Enemy of Mine

nature of the work, but this time the mission caused him some concern.

Ordinarily, Taskforce planning worked from the ground up, with Knuckles being told the objective, but left to his own devices to determine how it would be executed. In this case, all planning had been conducted by someone else, and he was about to exit a moving aircraft into the Mediterranean Sea, then swim for two hours for a link-up with another boat.

All the parameters had been provided to him. The grid for the boat, the signals for the beacons, the helicopter’s flight path, and the release point had been handed to him complete. He knew it was because of time sensitivity and the lack of ability to directly communicate with his link-up, but it did nothing to ease his fears. Once in the water, they were on their own. If they moved to the link-up, and nobody was home, they’d still be two hours off the coast of a hostile country.

Pike, you’d better be waiting.

His other concern was Brett, the third man on the team. There was no doubt the guy was handy in a gunfight, and plenty smart, but he’d spent the past twelve years in the Special Activities Division of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service. He hadn’t done any subsurface work since he was in the Marines, a long, long time ago, and they were swimming the Draeger LAR V rebreather.

A closed circuit underwater breathing apparatus, the Draeger recirculated the exhaled gas from the swimmer, and thus no telltale bubbles escaped like an ordinary scuba system. It was perfect for clandestine infiltration, but the gas mixture was also very deadly. Make a mistake in using it, and it would kill quickly.

He patted Brett on the knee. “You sure you’re good on this system? I don’t want to be towing a dead body after thirty minutes.”

Brett smiled, his teeth stark white against his ebony skin. “Yeah. Quit worrying about me. A few different buckles and switches, but it’s basically the same thing I trained with. Besides, I’m just along for the ride.”

The crew chief tapped his shoulder, holding up five fingers.

Knuckles echoed the command, shouting, “Five minutes!”

All three began preparing for the cast off of the helicopter, Brett working the waterproofed equipment bundle to the door while Knuckles and Decoy prepped their diver propulsion vehicles.

Knuckles checked his GPS and was relieved to see the release point he’d programmed approaching. At least that will go correctly. He shut off the GPS and zipped it into a waterproof bag. Hopefully, it would be the last time he looked at it, since it wouldn’t pick up a signal underwater. If he needed a GPS again, it meant the link-up had failed, and they’d had to surface to get a reading on where they were in relation to the shore.

The helicopter slowed and dropped down to the deck of the ocean, so close that Knuckles could see the white foam of the rotor wash in the moonlight. The crew chief gave the two-minute call and tossed his headset onto the floor of the helo. He positioned his mask on his face and placed the Draeger mouthpiece in, opening the dive surface valve to allow the flow of oxygen. He purged the system, then turned to help Brett.

At the one-minute call, he edged to the open door, holding his diver propulsion vehicle in his lap, then assisted Brett with the bundle of equipment. He would be first out, followed by Brett and the bundle, then Decoy with the second DPV.

He was so intent on making sure Brett was stable and ready with the bundle that he missed the thirty-second call. He felt the crew chief slap him on the shoulder and heard, “Go!”

He turned in confusion only to find the crew chief wildly pointing out the door and shouting “Go, go, go!”

Without hesitation, he chucked the DPV out the door and followed suit, before the towline attached to it yanked him out anyway.

He hit the water with a hand on his dive mask and went under, cursing himself for jumping before he was ready. Dumbass crew chief thinks an extra second or two matters?

He broke the surface, followed his towline to the floating DPV and popped a ChemLight, holding it in the air. Only then did he do a three-sixty survey of the water, the roar of the helicopter fading, leaving a ringing in his ears and a deep quiet all around.

He saw two other ChemLights and stroked to them. Decoy was already prepping his underwater scooter for the ride, while Brett was slowly treading water, holding on to the neutrally buoyant bundle.

He got an “A-OK” hand signal from both.

He attached his towrope to the plate on the DPV to his front, then attached a separate towrope to Brett’s harness behind him. Decoy did the same, hooking his secondary towrope to the bundle.

He secured his attack board onto the DPV, checked to make sure the compass and depth gauge functioned, then got a final A-OK hand signal, the constraints of using the Draeger preventing them from removing the mouthpiece to talk. Once in place, the body itself became part of the system, a symbiotic relationship that couldn’t be broken until the dive was complete.

The restrictions of the LAR V rebreather were a trade-off, but worth it. While it allowed them to swim underwater without telltale bubbles, its true value was in the length of time it could stay under. At thirty feet of depth, they could swim for four hours without surfacing, which, if his calculations were correct, would be enough to make it to the coast should the link-up fail. What was waiting for them there would be the new problem.

Knuckles triggered the DPV and dove, reaching twenty-five feet. He lined up his compass, set the pitch of the propeller on two-thirds, and began moving through the water at a rapid clip. The light attached underneath his DPV gave him enough illumination to see about five feet ahead of him, reminding him of the movies from submersibles at the ocean floor. A thin reed of illumination swallowed by infinite blackness. It was disconcerting and claustrophobic, but something he was used to after hundreds of night dives. He simply watched the compass needle, checking off to his left occasionally to make sure Decoy’s ChemLight was still with him.

Finding a boat in the middle of the ocean was literally worse than finding a pinhole in a field of snow. Using just a compass, with the variable currents underwater and the probability of error of the release point, would guarantee failure, but they had a little help inside their DPVs.

Made by Gavin Water Sports, they were a commercial, off-the-shelf item that looked a little like a torpedo, with a long cylinder up front attached to a propeller. Unlike the ones Knuckles had trained with in the Navy, he was connected to the device by a towrope instead of riding it as a passenger. Ordinarily used for cave diving and shipwreck exploration, the Taskforce had modified the DPVs for clandestine infiltration. In the nose of each was a transducer that would pick up the signals from a sonic beacon. Once it made an encrypted handshake, a computer would take over the steering, guiding them directly to the boat. All Knuckles had to do was get within eight hundred meters-the range of the beacon. A whole lot more room for error with the compass, but still easy to screw up. Miss the bubble by fifty meters and they’d never know it.

Passing the one-and-a-half-hour mark, Knuckles began to feel the adrenaline pick up. One hour and fifty minutes into the dive, Knuckles felt sweat form in his wetsuit, and not from the exertion. By the calculations he had made from the release point, they should hit the boat in two hours. Which meant, traveling at two hundred feet per minute, they should now have been within range of the beacon.

Here we go. Fucking plan B.

If he reached two hours, he was going to conduct a grid pattern, traveling north for five minutes, then repeating the move south for ten minutes. Two race tracks like that, and he would be at a decision point: Continue searching, or use the remaining battery power of the DPV to reach shore.

The two-hour mark passed, and he waved his ChemLight, bringing the DPV to a halt. Decoy waved his as well, and cut by him to the south. What the hell is he doing?

He watched the bundle go by, a shadowy blob miraculously following Decoy as if it could swim on its own. He made sure Brett was ready to move, then turned and followed suit, getting a little aggravated at Decoy for not following the plan. He increased his speed to overtake the rapidly disappearing glow from Decoy’s DPV, intent on knocking some sense into the man, when his transducer pinged. He felt a subtle shift in the direction of the DPV and knew the computer was locking on.

Two minutes later, he no longer worried about the compass, the DPV driving on autopilot. They were on the outer edge of the bubble, and for whatever reason, Decoy’s transducer had picked up the signal first.

He gave a mental sigh of relief and began focusing on the next problem: how to survive a gunfight on the open water if it wasn’t Pike in the boat.