The Black Bullet

CHAPTER FIVE

Nick Cronus almost wished he didn’t have the tank on his back. He always had the ability to descend to the ocean floor very fast. Sometimes he thought he might have had gills in another lifetime. Today, he felt the force of the Gulf Stream at his back, kicking the fins and shooting through the water like a human torpedo. His right hand slid down the rope, eyes scanning all around him as he descended.

The current gently pushed Nick down the long anchor rope, which ran at a perpendicular angle from the boat to the floor of the sea. He figured he was already out of Jupiter’s sonar radius unless Sean was quick to follow the rope.

At a depth of seventy feet, the dwindling sunlight turned the ocean floor into shades of merlot and purple. Nick could see he was descending on top of an underwater canyon that looked like a long crevice that had opened, causing a fracture on the bottom of the sea. The sand resembled underwater hills that faded into a blend of muted colors, slow dancing like a sea-induced hallucination.

“I’ve lost Nick on the screen,” O’Brien said, starting the diesels. “Don’t use the winch. Use your hands and pull the rope in hand-over-hand, not too tight, but enough so I can see which direction Nick swam. Maybe I can follow him.”

“Okay,” Jason said, not stopping to pick up the sunglasses that fell off his face as he leaned over and began coiling the anchor rope into the storage well.

Max trotted to the edge of Jupiter, where she had last seen Nick. She looked at the small swells and barked once, watching Jason pull up rope.

“I see Nick,” shouted O’Brien, looking at the screen. “I think he’s on top of whatever is holding the anchor.” O’Brien could make out two odd shapes, shapes that didn’t look like the natural topography of the ocean floor. He could see Nick was right in the center of them.

Nick wasn’t quite sure what to make of his surroundings. Maybe there had been some crazy earthquake out here recently, he thought. Maybe the waves from the last big storm churned this stuff up. The bottom was cracked like a bowl. What were the two long broken shapes, one with some kind of tower on it? He had seen plenty of shipwrecks in his time. He wasn’t certain even if it was a ship. Mother Nature didn’t cough up some broken cylinder out of the hole. It came from the surface, and it sank a long time ago. But it wouldn’t make sense, not off the shores of Florida.

He followed the rope to where it was caught on a twisted chunk of coral that stuck out from one part of the giant cylinder like a broken bird wing. Nick used the crowbar to chip away the barnacles. He saw the dark pewter of metal, tarnished like unpolished silver. It was some kind of ship’s hull. Blown apart. Maybe hit by a bomb years ago. How long had it been here? What kind of ship was it?

The other section was scattered about one hundred feet away. Both pieces of the ship were half buried in the sand like the remnants of a giant’s toy long ago forgotten and left in an underwater sandbox.

Nick had an eerie feeling sweep through his body. Maybe it’s an underwater grave? He used the crowbar to work the anchor. It was lodged in the twisted metal as if it was caught in the petrified jaw of an extinct leviathan whose gaping mouth had turned to stone.

A moray eel slid from a cranny underneath the structure. It darted by Nick’s leg and retreated to another massive piece of pretzel-like metal thick with barnacles. Nick pulled the knife out of its sheath on his belt and began scraping away barnacles so he could see where to apply the crowbar.

He saw it out of the corner of his left eye. Something white. Motionless. Something very out of place.

Nick looked farther inside the hull. A human skeleton was trapped upright like a scarecrow in shards of torn metal and dappled bluish light. It seemed to stare back at Nick. The eye cavities dark and vacant. Small fish swam through the shattered rib cage. The skull’s lower jawbone was gone. There was a second skeleton lying in a fetal position near a crushed table.

Nick felt cold. A chill ran through his body as he sucked in the compressed, cool oxygen a tad too quick. He made the sign of the cross, dropped the crowbar at his feet, and swam for the surface toward the promise of bright sky and warm air.