Redemption in the Keys

by Matthew Rief

  Kyle let out the cable slowly as I eased up on the throttles. I performed a quick calculation to decide how deep we would drag it and came up with one hundred feet down. From there, I was confident that the mag could pick up large remnants of the wreck within a five-hundred-foot radius along the seafloor, which would be the width of our lanes while searching. The problem was the plane had gone down in a storm, which meant that it was more likely to be scattered along the ocean floor. However, a relatively large intact part of the fuselage, or a wing, or an engine would leave a large magnetic field distortion for us to pick up.

  When the cable went taut, we booted up the laptop, which would make a sound whenever the device picked up metal and identify its location on a digital map. I adjusted the audible indicator’s baseline to ensure that smaller objects wouldn’t set it off. I also had the Baia’s built-in sonar up and running and connected it to the laptop as well. Using the sonar and magnetometer combined, we’d end up with a digital replication of the seafloor in addition to markings indicating metal objects.

  Usually, as had been the case with the search for the Crescent and the Intrepid, I’d start off by creating a large grid using sonar and then sweep through with the mag. But this time was different. Though it had been dark when it had crashed, Kyle was confident as to the plane’s general whereabouts. We also didn’t have weeks and an unlimited fuel supply to find what we were looking for, as had been the case before.

  “All set,” Kyle said, giving me a thumbs-up as he looked down at the laptop screen.

  Atticus sprawled out beside Kyle on the cushioned seat around the dinette as I pushed us up to ten knots. The yellow mag torpedoed through the water behind us, and the sonar gave readouts of the ocean floor below.

  While Kyle kept a sharp eye on the laptop screen, I kept my eyes peeled over the horizon and routinely scanned a 360-degree arc using Ange’s binoculars. An hour into our search, I spotted a pair of echoes on the radar screen but soon realized that it was only a couple of center-console sportfishing boats. For the most part, we had the ocean to ourselves, but I knew that could change in a hurry.

  By noon, the mag had identified a few metal objects, but none were in the same ballpark size-wise as a major piece of a wrecked plane. Neither Kyle nor I felt the least bit discouraged, though. I hadn’t expected to find the wreck in the first few hours. Even if you have a solid idea where to find something, the ocean is underestimated time and time again, even by the most seasoned salvagers. We’d managed to do three passes along the same lines since early morning. That meant that Kyle would have had to remember where the plane had gone down to within fifteen hundred feet or so, not exactly easy considering he had been floating in swells in the dark and that it was over ten years ago.

  We ate a working lunch of lobster rolls, using leftover lobster and some white bread, along with a side of potato chips. The wind started picking up a little around 1300, but the sky was still clear aside from a few scattered clouds. By the time the sun began to sink into the water, we were slightly dejected. The mag had yet to pick up anything large enough to be a significant part of the plane.

  Kyle sighed and leaned back into the cushion.

  “Maybe there’s something wrong with the mag?” he said, looking aft over the transom.

  I shrugged. “Not likely. That’s what the diagnostics are for.” He shook his head, growing irritated. I added, “These things take time. It’s a big ocean.”

  “Yeah, but it’s down there. I know it’s there.”

  I rose from the helm seat and reached overhead, stretching my body.

  “Keep an eye on her,” I said, stepping towards the salon hatch. “I’m gonna put on more coffee.”

  “How’s the fuel, anyway?” he asked, shifting off the half-moon bench and moving towards the helm.

  “We’re fine. We’ll be tight if we haven’t found it by morning, though.”

  I used the head, then filled my coffeemaker with its limit of Colombian medium roast. Opening the small fridge, I grabbed a plate of grouper filets and heated them up in the microwave. Then I melted a little bowl of butter and sat in the galley, snacking on the fish and watching as the water boiled and drizzled down over the grounds. I let my mind wander, thinking about what we’d have to do if we didn’t find the wreck.

  Should I still help him? I thought. And what if we return and come up dry again? What then?

  I believed Kyle when he said that the wreck was there somewhere. Though he’d made some borderline decisions during our time serving together, he wasn’t one to make up something like that.

  I finished off more of the fish than I wanted to, eating unconsciously. Waking myself from my thoughts, I realized that the coffeemaker was done and moved towards it.

  “Logan!” Kyle shouted from topside.

  Freezing in my tracks, I quickly headed up the steps and onto the deck above.

  “What’s going on?” My eyes went first to the laptop. Once I saw that there was nothing abnormal displayed, my eyes darted towards Kyle’s.

  He motioned towards the radar, and I saw an echo on the screen about seven miles southwest of our position. I grabbed the binos from the dashboard, then moved aft and focused on the horizon. Within a few seconds, I spotted the source of the echo.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” I said as I peered through the binos.

  “What? Is it that trawler?”

  I nodded. “The one that was heading south this morning towards Cuba.” I stepped back towards the cockpit, then handed Kyle the binos and glanced down at the radar screen. “Now it’s making waves on a northeast trajectory. Whoever these guys are and whatever they’re up to, they seem to like skirting the edges of our radar.”

  “They don’t even have nets in the water,” Kyle said, looking out towards the trawler. After a few seconds, he added, “What’s the game plan here? You wanna cruise over there and introduce ourselves?”

  He said the last words with a grin, then lowered the binos and looked over at me. I paused for a moment, wondering what to do next and considering everything from going over there and confronting them John Wayne style or just letting the Bahamian Coast Guard handle it. Suddenly, a high-pitched ping broke the silence. It came from the laptop and caused both Kyle and me to huddle over its screen in a fraction of a second.

  “Shit, that’s big,” Kyle said.

  He was right. The object being detected appeared to be roughly fifty feet long and looked like a wing. Just as I was about to idle the engines, another ping rattled across the ocean air, this one even louder. Keeping our eyes glued to the screen, we watched as an object over a hundred feet long came into view.

  Kyle smiled from ear to ear and placed his hand on my shoulder.

  “That has to be the fuselage,” he said. “There’s no way that isn’t the fuselage.”

  FIFTEEN

  I idled the Baia, then checked our depth and saw that it was right at two hundred and ten feet. I had six hundred feet of anchor rode, meaning the best that I could do letting all of it out would be a three-to-one ratio. The boating handbook recommends at least seven to one, but I was confident that, so long as the weather stayed calm, the Baia would stay in place.

  While Kyle kept his eyes on the laptop, I grabbed the binos and took another look at the pesky trawler. The light of the dying sun cast a glare over the water that made it more and more difficult to see them. All I could see was its dark silhouette.

  “Looks like he’s turned a little,” I said. I looked down at the radar and added, “They’re heading east now. Away from us.”

  Kyle looked out over the water and nodded.

  “It looks like they don’t want anything to do with us,” he said. “Let’s drop anchor and get in the water.”

  After a long day of searching, I was glad that we’d finally found something and was just as anxious to get into the water as Kyle was. But my instincts told me that seeing the trawler again wasn’t just a coincidence. I thought about Baldy and how he’d sa
id that the Russian Devil, who we’d learned was Drago Kozlov, was after us. His reputation of being unpredictable and mysterious was well established.

  I watched as the trawler’s echo faded off the radar screen, then turned to Kyle, who’d grabbed both sets of rebreather gear and carried them up onto the deck.

  “We’ll only need one,” I said sternly. He looked over at me with a confused expression on his face, and I added, “We need to have someone on the surface just in case that trawler or some other boat comes near.” I stepped towards him and grabbed one of the rebreathers. “I’m going down, Kyle. You stay up here and keep a sharp eye on things.”

  “The hell with that,” he said. “If anyone’s going down there, it’s me. You don’t even know what you’re looking for, and you don’t know where it is. I do.”

  I wanted to remind him that he’d agreed to my being in charge, but he was right. He could explain what the electronics looked like and where they were, but it wouldn’t be as effective as him going. He’d been on the plane and had seen its layout and the storage devices.

  I took in a deep breath and let it out. Usually, in a situation like this, I’d just send my underwater drone down to investigate, but there was no denying that what we were looking at was the main part of the plane. One of us had to go if we were going to try and recover the electronics.

  “Alright,” I said. “You go down. You remember how to use this, right?”

  I handed him the rebreather. It was a rhetorical question, of course. We’d been trained to use all sorts of diving methods in the Navy: scuba, various rebreathers, and surface-supplied air. We’d been trained so heavily that we were able to don the gear blindfolded in heavy crashing surf. The only easy day was yesterday and it pays to be a winner, those were the mottos that had driven us to be the best in the world at what we did.

  I climbed up onto the bow and released the anchor’s safety lanyard. Moving back down into the cockpit, I used the sonar to find a suitable anchorage site near the wreck, then fired up the windlass and splashed the anchor away. I killed the engines and let out all six hundred feet of rode. Once we were anchored down, I moved aft, where Kyle was reeling in the towfish cable. He’d already coiled up most of it, and just as I reached the transom, the yellow mag broke the surface. I stepped down onto the swim platform, wrapped my hands around its frame, and hoisted it up onto the deck. After doing a quick integrity check and seeing that it hadn’t been damaged, I shut it off and temporarily stowed it up against the starboard gunwale along with the coiled cable.

  As Kyle calibrated the rebreather, I opened a locker beside the dinette and pulled out a black mesh bag containing fins, masks, and weight belts. Stepping down into the salon, I moved into the guest cabin and grabbed a large 3mm full body wetsuit. I carried it with me topside and went through the final calibrations of the rebreather with Kyle. It took a few minutes to make sure that each tank was filled and properly pressurized, that the scrubber was working properly, that none of the connections were blocked or leaking, and that the gases were being mixed properly.

  Once Kyle was done, we traded places and I performed a few dummy checks, just in case. He grabbed the wetsuit, then stepped down onto the swim platform and submerged it, making it easier to put on. Removing his shirt, he slid into the dripping wetsuit, then grabbed a pair of fins from the mesh bag along with a black full-face dive mask. He spat into the glass frames of the mask and rinsed it out in the ocean, a simple yet incredibly effective means of preventing the mask from fogging. Once I was finished, I helped Kyle into the gear and tightened the straps, making the rebreather snug.

  He moved to the swim platform and plopped down onto the transom. I took one more look around with the binos but saw no sign of the trawler. The sun was almost gone, just a sliver above the horizon, and the sky was growing darker and darker with each passing second. Kneeling on the deck, I reached deeper into the locker beside the dinette and pulled out my dive flashlight, which was fully charged, handing it to Kyle. He strapped it around his left wrist, then slid his bare feet into the fins and secured the mask over his face.

  Usually, an ordinary dive mask works fine, but I wanted us to be able to communicate, so I’d opted for him to use the full-face. I did a quick check using my handheld radio in the cockpit to make sure he could hear me.

  “Loud and clear,” he replied through the speaker and gave me a thumbs-up.

  Looking down at the radar, I saw that, for now, we had the nearby ocean all to ourselves.

  “Alright,” I said, performing a final check of his gear. “It’s two hundred and ten to the bottom. Let me know when you have positive identification of the plane. Even at that depth, you’ve got plenty of bottom time with this setup. Just be careful, and don’t get caught on anything if you enter the plane.”

  “When I enter the plane,” he said through the com. He rose to his feet, then stepped toward the edge of the swim platform and added, “Piece of cake, Dodge.”

  Glancing over his shoulder, he nodded, then took a big step and splashed into the water. He bobbed on the surface for just long enough to tap his right fist on the top of his head a few times, signaling that everything was fine, then dropped down beneath the surface. I watched him descend for a minute, then grabbed the mag and rinsed it down on the swim platform using the freshwater hose.

  Once finished, I grabbed the binos, climbed up onto the bow, and had another look around. After seeing nothing, I stepped back down into the cockpit and opened the salon door to let Atticus out. He rushed out onto the deck and sniffed around, curious what all the excitement was about. I sat down in the cockpit and kept a steady eye on the radar. Atticus eyed his tennis ball which sat in a cupholder on the dash, then grazed his head against my leg.

  “Not right now, boy,” I said.

  After a few more minutes passed, the small radio came to life with static, followed by Kyle’s voice.

  “I have a visual of the plane,” he said. After a few breaths, he added, “It’s the main part of the fuselage. The tail broke off and is nowhere in sight. The other hit we had looks like part of a wing.”

  With the radio up to my mouth, I held the talk button down.

  “Can you get inside?”

  After a short pause, he replied, “I might be able to get in through the side door. Swimming over the main section now.”

  I petted behind Atticus’s ears while keeping the radio raised in front of me, waiting for more information. The distant sun sank completely into the water, disappearing in a spectacular light show that covered every color of the spectrum from dark red to light orange. The sky around me grew darker in an instant, and I grabbed my night vision monocular, exchanging it for the binos, which I placed back in the small locker beside the helm.

  “Nose looks like hell,” Kyle’s voice said over the speaker. “Cockpit windows are shattered and the frames are bent, but this looks like my best bet. I wanted to get in through the side door, but it’s pressed up against part of a rocky ledge.”

  “Roger that,” I said.

  He swam in through the cockpit, narrating his movements and what he was seeing every few seconds. As we’d expected, he told me that the plane was an absolute mess. Tangling wires, sheared metal, and debris everywhere. He finned his way to the back of the plane and lifted a few panels that had broken off and rested against a seat. After a few minutes of silence, I was about to say something when his voice came over the speaker.

  “Logan, I found it,” he said, sounding less excited than I expected him to be.

  “Great,” I said. “Let’s get it up and get the hell out of here.”

  After a short pause, he said, “Thing’s heavy as hell.” His words were rushed, and I could hear his heavy breathing. “I can’t get it out of here by myself.”

  I sighed and glanced over at the other set of rebreather gear.

  “Alright, stay there,” I said. “I’ll be right down.”

  As I stepped towards my other rebreather, he said, “Thing’s got
to weigh over a hundred pounds.”

  Over a hundred pounds? I thought.

  My mind went to work, thinking of ways to haul up something so heavy from so deep below water. Suddenly, an idea popped into my mind, but as I checked my rebreather, I quickly realized that there was something wrong with the calibration. It was giving me an error code, and I didn’t have time to deal with it.

  Perfect timing, I thought.

  Moving into the guest room, I exchanged it for my BCD. It took a few trips to bring everything up, but I soon had my BCD, two tanks of trimix, and one regular air tank resting on the sunbed. Trimix is a special blend of Oxygen, Helium, and Nitrogen that’s specifically designed for deep diving. Reaching into the overhead of the guest cabin, I also grabbed a deflated and folded-up yellow emergency raft that had come with the boat when I’d bought it.

  “Alright, boy,” I said, motioning towards Atticus.

  I ushered him down into the salon, then closed the door and locked it. After changing into my wetsuit, I strapped my dive knife around my left calf, then took out a mask and fins from the mesh bag still resting on the dinette. Grabbing my BCD, I did a few quick checks, then strapped on the two nitrox tanks and hooked up the regulator. I sat on the edge of the sunbed, brought each strap over my shoulder, then tightened the Velcro and pulled the straps snug. I grabbed my other full-face mask, powered it on, and tested it. When I heard Kyle’s reply, I defogged the lenses and donned it. I grabbed my other flashlight, strapping it around my wrist, and sat on the transom. After donning my fins, I grabbed a small dry bag, put my Sig inside, and clipped it to my BCD. Then I grabbed the deflated emergency raft, a coil of nylon rope, and my extra tank of air.

  Standing up on the swim platform, I looked one more time out over the empty horizon, then took a big step out into the water. I kept my BCD stowed with the weights in its flaps, so with no air in the bladder, I entered negatively buoyant and sank right away. Glancing at my dive watch, I was able to see my depth as I descended. When I reached fifty feet down, I switched on my flashlight.