“What do you want to bet the answers you’re looking for are contained within that?” Tom asked, floating toward the metallic suitcase.
“I’ll take that bet,” Sam replied.
Without further discussion, Sam manipulated his titanium pincers at the end of his right arm and pulled the case free from the bones.
Tom laughed. “All right, you beat me to it.”
He adjusted increased opposing power to his twin thrusters, causing him to rotate slowly through three-hundred-and-sixty-degrees. Running his eyes across the room, it appeared almost entirely empty.
When he was finished, he heard Sam say, “Find anything else?”
“No.”
“All right, let’s head to the surface and find out what was so important inside this case that someone was willing to terrorize Washington, D.C. just to retrieve it.”
Tom maneuvered his way through the smuggler’s vault and into the open waters outside. Once outside the sunken wreckage, he and Sam added small increments of gas to their ballast tanks.
The two Exosuits began their controlled ascent to the surface.
It was a slow and measured ride. Soon the dark gray of the bottom gave way to the soft light of predawn. Sam kept his eyes fixed on a series of gauges. There were significant external differences between 700 feet and sea level. Even the Exosuit needed to treat that pressure gradient with respect.
Both thinking hard, Sam and Tom rose in silence.
At 500 feet Sam said, “I can’t even imagine what that poor man went through. He must’ve known what happened as soon as he heard the explosions. He knew he was on his way to the bottom, but there wasn’t a thing he could do. The external water pressure made it impossible to enter or exit the smuggler’s cabin until the cargo was offloaded and the hatch was once more above the waterline.”
Tom swallowed. “It would have been a rotten way to go.”
“I only hope that whatever secrets are hidden within this suitcase are worth it. Maybe, the stranger’s death might not have been in vain.”
“Yeah. We’ll find out soon.”
The gray water turned light, as crepuscular beams shone through the last two hundred or so feet of water.
Tom raised the faceplate of his suit, studying the outline of the Maria Helena riding on the surface high above them. His jaw leveled, and his eyes ran across a series of gauges. They had little more than a hundred and fifty feet.
And then his world went dark.
He looked up again and spotted the cause. A large submarine nearly the length of two football fields and as wide as a three-lane highway had come to a complete stop in the silence directly above them.
Five individual lights suddenly pierced the now pitch-dark canvas.
Sam swore, and said, “It looks like we’ve got company.”
Chapter Fifty
Sam shouted, “Let’s go!”
He pressed all his weight on the balls of his feet, triggering his quad-thrusters into life. He stretched out horizontally, making his bulky Exosuit as streamlined as possible. An instant later, all four propellers whirred, and the suit raced through the water like an uncoordinated torpedo.
They needed to get around the massive submarine to reach the surface.
Above, a set of LED lights raced toward them.
There was no doubt in Sam’s mind about their intentions. Their attackers were using weighted sleds to descend at speed.
“We’re not going to reach the edge of that sub before they do!” Tom warned.
Sam’s head snapped back. The team of elite soldiers were nearly on top of them. “Okay our suits should provide the protection we need, but we can’t let them swarm us. Their numbers are overwhelming.”
“Agreed. Let’s split up. You go left I’ll go right.”
“Got it!”
Sam put pressure on his left foot and the Exosuit raced diagonally to the left.
The divers didn’t stop to rearrange their attack. Instead, they fixed on Sam like a homing missile and kept coming. There was nothing for it. Sam adjusted his position again to a right angle with the sub, in an attempt to shorten the distance.
It didn’t matter.
They kept coming.
Sam cleared the imaginary line that formed beneath the edge of the submarine. He dropped his emergency ballast weights. His buoyancy changed in an instant.
The Exosuit shot upward.
It lasted less than a few seconds before he heard the loud clank. One of the divers had landed directly onto the back of his Exosuit. The attacker somehow attached his heavy diving sled to Sam’s mechanical leg.
The additional weight had brought Sam to a standstill. He tried to kick it off, but it wouldn’t fall free. Sam tried to bend down and reach it. The diver had wrapped a small tether around the base of his left foot. Sam attempted to lift his knee to bring it higher. It felt like he was wearing a cement boot.
Sam said, “Tom, they’ve got me!”
“I’m coming for you!” came Tom’s reply.
“No! Get topside and get help!”
“Not on your life!”
Sam strained the fully articulated joints around his torso and lower abdomen. The suit provided surprising flexibility, but there was limited dexterity, compared to the divers outside who wore nothing but wetsuits and SCUBA. Besides, he only had the use of his left pincer arm — the right was still holding the metallic case.
The metallic case!
The thought snapped him out of his mental cloudiness. He dropped the weighted tether. There was nothing he could do about it right now. Instead, his eyes fixed on the end of his right arm, where the pincer gripped the heavy chain at the end of the metallic case.
Already, one of the divers was trying to pry it free.
Sam rotated his left arm. The fully actuated joints moved quickly, at speeds only just slower than someone outside of the suit. He extended the titanium pincer grip wide and drove his arm toward his attacker.
The pincer collided with the side diver’s solar plexus.
Sam squeezed his finger and the pincer closed together. His attacker screamed — or at least he would have, if that had been possible with his dive regulator in his mouth — instead it came out more of a high-pitched gurgle. The diver spun around, recovering faster than Sam had expected. The mechanical force would have crushed any flesh within its way but must have missed any vital organs.
Behind him, his shoulder plate started to move backward.
Someone else had joined their fight, followed by another person at his right. He could hear a slight tapping behind his suit. It was impossible to visualize it, but that didn’t matter. He didn’t need to. The sound alone was enough to panic him.
Someone was trying to unbolt his helmet!
His pulse racing, Sam jammed the quad-thrusters into full. Their small propellers sped with a whine, but he didn’t move far. He was being held by at least four separate divers. Like prehistoric peoples banding together to take down a Woolly Mammoth, his fortified suit would only hold them off so long.
Someone jammed metal into one of his thrusters. It stopped with a loud bang, the noise racing through the water like the sound of his lifeline shattering. The diver immediately worked his way through the rest of the thrusters.
Sam didn’t have long to go.
He swung his mechanical arms around like lethal weapons. Every time his arm connected with anything he closed the titanium pincer.
It didn’t matter. None of it did. There was no way he could hold off all five of them on his own.
What happened to Tom? Had he changed his mind and continued to the surface for help?
Sam didn’t have to wonder very long to find out.
The diver in front of him was suddenly drawn downward. Sam couldn’t see what had taken him, but he could guess. Three seconds later, air bubbles raced to the surface, followed by a diver.