down her face. “Oh God, Matt …” With deep reluctance, she put her hands against the hatch and began to push it shut.
Eddie joined her. “This is wrong,” he muttered, face tight. “It’s fucking wrong.”
“Twenty,” came the Australian’s voice over the intercom. “Nineteen. Eighteen …”
The hatch closed with a hollow bang, muffling Matt’s countdown. Eddie stonily closed the latch mechanism and turned the wheel to seal it. A red light on the cabin wall turned green.
Both hatches were secured.
They faintly heard Matt say “Ten,” followed after a pause by “Well. No point dragging it out, eh? Good luck to you both.”
Nina gripped Eddie’s wrist with one hand, the other clenched into a fist over her mouth. “Good luck, Matt,” she whispered.
Eddie’s voice was barely louder. “Fight to the end, mate.”
Metal scraped below—then the Mako shook as water slammed against the bottom of the hatch. The Sharkdozer had separated, the ocean surging back into the docking collar.
Trailing bubbles, the stricken submersible drifted away into the darkness.
TWENTY-FIVE
The Mako’s pilot slowly woke to a throbbing pain across his face.
A mushy splat of blood on the control panel revealed the cause. What had happened? Memories groggily returned. He had been chasing the IHA sub, about to unleash the last torpedo—then it had unexpectedly angled upward, and …
The rest was a blur. Something had hit the Mako, throwing him forward in his seat … then nothing. He had been knocked out. But he thought he had heard voices. How was that possible?
He squinted through the windows. No sign of the other sub—or the diver who had been with him. But something wasn’t right.
It took him a few seconds to work out what. There were reflections in the Plexiglas … of people behind him.
He spun his chair around in alarm—to find the menacing barrel of an ASM-DT pointing at him. It fired, the single shot earsplitting in the confined space. A nail round stabbed into the seat between his legs, the metal spike less than an inch from his groin.
The man holding the gun gave him a nasty look. “If you don’t do exactly what I tell you, the next one turns your bollocks into a shish kebab.”
The Mako powered through the blackness.
Eddie and Nina had debated—more accurately, argued—over their next action while waiting for the pilot to wake up. Eddie’s first thought had been to try to help Matt. But the pleasure submarine lacked manipulator arms, so had no way to release the Sharkdozer’s ballast. And by the time the pilot recovered and was coerced at gunpoint into getting under way, the other submersible had disappeared. Whether Matt was making a genuine attempt to return to the surface or had merely moved off to deter them from going after him they had no way of knowing: The Mako had no sonar beyond a very basic depth finder.
So, extremely reluctantly, they had turned to other options. The most obvious was returning to the surface. But the track on the inertial navigation system ultimately swayed the argument in Nina’s favor. Their attackers had come from a mother vessel, a submarine … and it seemed likely that Glas was aboard it. Wanted internationally for multiple crimes, and with the Group’s agents hunting for him, where better for the errant billionaire to hide? It explained the intermittency of his communications with his “partner,” Dalton: Something as simple as making a phone call was impossible hundreds of feet beneath the sea.
The architect of everything that had happened—the man responsible for all the lives that had been lost—was just over two miles away. As Nina pointed out, it seemed a waste not to pay him a visit while they had a chance … and a torpedo.
“So, is your boss on this sub?” Eddie demanded, poking the rifle against the pilot’s side to encourage a truthful answer.
“Yes, yes,” he replied, dry-mouthed. “Herr Glas is there.”
“How many others?”
“About ten.”
“About ten, or exactly ten?” The gun pushed harder against his ribs.
“Okay, okay! More than ten. Ah … twelve.”
“Sure?”
“Yes, yes, twelve! You killed two others.”
“I’ll make it three if you piss me about again.” Eddie gave him one final jab with the barrel, then moved back to join Nina. “You sure about this?” he asked her quietly.
She shook her head, but said, “It’s the only chance we’ve got to end this. Otherwise Glas’ll just keep sending people after us. After me. Even if I manage to stay alive, other people will still get killed in the crossfire. People like Matt, and Lewis, and the other