“Well, I’m not going to let you seduce me,” said Jonah. “But this is still crazy good.”
Alexis walked into the command compartment holding her own plate of food.
“I hate to be a bother,” said Alexis, “but we’re going to have to deal with this eventually. The bodies in the forward compartment? They’ve been in there for, like, three days.”
Dr. Nassiri sighed. “I can do it,” he said. “I imagine I’ve dealt with worse in the past. The deceased hold little mystery to me.”
“No,” said Jonah, his mouth full of food. “Don’t worry about it, I’m already on it.”
“On it?” asked Alexis. “That door hasn’t budged in three days! I wake up thinking I can hear them in there! Seriously, it just… freaks me out.”
“No worries,” said Jonah, still chewing. “I reconnected the HVAC system and hacked the environmental controls. I’ve been blowing 110-degree humidity-free air in there for the last thirty-six hours.”
Dr. Nassiri considered this, and seemed a little taken aback. “That’s actually a very clever idea.”
“I don’t understand,” said Alexis.
“Let me put this into Texan,” said Jonah. “I’m making beef jerky. That should make the whole clean-up process a lot less of a hassle.”
“Oh God,” said Alexis, holding her stomach and turning a distinct shade of green. She slammed the plate of food onto the nearest console and ran out of the room towards the bathroom.
“Must you play the psychopath?” asked Dr. Nassiri.
“Hey, free food,” said Jonah, taking Alexis’s plate and scooping the contents onto his own with his fingers. “You know what would go really well with this?”
“A piss-flavored American beer?” volunteered a thoroughly unimpressed Dr. Nassiri, scowling at him for both the treatment of Alexis and the meal.
“I was going to say a nice mint tea, would really compliment the lamb. I’m not a total barbarian.”
“I prefer a glass of Sangiovese myself,” said Dr. Nassiri, getting up from his seat.
“Is that a red or a white?”
Dr. Nassiri rolled his eyes, not rising to Jonah’s obvious bait.
“Hold up, Doc,” said Jonah. “Tonight’s the night.”
“You believe so?”
“Yeah, I do.” Jonah licked his fingers. “Come with me.”
Dr. Nassiri followed Jonah up the boarding ladder and into the claustrophobic interior of the conning tower. Jonah twisted the large wheel of a hatch built into the side of the vertical passageway. The hatch released, opening into a tight chamber where Jonah had stacked diving gear from the Scorpion’s ample armory.
“It’s a diver’s lockout chamber,” said Jonah. “We don’t even have to surface. We flood this chamber, I swim out, get your mother, bring her back here.”
“What’s this?” asked Dr. Nassiri, picking up a large pack with straps on it. It looked almost like a backpack with a hard skin, albeit with two regulators and an inflatable buoyancy-control vest.
“Don’t touch that,” said Jonah. “That’s a rebreather. Very finicky, dangerous as hell. You can just be swimming along, tra-la-la-la-la, one moment you take a breath and everything is groovy, the next moment you take a breath and die. It’s the CO2 mix… the body doesn’t have a mechanism to tell you that the air mixture is off besides passing out and dying. Incredibly, incredibly dangerous.”
“Then why use it? Why not use a traditional scuba tank? I know there must be some back there—”
“The rebreather system doesn’t leave any bubbles. Recycles every breath, very stealthy. And who knows? Maybe the technology has improved over the past few years.”
“You think so?”
“Probably not. Engineers have been working on it for more than a hundred years.”
“Oh,” said Dr. Nassiri.
It wasn’t Jonah’s intention, but he could tell he made the doctor feel a little foolish. Foolish and worried, to be exact.
“Let Alexis know tonight’s the night and then meet me back here in a half hour. I’m going to need your help getting all this shit on.”
Thirty minutes later, Dr. Nassiri watched with a surgeon’s impassive face as Jonah stripped down to his skin. Next came the wetsuit, the same one Jonah had worn when the Fool’s Errand came under attack. Jonah had patched the worst of the holes with silicone, giving the pricy wetsuit a ragged, secondhand look.
“I assume you’re taking more than a knife,” said the doctor, nodding at the blade stuck in Jonah’s belt.
Jonah held up a plastic dry bag with a polymer pistol. “Sixteen rounds, one in the chamber, and a spare mag.”
“Of course,” the doctor murmured. “I’m sure the pirates only outnumber your bullets three or four to one.”
“Maybe they’ll come at me in single file.”
“One can only hope they won’t come at you at all.”
“OK, I’m all set. Close the hatch behind you,” Jonah said, waving the doctor away and busying himself with the dive computer. On paper, this was going to be the simplest dive he’d done since his Basic Open Water certification at the age of fourteen. In real life… well, it was Somalia. Anything could happen.
“Jonah?” asked the doctor before closing the hatch. Jonah turned around, a little annoyed that the Moroccan hadn’t left yet.
“What?”
“Thank you,” said Dr. Nassiri, his arms open, a strange mixture of irritation and earnestness written all over his face. “You’re an arrogant, insufferable bastard… but thank you.”
Jonah smiled a sly kind of half smile. It took a lot to get that kind of acknowledgement out of the uptight doctor.
Dr. Nassiri exited the dive chamber, clanging the massive steel door shut behind him.
Here goes nothin’. After all, what was the worst that could happen? Besides being spit-roasted by pirates or dying of a faulty rebreather, of course.
Jonah pulled the lever, flooding the dive chamber. Cold water swirled around his ankles as he pulled the dive fins on, and in moments, the water was up to his waist, then chest.
Remember to breathe, he thought to himself as he cleared his ears. The first breath was always the hardest. A diver had to fight the small primal voice in his own mind that told him he was about to drown.
The seawater wasn’t as cold as he’d been expecting. A lowering tide had pulled beach-warmed water away from the shores, making the experience not altogether unpleasant. A rush of intense memories hit him almost at once. Floating through the ghostly halls of the Costa Concordia. Hiding from sharks in the massive steel pillars of an offshore oil platform. Seeing the first glint of silver buried deep within the ancient wreckage of Roman caravel. He’d never realized how much he loved diving, he’d never allowed himself to think about it during his time in prison.
Jonah opened the outer door to the chamber and floated out, adjusting his buoyancy to gently float on the bottom of the sea floor, the massive bulky form of the Scorpion protecting him from the current.
Navigation was going to prove a challenge. The sunlight was fading quickly and the Scorpion disappeared from sight after just three strong kicks as he entered the dark waters of the harbor. No matter, blackout conditions were no mystery to him. Hands stretched in front of him, Jonah drifted forwards under the inertia of the kicks for just a moment. Contact — he’d found the jetty wall. Jonah cracked and dropped a chem-light, watching it as it tumbled down and landed on the sea floor. When he returned, he’d know just where to push off from the jetty to find the submarine. Now it was just a matter of following the jetty into the harbor.
Seconds turned into minutes and the minutes into more than an hour. Finally, Jonah found his target — a long, dark trimaran shape in the water above him, a streamlined racing hull saddled with a large pontoon on either side. Jonah pushed up from the sea floor and allowed himself to slowly rise to the surface. He emerged from the water between the main body and the starboard pontoon, just as he’d intended. Stashing the flippers, he pulled himself and the lightweight rebreather apparatus up a small boarding ladder on the side of the racing yacht.