CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE #2
On the surface, Mo drew a wide circle in the air and slashed through its northeast quadrant.
Break the feed there. Garrett turned his head enough to see.
He plunged deeper, driving his arms into cold layers below the heated skin, then twisted his wrists.
The sea around them buckled. Warm water streamed southwest while cooler water welled up in its place, roughening the surface in long dark seams.
Garrett felt the difference. The humid inflow shuddered where it crossed the cooling water.
He raised one hand toward the clouds and swept the other southwest, not pushing the gale head-on now but opening a channel through it.
The wind curled around his body. Spray spiraled upward in a narrow column.
Far above, unseen inside the rain, the storm’s lower clouds began to lean. The shift was tiny—a fraction of a degree across miles of rotating air—but Montana’s instruments caught it. The projected track flickered. Louisiana remained inside the impact cone. The centerline trembled west.
Lightning struck the sea a hundred yards away.
White fire filled every visor. The concussion hit underwater, sharp and physical.
Nash seized. His grip on the current broke.
Garrett’s wind channel collapsed and snapped back with a roar.
Mo’s display went blank. For several seconds there was only rain, blackness, and the brutal rise and fall of the anchor line.
Below, Montana’s tactical glass dissolved into static. The three biometric traces vanished. She ripped the dead communications lead from its socket, opened the backup hydrophone circuit, and listened. Turbine noise. Hull strain. The distant grinding thunder of the storm. No locator pings.
She engaged the emergency winch for half a second, stopped, then engaged it twice more. One pull. Two pulls. The pattern traveled up the tether: alive, position held.
Mo felt the rhythm through his harness. He found Nash floating face down at the limit of his line and rolled him over. Nash’s eyes opened. Mo raised a fist between them, then slowly opened it. Breathe. Nash’s chest hitched. The regulator bubbled.
Garrett surfaced ten feet away, one arm wrapped around the drogue line.
Mo extended two fingers toward him, pointed to Nash then crossed both forearms. Wait.
Garrett shook his head violently. He pointed northeast, where lightning now strobed without pause.
Then he held up five fingers and closed them one by one.
Five minutes. Maybe less.
Nash pushed Mo’s hand away and turned back to the water.
This time he did not reach for the surface alone.
He followed the cold upwelling Montana had found beneath them, traced it down through pressure and darkness, and hooked his awareness into that moving layer.
His body arched. The sea lifted around all three men in a broad, rising dome.
When the dome collapsed, it collapsed southwest. A river formed inside the ocean, invisible except for the way wave crests turned and ran along it.
Warm surface water peeled away from the storm’s eastern feed and stretched toward the central Gulf.
Nash screamed into his mouthpiece, but the wind tore the sound away.
Garrett watched the changed waves, read their angle, and mirrored them with both hands.
He pulled the inflow down and southwest, then split his arms wide above his head.
The air responded in layers. Low wind bent first, racing along the new path over the water.
Higher wind resisted, twisted, and finally began to shear across the storm’s northeast side.
The hurricane recoiled. A descending burst punched a crater into the sea beside them.
The anchor drogue tore free. Their triangle collapsed.
Mo saw the steel remains of a buoy mast tumbling through the spray and kicked his DPU to maximum.
He struck Garrett in the ribs and drove him clear.
The mast caught Mo’s shoulder and spun him away, trailing a ribbon of bubbles from a torn suit valve.
Garrett reached for him. Mo slashed his palm sideways. No. He pointed to Nash, then southwest. Continue. With his other hand he clamped the leaking valve against his shoulder.
Montana felt Nash’s work through the hull.
The submersible surged sideways as the new current took it.
She used the movement, rotating emergency ballast between tanks until the vessel aligned with the flow.
With one thruster dead and the other overheating, she could no longer hold directly beneath them.
She could only stay close enough to recover whoever came down.
The navigation glass recovered in fragments. Coastline. Pressure contours. A broken storm track. The centerline had moved nineteen miles west, then stopped. Louisiana’s coast still glowed beneath the eastern edge of the projected eyewall.
Montana stared at the remaining battery reserve. Twelve percent. She could spend it on ascent, or on one full-power pulse through the keel vanes to amplify Nash’s southwest current. If she used it now, the submersible might not climb under its own power.