by J. F. Kirwan
‘This is the CIA, you are in violation of an Anglo-American treaty. This is a high-security operation. Stand down!’
Adamson smiled at the ruse, designed to put them off-guard. The boat was steadier now, the engines idling. Charlie shouted again.
‘Do not use the radio, I repeat –’
Adamson had to make the situation clear to everyone. Standing up, splaying his legs for stability, he shouldered the rifle, aimed at the boat’s console, and fired. Pieces of metal exploded in front of the skipper, who fell backwards into the boat.
‘Sonofabitch! You can shoot,’ Bud said, grinning.
Adamson ignored him, bent his knees to keep his balance, and swung the rifle a few degrees to the right, predicting what would happen next. One of the men had caught the skipper, but the other had bent down to pick something up. Adamson blinked hard to wash spray out of his eyes, and saw a gun’s muzzle in the man’s hand.
It was Adamson’s turn to shout. ‘Throw it in the sea, right now. Do not test me!’
The man hesitated, looked to his companion, then threw the pistol into the sea.
Bud faced Adamson. ‘Jeez, you’re no fucking suit, man; you’ve got balls.’
Adamson’s adrenaline trumped his nausea. Arnie, I wish you could see this, see your pa in action. The console on the other boat had caught fire, but the skipper recovered and quickly put it out with a handheld extinguisher.
Adamson stayed in command. ‘Charlie, Bud, get ready.’ He traded places with Charlie at the helm, checked the levers for the two engines and the rudder control. Then he remembered something.
He shouted at the other boat again. ‘Flare gun. You must be carrying one. Toss it in the sea, too.’
The three men turned to each other, a quick discussion ensuing. Adamson fired again, above their heads. Don’t give them time to think.
‘Do it now, or I shoot one of your air tanks. It’ll blow you and your boat apart.’
A flare gun plopped into the sea. He could tell by their defeated posture that they had no more options. Amateurs. Should have stayed at home.
‘How many divers down?’ he asked them.
The skipper held up two fingers.
‘Okay. No one else is going in, understood? Drop your tanks over the side.’
Again they looked at each other, uncertain. But this was how Adamson worked, how the CIA worked: get an enemy into a weak position, then weaken them a little more, step by step. If you tell them to do everything at once, they might resist, but if you do it in steps, the psychology of defeat worked in your favour. Rumour had it the CIA had actually learned it from studying the Nazis, but nobody ever wanted to admit that.
‘Do it now, or I’ll take them out my way.’
The skipper said something to the other two. There were four tanks upright in an aluminium rack in the boat’s centre. Slowly they unbuckled them and hoisted them over the edge. But they did something he hadn’t expected. The skipper opened the valve of the first one, so that it hissed and kicked up a jet of water as he let it go.
The skipper shouted to Adamson. ‘This way they’ll hear it coming; they can get out of the way so it won’t kill them on the way down.’
Now Adamson had to play it their way. The unspoken deal so far was that they all might live.
Charlie, fully kitted up with a sleek matt-black rebreather backpack on, joined Adamson, and yelled across to the other boat.
‘How long have they been down there?’
‘Twenty minutes,’ the skipper replied.
Charlie leaned close to Adamson. ‘You seem to have everything under control here. We’ll be back in twenty. When I surface and give you the OK signal, it means we have the device, and the two divers below are dead. You’ll need to shoot these three.’
Adamson gave the tiniest of nods. A thrill ran through him, like the old days. It had been a long time since he’d killed. He wasn’t a psycho, but there was an undeniable buzz of anticipation, heightened senses, and a heady feeling of power.
Charlie turned around and bent over to help Bud lift the sled and lower it into the water. Then he and Bud, without signalling to each other as divers usually do, rolled over the side and disappeared beneath the surface. There were no bubbles. Rebreathers, Adamson remembered; recycling oxygen and adjusting helium and nitrogen automatically to minimise narcosis and prevent oxygen poisoning at depth. The superior option for deep diving. Nadia had blown up the trimix dive shop, presumably to prevent any other divers from diving this wreck. A bad call on her part. One that would cost the little bitch her life, her boyfriend’s too.
He clunked the engines into reverse gear, edged back another few metres, kept his eyes on the other skipper. He was in charge; all those assholes back at the Office who whispered behind his back that he was past it and should be pulled out of the field and shoved behind a pre-retirement desk, well, they should see him now. Screw them. He wished Arnie was here, so he could show his son how to manage situations. He knew Arnie wasn’t that bright, but he’d understand his father was doing this to protect him and his mom.
He remembered taking Arnie to a James Bond movie with Sandy. Arnie didn’t understand all of it, but he liked the action, and loved the theme music. Adamson had confided in his son later that he, too, was a secret agent. Arnie’s eyes had gone wild. ‘Really?’ He’d shown his son his pistol and CIA licence to prove it. When Arnie was older, old enough to understand, he’d tell him all about this day, and make his son proud.
The seasickness banished, Adamson stood feeling more powerful than he had in years. One hand on the wheel, the other on the rifle perched on the top of the console, Adamson stared down the other men, and began to hum the James Bond theme tune.
***
Nadia swam through the slipstream of bubbles from Jake’s tank, painfully aware that each breath took a chunk out of her air supply, and the deeper they descended, the bigger the chunk. They passed the Tsuba’s battered bridge, its glass-less window-frames encrusted with purple and yellow flora waving slowly in the current. She could just make out the top of the helm, where she’d been three days ago. But they moved on, and the doorway to the wheelhouse slid past. Jake spun around briefly, gave her the OK signal, and upon her returning it, twisted around again and continued their descent. She equalised her ears again, too abrupt, too hard. It felt like a jab in her eardrums, made her wince. Ignoring the momentary pain, she returned her arms to their folded position in front of her face, her right hand on the stab jacket inflate button. Glancing at her left wrist, she saw they were at forty-five metres. She injected a squirt of air into her jacket to give her buoyancy for the ascent later.
They passed an open cargo hold. She swung her torch-beam across the rectangle of darkness, briefly illuminating a carpet of big-eyed orange fish sheltering within. As she swung the beam back, it caught the ship’s funnel right below them, almost horizontal. Jake had already kicked hard to go around it. She imagined many divers would pause to straddle it and take photos of each other; so unusual to see a ship’s chimney at such an angle. But time was ticking. She wondered if the SEALs were already on their way out to the wreck.
Jake turned again, staring at her longer when she returned the OK signal, no doubt searching her eyes for any sign of narcosis. She flicked her hand as if slapping his face, and his eyes flattened as he smiled beneath his regulator, and turned back around again. Fifty metres. There was a lot of silt in the water after the storm, small strips of grey confetti, and very few fish. At this depth most would be on the opposite side of the wreck, on the mound of reef that had first skewered the Tsuba, then served as its near-vertical resting place, like an open coffin. But the drift of silt was hypnotic. Nadia reminded herself to stay sharp, to fight the nitrogen-at-depth effects dulling her mind. Nitrogen was an inert gas, and that’s just what it does to the brain in high doses.
She checked her air – one-seventy bar left, roughly eighty per cent, but it would go faster down here – depth fifty-two metres, time in the w
ater five minutes. She tried to work out what actual time it was, when some light might arrive, but she couldn’t. The cognitive-dampening effects of narcosis were always first to arrive, at least for her. Never mind, their mission was about perception, not mathematics. Just find the Rose. Once they started heading up, particularly above forty, the effects would vanish.
Jake slowed as they came level with a small structure towards the Tsuba’s stern. He stopped, and she nearly overshot him; she’d forgotten to squirt more air into her jacket to achieve neutral buoyancy. Dammit, was he testing her? He veered towards the opening of what looked like a steel hut, and peered inside. What the hell was he doing? Jake glanced backwards, then… Fuck, he’s going in! Has he lost it? Is he narked? She regained neutral buoyancy and swam after him, reached his fins sticking out from the doorway. She pulled on one of them. No reaction. She couldn’t get inside with him, there was only room for one. Clearly he was doing something, his fins kicked slowly and his legs twisted every now and again. Relax. This is Jake. He’s not narked. She wedged the edges of her fins against a rusted railing and waited, arms folded.
Jake reversed out, his eyes sharp as ever. He gave her the OK signal and she returned it. Clearly he wasn’t going to explain what he’d been doing, and it would be pretty difficult underwater anyway. She looked over his equipment. Something was different. He smiled again, and she got it. When they’d descended he’d had a pony bottle with him, a three-litre tank with its own regulator – no pressure gauge – and now the pony-and-regulator were gone. He’d put them in the hut in case… She didn’t like to think too much about in case of what, but it was a smart idea. Any problems with their air supply, or if they got separated for some reason, they could bolt to this hut and then head up to the surface.
She’d picked the right guy to dive with.
Jake fished in the pocket of his stab jacket and pulled out a reel with a karabiner on one end of the line, another on the handle, which he clamped onto one of his stab jacket’s D-rings. He clamped the other to the right side of her stab, using the opportunity to check her air. He gave the Down signal, and they set off, tethered.
The sea floor was white in the torchlight, small ripples in the sand, a few hermit crabs here and there, an occasional flash of silver as a fish swam into the beams and then made a hasty exit. She landed a little heavy, her fins buckling, sending up two small spumes of sand. Facing Jake, she saw the large, three-blade propeller behind him, half-buried, the rounded stern like a metal fist rammed into the ground. She concentrated. Her mind was sluggish. She checked the depth.
Sixty-six metres.
Jake reeled out several metres of line, then knelt on the sea floor. He placed both hands on the sand, one on top of the other, then raised the top one upwards, directly above the other hand. With the upper hand he made a fist and then splayed out three digits. Okay, he wants me three metres above the bottom. Then he moved his top hand in an arc from left to right, then reached a little further and swept it in an arc the other way. All right, a search pattern like a windscreen wiper, getting longer on each sweep. She gave him the OK signal. He let out more line and she swam around the stern to the bottom of the rocky reef, picturing in her mind what she’d glimpsed on Mike’s sonar display, moments before she’d dropped the Rose into deep water. It should be away from the reef, maybe ten metres, maybe twenty. The Rose was small and heavy, so the current wouldn’t have deflected it much. Still, it made sense to do a systematic search.
As directed by Jake, she ascended three metres, her torch spreading a cone of light roughly three metres in diameter on the sea floor. Just ascending those few metres, her head already felt a little clearer. She glanced at Jake, visible from his torch which he’d laid on the ground pointing directly forwards, the beam giving her a line of orientation, a halfway marker for each sweep. She kicked and began the search pattern, keeping a little tension in the line to ensure she stayed at the same distance.
The first sweep revealed nothing except a few rocks. Once or twice she drifted closer, just enough to confirm they were simply that, small rocks. As she reached the end of the first arc and turned around, she began to feel dizzy. Glancing at her computer, it said that she already needed a two-stage decompression stop of fifteen minutes. She checked her air. One hundred bar. Half my air’s gone! They’d need that pony bottle for the return, even though Pete would hang a full tank ten metres below the boat, and another at five. Jake was still as a statue, but his head was turned to her. The line was slack; he’d reeled out some more. She’d probably feel the combined effects of narcosis and oxygen poisoning before Jake, since she was working, he was stationary. She needed to swim away from him, to extend the next sweep of the arc, and had to force herself to do so, fighting her natural instinct to bolt for the surface.
The second sweep took forever, and Jake tugged the line a few times as she drifted off course. It was getting difficult to stare at the mesmerising floor and swim in a long curve. Her computer beeped, telling her she should head up, but she didn’t even look this time. Air consumption was the only thing that mattered now. She nearly bumped into the rock wall, and had to grab onto it, feeling a wave of panic. Her air was seventy-five bar. Shit! She glanced at Jake, but he was immobile as ever, staring in her direction. He reeled out more line. Doesn’t he care? Why doesn’t he do the fucking search? Of course! The bastard’s trying to kill me. Then he’ll take the Rose. Give it to MI6. Wait. Slow down. He’s on your side. He promised. On Sean’s soul. She tried to pull herself together. This was bad narcosis, the paranoid rather than the ecstatic version. She kicked away from Jake until the rope went taut, and began finning again.
It was like trying to stay awake when severely drunk, and she had to focus on either swimming or searching. Doing both was too hard. Do the search, one more sweep, then abort. Talk to yourself, name everything you see. Keep the surface of your brain awake. She’d heard it would help, it was called verbal protocolling, or some such stupid name. Just do it. Right: sand, sand, endless fucking sand, a few rocks, some more damned hermit crabs, a pulsing red light, more fucking rocks, more endless fucking sand. Wait. What? Stop, go back you moron, where was it? She sank towards the floor, feeling like she’d downed two more tequila slammers on the way. She hit the ground, lost control of the torch, which danced around, increasing her dizziness. What was that noise? Getting louder. Wah, wah, wah, like something turning slowly, approaching. Where was her torch? She fell over, her vision blotchy. She clawed her fingers into the sand. This is it. Fucking hell, this is really it. Can’t think. Then breathe, just breathe!
Something collided with her. Light, bubbles, something crushing her, she kicked and thrashed but whatever had her was behind her. A zipping sound grew loud then diminished. Darkness, wild strobes of harsh light, and that wah, wah, inside her head, getting louder, no, getting softer, the bubbles, she was overtaking them, she could see something, someone. Jake. Right there. She clamped herself to him, took a few deep breaths, her head clearing.
As if suddenly waking from a dream, she pushed back from him. The Rose, she’d almost found it. Her computer was beeping again, now for going up too fast. They were at fifty and climbing. She half-broke out of Jake’s grip and pointed downwards. He shook his head. She fought to get out of his grip and he released her. He held up the small diving bag. Through its thin white plastic she detected a dim red light, pulsing. He must have picked it up off the sea floor when he’d rescued her.
They had the Rose.
In that moment she wanted to laugh, cry, kiss him, fuck his god-dammed brains out, but before she could react, he pointed up above. Glancing upwards she saw two small lights, very close together, descending. That wasn’t the plan. Gary and Claus weren’t meant to be down here yet, and the lights were twin-beam, high-powered halogen. A whining noise, like a dentist’s drill, buzzed through the water. It wasn’t them. The SEALs. And they had a sled. Jake’s plans A through C had just fallen apart.
She glanced at her air gauge. Th
irty bar! She should be at the surface, or at least at the deco stop. Jake gave her the ‘Up’ signal, grabbed her inflate button and pumped air into her jacket. She ascended rapidly, while he dropped away from her and headed down, still carrying the Rose. The SEALs were descending fast, even as she tried to dump air. Too late to follow Jake. He’d turned off his torch, and she could no longer see him or his bubble-trail. Besides, if she followed him, so would the SEALs. Turning off her own torch, she finned hard sideways, away from where she thought the wreck was, then stopped, and held her breath.
She heard the whine of the underwater sled and saw its lights carve through the water, initially in her direction, then it veered back towards the Tsuba. As soon as it was gone she headed back towards the wreck, in order to find her way up to the deco tanks. If she surfaced now she’d have serious decompression sickness. With less than twenty bar left in her tank, she found the prow and headed up. Thank god the SEALs hadn’t cut the line to the tanks hanging underneath Pete’s boat. She swam straight to it. Both hands on the fresh regulator, she planted it in her mouth and drank in huge breaths of cool air.
Her computer said she needed twenty minutes of decompression at ten metres. Forget it. She’d do five then go up to the surface. That was when she noticed the keel of the other boat, the one belonging to the SEALs, and she wondered what exactly was happening topside. But her gaze soon turned downwards. She wondered how long Jake’s pony cylinder would last, and just how good the SEALs were. But that wasn’t the right question. The real question was, how good was Jake? And if they killed him and took the Rose, what was her plan?
She stared down into the blue.
Chapter Twenty
Jake watched the fourth tank zip past, sounding like a torpedo, a jet-stream of small bubbles in its wake. It meant things weren’t good topside. The SEALs had arrived with a sled – he should have seen that coming – and must have left someone in charge on the surface. Ascending now would only serve to deliver the Rose to whoever was up there. He had to descend. Nadia’s air had been so low her only option was to reach the hang-tank under Pete’s boat at ten metres, so he’d sent her up.