SKELETON GOLD: Scorpion (James Pace novels Book 3) Read online

  ‘What are your orders, sir? Do we stay with K45 or should we use the motorboat to try and get help?’

  Barrett thought for a moment. Help would be too late in coming, here in this Godforsaken place, but word did need to reach the Admiralty. Once aware of the hijack, they could hunt for the submarine and, perhaps, sink her when she put in an appearance. As her commanding officer, his place was with his ship. His duty was to find some way of destroying her, or disabling her. He made up his mind.

  ‘I want you to take the motorboat and find help, Number One. The Admiralty must hear of this outrage and I charge you with the job of sending them a message, hopefully in time for them to do something about it. You must not fail,’ he finished, his voice dark and cold. ‘It is your duty to do whatever you must to get the message through. Whatever you must,’ he reiterated.

  Pringle threw Barrett a smart salute, knowing that he was right. The Admiralty had to be notified and he knew that trying to convince Captain Barrett to accompany him in the boat would be a fruitless waste of time. Barrett was old school and mindful of his duty, both to his country and to his crew. He would not leave the K45 in the hands of an enemy, whoever they turned out to be.

  ‘Aye, sir. It will be done.’ He turned and eyed the desolate coastline, hoping there might be some water supplies on the boat. He had no idea of where he could go. ‘What about you, sir? What are you going to do?’

  ‘Try to stop them,’ came the instant reply. ‘They must open up to release the locks on the stacks, Number One. I will try to retake the submarine, or scuttle her.’

  ‘How will I know if you’ve succeeded?’ asked Pringle, ever the pragmatist.

  ‘If I manage to regain control, I will fire the main deck gun as a signal for you to return to the submarine. If I manage to sink her, I’ll fire three pistol shots, spaced three seconds apart. Hopefully I will then be able to swim to shore and join you.’ His tone lacked conviction.

  ‘Understood, Captain.’

  ‘The base can’t be far from this point,’ added Barrett. ‘That motorboat will have launched from somewhere nearby. They are British scientists, I believe, so they will help you.’ In truth, this was guesswork. Every contact who came aboard to facilitate the trade was English, definitely, but the scientists working on Scorpion has never been seen by any of them.

  With the heat of the morning rising quickly to blistering proportions, so hot already that the coastline was now shimmering beneath a heat haze, his chances looked bleak. Resolved to do his own duty, he sucked in a deep breath of hot air and crossed over to where the motorboat was tied up. Not looking back, he untied the mooring line, jumped in, and powered the small craft away from the huge, silent submarine.

  Barrett watched the boat turn and head for shore, following it for five minutes before the rapidly shrinking vessel was lost amidst the shoreline breakers.

  ‘Godspeed, Number One,’ he whispered, before turning upon his heels and heading back towards the conning tower. Climbing up a ladder secured to the outside of the tower, he was soon standing atop it once again. He swept the horizon with his binoculars but found nothing, not even any sign of Pringle’s little boat. It had simply vanished.

  A few minutes later, the smoke stacks began to slowly retract inside the submarine, much to Barrett’s horror.

  Normally this was an operation that was handled from both inside and outside the submarine at the same time but here they were, fast disappearing before his eyes, in a manner that had never been designed.

  Leaping from the tower, he reached the stacks just as their sooty lips were vanishing inside. He tried in vain to grip them and prevent them sinking down completely but the power of the mechanical action, secretly installed in Plymouth by villainous hands four months previously, was too great and he watched in total resignation as they fully retracted and the heavy cover plates snapped shut, sealing the submarine tightly.

  Now there was nothing stopping her diving, he knew.

  As if reading his mind, ballast tanks were blown and the K45 began to settle more deeply into the gentle swells. The four, 1400 hp electric motors kicked in and the screws began to turn, slowly swinging the submarine around and nosing the boat away from the coast, building quickly towards her maximum dive speed of eight knots.

  The only saving grace was that the K-class submarines had a slow dive rate, averaging five minutes to completely submerge. It might just give him enough time to do something.

  Other men, in another time, would have looked towards the shore and thought about themselves. Barrett knew he was about to die and simply accepted it. His one thought was to stop the submarine and his only chance lay in the cover plates that protected the innards of the submarine from the outside water.

  Standing upright, he raised one foot and slammed his boot down onto the plate as hard as he could. Nothing. Again, he tried. Nothing.

  With water already washing over the rubber decking and sloshing around his ankles, he kept on trying. Two commutes passed and his leg felt leaden from repeated stamping but he persevered. Suddenly, after a particularly anger-fuelled stamp, he thought that he felt the plate give a little, ever so slightly.

  Spurred on, he stamped down as hard as he could another half a dozen times until, suddenly, the cover plate caved inwards on its hinge. With a diameter of ten inches, hundreds of gallons of seawater eagerly gushed down inside the hull, flooding the engine room before anyone inside had time to even seal off the compartment.

  Already committed to diving, K45 slipped beneath the waves, leaving Barrett floating on a foaming surface. He could feel the throb of the propeller blades beneath his body as the behemoth sank deeper and deeper, already too full of water to ever recover.

  Men died a dreadful death in the sudden darkness, as the internal electric lights quickly shorted out. Traitors and loyal, imprisoned crewmen drowned together.

  K45 continued to dive, completely flooding within a minute, until she settled into the heart of a gently swaying kelp forest, anchored to a seabed of powder-white sand, one hundred feet below the surface. Hitting bow first, very gently as her batteries died and the momentum ceased, the stern settled soon afterwards, leaving her sitting perfectly upright upon the bottom.

  Pristine, undamaged and totally salvageable should anyone ever find her, K45 had transformed her role from one of lethal military machine to a mass grave in less time than it took to boil a kettle of water.

  Drawing deep, controlled breaths, Barrett gradually relaxed. Treading water, he took stock of his situation. Slowly turning a full circle on the spot, he looked for land and spotted the thin yellow line he was looking for, about three thousand yards away now. Maybe he could find Pringle and help get a message home, after all. First things first, he thought, pulling his revolver out and raising it as high as he could. Carefully counting in between, he squeezed off three shots before managing to return the gun to its holster.

  That done, he took the opportunity to check himself over with his hands. The reddish tinge to the nearby water registered to him only a split-second before his hands wandered clumsily across a wound on his thigh. Pain lanced into his mind as he gently felt it with his fingertips.

  As far as he could make out, it was only a small superficial cut, possibly caused by edge of the cover plate scraping at his leg when the submarine went down. It was nothing too serious under normal circumstances, but deadly for a floating survivor at the mercy of the sea and its inhabitants. A heavily bleeding wound could only succeed in attracting all of the nastier ones.

  Leaking blood, he started to swim towards the coast. He knew that his chances of survival were good as long as he kept moving and did not stay around in an ever-increasing pool of blood.

  Common sense told him to float on his back and to paddle slowly to save energy. In reality, he wanted to see where he was going and, instead, chose a breast-stroke, occasionally interrupted by a short burst of front crawl. The water was fairly cold but perfectly tolerable, as was the pain in his thigh; it j
ust ached.

  In his heart, he knew it was a possibility but when he suddenly glimpsed it, a sense of cruel acceptance filled his heart. Two fins, one large and menacing, the other smaller, suddenly broke the water about one hundred feet off to his left; a dorsal fin, followed by the tip of the tail.

  A shark, and a pretty big one at that. Unluckily for him, the thick kelp forests just offshore were a thriving habitat for fish, which were hunted by seals, which in turn attracted a large shark population. Although the coastline may have been barren, the ocean close to shore was teeming with life.

  He guessed the distance between the two fins to be about ten feet. That made the shark at least fifteen feet long. Slowly, it began circling him, keeping its distance. Barrett kept on swimming, knowing his only chance was to reach shore before the shark made up its mind to devour him.

  Scenting the concentration of fresh blood, the shark, a tiger shark, became increasingly excited. Thrashing its tail strongly, it started to close its circles. Eighty feet, sixty-five, forty. The closer it got, the more blood it smelt.

  Still too far from shore, Barrett considered stopping and pulling out his revolver again but opted to keep swimming in the hope of reaching safety.

  Then the fins were gone, slipping silently beneath the clear water with barely a ripple. He could still see the dark shape that represented his death, just below the surface, and he realised that he was not going to make it, after all. Stopping dead, he trod water and drew his gun. Not yet resigned to his fate, Barrett screwed himself into as tight a ball as possible and cocked the hammer.

  The shadow, now only fifteen feet away, stopped circling and suddenly headed straight towards him with a phenomenal burst of speed. A slight lightening at the front of the shadow chilled him with its finality. The shark had opened its jaws for feeding and he was the food.

  Despite rising terror in his throat, Barrett took careful aim and fired at the shadow. He only managed two shots before the shark reached him.

  The attack was ferocious, cold and hard but not painful, removing his right arm and shoulder in one powerful bite. A second shark, even larger and unseen by Barrett, attacked simultaneously from below, clamping its jaws onto his lower body. The razor-sharp teeth scythed away a great chunk of flesh from his buttocks and thighs, sending a cloud of blood billowing into the water.

  In shock, Barrett remembered how shark attack survivors invariably stated that they never really felt the bite. It was too quick, almost painless. It was a strange final thought to be having, he decided.

  Death came as a blessed relief, suddenly exploding into the air amidst a claret fountain as a gaping maw clamped down over his head, dragging him below the surface with an accompanying crunch of breaking bones. In the scarlet depths, the two killing machines tore his lifeless body to shreds in a matter of seconds.

  The mystery of K-45, her secret cargo, unknown hijackers and final resting place, would trouble Captain William Barrett no longer.

  1

  Doyle McEntire stared at the neatly-bound photocopy of an old notebook that he held in his hands and noted how accurately the unknown machine had copied the yellowed tone of the original pages. The copy was only small, perhaps fifteen centimetres tall and ten wide, and it held no more than fifty pages. It was a perfect replica of the original.

  Pushing sixty; the full head of grey hair already turning white at the temples, barely scraping five feet six inches, and portly from years of good living, the billionaire entrepreneur also ran the McEntire Corporation, which in turn had been working for the British Secret Service for decades. Years of stress had lined his face heavily and his eyesight was so poor that a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles were a permanent feature on his face. Still, a sharp operator, feared in business and political circles alike, he realised that the venerable diary held clues to solving a century-old enigma.

  McEntire was still very busy smoothing over the international repercussions from the operation in Brazil, and he had tucked the photocopy away in the safe inside his cavernous London office until he finally found a minute to study it. It had actually come into his possession six months earlier but he had been focusing on Race Amazon, then Race Amazon II at the time. Now, however, he gave it his full attention because his company had been asked to investigate the book, and the story behind it, as a matter of national security.

  Although he now knew the contents intimately, he thumbed through the pages once again and allowed his eyes to wander across the fading lines of tiny, neatly handwritten text, pressed strongly into the paper many years before by a determined hand. The words were written in English and were drafted in a diary style, although the pages were not pre-printed like a modern diary. The entries began on June 3rd 1914, and told the story of a first officer aboard one of the Royal Navy’s original attack submarines.

  That, in itself, would have been interesting enough, given that submarine warfare tended to be thought of as only starting in the Second World War, but the rather humdrum early entries quickly altered into descriptions of far more interest.

  McEntire had read it from cover to cover; fascinated by the story of sheer courage and sacrifice that had emerged. None of that mattered to him though, other than providing further evidence of human resilience. The reason he had been instructed to investigate related to the references within the text to a secret wartime project referred to in the diary by the codename, Scorpion.

  He had subsequently discussed it briefly with his daughter, a few weeks previously and she, in turn, had dropped a hint about it to the man who now waited to see him, seated outside in a comfortable reception area. McEntire pressed the intercom on his telephone and asked his assistant to send the man in. A few moments later, the door clicked open and his visitor strode confidently across the plush carpet and thrust a hand into his own; the grip strong and assured.

  ‘Are you determined to get me killed immediately, or is there any chance that your daughter and I could have a couple of weeks off first?’ The question was a genuine one but delivered by a voice edged with poorly disguised humour. ‘I have barely had time to wash the dead bugs out of my hair yet. Why the urgency?’

  ‘I would not have asked you here if it wasn’t important, James. Something has come up and I need you to be involved from the start. After all,’ he grinned slyly, ‘I am now paying you a vast salary to be one of my key project development managers. Not to mention that this company has paid you almost one million pounds sterling in the past three months.’

  ‘I earned every penny,’ grumbled the visitor huffily. ‘Killers, mercenaries, faked kidnapping,’ he shot the last one at McEntire as a reminder that not all was yet forgiven. ‘Snakes, rain, bullets and blood,’ he continued. ‘And you only gave me the bonus money because my involvement with both races brought you in about twenty times more than you ever paid me. Finally,’ he added, with a half-smile, ‘being one of your project managers is likely to dangerously shorten my lifespan.’

  McEntire threw up his hands in mock surrender. ‘Okay, okay, you win. You are right, of course. But you are on the payroll now and I do have need of your services. Holidays with my daughter will have to wait.’

  ‘You can tell her,’ grinned the man. Six feet tall and lithely muscular, the man had an immediate physical presence. Short, thick dark brown hair framed a ruggedly handsome face and a solid jaw-line, together with a pair of broad shoulders gave him a reliable air. He also had the luck to view the world through a pair of intelligent, brilliant blue eyes that glinted with a depth suggestive of resolve and courage.

  James Pace knew that Sarah McEntire had already planned their break together and would not be pleased that her father was about to postpone it for them. Sarah was not a lady to be trifled with, as they both knew.

  ‘I will,’ agreed McEntire. Sarah would understand when she knew the full facts, which he had yet to share with her. She had been his personal assistant for years but had only recently been made aware of the McEntire Corporation’s real reason for existen
ce, and changed her role.

  He did feel a little guilty about ruining their holiday plans, especially as James had only been back in the country for five days, after flying back from his South American adventure. Sarah had shared much of it with him and she’d been determined that they should get away together and cement their fledgling relationship by soaking up the sun on a Caribbean beach and drinking far too much tequila. Her father did have a plan, however, to help soothe the coming troubled waters.

  ‘So, are you going to let me in on why I am here when I should be packing for Barbados?’ asked Pace evenly. ‘I’ve hardly had time to settle into my new home yet, though I do thank you for arranging it for me. It’s perfect.’

  ‘That’s quite alright,’ nodded McEntire. ‘It was Sarah’s idea, did you know? She said how much you both enjoyed your last stay in one, though it seemed very strange to me. Still,’ he conceded, ‘she thought it would do as a temporary measure.’

  Pace nodded. Sarah had asked him to move in with her a few weeks previously but they had decided that her little cottage was too small for them both. They had planned to go house-hunting when they returned from their holiday. Until then, she would live in her cottage and he had his new, surprise, accommodation.

  ‘Well, she’s off shopping for new bikinis at the moment, so good luck telling her. Anyway, what’s going on? Sarah mentioned something about an ocean trip just before I started running the last race. She hasn’t said anything more.’

  He left a questioning pause hanging in the air as he settled himself into a comfortable chair in front of McEntire’s large, polished-walnut desk. A huge conference table occupied a large section of the office but this wasn’t a board meeting.

  McEntire eyed him thoughtfully, then slid the notebook across the wooden surface between them. Pace leaned forward and carefully lifted it up, turning it over in his hands to inspect the cover, before opening it up. He read the first page carefully, then looked up at McEntire. ‘It’s a submariner’s diary, or a copy of one, to be precise. Nearly one hundred years old, if the original is genuine.’