John Ringo: A Deeper Blue

Kurt Schwenke watched the body tumble over the side, slid the silenced pistol into the rear waistband of his pants, then walked to where a ladder dangled over the side. As he climbed down, one of the boats came alongside. It was tough getting from a moving ship to a small boat but Kurt had no particular problems. He kicked outwards and landed on one of the seats of the boat, then settled into place.

“Do we have it?” he asked.

“Souhi has it on sonar,” Sayid Al-Yemani replied, powering up and turning, the boat splashing up and over the waves then crashing down in a shower of spray. “Allah’s beard! I am still having problems with these, Haji. Sorry.”

“Not a problem,” Kurt, AKA Sabah Arif, replied, wiping at his face. “You will have much time to learn.”

The boat turned away from the waves and powered up more, jumping over them now so that Kurt had to put on the safety belts. It was only about a quarter mile, though, to the place where the container had gone over the side.

“There,” the driver said, powering down and pointing to the sonar screen. “It went deep, though. Now it is on its way up.”

Kurt nodded and watched the sonar contact rising. The water in the area was nearly two thousand feet deep, so the massive plate had a ways to descend. The coil of cable on the container was supposed to play out evenly, never letting the container get too deep, until the plate hit bottom.

The container was hanging, now, between about seventy-five meters and a hundred. Deep. Possibly too deep. But even as he watched, the numbers began to drop. Sixty meters. Fifty. It leveled off at twenty and stayed there, steady.

“Are you ready, Kahf?” Kurt said, looking over his shoulder.

The Egyptian already was pulling his SCUBA rig out of the racks. A former dive instructor at the resort in Sharm Al Sheik on the tip of the Sinai peninsula, he was experienced in both conventional and “technical” diving. The rig he was using for this was a simple SCUBA apparatus, one steel 80-cubic-foot tank, two-stage SCUBAPRO regulator, the only difference from beginner-quality equipment being that it was a NITROX setup, which used extra oxygen in the mix to extend down time.

Kahf just held up a thumb and forefinger in an “Okay” signal and kept getting it on. In a few seconds he was ready to dive.

He tucked his regulator in his mouth and slid over the side into the warm waters, grabbing a rope on his way. Using the rope, he trailed behind the boat, searching the waters and occasionally using his body to plane downwards. After a moment he surfaced again and held up another “Okay” signal, then let go.

“He’s spotted it,” Kurt said. “Hold this position.”

Kurt was surprised to see that he could pick up the diver on the sonar. The sonar system tagged him as a fish, admittedly, but he could still follow his progress on the three-D imager as the “fish” made his way down to the container.

The “fish” hovered around the container for a moment, then came back up.

“It’s all good,” Kahf said, pulling himself out of the water onto the dive platform at the rear of the boat. “I got the doors open. That was harder than we expected but they’re open.”

“Right,” Kurt said, waving at another boat and making motions for them to dive.

This time the diver was carrying more gear. Double air tanks, a third dangling in front of him, and float bags were the big part of it. As Sayid pulled away, the second boat came over the container and as soon as it was there the pre-rigged diver hit the water. It was a bit of a wait but Kurt was patient. After a moment, though, two lift bags popped to the surface. Kurt watched as the boat came alongside the bags and the driver and a third man pulled a blue barrel over the side, carefully. The barrel was rolled out of sight just as another bobbed to the surface.

The process was repeated three times, a total of four of the barrels, and then Kurt gestured for the boats to assemble.

“I repeat,” Kurt yelled. “Only one boat at a time. That is very important. Follow your bearings. You all know where to pick up your routes. Souhi goes first. The rest of you will wait.” He stopped and then grinned. “By the way, welcome to the sunny Bahamas!”

“What are we doing about this?” the President asked.

“It’s tough,” the FBI director replied. “We don’t want people panicking. But we’ve upped the terrorism alert level and we’re flooding the South Florida area with agents. They’ve been told they’re looking for a major shipment of something that’s going to look like drugs but is terrorism related.”

“We’re clamping down on port checks,” the head of Customs and Border Protection added after a glance from his boss, the secretary of Homeland Security. “All my people are on overtime for the foreseeable future and we’re checking both pre-checked containers and uncleared. But even with the extra manpower we can’t check them all, Mr. President. We’re up from our normal, low, percentage but short of mostly closing the ports down…”

“National Guard is helping with the search,” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said. “And I’m pulling in all the teams. We’re not going to get caught forward like we were the last time. If it’s something that Delta or Rangers can operate on, they’re going to be ready to shoot.”

“Shaking all the trees,” the director of National Intelligence added. “NSA is on high alert and I’ve sent out a classified memo for any information, barring what we already have, on the shipment.”

“Same here,” the Defense Intelligence Agency director added. “And we’re trying to squeeze anything we can from recent detainees. But I don’t think there’s much there other than what we got from Al-Kariya and his computer. Once Kariya broke, he broke hard. We’ve pretty much got everything he knew. Short of picking up someone high-level who is aware of the op, I think we’re about done there.”

“Where is the ship?”

“Should be just about to Miami,” Homeland Security said. “We’re low-keying it.”

“But they were supposed to be ‘transferred’ before reaching port, right?” the President asked.

“Yes, sir,” the DDIA said. “We picked the ship up late. It was definitely off the sea-lanes. The transfer possibly occurred somewhere north of the Bahamas.”

“The Navy’s looking for it,” the CJCS added.

“Mr. President,” the secretary of Homeland Security said, “we’re using every available resource.”

“Not every resource,” the President said, looking at the secretary of Defense. “Call Pierson. Now.”

“Sir,” the DNI said, rolling his eyes since the President wasn’t looking, “you’re not talking about…”

“Get me the Kildar.”

The painting had been made by a renowned cover artist, an artist of the “old school” that still used acrylics to create massive paintings just to grace a book.

The subject was a Valkyrie but one far different than most. She had the blonde hair and busty build of one, but her hair was unbraided, long golden tresses floating in the breeze of her passage. And instead of the traditional overendowed “breastplate,” she wore only a white dress, rich with seed pearls, cut daringly down the front to nearly the navel and short in front, high on the thigh. She was riding, sidesaddle, a white, winged horse and held in her right hand a blazing minigun, pointed at the ground. And she was smiling, a vicious smile of triumph and victory.

Her face was a vision, but only to Mike. Oh, she was pretty, even beautiful, but you could see a dozen like her in any American college, three or four as good looking among the Keldara and several who were, arguably, more beautiful. But none of that mattered to the man in the comfortable chair placed at perfect viewing distance from the painting.