Retribution Road by Jon Coon (e reader comics .TXT) 📕

it, a rain of bullets hit the fiberglass hull, some penetrating and ricocheting into the cabin. Eduardo, the engineman, was hit in the chest and dropped to the deck, screaming in agony.

Cristóbal ignored him and ran to the ballast control valves, opening them to full volume. He revved the diesel engine and put the sub into a power dive. They were still taking fire from the surface, and the crew hid under anything they could find.

As the sub dropped below twenty feet, the hammering stopped, but they were taking on water through several bullet holes. Sebastian pulled off his shirt and tore it into rags that he pounded into the holes as temporary patches. With the worst of the leaks plugged, he turned his attention to the wounded shipmate.

The round had entered Eduardo’s left breast, and Sebastian could hear air wheezing in and out of the boy’s chest. He put pressure on the wound and yelled for the first aid kit and duct tape. The younger men were in shock or frozen with fear. Sebastian yelled again to get them moving.

“Help me sit him up,” he said, and after making a patch of gauze, he taped it in place with the duct tape. They moved the boy to one of the bunks and placed him on the injured side.

“I don’t want to die,” he cried repeatedly.

Sebastian knelt beside the bunk and offered the only pain meds they had. After taking them, the boy’s crying stopped, and he asked, “How bad is it?”

“We got your bleeding stopped, and your lung’s not collapsed. I think you will be okay,” Sebastian lied. “There are medics on the Anna Christine. When we can move you, they will take good care of you. Just lie on the side where you were wounded and try to rest.”

Sebastian went to the helm beside Cristóbal. “What’s your plan?” he asked.

“How much time do we have before it blows?” Cristóbal asked.

Sebastian checked his watch. “Eighteen minutes.”

“We need to get out of this channel, but I’m afraid the Navy will be waiting when we get to open water. What should we do?”

“Run for it. There’s no choice. If we stay here, we die.”

Released from the hospital, Dr. Alethea Laveau-Guidry sat up in bed, startled as if she had seen a ghost … again. The bedroom was lit only with one small nightlight on a nightstand, but she could hear rain pounding on the windows and see lightning flashing across the walled courtyard of her Garden District home in New Orleans.

Thunder followed seconds later, and the old home shook in the violence of a summer storm. Alethea propped up her pillows and sat back to watch. Fragments of her dream returned, and they were unwelcome intruders, not happily greeted guests. Her heart was heavy as the pieces of the sleep-veiled revelation came together. Gabe was in trouble. She didn’t know where he was or what he was doing, but only foreboding walked with him. Gabe was in trouble. She closed her eyes and began softly singing an old hymn in French.

Gabe descended to the sub’s hull and landed gently on the conning tower. He dumped the rest of his buoyancy compensator’s air, knelt, and took off his fins and stuffed them into the faring around the hatch. He looked with the bright cave light into the hull, turned, and dropped down the short ladder. At once the memories of the New Orleans school bus returned. He could see dead children, books and lunch boxes, loose clothing in the aisle, and the decomposing bodies. His chest tightened, and he couldn’t breathe.

He pointed the cave light at his feet and closed his eyes.

As he forced himself to draw deeply from the regulator until his breathing came normally again, he recalled Alethea’s soft voice singing in French. He opened himself to her spirit, and a wave of calm enveloped him. He opened his eyes and slowly raised the light.

This time he saw the boxes of Semtex stacked and secured down the center of the narrow deck. He saw white, hundred-grain Primacord pigtails tied into a trunk line that led to a waterproof box he presumed was the timer and detonator.

He took the toolkit out of his leg pocket and found the DuPont Primacord cutter, a custom tool for making clean cuts of the plastic-coated explosive core. He started forward, but then remembered the tripwires on the old bridge. The ones that had killed his partner, Charlie.

He froze and swept the aisle carefully with the powerful cave light. Confident the aisle was clear, he stepped forward and cut the first pigtail from the trunk line and then pulled the pigtail from the Semtex box. At the inserted end was a number 8 blasting cap, just as he had expected. One down, ten to go. Moving very cautiously, he clipped and removed the remaining ten and then approached the sealed detonator box. He clipped the trunk line and decided to leave the box in place. He checked his computer. He was at 110 feet and out of bottom time. His air was good, so there was time for a deco stop on the way up, and he wanted a better look at the inside of the sub on his way out.

At the helm, he made an intriguing discovery. The radio and the Garmin navigation system were smashed. “Why?”

He looked for any notebooks or charts and found nothing. “Someone was being careful.”

He checked his computer again. He was now in the red with deco required. He ascended the hatch, retrieved his fins, and rose slowly toward the surface, watching his computer to control his ascent rate. He leveled at twenty feet beside the tanker’s hull and began the fifteen-minute stop. His air was nearly gone when the computer said it was safe to surface. He did so and found Tom in an inflatable with two suited divers.

“We were getting worried. I was about to send them in after you.”

“Got it. I think we’re