The lights went out and the ride became a trip through a dark tunnel until their eyes adjusted. “More light than I expected,” Joe said.
“Seas are calm,” Kurt said. “That always helps. Not a lot of sediment moving around down here.”
“I put the visibility at fifty feet.”
“Then make sure we stop at least a hundred and ten feet from the wreck.”
The Turtle was fast for an ROV. With a boost from the current, they were doing almost seven knots, but it still took nearly twenty minutes before they approached the wreck site, a dim glow in the distance.
“At least three or four diving lights,” Joe said.
Kurt acknowledged, then saw a fifth and sixth light appear, as someone came up from behind a mound of sediment.
Up ahead, the lights blurred as if hidden in a swirl of dust. Already Kurt could feel the strange throbbing sound of a submerged vacuum at work.
“Ease us in a little closer and drop me off,” Kurt said. “I’ll find the nearest diver and ask if he needs help.”
Kurt flipped open a panel on the hard suit’s arm. A waterproof display screen would translate anything he said into printed words, allowing him to communicate with other divers.
“And what if he’s a bad guy?”
“That’s what this is for.”
From the tool rack Kurt pulled a Picasso twin-rail speargun. The two spears were set side by side, the triggers were arranged one in front of the other. The safety was currently on.
“I brought one for you in case you need it,” Kurt added. “But, for now, stay out on the perimeter and keep a sharp eye. If I get in trouble, you know what to do.”
They were about a hundred feet away from the activity. Kurt doubted anyone could see them, the same way a man in a lighted room can’t see out onto a dark lawn at night, but he didn’t want to take any chances.
“This is my stop,” he said. With that, he pushed away from the Turtle, engaged his own thrusters and moved off at an angle. A last look back showed Joe holding station, as ordered.
31
Kurt moved through the water in almost complete silence, the slight whirring of his own thruster barely audible. The left side of the wreck appeared to have more activity. At least five lights in that area, plus the divers in standard gear who were working the vacuum. He moved to the right, where he saw only two lights.
Approaching through the cloud, he could tell the divers were trying to dig something out from under the fossilized bones of the old ship.
Unlike with the NUMA excavations — and every other underwater dig Kurt had ever heard of — these men were literally hacking at the wreck, breaking pieces off and tossing them aside.
I guess when you have a gun to your head, preservation goes out the window.
By now, Joe was too far away to pick up any radio transmission, so Kurt was on his own. He eased in behind two divers, who were oblivious to his presence.
“Enable written communication,” he whispered.
A little green box with the letter T inside it appeared on his helmet display.
He had only so many characters to work with and he settled on the simplest thing he could think of. “I’m here to help you.”
The small screen on his arm lit up and Kurt nudged the throttle forward.
Reaching out, he tapped the closest man on the shoulder, waiting for the diver to turn in shock or look around surprised. But, of all things, the diver just continued working.
Kurt tapped him again, harder this time. When nothing happened, he grabbed the diver’s shoulder and spun him around forcibly.
The diver looked at him in numbed shock. Kurt could see that the diver’s face was blue, his eyes half closed. These men had been down here a long time. Too long.
Kurt pointed down to his arm and the display panel.
The man read the message and nodded slowly. He then grabbed a small whiteboard he had with him and scribbled Digging fast as I can. And turned back to the job.
He thinks I’m one of the bad guys. That meant there were overseers down here among the dive crew.
Kurt grabbed the man again.
“I rescue you.”
The man blinked for a moment, his eyes widened a bit. Now he seemed to get it. He became agitated to the point that Kurt had to hold him still.
“How many bad guys?”
The man wrote 9.
“All down here?”
5
… 4
Five up top and four in the water. That was worse than Kurt had expected.
“Show me.”
Before the man had a chance to show Kurt anything, a wave of light swept over them both. The diver’s eyes told the story. Kurt spun and saw a man charging with a spear in his hand.
32
Kurt pushed the diver to one side and brought the Picasso up to shoot, but the attacking diver was too close and they ended up grappling instead of spearing each other.
To Kurt’s chagrin, the attacker was in a full-face helmet and had on a partial hard suit. Otherwise, Kurt would have simply ripped the guy’s mask off. Instead, they twisted and rolled until Kurt got the man in a headlock, engaged the thrusters and accelerated toward an outcropping of wood and coral that had once been the bow of the Sophie C.
The attacker dropped the speargun and went for a knife, but before he could use it Kurt dragged him across the high point of the bow, slamming the back of the diver’s head into the outcropping at maximum speed.
The diver went limp on impact, dropping the knife and sinking toward the bottom with his arms outstretched, knocked-out at the very least.
Two more men came racing toward him from the far side of the work site. Like the first man, these men were wearing full-face helmets, but, unlike the man he’d just knocked out, they were being pushed through the water by propulsion units of their own.
A spear shot past Kurt, leaving a trail of bubbles in its wake. Kurt dove for the bottom, kicking up silt to act as a smokescreen.
He engaged his own thrusters at full speed and the cloud grew behind him. He remembered an old adage from a World War II fighter pilot he’d worked with years back: Always turn left in the clouds. Why left and not right, he didn’t know, but if it was good enough for the skies over Midway, it was good enough for the bottom of the sea.
He kept the throttle of his dive suit wide open and banked to the left, dragging his foot to kick more sediment. The trick worked for a moment, but the lights of one frogman came rushing out through the cloud. He spotted Kurt and raised a weapon.
Kurt turned, and instead of the whoosh of another spear, Kurt heard the dull, muted thumping of a rifle. It sounded an awful lot like the venerable AK-47.
One of the shoulder-mounted wings of his suit shattered. Kurt continued to move, kicking furiously in addition to the power of the thrusters.
He made it to behind the wreck. “Joe, if you can hear me, I need help in a big way. It’s three against one and these guys are carrying underwater rifles. Their propulsion units look Russian to me, so I’m guessing the rifles are too.”
Kurt could think of two different rifles the Russians had designed for their Spetsnaz commandos and frogmen. A weapon called the APS, which fired special steel-core projectiles called bolts that were nearly five inches long. These heavy bolts cut through the water far better than any standard lead bullet, but they still had a limited range due to the density of water. At this depth, it couldn’t have been more than fifty to sixty feet, but as Kurt’s aching back attested, they could still deliver a thump even out of the effective killing distance.