north. The weather is turning to shit. Waves are going to be four to fives easily, could be more.”

  “How soon is it going to hit?” Ryan asked.

  Dennis glanced at the horizon. “This afternoon.”

  “I better get in the water.”

  “If things get too rough,” Dennis said, “we’ll pull you up and stick you in the chamber.”

  “And make a run for Cap-Haïtien,” Ryan added. “We’ll be safe there.”

  “We will, eh?” Travis asked.

  “Yes,” Ryan replied. “We’ve been guaranteed safety.”

  “Which brings us back to the original question,” Stacey said. “How much?”

  Ryan walked over to where his drysuit hung on a rack. He began to pull on the thick fleece undergarments which would help keep him warm.

  Emery had turned the compressor on and was clearing the umbilical of moisture and checking the topside controls and gas levels.

  Travis caught Ryan by the shoulder and spun him around. Leaning in close, he growled, “How much, eh?”

  Ryan met his eyes. “Half.”

  “Half!” Travis exploded. “You’re giving her half the gold!”

  “Yes.”

  “I still want my ten percent,” Travis blurted. “I don’t give a crap how much you give her. I want ten percent of the whole haul.”

  “You’ll get it,” Ryan said, shrugging into the drysuit. “Now back off and do your damn job.”

  Stacey shook her head. “You’re an idiot, Ryan.”

  He stopped and looked at everyone. “I don’t want to give it up any more than you guys do. But Joulie is our lifeline here. She’s providing us with protection and she’s going to use her share to help her people.”

  Stacey gave a short, barking laugh. “You slept with her.”

  Ryan pulled the suit over his head and checked the neck seal. He held his arms out and Emery tugged the zipper closed. Emery double-checked the seals on the suit and patted Ryan on the shoulder. He whispered, “If I was a young whippersnapper, I’d have slept with her too.”

  Ryan grinned.

  Assured he would get his cut, Travis returned to the business of diving. He brought over the SuperLite neck dam and helmet. “Let’s find the gold and get out of here.”

  “I agree,” Ryan said.

  Don walked over. “Dennis is right about the weather.”

  “I know,” Ryan said, shrugging into his BCD, and then fastening his weight belt. Travis helped him clamp on the helmet and run through their topside checks. Emery was next to suit up. He would be the standby diver because Travis had already been in the water.

  “When you’re in the basket, I’ll run through Travis’s dives with you,” Don said. “You can see them on the DAVD.”

  “Okay.” Ryan stepped into the LARS. With the aid of the crane, Travis swung the heavy metal basket up and over the rail and lowered Ryan fifteen feet below the surface. They ran through the in-water checks to ensure the gear was functioning properly.

  “Send the basket down after me. I don’t want to waste time riding it down.” Ryan stepped into the darkness and continued his descent toward the wreck. The water pressure crushed his drysuit, the folds of fabric pinching his skin. He tapped the suit’s inflator button, adding just enough air to take away the squeeze. Every thirty-three feet, he passed through another atmosphere, adding 14.7 pounds per square inch of pressure to his body. At three hundred and fifty feet, he would experience one hundred and seventy pounds of pressure. His lungs, the size of deflated basketballs on the surface, would shrink to the size of tennis balls.

  Ryan watched the DAVD display and Don talked him through each of Travis’s previous dives. He’d covered just under half of the Santo Domingo’s hold. Parts of it were left uninvestigated because of the tangle of vehicles. Ryan hoped the gold wasn’t under them, but instinct told him it was.

  Dennis had positioned Peggy Lynn right over the wreck and Ryan landed on the port side of the ship. He climbed over the rail and dropped down the vertical deck, working his way to the hold. He glanced over at the Humvee where he’d positioned their emergency gas.

  “Trav, did you mess with the gas supply?”

  “No. I was looking for the gold. Why?”

  “The hatch is open,” Ryan said.

  “You must not have latched it, and the current opened it up.”

  “I latched it.”

  “Then I have no idea.”

  “No one else has been down here?”

  “Dude, come on,” Stacey said. “Who else is stupid enough to go down there?”

  Ryan dropped all the way to sea floor and closed the hatch. None of the tanks looked like they’d been disturbed. He turned and looked at the hull. Visibility had tightened since yesterday and he could only make out a portion of the yawning, cavernous hold. The rest of the ship remained shrouded in blues and blacks. He flicked on the powerful helmet-mounted lights and entered the cargo hold.

  He retraced some of Travis’s steps through the tangle of wrecked vehicles and bent to look at the open box of gold.

  “Get
moving. You’re burning bottom time,” Stacey told him.

  Ryan ignored her and swept his hand-held light over the bars and paused. There was something wrong. “Don, take a screen shot.”

  “Gotcha, and … done,” Don said.

  Ryan moved aft and began to search the new section. He kept the light on a constant sweep through the hold. The ship creaked and groaned under the stress of the water and the current sweeping around it. Ryan shone the beam along the row of three Humvees suspended above him on the deck. Pausing between breaths, he listened intently to the surrounding sounds. The eeriness that had been with him during the first dive had returned.

  “Ten minutes.”

  “Copy,” Ryan replied. He clambered onto an MRAP and stood staring at the rear of the cargo hold. He’d made it to the back and hadn’t seen the second strong box. After the strong boxes had been loaded, they were shoved to the side to make way for the unloading process. In the rush to beat the hurricane, the gold hadn’t been strapped down.

  He pivoted in place, sweeping the light across the hull, deck plating, and vehicles.

  “Hold up. What’s that?” Don asked in his ear.

  Ryan asked, “Where?”

  “Back to your left. It looks like a pallet.”

  Ryan swung back in the direction Don indicated, focusing the light in the nooks and crannies.

  “There,” Don said.

  Ryan trained the light on the spot and then moved toward the indicated pallet. Instead of a strong box, he found crates of Kalashnikovs. Some were open, and the guns had already started to rust even though they were packed in Cosmoline grease, a heavy wax-like substance smeared on the guns to prevent corrosion.

  Ryan heard Don sigh deeply before saying, “False alarm.”

  “It’s okay, bro,” Ryan said. “Keep watching.”

  “It’s gotta be right in that area according to what you told me.”

  Ryan resumed his search. The water pressure made his movements sluggish and his steps heavy. Defeat wasn’t an option, or a feeling he wore well. He slid off the MRAP into a tight opening between it and another Humvee. He got onto his knees and then laid down. He swept the light into the nooks and crannies. He labored back to his feet and did the same at the next opening.

  “Two minutes,” Travis called. “Get out of the ship now.”

  “Copy that,” Ryan said. It’s got to be here. The first one was so easy to find. He struggled through the debris to the opening of the hold.

  “Clear,” Ryan said. “Where’s the basket?”

  “Weather’s taking a shit,” Stacey said. “We pulled the basket. They’re going to haul you up with the umbilical.”

  “Roger that. Ready to go up.” The line tightened, and the harness bit into his thighs and chest. A movement to his left caught his eye, and he saw a flash of yellow. He focused on the spot again but didn’t see anything. Between the gloom and his steady rise through the water column, whatever had been there was now out of sight.

  Not more than fifteen feet off the ocean’s bottom, he began to feel the effects of the approaching storm. He was being drawn up and down like a yo-yo, and he knew it would only get worse the closer he got to the surface. He wasn’t looking forward to the ten-minute stop at one hundred and seventy-five feet, dangling like a bob on a plumb line. Even the current had picked up, twisting him, and tearing at his gear. He tried to watch his computer and adjust his buoyancy, so he would remain close to his planned depth.

  “Give me some slack on the umbilical,” he shouted.

  “Hold on, whippersnapper.”

  Ryan’s umbilical slackened, and he adjusted his buoyancy. “This isn’t working!”

  “You got a few more minutes, boy,” Emery said. His voice was calm and firm, unlike the normal high-pitched cackle he spouted.

  “Roger that,” Ryan said. He wanted to say he’d been in worse conditions, but he hadn’t. “What’s it like up there?”

  “Not good, whippersnapper. Soon as we get you through this stop, we’re pulling you for the chamber.”

  “Copy that.”

  Ryan closed his eyes and tried his breathing exercises. The constant jerking wouldn’t let him relax.

  Emery’s distorted voice said, “Okay, boy, we’re bringing you up.”

  The slack went out of the umbilical and he began to rise. They were reeling him in as fast as they could. Once he reached the surface, he’d have five minutes to get into the chamber before the nitrogen bubbles started expanding and punching their way out of his muscles. Under pressure, the bubbles would slowly leave his tissues, enter the bloodstream, and eventually be exhaled. If he went straight to the surface and didn’t get in the chamber, the nitrogen would no longer be under pressure and the expanding bubbles could lodge in his joints, under his skin, and move through his bloodstream to his brain, causing anything from excruciating pain to paralysis, and death.

  He swept his gaze around. The visibility was steadily worsening along with the storm.

  A gray shape materialized out of the darkness and sped past.

  “You better get me out of here, Grandpa. A tiger shark just took a pass at me.” The mature fourteen-footer lacked the stripes of youth, but Ryan easily recognized the shark’s wedge-shaped head, light-yellow underbelly, and dark-blue upper body. Tigers were known as the garbage eater of the sea because there wasn’t much the apex predator wouldn’t eat. Ryan didn’t want to be on that list. He cranked open the demand valve to vent more bubbles. Sharks normally avoided anything that blew bubbles, which cause cavitation inside the shark’s gills and cause it to suffocate.

  “Use your bang stick, boy.”

  “I’d rather you just got me out of the water.”

  “Hold tight.”

  The shark cruised in again, tail twitching against the current to hold it in place.

  “He’s staring at me,” Ryan cried, his voice rising an octave.

  “Fifty more feet. Don’t worry about the shark.”

  Ryan turned to see the tiger swim by again. He pulled the bang stick out of its holder on his harness and held it out. He wouldn’t use it unless it was a last resort.

  When they finally pulled him to the water’s surface, Ryan could hardly distinguish between it and the rain pouring down. He realized he’d had the easy job, bouncing around on a string, killing time.

  As soon as he was on the boat, Ryan began stripping his gear, dumping it at his feet. Time was precious. Travis leaped to him and began unbuckling the helmet before jerking it off. Ryan stepped out of the drysuit on the way to the chamber. By the time he got there, he was naked.

  Emery had the small hatch already open and Ryan dove inside. It shut with a solid thunk behind him. Almost immediately, Ryan cleared his ear as the air pressure changed and the tank began recompressing his body back to one hundred and seventy-five feet.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Outside, the storm raged unabated. Rain rang off the steel tube of the recompression chamber so loudly that Ryan had to cover his ears. He lay on the padded bench in a pair of blue coveralls someone had thrown in on top of a pile of towels. He was dry and as comfortable as he could get. Tossed around inside the steel tube was better than being jerked around at the end of his umbilical while fending off a shark. Still, he had to endure two more hours. They were headed to Billy Parker’s place to take on diesel and fresh water and wait out the storm.

  Ryan replayed the odd things that had occurred during the dive. There were so many that he didn’t know where to start. The hatch lid on the Humvee being open, the shark, whatever had flashed yellow in the distance, the missing strong box, the gold bars being tampered with.

  He sat up swiftly, swung his legs off the bench, and moved to grab the communications device. The crown of his head smacked against steel. He was thrown off balance and the pitch of the ship tossed him down like a rag doll.

  “Shit, that hurt,” he moaned, drawing each word out while trying to rub his ribs and his head at the same time.

 
; “You okay in there?” Stacey asked.

  “Yeah,” Ryan replied, his voice strained from the pain radiating through his skull. He squeezed his eyes closed and opened them several times. Then he yelled a string of curse words.

  “Are you okay, for real?” Stacey asked.

  “Did you know it’s been scientifically proven that cursing it helps take away pain?”

  “Well, you shouldn’t be in any pain after that outburst.”

  “Stacey, can you get Don for me?”

  “Sure, hold on.”

  A minute later, Don came on the line. Ryan peered out the little porthole and saw the mechanic hunched against the rain. “Hey, remember the picture I had you take?”

  “Sure do.”

  “Compare it to what the gold looked like when I first found it. There should be some footage of it.”

  “Why?”

  Ryan shrugged. “Just a hunch.”

  “Okay.”

  Ryan lay back down and rubbed his head. He closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing. Three in, four out. Three in, four out. In a few minutes, he was fast asleep.

  He awoke to a pounding on the recompression chamber. Don peered at him through the port hole. Ryan sat up and reached for the communication device.

  “I pulled up the photos and compared them,” Don said. “You gotta see this.”

  “What?”

  Don shoved a piece of paper against the chamber window. “Look at the way the gold is laying on the ground.”

  Ryan moved as close to the window as he could and stared at the printed picture.

  “Now look at the screen shot you had me take on the last dive.” Don pulled away the first picture and stuck a second piece of paper against the window. Fat raindrops marred its surface.

  Ryan looked at the paper. “What’s off?”

  “I emailed the pictures to my friend at DWR. She ran a program that allowed her to look at the placement of everything in the photos to check my Mod 1 Mark 1 eyeball. She confirmed the gold had moved, and one bar was missing.”

  “Missing?”