Jayden whipped his head around to get a look at it. The black body with a white logo wrapped around the fuselage blended in somewhat with the smoke that still rose from the oxygen tank fire, but the steady vertical lift was a dead giveaway.
“We can’t outrun that!” Jayden said, stating the obvious.
“Head for our ship!” Carter shouted. Jayden course corrected toward the Deep Pioneer, shaking his head as he mentally calculated how far they would make it before the aircraft overtook them. Not even halfway, he thought. But as the ‘copter levelled out onto a steady course, it became apparent that it was not coming their way.
“What’s it doing?” Jayden wondered aloud as he continued rocketing full throttle toward their ship.
Carter cupped a hand to his mouth to be heard over the racket. “Looks like he’s making a beeline for the mainland.”
“Not complaining,” Jayden shouted over the engine. “But why would he do that?”
Carter stared up at the chopper as it levelled out and accelerated toward the distant North American continent. “Because he’s got the map.”
“Our friends in the other tender are slowing down,” Jayden observed, without slowing their own inflatable boat. Radio chatter erupted at that moment, confirming that the Treasure, Inc. crew had picked up their own overboard crewman.
“Good on them for that, at least,” Carter said a split second before the pursuing Zodiac ramped up speed once again.
“They don’t seem intent on bringing the guy back to the ship right away,” Jayden said, craning his neck to look back past their wake. “I was hoping the chase was over but it doesn’t look like it.”
Carter waved an arm out in front of them. “Keep going, don’t stop!”
Jayden sped past their own ship, waving at their own crew, some of whom were lined up against the rails on deck as they motored past. Jayden picked up the radio after hearing it crackle. “What’s our chopper status?”
“You’re in luck,” Deep Voyager’s radioman came back. “Buzz says he happened to be at a fueling station for a non-critical assignment, and so he’s in the air right now on his way out here.
At that moment a bullet ricocheted off the console after passing inches from Jayden’s head. As he moved down and to the right, a second shot smashed into the radio, darkening the display and ending communication. “We lost comm!” he shouted to Carter, who was already down on deck.
“Keep going,” Carter waved him on. “If we stop to board, they’ll shoot us to pieces.”
“They’re shooting us to pieces anyway!”
“Keep zig-zagging — you got it!” Indeed, Jayden had begun to almost subconsciously weave the spry little boat back and forth in an erratic, unpredictable pattern, making them a more difficult moving target. Carter scrambled over to the console and sneaked a peek at the compass mounted on top in a clear bubble. He gave Jayden a heading number from memory. “That’ll take us straight to St. John’s, Newfoundland. Just head that way until we see our chopper.”
“Be a couple hours at least,” Jayden said.
Carter jerked a thumb back toward the shooters in the chase boat. “Hopefully those guys will give up before then when they realize we’re just leading them out to the middle of nowhere.” Jayden instinctively ducked as he heard another gunshot. The bullet didn’t hit the boat. “Hopefully,” he said, but there was a lack of conviction in his voice.
“Our ship has instructions to follow us back,” Carter said, undaunted. “Even though we’re out of comm, they should still do that. Their work on the wreck site is done, and there’s no physical anchor to pull, so it shouldn’t take them long to get underway.”
Jayden looked back to the Treasure, Inc. ship. “They have our freakin’ sub! How could our work be done?”
Carter shrugged. “I didn’t say it was pretty, but the mission objective has been completed. We recovered the map from the safe. It’s not our fault it was stolen from us afterwards, along with our sub.”
“I hope our client sees it that way,” Jayden said, turning his attention back to eluding their pursuers. They had gained some distance when the Treasure, Inc. tender vessel stopped to pick up their man overboard, putting them physically farther back, but they were still within shooting range. Jayden kept the boat ramped up to full throttle, weaving this way and that but always centering back on the heading to the faraway Newfoundland port.
“How are we on gas?” he asked.
Carter crawled to the back to stay beneath the line of fire and shoved the gas can. “Good. This one’s still half full, and the spare is full, too. That’s one thing we don’t have to worry about right away.”
“Hopefully those guys are almost empty,” Jayden said, but their pursuers showed no signs of slowing even as both tender vessels left their support ships in their wakes.
“Just keep going.”
Chapter 12
Carter shook his head as he spied the enemy craft from a prone position at the back of the inflatable boat. “Looks like they kept that one gassed up the same as ours.”
“They don’t seem to have an ammo shortage, either,” Jayden said, as another gunshot boomed from behind them. The round was lost to the sea, but that didn’t make him feel any safer. For the past two hours, the Treasure, Inc. attackers had kept up a regular volley of shots, intended more to keep Carter and Jayden on edge than to have any real hope of hitting them. The tactic was successful, though, and while Jayden had done a good job of maintaining their lead, the weather had taken a turn for the worse. The squall that was promised on the Titanic site was finally materializing here in the middle of the North Atlantic. Whitecaps dotted the increasing swells, and the motorized rafts rode up and over each wave like rollercoaster cars over hilly tracks. At the peak of each roller was when they were most vulnerable to enemy gunfire.
“Carter, where’s our chopper? Where’s our ship?”
Hunt’s gaze scanned the skies, but the rain that had begun to fall made sighting anything up there problematic at best. Their ship had been out of sight since they left it behind, its top speed being slower than that of the inflatable, although sustainable for a much longer period. As Carter nudged the remaining gas can, after running the first one dry over an hour ago, he knew that they didn’t have long before the ship would catch up to them much quicker indeed. But so would their pursuers. Carter glanced back at them. One of them wore a headlamp, which made them easy to pick out against the rapidly darkening sky.
And then it happened. They heard the faint boom of a shot being fired — still audible at this distance but the meat of the percussive blast was lost to the howling wind and motor noise. But the truly frightening sound was the soft pfffft that came immediately after. As they took a sled-ride down the face of another big swell, Carter felt the tube on the left side of the Zodiac begin to soften beneath his arm.
“Bad news, Jayden: they hit our port side pontoon. We’re losing air.”
“Wonderful!” Jayden yelled as he struggled to keep the frail craft headed into the oncoming swells, lest they turn broadside and be swamped with onrushing water. “This wasn’t difficult enough already, I really needed more of a challenge!”
Another gunshot was the reply to Jayden’s sarcasm, but fortunately this round found only the ocean. Making matters doubly worse, water began to flood into the inflatable raft while the deflated side sagged and was unable to keep out the roiling seawater. Both of the experienced mariners knew that an inflatable boat wouldn’t actually sink, even with all tubes deflated, it would remain floating, but would become an unnavigable piece of drifting debris, offering no control of any kind. It wouldn’t take much for them to be swept off of it by a passing wave.