by Steve Alten
Although the trawler was equipped to fish commercially, the deck space between the net drum and bridge was designed to accommodate a helicopter. The fish holds had been converted into a weapons bay, with mounts for two .50 caliber machine guns hidden within the base of the trawl gantry.
The biggest difference between the Malchut and a standard fishing trawler was located underwater. Fastened beneath the keel like a twelve-foot remora was a gondola-shaped device that housed a multibeam echo sounder (MBES)—a sophisticated sonar array equipped with the latest in underwater imaging.
Over the last four hours the Malchut had been slowly circling the same patch of sea, allowing the MBES array to develop detailed images of the USS Philadelphia. The sunken Los Angeles Class attack sub was resting 220 feet beneath the Atlantic, its hull balancing precariously on a rocky precipice above the 28,000-foot-deep Puerto Rico Trench.
Along with the five crewmen who operated the bridge, engine room, and galley, there were with two Americans on board the fishing vessel—both former Navy SEALs trained to locate and salvage sunken ships, along with nine Arab mercenaries. The latter were members of the Al-Nusra Front, a private militia that fought with the Syrian People’s Coalition against the oppressive regime of President Bashar Assad. Al-Nusra has been blacklisted by the Obama administration as a terrorist organization—a fact that only made the renegade militia more attractive to the CIA and other black ops groups.
The commandos received their orders from the only woman on board.
Sabeen Tayfour was the lone surviving child of Adad Tayfour, a former Syrian general who resigned from President Assad’s forces to join the people’s revolution. Only nineteen years old, the raven-haired beauty with coal-black eyes had already borne witness to several lifetimes of cruelty. She had lost her mother and younger siblings when Assad’s forces fired Scud missiles upon her city, and for six brutal weeks she had been held captive while guards tortured and violated her. Sweet Sabeen, who had once aspired to a career in dance, no longer existed. The woman known to her commandos as Onyx was a cold-blooded killer. The leader of the Black Widow brigade operated under a simple directive—revenge.
Cameron Reeves was out on deck, pretending to check his diving gear while his eyes behind the dark sunglasses focused on the athletic Arab woman bench pressing her weight in the blue neoprene two-piece. Two members of the Muslim Brotherhood watched the American commando suspiciously, but Reeves didn’t care. Muslim or not, a woman doesn’t wear skin-tight fabrics to work out in public unless she wanted to be watched, and the former Navy SEAL was only happy to oblige.
Reeves’s dive partner, David Watkins, was a linebacker-sized Californian who refused to function on land without his San Francisco 49ers hat, which he always wore backward. The two Americans turned in unison as they heard the helicopter’s pounding rotors approaching from the northwest.
Three minutes later, the Sikorsky S-434 light chopper landed on deck.
The man who climbed out of the cockpit was my father. Admiral Douglas Wilson was dressed in civilian attire, the sleeves of his embroidered Hawaiian Tommy Bahama shirt flapping beneath the slowing rotors.
Watkins greeted his black ops employer. “Your downed lady’s in two hundred and twenty feet of water, with her ass-end hanging over the edge of the Puerto Rico Trench. If she goes, you’ll need a DSRV to reach her.”
“Why the hell are we having this conversation? Go down and get me what I want.”
“Money first, Admiral,” Reeves said, entering the conversation. “And you can save the bad dog bit for the enlisted men.”
Admiral Wilson reached inside the four-passenger helicopter and retrieved an aluminum suitcase from beneath the copilot’s seat. “One million dollars—half a million apiece for doing a job the navy trained you to do for free.”
Watkins took the suitcase and passed it back to Reeves. “What do we do about the woman? She’s insisting on making the dive.”
Onyx stepped forward. “I can speak for myself.”
The admiral’s eyes widened behind his mirrored sunglasses. “Sabeen, so nice to see you again.”
“You will address me only as Onyx. I will make the dive with your team.”
Watkins looked up from counting the shrink-wrapped fifty-thousand-dollar stacks of money. “You’re too young; it’s way too dangerous.”
“I’m old enough to kill.”
“Onyx—”
“Admiral, my cousin Mahdi was aboard the submarine. My father has instructed me to recite the Salat al-Janazah among our dead. The prayer is a collective obligation among Muslims. If no one fulfills it, then all Muslims will be held accountable.”
Admiral Wilson pulled Watkins aside. “Let her dive. She can pray over her dead while you and Reeves load the package into the flotation harness . . . or she can join them if she screws up.”
The difference between a recreational dive and a technical dive is depth. Depth determines the mixtures of gases one will use to breathe and the number of decompression stops on the way up to prevent nitrogen narcosis. The preferred mix for dives exceeding 185 feet is Heliox, which is helium and oxygen. Unlike nitrogen, helium does not have an intoxicating effect, but its thermal conductivity is six times greater than that of nitrogen, causing the diver to lose body heat rapidly. Because helium dissolves quickly, divers must decompress more often during their ascent or risk the formation of nitrogen bubbles in their blood, a dangerous condition known as the bends.
Cameron Reeves joined David Watkins on the dive platform mounted along the trawler’s stern. Both commandos were wearing dry suits, with their main Nitrox tanks on their back and their two Heliox cylinders strapped in place along their flanks. In addition, Watkins carried a backpack containing a harness attached to an inflatable bladder.
Reeves looked up as Onyx climbed down the aluminum ladder to join them. Kneeling on the swaying platform, she carefully worked one bare foot at a time into each flipper, the muscles of her legs and buttocks flexing beneath her wetsuit.
The former Navy SEAL stared at her painted red toenails. “I didn’t know Muslim women went in for that.”
“How many Muslim women do you know?”
“Point taken. However, you really should be wearing a dry suit and rubber boots; it’ll be cold down there.”
“I prefer to feel the water; it is easier to swim. You have done this before?”
“Deep salvage dives? A few. The key is to keep your focus and watch your time. It’ll take us about seven to ten minutes to reach the sub. That leaves us fifteen minutes to locate the package and inflate the harness. Do your praying and wait for us outside the torpedo room, and we’ll surface together. Remember, we decompress at a hundred and fifty feet, then every thirty feet, just to be safe.”
She winked—then stepped off the platform and plummeted feetfirst into the sea.
“Hey, wait!” Reeves turned to Watkins, who was testing his regulator.
“Let her go, buddy. One way or the other, that crazy bitch’ll get you killed.”
Reeves nodded. She’s reckless . . . like a wild stallion. Is she really interested, or is she just playing me? Shoving the regulator into his mouth he checked the air flow, then stepped to the edge of the platform and jumped into the sea.
Watkins joined him in the water, the two divers floating along the surface while they checked their equipment. After several minutes they deflated their buoyancy control vests and descended together through a frenzy of air bubbles, falling rapidly into the deep blue underworld.
The pressure squeezed Sabeen’s ears, forcing her to slow. Pinching her nose, she filled her cheeks with air and popped open her ear canals, relieving the ache. The American commando was right—only halfway down and the cold was already seeping through her wetsuit.
She had been through far worse.
Sabeen continued her descent, the royal blue waters deepening into s
hades of gray until the bottom came into view and she saw it—a long, dark, log-shaped beast, a third of its girth poised over a crevasse so deep and vast it sent a shiver through her spine.
Orienting her approach so that the submarine appeared as it did on the sonar images, Sabeen quickly located the weapons bay and the blast that had most likely sunk the warship.
Sixty-seven meters . . .
Sabeen had never dived this deep before. She could feel the weight of the sea pressing in on her skull and face mask and felt herself trembling. Locating the fifteen-foot-wide blast hole, she switched on her underwater light and entered the dark, hollow chamber.
Time, depth, and current had swept away the evidence of a crime scene. Her eyes caught movement and she turned, her light catching the golden-brown flank of a shark. Eight feet long, with a prominent first dorsal fin, the sandbar shark swam in jagged, dizzying circles around the female diver until Sabeen realized there was more than one creature present.
Perhaps a dozen sharks moved through the flooded torpedo room, each one circling a rectangular crate—the crate her men had given their lives to transport halfway around the world. Sabeen quickly realized what was attracting the sharks—the water was warmer—she was no longer shivering. It’s the radiation . . .
Then she saw Mahdi.
Her cousin’s face was bloated and gray, his eyes open in death. The commando’s upper right quadriceps had been eaten clear down to his femur, only it was not a shark that had killed him—it was the bullet hole in his forehead, clogged from the inside with fragments of his brain.
The sight of the gruesome corpse would have sent most divers fleeing. Sabeen simply pushed her dead cousin aside, refocusing the beam of her light on the racks of platter mines.
Cameron Reeves was first to reach the damaged hull. Switching on his light, he swam into the cavernous opening—twisting sideways at the last moment to avoid being rammed by a torpedo-shaped mass that suddenly appeared out of the darkness. A slap of the shark’s powerful tail struck the Heliox tank hanging along Reeves’s left hip.
Watkins pulled him away from the hole, signaling him to wait. Unzipping a pocket on his dry suit, the commando removed several underwater flares, passing one to Reeves. The two divers popped off the caps and tossed the sizzling pink sticks into the flooded chamber. Within seconds they witnessed a shark exodus, the agitated predators streaming out of the hole and past the men into open water.
Satisfied, Watkins led Reeves inside an interior space that now listed at a thirty-degree angle. Racks of torpedoes were tilted sideways, control panels covered in sand.
In less than three minutes they managed to locate the crate with the warnings written in Arabic and Farsi and swim it out of the downed attack sub, laying it on a stretch of rocky bottom.
The woman joined them. She watched the two men as they laid out a canvas harness attached to a deflated underwater balloon. She pointed to the sharks, which were circling the periphery.
Reeves gave her a reassuring wink, then proceeded to inflate the open-ended parachute-like balloon with a pony bottle of compressed air.
Sabeen remained behind the two men for protection as first the balloon, then the crate began rising off the bottom.
That’s when the Black Widow struck.
Poised behind David Watkins’s back, she cut the air hose of his regulator with her dive knife. As air bubbles streamed out of the severed hose, she reached for Cameron Reeves and yanked the mask off the startled commando’s face. Releasing it, she scissor-kicked herself away from the bottom and inflated her dive vest, quickly distancing herself from the two distressed divers.
The former Navy SEALs never panicked. Engaging a buddy system, Reeves shared his regulator with Watkins, who became his eyes, locating the discarded mask. Refitting it to his face, Reeves quickly cleared his eyepiece, then—arm in arm—he and Watkins began their ascent, anxious to gut and drown the voluptuous Syrian assassin.
Wa-Boom!
A deafening roar of thunder rolled into multiple explosions—the platter mines detonating at staggered intervals around the hull of the downed attack sub. Before they could react, the two divers were swept up in a current and tossed across the coral-strewn bottom like tumbleweed.
Cameron Reeves was barely conscious when another sound reached him—the sound created by six thousand tons of shifting steel, the sub’s keel crushing him in a burst of warm white light.
* * *
From her vantage seventy feet above the action, Sabeen looked down upon a sandstorm of rolling black thunder. Her heart pounded with adrenaline as she watched the bow of the USS Philadelphia rise away from the bottom on a sixty-degree vertical plane before sliding stern-first into the dark depths of the Puerto Rico Trench.
Seconds later, a current of shrapnel hit her like a swarm of stinging wasps, her ears assaulted by metal striking metal as her air tanks were struck like hail on an aluminum rooftop. Abandoning her decompression, she kicked for a safer vantage, only to realize the balloon she had been rising with was now moving the other way—its inflated bladder torn, the trailing crate sinking fast.
The rectangular object and its bubble-trailing tethered buoyancy device hit bottom, bounced twice, and—as Sabeen watched in horror—was inhaled within the vortex created by the plummeting Los Angeles Class attack sub, following it into the 28,000-foot abyss.
11
The ride home from the lab that first night was an exhausting one—mentally, physically, and emotionally. I had pressing questions for Dr. Becker . . . Why weren’t human stem cells as effective as shark stem cells at restoring damaged spinal cords? Was there a way to counteract the side effects by reducing the dosage? Was it possible that a human subject would fare better than a rat?
The answers to these questions and dozens more would have to wait. Upon concluding my “sneak peek at the future of stem cell therapies” lecture and tour, Dr. Kamrowski had put me to work entering gobbledygook subject data into a computer. Four hours of tedious work . . . with no chance of face time with her majesty, Dr. Barbara Becker.
Still, using the lab’s computer did offer me access to the boss’s personal files.
I’m not a hacker by trade, but yeah, I know how to do it—thanks to Clark Newsom. Clark was my best friend back in San Diego. His parents owned a cybersecurity company and Clark often tested his parents’ clients’ firewalls, getting cash bonuses for hacking their sites or identifying honey pots—traps designed to detect someone illegally accessing a system. That knowledge became especially useful when we decided to hack into the navy’s site to access the Admiral’s private e-mails. We shut down after reading a series of encrypted messages from my father about some top secret deal called Operation Strawman.
Dr. Becker’s firewall was more of a Strawman than a real security system—designed to intimidate, but with little substance. By the time my driver, Bill, had us heading north on Interstate 95, I was already accessing her files on my iPad, perusing a list of links.
Background of protocol.
Granulocyte counts (listed by shark species).
Subject results.
Genetic mutations.
I clicked on Genetic mutations, which brought me to a page of links corresponding to every rat used in the study. I randomly selected Rat TS-19 . . . the TS an abbreviation for tiger shark.
Appearing on my screen were two images of a double helix. One twisting spiral ladder was the rat’s DNA before the stem cell injections; the other was the rat’s DNA after it had received an injection of the tiger shark elixir. In both the before and after double helixes of DNA, green, yellow, and red specks appeared along the twisting strand like lights on a Christmas tree.
A quick search of Becker’s notes identified the green points as the rat’s normal functioning genes. The yellow spots were noncoding DNA—insignificant to the animal’s genetic code. The green and yellow DNA
in the subject’s before and after helixes were identical.
The differences were rooted in the red spots—the rat’s transposons. According to Dr. Becker’s notes, transposons are parasitic DNA—a hand-me-down that was left over from the earlier phases of mammalian evolution. Found in both rodent and human genes, parasitic DNA disrupts normal gene function and is what causes cells to mutate into diseases like cancer.
Rat TS-19 had been purposely stricken with cancer to test the tiger shark stem cells. The good news was that the stem cells had gone after the rat’s transposons, destroying the cancer cells. The bad news was that, instead of forming scar tissue, the transposons had adopted the traits of its dominant benefactor—the tiger shark DNA. These mutated cells were spreading rapidly among TS-19’s genetic command center, and the green specks which represented the rodent’s normal functioning genes were too few in number to fight off the invading force.
In plain English—the stem cells had killed the cancer but had mutated the host into a species that was half-rat and half-shark . . . essentially killing it.
Hope is a double-edged sword—it can save you and it can cut you to the quick. For the next two days my mind was severely screwed up; by Friday I was officially depressed. Jesse Gordon texted me a reminder about Saturday’s band practice, but even that barely raised my pulse.
Leave it to Stephen Ley to resuscitate me.
With no appetite, I headed for the gym during my lunch period, hoping to break my lethargy by shooting hoops. Coach Flaig wasn’t around, but his office door was open, so I borrowed a basketball from his rack and wheeled myself out onto the hardwood court.
As I mentioned earlier, my wheelchair isn’t made for sports. Lacking leverage and a harness, I nearly heaved myself out of my seat on the first shot—an air ball from the lower block—about a three-foot bank shot. My next dozen shots were bricks—until I gradually began compensating by holding the armrest with my left hand and shooting one-handed with my right. Within fifteen minutes I had worked up a sweat and was consistently making shots from as far back as the foul line.
