Dark Signal: A Ryan Weller Thriller Book16 (EBOOK)

Tobago Cays,
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines

Sunlight cut through the water like spotlights as Ryan Weller propelled himself toward the seabed, lobster snare in hand.
He focused on the swirl of tiny fish near the mouth of a coral hole and saw two large spiny lobster antennae, used for fighting and defense, waving in the slight current. Using the butt of the snare, Ryan nudged the lobster’s tail through a crack in the coral and startled the crustacean from its hiding spot. Quickly flipping the snare around, he slipped the noose around the lobster and tightened it down. Moments later, the lobster was in Ryan’s catch bag, and he was on his way back to the surface.
As he finned upward, Ryan stared at the bottom of his Fountaine Pajot Sabre 50. The twin hulls were still sleek and clean from two years on the hard at a boatyard in Prickly Bay, Grenada.
Now anchored in the Tobago Cays, between Grenada and Saint Vincent, the water was shallow and clear, perfect for their tiny passenger’s initiation into boating life. Emily sat on the port sugar scoop with her legs in the water, holding Beth, their two-year-old daughter.
Beth stared down at her father with inquisitive blue eyes, her blonde curls matted to her head from splashing about in the water. She was the spitting image of her mother. Time would tell if Beth would match her mother’s five feet ten inches or Ryan’s six feet.
Ryan glided up to grab the lowest rung on the stainless steel ladder and, still beneath the surface, blew a bubble at his daughter, who smacked it playfully with her hand. He blew a few more bubbles until his lungs felt like they were about to explode from a lack of oxygen.
As he surfaced, Emily lifted Beth out of the water, teasingly crying out, “Oh no! The sea creature is coming to get us! Someone save us!”
Beth giggled hysterically as Ryan popped his head above the water. “Who’s hungry? I am. I’m going to nibble on a little girl.” He snapped his teeth and leaned in to snack on Beth’s arm.
“Daddy,” she giggled.
Ryan smiled so profoundly that it touched his heart. He loved hearing her call him Daddy. He loved being a father. The time they had spent in North Carolina and Florida, allowing Beth to get to know her grandparents, aunts, and uncles, had been time well spent, but Ryan was glad to be back on Huntress.
He climbed the ladder and plopped his bag of lobsters on the deck. Beth poked at the crustaceans with her tiny fingers. The lobsters tried to back away, entangling their antennae and legs in the net even further. Beth laughed at their antics and then scurried back to Emily’s side.
Ryan cleaned the lobster and pulled mutton snapper fillets from the fridge. He fired up the grill and cooked dinner while Emily fixed a salad. Beth tottered between her parents, bumping into things and falling when the boat swayed at anchor. She was just getting used to walking and now had to find her sea legs.
Sitting at the cockpit table, Ryan relaxed as he watched Beth chew her lobster and mutton. Everything was new to her, and it was fun to see the world through her eyes. Ryan tried to drink it all in and savor each moment with his two favorite ladies. Emily caught him staring at Beth and reached over to squeeze his hand. Her smile told Ryan that she loved being a parent, too.
The sat phone rang, startling Ryan from his peaceful dinner. He glanced at Emily, who shrugged.
Reluctantly, Ryan stood and went to the navigation station at the front of the main cabin. He glanced at the Caller ID and saw it was Greg Olsen, owner of Dark Water Research and one of his best friends.
“What’s going on?” Ryan said into the phone.
“Can you do me a favor?” Greg asked. “I know you’re in the Tobago Cays.”
Ryan figured Greg had checked Huntress’ transponder location on MarineTraffic. “Sure. What’s going on?”
“Some dipstick yacht captain dragged his anchor in a prohibited anchorage off Magazine Beach on Grenada and caught it on a subsea cable. I’ll pay you the usual day rate for a commercial diver to retrieve the anchor and move the cable back into place.”
Ryan glanced back at Emily, who was nodding her head emphatically as if to say, “You need something to do, mister.” They’d been anchored in Windward Bay for almost two weeks, exploring the islands, scuba diving on the reefs, and introducing Beth to boat life. As enjoyable as it had been, Emily could sense Ryan’s restlessness—his desire to sail for the Panama Canal.
“Yeah. That shouldn’t be a problem,” Ryan said to his former boss.
“Thanks, Ryan. If the cable is damaged, I’ll send a repair crew. I just need to know what to expect.”
“Did they sever it?” Ryan asked.
“No. It seems to be working fine. The concern is damage to the outer liner, which could allow seawater into the cable. From what I’ve heard, I think we’ll just need to move it back into place to take the strain off of it. I’ll text you my contact’s number at SVG Telecom. Give him a shout when you get to Grenada. No rush.”
“Roger that. I’ll get down there in a couple of days and take a look. I’ll give you a call afterward.”
“How’s the monkey?” Greg asked before Ryan could hang up.
“She’s good. Keeping me on my toes.”
“You need it. Give her a hug from Uncle Hot Wheels and tell her to keep up the good work.”
“You got it, bud. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Ryan ended the call and then examined the laminated chart on the tabletop. Depending on how they wove their way through the Tobago Cays, it was nearly one hundred nautical miles back to Magazine Beach, but it was also an excellent jumping-off point to head for the Panama Canal so they could resume their postponed world tour.
“Sounds exciting,” Emily said as Ryan returned to the cockpit and explained the mission.
“Should be a fairly routine dive,” he replied, reaching for another fillet, and hoping he was right.

CHAPTER 2
Two days later
Quarantine Point, Grenada

The sail down from the Tobago Cays had been gentle and easy, with an overnight stop at Frigate Island. Ryan liked the relaxed travel pace with no set schedule. And having Beth aboard was a ready-made excuse to stop at any time.
Now with Huntress moored off Quarantine Point, Ryan called the SVG Telecom representative who would take him out to the dive site.
An hour later, a lean, bald Grenadian with a pencil-thin mustache pulled up in an aluminum center console workboat with an ancient outboard on the back and a small crane arm mounted amidships. The man introduced himself as Ronald Julian, even shaking Beth’s tiny hand. Ryan loaded his dive equipment into the boat, and the two men set off across the water.
“When the yacht’s owner radioed for help, the Coast Guard cut his anchor chain, so in addition to inspecting the cable, we will pay you to remove the chain,” Julian explained.
“Do you know what size anchor he was using?” Ryan asked, squinting as he stared across the water.
“No,” Julian replied. “But it should not be a problem for you. This is why I brought the boat with the crane arm.”
“It would be better if we had a windlass to pull the chain up with.”
“This is all I have at my disposal.”
Ryan nodded, gripping the rail on the side of the center console to keep his footing as the boat bounced across the small waves. The hot sun beat mercilessly down on them, and he was thankful for the breeze to dry his sweat-soaked shirt. Ryan was ready to get into the water.
Ten minutes later, Julian pulled the throttle back and let the boat drift over the GPS coordinates that marked the anchor’s location.
“Why did he anchor out here?” Ryan asked. “There’s no protection from the weather.”
Julian shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Ryan shouldered into his XDeep Stealth buoyancy compensator device, or BCD, and then clipped a tank to his left side. He leaned over the edge of the boat and peered into the water below. They were in sixty-feet of murky water, and Ryan knew from studying the chart that the water quickly dropped to past one hundred feet the farther north he went. He strapped a tank to the right side to balance out his sidemount configuration, tested his inflator and each regulator, and then rolled over the side of the boat.
With no air in his BCD, Ryan dropped like a stone, blowing out through his nose to clear his ears of pressure as he pulled on his dive fins. Once he had the fins on, he spread out into a proper diving position and injected a puff of air into his BCD to become neutrally buoyant, allowing him to orient himself to the landscape below.
Rock piles and coral heads littered the sandy floor. Fish darted in and out of the reefs. Ryan spotted a conch so large that he could wear the shell as a hat. While he took all of this in, he searched for the anchor chain, knowing it would be brilliant steel, glinting like modern-day treasure against the darker backdrop.
The rocky seabed hadn’t allowed the cable-laying crew to use a plow to bury the cable as they normally would in shallow water to prevent just this type of thing from happening. They had just draped the cable across the rocky bottom, following a straight line across the ocean floor. If Ryan followed the cable long enough, he’d end up in Saint Lucia.
What Ryan eventually spotted on the seafloor was a black polyethylene cable about two inches thick. At the core was a fiber optic cable sheathed in copper and reinforced by steel threading. Manufacturers constructed each cable to meet the specific environmental conditions where it would be laid, to minimize corrosion, animal activity, and the growth of microorganisms that could harm it.
Most people thought of satellites when they turned on their Internet, but what the cloud really ran on was over seventy-five thousand miles of subsea cable resting on the bottom of the world’s oceans.
Ryan turned on his GoPro to record the action for Greg Olsen as he approached the barnacle-encrusted cable. Slowly finning along the line, Ryan kept checking his computer, monitoring his depth and the air pressure in his twin cylinders.
Approaching the anchor, Ryan could see that the cable had left a trail in the sand before snagging on a coral head and tightening like a guitar string. Twenty feet later, Ryan found the anchor tangled in the cable. Surprisingly, the anchor had dragged the first cable across a second and tangled in both, with the chain stretching into the murky distance.
Ryan swam another ten feet to inspect the two cables before turning around and heading back toward the coral head that had kept the cable from dragging farther west. He tried to tug the heavy cable away from the razor-sharp coral but was unable to move it. Wedging his camera between the cable and the coral, Ryan tried to get a decent shot of any damage to the polyethylene cover.
Once he had what he wanted, Ryan returned to the surface and reported his findings to the telecom official.
“What is your recommendation?” Julian asked.
“We need a bigger boat,” the diver deadpanned. When Julian didn’t get Ryan’s reference to the movie Jaws, he added, “I need more tools to free the anchor from the cables.”
“Can we use the crane to lift the cable to free the anchor?”
Ryan pondered that for a moment. “It’s a good idea, but I’m not a cable expert. Let me run it by my boss, and we’ll go from there.”
Julian looked dubious. “I had hoped to finish this project today.”
“I agree, but we don’t want to damage the cables. I think we should use caution here. Let’s go to my boat, and we’ll talk to Greg together.”
Julian fired up the workboat and headed for Huntress.
As they approached, Ryan surveyed the boats in the anchorage. Two more sailboats had joined them overnight, and a large exploration vessel sat closer to the point. Ryan noted the name Silent Signal painted in gold lettering on the boat’s dark blue hull. As Ryan stared at the unusual ship, he noticed the lines of a platform supply vessel. A large cabin area had been added to the white superstructure with a black crane arm on the starboard side amidships, several rust-streaked cargo containers sat on the low aft deck, and a stern A-frame lift had been added for launching small boats or remotely operated vehicles.
The telecoms rep slid the workboat to a stop alongside Huntress.
Ryan kissed his girls and brought a glass of freshly squeezed pineapple juice out for Ronald Julian before sitting down at the cockpit table with a cold beer and his laptop. First, he uploaded the video from his GoPro, and then he called Greg to give him a sitrep.
Moments later, Greg Olsen came on the screen through a Zoom call.
“Can we move the cable?” Julian asked.
“The anchor won’t cause a problem if you want to leave it until we can send a work crew,” Olsen said.
“If we chose to move it now?” Olsen asked.
“You could do as you suggested earlier and use the workboat’s crane to lift the cable,” Greg replied. “But you’ll need to use a sling and tie it off ten feet in either direction of the lifting point so you can lift the cable evenly.”
Julian glanced at Ryan. “Can we do that with the equipment we have?”
“Probably.”
“If you can untangle the anchor, that should give us the slack in the line that we need, and we won’t have to send a crew down,” Greg said. “And it will save SVG Telecom a lot of money.”
“I think that would be most agreeable to the company,” Julian replied. “Let’s do it tomorrow.”
“We can do it, but not tomorrow. I already have plans,” Ryan said, glancing over at Emily in the salon with Beth. He didn’t want to work underwater tomorrow. He wanted to keep his promise to his daughter to take her to the beach. It was important to him that he kept his promises.
“I’ll let you guys work out the details,” Greg said.
Beth ran out the door and jumped into her father’s lap. “I want to see Uncle Hot Wheels.” She waved her little hand in front of the camera, blocking the view.
“Hey, monkey! What are you doing?” Greg asked.
“I’m not a monkey,” Beth replied. “You’re a monkey’s uncle.”
“You know that makes you the monkey, right?” Greg asked.
“No. You’re the monkey.” Beth stuck her tongue out and wiggled off Ryan’s lap.
“Sorry about that,” Ryan said to Julian.
The Grenadian laughed. “That was the best part of the day. Children are a gift.”
Ryan noticed a flash of light on Silent Signal. He glanced at the vessel but didn’t see another flash. He suspected it was just the sun reflecting off a crewman’s sunglasses. Ryan tried to silence the part of his lizard brain that immediately thought someone was spying on them through binoculars.
“We’ll need two more people for the job,” Ryan informed Julian.
“What for?”
“I need a standby diver in case I run into trouble and another man to run the crane while you keep the boat steady.”
“I can round them up, but since you would like the weekend off, we’ll start fresh on Monday.”
“Perfect. I’ll see you about eight o’clock Monday morning.”
Ronald Julian left in his workboat after the two men shook hands. Ryan leaned back in his seat and studied the distant exploration vessel. Something about it bothered him, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

Publisher: Third Reef Publishing, LLC
Publication Date: January 1, 2026
ISBN: 979-8-9941751-1-8
Print Length: 307
File Size: 1MB
Language: English
Series Information: The Ryan Weller Thriller Series
Book: 16 of 16
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