The Minoan Cipher (A Matinicus “Matt” Hawkins Adventure Book 2) (10 page)

“The impact must have cracked a seal,” he said.

“What can we do?”

“Keep moving. Try to stay ahead of the leak.”

“I don’t mean to be pessimistic, but even if we get to the surface the submersible will sink under us.”

“I’ll blow the pontoons. There should be enough buoyancy to keep us afloat until help arrives.”

It would be a tight squeeze. The cold water was lapping at their shins by the time the fathometer marked them at the one-hundred-fifty-foot mark. He gritted his chattering teeth and kept his eyes glued to the dial.

One hundred feet.

Kalliste was using every ounce of stubbornness in her body, but the cold was eating away at her resolve. Hypothermia was setting in. Hawkins was shivering, and her teeth were clacking.

“Matt, the water is at my knees.” Her voice held a panicked edge.

“Promise me something, Kalliste.”

“Yes. Anything,” she said through chattering lips.

“That we’ll have dinner together back in Cadiz.”

She turned to Hawkins in the pale light, incredulous at his calm grin even with the prospect of death staring him in the face.

“I can’t believe I’m here with a crazy man. Yes, of course we’ll have dinner.” She brushed the hair out of her face again. “But I will have to look better than I look now.”

Hawkins placed his arm around her shoulders.

“You look like a Greek goddess.”

“Oh!” she said.

Her startled reaction had nothing to do with his attention.
Falstaff
had popped to the surface where it was lifted high by a swell and dropped back down between the angry waves.

By then, the water was at waist-level.

And all around them was darkness.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Hawkins had switched on the Mayday transmitter but he knew that help could be hours, possibly days, away.

Falstaff
bobbed in two-foot-high seas and the sphere was half-full of seawater causing a shift in the center of gravity. The submersible was inherently unstable on the surface because of the weight of the batteries behind the passenger space. The rocking motion created even more waves inside the sphere, making it look like wine being swished around in a glass.

Seconds after the pontoons emptied, the submersible tilted over backwards. The control panel lights blinked out. The water was under their chins. The choices were stark.

They could drown now, or crawl out of the submersible and drown in minutes. Hawkins figured he had been living on borrowed time since the explosion in Afghanistan that had nearly ended his life. But he felt bad for Kalliste, whose only offense against the sea was to uncover one of its long-held secrets.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” he said.

“Out to
where
?” Kalliste said.

“I’ll tell you when we get there.”

Doing his best to stand up in the small, curved space, Hawkins undid the clasps holding the hatch in place and boosted Kalliste through the opening. Crawling out beside her, they clung to the battery housing as the sea sloshed through the hatch opening and the submersible’s angle grew more pronounced.

“I’m slipping off!” Kalliste shouted.

Hawkins held onto the housing with one hand and reached down with the other. He could barely bend his cold fingers, but he managed to grab her wrist, stopping her descent into the ocean. The waves pulled at her feet. He didn’t have the strength to haul her back up onto the sphere. His arm was being yanked from its socket, but he ignored the pain and summoned his last reserve of strength.

“Climb!” he yelled.

“Wha—?”

“Climb out of the water or we’re gonna have to postpone that dinner.”

She managed a garbled reply. “You’re crazy!” Given the insanity of their situation he probably would have agreed. Especially after he heard a voice in the darkness shouting their names.

“Matt! Kalliste!” They were suddenly bathed in light. The voice called out again. “Hold on! For God sakes, don’t let go!”

The light become brighter as it moved closer and was within a couple of feet of the rolling sphere when Hawkins lost his hold on the housing. He and Kalliste slid off into the sea and went under the waves. Hawkins still had his fingers locked around Kalliste’s wrist in a death grip. Using a combination of kicks, and wild thrashing with his free arm, he got her back to the surface.

The voice again. Nearer this time.

“Swim! Swim!”

Another voice joined in.

“Over here! Come!”

Kalliste started to slip below the surface. Hawkins grabbed her around the waist and flailed in a clumsy attempt to swim.

Hands reached down, grabbed Kalliste under the arms and lifted her into the darkness behind the blinding light. He heard his name called again. He reached out. As he felt the strong grip around his wrists, Hawkins rose from the sea, his body slithering over a rubbery wet surface. There was the sound of a zipper being closed.

Hawkins lay next to Kalliste inside an enclosed life raft. He wiped water from his eyes and in the light of an electric torch, the faces of Captain Santiago and his son Miguel came into focus.

“You’re okay now,” the captain said.

Kalliste accepted Miguel’s offer of a jacket and wrapped it around her shoulders. The jacket was wet, but it at least offered some insulation.

“How did you find us?” she said through clacking teeth.

The captain said, “We are floating around inside the life raft when I hear voices. Someone talking about dinner. So I open the door and shine the light. There you are on the big bubble.”

“I thought you had gone down with the boat,” Hawkins said.

“Close,” Miguel said. Fear danced in his eyes.

His father nodded. “We’d be dead if we were in the pilot house. Miguel called me down to the deck to help him. We launched the life raft before the
Panza
went down.”

“What happened to Rodriguez?”

“He disappeared,” the captain said. “One second he is running back and forth on the stern. The next, he is gone. Lots of blood.”

Hawkins remembered the suspicious call Rodriguez had made before they were hit.

“Too bad,” he said. “I would have liked to talk to him. I’m sorry for the loss of your boat, Captain.”

“Thank you. As the great Cervantes said, ‘Those who play with cats must expect to be scratched.’ I have worked on the sea for many years without a scratch. It was inevitable that the ocean would show her claws one day.”

“I turned on my Mayday broadcaster,” Hawkins said. “Help should be here in a while.”

The son cocked his hand behind his ear. Audible above the slosh of waves against the raft was the low grumble of engines. Then the raft was bathed in the glare of a floodlight.

A grin came to Santiago’s lips. “No, Mr. Hawkins,” he said. “Help is here now.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Spanish Coast Guard cutter plucked the survivors from the life raft a few minutes later. The refugees from the
Sancho Panza
each enjoyed long, scalding showers before heating their insides with hot soup. Wearing jeans and shirts on loan from the friendly crew, they climbed into a shuttle van back in Cadiz. The vehicle drove the captain and his son home and dropped Matt and Kalliste at a hotel where she had reserved rooms for them to use as a base. They crawled into her king-size bed with their clothes on and slept soundly until they were awakened by the telephone.

It was Captain Santiago calling. The cutter’s captain had radioed his superiors, reporting that a government official named Rodriguez was missing and presumed dead. A police officer named Garcia had called Santiago asking to speak with everyone who’d been on the boat. Santiago had suggested the hotel for the meeting.

Kalliste had kept her suitcase in the room and had fresh clothes to change into. Hawkins had lost his bag when the salvage boat sank. He was still in his borrowed Coast Guard clothes and hadn’t shaved, when he and Kalliste joined the Santiago’s to, hopefully, find out more information about what on earth had happened the night before.

Sergeant Garcia signaled with a wave of a hand for them to take their seats. The sergeant was a big man, with most of his bulk centered in his substantial girth, a product of too many stakeouts and not enough exercise. He was tall as well, more than six feet in height. Simply sitting at the table in the hotel conference room, he presented an imposing figure. He often used his formidable physique to intimidate those he interrogated. With others, he took the opposite tact, beguiling them with his sympathetic tone and large brown eyes. He wasn’t sure how he would proceed with this group.

The father and son were Spaniards. They were respectful in answering his questions, although the older man’s deference seemed less than sincere. The American scientist had not been the timid academic Garcia expected. He was built like a longshoreman. His level gaze had an unnerving hardness that didn’t match the smile he wore on his unshaven face.

The Greek woman was attractively middle-aged. In another setting, he would have flirted as well as questioned her. But she had displayed a quick temper after he’d asked for her version of events the third time. It was a routine police procedure; have a witness repeat his or her story and look for discrepancies, but her patience had run out.

She crossed her arms in front of her. “We have told you the story twice already.”

“But you may have missed something.”

She looked him straight in the eye. “Sergeant Garcia, you have two…ears, and I think there is a brain resting somewhere between them, so you have heard what I have to say and presumably have understood me by now.”

Garcia had been embarrassed since childhood by his prominent ears and wore his black hair long to disguise them. He wagged his forefinger at the Greek.

“This is a serious matter.”

Lowering her head like a charging bull, she wagged back.

“Then I suggest you bring in someone who does not need stories repeated again and again like an idiot child.”

Which was when Hawkins intervened. Speaking in a quiet voice, he said, “Excuse me, Sergeant Garcia. May I make a suggestion?”

The raised fingers remained poised. Eyes were locked.

“What sort of suggestion?”

“We’ve gone through an exhausting ordeal and may not be as calm and patient as we normally would be. Maybe you could just ask questions about areas that concern you.”

Garcia wasn’t about to yield. And neither was the stubborn Greek. Hawkins must have seen the need for dramatic intervention because he turned to the captain. “To quote the great Cervantes….” He raised his eyebrows as a cue.

Captain Santiago smiled. Spreading his arms wide, he declared, “As the great Cervantes said, ‘honesty is the best policy.’ ”

Kalliste and Garcia stared at the beatific smile on the captain’s face, then slowly lowered their fingers.

“I would be the last person to argue with Cervantes,” the sergeant said. “To be perfectly honest, some of what I have heard is very hard to believe.” He consulted his notepad. “You told me you wished to examine an old ship on the bottom of the sea. Senora Kalchis and Senor Hawkins go down into the sea in a submarine. You find the ship. You hear noises. Then a boat almost…falls on you.”

“
My
boat,” the captain reminded him. “The
Sancho Panza
, a name from the great Cervantes.”

The sergeant sighed. “Yes, Cervantes. Tell me again why your boat sinks, young man.”

Garcia had hoped to take advantage of Miguel’s youthful lack of guile. Miguel glanced at his father, who nodded, then said, “The boat explodes. First the pilot house, then the hull.”

“Was the boat carrying any explosives?”

Kalliste broke in. “This was an archaeological project. We had a permit from your government to look at a ship. Why would we carry explosives?” she spoke with slightly veiled contempt.

“To blow up the ship. Maybe you’re looking for gold?”

Kalliste smiled seductively. The sergeant took her reaction as a gesture of personal interest.

He didn’t know Kalliste well enough to realize that she was actually looking for an unflattering physical attribute she could use as a cudgel to distribute a whack to his ego.

Hawkins cut in. “No explosives on board. I think the boat was hit by missiles.”

“But you heard no missile launch?”

“That means nothing. They could have come from a distance. Or their rocket motors might have been muffled.”

Garcia saw the opening and dove in. “And you are an expert in explosives?”

“Yes. I was with the U.S. Navy SEALs in Afghanistan.”

“Huh. Well. Let’s forget the explosives for now. There was an observer from the Spanish government on board. Senor Rodriguez.”