The Steel Shark

Chapter 39

Although Vivian’s instincts said to run, she tucked herself next to the submarine and waited for the light to pass. Before the light came back around, she pressed the transponder onto the sub. Hopefully it would stick, because that was as good as she was going to get.

Then she pushed herself and the DPV farther under the curve of the hull. Motionless, the DPV hovered next to her hip. She shouldn’t be visible from the surface.

Still, she pulled out her ridiculous toy gun. She slung the strap around her wrist, making it feel even more like an accessory and less like a weapon. She had only five shots, so she’d better make them count. But hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.

Should she flip on her propulsion device and head away from there double time? If she took off, whoever was up there with the light might spot the movement. She’d be hard to pick up on sonar, but not impossible. If they spotted her, she couldn’t outrun either the yacht or the sub with her little DPV. Running away had to be a last resort.

She could escape the yacht if she dove, but the sub could dive deeper than she could, and they had a huge sonar range. Miles. There would be no escaping them. They could either kill her right away, or follow her back to the ship and kill everyone there, too. More bad options.

That only left stealth. She hung motionless in the darkness, shoulder pressed tight against the hull. They were just shining the light around. Maybe they were trying to spot a fish. There’s no point in borrowing trouble, as her mother used to say.

Then a light caught her full on. She fumbled to adjust the buoyancy on her DPV, set it to descend, and hung on. The DPV dropped like a stone, and she swallowed again and again to equalize pressure in her ears.

No good. Six divers entered the water, lights pointing in her direction. She brought up her gun, ready to fire. Then she saw the divers were carrying the same kind of Chinese assault rifle she’d retrieved from the ocean floor in New York. A QBS-06. Its underwater range was nearly a hundred feet. Her little pepperbox, in contrast, had a range of about fifty feet, and the range would shorten the deeper she went.

She was outgunned and outnumbered. Nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. She had no option left but to surrender, lie, and try to protect Tesla and Voyager. Assuming the women let her live long enough to question her.

She let go of the DPV. That stopped her descent, and she adjusted the air in her BCD to start a slow rise to the surface. She didn’t want to die down deep. The divers and their lights grew closer.

Wishing she didn’t have to, she unfastened the pepperbox gun and let it drop. As designed, it sank. Captain Glascoe wouldn’t be happy about that. A pang of guilt shot through her at the thought that the she was littering, and she almost smiled. That response felt like hysteria, and she tamped it down. No time for weakness.

She activated the transponder in her pocket and stuck it in her dive bootie. Glascoe and Tesla would be listening, and they could track her, although how they could get her back from the yacht was another issue. She ran through everything else she carried, but there was nothing else to drop. Her suit and scuba gear were commercial, not military. All she needed was a good story to explain why she was over a mile off the coast of Halifax in the middle of the night next to a luxury yacht and a submarine.

As she kicked to ascend, she held up both hands in surrender. If these women were civilians, they might hesitate to shoot if she didn’t look like a threat.

Or they might not.