14. Chapter 14
14
Chapter 14
Sean
Before sunset, Sean, Gray, Knox, and Wolfe we’re on the ocean heading for the Rey Del Mar . The shipwreck was a good hour out, and Sean wanted to reach it before dark. They may be short on time, but any salvager worth his salt didn’t start salvaging from a boat until they knew what they were up against.
The sky was just starting to darken before any of them spoke.
“Are you seeing this boat behind us?” Knox asked.
A good two miles behind them, which appeared little more than a dot in the distance, a boat headed in the same direction as them. Sean had spotted it a while ago. Its navigation lights gave it away. He had been hoping it was a coincidence, but the farther they got out, the less he believed that it was. Which was why he’d started steering off in a different direction.
“Yeah, I see it.” And it was a liability. They couldn’t risk leading some curious ne’er do well to the treasure. “If they don’t turn off soon, we’ll have to scrap the mission for now.”
“We don’t have time for this,” Gray snapped.
As a SEAL unit, the guys had faced many situations that had big countdown clocks hanging over them. Two hours to deliver a message. Five hours to stop enemy combatants from completing a mission. Twenty-four hours to extract a prince from a foreign country where an assassination attempt had just been made on his life. Over time they’d gotten used to bearing the weight of such countdowns, but this was different.
In the past, they’d always been able to stay emotionally detached from their missions. It was part of what made their unit of twenty-three men so effective. But now it was just the six of them plus one retiree, Ryker. They’d spent the better part of a year looking out for, protecting, and becoming friends with Ryker, learning about his people and to care for them, and searching for this treasure that would save their country from being overrun by a dictator.
Finding this huge part of Isola’s treasury wouldn’t fix all of the problems happening in the country, but it would be a big step in the right direction. And they were invested now in making sure that happened.
So, they now had a little less than thirty-six hours until the hurricane hit, and another shorter timer, maybe another two minutes, counting down to when they would have to go off course if they were really being followed.
“That’s not Titan?” Gray said.
Sean shook his head and gritted his teeth. While the boat was almost too far away to make out details, Sean could tell that this was not one of Titan Green’s black boats. This boat was light—maybe white or yellow.
They were all tense as that second clock counted down to the turnoff, and that tension was made even worse by the group’s exhaustion. As soon as they’d finished preparing for the dive, they’d all split off to help the community prepare for the hurricane for a couple hours. They’d spent the afternoon being called helpful Marines and it grated on their skin. The only consolation he had was that Titan’s boat had a sign on it that read: Closed for Repairs. Looked like they still hadn’t figured out where those loose screws came from. Ha!
His neighborhood was chock full of people who needed help.
After taking care of his neighborhood, he’d called Axel to see how they were doing with Grandpa. They’d apparently finished taking care of Grandpa’s place hours before and helped around The Palms after Grandpa disappeared to meet up with his friends.
Even with Diamond Cove going on alert, and their mission becoming critical, he hadn’t been able to get Blue out of his mind. The thing that haunted him, was that she smiled when she was with the poser, but it wasn’t her real smile. It was that lip-stretching thing she did for the rest of the world in college, the mask that she hid behind so no one would know the real her. It took him two weeks of five a.m. study sessions and front-row seats at Axel’s concert to break through that smile to see the real her.
And she wanted to marry a man who hadn’t gotten behind the mask. It gutted him.
“Look,” Wolfe said. They all glanced back at the boat in the distance. It turned off, heading in a different direction.
A collective release of breath sounded. Sean slowed until the craft in the distance was long out of sight.
“That was weird, right?” Knox asked. “I could have sworn they were following us.”
“Me too,” Wolfe said.
That had been Sean’s gut instinct as well, but given their time crunch, he wasn’t going to waste time worrying about it.
“Better keep an open eye for it just in case,” Gray said.
They nodded in agreement. Sean gave it another minute, then put the boat into full gear, pushing her as fast as he could to make up for lost time.
They reached the dive site a little under half an hour later. Following the coordinates of the boat’s underwater GPS, Sean lined up directly above the shipwreck. When they dove here a couple days ago, they’d parked a ways off, and he’d barely seen the wreck before running out of air. They’d been lucky.
Working with the precision of a team who’d spent years together, they prepared everything in silence. Sean and Wolfe went to the back of the boat to suit up, while Gray and Knox prepared the video gear, tanks, and other equipment. They’d be taking bolt cutters, a wrench, headlamps, and mini-torches just in case.
Gray handed Sean his tank, and Knox handed Wolfe his. “You have forty-five minutes.”
Sean grinned at the serious expression on Gray’s face and took the tank. “Then I turn into a toad?” If Sean’s resting face was happy, Gray’s could be considered nothing but resting-I-give-up-on-life face . . . and occasionally resting-jerk face.
Wolfe’s lips quirked up just a little on the side. His resting face was nothing. Literally. No expression at all. “Not that far off.”
“How about we just avoid turning into toads today, yeah?” The resting smolder face of the group asked. Knox turned on the live feed of the video cameras Sean and Wolfe had attached to their headlamps.
Gray spoke into his mic, creating a reverb that had them cringing. “How are your dive mics?” His voice came through loud and clear.
Sean and Wolfe gave him a thumbs up.
“We’ve got you,” Knox said.
They made their way to the back of the boat, and Sean stared down at the water—they had forty minutes, tops before the sun dropped below the horizon. An hour before they lost all light. Thankfully the water was crystal clear and perfect. Already, he could feel the tightness in his chest easing up. He stepped off the back, Wolfe following close behind.
The moment the icy ocean water wrapped around him, the tension from the last few days drifted away on the current. This was his element. The thing he loved doing most. It’d taken joining the SEALs and fully immersing himself to survive losing Blue. It was his only escape, the only time he really felt at home and at peace with himself these days. The only other time he’d felt that way was when he’d been with Blue.
They descended to the wreck as fast as diving parameters allowed with Gray and Knox chattering away in their ears as they fiddled with the video gear and such.
“Can you see it yet?” Gray asked.
The hulking hull of the ship came into view appearing as a shadow. If he didn’t know it was a boat, it would pass as an underwater cavern or coral. He turned to Wolfe’s camera and gave them a thumbs up. A moment later, they saw it too.
“Whoa,” Knox said. “That’s a big ship.”
It was massive. They’d expected that from Ryker’s descriptions, but seeing it in person was different than hearing about it.
They stopped on the deck, and Gray gave them instructions from Ryker’s map of the ship. When he’d first given it to them, Sean had wanted to give him a big smacking kiss. They’d anticipated an arrogant, haughty prince they’d have to baby, and instead, they’d gotten a haughty, but not arrogant, and very competent Isola Del Famiglia ex-Royal Navy Lieutenant who’d had the foresight to grab the ship’s plans as he’d fled his country. “At the aft, there’s a door leading below deck. You should see it any moment now.”
They headed that way, and found the door a moment later. Thankfully, it was already open.
“Head down those stairs and take a right,” Gray said.
They did as they were told, diving deep into the bowels of the ship. Sean used the stair treads to pull himself along. The ship had crashed on a reef, and the sea life in the reef had adopted the ship like home. Coral grew all over, along with other plant life. Some seaweed waved at them as they went by. Sean was surprised by the variety of colorful fish that had taken up residence in only a year’s time.
“Look! It’s Dory!”
The excitement in Knox’s voice was palpable as he spotted a blue tang swim by. It made Sean grin. There weren’t many things that could surprise their unit, they’d seen so much, but the ocean was never the same. Even Sean, who ended up in the surf almost daily, always found something new to make him smile, something surprising.
The last time he’d had a surprise outside the water had, ironically, been when Blue had shown up at his mom’s party. He shook his head, trying to rid it of Blue thoughts, and carefully followed Gray’s instructions as he led them through metal halls and corridors, past rooms, and gear never to be used again, deeper, and deeper into the depths of the enormous ship.
“All right, you should be coming up on cargo any minute now,” Gray said.
They found a door with the word “cargo” still clearly visible on the side. Sean picked off a hard shell crab feeling the shell give slightly, and set it to the side. Wolfe tried the handle. It was stuck. Sean grabbed on, and between the two of them, they were able to push the rust-lined door open.
The cargo was massive, with multiple trucks, a few tanks, ramps, a couple of cranes for loading and unloading, and crates covering nearly every available inch.
“What were these guys up to?” Gray asked.
Sean and Wolfe exchanged glances. That’s what they wanted to know.
“How’s your air doing?” Knox asked.
Sean and Wolfe both checked their gauges. They had plenty of time to look around. Wolfe turned to Sean and gave a thumbs-up to the camera.
They split up but kept within sight of one another, and started combing through the crates. Most were common supplies you’d see on a ship: food, toiletries, weapons that would no longer function after so much time in the water, tools, and so on.
Then Sean came to a metal crate, about four and a half feet tall, and five by five feet wide in a long row of similar metal crates. This one had a Norwegian flag on it. Sean came up short.
“What is that?” Gray asked.
Sean waved Wolfe over and removed the bolt cutter from his pack. The lock dropped off with a snap. The two of them lifted the lid together.
In the sparkle of an indigo tiara, Sean’s life seemed to flash before his eyes. And while Blue had only been a small part of his life, her face was what appeared more than any other. Wolfe nudged him, breaking him out of his manic thoughts as jewels, coins, bills, precious metals, and other items glittered up at them.
“What. Is. That?” Knox whispered.
Trouble.
Wolfe and Sean looked at one another, then down the row of crates. Sean’s heart raced in his chest. Wolfe pointed to Sean and the next crate in the row, then to himself and down the row. They both nodded as Wolfe swam off slowly, checking each crate as he went, Knox read off the countries on the lids of each box as Wolfe’s camera caught them. “Norway, Liechtenstein, Andorra, Sweden, Monaco . . .”
Sean went to the next crate. It was from Spain. He cut that one open as well, only to find more treasures just as they had in the first crate.
“Isola de la Famiglia,” Knox practically shouted. “Wolfe found it.”
Sean hurried over to where Wolfe was, getting there in time to help him hoist the lid. Shining in their headlamps, just as with the other two crates, were all the treasures Ryker risked his life for.
Wolfe and Gray stared down the line of crates, each with a flag or family crest on it they didn’t recognize. There had to be at least fifty of them, if not more.
“What have we gotten ourselves into?” Gray said in a near whisper.
A long breath came through the mic.
Three thoughts popped into his mind almost simultaneously.
Knox voiced the first. “There’s no way we’re getting this out of here without help.”
“And just who do you suggest we get to help us on our top-secret, undercover mission to salvage five tons of treasure?” Gray snarked.
“Let me think,” Knox replied.
They would need help. A lot of it. They’d have to get Aaron and Ryker, but what they absolutely couldn’t do was call Mack and Liam back. They couldn’t run the risk of their behavior seeming suspicious to their superiors. They had to figure out what they were up against first.
Thought number two was that they were all dead men.
A ship that was only supposed to have stolen goods from one country, had stolen goods from a whole heck of a lot more than that. Whatever conspiracy had led to the attempt on Ryker’s life, was somehow connected to multiple other royal families or just plain wealthy families. Anyone connected to these treasures was also in danger for their lives. Any organization that managed to steal all this, was not amateur. They knew what they were doing, they’d already attempted to kill to get what they wanted, and for this much wealth, Sean guessed in the billions of dollars, they’d do whatever it took to get it back.
“I’ve got it,” Knox said. “I know who we can ask.”
“Who?” Gray asked, with more than a little exasperation in his tone. Likely he was coming to the same realizations Sean had about their lives being on the line—at least, more than they usually were in their undercover protection duty.
“You’re not going to like it,” Knox said.
There was a pause of a beat before Gray spoke. “No, forget it.”
“Like it or not, he’s the perfect choice,” Knox argued. “He has two boats, a crew of ten—all military.”
“They’re Marines ,” Gray said with distaste.
“Right, and they’ll keep our secret.” Knox was right. They’d worked with Titan before, which was where the long-standing feud between Gray and Titan had started, but he was an honorable guy who worked with honorable people.
“Have you lost your mind?” Gray snarled.
The two jumped into an argument that Sean, Wolfe, and even Gray, knew Knox would win. They needed help, and they’d get it where they could. But that’s not what Sean was thinking.
No, his mind fixated on the third thought that’d popped into his mind, and wouldn’t let it go. If he was going to die, and based on what he was looking at, he thought there was a very good chance he would die sooner rather than later, he wasn’t going down without telling Blue how he felt about her.