Temple of the Gods

‘You can’t—’

‘Nina, I have to. You never know, maybe the batteries will last, maybe the dome’ll hold up. There’s always a chance. Hey, I’ve survived everything else I’ve been through with you, right?’ The last few words were almost choked by barely contained emotion.

Nina’s feelings were more open, tears running 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.

25

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 upwards, 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 round 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. 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 depthfinder.

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 favour. 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 people on that sub.’

‘So what are we going to do? Cruise up to his window, wave, then blow the fucker up?’

‘I was thinking more of giving him the finger first,’ she said, with a faint attempt at a smile. ‘But we should talk to him before that. I didn’t believe that Warden was telling us the whole story any more than you did, so we ought to find out Glas’s side of it.’

‘Then blow the fucker up.’

‘If we have to.’ She looked back at the pilot. The dot representing the sub on the inertial navigator was approaching its origin point. ‘How much further?’ she asked him.

‘About half a kilometre,’ the pilot replied nervously.

The couple moved forward for a better view as the Mako continued towards its destination. Nothing was visible yet, but a readout on the navigation screen ticked down the distance in metres. Four hundred and fifty, four hundred… ‘What if it’s moved?’ Nina wondered, still not seeing anything. ‘Maybe they figured out that something went wrong and took off.’

‘Then we go back to the surface, and Chuckles here takes a swim with the sharks,’ said Eddie.

The pilot gulped. ‘It will be there, it will be!’

Three hundred metres. Their prisoner looked from side to side for any sign of the mother ship. Two hundred, and the pilot’s hands visibly trembled as he reduced speed. ‘I think they’ve buggered off,’ Eddie growled, hefting the ASM-DT.

‘No, no, they will be here!’ the pilot squealed. ‘They will be, they will — there!’

He pointed off to the left. A faint line of lights appeared through the murk.

As they closed, the line grew longer. And longer.

‘Wow,’ said Nina, unable to conceal her amazement. ‘That’s a big-ass submarine.’

The craft bearing the lights gradually took on form. The mother ship was well over two hundred feet long, a sleek white shape resembling an ultra-modern megayacht — but one with the ability to plunge beneath the waves on a whim. Large circular portholes ran along the length of its hull, a long wraparound window marking the bridge atop the elevated, streamlined superstructure. ‘Must have cost a few bob,’ said Eddie.