The blue hole’s corridor-like passage began to close in narrower and narrower. As Gannon got to the extremely tight pipelike end of it, he suddenly put on the jets and swam hard into the tiny entrance of the cathedral.
He felt his right shoulder slice open on a sharp rock as he squeezed through the pipe, but that didn’t matter. He ripped himself inside into the huge space, swam straight in for ten feet, dropped his light and left it there on the chamber’s floor. Then he turned and swam upward and back over the opening where he had just entered.
Gannon floated there, probing with his hands. There was nothing and still nothing, and he almost went into full out-of-body panic mode, trying to remember where he put it, thinking maybe someone else had found it.
Then his hand found the old duffel fishing rod bag.
Gannon’s heart rate and breathing came faster and faster as he pulled the bag to him and unzipped it.
The yard-long piece of metal he pulled out of it looked like a spear gun except instead of a spike at the end of it, there was a short squat length of steel tubing that almost looked like the coupling for a water hose.
The device was called a powerhead, and it was a one-shot underwater firearm that was triggered by making jabbing contact with something.
Due to the retarding density of water, a bullet shot from a regular gun at a distance under water was virtually harmless. But a powerhead set off by spring-loaded direct contact ripped into a target no differently than any other firearm round fired into something from point-blank range.
Already loaded with a waterproofed shotgun shell of double-aught buckshot, the powerhead Gannon pulled from his bag was the kind that spear fishermen used as a backup to protect themselves from sharks.
Gannon pulled out its safety pin and placed its shaft between his teeth like a pirate’s knife and took the second powerhead from the bag.
He’d just pulled the second one’s pin and was turning down toward the entrance of the cathedral double-fisted when Blackbeard’s head emerged into the chamber through the opening just below him.
Floating unseen in the dark two feet above, Gannon waited until he saw the commando’s tattooed bodybuilder shoulders.
Then Gannon swung the powerhead down at the base of the big son of a bitch’s unprotected skull with every single solitary fiber of fear and fury and life force he possessed.