Chapter 4. A Borrowed Submarine

The patrol boat held its respectful distance for three straight days, neither closing nor pulling back, as if it were less a ship than part of the scenery — a gray dot on the horizon the Kestrel's crew grew used to seeing so completely they sometimes forgot about it for hours at a stretch. A dangerous habit, and Eva knew it, but exhaustion works faster than any good intention.

By the end of the third day, what Morten had suspected since the first night after the blast became clear: hand-carrying gold through the narrow passage in the collapsed hold was physically possible, but catastrophically slow. In three days of relentless work by six divers, the crew had raised barely a fortieth of what lay below. At that rate, the entire cargo would take over two months — time neither Saskia's budget nor Hale's patience allowed for.

"We need higher-volume transport," Owen said at the evening briefing, wiping his hands on a rag soaked in engine oil. "Not baskets we haul by hand. Something that can take a ton at a time and clear the narrow part of the hold without risking a snag on the collapse."

"A small submarine," Morten said. "With a cargo bay. They use those on deepwater oil platforms to move equipment."

"And where, exactly, do you propose we get a small submarine in the middle of the ocean?" Leyla asked. "Order one from a catalog?"

Rafael, silent until then, drummed his fingers on the table and finally said what his expression suggested he'd been turning over for a while.

"There's a man. Old partner, from back when I ran not-entirely-legal cargo runs off the Valmara coast. He's got a decommissioned Nautilus-class research submersible — cargo model, rated for a ton and a half per dive — sitting idle in a private dock for a year now, ever since the research vessel it was mounted on went bankrupt before it could be sold off."

"And he'll lend it to us?" Eva asked.

"He'll lend it to me," Rafael clarified, "because I still owe him fifteen thousand for a cargo I lost in a storm once, through no fault of my own, and he's been threatening to collect in a way I wouldn't enjoy. Offering to take his old submarine off his hands indefinitely, against the debt, is probably the only deal he'll agree to without asking too many questions."

"'Indefinitely' sounds suspiciously like 'without asking,'" Saskia observed.

"Technically it's a loan," Rafael said, with the tone lawyers use for words they know won't survive a courtroom. "I'll call him and explain the situation after the fact. He'll understand."

"And if he doesn't?"

"Then we'll owe him a submarine on top of the fifteen thousand," Rafael shrugged. "But that's the lesser of our problems right now."

Retrieving the Nautilus-4 turned out to be a single night's work: a small dock town on the Valmara coast, where no one asked questions of a man remembered by the harbor watchmen from the old days, and enough cash to send the watchman off to urgent business at the other end of town for exactly two hours. By dawn, the battered yellow submersible, paint peeling off its hull, was already bobbing alongside the Kestrel, looking more like a museum piece than a tool capable of solving their cargo-speed problem.

"Does it even work?" Leyla asked, circling the machine on deck with open skepticism.

"Worked a year ago," Owen said, already unscrewing the access panel to the propulsion bay. "Give me a morning."

It took him four hours, a bottle of engine oil, and enough profanity that Morten at one point quietly suggested covering Saskia's ears, which only made her snort and keep working on her own calculations. By noon, the yellow submersible, dubbed "Borrowed Permanently" by Owen in a joke that stuck, gave off a steady hum from its engines, and the crew received it with something close to religious relief.

The first dive with the Nautilus-4 went flawlessly. The submersible slid easily through Leyla's widened passage, filled its cargo bay with bars and coins, and surfaced in the time it used to take two divers to complete a single run with a basket carrying a fraction of the volume. When the cargo bay opened on deck and gold poured out onto the tarp laid out beforehand, the Kestrel fell into a silence that was almost religious in its relief — then laughter, real and unrestrained, for the first time in the entire expedition not clouded by deadline math or risk assessment.

"Now that," Leyla said, scooping up a handful of coins and letting them stream back through her fingers onto the tarp, "finally looks like an actual treasure hunt."

Even Saskia allowed herself a smile at the sight of the growing pile of metal — the first genuine smile Eva had seen on her face during the whole expedition.

The joy lasted exactly as long as it took Morten to go below to check the radar after his watch — and come back up wearing the expression of a man whose best day in a month had just been ruined.

"We've got company," he said. "Not the Meridian Salvage patrol boat. A Valmara warship, heading straight for our coordinates. And by its speed, they're not patrolling at random — they know exactly where we are, down to a hundred meters."

The laughter on deck died as fast as it had started.

"How would the military know our coordinates?" Eva asked, though part of her already suspected an answer no one wanted to say aloud.

"Maybe they picked up the Nautilus's signal," Owen suggested. "Those things aren't built to be invisible to military sonar."

"Or maybe," Rafael said quietly, looking at the horizon where the approaching ship's silhouette was already visible, "someone just told them where to look."

He wasn't looking at anyone in particular as he said it, but the pause that followed settled over the deck heavier than all the gold they'd just raised from the bottom, and for the first time in the expedition Eva felt that the danger wasn't only coming from the sea, but possibly from their own deck as well.

There was no time for suspicion. The warship was closing, and the first order of business was a far more urgent question: what to do with the gold already sitting exposed on deck, and with the Nautilus-4, which on closer inspection could pass for no standard piece of archaeological equipment at all.

"Below, all of it below," Rafael commanded, and the crew scrambled to haul the tarp of gold down into the cramped cargo hold designed back when the Kestrel was an ordinary trawler hauling fish, not treasure. Bars and coins tumbled into hidden niches beneath the deck planking with a haste that seemed almost comical — people who'd been laughing over their fortune moments earlier now on their knees stuffing it into gaps, as if hiding evidence.

Leyla, meanwhile, threw a fishing net over the Nautilus-4, tangled with old buoys and rope scraps — crude camouflage, but at a glance from a distance, plausible enough to pass for decommissioned auxiliary gear left on deck out of neglect.

"This won't survive a serious inspection," she warned, tying off the last knot.

"We don't need it to survive a serious inspection," Rafael answered. "We need it not to raise questions from someone who's in a hurry and looking for a reason to leave, not a reason to stay."

While the others scrambled with the camouflage, Owen grabbed a roll of electrical tape and, in the last second before the warship closed to visual range, taped over the Nautilus's hull number, which had been sticking out from under the netting a little too plainly. That number was registered to equipment belonging to a company that had gone bankrupt two years earlier — a detail that, under close scrutiny, could raise far more questions than all the rest of the gold combined.

"Done," he said, stepping back and surveying the deck with the fussy eye of a man used to knowing how much can hinge on small details. "Now we just act bored."

Looking bored came easily enough — the exhaustion of the last few days was its own kind of camouflage — and when the Valmara naval officer finally climbed aboard, he saw exactly what he was meant to see: an exhausted, overworked research expedition too tired and too absorbed in paperwork to be hiding anything more interesting than expired documents.