“If they have a Typhoon,” Pitt said, “all they would have to do is carve sections out of the wall and drop them in the missile bay like it’s the back of a dump truck. But let’s be clear. We don’t know that they have one.”
Kurt nodded, accepting that, and Joe glanced over at him, raising his eyebrows.
“Even if we did know what they had,” Joe said, “what exactly are we going to do about it?”
Kurt considered Joe’s words. A Typhoon armed with torpedoes and crewed by mercenaries was far beyond the Argo’s capability to deal with.
“Joe’s right,” the captain said. “We can’t risk the ship. Until the naval forces come into range, we have no choice but to give these people wide berth, whatever they’re up to.”
Kurt knew they were right, but it felt like giving up to him, like quitting. There had to be a way to stop them. He glanced through the window in the conference room’s door, focusing on Katarina. She sat quietly on the bridge, a NUMA windbreaker over her shoulders, sipping a cup of coffee and talking to a crewman as she waited. A thought came to him.
“What if we don’t try to stop them?” he said. “What if we get out there, hide in among the wrecks, and lie in wait for them. Then if they do show up, we find a good moment and attach a transmitter to their hull. That way, we can track them to wherever their base is and let the big boys deal with the rest.”
The captain and Joe seemed to like the plan. Pitt remained silent.
“Director?” the captain said.
“Sounds like a huge risk,” Dirk said. “Easier to get some ASW patrols from shore-based aircraft.”
“All that’ll do is scare them off,” Kurt said. “This way, we find out who they are and where they’re from.”
“And how do you plan on getting out there without tipping your hand?” Pitt asked. “They’ll expect something the moment you leave port.”
Kurt smiled and glanced at Joe. “We’ll take the Barracuda,” he said.
32
Santa Maria Island, Vila do Porto, June 24
AFTER CONCLUDING THEIR PLANNING SESSION in the conference room, Kurt, Joe, and the captain broke away to handle different tasks. Joe went to the Argo’s machine shop to get working on a transmitter that would be powerful enough to hang onto the back of a submarine making 25 knots and also small enough to go unnoticed. He promised a miracle within the hour.
The captain ordered the Argo darkened to a normal state and then made contact with the Vila do Porto police. He requested two cars be sent out and parked at the dockside with their lights flashing. He assumed that would help keep any trouble away and also distract anyone who was watching while the Barracuda was quietly slipped into the water.
Meanwhile, Kurt walked Katarina to the end of the dock, waiting for a car to arrive.
“Your chaperone,” he said, avoiding the word handler.
“I’m not a spy,” she insisted, “but it seems all my life I’ve had someone watching me.”
“How do you deal with it?” Kurt asked.
“I’m used to it,” she said. “But you can’t imagine how hard it was to go on a date in Torino.”
He had to laugh. “And this guy?”
“Sergei,” she said. “Major Sergei Komarov.”
Sounded like a good strong KGB/FSB enforcer. For the first time in his life Kurt felt glad about that.
“Stay close to Sergei,” he said. “Keep your doors locked. I’m pretty sure these people have bigger fish to fry right now, but you never know. They know you’ve seen them, even if it was from a distance and in low light.”
“I will,” she said.
“Want to tell me why you were diving on that Constellation?”
She smiled, shook her head. “The major might not like that.”
“Well, maybe tomorrow or the next day,” he said.
The sad look returned to her eyes. “If I’m right, we’ll be leaving in the morning. I might not see you again.”
“Don’t count on that,” Kurt said. “I’ve always wanted to see Russia as a tourist. Maybe even come in the winter and get one of those giant fur hats.”
“Come see me,” she said, “I promise you won’t need a hat to keep you warm.”
The car arrived.
Sergei got out and stood by the door. Katarina gave Kurt a long kiss and then climbed in.
Thirty minutes later it was all a memory as Kurt and Joe raced through the ink-black Atlantic waters in the Barracuda, making their way to the tower of magnetic rock. They reached it in just under two hours, approaching the area with caution.
“I’m not hearing anything on the sonar array,” Joe said.
“If they were on-site already, it would probably sound like a working gravel pit,” Kurt said. “At least if they’re planning on getting any large amount of material out.”
“We should be in visual range,” Kurt said. “Flip on the lights.”
Joe switched them on, and the long, thin beams of yellowish light sprayed out over the underwater landscape. Once again, Kurt marveled at the sight of ship carcasses littering the seafloor. He’d once been fortunate enough to dive on Truk Lagoon, site of a World War II battle where the U.S. Navy had sunk sixty Japanese ships and downed over two hundred aircraft. The wrecks were more spread out than this Devil’s Gate, but it was the closest thing he could think of to what he was seeing now.
“Let’s set down beside the wreck of that old Liberty ship,” Joe said. “From there we’ll be almost invisible.”
Kurt looked down at the diagram of where the wrecks lay. With an expert hand he glided the Barracuda to a spot of sand right beside the great ship. Putting down, he had the odd feeling of being a guppy in a fish tank, settling in beside the ubiquitous sunken ship with a great hole in the side.
“Cut the lights,” he said.
Joe hit a few switches, and the Barracuda went instantly and absolutely dark.
Kurt held up his hand to test the old adage about not being able to see your hand in front of your face. Down here, at least, with daylight yet to break, it was true.
“How much air do we have?” he asked.
“Just under ten hours,” Joe said.
“Well,” Kurt said, trying to get comfortable, “nothing to do now but wait.”
FOUR HOURS LATER Kurt felt a tap on the shoulder from Joe. They’d decided to sleep in two-hour shifts. Kurt hoped Joe’s tap meant their guests had arrived.
“Something happening?” he asked, straightening and banging his head on the canopy and then his knee on the panel in front of him.
“Yeah,” Joe said. “The sun’s coming up.”
Kurt looked up. A smidgen of light could be seen filtering in from above. And while it was still dark enough down below that the only light he could see came from the glowing phosphors on his dive watch, he noticed the time was almost seven a.m. It had to be plenty bright up top.
He tried to stretch again, but it was no use. “Next time you design a sub, try including a little headroom.”
“Absolutely,” Joe said.
“This is worse than an economy flight to Australia.”
“At least they serve food on those,” Joe said, “even if it’s just peanuts.”
“Yeah,” Kurt said, thinking they could have planned better. Honestly, he hadn’t thought they’d need to. His biggest fear was that they would have arrived and found the killers already at work, which would have made their job either a lot harder or impossible.
“I don’t get this,” he said. “I would have thought they’d use every minute to mine what they could. You hear anything on the hydrophones?”
“Nope,” Joe said.
“You sure?”
“I’ve had these headphones on so long, I think they’ve melded with my brain,” Joe said. “But nothing’s going on out there except a few fish swimming around and mating.”
“You can actually hear them mating?” Kurt asked.
“Just the groovy music in the background,” Joe said, “but I kn
ow what they’re doing.”
Too much time sitting alone, listening to the sounds of the sea, had obviously warped his friend’s brain. He rubbed his eyes and blinked repeatedly. Too much time, he thought.
“They’re not coming,” he said. “Turn on the lights.”
“You sure?”
“At this point they’d barely have time to mine anything before they’d have to move out,” he said. “So much for my big idea.”
Joe started with the running lights and the low-level dash illumination.
Once their eyes adjusted to the presence of the minor lights, Joe flicked on the main exterior lights, and the area right around them lit up in the familiar yellow-green.
“Nothing’s changed,” Kurt said, half expecting the tower of magnetic rock to have disappeared out from under their noses. It still loomed in the distance like a monolith.
Kurt looked to the right, gazing at the dark shadow of the Liberty ship they’d sidled up to. A gaping wound below the waterline seemed to have been the fatal blow to this particular vessel. For a second he wondered if it had gone down in World War II like the ships he’d seen in Truk. Couldn’t have been that old, there was only a modicum of sea growth on the ship. No more than a couple years’ worth, if that.
He looked the other way out across the seafloor to where the next-closest wrecks lay. The first was a small plane, or at least what had once been a twin-engine Cessna. He remembered what Katarina had said about the triple-tailed Constellation being made of aluminum, a nonferrous metal that would not be affected by magnetism. It lay out on the very fringe of the area, but the remnants of this plane were in close. Why? he thought.
He looked at another of the sunken vessels that lay beyond the wrecked aircraft. It was a trawler, maybe 90 feet in length. Standard multinet fishing boat. He couldn’t see it clearly from where they were, but he remembered gliding over it at one point in the initial survey. And, now that he thought about it, that trawler also wore little in the way of growth, even less than the Liberty vessel they’d parked next to.
He wondered if the magnetism was affecting the rate of growth. Some ships of the day used low-level electric charges to inhibit algae growth on their hulls. Maybe this was a similar effect.
He turned back to the ship that loomed beside them, his eyes focusing on the gaping wound in its side. And then it hit him.
“I’m an idiot,” Kurt said suddenly. “I’m an absolute idiot.”
“What are you talking about?” Joe asked.
“How could we be so stupid?” Kurt mumbled, still lost in his own thoughts.
“Well, we’ve had a lot of practice,” Joe said.
“You know what else we’ve had a lot of practice doing?” Kurt said. “Hauling ships up from the depths. And also sending them to the bottom.”
He turned, trying to look back at Joe. “How many ships have you scuttled as part of the reef-building program?”
“At least fifty,” Joe said, “if you count all of the past ten years.”
“I’ve been there half the time,” Kurt said. “And how do we sink them?”
“We set charges below the waterline,” Joe said. “Blow holes in them. How else?”
“Look at the damage on this ship,” he said.
The Barracuda already had its main lights on, but Joe activated a secondary light that was directional. He aimed it at the hole in the Liberty ship’s side. It left no doubt.
“The steel plates are blown outward,” Joe said.
“Someone scuttled this ship,” Kurt said.
“It could have been an internal explosion,” Joe said. “You never know what she was carrying. Besides, that’s a much bigger hole than any of us would have made.”
“That’s because you want the ship to settle slowly and securely, landing bottom down so it can form a nice reef. But if you were trying to sink something quickly and not have anyone see it, this might be the way.”
Kurt powered up the impeller, and the Barracuda lifted off the seafloor. He guided them across the mouth of this Devil’s Gate toward the trawler. There they found the same type of damage. A large outward blast had sunk the ship. A third freighter was the same.
“None of these ships have more than a year’s sea growth on them,” Kurt said. “The only thing that did was that Constellation out there. This place hasn’t been collecting ships for ages. These all went down at the same time.”
“How could we not have seen this?” Joe asked.
“We were too busy with the scientists,” Kurt said. “Everyone was obsessing over that tower of rock, and, aside from Katarina, no one did more than a cursory examination of these ships.”
As they settled in front of the gaping wound in the third ship, Kurt racked his tired brain to put it together. “This whole thing is a hoax.”
“Sure seems that way,” Joe added. “But why? What’s the point? Who could even pull such a thing off?”
Kurt guessed they both knew the answer to that last question but not the reasons behind it.
He went over the events in his mind again, desperately looking for a connection. He felt something ominous approaching, like a storm he couldn’t outrun. There seemed little of value anyone could get out of such a hoax.
If the same people who’d attacked the Kinjara Maru were in on this, how did it help them? It didn’t get them any materials. It couldn’t really bring them any more money. In fact, it had to have cost a small fortune to set up the hoax to begin with.
“Some terrorist groups are big on publicity,” he said.
“There are more effective ways to get it than this,” Joe said.
He was right. So far, aside from a few low-level reporters, Kurt hadn’t seen any great flood of interest.
In fact, after the initial announcement, few in the outside world seemed to care what they’d found. The only people who’d shown up in droves and stuck around were the experts in magnetism and superconduction.
Kurt gasped as he realized the truth. “The scientists,” he said. “That’s what they’re after.”
It took the briefest instant for Joe to agree.
Apparently, the group that needed more of everything had included know-how on their shopping list. If Kurt was right, they’d baited a trap to bring experts from all over the world here. He only hoped they hadn’t snapped it shut yet.
Kurt grabbed the controls and gunned the throttle. As soon as they were moving again, he angled the nose of the Barracuda upward, and they began accelerating and climbing toward the gray light filtering in from above. They had to get to the surface and send a message to the Argo.
The science teams needed to be warned.
33
SEVERAL HOURS EARLIER, shortly after Kurt and Joe had first settled in on the seafloor beside the Liberty ship, Katarina Luskaya was packing her suitcase under the watchful eye of Major Sergei Komarov.
With everything that had happened, the high command had decided to abandon the mission for now.
“You became romantically involved with the American,” he said, sounding as if he disapproved.
“Not as involved as I would have liked,” she said brashly.
“This is not what we sent you here for,” he reminded her.
She’d almost forgotten that, so much had gone on. “He was in charge of the dive area,” she said. “I thought it would be better if he took a liking to me. That’s what I see in all the old movies, you know.”
The major eyed her suspiciously and then smiled just a bit, a slight crease appearing in his permanent five o’clock shadow. “That is a good answer,” he said. “Whether it is true or not, you are learning.”
She offered a sheepish grin in return and went back to packing as a knock at the door sounded. The major wasn’t so bad. More like a big brother than Big Brother.
He went to answer the door, putting one hand inside his jacket where his Makarov pistol rested.
OUTSIDE IN THE HALLWAY, two men stood at the door. A short man with dark hair held wha
t looked like a small monocular, his taller partner held what looked like a length of pipe, though it had frost on its curved top and some type of heavy electrical battery pack on one side.
The shorter man placed the monocular on the peephole in the door. “Movement,” he said, looking into the scope. “It’s the male. Three seconds.”
He stepped away from the door, and the man with the pipe moved in, holding one end of it against the door chest-high.
“Yes,” the deep Russian voice of Major Komarov said through the door. “What is it?”
“Now,” the shorter man said.
The pipe man pressed a button. A split second of buzzing and then a sudden thud, and splinters frayed out around the end of the pipe where it was pressed against the door. It was a mini rail gun powered by superconducting magnets and carrying a two-pound sharpened metal spike as a projectile. At the press of a button it instantly accelerated the spike to 100 miles per hour, more than enough to fire it through the door and the Russian major.
The pipe man stepped back and delivered a kick to the door. The jamb snapped, and what remained of the door swung open.
KATARINA LUSKAYA HEARD an odd sound and looked up. Slivers of wood were flying through the room. The major stumbled backward, clutching his stomach, a short spearlike piece of metal sticking out from his abdomen. Blood soaked his white shirt. He hit the ground without a word.
Katarina reacted slowly at first, but then she moved with all the speed in her body. She lunged toward the major as she heard the door being kicked in. Landing beside him, she grabbed for the weapon in his coat. She pulled it from its holster, thumbed desperately for the safety, and turned toward the door.
A boot slammed into her face, snapping her head to the side, before she could fire. She tumbled, lost her grip on the pistol, and felt someone on top of her an instant later.
Already stunned from the blow, she struggled only an instant before a rag soaked with chloroform was pressed to her face. She felt her hands go numb, and then nothing but darkness.