End of Enemies

25

Tanner doused the Range Rover’s headlights and coasted to a stop in the tree line. He and Cahil sat still, waiting for their eyes to adjust and listening to the jungle’s symphony of squawks and buzzes.

“Gotta love the jungle,” Cahil whispered, slapping a mosquito.

“Amen.” Like the water, jungle was darkness; jungle was cover.

They got out, shouldered their rucksacks, and started down the trail. In a few minutes, they reached the outskirts of Mitsu’s village. In the distance, a dog barked, then went silent. As if on cue, Mitsu appeared on the trail before them.

“You are late,” he whispered, smiling.

Cahil mussed his hair. “You’re early, scout.”

“You have the boat?” Tanner asked.

“Yes. Come.”

After a few hundred yards, the boy stopped at the crest of an embankment; through the foliage came the sound of gurgling water. Tanner’s flashlight beam illuminated the nose of a skiff.

Mitsu said, “Shall I come with you?”

“No, wait here. We need you to hold the fort.” Mitsu frowned, confused. “Keep this place safe while we’re gone,” Tanner added.

Mitsu smiled. “I will hold the fort.”

“If anyone comes around, stay out of sight. I’ll want a report when I get back.”

Mitsu nodded solemnly and saluted.

Tanner half-expected company tonight. Earlier that afternoon, Cahil had returned to the dive shop to exchange a defective regulator. When he came out, one of Takagi’s security trucks was sitting across the street. They followed him, but he was able to shake them on the way back to the hotel.

“So they know we’ve got dive gear,” Tanner said.

“Sorry, bud. I screwed up.”

“Forget it. It was bound to happen sooner or later.”

“Now what?”

“Now it gets interesting. They’ll probably assume we’re going for the shipyard.”

“Or Ohira’s mystery X-mark off the village. If there’s anything to it, that is.”

The previous few days had dragged by as they waited for the weather to improve. It gave Briggs plenty of time to ponder the strange course DORSAL had taken.

Truth be told, he was surprised Mason had given them the week. Ohira’s investigation appeared to be a tangent: a pair of mystery ships, one of which had skulked away into the night, “sold” to a company on whose board Takagi secretly sat; the other a floating fortress packed with advanced electronics gear. And what of the mysterious X-marks-the-spot chart with which Ohira had seemed obsessed? Was it all connected, and if so, how? Tanner couldn’t shake the feeling there were larger, unseen forces at work.

He’d experienced the same sensation before and had come to trust it. In special ops this was called the k-check, or kinesthetic check. It was intuition, plain and simple, and he was a believer, not only because he’d seen it work but because he’d seen the effects of ignoring it.

With DORSAL, he felt as though invisible pieces of the puzzle were falling into place. He suspected Mason was withholding something. For Ohira to be working so far outside DORSAL’s mission without their knowledge seemed impossible.

None of that mattered, he decided. He would see this through to the end. Unprofessional though it was, he felt his hatred for Hiromasa Takagi growing. Takagi had Ohira executed, tried to do the same to him, and was likely up to his neck in black-market arms dealing. Those things alone made him easy to loathe.

They loaded the skiff and began pushing their way through the mangrove roots. Above their heads, the canopy shook and squawked with night birds. Soon they heard the roar of waves and the jungle thinned. When the water reached their chest, they climbed aboard, and Cahil began rowing.

“Once more unto the breech,” Bear murmured, working at the oars.

Cahil was, in Tanner’s opinion, the most unlikely Shakespeare aficionado on earth. “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,” Briggs countered.

With Cahil following his steering orders, Tanner matched fixes from Ohira’s chart against landmarks onshore until he felt they were in position. He called a halt and tossed out the anchor. “We should be right on top.”

“The question being, of what?” Cahil said, shrugging on his scuba tank.

With Briggs in the lead, they followed the anchor rope to the bottom.

Their flashlights cut narrow arcs through the black water. When Tanner’s fingers finally touched the sand, his depth gauge read forty-two feet. To their right, lost in the darkness, lay the hundred-meter curve where the seabed dropped away into the depths. Divers called it the “deep black.” He felt that familiar prickle of anticipation and fear.

Cahil stopped beside him. They inspected one another’s gear, exchanged thumbs-up signs, hooked themselves to the twenty-foot buddy line, and started out.

The current was negligible so they moved quickly, skimming over coral and rock formations teeming with fish. Here and there crabs skittered over the sand. Momentarily caught in Tanner’s beam, a moray eel stared at them with its doll’s eyes, then snaked back into its cave.

They reached the end of the first 100-meter leg. Tanner set himself and signaled Bear to make the swing north.

Now the terrain began to change. Open sand gave way to low ridges blanketed with sea grass. Briggs felt an almost immediate increase in the water temperature as well, then remembered the same warm current from his previous dive. It came from the oyster beds, Mitsu had said. They must be close by.

He was skimming low over a ridge when he dropped his flashlight. It bounced off a clump of coral and dropped into a crevice. He signaled Cahil to stop and went after it.

Sea grass billowed over the opening, partially obscuring the beam. He reached for it, fell short, and reached again. Suddenly the rocks crumbled and he fell headfirst into the hole. The edge of his mask struck a rock. Water gushed into his eyes. He fell into the blackness.

The line went taut. He jerked to a stop. He swung free for a moment, then cleared his mask, groped around, and pulled himself to the ledge. He felt two rapid tugs on the line: Cahil questioning. Tanner tugged back the okay signal. The flashlight lay a few feet away. He retrieved it and looked about.

This was no crevice, he realized, not even a cave in the strict sense. The sea grass had formed a canopy over what appeared to be a ravine. Rising above him, the rock lip disappeared in a forest of sea grass.

He gave the line three short jerks, and a few seconds later, Cahil dropped through the canopy and hovered beside him. What? he mouthed.

Tanner pointed. Ahead, the ravine sloped into the darkness.

Cahil nodded, and they started forward.

The darkness absorbed all but a sliver of light from their flashlights. Fish swirled around them and up along the ravine’s walls.

A pillar of rock loomed in their path. Tanner played his beam over it, saw nothing unusual, and kept going. He stopped suddenly, backpedaled, and finned closer to the rock. Something was there, a dull glint in the stone. Using his knife, he chiseled at the rock until he’d cleared away a patch.

Heart pounding, he waved Cahil over and gestured for him to hover beside the rock. What for? Bear mouthed.

Scale. Just do it.

Tanner backpedaled and looked again. There was no mistake.

This was no rock. It was a propeller.

They had traveled fifty feet when Briggs noticed the walls widening. His depth gauge read seventy-six feet, thirty feet below the seabed proper. He checked his watch: thirteen minutes of air left. If they went much deeper, they would have to make a decompression stop.

Ahead, Cahil was shining his flashlight along the curve of the hull where it met the sand. However it had come to be here, the vessel’s hull was tightly wedged in the ravine, with only a couple feet of clearance between it and the rock walls.

Cahil finned up along the hull and disappeared. Tanner followed. He found Cahil standing on a steel platform. He gestured with his flashlight: Look!

Tanner saw the three vertical, polelike structures behind him, but the shapes didn’t register. He shrugged. What?

Cahil tapped two fingers on his face mask: Look closely!

Bear traced his light along the curve of the railing, then up the three poles. Now Briggs was seeing it. He backed up, looked again. Suddenly everything snapped into focus: the vessel’s narrow beam, the cigar-shaped hull, the tapered screw blade…

Cahil was standing on the bridge of a submarine.