Hell Ship

CHAPTER 16

Professor didn’t feel good about leaving Maddock and Bones in the middle of the mission, but he agreed with Maddock’s decision to break radio silence and contact Maxie. Professor didn’t necessarily believe in a centuries old Templar conspiracy, but he knew that the people who did believe — the fanatics who were desperate to wrap themselves in something mysterious and powerful — were capable of anything and were very, very dangerous.

That potential for danger made every mile, every minute of this race for port, pass with excruciating slowness. Four hours after parting company with Maddock and Bones, they were less than a fourth of the way back to Manila. It would be at least another day before they could call Maxie, and of course, let the world know that they had found the wreck of the hell ship Nagata Maru.

After that, he and Willis would move purposefully back to rendezvous with their comrades.

Professor was on the open-air flying bridge of the Sea Sprite, one hand resting on the wheel, keeping the boat on course. He was mentally calculating the length of the return trip — again — to pass the time when he heard Willis call out to him. “Hey, Professor. Check our six.”

Professor craned his head around and stared out across the cabin cruiser’s frothy wake. He expected to see a very familiar motor yacht closing on them, but there were no other vessels to be seen. Instead, there was a black speck in the sky, coming out of the west, and getting larger with each passing second.

Willis climbed halfway up the ladder to the flying bridge, so that only his head and shoulders were visible. He held out a pair of binoculars.

Professor trained the field glasses on the speck and confirmed his worst fears; it was a helicopter and it was chasing their wake. By the time he lowered the binoculars, the aircraft was close enough that he didn’t need them to confirm his identification. Five seconds later, the noise of its rotors was audible over Sea Sprite’s chugging engine, and five seconds after that, the bird passed overhead.

“Think it’s our old friends?”

Professor nodded. “Checking to see if we’re who they think we are.”

The helicopter banked to the right and turned a broad circle to come up once more from the boat’s rear.

“And now they know,” sighed Professor.

“Don’t sweat it, Prof,” declared Willis. “My daddy always used to say, ‘Fool me once, shame on you, and I’ll be a damned fool if you fool me again.’”

“Uh, can you translate that from redneck to English for me?”

“It means, I remembered to pack the cutlasses.” Willis slid down the ladder rails and vanished from sight.

“Impetuous youth,” muttered Professor, though in fact Willis was two months his senior. He trained the binoculars on the approaching helicopter. The pilot had turned the craft so that is was traveling sideways toward them, which presented a poor aerodynamic profile, but gave the men in the rear of the craft a clear shot at the boat…literally. One man appeared to be looking directly at him, over a gun with a very large bore barrel.

Looks like a Milkor MGL, thought Professor. The weapon fired 40-millimeter grenades from a six-round revolver-style cylinder. There was one just like it in their team room back at Coronado.

The MGL let out a puff of smoke.

Professor dropped the glasses and hauled the wheel to starboard. The boat had only just begun to move when a geyser of water erupted to port. Professor felt the energy of the explosion ripple through the hull.

“Hold it steady, Prof!” shouted Willis from the lower deck.

“Are you insane?” He assumed that his counterpart was going to shoot back and needed a steady firing platform, but if he kept the boat on a straight course, the next grenade would land in his lap.

“I just need five seconds.”

Professor muttered a curse under his breath. A straight line was a definite no-go, but a sweeping turn might give Willis those precious moments of stability he’d asked for. He doubted the grenadier would be fooled for a full five seconds, but if Willis didn’t accomplish something by then—

There was a boom — like a mortar round being fired — from the lower deck, and as heat and smoke washed over Professor, his first thought was that they’d taken a direct hit. Then he saw a finger of orange fire, with a tail of white smoke, streak toward the aircraft and impact right behind the open rear compartment.

The helicopter came apart in mid-air.

Willis’ whoop of triumph was mostly drowned out by the explosion. A few seconds later he appeared, holding the spent launch tube of an M72 light anti-tank weapon.

“How do you like that for a cutlass?” Willis said, grinning.

Dane plunged headfirst into the rising wave and felt it tug at him as its energy passed by. He kicked furiously to the surface, and kept going until the waves were behind him.

The saltwater had a faintly oily taste to it, and Dane could feel the thin sheen of diesel on the surface as he drew closer to the place where the Jacinta had gone down. Pieces of debris — fiberglass, wood and foam — were already washing ashore, but what Dane needed was too big and too heavy to be carried in on the tide.

Bones had offered to make the journey out, but one look at the pain in the big man’s eyes had been enough for Dane to give him a pass. Bones never showed much emotion; he usually hid his feelings behind a mask of sarcasm, or drowned them in drink. This was different. Dane didn’t know what sort relationship his teammate had with Gabby, but despite her betrayal, this tragedy had hit Bones hard. Dane wasn’t about to send him out to investigate the place where she had died.

He trod water in the center of the spreading oil slick, breathing deep for nearly a full minute to saturate his blood with oxygen. Then, after filling his lungs with one last breath, he dipped beneath the water and dove for the bottom.

For just a moment, he felt the familiar peace of the water’s embrace. True, he was doing it on a single breath — which under the best of circumstances, he could make last about three and a half minutes — but even with its time limitations, free diving — unencumbered by bulky equipment, artifice and technology — just felt more natural than SCUBA. Then, through the dark blurry water, he saw the shattered remains of the Jacinta, and his joy dissolved.

The bow end of the vessel looked no different than it had when on the surface, but twenty feet back, the familiarity ended. The boat looked as if a giant had stomped his foot down amidships. The destruction was bad enough, but Dane knew that the tangle of broken bulkheads and fractured fiberglass was also the final resting place of a young woman who’d been guilty of nothing more than a bad decision.

He kicked harder, feeling the faint excess carbon dioxide in his extremities and the impulse to exhale and suck in fresh air. He pushed that urge out of his mind. According to his watch, he’d only been under for forty seconds. He had plenty of time.

A flash of yellow drew his eye. It was Baby. The little ROV was intact, lashed to the foredeck and still connected to its 500 meter long spool of reinforced coaxial cable which served as both a tether and a control link. The control unit had no doubt been destroyed in the blast, but Dane reckoned the cable might have its uses. He swam to the device and loosened the bungee cords restraining it. The ROV’s ballast tanks had been purged during its last ascent, so it was already buoyant, but the cable kept it from drifting away. He left it there and continued searching the wreck for anything else that might facilitate their escape.

He had entertained a desperate hope that the diving equipment might be recoverable; with it, he could take his time salvaging the wreck, but the locker where it had been stored had been completely obliterated.

Further along the deck, he spied the cradle that contained a cylindrical container, about the size of a beer keg. The explosion had ripped apart one end of the canister, peeling the aluminum shroud back like the skin off a banana. The uninflated four-person life raft contained within was peppered with splinters of debris and black scorch marks.

He was starting feel a desperate urge to breathe. It was time to go.

He twisted the release handle of the life raft canister. There was an eruption of bubbles as the contents of a pressurized gas cylinder flooded into the cells of the raft, and then promptly rushed out through the gaping holes caused by the explosion. Not all of the cells were compromised however; half of the raft plumped up like a frankfurter on a grill, and started rising for the surface, boosted by the cloud of free gas rushing out of the damaged sections. Dane knew the raft also contained an array of survival equipment and emergency rations.

He swung around to Baby’s winch spool and disengaged the manual clutch, allowing it to turn freely. The weight of the cable and the friction of the winch axle kept it from shooting straight to the surface, but it nevertheless started rising. With one hand gripping the body of the ROV, he gave the cable winch a spin, rapidly unspooling several hundred feet of cable for the ROV, and was about to kick for the surface when something caught his eye.

Dane felt a surge of excitement at this discovery, but the demand for fresh air would not be put off any longer. He pushed off from the deck and kicked furiously for the surface, letting out the stale breath in a stream as he went.

The ascent was agony. The need to breathe was an animal in his chest, trying to tear its way out. He could see daylight, magnified by water refraction to appear deceptively close. He kept kicking, clawing for the surface with one hand. The ROV in his other didn’t seem to be aiding his climb appreciably, but it wasn’t weighing him down either. The animal told him to let it go, but he refused to part with his prize.

The end was almost anticlimactic. There was a moment of disorientation as his momentum suddenly changed, his kicking legs no longer propelling him upward, after which it occurred to him to check his watch — the sweep hand was just passing the ten o’clock mark, which meant he was fifty seconds through whatever minute this was, probably the fourth, which meant if he could hold for just ten seconds more he’d set a new personal record.

BREATHE!

He took a greedy gasp. Fresh air filled his lungs, lifting him up higher in the water. He realized only now that the ROV had actually helped him stay buoyant when he’d exhaled everything else.

The orange life raft floated nearby, looking like a collapsed parachute on the water’s surface. It was moving, caught in the slow drift current that ran parallel to the island. He imagined Trevor Hancock and Archie Bailey, fifty years earlier, clinging to each other for hours, perhaps days, brought to this island by that current, and then having to swim like crazy to avoid being just as quickly drawn away by it.

Dane knew the tethered ROV would keep him from drifting too far away, but if he didn’t secure the raft, it would be lost forever. He dog-paddled toward it and snared a handful of amorphous rubber. After shifting the ROV inside the collapsed body of the raft and wrapping it up into a crude bundle so the two would not become separated, he pulled his upper body onto the floating mass.

He ached for a rest break, but every idle second took him further from his goal — the beach — and would require that much more effort later on, so he immediately began kicking, propelling himself and the floating bundle back toward the surf. He quickly got into an automatic rhythm that allowed him to compartmentalize his weariness and just drive on without thinking about how exhausted he was, or how much further he had to go. Finally, after long minutes of mind-numbing exertion, he was caught by the incoming waves and thrown toward shore. He allowed himself to be swept in. Bones and Alex were waiting in the tide, and helped him drag his burden up onto dry sand.

While Dane lay supine on the beach, Bones began unpacking the bundle and taking stock of the emergency equipment cache in the raft. “There’s a leak repair kit,” he announced, “but this thing is shredded. We might be able to use the coaxil from the ROV to lash some of the driftwood together, make a raft, but I wouldn’t give great odds for it holding together in open water.”

The canister life raft had been Dane’s Plan A. Cobbling together a driftwood raft had been Plan B, and a desperate one at that. Fortunately, his last discovery before leaving the Jacinta trumped both of those ideas.

“I’m going back,” he announced. “To get the Zodiac. It’s still intact…mostly, anyway. Tied up right where…” Right where Gabby had left it, he almost said. “To the dive platform.”

Bones stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Drop the outboard and you’ll probably be able to float it back to the surface. Be a shame to lose it, though.”

“Maybe we don’t have to.” Dane would have preferred to rest a few minutes — or more accurately, days — longer, but he knew there was no time for delay. “You’ve got your Leatherman, right?”

Bones took the multi-tool from his pocket and held it up for inspection.

Dane outlined his plan, and assigned tasks for each of them. Bones went to work cutting away the damaged sections of the raft, and then he and Alex worked together to deflate the boat and ensure that its undamaged cells would remain air tight. Dane meanwhile removed the compressed air cylinder that was part of Baby’s ballast regulator, and switched out the spent cylinder that had initially inflated the lifeboat. To re-inflate the partial raft, he would need only twist the manual valve on the air cylinder.

Bones inspected the finished contraption with hands on hips. “MacGyver would be proud. But will it work?”

“I guess I’ll go find out.”

“It’s going to be dark soon,” observed Alex. “Sure you don’t want to put this off until morning?”

“We’re going to be a hundred miles away from here by morning,” Dane told her, confidently. He tucked the orange bundle of the deflated raft under one arm and headed out across the beach. “You guys keep working on the rain shroud. I’ll be back in a jiffy.”

The outgoing tide shortened the distance he had to swim and made the paddle out considerably less of an ordeal, which was a good thing since he was still bone-tired and carrying thirty pounds of equipment.

The fuel slick was mostly gone, but Baby’s coaxial cable tether led him straight to his destination, and before long he was once again preparing himself for a final free-dive to the Jacinta.

This time, there was no uncertainty about what he would find or what he would do when he reached the wreck. He sped down the length of the cable and when he reached the deck, the first thing he did was to pull out what remained of the cable and detach it altogether from the winch spool. That took up the first minute of his dive.

He quickly swam over the side of the boat and down to the sunken Zodiac. He immediately noted that it had not escaped the explosion completely unscathed. At least one of its cells had been damaged, and only its rigid fiberglass hull kept it from folding in half like a taco. That didn’t worry Dane overmuch; they could probably repair the damage once the little boat was back on the surface. It was the condition of the outboard motor that worried him most; after a few hours of total immersion, he wasn’t sure they’d be able to get it started again, and if they couldn’t all of his preparations would be for nothing.

No time to worry about that now.

He tied the loose end of the cable around the tapered base of the motor. The wire cable was stiffer than rope, but he managed a decent approximation of a bowline. He then hooked the repurposed life raft to the line and allowed it to unfurl a moment before opening the valve on the pressurized air cylinder.

The raft instantly puffed up and leaped out of his hands, lifting the Zodiac and the heavy engine as if they were feather light. The mooring rope went taut, too taut for him to even attempt untying the knot. Instead, he slashed it with the knife blade of Bones’ Leatherman. The Zodiac floated free back to the surface, and Dane was right behind it.

As soon as the Zodiac reached the surface, Bones started hauling in the cable from the beach. With hundreds of gallons of water filling its bilges, the Zodiac was like a floating anchor, but Bones won the tug of war and got the craft up on the beach faster than Dane could swim. Nevertheless, the sky was a deepening purple, shot through with orange clouds, by the time Dane crawled up on the sand next to the still swamped inflatable.

They bailed out as much of the water as they could, and then tipped the boat up on its side to drain the rest. Dane and Alex transferred their survival equipment to Zodiac, while Bones tinkered with the outboard.

“The good news,” Bones announced, “is that I don’t think the fuel supply was contaminated. I can’t tell if the electrical system was compromised, but we should be able to get her started.”

“And the bad news?” asked Alex.

“That fuel supply I told you about? There’s not a whole lot of it. About a quarter of a tank. Not sure how far that will get us.”

“Far enough,” said Dane, trying to inject a confidence into the discussion that he did not necessarily feel. He’d known all along that, even if the Zodiac’s outboard could be made functional, it would only be of limited use. If they were to reach civilization, it would require another means of motive force. “We’ll take another look at it in the morning. For now, we paddle.”

Alex slumped against the boat. “What, tonight?”

“I told you. I want to be a hundred miles away by sunrise.”

“I thought you were joking.”

“Him?” interjected Bones. “You’ve been around him long enough to know, he doesn’t have a sense of humor.”

“Very funny.” Dane handed Bones an oar. “But true.”