The Shadow Beneath The Waves

by Matt Betts

  “Blind Date Citadel.” It was a matter-of-fact monotone from a male voice.

  “Copenhagen, Denver, Munich,” Cass said. She’d memorized the pass code, but rarely used it. She waited for the response, which she’d also memorized.

  “Miami, Tokyo, Bangor.” The man’s tone loosened. “Good to hear from you Chaperone. What’s your update?”

  Cass knew Blind Date’s real name was Linden Kemp; they’d worked together on a number of ops over the last five years. He’d taught at the academy when Cass was training, and had requested that she be assigned to his command in the Navy years ago. Now, they worked together in covert ops for the Naval Interdiction Administration, keeping an eye on smugglers, terrorists, low-lifes, and, in this particular case, treasure hunters that may be of some use. “Nothing good, I’m afraid. We’re still at a standstill regarding our missing item. No new information on that.”

  “Sorry to hear that, Chaperone.”

  “Me too,” Cass said. “We’re in a situation. The crew found the treasure it was looking for here, but the boat was attacked by pirates. We could use some help taking care of the situation without too many questions.”

  “Understood. Is the situation in hand?”

  “Copy that, Blind Date. They seem to be neutralized for the moment, but their boat is sinking, so we can’t just leave them for the authorities and move on.”

  There was silence before Blind Date cued back on. “You could. No one would miss them.”

  “Blind Date, I think our connection is garbled. Could you repeat last transmission?”

  There was another pause. “We’ll send a group to meet you. E.T.A… give them one hour.”

  “Copy. Chaperone out.” Cass clicked off the phone before Linden could ask anything else. She turned it off and stuffed it back into the wool sock and shoved it back into the slat beneath her bed. She felt around inside the hole and made sure her pistol was still there, right next to the radio. She hadn’t had time to get up to her cabin to retrieve it when the pirates attacked earlier, but she just needed to make sure it was there. It was comforting to know it hadn’t gone anywhere.

  Once everything was back in place, she made her way to the wheelhouse and picked up the radio handset. She stood there for a minute until a couple of the crew had looked up at her and noticed she appeared to be doing what she said she’d do. She waved, gave a thumbs up, and they looked away. She had no intention of sending a description of their location, for fear of more pirates and criminals using it to hone in on their position before the Navy made it.

  After a few minutes, she put the mic back and took the steps back down to the deck. She approached the crew to find they’d had the pirates sit down with their hands behind their heads. “Any more of them come swimming over?” She looked out at the pirates’ boat. Its bow was slightly out of the water, and its aft was nearly level with the sea. It was obvious the boat was going down any time.

  “Not one,” Jakob looked slightly annoyed that he had no one to punch.

  “I raised some help; they said they’d be here in just over an hour.”

  “Ugh,” Martin said. “I want to start looking at these cups you guys brought up with the wreck. You sure it’s the right period?”

  “Boss, I know my treasure. These cups might as well have had “Property of Swansea” stamped on them.”

  Cass laughed, but she scanned the water between the ships, just to make sure no one surprised them. The pirate ship slowly sunk twenty minutes later, disappearing below the waves, barely disturbing the surface. No one swam away from it.

  ***

  4

  Linden ended the call and pressed stop on the recorder. He didn’t care about pirates and lost treasures, and he couldn’t care less about any of Martin’s crew, other than to find things. They were good at that. The NIA planted agents with several crews of treasure hunters and salvage operators, looking for clues to the whereabouts of an unusual treasure: a giant war machine.

  The agents were tasked with seeking out any new rumors, facts, tidbits, or clues as to the machine’s location or the fate of its fifteen-man crew. Linden felt Chaperone, Cass Palmer, had the best chance of finding something. That crew had a knack for finding hidden treasure in the most obscure places. As a bonus, the leader and owner of the crew, Martin Taylor, would fixate on the big prizes, ignoring other things in search of glory. And he could be baited, tantalized.

  “Anything new?” Linden’s assistant, Sergeant Lou Forester, dropped a folder on Linden’s desk.

  “No. Nothing. Cass’s crew found some sort of treasure, but no new clues on the Cudgel yet,” Linden said. He began to write down some numbers from the phone call’s readout. “Sounds like they had a run in with some pirates. Can you get a rescue group sent out to these coordinates?”

  “Can do,” Lou said.

  Linden stood and came around the desk. “I’ll walk with you. I need a drink.”

  They turned and walked past the front desk over toward the break room and vending machines. They passed their situation room, where Lou admired the models of the missing fighting machine that adorned the wall.

  “How does a giant hunk of metal like that go missing?” Lou asked. “It still baffles me.”

  “Don’t get me started.” Linden broke away from his assistant and walked to the soda machines. He dropped his change in the slot and pressed the button for a grape drink. It fell with a clunk and he grabbed it and slipped it into his coat pocket. He dropped more coins into the slot and got another soda, this time a cola and slipped it into his other jacket pocket. He grabbed a coffee cup and headed back to his office.

  On the way back, he stopped in their small planning room and looked at the models of the fighting machine called the Cudgel A-9. He asked his assistant’s question to himself. How did such a huge chunk of metal just disappear? The going theory was that it was somehow neutralized and stolen by the Circle of Liberated Territories during the war. But, when the war ended, no trace of the Cudgel was found on any of the captured CLT bases.

  Other theories floated around, but none stuck. If the machine was downed, its emergency beacons would have been triggered. The crew would have found some way to signal for help if they’d survived. But nothing materialized.

  Linden sighed. He’d inherited this mission almost two years ago, and the machine had been missing for just over eight years before that. He was beginning to fear the only way out of his post was by finding the Cudgel, retiring, or having a coronary incident. Unfortunately, he was in good health and only forty-two, so those options were likely out. He took one last look at the blocky white model and turned for his office.

  Lou nearly ran into him. “Hey, sorry. As empty as this place is, you’d think we could stay out of each other’s way.” He turned, headed back to his office. “Rescue call made, cavalry is on the way to help your treasure hunters.”

  “Did you tell them that our people are the good guys?”

  “Hmm. Can’t recall. Hopefully it turns out okay,” Lou said.

  Linden nodded and thanked him. He stepped back into his own office and set the coffee cup on this desk. He pulled the grape soda from his pocket, opened it, and poured half of it into the cup. He pulled the cola out and poured some of it into the cup with the grape. As the fizz died down, he sat in his chair, and woke up his computer with a touch on the desk pad. He took a long drink of his concoction and pulled up the Cudgel maps for the umpteenth time.

  5

  Almost exactly an hour after Cass made her call, Martin noticed a large shadow appear on the horizon. Then a couple of smaller ones, and then some more that were smaller still. “Anyone want to hand me the binoculars?” He looked around to see Rina sitting on a deck chair with her headphones on and a MAC 93 submachine gun on her lap that she’d taken from one of the pirates. Though she was wearing a large pair of sunglasses, Martin was sure she was staring at the prisoners on the deck below.

  Jakob tapped Martin on the shoulder and handed him the bino
culars at about the same time Joe leaned out of the control room to point to the ships in the distance.

  Through the viewfinder, Martin allowed the device to auto-focus on the large ship and its battle group. Magnified, it was easy to tell what was coming. “Cass? Who the hell did you call for help? There’s a god damn naval destroyer and its support ships headed our way.” Hearing no response, he looked back into the binoculars. “Jesus, they’re launching troop and gunship drones. Maybe we can invite the marines to our treasure find next time.”

  “Is it the American navy?” Jakob asked.

  It was a fair question, this far out, but the stars and stripes waved from the deck of the destroyer. “Yeah, no one else would bother with us.” He handed Jakob the viewer and leaned against the rail as the drones closed in quickly. The four gunships circled the Adamant twice, then hovered around the ship as the two troop drones hovered over the deck while sailors in shiny blue jumpsuits rappelled down.

  One of the troops came towards Rina, who hadn’t moved and still had a hand on her weapon. Before the soldier could utter a word, Rina pointed toward Martin. The sailor took off their helmet to reveal a woman with short-cropped red hair and a stern look. “I think you can stand down now, we’ve…”

  Rina interrupted by jutting her finger a little more firmly at Martin.

  The soldier looked to Martin, but didn’t move.

  “She likes her music,” Martin said. “When she gets tense, she likes a band called The Hans Gruber Experience. It’s loud.”

  The sailor walked over to Martin, stopping only to watch the rest of the sailors spread out and take up positions on the deck. “Are you clear up here? Any more targets unaccounted for?”

  “I think we got everyone.”

  “You think? Mind if we have a look?”

  “Uh,” Martin stumbled. He assumed that they’d gotten everyone, but they hadn’t walked through the ship to check. “Well, sure.”

  The sailor mumbled into her mic and several of the others took off into the Adamant.

  “My name is Sergeant Johnson,” the woman said. “We got a call that there was trouble out this way.”

  Martin looked around at the hovering drones, the looming destroyer, the fast attack craft, the loaded guns, the intense soldiers covered in combat gear and hidden by helmets. Then he peered over at the pirates’ ship, still slightly visible below the water, then the dozen or so captives sitting on the deck, eating Martin’s crackers and drinking his water. “Yeah. Thank God you’re here.”

  “Did any of these men say anything to you?” Sergeant Johnson asked.

  “Other than ‘Don’t move or I’ll shoot you?’ No.”

  “Just asking,” Sergeant Johnson said. “Probably just after money or any treasure you might have already brought up.”

  It took a second to click, but Martin realized they weren’t. “That’s the thing. They were going to herd us into the motorboat and take us to the ship that sank. They never even looked for treasure as far as I know.”

  One of the warship’s attending ships maneuvered over to the pirates’ ship and lowered chains and a harness down to a dive team that was already in the water. They hooked the ship up and in twenty minutes, they were raising it up alongside the Navy vehicle.

  Martin watched the water drain from the charred boat as it left the water, watched it hang there above the ocean, empty and disabled. If the pirates and their leader weren’t looking for treasure, what were they really looking for?

  Once the captives were loaded onto a troop transport and hauled away, Sergeant Johnson shook Martin’s hand. She’d spoken to the rest of Martin’s crew, gotten their stories in a quick manner, then circled back to him. “Thanks. We’ll be in contact if we need more information, or help with further investigations.”

  “Shouldn’t be hard to find us, we’ll be right here, hauling up our claim.”

  The sergeant nodded. “I assumed as much. Good hunting.” She stepped onto a dangling rope and climbed up as her troop transport moved off the starboard side.

  “She seems nice,” Rina said, her headphones were bleeding sound out of some heavy beat.

  Martin didn’t bother replying, he knew Rina wouldn’t hear him. He would’ve had trouble saying what he thought of her, really. She was all business. He still found it odd that a task force that size would’ve mobilized so fast to check on a claim of an attack on a civilian boat.

  After the pirates and their boat were hauled off by the large warship, things got relatively quiet at the site. Tensions subsided, and the crew of the Adamant got to enjoy their find. By the time the warship disappeared over the horizon, the sun was well on its way out of sight. They set up a more thorough watch, with two crew members on guard together for three hours, before waking the next pair for duty. Normally, one person would take six hours alone. It wasn’t much, but it allowed them some peace as they slept.

  The night passed without incident, and the crew slept well on that first night from all of the excitement.

  During the next day, they cleaned equipment, sent drones down to the site and did a few passes of the ship on their own. It was a little anticlimactic from the high of first finding it.

  On the second night, they celebrated. There was French Champagne and Japanese steaks, German beer and individually wrapped slices of American cheese—a guilty pleasure of Jakob’s. They sat on the deck in the dark and stared out at the dimly glowing buoys that marked their find. The moon was up, giving them a gorgeous view of the ocean around their site.

  Martin raised his glass. “Another find of a lifetime.” The others raised their glasses in salute.

  “Which do you think you’ll run out of first; finds or lifetimes?” Rina sipped her Champagne from a red plastic cup as she waited for a response.

  Martin had been asking himself that same question in a roundabout way. He’d been doing this for nearly two decades—briefly taking a break during the war when it got too dangerous, and a portion of his crew had left to fight for the Allied Forces. As soon as the war was over, Martin started getting commissions and requests almost immediately. Citizens wanting him to find their lost fortunes buried in the rubble of a bombed-out town; corporations missing supply ships that were sunk by the Circle in the middle of nowhere, and, eventually, the military came calling. They wanted help with their own ships, their own missing persons, and their own treasures. Martin and his people assisted when they could, but the chaos of war made finding anything a true challenge. They waited until the dust settled and helped in the following years. Martin had no idea what he wanted to do with his fortune, so he put his money to as good a use as he could think of by doing all of his hunting for free when it came to war-related requests. Eventually, he got back to work finding things just for himself.

  “Hello?” Rina said.

  It took a moment to realize he’d perhaps paused too long in thought. “I don’t know what I’ll run out of first. It might be neither. Maybe I’ll get bored and open a pizza shop in the San Jose area.”

  His crew laughed at him. They’d seen him chase one thing after another with no talk of stopping.

  “Anyone need another steak?” Takis asked. He’d set up the grill on the deck to cook, and the food was delicious, even with the simple ingredients he had to work with. Some peppers, some spices. Everyone was wowed. “Come on people, there’s plenty to go around and I don’t want to burn these.”

  “Wrap mine up to go,” Cass said as she stood. “I’m stuffed.” She stumbled, and Martin reached out to steady her, but she righted herself without help. “And I’m a little drunk.”

  “Oh come on.” Ozzie opened the cooler he’d been using as a footrest and pulled out another bottle. “There’s still plenty of beer in here. We’ve barely started.”

  “No, thanks. I’ll see you all in the morning.” Cass looked better on her feet after a few steps.

  Martin leaned in and put out his hand. “If she’s not going to drink it, hand it over to me. I’m the one who bloo
dy paid for it.” He twisted the cap off and flung it at the trash; it hit the rim of the can, bounced off and flew overboard, into the water.

  “Great. That’s going to be someone’s treasure someday,” Jakob said. “You’ve just made someone in a hundred years very rich.”

  “We’ll get the second crew to clean that up,” Rina said.

  Again, everyone laughed. They were drunk enough and happy enough, that everything was funny. The second crew consisted of another boat they brought in to help catalog and document the finds. They were all capable divers, scientists, and historians who chose not to live the bulk of their lives on a boat chasing treasure, instead they came once something was actually found. This unwillingness to live a wandering life earned them scorn and good-natured ribbing from their nomadic brethren. And a smaller share of the find.

  Martin looked up toward the living quarters and saw Cass’s light come on. He was impressed with her initiative and calm in dealing with the previous day’s attack. She’d fit in well once she worked on her drinking skills.

  6

  The next morning was a late one for most. When Cass came down to start breakfast, Jakob was sitting in the mess hall with his chin on the table, staring at the coffee maker. His lids hung low and the bags under his eyes were deep and dark. “Did you sleep?” she asked.

  Jakob moved only to blink. “No.” His tone was weary and he did not elaborate.

  “Stay up all night drinking?”