“The accident!” Cutter’s voice was trembling. “English said it was sabotage! I thought he was crazy. But look.” He paged down.
Now the screen showed a close-up of the fiberglass plates that protected the temperature probe in the belly of the sub. “Those are the exact same plates that failed on Deep Scout.”
“So?” Light dawned on Reardon. “You’re not saying that Marina rigged the sub? My God, Braden Vanover died in that accident!”
Cutter looked pasty in the artificial light. “A submersible must have ten thousand parts. Marina has the drawing for only one of them. It can’t be a coincidence!”
“Don’t you understand what this means? She’s a murderer!”
Cutter was in a full panic. “And she’s down where there could be divers in the water! Maybe that’s why she isn’t answering us. Who knows what she could be doing?”
Reardon was shaking now. “Tad, I’m just in this for the money. No one said anybody was going to get killed!”
The decision tore Tad Cutter in two. A man was dead already, and more lives could be at stake. But if he warned the oil company’s ship, he would be giving up any chance whatsoever to recover the treasure of Nuestra Señora de la Luz, an operation he’d been planning for years.
He hesitated. A billion dollars. A life’s dream.
And then he pressed the intercom to Captain Hamilton in the wheelhouse. “Bill, hail the other boat.” He sighed. “And you’d better forget about buying that Ferrari.”
Far below, all four hard-hat divers were clamped onto Tin Man’s husk in a desperate attempt to wrest the gold bar from the iron grip of its mechanical claw.
Star’s agitated voice burst into their helmets. “What’s going on down there? Has it got anything to do with Marina?”
“She’s got some gold!” wheezed Dante. “And she’s wearing a U-boat!”
“It’s a one-atmosphere suit,” Star said urgently. “Cutter just called to warn us. He thinks she’s dangerous!”
Tin Man’s flailing arm dealt a tremendous blow to Kaz’s Rat Hat. The helmet protected him, but the collision with a thousand-pound piece of equipment knocked him senseless. The force of it sent him tumbling head over heels through the water, his umbilical trailing behind him. The silt cushioned his landing, but he felt nothing anyway. Everything went dark.
English pulled a long knife from a scabbard on his weight belt.
Adriana stared in disbelief. “That can’t break through metal!” she gasped.
But that was not the dive guide’s plan. Instead, he jammed the blade into the grip of Tin Man’s mechanical claw. Using the weapon as a lever, he pried with all his might. The steel snapped, but the gold bar popped free. English dropped the hilt and snatched it up.
“Topside!” he barked. “Raise the basket!”
“Is everybody okay?” pleaded Star.
“The basket!!”
The cage began to rise silently, bearing its treasure trove toward the surface.
The sight of this mountain of wealth being lifted out of her grasp drove Marina to rage. Both claws swiped at English, scissoring through the water. One of the pincers caught the shoulder of his dry suit, cutting through the heavy material like it was newsprint. Frigid water flooded the dive guide’s body.
“Back to the bell!” he ordered, shivering.
This time, Adriana and Dante didn’t argue. They let go of Tin Man, sinking to the shelf.
Left alone against the armored suit, English was at a serious disadvantage. Marina smacked him across the chest with Tin Man’s elbow joint. Then the claw reached for his Rat Hat.
Desperately, he ducked. It was the wrong thing to do. The pincers sliced through his umbilical lines, severing them all. A cascade of bubbles erupted from the heliox hose.
Knowing he only had a few lungfuls of gas left in his helmet, English exploded into action. Bracing against Tin Man’s massive shoulders, he vaulted up to the suit’s lighting array. He reared back the gold ingot and, one by one, smashed the three floodlights.
Marina grabbed for him again. English switched off his own light, disappearing into the dark ocean before her. She could see only the blinding illumination of the bell. More than a few feet away from that, everything faded to black.
Holding his breath as the Rat Hat filled with water, English kicked for the bell. Adriana and Dante were right below the hatch, still plodding along in their boots. He streaked past them and burst through the open work-lock. One big breath, and he was down again, pulling them inside to safety.
The broad flat deck of the Adventurer tossed in the worsening storm. Heavy rain pelted the comm. station and gas shack. Forks of lightning carved up the angry sky. Thunder drowned out the roar of the winch as it labored to haul the lift basket full of treasure to the surface.
Star and Henri hung on to bulkheads, still barking frantic queries down to the divers. So far, their only responses had been terrifying sounds of struggle and violence.
And then English’s voice: “You are all right? You are unhurt?”
Henri let out a whoop. “They are back in the pot!” He leaned into the microphone. “This is topside. We raise the bell, yes?”
“No!” shrilled Adriana. “We’re missing Kaz!”
“Missing?” Star echoed. “What do you mean, missing?”
“Marina hit him in the head!” Dante croaked. “He isn’t answering us! I think he’s unconscious!”
“I will find him, me,” English vowed.
“We’re going with you,” exclaimed Adriana.
“No!” snapped the guide. “If you move from this bell, I will kill you myself! Entendu?”
All at once, the boiling clouds lit up like day. Lightning hit with a shattering roar, turning the Adventurer’s antenna into a pyrotechnics display. The thunderclap was instant, coming with a shower of sparks. The strike traveled through every electrical system on the ship, frying lights, radar, sonar, comm. panels, and appliances. Even the microphone blew up in Star’s hand.
The crane that controlled the basket of treasure ground to a halt. So did the heliox compressors.
Henri was nothing short of frantic. “The backup generator!” With the compressors dead, there was no breathing gas going down to the divers.
Grabbing flashlights from a rack of emergency equipment, he and Star raced into the gas shack. The backup generator looked like an ancient car engine, about the size of a dishwasher.
Star stared at it in dismay. “Their lives depend on that?”
Henri pulled out the choke handle and yanked a cord similar to the starter on a lawnmower. Like an old man with a chronic cough, the contraption sputtered twice, and then put-putted to life in a cloud of burning oil.
They held their breath. A few seconds later, the compressors clamored back into operation.
Star let out a long sigh of relief. “Now how do we get communication back?”
“With a miracle only,” the dive master replied sadly. “The wires, they are — how do you say in America — toast. Fini.”
Star’s eyes were haunted. There was no way of knowing what was going on below.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Say something, Marina. We know you can hear us!”
The weary voice of Tad Cutter echoed inside the sealed environment of the one-atmosphere suit. Marina continued to ignore him, scanning the darkness for a sign of the missing intern. What was there to talk about, after all?
She wondered how her two partners had learned that she had been behind the sabotage of Deep Scout. It didn’t matter. They had already ratted her out to English’s crew. Which meant that the partnership was at an end.