Floating on his back in the hull of the sub, with perhaps no more than six inches between his face and the fibreglass ceiling, Michael realised he was going to drown. After all he had tried to save the vessel, death was still inevitable. His biggest regret was that he would never get to look upon and embrace his fully grown daughter, despite her only being a few nautical miles away on this godforsaken, lawless continent. He would never get to tell her how much he still loved her and how he had thought about her every single day since he had left their unhappy family home in Southeast London. Those were dreams of a reunion that would remain unfulfilled, now, as he allowed his watery grave to embrace him. There was no point struggling any longer. He had all but bled out anyway.
The bullet from Jorge’s gun had ripped through Michael’s shoulder and into the fabric of the hull. The pain had been intense. He had screamed, clasping at the wound, feeling his blood ooze thickly through his fingers. Then, as if the shock had taken a few seconds to register, Michael had frozen, whimpering with pain and staring in disbelief at the monster that straddled him. There had no longer been any sign of reasoned thought behind his guard’s eyes, so high and so feverish with bloodlust had he been because of the meth. But even amid the panic, some calm and analytical part of Michael’s brain had noted that Jorge’s colour had drained, giving him a sickly pallor.
With nobody at the helm, the sub had lurched downwards abruptly, throwing Jorge off him.
‘You stupid, ignorant bastard!’ Michael had shouted, scrambling to his knees. His ears had been ringing with the deafening sound of a shot having been fired from a gun in an enclosed space. Though his strength had been no match for the well-nutritioned, drug-fuelled Jorge and though his shoulder had been bleeding freely, he had thrown himself on top of the guard, clasping his gun hand to seize control of the weapon. For the first time in decades, Michael had rediscovered the fire that Letitia had snuffed out of him. ‘Drop it! Drop the fucking gun, Jorge! You’ll compromise the sub’s stability. We’ll sink, you prick.’
‘I’m going to kill you, mecánico. You’re a lying, sneaking son of bitch.’ Jorge had pulled the trigger a second time, with the bullet embedding itself this time in the fibreglass ceiling. As the sub had lurched ever downwards, water had started to trickle onto the grappling pair.
‘We’re going to die, anyway!’ Michael yelled. ‘Drop the gun! We need to plug that hole and get this sub back to the surface fast. We’re going down.’
Instruments on the navigational dashboard had started to ping loudly in alarm. Michael had lunged for the gun again, encircling Jorge’s wrist with his own bony hand. But though Jorge had tried to throw him off, pistol-whipping him hard on the mouth so that Michael had balked at the unsavoury metallic taste as his mouth had filled with blood, the guard’s energy had seemed to dwindle rapidly, like a leaking fuel tank on an old car.
‘I don’t feel so good,’ Jorge had said, suddenly relinquishing the gun. He had rolled over and vomited.
The sea had started to force its way in through the bullet hole in earnest, replacing the trickle with an insistent spurt, which had showered down onto the prone Jorge.
Snatching up the weapon and stuffing it in the waistband of his shorts, Michael had realised that he had three almost insurmountable problems to contend with. If he didn’t bind his shoulder immediately, he would bleed to death, perhaps inside five minutes. The sub had been sinking, causing the hull to groan in complaint. The painful pressure in his ears had told him that the descent was too rapid. The vessel would break up. But the main problem had been the water ingress.
He had staggered over to the pile of meth bricks and had unfurled a long piece of clingfilm, binding his shoulder tightly as best he could so that the flow of blood had at least been stemmed. Shooting a glance at Jorge, it had been clear that his guard was out cold, lying in a watery pool of his own vomit and the encroaching sea. Determined that his humanity should not leave him, Michael had knelt by the man, feeling for the pulse in his neck. But there had been none. The grey tinge to Jorge’s lips and his unseeing eyes had told Michael that he was now alone. Mercifully still breathing and with his own life still to fight for.
‘Come on, for God’s sake. You’re el mecánico. You made this tub. You can fix it. Dear God, don’t let me die.’ He had rammed a ball of clingfilm into the leaking hole made by the bullet. Had at least stemmed the flow enough to turn it from a spurt back into a trickle, though he had known it was nothing more than a temporary fix.
Saying a prayer silently, he had made for the pinging nautical instruments. The digital displays had been flashing apocalyptically at him, showing that the vessel had dived some twenty-five metres already and had drifted way off course.
‘Shit!’ He had closed down the sub’s computer, feeling his hope and his own energy ebbing away. The blood had still been flowing defiantly from his wounded shoulder, beneath the clingfilm, but he had ignored the increasingly light-headed sensation, knowing there was no time for self-indulgence.
The propellers had fallen silent. The sub had been plunged into darkness.
Flipping the switch, he had prayed that the system would rectify itself automatically. With no laptop to tinker with the on-board computer’s programme, it had been his only hope.
Nothing.
He had flipped the switch again, thumping the dash. There had clearly been a fault with the computer’s power supply. Had the first bullet that had passed through his shoulder caused damage to the reams of delicate cabling that ran in a fat tangle through a pipe embedded inside the Kevlar? ‘Reboot for God’s sake!’
A third time, and he had held the button down.
Finally, the lights had come back on and the engines had whirred back into life. The navigational instruments had all been working, except the reboot had wiped the sat nav’s memory. The co-ordinates of their destination had disappeared.
‘Damn! Damn! Damn!’ He had held his fists to his forehead, running through the implications of having a malfunctioning sat nav.
Lost at sea. Great. And Jorge had died, taking the co-ordinates with him.
‘Pockets.’
Rifling through Jorge’s pockets, gagging from the smell of the dead man’s vomit, he had, at first, been hopeful of finding the slip of paper. But his search had revealed nothing. Then, sifting through the ashes from Jorge’s smoking materials by his mattress, he had spotted the remnants of a singed slip of paper. They had showed only a fragment of the information he needed. It had not been enough.
‘Great. So I’m stranded in the Caribbean Sea,’ he had shouted at the ceiling. ‘Thanks, God. Thanks for nothing.’
His best bet, he had calculated, would be to bob on the surface and pray that he was picked up by the coast guard. El cocodrilo had expressly demanded that no facility for transmitting an SOS signal be incorporated into the design, so that his men would not be captured by the Federales, should they run into trouble. It had always been designed to be a semi-submersible on a semi-suicide mission. It had dawned on Michael then that he had unwittingly colluded in his own demise.
‘Shut up! Shut up!’ he had shouted. ‘This is loser’s talk. Enough!’
He had had to try harder.
Having re-programmed the semi-submersible to climb once more, he had realised the vessel was not heading fast enough towards the surface. The water had been starting to come through again in earnest and was now gaining pace, gushing, rather than just spurting. Already, Michael’s ankles were submerged. He had pulled off his boots and had studied the tightly packed pallets full of crystal meth, destined for the cargo ship in the Dominican Republic. If he had only been able to jettison the load, he knew he would have been able to bring the sub safely to the surface.
But it had been impossible to open the hatch on such a basic piece of kit without flooding the entire vessel within minutes.
After a while, he had brought the reluctant sub up to fifteen metres below sea level. But it had refused to rise any higher. He had calculated that his only option would be to wait until the sub had filled with water with the intention of opening the hatch at the last minute, once the pressure would have equalised with the outside. Then, he would have to pray that he would be able to hold his breath long enough to swim for the surface without getting the bends. And then, there was the small matter of not drowning in the open sea or being eaten by a shark, mistaking his bony shell of a body for a disappointing dolphin. It had been flawed, but it had been his only plan.
And so, Michael Carlos Izquierdo Moreno had resorted to allowing the sub he had built over the course of two years to fill with water. Lying on his back, he had waited until the water level had been only six inches or so away from the top. At least the water had been warm and Jorge’s body had remained somewhere on the bottom, pinned to the floor of the hull in perpetuity beneath the weight of the meth that had killed him.
When he had judged the water level was just high enough to give him sufficient air to breath, he had started to manoeuvre the wheel that allowed him to open the hatch manually. But his arms had been weakened by blood loss and the wheel was jammed. The faster his heart had beaten with rising panic, the more light-headed he had grown, his energy leaching from him entirely.
Eventually, he had accepted that he was not going to escape this watery sarcophagus after all. It had been ordained that this would be the end of him; the end of his hopes for freedom; an end to his aspirations to reforge contact with his long-lost daughter and to make amends for the decades when he had not been there for her.
‘Goodbye, Ella,’ he said to the darkness.
Consciousness was leaving him. He knew it was over. He had, at least, fought valiantly to stay alive this long. Perhaps Ella would be proud if she ever found out the truth about her papa and his epic tale of trial and redemption.