Chapter 114 - The Drowned Cockpit
Before the diver could clear the water from his optic, I lunged forward across the wave swell. My left hand clamped down on his weapon's muzzle, wrenching it upward into the rain, while my right drove the serrated edge of my combat knife into the high-pressure hose of his rebreather manifold.
The hose severed with a violent underwater hiss of compressed gas. The diver convulsed, eyes widening in shock behind his tinted mask as the sudden pressure imbalance flooded his lungs with brine. I twisted his body, stripping the suppressed underwater carbine from his grip, and kicked him away into the dark current.
A second diver surfaced five feet to my left. Reyes met him in the trough of the wave, driving a steel tactical pen directly through the man's drysuit collarbone before drowning him in the churning wake.
"That's two!" Reyes spat out a mouthful of seawater. "Two more in the water, and the ship’s deck team is training light machine guns on this sector!"
"Get them under the hull!" I ordered, grabbing Arthur by the scruff of his neck. The old man was limp, dead weight, muttering incoherently about bank deposits and wire transfers. The cold was shutting his brain down.
"Look!" Clara pointed into the churning waters ahead.
The forward hull of the corvette had paused its drift, hovering right over the sunken wreckage of an offshore support vessel that had been anchored to the rig. A submerged moon pool beneath the corvette's hull was opening—a glowing rectangle of light sixty feet beneath the surface.
They weren't just deploying divers. The corvette was a sub-surface mothercraft, designed to dock with underwater installations.
"They’re opening the lower airlock to recover the cargo," I realized instantly. "The Syndicate doesn't want the authorities to find a single trace of this operation on the surface."
"Marcus, if we stay out here, we freeze to death in ten minutes," Reyes said, his teeth clicking together. "Or that deck gun turns us into chum."
"Then we don't stay out here," I replied, checking the magazine of the captured sub-aquatic carbine. "We're going inside."
"Are you insane?" Clara shrieked against the gale. "That's their ship!"
"You wanted luxury, Clara," I said coldly, looking her dead in her terrified eyes. "You wanted a four-million-dollar house paid for with blood money. Now you're going to see how your benefactors operate."
I grabbed Arthur's wrist, drawing my knife, and sliced the leather strap of his life vest so he wouldn't float upward.
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"Take a breath, Arthur," I ordered, shaking him violently until his eyes focused on mine. "Take a breath, or drown right here. Your choice."
The old man gasped, sucking in a lungful of air just as I hauled him beneath the surface. With Reyes dragging Clara, we kicked hard against the freezing Pacific current, diving headfirst into the glowing abyss toward the open belly of the beast.
