A/N: I think I mentioned how much of a pain this chapter was being in a previous author's note. It bears repeating. This chapter was a pain to write. Not so much in the actual writing of the chapter. Because once it got going. Man, it got going. I'm talking about writer's block. :(

Chapter 10:

It wasn't that easy, of course. It never is. They had to crawl around to the ladder heading below-decks so that the gunmen in the pursuing boat wouldn't see them. The railing was solid in most places, so it screened them from sight, but if they were spotted it wouldn't protect them from gunfire. Especially not the high-powered rifle rounds their pursuers seemed to favor. As they crawled around back of the wheelhouse to the hatch, Sarah caught a glimpse of the man Chuck had mowed down and she blanched visibly. Chuck had to swallow hard to keep from losing his lunch.

"Hey," he whispered. "Grab his ammo; I'll go check the one you shot."

"You going to need that many bullets, 'Tex?'"

"Better safe than sorry," Chuck shrugged.

Sarah nodded at the logic of the moment and crawled close enough to snag the man's weapon by its shoulder strap. She was getting quite the collection of weaponry; spear-gun, pistol, shotgun, and now assault rifle. Sarah shook her head. Practically a one woman arsenal. Chuck joined back up with her and they went toward the ladder.

Once out of their pursuers line of sight, Chuck stood, holding his back. Sarah held the second AK out to him. "Here," she said. "I didn't know how to work the magazine release, and I didn't want to risk accidentally shooting something."

"Oh, you don't want to hold onto it?"

Sarah rolled her eyes and waved at herself. "I've got plenty. Besides, we don't have time for weapons familiarization."

Chuck took the second AK and removed the magazine, before pausing for a moment and racking back the charging handle to check the chamber. There was one more round in there, which Chuck palmed before squeezing it into the spare box magazine with his thumb. "You have another backpack I can use?"

Sarah nodded and led the way to her father's cabin, finding a heavy rucksack and tossing it over to him.

"You mind if I ask where you learned to handle automatic weapons? Just seems a little odd, for a computer programmer." There was a touch of suspicion in her tone.

Chuck merely shrugged. "Summer camp," he grinned when she glared at him on the way back toward the galley.

"No seriously," Sarah pressed. She kicked open a cabinet and came out with a pair of pry-bars.

Chuck grabbed one of the pry-bars and shrugged again before setting to work on the wall where Sarah pointed. "Sophomore year of college," he explained. "Bryce and his dad took like half the frat to this private security firm boot camp thing. Like I said. Summer camp," Sarah grinned at him. "What?"

"You were in a frat?"

"Yes," Chuck sighed. "It's not all bear pong and naughty coeds, believe me."

They pried open the wood paneling in the farthest forward wall of the galley, and Sarah climbed into a tiny triangular room, more a cubbyhole really. "Okay," she said, pushing a detonator into one of the blocks of explosive and handing it over. She paused to twist the ends of a wire onto the end of the blasting cap. "Take this up on deck and put it on the side of the winch."

"What?" Chuck stared down at the brick of C4 in his hand and the accompanying spool of wire.

"I'm gonna be busy making the shaped charges to do the actual scuttling. We need a big flashy explosion so they think the engines blew and we didn't do it ourselves."

"Because that's going to be their first guess?" Chuck said. "Really?"

"You want to risk it? And have to choose between suffocating and surfacing into their gun-sights? How about we cover all our bases instead?"

"Point taken. And you know how to make shaped charges?"
"Theoretically," Sarah said. "When you're done, start bringing the tanks in here from the engine room. We're going to want to be as far away from the blast as we can get, just in case."

"Yeah, I can see that. How long do you think we've got before they catch up?"

"You're the math-lete, remember, not me," Sarah shrugged. "I'm guessing... ten minutes?"

"I guess I'd better hurry."

"Don't forget to tie down the Zodiac!" she called after him. Chuck waved acknowledgment and made his way up the ladder.

Sarah had one of the bricks of C4 in her hands when Chuck got back from crawling around on deck to the crane and doing his part. He held the end of the wire in one hand and watched dubiously as she began to work the explosive block between her hands, rolling it out into a long snake between her palms like it was play-dough. "I hope you know what you're doing," Chuck shouted over the roaring diesel engines.

Sarah's grin was a touch manic. "You and me both, Chuck."

Chuck started dragging the air-tanks forward to the galley, taking one per trip so he wouldn't risk dropping one of them. On his third trip Sarah was fiddling with foot-long sections of steel bar with an L-shaped cross-section. He frowned at the progress. "You do know what you're doing, right?"

Sarah waved him off. "Yes. God, you worry like my grandmother."

"When there's plastique involved. I figure I'm entitled."

She stuck out her tongue at him and started duct-taping sections of C4-packed bars to the floor in between the twin diesels. "Back to work," Chuck rolled his eyes and finished toting the air tanks up to the little cubbyhole in the fore wall of the galley. On his way back, he met Sarah in the corridor coming the other way, trailing the spools of wire to both the shaped charges in the engine room and the pound of C4 on deck. She quirked an eyebrow at him when he kept on past her.

Chuck turned to walk backwards for a moment. "I had an idea," he explained, before ducking into her father's cabin for a moment.

When he dragged the mattress off her father's bunk into the galley, she nodded. "Nice thinking," she said, helping him make a kind of shield with the padding. Hopefully it would cushion them a little bit. They were strapping the air tanks down securely when Chuck's watch beeped.
"What's that?"

"Five minutes," he explained. "You figured ten, but I halved it to be on the safe side."

"That's probably," she said, but cut off. "Oh, shit." Sarah pointed out the small porthole.

The pirates were back, pulling alongside already. Chuck couldn't make out any faces, but he recognized the boat easily enough.

"Crap, crap, crap!" Chuck said as he clambered hastily over the mattress doing double duty as makeshift blast shield. If the shaped charges worked as advertised, they wouldn't need it, but 'better safe than sorry' was kind of becoming his unofficial motto recently.

Sarah wriggled into the compartment next to him. He could just catch the sound of raised voices through the hum of the engines and the slap of waves against the hull, but he couldn't make out any of the words.

She grimaced and held up the two wires in one hand and a nine-volt battery in the other, grinned crookedly and gave him a peck on the cheek. "For luck," she said as she tapped the wire to the battery terminals.

The explosion wasn't what Chuck had expected. His experience with explosives was limited at best; his memories of the flash-bangs back at that summer camp seven years earlier had him tensed for bright lights and stupendous crash of thunder. But it sounded more like a shotgun blast, not easy on the ears by any means, but still not quite what he had expected. The boat lurched and shuddered from the pound of C4 on the rear deck, but that was all. He barely felt the concussion of it at all. Hopefully it had been more impressive to the men on the other boat.

"Kind of a let-down," Chuck said.

"Well, I wasn't really trying."

"What?" Chuck said with a frown of confusion.

"The kiss."

"I meant the explosion!"

"Oh, right," Sarah levered herself back to her feet. "Come on!"

"Um, I think we should stay put."

"You left the pressure regulators in the engine room."

"Why is nothing ever easy," Chuck asked the sky.

Lisa's Revenge was already starting to tilt down at the stern from water rushing into the engine compartment, and he hardly relished the idea, but it would be a little complicated trying to breathe out of the air tanks without mouthpieces. They might be able to do it if it came to that.

Hopefully it wouldn't.

They charged aft and were up to their ankles in water before they even left the galley. It was knee deep in the corridor and approaching thigh-deep in the engine room. A huge bloom of water was still rising up between the engines as they waded in.

"Where the hell are they!" Sarah shouted. "I thought they were right here!"

The water was rising, up from mid-thigh to their hips already.

Chuck dunked himself under the water and blinked against the salt. He shot a hand back up through the water, pointing for Sarah. "They fell off the hook. Over there in the corner." The flow of water and gravity had nudged the fallen dive-equipment into the far rear corner of the engine room.

The diesels were struggling, chugging along but stuttering every few seconds. They wouldn't last much longer, in all likelihood. In addition to the water, a pall of smoke was filling the room.

Sarah dove in the direction of the regulators and masks, but the up-draft of water from the hole blasted in the hull knocked her back. She came out of the water sputtering, her hair plastered to her head. "Go back into the galley," she shouted over the rush of water. She un-slung the spear-gun from her shoulder.

"What are you doing!" Chuck demanded.

"There's a bunch of dead pirates on board," Sarah said in the middle of hauling back the rubber. "That much blood will draw sharks."

"And you're just thinking of this now!"

"Hey! I didn't hear you suggesting anything better!" Sarah fitted a spear into the notch and coughed from the smoke. "I can't get to the regulators until the water pressure in here equalizes."

"Can you hold your breath that long?"

"I don't know! But I doubt you can. Get back into the galley. Maybe you'll get lucky and an air bubble will form up in the bow."
"Don't you have some little emergency air tanks somewhere?"

"They were with the masks on the hook," Sarah shot back. "They must have got washed over where we can't get them with the rest of the stuff."

"Well, crap," Chuck said before a coughing fit racked him. The water was up to his chest now.

"I'm going to try for the gear again," Sarah said. "Get as far forward as you can!" She was shorter than him, and the water level was up past her shoulders. It wasn't so much a dive this time as just letting herself drop below the surface. It sent a shiver down Chuck's spine to see.

He grimaced and turned to the door, hating himself for deserting her. But he wasn't, really, was he? It was her ship. It was her plan.

The corridor was tilting crazily as he made his way forward, and now upward. The ship was listing somewhat to the side, and he half-waded, half-climbed his way back toward the galley. His adrenaline was pumping, and everything was clear in his mind, even with the smoke trailing up the corridor above his head from the engine room and water gurgling up around him. He saw the galley door. It was one of those pressure doors like you saw on submarines and warships. Bulkhead door, was that right? His thoughts coalesced and he tried to shoulder the door closed. Water was still rushing in and he couldn't get the thing closed. Even up at the highest of the interior spaces the water was up to his thighs now. Besides, he'd need to wait for Sarah before he could seal the thing against sharks. Stupid! You should have remembered that earlier.

The refrigerator. He could probably wrestle it over to put against the door, if they couldn't get the door sealed. That might keep out a shark, and the dead men would all be on the other side. Smoke made him cough again. Maybe they wouldn't be able to sense him and Sarah. Didn't sharks have some kind of sixth sense though? He thought he remembered that from a school report. Magnetic something, because they had iron deposits in their heads somewhere? That couldn't be right. He was thinking of carrier pigeons. No. The refrigerator was bolted down like everything else in the galley. Bolt cutters. Back to the engine room. He wrestled the door all the way back open and started back for the bolt cutters, and stopped.

Looking back down the corridor, it stopped only a few feet back, water filling the entire thing, cutting off the corridor at a bizarre-feeling diagonal as the boat continued to pitch down at the stern. The water was up past his hips even in the galley, and the smoke was thinning out. The engines were completely underwater now, some part of his brain chimed in.

Where the hell was—

Sarah's head burst through the surface and she thrust a mask at him. She already had hers on, and one of the emergency air bottles sticking out of her mouth. She took it out long enough to ask. "Where do you think you're going?"

"Bolt cutters," he tried to explain, holding his shirt over his mouth against the smoke. Sarah shook her head so he went on. He pointed out the refrigerator needlessly. "To move the fridge in front of the door."

"No, just wait," she said. "Breathe from the emergency bottle for now." Sarah spoke in relatively short sentences, pausing to breathe from her emergency bottle to avoid smoke inhalation. "Once the pressure equalizes we can seal the door. Should keep out sharks. Then we hook up to the big tanks. Put the mask on. It helps with the smoke."

The water was up around his neck by the time Chuck got his mask on, with Sarah's help. Once they were completely underwater, it was a relatively painless process getting the door shut and turning the handle to seal them in.

The air from his tiny emergency bottle tasted stale, and a little metallic, almost coppery, like blood. That was probably his imagination. Sarah swam forward, which was closer to straight up now, but that was shifting too a little. The engines were heavy enough to keep them tipped toward mostly toward the stern, but the shape of the hull mitigated that some as well. Boats were designed somewhat like planes, with the forward edge designed to cut through water or air both; the shape itself gave the sinking ship a little forward momentum, keeping it from falling straight down at the stern. It was still about a forty-five degree backward tilt, Chuck judged. Getting around the mattress they'd wedged into the cubbyhole in the fore wall was a chore, but then they were packed in with the tanks again and hi head broke the surface of a little bubble of air.

Chuck pulled the air bottle away from his mouth and breathed in instinctively; a coughing fit took him. All the smoke had gathered in the tiny pressurized bubble. In the dark, hands gripped him and forced something into his mouth, and the metallic tasting air was suddenly the best thing ever.

There was light a moment later, and he managed to focus. A glow stick. Sarah was pulling a second one out of her pack and handing it to him.

He cracked the stick and shook it to mix the chemicals, then held onto the light like it was a lifeline.

Chuck dug in his pocket for his phone. The screen lit up and he tapped a quick message.

Thanks.

He turned the screen toward her.

Despite the mask and the air bottle obscuring her expression, Chuck could tell she was surprised. She took the phone from him.

Forgot this thing was waterproof.

The boat lurched suddenly and Sarah dropped the phone. It flipped slowly through the water and then sped away as the boat finished crunching into the bottom. The forty-five degree angle hurled them upward into the mattress. Or, strictly speaking, the tiny bit of remembered hydrodynamics from Stanford informed him, the boat had shifted downward and they had stayed in the same position. Without the mattress, they might have been seriously injured. It took Sarah a while to find the phone by the light of its screen and the pair of glow-sticks.

She typed briefly on the touch screen.

Really good thinking on the mattress.

Chuck shrugged it off. But he took his phone back.

Now what?

Now we wait. Sarah replied.

Even without the glow-sticks, Chuck realized it wouldn't have been completely dark inside the flooded ship. Lisa's revenge had settled somewhat on her side, and one of the portholes had a partial view upward, of the sky, though at an angle that was a little disorienting. Sarah joined him at the porthole, peering out. Chuck saw the shark first, and pointed, before grabbing his phone back.

I think we need a bigger boat!

Even with the dive gear obstructing her face, he could tell she glaring at him.

It was a fairly uneventful couple of hours before the pirates gave up and the sharks finished their own bit of business with Garret and friends in and around Lisa's Revenge. Sarah's depth gauge on her dive computer only read forty-five feet, which was puzzling, but not necessarily that important. It might have been just a ripple in the ocean floor, and so she didn't bother mentioning it to Chuck.

Once she was satisfied that the waters were clear of predators, both of the finned and of the two-legged varieties, they each switched to fresh tanks and unsealed the galley door. Chuck and Sarah swam out to the forward deck where Chuck had tied down the Zodiac, and a quick swipe of Sarah's diving knife had the inflatable boat cut free and bobbing quickly to the surface.

Sarah grabbed Chuck before he could follow it upward straight off, and took his phone away for a moment.

Decompression. Very important. She tapped onto the screen, and Chuck nodded.

They made two stops, holding onto the rope that trailed down to them from the Zodiac. They used as much of the last tanks as they could, nearly a full hour between the stops, before they broke the surface. The Zodiac had drifted, tugging them along with it, and the wreck of Lisa's Revenge was a couple hundred yards distant along the bottom. The sun was on its way down, but still a fair bit above the horizon. It was nearly seven, by her watch. And sunset wouldn't be more than an hour or so off.

Sarah cut her tanks free before climbing into the rubber boat. They were pretty much dead weight at the moment. Chuck followed suit and they sat for a couple minutes in relative silence, except for the sound of Chuck's deep breathing. He was savoring every lungful now that they were back topside. She arched an eyebrow at him. "I guess scuba isn't really your thing after all."

"Well," Chuck said. "Most people their first dive is a little less... exciting."

"Granted," Sarah chuckled. She hauled herself up from lying along one side of the boat and shuffled back to start the outboard.

She pulled the string and nothing happened. Sarah cursed under her breath and tried again. Several times. Finally the cursing was no longer under her breath.

"Something wrong?"

"It's supposed to be able to start. I saw this YouTube video and everything."

"I..." Chuck started. "Um. I think that's a special model. You know, for the military? Where did you guys get this one?" Sarah glared at him, and then shrugged. "Dad got it from some guy he knows. I didn't want to know the details, if you understand?" He let the subject die.

When he came over to try and help, Sarah glared at him some more.

"What, do you think I don't know how to start an outboard?"

"No, you probably know better than me, I just," Chuck said. He grimaced. "Well, here's a problem. I don't know if it's the problem."

"What's that?"

"The bullet holes were the major tip-off," he said, pointing.

"Son of a bitch!" Sarah growled. "What the hell! All that gunfire, and the thing gets shot in the engine, but somehow the hull doesn't take anything?"

Chuck shrugged. "So does that mean we're stranded?"

Sarah shook her head and pointed. "No. Luckily we still have the oars," they were strapped securely to the inside of the bottom of the Zodiac. She shrugged out of her backpack. "Still, we've got to be fifty miles from land. So, the satellite telephone in a waterproof baggie in here is probably out best bet."

Sarah pulled out the bag and unsealed the zip-close, pulling out the satellite phone and extending the antenna. She pushed the power button for three seconds as the user manual dictated, if memory served. But nothing happened.

"Oh, come on!" She tried again.

"Sarah," Chuck said in a calm that came from he didn't know where. "When was the last time you charged that thing?"

She shrugged. "A couple months ago when I put the bag together, why?"

"Nickel metal hydride batteries only keep their charge for maybe a month," he said. "Battery's dead."

Sarah cursed like a sailor. Which, Chuck guessed, was fair. She reared back to throw the thing into the ocean in anger.

Chuck lurched forward and grabbed her wrist. "Whoa there! I might have an idea. May I?" Sarah relinquished the sat-phone, and Chuck pried the back off the battery compartment briefly.

"What are you thinking?"

He replaced the back of the Sat-phone and dug out his cell. "I'm thinking I might be able to wire the sat-phone to my cell-battery. But..." He made sure his hands were dry before he peeked briefly at the battery in his phone. "You have a pen and paper? We'd only get one shot at this. And all the salt water vapor in the air, the contacts might corrode if we're not careful. We can't afford to short out either of these."

Sarah searched through her emergency backpack and found an old Bic disposable ball-point pen, but the exposure to the pressure, even at forty feet below, had cracked the case, and water had gotten into the ink. She didn't have any paper to go with it. "I'd better put the sat-phone away again, huh?"

"Yes." Silence while she put the sat phone away in its waterproof bag and Chuck turned off his cell-phone to preserve the battery. It was already down to about twenty percent according to his charge readout. "So," he finally said. "I guess we better start rowing? Any clue on a direction?"

Sarah squinted. "Sunset gives us a rough westerly, but this time of year, at this latitude it'll be off somewhat." She did some racking of her brain, and then pointed. "Island of Luzon is that way, but we're drifting north. Might be the wind, might be a current. Either way we'll have to fight it to keep going east. And we might miss it entirely if we're not on a true bearing."

"What you're saying is rowing is out?"

"It's not exactly going to be very fast, is the main thing, and we could tire ourselves out pretty good, use up all our fresh water. I've got a couple canteens, but that's maybe two days of water for both of us, if we stretch it."

Chuck frowned. "You hear that?"

Sarah cocked her head. "Seagulls."

"We could follow them in!"

She shook her head. "That's not a sure thing, Chuck. They can range for miles out to sea."

"But it's evening, right. Won't they be heading back toward land to roost for the night?"

"Or they could be roosting on a tiny little atoll someplace and if we use up our water exerting ourselves to get there we're screwed."

"The only people who might come back to look for us are the pirates," Chuck said. "We're screwed anyway."

Sarah chewed her lip for a moment, and then broke out the oars. She passed one to Chuck grimly. "If this doesn't work, you're going to have to try the thing with the phones, salt air or no."

"I know," he sighed, dipping his oar into the water.

"One thing I don't get," Chuck said in between paddling after the sound of the gulls.

"Yeah, what's that?"

"How did garret and the jerk brigade find us," he frowned. "Your dad gave them the wrong coordinates, they should have been like thirty miles away. They couldn't have seen us at that distance could they?"

"Probably not," Sarah said. "Unless they had some really bitching field glasses. No, it's probably something much simpler. Garret knows ab— knew about the boat. He could have had one of his guys drop a GPS transmitter on it while we were at the hospital." Her voice lost the speculative edge as she went on. "That's probably why they let dad go in the first place. If they suspected he wasn't telling the truth... I mean, I doubt they've got anybody on the payroll who's really experience at torturing somebody. It's not exactly that common of a skill."

"Thankfully."

"Yeah," Sarah said. "Garret isn't— wasn't a complete idiot. Just... a crook. He'd have been smart enough to know Dad would give me the real coordinates and I might just run off without sweeping the boat. Stupid. My fault really."

"Hey," Chuck said. "Neither of us thought of it. It's both our faults or- no. It's the bad guys' faults. We didn't come on their boat with guns and threaten to shoot everybody. You want to get angry at somebody. Get angry at those guys who got away with the case. Shit! We still don't even know what all this is about."

Sarah put a hand on his knee. "Thanks for not blaming me."

He shrugged. "Don't worry about it." They kept paddling, chasing the seagulls toward land. Hopefully.

It was sunset that let them find the island, cast in silhouette against the disc of the sun. Chuck let out a whoop, calling land ho! Like a sailor of old and setting Sarah off in a fit of nervous giggles. He didn't really know what came over him, but he pulled her close and kissed her.

She was surprised more than anything at first, but she didn't pull away for a long time. When she finally did, it was to remind him they weren't finished paddling.

Full dark was falling by the time they rowed the Zodiac through the breakers. The tide was on its way in, luckily enough, and Chuck and Sarah were nearly wrung out by that point anyway. They made landfall on a black sand beach and Chuck collapsed to kiss the ground. Sarah nudged him with a toe, and he managed to haul himself to his feet. They dragged the zodiac with them up the beach at Sarah's insistence. They couldn't afford to lose the boat when the tide went back out.

The beach wasn't very large, only a couple hundred yards wide, and maybe a quarter of that deep, butting up against a cliff-face only a fifty yards or so from where they came ashore. There was a fold in the cliff-face nearby above the high-tide line. Not quite a cave, but with just enough overhang to give them some shelter from the heat of the day on the morrow.

Chuck and Sarah sank down onto the sandy floor of the not-quite-cave, winded from hauling the zodiac.

He let out a sigh, and laughed briefly. It was contagious, a resumption of the giddy realization they'd had when they had first spotted the island. Finally they wound down. "Well, I guess it could be worse," Chuck said before he could stop himself."

Sarah rolled her eyes. "Come on, really?" she said as the first drops of rain landed on her arm. "You know better than that."

Chuck shook his head. "No, you come on!" He turned and shook his fist at the rainclouds, nearly invisible against the sky. "It's the other way around. I say: 'At least it can't get any worse,' and then it starts raining. Where's your sense of drama, rain-gods?"

Sarah poked him in the side. "If maybe we flip the Zodiac we can get some more shelter from the rain. I don't think the cliff is going to help us much."

"Yeah," Chuck said, exhaustion creeping into his voice. It took some doing, and the rain was quickening all the time, but Chuck and Sarah got the Zodiac flipped and over their heads. They carried it the last few yards like a turtle shell against the rain, and wedged the thing crosswise in the opening of their natural shelter.

They huddled together for warmth, listening to the storm grow in fury and shivering in their rain-damp clothes.

Thunder roared somewhere out over the water and a gust tumbled the zodiac in on top of them. Sarah lay half-on top of him, when the dust had settled, chewing her lip. "You know, when I stopped you earlier... it wasn't... it didn't seem like you were finished kissing me."

"Yeah," Chuck said. "I wasn't."

"Good. I wasn't finished kissing you either."

Their lips met. The rain drummed above them on the underside of the Zodiac. One thing led to another.

TO BE CONTINUED...

A/N: Reviews are the candy coating that slowly gives me diabetes. But... in a good way? That metaphor needs some work, but the point remains: please review. And don't be bashful about telling me when something doesn't work. I've got a thick skin.