Apocalypse

24

The water of the Florida Straits was filled with shimmering beams of sunlight that pierced the rippling surface above to drift across the seabed below. Ethan watched the beams of light dance like golden snakes on the sand far below as he descended.

Lopez swam alongside him as they leveled out ten feet above the seabed. A flight of manta rays glided past nearby through the immense blue wilderness, and a swarm of brightly colored butterfly reef-fish flitted in a rippling kaleidoscopic cloud through a maze of driftwood trapped by the sandbar.

Ethan glanced up at the surface and saw the Free Spirit’s hull above them. Her anchor chain was at a steep angle, the swift current of the straits pulling on her. The solution to the disappearance of wrecked ships and airplanes in the Bermuda Triangle was often painfully simple: people were looking in the wrong place. They could hardly hope to find the plane, even if it had moved just a few hundred meters: even in clear waters, the blue eventually concealed anything more than twenty to thirty meters away, and a grid-pattern search of the seabed would take them months.

Ethan was about to curse himself for not organizing an aerial search first when Lopez signaled to him and pointed into the shadowy blue distance to their right.

Ethan squinted through his face mask and saw a feature barely visible through the gloom, a ghostly object made up of sharp angles that did not exist in nature. It had been a common theme of survival training in the US Marines to maintain a lookout for such features in the wilderness as signs of human occupation. Nature did not build in straight lines but instead used curves, coils and sweeping arcs, the elegant freehand strokes of creation.

Ethan turned toward the object and swam over the rugged driftwood debris and the attendant fish that scattered in shimmering shoals as he passed by. He saw the object resolve itself as the vertical tail-fin of an aircraft, the tail code on the damaged metal easy to read: N2764C.

Lopez gave him a thumbs-up as they approached the aircraft and ascended to glide over the wreckage. Ethan could see that the aircraft had hit the water hard, the aluminum nose crumpled like paper. The windscreen had imploded with incredible force, tearing the cockpit apart, and the wings had been sheared off to lie fifty feet either side of the crumpled fuselage. Both the fore and aft exit doors had been ripped away and also lay crumpled nearby on the seabed. Ethan realized that it was sheer chance that what remained of the aircraft had drifted so far from the point of impact and yet had come to lie upright in its watery grave.

Ethan descended until he was level with the exit and then slowly eased his way inside, careful not to hit his oxygen cylinder on the fuselage wall.

A pair of yellow eyes raced into his face and slammed him backwards as giant fangs scraped like scalpels against his mask, searching for his flesh. Ethan shot a panicked swipe at the creature’s head and the barracuda snapped past him and raced away into the deep blue distance. Ethan’s heart slammed against his chest as he struggled to get his breathing back under control. Idiot. It had been a long time since he’d dived, and he’d forgotten one of the cardinal rules: never, ever panic underwater.

He checked his watch as a diversion. Lopez watched him with concern and then reached out and squeezed his shoulder. Ethan gave her a thumbs-up and turned again toward the exit hatch to ease his way inside.

The fuselage was filled with fragments of floating debris that gently swayed from side to side as the currents outside heaved and churned. Ethan turned, and as he moved forward he saw rows of bodies still strapped into their seats. Mortified mouths gaped open, bare eye sockets stared sightlessly into oblivion, picked clean by countless fish, and clouds of hair rippled upright from scalps as though still alive.

Ethan saw the crushed cockpit ahead, the bodies of the pilots pinned against the bulkheads by the weight of the instrument panel that had smashed inward upon them. Ethan saw a wavy mass of long blonde hair drifting in the current and felt a surge of anger. Aircraft didn’t drop out of the sky for no reason, and he felt certain that Purcell was trying to tell them that this crash was no accident. What Ethan could not tell was how the airplane had been brought down.

He turned and headed back out of the fuselage toward the tail, determined now to recover the one thing that could tell the authorities what had brought down the aircraft: the flight-data recorder.

Ethan knew that the device was usually located at the very rear of the aircraft. In this position, the entire front of the aircraft acted as a ‘crush zone’ to reduce the effects of shock in an impact. Double-wrapped in corrosion-resistant stainless steel or titanium, with high-temperature insulation inside, flight-data recorders were invariably colored bright orange; they were more than capable of withstanding immersion in water at such a depth.

Ethan swam to the rear of the aircraft, alongside the tail section, and looked down.

An open compartment stared back. The flight-data recorder had already been removed. Ethan’s conviction that Charles Purcell was an innocent man on a mission for justice — and that this aircraft was a major key to the puzzle — swelled within him. Whatever else happened, he knew that he needed to get to the surface and inform the National Transport Safety Board of the wreck’s location, and then get the Coastguard to prevent any further tampering with the evidence at the crash site.

As he looked at the tail, he noticed a thin cable tied to it. His eyes traced the cable upward toward the surface, where it vanished into the blue, but against the rippling sunlight hitting the surface of the ocean far above he could just make out a small buoy.

Ethan turned to indicate the buoy to Lopez, who was hovering above him in the water. As he did so something zipped past his head at terrific speed, leaving a thin trail of bubbles in the water before burying itself in the aircraft’s fuselage, behind where his head had been a moment before.

Ethan whirled in the water as four divers rushed down toward them, each wearing a ducted fan attached to their dive tanks that propelled them effortlessly through the water. Each held a weapon in one hand, and Ethan instantly recognized them as Heckler & Koch P11 underwater firearms. The pistols fired four-inch steel darts from the five barrels that gave the weapon its squat appearance.

Lopez’s hand flicked to a knife in a sheath attached to her thigh as she darted away from Ethan, drawing two of the divers and some of the fire with her as she headed toward the front of the aircraft. Ethan turned and grabbed the metal flight-data recorder panel from the seabed before swimming directly at the nearest of their attackers, closing the distance in seconds as the diver plunged down toward him. The diver aimed at Ethan’s face and pulled the trigger on his pistol from barely six feet away.

Ethan raised the panel as he saw the steel dart race toward him. The dart hit the panel hard, snapping the metal from Ethan’s grip and spinning it away toward the seabed. Ethan caught the spent steel dart and grabbed the diver’s pistol arm as he sailed past, yanked along by the power of the fan on his back. Ethan pushed the pistol away and then swung the steel dart over-arm and plunged it into the back of the man’s shoulder.

A rush of bubbles exploded from the diver’s mask as he writhed in agony, a cloud of thick blood puffing like red smoke to trail behind them through the clear blue water. Ethan ground the dart around inside the man’s shoulder as they rolled upside down, the diver squirming desperately to get away as they plunged down toward the seabed. As the diver looked round and exposed his face, Ethan yanked the dart out of his shoulder and smashed it into his facemask.

The steel dart plunged straight into the man’s left eyeball in a cloud of blood and travelled upward to lodge deep into his brain. The diver relinquished his pistol as his hands flew to his face, and then began quivering and jerking as his damaged brain began to shut down.

A steel dart whipped past Ethan’s shoulder and smacked into the dying man’s chest with a dull thud.

Ethan whirled as a second diver rushed in with his pistol aimed directly at him. Ethan span in a grim pirouette to keep the shuddering corpse between himself and his new assailant. He reached down and grabbed the pistol now dangling from a cord attached to the dead man’s utility belt, aiming it even as the second diver realized the danger and struggled to turn away in time to flee. Ethan jerked the dead diver’s body around and let the still-running fan propel them in pursuit as he aimed and fired.

The first dart deflected off the fleeing diver’s oxygen tank, and Ethan corrected and fired again. This time the dart struck the diver in his side, the metal sinking between his ribs. The man flinched in pain and turned, aiming himself back at Ethan on a collision course.

Ethan released the corpse and let the grisly projectile plough onward through the water as he swam behind it. The onrushing diver struggled to get out of the way but the corpse plunged into his chest and hurled him out of control as Ethan rushed in and fired the last two remaining steel darts. Both quivered as they sank into the man’s flesh, one almost vanishing into his stomach as the other lodged in his thigh.

The diver coiled up into a fetal ball, one hand searching desperately to remove the darts as the other aimed his pistol frantically at Ethan. Ethan yanked his knife from its sheath and smashed the pistol to one side before ramming his blade into the man’s skull, just behind his ear. The blade splintered the thin bone and sank hilt-deep into the brain with a muted crunch like a boot on gravel.

Ethan wrestled the pistol from the dead man’s hand, yanked the cord free from his belt and turned as he dove once more toward the aircraft wreckage, where he could see Lopez crouched in the buckled remains of the cockpit, using a twisted piece of the nose cone as a shield against the lethal darts being fired at her.

Ethan plunged downward and aimed at the nearest diver, firing a single shot from barely two meters away.

The cruel metal dart zipped across the distance between them and buried itself in the back of the man’s head. The diver’s body twitched and then froze as he began to sink toward the seabed below, his arms floating uselessly beside his head.

The second diver charged up toward Ethan without a moment’s hesitation and plunged into him before he could fire. The impact knocked the wind from Ethan’s chest and he choked briefly on his respirator as he struggled to hold the diver’s pistol away from his body. They tumbled awkwardly, spinning upside down in a frenzied cloud of bubbles as with one hand the diver tried to rip Ethan’s mask from his face. Cold seawater flooded Ethan’s vision as he felt himself propelled head-first in a vertical dive toward the seabed.

The sandy surface of the bed slammed into the top of his skull and his attacker landed on top of him and pinned him down, the force of the fan on his back driving Ethan through a choking cloud of sand that swirled in a golden vortex around them. Ethan felt his grip on the pistol fail and then suddenly the weapon slipped from his grasp. He saw the diver jerk upright and aim the pistol at Ethan’s heart, the man’s eyes shining with hatred behind his mask.

In an instant one of those eyes burst like a water balloon as a steel dart punctured his mask and shattered the plastic. Ethan stared in shock as the mask filled instantly with blood. The man’s expression sagged and, with his remaining eye, he stared unseeing into Ethan’s eyes as the pistol slipped from his hand. Ethan rolled out from beneath the corpse and saw Lopez aiming one of the fat pistols double-handed as she hovered above him.

Ethan was about to give her a thumbs-up, but as his vision cleared he saw the hull of the Free Spirit above them and another boat circling at a distance. Even from the seabed, he could see bullets shooting into the water.