Alexis pulled a fire axe off of the nearest wall.
“Hassan, I put two shots in his chest,” shouted Jonah, getting angrier by the second. “I assure you, he will die in minutes. I need you right-fucking-now!”
“I’m good with an axe,” said Alexis.
Dr. Nassiri glanced up as Jonah stared him down. It wasn’t as if the American could march over there and make him give up his patient. The door kicked again, almost opening enough to see moving shapes on the other side. Either Jonah was weakening or the men inside were getting desperate.
“Knock out that ceiling pipe,” ordered Jonah, pointing above his head.
Alexis took a single wild swing at the overhead pipe and the axe head clanged off, sending the uncontrolled blade flying downwards, embedding itself in the deck between Jonah’s legs just inches from his crotch.
“Try again,” said Jonah. “Aim for that pipe.”
Alexis scowled as she took aim at the overhead pipe.
The mercenaries behind the door heard the axe-on-metal clanging and renewed their efforts to escape.
Alexis swung the axe a third time, burying it into the pipe. Jonah plastered a wolfish grin on his face, excited by her initial success.
One more shot to the pipe and it came free, exposing a small opening into the other compartment normally reserved for air flow.
“First grenade, no pin pulled,” said Jonah. “Far as you can shove it in.”
Alexis pushed the first phosphorous grenade into the air pipe, bracing herself in the air so she could reach in almost to her shoulder.
“Good,” said Jonah.
“Now what?”
“Now we give them a chance to surrender. Ever seen video of what white phosphorus does to the human body? We put a live grenade in their compartment, it’s going to light up the whole forward like an industrial oven.”
Jonah adjusted his position, still bracing the hatch shut.
“Hey assholes!” shouted Jonah through the heavy hatchway. “Time to pack it in. You’re cornered. You’re outgunned. How about I open this door and see you on your knees, facing me with your hands raised? It’s either that or I swear to god, I will turn you into a smudge on the deck plates.”
The pressure on the other side of the door eased. They’d stopped trying to force their way through.
“What do you say?” yelled Jonah.
“Standing down!” rattled a voice from the other side of the hatch. “We’re standing down!”
Jonah stepped back from the hatchway and allowed it to open slightly only to see the black barrel of an assault rifle jammed through the opening.
“Shiiiiit!” he stuttered and kicked the barrel back into the forward compartment. Using all his strength, he dragged the hatch shut again with a ringing clang as the assault rifle shot twice, bullets ricocheting against the deck and through the accessway.
“Fuck these guys,” he growled, checking himself and Alexis for bullet wounds. “Get the second grenade. Pull the pin; shove it in deep into the pipe, past the dividing wall and into the forward compartment. Close the valve. Can you do that in the six seconds before it detonates?”
“Yes,” answered Alexis.
“Six seconds,” repeated Jonah.
Alexis stared daggers as she yanked the pin and plunged the grenade into the air pipe. She wrenched the pipe valve with all her strength, nearly succeeding in closing it when the explosion went off, shooting a five foot long jet of hot phosphorus flame out of the pipe and shaking the submarine to the keel. Alexis reached up again and just managed to cut off the jet before it set the nearby bunk beds on fire.
From the other side of the steel wall and three hatchways compartments forward, two men screamed as they burned alive. Ammunition cooked off with dull pops, precipitating a secondary explosion and more screaming. Jonah held the door closed against one last kick, waiting for the sickening silence.
Still bracing the door, Jonah grimaced and Alexis shuddered. Dr. Nassiri had seen burn victims, even treated a few; he couldn’t imagine celebrating anyone dying that way, not even a mortal enemy. And what of this supposed victory? Were they victorious in the fact that they would die moments after the mercenaries instead of moments before?
Dr. Nassiri glanced up at the depth gauge as they passed a thousand feet. The very thought of it gave him chills, water the distance of three football pitches weighed down on them. How much could the hull of this vessel take? Probably not much more, judging by the creaking and pinging sounds echoing through the submarine.
Jonah held the door shut for one more minute, then let it go. No sounds came from the compartment; his hands were bright red from the searing heat. The smoldering bodies of the mercenaries in the bow would have to be considered a loose end, at least for now. If the jet of white fire shooting out of the pipe was any indication, death would have been fast, a bright white light searing heat, a few screams and—once the brain cooked or blood boiled—nothing.
Jonah scrambled to the control panel followed by Alexis, both now intimately close to Dr. Nassiri in the tight quarters of the command compartment. Dr. Nassiri kept his back turned—a few more staples and the bleeding might actually be under control—
“Blowing ballast tanks,” said Jonah. He inputted a series of commands into the controls console and was rewarded by a loud hissing sound as the external ballast tanks filled with air, displacing the heavy seawater and lightening the entire vessel. The depth gauge slowed as all three watched with held breath. The gauge just edged barely past fifteen hundred feet, almost stopped, then continued deeper and deeper, once again picking up speed. The groaning of the structural members continued with renewed intensity.
“This is not good,” Jonah said. “There’s too much weight from the yacht pulling us down. Alexis, give me engine power. Let’s push this ship off our backs.”
“Me?” Alexis looked at him as if he’d sprouted horns.
“You’re my engineer.”
“But I’ve never—”
“What happened to their engineer?” Dr. Nassiri asked.
“I think I shot him.” Alexis said.
“Dead man’s boots.” Jonah pointed at the controls. “You’re my new engineer.”
“Shit. Shit. Shit!” Alexis kicked the empty chair in front of the control panel, sending is spinning.
“I need you.” Jonah said.
“Fuck you.” Alexis said as she stilled the chair and sat down. Fingers flying, she pulled up a series of menus and engine diagnostics. “I can give you sixty seconds of full battery power,” she said. “Maybe ninety, then we’re running off emergency reserves.”
“Sixty?” demanded Jonah. “That’s it?”
“I may have also shot up the battery compartment,” she admitted.
“Can’t do anything about that now. Put the pedal to the metal.”
Alexis winced as she inputted the command. The long driveshaft of the submarine spun to life, chewing at the dark water, trying to gain traction. The entire vessel shifted, the bow rising as the stern fell, putting Dr. Nassiri in the uncomfortable position of hugging his patient to prevent him from sliding off the chart table.
The semi-conscious Russian hugged him back, and Dr. Nassiri could have wept with joy—with the bleeding contained and with the IV bag the Russian still had enough strength to move. The doctor took the opportunity to listen to both lungs. It wasn’t good news, but total lung collapse had been prevented. If they lived through the next sixty seconds, the Russian might just make it.
“Come on, you bitch!” Jonah shouted as the submarine shuddered and bucked under the intense power of the massive rear propeller. “Come on!”
One loud, long scraping sound, peeled along the skin of the submarine, and then another—the yacht wreckage above them was moving, but not enough. Not more than thirty seconds into the exercise, the engines died amid the howl of emergency warning klaxons.
“What happened? That wasn’t sixty seconds!” yelled Jonah over the cacophony.
“It’s the drag, we sucked down too much power,” shouted Alexis. “We’re down to emergency reserves. The computer is locking me out of throttle controls.”
“Down to bare knuckles and swingin’ dicks,” mused Jonah as the now unimpeded depth gauge rolled past 1700 feet. “Fill the ballast tanks, make us heavy.”
“What?” said Alexis.
“Fill them. I want to hit the sea floor with enough impact to knock this wreckage free. Doc, I need your help here. Fuck that guy—he’s already good as dead.”
“But we have no idea how deep the bottom is!” protested Alexis.
“You got a better plan?”
Dr. Nassiri ignored both Americans. There it was, the last bandage put in place.
“Am I going to have to put a fucking bullet in your patient’s head?” demanded Jonah. “If I kill him, will you please fucking help me?”
Dr. Nassiri cleared his throat, loud enough for Alexis and Jonah to look up from their stations. “Please allow me to assist,” said Dr. Nassiri. And with that, he took a massive syringe loaded with a bear shot of amphetamines and adrenaline and jammed it into the Russian’s heart, pushing the plunger fully down.
The Russian’s eyes jumped open, wide enough to see the whites around all sides. Nearly crazed, he yanked the syringe out of his chest and tried to jump to his feet while screaming in Russian.
“English!” shouted Dr. Nassiri.
“Who fuck you are?” he yelled, his thick accent tumbling out of his mouth for the first time.
Dr. Nassiri glanced down at his name patch—Vitaly Kuznetsov.
“Vitaly, we’re the ones your crew tried to kill,” said Dr. Nassiri. “All your comrades are dead and we’re sinking.”
“Is submarine. Is designed to sink,” said the Russian, as if this would be obvious to anyone.
“We’re passing eighteen hundred feet,” said Jonah. “What’s our crush depth?”
“Difficult to say until actually crushed, no?” Vitaly gurgled. He dragged himself up against the wall, his head lolling.
“Fucking guess for me,” said Jonah, frustration building again.
“Maybe two thousand five hundred? What big deal, just blow ballast, make us very light for emergency surface.”
Nobody had to tell Dr. Nassiri that they were already past two thousand and still rapidly descending. Five hundred feet to go, maybe less given the violence of the collision. How long would it take, a minute, maybe two? At least the end of the ride would be quick enough, a sudden bang, a rush of water.
“We blew the ballast,” said Jonah. “We’ve got three hundred and seventy tons of yacht wreckage fused to the upper deck pushing us down.”
“No good, no good,” Vitaly said, realizing the predicament for the first time over the powerful combination of endorphins, pain, amphetamines, and adrenaline. “Battery power?”
“Down to reserves,” said Jonah, scowling at the man he’d shot. “We were going to try to drive the submarine into the sea floor, knock off the wreckage that way.”
“No good, no good,” said the Russian. “Your idea terrible. We must roll submarine. You certain everybody dead?”
“Your comrades are dead,” said Jonah. “How do we roll? Is that even possible?”
“I believe rolling only option. But rolling submarine only tried one time. Black Sea, nineteen-seventy-three by Russian Navy.”
“Did it work?” asked Alexis.
“Everybody die,” Vitaly said. “My father lose two cousins.”
The Russian threw an arm over Dr. Nassiri’s shoulder. The doctor guided him to the helmsman’s chair, inches from where he’d been shot through the chest.
“Brace yourselves,” Vitaly ordered as he secured himself in the mounted helmsman’s seat with a seatbelt across his lap and shoulder. Without further warning, he dumped the starboard ballast tank. The submarine suddenly lurched to the right like it’d just had a leg kicked out from underneath it. Alexis, Jonah, and Dr. Nassiri all fell to their knees, crawling over the jagged surfaces of the bulkhead mounted consoles that had once been on the right wall as the submarine turned over on her side.
Vitaly swore, pounding away at the command console, adjusting the depth planes and trim with furious speed, his fingers dancing over the controls as if conducting an eighty-piece symphony orchestra.
“Brace, brace,” he chanted. “We must show belly!”
The submarine lurched forward, propelled by emergency power that he had dredged from god-knows-where, her depth planes cutting through the water, forcing her upside down. Every metallic member of the submarine shuddered and rattled, every unsecured bunk, computer monitor, manual, loose change, everything came tumbling out of its place, spilling across the ceiling of the submarine as she showed her underside to the distant surface.
And for one perfect moment, there was stillness as the submarine plunged into the depths like a tuckedwing bird of prey, upside-down, passing 2500 feet. With one last scraping groan, the twisted wreckage of the Fool’s Errand peeled from the submarine and fell away into the darkness.
Vitaly hung from the ceiling in his mounted chair, arms and legs dangling like a dead deer ready to be trussed.
“He’s unconscious again!” shouted Alexis. Without prompting, she stood up and slapped him across the face, hard.
Vitaly snapped to consciousness, shaking his head and regaining control of the computer console.
“Da, da, da!” he shouted with such conviction that Dr. Nassiri actually found himself wondering if this was not the strangest position the young Russian had found himself waking to.
Vitaly’s fingers jabbed at the controls, plunging the bow further down, adjusting the depths planes—and then it happened. The submarine twisted, slowly regaining her equilibrium as the depth gauge nearly touched three thousand feet. Both ballasts blew simultaneously, rocking the vessel back upright, stopping the depth gauge cold and sending the unburdened vessel shooting upwards.
“No way that should have worked,” breathed Jonah. Alexis looked at Dr. Nassiri. She was more shell-shocked than happy, the sheer magnitude of the past hour weighing heavily on her shoulders.
Twenty-eight-hundred feet, read the gauge. Twenty-seven fifty. They’d break through the surface in minutes. Dr. Nassiri unbuckled Vitaly’s seat belt and carried him to the nearest bunk, laid him on the mattress, and set the IV drip to work. He injected Vitaly with a sedative and watched as the Russian’s eyes fluttered, then closed. It would be a rough couple of days, but the young man should survive his initial gunshot wounds. Whether or not he could survive this expedition—if any of them could—was another matter entirely.
CHAPTER 10
Dr. Nassiri sat alone in the command compartment of the submarine, eyes fixed on the radar screen. It was quite a different sensation to be on the surface again. The submarine rocked and bobbed in the gentle waves like any other midsized vessel, but there were no windows to anchor one to the horizon. A little nauseating, if one was completely honest with oneself.
None of them spoke during the interminable ascent through the water column, no cheers when they’d finally broken through the surface or opened the hatch. Battle fatigue set in, a kind of stillness in the soul made up of equal parts physical exhaustion and spiritual reflection. Dr. Nassiri found himself playing the day back like a movie reel, pointing out moments where he should have been faster, should have been cleverer, should have been killed but wasn’t.
He brushed his fingers across the name placard of the submarine.
Scorpion, it read.
Appropriate. Named for an arachnid that lies in wait for its prey, stinging when least expected. Perhaps this ship should not be renamed as was the Conqueror. What would be the point? There was no slipping this weapon through a shipping channel or canal with little more than a paint job, fake papers, and a forced smile.
Alexis worked alone in the engine room, trying to repair the batteries or at least isolate the damage. Dr. Nassiri found her technical explanation
s difficult to understand at best. At least he understood enough to get that the Scorpion was kind of like a hybrid car, using conventional diesel fuel on the surface, battery electricity while submerged.
Finding himself useless to her or Jonah, he occupied himself with the logs of the latest series of drone surveillance flights. Apparently Charles Bettencourt took his pirate neighbors to the west very seriously, taking great care to spy on each pirate harbor in turn.
One of the high-resolution aerial spy photos caught the doctor’s attention. At first, the harbor looked like all the rest—a single cut-out deep harbor guarded by two tall stone towers. Two rusting mother ships were nestled within, surrounded by a dozen fiberglass skiffs tied up by the bows. The compound was walled off with a corrugated steel fence. Apparently the pirates feared attack by land just as much as assault by sea. Several broken-down trucks dotted the interior of the wall. Whether they drove or not—in fact, whether anything in the compound worked—couldn’t be ascertained by the photograph alone.
Then he realized what had caught his surgeon’s eye.
One of these is not like the others, he thought. A dark shape in the far corner of the harbor couldn’t be ignored. It was somewhere between the size of a skiff and a mothership. Unlike the rusting white steel ships, this one was matte black.
Dr. Nassiri zoomed in with his fingers on the tablet computer. His first instinct was correct, this was no pirate ship. From the high-resolution surveillance photo he could make out the build of the ship, a futuristic ultra-lightweight trimaran carbon-fiber racing yacht. The name Horizon was painted on the side, but not recently. More interestingly, he recognized the distinctive crimson and gray logo of MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The name and the ship seemed familiar somehow, like he’d read about it in a newspaper or a magazine some long time ago. But then again, anything before about two weeks ago felt like it’d happened to a different man.
Dr. Nassiri realized he could see two shadowy figures on the back deck. They didn’t look like pirates, but then again, what did a pirate look like?
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