Trusting Viktor (A Cleo Cooper Mystery) (23 page)

“Yes,” I said. “Phil’s still here, isn’t he?”

“Yup,” Powell put the binoculars back up to his eyes. “The gang is gathering. Hope you can produce one of those rabbits you said you had up your sleeve.”

Grimacing inwardly, I closed the helm door behind us. It was actually two rabbits, he just didn’t know it. “Bad news for SunCo is good for us; something else to divert attention from what we’re doing,” I reminded Viktor.

At the ROV area, we caught another lucky break: the warning sign was posted, which meant Scooter was in the water.

“Keep your eyes peeled,” Viktor said under his breath as he headed for the van door. I kept walking, continuing along the deck to the logging lab.

A look of relief flooded Elton’s face upon my arrival. “Thank heavens you’re here,” he said. “I could use some help since things are really starting to pop around here.”

Not wanting to explain my delay as being due to a shootout at an old folks’ home, I smiled, gave him a pat on the shoulder, and said, “That’s what we’ve been waiting for. What’s the latest gas reading?”

“Well over a hundred units, but I’m fighting just to keep up with the number of samples called for in the contract”—Elton stopped to suck in a breath—“and Grant keeps making my job harder by raising the bit and mixing up the samples at the annulus.”

“Calm down, you’re about to blow a valve yourself. Try cutting your sample rate to less than six an hour. About the mixing, have you talked to Grant?”

“No.”

“
What have I told you about communication? Let’s go find him,” I said, eager to get back on deck and be within sight of the ROV van. I made little progress, though. Just as I stepped out with Elton on my heels, I nearly collided with David Grant. “Ah, just the man you’re looking for, Elton,” I said. “Explain your concerns.” I stepped back from the two of them to where I could see the door to the ROV van. Pulling out my iPhone, I pretended to check for messages. Lo and behold, there was one. A text from Pierce:

Heads up. Duchamp and sons out of custody.

Great. A crazy guy and his two almost-as-crazy sons were back on the loose gunning for me. With an eye trained on the van, I hit redial for Pierce. He answered on the first ring.

“What do you mean ‘out of custody’? Did he get a lawyer?” I asked.

“Well, technically he wasn’t in our custody yet. Remember, Raleigh PD had jurisdiction. I had to wait until they charged him with the firearms violation before I could—”

Was he being intentionally obtuse? “Well, what? Didn’t they charge him? I thought it was against the law to draw a firearm on a policeman in a public place, especially after said firearm accidentally discharges. Might I remind you it was only by the grace of God that none of us were hit.”

Pierce made a little exasperated sound, then snapped, “I mean, he’s out of custody because he was never in. He … escaped first.”

Good Lord. “How?”

“That’s not important.”

“You posted a guard at his door, didn’t you?”

“I imagine Raleigh PD would have,” Pierce said. “Turns out he wasn’t as incapacitated as we thought, so he never made it from ICU to his room where the guard was.”

“Where do you think he went?”

“I don’t think, I
know
,” Pierce barked.

“Okay, let’s hear it.”

“Knowing how all you oil people fly everywhere in helicopters, Myers and I checked at RDU and, sure enough, he hopped one to Morehead. We also found out through Fish and Wildlife that he recently applied for registration for a new boat, a very fancy Fountain. Turns out he keeps it in Morehead, too, so our guess is he’ll try to use it to vamoose to Louisiana and territory he’s more familiar with, where he thinks he can hide from us.”

“You don’t think he’d come out here?”

“Look, I already know he’s taken the boat and gone. It’s only a forty-minute chopper ride to Morehead from Raleigh, and the marina owner says his boat’s been gone about an hour. Left with three men aboard. Don’t worry, Ms. Cooper. We’ve called in the Coast Guard. We’ll find him, and when we do, I’m going to get to the bottom of all this.”

“I hope so, because—as I’m sure you’re aware, you being on top of this and all—the ROV team wears bright orange jumpsuits and—”

Just then, the ROV team trooped out of the van on their break. I looked back to Grant and Elton. They motioned that they were headed to the DC. I signaled back that I’d be right along.

“And …” Pierce wanted to know.

“You figure it out. Gotta go.” I hung up my iPhone and made a beeline for Viktor and the ROV van. On the way, I tried to come to grips with the thought that one or both of the handsome Duchamp twins could actually have tossed Hunter overboard. Why? Was it, as their dad had said, that he’d gotten too pushy? Was it they who’d returned my limp, unconscious body to my room, knowing it’d be easy enough to frame me for his death?

Viktor was already at Scooter’s controls as it prowled 2,200 feet below us. “Oh my God!” he exclaimed. “It
is
right here. Practically right under us.”

“Where?” I said, joining him in front of the monitor.

“Look how compressed it is from the pressure at this depth, and the damage,” he breathed. “God, looks like a direct hit on the port side. It literally blew part of the bow off.”

The ghostly images unfolding before me as Scooter cruised over
U-498
were far different from the ones Henri and I had seen when we dove the wreck of
U-352
. Here, instead of the abundant marine life that had made a home in that sub, only fine barnacles, silt, and rustlicles—a type of bacteria that eats iron and creates a tube structure of rust—were present. Even knowing we only had about thirty minutes to find our treasure, the two of us stared in awe.

“Damn!” Viktor said. “The part of the bow that’s missing is the part that contained the torpedo tube we’re looking for. We have to find it to find the cylinder.”

As the robot reached the forward end of the mangled vessel, I saw an eerie sight: a boot standing upright, all alone in the far reaches of the light field about 25 feet to starboard. Just then Viktor sucked in a short breath as the ROV caught a strong current and pitched down violently. “Shit!” Clouds of sediment billowed around the ROV then quickly blew forward in the torrential currents. “Okay, let’s play
follow-the-mud-cloud. Maybe the current will lead us to where the bow landed.”

As the wrecked hull disappeared from the monitor, another shadow appeared. “Wait!” I said. “What’s that off to port about twenty feet?”

“I see it.” Viktor pushed the juice to the aft thrusters, and Scooter glided forward to illuminate a large side plate of twisted metal. Its rivets, though still in place, had been severed as cleanly as though they been made of putty.

“A little farther out,” I said, picturing the site survey in my mind. Scooter swayed in the water column as Viktor maneuvered it through the relentless snow of a miniscule percentage of the trillions upon trillions of tiny plants and animals that live and die in the world’s oceans. They sink to the seafloor every minute of every day and have since life began: fuel for another day, millions of years from now.

“I bet that’s it,” he said as another dark shape slowly became
visible in the bright headlights.

“It is!” I practically shouted, recognizing the snub-nosed shape of the sub’s bow, which lay keel down. Other than being blown away from the rest of the sub, the starboard side looked remarkably undamaged. As Viktor carefully sent the robot over the remains, the light exposed the openings of the once-lethal torpedo tubes. They resembled the air scoops on a ’57 Buick, except these had square edges, not curved ones. At the severed end of the wreckage, unrecognizable debris was scattered everywhere. Once Viktor directed the lights into the opening, we could see the hatch doors to the four torpedo tubes.

Only one was open.

Twenty-Four

“The professor did say
the cylinder was packed into the top starboard tube, didn’t he?”

“Sure did,” I said, surprised at the size of the tube. It was as big around as my body. I was practically salivating to somehow magically slide inside it and collect its contents.

“Only one way to tell,” Viktor said, reversing Scooter’s thrusters and backing it to a better position. “See any light coming out?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Nope.”

“Wait,” Viktor said. He flipped a switch on his control board, which turned off the starboard headlight. “What about now?”

We were squinting at the monitor when suddenly I thought to check Mickey on my wrist. Uh-oh.

“Holy crap! Twenty-eight minutes have already gone by. Ray and the boys will be back any second now! Pull away from the wreck!” I jumped up, scurried to the van door, and peeked out. They were nowhere in sight. I looked back at Viktor, saw the frustration on his face. “There’s nothing to do but come back later. I’m headed to the DC. Text me or call me when you can get Scooter again.”

Just before I left I said, “Oh, I almost forgot. I got a call from that detective that found us with Coester. He said apparently Duchamp’s head wound and concussion weren’t bad enough to slow him down much and that he and the twins had
‘
left’ their custody before they could be further questioned.”

“Left. You mean they escaped?”

“Well, technically, no one has been arrested. But, yes, they left before Pierce could take their statements. It was up to him to then arrest Duchamp if he felt the incident at the nursing home justified it.”

Viktor turned back to the monitor. “Did he say where they went?”

Scanning the catwalk for the returning ROV team, I said, “He says he’s sure they’ve gone back to Louisiana because their boat is gone. I hope he’s right.”

He shook his head and said, “It would be very unlike Davy to give up without a fight.”

Then, hearing the voices of the team, I told him, “Here they come. Gotta go!”

Figuring Elton had returned to the logging lab, I was heading that way when I heard the pitch of the drill increase and I knew a break—when the rate of penetration increases—was about to occur. We were entering our reservoir, though it would be a little while before the computer printouts showed it.

Once at the lab, I wasn’t surprised to find Elton freaking out again. His eyes bulged behind his glasses, giving him the look of a lunatic. Jonathan, the mudlogger currently on duty, was watching the monitors like a coyote watching a ground squirrel. “I think we’re fixing to get a break,” he drawled.

“Uh-oh. I should recalculate lag time,” Elton said. Jonathan rolled his eyes.

“So, go do it!” I said. “They’ll be making a connection in the next few minutes.”

“Right,” Elton said and dashed off for the supply room down by the shakers.

“That boy is going to make a fair enough wellsite geologist when he learns to settle down a bit and just go with the flow,” Jonathan commented.

“He’s determined, I’ll give him that,” I said.

Just then, there was a knock at the door. Jonathan looked at me and raised his eyebrows. I opened the pressurized door, saw Viktor, and stepped out to him.

“There’s good news and bad news,” he said.

“Okay, good news first.”

“In two hours, Ray and the boys have to go over some new procedures on capping off a well. He said I could continue to practice docking maneuvers while they’re gone.”

“Great,” I said, checking my watch. “The bad news?”

“They’ll only be gone for another thirty to forty minutes. Then they’re going to put Scooter up because that’s the end of their shift.”

I swallowed hard. “We’ll find it by then. I know we will.”

Just then Elton appeared out of nowhere. “We’re out of carbides!”

“How can you be out? You’re in charge of supplies for the mud-
loggers!”

“I miscalculated?”

“Well, that’s one way to learn,” I sighed.

“What should I do? If I can’t make accurate logs, we’ll have to stop drilling until I can get some flown out here from Morehead.”

Imagining all the bigwigs on board waiting for word on whether Global would survive or not, I quickly nixed that plan. “No. Don’t do that,” I said. “Go up to the galley. Ask cook to spare you a bag of rice. Put that down the well. It’ll work just as well. Then call Wanda at shorebase. You’ve established a good working relationship with her, haven’t you?” He nodded. “Good. She’ll send some carbides on the next flight out that’ll get you through until the supply boat gets here.”

He scurried off, and I turned back to Viktor, “So text me when you get access to Scooter again. Until then, hang out either here or in the DC. Of course, it’s a bit crowded in here and there’s Elton to contend with. Tell him you’ll help bag and label samples. That’ll calm him down a bit.”

“Where are you going to be?”

“I’ve got to go find Phil Gregson, the senior geologist.”

I paused when I reached the landing at
Magellan
’s top level. Almost to the horizon, SunCo’s
Able Leader
was visible, positively glowing in the orange light of the setting sun. I wondered if they’d resumed drilling. The sound of another helicopter approaching quickly brought me back to the tasks at hand.

“Phil,” I said upon entering the conference room where most the well data was stored. “Data will be coming in during the next hour that’ll show us in the reservoir.”

Phil jumped up. “Great! I haven’t been down yet. I’ve been working on other projects all day. How do you feel about it? Any readings yet on gas content?”

“They’ll be starting to come in soon. Assuming the lag time’s correct—and Elton’s seeing to that right now—we’ll have a good idea of where to take another side core for rock eval.”

“Sounds good.” He started to pace nervously.

I checked my watch, counting the minutes until I could rejoin Viktor and the ROV. I was thinking maybe around two hours.

“Today’s going to be a great day for this company,” Phil said.

Soon we were joined by Duncan Powell, Braxton Roberts, and other Global honchos who wanted to discuss a press conference. Later, when the discussions turned away from my area of expertise to creating the nonexisting infrastructure for delivering the gas to shore, I checked my watch. The two hours were almost up, so I excused myself. Just as I reached the door, Bud came through it.

“Where are you going?” he whispered as I slipped past him. “I need to talk to you.”

I should have planned on Bud’s being included in this discussion group, but with so much going on, I just hadn’t thought that far ahead. As usual, I was running headlong, making adjustments when needed. But what kind of adjustment was needed when one’s ex-husband and current lover were both on board the same ship, I wasn’t sure.

“I can’t right now,” I said. “We’ve hit our target. The first cuttings have come up by now, and I need to be with the wellsite geologist.”

He followed me outside the conference room. “What’s the plan?”

“Well, first off, you stay up here out of the way …”

Bud squinted at me.

“With the investors, I mean, and I’ll send word up when we get to the bottom of the reservoir. We have equipment on board that’ll give reliable estimates for all the biggest questions; namely, is the gas dry and abundant enough to put Global in the black? After that, if everything looks good, they’ll run logs for days to be certain about what we have.”

“Text me when you can get free for dinner.”

“Uh, okay. Later,” I said. I waited until he’d closed the door behind him, then booked it for the ROV van.

Two roughnecks dodged aside to avoid colliding with me as I raced by them. Breathless as I reached the door, I thought twice about opening it. I didn’t want to startle Viktor and cause him to crash the huge ROV into something delicate … like a friggin’ torpedo. I briefly wondered if the other three tubes were still armed. I softly pushed the door open. Viktor was biting his bottom lip as he manipulated Scooter’s controls.

“Cylinder’s definitely in the tube,” Viktor told me as I entered. “There was some other rotted debris like old wooden boxes in there too, but they were within easy reach and I pulled them out of the way. Cylinder is a bit farther up in the tube.”

I gave a fleeting thought to the top-secret military documents those wooden boxes were thought to contain. Now disintegrated, the horrors they’d likely reveal and the lessons to humanity were lost to the sea forever. But then the reality of the enormous find within our grasp overcame me, and I was giddy with excitement.

“The trouble is, I can’t reach it from either end,” he said. “So I’m looking for a piece of railing that I saw in the debris field between the main part of the wreckage and the bow. I think it’s long enough to use to push the cylinder out the exit end.”

He navigated Scooter along the bottom, using the levers to illuminate first left, then right until he found the railing. Manipulating the stainless-steel pincers on the jointed arm,Viktor grasped the railing, spun Scooter around like a jouster with a javlin, and made a beeline for the torpedo tube again.

“Good job!” I said, my adrenaline pumping so hard I was panting.

“I hope it’s long enough to reach,” he said, inserting it in the tube.

“Wait!” I said.

He jumped. “What?”

“You don’t think there could be any explosives in there, do you?”

“Like what? The torpedo is gone. This is just the tube.”

“Well … I don’t know anything about bombs and warheads and stuff like that. But the sub was pretty wrecked. Do you think there could be pieces of the other torpedoes in there or something?”

Viktor gave me the same look my older brother used to give me when I asked girly questions. “No,” he said, “there couldn’t be. If you’ll just …”

“Yeah, yeah. I know,” I said. “Trust you.”

“Right,” he said, and rammed the railing into the tube.

Tap, tap, tap
. Viktor and I froze at the sound of someone tapping lightly on the door. We stared at each other. “Who could it be?”

“Not Ray and the boys,” I said, standing. “They wouldn’t knock.” I opened the door and poked my head out.

Bud.

“What are you doing here?” I was accusatory. “I told you to stay upstairs.”

“I know but—”

“No,” I snapped. “Obviously, you don’t know.”

“Huh?”

“Can’t you read?”

“Read what?”

“That,” I said, pointing to the
no admittance when ROV is operating
sign.

“How would I know if the ROV is operating?”

Pushing him back a few feet and pulling the door closed behind me, I said, “Do you see the ROV anywhere?”

Bud looked around, feigning serious observation. “No, I don’t,” he said.

“Then it must be down below, huh?”

“Makes sense.” A big grin spread across his face. “Actually I came up here looking for you and … your friend.”

“Friend?”

“A guy named Elton said you might be with your friend, an ROV pilot.” His voice held curiosity. “Viktor, I believe he said was his name. Have I met your friend Viktor?” he asked pointedly.

My adrenalin rush doubled down. I stepped to the railing to steady myself. “Uh, no,” I said. “No, you haven’t. I was looking for him too, but he isn’t in there.” The wind, continuing to gain in strength, now whipped my ponytail about my face and I realized I didn’t have my hard hat on.

I slapped my hand on top of my head. “Jeez, I’ve got to get my hat and you need to go.” I looked below to see if anyone, like a safety inspector, had seen me. That’s when I spotted Davy Duchamp.

He was talking to Braxton Roberts. Their conversation looked heated. This last surprise sent me into lightheaded land. Bud, following my line of sight, startled me even further by shouting down to them. “Braxton! Davy!”

Oh my god. “Bud! What are you doing? Do you know that man with Braxton?”

“Of course I do. Name’s Davy Duchamp, from SeaTrek. He’s an investor.”

“Investor?”

“Yes. It’s quite common for oil companies to take other companies in as investors,” he explained impatiently. “Especially those with an ongoing stake in a project.”

I looked down again for the two men, but they’d disappeared. Clumping sounds on the stairs to my right let me know where they were headed. I grabbed Bud’s arm and turned him in their direction. “I hear your friends coming. You shouldn’t be up here and neither should they. Why don’t you go head them off, let them know the ROV’s down. I need to go find my hat. Oh, and Bud?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t mention me to them, okay?”

“Okay,” he said, drawing the word out dubiously. “But what about dinner?”

“Maybe later,” I called over my shoulder just before I descended the stairs at the opposite end of the catwalk. Halfway down, I stopped. I knew I’d be leaving Viktor in a vulnerable position, yet at the same time I desperately needed to talk with Bud … alone. I had to find out what he knew about Duchamp, who was obviously here looking for Viktor and me.

What if Duchamp looked in the van? What would he do? He’d already pulled a gun. I needed to think. I sat down on the stairs and tried to make out what the three men were saying. I couldn’t. But when metallic clumping at the other end of the catwalk told me they were leaving, relief washed over me. I tiptoed back up the stairs and peeped over the railing to make sure the coast was clear before entering the van.

“Davy’s here!” I told Viktor as I closed the door.

“I knew it,” he said. “I knew he wouldn’t give up so easily.”

“How much time do you think we have left?”

“About fifteen minutes by my calculations, but I’ll make it. I’ve already pushed out the packing that was jammed in the torpedo exit and I’m pulling it apart now, looking for the cylinder.”

“Great!” I said, jumping back into my chair to watch him operate the hand-sized duplicate of Scooter’s jointed manipulating arms. With the plastic arm resting against his thumb, he opened and closed the pinchers, shredding the rotted material. Then, in the flash of an eye, the cylinder rolled out of the murky cloud of mangled wadding and silt onto the sea floor, looking just as it had in the photo when Erich Koch handed it to young Gerhard Coester back in 1945.