“Call them off!”
“Let us go,” Jinn said, “and I’ll do as you wish.”
“Call them off or I’ll splatter your brains all over the wall.”
“And what will that get you, Mr. Austin?”
Kurt pulled back. “Marchetti, find a computer, you’re going to have to do your code-breaking thing again.”
Marchetti raced over to another laptop, docked on the main console.
“He’ll never break it,” Jinn insisted. “He’ll never even get in.”
Marchetti looked up. “He’s right. I was able to reverse Otero’s last trick because I could access the files, but we’re locked out of everything.”
“Can’t you hack it?”
“It’s a nine-digit code protected with top-level encryption. A supercomputer couldn’t break it without a month or so to work on it.”
“You’ve got to be able to do something.”
“I can’t even log on.”
Now Kurt understood why Jinn had blasted Otero and the laptop. It was Otero’s code. No chance he would give it up lying dead on the floor and no chance Marchetti could check the laptop for any type of keystroke memory or temp file.
Leilani eased up beside Kurt. “What’s happening?”
“Those things that made us sparkle, they’re all around the island, a lot thicker than they were when we saw them. Jinn’s sent them into a frenzy. They’ll come on board like a horde of locusts and eat everything in sight, including us.”
“What are we going to do?” Leilani asked.
“Is there any way to stop them?” Kurt asked Marchetti.
Marchetti shook his head. “There are too many, fifty miles’ worth in every direction.”
“Then we have to get off the island. Where are those airships of yours?”
“In the hangar bay by the helipad.”
“Take that laptop and get everyone to meet us there,” Kurt said. He looked at Tautog. “Get your men up here. We’re leaving by air.”
“Not to the boats?” Tautog asked.
“The boats won’t help us now.”
Tautog went to the balcony and began yelling to his men, waving for them to come up. Marchetti grabbed a microphone and began an island-wide broadcast through a series of loudspeakers.
Kurt noticed two small radios on the flat part of the control console. He grabbed them and then shoved Jinn toward the elevator doors. “Let’s go.”
Moments later Kurt and his growing entourage stood on the lighted helipad suspended between the two pyramid buildings. From this vantage point the sea around Aqua-Terra looked more like solid ground covered with millions of beetles. They reflected the glare of Aqua-Terra’s floodlights in a smoky charcoal color. Streams of them could be seen coming inland like long, probing fingers.
“They look thick enough to walk on,” Paul mentioned.
“I wouldn’t try it,” Kurt said.
A hangar door opened in the side of the starboard pyramid, and Marchetti’s men began rolling one of the airships out. Two others waited behind it.
“How many people can each one hold?” Kurt asked.
“Eight. Nine at most,” Marchetti said.
“Dump out everything you don’t need,” Kurt said. “See if you can lighten the loads.”
Marchetti went to supervise. Paul and Gamay went with him. Leilani stepped over to Zarrina, who was standing against the edge of the helipad with Jinn.
“So you pretended to be me,” she said.
“I wouldn’t get too close,” Kurt warned.
“You’re a weak little woman,” Zarrina said. “That was the hardest part to play.”
Kurt grabbed Leilani as she went to slap Zarrina, pulling her away a safe distance.
“She’s baiting you,” Kurt said. “Go help the others.”
Leilani pouted but did as he asked.
“It’s too bad you didn’t try more to comfort me,” Zarrina said. “You might have enjoyed it.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Kurt said.
Beside her, Jinn fumed.
Tautog greeted the last of his men and shepherded them toward the hangar. “What about the prisoners?” one of them asked.
Kurt looked at the sadistic leader. “What’s it going to be, Jinn? Are you going to leave your men to be eaten alive?”
“Whether they live or die means nothing to me,” he said. “But perhaps you’d like to go get them since you care for them so much.”
“No,” Kurt said, “I’m not sending anyone down for them.”
“Then you are as ruthless as me.”
Kurt glared at Jinn. The man disgusted him. But Kurt wouldn’t risk one good person for the lives of those down below.
“This is what’s going to happen,” Kurt said. “We’re going to get on those airships and fly away and you’re going to be left behind to die in a manner you justly deserve. Your power play does nothing but murder your own men and take the two of you with them in a slow-motion suicide.”
He took the laptop, placed it on the rough surface of the helipad and shoved it toward Jinn.
Jinn stared at it but did nothing more.
Zarrina seemed nervous. She bit her lip, hesitated and then spoke. “Type in the code,” she said to Jinn.
Behind them the first two airships were ready, their pods inflated to full volume, their fans powering up. The third was right behind them.
“What’s the word?” Kurt asked Marchetti without turning.
“If we deploy the air anchors and get up to speed before we go off the edge, I think we can carry eleven,” Marchetti said. “I think.”
“Put twelve on each.”
“But I’m not sure—”
Kurt silenced him with a glance and looked Marchetti in the eye. “I’m going to need your help,” he said, handing him one of the small radios. “Now, what’s the word?”
“Twelve,” Marchetti said. “We can do twelve … I hope.”
“That’s only thirty-six,” Gamay said, calculating quickly. “There are thirty-seven of us.”
Jinn smiled at the numbers. “I suppose someone is staying behind to die.”
Kurt replied without blinking. “I am.”
CHAPTER 56
JOE WENT INTO THE WATER OF LAKE NASSER IN AN OLD-school diving getup. It wasn’t exactly the old brass helmeted, Mark V salvage gear the U.S. had stopped using shortly after World War Two, but it came close.
A thirty-pound helmet of stainless steel fit over his head and onto the shoulders of the suit. A fifty-pound belt strapped around his waist and heavy, weighted boots made taking a few steps a Frankenstein-like walk.
An air hose, a steel cable and a high-pressure line for pumping the Ultra-Set were attached to the shoulder mounts. They made him feel like a marionette, but once he hit the water Joe was glad for every ounce of weight and the security of the steel cable.
The weight kept him balanced in the swirling current. The cable, which was attached to a dive boat above him, was the only way to ascend with so much weight on. If it snapped, he would sink to the bottom like a stone and probably be excavated in a thousand years or so, only to baffle future archaeologists.
Joe had no desire to be part of the Valley of the Dead. All he wanted to do was to stop the dam from being washed away.
If he and the supervisor were right, the main breach was containable, and while disastrous, especially for those close to the dam, it was not cataclysmic. It would widen, perhaps to the full width of the dam, but the clay core and the gentle slope of the structure would keep it from eroding any deeper.
Eventually, like water spilling out of an overflowing bathtub, the water level in the lake would drop to a level matching the depth of the breach and the flow would slow and eventually stop.
But if the microbots were burrowing into the clay core from the tunnel, the incredible pressure of the water would weaken the core itself. It would eventually fail. A bigger, deeper, more jagged breach would form and there would be nothing to
keep the dam from total collapse.
As Joe’s feet touched down on the sloping surface below, the speaker in his helmet crackled.
“Diver, can you hear me?” It was the supervisor. He was up above, risking his life on the dive boat, along with the major and another technician.
“Barely,” Joe said.
“We’re just over a hundred feet from the breach,” the supervisor said. “It continues to widen at a rate of three feet per minute. You have less than thirty minutes to find the entry point or we’ll be caught in the outflow and dragged over the top of the dam.”
Joe figured differently. Within twenty minutes, the breach would be too close for either he or the boat to fight the effects of the current.
“I never wanted to go over the falls in a barrel,” he said, “and I still don’t. Let’s get this done. Start pumping the dye.”
A pump above on the dive boat began to rumble, and a secondary line attached to the Ultra-Set hose pressurized.
Down below, a high-pressure spray of fluorescent orange particles began to jet out of the hose. Joe switched on a black light attached to his helmet. The particles lit up like fireflies as they swirled in the murky water washing slowly to Joe’s left.
At the limit of his vision, Joe saw them quicken and speed toward the surface headed for the breach in the dam. That was the death zone. When that high-speed current reached him, there would be no escape.
Joe moved across the wall, hopping side to side like a spaceman on the moon. He washed the dye up and back across the area where the tunnel’s entry point was suspected to be. It flowed oddly over the uneven surface of the boulders and stones.
Ten minutes and twenty swaths later, they were still without luck.
“We need to go deeper,” Joe said. “Pull us back away from the dam.”
“The farther out we go, the stronger the drag from the break in the dam,” the supervisor said.
“It’s either that or call it a day,” Joe said.
“Hang on.”
A second later Joe felt the steel cable lift him off the slope. From there he was dragged backward perhaps another thirty or forty feet and dropped down again.
As he landed, he could feel the sideways pull of the current tugging at his feet. He pulled the trigger on the fluorescent spray and saw it catch in the crosscurrent to the left. At first it looked no different than the other marking attempts, but this time Joe noticed an eddy swirling in the pattern.
“Ten feet left,” he said.
“Closer to the breach?”
“Yes.”
Joe began to walk. High above, the dive boat moved with him. He pulled the trigger again, aiming the reflective stream of particles right at the center of the eddy.
The glowing particles swirled and the majority of the spray was sucked into a gap between two railroad tie–sized beams of concrete, vanishing in a blink like fish disappearing into coral at the sight of a predator. It happened so quick, Joe had to trigger a second burst of the spray just to be sure.
“I’ve found it,” he said. “The gap is between two concrete pylons in the riprap. I can feel the suction from it.”
As Joe got closer, he felt himself being pulled into the gap. He could see sand and gravel disappearing from around the edges of the beams. A crater was widening beneath them, he could see what looked like a twenty-inch-diameter hole.
He wedged a foot against one of the concrete beams to keep from getting sucked in. As much as he wanted to block the hole, he personally didn’t want to be the plug.
“I’m ready for the mud.”
“Mud?”
“The Ultra-Set,” Joe clarified, awkwardly holding himself back.
“Starting the pumps now,” the supervisor said.
Careful to maintain his balance, Joe managed to jam the front end of the hose into the opening. As the pressure came up, he pulled the trigger.
The Ultra-Set began flowing out at high pressure, some of it escaped into the water, looking like magenta-colored whipped cream as it expanded and hardened. Most of it funneled into the breach drawn down by the suction of the unwanted tunnel.
“How much does this stuff expand?” Joe asked.
“Twenty times its original volume,” the supervisor said. “And then it hardens.”
Joe hoped it would. And if there were any microbots left in the core, trying to widen and expand the breach, he hoped they would be caught in it and frozen in place like insects in amber.
The current tugged him to the left and he heard the rumble of the falls over the motor of the boat and the pump above him.
“Anything?” Joe asked after about thirty seconds.
“Control reports orange dye from the lower geyser,” the supervisor said. “The water flow is unchanged.”
“How much of this stuff do we have?”
“The tank holds five hundred gallons,” the supervisor told him. “It pumps two hundred gallons per minute.”
Joe hoped it would be enough. He held the nozzle and reset his feet to fight the crosscurrent.
The major came on the radio next.
“Mr. Zavala, we’re awfully close to the breach. We’re running full power just to keep ourselves out of the fray. If you could hurry …”
Joe looked up through the window in the top of the huge helmet. He could see the lights on the underside of the boat and the swirling turbulence where the propeller was churning full speed.
“I’m not exactly taking a lunch break down here,” he said.
Joe shut the nozzle off for a moment, climbed up on the boulder field and, using the leverage of his feet, pushed a boulder down the slope and into the gap. It plugged somewhat, leaving a much smaller fissure.
Joe jammed the hose back into place and pulled the trigger again. “Go to full pressure on the hose,” he said. “We either fill it or we don’t.”
Joe held the trigger down and the Ultra-Set surged forward. As it did, he felt the current changing around him. The pull from the opening in front of him was lessening, but the side load dragging him toward the breach was picking up steam.
“Control reports the flow lessening. Ultra-Set spewing from the geyser!”
Joe’s left foot slipped out from under him as the side current intensified and suddenly he was surrounded by red foam. The tunnel was packed and the Ultra-Set was spewing out of the now blocked hole like a bottle of carbonated soda that had been shaken and then opened.
Joe caught himself and then stumbled again. He shut off the valve.
“Bring me up!” he shouted.
The steel cord yanked him off the slope and then dropped him back down again, but it wasn’t a vertical tug, it was a sideways one that almost tipped him off his feet. For a second Joe was confused. Why was he being pulled sideways?
A call from above straightened it out. “We’re caught in the current!” the major shouted. “We’re getting pulled into the breach!”
CHAPTER 57
GAMAY TROUT STARED AT KURT AUSTIN ON THE DARK, COLD bridge of the helipad. Nothing in the air could have chilled her like the words he’d just spoken.
“You’re not staying here,” Gamay said.
“Those things are overloaded with twelve of you,” he said. “Another one hundred and ninety pounds will put one of them in the drink.”
Down below, the lights had begun to blow as the horde of metal sand crawled over them and covered them up. All of zero deck had gone dark, central park no doubt being stripped bare.
A strange sound, like concrete blocks being dragged over metal, seemed to resonate from all directions as trillions of the microbots slid across one another, filling the nooks and crannies of the island and beginning to climb vertically.
“But you’ll die here!” Leilani cried out.
“I’m not going to die,” Kurt insisted.
Gamay noticed he never took his eyes off Jinn. “He’s going to give us the code and shut these things down before they eat us alive.”
“I would not count on
that,” Jinn said.
To their left, the first airship accelerated forward, picking up speed and rolling off the edge of the platform before dropping … dropping … dropping toward the zero deck. As its speed came up, the descent slowed and then finally at thirty feet or so it began to climb.
“You two get on the airships and get out of here,” Kurt said.
Leilani stared at Kurt with her mouth agape. Gamay understood him better. Kurt was locked in a test of wills with Jinn.
“Come with me,” she said to Leilani. They walked along the edge of the platform as the second airship launched. Marchetti and the last ride out waited.
“What is he doing?” Leilani asked.
“He thinks he can break Jinn and force him to countermand the doomsday order.”
“But that’s insane,” Leilani said.
“Maybe,” Gamay said. “But if what Jinn told us yesterday is true, his doomsday command will take a lot of lives and cause years of worldwide misery. If he dies, it’ll never be countermanded, but to take him with us means two or three of our people have to stay behind and die. Kurt would never give in to that and I can’t blame him. The only way we can help him is to get off the island. Give him one less thing to worry about.”
Marchetti hustled them aboard the airship as the fans cranked up to full speed.
“Ready,” she said.
A few pairs of boots were thrown out and the rifles the men carried, even some of the heavy jackets, anything to lighten the load a few more pounds.
Paul grasped her hand tight as they picked up speed.
Gamay held her breath as they went over the edge. It felt like they were cresting a ridge on a roller coaster. Her knees went weak and her stomach seemed to float for several seconds as the nose pitched down and the airship dropped and accelerated.
Rising up toward them, she saw the flat area of the central park teaming with masses of the microbots. The descent didn’t seem to be slowing fast enough.
“Marchetti?”
“Hang on,” he said.
They were still descending way too fast. Marchetti was pulling back on the controls, and the horrible sound of untold numbers of metal machines eating rang in her ears. The descent began to slow, the craft leveled and skimmed across the park, narrowly missing a tree covered top to bottom with the invading horde.