Dark Watch

“Good idea. But let’s hope I don’t need ’em.”

The garage’s door rattled open, and without another word Juan stepped down the ramp, slid into his fins, and silently rolled into the sea. As soon as the water enveloped him, he felt the cumbersome weight of his gear vanish. This was Cabrillo’s element. Here his mind became focused. He could forget about Eddie Seng, the pirates, the smugglers, and the thousands of details it took to run his company. It was as if nothing else in the world existed except him and the sea.

He adjusted his buoyancy until he was ten feet below the surface and checked his dive computer’s integrated compass. With his arms dragging at his side, Cabrillo effortlessly fi

Even with the Draeger’s large mouthpiece, he could taste the foul water on his lips. It was metallic, like sucking on a pe

He didn’t dare use a light, so he had to rely heavily on his other senses. He’d been in the water for twenty minutes, swimming against a mild tide, when he heard a hollow whooshing sound. It was water sluicing under the doors of the mammoth building. He changed course slightly to compensate for a minor drift, and a minute later his hand brushed against rough concrete. It was one of the many pilings holding up the huge building. He swam around so he was directly behind the shed. While gantry lamps illuminated a great swath of the beach, the seaward side of the structure was in total darkness. Cabrillo flicked on his dive light. The red lens produced a feeble ruddy glow, but it was enough for him to get his bearings.

He doused the light again and allowed himself to float upward, breaking the surface with the merest ripple. The doors were as tall as an eight-story building and stretched nearly two hundred feet wide. All but the largest cruise ships, container ships, and tankers could easily pass inside on their way to be broken up.

Juan ducked back under the water, kicking down only a few feet before feeling the underside of the door. He rolled under the door and resurfaced inside the hangarlike shed. He spat out his regulator and pushed his dive mask onto his forehead. The tang of scorched metal burned his nose when he took a breath.

For a moment he thought the warehouse was completely black, far darker than the near moonless night, but he realized he’d surfaced under a catwalk. Once he moved out from its shadow he could see there were a few bare bulbs strung along the distant ceiling, revealing the dark outline of a ship. He swam along its length. Unlike the vessels out in the bay, this ship wasn’t scaled with rust. The hull was smooth and free of growth and had a fresh coat of either black or dark blue paint.

This was no derelict at the end of its useful life. This was a new ship that wasn’t more than a few years from coming down the ways. Cabrillo’s pulse quickened.

He found a set of open metal scissor stairs that rose from under the water all the way to the walkway circling the building near the ceiling. He shrugged out of his gear and tied it so it remained submerged. He transferred his silenced automatic to a shoulder holster and made sure the minicomputer had survived the trip without damage. Leading with the pistol, he slowly eased his way up the stairs, placing each foot carefully before transferring his weight. He had no idea if Singh had posted any guards, but he knew the slightest sound would echo within the metal confines of the building, so he took every precaution to maintain silence.

A metal scaffold had been laid from the stairs to the ship’s main deck. He paused in a shadow, listening for the quiet conversation of bored guards or an accidental cough. He heard nothing but the low hiss of water against the ship’s hull and the occasional creak as a large wave surged in from outside.

He padded across the scaffold and found cover on the ship next to one of the ship’s capstans. He brushed his fingertips against the metal deck. Like the hull, it was smooth and newly painted. From what he could tell, the ship was a small tanker, what in the profession was called a product tanker because it usually hauled refined products like kerosene or gasoline rather than crude oil. The first sixty or more feet of the tanker was gone, carved away by the ship saw and hauled outside. It went against his seaman’s sense to see such a new and beautiful vessel get treated like this.

Juan ignored the slight superstitious chill and made his way aft toward the superstructure. The four-story accommodation block sat right at the stern, and he could see that workers had removed her bridge wings and hacked off her fu

He found a stairwell and climbed to the bridge. Keeping his light shielded, he discovered that all her electronics had been stripped out. Her radios, navigation aids, weather computer, it was all gone. The empty racks, where the gear should have been, looked like whoever had done it had taken their time. There were no torn wires or any indication the workers had been rushed.

They had also removed anything that might list the ship’s name. He searched the rest of the superstructure. The galley was nothing more than a room sheathed in stainless steel. The refrigerators and stoves had been removed as well as all the pots, pans, and utensils. They’d taken the place settings as well, which usually carried the owner’s corporate logo and the name of the ship. The cabins were devoid of furniture but somehow retained a hint that they had been recently occupied. One smelled of cigars, while the bathroom of another carried the aroma of aftershave.

His next stop was the engine room.

A pair of big diesels dominated the space, each the size of a bus, and fed by miles of wiring, ducts, and pipes. He checked each engine carefully, cursing where he saw someone had removed all the identification tags. And where serial numbers had been stamped into the engine blocks someone had used a hand grinding wheel to polish them away. In their wake the metal was shiny silver and smooth.

Juan holstered his pistol and began a more thorough search. It was laborious work because of the engine room’s cavernous size compared to his light’s puny cone of illumination. And no matter where he shone the lamp, shadows dominated his view. Still, he pressed on. He got down on the floor to squirm under a freshwater condenser only to find that someone had already beaten him there and peeled off the manufacturer’s decal. He played his flashlight beam over every nook and cra

Singh’s people knew what they were doing, he thought. Then he spotted an area where a thick coating of spilled oil had congealed under the starboard engine. It would be next to impossible to reach the spot, which was why he felt like ignoring it, but if he was unwilling to check it out so, too, might the men who’d erased the ship’s identity.

Moving his body like a contortionist, he slithered under the cold engine. The space was tight, the engine mounts barely giving him enough room to breathe, and he rapped his hand against an unseen conduit and had to suck the blood from three knuckles. Once he reached the spot, he used his hand to scrape away the tarry grime. As his fingernails peeled back trenches of thick oil, he felt the slightly raised outline of a metal plate. They’d missed one!