Wood's Reach (25 page)

“What about Hawk’s man?” Mel asked.

“He’s a good diver, but underwater would be the place to take him out if I had to,” Mac answered. He had been thinking about Ironhead, knowing that it would be up to him to deal with the man. Underwater was the logical venue—but that might go both ways.

“Just be careful down there,” she said.

“Not going to try and talk me out of it?” he asked.

“I’ve learned some things over the last year, Mac. One of them is that there’s no changing people. I always thought that if I could tame you just a little, things could work out between us, but I know if you’re going to be happy, you need to be you.”

He was quiet for minute. “To tell you the truth, I haven’t been happy since you left.”

She looked at him with a tear in her eye. “But, I just don’t see—”

He reached in and kissed her. It wasn’t that romantic, and it didn’t last that long. The moment was more like the signing of a peace treaty, an agreement that somehow they could find a way to be together without changing each other.

They sat with their bodies pressed together, and the night passed quickly, the slight chill to the air pushing them closer. TJ came up to take the four a.m. shift with Alicia dragging behind him, but Mac waved them off. There was only an hour left until they needed to get up anyway, and he was too content to sleep.

“Might as well get some breakfast going,” TJ said, leaving the bridge.

Alicia remained behind for a minute. “Nice to see a smile on your face, Mac,” she said and climbed back down to help TJ. Soon after, he smelled coffee brewing and bacon frying. The sky began to lighten, and they brought their breakfast back to the bridge to watch the sunrise. The group was quiet, only a few of them having slept, and though he was one of those who had, Trufante was never a morning person.

“I think we should ditch the research,” Mac said to Alicia. TJ was up on the bridge, and the rest of the group was cleaning up from breakfast.

“Why?” she asked.

“It’s caused enough trouble already. I think we drop on this site and if it’s there, great. If not, we put this to bed and move on. I don’t want Hawk as a partner forever, and without the data he has no leverage.”

She looked at him. “There’s a spot in the cloud where I can stash and protect it.”

Mac wasn’t sure what the cloud was, but he knew what she meant. “No, I mean double-delete it, or whatever you do so no one can ever reconstruct it.”

Reluctantly, she went to the computer and executed the hot key sequence she had installed earlier. The computer screen went black, and she looked at Mac. “Done.”

It was five thirty now and they radioed Hawk, confirming the meet at the mouth of Sister Creek. TJ started the engine and Trufante handled the anchor, clipping the ball to the bow rail in case they needed it again. Slowly, TJ pushed the throttles down and the boat moved forward. At idle speed, they followed the mangrove-lined channel, emerging in the main waterway that led to the ocean. He added a few rpms to the engines, and the boat coasted at a fast idle behind several fishing boats heading out for the day. At the mouth of the inlet, they saw Hawk’s trawler, sitting by the last green marker.

Following his signal, they approached his starboard side, where he passed across a two-way radio to allow them a private means of communication. The boats separated, and Mac took the radio up to the bridge, where he keyed the mic and gave Hawk the coordinates.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Once Hawk confirmed he had the coordinates, Mac nodded to TJ. The sportfisher jumped forward, plowing through the waves driven by the fifteen-knot southerly wind, causing the heavy boat to take a long minute before it planed out and was able to reach cruising speed. TJ headed toward the outside of East Sister Rock, a small island with a private residence, then cut the wheel to port and lined up their heading with the course on the GPS screen.

“We should beat them there by a good ten minutes,” TJ said.

“Best slow it down. Let him think he’s in charge,” Mac said, looking behind them at the slower boat. “I’ll get everything ready.” They had carefully altered the coordinates they had given Hawk to allow him to anchor slightly away from where they estimated the wreck to be. If they arrived first and anchored away from those numbers, he might get suspicious.

TJ dropped his rpms to match Hawk’s speed, and together the two boats headed for the reef. They passed over the shallow water and slowed when they reached the one-hundred-foot line. Mac stood by the transom holding a watermelon-sized buoy with a weight and line attached to it. Trufante was on the bow waiting to work the anchor.

TJ allowed Hawk’s boat to circle and zero in on the coordinates they had given him. A few minutes later, a similar marker buoy was thrown from Hawk’s boat, and a second later they heard the chain click through the windlass as he dropped anchor.

“Okay,” Mac called.

It took TJ several quick corrections before he was satisfied and yelled for Mac to throw the buoy. Mac dropped it over the transom, and TJ worked the boat. Sensing the current, he positioned the boat so the bow was just upstream of the buoy and called out to Trufante to drop anchor. After a few adjustments, he shut off the engine and they looked across the hundred feet separating the boats. Hawk was also anchored, and Mac could see Ironhead on the back deck gearing up to dive.

He went to the transom and started to spread out his gear on the deck. Trufante pulled two tanks from the hold while he pulled on the heavy wetsuit and side-mount harness. The suit was suffocating, and he started to sweat. “Come on,” he called to Trufante, impatient to get in the water. Looking across to Hawk’s boat, he saw Ironhead pull the mask around to the front of his head and look back over at him.

Mac slid into the straps of the rebreather and fastened the buckles, making a few quick adjustments. Out of habit, he pulled the retractable cable to check the compass, holding it straight out in the direction of Hawk’s boat to see which direction he needed to head to meet the other diver. Once underwater, there would be no landmarks and he would need the help of the device.

With the tanks clipped to his side, he took the mask, placed it over his head, checked his hoses, and moved through the transom door. On the swim platform, he leaned against the transom and put his fins on, and with a quick glance at Mel, he gave a thumbs-up sign, followed by a classic giant step entry into the water. After a quick adjustment to his buoyancy, he checked his gauges, then with the compass held out in front of him, he finned toward Hawk’s boat, where Ironhead waited.

The men exchanged a quick look, and Mac thought he saw pain in Ironhead’s eyes. He followed Ironhead down the water column, surprised that he was descending much more slowly than on the last dive. Mac cleared his ears and checked his gauges, adjusting his buoyancy to hold him a few feet from the bottom. Ironhead turned and gave him the okay sign, which Mac returned and together the men set off, following the same search pattern as yesterday.

Mac ignored the schools of yellowtail, focusing all his attention on the bottom, and the man a few feet in front of him. They worked their way through the first two legs of the pattern, and Mac checked his gauges. Their prearranged bottom time was forty-five minutes, and at a hundred sixty feet, they were already past their no-decompression limit. Just finishing the pattern would leave them with at least an hour of decompression time.

The third leg took them past Hawk’s boat and closer to the true coordinates. As they approached the next leg, Mac increased his vigilance, wondering if Alicia was really capable of getting this close on the first try. She’d seemed confident, but he had been at the salvage game too long to trust data that was hundreds of years old and passed down from generation to generation by body art. Ironhead was still in front, but moving very slowly, veering from side to side, and having trouble controlling his buoyancy. Mac took his eyes off the bottom and studied the man. After his years here, and his training as a commercial diver on the oil rigs in the Gulf, Mac was well aware of the symptoms of a distressed diver—and Ironhead was showing several.

The third leg revealed nothing, and already an hour into the dive, they started the final turn. Mac scanned the bottom, his LED light flashing against small fish scampering above the sand, but revealing nothing else. With every minute that went by and every patch of sand he passed, he became more pessimistic about finding anything and started thinking about what would happen when they surfaced. Hawk would be livid, especially when he found out that they had deleted the data. Realizing he should have gone back to Celia’s and gotten the gun from the center-console, he tried to think what weapons were available to counteract the arsenal he already knew was aboard Hawk’s trawler.

A quick check of his gauges confirmed what he’d already guessed—the dive was over. They had found nothing. He glanced at Ironhead, who still looked slightly disoriented, and finned toward him. Mac looked at his eyes, but they were glazed over. He reached out to grab the back of his vest in order to help him to the surface when the man struck back. Whether it was instinctual or planned, Mac had to act, and when he saw the knife in Ironhead’s hand, he knew he had been played.

Ironhead slashed out for him, but with the weight of the tanks, Mac was too slow and a second later he saw blood, rising green through the water. Turning quickly, he finned backwards, trying to put some space between them so he could figure out how to counter the attack. The blood was still rising, and he chanced a glance at his arm. The wetsuit was cut through, revealing a deep gash. In that instant, Ironhead lunged again, but Mac was able to fin to the side, the blade barely missing him. He turned, trying to locate Ironhead, but realized the other man had anticipated his move, and just as he spun around to locate him, he felt a tug on his vest and inhaled seawater.

Ironhead must have cut the hoses behind him. A huge cloud of bubbles escaped from the rebreather now that the closed circuit was broken, and he slid back into the disturbance, using it as cover while he reached for the regulator attached to his right tank. He was in a bad spot now, and his first thought was air, but before he could put the mouthpiece in, he felt a hand jerk it away. There was no time to reach for the other regulator on his left side. Holding his breath, he pulled away, staying with the bubble stream. Ironhead released the hose, and Mac struggled against the heavier man, but felt his arm reach around his neck. Feeling the cold steel of the knife against his throat, he lashed out one last time. Not expecting the reaction, Ironhead was pushed off balance and reached his free hand around Mac’s chest to stabilize himself, hoping to gain enough leverage to pull the knife across his throat.

Mac knocked the hand away, struggling to hold on to the air in his lungs and knowing he had no time left. Ironhead reached for him again, but Mac swatted his arm away. He pulled back to prepare for the next attack when his hand brushed against the compass attached to his vest. Instinctively, from years of using the device, he pulled the retractable cable. Ironhead had him again, and just as he felt the pressure of the knife, he saw the thin-coated wire holding the compass. In a desperate move, he wrapped the cable around his adversary’s forearm and pulled.

Ironhead dropped the knife and started to hammer Mac with his free hand, but Mac pulled harder, knowing this was his only chance. He was getting light-headed and started to loosen his grip on the cable when all of a sudden there was no more resistance. Not sure what had happened, he backed away and saw Ironhead’s forearm drifting toward the bottom and a cloud of blood floating toward the surface. Immediately, before he could ascertain the condition of his opponent, he grabbed the regulator.

Disoriented and breathing deeply, he looked around, but the silt kicked up from the fight hid the bottom. Finally, his breath evened out and the water cleared. Ironhead was on the bottom, facedown. From the blood loss, he assumed he was dead. Moving toward him, Mac went to retrieve the knife from the sand. He picked it up, and just as he was about to turn away, he saw an irregular shape in the sand. Despite his condition, he wanted a look and quickly took stock. His arm had stopped bleeding, either from the cold water or the compression from the wetsuit; otherwise, he was uninjured. His biggest problem was the long decompression he was faced with, and after checking the gauge on the tank he had been breathing from, he realized it was almost empty; the exertion and depth had quickly depleted it. Knowing the full tank strapped to his right side was more than enough for at least the ascent and probably the first decompression stop, he sank to his knees and fanned his hand back and forth, moving the sand away from the object.

After a few minutes, he had the surface of the object uncovered and saw the roughly cylindrical shape of a stone ballast. Excited now, he scooped sand away from it and found another by its side. There was little else he could do except get safely to the surface. Reluctantly, knowing the ocean bottom could swallow his find in a second, he checked the compass, now swinging by his side, and finned west toward TJ’s boat.

Several times during the ascent, he had to control his excitement and slow himself, the risk of surfacing too fast vastly outweighing the importance of delivering the news of the discovery. At thirty feet, he checked the computer and his air supply. He would hang here until his tank was near empty and then surface. Looking up, he saw the hull of the sportfisher fifty feet away. Carefully maintaining his depth, he swam to the far side of the boat so it would conceal him when he surfaced. Unless he had seen the blood come to the surface, Hawk would not be expecting the divers for at least another hour before he became concerned. A few minutes later, he was below the boat and took another breath. Feeling just a bit of resistance, he knew there were only a few lungfuls remaining in the tank, and he surfaced amidships.

TJ was not expecting him either, and he had to call out quietly to get their attention, scolding them when they all rushed to the side. “Slide me a couple of tanks and take these,” he called out quietly, unclipping the first tank from his side. “Don’t let Hawk see.”