Free Sharkman by Steve Alten Page A

child of Adad Tayfour, a former Syrian general who resigned from President Assad’s forces to join the people’s revolution. Only nineteen years old, the raven-haired beauty with coal-black eyes had already borne witness to several lifetimes of cruelty. She had lost her mother and younger siblings when Assad’s forces fired Scud missiles upon her city, and for six brutal weeks she had been held captive while guards tortured and violated her. Sweet Sabeen, who had once aspired to a career in dance, no longer existed. The woman known to her commandos as Onyx was a cold-blooded killer. The leader of the Black Widowbrigade operated under a simple directive—revenge.
    Cameron Reeves was out on deck, pretending to check his diving gear while his eyes behind the dark sunglasses focused on the athletic Arab woman bench pressing her weight in the blue neoprene two-piece. Two members of the Muslim Brotherhood watched the American commando suspiciously, but Reeves didn’t care. Muslim or not, a woman doesn’t wear skin-tight fabrics to work out in public unless she wanted to be watched, and the former Navy SEAL was only happy to oblige.
    Reeves’s dive partner, David Watkins, was a linebacker-sized Californian who refused to function on land without his San Francisco 49ers hat, which he always wore backward. The two Americans turned in unison as they heard the helicopter’s pounding rotors approaching from the northwest.
    Three minutes later, the Sikorsky S-434 light chopper landed on deck.
    The man who climbed out of the cockpit was my father. Admiral Douglas Wilson was dressed in civilian attire, the sleeves of his embroidered Hawaiian Tommy Bahama shirt flapping beneath the slowing rotors.
    Watkins greeted his black ops employer. “Your downed lady’s in two hundred and twenty feet of water, with her ass-end hanging over the edge of the Puerto Rico Trench. If she goes, you’ll need a DSRV to reach her.”
    “Why the hell are we having this conversation? Go down and get me what I want.”
    “Money first, Admiral,” Reeves said, entering the conversation. “And you can save the bad dog bit for the enlisted men.”
    Admiral Wilson reached inside the four-passenger helicopter and retrieved an aluminum suitcase from beneath the copilot’s seat. “One million dollars—half a million apiece for doing a job the navy trained you to do for free.”
    Watkins took the suitcase and passed it back to Reeves. “What do we do about the woman? She’s insisting on making the dive.”
    Onyx stepped forward. “I can speak for myself.”
    The admiral’s eyes widened behind his mirrored sunglasses. “Sabeen, so nice to see you again.”
    “You will address me only as Onyx. I will make the dive with your team.”
    Watkins looked up from counting the shrink-wrapped fifty-thousand-dollar stacks of money. “You’re too young; it’s way too dangerous.”
    “I’m old enough to kill.”
    “Onyx—”
    “Admiral, my cousin Mahdi was aboard the submarine. My father has instructed me to recite the Salat al-Janazah among our dead. The prayer is a collective obligation among Muslims. If no one fulfills it, then all Muslims will be held accountable.”
    Admiral Wilson pulled Watkins aside. “Let her dive. She can pray over her dead while you and Reeves load the package into the flotation harness . . . or she can join them if she screws up.”
    The difference between a recreational dive and a technical dive is depth. Depth determines the mixtures of gases one will use to breathe and the number of decompression stops on the way up to prevent nitrogen narcosis. The preferred mix for dives exceeding 185 feet is Heliox, which is helium and oxygen. Unlike nitrogen, helium does not have an intoxicating effect, but its thermal conductivity is six times greater than that of nitrogen, causing the diver to lose body heat rapidly. Because helium dissolves quickly, divers must decompress more often during their ascent or risk the formation of