Devil's Gate

  Ten seconds later the lights were still on, the computers still running.

  Everyone began to look around.

  “Well?” Vice President Sandecker asked.

  A female staffer spoke up. “The networks are still broadcasting live,” she said. “No sign of impact or damage.”

  Brinks’s face began to fill with color again. He turned to Dirk Pitt. “Your man did it,” he said hopefully.

  “His name’s Austin,” Pitt said.

  “Well, you give him my thanks along with the country’s,” Brinks said. “Along with my apology for being a bigmouthed idiot.”

  Pitt nodded, guessing that Kurt Austin would enjoy all three. He turned to the Navy brass in the room. “He’s going to need a way off that ship.”

  “Already on it,” one of them replied, smiling.

  That pleased Pitt. But they weren’t out of the woods yet.

  Up on the monitor the icons that represented the USS Memphis and the USS Providence were flashing. A new ship’s status was being reported. They were going into battle.

  THE USS MEMPHIS had come up from the depths, just beyond the edge of the continental shelf. Holding station there, it had begun pinging away madly with the powerful sonar in its bow.

  This was not normal operating procedure, as it gave away the ship’s position, but the plan was to draw Garand’s fleet of small subs out from its bay and allow the Trouts and Rapunzel to sneak in behind them.

  A further effect of the violent sonar emissions would likely be confusion and even terror on the part of the enemy.

  Inside the sub’s control room the sonar operator could see the plan working almost too well.

  “Five targets approaching,” he called out. “Labeled bravo one through bravo five.”

  “Do we have firing solutions?” the sub’s skipper asked.

  The fire control officer hesitated. His computer kept flashing green for yes and then red for no.

  “The subs are so small, and continually changing direction, the computer can’t create a solution.”

  “Then fire on acoustic mode,” the captain ordered. “On my mark.”

  “Ready, sir.”

  “Fire from all tubes.”

  Over a period of five seconds compressed air launched six Mark 48 torpedoes from the Memphis’s midships tubes.

  Seconds later the sonar man heard a different sound. “Incoming torpedoes,” he called out. “Bearing zero-four-three and three-five-five. At least four fish.”

  There were torpedoes approaching from the right front quadrant and the left. It took away their ability to maneuver.

  “Hard to starboard,” the captain shouted. “Full revolutions, bow planes full up. Deploy countermeasures.”

  The ship turned, accelerated, and rose toward the surface. The countermeasures designed to draw off the approaching torpedoes were dumped in the water behind them.

  Submarine battles were slow-motion versions of aerial dogfights. And the wait as a torpedo tracked inbound could be interminable.

  Ten seconds passed and then twenty.

  “Come on, go,” the skipper grunted.

  The sub rose fast.

  “One miss,” the sonar man reported. Then seconds later, “We’re clear.”

  They’d managed to avoid the incoming weapons. But the Memphis wasn’t as nimble as the small craft it was fighting. Like a bear tangling with a pack of wolves, she wouldn’t last long. As if to prove it, the sonar man called out again.

  “New targets, bearing zero-nine-zero.”

  “Full down angle,” the captain ordered.

  In the distance a series of explosions rocked the depths as two of the torpedoes from the Memphis found their marks in quick succession. But there was no celebration; their own troubles were too close.

  “Bottom coming up fast, skipper,” the helmsman reported.

  “Level off,” the captain said. “More countermeasures.”

  The bow angle eased. Another explosion rocked them from far off, but the sonar man looked stricken.

  He turned to the captain, shaking his head. “No good.”

  An instant later the Memphis was hit. Anyone not seated and belted in was thrown to the floor. The main lights went down. The sound of alarms wailed throughout the ship.

  The captain got to his feet, managed a quick look at the damage board. “Emergency surface,” he ordered.

  The Memphis blew all tanks and began to rise.

  MILES AWAY, Paul and Gamay Trout couldn’t see any screen or hear any radio calls describing the action. But the ocean carried sound much more effectively than the air, and echoes from the booming explosions reached them one after another like the sound of distant thunder.

  Neither of them spoke, except as necessary for navigation.

  Finally, Paul slowed the craft. They’d dropped from the Navy helicopter, descended into the far end of the canyon, and wound their way back toward the platforms.

  “We’re at two hundred feet and holding,” Paul said. “If the inertial system is right, the platforms are less than a mile away.”

  Gamay was already activating Rapunzel ’s program. She wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible.

  “Detaching umbilical,” she said.

  She felt herself sweating once again despite the cold. And then she felt Paul’s hand on her shoulder, massaging it softly.

  Another series of explosions rumbled through the depths, these far bigger, closer, and more menacing than any that had come before.

  “Do you think that was one of ours?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Don’t think about it. Just do what you have to do.”

  She tried to block it out, even as another, smaller boom reached them, but there was nothing to see through her visor except darkness.

  Seconds passed.

  “How far?” she asked.

  “You should be almost there,” Paul said.

  Something was wrong. “She’s not moving,” Gamay said.

  “What?”

  Gamay studied the data feed from the little robot. “Her motor is operating, but she’s not moving. She’s stuck.”

  “How is that possible?” Paul asked.

  Gamay, with a flip of her right hand, switched on Rapunzel’s exterior light. The answer to Paul’s question came through instantly.

  “She’s stuck in a net.”

  Gamay put Rapunzel in reverse and pulled her back a few yards. The net was no fluke; it was draped from above.

  “Antitorpedo nets,” Paul said. “We must be right beside the platform.”

  Gamay switched on Rapunzel’s cutting tool. “I’m cutting through it.”

  THE MEMPHIS had broken the surface but was taking on water fast. The order to abandon ship was given, and men were scrambling from the hatches and into boats or just into the sea itself.

  But the survivors were well inside the Event Horizon line. If their enemy wanted to, he could fry them all with a single burst from his weapon.

  ON THE ONYX, Kurt noticed the lighting returning to normal. He was thankful that the bow thrusters hadn’t come back to life. He hoped that meant the high voltage was still out and the Fulcrum array was still off-line.

  He moved back to where Katarina sat in the hall. “Ready for one more run?” he asked.

  “I don’t think I can,” she said.

  He studied her hand. The blood flow had slowed, the wound was finally clotting.

  “Come on,” he said. “You’re a champion. Prove it to me.”

  She looked into his eyes and clenched her jaw. He helped her up, and they began to move.

  “Do you still want to get to the coolant room?” she asked.

  He nodded. “They’ll get this power back on soon enough. We have to permanently disable this thing.”

  “I know another way to get there,” she said. “They’ll never expect us to use it.”

  She led him forward until they came to another hatch. This one was sealed tight.

&
nbsp; Kurt dropped beside it and grabbed the wheel.

  After two full rotations it spun easily. He opened it to see a ladder dropping down through a shaft. Dim red lights lit the rungs, and glacial air wafted up toward him. Kurt suddenly thought of Dante’s Inferno, which depicted some of Hell’s outer layers as frigid, Arctic-like zones.

  “What’s down there?” he asked.

  “The accelerator tunnels,” she said.

  That didn’t sound like a safe place to be, but the sound of feet pounding on the metal deck above changed his mind.

  He helped her onto the ladder, climbed down behind her, and shut the hatch. At the bottom they dropped into a tunnel.

  It reminded Kurt of standing on a subway platform, like the Washington Metro, only narrower. The familiar high-voltage lines and liquid nitrogen conduits raced down each wall and also along the ceiling and floor. Rows of the shiny gray rectangles that Kurt knew to be the superconducting magnets traveled off into the distance, curving slightly at the limit of his vision.

  Kurt exhaled a cloud of ice crystals. He was already chilled to the bone. It reminded him of the Fulcrum’s compartment only colder.

  “If we go this way,” she said, “we can pop up through the rear access hatch. One level down from the coolant room.”

  Kurt began walking, with Katarina leaning heavily on his shoulder. It was a great plan. The crew would never search for them down there, he was sure of it.

  “What if they turn this thing on?” he asked.

  “Then we’ll be dead before we even know what’s happened.”

  “All the more reason to hurry,” he said.

  61

  BY NOW DJEMMA GARAND could feel the danger clawing at his own throat. Washington, D.C., stood untouched by his weapon. Andras would not answer and the crew of the Onyx reported commandos aboard.

  Swirling around him, the American military showed no signs of backing off, no matter how hard he pounded them.

  “Where’s Andras?” he demanded into the radio.

  “He is looking for the American,” came the reply.

  “What about the array?”

  “It’s still down. We have no power.”

  The crewman from the Onyx sounded panicked, though he could not be facing what Djemma was facing.

  He put the headset down. It would end in failure. He could see that now.

  He looked out over the waves. One of their submarines had been destroyed and forced to surface. The other continued to fight, firing from deeper waters.

  Through a pair of huge binoculars, he saw the crew of the American submarine bobbing in their orange life rafts.

  “Target their position,” he said calmly.

  Cochrane hesitated.

  “We are going to die, Mr. Cochrane,” he said. “All we can do now is take as many of them with us as possible.”

  Cochrane stood back from the controls. “Forget it,” he said. “You want to go down in flames, that’s your business. I’m not dying here.”

  Djemma had been waiting for this moment. He pulled out his old sidearm and blasted three holes in Cochrane.

  Cochrane fell back in an unmoving heap. Djemma fired a few more shots into his worthless hide just for the sheer pleasure of it.

  “And you are proved wrong yet again, Mr. Cochrane,” he said.

  He stepped to the controls, glaring at the engineers. “Target the life rafts and fire!”

  GAMAY TROUT had finished cutting through the net and had eased Rapunzel and her harness of explosives through. Since then, she’d been looking for what the Truxton’s captain had described.

  “Head two-nine-zero,” Paul said.

  She turned Rapunzel onto the course and got her moving again. She considered shutting off the floodlight, but she didn’t want to run into any more obstacles. Besides, they were almost there—up ahead she could see the base of some large structure.

  A large tube ran up to it, like a city’s oversized sewer pipe. She guessed this was part of the accelerator.

  “That’s it,” she said. “It’s got to be.”

  “I think you’re right,” Paul said, excitedly. “Find the base where it connects to the seafloor.

  Gamay looked around, shining Rapunzel’s light in the darkness. Then she directed her to the base of the huge pipe.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “Wedge her in there between the bottom and the pipe where it starts to angle out of the water,” Paul said. “It’ll give the explosion more force.”

  Gamay did as he suggested. “That’s as far as she’ll go.”

  Paul grabbed the detonator, flipped the safety cap up.

  “Do it,” Gamay said.

  He pressed the switch.

  “Good-bye, Rapunzel,” she said, thankful for the little machine and sorry to see her go.

  The feed to Gamay’s visor cut out, and she lifted it up. Two seconds later the concussion wave reached them. It hit with a shuddering rumble, shaking the sub for a moment and then fading away.

  UP ON THE PLATFORM Djemma saw all the indicators on his weapon turn red. He saw a great eruption of water and silt just behind the emitter. A moment later the raised portion of the accelerator tunnel collapsed into the sea.

  How? he wondered. How had they done it?

  At almost the same moment, one of his men called from the radar console. “More missiles inbound. One minute to impact.”

  Djemma ignored him. He walked out of the control room, moving forward onto the platform. The wind buffeted him. The darkness of the night swirled, and the water churned where his weapon had been breached.

  He looked up to the horizon. He could see the tiny dots of fire approaching: the tail end of the Harpoon missiles that were zeroing in on him. There was no escape.

  “And so I shall fall,” he whispered to himself. “Like Hannibal before me.”

  The missiles hit to his left and right almost simultaneously. The explosions merged together, vaporizing him into a fireball that could be seen for miles.

  62

  KURT AND KATARINA continued toward the aft end of the Onyx. Kurt kept one arm around her waist and held her close beside him because she was weakening and barely able to keep up with his pace.

  The tunnel itself was filling up with a dense white fog and a cold that chilled them to the bone. With the high voltage off-line, the liquid nitrogen was beginning to warm and expand. It would boil off as soon as it got above negative 321 degrees. Kurt guessed a system like that would have relief valves that might vent the gas into the tunnel.

  They pushed forward, feeling their way through the frigid cloud. At times, visibility in the tunnel was no more than three feet. They moved slowly, looking for the aft-most hatch.

  Finally, Kurt’s hand fell on a curved seam. He recognized the recessed handle and the shape of an access hatch.

  “Our way out of here,” he said, reaching up and turning the wheel that sealed the hatch shut.

  After pulling it open, he helped Katarina onto the ladder. She began to crawl up the rungs. Kurt was ready to join her when a familiar voice cut through the dense mist like a knife.

  “Kurt Austin.”

  Katarina stopped on the ladder.

  “Go,” Kurt whispered. “And don’t wait for me.”

  She pushed off, moving upward, and Kurt held still.

  “Do you realize you’re quite possibly the most aggravating man alive,” Andras said, still hidden in the vapors.

  Certain the killer was setting up to spray the tunnel with automatic weapons fire, Kurt dropped flat to the deck and pointed the barrel of his nine millimeter into the white blanket of mist.

  Andras wasted no time sending a volley of gunfire into the passageway. The shots rang like thunder on a warm drizzly night. The shells thudded against the steel bulkheads and ricocheted like a flight of deadly wasps.

  As Kurt hoped, the bullets all passed above him, but he let out a groan and spoke as if he were in agony. “It doesn’t matter what you do to me,?
?? he grunted. “You’ve lost.”

  He waited for a reply but none came.

  Kurt could hear the catwalk creaking underneath him. He surmised that Andras was taking a new position and zeroing in on the sound of Kurt’s voice. Kurt needed to get him talking so he could do the same thing, since it didn’t take a wizard to predict that Andras was not standing in the middle of the tunnel but was either lying on the deck like Kurt or pressed up against the bulkhead on one side or the other.

  Breathing heavily for effect, Kurt spoke again. “If I was you . . . I’d be . . . getting out . . . of here.”

  He was counting on Andras having enough of an ego to feel he had mortally wounded his prey. But, so far, the man had made no mistakes.

  “Give me your weapon,” Andras said, his voice coming from the shroud of gas like an unseen evil ghost.

  Austin lay there with the cold seeping in his skin. His face was so numb, he could hardly feel anything. He held the Beretta in hands nearly frozen, his elbows placed on the deck.

  “Let the girl go,” he said, cupping a hand to one ear like a radar directional finder and waiting for a response.

  “Of course,” Andras said, his words echoing in the tunnel. “Everyone goes free. I’ll send them all off with roses, and mints on their pillows. Now, slide over your weapon!”

  “I’ll . . . try,” Kurt muttered brokenly.

  Kurt inched to his left, thumped his pistol onto the metal walkway as if he had dropped it and scraped it along the deck, to make it seem as if it were sliding over metal before stopping.

  With that, Kurt rolled quickly to the other side of the tunnel. A burst of three shots rang out, pinging off the deck where he’d just been.

  “Sorry, Mr. Austin,” Andras said as if he were bored. “I don’t trust you any farther than I can throw this ship.”

  And then several more bursts shook the tunnel. The muzzle flash lit the fog like lightning in a cloud. The glare was too diffused to give Andras’s position away, but Kurt spotted something else. He couldn’t see the bullets themselves fly, but he noticed they created tiny shock waves in the thick, frigid mist.