Retribution Road, Jon Coon [top business books of all time .txt] 📗

through the center hatch on the rear of the two-story cabin and wheelhouse. Tom was drinking coffee with the other two Rangers.

“Damn shame about the Bensons,” the lieutenant was saying. “I heard their kids are on board.”

“Guess we’ll know before long,” Tom answered. He introduced Gabe and pointed to the coffee urn near the stove. Gabe nodded and went for a cup. They heard the boat’s diesels fire up and felt the boat jar to life.

Hendricks stuck his head in the door and said, “Showtime. We’re going to meet the crane barge on the site. It will only take an hour or so to get out there.”

The boat idled away from the dock and past the research vessels tied up there. Once in the channel, the big Detroit twins roared to life and pushed the boat to a speedy thirty knots. The flared hull cut smoothly through the water, and before long they were on the fringe of the Baytown oil field.

“How do you want this to work?” Tom asked. They had abandoned the little galley and crew’s quarters and were sitting alone on the main deck.

“I’ll have enough gas for about thirty minutes. That should be plenty of time. What specifically do you want me to ask him?”

Tom went over his list of questions and Gabe made notes on a pocket slate.

“Our forensics team will tear the plane apart until we know exactly what happened, but if Bobby can help us, that might save a lot of time. There should be three kids with them. Nothing to be done for them, but we want to confirm they are on board. That should be it. Gabe, I know this is a terrible dive and I feel really bad asking you to do it. But these folks were like family. Carol and Bobby went to UT together and dated some. If this was murder … well, I don’t have to explain it to you.”

“Got it. I’ll take good care of them. No worries.”

Chapter 11

GABE AND BRAD HENDRICKS STOOD on deck and waited as the boat, with the captain at the stern controls, moved into position next to the buoy. Geared up and ready, when the captain hit the horn, they both did giant stride entries into the brown Gulf water. After a quick gear check on the surface, they began dropping down the line. Gabe wore a 100-cubic-foot tank with a 32-percent-oxygen nitrox tank on his back and another slung under his right arm.

Brad wore a single 100-cubic-foot nitrox tank, also with 32-percent-oxygen, with an attached pony bottle and carried an oxygen tank he would hang from the buoy line at twenty feet for decompression. Brad would have forty-eight minutes at eighty feet without needing more deco than a five-minute safety stop. Depending on how long Gabe stayed on the bottom, he might require a much longer deco hang time.

Brad hung the O2 tank and dropped with Gabe to eighty feet. He gave a salute as Gabe passed him and descended into the void twenty feet below. At a hundred feet, Gabe paused, cleared his mask, and checked his gauges. He took two deep breaths and exhaled slowly to help relax and focus. He prayed his dive prayer, adjusted his buoyancy to compensate for the compression of the air in his back-mounted wing and the compression of his wet suit. Comfortable and neutrally buoyant, he continued his descent.

He hit bottom at 122 feet. There was about fifteen feet of visibility, but no plane. Frustrated but not perturbed, he unclipped a cave reel from his harness and attached the snap shackle to the buoy line. He checked his computer for time and compass direction and then headed into the current. As the line from the reel played out with no sign of the plane, he began to worry. Just as he came to the end of the line, he saw a dark shadow ahead. He raised his hand and called out loudly, “Bobby Benson, awake!”

Light flashed like a lightning bolt, giving him a clear view of the plane. The light lingered. Gabe hesitated, and then to reduce the drag as he swam, he unhooked his spare tank and secured the cave reel line to it.

He stood the tank up and shot a compass heading to the plane with his digital compass on the computer. The plane was about thirty feet away, but he knew when his light faded that his dive light would only punch through the haze about ten feet at most, and if he didn’t recover the cave line, the odds of finding the buoy line were not in his favor. It was a risk, but there was a job to do and he wasn’t about to give it less than his best.

He swam more easily to the plane without the extra tank, a twin-engine Beechcraft, smaller than Tom’s Cessna. It was nose down in the hard clay bottom and the tail was broken. As he approached, the ghastly apparition of Bobby Benson emerged from the plane.

“What …? Who …?”

“It’s all right, Bobby. None of that is important. We only have a little while. Captain Bright sent me, and we need to know what happened.”

“Tom sent you?”

“That’s right. Now please tell me, how did this happen?”

“When we were in the hangar at Porta Aventura, two men with guns took the girls and told us the only way we’d get them back was to fly their drugs back to the states. There was nothing I could do. They said when we delivered the drugs they would let us know how to find the girls.”

“So you were on the way back. Then what?”

“We ran out of gas. But that’s impossible. I checked the fuel, and the gauges said we still had eighty gallons. At least enough for two more hours. I radioed our position to Scholes tower and told them we were going down. That was it. I tried to get us out when we first hit the water, but we