The Black Bullet (Sean O'Brien 1) Read online

  When O’Brien looked back at the screen, Nick was gone.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Nick Cronus almost wished he didn’t have the tank on his back. He always had the ability to descend to the ocean floor very fast. Sometimes he thought he might have had gills in another lifetime. Today, he felt the force of the Gulf Stream at his back, kicking the fins and shooting through the water like a human torpedo. His right hand slid down the rope, eyes scanning all around him as he descended.

  The current gently pushed Nick down the long anchor rope, which ran at a perpendicular angle from the boat to the floor of the sea. He figured he was already out of Jupiter’s sonar radius unless Sean was quick to follow the rope.

  At a depth of seventy feet, the dwindling sunlight turned the ocean floor into shades of merlot and purple. Nick could see he was descending on top of an underwater canyon that looked like a long crevice that had opened, causing a fracture on the bottom of the sea. The sand resembled underwater hills that faded into a blend of muted colors, slow dancing like a sea-induced hallucination.

  ***

  “I’VE LOST NICK ON the screen,” O’Brien said, starting the diesels. “Don’t use the winch. Use your hands and pull the rope in hand-over-hand, not too tight, but enough so I can see which direction Nick swam. Maybe I can follow him.”

  “Okay,” Jason said, not stopping to pick up the sunglasses that fell off his face as he leaned over and began coiling the anchor rope into the storage well.

  Max trotted to the edge of Jupiter, where she had last seen Nick. She looked at the small swells and barked once, watching Jason pull up rope.

  “I see Nick,” shouted O’Brien, looking at the screen. “I think he’s on top of whatever is holding the anchor.” O’Brien could make out two odd shapes, shapes that didn’t look like the natural topography of the ocean floor. He could see Nick was right in the center of them.

  ***

  NICK WASN’T QUITE SURE what to make of his surroundings. Maybe there had been some crazy earthquake out here recently, he thought. Maybe the waves from the last big storm churned this stuff up. The bottom was cracked like a bowl. What were the two long broken shapes, one with some kind of tower on it? He had seen plenty of shipwrecks in his time. He wasn’t certain even if it was a ship. Mother Nature didn’t cough up some broken cylinder out of the hole. It came from the surface, and it sank a long time ago. But it wouldn’t make sense, not off the shores of Florida.

  He followed the rope to where it was caught on a twisted chunk of coral that stuck out from one part of the giant cylinder like a broken bird wing. Nick used the crowbar to chip away the barnacles. He saw the dark pewter of metal, tarnished like unpolished silver. It was some kind of ship’s hull. Blown apart. Maybe hit by a bomb years ago. How long had it been here? What kind of ship was it?

  The other section was scattered about one hundred feet away. Both pieces of the ship were half buried in the sand like the remnants of a giant’s toy long ago forgotten and left in an underwater sandbox.

  Nick had an eerie feeling sweep through his body. Maybe it’s an underwater grave? He used the crowbar to work the anchor. It was lodged in the twisted metal as if it was caught in the petrified jaw of an extinct leviathan whose gaping mouth had turned to stone.

  A moray eel slid from a cranny underneath the structure. It darted by Nick’s leg and retreated to another massive piece of pretzel-like metal thick with barnacles. Nick pulled the knife out of its sheath on his belt and began scraping away barnacles so he could see where to apply the crowbar.

  He saw it out of the corner of his left eye. Something white. Motionless. Something very out of place.

  Nick looked farther inside the hull. A human skeleton was trapped upright like a scarecrow in shards of torn metal and dappled bluish light. It seemed to stare back at Nick. The eye cavities dark and vacant. Small fish swam through the shattered rib cage. The skull’s lower jawbone was gone. There was a second skeleton lying in a fetal position near a crushed table.

  Nick felt cold. A chill ran through his body as he sucked in the compressed, cool oxygen a tad too quick. He made the sign of the cross, dropped the crowbar at his feet, and swam for the surface toward the promise of bright sky and warm air.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “There he is!” shouted Jason as Nick popped to the surface about thirty feet off the bow. O’Brien nodded and cut the diesels, letting Nick swim to the dive platform behind the cockpit.

  “Sean!” yelled Nick, kicking the fins and paddling to the stern.

  O’Brien knew something had shaken up Nick. He scaled down the ladder to the cockpit. Max and Jason joined him as Nick tossed the fins up on the platform, removed his face mask and said, “Somebody get me a beer!”

  “You see a shark or something?” Jason asked.

  “I saw something! That’s for damn sure.” Nick touched the cross hanging around his neck before he pulled himself up on the platform. “Sean, you got the damn anchor caught in the gates of hell!”

  O’Brien smiled. “I’ve told you not to dive down so fast. Deprives oxygen from the brain.” He grinned and tossed a towel to Nick.

  “I’m freakin’ serious as a heart attack.”

  “Was the anchor caught on a reef?”

  “A manmade reef. Looks like you caught an old submarine.”

  “A what?”

  Jason handed Nick a beer. “A sub! Cool. Maybe it was from the war, the Germans or even the Japs. Dude, I want to see it.”

  Nick took a long pull from the can, wiped the foam from his mustache with the back of a hand and shook his head. “No you don’t. Place is full of bodies.”

  “Bodies?” Jason’s eyes popped.

  “Skeletons, man. Long time ago picked clean by crabs and whatnot. I feel bad for whoever those guys are … were.” Nick sipped the beer and flopped in a deck chair. He set the beer at his feet and extended both hands. “I’m shakin’ like a damn leaf.”

  O’Brien said, “Where was the anchor?”

  “Caught in a bunch of twisted metal. Looks like whatever’s down there got hit by a bomb or something. Blew the thing in half. That was what we saw on the sonar. The straight lines, man. They are two long pieces from a submarine.”

  “A sub! That’s pretty wild,” Jason said.

  “How many bodies did you see?” O’Brien asked. “Where exactly were they?”

  “Right inside the biggest piece of the sub. Saw at least two. The freaky thing is one of ‘em is caught in the splintered metal. It’s kinda like the poor dude was running or something. Sort of blew up in his face and caught him from fallin’ down. Spooky. No, it looks evil.” Nick touched the crucifix lying against his chest, picked up his beer, and drained the can, crushing it with one hand.

  O’Brien knelt down by Max and rubbed her behind the ears. “Could be a lost sub from World War II. Did you see any identification, insignias, or any numbers?”

  “Sean, you’re back in cop mode. It’s not some crime scene.”

  “Is the anchor still stuck?”

  “Yeah. After I saw the stick man standing there at the door, fish swimmin’ outta the fuckin’ eye sockets, I sort of lost it and headed north. Dropped the crowbar.”

  “Let’s go get it,” O’Brien said smiling.

  Nick’s eyebrows arched. “Go get it? That’s a freakin’ graveyard! Got to respect the dead! Let it be. I shoulda let you do like you wanted—cut the damn rope.”

  “I’ll go with you, Sean,” Jason said, glancing down at the crushed can of beer.

  O’Brien put his arm around Jason’s shoulder. “It’s pretty deep. Nick will go back down. He’s done a thousand dives at this depth. If we have two divers down, we’ll need a man on deck for safety. We need you up here, okay?”

  “No problem. I saw that underwater camera up in the fly bridge. Maybe when you go down you could snap a couple of pictures?”

  “Good idea. I’ll get it.” O’Brien climbed back to the bridge. He picked up the small digital camera with t
he underwater housing. He looked down into the cockpit where Nick was preaching to Jason about desecrating the dead. Maybe the less the kid knew, the better, O’Brien thought. If it was a relic from World War II, what was it doing sixty miles off the Florida coast? And why was the sub never spotted? Leave well enough alone. He glanced at the GPS numbers and committed them to memory.

  Max barked. From the bridge, O’Brien could see a sailboat less than two hundred yards off starboard. He could tell a woman was sunning near the bow and wore nothing but her sun block. He disconnected the GPS and climbed down the ladder.

  “Check out the sailboat,” Jason said.

  “Better check out the lady on deck,” Nick said, standing and inhaling through his nostrils like a bull snorting.

  O’Brien said, “Jason, while Nick and I are down there, if any boat approaches, just make casual conversation. At this time, it’s probably not smart to talk about some sunken submarine. There’ll be a time and place. Okay?”

  Jason half smiled. “No problem. I’ll hang out with Max.”

  O’Brien turned to Nick. “You good to go back down?”

  “It goes against my Greek Orthodox religion. But as scared as I was starin’ into the face of skeletons, I’m more afraid to let you go down there alone to get your anchor.”

  “How much sunlight is getting to the bottom?”

  “Could use a flashlight to see farther in the hull. Not that I really want to see.”

  O’Brien opened a storage compartment and took out two underwater flashlights. He said, “I guess the only way to see what’s there is to take a look.” He slipped on a pair of fins and a mask and then knelt to lift the tank onto his back.

  As O’Brien and Nick stood on the dive platform, adjusted their masks and tested their regulators, Nick said, “You got no fear for this weird stuff … dead people.”

  “That’s usually what you’d see at a homicide scene.”

  “Maybe this wasn’t a crime. Just something that happened in the war.”

  “Just tell yourself we’re going down to free the anchor.” O’Brien dropped backwards into the sea.

  Nick shook his head and mumbled, “Why did I volunteer to teach him how to find fish. He caught a monster.” Nick looked up and saw the tern fly from the bridge. “Not a good sign,” he said to Jason. “Lucky’s gone.” Then Nick dropped back in the sea. Max darted around the cockpit and barked.

  Jason yelled, “Bring back some good pictures! Freakin’ skeletons, that’s insane.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  O’Brien dodged a plate-sized jellyfish, tentacles more than three feet in length, as he found the anchor rope and followed it into the abyss. Nick was at his side, descending through the warm currents of the Gulf Steam. The anticipation of discovering a lost ship, maybe a relic from some war, kicked in strong. The adrenaline was pumping through O’Brien’s blood the deeper he went and the closer he came to the shipwreck.

  When they were fifty feet from the bottom, O’Brien had to remind himself not to suck all of the air from the tank. The human eye could pick up what the sonar couldn’t. Human tragedy.

  It was a submarine, and it was a big one. O’Brien guessed that between the two huge pieces, the sub would have been more than three hundred feet in length. He could make out the conning tower, a chimney-like structure built atop some World War II subs. He forced himself to control his breathing.

  O’Brien knew the tower was usually near the center of a U-boat, a place used for greater visibility when the sub was on the surface. The tower was where he might find the sub’s ID number. But as they descended closer, O’Brien didn’t need a number to tell him what he already knew.

  A German U-boat.

  Although the tower was covered in barnacles, there was no mistaking the maritime monster sleeping quietly beneath them.

  Nick tapped O’Brien’s arm and pointed toward the anchor lodged in the section without the tower. O’Brien followed Nick down to the ocean floor. Nick picked up the crowbar and twisted the shards of metal. A small brown cloud drifted from the barnacles and wandered in the current like dust blown off attic furniture. Within a few minutes, Nick managed to create a hole large enough to free the anchor. O’Brien helped him lift it out of the tangle, the anchor falling to the sandy floor.

  Nick gave O’Brien the thumbs up sign, motioning for them to swim back to the surface. O’Brien shook his head and pointed to the torn opening in the hull. He gestured for Nick to follow him, gently tugging at Nick’s elbow. Through the face mask, O’Brien could see Nick’s dark eyes wide with disbelief. Reluctantly, Nick followed.

  The flashlight beams traveled deep into the hull. Small fish and plankton were caught in the light like alien life forms in a tiny galaxy of eternal night. O’Brien looked at the first skeleton, the one Nick had described as “standing.” It was propped up, captured by the force of a blast that had splintered the sub. O’Brien swam inside, keeping a respectable distance from the human remains. He saw the second skeleton lying on its side, bony arms over the skull as if the victim had been shielding his head when he died. O’Brien saw an algae-covered holster still strapped to the remains. He could tell the holster was made for a German Luger.

  O’Brien turned, expecting to see Nick right behind him. Nick stood at the entrance, his flashlight illuminating an erect skeleton. O’Brien signaled. Nick made the sign of the cross and swam between both skeletons, not looking at either, quickly catching up with O’Brien who was more than thirty feet into one half of the U-boat.

  O’Brien aimed his light at a metal desk that had toppled upside down. He picked up a dinner plate that was not broken and turned it over. On the bottom was an emblem of a golden eagle. He felt his heart race as he handed the plate to Nick who nodded and gently returned it to the floor.

  There were more than a dozen skeletons scattered throughout the sub. Most were lying face down. As O’Brien swam over them, he thought about the horror of their deaths. The plight of their last minutes on earth caused his chest to tighten, their frightened misery somehow still present in the dark, confined waters. The explosion, followed by the sub plummeting to the ocean floor, an iron coffin in a dark vortex, would have created a shared terror for the encapsulated men in their final seconds. Who were they? Did their families have any idea they were here, so close to America? At what point in the war was the sub hit?

  As a detective, he always felt it was his job to speak for the dead, at least those murdered. He had never been around as many dead that lay broken like human china. Were more in the other half of the sub? Did the U.S. government know this was here?

  O’Brien noticed something strange in a place where everything was mysterious.

  A jet engine.

  There was no mistaking the barnacle encrusted turbines, the air intake, the torpedo-like shape of the housing. How did a small jet engine, probably something that was destined for a fighter jet, get into a German U-boat? O’Brien pointed the engine out to Nick, who shrugged and held both palms up.

  He aimed the flashlight through some of the metal slates in a crate. A plastic canopy, one that would cover a jet pilot, was there along with tires and assorted jet parts. O’Brien thought the sub was carrying enough cargo to assemble two small fighter jets. He pulled the camera from his swimsuit pocket and snapped a picture of the engine.

  A larger crate sat behind the one with the jet engine protruding from it. The enclosure resembled a giant crab trap, metal slats welded like a cage, and inside were two canisters, each about three feet long.

  Nick looked at his watch and the gauge that indicated he had less than ten minutes of air in his tank. He breathed slowly and watched as O’Brien opened the solid steel crate. He reached inside and struggled to bring out one of the canisters. Even underwater it was heavy. Nick trained the light on the top of the container.

  The label read: U-235.

  Nick shined the light on the second container: U-235. O’Brien gently set the canister back in the cage and snapped a picture. May
be the sub was U-boat 235. The canisters were cylinder-like. O’Brien signaled Nick to follow him out of the sub. He thought he saw Nick grin behind the regulator clinched in his teeth.

  O’Brien snapped a picture of one skeleton as he swam out of the broken sub and over to the conning tower. The tower was covered in thick barnacles. O’Brien used the knife he’d strapped on his belt to chisel through the crustaceans. The barnacles fell like bark from a stripped tree.

  Nick tapped O’Brien and pointed to the air gauge. He had six minutes of air remaining. O’Brien nodded, looked at his gauge and moved the knife along the conning tower faster. Within a minute he could read: 2 3—the last number still too covered in barnacles to see. He used both hands to scrape and break away enough covering to reveal the faded white number, a worn down inscription on a long-forgotten tombstone.

  2 3 6

  O’Brien nodded to Nick and pointed toward the surface. He looked at Nick who seemed delighted to be leaving the dead. O’Brien hoped the labels on the box they’d found in the cage were some kind of misprints. He knew the numbers on the conning tower were accurate, and they didn’t match the labels on the two mysterious cylinders.

  Maybe the German’s loaded the cargo into the wrong sub. Maybe the cargo was meant for a U-boat named U-235. If not, O’Brien thought that he and Nick just chiseled the top off a modern Pandora’s Box. That thought alone sent a chill down his spine in the warm waters of the Gulf Stream. Because below them might be enough uranium to make an atomic bomb.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “You guys were down a long time!” Jason almost shouted, helping O’Brien and Nick out of their SCUBA tanks. “What’d you see? How many skeletons?”

  “Too many,” Nick said, running a hand through his wet hair.

  “Get some pictures?”

  “Sean did. Just like a crime scene photographer.”