Zero Visibility

Cold runoff tasted of iron filings and old sump oil around the dead mouthpiece of his severed umbilical, but Tidjani kept his jaws clamped tight on the rubber bite-tabs of the lumbar bailout rig. Forty feet down in the pitch black of the siphon mouth, he needed to put his hands on the man who had shot up the pump house before his remaining thirteen minutes of gas thinned to nothing. The concrete lip of the discharge culvert dug into his hip bones. He stayed belly-down in the grit, counting the vibrations pulsing through the flooded floor: two metal heels stepping along the submerged catwalk fifty feet out, followed by the slow, metered sweep of a halogen beam cutting cone-shaped slices through twenty thousand gallons of suspended silt.

The light was wide, pale, and expensive. It carved a clean green tunnel through the blackwater, illuminating floating rafts of grease and shredded cellulose before striking the curved limestone ribs of the lower collection vault.

A municipal diver in Nouar-el-Bahr carried whatever brass-cased incandescent bulb the quartermaster had salvaged from the dockyard scrap auctions. That yellow glow died four inches past the glass. This beam threw twenty paces of sharp white daylight through raw storm runoff, mounted to the foregrip of a matte-black pneumatic spear carbine. Behind the lens hovered the silhouette of a closed-circuit rebreather rig. No exhaust bubbles climbed the vault arch. No ragged mechanical valve clicks broke the water's dead weight. The man moved with the silent, balanced kick of an operator who had trained in coastal drop-tanks rather than dragging grease mats out of municipal storm traps.

Tidjani pressed his backplate into the gravel and let his breathing drop to three slow sips a minute.

The city council refused twenty dinars for replacement gasket seals every budget cycle, claiming the drainage bureau was bleeding municipal funds dry. Yet here swam fifty thousand dinars of sealed composite rubber, military scrubbing canisters, and machined alloy fins, kicking through sixty inches of domestic toilet grease.

"Wasting champagne on a sewer pit," Tidjani whispered against his inner collar microphone, the dead wire deadening his own voice to a muffled rasp.

He slid his right palm down the shank of the twenty-four-inch bronze spud wrench. The metal was pitted, cold, and solid, carrying twenty pounds of casting ballast that wanted to pull his forearm into the mud.

The light crossed the siphon opening. It was twenty feet overhead, angled downward toward the low weir where the storm runoff spilled into the secondary retention cavern. The mercenary was not scanning the masonry pipes. The man was checking the overflow weir's iron trash grating, likely searching for bodies swept down from the turbine throat or verifying that the secondary bypass remained locked down.

The current through the culvert neck ran out at three knots, curling over the sill and sliding into a counter-eddy along the western wall.

Tidjani did not push off the floor. An upward kick would displace silt, and the mercenary's halogen beam would catch the plume instantly. Instead, Tidjani reached out with his left hand, found the bronze bleed valve on his chest harness, and tapped it twice. A controlled burst of gas hissed out of his drysuit shoulder vent. He dumped enough buoyancy to sink hard against the bedrock, turning his bulky neoprene body negative.

He gripped the rim of the concrete pipe, rolled sideways into the main current, and let the back-eddy carry him across the floor like a waterlogged timber.

The cold hit him first, numbing the scarred skin across his ribs where his heated undersuit had gone inert. The current swept him five yards below the beam. Suspended grease clumps and torn jute bags tumbled through the light above him, masking his bulk as he drifted along the scouring trench beneath the weir apron.

Ten feet out from the mercenary's steel-toed combat fins, the bottom shelf shelved upward into an iron deflection baffle.

Tidjani caught the baffle's bolted angle iron with his left gauntlet. The shock shuddered through his elbow, but he locked his tendons and held his station against the drag of the river.

Above him, the mercenary swung the spear carbine toward the eastern wall. The bright halogen cone swept past Tidjani's position, lighting the green moss on the weir crest without catching the dark shape huddled behind the iron baffle.

The frogman paused, adjusting the trim on his rebreather counter-lung.

Tidjani braced both heavy dive boots against the concrete baffle footing, coiled his knees to his chest, and drove himself upward through the dead zone behind the diver's left fin.

Water resistance dragged at his shoulders, but twenty years of wrestling seized gate valves gave Tidjani a butcher's grip. He struck the mercenary from below, coming up under the man's armpit with his full mass.

The collision knocked the mercenary's fins out of trim. The spear carbine jerked upward, its trigger tripping in the panic of impact. A heavy steel shaft hissed from the muzzle with a violent hydraulic clap, ricocheting off the masonry vault ceiling fifty feet above and sending a shockwave through the water that rattled Tidjani's faceplate.

The mercenary reacted without panic. He whipped his right elbow back, driving the hard polymer stock of the discharged carbine toward Tidjani's helmet visor.

Tidjani did not duck. He brought the twenty-pound bronze spud wrench up like a riot shield.

The carbine's barrel struck the cast bronze with a dull chime that rang in Tidjani's teeth. Before the mercenary could pull the empty weapon back to draw a dive knife, Tidjani hooked the wrench's open jaw over the carbine's receiver, twisted his wrists with all the torque in his back, and tore the weapon out of the gloved hands. The carbine hung suspended by its wrist lanyard, dragging between them in the churn.

The mercenary reached for Tidjani's bailout regulator, gloved fingers clawing for the second-stage hose to tear the air supply from his mouth.

A tearing breath tasted of rust. In the narrow black between their visors, Tidjani saw the mercenary's eyes: wide, pale beneath the mask, completely focused on killing him before the light drifted away.

Tidjani did not fight for the hose. He reached over the man's shoulder, found the corrugated rubber loop of the rebreather's exhalation hose, and slammed the flat of the bronze wrench down across the diver's neck ring.

The heavy bronze crushed the corrugated rubber against the machined brass manifold. Bubbles—furious, frothing streams of gray scrubbed gas—erupted into the zero-visibility water as the rebreather loop sheared open.

The mercenary stiffened, thrashing violently as his counter-lung flooded with raw, freezing sewage. The man kicked his fins against the weir wall, trying to break the lock and push toward the surface ladder forty yards across the pool.

Tidjani wrapped both legs around the diver's weighted waistbelt, clamped his left arm across the man's helmet dome, and drove him face-first into the concrete apron beneath the weir sill. He planted his knees into the small of the mercenary's back and leaned his dead weight onto the wrench, pinning the shattered breathing rig against the stones until the thrashing gave way to a ragged, hitching tremor.

The frogman went limp against the floor, settling into the gravel silt as the current washed his combat fins downstream.

Tidjani held him down for twenty slow beats, his own chest heaving as the bailout cylinder's needle trembled near one hundred bar. Roughly ten minutes of air left.

He let go of the wrench, reached down, and unclipped the lanyard securing the spear carbine from the dead wrist.

The weapon was an eighty-centimeter pneumatic carbine, its titanium air reservoir intact and its rail fitted with two spare carbon-fiber shafts clipped along the lower groove. Clipped beside the trigger guard was the halogen dive torch, still burning with blinding, uninterrupted daylight.

Tidjani unsnapped the torch bracket, held the wide white beam in his left fist, and rolled the body onto its back.

The diver's suit was dry neoprene, reinforced at the joints with vulcanized aramid weave. On the left shoulder sat a sewn tactical sleeve pocket, closed with a rubberized marine zipper. Just above the breast seal, heat-pressed into the gray chest rubber, was a circular silver crest: a stylized desert falcon perched across an open floodgate, surrounded by three interlocking cog teeth.

It was not a military insignia, and it had never belonged to the Nouar-el-Bahr Municipal Drainage Bureau.

It was the private corporate seal of the Sebkha Reclamation Consortium.

Tidjani ran his thick neoprene thumb across the cold silver foil of the patch. The same crest was stamped on the glossy prospectus brochures the city land office handed out when they announced the planned condemnation of the El-Mellah waterfront tenements.

"Reclamation," Tidjani spat into the rubber mouthpiece, the bitter gas scouring the back of his tongue.

He clipped the spear carbine to his shoulder D-ring, slotted the two spare shafts into his thigh sheath, and gripped the burning halogen light. Rising slowly into the dark pool above the weir, he set his boots toward the iron access ladder leading up to the dry service mezzanine.