Tom Lowe - The Black Bullet

“Cool. I really appreciate you hiring me. I know you didn’t have to do it.”

“We’ll make a good band of brothers. For your own good, don’t tell anyone what we found out there today. Not even your mom. Promise me you can keep a secret. I need to notify the proper authorities at the right time. The worst thing that could happen is for the media to know about this. It’d be a circus out there.”

“It’s just an old World War II U-boat. I’d read there were a bunch of them in the Battle of the Atlantic during the early part of the war. Looks like you and Nick found one that wasn’t lucky enough to limp back to Germany.”

“Just keep it under your hat.” He watched Jason’s eyes, the wavered movement, the licking of lips, tightening of hands on the wheel. “Want to talk about it? What’s on your mind, Jason?”

“Before you told me not to say anything to anybody, Dave Collins called on the marine radio. You and Nick were down on the bottom. Dave was asking me how fishing was. I told him we hadn’t caught much, a few snappers. Then I said we might have caught an old submarine with skeletons in it. He was like real cool, you know? He said he was looking forward to Nick making Greek submarine sandwiches when we got back to the dock. I said we ought to be coming through Ponce Inlet in a few hours, but he’d already gone off the radio. I don’t think he heard me.”

“I wonder how many others did. Which channel?”

“What?”

“The frequency. Which channel did you use?”

“Thirty-six, I think.”

“On the bridge or below?”

“Below.”

“You sure? Go check. See what channel the radio’s set to.”

“Okay, sorry. I didn’t-”

Jason got out of the captain’s seat and started down the ladder. Nick opened one eye and grunted. “Jason hit a buoy?” he asked.

“We’re not that close in yet. But he might as well have hit an iceberg.”

“What do you mean?”

“Dave Collins called on the radio when you and I were underwater. Jason told him we’d found a submarine with bodies. Dave, with all his years of training, ignored it with a casual comeback about you making submarine sandwiches.”

Nick leaned back in the cabin, rubbed his chest. “We could be screwed.”

Jason, cheeks flamed, breathing heavy, flew back up the steps. He made a dry, forced swallow. “It’s channel thirty-six.”

Nick said, “If you and Dave talked on thirty-six, that’s good. Not many people on that frequency.”

O’Brien said, “It’s the channel used by some of the commercial boats. Maybe a drug runner or two. Which means it’s monitored by the Coast Guard.”

Nick stood and stepped closer to one of the rolled up isinglass windows, the breeze in his face, his hair rising like bird wings flapping on the side of his head. He lifted binoculars from the console and looked at the horizon in all directions. “You ever feel like uninvited company’s comin,’ you just don’t know when?”

“Let’s get something straight from this point forward,” O’Brien said. “We saw nothing. The casual remark you made was because we couldn’t figure out what snagged the anchor and you were goofing around, joking. It could have been a submarine or any ship or plane wreck on the bottom of the ocean. Understand?”

Jason nodded. “I apologize. I didn’t think … just being dumb.”

O’Brien couldn’t help but feel sorry for the kid. He said, “The genie’s out of the bottle. Don’t beat yourself up, okay? You got the call from Dave before I saw what was down there and told you not to say anything.”

“You’re right about that ol’ genie,” Nick said. “Looks like we got a boat coming north outta Jacksonville. That’s where the Navy keeps the real subs.”

“Is it Navy?” asked O’Brien.

Nick stared through the binoculars for a long moment. “Don’t think it’s Navy. Still way too far off. But whoever it is, they’re in a big hurry.”

It took O’Brien less than twenty minutes to get within a half mile of Ponce Inlet. The lighthouse, highest in the Southeast, stood like a sentry near the inlet. Jason and Max stepped up to the bowsprit, the water spray keeping them both cool. O’Brien and Nick remained in the wheelhouse.

Nick said, “Looks like, whoever and whatever that boat was, it’s laying way the hell back. Maybe just some kind of research vessel, or maybe we got a bad case of paranoia since we walked around that underwater graveyard.” He pulled a bottle of Corona out of the ice chest. “Fuck it. We haven’t done anything wrong? It is what it is.”

O’Brien said, “I’m thinking about what it is and what it can be.”

“You got worry in your DNA. That’s why you were a cop so long.”

“You think that’s it?”

A casino gambling boat, on a daily “trip to nowhere,” was coming out of Ponce Inlet and heading for international waters as O’Brien slowly guided Jupiter into the mouth of the pass. Fishing boats chugged by and two people on jet skis zipped through the inlet. O’Brien used his cell to call his friend, Dave Collins.

“I was expecting to hear from you,” Dave said.

“I wish I could have reached you before Jason did.”

“I terminated the conversation when I heard him mention what you found.”

“It’s definitely a German U-boat.”

“I heard you found bodies, some skeletal remains.”

“But you didn’t hear about a cargo that could be highly enriched uranium.”

“What! If it’s yellow cake, the stuff is as dangerous now as it was then. Maybe more so, considering today’s global climate of terrorism. The Germans may have been further along that we knew at the time.”

“I’m debating whether to give the coordinates to the Coast Guard and forget it, or let an old sleeping dog lie.”

“Sometimes old dogs have a damn mean bite if you get close enough. I’d let the secret remain one until we can offer the intelligence to someone who’s got a higher clearance than a reservist. All we need is a weekend guardsman with an active Facebook page to create a viral mess for the world to see.”

“You have a good point. We’re coming through the pass now. See you at the docks.”

Max ran around the deck barking at the big gambling boat as it plowed through the choppy pass, its diesels belching acrid black smoke, retirees sipping free cocktails on deck, the captain and crew pushing toward the open sea and total unaccountability.

“What’d we do if you forget the GPS numbers?” asked Nick, sipping his beer.

O’Brien eased Jupiter through Ponce Inlet, keeping to the right of the channel markers. He said, “Maybe I’ve already forgotten them.”

“You remember details and shit most people never see. You’ll remember those numbers as long as you want. Probably take ‘em to your grave.”

O’Brien smiled. “Let’s hope the ‘grave’ part is far in the future.”

Nick laughed. “If you get amnesia or something … that old sub will be hangin’ out there on the bottom of the ocean. Long as nobody wakes up that giant locked in those canisters-that HEU, no problem, right?”

“Like you said, it could be canisters for another sub … or mislabeled.”

Jason climbed the ladder to the bridge. “Want me to bring Max up?” he asked.

“She’s fine down there,” O’Brien said. “She loves the breeze and the scenery. Max likes to bark at the dogs that people bring to the Lighthouse Park.”

Nick grinned and added, “Scenery’s getting better.” He pointed to a bikini-clad woman lying on her beach towel. She sat up and sipped from a water bottle as Nick leaned out the open wheelhouse, raised his beer bottle in a toast, and yelled, “To the most beautiful lady on the beach!” The woman smiled and returned the wave. Nick, grinning, turned to O’Brien. “She thinks I’m Yanni and this is my yacht.”