Ark Found, page 10
part #2 of Omega Files Adventures Series
Jayden was unable to help Carter with the actual fight, since getting the boat underway beneath the impending onslaught of bullets was priority number one. He was on his own with the beefy gladiator while Jayden fired up the motor, took up position behind the wheel in an awkward ducking stance to partially shield him from enemy fire, and put the tender vessel into gear. Luckily for Carter, when Jayden jammed the throttle all the way up, the sudden momentum and burst of speed caused him and his attacker to roll over one another such that Carter ended up on top, a few feet away from where they landed.
Even with bullets flying overhead, Carter wasted no time in taking advantage of the small upper hand he’d been given. He racked his left elbow into the bigger man’s ribcage, taking great satisfaction in the resulting grunt and exhalation of air. His opponent came back with a powerhouse fist meant for Carter’s temple that he ducked, sending the opponent’s knuckles into the boat’s deck. As an inflatable boat, it was a soft deck, though, granting him a bit of the luck Carter had been given earlier. He used the same balled fist to spring himself up from the deck, intending to fall back down on Carter in some kind of pseudo-pro wrestling move.
But Jayden, having cleared the vicinity of the ship where they were in imminent danger of being shot at, now came to Carter’s aid. He grabbed a nearby bungee cord that had been securing a small fire extinguisher, and used it to lash the steering wheel into position so that the boat would continue on a straight path unaided. On a whim, he picked up the extinguisher, too. Then he stepped around the console the long way to both shield himself from any further gunfire and to hide from the opponent’s view when he came in for his attack.
As he rounded the console he was distracted by a streak of white in the water—the other small boat rounding the ship’s bow and coming after them. First things first, he thought, as Carter grappled with the much bigger individual a few feet away on what little deck space there was available. Jayden pulled the pin on the extinguisher and aimed it at the head of Carter’s rival.
“Get away from him, Carter. I got this!”
Both men looked over and then Jayden blasted the brute in the face with the pressurized chemical powder from about six feet away. Not lethal, by any means, but more than enough to give the fighter pause for a few seconds, which was all Carter needed to regain his feet and kick his foe in the face. Blood splatter suddenly appeared on the boat’s PVC tubes, and then the burly crewman slumped onto the deck in an uncoordinated heap.
“Take the wheel, I got him!” Carter shouted. While Jayden retreated back around the console, Carter grabbed a life vest and strapped it on the semi-conscious man, whose eyes were open and was mumbling incoherently. Carter hefted him by the shoulders, dragged him up onto one of the boat’s buoyancy tubes, and then tossed him off into the sea. He watched to make sure the man was floating face up, and then moved to the console, where he picked up the radio. Broadcasting on an emergency channel he informed the Transoceanic that they had a crewman in the water. Then, recalling Daedalus ’ ruthlessness, he radioed his own ship as well, knowing that they would actually pick up a seaman overboard no matter what was at stake. He wasn’t so sure Daedalus would even bother to stop to pick up his own crewman.
“Pick him up first if you have to,” Carter told the Deep Pioneer’s bridge, “and then catch up to us.”
Chapter 10
Daedalus paced back and forth in the bridge of the Transoceanic. “Yes, pick up our man on the way to taking down the other tender. We don’t need to leave him to be rescued by Deep Pioneer and draw more attention to ourselves. But those two treasure hunters must not be allowed to escape.”
“Why not?” one of the bridge crew who sailed the ship asked. “We have the map. Why not just let them go rather than risk an international incident?”
Daedalus shook his head while continuing to pace. “Believe me, while what you say seems reasonable on the surface of it, I know from past experience that these two are quite capable of becoming serious thorns in our side. The implications of the discovery the map leads to are far too profound to assume that anyone privy to its existence will simply walk—or boat—away. They must be neutralized.”
The bridge officer nodded and stepped aside as he brought a radio to his mouth.
To the captain, Daedalus said, “I want the helicopter pilot on standby.”
The captain nodded and barked into an intercom. Then he turned to Daedalus. “He’ll be ready to lift off in five minutes. Really, we can call the boat off after it picks up the man overboard. The chopper will catch up to the boat and we can have a gunner on board to shoot it down.”
“As much as I would like to see that,” Daedalus said, “it will not come to pass.”
“Why not?” The captain appeared perplexed.
“Because the helicopter is to carry me and my new map to Newfoundland, so that I can begin the search for Noah’s Ark.”
Chapter 11
Jayden turned around from his position at the steering console. How close were their pursuers? The two boats were identical makes and models, including the outboard motors, so there was no inherent speed advantage to either vessel. Jayden and Carter had a head start, and as a skilled small boat pilot, Jayden didn’t intend to squander that lead.
“I’d say we’ve got half a football field on them,” Carter estimated from his sitting position on the starboard side pontoon behind Jayden. Black smoke still filtered into the sky from the fire in the moon pool.
Carter eyed their own ship, the R/V Deep Pioneer, looming not far away, still in position over the wreck site. “Try to board our ship?”
Carter eyed the vessel dubiously. “If we do, we’ll just bring the fight to them because Daedalus’ ship will follow. Advise them to get underway and they’ll catch up to us later, unless our chopper reaches us first.”
Jayden nodded and shouted the plan into the radio transmitter while steering the boat out into the open sea. Carter kept watch on their pursuers as well as the enemy ship. When he saw something moving on the Transoceanic, he stared intently at the area until he could make sense of it in the bouncing craft. The realization of what he was looking at sent a chill up his spine. “Helicopter!”
Jayden whipped his head around to get a look at it. The black body with a white logo wrapped around the fuselage blended in somewhat with the smoke that still rose from the oxygen tank fire, but the steady vertical lift was a dead giveaway.
“We can’t outrun that!” Jayden said, stating the obvious.
“Head for our ship!” Carter shouted. Jayden course corrected toward the Deep Pioneer, shaking his head as he mentally calculated how far they would make it before the aircraft overtook them. Not even halfway, he thought. But as the ‘copter levelled out onto a steady course, it became apparent that it was not coming their way.
“What’s it doing?” Jayden wondered aloud as he continued rocketing full throttle toward their ship.
Carter cupped a hand to his mouth to be heard over the racket. “Looks like he’s making a beeline for the mainland.”
“Not complaining,” Jayden shouted over the engine. “But why would he do that?”
Carter stared up at the chopper as it levelled out and accelerated toward the distant North American continent. “Because he’s got the map.”
“Our friends in the other tender are slowing down,” Jayden observed, without slowing their own inflatable boat. Radio chatter erupted at that moment, confirming that the Treasure, Inc. crew had picked up their own overboard crewman.
“Good on them for that, at least,” Carter said a split second before the pursuing Zodiac ramped up speed once again.
“They don’t seem intent on bringing the guy back to the ship right away,” Jayden said, craning his neck to look back past their wake. “I was hoping the chase was over but it doesn’t look like it.”
Carter waved an arm out in front of them. “Keep going, don’t stop!”
Jayden sped past their own ship, waving at their own crew, some of whom were lined up against the rails on deck as they motored past. Jayden picked up the radio after hearing it crackle. “What’s our chopper status?”
“You’re in luck,” Deep Voyager’s radioman came back. “Buzz says he happened to be at a fueling station for a non-critical assignment, and so he’s in the air right now on his way out here.
At that moment a bullet ricocheted off the console after passing inches from Jayden’s head. As he moved down and to the right, a second shot smashed into the radio, darkening the display and ending communication. “We lost comm!” he shouted to Carter, who was already down on deck.
“Keep going,” Carter waved him on. “If we stop to board, they’ll shoot us to pieces.”
“They’re shooting us to pieces anyway!”
“Keep zig-zagging—you got it!” Indeed, Jayden had begun to almost subconsciously weave the spry little boat back and forth in an erratic, unpredictable pattern, making them a more difficult moving target. Carter scrambled over to the console and sneaked a peek at the compass mounted on top in a clear bubble. He gave Jayden a heading number from memory. “That’ll take us straight to St. John’s, Newfoundland. Just head that way until we see our chopper.”
“Be a couple hours at least,” Jayden said.
Carter jerked a thumb back toward the shooters in the chase boat. “Hopefully those guys will give up before then when they realize we’re just leading them out to the middle of nowhere.” Jayden instinctively ducked as he heard another gunshot. The bullet didn’t hit the boat. “Hopefully,” he said, but there was a lack of conviction in his voice.
“Our ship has instructions to follow us back,” Carter said, undaunted. “Even though we’re out of comm, they should still do that. Their work on the wreck site is done, and there’s no physical anchor to pull, so it shouldn’t take them long to get underway.”
Jayden looked back to the Treasure, Inc. ship. “They have our freakin’ sub! How could our work be done?”
Carter shrugged. “I didn’t say it was pretty, but the mission objective has been completed. We recovered the map from the safe. It’s not our fault it was stolen from us afterwards, along with our sub.”
“I hope our client sees it that way,” Jayden said, turning his attention back to eluding their pursuers. They had gained some distance when the Treasure, Inc. tender vessel stopped to pick up their man overboard, putting them physically farther back, but they were still within shooting range. Jayden kept the boat ramped up to full throttle, weaving this way and that but always centering back on the heading to the faraway Newfoundland port.
“How are we on gas?” he asked.
Carter crawled to the back to stay beneath the line of fire and shoved the gas can. “Good. This one’s still half full, and the spare is full, too. That’s one thing we don’t have to worry about right away.”
“Hopefully those guys are almost empty,” Jayden said, but their pursuers showed no signs of slowing even as both tender vessels left their support ships in their wakes.
“Just keep going.”
Chapter 12
Carter shook his head as he spied the enemy craft from a prone position at the back of the inflatable boat. “Looks like they kept that one gassed up the same as ours.”
“They don’t seem to have an ammo shortage, either,” Jayden said, as another gunshot boomed from behind them. The round was lost to the sea, but that didn’t make him feel any safer. For the past two hours, the Treasure, Inc. attackers had kept up a regular volley of shots, intended more to keep Carter and Jayden on edge than to have any real hope of hitting them. The tactic was successful, though, and while Jayden had done a good job of maintaining their lead, the weather had taken a turn for the worse. The squall that was promised on the Titanic site was finally materializing here in the middle of the North Atlantic. Whitecaps dotted the increasing swells, and the motorized rafts rode up and over each wave like rollercoaster cars over hilly tracks. At the peak of each roller was when they were most vulnerable to enemy gunfire.
“Carter, where’s our chopper? Where’s our ship?”
Hunt’s gaze scanned the skies, but the rain that had begun to fall made sighting anything up there problematic at best. Their ship had been out of sight since they left it behind, its top speed being slower than that of the inflatable, although sustainable for a much longer period. As Carter nudged the remaining gas can, after running the first one dry over an hour ago, he knew that they didn’t have long before the ship would catch up to them much quicker indeed. But so would their pursuers. Carter glanced back at them. One of them wore a headlamp, which made them easy to pick out against the rapidly darkening sky.
And then it happened. They heard the faint boom of a shot being fired—still audible at this distance but the meat of the percussive blast was lost to the howling wind and motor noise. But the truly frightening sound was the soft pfffft that came immediately after. As they took a sled-ride down the face of another big swell, Carter felt the tube on the left side of the Zodiac begin to soften beneath his arm.
“Bad news, Jayden: they hit our port side pontoon. We’re losing air.”
“Wonderful!” Jayden yelled as he struggled to keep the frail craft headed into the oncoming swells, lest they turn broadside and be swamped with onrushing water. “This wasn’t difficult enough already, I really needed more of a challenge!”
Another gunshot was the reply to Jayden’s sarcasm, but fortunately this round found only the ocean. Making matters doubly worse, water began to flood into the inflatable raft while the deflated side sagged and was unable to keep out the roiling seawater. Both of the experienced mariners knew that an inflatable boat wouldn’t actually sink, even with all tubes deflated, it would remain floating, but would become an unnavigable piece of drifting debris, offering no control of any kind. It wouldn’t take much for them to be swept off of it by a passing wave.
But their mercenary attackers kept coming, now rapidly closing the gap between the two boats as Jayden and Carter’s craft limped along, flooded with water. Carter began to look around for items with which to mount a last resort defense. “Flares, where’s the flares?” He scrounged around through the console cubbies, and then looked inside the small anchor hold, but found none.
“Figures, these guys don’t follow any laws, including those pertaining to maritime safety,” Carter muttered. Then, out of desperation as the enemy tender neared, he removed the small anchor from the hold. About the size of a large grappling hook, it was connected to a short length of chain which was in turn tied to a long length of manila rope.
He told Jayden to cut the motor. “It’s pointless to keep going, might as well try and mount a defense. Actually, try waving a white flag first. Let them take us alive if they’re willing.”
Regretfully, Jayden stripped off his white T-shirt, with a logo from Sloppy Joe’s, a well-known watering hole in Key West, Florida, and began to swing it around above his head. “All right, I’m waving the white flag of surrender.”
But the act seemed to make no difference, for another gunshot rang out and then the other pontoon began to hiss out the air that was keeping them afloat. Carter was in the process of looping the anchor rope around his arm while gripping the anchor in his other hand, when he realized it was hopeless. The enemy Zodiac pulled up alongside them, manned by four men, three of which pointed pistols straight at them. The boat pilot held a megaphone to his lips and addressed them:
“Nice day for a boat ride, eh?” He laughed along with the rest of his motley crew as a large wave steamrolled over the now deflated dinghy of Carter and Jayden while Treasure, Inc.’s air-filled craft was lifted harmlessly up and over the passing water. Then the sky split open with a crack of lightning, a booming explosion of thunder, and a torrential downpour began to fall.
The motor of Carter and Jayden’s boat sank beneath the waves, no longer supported by the airless tube. The two men now floated in water as if in a bathtub. They were able to support their weight on the submerged mass of rubber, but they were no longer dry. The boat pilot waved an arm at his crew.
“Cease fire, men. There is no need to waste any more bullets on these two. Shooting them would be too kind. Let them finish their boat trip out here in these friendly seas!” He looked up at the darkening sky as the rain drenched his face while another peal of thunder boomed around them.
“No, do not let them go or their ship could pick them up!” one of the crew protested.
“Our own ship is doing battle with them at this very moment! On our way back, we will distract them as well. Let these two scum drown, and it will look like an accident. All the better for us. Let’s go!”
He shot Carter a cold stare before putting the boat into gear and turning away from them, throwing a wake that flooded the stricken vessel even more, drenching Carter’s face with icy ocean water.
“Awesome,” Jayden said, legs floating out in front of him while his elbows rested on the bunched up mass of rubber that used to be their pontoon, as if he were relaxing in a hot tub. No longer wearing a shirt only added to the picture. “This is just great. Real pickle we’re in, Carter. Any ideas?”
The treasure seeker slowly shook his head while he searched his mind in vain for a plan. But the cold water made it difficult to concentrate. “It’ll be dark before too long…” he began, when he was interrupted by a faint sound to the east. He turned that way, coaxing his ears to magnify the noise, but it was lost to the wind and sea spray before returning a few seconds later, a tiny bit louder this time. And more identifiable.
“Helo!” he yelled.
“Hopefully that’s not Daedalus,” Jayden said.
