Chapter 263

The west coast of Gamti Island was a monotonous, razor-straight marine abrasion flat, as if cut with a knife. The tides barely rose and fell, and reefs were rare, making approach relatively easy—but those very conditions had led the area to be used for military purposes in the past.

Under Spanish rule, it served as a lookout to watch pirate routes and as a temporary anchorage for merchant ships; during the Cold War, an unofficial camp was built there to secretly hold asylum seekers, spies, or Americans accused of treason.

Time passed and the Cold War camp faded into history, but on the same site Somora Prison was born. Traces of the Cold War facility remained throughout Somora Prison—along with multiple decoy buildings on the surface, a secret undersea tunnel for classified transfers had also been built in that era. The building Isaac and the two others entered was a single-story scrap-materials warehouse connected to that undersea tunnel.

“Come in.”

Stepping into the warehouse, Isaac slipped on night vision goggles and looked back. In the blue darkness, Siron and Baekgyeong were feeling their way forward like the blind, moving with cautious steps.

“Ah, fuck! Scared the shit out of me.”

Catching himself on the wall after nearly tripping over an abandoned bucket, Baekgyeong grumbled. A little ahead, Siron swept a hand through empty air.

“I can’t see anything.”

“Reach out.”

Panting, Siron stretched his arm toward Isaac’s voice. Isaac wrapped a hand around Siron’s wrist and drew him in.

“Here.”

As Siron eased toward him, he felt a hand groping for him from behind. It was Baekgyeong. Feeling around, Siron found Baekgyeong’s hand and laced their fingers tight. Guided by Isaac with one hand and guiding Baekgyeong with the other, he moved inward.

Skirting piles of boxes and gear stacked like cover, Isaac led them deep into the building and stopped before a dead-end wall. He dragged aside a rusted steel panel that had been hiding the wall, and a bleak draft blew from the hole in the masonry. Debris lay on the floor where a charge had been set on the concrete plug sealing the tunnel connected to the sea—how they had blasted into the prison from outside.

“Wait here.”

After making sure Siron and Baekgyeong had safely entered the tunnel mouth, Isaac went back to the entrance. He propped a steel partition to hide the hole so that anyone entering the warehouse wouldn’t immediately notice the passage. It was only a stopgap; their escape route would be discovered soon enough.

He swapped the NVGs for a headband flashlight. At the switch, a white LED beam tinged faintly red fanned out in a cone and cut through the dark passage. At his feet sat an oxygen cylinder with its gauge bottomed out and a duffel bag soaked through with water.

“Give me your wrist.”

Siron held his hand out. Isaac buckled a flat rubber band around his forearm, then handed the same thing to Baekgyeong. Up close, there was a small valve on the side. When Siron reached to fiddle with it, Isaac raised a hand to stop him.

“What is this?”

“A buoyancy tube worn on the wrist. In a minute, when we pass through the tunnel and head into the sea, pull this lever. Carbon gas will discharge and the tube will inflate automatically to float you up. Once you break the surface, get on the moored boat.”

Which meant until he found the boat, he would be bobbing on a lightless sea with only a buoyancy tube to rely on. Siron’s heart lurched as if caught in the ocean’s heavy heave.

As he strapped on his tube, Baekgyeong asked, tension in his voice, “What if it’s too dark to find the boat?”

“I tied a rope to the cable at the end of the tunnel. Grab that and climb. Move.”

Hunching down, Isaac advanced deeper into the tunnel. The cold, knife-bright beam lit a narrow, deep passage barely a meter across. Condensation beaded on walls blackened with mold, throwing back shardlike glints that looked sinister.

They reached a final wall. There, like something out of a spy movie, was a pressure door—hydraulic, opened and closed by turning a wheel to block water or air. Isaac knelt and opened his bag.

“From here it gets a little risky.”

“What risk?”

Rummaging, Isaac answered Baekgyeong. “Think submarine. Outside is held back by hydrostatic pressure, inside at atmospheric. If we crack a door just because it’s the sea outside, the pressure will drive water in and drown the whole tunnel. It’s old, but there’s an airlock between two pressure doors to equalize gradually.”

“Then we close the first door and flood the lock to match pressure.”

Isaac nodded. “Right. We flood it, open the second door, and go out... except we have a problem.”

“A problem? What is it?”

Leaning close, face taut, Siron pressed him.

“The valve assembly jammed while I was spinning up the pressure control. The lock is about two-thirds full of seawater right now.”

“So there’s a pressure differential.”

Isaac grimaced as if a stab of pain ran through him and nodded, but under the flashlight glare Siron couldn’t read his expression. Isaac pulled a stainless cylinder, tumbler-sized, from the bag and handed it to him.

“Emergency air supply for divers. You can breathe off it up to three minutes. Keep it for contingencies.”

“Don’t tell me there’s only one.”

Isaac nodded.

“Fuck, that’s just perfect.”

Siron looked between Baekgyeong and Isaac, anxiety shining in his eyes. “We can share it.”

“No. Use it yourself. In a black sea with no visibility, trying to help someone else only creates trouble.”

Turning down the idea flat, Isaac said to Baekgyeong, “Hold on. You won’t die.”

Baekgyeong stared Isaac up and down—his face unusually pale and slicked with cold sweat—and answered, “Worry about your own damn life. Let everyone else drop dead for all I care.”

With a faint curl of the lip, Isaac stepped to the door. Pain flickered across that dry smile, but he hid it perfectly under a masklike blank.

After one more run-through of what to do the moment they exited, Isaac grabbed the wheel on the pressure door. When he put muscle into it, Baekgyeong took the opposite side to help. As the heavy metal locks disengaged, oily lubricant bled down and the shutter clacked open.

“Pull it inward.”

At his word, Baekgyeong hauled the handle. Beyond the wide-open door, five meters down, black water heaved like a bottomless pit. The flashlight’s reflection on that dark surface made Siron’s heart hammer hard and fast.

Isaac went in first. Siron followed without time to think despite the ice-cold terror in his knees, and Baekgyeong went last.

While Siron bobbed in the slanted, iron-walled chamber perhaps a meter across, Isaac and Baekgyeong shut the first pressure door as planned. Now only the second door stood between them and the cold open sea.

“The surge will hit hard. Grab whatever structure you can and don’t get swept. When the door opens, we meet on the boat.”

Isaac drew a deep breath, dipped his head under. Siron and Baekgyeong followed, filling their lungs as much as possible.

Siron had never thought of himself as afraid of water. He’d never been into beach swimming or shot underwater, so he’d simply never had occasion to think about it. Opening his tightly screwed eyes, he saw a blue-white glow stabbing the sealed second door.

Isaac guided Siron to latch onto a ladder structure embedded in the wall, then kicked down into the water column and took the door wheel.

Salt and pale suspended matter pricked Siron’s eyes like needles, but he kept them as wide as he could and watched Isaac. The second door was much larger than the first. It looked massively stout, as if built to bear the pressure where it met the open sea.

Bracing one foot hard to the wall, Isaac wrenched the wheel. The locked door creaked and fought back, but he gritted his teeth and didn’t stop.

In that moment, something bright red bled like ink into the blue-white light. Blood was spreading from Isaac’s left mid-back and flank. Siron, feeling his heartbeat spike and his breath run short, bit down on the emergency mouthpiece and drew air. The clean oxygen pouring into his lungs felt unreal as he watched the blood stream from Isaac’s side.

Baekgyeong shot to Isaac and cranked the wheel with him. The click of clamps unlatching one by one came through as vibration. The instant the last lock released, the great iron door lifted, and a sudden rush smashed Baekgyeong—who was floating with nothing to brace against—full-on. Forcing out the air trapped in the chamber, seawater roared in, whirling violently.

Isaac and Baekgyeong were swept away into the dark by the current. Even though Siron was clinging to the ladder, at some point he lost hold of the emergency air. In the milky boil he couldn’t find it again.

In the opaque water where he couldn’t see an inch ahead, Siron felt along the wall of the lock toward the exit, inching forward. The terror crushing his throat was so absolute he couldn’t even spare worry for Baekgyeong and Isaac. Despite having been breathing calmly moments earlier, in not even twenty seconds after losing the cylinder, he was suffocating. With guilt and a little panic, he prayed the other two—who would have to hold their breath far longer than he—would be safe.

Breaking out of the tunnel mouth under the crushing pressure and lack of air, the environment changed at once. Darkness swallowed his vision, and the sea gripped his whole body on all sides like a living thing.

Cable. The rope tied to the cable.

He had to climb the rope to reach the moored boat. But in the dark, his hands found nothing. Only slick seaweed and sharp shell edges slid under his palms. Gasping in pain that felt like it would stop his heart, losing his patience, Siron yanked the lever on the buoyancy tube at his wrist. Instantly the tube swelled to the size of a watermelon and his body bobbed upward toward the surface.

The moment his face broke into the air, oxygen rammed down his throat. His crushed lungs expanded all at once, gulping greedily. The fear coiled around his body vanished like that, and it felt as if every cell woke with the relief of rescue.

But it didn’t last. A massive sheet of water slapped him down and shoved him under. The wind had turned ugly; the waves were surging.

“Gwek—kh, huh—huh.”

In a darkness where he couldn’t tell sea from sky, Siron barely got his head above the black water and gasped raggedly. He was already drifting toward who-knew-where. And from every direction came a repeating noise with no clear source, booming like thunder—like a small drum hammered at high speed.

Clutching the tube at his wrist for dear life and taking waves full in the face, Siron strained to find the sound’s origin. But the low, heavy noise echoed all around, and he couldn’t fix on a direction.

Then the tall watchtowers of the prison lit their red beacons and a massive searchlight swept the night sky.

“Unauthorised aircraft, this is Somora Correctional. You have entered a restricted airspace. Change altitude immediately and exit a two-mile radius at once! Failure to comply will be considered surveillance-target status and a violation under regulations! Unauthorised aircraft, we repeat—this is Somora Correctional! Vacate immediately!”

Speakers installed around the prison began to blare the warning. A bad feeling rising, Siron hugged the tube and looked up. A helicopter’s silhouette flashed like a spark over the open sea.

Hybris?

He was about to drown and die right here, and they were still looking for him. Despite the blaring warnings, the helicopter kept closing on the prison, dropping altitude. Beaten mercilessly by waves pouncing like a beast, Siron found himself almost wishing Hybris would come fetch him.

Then something black and gleaming slid into his view. About a hundred meters away floated a boat, and a black shape flickered on it. It had to be one of the two—either Baekgyeong or Isaac had made it aboard.

Gyeong.

His chest dropped. Since seeing Baekgyeong hurled away by the surge when they opened the second door, he hadn’t seen him again.

Please don’t let him still be in the tunnel.

And the blood pouring from Isaac’s body—he had clearly come into the prison already wounded.

Thinking that danger had found one of them, tears burst from Siron’s eyes. But the waves smacked his face and scoured them away the instant they fell.

He tried to head for the boat, but the pounding succession of breakers kept sweeping him farther from the island. He felt like Wilson, the volleyball vanishing into the open sea. He thrashed and kicked toward the boat, but he could not reach it.

I’m scared. Please, help me. I think I’m going to die.

Engulfed in blank terror, he felt his body drifting farther from shore. What if no one spotted him and he just drifted? Against the gale and swell, the tube in his arms felt small and flimsy, ready to pop with a puff at any moment.

With the helicopter’s roar and the prison’s alarms merging into chaos, shoved and battered by the waves, Siron fought to keep his head. Maybe the sky heard him—through the muffling din he caught a sound that didn’t belong.

The jet intake and thrust of a boat drawing water beneath the surface and blasting it aft. The engine’s distinct bellow grew louder, cutting the black. The boat was coming closer. Siron kicked desperately and flailed his arms.

It wasn’t his imagination. The boat speared a dazzling light straight at him and drove in on a line. It stopped near him at last. And then someone on board reached out, grabbed him by the nape.

The flashlight’s fierce beam carved the dark and poured over him, bleaching his vision white so he couldn’t even make out the rescuer’s outline. Just as the shiver of being saved ran through him, the man in that light—who had hooked Siron out of the sea—spoke.

“Long time no see, Bébé.”