Richard Castle - Wild Storm

And yet each time, the One-Legged Bandit would somehow float up to the top, its propellers still spinning through the wind-whipped fury. From underneath, Storm could hear the bilge pumps working double-time to excrete the water that was managing to find its way into the hull.

Tommy was hanging on to the wheel for all he was worth, his old seaman’s arms tested to the limit of their strength. His titanium leg was braced against one side of the bulkhead. His flesh leg was curled tightly around the captain’s chair.

Storm was, likewise, using a considerable amount of energy just to hang on through the unending roller-coaster ride. His task was made more difficult by the gear he had strapped on: scuba apparatus on his back; a modest amount of C-4 taped to the inside of his left leg; blasting caps and a small wireless detonator taped to the inside of the right one; a KA-BAR in a sheath on his right ankle; a bulletproof vest snug around his torso; a dry bag that included a grappling gun, a ring of single-loop plastic restraints, a Sig Sauer P229, and enough bullets to take on whatever hostile personnel he encountered once on board. It weighed him down, but it was a necessary concession. Getting equipped on a small boat in the middle of this maelstrom would have been impossible.

On flat seas, the One-Legged Bandit could have easily covered the distance it needed to travel in fifteen minutes. In these conditions, it had been fighting for two hours with no promise of an end. They had left with what Storm thought was plenty of time before dark. Now he wasn’t so sure.

There was no conversation between the passengers. Each man was simply concentrating on surviving the next wave.

Every once in a while, at the crest of a wave, Storm’s eyes would flit to the anemometer on the dashboard. He had yet to see the wind speed dip below seventy miles per hour. Most of the time it was in the eighties. The device topped out at a hundred. One or two gusts pushed the needle against its stop. The noise alone was deafening.

Finally, when they reached the peak of one particularly colossal wave, Tommy shouted over the howling, “I think I see it. We’re heading right for it. Look at your one o’clock.”

Storm had to wait for seven waves to pass until they again got high enough that he could make out a glimpse of Ingrid Karlsson’s billion-dollar ocean liner. It was still roughly two miles off, which was the extent of the visibility in this tempest.

“Think they’ve seen us?” Storm asked.

“I hope not. I didn’t make this thing torpedo-proof.”

“That was poor planning.”

“Look, Storm, not that this hasn’t been a lot of fun, but this is about as close as I want to go.”

“I understand. I’ll take my leave of you now.”

“Okay, my friend. Good luck.”

They plunged down a particularly steep slope of a wave and sank underwater for three terrifying seconds. Storm held his breath until they popped up again, then clapped Tommy twice on the shoulder.

“Thanks, my friend. I owe you one. Again.”

“You owe me nothing,” he shouted. “Or at least nothing that those hundred thousand euros didn’t take care of.”

Storm could not reply. He had already pulled down his scuba mask and strapped it as tight as it would go to his head. The mask had the regulator built in. Storm twisted a knob and the oxygen started flowing.

With one hand steadying himself, he used his other hand to unstrap the diver propulsion vehicle from the side of the cabin. The DPV was the latest in individual underwater propulsion, a slick little unit developed for military purposes that delivered both speed and durability, along with lights, a navigation system, and other useful features. Storm didn’t want to know how Tommy had procured one. He got it loose, then gripped it tight.

Then he crabbed over to the cabin door and timed his exit. If he opened it at the wrong moment — or, more accurately, if he didn’t get it closed quickly — the cabin would be inundated with Tommy inside it. Without the buoyancy of the air-filled cabin, the boat might not make it up from one of the larger depressions.

Storm waited until the boat had rolled through off one of the smaller troughs and was heading for one of the peaks. Just as soon as he was confident enough water had rolled off the decks, he opened the door and ran through it, slamming it shut with all his strength.

From there, gravity did the rest. The boat’s stern was tilted down at forty-five degrees. Storm followed the slope at an involuntary run, leaping when he reached the gunwale so he could clear over the side.

He was immediately in near total darkness. For one sickening moment, he thought the DPV had been ripped out of his hand by the force of his entry. Then he realized it was still tight in his fist.

As he sank in the water, breathing comfortably the whole time, he got his other hand on the DPV and switched it on. He let his weight belt take him fifty feet below the lowest trough, pressurizing his ears every ten feet or so, then filled his buoyancy regulator.

He switched on the headlight, and next took a look at the navigation system to make sure he was pointed in the correct heading. Then he turned on the propellers and started his journey toward the Warrior Princess .

NOTES FOR TRAVELING IN A HURRICANE: staying under the waves makes progress infinitely easier than trying to fight it out on top of them.

Fifty feet down, Storm was still dimly aware of the frothy, white-capped bedlam above him. But it did not impede his progress.

As he neared his target, Storm started aiming more erratically, but doing so purposefully. To the Warrior Princess ’s great variety of sensors, he wanted to seem more like a seven-foot-long, four-hundred-pound tuna meandering through the depths than a six-foot-two, two-hundred-thirty-pound man about to mount a raid.

He had ninety minutes of oxygen. He used sixty of it, knowing that would be enough for full darkness to set in. His dry suit kept him warm enough, with its insulated layer of air allowing his body to keep enough of its heat so that hypothermia was not an issue.

By the time he resurfaced, about thirty yards from the Warrior Princess , the dim traces of daylight that had been penetrating the cloud cover were gone. It was now fully nighttime.

The edges of the boat were lit from stem to stern. Only a few of the staterooms were illuminated. She was not being tossed about like Tommy’s small craft, but she was still feeling every inch of those forty-foot swells. According to her technical specifications, the Warrior Princess could withstand a Category 5 hurricane. That didn’t mean riding out a Category 1 or 2 storm was a lot of fun. Certainly, no one was on the upper deck, shooting skeet.

No one was topside at all. And that was to Storm’s advantage. He didn’t worry about being spotted while he was in the water — he was just one tiny head bobbing in the huge waves.

But he did worry about being spotted while doing what came next. Releasing his grip on the DPV and letting it sink slowly to the bottom of the strait — a thirty-thousand-dollar piece of military equipment turned into another piece of trash on the ocean floor — he swam to within ten yards of the ship. The Warrior Princess ’s engines were going just fast enough to keep her pointed into the waves and prevent her from getting broadsided. But she wasn’t really going anywhere. It made her easy enough to keep up with, for as much as swimming in a hurricane was ever easy.

The nearer Storm got to the boat, the more he felt her hull looming over him as the waves bucked her about. It was difficult to quell the fear the boat was simply going to fall on top of him in the wild seas.