Trouble In Paradise

[colt.45]

I wrote this story a couple months ago for my english class and I figured that you guys might get a kick out of it. It's kinda long for a short story so I'll be posting in segments every day or so. I hope ypu like it.

“Well, we finally made it,” I said to my buddy Rob as we stepped out of the air-

port into the hot island sun. We had just gotten off a flight from Southern California to

The Cayman Islands to spend the summer spear fishing and hangin’ out on the islands.

We walked to the curb and hailed a cab to take us to the hotel we would be staying in,

until we could find an apartment for the rest of the summer.

“This is going to be great!” I said, as we unpacked our stuff.

“Yep,” said Rob, “nothin’ to do but hang out, shoot some fish, and surf.”

After we had unpacked, we walked down to the boat harbor to see if we could rent a boat

for the summer. After we looked for a while, we decided on a little twin engine outboard

with down riggers and a depth finder.

“Well what do you think?” I asked Rob as we walked back to our hotel.

“Nice boat,” he said.

“You ready to take it for a spin tomorrow?”

“You betcha,” he said, “they say there’s a drop off out to sea a ways that’s great

for Black Fin and Wahoo, and the reefs are full of Snapper and stuff like that.”

“All right.” I said “It’s going to be a busy day tomorrow.”

The next morning we woke up early, packed a lunch and our gear and were headed out to sea by 9:30. A little later we found a nice reef a ways out to sea, so we set our poles and started trolling. Pretty soon, WHAM, fish on! I jumped out of my seat, grabbed my pole and started reeling it in. Before I even had mine half way in, WHAM! Rob had one too.

“Man this place must be full of fish,” I said. As soon as I had mine in I threw on my stuff grabbed my spear gun, took a deep breath and dove in to the deep, blue waters of the Caribbean. Sure enough the place was packed with fish.

“Man these new fins are great,” I thought to myself, as my new 3-foot long Omar’s propelled me smoothly and quickly through the water in long fluid strokes. For the first minute I just swam around taking in my surroundings. The bright colors of coral neon hued anemones swayed as if in some undetectable ocean current and schools of bright flashing fish passed by.

As soon as I was done sight seeing, I snuck up on a school of Parrot fish and started looking for a good one. As soon as I picked one out, I took the shot. THUNK “Ha,” I thought, “Good solid hit just behind the gills.” The line burned off my reel as the fish took off. I grabbed the line and jerked it backwards, then drawing my knife I shot foreword and brained the fish right between the eyes.

Realizing how dangerously low on air I was, I shot to the surface and gasping for air yelled to Rob, “Hey, check this out!”

“Ah, that’s nothin” he said, and jumped in.

 

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Aside from a little excitement with a moray eel, (Never shootin’ one of those things again) the day went on like this for a couple of hours until Rob came up with what looked like an Abalone.
“Hey, check this out,” he said.
“Cool, you found an Abalone.”
“Yeah,” he said, “but look at this.” He flipped it over and instead of a soft fleshy bottom there was a hard black plate with a tiny key hole in it.
“Weird,” I said, “see if you can get it open.” He went to work on it with his knife and I went down for another dive.
When I resurfaced a couple minutes latter he was still working on it
“No luck huh?”
“Nope, it’s sealed too tight.”
“Here let me see it.” I pulled a hammer from the tool box. WHAM! “There, that did the trick,” I said, as I pulled the two halves apart.
Inside there was a small memory stick.
“Hey Rob, hand me my digital camera.”
“Sure thing,” he said.
I pulled out my memory stick and stuck in the one we found. Suddenly, a message appeared on my screen, it said: “The shipment will arrive at Lost Island the night after tomorrow at 11:30.” Underneath there were some directions and a note that said: “This message wills self destruct ten seconds after activation.” I ripped the memory stick out of my camera and threw it into an empty Gatorade bottle where it detonated with a muffled pop.
“Well, that was interesting,” said Rob.
“Yea,” I said, “let’s get back to the hotel and see what we can find out about this ‘Lost Island’.”

 

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A couple hours later we docked at the boat harbor and hailed a cab. As soon as we had started off, Rob asked the cabbie, “What do you know about Lost Island?”
“What do you want to be goin’ der for?” he asked in his laid back Cayminian accent.
“Just curious,” said Rob.
“Dats a very bad place,” he said, “people go der an de don’t come back, an de say da watta is full a sharks.”
“Do you know where it is?” I asked.
“Sure” he said “let me see your map.”
I handed him our map and he opened it up.
“Look at dis” he said, indicating a miniscule dot on the map that I had previously mistaken for a stain.
“Dat’s it right der,” he said, “is so small dat dey don’ put a name on it. It’s not too hard to find but is bad place for diving because a da sharks. Well here you are,” he said as we pulled to a stop, “dat will be five dallas.”
“Thanks,” we said as we got out of the car.

“Well what do you think?” I asked Rob, “are we going to pay Lost Island a visit tomorrow?”

“You bet!” he said with a grin.
The next day we got our stuff and headed down to the boat harbor with a sense of excited anticipation for our upcoming adventure. If only we knew what it would lead to.

We followed the map, and two or three hours later we saw a dot on the horizon. As we got closer we realized that it was Lost Island. When we got within about five hundred yards we slowed down to check things out. Within about a minute or so we saw a boat heading around the side of the island.
“Hey look at that,” said Rob.
“Yeah, I wonder what they’re doing here,” I said.
“I think they’ve seen us.”
They had changed direction and were coming towards us. When they got within a hundred yards or so, we stood up and started waving. Suddenly I saw the passenger bring a machine gun up to his shoulder.
“Holy $#!%, play dead!” I managed to yell to Rob just before a hail of bullets zipped past us. We both dropped as if we had been hit. As fast as I could, I crawled to the controls and keeping my head down, shoved the throttle stick down as far as it would go. We shot off across the water with another hail of bullets and the trigger happy dude in hot pursuit.
“Well that explains the ‘people going there and not coming back’ part!” yelled Rob over the roar of the engines.
“Yeah no kiddin’!” I yelled back. I raised my head to check the compass and turned a hard right as another hail of bullets came flying overhead.
“What are you doing?” yelled Rob.
“Remember that big reef we had to drive around on the way here?” I yelled.
“Yeah.”
“That’s where we’re going.”
“We’ll never make it over that thing!”
“Exactly!” I yelled back.
“Are you insane?!” He yelled.
“Yes, but that’s beside the point right now, just trust me!”
“Alright.”
As soon as we got within two hundred yards off the reef, I yanked the throttle back causing the guys behind us to stop, putting us only about ten yards apart. Then I rammed the throttle home and threw the fire extinguisher over my shoulder into the windshield of the boat behind us smashing it to pieces.
“Get you’re fins and stuff and get ready to jump!” I yelled. We both grabbed our gear, “NOW!!” We both jumped out just before the boat hit the reef, ripping off the engines and spreading fuel everywhere. Only meters behind, the other boat smashed into the reef and exploded in a giant fireball.
We dove down to avoid the falling debris and started swimming to resurface a few hundred feet away. As soon as we broke the surface I let out a yell,
“Ha ha! Yeah baby! We made it!!”
“That was insane!” yelled Rob.
“You know what sucks though,” I said
“What?” asked Rob.
“Do you have any idea how long it’s going to take us to swim back?”
“Oooh crap, you’re right.” He groaned. “Well, we better get going.”

 

[colt.45]

We arrived completely exhausted at our hotel at 1:00 the next morning and flopped down on our beds, to tired to even talk.
I was woken up at about 12:00 that afternoon by a pillow in my face from Rob “Come on dude,” he said, “let’s head down to the police station. I think they might be interested to hear what happened to us, and I’m guessing we’re going to need a new boat.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” I said.
Two hours later, after getting a new boat, we were kicked out of the police station by an officer grumbling something about “stupid tourists” and “magic mushrooms.”
“Geez lota good that did,” I said.
“Yep,” said Rob “well let’s head back to the hotel and get ready for tonight.”
“Why what’s tonight?” I asked.
“Can you imagine the reward we would get if we busted those guys?” said Rob
“What, are you insane!?” I said, “I’m not goin back there!”
“Got any other plans for tonight?” asked Rob.
“Good point,” I said.
On the way back to the hotel, I told Rob to keep going and stopped at a hardware store where I picked up some utility knife blades, a steel file, and crazy glue.
When we got back to the hotel, I pulled out the stuff from the hardware store and put needle sharp tips on my spears with the file, removed the barbs, and glued the utility knife blades onto the newly sharpened ends.
“What are you doing?” asked Rob.
“We may be shootin’ a little more than fish tonight.” I replied. Rob’s expression grew serious. “Good point,” he said, “here hand me some of that stuff.” I handed him the file and some utility knife blades and he began to do the same thing to his own spears.
As soon as it got dark, we walked down to the boat dock, put our gear in the boat and headed out to sea.
Several hours later we pulled up just about a mile off the shore of Lost Island.
“What time is it?” I asked Rob.
“11:20pm,” he said.
“All right, only 10 minutes left.”
At exactly 11:30, we saw lights on the horizon parallel to the island. Suddenly the lights went out. I looked through the binoculars and even though it was dark, there was enough light coming from the waning crescent moon to see a boat as it turned and headed towards the island. Slowly we made our way up to the island and then watched as they sent divers into the water with what looked like some sort of crates. Pretty soon they started up the boat, drove to almost the exact place where we had first seen them, turned on their lights and continued on their way. The whole operation took no more than ten minutes.

 

[colt.45]

We putted over to the spot where we saw the divers go in, and I flipped on the depth finder.
“Not too deep,” I said, “only about 30 feet or so.” I went over to the depth finder and unhooked it from its stand and then took the wiring and detached it from the boat and set it on the back.
“What are you doing?” asked Rob.
“I’ll bet those guys used a cave to store this stuff in and I noticed those guys were using SCUBA tanks. I want to see how deep it is before we go swimming into it.” I dove into the water, detached the sonar unit from the bottom of the boat and took off looking for the mouth of the tunnel. When I got there, I pointed the sonar thing down the tunnel for a minute and then came back up to the surface. “Well how deep was it?” I asked Rob who had been watching the screen.
“Only thirty feet or so,” he said, “how far down was the opening to the cave?”
“It's only fifteen feet down.”
“So that means its forty five feet to the end and no more than fifteen feet up, so that’s a 60 foot swim. We should be able to make that pretty easy.”
We grabbed our equipment and put on our wet suites.
“Ready?” asked Rob.
“Yep,” I said. And we dove down, head first into the Caribbean, and into the final part of our adventure.
I couldn’t help but wonder if I was dreaming as we slipped silently through the surreal, moon lit, under- water world. The bright colors of the reef were dull tinted grays and the normally flamboyant fish, quick flashes of silver in the dark, moonlit sea. Soon we reached the tunnel entrance and I flipped on my light as we made our way inside. Fifteen feet in, there was an opening in the side that curved upward. We swam over to it and surfaced quietly in a small pool in the middle of a large, dimly lit cave. I was about to gasp for air, when I realized the cave was lit! I looked around and behind me, about 50 feet away there were two men stacking boxes by the light of a bare light bulb.

 

[colt.45]

“What are they doing?” whispered Rob.
“That must be the shipment that just arrived,” I whispered back.
We waited until they were finished and their footsteps had faded down a side tunnel before we got out of the pool, quietly tied our fins and snorkels to our weight belts, and lowered them back into the pool before examining the boxes. The ones on the bottom had radioactive symbols on them and the top ones were unmarked. Carefully I undid the screws on top with the tip of my knife and peered inside. Laying there, carefully packed in Styrofoam, were several card deck sized computer chips and several rolls of different colored wire. Inside the next crate were several circular packs of solid explosives and what appeared to be some sort of electrical blasting caps. Suddenly a terrible thought entered into my mind. With growing dread, I slowly opened the final crate and my fears were confirmed. Inside, carefully packed in Styrofoam, lay a long metal tube with several electrode points and some sort of metallic casing, along with some other assorted metallic odds and ends.
“Oooooh,” I groaned, “we’re screwed.”
“Why?” asked Rob.
“This is stuff to make an atomic bomb,” I said gravely. Rob’s eyes grew wide. “And look here,” I indicated a small Cuban flag on the corner of each crate. We sat there in silence for a second.
“So what you’re saying is that a couple of frat boys from southern California have stumbled across a huge international scandal, and in doing so have become the last hope of saving the world as we know it and all of its inhabitants from certain and absolute destruction?”
“Pretty much,” I said.
“I told you we should have gone to Hawaii.”