FRANK PAYNE AND THE MYSTERIOUS CAVE

-- Chapter 12 -- The Mariana's Trench

He went down the pier, hanging from the wooden logs that stuck in the sands of the sea, and waited for whoever it was to appear. Then Frank and Jason appeared, carrying a few boxes and opening a door to some sort of warehouse in the back of the submarine. They walked back to the village, leaving the storeroom door half-open, imagining that they had closed it, had it not been for a small trunk from one of Jason's sacred roots, which had fallen from one of the boxes Frank had carried and got between the frame and hatch door, preventing it from locking.

This was the opportunity that Mark needed to board the vessel and discover more things to send to his father. He turned on his cell phone flashlight, closed the hatch door, locking it from the inside, and began to open the boxes that had been neatly tucked into a space so they wouldn't budge during the trip. The boy began investigating box by box for an hour or so, taking pictures of everything in there, missing nothing. The more he could incriminate these thieves the better it would be, already imagining the scent and flavor of the fame he would achieve.

That's when he saw a box written in large letters with the following warning words: "Watch out"! Mark was taken by an astonishing curiosity with the certainty that the contents of this box would be his trump card, but when he opened, he came across a beautiful plant, which had in its stem some small flowers of white color and reddish features, wrapped in a glass bell that protected it.

He realized that it had been freshly harvested, as he noticed that its leaves were still a very vibrant green color. The boy, thinking that it could only be things from these Indians and their idiotic beliefs, threw everything on the ground, breaking the dome that preserved it and scattering its leaves all over the warehouse, not noticing that one of them had fallen and got caught in his hair.

After a few minutes, Mark felt his body was exhausted, as if something had drained his energy suddenly, his legs started to weaken. The boy tried in every way to get to the warehouse door to get out of that damn place, but there were no forces to open the doorknob. His fingers were slipping, the body began to weigh a ton and his eyelids could not stand the task, closing completely. Mark fell to the ground like a rock and fell asleep for a few hours consumed by the toxin Jason used to help him sleep through the hard days of insomnia.

Then Mark heard a very loud noise, coming from something near him. He continued to sleep imagining that he was in a war alongside American troops, commanding an entire army. He heard another loud noise, this time on his left side, and his body was thrown too hard into the corner and his eyes popping open. It was the noise of the Submarine's turbines that made it descend for a dive through the ocean waters at a monstrous speed. He didn't believe he had slept and boarded with that band of criminals into the ocean.

He needed to talk to his father, but there was no sign, that's when he heard something from the front of the submarine that made him even more worried:

"We managed to dodge that missile attack," shouted Jason happily, but at the same time worried that this would only be the first.

"Why are they doing this?" asked Frank

"Remember what that captain told us when we were going to Rota? What did they think there were enemy submarines in the region? Maybe they think that of us," Walter argued.

Barbara continued to look at the submarine's radar to see how far they were from the group's destination and concluded that they had two hours to go before they reached the Mariana Trench region.

"We still have plenty of time to navigate, and by now everyone should be waiting for us with a very unpleasant welcome. We need to go even lower, below 20.000 ft, if we are to remain unnoticed by the US Navy's radar. At this depth there is little communication, and they will hardly detect us."