18
Sin and Charlie did a buddy check on each other’s gear before they trudged into the water.
“It’s a moonless night,” Charlie said, “that’s good and bad.”
Sin nodded her understanding.
“We can’t risk being spotted so we can’t use a dive flag and I don’t want to use any underwater flashlights until we reach a depth of forty feet,” he continued. “I checked the current and it’s running due south. Once we swim past the break, we have five minutes to reach our depth and turn on our lights. If we take longer than that, we may run right into the first reef and get torn to bits.”
“It sounds like you’ve made this dive before,” Sin said.
“Only from the chair in my den. You’re the only one I know that’s been crazy enough to have done it in reality.”
Charlie watched Sin look out at the water and bite her lip. “Anything you want to add?”
She pointed to where the waves made their final break. “About thirty feet in, where the waves begin to swell, there is a ledge. It drops from a depth of about twenty feet to eighty. The deeper we go, the less of a current we will deal with. I suggest hugging the bottom until we hit the inner reef.”
Sin watched the left side of Charlie’s mouth rise and she felt an inner pride. “You take the lead,” he said, “I’ll follow.”
He tied the end of a yellow rope to his weight belt and handed the other end of the ten-foot rope to Sin. She did the same. Silently, they turned toward the ocean, placed their masks on, put their snorkels in their mouths, and made their way past the rocks and coral of North Point.
For the first part of the dive, the only communication between the two was the pull of the rope when they strayed too far apart and a kick in the head when they were too close. Once Sin swam past the shelf where the ocean bottom dropped off, the descent was quick. Before she knew it, her lead hand was touching sand. She wasted no time turning on her dive light. Charlie’s soon followed.
He gave her the ‘okay’ sign, Sin signed back. They then made their way toward the inner reef.
When they arrived at the reef, Sin knew something was wrong. She hugged the sand, trying to belay the current as much as possible. Lying on the ocean bottom, she reached for her slate and wrote a short message. Finished, she handed the slate to Charlie.
“Looks wrong.”
Sin waved for him to follow her lead.
Charlie nodded in affirmation.
They held on to each other with one hand and the vegetation on the top of the reef with the other in order to swim against the strong pull of the current. They hadn’t gone more than thirty feet when Sin stopped. She looked back at Charlie and then suddenly dropped off the end of the reef.
In a matter of seconds, they were fifty feet deeper and hovering over a perfectly manicured ocean bottom.
Sin grabbed at her slate and scribbled like a woman possessed.
“Trough dug out.
Man-made.”
Charlie read the words and then pointed south. He signaled to Sin that he was taking point. She nodded and followed his lead.
Charlie removed the glove from his right hand and felt the sand in front of him. For every foot he moved forward, he made at least three passes through the sand with his hand. This went on for about twenty minutes and they had progressed less than fifty feet.
Sin tugged on his wetsuit to draw his attention and shrugged her shoulders.
Charlie grabbed the slate hanging from his waist and tapped a message.
“Too smooth. IEDs?”
Sin looked around and noticed the same phenomenon. She nodded and let Charlie resume his search.
A few minutes later—he stopped.
Sin watched as Charlie dug in the sand. He waved her forward and shined his light in the hole he had made.
Sin looked down and saw an underwater IED. She stared and thought, You’ve got to be shitting me.
Sin busied herself filling in the hole as Charlie discovered others. She glanced at her underwater GPS and realized they were just offshore of the fishing company. Her mind was going a mile a minute when she felt Charlie poke her. She looked to see him shining his light on his watch. Their bottom time was over.
It was time to surface.
They quickly covered the other mines and rose from the bottom, the current pulling them south onto South Point.
Safe on land and their equipment off, Charlie grabbed their tanks and tossed them into a mangrove sanctuary.
“What are you doing?” Sin asked.
“We’re about to have company,” Charlie answered. “Come on.”
Sin grabbed her fins and mask and ran behind Charlie until they were hidden in the tangle of the mangroves.
“What makes you think we are going to have company?”
“The IEDs had two wires attached to them. One is a pressure and vibration sensitive trip wire. The other one made no sense. As we surfaced, I started thinking that maybe it was connected to some sort of early warning system.”
“Okay,” Sin said, “But that still doesn’t explain why you think we tripped it or that someone is coming.”
“Call it a hunch, I just don’t like the way things feel right now.”
Sin thought for a moment and then said, “Do you think this might have something to do with how the agents got caught?”
Charlie was about to answer when headlights flooded the parking lot. “Hold that thought,” he whispered.
Two men stepped out of a truck. They were dressed all in black and their faces were concealed behind black headgear. Each held an automatic machine pistol.
Sin could tell they were aggressive and thought they were immortal by their nonchalance. She heard
