Upon hitting the sea, the craft righted itself for a moment, and Court used the time to fumble back into his cockpit chair. It was difficult to do, but he managed, had only just snapped the clasp when he felt the weight of gravity on his right side. The water around the Plexiglas’s bubble was an opaque dark green, so Gentry waited for the sub to come back up to the surface so he could get his bearings.
For five seconds he waited to resurface, and all the while he felt the pull harder and harder to the right, as if the sub was somehow beginning to roll.
At ten seconds he realized it was rolling, but the pull to the right seemed to stop. The sub was still submerged.
He pulled the small folding knife from his pocket, held it in his lap, and let it go.
The knife flew upwards, just missing his chin and nose, before bouncing on the plastic canopy and sliding forward.
Court realized then that they were inverted, and they were sinking.
“Zack! Zack!” Gentry’s ears popped, and he fought a wave of panic. He had no situational awareness whatsoever now, completely entombed as he was in a dead craft in dark water.
Hightower did not reply.
Above him he heard a shell hit the yacht, a two-stage explosion, the first being the warhead and the second, undoubtedly, the fuel tanks. A shock wave buffeted the bottom of the sub.
Gentry could wait no more. His hands reached out in front of him, his right index finger found a button, an arbitrary button, as there were dozens, and he could not even see what color they were much less any writing on them.
Fuck it. He pressed down.
Nothing.
His ears popped again, and a sustained pressure entered his head. He had no idea how deep the water was here, but he neither wanted to keep dropping nor hit the bottom, especially canopy first.
He reached for the next button. Pushed it. Then a third. Then a fourth. He wondered if he was releasing fuel or opening a cargo door or triggering a self-destruction sequence.
Court did not know the first goddamned thing about submarines.
He pressed a fifth button, and immediately warm infrared lighting illuminated the cabin.
His head was killing him, and nausea ripped through his body from his intestines to the back of his neck.
With the new light he quickly scanned dozens of choices, looking for anything to turn on. His finger stopped at a button labeled HUD, and he pressed it without hesitation. The laser head-up display came online, projecting all sorts of data on the windscreen in front of him. Speed and Current Depth increased by the second, an artificial horizon turned slowly clockwise, and a compass heading revolved steadily around the dial.
He wanted situational awareness, and he got it. Now, after the onboard computer told him that he was cork-screwing down to his death, he realized that he really didn’t want that info after all.
The pain in his head worsened. He vomited water and bile; some of it spewed through his nose and followed gravity’s path, running into his eyes. He smeared away the burn with his sweaty arm, put his hand on the joystick on his right, and tried to right the craft, but it had no effect whatsoever. He pushed the lever that he took for a throttle with his left hand. Again, nothing doing. He stomped his bare left and right feet down, kicking out for rudder pedals that were not there.
The submarine passed sixty feet.
Court fought another wave of nausea and a further increase in panic.
Then he stopped playing with the controls, brought his hands into his lap.
“Zack. You awake?” Court’s voice was calm now, no sign of panic or threat to the other man in the doomed submarine.
“Yeah. Just enjoying the ride, bro.” Zack’s voice was incredibly weak. He’d likely be dead soon, Court realized, no matter what happened to Court. Still, Gentry knew Zack well. He was not as calm as he pretended to be.
Zack Hightower didn’t want to die, either.
“I can’t make this thing work.” Gentry pulled his Glock-19 and held it up in the red light for his rear passenger to see. “But I can make this thing work.”
“Really? You’re threatening to shoot me? That’s all you got, dude? Pretty fucking lame.”
Court ignored him. He said, “I’ve trained without oxygen at depths of one hundred thirty feet. If I blow this hatch in the next minute, flood the sub, and