by Roland Smith
“Drop your gun,” Al said. “I won’t miss twice.”
Butch looked at him and smiled. “I won’t miss once. I’ll have a bullet in Laurel’s head before your bullet reaches me.”
“That’s right,” Al said. “And you’ll both be dead.”
* * *
As soon as the Orb splashed back down into the Moon Pool, a red tentacle wrapped itself around it.
“Now would be a good time to use the shocker,” Lepod said, staring in horror at the gigantic barbed suckers squeezing the Orb.
“It might scare the squid out of the pool,” Ted said.
“I don’t think so,” Lepod said. “It’s disoriented. Hit the button!”
Ted did.
The tentacle disappeared like it had touched a hot stove.
“Hang on,” Ted said.
He dove the Orb under the surface, shot into the holding pool, and slammed the door behind them.
Pepper picked up his radio. “We have a situation down here,” he said into Butch’s earpiece.
“Yeah,” Butch said into his throat mic. “Well, we have one up here, too. What’s the problem?”
“There’s a giant squid in the Moon Pool. At least I think that’s what it is. And this round golden thing that looks like some kind of spaceship.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m just tellin’ you like I see it.”
“Get up here,” Butch said. “Or we’re going to leave you behind. And that wouldn’t be too good for your health.”
“I’m on my way,” Pepper said, and he was, until he saw the gold fabric on the ball rip open and what looked like three spacemen step out. He watched them remove their black helmets. As they took them off, weird liquid spilled out of two of the spacemen’s helmets, followed by the distinct smell of vomit.
Pepper got back on the radio. “Three guys just got out of the gold ball. Well, two guys and a kid. Two of them are covered in what looks like vom —”
“What kid?” Butch interrupted.
“Marty O’Hara.”
* * *
Wolfe and the others could hear what Butch was saying, but they couldn’t hear the person on the other end of the transmission.
Butch smiled. “Bring him up here on the double.” He looked over to Blackwood. “Looks like they have a giant squid.” He looked at Wolfe. “And we have Marty.”
Blackwood processed this new information and came to an instant decision. With the hatchlings in hand, he would send the giant squid back to the bottom of the canyon — along with the Coelacanth’s crew. If he had it transferred to the Endangered Too, he’d have to incarcerate everyone on the Coelacanth before he sank it. The longer he remained on board, the more that could go wrong.
“Congratulations, Wolfe!” he said. “It’s the catch of the century. I hope you get it back to NZA in good shape. I got what I wanted … what was rightfully mine. And you have what you wanted. Let’s forget all of this other business and call it even.” He looked at Butch. “We will proceed as planned.”
* * *
Pepper walked over to the threesome.
“Who are you?” Ted said.
Pepper answered by shooting him in the chest, then turned the pistol on Lepod and shot him. Both men went down.
“You get to live,” he said to Marty. “For the time being, that is.”
From the floor, Ted kicked Pepper in the knee. As he fell, his radio and pistol skidded across the deck.
Both men were on their feet within a second. Pepper pulled his knife and rammed the blade into the gold man’s belly. The man stepped away. Pepper was shocked to see no gaping, bloody wound and no reaction to the vicious knife thrust.
“What the —”
“Mistake,” Ted said, and kicked him in the head. Pepper stumbled backward and fell into the pool. A tentacle wrapped itself around him and pulled him under. The water bubbled and turned black with squid ink and pink with Pepper’s blood. Ted didn’t even glance at the gruesome show. He ran over to Pepper’s satchel and started rifling through it as Marty helped Lepod to his feet.
“That man just shot me at point-blank range and I’m perfectly fine,” Lepod said, amazed.
“How about that,” Marty said.
“Get over here,” Ted said. He showed them a package of what looked like clay. “C-4,” he said. “Plastic explosives. They’re going to sink the ship.” He pulled out a diagram and scanned it. “There are nine charges. Six in here, one in the bow, two in the stern.” He tore the diagram into three pieces. “Lepod, you get the charge in the bow. Marty, you get the two in the stern.”
“I don’t know how to disarm a bomb,” Lepod said.
“Well, you’re going to have to learn quick. The C-4 detonators are radio-controlled. I don’t know who has the radio, but all they have to do is punch a button and the Coelacanth is going down. Come with me.”
Using his section of the diagram, Ted led them over to one of the charges. “Two wires. One blue. One yellow. Pull the blue wire first, the yellow wire second. Just remember this: Blue is cool. Yellow will kill a fellow. Now go.”
“What about Architeuthis?” Lepod asked. “The Moon Pool door is still open. It’ll get away. If we don’t change the pressure it will die.”
“We can’t do anything without power,” Ted said. “And if the ship goes down, it doesn’t matter. I’ll pull the wires in here, then I’ll try to scab in power from the Orb to the ship. As soon as you defuse the C-4, come back here. We’ll figure out our next step.”
Marty and Lepod ran out through the air lock.
Ted grabbed the dead man’s radio as he hurried over to the second packet of C-4 and pulled the blue wire.
He typed in a code and put the radio to his lips as he pulled the yellow wire.
“Wolfe? If you can hear me, don’t say anything. Just key your mic so I know you’re there.”
Ted heard the click as he raced over to the third charge.
“One click for yes. Two for no. You got bad guys up there?”
Click!
“Are they monitoring this frequency?”
Click! Click!
“They’ve wired the ship to explode. C-4. Nine charges. I’m taking out the six in the Moon Pool. Marty and Lepod are disarming the three in the stern and in the bow. The explosives are hooked up to a remote.” Ted pulled out the yellow wire and started toward the fourth charge. “I took out a guy when we surfaced. He’s being dined on by a giant squid at the moment. They won’t try to blow the ship while they’re still on board. You need to stall them. I need five or six minutes to disarm the explosives. I’ll let you know when we have everything defused.” He pulled another blue wire. “Key your mic again if you understand.” He pulled the yellow wire.
Click! Click!
* * *
Lepod found the C-4 quickly, pulled the wires, and got back just as Ted disarmed the last charge in the Moon Pool, hoping Blackwood’s men hadn’t decided to install a couple of extra charges that weren’t on the diagram.
“Where’s Marty?” Ted asked.
“I don’t know,” Lepod said. He walked over to the pool. The squid was still there, feeding on the man Ted had kicked in.
“Go!” Ted said. “Help him find those explosives.”
Lepod hesitated.
“It’s either that or I go,” Ted said. “Do you know anything about how to hook up nuclear power to a conventionally powered ship?”
Lepod shook his head.
“Then go help Marty. If you and he aren’t back here in three minutes, I’m going to come help you and your squid is going to get away.”
Lepod ran back through the air lock.
He found Marty frantically searching the stern of the ship.
“I found the first one,” Marty said. “But the second one isn’t where it was supposed to be.”
Lepod grabbed the diagram and looked. Marty was right. It wasn’t where it was supposed to be.
* * *
“Let
Laurel go,” Wolfe said.
Butch smiled. “Only if you let Grace get onto the chopper with Yvonne.”
Wolfe shook his head.
“Here’s another incentive for you,” Butch continued, still smiling. “We have a man below and he has Marty. Be a shame if something bad happened to your nephew.”
“They have Marty?” Grace screamed.
Wolfe clamped his mouth shut. He wanted to tell her that they didn’t have Marty after all, but he couldn’t without tipping his hand.
“I’ll go,” Grace said.
“No,” Wolfe said.
“They’ll kill Marty and Laurel,” Grace said. “I couldn’t live with that. You couldn’t live with that, Wolfe. We need to stop this right now. This feud has to end.”
Wolfe took her hand. “It’s not a feud. And you don’t know everything that’s going on. Grace, you can’t go with Noah Blackwood.”
* * *
Luther was watching everything unfold on the Gizmo. He had even heard the exchange between Ted and Wolfe. He wanted to help, but what could he do? To get to the Moon Pool he would have to walk right past everyone on deck.
He pushed a button on the Gizmo. “Ted?”
“Yeah. Who’s this?”
“Luther.”
“Where are you?”
Luther told him, along with everything else that was going on.
* * *
From the helipad, Blackwood motioned to the pilot to start the chopper, then looked back at Wolfe and shouted, “Let her go, Travis! You lost this one. Admit it. Cut your losses. You have your giant squid. eWolfe is secure. I have as much right to have Grace as you do. If you don’t let her go, Dr. Lee will die. Marty will die. And for what? You know I’m not going to give up until Grace is with me. You can’t win.”
“You can’t have her, Noah,” Wolfe shouted back. “I’m her father. She belongs with me. I promised Rose you would never get her and I’m not going to break that promise.”
Grace looked up at her father and knew he meant what he said. She looked at Laurel, who had not flinched through this whole ordeal; she looked as calm as she had the first day Grace had seen her in the library on Cryptos. She looked at Butch. She had no doubt that Butch would kill Laurel and Marty, when his man dragged him up on deck. All it would take was a simple nod from her grandfather.
She jerked her hand out of Wolfe’s and ran back over to Yvonne. “I want to go with my grandfather,” she said.
Yvonne grabbed her by the arm.
“You can’t mean that,” Wolfe said.
“I mean it!” She looked at Yvonne. “Let’s go before I change my mind.”
Butch started to make his way to the helipad with Laurel.
Wolfe stared in helpless disbelief.
Luther ran down to the deck and shouted at Grace, “Are you crazy?”
“Remind Marty that he squeezed Monkey’s arm!” she shouted back.
“What?”
“Just tell him!”
“Yeah, fine!”
But Luther had not raced down from the bridge to determine if Grace was crazy. He had come down to delay Blackwood’s departure because he knew Marty, Ted, and Lepod hadn’t found the last packet of C-4. But now he wasn’t so sure about Grace’s sanity. What was she talking about? He wanted to tell her that they didn’t have Marty, but just like Wolfe, he knew he couldn’t.
The men lifted Grace up to the helipad. Noah Blackwood took his granddaughter’s hand. He tore off her blue tracking tag and dropped it on the deck. “You won’t be needing this collar anymore. At the Ark we don’t treat people like dogs.”
There was another reason Luther had come out of hiding. “Grace!” he shouted. “Don’t let that old man bug you. Be a dragon.”
“What?”
“I said, Be a dragon!”
Grace felt something move in her shirt pocket but, to avoid attracting her grandfather’s attention, didn’t look down. “I will, Luther. Thanks.”
“What about Pepper?” one of Noah’s men shouted.
Luther swore under his breath. No point in hiding anything now, he thought. They’re about ready to take off.
“He can’t make it,” Luther shouted back. “He’s having lunch with a giant squid.”
“Guess that makes us even,” Butch said, smiling. “I got Roy. You got Pepper.”
Butch was the last to board the helicopter. As he got in, he thought about shooting Laurel just to see the look on Wolfe’s face, but he let her go. Wolfe already looked devastated at the loss of his daughter, and they’d all be dead soon enough anyway.
The helicopter took off.
PD, Congo, and Bo came scrambling onto the deck.
Bo was carrying a brown wig in one hand and what looked like a clump of gray clay in the other.
Luther took refuge behind Al, but Bo didn’t seem interested in his hair. Nor did she seem nearly as crazed as she had a few hours ago.
Wolfe walked over to her. She hid the wig behind her back.
“You can have the hair,” Wolfe said. “Just give me the other thing.”
Bo handed it to him. It was a brick of C-4 with two wires dangling from it. One yellow, one blue.
Wolfe threw the brick over the side in angry disgust, then keyed the radio. “We have the final charge. Bo had it.”
“Lucky she pulled out the wires in the right order,” Ted said.
“There is nothing lucky about this day,” Wolfe said. “Blackwood has Grace.”
“I’m sorry, Wolfe,” Ted said quietly. “I’ll be up soon.”
* * *
Ted found Marty and Lepod frantically searching the stern for the last charge.
“Bo found it,” he said. “She brought it up to the main deck and Wolfe tossed it over the side.”
“So we’re safe?” Marty asked.
“We’re not going to sink, if that’s what you mean,” Ted answered.
“What about the giant squid?” Lepod asked.
“Secured and doing fine. I spliced power from the Orb to the Moon Pool. The door’s closed and the room is pressurized.”
“I better get down there and monitor the squid,” Lepod said happily, and quickly headed in that direction.
“What’s the matter?” Marty asked. He could tell by Ted’s somber mood that he hadn’t told them everything.
“Blackwood got the hatchlings,” Ted answered.
“How did that happen?”
“That’s not all,” Ted said. “Blackwood also has Grace.”
Marty stared at him, not sure he had heard correctly. “What?”
“She’s gone. Butch must have grabbed her from the lab.”
Marty took off running. On his way up to the main deck he ran into a concerned-looking Phil Bishop.
“Is it true?” Marty asked.
Phil nodded. “Blackwood won. He got the hatchlings and Grace. He just took off with them in his helicopter along with Butch and Yvonne.”
“Yvonne?”
“She was working for Blackwood all along. She’s the one who drugged Bo and let her loose. I’m on my way to Lab Nine to check on Bertha and Ana. Yvonne drugged them, too, with a tranquilizer gun.”
“I hope they’re okay,” Marty said, continuing up to the main deck.
What he found there was a grim group of people staring at a helicopter hovering about a half mile away. Bo was hanging over the rail, hooting at Winkin, Blinkin, and Nod. PD and Congo had joined her and were barking and screeching at the dolphins.
Wolfe and Laurel were holding hands.
Luther was standing a few feet away from them, looking down at his Gizmo.
“I lost her,” Wolfe said. “I’m sorry, Marty.”
“We’ll have to get her back,” Marty said.
Luther glanced up from the Gizmo. “Just before she took off, she told me to tell you that you squeezed Monkey’s arm.”
“Huh?”
“Didn’t make sense to me, either,” Luther said, and looked back down at the Gizmo.
“How did he get her?” Marty asked.
“She got away from me and went with him willingly,” Wolfe answered.
“No way,” Marty said.
“She didn’t have a choice,” Laurel said. “Butch had a gun to my head and would have killed me. She thought they had you, too. Grace gave herself up for us.”
Endangered One and Endangered Too had pulled their anchors and were moving away. The remaining pirates had boarded the fishing trawler, and it, too, chugged away. Theo Sonborn came up on deck with his hands in his pockets and stood about ten feet away from the group.
“Why is Blackwood just hovering there?” Marty asked.
“Because he thinks the charges are still in place and he wants to see us blown out of the water,” Al answered.
“I can’t believe Grace is gone,” Marty said.
“Maybe not for long,” Luther said.
“What are you talking about?” Wolfe asked.
“What’s the range between the dragonspy and the Gizmo?”
“I don’t know,” Wolfe answered, glancing at Theo. “Maybe five miles, but it’s like a tracking tag. With the satellite we can find it anywhere, and we can see what it’s seeing. We’re building more of them. As soon as they’re finished we’re sending a swarm down to the Amazon to look for Marty’s parents. Why?”
“The dragonspy is in her shirt pocket,” Luther said. “And she knows it. She just looked down at it and winked at me.”
Wolfe grabbed the Gizmo. He and Marty and Laurel stared at the screen. All they could see was pink fabric. Wolfe turned on the audio, but he couldn’t pick up their voices. The helicopter rotors were too loud.
* * *
Grace saw the sun reflecting off Marty’s golden aquasuit. She couldn’t see him clearly, but she knew it was him. And she knew how frustrated he was right now with her so close, yet unreachable. She hoped he’d been looking at the Gizmo when she’d winked. She hoped he knew why she really left.
She was in the back of the helicopter with the two soldiers, Butch, and Yvonne, who was treating Butch’s shoulder wound. Her grandfather was in the copilot’s seat. He looked back at her and pointed to his headset, indicating for her to slip a pair on herself. She did.