The Steel Shark

Chapter 37

Vivian loved flying through the sea. The surface glittered green in her night vision monocle. If they hadn’t been trying to stay hidden, it would have been amazing to ride at the surface under the moon like a dolphin.

She’d always hated watersports, but the DPV changed everything. The device was incredibly maneuverable, it was easy to navigate, and it could move much faster than she could swim. But she wasn’t trusting her safety to just the DPV.

Unlike Tesla, she was armed. She’d borrowed a Heckler & Koch P11 underwater pistol from Captain Glascoe. It looked like a flare gun and had only five shots, but it was supposed to be fairly accurate underwater. She hadn’t been able to test-fire it, because it had to be sent back to the manufacturer for reloading after five shots. She hated going into a dangerous situation with a weapon that looked like a toy that she’d never actually seen work before, but better than nothing. Maybe.

Hopefully, they’d complete their mission and head back to the ship without being detected, and she’d never need to worry about using a gun. That was the plan. But she’d done enough missions to know that nothing ever went according to plan.

She glanced over at Tesla. He was hanging on to his propulsion device, shoulders tense and arms pulling it too close. She wished she could tell him to ease up and save his strength for later. But she had no way to talk to him underwater, and he couldn’t surface. He’d just have to tough it out.

If only he’d had time to practice instead of puking. If only she’d had time to review the plan. This kind of mission took weeks to set up in the service, preferably with a dry run, or ten. But instead, she was executing an untested strategy designed by a civilian with only a few days’ practice and deadly stakes.

Not that different from any other day, really.

Relax and go with it, she told herself. Control your breath. Be ready when you get to the submarine. Conserve your strength and your air.

Clearly having trouble with his buoyancy control, Tesla dipped up and down like a drunken dolphin. That couldn’t be good for his seasickness. She knew she should feel sorry for him, but he should have stayed on the boat. Captain Glascoe would have been an asset at her side, not a liability. But instead, Tesla had insisted on coming along.

The range finder showed they were close, and she crossed in front of Tesla so he could see her. Then she slowed down and was relieved when he followed suit. He was a smart guy, but he wasn’t used to military ops or even working in teams.

A few minutes later, the hull of the submarine came into view. Backlit by lights from the yacht, it looked smaller than she remembered, but everything always seemed bigger when it was trying to kill you.

She cut her engine and decided to risk surfacing. She’d be a tiny black dot in a black sea with the light source in front of her. Not invisible, maybe, but practically.

A quick tug of Tesla’s sleeve. She pointed up, then at herself. He gave her the traditional thumb-and-forefinger-together OK sign.

A few kicks of her flippers later and her head broke the surface. Stars above, wind on her face. Better than being surrounded by water and blackness. She popped out her regulator and took a long breath of salt-scented fresh air, then stuck it back in and turned her attention to the yacht and the sub.

Even though the boats were sitting with most of the lights off, it was still too bright. She adjusted the gain on her night vision. Everything came into focus.

The submarine was about fifty yards away and right next to the yacht. Probably tied off, but she couldn’t tell for sure. Tiny figures carried boxes from the boat onto the deck of the submarine and down the sail. They were moving at double time.

A crane attached to the yacht was lowering a box onto the submarine deck. Figures below moved to receive it. That must be the oxygen generators Tesla had tracked online.

The drones were sure to have good pictures of it.

Now for the transponder.

She dove under to a depth of three feet. Tesla was right there waiting for her.

He held his tiny flashlight under his chin like a kid in summer camp. He jerked his thumb in the direction of the submarine. This was the part of the plan she liked the least — get a little closer and use the submarine drone to attach the transponder. Fred Mulcahy had promised the transponder would broadcast on a frequency that was almost never monitored. Unlikely the submarine would ever know the transponder was there. Or at least that’s what Fred believed.

Tesla bucked a couple of times. It took her a second to figure out what had happened. He’d puked into his regulator. Nasty. He pressed a button and purged it into the ocean with a rush of air. A swarm of tiny fish came up to eat it.

She swam back a few strokes to put space between herself and the vomit. Not that it should matter, right? The ocean was full of fish pee. Even so.

But how often had he had to purge his regulator? After all, they had limited air. If Tesla was venting his air to blow out his puke, which he had to do to keep from clogging up the system, then there might be a problem. Especially combined with the cold water, his mild panic, and the death grip he had on the DPV. All those things used up air.

She checked his dive computer. He’d used half his air. He didn’t have time to mess around with placing the transponder. He needed to go right back to the Voyager.

She tapped the dive computer and watched him look at it. His eyes widened. He must have done the math, too. After all, Tesla was good at math. She pointed to her dive computer. She still had two-thirds of her air, a nice margin of error.

She pointed back toward the Voyager. He shook his head. She pointed back to his air gauge, then made a throat-slitting gesture. Arguing in charades was a pain.

Again, he looked at the dive computer. She could see him thinking, but there was no other answer. He had to go back. If she’d run out of air, she could swim at the surface, even all the way back, but Tesla couldn’t do that.

As if he’d read her mind, he pointed to her tank, then his and flipped his hands from side to side. He was suggesting they swap tanks. Then he pointed back to Voyager and at her. As if she would swap tanks and go back, leaving him to do the most dangerous part of the job while puking sick. Even though he was the least-qualified member of this team.

Plus, his regulator had been puked in who knew how many times, and she wasn’t going to put it in her mouth. Sure, he had a spare, but he’d probably puked in that one, too.

She shook her head violently and took the transponders and the tiny submarine drone. Tesla had brought three transponders, just in case they lost two. He was usually overprepared. But not for this.

His shoulders slumped. Even with most of his face obscured by the mask and regulator, she could tell how much he hated accepting reality. He had to go back.

She clasped his shoulder and gave him a thumbs-up. She made swimming movements with one hand, then the other, and then brought them together. She hoped he knew that meant she was saying she should go back with him.

He shook his head, pointed to his chest and back to the Voyager, then pointed to her chest and forward to the Shining Pearl. He wanted her to complete the mission, and he would go back on his own.

She shook her head. She couldn’t let him go back on his own. Too dangerous. He couldn’t surface if he had an equipment failure or ran out of air. He’d just drown.

He glared at her and took a dive slate out of his pocket. She’d forgotten they had those. He wrote, I’ll go slowly. You can catch up.

She took the slate and wrote, NO! Too dangerous for you to go back alone.

He took the slate out of her hand and wrote, If transponder isn’t attached, they can’t track it. I’ll never be safe.

She wondered if that was true. Would the House of Dakkar keep sending assassins after him if he didn’t prove it had been a sub that tried to kill their prince and not him? Would the US government let him show the pictures he’d taken? Would they track the transponder? Would any of that be enough to change their mind?

Please, Tesla wrote, stay and do this for me.

He didn’t have time to stay and argue. She had to make a decision quickly.

She linked the wire-control sub to her BCD. Straight back?

He nodded, then set out.

Every protective instinct urged her to follow him, but instead, she turned to the ship and their mission, like she’d told Tesla she would. At the range of a thousand feet, Mulcahy said they needed to keep the DPV’s motor off, so she’d have to swim the next leg. They were putting a lot of faith in a guy who spent more of his life listening to nonhuman sounds than to human speech.

The sub drone had a five-hundred-foot cable. Because radio signals don’t work underwater across long distances, the sub had to have a tether to send signals across. She had to get within the range of the tether to send the sub on its way. Once she was close enough, she hovered three feet underwater and set up the tiny device. Pretty straightforward — just drive the drone toward the yacht and sub. It had a camera mounted on top, and it would send the image back along the wire. She unwound the cable slowly, making sure there were no knots or kinks.

She turned the underwater drone on and sent it toward the sub. For the first two hundred feet, everything looked fine. Through the camera, she saw dark water flowing around the drone and a subtle brightening ahead that must come from the yacht. Just keep on going.

Then the video sent by the drone lurched to the side. The faint glow was replaced by complete darkness. She had no idea what direction the drone was heading in. A malfunction. Or it had hit something.

She’d have to start over.

Slowly, she pulled the cable back, one handful at a time. Nothing to worry about. But then she reached the end of the cable.

The remote-control drone was not attached.

The drone must have fallen off the cable. She’d never be able to recover the tiny sub. Tesla had set the sub to have negative buoyancy so it wouldn’t float to the surface if they lost control of it.

It was halfway to the ocean floor by now.

She looked down at her dive computer. She had plenty of air.

Decision time.

She could abandon the mission and follow Tesla back to the Voyager. The flying drones had captured plenty of pictures. She and Tesla had proven that the submarine existed. They could let the government take care of the situation.

On the other hand, the people on the submarine were going around killing innocents. They had sunk an oil tanker. They had killed the prince’s bodyguard and almost killed her and Tesla. If she put a transponder on the sub, it would be easy to find them and stop them. If she didn’t, or didn’t even try, wouldn’t the lives that they still might take be on her?

Unsure, she hovered in the dark water, the useless cable in her hand.

She remembered her terror in the submarine. Tesla’s determined face on the other side. He’d stuck with her. He hadn’t let her die down there. She couldn’t let him down. They had set out to tag the giant sub, and that’s what she was going to do.

But quietly.

She stabilized at three feet under the surface and kicked toward the sub, pushing the silent DPV in front of her with her good hand. She had two transponders left in her pocket. Two chances to attach one to the sub.

When she reached the back of the submarine, she was careful to stay away from the giant propellers. Captain Glascoe had told her they’d “chew her up to chum” if she got too close when they were on. Trying to put that mental image out of her head, she swam on.

She drifted up next to the sub’s hull. Almost close enough to touch. She kicked back a stroke and took out a transponder. Painted black and about the size of a coaster, but fatter, it was supposed to be so tiny the people on the sub would never notice it. Step one was to not drop the transponder into the depths of the sea.

Step two was to stick it to the sub. Before she could attach it to the hull, a light from above cut through the water and overwhelmed her night vision.