The Black Bullet

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

O’Brien climbed to the fly bridge and used a pair of binoculars to scan the horizon in all directions. He came back down the steps, binoculars in hand. “Nothing,” he said. “We have three-hundred feet of rope. When we get down there, let’s look in the other half of the sub we didn’t enter. If there are no canisters marked as U-235, we’ll go back in the half where we saw the stuff. We’ll tie both of them onto this rope, move them to a spot on the bottom, swim back to the boat, and use the winch to haul the stuff to us. Got it?”

“Yeah, I got it,” Nick said.

They stepped onto the dive platform. Before putting the regulator in his mouth, O’Brien said, “Turn the lights on underwater. Okay, let’s do it.” He slapped a high-five against Nick’s hand and stepped off the platform, the flashlight descending in the clear water like a meteor fading in the night sky.

Nick made the sign of the cross and looked up at the heavens. “If you get us outta this one, I won’t ask for nothin’ else, and I take back those thoughts I had today of Ralph Jenson’s wife.” Nick gripped the spear gun in one hand, the flashlight in the other, and fell backwards into the dark sea.

At thirty feet down, O’Brien adjusted his buoyancy and waited for Nick. Within a few seconds, Nick appeared next to O’Brien, and they began to swim the remaining seventy feet to the floor of the ocean. Nick panned his flashlight beam left to right as they descended, occasionally looking toward the surface, the light illuminating jellyfish and squid. O’Brien kept his light pointed in the direction they were heading. A minute later, they could see the dark gray hull, most of it encrusted with barnacles and algae.

O’Brien tapped Nick on the arm and motioned toward the long remnant of the sub they had not entered on their first exploration. Nick nodded and followed O’Brien as he swam for the opening, a twisted cavity of metal so thick with sea growth it looked like a dark entrance to an underwater cave.

The spotlights crisscrossed as the men entered, the light illuminating plankton, small fish, and shrimp flittering across the floor of the broken U-boat like mice scurrying for shelter. Nick pointed to a human skull, decapitated from the rest of the body, the skull wedged under a shard of metal. The skull had a small hole above one eye socket. A moray eel, mouth slightly parted, dogteeth visible in the light, backed into the dark crevice beside the skull. The men swam by, careful not to disturb the sediment, their bubbles rising to the ceiling of the broken U-boat.

The lights panned across shattered wires, pipes, pressure gauges frozen in time, and valves resembling small steering wheels, locked with barnacles. O’Brien thought it looked as if the insides of the U-boat were coated in volcanic lava.

Even with the veneer of ossified sea life, O’Brien could tell the long objects in front of them were torpedoes. They had entered the torpedo room. Four of the deadly cylinders had never been fired. A partial skeleton, missing one leg, was resting on the floor, half buried in residue.

The men could find no evidence of the U-235 canisters anywhere in that half of the submarine. O’Brien pointed toward the entrance and motioned to leave. He thought he caught a glimpse of relief in Nick’s eyes through his mask.

They swam by the remains of an eighty-caliber deck gun, blown off the area near the conning tower when the sub was hit. They tied the rope to a piece of metal shard at the opening, connecting it to the other half of the sub. Nick secured his spear gun at the entrance, and they slowly entered. Everything was as they’d left it.

Within a minute, O’Brien and Nick were back at the place where they originally found the U-235 canisters. They spent another ten minutes searching through the remainder of the sub. Nothing. Nothing but bones and bent metal. Then O’Brien spotted something on the floor about two feet from what looked like human pelvic bones. The object was a leather holster, caked in corrosion. O’Brien heard Glenda Lawson’s voice echoing off the walls of the U-boat. “All three gunshots sounded the same … and I’d heard Billy shooting lots of times at cans he’d set up in our backyard. His gun didn’t sound like the shots I heard that awful night.”

O’Brien lifted the gun out of the sediment, the move causing a soup of rust colored water to swirl in a vortex, a small red ghost dancing down the center of the submarine before melting to the floor.

They swam back to the cage that held the U-235, opened it and together lifted out each canister. O’Brien motioned for Nick to help him swim with the first canister to the blown-out entrance of the sub. Nick nodded, held a flashlight under his armpit, and swam beside O’Brien with the canister between them.

At the entrance, they turned and looked back toward the cage that held the remaining canister, the water murky, rust and sea mud in a thick broth. O’Brien shined a light on his watch. Eleven minutes of air left. He motioned for Nick to follow him to the cage for the other canister.

Nick’s eyes popped behind his mask. He reluctantly followed O’Brien back into the sea of tarnish, reaching for one of O’Brien’s fins for a connection. Using their sense of touch, the men lifted the remaining canister and walked it toward the entrance.

Nick stepped on something hard and round, like a bowling ball under his fin. The object, a human skull, cracked under the weight of the canister. Then Nick felt a pain across his shoulders as he backed into a sharp metal shard, the rusty edge slicing through his wetsuit, blood mixing with the decay in the water.

O’Brien tied the canisters to the end of the rope. He looked at his watch. Less than eight minutes of air left. O’Brien checked the slash across Nick’s back. Blood drifted from it, creating an eerie image of red smoke floating around his shoulders. O’Brien pointed to the surface. Nick nodded as they started a slow ascent.

Something shot through a flashlight beam. It could have been a shadow out of the corner of his Nick’s eye. But there are no shadows ninety feet down in the ocean at night. There are only predators.