by Joseph Badal
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
Christo had a reputation for toughness. He was indomitable under pressure. But he was first and last a Greek. And when a Greek sees a woman—especially a beautiful woman—in distress, he is congenitally incapable of not coming to her aid.
The sight of the wonderfully tall, bikini-clad blond took Christo’s breath away. She stood behind the controls of a streamlined, white yacht and frantically waved an arm out a window at him as her boat approached. Christo could see she was anxious about something.
He stood by the rail and watched while the woman brought her boat to within twenty meters of the Aphrodite’s starboard side.
“My husband!” she cried out in accented English. “I think he has had a heart attack. Can you help us?”
Christo watched the yacht’s anchor deploy. He could see a man who looked to be in his sixties on a deck lounge chair. He felt a slight twinge of suspicion. His policeman’s early warning system. But then he filled his eyes with the long-legged blonde’s curves and angles and her distraught expression and suppressed whatever his instincts tried to tell him.
Christo lowered the Aphrodite’s ladder. He climbed down to the dinghy tied to the boat, rowed over to the yacht, and ascended the ladder built into the side of the luxury vessel. He moved to where the man lay and pushed up one of his eyelids. He had just placed his hand on the man’s neck to check for a pulse, when something jabbed the back of his head.
“Stand up,” the woman ordered. She had a pistol in her hand.
Christo stood; he felt as stupid as he had ever felt in his entire life.
The woman swept her free hand at Christo’s belt and extracted his pistol from its holster.
Christo felt heartsick when he saw the man raise up and laugh.
“See, I told you, Theo. The easiest way to a man’s heart is through his balls. Particularly if he is Greek.” The man looked at Christo. “You are Greek, are you not?”
Christo glared back.
“Ah, I thought so,” the man said. Then his tone changed to one that sounded as though there was gravel in his throat. “We need to get on board his boat.” He took Christo’s pistol from the woman and climbed down the ladder to the dinghy. The woman poked Christo with her pistol, signaling him to follow.
When they were all aboard the Aphrodite, the woman backed Christo against the boom and viciously swung her right fist into the side of his face. He dropped like a stone onto the deck.
“Now, asshole, you will tell me what your friends have found below.”
“Now, now, Theo, my dear,” the man said mockingly. “I am sure our Greek friend will be more than happy to cooperate with us. No need for violence.”
“Gamise!” Christo cursed. “As sto diavolo!”
The man laughed. “Well, I guess I was wrong.” He stepped back and in a voice as calm as though he were telling someone the time, he said, “Shoot him!”
The blonde leveled her pistol at Christo and pulled the trigger.
Christo roared as the bullet tore through his lower leg, punched a hole in his flesh, shattered his tibia. The pain seared his brain like a hot poker.
The man came over to Christo and carefully stepped around the stream of blood that ran from his leg and pooled onto the deck. He cruelly grasped Christo’s chin. “I suspect you would like to cooperate now.”
Christo spat in the man’s face.
The man straightened and, with as much dignity as was humanly possible, he took a handkerchief from his pants pocket and wiped his face. He sighed as though what he was about to do was difficult for him. Then he spoke to the woman in German.
She stuck the pistol in her belt and pounced on Christo. A foot taller than Christo and in significantly better condition, the woman was an ominous force. She pummeled Christo with her fists, then thudded several kicks into his back and side. After she tied his hands behind him and bound his feet, she dragged him across the deck, leaving a smudged, bloody trail behind. She tied one end of a rope to the rail. She formed a slip knot at the other end of the rope and looped it over Christo’s legs. Then she lifted him—now nearly unconscious—off the deck as a mother might lift a small child and dropped him over the side.
Christo screamed when the rope snapped to a stop. At first he was disoriented. It took several seconds for him to realize where he was and the dire nature of his predicament. He looked up at the boat rail and saw the rope. It was tied around his legs just below his knees. His weight had caused it to tighten mercilessly. Dangling upside-down at the end of the rope, his arms hung down, his hands brushed the water as it lapped against the side of the boat, Christo cursed himself for his stupidity. His vision blurred. He quickly asked John and Nick to forgive him. Then all went dark.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
John swam back up through the door opening, grabbed the empty cargo net, and carried it back into the captain’s quarters. He spread out the net next to Nick and rolled him onto it. He then jerked three times on the cable. He knew each pull on the cable would ring a bell attached to the winch on the Aphrodite’s deck. Christo’s signal to bring it up. The net started to slowly lift out of the cabin. John swam along, while the net lifted Nick. The net had nearly passed through the doorway when it snagged on one of the door hinges. The pull of the winch only made the problem worse. It quickly took up the little bit of slack in the net and caused it to be trapped on the hinge.
John held onto the doorjamb with one hand and pulled down on the net with his other arm. He should have pulled on the cable which would alert Christo to stop the winch, but he thought it would be quicker to just try to pull the net loose by himself. It took all the energy and strength he could muster to release the net. Just when it slipped from the hinge, he felt something pop and then an excruciating pain shot through his shoulder. He knew what he’d done—it had happened before when he was a high school wrestler. He’d dislocated his right shoulder. A tingling sensation joined the pain that ran down his arm and into his hand. It felt as though he’d hit his funny bone, except ten times worse. In a matter of seconds, his right arm hung uselessly. Every time he allowed the water to float that arm away from his side, he felt a shock of pain in his right shoulder. Now he only had one good arm. It was only then he really started to worry.
John followed the net in its slow creep through the passageway and the staircase. He managed somehow to prevent it from hanging up again.
By the time they cleared the Sabiya and the cavern opening, he was exhausted. He’d sweated profusely inside his wet suit and now felt chilled. In less than a minute he was freezing cold and shook violently. He had to get out of the water and out of the wetsuit as quickly as possible.
While the winch continued to slowly lift the net, Nick remained unconscious. John gripped the outside of the net with his good arm while he concentrated on Nick’s breathing apparatus. Nick could easily have spit it out in his unconscious state.
The net broke the surface. John looked for Christo, to tell him he needed his assistance. But what he saw made his breath catch in his throat. Christo hung upside-down from the Aphrodite’s rail, a rope tied around his legs. His skin ashen. He looked dead.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
Christo’s body moved with the motion of the boat as the craft bobbed in the sea. A blonde Amazon pointed what looked like an Uzi at John. She had the same crewcut hairstyle that Leidner’s other enforcers had.
A man operated the winch and hoisted John and Nick over the rail as though they were a fisherman’s catch. John hung on to the net with one arm, his flippered feet wedged into the openings in the net. While they dangled high above the deck, John noticed a fifty-foot yacht off the other side of the Aphrodite.
He’d been careless, because of his concern about Nick and the pain of his own injury. If he’d paid attention while they came toward the surface, he would have seen the yacht’s hull. He didn’t know what he would have d
one about it, but he felt stupid to have fallen into a trap.
The woman wore tight-fitting leather pants and a sleeveless T-shirt. A runway model with the eyes of a killer.
A man stood by the winch’s controls. He wore tasseled loafers, linen trousers, and a short-sleeved silk shirt. Dressed to grab a bite at Le Cirque after he killed them. He released the brake on the winch and unceremoniously dumped John and Nick three feet to the deck. Nick groaned when he hit. John landed on his bad arm and barely suppressed a cry. The net drooped around them, a sagging nylon cage.
“Well, well, what do we have here?” the man said. “It’s too big to be a fish, don’t you think, Theo?”
“Ich wiss nicht, mein Herr.”
“Remove their tanks, my dear,” the man said.
John looked up at him as the woman stripped the diving gear from him. “You must be Fritz Leidner,” John said.
Hearing his name seemed to throw Leidner off balance for a moment, but he quickly recovered. With as much disdain as John had ever seen on a person’s face, the man said, “Ah, the fish speaks. I presume you are John Hammond. You have caused me much inconvenience, Mr. Hammond, and for that you will pay a very dear price. But, first you will tell me about your diving. What have you found?”
“Go to hell!”
John had barely completed his retort, when the tall blonde with the machine gun kicked his bad arm. Hot tentacles of pain shot into his shoulder.
“Here is the deal, Hammond,” the man said. “I will ask you a couple of questions. You will answer those questions quickly and completely. If you do not, then my lovely companion, Theo here, will make you very sorry. Do we understand each other?”
All John could think about at that moment was the terrible suffering this man had inflicted on Zoë and how she’d never told them a thing about the map. He rolled to a sitting position. “I understand you quite well, asshole. Screw off.”
The woman unloaded on his chest with her size elevens and John felt a couple of his ribs go. Like a trained dog, she then retreated a step, but kept her eyes on him.
“All right, Hammond. Let’s try once more. What have you found?” He pointed down at the deck as though John didn’t understand what he referred to.
It hurt terribly just to breathe. John took in as much air as he could and then slowly, painfully let it out, wrapped around the words, “Shove it, Leidner. You, too, Butch.”
That really seemed to piss her off. She kicked at him so hard that when he moved to dodge her foot she lost her balance and only landed a grazing blow to his right side and then fell back against the rail.
She started to come at him again, but Leidner held up a hand and she came to an immediate stop.
Leidner stared at John for a few seconds and then looked over at Nick’s prostrate form. “Why don’t we do this a different way, my dear,” he said. “Go put a bullet in Mister Hammond’s friend’s brain.”
The woman turned and moved toward Nick.
“Wait!” John shouted. “All right, Leidner, you win.”
“I thought so,” he said. Then, as calmly and dispassionately as someone might order a sandwich, he told the woman, “Shoot his friend anyway.”
“No!” John shouted. “I know where the strongboxes are. If you kill him I will never tell you anything. You’ll kill me before I’ll do a thing to help you.”
Leidner gave Burger the hand signal and she again stopped in her tracks.
“Here’s the deal, asshole,” John said. “You let me tend to my friend and you pull the man hanging over the side of the boat back up on deck. Then I will tell you everything I know.”
All he could hope for was a little bit of time.
“Let me make something clear,” Leidner said. “I would prefer to get what I want off that shipwreck. But I can accomplish almost as much if I kill you and your friends. You are trying my patience, Hammond. I will go along with you for the moment. But the minute I think you are not being truthful, I will kill you all. Now do we understand each other?”
John nodded, certain Leidner would eventually kill them all, regardless of how cooperative he might be.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
Nick had started to come around. John checked his arms and legs and found no obvious breaks. He could see a nasty bump on the back of Nick’s head where it had been struck by the metal door. He was still groggy and seemed to have trouble focusing. John suspected Nick had a concussion and he knew he needed medical attention, because a bad concussion could be fatal. He’d become an expert on concussions since he arrived in Greece. Of course, it was more likely they would all soon die from multiple Uzi bullet wounds than from concussions or broken limbs. When he’d done as much as he could for Nick, Leidner took the Uzi from the woman and ordered her to tie up Nick.
Once Nick was secured, Leidner told the woman to haul Christo on deck. Even though he was small and Burger was big and strong, it still amazed John to see her bend over the side of the boat, grab Christo’s belt, and hoist him aboard with ease. She dropped him at John’s feet and walked over to her boss. Leidner handed the Uzi back to her.
Christo looked as though he’d been run through a meat grinder. He had what appeared to be a bullet wound in his leg, just below the knee. The wound did not bleed profusely, probably because the rope used to hang him over the side had acted as a tourniquet. And hanging upside down had also slowed the flow of blood to the wound. His breathing was extremely shallow, however. Christo had also been severely beaten; his face swollen and blood-encrusted and both eyes completely closed. John looked back at the woman and noticed the cuts on her hands. He shook his head in wonder. It would have amazed him if Leidner had beaten Christo. The man didn’t look like the type that would get his hands dirty. But he could hardly imagine a woman doing the damage, either. He’d never encountered the likes of Theo before. He glared at her. She half-smiled and flexed her right bicep at him.
Leidner didn’t even bother having Theo tie up Christo. “I have done as you asked, Hammond,” Leidner said. “Now you will tell me what I want to know.”
John stood, with some effort, and faced him. “All right! We found it. The old ship is a hundred feet beneath us.”
“What did you find on the Sabiya boat?” he asked.
“We had barely begun to explore it when my friend got hurt.”
“Yes! But you said you found strongboxes.”
“That’s right,” John said. “Six strongboxes and a safe, all in the captain’s cabin.”
Leidner visibly brightened at the mention of the safe. “Sehr gute, Herr Hammond. Sehr gute, indeed.”
Leidner rattled off several sentences in German to Theo and then turned his attention back to John. “This is what you will do, Mr. Hammond. You and Theo will go for a nice little dive. You will show her exactly where the boat is, and you will take her to the cabin where the safe is located.”
“I can’t imagine how I’ll be able to dive with broken ribs and the use of only one arm,” John said.
Leidner again looked at John with disdain, stepped closer, and put his hand on top of his injured shoulder. John winced at his touch. Although his lower arm and hand had long since lost all feeling—numb from elbow to fingers—the top of his shoulder hurt like hell. Leidner again said something in German to the woman. She put her gun on the deck, walked around behind John, threw her arms around him, and squeezed him in a rib-crushing bear hug. The pain in his chest was incredible. It took his breath away and immobilized him.
While she had him in her vise-like grip, Leidner grabbed John’s right wrist in both hands, pulled his arm straight out to the side and twisted it. John felt a horrendous pain shoot into his shoulder, so bad he forgot about the pain in his ribs. He moaned despite himself. Then he heard a “pop.” Almost immediately, his arm tingled again as feeling returned to it.
“Feeling better, Mr. Hammond?” Leidner aske
d. “It was merely a shoulder separation. You will be as good as new in a moment or two.”
Theo the Amazon released him, cuffed him hard on the back of the head, and pushed him away. She laughed. John realized that meting out punishment was not just business to her, it was pleasure, too.
Leidner picked up the Uzi. He ordered the woman to inspect the diving equipment. She seemed to know what she was doing. When she finished, she spoke to Leidner. He said, “Gute!” and pointed the Uzi at the middle of John’s chest. “Time to go swimming, Mr. Hammond.”
John gave Leidner the most determined look he could manage. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Leidner and his Amazon gawked at John as though they couldn’t believe what they’d heard. “I do not think you appreciate your situation, Mr. Hammond. Either dive or I will shoot you and your friends.”
“No, it’s you who doesn’t appreciate the situation. I’ve just been underwater longer than I should have been. My right arm is still almost useless. And, thanks to your girlfriend, I can hardly breathe. If I don’t get some rest I won’t be of any use to you down on that wreck.”
“Theo, my dear, if Mr. Hammond does not immediately put on his diving equipment, kill both of his friends.”
Burger took a pistol from her waistband and placed the muzzle against Nick’s temple. Nick’s senses had returned enough to realize what was going on. John saw him close his eyes in anticipation of a bullet. John stepped over to where the fresh air tanks were stored.
Burger looked downright disappointed—a spoiled kid who doesn’t get her way.
CHAPTER SEVENTY
They were down about fifty feet. Burger carried a spear gun pointed at John. As they drifted down, the cargo net—weighted with deep-sea fishing sinkers—slid past them toward the sea floor. John led her along the lava flow and into the cavern where the boat lay. With a movement of the spear gun, she ordered him into the boat.