Mark, who had just kicked over a dumpster, scattering food scraps through the streets of Chamorro Village and eliciting laughter from his friends and henchmen Mountain and Hugodzilla, stopped short, ducking so as not to be seen by the foreign couple. Yes, it was the same losers who knocked him to the ground by smearing ice cream all over his face.
"What are they doing here, inside a stall selling the handicrafts of the losers of the tribe of Inarajan? I'm sure that the rabble Emily Cruz is helping them get to know the place. But who are they? Or better yet, who do they think they're meddling like that on my island?" thought the boy.
He asked the pair of friends to wait for him there without breathing, in fact, to wait for him there without moving, as it was highly likely that the two fools stopped breathing because he had asked. Mark remained crouched, not caring what others might say about him, and hid near the tent where he could hear the conversation between the two strangers.
"But, Frank, are you sure that notes you found on the submarine was your father's?" asked Barbara.
"Of course, I'm more and more sure every time."
"So, he was the one who was here on the island five years ago and got into trouble with the navy! Who would have thought, his beloved father tried as a thief by the Rear Admiral? But also, with the upbringing he gave his son, the admiral must not be a good person."
"Yeah, but tomorrow we'll draw our conclusions as soon as we get to that trench. I'm sure my father didn't die, and we'll know the truth there," Frank pondered. "I feel he's still alive!"
"I'm glad we found this submarine. I'm so looking forward to getting into the early hours of the morning and traveling to the Mariana Trench. I can't wait to get to know the bottom of our ocean, especially the deepest point, in the Challenger Deep depression," said the girl with a twinkle in her eyes and a smile that made Frank's heart flutter.
"Hmm," thought Mark, "it all makes sense now." He tried to call his father to explain that the thief's son was in Guam, but he had already left on his mission and must not have a signal on his cell phone. He decided to return home, put some clothes in his backpack, a flashlight and a canteen, as he was going to investigate this submarine that was in Inarajan and which they would use for travel.
He knew that the dance of the "losers", as he called them, should end around 10:30 pm and until they got all their things and arrived in Inarajan it would take about an hour, so they would have enough time to get to village, explore the submarine and see if he could find any evidence to incriminate the thief and his gang, including the people of the south of the island, who must also be involved in the crime of the past. He imagined receiving the honors with the resolution of this case, who knows, finally, he would be able to prove to the Rear Admiral all his worth as a future naval officer.
He arrived at the village around 11:00 pm, half an hour before the group was expected to arrive. He figured that a submarine must be hidden close to the shore where there was little visibility for someone on the sands of the bay and headed for it without thinking twice. Surely, he would be there, between two rocks on a makeshift pier.
He saw when some Chamorros locked the vessel and returned to the village. Now it was his chance, he ran to the pier and bent to see through the cabin glass, discovering it to be a different submersible than the ones docked at the Guam naval base. In fact, he remembered a project that his father had shown him remarkably like what he was seeing.
Thomas Wolf had asked to build according to the design developed by him and US Navy engineers. Now he was sure, they had stolen the navy submarine and were about to flee, it was all he needed to frame them for life. Mark pulled out his ultramodern cell phone to take pictures of the vessel when he heard voices close.
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."
In his mind, Mark thought that he had been kidnapped by the gang to avenge what his father had done to the thief and for having discovered his intentions and would die like that, alone, at the bottom of the sea. It was then he realized that, if he had been kidnapped, he would be tied up and not released, and he understood that he had gotten into it by accident, and that he was not suspected of being on the vessel, so he thought it best not to make any noise and think of some strategy to get out of that situation. If he attacked the group, he would be in an unfavorable condition, as he was still weak and outnumbered. The boy looked at some leaves on the ground but didn't have the heart to pick it up for fear of falling again and not waking up.
Mark sent several messages on his father's cell phone, hoping that he would be able to communicate, but his phone was still without a signal and apparently it would stay that way until they got back to the island. He didn't know what to do. If only he was with his friends to protect him from these criminals, it wouldn't be like this. With each passing minute, more anger consumed his body and soul. He hated that gringo boy and everything he stood for. As soon as he could, he would pay off that debt, the appetite for revenge only fueling the young man's fury.
"We're only an hour away. Almost there!" - Barbara said to those interested.
Then they saw on their radar something exceptionally large coming their way in those deep waters. It couldn't be, they were being followed by an American submarine, the USS Obstinatus, which had among its crew a battalion of The American Marines. The vessel got closer and closer, coming at a speed unusual for a war submarine. Jason triggered the submarine to descend even further, as he knew that not just any vessel could reach extreme depths without any implications. The speed was so strong that he threw the cell phone out of the hidden young man's hand, who couldn't find it in the middle of all that mess. The submarine Obstinatus did not give up, followed its target firing an even bigger missile, which if it hit the submersible, would destroy everything, but they did not have the skills of Captain Chamorro.
Jason, using naval strategies, accelerated the vessel and valiantly aimed the sub at a ninety-degree angle downward, going deeper and deeper into the bowels of the ocean in a deadly dive, were it not for the highly pressurized effective internal equipment. Luckily, Mark had fastened one of the seat belts, which were used to hold the crew's belongings, around his body, or else he would have been thrown sharply against every box in the room.
"We did it," Jason said, his hands shaking, still not believing the feat that had occurred seconds before.
Everyone looked at each other and some tears leaked from the eyes of some.
"What was that?" Frank asked not understanding what he had just saw.
"It was one of the navy's submarines. I didn't know there was one that reached that depth. But now I believe that there won't be any more problems, as we are reaching more than 32,800 ft and no war submarine can reach unless..."
But before Jason had even finished his sentence, they found themselves facing a light that didn't belong to their submarine.
As soon as it cleared to the point where they could see who was ahead, they saw a copy of their submarine, unable to identify who was in command, finding it more prudent to flee, accelerating the vessel increasingly, thus starting yet another chase, only this time with an equipment with the same skills as theirs.
Rear Admiral Thomas Wolf, piloting the other submarine, had him stop by radio, imagining he was in pursuit of his old enemy Douglas, as it was the same submersible as five years before. The officer, who had a copy like the vessel built after several tests to give it the same performance as his rival's submarine, had never understood how it had disappeared without appearing on his radars and leaving no traces in the ocean and he imagined that way he would have a chance of unraveling this mystery. In that moment, seeing Douglas in front of him, he was sure that he would not pass up this chance again. They were already close to the ground, the lowest depth ever found by man, at almost 36,200 ft, and the submarine in front of them simply wouldn't stop.
With the torpedo attached to the new submarine, Thomas took aim at the enemy vessel, saying that if it didn't stop accelerating and surrender, he would destroy it once and for all, not caring what might happen to the Ocean. Anger at him already at the surface, wanting in any way to stop the burglar who almost ended his career and stole the artifact that should have been his, was much greater than anything else.
On the other side, everyone was still afflicted with the words of the military, even Mark, who begged himself not to end up like this, at the hands of his own father.
Having nowhere else to flee, and being cornered by the rear admiral, they began to plan how they would go about giving themselves up. Disappointment gripped all the group at having gone so far and not completing the mission. Perhaps they would never find the answers to Frank's father's disappearance. It was then that something sinister happened, the stone, which until then was forgotten in the boy's pocket, began to float around the crew and, mysteriously, a white light that emanated from inside the stone blinded everyone, including Mark who even in the part The rear of the submarine saw a strange glow propagate through all the walls of the vessel and, at the same moment, the submarine fell into total silence, as the people who were there fell asleep in a deep sleep, completely blacking out.
That was the view of those inside the front submarine, while Thomas' view was completely different. He saw as it came out of the fugitive vessel a shrill light, like a starburst, ripping the ocean into a narrow fissure some 16 ft high by 10 ft wide, engulfing the submarine in front of him entirely and closing instantly, as if it were a magical portal, leaving the admiral and his submarine again alone in the immensity of the Pacific Ocean.
The group opened their eyes after a few good hours of sleep and was no longer in that vast darkness, on the contrary, the ocean floor seemed to have come to life, with fish, corals and other marine life, in an extraordinary color.
Frank noticed that the stone was settling back into his pocket and no longer glowing. He looked at everyone and found that the other four were fine and, like him, were incredulous when they realized that the lighting was given by fish that emanated a yellowish white light, looking like a lamp. There were beings never seen by the group and this could be a great discovery for humanity.
Barbara, who had Douglas' notes in her hands, began to write down everything she had seen so far, so as not to forget when they returned to their homes, from the navy chase, the glow that mysteriously erased them until the strangeness and bizarreness of the bottom of the sea. Then they heard a loud noise followed by a power outage from inside the submarine, which began to surface increasingly towards the surface at high speed. Jason tried to turn it back on, but without success, that's when, looking at the cabin's oxygen meter, he realized it was emptying itself too fast, terrifying the entire group for fear of lack of the blessed gas.
They reached the surface in a few minutes and found themselves inside what seemed to them a gigantic cave, like a great gallery, where they couldn't see the end or some bordering wall, without a sky above their heads, but still extremely lit, as if led wires descended from the ceilings, illuminating the environment, connected to an imaginary electrical network, or with a glass ceiling where you could see a completely starry sky.
They opened the hatch that separated the team from the mysterious cave without thinking about the consequences, perhaps because of the lack of oxygen that had already left the team feeling the first symptoms. Strangely, the cave did not lack oxygen, so they were able to remove their diving suits, leaving them in the submarine and thanking for this finding. They started to look around, but they didn't find the source of the cave's illumination finding everything very enigmatic what they saw since they woke up, until heard a noise coming from inside the submarine as if something, or better, someone wanted to leave the deposit, in a rush.
Upon opening the submarine's back door, they couldn't believe what they saw. Out came none other than the son of the rear admiral who was chasing them, with a backpack on his back. Mark faced the five who did not understand how the boy was there in front of them, but had no chance to question him, as he ran to the far side where the vessel had stopped, getting lost in the group, while screaming with his chest full of hate, threatening them and saying they would regret having messed with him and his family.
Jason entered the warehouse door that had been half open and found the boxes all overturned, as well as pieces of broken glass on the floor with some petals of the plant from which he used the toxins to beat the insomnia that had plagued his nights for more than ten years, since the death of his wife. The friends would have to clean up all the mess created by the boy before founding out which cave they were in, and then entering the gallery to look for the runaway boy so he wouldn't get into more trouble wherever they were.