On the Fifth Day

It was Kumi’s voice on the radio and it lasted no more than three or four seconds. Thomas caught the words helicopter and attack and then there was only the rapid burst of automatic weapons fire followed by the static of dead air.

“Wait,” said Parks, who was struggling to right the sub after it had been bumped into the rock wall by the creature in the cave. “If I can get some film of that . . .”

“They are probably dead already,” said Parks, gazing out into the water, “so it doesn’t matter how long it takes us to get back to the surface.”

“If I can just push the nose back into the cave and set the cameras running . . . ,” Parks began. He paused at the pressure against his temple and turned very slowly. Thomas was holding the flare gun to the side of his head.

“Probably,” Thomas shrugged. “But I’m not on the edge of a shattering discovery, am I? In fact, I’m not on the edge of much these days, and the world won’t miss me.”

“Got a plan, chief?” said Parks, the perpetual sneer reappearing. “Or are we just going to surface next to the boat and let them shoot us full of holes?”

Thomas said nothing. He had no idea what to do. He had to assume that the Nara had been taken. He figured that their sonar would have picked up any substantial explosion, so the boat was probably still intact, but who was still alive and where they were he had no way of knowing. Kumi had said something about a helicopter, so they could have been taken off the boat, but surely the attackers didn’t have the personnel to comfortably guard the twenty-odd crew? And if Kumi and Jim had been taken, they could be anywhere by now. The island was the logical place to set down if the attackers wanted to stay local, if they thought there were still loose ends to tie up.

To take the sub back to the boat would be to give themselves up, or worse. They had to find somewhere else to beach the sub and get onto the island. That way at least they kept the initiative.

Kumi recognized the guy from the Kofu railway station as one of the soldiers, but he was not the one who seemed to be giving the orders. The woman was, presumably, the person who had masqueraded as a nun in Italy, though in her elegant makeup, tank top, and shorts, that was hard to imagine. The muscle were three guys in combat gear and armed with machine guns. One of them was black, all of them were built like soldiers, and good ones at that. They called the leader sir, and unless she had misheard, the woman had called him War. It was bizarre and might have been funny, except that Nakamura was already dead and she had a feeling they would be too, soon, unless the situation changed radically.

The helicopter had come out of nowhere, the men dropping onto the deck of the Nara, shooting before anyone had realized they were even armed. There had been no battle per se, and the captain had been killed merely to keep the rest of them in line. The radio, GPS, and other equipment on the boat had been shot up as she tried to warn Tom, so they were effectively marooned, cut off from the outside world. The only good thing was that in riddling the boat’s communication systems they had also disabled the sonar, so they had no idea where the submersible was.

The crew had been locked belowdecks, while she and Jim were bundled into a lifeboat at gunpoint and sent ashore. No guards had been posted on the boat, but with no way to send a message to anyone else, the crew wouldn’t be able to do anything even if they broke free, and if they tried to get the boat moving again the gunmen would hunt them down from the air. The helicopter had landed on the beach and had become a kind of base camp, though it was impossible to tell how long they expected to be here. There seemed to Kumi to be an air of expectation among their captors, and there was a lot of standing around, as if they were waiting for something to happen.

Kumi gave him an appreciative smile. He was trying to keep her cheerful, but unnecessarily. She didn’t wilt under strain, merely withdrawing, tortoiselike, until she had a clear sense of the situation and how she would resolve it. She felt no panic, not yet at least, and the killing of the captain had only toughened her resolve to do whatever was necessary to see that these thugs did not win. She didn’t know what they wanted, but she would do all in her power to see they didn’t get it.

She clambered out, losing her footing as the boat rocked, and staggered ashore. Jim followed, still smiling doggedly. His eyes had had a glazed, distant look ever since the shooting of Nakamura, as if his world had been jarred out of its orbit.

One of the other soldiers approached them from the helicopter, spun her around, and pulled her hands behind her back. In seconds she was cuffed with a thin but unyielding strand of plastic like a heavy-duty zip tie. Then she and Jim were pushed across the beach toward the palm trees and the blasted remains of a thatched hut, the wooden walls half burned away by some terrible heat.

Inside, Jim sat in the sand. Kumi studied their makeshift prison. They could get out easily enough, but it was a good ten- or twelve-second sprint across the sand into the trees, twice that to the water. They’d be cut down long before they could lose themselves in the jungle. She would have to think of something else.

“Six hours,” said Parks. “Nine at a push. If we switch to survival mode, we can make it longer, but then we have no power for anything else, including movement.”

“They may know where we are already,” said Parks. “If they have access to the Nara’s sonar or they have a sonar buoy they can drop from the chopper, we’re a sitting target.”

“Not sure what else we have,” said Thomas. “Take her away from the boat and stay deep. We’ll go around the back of the island and wait for dark before beaching.”

“That will take hours,” said Parks. “And once we beach the sub, it’s useless. Without the Nara we can’t get it back in the water.”

Parks sighed and moved the sub away from the rock wall, staying close to the rippled sand of the seabed. He moved slowly, since they were in no rush and higher speeds increased the chance of being picked up by sonar. “Cavitating,” he called it.

“Still think that ‘them’ is the Catholic Church?” said Thomas. “Dropping out of helicopters with machine guns? Doesn’t sound right to me.”

“And you think these are the people who have taken my wife?” said Thomas, only realizing after he said it that he didn’t use the habitual “ex.”

“Yes. And you should forget all that stuff about Christian mercy. If you aren’t with them you are against them. Forget all your nuanced, gray-area arguments; these people are waging a war against you as fiercely as if you fought for the Devil himself. Don’t expect her to live through this, Thomas. You’ll only make it tougher on yourself when you find her body.”