by Bob Finley
He glanced at the sky. The sun was no more than an hour from dropping into the sea. He’d be dead by then.
A resolve flowed through him. He didn’t know where it came from, but there was no denying its influence. Energy came surging, seething back into his tired limbs and his mind cleared as suddenly as the sky after a storm front. He saw his plight and he accepted it with a peace and clarity of thought that caught him by surprise. He knew he was about to die. But he would not...would not...roll over for anybody or anything, no matter the odds.
Without actually deciding to do so, he began to hyperventilate. He dragged in huge quantities of air, stretching his lungs, forcing them to accept more than they could possibly hold, ramming it, jamming it in. And, just as quickly, with no thought given to the act, he jackknifed his body and dove, dropping like an arrow, plummeting, slicing the sea, piercing through the swirling, gray mass of shark flesh without giving them a thought. Down. Down. A falling stone.
And he was there. He felt good. Power flowed through his body and his thoughts skipped without effort like leaves before the wind.
He flipped upside down beneath the polished ball and discovered that, somehow, the little bit of metal zipper was still captured beneath his tongue. He took it in deft, articulate fingers and had the other two screws out and the cover off in what seemed like a mere instant. He let the metal plate fall away, flipping it into the depths, reflecting light and dark in erratic flashes of light until it was there no more.
Without regard for niceties, he put his face close to the opening. Shoving his right hand in, he grabbed a fistful of wires. Bracing with his other hand against the globe, he gave a violent jerk. A white flash of electricity arced into the water, temporarily blinding him in the dim depths. But a few seconds later, as his vision cleared, he heard a chatter of servo motors whine in rapid, staccato bursts and then sputter as they shorted out. He felt a couple of blasts against his skin as high-pressure water jets fired randomly, until they gave up and went silent. A few seconds later there was a hard THUNK! and a piece of the buoy detached itself on top and headed for the surface, trailing a thin wire out behind it. A couple of seconds after that, the buoy began to rise as well, though more slowly. Marc started to rise with it but the buoy quickly gained speed and began to leave him behind. He swam harder, but the buoy was still pulling away from him. Realizing that the jumpsuit he’d knotted around his waist as emergency flotation was slowing him down, he frantically ripped at it. Finally, unable to untie the knot, he muscled it down from his waist and kicked it free. It hung suspended for a moment and then slowly undulated away from him. Marc struck out for the surface, kicking and pulling himself along with his cupped hands and the strength of his arms until he caught up with the rapidly ascending sphere and managed to grab hold of the edge of the hole where he'd removed the panel. He allowed it to drag his drained body along with it. When the four-foot sphere reached an ascent speed of seven feet per second, a ten-by-ten inch plate blew away from its bottom side and a hemispherical sea anchor paid out beneath it on a fifty-foot cable, slowing the ascent like a drogue chute on a jet aircraft.
The NAVBUOY rose faster than he could have, so Marc just rode the elevator to the top floor. They zoomed through the shark cover, the big killers scattering at the sudden intrusion of the alien object. Just before the buoy broke surface, Justin let go, not wanting a cracked skull when this giant cork topped out. With a big splash it broke through the ‘glass ceiling’, bobbed violently around for a few seconds, and then settled down as its sea anchor paid out behind it. The long antenna that had uncoiled and reached the surface first had already begun broadcasting on a special frequency, alerting the standby repair crew that they had a ‘loose cannon’.
This was the first time the new company had unexpectedly released a floating hazard into the shipping lanes and they didn’t plan to allow any criticism of their emergency procedures. Five minutes after their first receipt of the buoy’s transmission, they were on the international channels warning shipping of the problem. Ten minutes after first alert, a recovery crew had scrambled a CH-53E Sea Stallion helicopter from its base in Spain and was squinting into the setting sun, inbound at 160 miles per hour. They were determined to snatch the errant buoy from the sea before sundown and had locked onto its ELT signal. Though they couldn't see anything on the bronzed surface because they were flying directly into the glare the sun cast on the calm seas, the signal from the SARSAT tracking satellite was guaranteed to put them within a few feet of it. They were in final approach just 20 minutes after taking off.
"See anything yet?" the pilot called over his commset.
"Nope. But that sun’s a killer," came the half-shouted reply from his co-pilot who was leaning out the open starboard hatch as he scanned the vast, open sea 1200 feet below them. From his vantage point, he could see the chopper’s name, Sarah Dale, painted in three-foot-high letters on her starboard bow.
"I make it to be maybe two or three points off to starboard and about a half-mile out," the pilot advised above the din of three turboshafted engines that were driving his big ship.
"Roger that," acknowledged the burly ex-Army chopper pilot, raising his gaze a little to scan a few degrees farther out on the horizon. The name REEVES was stitched on his left jumpsuit pocket, and ‘Gunner’ machine-embroidered across his back, a nickname he’d picked up as a warrant officer on combat choppers. He'd been stuck with too much ground time lately and was glad for the diversion the flight had provided.
"Got it!" he called to the pilot. “Come three degrees to starboard and drop ‘er down to about 600."
The deck tilted down and to the right as the pilot nosed her over. ‘Gunner’ was three-fourths out the door now and straining on his leash. The thousand feet of empty space below him just made him grin a little wider. What’s life without a little risk-taking?
As the ship arced around on final approach, ‘Gunner’ stiffened. The buoy was out of the sun’s path on the water now and, even though the stainless steel reflected a lot of light, he could see it fairly well. Something didn't look right.
"That’s kinda weird," he said.
"What?" the pilot asked over the noise of the engines. Their tenor had changed now that the ship had slowed down prior to landing on the surface in order to onload the buoy.
"I said, there’s something weird down there!" Reeves shouted. "There must be twenty, thirty sharks swarming around the buoy. Never seen that before."
"Yeah...me neither," the pilot agreed.
Then Reeves caught a flash of something pale just at the edge of the buoy. Something moving. Something alive. And it wasn't a shark. It seemed to be almost...
"Holy...you ain't going to believe this," he shouted excitedly. "There’s somebody down there!"
"What?!" the pilot yelled.
"Yeah! There’s somebody down there...looks like a man...and he's...HEY! Did you see that?! He's fightin’ off that pack of sharks!"
"You’re kidding!"
"No! Look, get us down there! Hurry!!"
"Hang on!" the pilot yelled. The deck went almost vertical as the nose dropped and the big ship dived the last few hundred yards in a fast attack angle. Then, just as abruptly, he flared and the nose came up, then settled back into a hover almost directly above the swimmer in the water.
"GOING IN!" Gunner shouted, ripping off his helmet and fitting a dive mask to his face. He snatched the heavy winch hook up off the deck where he'd already thought to drop it and pay out slack cable and, glancing once out the hatch to make sure he didn't brain the man in the water, he jumped out of the helicopter. Landing with a huge splash just six feet from the swimmer, he let go of the winch hook. He glanced up at the chopper and saw the remote closed-circuit television camera swivel in his direction. It was normally used to help the pilot hold position over a buoy, but Gunner was glad to see his buddy had had the presence of mind to use it on him.
He whirled back around in time to see the figure next to the buoy staring at h
im. It took a second to realize that, though he could see the man clearly because he was wearing a face mask, the other man probably couldn't see him as clearly because he wasn’t. He wondered whether the swimmer could tell the difference between his would-be rescuer and one of the sharks he’d been battling for who knows how long. As he took in more of the scene, he realized the man was wearing nothing but undershorts.
"Where’d this guy come from?" he had time to wonder before he was hit in the back by something blunt and moving at high-speed. He was driven forward in one violent motion, almost colliding with the other man. He realized with a shock that he'd been pile-driven by a shark that hadn't quite made up its mind yet to take a bite.
He didn’t wait for seconds. He grabbed the swimmer by the arm and swam for the dangling winch hook that was swaying lazily in the water six feet down. He physically put the man's foot on the hook and helped him wrap his hands around the cable, so that he was standing there underwater. Then he shot to the surface. Breaking into the air, he simultaneously sucked in a lungful of spray-laden air and jabbed his thumb into the air for the pilot to see. Immediately, the winch kicked in and the cable started sliding by him. In a couple of seconds, the swimmer’s head broke the surface and he heard the man gasp. As the man’s body quickly rose from the water, Gunner looked down. The sea below them was seething with so many sharks they looked like a hornets’ nest. Swimming furiously, they were darting at and away from the two of them faster than he could count them. He was sure that in seconds, with the activity of the winch focusing the sharks’ attention, they’d swarm in so fast he wouldn’t be able to fend them off.
As Justin’s feet cleared the water, Reeves grabbed onto the hook and pulled the lower half of his body up out of the water like a gymnast on the rings. They were clear!
There was a sudden, violent explosion of water below them as a half-dozen eight and ten foot sharks attacked the spot where they’d last seen the two swimmers’ feet rising to the surface. But they were too late.
The 16-ton winch made short work of swinging the two men aboard. As soon as he’d parked Marc in a sling seat across the cabin, Gunner went back and manipulated the winch until he’d slipped the hook into the hole on the floating buoy where the access plate had been. The pilot dragged the buoy across the surface several hundred yards until they were clear of the shark pack. Then he eased the ship down onto the sea’s surface and, leaving the rotors turning, came down to help his co-pilot maneuver a sling under the four-foot ball and lift it from the water. While Reeves secured the buoy on the chopper’s deck, his buddy climbed back up to the cockpit and ran up the rotors again. Reeves slid the hatch shut, slipped his helmet back on, and gave the okay to lift off. As the big ship revved up and tore itself loose from the waves, he took a blanket from a compartment and came over to sit beside the man they’d pulled from the sea. He shook the blanket out and let it drop around the man's shoulders. As he did so, Marc looked up at him.
"Thanks," he said.
The crewman stopped and stared, his eyes narrowing. "Do I know you?" he asked tenuously.
Marc Justin grinned and used an edge of the blanket to rub some of the seawater from his hair.
"That’s a possibility," he said. He reached out to shake the pilot’s hand. "I'm..."
"Marcus Justin!" the man finished for him. His face took on in incredulous look. "What are you doing out here?! I mean...sir!"
Justin chuckled. "It’s a long story. But one thing’s for sure...I'm glad you’re out here!"
"I don’t understand, sir. What...?"
"Just field-testing response times on our recovery crews. You passed."
"Sir?"
Marc laughed and held up a hand. "Later," he said. "Right now, we’ve got work to do. I need a radio."
Gunner led the way to the flight deck and quickly introduced the astounded pilot to their boss. Justin slipped into the co-pilot’s seat and asked the pilot to use his emergency channels to contact the Washington. In less than five minutes he was on the horn to Jerry Carruthers, commanding officer of the carrier.
"We’ve been tracking your boat for a pretty good while," Carruthers told him. "Thought for a while there we’d lose her ‘cause she was just about outrunning our dipping sonar. But then, for some reason, she went deep and doggo. Been there for a couple of hours now."
"You have coordinates on her location?" Justin asked, though he was sure they would.
"Yeah, thanks to your co-pilot. He gave us the frequency for your distress beacon. Tracking her after that was easy. There is one thing...two, actually...that I don't understand, though."
"What’s that?" Marc asked.
"First, why’d she suddenly go from seventy plus knots to dead in the water and dive? It looks like she’s just sitting on the bottom at about 2,000 fathoms."
"And second?" Marc said, smiling, because he already suspected what the second question would be.
"And second, what are you doing swimming sixty miles offshore, in your skivvies if the pilot can be believed, when you’re supposed to be aboard your ship that’s 33 miles from your present location and sitting on the bottom of the ocean?"
"Company dropped in unexpectedly and I got kicked out of my own house."
There was no response for almost three seconds. "Say again?"
"What was your last contact with Jambou?" Justin asked.
"He went down in one of his own minisubs just before the volcano blew. Can’t say anybody here’s grieving."
"You sure?" Marc pressed.
"Yeah, sonar verified the vessel breaking up and a scatter pattern that was probably debris. In fact, your own man, Matsumoto, told us how he’d escaped."
"Your sonar was telling the truth," Justin told the Captain of the Washington. "Except for one thing. Jambou wasn’t on the minisub. He was hiding on the VIKING."
Another silence. Then, "You’re sure?"
"Ohhh, yeah. He left me for fish bait and stole my ship. I’m sure."
"Then, he’s..."
"Still aboard," Marc finished for him.
"Then, if he has your ship, why did he go deep and lay by after only a few minutes? Why didn’t he just keep running? I hate to admit it, but he probably would have lost us."
"‘Cause I pulled his plug. I SCRAMMED the reactor before he fed me to the fish."
"And he let you go? Knowing he wouldn’t be able to..."
"He didn’t know that until it was too late."
"So, your ship just, what? Sank?"
"She’s programmed to protect herself. She’s down there, now, waiting for us to come get her."
"Well, what about Jambou? Do you think he’s still alive?"
"Probably. Nuts, maybe, but most likely a live one."
"You said your ship was waiting for you to ‘come get her’. What do you mean?"
Marc Justin looked out the cockpit windows. He could see the coastline of Spain as a smudge on the horizon and he knew they’d be feet dry in five or six minutes.
"I'm going ashore. I've got to get a piece of equipment flown in that I'll need to raise the VIKING. But I don't want to raise her in the dark. If you can keep station tonight in her vicinity, I can be there at first light...assuming you’ll authorize a civilian aircraft to land aboard your ship?"
"Why not? We’ve already crashed one, what’s one more? But, what about Jambou? What makes you think he’ll be willing to cooperate in the morning?"
Justin's lips drew back in a rictus that barely passed for a smile, but there was no humor in his eyes.
"Down where he is, there is no morning. And, when Yoko’s finished with him, he’ll be ready for anything that has the word ‘up’ in it." He looked over at his two rescuers who were watching him closely and winked.
"In the meantime, if that bunch of mine you've got aboard gives you any trouble, tie a line to ’em and toss ‘em off the stern."
He heard a chuckle over the radio. "Roger that. See you in the morning."
The big Sea Stallion roared in
over the surf just as Marcus Justin made contact with his land based field office in Puerto Real.
"Call Miami," he told them. "Get Ben Cramer out of whatever bar or bed he’s in and tell him I want a package in your hands by five a.m., your time."
"Yes, sir, Mr. Justin. What kind of package?"
"Tell him," Justin said, "to send me Lazarus."
Chapter 105
From 5000 feet, though the rising sun bathed the white hull of the Sarah Dale in its honeyed light, the task force below them still lay in the last fragile remnants of dawn’s shadow. The pilot had just received permission to land on the big flattop two miles dead ahead. By the time the Sea Stallion was chasing up the ship’s roiling wake, the first long rays of the sun were just illuminating the Washington’s island superstructure. They observed that most of the armada that had included warships from half-a-dozen countries had dissipated. All that remained were the ships of the American task force and a couple of ‘newsies’ hovering on the fringes.
"Man, what a hunk o’ junk!" Gunner Reeves murmured reverently. The huge ship, over a thousand feet long, seemed to grow as they made their final approach. Their own helicopter was as long as a five story building laid on its side, but was nevertheless rendered insignificant as it dropped to the aft deck of this floating city.
Marcus Justin emerged from the chopper carrying a metal suitcase. He diplomatically waved off a crewman who tried to relieve him of it. He wasn’t prepared for the welcoming committee that suddenly appeared.
Even though the hour was early, hordes of uniformed navy and marine personnel swarmed him. He was reminded of vids he'd seen of heroic astronauts plucked from the sea more than forty years before. He didn’t feel like a hero. Instead, he was humbled by the display of emotions. He knew the difference between being a hero and being lucky. They’d been lucky. All of them.