Breacher (Tom Keeler Book 2) by Jack Lively (reading well TXT) 📕

I saw it from fifteen meters out. A massive underwater net blocking access to the island, difficult to notice against the big blue. I swam closer and began to see details. It was some kind of steel, or compound material. More like a very flexible fence than a net, finished in dull matte gray, but the inside of each link shone. The dive knife would not be effective against it. The net was hung from gunmetal blue floaters at the surface. I couldn’t see the bottom of it. I stopped swimming forward and descended to thirty meters. The underwater fence continued down into the depths, until there was nothing to see but the darkness. Installing that thing had been a major project.

I was not going to get under it, but figured I could go over it.

I swam hard south, parallel to the security net. After five minutes of swimming, I came up to three meters. I slowly surfaced, careful to maintain neutral buoyancy. I wanted only the top of my head and my eyes above the water. I was broadly on target. Coming up on the south side of the island, but approximately two hundred and fifty yards out. I could hardly see the zodiac, anchored about five hundred yards away. The Sea Foam and the skiff were working the net.

I took hold of the thick steel cable at the surface and hauled myself over it and then under again. No way they could notice that at five hundred yards. Back under, I swam hard for the south side of the island, descending at the same time to fifteen meters. I figured it would be a five-minute swim. I relaxed my body and settled into the rhythm, kicking, and breathing.

A minute later, I saw a form in the depths. A shape in the darkness, darker even than the ocean below it. The only thing that could be darker than the deep blue was deep black. The thing had the shape of a thick torpedo, and I knew immediately what I was looking at, a nuclear submarine, five and a half football fields long. I stopped swimming and released air from my lungs and from the vest. I began to descend.

As I got closer, the submarine became clearer.

It was inert and lifeless, and approximately sixty meters down. I got to thirty meters and could see pretty clearly. The cladding had originally been black, but was now covered in barnacles, like the skin of an ancient whale. No shine, nothing coming back but dark malevolence and decades of neglect. It was a salvaged wreck.

I swam along the sub’s axis, from south to north, looking down at the beast. The old submarine was held in place by two enormous arms ending in gigantic clamps that made a C shape around it. The other end of the C clamps were embedded in the rocky edge of the marine trench.

When I had swum up to the middle of it, I could see over to the other side.

The sub and the clamp were encrusted with barnacles and mussels. They looked like they had been submerged for decades. I checked the tank dial. I had used up more than half of my air, a combination of the depth I was at, and the unexpected swim along the submarine. I was not going to make it to the island, but I wanted to see if I could get eyes on the submarine’s markings. Which was not going to be easy given the depth and the age of the thing. I estimated the top of the sub at sixty meters, but to properly read the markings I would need to get down to fifty at least.

I went into a kind of physical trance, barely breathing, my body inert and limp. At the same time, I depressed the buoyancy of my vest and began to sink. I kept an eye on my depth meter. After thirty-five meters, nitrogen compresses enough to pass through the cell walls and enter the blood stream. I felt it hit me at forty meters. Euphoria. On the other hand, oxygen can become toxic after sixty meters. I had to explore efficiently. I needed to swim to the sub’s bow, where the markings would be.

By the time I got there, I was low on air, high on nitrous, and sucking down poisonous oxygen. I was a little light-headed, which was pretty enjoyable. The old submarine came into view more clearly. Green tendrils of algae had attached to the sides along with layers of assorted crustaceans. I could see indentations that I figured were places where the sub had been crushed by the sheer pressure of all the water above it. In the Pacific Ocean, that sub might have been submerged under a mile of water or more.

I saw the residual white traces of the submarine’s identification markings. The identification code was K-349. There was nothing else. I scanned for another minute. Then I broke off and swam due west. The only thing that mattered now was getting over that security net before I ran out of air.

When I hit the net, I was sucking the end of the twin air tanks. I decompressed at ten meters for five minutes, holding on to the net with fingers. I needed to get those nitrogen bubbles out of my blood stream. Five minutes is a long time to hang out when you’ve just found a salvaged nuclear submarine. I was buzzing.

I thought about what Ellie had said about mysteries versus puzzles. With a puzzle you know exactly what you’re missing, with a mystery you don’t even know if there’s a puzzle out there to solve.

Now we had a puzzle inside of a mystery.

Valerie Zarembina, aka Jane Abrams, had worked for the Department of Energy as an investigator, but she wasn’t with Energy anymore. George Abrams had been called in by the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission to consult. Triangulate that with