In a moment, they were out over nothing, two stories in the air. The crane lowered them to the water, the green fishing trawler looming above them now. A Zodiac appeared with one man aboard, moving fast. The man on the outside deck busied himself releasing the cable straps and then stepped into the Zodiac.
A voice came over the radio. “Nereus, this is Aegean Explorer command. Initiate tests.”
“Roger,” the pilot said. “Initiating now.” The man had an array of controls in front of him. He pressed a button on top of the joystick he held in his hand. Then he began to flip switches, his meaty left hand moving from one to another in fast succession. His right hand stayed on the joystick. Cool, oxygenated air began to blow into the tiny module. Smith took a deep breath of it. It felt so nice on his sweaty face. He’d been starting to overheat there for a minute.
The pilot and radio voice exchanged information, talking back and forth as the sub rocked gently forward, then backward. The water bubbled and rose all around them. In a few seconds, the surface of the Black Sea was just above their heads. Smith and the man in the back remained quiet, letting the pilot do his thing. They were nothing if not complete professionals.
“Initiate silent running,” the voice said.
“Silent running,” the pilot said. “See you tonight.”
“Godspeed, Nereus.”
The pilot did something then that no civilian submersible pilot looking for a shipwreck would ever do. He switched the radio off. Then he switched his locator beacon off. His lifelines to the surface were cut.
Could the Aegean Explorer still see the Nereus on sonar? Sure. But the Explorer knew where the Nereus was. In a little while, even that wouldn’t be true. The Nereus was a tiny dot in a vast sea.
For all intents and purposes, the Nereus was gone.
Reed Smith took another deep breath. This must be the thirtieth time he had gone below the surface in one of these things, in training and in the real world, but he still couldn’t get over it. Just fifteen feet down and the sea became bright blue as the sunlight from the surface was scattered and absorbed. On the color spectrum, red was absorbed first, casting a blue patina over the undersea world.
It became bluer and darker as the sub sank through the depths.
“It’s beautiful,” Eric Davis said from behind them.
“Yes, it is,” the pilot said. “I never get tired of it.”
They dropped through the blue into deep, still darkness. It wasn’t complete, though. Smith knew that a small amount of light from the surface still reached them. This was the twilight layer. Below them, even deeper, was midnight.
The black enveloped them. The pilot didn’t turn his lights on, navigating with his instruments instead. Now there was nothing to see.
Smith allowed himself to drift. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Then another. And another. He let the hangover take him. He had a job to do, but not yet. The pilot, Bolger, would tell him when his time came. Now he just floated in his mind. It was a pleasant sensation, listening to the hum of the engines and the occasional soft murmuring of the two men in the capsule with him, as they made small talk about one thing or another.
Time passed. Possibly a long time.
“Smith!” Bolger hissed. “Smith! Wake up.”
He spoke without opening his eyes. “I’m not asleep. Are we there yet?”
“No. We have a problem.”
Smith’s eyes popped open. He was surprised to see near total darkness everywhere around him. The only lights came from the red and green glow of the instrument panel. Problem was not a word he wanted to hear hundreds of meters below the surface of the Black Sea.
“What is it?”
Bolger’s stubby finger pointed at the sonar display. Something big was on there, maybe three kilometers to their northwest. If it wasn’t a blue whale, which it almost certainly was not, then it was a ship of some kind, probably a submarine. And there was only one country Smith knew of that operated real subs in these waters.
“Aw hell, why did you turn the sonar on?”
“I had a bad feeling,” Bolger said. “I wanted to make sure we were alone.”
“Well, clearly we’re not,” Smith said. “And you’re advertising our presence.”
Bolger shook his head. “They knew we were here.” He pointed at two much smaller dots, behind them to the south. He pointed at a similar dot ahead and just to their east, less than a kilometer out. “See these? Not good. They’re converging on our location.”
Smith ran a hand over his head. “Davis?”
“Not my department,” the man in the back said. “I’m here to rescue your asses and scuttle the sub in case of a system malfunction or pilot error. I’m in no position to engage an enemy from inside here. And at these depths I couldn’t open the hatch if I wanted to. Too much pressure.”
Smith nodded. “Yeah.” He looked at the pilot. “How far to the target?”
Bolger shook his head. “Too far.”
“Rendezvous spot?”
“Forget it.”
“Can we evade?”
Bolger shrugged. “In this? I guess we can try.”
“Take evasive action,” Smith nearly said, but he didn’t get the chance. Suddenly, a bright light came on directly in front of them. The effect in the tiny capsule was blinding.
“Turn it around,” Smith said, shielding his eyes. “Unfriendlies.”
The pilot sent the Nereus into an abrupt 360-degree spin. Before he could finish the maneuver, another blinding light came on behind them. They were surrounded, front and back, by submersibles like this one. Like this one, except Smith was familiar with the enemy submersibles. They’d been designed and built back in the 1960s, during the era of pocket calculators.
He nearly punched the screen in front of him. Dammit! None of this even took into account that large object further out there, probably a hunter-killer.
The mission, highly classified, was going to be a dead loss. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Not even close. The worst of it was Reed Smith himself. He couldn’t be captured, not at any cost.
“Davis, options?”
“I can scuttle with the team inside here,” Davis said. “But personally, I’d rather let them have this hunk of junk and live to fight another day.”
Smith grunted. He couldn’t see a thing. And his only choices were to die inside this bubble, or… he didn’t want to think about the other choices.
Terrific. Whose idea was this again?
He reached down to his calf and opened the zipper on his cargo pants. There was a tiny, two-shot Derringer taped to his leg. It was his suicide gun. He ripped the tape off his calf, barely feeling it as the hair was torn away. He put the gun to his head and took a deep breath.
“What are you doing?” Bolger said, alarm rising in his voice. “You can’t fire that in here. You’ll blow a hole in this thing. We’re a thousand feet below the surface.”
He gestured at the bubble all around them.
Smith shook his head. “You don’t understand.”
Suddenly, the special ops kid was behind him. The kid wriggled like a thick snake. He had Smith’s wrist in a powerful grip. How did he move so fast in such a tight space? For a moment, they grunted and wrestled, barely able to move. The kid’s forearm was around Smith’s throat. He banged Smith’s hand against the