And if not, well, he would simply settle the score and move on. Ingenious as they’d been in their ambush of him, he felt it only fair he find an equally novel way of repaying them.
“I assume you’ve taken steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again?” Hadeon Bondaruk asked.
Arkhipov clenched the phone tighter against his ear until his knuckles turned white. “Yes. Three of my best men are here now. I’m guessing they have an hour’s head start on us.”
“What are their names?” Bondaruk asked.
As Arkhipov had predicted, finding the identities of Frobisher’s rescuers had been a relatively easy task.
After the deputy and the tow-truck driver had left, Arkhipov had half jogged, half limped up the road to the nearest farmhouse, where he found an old Chevy truck parked behind the barn with the keys in it. He drove back to Frobisher’s shop and parked the truck behind the garage, then went inside and turned the house upside down, finding what he needed in ten minutes. Frobisher had only a few dozen names in his Rolodex, half of them businesses, the other half personal, and of these only eight were couples. A quick Google search gave him what he needed.
From Frobisher’s house to the Princess Anne Greyhound station was a short five-minute drive. The truck he parked on a side street and the license plates he stuffed into a nearby trash can under some coffee grounds and a bucket of KFC chicken bones.
Twenty minutes later he’d recovered his backpack from the rental locker and was checked in to a nearby Motel 6 under a different driver’s license and credit card.
“Sam and Remi Fargo,” Arkhipov now told Bondaruk. “They’re—”
“I know who they are. Treasure hunters, and good ones at that. Damn! This is a bad sign. Their being there can’t be a coincidence. Clearly Frobisher figured out what he had and called them in.”
“I’m not convinced of that. I’ve interrogated a lot of men in my time and I know what lying looks like. Frobisher was telling the truth, I’m certain of it.”
“You might be right, but assume he was lying. Assume the Fargos are after the same thing we are, and act accordingly.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How soon do you leave?”
“The boat’s ready now.” Armed with the Fargos’ names and particulars it had been simple work to track their credit card purchases to the boat rental shop in Snow Hill. “It won’t take long to catch up to them.”
Sam had carefully marked the inlet’s position on the map so they found it with little trouble. The previous night’s rain had piled up even more branches at the mouth of the inlet. It now looked like a hunting blind, a patchwork of crisscrossing branches and leaves, both dead and still-green alike. Remi steered the skiff alongside the pile, then tied the painter line to one of the sturdier branches. They let the boat drift until the painter line was taut and Sam was sure it would hold, then Remi slipped into the water and onto the bank. Sam swam around to the side, handed up to her the two duffel bags containing their gear, then accepted her hand and climbed onto the bank himself.
With a duffel bag over each shoulder, Sam led the way through the tall grass and shrubbery along the bank, veering inland twenty feet until they reached the edge of the inlet. To their left through the undergrowth they could just make out the branch pile and the river’s main channel beyond it. As it had the day before, the inlet had an eerie quality to it, a tunnel of green that felt somehow separated from the rest of the world.
Of course, Sam conceded, part of that feeling probably had something to do with the algae-draped periscope jutting from the water only a few feet in front of them, like the neck of some primordial sea serpent.
“A little spooky, isn’t it?” Remi whispered, crossing her arms as though warding off a chill.
“More than a little,” Sam agreed, then dropped the duffel bags and rubbed his hands together in anticipation. “Never fear, the Fargos are here.”
“Just promise me one thing,” Remi said.
“Name it.”
“After this, a vacation. A real vacation.”
“The destination is all yours, Mrs. Fargo.”
The first order of business was to get down there and determine the general condition of the submarine, look for any markings they might use to identify it, and hopefully find an entrance. This last goal Sam hadn’t yet shared with Remi, knowing she would forbid his entering the wreck, which was admittedly the prudent course. But Sam was confident that between his diving skills and Remi’s reliability they’d have no trouble handling anything that came up.
To that end they’d brought along a dive mask, a pair of truncated swim fins, waterproof flashlights with extra batteries, four coils of nylon towing-grade rope, and three ratchet blocks to secure the sub in position lest it slip during Sam’s inspection. If they even got that far.
Additionally, the day before he’d asked Selma to FedEx him a trio of Spair Air emergency pony tanks, each of which contained enough air for roughly sixty breaths, or two to five minutes.
“I know that look on your face, Fargo,” Remi said. “You want to go inside, don’t you?”
“Only if it’s safe. Trust me, Remi, I got my adrenaline fix last night. I’m not going to take any stupid chances.”
“Okay.”
Sam slid down the bank into the water, then stroked over to where the periscope rose from the water. He grabbed ahold of it, gave it a tug and several shakes. It seemed solid. Remi tossed him two ends of rope, both of which he secured around the periscope. Remi took the other ends, secured each of them to a ratchet block, then each of those to nearby trees. Sam climbed back out and together they cranked the ratchets until the lines were taut. Sam gave each one a tug.
“It’s not going anywhere. Okay, I’m going to have a quick look around. Three minutes, no more.”
“Do you want me to—”
“Shhh,” Sam whispered, a finger to his lips.
He turned his head, listening. Five seconds passed and then faintly, in the distance, came the sound of a boat engine.
“Coming this way,” he said.
“Just fishermen.”
“Probably.” But after last night . . .
One thing that had been nagging at Sam was the proximity of their submarine to where Ted had said he’d found the punt shard. It was unlikely the two were connected, but not so unlikely that Ted’s assailant might choose to search this area of the Pocomoke.
He crouched beside one of the duffel bags, rummaged around, and came up with a pair of binoculars. With Remi on his heels, he ran back along the bank to where they’d tied off the skiff. They dropped to their knees in the high grass and Sam aimed the binoculars upriver.
A few seconds later a powerboat appeared around the bend of the river. It contained four men. One at the wheel, one on the bow, and two sitting on the afterdeck. Sam zoomed in on the driver’s face.
Scarface. “It’s him,” he muttered.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Remi replied.
“I wish I was.”
Sam spit into his mask, dipped it into the water, then settled it onto his head. Remi stood on the bank, arms on her hips, face etched with worry.
“Just going to have a look around,” he assured her. “I’ll save the air in case we can get inside. This won’t happen, but if it shifts in my direction while I’m down there, just start working those ratchet blocks until it tips back. If I don’t come up within, say, four to six hours, you can start worrying.”
“Comedian.”
“Hold the fort, I’ll be back.”
Sam clicked on his flashlight, took a deep breath, and ducked beneath the surface. Left hand extended, he finned downward. Within only a few feet the algae-filled water turned a deep green and visibility dropped to only a few feet. Sediment and bits of plant life swirled in the flashlight’s beam, leaving Sam feeling like he was trapped inside a nightmarish snow globe.
His hand touched something solid, the hull. He kept going, letting his hand trail over the curve of the hull until finally the bottom appeared in his flashlight beam. The keel was perched atop a jumble of sunken logs, precariously balanced but stable enough that Sam felt a flood of relief knowing the sub wasn’t likely to roll over on him. He felt the ache in his lungs turn into a burning, so he finned for the surface.
“Everything okay?” Remi asked once he’d caught his breath.
“Yep. Good news. She’s sitting upright, more or less. Okay, going again.”
He ducked back under, this time estimating the hull’s diameter as he skimmed past it. At the keel, he turned aft. At about the midpoint he encountered a bracket of some sort jutting from the hull and running lengthwise. For a moment what he was seeing didn’t register on his brain. He’d seen this before . . . one of the pictures from his earlier research. When the answer came, Sam felt a knot form in his belly.
Torpedo rack.
He stopped swimming and cast the flashlight along the bottom, seeing it with new eyes. Was one of those seemingly harmless sunken logs something else altogether?
He kept swimming aft until his flashlight picked out the tapered cigar end of the sub, and jutting from its side a horizontal plane. When he drew even with it he righted himself and let himself rise alongside the hull until the last piece of the puzzle came into view. Rising from the back of the hull was another tube, about eighteen inches tall and about shoulder-width in diameter.