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First Chapter of A Sword for Pizarro by Tom Ryan
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Rated "R" by the Author.
1st Chapter of Tom Ryan's New Thriller: A Sword for Pizarro
Chapter 1
By the time I reached the ocean floor, it was too late – I was being hunted. Bull sharks have the most testosterone of any animal, and this one was displaying every drop, eyeing me like a butcher studying a slab of fresh meat. I was 30 feet down, too far from my boat to make a successful run for it, so I stayed close to the bottom, suspended just above the sand, watching her, keeping my movements slow and steady. The bull was large, a torpedo of muscle and teeth, sculpted by the sea for four hundred million years. Her finely-tuned sensory system was capable of detecting the faint electrical fields of a human heartbeat as if it were as loud as a bass drum, so I tried to stay cool, imagining myself drinking a freshly tapped Budweiser, kicking back at the bar at the Sunrise Marina.
She passed in front of me, about ten feet away, moving from my right to left, momentarily blocking all else. I steadied my breathing, taking long, deep inhales of oxygen and nitrogen, the bubbles from my regulator cutting awkwardly through the water on their escape towards the surface. She made one more pass, her back arched, her lower pectorals pointed, and then darted off to my east, staying a distant sentinel, swimming just in and out of sight.
The late summer water was warm and clear. Normally I wouldn’t be in a rush, but the presence of the monster fish was a tip-off that the day’s trial would be cut short. The dive was to serve as a test of a new apparatus I was working on; a device that would allow underwater wreck sites to be instantly mapped, using sub-surface recognition sensors to differentiate between trash and treasure, showing the precise locations of priceless historical artifacts. The unit, which I dubbed the “Omnitometer,” took a number of measurements and readings, relaying the data to a submersible computer that displayed the information on a modified Heads-Up display built into my diving mask. The Omnitometer combined such disparate devices as the magnetometer, gravitometer, side scan sonar, sub-bottom profiler, and ground penetrating radar into one cohesive tool so that they seamlessly and efficiently worked in unison to compile a three-dimensional profile of a site within a matter of seconds. With the device, one could take accurate readings in a fraction of the time it would take to do a manual archaeological survey and recovery operation. It would allow for immediate spot retrieval of specific artifacts, bypassing the “wait-and-see” approach of routine underwater excavation, and the countless hours of bottom time. The apparatus could penetrate sand and limestone, and could detect both organic and inorganic materials less than a quarter of an inch in size, buried up to ten feet in depth, and covering a swath of twenty-five yards. The Omnitometer wouldn’t take any of the fun and adventure out of digging for underwater artifacts; it would simply save time and make certain that nothing was overlooked. Period.
I decided to conduct my first field test of the unit at a wreck site off the coast of Cape Canaveral. The wreck was of a well-known but unidentified Eighteenth-century Spanish treasure ship that was so picked over by both professional salvagers and amateur scuba enthusiasts that if anything remained, which was unlikely, only the Omnitometer would have any chance of finding it. To give you an idea of the popularity of the wreck site, the local Walgreens sells postcards displaying a map of the wreck, above the words “I dove for treasure in Florida, and all I got was this stupid postcard.” If the Omnitometer were to detect something at this location, where no real treasure had been found in twenty years, it would be an indisputable confirmation of the unit’s abilities.
With the bull off in the distance, I switched the Omnitometer on. I stood on a pile of ballast stones that were discarded to the site’s periphery by earlier salvage operations, and held the unit out in front of me. The device’s sensors were laid out in succession and housed in a cylindrical waterproof polycarbonate resin casing. The entire component measured three feet in length and nine inches in diameter. It was a bit bulky, but since it was just a prototype, I reasoned that ergonomics could come later.
Within a few seconds, the apparatus collected information and sent it to a specially-constructed computer, transmitting the facts and figures, by wire, to my dive mask. The sea floor and its contents, in semi-transparent, digitized form, materialized almost instantly within the glass panes of my mask, allowing me to see an overlay of the Omnitometer’s findings over the actual ocean bed. There were the usual shapes: broken shells, conglomerations of coral and stone – items organic in nature. And then there were things that could only be manmade.
Before I could make sense of the data, the bull shark swiftly advanced, this time from my south. Living things, like schools of fish, appear to the Omnitometer as incomputable streams of information; the bull appeared on the HUD as a large, digitalized green smear, indicating that she was just over eleven feet in length; a behemoth of a specimen for the species. It wasn’t the first time that this particular shark had graced me with its presence. In fact, I had seen her so much on recent dives, I decided to affectionately name her “Marjorie,” after my ex-wife’s mother. It’s safe to say that my ex, who I remain close with, would divorce me all over again if she knew I bestowed her mother’s name on this portly fish, although the resemblance was uncanny. Marge had become more frisky with each dive, and on our previous meeting, I almost came out of the water no longer needing my extensive Speedo collection.
Marge paced back and forth, stopping for short breaks in the oblong shadow cast by my boat overhead. When a presumably tasty fish would swim in front of her, a Jack or an occasional Tarpon, she would follow it, although with mild interest. Rays of the sun that reached the bottom reflected off her back and sent glimmers of light haphazardly through the water. She was gray in the way that a tombstone is gray, with weathered, pockmarked skin, and she watched me intently with two black, pinhole eyes.
On her fourth pass, Marge broke from her routine and came directly at me. Within a second of her charge, all I saw was a set of serrated, triangular teeth. In an instant, the mass of her body disappeared and she was all mouth – open, terrifying, and primitive.
There are two schools of thought on how to deal with an attacking shark. The first is to be entirely passive, to do everything possible to get out of the way of the animal and avoid any further provocation. The second is to make a counter attack. A hammerfist to the nose or a swift poke in the eyes or gills. Which strategy one chooses says a lot about who they are as a person. I didn’t have a hell of a lot of options, and as she darted for me, I swung the business-end of the Omnitometer at her snout. It hit its target. I guess I’m the latter.
I took the force of her charge on my right shoulder, falling back into rock and sand. All around me, a thick flow of blood stained the water. Whose blood was anyone’s guess.
The water cleared. I scanned the vicinity. The Omnitometer lay battered and broken at my feet. I looked over my body; two arms, two legs – all appropriate appendages intact and unscathed. Marge was gone, but I could still feel her presence in the little hairs on the back of my neck. And then, like a flash of lightning, I saw her in the distance; a stream of dark red extended from her thick nose and trailed hazily behind her.
I gathered the mass of plastic and wire and made for the surface. Ascending through the bubbles, the last bits of information the Omnitometer collected raced across my HUD. Among the rusted beer cans and fishing lures, one solitary tell-tale ping particularly caught my eye. It was something special, something rare and beautiful. Something golden.
Corporal Travis dreamed of partnering with a police dog, but Fate handed him a faery and something unexpected instead.. As his normal world spirals into chaos, he is thrust into a centuries-old conflict with stakes higher than he ever imagined.
