Hidden behind this tank, Kurt watched the two remaining Audis crawl toward the cliff. They stopped near the spot where the cars had gone over, leaving their remaining lights on. Two men got out of each car. One of them carried a flashlight; the other three carried short-barreled assault weapons of some type.
“Let’s get out of here,” Katarina whispered.
“Don’t move,” he said. “They can’t see us here. I don’t want them to hear us either.”
The men with the guns moved toward the edge of the cliff and peered over. A fire must have been burning down below because the smoke and dust were lit up, turning the men into silhouettes.
“Looks like they went over,” one man said.
Kurt couldn’t hear the initial reply, but then the man with the flashlight moved to the edge.
“Get me a scope,” the man with the flashlight said. When the order was not followed rapidly enough, he barked louder. “Come on, we don’t have all night.”
As the man spoke, Kurt recognized the voice as belonging to the thug on the Kinjara Maru.
“So you’re not dead,” Kurt mumbled. He’d thought there was something suspicious about the explosion on the water that took the hijackers’ boat. It had seemed a little too convenient. A little too perfect of an ending for what appeared to be a sophisticated operation.
“You know these people?” Katarina asked.
“I know that man’s voice,” Kurt said. “He was part of a hijacking that took place a week ago. We thought he’d blown himself up by accident. But obviously it was a trick meant to make us think he did.”
“So these men are after you?” she said.
He turned to her. “You didn’t think they were after you, did you?”
She seemed offended. “They could have been. I’m a very important member of the Russian scientific establishment. I’m quite certain they’d get more ransom money for kidnapping me than they would for you.”
Kurt smiled and fought back a laugh. She was probably right about that. “Didn’t mean to offend you,” he said.
She seemed to accept that, and Kurt turned back toward the thugs at the cliff’s edge. They were perfectly backlit in the smoke. If he’d had a rifle, he could have taken them all right now, knocking them down one after the other like ducks in an arcade. But all he had was the metal pipe and the knife that the thug now hunting them had left behind on the Kinjara Maru.
Kurt watched as the man stepped to the edge with a scope in his hand. He stared through it for a long moment and then changed angles a bit. Kurt guessed he was now looking at the second car.
“They’re dead,” one of the other thugs said. “All of them.”
“Don’t be so sure,” the lead man said.
“That’s a long way down,” the thug replied. “No one’s going to survive that.”
The lead man turned and pushed his subordinate back against the car in a menacing fashion. A pretty ballsy move, considering he was the only one without a weapon. Obviously these men did not question him.
“You’re right,” the leader said. “No one could have survived such a fall. Unless they didn’t take it.”
He slapped the night vision scope in the man’s hand. “There are no bodies in or around that car,” he said.
“Damn,” Kurt whispered. Where their biggest problem had seemed like a long walk back to civilization, they now had a much more pressing issue: these thugs would not leave the plateau until they’d found him and Katarina or until police units came—perhaps half an hour away or more.
He doubted they could hide that long.
As the lead thug turned and began spraying his light across the grassy field, Kurt ducked back down behind the fuel tank. When the beam of light pointed off in another direction, Kurt grabbed Katarina’s hand again. “Hope you’re not afraid of heights.”
They scrambled across the open space and made it to the dark hangar. After quietly forcing the lock with the pipe, they slipped inside.
“What are we going to do?” Katarina asked.
“You got fifty dollars?” he said, sneaking over to one of the ultralights and unscrewing the gas cap.
“Not on me,” she said. “Why?”
“We’ll have to leave an IOU,” he said, grabbing a helmet and handing it to her.
“We’re going to fly out of here?” she guessed.
He nodded.
She smiled so broadly, he swore it lit up the room. “I always wanted to try one of these things,” she said.
He checked the tank to make sure it held some fuel. Seeing it was half full, he screwed the cap back on, moved to the hangar door, and began pushing it open slowly.
OUTSIDE NEAR THE CLIFF, Andras and his men were fanning out. Andras had grabbed a Glock 9mm that he now held in his left hand, and the flashlight was in his right. One of his men was making his way along the edge of the cliff, another going in the opposite direction.
Andras guessed his quarry had moved inland. It opened up the terrain and would force him and his men to consider many more hiding places. It would be the better tactic, he thought. And having encountered this man from NUMA once, Andras knew that, if anything, he was very smart.
It would make it all the sweeter when he killed him.
His light played across the ground. Had Andras feared they were armed, he would have been walking in the dark using the night vision scope. But his targets had shown no weaponry during the chase except for a lead pipe and their own wits, so he knew he could safely proceed.
He was rewarded when something caught the light: a woman’s shoe, dusty in places, but the red patent leather was unmistakable. Ten feet away, he saw another one. He whistled to his men, and as they gathered he shone the light around, spotting the cyclone fence and the building beyond.
“Surround the building,” he said. “They’re inside.”
His men dashed to the fence and began to climb. As they did, a sound like a lawn mower starting spilt the quiet of the night.
Andras hopped the fence and shone his flashlight toward the building just in time to see one of the ultralights come rumbling out and begin accelerating across the grass.
“Shoot them,” he ordered.
Two of his men dropped down and opened fire as the buzzing ultralight sped away. In a moment, it exploded, and flames engulfed the nylon wing.
Too easy, he thought. And he was right.
AS THE FIRST ULTRALIGHT began to zoom across the grass, Kurt and Katarina climbed into a second one and started it up. Kurt hoped the noise and movement of the first one would mask their departure in the other direction.
He sent the decoy to the right and seconds later turned his own craft to the left. Even as he pushed the throttle he heard the gunfire. A moment later he saw a flash cross the grassy plain that served as the ultralight’s runway. Just enough light to see by.
He gunned the throttle, realizing the time for stealth had ended. The little fifty-horsepower engine buzzed like a swarm of angry bees, and the small wooden prop spun up to full rpms in a second.
The gangly craft sped forward, accelerating down the grass strip and lifting off in a hundred feet or so. Kurt turned out toward the cliff, trying to put the hangar between him and the men with the guns. He heard a few sporadic shots and then nothing. By then he and Katarina were gone, out over the cliff, accelerating into the darkness and heading for the lights of Vila do Porto.
ON THE GRASSY RUNWAY, Andras realized his mistake. They’d been had by a stroke of misdirection. He turned just in time to see the other ultralight take off. He fired at it and then ran to the hangar with his men.
Inside was a whole fleet of the flying contraptions. Four of them looked to be in working condition.
“Get in,” he shouted to his men. “We’ll shoot them down from the air.”
As his other men climbed into a second aircraft, Andras went to hop into the front seat of the lead craft and stopped. A familiar object stood vertically on its point, stabbed straight down into the ultralight
’s padded seat.
Andras recognized the matte-black finish, the folding titanium blade, and the holes in the handle. It was the knife he’d plunged into the crane operator’s seat on the Kinjara Maru after cutting the hydraulic lines.
So the man from NUMA had taken it and kept it. And now he’d returned it. There had to be a reason. Clearly, he was showing Andras that he knew who was after him, but Andras suspected something more.
He stepped out of the ultralight, looking for danger.
“Don’t start them,” he ordered as one of his men reached for a key.
Andras moved to the engine of the machine he’d been about to pilot. He checked the hydraulic lines and the fuel lines, thinking those would be poetic targets for his adversary to strike—and probably deadly, had he or his men started the aircraft in the confines of the barnlike hangar. He found nothing wrong with the exposed sections of the tubing and saw no liquids dripping onto the floor below.
He looked up.
The wings had huge cuts in them, long, clean slices that were not easily seen. From the look of it, they’d been carefully made to avoid leaving the nylon in obvious dangling strips. The damage might not have been enough to keep the craft on the ground, but Andras had no doubt that, once airborne, the fabric would have frayed in the airstream, shredding in minutes. Had they taken off, he guessed, they would have discovered it shortly after making it out over the cliffs.
“We should check the others,” one of his men suggested.
Andras allowed them to do so, but he knew there was little point. They would all be the same.
He pursed his lips, disappointed, but sensing something new in his heart: admiration. The kind of thrill a hunter feels when he realizes his prey might be bigger, stronger, more fierce and intelligent than expected. Such a thought never brought anger, only a greater exhilaration. So far, he’d given this man from NUMA some grudging respect, but he’d still underestimated him. A mistake he wouldn’t make again.
“It’s been a long time since I faced such a challenge,” he whispered to himself. “I’m going to enjoy killing you.”
25
Continental shelf, off the coast of Sierra Leone, June 23
DJEMMA GARAND SAT in the passenger cabin of an EC155 Eurocop-ter. The sleek modern design included a ducted tail rotor, an all-glass instrument panel, and a leather-clad interior stitched by the same company that did the seats on custom Rolls-Royces.
It was fast, relatively quiet inside, and the epitome of luxury for any self-respecting billionaire or dictator of a small country.
For the most part, Djemma hated it. He preferred boating or going by car to any place he needed to be. His days in the field had shown him firsthand how vulnerable small helicopters were to ground fire. An RPG exploding nearby could bring down many rotary aircraft, let alone a direct hit. Small-arms fire could do the same.
But more than an actual attack, Djemma felt it was too easy for small planes and helicopters to have unexplained accidents, accidents that seemed to plague the leaders of small war-torn nations at a rate completely out of proportion to the amount of time they spent traveling.
Air crashes usually had no witnesses, especially over mountainous or jungle terrain. Without a forensic team to sift through the debris, there was almost no way to tell if a craft came down on its own, had been hit by a missile or gunfire, or had been blown to pieces by a saboteur’s bomb.
Normally, Djemma wouldn’t travel in them. But in this case he’d made an exception. He’d done so because speed was of the essence, because events and even trusted allies seemed to be conspiring against him, because if the lid blew off his plan he had to know if his weapon was ready.
The EC155 crossed the shoreline and headed out into the Atlantic. Ten miles off the coast, four little dots appeared on the horizon. As the helicopter grew closer, they resolved into sharper forms: huge offshore oil rigs, set up in a perfect square, with several miles between them. At least a dozen boats patrolled the waters around the rigs, and huge barges with equipment sat moored to one of them.
“Take us down to number three,” Djemma ordered.
The pilot complied, and a few minutes later Djemma was removing his headset and stepping out of the gleaming red-and-white helicopter and striding across the platform.
The rig’s superintendant and his senior staff waited in a formal line.
“My President,” the superintendant said. “It is an honor to have you—”
“Spare me,” Djemma said. “And take me to Cochrane.”
“Right away.”
Djemma followed the man across the helipad toward the main block of the oil rig. They stepped inside, passing an area filled with coolant pipes, thick with condensation and frost, and then into a climate-controlled area filled with computer screens and flat-panel displays.
On the most prominent centrally mounted screen, a strangely shaped design appeared. It looked like the schematic of a racetrack or a rail yard. It could best be described as an elongated oval connected to a wider circle, off of which two dozen straight lines stretched, fanning out like tangents.
Small data marks, unreadable from any distance, seemed to indicate conditions within each section defined by the tangents. The sections were also color-coded. Djemma noticed that most were illuminated in green. This pleased him.
“All sections of the loop have power?”
“Yes, President,” the superintendant replied. “We activated them this morning. Currently we are only operating at test levels, but Cochrane confirmed that we are within specs.”
“Excellent,” Djemma said. “Where is he now?”
“In one of the targeting tunnels,” the super said. “He is overseeing the final phase of construction.”
“Show me,” Djemma ordered.
They crossed the climate-controlled room and arrived at an elevator barely large enough for two men. It took them down through the rig and beneath it in a clear Plexiglas tube like those used at amusement parks and places like SeaWorld.
Brilliant light shimmered and danced through the water. Schools of fish swam everywhere, as they often did near oil rigs and other man-made structures. Below them, a scar crossed the ocean floor in a long line from east to west.
The line appeared straight only because the curve was so gradual; but had the ocean been drained, it would have been easy to see from space that this line matched exactly the circular design displayed inside the control room. At the far end, men in hard-shell dive suits and small submarines no larger than a family car worked on filling in the last section.
Farther off, at the very limits of underwater vision, Djemma spotted another submarine, lying on its side. This was no small vessel but a giant, its hull cut open like a whale that had been gutted. Unlike the other things he saw, this sight angered him.
The elevator car approached the sandy bottom and then went beneath the seafloor, continuing in the tube in the dark another forty feet before stopping. The darkness was banished when the doors opened to a concrete hall lit by fluorescent lights.
The superintendant stepped out, and Djemma followed him. He noticed that the hall was not square but built in an oval shape, a design like the arches of ancient Roman aqueducts, that helped the tunnel support the outside pressure of rock and water. He also noticed something else.
“It’s wet in here,” he said, noticing pools of water on the floor and wet spots on the walls.
“Until it finishes curing, the concrete is porous,” the super said. “We have treated it and buried it forty feet beneath the seafloor, but we still have seepage. It’ll clear up in a month or so.”
Djemma hoped he was right. He continued on through the tunnel until he reached an intersection point.
A ladder led down.
Djemma climbed down and came out in a different type of tunnel. This one was perfectly circular in cross section, wide enough to drive a small car through, and lined with power conduits and cooling tubes like those seen above. Pinpoint LED lighting an
d shiny metallic rectangles on three sides ran as far as the eye could see.
In the other direction, he spied Cochrane.
“You are almost done,” Djemma said. “This pleases me more than you know.”
“The construction is almost done,” Cochrane said. “We still have to test it. And if you think you’re going to get me the kind of power you keep demanding, you’d better have something up your sleeve. Because, as it stands, I can only get you sixty percent of what you require.”
“I no longer am surprised or grow angry at your failures,” Djemma said. “I’ve grown used to them. Have you heard of this Devil’s Gate near the Azores?”
“I don’t get a lot of news down here,” Cochrane said. “But, yeah, I heard of it. Some type of naturally occurring superconductor.”
“That is the report,” Djemma said. “I have men there. I believe that will be the answer.”
Cochrane put down some type of fiber-optic testing device he was working with and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “I’m not sure you understand,” he said. “We just worked in three hundred tons of material your sub brought us from the freighter. We don’t have space for anything else.”
“Space,” Djemma said. “Interesting that you should use that word. Because I am worried about space and what can be seen from it.”
“What are you talking about now?” Cochrane asked.
“The Russian submarine that we took the reactors from. You were told to have it dismantled and dispersed by now. I don’t want anyone spotting it from a satellite.”
“It’s on its side, fifty feet down, covered in netting,” Cochrane said. “And they’re not looking for it,” he insisted. “The Russians sold it. They don’t care what happens to it. And the only submarines the Americans care about are the ones carrying ballistic missiles out there in the depths. Only you and Comrade Gorshkov know where this one went to, and even Gorshkov doesn’t know what you’re doing with it.”
“Finish the dismantling,” Djemma ordered. “And don’t question me again or I’ll dismantle you . . . piece by painful piece.”