Sam pushed her to the ground and lay on top of her. A few seconds later they felt a gust of cool air wash over them. A cloud of dust billowed through the tunnel and filled the cavern, the heavier particles peppering the surface like rain. Sam and Remi looked up.
“Ah, alone at last,” Remi murmured.
Sam grinned, stood up, brushed himself off, and pulled her to her feet. “You want to stay for a while?”
“No, thanks.”
“Well, then we better get busy on our escape pod.”
Remi put her hands on her hips. “What’re you talking about?”
Sam unclipped the flashlight from his belt and shined it in the water, illuminating the sub’s hull. “I’m talking about that.”
“Explain, Fargo.”
“I’ll check to be sure, but chances are we can’t go out the way we came, and no one knows exactly where we are, so we shouldn’t count on rescue. That leaves one option: down the river.”
“Oh, you mean down the river that killed one of Kholkov’s men and sucked him into limbo? That river?”
“It goes somewhere. That tunnel is a good fifteen feet in diameter and the water’s moving fast and steady. If it narrowed anywhere down the line we’d see backflow or signs of a higher tide line on the walls. Believe me, it dumps out somewhere—either aboveground in a lake or pond, or into another sea cave.”
“And you’re sure about this?”
“Reasonably.”
“There’s a subjective judgment if I’ve ever heard one.” Remi chewed her lip for a moment. “What about this: You work your engineering magic with one of the tanks and blow a hole in the ceiling crack.”
“Not enough power, and we might bring the whole roof down on us.”
“True. Okay, we can wait for daylight then set the root tangle on fire. It’ll be a smoke signal—” She caught herself and frowned. “Scratch that. We’d asphyxiate long before help arrived.”
“You’ve done as much cave diving as I have,” Sam said. “You know the geology. That river’s our best chance. Our only chance.”
“Okay. One problem, though: Our escape pod is full of water and sitting fifteen feet below the surface.”
Sam nodded. “Yes, that’s a problem.”
After checking to make sure the main cavern was in fact sealed, they returned to the secondary cave and got to work, first retrieving their gear from the bottom, then scrounging through the Kriegsmarine crates for any odds and ends that might be of use. In addition to a well-stocked toolbox of mostly rusted tools they found four lanterns and a dozen stubby votivelike candles that lit at the first touch from Sam’s lighter. Soon the pier and surrounding water was dimly lit by flickering yellow light. While Remi sorted through their remaining gear and conducted an inventory of the toolbox, Sam stood at the edge of the pier, staring distantly into the water.
“Okay,” Remi said. “We’ve got two air tanks, one two-thirds full, a second completely full; two flashlights, both working, charge unknown; my camera’s shot but the binoculars are fine; the revolver is dry, but I can’t vouch for the bullets; two canteens of water and some slightly soggy beef jerky; a first-aid kit; your Gerber Nautilus multitool; one dry bag that’s in good shape, one that’s Swiss cheese; and, finally, two cell phones that are dry, working, almost fully charged, but useless inside here.”
“The motor?”
“I dried it out as best I could but we won’t know until we try it. As for the gas tank, I didn’t find any holes and all the valves are sealed, so I think it’s fine.”
Sam nodded and went back to staring at the water.
After ten minutes of this, he cleared his throat and said, “Okay, we can do it.” He walked over and sat down beside Remi.
“Let’s hear it,” she said.
He started explaining. When he was done, Remi pursed her lips, tilted her head, and then nodded. “Where do we start?”
It started with a tense, claustrophobic crawl for Sam. He had no trouble with either confined spaces or water, but had no love for the two combined.
Wearing only his mask and a dive belt, he first did a series of practice dives to expand his lung capacity, then spent a full minute on the surface doing deep-breathing exercises to oxygenate his blood to its maximum.
He took a final breath, then dove to the bottom. Flashlight extended before him, he wriggled through the sub’s dome hatch and turned aft. He knew from his cursory study of Kriegsmarine subs back in the Pocomoke, the nose section of a Marder-class boat held only a seat and some rudimentary steerage and diving controls. What he was looking for—the scuttle valves—would be in the tail section. Pulling and pushing himself along the interior piping, he felt the cylindrical walls close around him, felt the darkness and the water pressing him, crushing him. He felt the hot bloom of fear in his chest. He quashed it and refocused:
He shined his flashlight left, right, ahead. He was looking for a lever, a raised cylindrical fitting in the hull. . . . And then, suddenly, there it was, ahead and to the left. He reached out, grasped the lever, and heaved. Stuck. He drew his dive knife, wedged it between the lever and hull, then tried again. With a squelch and spurt of rust, the lever gave way. Lungs pounding, he turned to the opposite valve, repeated the process, then backed out and finned to the surface.
“You okay?” Remi called.
“Define okay.”
“Not mortally wounded.”
“Then, yes, I’m okay.”
The next part of the plan took three hours, most of which they spent sorting and splicing the rope the Germans had left behind, about half of which was either completely rotted or so weakened Sam wasn’t willing to trust it. They would get only one chance at what they were attempting, he told Remi. If they failed, they would have to turn to her signal fire idea and hope help would arrive before the smoke killed them.
After four hours, at nearly two A.M. according to Sam’s watch, they were almost ready. They stood at the edge of the pier, studying their handiwork.
Two quadruple-braided lines, one secured to the sub’s bow and the other to its stern cleats, rose from the water to the ceiling, where Remi, superb climber that she was, had threaded each through a catwalk ceiling eyelet. From there, each line dropped down again and was tied off to a cable under the catwalk planking. The vertical support cables were themselves connected, midpoint to midpoint, by a carefully constructed spiderweb of rope. To one of the cables—the farthest one from the lines secured to the sub—Sam had lashed one of their scuba tanks.
“So,” Remi said. “Let’s review: You shoot the tank, the blast sheers the cables, the catwalk drops, the sub pops to the surface, and the water drains out. Is that it?”
“More or less. The tank won’t explode, but it’ll take off like a rocket. If I’ve rigged it right, the torque should part the weakened cables. Beyond that, it’s all math and chaos theory.”
Estimating the weight of the sub and the water inside it, as well as the combined weight of the catwalks and the shearing limit of the cables, had given Sam a headache, but he was fairly confident in his process. Using the ancient and rusted but still-serviceable hacksaw they’d found in the toolbox he’d cut halfway through eleven of the eighteen vertical catwalk cables.
“And gravity,” Remi added, curling her arm in his. “Win or lose, I’m proud of you.” She handed him the revolver. “It’s your mouse-trap. You get the honors.”
They climbed behind the protective bulwark of crates they’d assembled at the far end of the dock and made sure everything was snug around them, save Sam’s firing slit.
“Ready?” he asked.
