Shadow Catcher (4 page)

CHAPTER 6

N
ick fought back a wave of dread as he stared at the knife.

“Drake? Are you out there?” His efforts were futile. He still heard no response. Something was wrong. The knife had not fallen onto the seafloor by accident. Drake had obviously stuck it into the silt as a signal, a warning.

There were hostile players in the water.

Nick slowed his breathing to focus his thoughts. If he shed his bulky rebreather and tanks to swim through the gap, he'd be a sitting duck for any intruders, blind and weakened as he struggled to re-don his gear. But shedding that gear was the only way to get out. Otherwise he may as well make the bay his tomb. He checked his air gauges. Too low. He couldn't just wait it out. Besides, Drake might be in trouble.

As Nick wracked his brain for a solution, a little brown fish swam through the gap between the crushed doors and the seafloor, kicking up a cloud of silt. That inspired an idea.

Nick loosened his gear, preparing to shed it quickly, and then began to kick up as much sediment as possible and propel it through the gap. The cloud would mask his exit and deny a hostile diver a clean shot. It wasn't a great plan, but it was the only plan he had.

He stripped off the miniature tanks strapped to his thighs, unbuckled the fasteners on his vest, and positioned his body just in front of the hole. After three deep breaths, he pulled off the rebreather and mask and pushed through the gap. On the other side, he remained just above the silt, working feverishly to put the rebreather back on. He allowed his fins to skim the seafloor and kick up more silt to maintain his smokescreen. Then he sensed a dramatic change in the light. Someone had fixed a powerful beam on his position.

Nick darted and rolled in the water, presenting his back to the light, hoping that the hard rebreather might provide some protection. He ignored his straps and fasteners and focused on donning and clearing his mask. Just as he opened his eyes and looked up, a small harpoon penetrated the silt cloud above him. He jerked his head to the left. The projectile missed by barely an inch. Grasping a tank in each hand, he shot for the only cover he could find, the cave formed by the bomber's wing.

Under the shadow of the B-2, Nick whirled around to face his attacker, but he could see nothing through the dark, swirling cloud. He took advantage of the moment's respite by strapping on his gear, finishing with the holster that held his rocket pistol, the Triple Seven's answer to the standard harpoon gun. Designed and built in-house by Scott's team, the weapon amounted to a compact rocket-propelled grenade. Its small club-shaped rounds were far superior to harpoon bolts—faster, with a more stable trajectory and fragmentation warheads that widened the damage envelope considerably.

Nick surveyed his surroundings. The crumpled bomb-bay door blocked his path to the right. Behind him and to the left, the wing sloped into the seafloor. There would be no attack from the rear or the flanks, but there would be no escape either. The only way out of this bizarre cave was back the way he had come, back toward an attacker that he could not see. Nick wondered if he had just made a fatal mistake.

He drew the rocket pistol from his belt and seated a round, but without a target, the weapon was not much use. And even with the pistol's advantages, the chances of scoring a solid hit against a wary opponent were slim. Somehow he needed to regain the element of surprise.

The light reappeared, panning back and forth across the seafloor beneath the wing's trailing edge. In the white beam, he could see the silt settling. Now he understood his opponent's plan. The intruder was patient, unwilling to enter the cloud of sediment and sacrifice his advantage. He would wait for the dust to settle and the water to clear before pressing his attack.

After a short time, the light stopped panning and locked onto the spot where Nick had entered the cave. The beam formed a ghostly cone in the drifting particles. Nick watched it shrink as the attacker descended. He held his pistol at the ready, knowing he would only get one shot.

The beam slimmed, and then the flashlight itself appeared. There was no time to wait for a full target. Nick aimed just below the descending light and pulled the trigger. The pistol jerked in his hand with an audible
thump
. A rush of bubbles trailed behind the projectile as it accelerated away. The beam flashed up to Nick's face. Through the dazzling white light, he could just make out the silhouette of his attacker and the shadow of a small harpoon gun aimed at his chest. He did not attempt to evade or spoil the attacker's aim. He knew it wouldn't matter. The man would never get the chance to fire.

The projectile found its target a millisecond later, snuffing out the intruder's light in a surreal explosion, a spherical mass of blue fire and bubbles. The shock wave rippled out from all sides, hitting Nick like a punch in the chest even though he was several meters away. He shined his flashlight on the hostile and grimaced at the macabre effect of the fragmentation grenade. The man no longer had a left shoulder. In its place, a stringy mass of flesh and tissue. Blood poured from his body, tinting the water around him red.

The hostile diver began to rise, already lifeless, and Nick guessed that some of the steel shards had penetrated his heart. He raced over and grabbed the body before it floated to the surface. He tried to get an idea of the man's nationality, but the projectile had caused too much damage to the mask and face. Whoever he was, he had a small frame and thin arms, with a gray and blue camouflage wet suit that bore no unit markings of any kind.

“You didn't see that one coming, did you?” Nick asked the corpse as he pulled it up under the wing, hoping the current there would not be strong enough to carry it away. He noted that the intruder carried a small, underwater flame cutter on his belt; he had come well prepared.

Nick doused his flashlight and felt his way to the edge of the wing. With his pistol loaded and ready, he swam low and slow over the top of the wrecked bomber, searching for other intruders. A flash of light caught his eye. It had come from the open ejection hatch. He steeled himself for another confrontation, advancing with measured strokes, ready to shoot anything that emerged from that hole.

Searing pain shot through Nick's right arm, causing him to drop the rocket pistol. A harpoon bolt flew by, followed by a trail of his own blood. The carbon steel tip had ripped through his wet suit, leaving a bleeding gash in his triceps. Acting on instinct, Nick wheeled around and kicked hard to his right, defeating a second shot. But he had left his gun behind. He tried to zero in on the assailant's position, simultaneously flipping on his light and drawing his knife from the sheath on his leg.

The intruder materialized out of the murky gloom less then ten feet away. He already had a third round seated in his harpoon gun. He wore a similar wet suit to the other hostile and carried a canvas bag over his shoulder: Drake's tool bag.

Nick knew that he'd been caught. He kept his movements slow and deliberate, willing the man not to fire. Then he remembered the light in the cockpit and shot a glance over his left shoulder, wondering if another intruder might be closing in from behind. He didn't see anything. Putting his focus back on the primary threat, he crouched into a defensive stance with his fins spread front and back, ready to make a final thrust to dodge the next harpoon.

The attacker milked his advantage. He stretched out the harpoon gun, taking a moment to refine his aim. Then Nick heard a familiar
thump
resonate out of the shadows to his left.

With a single thrust of his arms, Nick pushed himself backward, shining his light in the attacker's face. The man took his actions as an attempt to escape and gave him a slow, menacing shake of the head, as if to say, “Ah, ah, ah . . . there's no escape now.”

Nick just nodded in reply. “Say cheese, moron,” he said into his mask.

With a bright blue flash, Drake's rocket detonated on the wing just in front of the attacker. The man reeled back, stunned by the shock wave. Blood streamed from wounds on his legs.

Nick did not let the reversal of fortune go to waste. He shot forward, kicking with everything he had and rotating the knife in his right hand to turn the point downward. The intruder came out of his daze just as Nick closed to within arm's reach. He tried to raise his harpoon, but Nick fended it off, knocking it from the man's grip with his left arm as he brought the knife down in a slashing motion with his right. He barely nicked the intruder's neck with the tip of the blade. But the neck was not his target.

The knife slid easily between the base of the mask and the hostile's main air line, trapping the hose between the blade and Nick's forearm. He pulled down and away, yanking the mask right off the man's face as the blade severed the hose. Blinded and unable to breathe, the intruder flailed, pawing at Nick like a frightened animal.

Nick left nothing to chance. He found the auxiliary regulator and severed that supply line as well. As he did, the intruder broke free from his grasp and kicked toward the surface. With a final effort, Nick launched upward from the wing and slashed at his opponent, but he only succeeded in cutting the strap of the canvas tool bag. It fell free.

The attacker sped upward, out of reach. Nick let him go. Pursuing him was too risky; a straight shot to the surface with no decompression stops could lead to a deadly case of the bends. At least he'd recovered Drake's tools.

Drake!

Nick spun around, rapidly shining his light back and forth to find his partner. He found him a few feet away from the cockpit hatch, hovering motionless just above the fuselage. He still held the rocket pistol loosely in his hand.

It had been Drake's light that caught Nick's eye from the ejection hatch. Somehow he managed to sneak out of the cockpit and fire off a shot, but now he looked as lifeless as the body that Nick had stuffed under the wing. Nick sheathed his knife and kicked over to his friend's side, grabbing his arm and shining his light across Drake's face. Drake blinked with glassy eyes and feebly raised the hand holding the gun to block the light.

Nick lowered his light and gently took the pistol away, holstering it in Drake's belt. Then he turned the light on himself, pointed at Drake, and gave the okay sign with a questioning look. Drake responded with a thin smile, but rather than returning the okay sign, he pointed to the left side of his head. That's when Nick noticed the thin stream of blood coming from Drake's scalp.

Both divers' gauges read dangerously low. Nick gave Drake the sign for “Wait here” and then quickly retrieved his pistol as well as the body of the first attacker. Dragging the corpse with him, he returned to his teammate and thrust a thumb up toward the surface. Drake gave an affirming nod.

During the ascent and the decompression stops, Drake gave Nick several disapproving looks. Apparently, their cadaverous companion unnerved him. Nick smiled. His longtime friend had always taken zombie movies a little too seriously. Drake also spoke a few times into his mask—still in communication with the surface—but Nick couldn't decipher what he said. He hoped that Drake had warned Walker about the hostile that escaped to the surface. Both men were injured and exhausted, and Nick didn't relish another fight.

CHAPTER 7

N
ick surfaced just aft of the
Illustro
, happy to see the sun peaking over the horizon. “Welcome back to the land of the living,” said Scott. “For a while there, we thought you were both dead.”

“There's another hostile,” said Nick, ignoring the engineer and looking to Walker. “I wounded him, but he surfaced out of my reach.”

“Relax, Major,” replied Walker, holding up a hand. “He was in no shape to fight when he got to the surface.” The colonel wore a wet suit instead of his usual khakis and golf shirt. A rebreather and tanks lay on the dock, off to the side.

Nick looked his boss up and down and then gestured at the rebreather. “Really?” he asked.

Walker offered a rare smile. “I was almost finished suiting up when Merigold checked back in.”

“I'm touched that you thought of rescuing us, sir,” said Drake.

The colonel's scowl returned. “I thought you were dead, Merigold. I just didn't want the enemy to get away with a chunk of my bomber because of your screwup.”

“I see,” Nick said. “Well, we screwups are both still kicking. Although I can't say the same for my pal here.” He dragged the body over to the platform, where Walker pulled it out of the water. Only a little blood spilled onto the dock; most of it had already poured out.

Scott took one look at the cadaver and clambered up the ladder, running to the other side of the dock before ejecting his breakfast into the gulf.

“He just can't win, can he,” commented Nick, taking the colonel's outstretched hand and climbing onto the dock. “So, where's my other hostile?”

“Your other friend is in the infirmary,” replied Walker.

“Has he said anything?”

“I'm sorry, let me rephrase. Your other friend is in the infirmary-slash-morgue. He's wrapped in a body bag. He was unconscious when we dragged him out of the water, and Doc Heldner couldn't save him. She thinks the combination of the shock wave from Drake's rocket and the rapid ascent completely decimated his lungs. He began drowning in his own blood long before he reached the surface.”

“Don't worry about me, I'm fine,” said Drake, lifting himself out of the water and trudging over to Nick.

“Sorry man.” Nick patted him on the shoulder. “What happened to you?”

“I saw one of the intruders trying to cut a piece off the jet with a torch,” Drake replied, turning around to let Nick help him remove his rebreather. “I called you, but you were off comms. I couldn't risk making a noise by banging on the bay, so I stuck my knife in the silt as a warning. When I tried to sneak up on the guy, his buddy must've bludgeoned me from behind. I guess they stuffed me in the cockpit and left me for dead.” Drake set his gear down and then reached up and gingerly touched the left side of his head. “It looks like I woke up just in time.”

“Yeah, thanks. That guy had me dead to rights until your shot stunned him.”

Drake frowned at his teammate. “Did you really have to bring your first victim along for the ascent? There's nothing creepier than swimming with a zombie.” He shuddered. “I kept waiting for him to reach out and grab me with his one arm.”

“Speaking of the corpses,” said Nick, glancing down at the masked body and then up at Walker, “I never got a look at their faces. Do you have any idea where these guys came from?”

“We don't have an exact fix,” said Walker, his eyes drifting to the eastern horizon, “but they're definitely not local.”