Get your head back in the game, Lauren.
Above them, the long dark shape of a freighter pulling from the lock cut the scarlet reflection on the water’s surface. At its stern was an area of roiling vortices as its prop thrashed to build up speed. The hull was coated in barnacles that would drop off by the time the ship exited the Gatun Locks on the Caribbean side of the canal. Like the tarpon, they couldn’t survive long away from their natural saltwater environment.
The area she and Vic had to survey was much larger than Lauren had anticipated, and they had about ten minutes before they needed to retreat away from the intake tunnels for the duration of the filling process. The shaft of light from their dive lamps drilled a cone through the murk that only reached twenty-five feet. By swinging side to side, they cut fifty-foot swaths back and forth across the bottom, eyes tracking the sweeping beams. Vic pointed out a couple of industrial shapes, old equipment dumped off to the side of the lock gates, but nothing resembling a submarine or large underwater propulsion platform.
They’d been under for twenty-two minutes. By working from the lock back toward the boat, they shortened the distance needed to return, giving them another twelve minutes, including a couple for decompression. Lauren began to feel the futility of their task. There wasn’t anything down here. Mercer had been wrong. She didn’t think Roddy Herrara had lied about his accident to cover incompetence, but whatever happened to him and the other pilots who’d been fired had nothing to do with this lock.
Intent on their search, Lauren and Vic didn’t notice that the huge doors had closed. In another three minutes, the valves that controlled flow into the chamber would open. The lane they were cutting across the canal was just beyond the danger point where it would suck them in.
Neither did they notice that they were no longer alone.
Six amorphous shapes had moved into position above them, hovering like wraiths. At a signal from one of them, the six swooped downward in pairs, slicing through the water with the ease of sharks.
Lauren was the first to feel that something was wrong. It was the same sixth sense that had anticipated the tarpon charge. She flipped onto her back and gazed upward just as the frogmen plunged down at her and Vic. They wore black wet suits. Four held knives while the other pair carried spearguns. Bewilderment immobilized her for just a moment before her combat training took over.
She flashed her light at her dive partner, alerting him, then reached for the knife strapped to her thigh. If not for the spearguns, Lauren would have pumped more air into her buoyancy compensator and rushed past them for the surface. Instead she dumped air and raced for the bottom. Vic dove with her, swimming on his back so he could watch their stalkers. He held his knife across his chest.
The two divers with spearguns halted their advance twenty feet off the bottom, taking up positions that covered their partners as they continued downward in pursuit. The angle of the hunt took everyone closer to the locks.
Lauren found rocky footing on the bottom, bracing herself for the rush of attack. As the distance closed, she saw that the divers were Chinese. A frogman lunged from above and to her right, a straight slash that she easily ducked because her flippers were wedged against a stone and gave her leverage. She swept her knife as the diver tried to twist away. Dark blood bloomed in tendrils from the gash in the man’s calf.
She swam after him. The wound slowed the Chinese diver enough for her to catch up. Unable to brace her body for a killing strike with her blade, Lauren slashed again, opening another cut below the man’s double tanks. He spun over to face her. Lauren parried his attack, the clash of metal on metal muted by the water. With her free hand she reached for his dive vest, found what she wanted and with a squeeze filled the bladder of his buoyancy compensator like a balloon.
The frogman shot upward like a rocket, effectively taking him out of the fight for a couple of minutes. Lauren panted through her regulator.
Tomanovic struggled with the other three Chinese divers. One of them was bleeding from his shoulder while the other two looked unscathed. They had Vic surrounded in a cordon large enough for one of the divers above to shoot the Serb with his speargun. Lauren stroked into the battle, coming up behind one of the Chinese. She feinted going for his air hose, and when he moved to protect it she pumped up his vest so he began to rise uncontrollably. This time she stayed behind her victim as they ascended toward the two armed divers, using him as a shield.
Had the Chinese been a larger man, stronger, she wouldn’t have been able to smother his writhing attempt at escape. She held on tight, steering them to slam into his partner. The blow barely distracted either man, but Tomanovic used those few seconds to back away from the men who’d nearly captured him.
Lauren was now embroiled in a fight that resembled an aerial battle from World War One. She and the two frogmen tumbled through the water, pursuing one another and fleeing at the same time, defending and attacking in a ball that continued to shrink as each tried to get an inside advantage. The speargun had been nullified by the closeness of the combat, but knives flashed in the glare from the wrist lights the Chinese wore. It seemed no one could get the advantage to end the struggle.
The second speargunner watched the squirming ballet, waiting for an opening.
Vic launched himself from the bottom of the canal, ignoring the two divers who came after him. The speargun swiveled at him when he was spotted and still he kept coming. The Chinese diver steadied his aim, waited until his quarry was less than five feet away and pulled the trigger.
The Serb had judged his attack perfectly, his experience almost allowing him to read the mind of the man with the gun. He anticipated the shot by a full second. The arrow left a silvery streak of bubbles in the water as it slid along the length of his body, missing his torso as he contorted to the side. It continued harmlessly into the depths, its power diminishing by the drag of the water.
He swam past the gunman and somersaulted so that he hung inverted just above his target, keeping himself protected from the two divers with knives and at the same time giving him access to the speargunner’s air hoses. He sliced through the first one before the man realized Vic was still nearby. The Serb was just feeling for the second hose through the torrent of bubbles when an unimaginable pain exploded in his groin. A knife had been thrust nearly to the hilt from above. The blade entered below his testicles, ripping open his scrotum, cutting apart the large nerve cluster and scraping along the cradle of his pelvic bone.
He’d forgotten about the sixth diver, the one Lauren had launched toward the surface. He’d come back and exploited Vic’s vulnerable upside-down position.
Like an octopus that uses ink to escape a predator, the diver Vic had almost cut off from his air supply slipped away in the clouds of blood that pumped from the juncture of Vic’s legs. The man whirled, finding his adversary hanging limply in the water. Tomanovic was still alive but wouldn’t be for long as the lifeblood billowed from his body. Centering his aim, the Chinese frogman moved in to smash the butt of his empty speargun into Vic’s face mask hard enough to shatter the glass.
He’d clamped a hand over the air venting from his severed hose and was about to assist his partners still battling Lauren when a dull boom echoed through the water. He’d been stationed at the lock long enough to know what the sound meant. A ship was about to be lifted. The floodgates were opening to fill the chamber.
Disregarding the safety of his partners, he started swimming away as fast as he could, the two others holding formation with him.
In the odd rendering of time that is combat, the sixty seconds Lauren had been struggling with the other pair of divers had felt like an hour. As long as she stayed close to the speargunner, she wouldn’t be shot and the other with the knife couldn’t come in on her. Not that she’d gotten away unscathed. A couple of slices like razor cuts had split her suit and skin.