Kurt knew some of the stories. The fact was the Star Tiger disappeared well to the west of the Azores, perhaps a thousand miles from here, and the Scorpion was believed to have suffered a catastrophic failure at depth. There were some in the Navy that insisted she’d been rammed or hit by a Russian torpedo in retaliation for the accidental ramming of a Russian sub in the Pacific. He decided not to relay that theory.
“This place is much like the Bermuda Triangle,” she said. “Can’t we let it be mystical for just a moment?”
“Sure,” he said. “But you should know, U.S. Coast Guard studies have found no significant difference in the rate of ships and planes disappearing in the Bermuda Triangle than anywhere else on the seas. The oceans of this world are dangerous places wherever you decide to go.”
Looking disappointed again, she took a sip of wine. “You know, they’re calling it the Devil’s Gate.”
“Who is?”
“The other scientists,” she said. “Maybe the press.”
That was the first he’d heard of it. “I haven’t seen any press, not since the first day,” he said. “And I’m not sure I understand the reference.”
“The wreckage down there,” she said. “It lies in a wedge-shaped slice, narrowing from the west to the east and pointing toward the tower. At the closest end is a narrow gap through which the current accelerates and then spills over into the deeper waters. At the far end, the presumed entry point, there’s a wider gap between two distinctive raised sections of rock that look something like pillars.”
“And that’s the gate,” he said.
She nodded. “‘Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction,’” she said. “That’s from Matthew. Chapter seven, verse thirteen. The theory I’ve heard tossed around is that the ships and planes and other wreckage have been dragged through the wide and crooked gate and cannot get through the straight and narrow. A graveyard of the damned: the Devil’s Gate.”
Kurt had to admit it sounded far more exciting than North Central Atlantic Magnetic Anomaly, or whatever it had officially been named.
“The ships check in but they don’t check out,” he said.
“Exactly,” she said, smiling at him.
“None of which explains why you were diving on a wrecked aircraft at the entrance to that gate,” he said.
“No,” she agreed, not attempting to defend her actions or even offer a reason for them. “Nor does it explain why an aircraft made of aluminum—a nonferrous, nonmagnetic metal—would be drawn in by this decidedly magnetic anomaly.”
She had a point, one that hadn’t dawned on Kurt before. As her words sunk in, she took another sip of the wine.
“Very good wine,” she said. “Would you excuse me? I’m just going to freshen up.”
Freshen up? After trying on three different outfits, she’d spent half an hour in the bathroom of her hotel room fixing her hair and makeup. How much fresher could she get?
Kurt stood politely as she walked away. The truth was, she looked fantastic in a simple black cocktail dress and red high-heeled shoes. Especially in contrast to his somewhat disheveled state. He was still in the clothes he’d been wearing this morning, with a change into dive gear, a quick change back, and no shower in between.
He watched her leave, thought about what she’d just said, and took the opportunity to grab his phone and send a text to Joe.
He typed furiously.
I need anything you can find about this Katarina Luskaya. Why she’s here. Who she’s worked for in the past. And anything about that old plane she was diving on. I need it quick.
A text came back from Joe seconds later.
I must be a mind reader. Already on it. Here are a few links. FYI: the plane was listed as lost out of Santa Maria in 1951. There’s a Civil Aeronautics Board file and a crash report. There’s also a CIA stub on it, but I can’t get access to any of the data.
A CIA stub. Kurt guessed he shouldn’t have been surprised. He started looking over the links Joe had sent, dividing his attention between the entrance to the restrooms and the phone.
IN THE LADIES’ ROOM, Katarina lingered in front of the mirror, hovering over a marble sink. She wasn’t looking at her makeup or her hair or anything besides her own phone.
“Come on,” she urged as the download proceeded sluggishly.
Finally, the screen changed, and a bio of sorts on Kurt Austin appeared. It held more than she expected, more than she had time to read. She scanned the main points, texted a reply to Command saying she’d received it, and slid the phone back into her purse.
A quick check of her hair told her it was as good as it would get, and she turned and walked out.
KURT GLANCED TOWARD THE RESTROOMS, then back at his phone, then back toward the restrooms. He saw the door swing open, read one more line, and stuffed the phone back into his pocket.
He stood and pulled out her chair as she arrived.
“You look so much fresher,” he said, smiling.
“Thank you,” she replied. “Sometimes it’s hard to feel pretty enough.”
Kurt sensed some unintentional truth in what she’d said. He pinned it on a lifetime of competing in a sport that was judged as opposed to one where you scored or you didn’t. Too much subjectivity had a way of making people uncertain of themselves.
“You look stunning,” he said. “In fact, everyone here is wondering why you’re having dinner with a scruffy guy like me.”
She smiled, and Kurt detected a slight blush.
By now the sun had disappeared. They made small talk till the entrées came, and then, after another glass of wine, Kurt decided to reopen the earlier conversation.
“I have a question,” he said. “Why did you dive on that plane alone? You had two sets of tanks on board. Don’t you have a partner?”
“That’s two questions,” she said, again smiling. “I came to Santa Maria with another representative of the government. But he is not part of the Science Directorate. The assignment is my own,” she added. “The tanks came with the boat.”
Kurt guessed that other representative would be a handler of sorts, to watch over her, to keep her both in line and out of trouble.
“Your turn,” he said, taking another bite of the fish.
“I think I might like this game,” she said, then fired away. “You seemed awfully angry when we came up,” she said. “What made you so mad? Was it my violation of your precious ‘exclusivity zone’ or the fact that I never registered in the first place?”
“Neither,” he said. “I don’t like to see people get hurt. You could have been killed down there in that wreck. Another five minutes and you would have been.”
“So Kurt Austin is a man who cares?”
“Absolutely,” he said, offering an intentionally warm smile.
“Is that why you’re in the salvage business?”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Any fool can blow up a boat and send it to the bottom,” she said. “But it takes skill and dedication and far greater risks to bring one back up again. I can see you doing it for exactly those reasons: because it’s harder and because it’s better. And because you like saving things.”
Kurt had never thought of it quite that way, but there was some truth in what she’d said. The world was full of men destroying things and throwing them away. He took pride in restoring old things instead of tossing them out.
“I suppose I should thank you,” she added. “I’m guessing you dove down to salvage me.”
He hadn’t been sure she was in trouble when he’d gone in the water, but he’d been glad to pull her out alive instead of dead. He considered her motivation for taking such a risk in the first place.
“And you’re a competitor,” he said, taking his turn at amateur analysis.
“It has plusses and minuses,” she said.
“National competitions, world championships, the Olympics,” he said. “You’ve spent your whole life trying to prove to coaches and jud
ges and the audience that you’re worthy of their scores, that you even belong in the arena in the first place. Despite a partially torn ligament, you nearly got the bronze in Torino.”
“I nearly won the gold,” she corrected him. “I fell on the last jump. I finished the program on one foot.”
“As I recall you couldn’t walk for a couple of months afterward,” he said, a fact he’d just read on Joe’s update. “But the point stands. A different skater would have backed down, saved her leg for another day.”
“Sometimes you don’t get another day,” she said.
“Is that what drove you on?”
She pursed her lips, studying him and twirling her fork in her angel-hair pasta. Finally, she spoke. “I wasn’t supposed to medal,” she said. “They almost gave my spot to another skater. Most likely, I would never get another shot.”
“You had something to prove,” he replied.
She nodded.
“And this whole thing—an assignment outside your laboratory—I’m guessing this is new to you,” he said. “You must have people back home to impress, maybe you feel you have something to prove to them. Or you might not get another shot.”
“Maybe,” she admitted.
“Nothing wrong with that,” he said. “We all want our bosses to be impressed. But there are places on this earth where you don’t take chances. The inside of a wrecked aircraft a hundred forty feet below the surface is one of them.”
“Haven’t you ever wanted to show someone they were wrong about you?”
Kurt paused, and then spoke a half-truth. “I try not to worry about what other people think about me.”
“So you have no one to prove anything to?” she asked.
“I didn’t say that,” he replied.
“So there is someone,” she said. “Tell me who. Is it a woman? Is there a Mrs. Austin, or future Mrs. Austin, waiting for you back home?”
Kurt shook his head. “I wouldn’t be here if there was.”
“So who is it?”
Kurt chuckled. The conversation had certainly turned. “Tell me the secret you’re holding, and I’ll give you the answer.”
She looked disappointed again. “I suppose dinner ends as soon as I give you that?”
Kurt didn’t want it to end, but then again . . . “Depends on the secret,” he said.
She picked up her fork as if she could stall him just a little longer and then she put it down dejectedly.
“Yesterday you rescued a French diver,” she said.
“That’s right,” he said. “The guy had a hundred pounds of weight on his belt. Where you were reckless, he was just an idiot.”
“Maybe not,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“It was a setup,” she said. “While you and your partner were pulling him out of the water, another member of the French team was drilling a four-foot core sample out of the side of that rock. They’ve been bragging about it already.”
Kurt felt an instant burst of anger. He exhaled sharply and then grabbed his napkin and threw it on the table.
“You were right,” he said. “Time to go.”
“Damn,” she said.
He stood, left a handful of bills on the table, and took her by the hand. They headed for the exit.
“But what about your secret?” she said.
“Later,” he said.
With Katarina in tow, Kurt pushed the door open and stepped through. Something moved in the shadows. An object swung toward him from the right. He tensed himself in the instant he had, and then a bat or a club or a pipe of some kind slammed him in the gut.
Despite his strength, the blow jarred Kurt and knocked the wind out of him. He doubled over and crumpled to his knees.
22
PAUL AND GAMAY were rising fast in the Grouper. With all the ballast dumped on the bottom of the ocean, the sub’s nose pointed upward, and, the electric motor churning at full power, they rose at nearly three hundred feet a minute.
As the depth decreased, the pressure decreased. But twenty minutes into the climb they were still ten thousand feet below the surface, and the steady flow of water was increasing.
“The weakest part of the hull is the flange,” Paul shouted, noticing that the water was flowing in where the two sections of the submarine had been joined together like lengths of pipe.
“We have clamps, we can help seal it,” Gamay shouted back.
Paul reached over to the wall and tore down a Velcro-latched covering. Behind it was a set of tools that the sub’s designers thought might be useful to its occupants. Included in that package were four clamps. Large, sturdy, and designed to fit the particulars of the Grouper, they were not that much different from a standard screw clamp that one might have on a workbench at home except they worked on a ratchet system like a jack used to lift up a car. Apparently, whoever had designed the boat realized the flange between the two halves of the sub was the weakest part.
Paul ripped down one of the clamps and handed it to Gamay; he was too big to turn around and get back there to help her.
“You’ll find a spot on the flange with a notch in it, like the notch under a car for the jack. Slip the clamp on there. Once you get it locked, give it everything you’ve got to wrench it down. Then I’ll hand you another one.”
She nodded and took the clamp. Running her hand along the flange, she located the notch, lined the clamp up, and began to tighten it.
“Should I leave a little play, like when we do the lug nuts on the tires?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “Slam that sucker down as hard as you can.”
As Gamay worked, Paul sensed the Grouper rolling a bit. He glanced back at the control panel. They were still angled up at thirty-five degrees, but the sub was yawing to the right. He figured one of the control fins had been damaged and bent. He corrected their alignment and glanced back at Gamay.
He could see the strain on her face as she worked to get one final click on the first clamp.
“How are we doing?”
She slammed the handle home. “I think that one’s done.”
He looked over at the leak. It hadn’t stopped. If anything, it was a little worse. Looking past her, he could see water pooling at the tail end of the sub, maybe a gallon or two.
He grabbed another clamp as they passed nine thousand feet. “Here,” he said. “Hit the other side of the leak next.”
KURT AUSTIN FELL in what seemed like slow motion to him.
He’d seen the pipe coming his way. And from the corner of his eye he’d caught sight of a burly man swinging it like an amateur ball player, using a big wide arc, a slower swing than it could have been.
He’d been able to react fast enough to flinch and harden his body against the blow, but not enough to dodge it.
As he doubled over, most of his mind focused on the intense pain across his abdomen, with just enough left over to hear Katarina scream and to realize the next blow would likely cave his head in.
Even as his knees hit the ground he flew into action.
He saw legs and lunged for them, pushing hard off the ground and driving his shoulder into the man’s knee.
The joint hyperextended backward and gave out with a sickening snap. The thug let out a shout and fell backward. Kurt climbed onto him and slammed his fist into the man’s face, exploding his nose in a spray of blood.
A second shot shattered a cheekbone or an eye socket, and the man’s head snapped sideways, unmoving.
Whether he was dead or just unconscious, Kurt didn’t know or honestly care. He had bigger things to deal with, mainly a second thug that had jumped on his back and now had him in a sleeper hold.
“Get out of here,” he shouted in a raspy tone to Katarina.
He tried to pull the man’s arm loose, a natural reaction that was impossible to accomplish under the best of circumstances. In this case, with his abs screaming from the impact of the pipe, Kurt had no power or leverage, and the man knew it.
The
arms tightened, cutting off the blood supply to Kurt’s brain.
Gasping for air, Kurt rolled and tried to slam the man against a van parked beside them. He pushed back and felt the impact. He did it again, but far weaker this time, and the man didn’t let go.
He groped around for a weapon of any kind, a rock or a stick. Then suddenly he heard a dull thud, and the man’s grip weakened. Kurt sucked in a breath of air as a second thud followed, and the man sloughed off him like a dead vine falling from a tree.
He tried to turn but couldn’t, tried to stand but couldn’t do that either. He could only squat there on the parking lot’s black surface. He felt hands grasping his arm, small hands but with a firm grip. They pulled him up, helping him to his feet.
“Put your arm over me,” Katarina said.
He threw his arm over her shoulder despite the pain it caused him. Leaning on her, they hobbled across the parking lot and made it to the small car. He just about fell into the passenger seat as she ran around to the driver’s side.
She opened the door, tossed the pipe she’d grabbed from the first assailant into the back, and climbed into the driver’s seat
The small engine came to life with a quick turn of the key, and seconds later they were speeding out of the parking lot onto the twisting mountain road.
Unseen by either of them, two Audis snapped on their headlights and turned to follow.
GAMAY HAD WRENCHED the third clamp into place and tightened it down with all the strength in her lithe body. Breathing hard, with the muscles in her arms burning, she glanced at the seam through which the water was forcing itself. The leak had slowed back to a trickle for a while but had now increased again and was becoming a continuous flow.