The Wrecking Crew

by Taylor Zajonc

  “Let’s start with the weapons locker,” said Alexis.

  Dr. Nassiri allowed her to lead him, taking cautious steps towards the stern of the submarine while he reached forward with his free hand, trying to anticipate when he’d reach the hatchway. Alexis was a good guide, she found the hatchway in moments. She released his hand, and a twinge of loss ricocheted through his body.

  Sounds—Dr. Nassiri heard Alexis running the silent EMF meter over the walls, along the deck. She bumped the device against rifles and ammunition boxes. The detector made not so much as a burble.

  “Maybe it’s not working,” whispered Alexis.

  “May I?” replied Dr. Nassiri in his own hushed tone.

  The doctor gingerly walked towards her voice, making little gentle sweeps with outstretched fingertips to find her. He touched something firm, her shoulder, and ran his hand down her upper arm. He reached her wrist, fingers softly running over the barely-there peach fuzz of her forearm. The doctor felt goosebumps, felt her shiver. Strange—it was not cold in this compartment. He felt around the outside of her hands, coming across the plastic construction of the EMF reader and slipped it from her grasp.

  The doctor placed his free hand into the small of Alexis’s back and brought the EMF reader up underneath her left breast, gradually increasing pressure until it was firmly against her chest. He felt the muscles in the small of her back tense up for just a moment, then release.

  The EMF reader gently chirped, reading a faint signature.

  “It’s your heart,” he whispered, holding the device in place. “The EMF reader is detecting the electrical charge in your skin from each beat.”

  “It works,” whispered Alexis, breathlessly.

  She fumbled against his hands, taking the device back as his hand fell away from her lower back. No guiding her fingers this time, he was forced to follow the sounds of her footsteps as she exited the weapons locker for the engine room.

  Dr. Nassiri followed, trying to keep up with her. She stopped dead and swiveled and the doctor collided with her. He’d just opened his mouth to utter a profound apology when he felt her arms reach around his torso, running up and down the length of his abdomen, pulling away at his shirt. His body reacted before his mind could issue a single command. He found himself lifting her entire body onto his, her legs wrapped around his waist as he held her in his arms, hands sliding across her back and up to the nape of her neck.

  Her mouth found his. The EMF reader dropped on the ground and clattered across the metal deck as Dr. Nassiri pressed Alexis into the wall, her nails digging into his skin, days of tension and attraction between them culminating in a singular moment. She ripped open his shirt, buttons bouncing off the engine block as she pressed herself against his bare chest.

  The EMF reader sat unnoticed a few feet away, as if content to chirp away merrily and without attention.

  “Wait! Did you hear that?” Alexis pushed Dr. Nassiri’s face away from the tiny dimple just above her clavicle.

  “What?” he asked as he held Alexis suspended, her legs still wrapped around his waist.

  “I … I think it’s beeping,” said Alexis.

  The Texan wriggled her hips, lowering herself to the ground. Both she and the doctor dropped to all fours, feeling around for the reader.

  “Found it,” Dr. Nassiri said, his fingers brushing against the undamaged plastic casing of the device. Alexis took it from him and began running slow sweeping patterns across the floor and wall. The beeping strengthened as Alexis found the source of the signal behind a panel just a few degrees off the apex of the rounded ceiling.

  “Clever putting it in here,” said Alexis. “The electromagnetic signature from the batteries could have made it impossible to find. I guess we’re lucky they’re so low right now.”

  “Lucky,” mused Dr. Nassiri. He could still taste her lips on his.

  “I think it’s just behind this panel,” said Alexis. She grabbed Dr. Nassiri’s hand, a little more forcefully this time, forcing him to mark the location.

  “Got it,” said Dr. Nassiri.

  “Don’t move,” she said. “I’m going to turn all the lights back on.”

  With that, the Texan walked away, the sound of her footsteps disappearing into the far end of the compartment. A few moments later, the lights flickered back on. Dr. Nassiri winced, covering his eyes with his free hands as the blinding illumination forced its way through the gaps between his fingers.

  Looking down, he saw his pants askew, and the entire front of his shirt was open, buttons missing. Alexis reappeared, grinning at him as she adjusted her tank top and shorts. One of her shoes had fallen off, it lay not far from Dr. Nassiri’s feet.

  They both turned as Fatima entered the compartment, rubbing her eyes against the light. Embarrassed, Alexis ducked behind a console and busied herself in a toolbox.

  “Did you find it?” Fatima asked, her glance shooting between her son and the American girl. “What happened to your shirt?”

  “I … caught it on something in the dark,” gulped Dr. Nassiri. “It ripped.”

  Alexis stifled a snicker which she tried to mask by clattering around in a drawer. Fatima frowned and crossed her arms.

  “But I think we found what we were looking for. How’s Vitaly?”

  “He’s asleep,” said Fatima, scowling. “Whatever you gave him really knocked him out this time.”

  “I didn’t give him anything.”

  “Maybe he finally understands we won’t murder him in his sleep,” Alexis said, brandishing a particularly menacing-looking crowbar. She stood on her tip-toes and stuck the edge of the crowbar underneath the panel, carefully prying it away from the wall.

  Rivets strained then popped and the panel fell free, still suspended in the air by electrical cording.

  “Um,” said Alexis, emerging from behind the hanging panel. “There isn’t anything back here.”

  “That’s not good,” mumbled Dr. Nassiri. He looked, and didn’t see anything either.

  “What do we do?” asked Fatima. “Are you sure about the reading?”

  “A hundred percent,” said Alexis. “A transmission is coming from that location, it couldn’t be anything else.”

  Dr. Nassiri looked Alexis squarely in the eye and realized they were both thinking the same thing.

  “It’s on the outside of the vessel’s hull,” he said. “So it cannot be accessed while submerged.”

  “Can we surface?” asked Fatima.

  “There’s just no way,” said Alexis. “Even if we surface, we can’t dive again, not until we’ve charged the batteries to at least twenty percent. The mercenaries will be on us like a tornado on a trailer park.”

  “Charming,” interjected Fatima.

  “I’ll do it,” said Dr. Nassiri.

  “Do what exactly?” demanded Fatima. “What are you going to do? You said it cannot be accessed while submerged!”

  “It’s obvious what has to be done. Someone has to swim out of the lockout chamber, find the transponder and deactivate it.”

  “Certainly you cannot—” began Fatima.

  “Your mom’s right,” said Alexis. “It’s suicide, and we—we need you.”

  “Who would you have me send?” he demanded, his voice raising. “Mother, look around you. Shall I send the only man who can pilot the ship, a man who can barely get in and out of his bed? The woman who runs the engines we’ll need to escape? Or perhaps you’d have me send my own mother out with her broken wrist?”

  Fatima fell silent.

  “I’ll go,” said Alexis.

  “You will not,” said Dr. Nassiri. “I will not further imperil your life.”

  Alexis too fell silent.

  “I don’t know how to dive,” he admitted, “but I paid attention when Jonah was preparing for our dive in Malta—”

  “Malta?” Fatima interrupted.

  “It’s a long story.” He turned back to Alexis. Just one air bottle would probably be safest. I do not intend
to be outside the submarine for long. Alexis, please use a hammer and rap it against the hull loud enough for me to hear it. Mother, please go attend to the lockout chamber. It will just be matter of pressurizing the chamber until it matches the pressure of the sea outside.

  “Once flooded, I can simply open the door and swim out. I will change into a wetsuit and join you shortly.”

  Fatima nodded, and left the engine room without another word. Wrestling with his own fear, Dr. Nassiri stormed into the weapons locker. He found a small bottle of air—he believed he’d heard Jonah refer to it as a “pony bottle”—and a marine flashlight. He grabbed a wetsuit that appeared to be more or less his size and stripped off his shirt. He noticed that he seemed leaner somehow, tauter than he’d remembered. While this dangerous life did not suit him, his body had already begun to adapt.

  “Hey,” came a voice from behind him.

  Shirtless, the doctor turned towards the voice. Alexis stood in the hatchway, blocking his path. She raised one long, graceful leg and braced it against the bulkhead.

  “Hello to you as well,” said Dr. Nassiri, giving her the benefit of a small smile despite his overwhelming sense of impending doom.

  “I want to finish what we started,” she said. “So come back in one piece.”

  Alexis turned around and with that she was gone. Her promise lingered, if in no other place than Dr. Nassiri’s vivid imagination.

  Fatima was still familiarizing herself with the controls of the lockout chamber when her son climbed up the ladder to meet her.

  “Lock chamber,” she whispered to herself, reading the manual, her fingers pretending to press the buttons. “Pressurize interior at a rate of no more than one atmosphere per every ten seconds. Check interior pressure against exterior pressure. When equalized, flood chamber. Open outer doors.”

  “You understand what you’ll need to do?” her son asked.

  “I woke Vitaly up. He gave me a brief overview,” said Fatima. “He says he has to stay in the command compartment.”

  “I don’t think he can stand for any prolonged period of time yet,” said Dr. Nassiri.

  Fatima nodded, opened her mouth to speak then closed it again.

  “It will be okay, mother.”

  “I made this for you,” said Fatima, breaking eye contact and nodding, trying to reassure herself as well. The professor reached into her pocket and drew out a small glow stick on a long shoelace. She tied it around his neck and cracked it, illuminating mother and son with a gentle yellow.

  “Thank you.”

  “It’s like a lamb’s bell,” she said, her eyes welling up with tears. “Please come back safe, little lamb.”

  “I will.”

  The doctor wasn’t certain whether to be deeply touched or mortally embarrassed. He gave his mother a light kiss on the top of her head and entered the diver’s chamber, a small compartment no larger than a shower stall. Fatima closed the door behind him. When it shut with the loud sound of bolting locks, he realized all he could hear was the sound of his own breathing.

  Swim out. Get the transmitter. Swim back.

  Do it, he mouthed to his mother through the tiny four-inch portal window separating them. Vents hissed loudly as tanks released air into the chamber. The compartment pressurized quickly, too quickly, forcing Dr. Nassiri to gulp air, plug his nose and violently squeeze it into his ear canals before the increasing pressure burst them. Everything hurt, his teeth, his eyes, every joint protested with pain at the rapid pressurization.

  The hissing stopped. With a click, water rapidly rose through the gaps in the steel deck. He shivered from the moment it touched his toes, the cold water of this depth was only a few degrees above freezing, more than a match for his thick neoprene suit. With his last few seconds, Dr. Nassiri adjusted his swimming goggles and took two experimental breaths out of the pony bottle.

  Water flowed over his face and head. For a moment, Dr. Nassiri wondered why he wasn’t floating. Between the air in his lungs and the neoprene suit; he thought he’d need to practically peel himself off the ceiling. Not at this depth, he recalled. The air in his lungs, the bubbles in the neoprene, all would be compressed by the surrounding pressure. At least that was good news, the idea of stepping out of the chamber and rocketing to the surface for crippling decompression sickness and immediate capture wasn’t appealing.

  The door to the lockout chamber clicked open and swung wide, revealing the bow deck of the submarine. He could only see what little was illuminated by the light streaming out of the chamber; the rest disappeared into impenetrable darkness.

  He clicked the flashlight on and swam out of the lockout chamber and around the back of the conning tower. A sudden wave of contentment and ease washed over him, strengthening with each muscled exertion.

  Nitrogen narcosis, he lazily thought to himself. Why didn’t I think of that before?

  He knew the hazards of surface air breathed under so much pressure—tranquility, loss of reasoning, calculation errors, poor choices and over-confidence, not entirely unlike the benzodiazepine family of pharmaceuticals. He did the math. If every thirty feet below sixty was about the same as drinking a martini, that would put him at what, six martinis? Seven? Part of him felt like maybe all the concern was unnecessary. This was going to be easy.

  As he swam along the length of the deck to the immediate rear of the conning tower, Dr. Nassiri realized he could hear the tinny clanging of a hammer against steel over the sound of his own hissing, ragged breath. Somewhere inside, Alexis was doing her job. Time to do his. He played his flashlight around the area where the clanging emanated but saw only bare hull. The device, wherever it was, had to be between the pressure hull and the outer hull.

  Dr. Nassiri swam down into the massive gash left by the Fool’s Errand where it had stripped away the gun emplacement and large chunk of the outer hull. The clanging now seemed to be coming from everywhere, every direction. He felt for the vibration of the hammer with his fingers, lazily allowing them to crawl over the cold metal skin of the submarine and lead him to the source. The doctor wriggled between the cross-members between the inner and outer hulls.

  He sucked at the regulator and felt resistance. Terror flooded over him. He managed one more half-breath, then let the pony bottle fall away from his mouth and disappear into the darkness, empty and useless. At six atmospheres of pressure, he’d sucked through the bottle six times faster than he’d intended. In his shock, he tried to turn around and smashed the face of his flashlight against one of the crossbeams. With a distinct pop, the plastic front imploded and the light vanished.

  The clanging grew louder and louder, almost matching the ferocious volume of his heart in his ears. At least the cold water would slow his metabolism, buying him a few precious seconds to try to make it back to the lockout chamber. Dr. Nassiri tried to back his way out. His wetsuit caught on something blocky and plastic.

  Clang, clang, clang, clang, the hammer banging on steel just wouldn’t stop. He could feel Alexis on the other side; she was there, right below him, inches away. She was banging with the hammer and he was drowning. Dr. Nassiri pulled at the blocky shape, snapping plastic rivets and freeing it from its mount on the pressure hull. He saw two now-severed wire leads hanging and realized he’d been caught on the transmitter. He yanked hard and it came free.

  Boxy transmitter in hand, Dr. Nassiri wriggled free of the tight compartment, losing precious seconds and oxygen as he did. His chest pounded, his vision swam, his lungs involuntarily spasmed, trying to force him to just breathe!

  The electronic transmitter dropped from his hand, knocking once against the side of the submarine and vanishing into the all-encompassing darkness. He desperately kicked towards the light of the lockout chamber, hand outstretched, trying to reach for something, anything to pull himself inside. He caught the rim of the outer hatchway and forced himself into the chamber, squeezing it shut behind him. Just as the last of his consciousness slipped away, he sucked in a massive lungful of freezin
g sea water and his entire world vanished into white.

  CHAPTER 16

  Klea slept in Jonah’s arms as if she’d hadn’t slept for a thousand years. He held her tight, her body pressed into his, cradling her head against his shoulder, running his hand through her short, dark hair, around the curve of her ear, against the nape of her neck. He kissed the crown of her head like a whisper.

  “Colin, it’s too early,” she moaned, so quietly Jonah could barely make out the words. Then she nuzzled closer, sheltering herself against him in the quickening heat of the early afternoon, their third day at sea.

  They hadn’t spoken much, not since her little ruse on the morning of the first day. Jonah appreciated her ease with silence.

  Sometimes they’d sit far from each other with hands outstretched, barely brushing the very tips of their fingers against each other, as if anything but the slightest contact would overwhelm the senses.

  Other times, mostly in the cool evenings, she would crawl over and curl up on top of him, so much so that her much smaller body would be completely suspended upon his, not one stray toe touching the inflatable raft.

  With no speaking came no complaining. Jonah understood three days without eating was simply an immutable fact, no more changeable than the sun in the sky.

  They’d gone through significantly more water than he’d had anticipated. The orange tent over the raft turned the small inflatable vessel into a floating greenhouse. Try as they might to catch the wind with the tent flaps, the exercise was futile. Jonah couldn’t risk repositioning the raft by paddling with his hands. His hands would accumulate salt and sores would soon follow, to say nothing of passing sharks.

  Eyes closed, Jonah first felt a gentle, almost imperceptible nudge against the side of the raft. Then a shadow fell across nearly half of the tented canopy. He shook Klea awake. She startled at first, but Jonah held a single finger to his lips, and pointed for her to hide in the far corner, as far from the open tent flaps as possible. It wouldn’t be good to reveal a woman on board the raft, not until he knew what he was dealing with.

  Jonah struggled towards the entrance. He hadn’t realized how weak he’d become, every movement felt like a battle against gravity and his own tired, wasting body.