Seng had already seen the indicator light in the cockpit telling him that the hatch was secure. He’d hit the button even as the Chairman’s voice came over the radio.

With a clunk, the Nomad detached from its lower frame and began a wild rise to the surface. Only it didn’t. It rose less than two feet before it became enmeshed in the mine tender’s dislodged radio mast and an old, rotted fishing net.

Juan knew he should feel the cylindrical hull rocketing up from the depths the way one feels in a high-speed elevator. That wasn’t happening. They had cut loose the heavy sled but weren’t rising.

There was at most thirty seconds between the torpedoes, and he reacted without thought.

“Seal the hatch after me,” he said to Mike Trono and opened the air lock.

Cabrillo launched himself out of the mini-sub, flashing his light along its length, searching for whatever had snagged it and prevented its ascent. He saw the mast that had fallen across the sub’s hull, but it wasn’t big enough to have stalled their rise. Instead, it was the tangled mass of fishing nets that kept them stuck in place.

His titanium dive knife was honed to a razor’s edge, and the buoyancy of the submersible cabin kept the net’s lines taut. He attacked them like a ninja wielding a samurai sword, slashing and hacking the lines with abandon. The mini-sub rose fractionally as more of the tendrils binding it fell free. Cabrillo kept at it. The water filled with tiny bits of old sisal and a maelstrom of disturbed marine growth.

Then all at once, as he knew it would, the submersible erupted from the net, freeing itself of the last of the ropes and vanishing upward in the blink of an eye.

Cabrillo wasted no time watching it. He swam over to the far side of the wreck, dropped down to the bottom, and crawled as far from the ship as he could. He had to thrust his hands into the silt to keep from being blown away by the current.

The second torpedo augured into the seafloor well short of its target. Because he was shielded by the ship’s hull and was lying flat on the bottom, the pressure wave mostly expanded over him, but he still caught enough to have the air forced from his lungs in an explosive breath that almost unsealed his dive helmet.

He thought he’d survived the worst of it when a second pressure wave hit, and this time it peeled him off the bottom and sent him tumbling. The current grabbed at him immediately, and he was soon bouncing along the bottom at a stiff four knots.