Deep Fear

by Jethro Wegener

  DEEP FEAR

  Jethro Wegener

  www.severedpress.com

  Copyright 2019 by Jethro Wegener

  1

  The mini-submarine slid slowly through the eerie blackness of the underwater trench. On-board, two men sat, shivering slightly in the chill. One drank strong, black coffee from his thermos, using it to warm his hands. He was a skinny man, with long, wispy hair and a greying beard.

  His partner, who was piloting the little sub, was a lot bigger—tall, with a large gut that strained against his shirt. He had long since lost the battle with male-pattern baldness, and his watery eyes strained to see something on the monitors in front of him that projected an image outside the sub.

  “Bloody cold down here, isn’t it, Roger?” asked the bearded man, taking another sip of his coffee.

  “Jesus, Will, you say that every time,” Roger replied in a bored tone. “We’re miles away from the sun’s lovely warmth, remember?”

  “It bears repeating, my friend.” The small submarine was heated, but the outside temperatures were so close to freezing that it seemed to make little difference.

  Will had always hated deep dives in these tiny things. They were always uncomfortable, and the mysteries of the ocean had lost their allure to him when he was crammed into a tin can with another person like a sardine. It didn’t help that Roger had been gaining weight at a steady pace since Lilith had left him two months prior. If the man didn’t stop using food for comfort soon, he’d need the two-man sub all to himself.

  “If you hate it so much, why don’t you just quit?”

  “And leave you here all alone? Nah, my friend,” Will said, twisting the lid back on the thermos. “I’ll retire when you do. Besides, we hardly dive that much anymore.”

  “Well, they usually don’t need us. Until some idiot drops something down the bloody trench.”

  The two men hadn’t been down in a few weeks, instead overseeing the construction from the relative comfort of the ship that was anchored far above their heads. The only reason they were diving now was because one of the workers had accidentally rolled a piece of building material down into the trench, with Roger and Will being the only two personnel available to go looking for it.

  “Who the hell builds an underwater hotel so close to a bloody deep-sea trench anyway? More to the point, who the hell builds a hotel so far underwater?”

  “Rich people, my friend.”

  “But it’s so far underwater!”

  “Their ways are alien to the likes of us.”

  Will chuckled. “And they always will be. When shall we head back up and tell them we can’t find the bloody piece of pipe, or whatever the hell they dropped down here?”

  “Jesus, Will, you’re always griping. We’ve only been down,” he checked his watch, “seventeen minutes.”

  Will looked at the camera feeds in front of him. They showed a barren sea floor, all life having scurried away from the harsh glare of the sub’s headlamps. He turned his attention to the tiny porthole beside him, peering out into the inky blackness of the deep. It sent a chill down his spine every time. Anything could be out there, and the natural human fears of the unknown and the dark made a crappy cocktail.

  “I mean, look at that,” he complained. “Can’t see a bloody thing. How do they expect us to find a goddamn—?”

  His griping was cut short when the headlamps illuminated a piece of shiny metal, jutting out of the seabed at a forty-five-degree angle. Roger was already chuckling to himself.

  “See? Patience, my moaning friend,” he said, reaching for the radio. “Ahoy up there, Richie! We found your piece of piping.”

  “Thank fuck for that,” Richie’s voice came back through the sub’s speakers, giving his voice an alien quality. “We got enough trouble without budget audits and questions from the damn environmentalists. Mark the location, we’ll send someone down to pick it up.”

  “Roger that.”

  Will grinned. He always got a kick out of Roger saying stuff like that. However, his grin was soon replaced by a puzzled frown. He leaned forward in his seat.

  “What is it?” Roger asked.

  “You see that?” He pointed to something on the screen.

  “What?”

  “Looks like something moving. There! At the base of the pipe.”

  Roger leaned forward as well, struggling to pick out what his friend was seeing. He couldn’t see anything at first, but then he did. Something seemed to be moving, wriggling around the base of the pipe.

  “Get us closer, man,” Will said, overcome by curiosity.

  Nodding, Roger guided the little sub closer. For a reason he couldn’t explain, his heart was pounding in his chest. Something wasn’t right and his gut was churning furiously. Meanwhile, Will had his face as close to the screen as he could get it, trying to see what it was.

  “It must be one of those underwater weirdos we always hear about,” he was saying. “We could—”

  Suddenly, the seabed went dark, cutting Will’s sentence short. The submarine’s floodlights had just cut off. Roger swore and started checking instruments, trying to find out what had just happened.

  “The fuck just happened?” Will asked, a note of panic creeping into his voice.

  “I don’t fucking know.” He reached for the radio. “Richie, come in, Richie! The lights just cut out. We’re blind down here.”

  “Fuck,” Richie said. “Get your asses back up here.”

  “Working on it.”

  Roger stopped fiddling and gripped the controls, getting ready to steer the submarine toward the surface. He activated the throttle, expecting movement. But instead, they held fast. Cursing, he increased speed. The sub jerked forward slightly and stopped, before it jolted backward, throwing both men forward in their seats.

  Both Will and Roger smacked their heads into the bulkhead, causing both of them to see stars. Will leaned back, dazed and bleeding from a bad cut in his forehead. Roger tried to push himself back into his chair so that he could get them out of there. Suddenly, the walls started to groan, a low, threatening sound that chilled him to the bone.

  “What the fuck was that?” Will asked, his words slurred slightly.

  Roger was scrambling now, giving the throttle all that it had. The little sub didn’t budge and the groaning intensified. He looked up and gasped in horror. The hull was being bent inward. They were being crushed like a soda can.

  “Jesus Christ, Roger, get us out of here!” Will screamed.

  “I’m fucking trying!” he yelled back.

  A thought occurred to him. He stopped pushing forward and instead put the sub in reverse for a few seconds, before throttling forward again. It finally started moving forward and he almost laughed in relief.

  “We might just make—” A terrible groaning sound cut his sentence short.

  He looked at Will, who was peering out the porthole, trying to get some glimpse of whatever was behind them. Sweat pouring off of him, he gave it all he could, shooting through the water toward the surface. All they had to do was get into the light.

  Suddenly, the submarine juddered, causing Roger to lose control. The groaning outside intensified, and the bulkhead started to cave inward again. He caught a glimpse of something passing across the porthole before the mini-submarine was crushed, he and Will along with it.

  2

  Six Months Later

  Axel Calder shifted slowly and deliberately into a headstand position, keeping his breathing steady, the muscles on his lean body glistening with the sweat that he’d just worked up through his morning yoga routine. He usually ended his session with headstand meditation—it calmed his mind and rejuvenated his system better than any cup of coffee he’d ever tried.

  Calder was six feet of lean muscle,
with sandy blond hair, and a ruggedly handsome face. His short beard was neatly trimmed, and his hair cut short. An expertly done, intricately detailed black and grey tattoo of a scythe-wielding grim reaper riding a horse covered the entirety of his back.

  A long scar ran diagonally across the left side of his chest, the result of a knife fight that had almost killed him as a teenager. There were a few other scars as well, the result of long stint in the SAS, and a few more brushes with death. It would have been obvious to any observer that the man was a warrior that was not to be messed with.

  As he balanced, Calder let his mind go blank, focusing himself in the moment as he watched his breath enter and leave his body. His soul and emotions, which were always a mess after his nightmares, started to calm as he began to find his centre. The beginning of the day was always the hardest for him, but his morning routine, honed over many years, always worked to calm the battle inside himself.

  After five minutes, he lowered himself down into child’s pose for a moment, before shifting into corpse pose and letting his body go loose. He stayed there for a while, breathing slow and steady, before pushing up into a seated position, just as the noise of a small-engine plane reached his ears.

  He glanced at the clock. It was about time for the last batch of visitors to arrive—a couple of reporters who had been called in to cover The Kingdom’s grand opening, although they had an ulterior motive. He sighed as he stood up, because journalists had never been his favourite people. Then again, neither had unbelievably wealthy people, and he was about to be surrounded by those as well.

  Calder grabbed his towel and went to shower. He’d have to be ready when Richie came to pick him up. As the head of security for the “biggest and best underwater hotel in the world,” at least he wasn’t going to spend that much time interacting with the guests, but he’d have to spend some time among them to make sure his team was doing their job correctly.

  It took ten minutes for Calder to be showered and dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt. He was just pulling on his boots when he heard a jeep pull up outside and the horn sound. Calder yelled that he was coming, before sliding his Sig Sauer P226 pistol into his shoulder holster, grabbing his black rucksack, and heading out into the cloying jungle air.

  Calder was situated in a small, nondescript, double-story building in the middle of a patch of green forest. A mud track ran up to the front of it, where a muddy clear served as a kind of carpark. He was on an island in the middle of the ocean which was acting as the stop-off for people wanting to go to The Kingdom. Visitors would fly in from their various destinations to the tiny island, and a luxurious yacht would take them to the hotel.

  At the moment, the island was little more than a makeshift airport and muddy tracks, with one proper tarred road that ran from the airport to the jetty where the yacht was moored, but the person who had built the Kingdom with his own money—a man named Bernard Thompson—had big plans for the little island, including a Michelin-star restaurant and bar.

  Thompson struck Calder as the kind of man who had big dreams about everything, and the money to make most of those dreams a reality—at least for a little while. Charismatic, charming, and a ruthless businessman, he had been smooth enough to get Axel on-board, and yet there was still something about the man that bothered him. That something had been bothering him even more since Will and Roger had disappeared and Thompson had given up the search.

  Outside, Calder found a green, mud-splattered jeep waiting for him. Richie De Luca, head engineer, sat in the driver’s seat, and two people sat in the back. One was a short, stocky man in his mid-forties, with grey hair that was shaved close to his scalp, a lined face, and black eyes. The other passenger was a dark-skinned, fit young woman with long, raven-black hair, and piercing almond eyes.

  “Jones, Priya, meet Axel Calder, head of security for The Kingdom,” Richie said as Calder climbed in beside him and shook hands with the other two.

  Richie, a man in his early fifties with long, greying hair tied back in a ponytail, black eyes, and a bit of a belly straining against his thin linen shirt, reversed back onto the muddy track and started the drive toward the jetty.

  “Pleasure,” Calder said. “Jones your first or last name, mate?”

  “Last,” he said.

  “I knew a Eugene Jones in Afghanistan, a journalist. He was embedded with one of our para units. You wouldn’t be related to him, would you? Only you remind me of him.”

  Jones nodded. “He was my brother.”

  “I had the pleasure of spending some time with the man. I don’t mind saying that I usually don’t like journos, but your brother was an exception. I’m sorry about what happened. He was a hero.”

  “Thank you. Eugene wasn’t supposed to be there.”

  “None of us were, mate,” Calder said, noting that Priya seemed to be paying very close attention to the conversation. “Nothing we can do about it now. Richie, have you filled them in?”

  He nodded. “I’ve given them the full brief. Their cover is that they’re here to report on the grand opening, but they’re actually trying to find out what Thompson is covering up about their disappearance.”

  “You trust them?” He glanced behind him. “No offence.”

  “None taken,” Priya muttered.

  “Jones and I have been friends for years, Axel. I trust him with my life.”

  “And Priya?” Calder asked.

  “She’s one of my best reporters,” Jones said.

  “And I know how to keep a secret, mate.”

  Richie chuckled. “Axel isn’t the best at making friends. Comes with people in his line of work. He doesn’t mean any harm.”

  “Also, keep in mind that both Richie and I are putting our jobs on the line here.”

  “Figures that a mercenary would only care about money,” Priya shot back.

  Calder laughed. “I’m no mercenary, luv, but I do need to eat.”

  “Will and Roger were our friends,” Richie said. “It’s not fucking right that Thompson just gave up looking.”

  “Why the grand opening if you suspect there’s danger?” Priya asked.

  “Because our benefactor is bleeding money. The man has a lot, but he also spends it like it’s nothing. We’re sure you’ve seen some of his experiments? He’s a man of many grand ideas, but not all of them pay off. This opening is so that he can get the investors interested again and get the funds he needs to finish off the place.”

  “Hence why he’s keeping the disappearances of the two workers so quiet?”

  “Exactly,” Calder said. “We can help you two get the evidence, you just have to be able to report it to everyone else. We need to use a softly-softly approach here. We get in, use the opening as a distraction to get the evidence to you two, and you get to splash it all over the headlines once it’s all over. If Thompson finds out either Richie or I are involved, he can destroy us because of our contracts, but neither of us can sit back and let Will and Rog’s families go without closure.”

  Richie nodded. “Axel will be with you guys in the hotel, I’ll be up top on the monitoring rig. I trust this man as much as I trust you, Jones. You can too.”

  “Did my brother trust you?” Jones asked.

  Calder twisted in his seat to look him in the eye. “Your brother saved my life.”

  Jones nodded. “Okay.”

  “We’re here,” Richie said suddenly.

  The jeep broke through the line of greenery and out onto an open field that faced the ocean. At least it would have, if there hadn’t been a massive, gleaming white yacht obscuring their view. It was one of the biggest and most beautiful boats Priya had ever seen, and although she knew nothing about them, she could tell that this one was special.

  It sat at the end of the pier, bobbing gently in the pale-blue water. People could be seen lounging on the decks, and the sounds of music and laughter drifted down toward the four in the jeep. The spectacle before her brought only two words to mind.

  “Fuck
me.”

  3

  “She is an impressive sight. One of the largest privately owned yachts in the world,” Calder said as he grabbed his pack and pulled himself out of his seat in one graceful movement. “Thompson already on-board, Richie?”

  Richie was slightly less graceful getting out of the vehicle. “Everyone is. They’re just waiting on us. Each of us has our own cabin.”

  “I’ll bet they’re a far cry from the ones given to the paying guests,” Jones said.

  “You’d be surprised.”

  Richie grunted as he pulled his bag out of the jeep before the four of them set off across the pier. As they walked, Priya watched Calder. The Englishman moved with an easy grace, carrying himself with confidence. She wasn’t sure if she could trust him just yet, despite what Jones and Richie had said.

  “It’s impolite to stare, luv,” Calder said.

  “Just observing. I’m an investigative journalist—it’s what I do.”

  “And what have you observed?”

  “Not sure yet.”

  He laughed. “I’m not who you should be wary of. We’re about to get on a yacht full of some of the richest people in the world. Those are the ones you should be watching.”

  They started up the steps leading to the deck, Richie going first, Jones second, Priya third, and Calder last. Priya missed a step halfway up and Calder steadied her with a hand on her shoulder.

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem, luv.”

  Once they reached the deck, somebody in a pristine white uniform came over and started talking to Richie. He apologised, saying that he was needed, and that Calder would show them to their cabins before heading off with the crew member.

  “This way.”

  They followed Calder through a side door, down a couple decks, and came to a corridor with doors to cabins on both sides. The floor was polished wood, the walls a pristine cream, and the railings and doors a classy polished wood. It was the richest setting Priya had ever set foot in, and she couldn’t help feeling like she didn’t belong.