Poseidon used the momentum of their mutual fall to smash his adversary headfirst into the wheel lock of an open doorway. Ryan slid to the floor, momentarily knocked senseless. Flakes of rust dotted his dank black hair, adhering from where he had impacted with the metal. He shook his head, fighting to keep his thoughts and actions clear.
Then he saw the wrench.
The tool that had been left behind by a sloppy sailor and had slid under a mass of boxy equipment.
He reached for the weapon, ignoring the pain in his ribs as Poseidon lashed out with a hard kick. Ryan had seen the foot coming and dodged as best he could; otherwise he’d be experiencing the smothering sensation of a half a rack of broken ribs, but the blow still stung like a piledriver’s kiss.
Ryan swung the wrench two-handed, catching the larger man in the solar plexus. That slowed the Admiral, and he fell to his knees spitting blood.
Ryan lifted the wrench over his own head and brought it down on top of Poseidon’s unprotected skull. The Admiral fell on his face and was still. Ryan nearly stumbled into a bulkhead from the wrench’s weight as he let it drop. He’d never been so tired in all his life, but he had to get off the Raleigh. Racking his mind, Ryan wished for a fleeting second that J.B. were here. The Armorer’s near photographic memory would have instantly recorded all the information he’d passed when traversing the submarine earlier.
Ryan was already having some difficulty telling the difference between some passageways.
However, this one took no extra memory.
As he’d made his way down deeper into the body of the submarine earlier, Ryan had made mental notes, and he remembered the Admiral’s quarters as being located forward to the galley, near the other officer accommodations. The walls in this section were painted in a faded blue, with white trim on the molding and pipes overhead.
Ryan stepped into Poseidon’s room. A footlocker was still in front of the tidy bunk, although both had slid slightly back and were now flush with the bulkhead.
“If I was a man like Poseidon, I’d always have a contingency plan,” Ryan whispered.
He delivered a series of kicks with the steel toe of his boot until the small lock on the hasp of the footlocker was knocked off. Ryan knelt and lifted the lid, revealing what he knew to be a tangle of scuba equipment inside. He had used such equipment once or twice in his youth, and as he pulled out a battered air tank, which was snugly wrapped in a mesh of nylon harnessing, he hoped that someone as precise as Poseidon had claimed to be would have regularly maintained the gear.
Ryan screwed the silver-and-black regulator to the valve on top of the tank and hoped the gods who had kept him alive this long were still keeping a watchful eye. He held his breath and turned the knob that opened the tank’s air flow.
He was rewarded with a thipp as air rushed into the tiny regulator and air hose. Ryan raised the mouthpiece and placed it between his lips. He tried a sample intake of breath. The air was musty, but breathable, and that’s all that mattered.
He pulled a heavy cloth-and-metal weight belt from the bottom of the chest and placed it around his waist, followed by two face masks, both yellowed with age. Ryan chose one, and pulled the elastic strap wide enough to strap the mask on his forehead, above his eye.
At the bottom of the locker was an object wrapped in an old towel. Ryan unfolded the cloth and revealed an ivory-handled knife with a four-inch blade. The handle of the weapon was an ornately carved head and torso of the mythical Lord Poseidon himself. He couldn’t have cared less. The knife was a weapon, and he carried it in his right hand as such, honed edge out and ready.
He grabbed an underwater flashlight, then stood, the tank on his back heavy and cumbersome in the small passageway as he stepped from Poseidon’s quarters into the hall. The sub was continuing to go down, now with the tail end plummeting first, since the blast came from the engine room. Ryan pulled the tank and harness tighter, checking the length of the straps and adjusting the buckles. The gear still felt looser than he would’ve liked, but he knew he was out of time.