Mirage (Oregon Files 9)

“It’s up to you.”

Juan gathered his energy, channeled it, and pushed with everything he had. Mike had done just enough so that the plate that had kept him pinned shifted and ground against the others but didn’t jam up. He heaved again and finally dragged himself out of the pile.

Mike was there with a hand to steady him.

“I owe you.” Juan meant it to sound solemn, but the helium lessened the sense of import. “Now, let’s get out of here.”

The two men swam back up to the main deck and finned down the corridor. They burst out of the superstructure to see that Eddie had used the manipulators to tear apart more of the old framework and had the submersible practically parked on the deck.

Mike reached the air lock door first and spun open the wheel lock. The space was tight—a phone booth, really—and he and Cabrillo would need to stay in it for quite some time. They’d been at depth long enough to need almost two hours to decompress. The cramped space would act as a decompression chamber once they reached the surface, but they would need the Oregon supplying power since the Nomad’s batteries would be left behind.

Getting away from the wreck was only the first part of their ordeal. If they didn’t link up with the Oregon in time, both divers would run out of trimix, and the Nomad had no internal supplies of the gas. To make matters worse, Juan and Mike had to be decompressed before Eddie could leave the sub via the air lock.

Trono dove headfirst through the hatch and disappeared inside. Juan waited a beat, letting his dive partner get settled, before he swam into the air lock chamber. His feet were on Mike’s tanks and his head was still outside the sub when he felt a vibration through the water. He knew immediately what it was and ducked at the last second.

He managed to get the hatch closed but not fully secured when the torpedo slammed into the old mine tender up near her bow. Nearly a thousand pounds of high explosives detonated in a blast of energy that swept through the uncompressible water and pummeled the mini-sub so that she crashed into the remains of the metal framework. Steel tore and shrieked. The ship’s superstructure was peeled back and collapsed at the same time.

Inside the air lock, the Chairman and Mike Trono were so tightly wedged that neither man was injured but both were severely disoriented as the sub tumbled end over end. Yet even before they had settled, Juan was working to secure the hatch’s lock. His head rang with the concussive force of the explosion, and his hands felt leaden, but he managed to spin the lock down, sealing the two of them in the tight chamber.

“Eddie, emergency blow.”

Seng had already seen the indicator light in the cockpit telling him that the hatch was secure. He’d hit the button even as the Chairman’s voice came over the radio.

With a clunk, the Nomad detached from its lower frame and began a wild rise to the surface. Only it didn’t. It rose less than two feet before it became enmeshed in the mine tender’s dislodged radio mast and an old, rotted fishing net.

Juan knew he should feel the cylindrical hull rocketing up from the depths the way one feels in a high-speed elevator. That wasn’t happening. They had cut loose the heavy sled but weren’t rising.

There was at most thirty seconds between the torpedoes, and he reacted without thought.

“Seal the hatch after me,” he said to Mike Trono and opened the air lock.

Cabrillo launched himself out of the mini-sub, flashing his light along its length, searching for whatever had snagged it and prevented its ascent. He saw the mast that had fallen across the sub’s hull, but it wasn’t big enough to have stalled their rise. Instead, it was the tangled mass of fishing nets that kept them stuck in place.

His titanium dive knife was honed to a razor’s edge, and the buoyancy of the submersible cabin kept the net’s lines taut. He attacked them like a ninja wielding a samurai sword, slashing and hacking the lines with abandon. The mini-sub rose fractionally as more of the tendrils binding it fell free. Cabrillo kept at it. The water filled with tiny bits of old sisal and a maelstrom of disturbed marine growth.

Then all at once, as he knew it would, the submersible erupted from the net, freeing itself of the last of the ropes and vanishing upward in the blink of an eye.

Cabrillo wasted no time watching it. He swam over to the far side of the wreck, dropped down to the bottom, and crawled as far from the ship as he could. He had to thrust his hands into the silt to keep from being blown away by the current.

The second torpedo augured into the seafloor well short of its target. Because he was shielded by the ship’s hull and was lying flat on the bottom, the pressure wave mostly expanded over him, but he still caught enough to have the air forced from his lungs in an explosive breath that almost unsealed his dive helmet.

He thought he’d survived the worst of it when a second pressure wave hit, and this time it peeled him off the bottom and sent him tumbling. The current grabbed at him immediately, and he was soon bouncing along the bottom at a stiff four knots.

If he had any chance of being rescued, he needed to stay with the wreck. It was the only logical place Max would search for him. If he tumbled past it, there was no way he’d be able to fight the current to return. He didn’t have anywhere near enough air to surface using proper decompression stops. And an ascent without them would lead to a fatal dose of the bends. His joints would constrict as the nitrogen in the tissue dissolved out, and he would die in unimaginable agony.

He managed to flatten himself into a proper swimming position. He knew he couldn’t fight the current, so he didn’t even try. Like someone caught in a riptide, he swam at an angle to the current instead of fighting it directly, vectoring off some of the brute force of the water rushing past him. He was certain that the current had already kicked him north of the hulk, but he had a slim chance of finding the wavering remains of the fishing nets that trailed off the ship like a bride’s train.

His legs began to burn as he kicked with everything he had. He wouldn’t let himself consider that the nets had been ripped clean off the old wreck by the second torpedo. He swam hard, battling a current he couldn’t defeat, burning through his supply of trimix at a prodigious rate. He fought the growing agony of cramped muscles filling with lactic acid, groaning aloud inside his helmet. The rip and saw of his breathing filled his head with the sounds of desperation.

This was how he would die, clawing his way across the bottom, sensing the net was just outside of his visual range and feeling that if he could just keep going another handful o

f seconds he would reach it.

And then he actually saw it, waving in the current like the arms of a giant jellyfish. He could also see that he was approaching the very end of the ensnared mass of nets. He had only fifteen feet to swim, but there was only ten feet of net before he was swept past it. If he missed, death was the only option.

Cabrillo doubled down. His feet kicked in a flurry of motion, but not giving up any efficiency. He thrust with his arms, his gloved hands curled into perfect paddles that pulled him against the Gulf Stream. He adjusted his angle slightly, forcing himself to fight even harder in the face of the current but knowing he’d been coming in too shallow and would miss.

He reached out. Inches. That was all he needed. He roared as the tips of his fingers brushed the old netting just at its very end. They scrambled to find purchase, but the net was covered in marine slime that was as slick as grease.