by Chris Howard
Bloody nose gushing, dripping to the floor, Wilraven got halfway to his feet, opened his arms, trying for some kind of grappling maneuver. Levesgue danced aside, his gaze sweeping left. Wilraven went suddenly cold. The killer was going after Angelo.
The captain’s voice came out threatening, threw another punch, a desperate swing. “Get away from him.”
Levesgue batted away Wilraven’s attack, voice shrill. “You think I’m stupid?”
His gun was up, a black nine-millimeter Glock, jammed against the captain’s head. It happened so quickly that Wilraven, Angelo, Jerry, or the chief had no time to react. Royce Cordell was especially jumpy, as if uncertain about which side to take. He had betrayed them all for some kind of payout—that was obvious--but clearly hadn’t understood the measure of Levesgue’s drive, insanity, and complete lack of empathy.
The soldier’s gaze was pinned to Wilraven, sweat dripping off his chin and nose. A feverish shudder ran through him, and he eased the gun away from the captain’s head. “Where is the Serina Beliz?”
Wilraven wiped his face with his arm; dark streaks of blood smeared wrist to elbow, he managed to snarl back at Levesgue. “No idea what you’re talking about.”
Levesgue’s voice tightened down to a low, inhuman growl. Then a blur of combat motion put Wilraven on the floor of the Marcene’s bridge. Looming over him, the soldier jabbed the gun at him with every word. “You may think it will work playing stupid, Captain, but I’m here to do a job. And to make sure anyone who fucks up that job is dead.”
Breathing hard, the soldier looked up and scanned the rest of the crew, standing with their backs to the wall, shocked into immobility. He stopped on Royce, and the traitorous crane operator started shaking his head, lifting one arm defensively—as if he could read direction in the soldier’s face and knew something bad was coming.
In one swift motion Levesgue brought the Glock up, aimed, and fired. Royce bounced off the wall, eyes wide—shocked, a bloody knot opening right in the middle of his chest, followed by a thick splatter against the wall behind him. The dark stain spread into his shirt. He made an open-mouthed squeak, his tongue jabbing into his lower teeth.
Royce fell to his knees, looking at Levesgue with a pleading, betrayed expression, bubbles of saliva and blood sliding down his chin. “But you said . . . ” He whispered the words, and the last one came out wet and wheezing. “You said I could have Spanish silver.”
He slumped to the floor, shaking for a few seconds. Then he was still.
Levesgue stood over Wilraven. “Now I’ll give you three seconds to explain yourself, Captain. One. Two. Thr—”
A barefoot woman in jeans and a T-shirt, her wild, long dark hair fanned out in the air with her momentum, landed in a crouch right behind Levesgue. She knocked his gun arm up. There was an explosion, the shot going through the front window, and then panicked motion and a spray of shattered glass. Angelo and the others dived for the floor. Captain Wilraven looked up, following the movement, flattening his hands and pushing himself forward to his knees, trying to ignore the panic and get to his feet.
Levesgue rolled to one side, trying to bring the gun around, but the woman snapped out a fist, her whole body curling and then uncoiling, the motion so fast Wilraven didn’t know what had happened until Levesgue’s gun skidded across the floor, right into Angelo’s hands. Levesgue was on one knee, ready to climb to his feet, but he was staring down at his ruined right arm, blood spurting and splintered bone jutting through skin. His fingers hung limp, a couple of them turning dark yellow and purple.
When the soldier looked up into the face of his attacker, the woman said something rapidly that sounded Greek to Wilraven—too fast for him to catch. Her left hand swung under Levesgue’s chin, and she had him by the throat; a couple of quick jabs just above his hip, then she twisted sharply, locking out his remaining arm.
Levesgue’s mouth dropped open, rage knotting his features. “Fuck are you?” He had the start of something else out of his mouth, but the woman shifted her feet, a precise half-turn of her body, a dance that dislocated Levesgue’s shoulder just before the dull crunch of bone in that arm.
“I am Adista. First officer on the Serina Beliz.”
Levesgue’s mouth was opening and closing, fishlike, and the woman danced out the door with him, folding him backward against the starboard railing. The soldier tried to get a fist up to block another attack, but Adista crouched, pulling his defense down with her. Knees bent, muscle tension ratcheted down, she released it all in one motion, leaping into the air, one hand tightening around Levesgue’s throat, taking him over the rail with her.
Wilraven scrambled to his feet, Angelo grabbing him under one arm to get him moving forward. The whole crew aboard the Marcene rushed to the railings. Down on the Irabarren, Miles and Tam were climbing into the rigs to get a better view.
Adista and Levesgue fell headfirst from the full height of the Marcene’s bridge into the sea, Levesgue getting out a last gust of a word, echoing against the metal hulls of the vessels.
“Who?”
They vanished in a burst of sea foam and blue-green.
Wilraven felt a chill at the back of his neck and turned around; the chief, Jerry, and Angelo turning with him.
Tychasis, the other occupant of the rebreather pod, stepped through the portside door, glancing around as if taking in all the action from a few moments before. He frowned down at the body of Royce Cordell, bleeding across the bridge floor, eyes staring at nothing.
Wilraven’s mouth dropped open, questions just starting to form. Tychasis bent and picked up the Glock, inspecting it, and then came forward and handed it to Angelo. He gave the first officer a serious look and then turned and locked eyes with Wilraven. He had a thick accent, but he spoke English well. “My friend Adista does not like guns. She is very disapproving of them.” Then a glance back to Angelo. “Please hide the gun.”
A few minutes later Adista surfaced, kicking and gliding in circles before she noticed Tychasis and Wilraven and everyone else at the rails looking down at her. Then she smiled.
She was alone.
Chapter Forty-six
Triangle
Laeina smacked Cameron, the command officer, hard across the face, and it brought him up sputtering and shouting abusive language, his hands swinging sluggishly, fingers clawing instinctively at an empty holster at his side.
The crews of the Irabarren and Marcene were out of the building and across the street by now, with Maureen and Brant leading the way. They had left Laeina and Andreden to tidy things up with Cameron, who was starting to slip into a drug-induced stupor.
“What do you know about the ship that sank in the Caribbean Sea? The Serina Beliz?”
He looked at her stupidly.
She looked disappointed. “Nothing. He knows nothing about it.”
Andreden slid across the floor, dragging his leg. He wanted to get a closer look at Cameron’s face, into his eyes. To Laeina he said, “What did you do to him?”
She grabbed Cameron’s jaw roughly, turning it one way, then the other. She gave him a hard slap. “It is like a narcotic. Reduces his ability to act on his own. He will talk to us, but we have to keep him awake.”
“That’s it? Just by his reaction . . . you can tell he doesn’t know about the ship your sister was on?”
Laeina gave Cameron another thoughtful look. “He would have told us what he knew. If there was something.”
Andreden gave the soldier a punch in the shoulder. “Tell us about the pods and why you were keeping the crews of two ships? What do you know about Lenient Luck?”
Those were questions he understood, and he had answers. When he started talking, he couldn’t shut up. It was as if the information had been burning a hole somewhere deep inside him—for years--and here was his chance to spit it all up and free himself of it.
Breathing hard, sweat dripping off his face, he spilled it all. “Covert Navy ‘Bermuda Triangle’ project from the 1990s—off
icial names were Pageant-Tycoon and Lenient-Luck. Pageant was for pulling ships to the bottom of the sea rapidly, making vessels vanish—we called it ‘triangle’ as a verb, to triangle something. It was specifically for sinking ships without a trace—no crew, no wreckage trail, no emergency launch, no distress calls. Rapid and unrecoverable vessel failure. You think all those alleged Bermuda Triangle incidents are natural disasters, weather, shifting shoals, dipshits making up sea stories? Fucking shit. Some were authorized tests of the project. Pageant-Tycoon used some sort of hull-grab machine—I mean huge—comm jamming, sonar, radar, and other sensor disruption, stun charges to disable the crew—who would drown before they returned to consciousness—debris nets and weighted hooks to pull floaters below the surface of the sea.”
“What’s Lenient Luck then?”
Cameron needed another slap across the face to get going. Laeina obliged.
“That’s new. Next generation. Something bigger, smarter.” He lowered his voice as if whatever he was afraid of could be listening in. “I saw it in ops once—and the thing’s alive. Never seen anything like it. Both projects were geared as much toward being a morale-breaker as they were to inflict death and damage. Because there are no survivors. That’s built into the operation of the thing. The goal was to create a ‘no one knows what happened’ scenario. Mystery is one of the finer tactics in warfare. ‘The threat is in the mystery’ is a quote from the project introduction. The Navy never attempted to triangle anything larger than a destroyer-sized vessel, just to prove the concept. Mid-2000s the project was terminated, research shelved, funding canceled. But it’s been revived recently by a private party. Lenient-Luck was the project for keeping people alive underwater for long periods of time—basically hibernation and rebreather gear within an extreme-pressurepod.”
Andreden looked at Laeina. Didn’t he just say the purpose was to kill them all? “Why keep some of the crew alive?”
“Not some. All.” He shook his head as if he didn’t really believe what he was about to say. “The idea’s that we might want to triangle one of our own vessels to make an enemy believe we lost the ship and crew. To make them believe that they got one of ours when they didn’t. There was an actual test vessel, a Freedom Class LCS—a littoral combat ship, relatively small, fitted out with pressure hatches and a sealed deck and command structure that could be ballasted to a specific depth and then pumped free to surface it. Again, only a proof of concept with some working experiments. But all that’s long gone. What we’re looking at now . . . is that all of this has been taken over by someone operating outside an identified national jurisdiction or control.”
Andreden shot Laeina a suspicious look and then turned it back to Cameron. “What does that mean? The Navy’s not running it anymore?”
“Exactly. And whoever’s running the project isn’t interested in using the rebreather pods and relaunch plans for hiding one of our own ships in enemy waters.”
Andreden leaned away, giving that some thought, studying the stacked white pods across the room. He came up empty. “What are they using them for?”
“Breeding.”
“What?”
“Listen to me. This thing’s alive. It’s machine-like—thousands of little machines that make up one--but it’s not a machine. And the rebreather pod is for the food.”
Andreden felt sick. A glance at Laeina showed that she wasn’t feeling that well either. “Food for what?”
“The larval stage of the thing.”
“Ekhidnadai,” whispered Laeina, and Cameron scrambled crablike away from her, kicking fearfully across the floor.
His panic was real. “Where did you hear that?”
Laeina reached out, caught one of his boots, and yanked him closer. Then she grabbed him by the collar and pulled him into a sitting position. Sweat was running down the soldier’s face, his eyes fixed open and wide, his body weaving back and forth. He whispered a few words, nothing that meant anything to Andreden.
Laeina didn’t answer his question. It was enough to know that Cameron knew what the Ekhidnadai were. Andreden grabbed his collar and jerked his attention back to him. “Why breeding?”
Cameron was fading, his eyes starting to go unfocused. “Because he only has one.”
The floor shuddered, a deep rumbling rolled up from under them, and that shook the soldier awake and made him happy. Cameron laughed weakly, “The building is a trap. Rigged.” He patted the floor. “Explosives. Goodbye. You’re about to die.”
The floors above broke free; load-bearing column charges fired, pancaking the space below each. Blinding light and blasts of heated air ripped past them, charges blowing from the outside in, from the walls to the core. And no escape.
Meter-thick flooring came apart under Andreden.
Pieces of concrete the size of small ships stabbed up from below. The ceiling and hundreds of tons of brick and concrete came down on them. The bright construction lights exploded, throwing sparks and molten glass. Andreden was spinning toward Laeina, who was shrieking something, eyes wild with fear, arms up, her hands opening in a warding gesture.
Chapter Forty-seven
Memories and Hats
The salvage ship Marcene sat quietly in the Caribbean, tied up to the crane platform Irabarren, twenty miles off the western coast of Cuba. There were still a few seagulls wheeling overhead, but most had winged off to follow ships with more action.
Up on the Marcene’s bridge, Wilraven was too tired and beat up to argue with his first officer. He sagged into the captain’s chair, sighing and shaking his head when Angelo told him he was going to sacrifice himself, and could conceivably not return. There was even a slight possibility that the Marcene would be damaged too badly for salving.
“Wait. Why?”
Angelo gave him a quick grin before saying, “No problem. I got this, Cap.” And then he slipped out the starboard door.
And he did. Angelo came back thirty minutes later with two dull-green boxes and meters of spooled-up cable. “Took down Levesgue’s alarms and traps.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “The jamming and other radio gear they brought with them is shut down. Phone and sat services should be back on.”
He swung one hand up in an on the phone gesture when Wilraven’s phone buzzed.
The captain stared back at Angelo for a second, and then unclipped it. The screen showed Rusty from Ocean Eight’s Portsmouth offices.
“Hey, Cap!” He sounded glad to hear from him, almost out of breath. “Where have you been? Tell me everything’s done down there.”
Wilraven looked around at what was left of the crew of both vessels—except for the chief, who was with Ty on the main deck. He was too tired to argue. “I believe so. Why?”
“Corkran called this morning and asked. Actually, he said ‘Time’s up.’ I told him we’re done. Paperwork’s been sent off, casualty is marked as unrecoverable. He’s already paid his final third, just wired the money. He wants you to call him. But be careful. I think he’s cracking. More than he already was when we took this one on.”
Wilraven grabbed the chair’s arm and levered himself to his feet. “Will do.” He swung the portside door open and stepped into the sunlight; the cool sea air breathed new strength into him.
Behind him, Angelo stowed Levesgue’s alarm and triggering boxes, following him out to the landing, watching the two from the Serina below.
Down on the deck, Tychasis jumped the stairs in a couple of bounds and was helping the chief with the rope ladder. Seconds later, Adista climbed up and hopped the rail to the deck of the Marcene.
Wilraven glanced over his shoulder, his voice quiet. “First? Let’s bring the ship about and get the towlines up. I want us miles deeper into international water. Put as much distance between us and this mess as we can.”
“Aye, sir.” Angelo stepped through the open door to the bridge. “We have deep water to the east.”
It took almost three hours with every hand on deck working the winches, stowing lines
and chain, to bring in the Irabarren’s anchors and set up the crane platform for towing. It would have taken twice as long, but Ty and Adista slipped right into the work with the rest of the tiny crew—as if they had been part of it for years.
Wilraven thought about the missing crew members from both ships. Where had they been taken? Were they safe? With Corkran involved, there was no assurance of that—more fear of the opposite. But for now, the captain could only do what needed to be done with the people he had—and silently hope he’d see the others, alive and well, again some day.
The last slice of the evening sun was hovering above the horizon, a fiery piece of blinding light cutting through dark smears of cloud. The Marcene was headed northwest, towing the Irabarren at a steady fifteen knots. The sea was calm, and at their speed they would remain ahead of another storm swinging up from the south.
Wilraven turned back. “First?”
Angelo turned with a questioning look.
“Got questions for you. Pretty sure I’ve figured out most of the answers. I just want to hear you explain it. You dropped some welded-together steel shapes down with the Serina, and you knew they would show up in the depth scan?”
“That was it. I didn’t know if you shared everything with me, but I thought it might be part of Levesgue’s plan to hang around long enough in Cuban water to verify the Serina on the floor. The welding team worked up some nice large hull-like shapes for me to drop. The Marcene owes them a couple of cases of beer—told them we’d set them up out of the ship’s cash.” He laughed and gestured abaft, toward the Irabarren. “And we will have some replacement sheet steel costs when we get that girl back to port.” He shrugged. “I had to borrow a lot of it.”
Wilraven grinned as he turned back to the sea. “Damn, that was nicely played.”
The day had been so busy, the captain hadn’t shared more than ten words with the first officer of the Serina, but he had a hundred questions stacking up in his thoughts, demanding answers.