Stop at Nothing

by Michael Ledwidge

  10

  Ruby went to the window. As the Dolphin lifted off, she looked down and saw a diver in a wet suit talking to a seaman along the main-deck starboard rail.

  “Hey, guys. I’m Lieutenant Everett from Naval Safety investigating the crash,” she said as she arrived in front of them. “Did you go down and see the wreckage?”

  The diver nodded. He was a cute kid, lean and blond and green-eyed with a fresh green tattoo of a shamrock on the webbing of his right hand. He was short, about five foot five or six. Sitting gracefully in his Body Glove suit, he could have been a teen surfer resting between waves.

  “How far down was it?” Ruby said.

  “About a hundred and twenty feet,” the blond diver said.

  “Can you go deeper?”

  “You’d be amazed,” said the older deckhand with a wink as the kid blushed.

  Ruby glared at the joker, a thick-featured, dark-haired thirtysomething with a goatee. She looked at his deckhand’s green hard hat. What was the navy term for green hats? Oh, yeah. Deck apes.

  “We’re trained to go up to two hundred or so or even more, but you need special tanks with added helium,” the young diver said.

  “Were the deceased in uniform? Air force personnel or navy? Could you tell?” she said.

  “Lieutenant?” called a voice from above.

  Ruby turned around to see Lieutenant Martin at the pilothouse rail above, waving.

  “Excuse me,” she said to the diver. “We’ll talk later, okay?”

  “I’ll be here,” the diver said.

  “Me, too,” said the deck ape with a wink.

  She went back up the stairs and followed Lieutenant Martin inside. He led her across the bridge through a short corridor into his wood-paneled office.

  “Coffee?” he said, closing the door.

  “Please. Black.”

  She stood silently waiting as he poured. The mug he handed her had a picture of a cute little blond boy in a funny puffy Hulk costume on it.

  “Please, sit back and get comfy, Lieutenant,” Martin said, gesturing at a bench-like padded couch bolted to the wall. “There’s been a change in plans apparently.”

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  “We’ve been advised to completely stay away from the wreckage. We’re actually leaving now. We’re supposed to babysit at a distance of a quarter mile. We’re not supposed to touch any debris. Just keep people away. Starting now. No personnel are to go near the wreckage until the navy salvage ship arrives. Including you.”

  Ruby’s brow wrinkled.

  “What? Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But how does that make sense?”

  Lieutenant Martin leaned forward in his bolted-down office chair and thumbed back his hat as he thought about that. He took it off and began spinning it off a finger.

  “I have absolutely no clue,” he finally said. “But as it turns out, I shouldn’t even have called you. My boss is pissed that I jumped the chain. I should have called him first, he said, even though he’s on leave with his family on vacation out in California. You ever see something like this with a crash before?”

  Ruby looked down into her coffee and then back at him before she slowly shook her head.

  “Not even close,” she said.

  11

  The clock in the dashboard was at 2:53 when the dirt road Gannon was looking for suddenly leaped out of the darkness into his headlights on his right.

  His GMC Sierra skidded slightly as he brought it to an abrupt stop on the right shoulder and flicked on the cab light. There was a map of Eleuthera Island’s southern end on the passenger seat, and he reached over and lifted it up. He looked at the map then looked back at the dashboard, where he’d been clocking the distance on the odometer. Then he flicked off the dome light and shifted the truck into Reverse.

  He’d finally arrived home around ten and put up the boat at his berth in Davis Head Harbor and went back to his house in Tarpum Head.

  Weeds leaped and danced in the bobbing headlights as he turned off the asphalt down onto the slightly sloping bumpy dirt drive.

  Now it was four hours later, and he was twenty miles south of his house in a mostly unpopulated part of Eleuthera known as Bannerman Town.

  After a few hundred yards, he stopped again, shut off the engine, got out and stood looking.

  There wasn’t much to see. The old road led into fifty or so acres of deserted pineland that had belonged to a run-down resort that had been abandoned years before after hurricane damage had finished it off.

  He crossed the rocky, sandy dirt to the rear of the truck and dropped the tailgate. In the bed was another vehicle, a golf cart–like utility quad ATV 4x4 known as a Gator. It, too, had a kind of truck bed that was filled now with diving tanks and coils of lights and ropes.

  Gannon dropped the ramp and backed the Gator down. He winced at the tremendous roar of its four-stroke engine as he fired it on.

  Not exactly stealth mode, was it? he thought. But there was no helping it.

  He went to the back of it. Down between the tanks was a bulging faded-green canvas sea bag and he zipped it open.

  Sealed up watertight in thick plastic vacuum-sealed garment bags were the money and the diamonds and his GoPro camera.

  He hadn’t planned on adding the GoPro to the rest of his salvaged contraband until he’d wisely decided to take a look at it back at the house and realized he’d actually filmed the whole dive into the plane.

  It was some pretty creepy footage. Not to mention incriminating.

  He certainly hadn’t meant to memorialize the event, but he must have accidentally hit the camera’s record button when he turned on its light while he was in the water.

  He zipped the canvas bag back up again. As he stood there in the dark it occurred to him that he could still cease and desist from what he was doing here. That even now there was still time.

  Then the moment passed, and he found himself hopping in behind the Gator’s wheel and flicking the lights on.

  12

  The narrow foot lane he was looking for was another two hundred feet down the pitch-black drive.

  It was off to the left atop a thickly overgrown slope, and thistles and sharp pine brush and branches scraped like claws through the Gator’s open door as he throttled up to it.

  About a football field from the tree line where he’d come in, the path began to slope steeply downward as the pine forest trees began to thin. The trees gave way to a shrubby glade, and he hit the brakes a moment later as the path suddenly ended.

  Beyond in the headlights of the ATV was a large depression in the earth about the size and shape of an ice hockey rink. It was rimmed with steep, almost sheer ten-foot-high pale rock walls, and at the bottom of it was a large pond-like body of water.

  The large quarry-like opening in the ground was known as a blue hole. All over the Bahamas, blue holes were cave-like water-filled sinkholes that had been formed by eons of rain eroding through the soft Bahamian limestone.

  There were several that were famous diving tourist spots but not this one. The only reason Gannon knew about this one out here in the boonies was because he had dived it three years before with a geology professor from Australia who had hired him to watch his back while he did research.

  Gannon had thought the old Aussie was a little off his rocker until he dived down with him and saw the amazing subway-like network of corridors and caves with his own eyes. Several channels were almost a mile in length and went down hundreds of feet in depth. Every day for two weeks they had explored and mapped the cave network with guide ropes and radiolocation transmitters.

  From behind his seat, Gannon produced a cardboard tube and tipped out the rolled-up laminated map that he and the professor had made of the cave system.

  Then he clicked on a fl
ashlight and uncapped a Sharpie marker.

  It was almost 3:30 on his wrist dive computer when he finally managed to get his game plan sussed out and all his equipment and the money bag lowered on ropes down to the water.

  He had just climbed down himself and was about to get into his tanks when he realized he had forgotten something after all.

  “If it’s not one thing, it’s another,” he mumbled to the darkness as he scurried back up the rope and rock in his bare feet.

  He went to the Gator and lifted up the green cloth fishing rod bag he’d left in the foot well. He couldn’t strap the small cloth bag to his back because of the tanks, so he decided to tape it to his lower right leg with a few wraps of black vinyl electrical tape he’d brought along.

  Two minutes later, Gannon was finally back down in the warm water of the blue hole completely geared up.

  Here goes nothing, he thought, as he finally untied the heavy money-filled bag and let its weight take him down.

  Most of the top part of the hole was like the bowl of a giant wineglass. But at seventy feet, its bottom tapered, and three corridor-like passageways opened up, two to the west and one to the east.

  Gannon took the eastern passageway that went another thirty feet down in an angled sort of corridor that was like a steep stairwell with no stairs. At the bottom of the stairwell was a short corridor-like passage that went in two directions, east and west.

  Remembering the directions he’d memorized, Gannon went to the left, east, and passed two more branches: one to the left and one to the right, and then a third on the left that he took. A hundred feet in on a level plane, the walls and ceiling of the hotel corridor–like passage began to close narrower and narrower to that of a barely diver-wide pipe.

  Just when it looked like it was going to dead-end, the pipe suddenly opened up into a huge rectilinear chamber that rose up thirty or so feet.

  Gannon pulled himself in through the manhole-sized opening and swung his light up at the stalactites. The professor had dubbed the chamber “the cathedral” because of its height.

  Along the high wall to his right, about twenty feet up, he stopped the light where a horizontal lip of rock jutted out.

  Gannon shone the light down onto the sea bag and opened it and took out the twenty-pound weight. Then he adjusted his buoyancy and floated and swam up to the ridge with the bag.

  Arriving at the ridge, he peeked over at the shelf of rock he had noticed when he had explored the chamber with the professor. When he placed the heavy sea bag down onto the shelf, it fit almost perfectly, but it kept floating up a little. After a few more failed tries of stuffing it down, he swam down to the cathedral’s floor, retrieved the weight, swam up and put it into the bag.

  Gannon paddled back a little bit and looked with the light at the almost-invisible ridge of rock. He smiled around the regulator in his mouth.

  The money bag was settled now. Invisible.

  Better than a Swiss vault, he thought.

  Gannon was squeezing into the pipe-sized tunnel out of the cathedral when he realized the green cloth fishing rod bag was still taped to his leg. He backed into the cathedral chamber and cut the tape with a knife from his ankle and held the bag in his hand as he looked around.

  Just above the tunnel exit he found a rock ledge, and he took the narrow tube-shaped cloth bag and dug it down into the silt and rocks there.

  Now we’re done, he thought.

  13

  “Okay, here we go. Which famous English writer was called ‘the prophet of British Imperialism’?” a tall, skinny coast guard sailor at the next table read off a Trivial Pursuit card.

  “Harry Potter,” somebody called out in the bright sunny bacon-scented room. Then somebody called out “Joe Mama” in a funny voice, and they all cracked up.

  Ruby put down the beat-up Nicholas Sparks paperback she’d found in the lounge next to the mess and looked out at the bright light coming through the big window at the other end of the cafeteria.

  They were shore bound now, still in the Bahamas on Andros Island on a US naval base called the Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center.

  She had actually heard of it. It had some deep ocean trench close by off its coast where they supposedly tested submarine stuff, sonar and torpedoes and missiles and depth charges and who knew what else.

  As if she could care what they did here, she thought, checking her watch and seeing that it was coming on two in the afternoon.

  Why the hell was she here?

  It wasn’t clear. Three hours after Lieutenant Martin had received his babysitting orders, a navy salvage ship called the USS Recover had arrived.

  When the navy ship had relieved them, she had thought they would head back to base in Miami. Silly her. Lieutenant Martin had been ordered south directly to Andros Island to dock here at the obscure base until further notice and that was all.

  Or at least, Ruby thought, that was all she was being told.

  She lifted up the paperback again but then put it down, stood, went to the window and looked across the base yard at the USS Recover.

  It had arrived at one of the deep-sea docks a half hour before. They had some kind of big dividers or something set up on its deck. As if they were actually hiding the damn wreckage or something.

  She stared at the boat, trying to decide which pissed her off more: that they’d stuck her here without explanation or that someone else was doing her job.

  What was also great was she’d tried to call her boss to get her the hell out of here, but there was no service. There was Wi-Fi, but it was password-only, and what do you know? No one at the base would give any of them the password.

  Ruby wanted to find Lieutenant Martin to complain, but he was conspicuously absent.

  Out of bitching range, she thought. He’d move up quickly.

  Just called out here to stand down, she thought as she looked at the stupid navy ship. Which really, really wasn’t working for her since she was supposed to be on leave by now helping her sister, Lori, due in less than twenty-four hours.

  Ruby shook her head as she pictured Lori by herself out in Lake Charlene, waiting for her water to break. If it hadn’t already.

  “Screw this,” Ruby mumbled as she crossed for the door.

  It was incredibly humid outside, the hot air still, the sun beating. She walked down the mess hall’s rust-tinged steps and across the bleached concrete base yard. There were some more rust-flaked steps onto the deep-water dock on the other side, and she was already sweating like it was going out of style as she came up them.

  As she walked along the three thousand–ton navy ship’s looming football field–length of gray steel for the boarding ramp, she could hear some clanking coming from it, faint voices, the hum of equipment.

  It sounded like a crane up there or a Bobcat or something moving things around. People working up there, arranging the wreckage.

  But not Naval Safety people? she thought, looking up at the ship, huge and gray and still. She swiped sweat off her forehead with her blue camo blouse sleeve. Some other mysterious people up there, the Keebler elves of the navy or the Smurfs maybe, up there stealing her job.

  “I’m sorry. You can’t be here,” called down a sailor way up on the ship in a booming voice as she arrived at the other end of the gangway ramp.

  He was a tall blond guy with a goatee and a bullet-shaped head. A petty officer first class, by the three red stripes on his shoulder.

  Unbelievable. Why would they put such a heavy hitter at the ramp? she wondered.

  “I’m Lieutenant Everett from Naval Safety. Is the plane up there? The jet they found? I’m supposed to be working on it,” she called back.

  “Sorry,” he said. “No one can come aboard, Lieutenant. Captain’s orders. Call your CO.”

  “I can’t. I don’t have the damn password for the Wi-Fi.”
r />   The sailor at the other end of the gangway shrugged his large shoulders.

  “No one can come aboard, Lieutenant. Sorry,” he said, not sounding very sorry, his face like a slab of stone.

  14

  Ruby walked across the yard, cursing to herself, sweat dripping down her back. She was slow to anger normally, a get-alonger by nature. But she’d about had it.

  Most of the Surmount’s sailors were outside now at the bottom of the mess steps. They were smoking and kicking a hacky sack around. One of them had a football, and they were laughing and carrying on like middle schoolers with the teacher gone as they tossed it back and forth.

  Beyond them in the shadow of the mess hall was a bleached-white wooden picnic table next to an old grill that was Cheeto-orange with rust. Ruby sat down at it, looking out at the endless turquoise Caribbean behind the building.

  How far to Florida, she thought, if she started swimming now?

  “Hey,” said a voice behind her.

  The short blond surfer kid diver looked even younger in his ironed uniform. And cuter in a cute little brother sort of way. He looked like a Catholic grammar school eighth-grader on picture day.

  “Hey,” Ruby said as he sat down across from her.

  “This sucks, huh?” he said. “I saw you head over to the ship. What’s the story?”

  “They won’t tell me.”

  “I’m Steve, by the way. Steve Vance,” the diver said, offering his hand with the green shamrock tattoo on it.

  She shook, smiling at him.

  “I’m Ruby,” she said, dispensing with all the navy protocol rank bullshit that she actually despised.

  “Hey, Ruby, you want to see something?” he said, waving his phone at her.

  “Tell me you got the Wi-Fi password,” she said, tenting her fingers in prayer.

  “No. Better,” he said, handing over his phone.

  There was some kind of video queued up on the screen. When she pressed the play triangle, it showed a bright beam of light in dark water. After a moment, coral passed at the edge of the light and then a pale aircraft fuselage appeared along with a porthole plane window.