Retribution Road

by Jon Coon

  Now came the hard part: waiting for the right moment in the middle of the night to flood the sub, swim to the surface, board Cristóbal’s vessel, and escape into the safety of the dark sea.

  Above them, helicopters with spotlights searched the shoreline, and the USS Gabrielle Giffords waited outside the ship channel, watching and listening for anything resembling a submarine.

  In the sky, the P-8A Poseidon was making 270-degree turns, flying a tight grid, and the Falcon 900 MPA was making broad sweeps across the bay. All found nothing.

  Senator Benson’s Learjet landed at George Bush International. They parked the aircraft and the three men were met by Texas Rangers in a four-wheel drive pickup. Gabe’s gear was quickly loaded, and they were in the air for the short flight to Baytown.

  They landed at the company’s heliport and were escorted into the executive offices. The senator introduced himself and asked how the shutdown and evacuation were progressing. The news wasn’t good.

  “It takes days to shut this place down and it takes a lot of personnel for that to happen,” the chief engineer informed them. “We’re doing it, but I hope this isn’t another one of those phony bomb scares. It costs a fortune to get this place back online.”

  “Believe me, we’re all going to be praying this is one of those phony scares,” the senator replied. “Because if it’s not, if it’s what our intel suggests, this entire operation could be nothing but a grease spot by morning. Do everything you can to get your people out of here as fast as you can. And if you can head those tankers we saw when we flew in back to sea, I’d do that right now.”

  “We’ve already made the calls. Unfortunately, when the ships tie up the crews tend to scatter. After weeks at sea … well, you understand. But we’re doing everything we can.”

  “Good. We’ve got military and emergency services on standby. Anything else you can think of, just ask.”

  It was nearly 2100 hours, nine P.M. The sun was setting, and Gabe was antsy. The scenario he imagined worked better at night. “I can’t imagine they’ve got any kind of diver lockout on those subs. That means one or both will have to surface to pick up the crew who scuttles the boat with the Semtex, and I’d want to do that in the dark, wouldn’t you?”

  “Makes sense,” the engineer said.

  “So, where would be the best place to do that?”

  “The channel’s not well lit at night. The ships have their own lighting so—”

  “Let’s get back in the air. I don’t want to give them a pass to get out the back door unnoticed.”

  Tom agreed. Senator Benson said he was going to stay by the phones and would relay any news.

  Back in the air, Gabe assembled his dive gear and put on a wet suit. The scooter Tom had arranged for was in its case strapped into a seat. Gabe felt ready. He had a small toolkit in his leg pocket and a cave light wrapped and ready on his right arm. In his left pocket were waterproof flares, and on his left arm, his dive computer. The pit of his stomach was churning. He tried to control his breathing to stay focused.

  They flew a grid over the ship channel. There were four ships in all, three ahead of the Maroon Trader. “How many of those came in today?” Gabe asked.

  Tom made a call and learned only the Maroon Trader.

  “If they came in with her, why wouldn’t they just stay with her. They know she’s fully loaded. If they can ignite that oil, this place is toast, even if the initial blast doesn’t destroy it all.”

  “Sounds right,” Tom agreed.

  “Let’s get shooters on that helipad and more along her starboard side. If they surface a sub here, we might get lucky.”

  “How do you think they would detonate it?” Tom asked.

  “I don’t think a remote radio detonator would be reliable at that depth. The sub is going to be flooded. Semtex 10 is completely waterproof, so all they’d need is a waterproof timer that can set off an electric cap that fires Primacord pigtails to number 8 caps. Pretty simple. I’m a simple guy. That’s the way I’d do it.”

  They flew another pass and saw officers with semi-auto rifles running down the dock to board the ship.

  “Good. That makes me feel better,” Gabe said. He checked his watch. Ten thirty. They’d been in the air an hour. “I could sure use some coffee.”

  Tom got up and went forward. He returned with a thermos and handed it to Gabe.

  As Gabe poured, he looked away from the water. He filled the metal cup, tightened down the cap, and handed the thermos back to Tom.

  “Thanks. Please thank whoever you stole that from.”

  When he looked back at the ship, a dark-green sub, a hundred feet long and barely visible, was surfacing tightly beside the tanker’s hull.

  “There!” Gabe shouted and spilled the coffee. “Get us down there, and tell your men to blast that sub with everything they’ve got.”

  Four divers surfaced, and crewmen from the sub threw lines and pulled them in. The gunners on the tanker were running the hundreds of yards from the bow to the stern, and as yet, not a shot had been fired.

  “Shoot! Shoot!” Gabe shouted, and Tom grabbed an AR-15 and opened fire. The movement of the chopper rendered his firing ineffective, but he emptied one clip, flipped it, and slammed in the other. The chopper dropped to thirty feet, and Gabe put on his mask and fins. He yelled, “Cease fire!” and jumped.

  Gabe pointed his fins as straight down as he could and held his mask firmly in place. The impact flooded the mask anyway, and as he sank toward the bottom, he cleared his regulator and then cleared the mask.

  The water was dark and dingy. He slowed his descent and turned on the cave light. He checked his computer and read the depth at sixty feet and still dropping. At ninety feet, he could see the tanker’s keel, and as he continued down, the vague outline of the other sub became visible. The hatch was open, and it reminded Gabe of a huge mousetrap.

  On the surface, the three divers from Sebastian’s crew scrambled up the side of Cristóbal’s sub and down the hatch, like mullet trying to escape a hungry dolphin. Sebastian was the last to board, and as he pulled down the hatch and secured it, a rain of bullets hit the fiberglass hull, some penetrating and ricocheting into the cabin. Eduardo, the engineman, was hit in the chest and dropped to the deck, screaming in agony.

  Cristóbal ignored him and ran to the ballast control valves, opening them to full volume. He revved the diesel engine and put the sub into a power dive. They were still taking fire from the surface, and the crew hid under anything they could find.

  As the sub dropped below twenty feet, the hammering stopped, but they were taking on water through several bullet holes. Sebastian pulled off his shirt and tore it into rags that he pounded into the holes as temporary patches. With the worst of the leaks plugged, he turned his attention to the wounded shipmate.

  The round had entered Eduardo’s left breast, and Sebastian could hear air wheezing in and out of the boy’s chest. He put pressure on the wound and yelled for the first aid kit and duct tape. The younger men were in shock or frozen with fear. Sebastian yelled again to get them moving.

  “Help me sit him up,” he said, and after making a patch of gauze, he taped it in place with the duct tape. They moved the boy to one of the bunks and placed him on the injured side.

  “I don’t want to die,” he cried repeatedly.

  Sebastian knelt beside the bunk and offered the only pain meds they had. After taking them, the boy’s crying stopped, and he asked, “How bad is it?”

  “We got your bleeding stopped, and your lung’s not collapsed. I think you will be okay,” Sebastian lied. “There are medics on the Anna Christine. When we can move you, they will take good care of you. Just lie on the side where you were wounded and try to rest.”

  Sebastian went to the helm beside Cristóbal. “What’s your plan?” he asked.

  “How much time do we have before it blows?” Cristóbal asked.

  Sebastian checked his watch. “Eighteen minutes.”

  “We
need to get out of this channel, but I’m afraid the Navy will be waiting when we get to open water. What should we do?”

  “Run for it. There’s no choice. If we stay here, we die.”

  Released from the hospital, Dr. Alethea Laveau-Guidry sat up in bed, startled as if she had seen a ghost … again. The bedroom was lit only with one small nightlight on a nightstand, but she could hear rain pounding on the windows and see lightning flashing across the walled courtyard of her Garden District home in New Orleans.

  Thunder followed seconds later, and the old home shook in the violence of a summer storm. Alethea propped up her pillows and sat back to watch. Fragments of her dream returned, and they were unwelcome intruders, not happily greeted guests. Her heart was heavy as the pieces of the sleep-veiled revelation came together. Gabe was in trouble. She didn’t know where he was or what he was doing, but only foreboding walked with him. Gabe was in trouble. She closed her eyes and began softly singing an old hymn in French.

  Gabe descended to the sub’s hull and landed gently on the conning tower. He dumped the rest of his buoyancy compensator’s air, knelt, and took off his fins and stuffed them into the faring around the hatch. He looked with the bright cave light into the hull, turned, and dropped down the short ladder. At once the memories of the New Orleans school bus returned. He could see dead children, books and lunch boxes, loose clothing in the aisle, and the decomposing bodies. His chest tightened, and he couldn’t breathe.

  He pointed the cave light at his feet and closed his eyes.

  As he forced himself to draw deeply from the regulator until his breathing came normally again, he recalled Alethea’s soft voice singing in French. He opened himself to her spirit, and a wave of calm enveloped him. He opened his eyes and slowly raised the light.

  This time he saw the boxes of Semtex stacked and secured down the center of the narrow deck. He saw white, hundred-grain Primacord pigtails tied into a trunk line that led to a waterproof box he presumed was the timer and detonator.

  He took the toolkit out of his leg pocket and found the DuPont Primacord cutter, a custom tool for making clean cuts of the plastic-coated explosive core. He started forward, but then remembered the tripwires on the old bridge. The ones that had killed his partner, Charlie.

  He froze and swept the aisle carefully with the powerful cave light. Confident the aisle was clear, he stepped forward and cut the first pigtail from the trunk line and then pulled the pigtail from the Semtex box. At the inserted end was a number 8 blasting cap, just as he had expected. One down, ten to go. Moving very cautiously, he clipped and removed the remaining ten and then approached the sealed detonator box. He clipped the trunk line and decided to leave the box in place. He checked his computer. He was at 110 feet and out of bottom time. His air was good, so there was time for a deco stop on the way up, and he wanted a better look at the inside of the sub on his way out.

  At the helm, he made an intriguing discovery. The radio and the Garmin navigation system were smashed. “Why?”

  He looked for any notebooks or charts and found nothing. “Someone was being careful.”

  He checked his computer again. He was now in the red with deco required. He ascended the hatch, retrieved his fins, and rose slowly toward the surface, watching his computer to control his ascent rate. He leveled at twenty feet beside the tanker’s hull and began the fifteen-minute stop. His air was nearly gone when the computer said it was safe to surface. He did so and found Tom in an inflatable with two suited divers.

  “We were getting worried. I was about to send them in after you.”

  “Got it. I think we’re good.”

  “Thank God. Was it Semtex, like Maria said?”

  “Yes, and a lot of it. I didn’t count the boxes but there were a couple hundred or more. At fifty pounds a case, that’s a lot of bang.”

  “Sitting under two million barrels of oil. God help us.”

  “I think he often does,” Gabe said. He slid out of his tank and took a steaming cup of coffee from the helmsman. “What happened with the other sub?”

  Galveston Bay was a flurry of activity. Choppers in the air, Navy and Coast Guard on the water, divers in inflatables, shipping diverted, yellow sonobuoys deployed, and yet, with all electronics shut down, the engine off, and the crew silent, the fiberglass sub, built for this single mission, rolled across the bottom on the four retractable tires. Hugging the shore out of the deeper water where the ships were hunting them, they made slow but steady progress toward Galveston and open water.

  Heat from the batteries made the sub hot and uncomfortable. With only two bunks and very little deck room because of the batteries and sandbags for additional ballast, the crew suffered in silence. Time passed, and Sebastian nervously glanced at his watch. When the detonation time came and went, he shook his head in disappointment and disgust. He had plenty to say, but no safe place to vent his anger. Somehow, they had been betrayed. Somehow they were expected. Someone was going to feel the full fury of El Patrón’s vengeance. His only hope was that the target of the boss’s anger would be someone else.

  Chapter 33

  A CRANE BARGE WITH ITS own dive crew was being pushed by a tug into place over the sub as Gabe and the crew of the inflatable boat tied up to a pier in the turning basin. Senator Benson was standing in front of a dozen reporters and cameras giving a blow-by-blow description of the attack on the ranch and Gabe’s rescue of the refinery.

  “Can’t you keep me out of this?” Gabe asked Tom as they tied up the boat.

  “Not this time, son. Cowboy up. This one is all about you.” He put his hand on Gabe’s shoulder and marched him up the ramp into the senator’s clutches.

  The interviews were way too long and full of “How do you feel?” questions, and Gabe had to bite his tongue to keep from answering honestly. How he felt was like he’d rather be bitten by a rattler than have to stand there and answer their inane questions. But for Tom’s sake and the senator’s too, his answers were the politically correct ones the reporters wanted.

  Carol and the kids watched from the TV in the bunker, but the most interested viewer was Juan Mateo Caldera.

  Caldera paced in front of his television hurling expletives, a whiskey glass, and then a half-full bottle of fifteen-year-old bourbon against the stucco wall. He’d been waiting expectantly for news of the explosion: the complete destruction of the refinery, the impact on the US economy, and the staggering death toll. Now the reality of millions of dollars wasted and the possibility that the attack might be traced back to him hung heavily in the air.

  He swore. “How did they know?”

  It didn’t take long for that line of questioning to lead in a single direction—Maria. He wasn’t sure how, but he was certain who. It had to be Maria.

  He went to his desk and punched in the intercom for his assistant. “Find Maria and bring her to me. Now!”

  But Maria had known the minute she gave the target destination to Tom she was signing her death warrant. She’d left the hacienda before she made the call and pushed her Mercedes convertible through the mountain curves as fast as it would take her, as far away as she could get. With a six-hour head start she felt confident she could vanish into the nearly nine-million population of Mexico City and wait for Tom to extract her. She used her secure satellite phone to call him.

  Tom answered the call just as Senator Benson’s news conference was concluding.

  “You need to get me out of here,” was the way she began the call. “I’m in Mexico City, and I’m going to our safe house, but you need to get me out of here today.”

  “I’ll arrange it. Sit tight and I’ll call you back. Are you sure you’re safe there?”

  “Not at all, so hurry up.”

  “Then ditch the Mercedes and go to a hotel. Get a room with a view of the street and stay there—”

  “I know how to do this, Tom. Just get me out of here as fast as you can.”

  “Be safe, Maria. I lo—”

  But she was al
ready gone.

  Cristóbal and Sebastian continued running the shallows and pushing slowly toward the channel leaving Galveston Bay. The air was foul, the temperature rank, and the morale worse.

  The sub was equipped with a small digital periscope with a piece of driftwood hiding it. The driftwood also contained a radio antenna, but Sebastian was sure all lines of communication would be monitored in an area as confined as the bay, so they maintained radio silence. He was, however, using the periscope to keep them from hitting docks, piers, and tanker buoys, and avoiding anything that looked like a sonobuoy.

  From the bunk, Eduardo moaned in pain. He’d been comatose for the past hour, and Sebastian, who had served in the Mexican Navy and had some basic first aid training, doubted the wounded man would survive the night. In fact, he doubted any of them would survive if they couldn’t find a safe place to surface and vent the sub. The air had an acid taste that meant the single carbon dioxide scrubber wasn’t doing the job for eight it had easily done for four. Sebastian scoured the shore for any cover they could hide under and safely surface.

  So far there was nothing. The darkness that gave them some cover would only last another two hours and then going to the surface would be impossible. He continued to search.

  Gabe was exhausted, but they flew out to the USS Gabrielle Giffords and landed the chopper on a helipad. He and Tom were going to join the search for the second sub.

  They were invited to the officer’s mess, fed a good meal, and tanked up with strong coffee. Almost as good as an eight-hour nap. Commander Edwards was an excellent host.

  On the bridge, he explained the search and showed the navigational equipment. Gabe noticed how the nav-plotter plotted. It left a trace of the vessel’s course as well as showing course and speed.