Breacher (Tom Keeler Book 2)

by Jack Lively

  Guilfoyle nodded. “That’s right. Trench runs parallel to the beach there. Starts a hundred yards out, ends about where we are now.”

  “So a sub can cruise up, enter the trench and dock. But why the need for that depth?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe wanted to run tests at depth. Usually subs dock at the surface.”

  Hank said, “How long will you be gone?”

  I said, “An hour and a half, two hours? Guilfoyle, think you can putz around that long?”

  “Why not. Where are you thinking to land?”

  I shrugged. “Zodiac came from the north side. So I figure there’s either a dock installation on the other side of the island, or they came out from the mainland. I’ll go around to the south. Find a spot to come out of the water.”

  The sea was flat and only a slight breeze troubled the surface. Guilfoyle got the boat around. I went down into the engine room where the dive gear was stored.

  The wet suit was tight, but it just about fit. The weight belt went around my waist. The mask went around my neck. The booties were the right size. Guilfoyle’s dive knife strapped to my right leg, above the ankle. I pulled the other gear up the ladder. Guilfoyle had maneuvered the Sea Foam so that the stern was out of sight. I loaded the skiff with flippers, regulator, vest, and the double air tanks. Then I whistled to Hank. When he came over and boarded, I lay flat on my back. The skiff was deep enough that there was no chance of the men on the zodiac eyeballing me.

  I felt Guilfoyle increase the throttle and bring the big boat around. Then he drove it straight in toward the island. I was looking at the blue sky. Not a single cloud. When Guilfoyle banked again, I spoke to Hank. “Okay, start her up.”

  He depressed the starter button and the skiff engine roared to life. Hank had his eyes on Guilfoyle. From where I lay, I could strain my neck and see the Sea Foam once in a while, when the waves lifted the skiff. I watched Guilfoyle come out to the stern, in front of the net pile. He raised his hand, thumb up, then he yelled out, “Let her go!”

  Hank got it just right. He hit the throttle, gunned the skiff away from the mothership. The last thing I saw was Guilfoyle pulling on the release rope, setting the net free from the big boat’s mast. Then there was the vibration of the big skiff engine, and the thump, thump, thumping of the floaters coming off the Sea Foam with the net.

  I had to shout to be heard over the noise. “You see them?”

  Hank shouted back from a couple feet away. “Yes. They are watching us.”

  “Okay. So I’ll need you to screen me with your body when it’s time. I’ll need maybe three seconds.”

  He said, “Right now?”

  I couldn’t see where we were. I said, “Your call. After the net is all out and you see the tension in the line. Then just get me close.”

  Hank said, “And then?”

  “When I’m gone, you go back to the boat, hand off to Guilfoyle. Do the whole thing one more time, then I’ll be back here. Same spot.”

  Hank got back to business and gunned the boat, hauling the net for about three minutes. Then he cut the engine to idle and shuffled to the middle of the skiff, where I lay. He had a rope length with him and began to attach it to an eyelet on the skiff side. He wasn’t actually doing anything but looking busy for the watchers. Now was the time.

  He said, “How will you know the spot?”

  I had already peeked over the side of the skiff, looking for a fix. The communications tower on the island was high enough that it visually crossed one of the mountains in the background. Like all mountains in Alaska, Skinner Mountain has a white peak, year-round. Looking to my right, I could see another white-peaked mountain further south. I memorized the relative positions, like memorizing a face. Two objects in the background, relative to one in the foreground. Simple triangulation by eye.

  I said, “Just be here.”

  I had already attached the tank to the vest and inflated it enough to be buoyant. I dropped that over the side and held on by a strap. Then I slipped over, flippers in the other hand. The water was cold at first, as it usually is. There was no current to speak of. I was now screened by the skiff. No problem.

  The flippers went over the booties, straps tightened. I spit in the mask and rubbed it around, rinsed and pulled it over my eyes. Then the vest and tanks got strapped on. I had trained hard and operated long enough so that maneuvering the various tubes and straps was like a second nature. I had it straightened out in a minute. I looked up at Hank. He was at the stern with the engine.

  “Good to go.” He nodded. I said, “Keep the net away from the big boat. That’s the only thing to do. If you’re late, don’t sweat it.”

  Then I released air from the vest, bit down on the mouthpiece, and let the weight belt take me under.

  Thirty-Two

  The ocean was a thousand shades of blue. Dark to the depths, lighter to the surface.

  I let myself descend to fifteen meters, before allowing some air into the vest and neutralizing the buoyancy. I pictured the geography. To get over to the south side of the island, I would be swimming broadly toward the edge of that floating dock. I would cut to the south and east of it maybe a hundred meters. My goal was to stay under until I came around the south side. I planned to surface and find a good place to land. The island was mostly forest and boulders. I didn’t expect to have any issues hiding the gear.

  Once I was neutral, and neither rose, nor sank, I was flying through the water. I swam hard, kicking at a steady rate. I focused on swimming straight. Visibility was good, maybe fifty meters. Which is why I was able to see the barrier before I ran into it.

  I saw it from fifteen meters out. A massive underwater net blocking access to the island, difficult to notice against the big blue. I swam closer and began to see details. It was some kind of steel, or compound material. More like a very flexible fence than a net, finished in dull matte gray, but the inside of each link shone. The dive knife would not be effective against it. The net was hung from gunmetal blue floaters at the surface. I couldn’t see the bottom of it. I stopped swimming forward and descended to thirty meters. The underwater fence continued down into the depths, until there was nothing to see but the darkness. Installing that thing had been a major project.

  I was not going to get under it, but figured I could go over it.

  I swam hard south, parallel to the security net. After five minutes of swimming, I came up to three meters. I slowly surfaced, careful to maintain neutral buoyancy. I wanted only the top of my head and my eyes above the water. I was broadly on target. Coming up on the south side of the island, but approximately two hundred and fifty yards out. I could hardly see the zodiac, anchored about five hundred yards away. The Sea Foam and the skiff were working the net.

  I took hold of the thick steel cable at the surface and hauled myself over it and then under again. No way they could notice that at five hundred yards. Back under, I swam hard for the south side of the island, descending at the same time to fifteen meters. I figured it would be a five-minute swim. I relaxed my body and settled into the rhythm, kicking, and breathing.

  A minute later, I saw a form in the depths. A shape in the darkness, darker even than the ocean below it. The only thing that could be darker than the deep blue was deep black. The thing had the shape of a thick torpedo, and I knew immediately what I was looking at, a nuclear submarine, five and a half football fields long. I stopped swimming and released air from my lungs and from the vest. I began to descend.

  As I got closer, the submarine became clearer.

  It was inert and lifeless, and approximately sixty meters down. I got to thirty meters and could see pretty clearly. The cladding had originally been black, but was now covered in barnacles, like the skin of an ancient whale. No shine, nothing coming back but dark malevolence and decades of neglect. It was a salvaged wreck.

  I swam along the sub’s axis, from south to north, looking down at the beast. The old submarine was held in place by two enormous arms ending in giganti
c clamps that made a C shape around it. The other end of the C clamps were embedded in the rocky edge of the marine trench.

  When I had swum up to the middle of it, I could see over to the other side.

  The sub and the clamp were encrusted with barnacles and mussels. They looked like they had been submerged for decades. I checked the tank dial. I had used up more than half of my air, a combination of the depth I was at, and the unexpected swim along the submarine. I was not going to make it to the island, but I wanted to see if I could get eyes on the submarine’s markings. Which was not going to be easy given the depth and the age of the thing. I estimated the top of the sub at sixty meters, but to properly read the markings I would need to get down to fifty at least.

  I went into a kind of physical trance, barely breathing, my body inert and limp. At the same time, I depressed the buoyancy of my vest and began to sink. I kept an eye on my depth meter. After thirty-five meters, nitrogen compresses enough to pass through the cell walls and enter the blood stream. I felt it hit me at forty meters. Euphoria. On the other hand, oxygen can become toxic after sixty meters. I had to explore efficiently. I needed to swim to the sub’s bow, where the markings would be.

  By the time I got there, I was low on air, high on nitrous, and sucking down poisonous oxygen. I was a little light-headed, which was pretty enjoyable. The old submarine came into view more clearly. Green tendrils of algae had attached to the sides along with layers of assorted crustaceans. I could see indentations that I figured were places where the sub had been crushed by the sheer pressure of all the water above it. In the Pacific Ocean, that sub might have been submerged under a mile of water or more.

  I saw the residual white traces of the submarine’s identification markings. The identification code was K-349. There was nothing else. I scanned for another minute. Then I broke off and swam due west. The only thing that mattered now was getting over that security net before I ran out of air.

  When I hit the net, I was sucking the end of the twin air tanks. I decompressed at ten meters for five minutes, holding on to the net with fingers. I needed to get those nitrogen bubbles out of my blood stream. Five minutes is a long time to hang out when you’ve just found a salvaged nuclear submarine. I was buzzing.

  I thought about what Ellie had said about mysteries versus puzzles. With a puzzle you know exactly what you’re missing, with a mystery you don’t even know if there’s a puzzle out there to solve.

  Now we had a puzzle inside of a mystery.

  Valerie Zarembina, aka Jane Abrams, had worked for the Department of Energy as an investigator, but she wasn’t with Energy anymore. George Abrams had been called in by the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission to consult. Triangulate that with the salvaged nuclear submarine lying in a deep water trench up here. There was even more reason to believe that Zarembina had moved from Energy to Nuclear, and that her and George Abrams had been investigating what I had just found. Add to that the boat that George had rented, which came back without him. They were pieces of a puzzle, that was for damn sure.

  There are no coincidences.

  And there was literally nothing left in the tank when I surfaced.

  I took a look around. No sign of the zodiac. I flipped myself over the cable. The Sea Foam was four hundred yards out. I was not wearing a watch, so I didn’t know how long I had been gone. When the skiff came, I waited until it was pulling the net at full tension. I detached from the security fence and swam out. I saw Hank looking at me, then looking away, concentrating on the task at hand. I dropped my gear into the skiff. Then hauled myself in and landed on my back like a beached shark. Hank glanced at me. He looked tired and wet. He was wearing a baseball cap and his face was red, which is how I knew he’d been helping Guilfoyle with the net.

  When we got back to the boat, Hank handed off the net to Guilfoyle, who snapped the connector into the winch. We came around and tied up to the stern. Down in the engine room, I stripped out of the dive gear and back into the fishing rubbers. The winch motor came on and the diesel smell was strong.

  Up top, Hank and Guilfoyle were stacking the net, coming over the top of the winch wheel above. Pulverized chunks of Cordova-red jelly fish were raining down on their covered heads. Each molecule of Cordova-red contains a tiny protein spring that literally embeds into skin. The constant rain of poisonous jelly fish bits is like having a thousand little wasp stings per minute. After you experience that for the first time, you tend to cover up.

  I took my place on the stern and looked over at Hank. His face was a rash of red. But now he was wearing that old SEAS baseball hat.

  I yelled at him over the noise from the winch. “Told you people end up wearing baseball hats out here.” Hank grimaced in response. He concentrated on his work. I watched him for a moment, the kid was tougher than he looked.

  Thirty-Three

  By the time we were motoring back to Eagle Cove, the sun was kissing the horizon. The water was calm, and golden light pierced through the gaps made by dozens of islands that dot the inside passage. Guilfoyle piloted the boat while I cleaned up with Hank. The deck had to be thoroughly hosed down and all the equipment cleaned and put away in the right place, in the right order. The work is never done on a fishing boat, and when we finally got out of the wet gear, Hank slumped on to the net pile, exhausted.

  I said, “Go lie down, buddy. You look like shit.”

  Hank went in and lay down on the galley bench. He was sleeping five minutes later.

  I climbed up to the wheelhouse. Guilfoyle waited for me to sit down. I took a seat on the bench behind him. He said, “So, what happened out there?”

  “Never made it to the island. They have a security net blocking off access.” Guilfoyle whistled. I continued, “I went over that, and then I saw what they had at the floating dock.”

  “What, a sub?”

  “Yes, an old one. A salvage.”

  “That’s interesting. You see markings?”

  “Just the identification number. K-349.”

  Guilfoyle’s eyes almost popped out of his head. “Holy shit, that’s not ours. It’s theirs.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, across the Pacific to the Asian continent.

  “Russian?”

  “Hell yes. Ours are all USS prefix and theirs are K. So they’ve got a salvaged Russian submarine out there on Bell Island. I’ll be damned. Was it big?”

  I told him what I had seen. The size, big, the apparent age, old, and the fact that the hull had looked crushed in some places from the depth. Guilfoyle nodded. He said that after a certain depth the water pressure will crush any structure, so subs are always rated to what they call a ‘crush-depth’.

  He looked over at me, appraising. “Given the size, it’s likely the sub is nuclear.”

  “Which means what?”

  Guilfoyle looked through the wheelhouse window. We were approaching Port Morris. The town’s lights were a cloud of pin points in the dark. He said, “I don’t know. Could mean a couple of things I guess. You have to check out if there’s any information around on that hull identification. K whatever.”

  I said, “K-349.”

  “K-349.” Guilfoyle glanced at me. “You want to tell me what’s going on, Keeler, give me the big picture?”

  “Sometimes Guilfoyle, what you don’t know can’t hurt you.”

  He was looking at me, and now his eyes dropped and settled on the steering wheel under his hand. Polished mahogany, a classic and timeless object. Connected to the rudder, steering true through the Pacific waters. A stable and unchanging object in a chaotic world. He was captain of the Sea Foam, and I had served under him as a guy working the boat. But we weren’t working the boat anymore.

  He said, “You got a point there.”

  I said, “Keep it simple, captain.”

  He chewed his beard for a moment, looking out again at the diminishing daylight. “You just let me know what I can do to help.”

  “Will do.”

  He said, “I think I’ll
kick off tomorrow, after breakfast. You know, get one more of those breakfast rolls in me before I end the season. If you get this wrapped up by then, you might think of joining me for the trip down.”

  I nodded. “Copy that.”

  Guilfoyle looked at me, unsmiling. “Good, because I’m not going to say it again.”

  I smiled for us both. Up in the North Pacific I had noticed that many people like to keep their conversation minimal. As if in a perfect world all you had to do was say something once and folks would pay attention. For the remainder of the journey I told Guilfoyle about Hank and his mom. How he’d become an orphan today. Guilfoyle nodded through the story, whistling here, glancing at me there. When I had finished telling it, the Sea Foam was pulling into the dock at the Glen Cove Cannery and the sun had gone over the horizon.

  Ellie was walking out to meet the boat.

  Guilfoyle brought her in easy. Hank set the bumpers and I jumped off with the rope. I glanced at Ellie. She looked tired and serious, as if things were piling up on her, weighing her down. I noticed the shoulders, tight and high. She was hugging herself. First thing she said was, “Dave called. He’s got eyes on Chapman.”

  “Where are they?”

  “It was only ten minutes ago. He said that she was in a group. They got into a vehicle and he was following.”

  I said, “Dave keeping you updated?”

  “Yes, but I think we should be positioned close. We need to speak with her.”

  I said, “Come on board.”

  “We need to get going.”

  I said, “We need to eat, and then we need to talk. Lack of nutrition is responsible for a whole lot of bad decision-making. Millions have died due to lack of the right minerals, vitamins, all the right fats. Brain food, Ellie. If Dave’s got eyes on them, we should let them roll. Maybe we’ll learn something new.”

  She looked at me strangely but stepped onto the boat regardless.

  By then Guilfoyle was on the barbecue, seasoning the steel before the fish hit the grill.