With a sneer, he shook his head. “You kill me, Rachael. You’re going to write me up? The DOD will eat you alive. Don’t you get it? They’re going to make this whole thing vanish! Stuck in a black box and put away, like it never happened. What evidence could we have found that they would have let us use? Nothing! You want Viscaya, you’ll have to do it the hard way. And if you want to come at me, by all means, try your luck. But nobody’s going to let you breathe a word about the Antoinette or this island or anything about this case, so you might want to think twice about what happens if they decide your little grudge against me is bad for national security.”
She glared at him, but Turcotte turned and stared out across the blue water. They were nearly a mile out from the Antoinette now, a safe distance, and from here the island seemed so small and ordinary and unthreatening that the entire scene became unreal.
“Damn it,” she whispered, dropping her gaze and staring at the small waves lapping against the side of the Kodiak, down below. “Damn you all.”
The roar of the helicopter had diminished. By now, they’d be putting that container down on the deck of the Hillstrom. They’d brought the devil on board, and she was just glad Alena Boudreau had chosen the Navy ship as her base. Voss didn’t want to be anywhere near one of those things.
The Antoinette detonated in three explosions, one on top of the next, a staccato eruption out on the open sea. Voss looked up to see fire and debris raining down around the swiftly sinking, ravaged remains of the container ship. It slid into the water in smoking pieces, all of its crimes and dark secrets engulfed by the blue Caribbean.
The thunder of the Antoinette’s destruction was still echoing in her ears when she heard someone shouting her name. Voss and Turcotte turned as one to see McIlveen hurtling along the Coast Guard ship’s deck toward them, with Dan O’Connell hustling along in his wake. Mac looked grim, but it was the shock on O’Connell’s pale, drawn features that told her something awful had happened.
Off to her right, Lieutenant Stone had started to shout into his comm, and David Boudreau had turned deathly pale.
Something had gone wrong on the island.
Voss hung her head, running a hand through her hair.
“Josh,” she whispered, or thought she did. Maybe she had only thought his name, along with the one other thing that swam up into her mind.
What now?
78
Josh broke the surface choking, coughing up water, and gasped for air. Shafts of sunlight made shining columns in the dark chamber, plenty of light to see by, and maybe enough to survive by; he didn’t know. He threw out his right arm, pulling toward a rock ledge a dozen feet away, but his waterlogged clothes and boots dragged at him and he sensed the predatory abyss beneath him. Images flashed through his mind of white flesh, needle teeth snapping shut, and black eyes gleaming. He could feel them there, under him, and whether they were actually there mattered not at all.
Without both arms, he wouldn’t be fast enough. And if the creatures didn’t snag him from below, he might drown anyway. Struggling out of his sling, he cried out in pain as the knitting flesh of his bullet wound tore anew, but the pain drove him on. He set his jaws tight, hissed through his teeth, and swam, cursing the wound, the bullet, and the dead Miguel Rio for shooting him in the first place. The beautiful haze the Vicodin had provided had evaporated.
Something splashed behind him — maybe a rock falling from above, but maybe something else, something hungry. Ahead on the sun-splashed ledge, others were even now pulling themselves out of the water. Some were cradling injured limbs, one sailor bleeding from a gash on his face, and he saw Tori kneeling at the water’s edge. Her eyes locked on him and he saw relief spill across her features. She urged him on.
Then he was there, at the ledge. He hooked his right arm onto the rocky outcropping and tried to climb, but he could not raise his left. His head and arms were in sunlight now, but the water remained dark and deep and he felt the vulnerability of his legs so keenly that a scream began to build inside him. Frantic, he tried to scrabble up the jagged rock ledge.
A hand clamped on his right wrist and, as he looked up, Lieutenant Commander Sykes hauled him bodily from the water, pulling him out with such effort that the two collapsed on the slick ledge. As Sykes regained his feet, Josh took long gasping breaths, and the pain in his shoulder throbbed into hideous life. He held the arm against his chest and looked up at Sykes.
“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you.” Though he knew getting out of the water was not the same as getting out alive.
Then Tori knelt beside him, her wet hair plastered to her face, eyes alight with fear and with something akin to fervor.
“You’re all right,” she told him. Only instead of reassurance, it sounded like a command. “Come on, get up. We have to get out of here.”
But as Josh rose and glanced around, he saw that would be easier said than done. They were in the vast sub-chamber beneath the bowl — beneath the level of the grotto entirely. A broad section of the bowl had caved in, but not everyone had been fortunate enough to hit the water. In the illumination from the shafts of sunlight that came down from above, he could make out at least four bodies — sailors who had struck the rocky edges of the pool — and one tangled wreck of limbs half-buried in the pile of shattered black stone. Someone from the descent team, he figured, who had been hanging underneath the shelf before it gave way.
Alena Boudreau had survived, and stood talking quietly to Dr. Ridge, her geologist, a few feet away. Both were saturated with water, the woman’s silver hair wet and stringy, making her suddenly look her age. Regardless of how well she’d maintained her body, this had to be hard on her.
Three sailors stood with Sykes right on the ledge, searching the water for signs of anyone else who had survived. But some of those who had landed in the subterranean pool had not surfaced. Josh knew without question that they would never surface. They had either been injured in the fall and drowned, or fallen prey to what swam in those waters.
“There!” one of the sailors shouted, pointing. “Did you see it?”
But Josh didn’t, and no one else seemed to. At least, no one spoke of it. Tense moments passed with all of them holding their breath, but no streak of white surfaced in the pool or darted just below the surface.
“Kaufmann,” one of the sailors said, the word either a curse or an indictment. “Fuck, Teddy, Kaufmann’s dead.”
“I know, man,” another sailor replied. “A lot of guys are dead.”
Josh steadied his breathing, forced himself to find control in the mire of his pain and fear. His sling remained around his neck, a sodden rag, and he worked it into place, every motion a fresh jolt. Then he stepped up beside Tori and followed her gaze upward.
“A second bowl,” he said.
“What?”
But he didn’t clarify. There was no need; she could see what he saw. They were down in a cave now. The upper bowl, the original chamber, had looked down into the mouth of the cave, which sloped inward to form what was, in essence, another bowl. At high tide, water would pour in through the cave mouth above them and the water level of the subterranean pool would rise. But the ledge where they had gathered, a slab of volcanic rock, put them thirty feet below the cave mouth. There would be no climbing back up.