Sea of Greed

Tessa left the cockpit. “I’ll be on the lower deck,” she said. “Keep the engines turning. I want to be able to leave here at a moment’s notice.”

The pilots responded in unison and Tessa left them behind, racing to the bottom deck and heading aft. She arrived to find the tail ramp already lowered and Volke and Woods working together to get the recovery teams into the water.

The disk-shaped submersible was lowered first, followed by a slower, bulkier sub, which her people called the Bus.

Volke was in the Discus. Woods drove the Bus.

Behind them, two high-speed boats were launched, each with four divers aboard. The group in the first boat were commercial divers Woods had rounded up. The group in the second boat were the remnants of the mercenaries Volke had hired. He called them the predator team.

Tessa intended to keep in contact with all of them. She put on a headset with noise-dampening earcups so she could hear over the continued whistle of the engines. After plugging the jack into the transmitter, she moved the microphone in front of her mouth. “How long will this take?”

“No time at all,” Volke insisted. “The depth is a hundred and twenty feet. The vessel seems to be intact. And this time we know what we’re looking for.”

“Get it and get back here,” she said. “Austin may have called for help, we might not have a lot of time.”

• • •

VOLKE GRIPPED the controls of his submersible. It felt good to be back in control again. “Woods, are your men ready?”

Volke didn’t trust Woods. Even with the threat of death, the man was a fanatic. When told they’d be recovering the antidote, Woods had been furious. He wanted it destroyed, claiming it could only lead the world back to the Oil Age. Tessa had had to explain again that their lives were worthless without the antidote, then Woods had finally come around. Still, Volke and Tessa had agreed to keep a close eye on him and use him only when absolutely necessary.

“They’re ready,” Woods said.

“Tell them to follow me down. We don’t have time to wait for you.”

Volke engaged his propulsion jets and the Discus began crossing the water toward the wreck site. The powerboats passed him, one to either side, while the Bus trailed well behind.

Reaching the dive coordinates, Volke tuned a valve and flooded his ballast tank. The Discus submerged and began dropping toward the bottom. The commercial divers went in the water, swimming beside him in a steady descent.

Volke spotted the Minerve and approached it from the broadside, noticing the opening that had been cut in it.

“NUMA’s already been down here,” he reported. “I only hope the counteragent wasn’t on board their vessel when we blew it apart.”

“They wouldn’t have been sitting around if they had it,” Tessa insisted. “It’s down there.”

Volke looked around. It dawned on him that some of the NUMA personnel might have been in the water when they attacked the Gryphon. He doubted a lone diver or even a group of them would be brazen enough to attack his men, not when it would be far wiser to swim away and call for help, but he put nothing past these men and women from NUMA.

“Group one, take up positions on the hull where you can watch for trouble. Group two, get inside and see what you can find.”

As the divers swam to their new positions, Volke backed away from the submarine, giving himself a wider view. He watched as the two men swam up to the opening and shined their lights inside.

“Looks like the control room,” one of them reported.

“A hundred thousand euros to whoever finds the canister,” Volke said.

• • •

THE FIRST DIVER went in, disconnecting the small air tank from his dive harness and pushing it in front of him. “I’m going aft.”

He knew he had the best chance of finding the canister. He’d been part of the team that found the oil destroyer in the Dakar and he would know the canisters by sight.

The Israelis had stored them in a refrigerated compartment meant for food. Why, he didn’t know, but he expected the French would do the same. He went aft, heading for the galley, came to a bulkhead door and found it chained in the open position.

He grabbed the door and shook it, interested in whether it would even move at this point. As he did so, his light illuminated the skeletal remains of a crewman, stuck behind the door.

He pulled back instantly, exhaling a cloud of bubbles. It wasn’t fear, just shock, made worse by the adrenaline and the high level of oxygen running through his body.

Waiting for his heart rate to slow, he drifted backward and bumped into something. Spinning around, he saw a metallic monster, bulbous and grotesque, with copper-colored skin. He saw his own reflection in the curved glass of the huge head. Far too late, he noticed a weighty arm crashing down toward him.

The metal fist slammed into his skull and knocked him out cold.

• • •