Hell or High Water (Deep Six #1)(76)

She rolled her eyes. When he looked at her expectantly, as if he was prepared to wait all day, she huffed and started rolling her tongue. “Dddddddddddd.”

“The Deep Six!” he crowed triumphantly. She blinked up at him, her mouth hanging open. Yeah, because he’d pulled that one straight out of his ass. Talk about an old, totally esoteric film. He was impressed with her choice. Of course, he wasn’t going to tell her as much. Because where was the fun in that? “What?” He grinned. “No applause?”

The sound of clapping—slow clapping—echoed from behind him. He looked over his shoulder to see Mason standing there. “Hey, bro. What’s up?”

“I think you just named our salvage company,” Mason said, head cocked contemplatively.

Bran blinked at him, trying to comprehend. He couldn’t, so he asked the only question available to him. “What the huh?”

“Deep Six Salvage.” Mason rolled the words around on his tongue like he was tasting them. “It’s f*ckin’ perfect. There are six of us. We make our living in the deep.”

“And in case you’re forgetting,” Bran said, “our salvage ship was deep-sixed a couple of hours ago. Without it, we don’t have a company, nameless or otherwise.”

“That’s not true,” Olivia chimed in from the swim deck below. “I told Leo I’d make sure you guys—”

“Hang on just a cotton-pickin’ minute here,” Maddy interrupted. Bran looked over to find her hands fisted on her hips. Her very curvy hips. Some people might say they were too curvy for her small frame. Yo, and some people are morons. “Y’all are really salvors?” Her light-brown brows were drawn together. “I thought she said you worked for the government.” She hooked a thumb over her shoulder at Olivia.

“It’s…uh…” Bran rubbed a hand across the back of his neck. He thought he’d left the days of keeping secrets behind him. And quite honestly he’d preferred it that way. “It’s complicated,” he finally admitted, watching her cute button-nose wrinkle. The freckles across the bridge melded together, like brown sugar atop a scoop of vanilla ice cream. “We’re salvors working for the government on this gig, and—”

That’s all he managed because a subtle splashing had all eyes swinging toward the location buoy. Bobbing beside the white marker was a shiny metal box kept afloat by two neon-yellow lift bags.

Maddy turned back to him, her expression wry. “What’s in the box? What’s in the boooxxx?”





Chapter Sixteen


5:15 p.m.…

Banu punched the End button on the side of his satellite phone and narrowed his eyes. Through the tinted windows of the wheelhouse, the sea was a pristine, endless undulation of low waves as far as the eye could see. But that had not been the case five minutes ago…

“Nassar is not answering?” Ahmed asked, frowning.

“No,” Banu growled, his jaw sawing back and forth, his mind conjuring up all the unique and exciting ways he could slowly kill Nassar if the * had f*cked things up for them. For him.

“It’s possible the debris we just passed had nothing to do with us or Nassar or that salvage ship he spoke of,” Ahmed assured him. “Styrofoam breaks off docks and floats out to sea all the time. Cushions that are not tied down fly off boats every day. There was nothing out of the ordinary, if you think about it.”

“You’re right.” Banu nodded. Inwardly he couldn’t help but wonder, though. Because the currents in the Straits were viciously strong. And if Nassar had sunk the salvage ship, it was possible some of the wreckage could have floated out this far. He checked his watch. Three and a half hours since the last time we spoke, said the hour and minute hands. And the man’s a f*cking lunatic, added a voice in his head. “So why isn’t he answering?”

Ahmed made a rude noise. “Nassar probably forgot to put a new battery in the phone. And since their ship sank, there is no way for him to charge the one he has or get a new one. I am sure it is nothing, brother. Wait and see. You will triumph still. And your name will be immortalized in songs of jihad for centuries to come.”

Now that turned Banu’s frown upside-down. Immortalized in song, huh? Like Davy Crockett or Rasputin. Like f*cking Beethoven or Henry VIII! Okay, okay. Maybe he was overreacting. Seeing problems where there weren’t any. But could you blame him? This was his chance. This was The One! And it had to work. He’d come too far to go back now. Too many arrows were now pointing in his direction for him ever to return to Jonathan Wilson’s life…

*

5:42 p.m.…

Hallelujah! And thank you, sweet baby Jesus!

From the corner of her eyes, Olivia saw Wolf toss his fins and goggles onto the swim deck before climbing the ladder. It was from the corner of her eyes, because her gaze was laser-locked on Leo, bobbing in the water at the back of the yacht, waiting his turn to climb aboard.

The hour between the capsules rising to the surface and his emergence had felt like an eternity. Two eternities. Mason and Bran had assured her it was good it was taking him so long to make the ascent. It meant things were solid gold, hunky-dory. He was hitting all of his safety stops, and so on and so forth, yada yada.

In her gut, she’d known they were right. And her head couldn’t refute their logic, not after everything she’d read about deep dives on her flight from DC. Was that just this morning? But her heart? Yeah, her heart was another matter entirely. She would swear the thing had refused to beat the whole time he was down there, only stuttering to life when his blond head poked above the waves.