The pounding of the drill head suddenly changed again as it bit with a tell-tale, if muted, screech into metal. Garcia stopped the drill and drifted out of the way.
“It’s all yours,” he said as Nadia finned past him through the swirling debris. There, in a small section which Garcia had laid bare, was the smooth, dull red colour of the meteoric metal which they had unofficially dubbed ‘Xibalbanite’. It was the same metal that the primitive tribes of Venezuela had, thousands of years ago, fashioned into the shape of a human face and venerated until the Progenitors, for reasons unknown, had delivered to them a broken fragment of an almost identical mask which had ultimately changed their culture forever. But why?
Plucking a powerful underwater torch from her vest, she pulled herself closer to the pillar, toggled the switch and watched as the intense beam of light struck the exposed metal.
She gasped!
Erupting from behind the pillars, a pair of razor-sharp jaws gnashed through the water, moving at lightning speed. Come to investigate the sound of the drilling, the hammerhead had been startled by the sudden eruption of light from her torch and acted on deadly, defensive instinct.
Nadia screamed as she thrashed her fins but was too late. The shark’s jaws clamped down onto her hand. Pain lanced through her body. Garcia swore and brought his underwater rifle to bare, firing twice into the shark’s head. An eruption of blood, brains and gore swirled and Nadia felt the pressure in her hand diminish.
“Nadia,” Raine’s voice called urgently through her radio. He’d pushed away from the monument and finned like mad, descending to her level and arriving only instants after the shark’s brutal death. He grasped her by the shoulders and spun her around. Her face was deathly pale, her eyes wide with shock. He grasped her hand and studied it. She still held the crushed remains of the large torch which had prevented the shark’s jaws from closing completely. It had saved her hand. Possibly her life. Nevertheless, the hammerhead’s teeth had pierced her glove and her flesh and blood flowed freely.
“You’re okay,” he promised her and, trying to rain in her panic, she realised all she wanted was to feel his arms around her, holding her tight, protecting her. “It’s just a flesh wound.”
“Shit!” Gibbs cursed upon arriving at the scene. They had all abandoned the site of the explosives to gather around the injured woman.
“I’m getting her out the water,” Raine said urgently. Nadia knew that, regardless of the shock, a far greater danger lurked. Hammerheads could smell a single drop of blood from over a mile away and, while generally placid, the scent would whip them into a feeding frenzy that you didn’t want to be on the wrong side of.
“Garcia, get her topside, now,” Gibbs ordered. “Get Siddiqa out of here as well.”
“No, I’m taking her,” Raine argued.
“Like hell you are,” the SOG commander shot back. “Thanks to your girlfriend’s carelessness and Garcia’s stupidity, this whole place is gonna be swarming with a shit-load of pissed off sharks any second now. We’re gonna blow that damn hole, you and King are gonna find the mask then we’re high tailing it out of here. Garcia, what are you waiting for!? Get them out, then get back down here with a reloaded gun. We might need it.”
Swallowed up in the frenzy of the moment, Nadia broke free of Garcia’s grip and wrapped her arms around Raine in a shockingly public display of emotion. It was clumsy in their gear and fighting against the current, but Raine returned the embrace. “It’ll be okay,” he promised.
“Don’t worry, I’ll look after her,” Sid vowed, reaching out and taking Nadia’s arm. She allowed her friend and Garcia to float her up to the surface, too much in a state of shock to even think about kicking.
As they broke the surface and swam urgently for the waiting boat, she felt a sense of relief wash over her.
Minutes later, a geyser of water fountained into the air as the explosives detonated.
52:
Blood on the Water
The explosion sent a plume of water six feet into the air and blasted a shockwave which rippled out from the epicentre at an astonishing speed.
Despite taking shelter at the base of the Yonaguni Monument sixty feet below, the boom still hurt Nathan Raine’s ears and he felt the sudden movement of water press against him.
As soon as the explosion had died down, Gibbs ordered the entire team out of the shelter and they ascended quickly but carefully to a depth of about fifteen feet, level with the top of the structure.
A cloud of blasted debris swirled in the current as they finned towards the ‘hole’ in the ceiling. The middle, circular hole had been chosen in hopes that the explosion there would cause the least significant structural damage. The underwater charges had been strategically positioned to direct the blast downwards. The plan was to blast the ‘plug’ which had been used to block the hole down into the expanse below. The danger, however, was that if King was wrong and there was no expanse and that the structure was one solid lump of rock, then the explosion would shatter it.
As it was, King was right. Raine, King and Gibbs all peered cautiously into the depths of what had moments ago been an inexplicable well but which now provided the only access into a temple which hadn’t seen the light of day in over nine thousand years.
“Boss,” O’Rourke reported over the radio. “Dosimeter readings just spiked. There’s tachyon radiation down there.”
Raine could see the triumphant smile spread across King’s face. The ultimate ‘I told you so.’
If Gibbs picked up on it, he ignored it. “Raine and King, you have a go,” he commanded.
“Uh, Sir,” Tank’s voice suddenly cut in, unaccustomed to the lack of identifying ranks in the SOG. Gathered around the hole, the entire team turned to look in the direction the marine was pointing. To the east, dozens of silhouettes were highlighted against the lighter blue gloom of the sea. The ultimate artistic expression of Mother Nature’s unique design meant that what they saw was one of the most recognisable creatures on the face of the earth.
Hammerheads.
Lots of them.
Unusual for most shark species, hammerheads tended to swim in large schools, often around twenty to thirty individuals. But, in some parts of the world, schools of over a hundred prowled the depths. The waters surrounding Yonaguni Island was just such a place.
“They’re going for the carcass of the one Garcia killed,” Tank explained.
“Great,” O’Rourke replied unenthusiastically. “What about when they’re ready for dessert?”
“Hammerheads rarely attack humans unless they mistake us for prey or are attracted to our blood. So long as no one is bleeding, we should be fine.”
“Nevertheless,” O’Rourke turned in his suit towards Raine and King. “You wanna hurry this up?”
Raine clasped King’s shoulder then switched on the powerful halogen lamp he carried. “Let’s go,” he said and then, holding the lamp out before him, he descended into the darkness below.
“So, what’s the deal with you and Nate?”
The question took Nadia off guard. Her mind had been drifting as she allowed the painkillers Sid had given her to take effect. Her wound was relatively superficial, a single tooth she reckoned having pierced the fleshy bit between her thumb and forefinger. But she knew that shock was a danger and so had allowed Sid to take her below decks once back aboard the boat and wrap a blanket around her shoulders. It wasn’t every day, after all, that you lived through a shark attack, superficial wound or not.