The hostile diver began to rise, already lifeless, and Nick guessed that some of the steel shards had penetrated his heart. He raced over and grabbed the body before it floated to the surface. He tried to get an idea of the man’s nationality, but the projectile had caused too much damage to the mask and face. Whoever he was, he had a small frame and thin arms, with a gray and blue camouflage wet suit that bore no unit markings of any kind.
“You didn’t see that one coming, did you?” Nick asked the corpse as he pulled it up under the wing, hoping the current there would not be strong enough to carry it away. He noted that the intruder carried a small, underwater flame cutter on his belt; he had come well prepared.
Nick doused his flashlight and felt his way to the edge of the wing. With his pistol loaded and ready, he swam low and slow over the top of the wrecked bomber, searching for other intruders. A flash of light caught his eye. It had come from the open ejection hatch. He steeled himself for another confrontation, advancing with measured strokes, ready to shoot anything that emerged from that hole.
Searing pain shot through Nick’s right arm, causing him to drop the rocket pistol. A harpoon bolt flew by, followed by a trail of his own blood. The carbon steel tip had ripped through his wet suit, leaving a bleeding gash in his triceps. Acting on instinct, Nick wheeled around and kicked hard to his right, defeating a second shot. But he had left his gun behind. He tried to zero in on the assailant’s position, simultaneously flipping on his light and drawing his knife from the sheath on his leg.
The intruder materialized out of the murky gloom less then ten feet away. He already had a third round seated in his harpoon gun. He wore a similar wet suit to the other hostile and carried a canvas bag over his shoulder: Drake’s tool bag.
Nick knew that he’d been caught. He kept his movements slow and deliberate, willing the man not to fire. Then he remembered the light in the cockpit and shot a glance over his left shoulder, wondering if another intruder might be closing in from behind. He didn’t see anything. Putting his focus back on the primary threat, he crouched into a defensive stance with his fins spread front and back, ready to make a final thrust to dodge the next harpoon.
The attacker milked his advantage. He stretched out the harpoon gun, taking a moment to refine his aim. Then Nick heard a familiar thump resonate out of the shadows to his left.
With a single thrust of his arms, Nick pushed himself backward, shining his light in the attacker’s face. The man took his actions as an attempt to escape and gave him a slow, menacing shake of the head, as if to say, “Ah, ah, ah . . . there’s no escape now.”
Nick just nodded in reply. “Say cheese, moron,” he said into his mask.
With a bright blue flash, Drake’s rocket detonated on the wing just in front of the attacker. The man reeled back, stunned by the shock wave. Blood streamed from wounds on his legs.
Nick did not let the reversal of fortune go to waste. He shot forward, kicking with everything he had and rotating the knife in his right hand to turn the point downward. The intruder came out of his daze just as Nick closed to within arm’s reach. He tried to raise his harpoon, but Nick fended it off, knocking it from the man’s grip with his left arm as he brought the knife down in a slashing motion with his right. He barely nicked the intruder’s neck with the tip of the blade. But the neck was not his target.
The knife slid easily between the base of the mask and the hostile’s main air line, trapping the hose between the blade and Nick’s forearm. He pulled down and away, yanking the mask right off the man’s face as the blade severed the hose. Blinded and unable to breathe, the intruder flailed, pawing at Nick like a frightened animal.
Nick left nothing to chance. He found the auxiliary regulator and severed that supply line as well. As he did, the intruder broke free from his grasp and kicked toward the surface. With a final effort, Nick launched upward from the wing and slashed at his opponent, but he only succeeded in cutting the strap of the canvas tool bag. It fell free.
The attacker sped upward, out of reach. Nick let him go. Pursuing him was too risky; a straight shot to the surface with no decompression stops could lead to a deadly case of the bends. At least he’d recovered Drake’s tools.
Drake!
Nick spun around, rapidly shining his light back and forth to find his partner. He found him a few feet away from the cockpit hatch, hovering motionless just above the fuselage. He still held the rocket pistol loosely in his hand.
It had been Drake’s light that caught Nick’s eye from the ejection hatch. Somehow he managed to sneak out of the cockpit and fire off a shot, but now he looked as lifeless as the body that Nick had stuffed under the wing. Nick sheathed his knife and kicked over to his friend’s side, grabbing his arm and shining his light across Drake’s face. Drake blinked with glassy eyes and feebly raised the hand holding the gun to block the light.
Nick lowered his light and gently took the pistol away, holstering it in Drake’s belt. Then he turned the light on himself, pointed at Drake, and gave the okay sign with a questioning look. Drake responded with a thin smile, but rather than returning the okay sign, he pointed to the left side of his head. That’s when Nick noticed the thin stream of blood coming from Drake’s scalp.
Both divers’ gauges read dangerously low. Nick gave Drake the sign for “Wait here” and then quickly retrieved his pistol as well as the body of the first attacker. Dragging the corpse with him, he returned to his teammate and thrust a thumb up toward the surface. Drake gave an affirming nod.
During the ascent and the decompression stops, Drake gave Nick several disapproving looks. Apparently, their cadaverous companion unnerved him. Nick smiled. His longtime friend had always taken zombie movies a little too seriously. Drake also spoke a few times into his mask—still in communication with the surface—but Nick couldn’t decipher what he said. He hoped that Drake had warned Walker about the hostile that escaped to the surface. Both men were injured and exhausted, and Nick didn’t relish another fight.
CHAPTER 7
Nick surfaced just aft of the Illustro, happy to see the sun peaking over the horizon. “Welcome back to the land of the living,” said Scott. “For a while there, we thought you were both dead.”
“There’s another hostile,” said Nick, ignoring the engineer and looking to Walker. “I wounded him, but he surfaced out of my reach.”
“Relax, Major,” replied Walker, holding up a hand. “He was in no shape to fight when he got to the surface.” The colonel wore a wet suit instead of his usual khakis and golf shirt. A rebreather and tanks lay on the dock, off to the side.
Nick looked his boss up and down and then gestured at the rebreather. “Really?” he asked.
Walker offered a rare smile. “I was almost finished suiting up when Merigold checked back in.”
“I’m touched that you thought of rescuing us, sir,” said Drake.
The colonel’s scowl returned. “I thought you were dead, Merigold. I just didn’t want the enemy to get away with a chunk of my bomber because of your screwup.”
“I see,” Nick said. “Well, we screwups are both still kicking. Although I can’t say the same for my pal here.” He dragged the body over to the platform, where Walker pulled it out of the water. Only a little blood spilled onto the dock; most of it had already poured out.
Scott took one look at the cadaver and clambered up the ladder, running to the other side of the dock before ejecting his breakfast into the gulf.
“He just can’t win, can he,” commented Nick, taking the colonel’s outstretched hand and climbing onto the dock. “So, where’s my other hostile?”
“Your other friend is in the infirmary,” replied Walker.
“Has he said anything?”
“I’m sorry, let me rephrase. Your other friend is in the infirmary-slash-morgue. He’s wrapped in a body bag. He was unconscious when we dragged him out of the water, and Doc
Heldner couldn’t save him. She thinks the combination of the shock wave from Drake’s rocket and the rapid ascent completely decimated his lungs. He began drowning in his own blood long before he reached the surface.”
“Don’t worry about me, I’m fine,” said Drake, lifting himself out of the water and trudging over to Nick.
“Sorry man.” Nick patted him on the shoulder. “What happened to you?”
“I saw one of the intruders trying to cut a piece off the jet with a torch,” Drake replied, turning around to let Nick help him remove his rebreather. “I called you, but you were off comms. I couldn’t risk making a noise by banging on the bay, so I stuck my knife in the silt as a warning. When I tried to sneak up on the guy, his buddy must’ve bludgeoned me from behind. I guess they stuffed me in the cockpit and left me for dead.” Drake set his gear down and then reached up and gingerly touched the left side of his head. “It looks like I woke up just in time.”
“Yeah, thanks. That guy had me dead to rights until your shot stunned him.”
Drake frowned at his teammate. “Did you really have to bring your first victim along for the ascent? There’s nothing creepier than swimming with a zombie.” He shuddered. “I kept waiting for him to reach out and grab me with his one arm.”
“Speaking of the corpses,” said Nick, glancing down at the masked body and then up at Walker, “I never got a look at their faces. Do you have any idea where these guys came from?”
“We don’t have an exact fix,” said Walker, his eyes drifting to the eastern horizon, “but they’re definitely not local.”
CHAPTER 8
Nick pushed the dinghy away from the Illustro’s dock as Drake fired up the motor. The intruders couldn’t have gotten that far out into the gulf without a boat. Walker had activated the surface radar and gotten an intermittent contact, but the range and heading were sketchy at best.
As the sun climbed above the horizon, visibility did not improve; instead of dissipating, the early morning fog simply darkened into a brown haze. The team’s cover had become their biggest threat. There was a high probability that more hostiles waited aboard the enemy craft, and they had the advantage. Waiting silently in their boat, they would hear the dinghy coming well before Nick and Drake could make visual contact.
“She’s northwest of us,” said Nick, consulting a handheld GPS, “almost on a straight line to the docks in Kuwait.”
“Were they running?” Drake asked.
“No. Walker said the contact was stationary.” Nick set down the GPS and then loaded an extended magazine into his MP7 submachine gun. He winced as he pulled the nylon strap over his shoulder. Doc Heldner had been a little heavy-handed when she stitched up his arm. She could be that way when she was angry.
After ten years, Dr. Patricia Heldner remained a mystery to Nick, patient and caring one minute, merciless with a needle the next. A striking redhead in her late forties, she could still turn heads on any city street, but she preferred to be thought of as the Triple Seven’s team mom. And like any mother, she had her secrets. Only Walker knew her story. She and the colonel had worked together well before the Triple Seven Chase came to be. When pressed about her past, the doctor would deftly steer the conversation toward her early medical training or her short tours with aid missions in Africa and eastern Europe, leaving decade-wide gaps in her history.
Most of the team figured that she had worked for the CIA, as was often the case when a DC operative had holes in their background. Drake had an alternative theory. He proposed that she had worked for the CDC and had been placed in the Triple Seven Chase for safekeeping because she was the only living soul with the top-secret knowledge necessary to thwart the impending zombie apocalypse.
After examining Drake, Doc Heldner had determined that he had a concussion and insisted he be kept under observation for twenty-four hours. The rest of the team, including Drake, had tried to convince her that finding the hostiles’ boat was more important. Eventually tactical necessity prevailed but not without consequences for Nick. The entire argument took place while the increasingly frustrated doctor ran a needle and thread back and forth through his arm.
“I think I see something,” said Drake, extending the stock of his own MP7 and seating it in the crux of his shoulder. He peered through the scope. “Yeah, tally one small craft, about a hundred fifty yards ahead.”
Nick cut the motor to idle to reduce their noise. “Any occupants?” he asked.
“Not that I can see. They could be lying down inside, but it’s just a runabout, so that would be tough to pull off.”
The intruder’s boat gradually emerged from the haze, a blue and white runabout. Drake was right; there was no one inside. Then a sickening feeling washed over Nick.
“I’ve seen this boat before.”
“Where?” asked Drake.
“The docks. Two Kuwaitis were getting it ready as we loaded up the dinghy.”
“I guess they weren’t really Kuwaitis.”
Nick clenched his fist. He should have investigated. A sunny day on the docks, and those two had been working on a boat in full white robes and headdresses. How could he have been so stupid? They had worn the traditional Kuwaiti garb because it obscured their features. “I’ll drive it back to the Illustro. You lead in the dinghy,” he said.
“Sure, boss,” Drake replied. “Just don’t lose me in the haze.”
Nick cautiously stepped from the dinghy into the runabout, his weapon still up and ready. It appeared that the intruders had brought only what they needed for the dive. There were some extra tanks, the white clothes, and little else.
While Drake turned the dinghy around, Nick pulled in the anchor and then moved forward to start the motor. As he leaned down to turn the key, he placed his hand on a beach towel lying on the front seat. Something hard was wrapped up inside. He held up the bundle and let it unravel, catching the object before it dropped onto the deck. “Well, that narrows it down,” he said out loud.
* * *
An hour after sunset, Nick and Drake hit the water again. Doc Heldner continued to pout, but the rest of the team agreed there was no time to waste in completing the salvage. Both divers used scooters, dragging the umbilical hoses that they would use to inflate the air bags they had brought down on the previous dive.
They made their final approach to the wreck with their scooters silent and their lights out. Nick wanted to maintain the element of surprise in case more intruders had converged on the wreck. Before beginning the salvage, they searched the bomber’s perimeter for signs of enemy activity. They found none.
With no more bombs to disarm and no more rude interruptions, the operation ran smoothly. In a short time, they had the first set of air bags fully inflated. These did not lift the bomber off the seafloor, but they dramatically reduced the aircraft’s effective weight for the cranes. Nick nodded to Drake to begin the lifting calls.
“Ready cranes one and two,” transmitted Drake. “Start with the lowest setting and lift together. Ready . . . Ready . . . Now.”
The cables creaked and groaned, but the bomber did not budge.
“Give ’em some more gas. Slowly . . . All together . . .” said Drake.
The cables quivered as Scott increased the torque on the cranes. Finally, like a massive ray lifting itself out of the silt, the aircraft inched upward. Great swirls of murk billowed out from beneath. Suddenly, an alarming clunk sounded from the bomb bay. Nick winced, painfully aware that no bomb was ever truly disarmed.
“Hold!” ordered Drake. But the defunct weapons offered no more protests. Once the silt settled, he started barking orders again at a furious pace, trying to keep the bomber level as the cranes lifted it to the first mark. After several stressful minutes, he had it ten feet off the bottom.
While Drake retrieved another air bag, Nick panned the light of his handheld scooter across the seafloor beneath the bomber. A shiny obje
ct reflected the light, a diver’s watch. He swam over and tried to pull it out of the silt. After a few tugs it came up. And with it came a skeletal arm.
CHAPTER 9
Despite the shock of discovering the body of Walker’s lost diver, the rest of the salvage operation progressed smoothly. Less than an hour later, the team had the bomber at neutral buoyancy twenty feet below the surface—towing depth. They left no trace that the stealth bomber had ever been there.
A professional salvage operator might have frowned upon it, but Nick and Drake used the top of the aircraft as an elevator, piling all of their refuse and equipment on top of the jet, even the body. It felt wrong lifting human remains that way, but the urgency of covert operations rarely allowed for ceremony.
Colonel Walker wasted no time. With the bomber in towing position and the intruders’ runabout lifted aboard, he immediately directed the Illustro toward the Strait of Hormuz.
“So this is the guy who got trapped under the bomber during the original salvage op,” said Nick. The team had gathered in the Illustro’s small sick bay to examine the remains.
Walker lifted a foam cup and took a sip of coffee, staring out the sick bay’s small portal. “Martin . . . His name was Mitchel Martin. He wasn’t even supposed to be on the dive.”
“How so?” asked Nick.
“I put the salvage team together quickly, using two SEALs that I had worked with in the past. I wasn’t sure that would be enough, so I consulted our man at the CIA. He recommended we add one of their experts.”
“This guy was a spook?” asked Drake.
Shadow Catcher Page 4