Anandur
Underwater approaches were far from his favorite, especially at night and in enclosed spaces.
It had been bad enough out in the open ocean, but there was something about the way sound carried in here, strange and muffled, that put him on edge.
He preferred a fight he could see coming, on solid ground, with room to swing, but the cove was the only hidden route onto the island, and they were lucky to have found out about it.
This mission would have been much more difficult, probably impossible, if they didn't have this option.
He pulled the rebreather from his mouth, breathed in the dank air, and looked around.
Navuh's slick submarine dominated the area, tethered to an iron ring at the edge of the stone shelf and gleaming in the artificial weak light of the cove.
It was a four-person craft with a teardrop hull and a clear canopy and lines that belonged in a billionaire's marina rather than a cave.
Navuh's personal escape pod, kept ready for the day the island turned on him or the clan finally launched an attack and his forces lost. If everything fell apart, he'd come down through the tunnel with Areana and abandon everyone on the island to fend for themselves.
That had been the plan, but that was not how things had turned out for Navuh.
Areana had stumbled and fallen, and Navuh had leaped off the cliff after her, thinking she'd plummeted to her death. She hadn't because Yamanu had caught her, but Navuh nearly had. The clan had collected his mangled, dying body off the rocks and saved his life.
Shifting his gaze from the luxurious vehicle, Anandur looked at the surveillance cameras mounted high on the cove walls.
The tech crew had surfaced ahead of the main element and looped the feed, so anyone monitoring it, if anyone did, saw nothing of note.
They were going ahead of the rest of the team and doing the same to all the other cameras mounted along the tunnel.
The chances of anyone watching the feed were small, because it only went to Navuh's private terminal, which Losham now controlled, but it was better not to take chances and handle everything properly.
They weren't an amateur operation, and since Turner had joined the clan, their operational sophistication had truly become unmatched.
Anandur hauled himself up onto the stone shelf above the waterline and reached down to give Brody a hand up.
The shelf was bigger than it had looked in the simulation, a broad flat tongue of rock that ran back into the cliff, and it was already filling with Guardians shedding their dive gear.
The Odus came up after the Guardians, Okidu and Onidu breaking the surface in their dive gear, breathing apparatus and all, riding their scooters like pros.
Their dense, part-mechanical bodies sank like anvils, and no one wanted a repeat of what had happened to Okidu during Carol's rescue mission.
He'd sunk to the bottom, and they'd had to drag him to the vessel and then pull him up with the use of a winch.
The result was a reboot that unlocked hidden protocols the Odus' creator had embedded in their neural network, leading to sentience.
Thankfully, the experience hadn't made Okidu wary of deep water.
He was as eager as always to be of service, and so was Onidu, who had also been rebooted by being dunked in a bathtub by Okidu and was gaining sentience along with his brother.
As soon as the Odus were done stripping off their wetsuits and diving equipment, they turned to assist with hauling up the waterproof casings. They weren't heavy, and in their deflated state they were also easy to maneuver. Both those variables would change once the chests were encased inside.
The Odus stacked them next to the dive gear.
Pavel came up over the lip of the shelf next, his usually olive-toned skin looking greenish, and not because of the dim, artificial illumination of the cove.
Like the Odus, the Kra-ell didn't float. Unless they put forth a lot of effort, their dense bodies sank, so naturally, they avoided deep water.
"I really hate the ocean," Pavel said after removing his rebreather. "I hate everything about it."
"Where is Drova?" Anandur asked.
"Right behind me. She got annoyed when I stayed too close to her."
"Ouch." Anandur chuckled. "Do you have that effect on all females?"
Pavel grimaced. "Not at all. Just the one that counts."
"Oy." Anandur put a hand over his chest. "Do I smell love in the air?"
"You smell mold."
When Drova surfaced a few minutes later, she pulled off her mask and looked around the cove with a flat expression that gave nothing away. If she'd been scared down there, and Anandur would have bet that she had been, she wouldn't let anyone know.
Pavel was smart enough not to offer Drova a hand up, and she climbed onto the shelf effortlessly.
Julian was next, surfacing with his sealed medical pack strapped across his back.
"How was it?" Anandur asked.
Julian shrugged. "I wouldn't do it for fun, but it was okay. I just hope that after this mission I won't have to dive for a very long time."
While the Odus organized the gear, Brody drifted over to the submarine and ran a hand along the hull. "Shame we can't take her home. I bet Julian wouldn't mind diving in this beauty."
The physician cast a glance at the luxury vehicle. "That's right." He turned to Anandur. "Is there anything stopping us from taking it?"
"It has a biometric lock keyed to Navuh," Yamanu said.
"We could have taken his fingerprints and retina scan and used them to open it, but it also requires a code that only he knows.
Regrettably, he is immune to compulsion, so getting it out of him wasn't an option.
" He looked at the sub bobbing gently on the water.
"As nice as it is, it's not worth the effort. It's just a fancy toy."
"I could have gotten the code out of him the old-fashioned way." Anandur punched his fist into his palm. "And enjoyed every moment of it."
Brody chuckled. "I would have helped, but that old bastard is tough. I doubt he would have cracked."
Anandur smiled. "Does it matter? It would have been tremendously satisfying to beat the crap out of him."
The problem was Areana, and Annani's promise to her sister to show Navuh mercy he didn't deserve. What he deserved was an eternity in hell for all the suffering he'd caused over the last five thousand years.
"We should move out," Yamanu said after reporting to the war room that everyone had made it safely to the cove. "The tech crew is probably halfway down the tunnel by now."
The entrance to the side tunnel that led down to the cove was narrow, but the incline wasn't too bad, and the march to the mansion got underway.
Lights came up automatically as they passed them, but given that the tech crew had already taken care of this section, the motion detection activated nothing other than the bulbs.
The tunnel smelled just as Anandur had expected, of salt and mold, the way places that never saw the sun did. When the incline ended, the narrow tunnel coming up from the cove met the main one, which was wide enough for a vehicle to drive through, and it was paved, which made their march easier.
Anandur and Yamanu led the procession, with the Guardians and Kra-ell sandwiched between them and the Odus, who brought up the rear, carrying the heavy digging gear.
There was probably enough of it on site, but just in case the digging crews stored their equipment for the night, the team brought everything they needed with them.
After about an hour, they caught up to the tech crew, and after another hour and a half, they reached the end of the tunnel, where the jeep was parked.
"We have arrived at the mansion side," Yamanu reported to the war room. "Going in."
A door led to the basement, or so Anandur hoped.
Eluheed and Tony had never gone to the other side of the tunnel, so they didn't know what was on the mansion side of it, and Kian didn't want to ask Losham or Number One because neither of them was supposed to know about the clan coming to retrieve the chests.
They were both under the impression that the clan wanted them to deliver the chests to one of the ships in the harbor.
Once there, Yamanu held up a fist to signal for everyone to be quiet, put his ear to the rock, and listened.
"Seems clear," he said after a moment, and looking at Anandur, he received a confirming nod. He too did not sense anyone on the other side of the access door.
There was no handle, and Yamanu felt along the panel until he found the catch, and the panel swung outward on silent hinges.
Beyond it was not the basement but a cramped square of a space with a tight spiral staircase climbing up into the dark on one side.
Those must be Navuh's private stairs, leading straight up to his quarters or his office.
After all, he'd made the journey from the harem to the mansion and back on a daily basis, and he'd somehow kept it a secret.
What had his people thought he was doing? Beaming himself from one place to another?
Anandur shook his head. Losham knew about the tunnel, and his so-called brothers must have suspected its existence. They were dead now, but Anandur had no doubt that the junior brothers suspected it too.
The tech crew entered the space first and checked for cameras but found none in the stair landing. There was a second door, set into the opposite wall, with a coded lock beside it.
That one most likely led into the basement.
Yamanu put his ear to it and listened.
The tech guys worked the lock, which was a simple keypad, not biometric, and easy to disable. They were done in under a minute.
The door released, and the smell of dust, rust, and lingering immortal sweat rolled out to meet them.
"We are in the basement," Yamanu reported to Onegus as they moved in.