They swam together under the hull of the Obscure, the underhull lamps lighting their way. Beyond the sound of his breath, Gabriel could hear the high-pitched whine of the engines. Peter was right: The cables attached to the dead Dandelion were tugging, and the Obscure could barely stand the strain.
Gabriel kept a lot of useful stuff tethered to the bottom of the Obscure. As he and Misty swam along the sixty-five-foot hull, they passed a two-person minisub the size of a small car and a motorcyclelike “manned torpedo” called a Katana, until they arrived at what he was looking for: a pair of personal DPVs. They were like rugged boogie boards with propellers. The rider grabbed hold and went.
Gabriel pulled at the lever that held the metal straps around the DPV in place and it dropped, remaining slightly buoyant. He flipped a switch near the front and felt it yank in his hands. He held on to the black, rubberized handles on the sides and sped down past the Obscure’s nose along one of the cables.
He looked briefly over his shoulder to see Misty behind him, like a red porpoise, her long legs fluttering in the water as she guided her own DPV.
“Can you hear me?” Gabriel spoke into the mic in the rebreather mouthpiece. He looked at his watch. Tick tick tick.
“Five by five.” Misty’s voice sounded in his mask. “Loud and clear.”
A loud pop shot through the water. Oh, no. Gabriel sucked in a breath as the cable they were flying along made several more alarming, wobbly metal sounds. If it snapped, they’d lose the boat—and the little boy trapped inside—for good.
“We gotta hurry.” They reached the edge of the cable, and Gabriel brought his feet smack against the hull of the Dandelion. It took him a moment to get oriented. The vessel was almost completely upside down.
They swam over the upside-down bottom of the vessel looking for a way inside.
“There’s the hole.” Misty pointed out a section of the wooden hull that had blown out, the boards separated and pushed out by some explosion in the engine. It looked as though someone had punched the boards with a giant hammer. Engines could fly apart and do that. As he swam on, Gabriel was beginning to understand the course of events—some kind of kitchen fire, a spreading fire, an exploding engine, then a breached hull.
But the explosion hadn’t been enough to cause a hole they could swim in through, so they moved on quickly. They would have to go up into the hull from the main entrance. Within moments they were swimming down toward the door that earlier had belched smoke and flame.
“We have six minutes left. Let’s clip the DPVs here.” Gabriel put up his hand to the side of the doorway as he edged through, catching a glimpse of his wristband receiver. “There’s not enough room inside.” He touched a button on his mask and a line of tiny LEDs lit up, casting light in front of them. Misty did the same, doubling the visibility in the darkened space.
The bridge was awash in half-burnt papers and Coke cans, along with other varied flotsam and jetsam left behind by the tourists. Within a moment they had found the stairwell that had been the way belowdecks but that now was an upside-down stairway going up.
“The head should be toward the front of this level. Gabe, do you think it could be airtight?” Head was the nautical term for bathroom, though chances were a civilian vessel like the Dandelion would simply call it a bathroom.
“On a pleasure craft like this?” Gabriel shook his head. “Seems unlikely. Best we could hope for is trapped air.” Sometimes when a ship turned over, air could fill parts of the deck. If Jacob were lucky enough to be in one, he might still be breathing. Even if he wasn’t, Gabriel thought, they still needed to get him. People could be revived after drowning if the rescuer moved fast enough. Sometimes.
None of that would matter if the Dandelion fell apart before they reached him.
They swam up the stairs to reach a corridor lined with brown wooden paneling. The carpet on the floor above Gabriel’s head shimmied as he swam under it.
Gabriel signaled to turn as they reached a new corridor. “You feel a slight rise here?”
“Yes. We’re going up a little.”
Gabriel’s eye caught a strange shimmer in the water as they turned, and he raced forward. “Air!” In a moment his head splashed up out of the water. He let his rebreather drop and dangle at his chin as Misty surfaced as well.
The space between the water’s surface and the carpet above them was about two feet. They paddled, moving down the corridor. Then they heard it—muffled cries coming from behind one of the doors.
Misty swam ahead and stopped at the plywood door. “Here.” Gabriel dipped his head under and saw a plastic plaque on the door that read MEN.
Gabriel came up beside her and beat on the door. “Hey! Hey! Anybody in there!”
A voice, small and fragile, cried out. “Hello?”
“Are you Jacob?” Gabriel called.
“Yes!”
Water splashed around Gabriel’s head as the walls and decks around them groaned heavily. A strip of wood siding cracked and popped free, falling past his head. The boat was starting to crumple. “We’re gonna get you out of here, okay? Can you open the door?”
“I can’t,” the voice came back. They heard splashing. “I’m hanging on to the toilet bowl. It’s … on the ceiling.”
“That’s … that’s good!” Gabriel looked back at Misty and shouted to Jacob again. “Can you reach the doorknob?”
“I can’t! It’s underwater!”
Misty dove and Gabriel saw her go around him, trying the doorknob. She splashed up again. “It’s locked. We’re running out of time, Gabe. This boat is going to tear apart.”
He looked at his wristband. “We have four minutes.” Gabriel tried again, shouting at the upside-down door. “Can you let go, swim down, and turn the knob?”
“No!” came the answer. “I want to go home!”
“I know, I…” Gabriel treaded water and looked back at Misty.
The boat shuddered as Gabriel heard a heavy crunch—too heavy. Most likely the keel, the central beam that ran along the bottom of the boat, had snapped. She might hold together after that. Might. But within moments one or all of these things were going to happen: The engines of the Obscure would burn out, causing it and the Dandelion to sink. Or the cables would break free and the Dandelion, again, would sink. Or the whole boat would fall apart and likely kill them in the process. Three options, all ending in death. They had to move quickly. “We’ve gotta get this door open.” Gabriel looked around. “Find anything.”
They put in their rebreathers and plunged underwater again. Gabriel scanned along the corridor by the light of his headlamps. He saw pens, staplers.
Think.
He remembered the fire extinguisher the captain had used. There might be another. Or maybe he had time to swim back out to the upper deck and look for it. That might be heavy enough to break the lock. Except he’d have to swing it underwater, and that would make his blows slower, sluggish. Still.
Under the water, Gabriel saw Misty seize a fallen pen holder next to an overturned desk in the corridor. They both surfaced, and she held out two ballpoint pens. “What are you doing?”
“We don’t have to break it down.” She unscrewed the pens, discarding the useless pieces until she held out two steel ink-pen tubes.
Misty put on her rebreather again and dove toward the doorknob. Gabriel followed and watched her thrust the steel rods into the doorknob of the bathroom.
“Are you serious?” he asked through his mouthpiece.
“Not now, Gabe—”
After a moment she hissed in frustration, and then he heard her again. “’Kay. ’Kay.”
It wasn’t going to work. He was going to lose the boy and ruin the whole rescue because they couldn’t get through an upside-down door. Think. Maybe he could kick it. If he got up and put his shoulders against the wall and his feet against the door. If he was tall enough to get leverage. If, if, if.
Then: “Got it.” Misty backed up and turned the knob. Sure enough,
she had picked the lock. That was cool.
They both surfaced in the bathroom. Right in front of them, Jacob McNally’s face was as white as the porcelain toilet bowl he clung to.
“I’ll take him.” Gabriel propelled himself forward to grab Jacob, who instantly put his arms around the older boy’s neck. Gabriel smoothly moved the Jacob’s hands to his shoulders. He was accustomed to panicked swimmers grabbing his neck and was adept at redirecting them. Gabriel looked at Misty. “Hurry, go ahead of me—tell Peter to be ready to get out of here.”
The hull of the boat shook as carpet broke free from above and more strips of paneling popped, one after the other, like fingers coming alive to grab them. Misty disappeared into the water. Gabriel looked back at Jacob, whose fingers dug fiercely into his wet suit. They had maybe a minute. Gabriel unclipped his rebreather and held it up. “I’m gonna give you this thing to put in your mouth and you breathe through it, okay?”
Jacob stared. Gabriel reached back and put the rebreather’s strap around the boy’s head, then brought the device to the boy’s mouth. “Breathe, try it.”
Jacob sucked in air.
“Okay. You breathe through that, and don’t take it off.” He looked into the other boy’s eyes and tried, tried to push away every ounce of worry in his own. “My name is Gabriel. And we’re gonna go under the water now, and there is absolutely … nothing … to be afraid of.”
Jacob nodded.
Gabriel pictured the swim through the corridor, the stairs, out, two hundred yards or so to the Obscure.
Nothing to be afraid of. Sure.
He wouldn’t be free-swimming—the DPV would help them move fast once they were free of the boat—but still, that was going to be, what, four minutes underwater?
Gabriel pictured countless mornings, looking up through shimmering water at his father at the edge of a pool, an enormous digital stopwatch displayed on a tiled wall behind him.
Learn and be able to do.
Pushing away the noises coming from the ship and the boy, Gabriel closed his eyes. He straightened his body, letting his rib cage stretch out. He took a deep breath, feeling air going deep into his lungs, and shut his mouth. Then he worked his cheeks in brief pumps, forcing oxygen down fistfuls at a time. Lung-packing, his father called it.
Ready. He hoped.
Gabriel plunged under the water with Jacob gripping his shoulders. He swam, kicking, trying to accommodate Jacob’s weight, heading down, down and out.
Down the stairs. Out through broken windows. Gabriel felt the first crackling deep in his body of carbon dioxide acidifying in his blood, signaling his all-too-human brain to start trying to breathe. A signal he ignored as he grabbed the DPV and turned it on.
Gabriel and Jacob swept out and up, following the path of the groaning, churning cable.
His lungs burned and he pushed on, one hundred yards. Two.
By the time they reached the hull of the Obscure, the submarine was shaking so hard that it sounded ready to explode. Gabriel’s lungs were ready to burst and he concentrated, one step at a time, one motion at a time. He had to do everything right: just don’t breathe.
Gabriel pushed Jacob up through the dive porthole and followed. By the time they were both inside the dive room, Gabriel’s vision was filling with inky spots and he was losing the ability to move his arms. He looked past the growing shadows and slapped a seashell-shaped control, and the porthole swiveled shut. Water began to flow out and he pushed to the top, gasping as air plunged back into his lungs again.
Gabriel staggered in the puddle of water that remained as Jacob shook uncontrollably on the floor. The whole room was angled sideways due to the forward pitch of the sub, and Gabriel found it difficult to balance. He leaned on the wall and gasped again.
Yeah. Nothing to be afraid of.
Gabriel felt the shaking of the Obscure in the wall and remembered the danger he—and all those passengers—still faced. He pushed the intercom on the wall. “Peter!”
“Captain!”
Gabriel coughed. His vision was back, though. “Is Misty with you on the bridge?”
Misty’s voice came on. “Just made it.”
“Cut engines and cut cable and get us out of here.”
“Aye—”
Idiot!
“Wait, no, belay that, belay!” Where is your brain? Gabriel slapped his forehead and snatched up Jacob, seating them both next to the door on a metal bench. Like the room, the bench leaned back, and they looked up at the tail of the sub. As Gabriel grabbed safety restraints and clicked them in place, he spoke again. “Okay, now, Peter.”
“Aye, aye.”
Even inside the sub, Gabriel could hear the sharp crack as the cable was cut loose from the nose of the Obscure, and at once the submarine rose—fast, let loose like a stone from a slingshot. The thrust of the rising vessel threw them back against the wall as the Obscure pushed hungrily toward the surface.
Jacob started screaming.
Gabriel felt the weightlessness of the entire ship as the Obscure broke the surface. He could picture it: the long, mother-of-pearl plates with seashell ornamentations and shimmering lights erupting with a spectacular spray of ocean water, the whole submarine shooting up like a dancing whale.
Gabriel shouted, “Hang on!”
They slammed back onto the surface of the water, the Obscure shaking and sliding until it came to a rest in a steady, humming state, floating on the calm ocean.
For a moment, a brief moment his father would likely not have approved of, he thought: We actually made it.
Then Gabriel unclicked the belt and went to the hatch at the wall, opening it up to peer into the next room. He saw Misty running down the corridor toward them.
“Jacob!” Misty sounded out of breath. “Your mother wants to see you.”
As she led Jacob away by the hand, Gabriel grinned at her. “You gotta tell me where you learned to pick locks.”
* * *
They dropped off the survivors of the lost Dandelion at the Santa Marta marina, on a distant jetty where the sounds of “Margaritaville” drifted on the night air from nearby restaurants. Gabriel only had one request, especially for the captain and Mrs. McNally: that they say nothing about who had come to their aid.
Gabriel didn’t want the attention. “Promise me.”
Because who had it been?
No one.
And with that, the Obscure slipped away once more.
5
GABRIEL BLINKED AWAKE at two in the morning to the sound of his cell phone buzzing. He shifted in the hammock strung across his room, still groggy, not sure what he had heard at first. The sounds of clanking sailboat lines on the marina drifted in from outside, and suddenly his phone buzzed again. He snatched it up from the nightstand next to his hammock.
The screen read: ANONYMOUS.
Gabriel hit a green button and held the phone up to his ear. “Hello?”
There was a whir, and then a fake, metallic voice rattled out a response.
“Four. Six. Oh. One. Two.” And then, click.
* * *
Station 46012 was a great, yellow weather buoy ten miles off the coast of California. It belonged to NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but Gabriel knew it wasn’t the government that wanted to meet him there.
The cool water slid past Gabriel’s body as he rode the Katana, a slender vehicle about the width and length of a motorcycle. Riding the Katana was like using a Jet Ski but underwater. Handlebars allowed for direction control while levers at the rider’s feet controlled depth and speed. He loved it: The underwater motorbike was the coolest thing (besides a sixty-five-foot submarine) that his parents had ever given him.
Misty liked it, too, but of course Peter stayed as far away from it as possible.
On the Katana’s control panel sonar screen, a pulsating orb came into view about a mile from his location. That would be the buoy. About time to lighten up. Gabriel sped another half mile and then adjusted
the ballast lever with his heel. Water pushed out of the tanks, and he shot upward. Within moments he surfaced.
Waves lapped around Gabriel as he took the rebreather out of his mouth and let it dangle. The bright-yellow buoy looked like a twelve-foot-wide floating beaker—or a yellow genie bottle—bobbing on the water as Gabriel approached it. A light at the top of the beacon swiveled around, blinding him and then sweeping away, blinding and sweeping.
Gabriel circled the buoy slowly, glancing back to shore, where just over the horizon he could see the glow of Santa Marta. The buoy—one of twenty or so along California’s shoreline that measured waves, wind, and pressure, constantly recording and sending information up to government satellites that scoured the data for weather patterns—clanked softly as it rocked. Because the buoys never moved and had numbered addresses, they made useful meeting spots.
A light under the water caught Gabriel’s eye. He swiveled around to watch the light grow as it rose fast just a few yards away from his Katana.
Nerissa?
But it wasn’t a personal craft. Instead, a metal pole, long and inlaid with silvery, incandescent organic material like the hull of every vessel in Gabriel’s family, broke through the waves.
It was another buoy, this one smaller and not a kind recognized by any government agency. No sooner had the silvery bulb at the bottom surfaced than it began to hum.
A metal rod slid out from the top of the pole and extended, unfolding into an upside-down L. There were nozzles running along the pole, and as the pieces locked into place with a tiny click, water vapor began to spray from the nozzles.
“I need you to look at something for me,” came a voice from behind him, and Gabriel gasped, nearly falling off his Katana. He looked back and was nearly blinded by an illuminating beam shooting out from a second craft.
Someday, he vowed, she would not be able sneak up on him.
Young Captain Nemo: The Door into the Deep Page 4
