to gravity the electric motor began fighting them. The skiff slipped backward a foot.
“One more good pull,” Sam said. “On three. One . . . two . . . three!”
The skiff arced up and over the lip and slid onto level ground. In lockstep Sam and Remi backpedaled, dragging the skiff deeper into the grass.
“Down, Sam.”
Remi dropped to her belly, followed a split second later by Sam. They went still, tried to slow their breathing.
“Think we made it?” Remi whispered.
“We’ll know shortly. If things go bad, I want you to run as fast as you can. Head for the forest and don’t look back.”
“No, Sam—”
“Shhh.”
The powerboat’s engine was growing louder by the second, seemingly headed straight for their spot.
Then, Scarface’s voice: “Anything?”
“Nothing. What are they in, anyway?”
“A skiff, about twelve feet long.”
“Can’t be on this side,” the voice said. “There’s nothing here. Got to be the other one. Plenty of side channels to hide in there.”
“Yeah.”
The engine noise began moving off, fading across the water until Sam and Remi could only hear its distant echo.
“They’ve moved into another channel,” Sam said, rising to his knees and peeking over the top of the grass. “Yep. Don’t see them. They’re gone.”
Remi rolled onto her back and let out a sigh. “Thank God.”
Sam lay down beside her. She laid her head onto his shoulder.
“What do you say?” he asked. “Stay or go?”
She didn’t hesitate. “We’ve come this far. Be a shame to leave the mystery unsolved.”
“That’s the woman I love,” Sam said.
“What, reckless and misguided?”
“No, courageous and determined.”
Remi sang softly, “ ‘You say potayto, I say potahto . . .’ ”
“Come on, back to work.”
Sam spit into his mask, dipped it into the water, then settled it onto his head. Remi stood on the bank, arms on her hips, face etched with worry.
“Just going to have a look around,” he assured her. “I’ll save the air in case we can get inside. This won’t happen, but if it shifts in my direction while I’m down there, just start working those ratchet blocks until it tips back. If I don’t come up within, say, four to six hours, you can start worrying.”
“Comedian.”
“Hold the fort, I’ll be back.”
Sam clicked on his flashlight, took a deep breath, and ducked beneath the surface. Left hand extended, he finned downward. Within only a few feet the algae-filled water turned a deep green and visibility dropped to only a few feet. Sediment and bits of plant life swirled in the flashlight’s beam, leaving Sam feeling like he was trapped inside a nightmarish snow globe.
His hand touched something solid, the hull. He kept going, letting his hand trail over the curve of the hull until finally the bottom appeared in his flashlight beam. The keel was perched atop a jumble of sunken logs, precariously balanced but stable enough that Sam felt a flood of relief knowing the sub wasn’t likely to roll over on him. He felt the ache in his lungs turn into a burning, so he finned for the surface.
“Everything okay?” Remi asked once he’d caught his breath.
“Yep. Good news. She’s sitting upright, more or less. Okay, going again.”
He ducked back under, this time estimating the hull’s diameter as he skimmed past it. At the keel, he turned aft. At about the midpoint he encountered a bracket of some sort jutting from the hull and running lengthwise. For a moment what he was seeing didn’t register on his brain. He’d seen this before . . . one of the pictures from his earlier research. When the answer came, Sam felt a knot form in his belly.
Torpedo rack.
He stopped swimming and cast the flashlight along the bottom, seeing it with new eyes. Was one of those seemingly harmless sunken logs something else altogether?
He kept swimming aft until his flashlight picked out the tapered cigar end of the sub, and jutting from its side a horizontal plane. When he drew even with it he righted himself and let himself rise alongside the hull until the last piece of the puzzle came into view. Rising from the back of the hull was another tube, about eighteen inches tall and about shoulder-width in diameter.
Entry hatch.
Sam popped back up to the surface and stroked over to the bank, where Remi helped him out. He shed his fins and mask and took a moment to gather his thoughts.
“Well?” she said.
“There’s a manila folder in one of the duffels. Could you grab it for me?” She was back with it in half a minute. Sam flipped back and forth through the loose pages for a couple minutes, then plucked one of the sheets out and handed it to Remi.
“
Her words trailed off as she kept reading.
Sam said, “ ‘Molch’ means ‘Salamander.’ It was a class of midget torpedo submarine produced by Nazi Germany in 1944.”
Built for the Kriegsmarine by A. G. Weser, a company in Bremen, the Molch was the brainchild of Dr. Heinrich Drager. Measuring thirty-five feet long, three feet from deck to keel, and six feet from beam to beam, the Molch was designed to carry one crew member and two G7e torpedoes on port and starboard racks to depths of 120 feet and distances up to fifty nautical miles at a maximum submerged speed of three knots, a moderate walking pace.
As an offensive weapon the Molch, like most of Germany’s other midget subs, was largely unsuccessful: it was hard to steer, almost impossible to dive, and with a range so limited it was dependent upon auxiliary vessels for support and deployment.
“Are you sure, Sam?” Remi asked.
“I’m sure. Everything fits.”
“How in the world did it end up here?”
“That’s the part that doesn’t fit. According to everything I’ve read, these things only saw action in Holland, Denmark, Norway, and the Mediterranean. There are absolutely no records of Molches being deployed this far west.”
“How many of these things were there?”
“Almost four hundred, and most of those were lost, either sunk or vanished. They were death traps, Remi. Only crazy men volunteered for midget-sub duty.”
“You said a one-man crew. You don’t think . . .”
“Won’t know until I get in there.”
“And that other lovely word you used—torpedo.”
“That’s the dicey part. My hunch is it got pushed this far upriver by six-plus decades of storm surges. Probably both the torpedoes—if it was equipped with any to start with—were knocked off long ago.”
“Well, that’s some small comfort,” Remi replied. “Except for the unlucky fisherman who manages to snag one
