The Black Bullet so-1

by Tom Lowe

  Nick’s eyes popped. “I don’t even own a BB gun.”

  O’Brien nodded. “I’ll bring mine. Dave, did your CIA contact say what the chatter was about? Who’s talking and what they’re saying?”

  “I’d answer that if I knew. Internet chatter. Arabic. One person is a guy named Abdul-Hakim whom, I was told, helped supply Hezbollah with bombs it used against Israel in a skirmish.”

  “A weapons’ broker? I imagine they’ve heard about all of this, of course.”

  “A good guess is they’re on their way. Between the Internet and satellite TV, it’s a world without borders. Many young Islamic extremists are recruited via the Internet, including the ones who strap bombs to themselves. They’re recruited by the top echelon. The so-called martyrs do live forever on these websites where a new generation can see and hear why they do what they do. It’s all about perception. You can bet Abdul-Hakim and his group probably aren’t alone in their desire to possess weapons-grade uranium.”

  Nick mumbled, “That TV chick don’t know the shit she’s got us into.”

  “Probably doesn’t care,” said O’Brien. “I’ve got three good underwater flashlights. Plenty of batteries. Nick, are your dive tanks filled?”

  “Yeah, man. Always.”

  “Okay, we’ll have about an hour to comb through what we can.”

  “Good,” said Dave. “I checked the weather. No storms. Seas are about two feet in the stream. Can you find it again, Sean?”

  “Yes.”

  “No doubt. You’re about ninety minutes away from it, an hour on the bottom and ninety minutes returning. Should put you back at the marina before sun-up. We can off-load it and store the stuff in a secure area.”

  O’Brien smiled. “Outside of Fort Knox, what do you have in mind?”

  “I don’t know yet. We’ll hear soon. Let me fix you two a big thermos of coffee.”

  “Don’t need any caffeine down there,” Nick said. “When you’re in the devil’s den, your heart’s goin’ a mile a minute. I imagine one of those skeletons tapping on my shoulder as I swim by. If I had too much caffeine, I might shoot up outta the ocean like a rocket. Maybe I come down on the lovely island of Mykonos.”

  Andrei Keltzin walked out of the Kiev, a Ukrainian restaurant and bar in Midtown Manhattan, at a little past midnight. When in New York, it was where he always went on Tuesday nights. This night of the week they provided two-for-one Stolichnaya and his favorite, Zapechona, a dish of braised lamb and garlic-roasted potatoes. Although the restaurant was Russian-owned, they adopted some of the American marketing. Two-for-one called a “happy hour.” Then why are the Americans such unhappy people? His small ears were pink, and they protruded from a round, bald head that seem to sit on a neck too long to be attached to such wide shoulders. His hard eyes looked liked black beads surrounded by too much white.

  Rain fell over the city as he stood to hail a cab. A Ford Excursion gunned through a changing traffic light, splashing water across Keltzin’s shined black wingtips. “Fuck you,” he grumbled in Russian. The Americans and their giant fucking cars, SUVs-a stupid name. Automobiles a poor Russian couple could live in and call home.

  His cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He slipped back into the shadows beneath an awning, the rain popping against the canvas, the odor of diesel exhaust in the air. “There is a plane leaving for Miami in two hours,” said the deep monotone voice in Russian. “From LaGuardia. Be on it.”

  “Will you meet me in Miami for further instructions?”

  “Yes. Same place as last time.”

  “Are you alone?”

  “Dimitri will be there as well, and others very soon.”

  The caller disconnected and Keltzin stopped the next cab. “LaGuardia. You get a tip of one hundred dollars if you can get me there in twenty minutes.”

  “No problem,” said the man in a Moroccan accent. “This time of night, not much traffic. You might get lucky.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Nick Cronus stood near his boat’s bowsprit as clouds parted and a near full moon rose above the dark ocean. He watched O’Brien in the bridge read the GPS and slowly bring the boat somewhere over the lost submarine. “Drop it!” yelled O’Brien above the throttle of the diesels. Nick pressed a button on the deck, and the anchor slid into the inky water.

  O’Brien cut the engines and climbed down to the cockpit. The boat rocked gently on the surface, the slap of waves lapping against the hull, the stars like twinkling ornaments in the sky. O’Brien pulled out the SCUBA tanks, fins, knives, wetsuits, and underwater flashlights.

  Nick got a spear gun from the salon. “Might need this down there.”

  “What do you think you’re going to shoot?”

  “Hope I don’t have to shoot a shark. You can get great whites out here. Tiger sharks. This is the freakin’ Gulf Stream, a flowing smorgasbord for things to eat things.”

  “Let’s hope they’ve all eaten and gone to sleep it off?”

  “Sharks don’t sleep at night. They eat at night. I’m not gonna be their meal.”

  “You don’t have to go down there, you know.”

  “If I don’t, who will? Jason? That kid would go just to say he’d gone, but he’d suck up so much air outta the tank seeing those skeletons he’d be no help. If he saw a shark swim through the light beam, bet he’d panic and pop to the top. He’d die from the bends.”

  “I’m glad you’re here, Nick. I mean that.”

  “I’m not out here ‘cause I’m still payin’ you back for pulling those three bikers off me. But when a man saves another man’s life … well, that kinda friendship is about as deep as you can get. You know?”

  “I know. I just don’t want you to think you owe me something. You don’t.”

  Nick grinned. “Let’s dive, brother!” He strapped on his tank, braced himself against the transom to slip the fins on his feet and shook his head. “Did I ever tell you what happened to me one night off Cedar Key?”

  “No.”

  “One time, ‘bout an hour before sunset, I was diving off Cedar Key, more than one hundred feet down. Found a lot of sponges. I stayed down too long. Come up too fast. Got back on my boat. Dropped the anchor and started fixing dinner. Looked at my chest, stomach, and I was getting blue spots all over. Felt weak. Dizzy. I knew I’d got hit, you know, the bends. Couldn’t get to a hospital for decompression. The old Greek way is to go back down, at least thirty-three feet … just hang there on the anchor rope ‘till the nitrogen is outta the system. Maybe an hour. So, that’s what I did.”

  “Looks like it worked, you’re here.”

  “Yeah man, but as I was floatin’ on my back like an astronaut in space, I see nothing but the lights from my boat above me. Then the lights went dark. Like a blanket was tossed over them. Know why?”

  “Generator quit?”

  “No. A huge shark was between me and the lights. Then it circled me, round and round. From dark to light to dark. I’ve never been so damn scared in my life.” Nick held up the spear gun. “But I had one of these. When the beast from hell opened his mouth to try and take off my leg, I say a quick prayer, stick this spear down his throat, and pulled the trigger. This saved my life that night, Sean. Could save ours tonight.”

  O’Brien tossed a knife in a sheath to Nick. “Wear this on your belt in case you miss with the spear.”

  “I won’t miss close. And sharks are only dangerous when they’re close.”

  “Where’s your extra rope?”

  “Storage bin behind you.” Nick pointed.

  O’Brien opened the bin on the cockpit and pulled out rope, arranging it in a neat figure-eight loop that would allow for it to easily slide into the sea without becoming knotted. As he reached in to tie off the remaining few feet, he noticed something about the size of a small hockey puck. Black. Stuck on the side wall of the compartment. “Nick, shine one of the lights over here.”

  Nick clicked on one of the flashlights, the beam falling on the object. “What the
hell’s that?”

  “O’Brien carefully removed the object and studied it in the light. “It’s a GPS transponder, Nick. Somebody knows we’re out here.”

  “This is my boat! Not Jupiter. How the hell do they know?”

  “Because they’re good, damn good. Turn off the light.”

  Nick shut off the light and looked in a 360 circle. Nothing. Miles of dark sea and silence. “Who put that there, Sean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We’re way the hell out in this big ocean, and now I feel like we’re not alone.”

  O’Brien scanned the horizon, the reflection of the moon on the water as clouds parted. “I don’t see another boat in site. If they’re coming, they could be running with lights out. Let’s beat the bastards. There may be no time for a two-tank dive. I just hope whoever put this here doesn’t surprise us when we come back to the surface.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  O’Brien climbed to the fly bridge and used a pair of binoculars to scan the horizon in all directions. He came back down the steps, binoculars in hand. “Nothing,” he said. “We have three-hundred feet of rope. When we get down there, let’s look in the other half of the sub we didn’t enter. If there are no canisters marked as U-235, we’ll go back in the half where we saw the stuff. We’ll tie both of them onto this rope, move them to a spot on the bottom, swim back to the boat, and use the winch to haul the stuff to us. Got it?”

  “Yeah, I got it,” Nick said.

  They stepped onto the dive platform. Before putting the regulator in his mouth, O’Brien said, “Turn the lights on underwater. Okay, let’s do it.” He slapped a high-five against Nick’s hand and stepped off the platform, the flashlight descending in the clear water like a meteor fading in the night sky.

  Nick made the sign of the cross and looked up at the heavens. “If you get us outta this one, I won’t ask for nothin’ else, and I take back those thoughts I had today of Ralph Jenson’s wife.” Nick gripped the spear gun in one hand, the flashlight in the other, and fell backwards into the dark sea.

  At thirty feet down, O’Brien adjusted his buoyancy and waited for Nick. Within a few seconds, Nick appeared next to O’Brien, and they began to swim the remaining seventy feet to the floor of the ocean. Nick panned his flashlight beam left to right as they descended, occasionally looking toward the surface, the light illuminating jellyfish and squid. O’Brien kept his light pointed in the direction they were heading. A minute later, they could see the dark gray hull, most of it encrusted with barnacles and algae.

  O’Brien tapped Nick on the arm and motioned toward the long remnant of the sub they had not entered on their first exploration. Nick nodded and followed O’Brien as he swam for the opening, a twisted cavity of metal so thick with sea growth it looked like a dark entrance to an underwater cave.

  The spotlights crisscrossed as the men entered, the light illuminating plankton, small fish, and shrimp flittering across the floor of the broken U-boat like mice scurrying for shelter. Nick pointed to a human skull, decapitated from the rest of the body, the skull wedged under a shard of metal. The skull had a small hole above one eye socket. A moray eel, mouth slightly parted, dogteeth visible in the light, backed into the dark crevice beside the skull. The men swam by, careful not to disturb the sediment, their bubbles rising to the ceiling of the broken U-boat.

  The lights panned across shattered wires, pipes, pressure gauges frozen in time, and valves resembling small steering wheels, locked with barnacles. O’Brien thought it looked as if the insides of the U-boat were coated in volcanic lava.

  Even with the veneer of ossified sea life, O’Brien could tell the long objects in front of them were torpedoes. They had entered the torpedo room. Four of the deadly cylinders had never been fired. A partial skeleton, missing one leg, was resting on the floor, half buried in residue.

  The men could find no evidence of the U-235 canisters anywhere in that half of the submarine. O’Brien pointed toward the entrance and motioned to leave. He thought he caught a glimpse of relief in Nick’s eyes through his mask.

  They swam by the remains of an eighty-caliber deck gun, blown off the area near the conning tower when the sub was hit. They tied the rope to a piece of metal shard at the opening, connecting it to the other half of the sub. Nick secured his spear gun at the entrance, and they slowly entered. Everything was as they’d left it.

  Within a minute, O’Brien and Nick were back at the place where they originally found the U-235 canisters. They spent another ten minutes searching through the remainder of the sub. Nothing. Nothing but bones and bent metal. Then O’Brien spotted something on the floor about two feet from what looked like human pelvic bones. The object was a leather holster, caked in corrosion. O’Brien heard Glenda Lawson’s voice echoing off the walls of the U-boat. “All three gunshots sounded the same … and I’d heard Billy shooting lots of times at cans he’d set up in our backyard. His gun didn’t sound like the shots I heard that awful night.”

  O’Brien lifted the gun out of the sediment, the move causing a soup of rust colored water to swirl in a vortex, a small red ghost dancing down the center of the submarine before melting to the floor.

  They swam back to the cage that held the U-235, opened it and together lifted out each canister. O’Brien motioned for Nick to help him swim with the first canister to the blown-out entrance of the sub. Nick nodded, held a flashlight under his armpit, and swam beside O’Brien with the canister between them.

  At the entrance, they turned and looked back toward the cage that held the remaining canister, the water murky, rust and sea mud in a thick broth. O’Brien shined a light on his watch. Eleven minutes of air left. He motioned for Nick to follow him to the cage for the other canister.

  Nick’s eyes popped behind his mask. He reluctantly followed O’Brien back into the sea of tarnish, reaching for one of O’Brien’s fins for a connection. Using their sense of touch, the men lifted the remaining canister and walked it toward the entrance.

  Nick stepped on something hard and round, like a bowling ball under his fin. The object, a human skull, cracked under the weight of the canister. Then Nick felt a pain across his shoulders as he backed into a sharp metal shard, the rusty edge slicing through his wetsuit, blood mixing with the decay in the water.

  O’Brien tied the canisters to the end of the rope. He looked at his watch. Less than eight minutes of air left. O’Brien checked the slash across Nick’s back. Blood drifted from it, creating an eerie image of red smoke floating around his shoulders. O’Brien pointed to the surface. Nick nodded as they started a slow ascent.

  Something shot through a flashlight beam. It could have been a shadow out of the corner of his Nick’s eye. But there are no shadows ninety feet down in the ocean at night. There are only predators.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Nick grabbed his flashlight and spear gun at the same time. Within a second, O’Brien had his knife off his belt. Nick looked at O’Brien and motioned toward the left. Both men aimed their flashlights into the dark void. Squid and needlefish swam by them.

  Nick panned a few feet to the right, his shoulder bleeding.

  A monster bull shark, at least ten feet long, circled the men.

  O’Brien knew the bull shark was one of the most aggressive. One this size feared nothing, especially when there was blood. He looked at Nick, whose eyes were wide behind the face mask. O’Brien gestured, moving Nick’s back against his and pointing toward the surface. Nick nodded, keeping the spear gun in front of him as his flashlight swept the murky sea. Back-to-back, both men began moving the beams of light in half-circles as they ascended. They followed the anchor rope. To rise too quickly would risk a dangerous case of the bends. To stay where they were any longer would put them at risk of more sharks arriving and attacking.

  O’Brien looked at his depth gauge. At fifty feet they stopped, held onto the rope and breathed slowly. They would have to decompress here for two minutes, purging the trapped nitrogen from their b
loodstreams.

  The shark circled again. Each orbit closer. An aggressive twist of the head. Eyes watching the men. Closer. O’Brien and Nick followed it with their lights. Then it was gone. Vanished. O’Brien looked at his watch. Thirty seconds more to decompress. Two minutes of air left. For thirty long seconds they would have to stay right where they were. He tapped his watch and showed Nick who nodded, his eyes darting back to the moving light. Then Nick aimed the flashlight beneath them.

  The image was frightening. The bull shark rose like a torpedo from the inky depth. Mouth open. Rows of one-inch teeth expanding. Nick fired the spear gun. The spear grazed the shark’s side. It was like hitting a dinosaur with a dart. But it was enough to confuse the shark. It cut to the right and swam off into the dark.

  O’Brien pointed toward the surface. Nick nodded and they followed the rope. Another twenty feet and they’d be at the dive platform. Could they clear the water before the shark turned around and charged? O’Brien tried not to think of the odds. Within ten feet of the boat’s dive platform, they broke the surface. Nick spit out his regulator and blurted, “Swim! Fuckin’ swim!”

  They both reached the wooden platform at the same instant. Hands slapping wood. Fingers gripping the half-inch slots. Feet and fins grappling for the ladder rungs. Nick stood. He grabbed O’Brien’s hand and helped pull him up from the top rung of the ladder. Under the moonlight, they saw the shark swim closer. Just beyond the dive platform, the shark’s steal gray dorsal fin slicing the surface.

  “It’s following us up on the stand!” Nick yelled. He pushed the transom door so hard the lock flew across the cockpit floor. Both men stood in the cockpit, the boat rocking in the swells, the sound of water dripping from dive suits, breathing heavy.