Zero Hour

by Clive Cussler

  The roof of this structure sat near a depth of two hundred and fifty feet, the bottom checked in below three hundred and twenty. The dome loomed above it and off to one side.

  Kurt was grudgingly impressed. Building a structure like this at a depth of three hundred feet was quite a task to begin with. To do it in a toxic lake, in secret . . . He was more than grudgingly impressed.

  He took his hand off the throttle, and the amphibious rig coasted to a halt near the center of the lake. Kurt got out of his seat and climbed onto the flatbed behind him.

  He was directly over the main structure. Now all he had to do was get down there.

  • • •

  JOE SPENT A FEW MINUTES tending to Bradshaw and trying to patch him up with the meager offerings of the first-aid kit. Despite the effort, Bradshaw looked bad, ghostly pale, with skin that was cool to the touch. He needed real attention and he needed it soon.

  Joe left Bradshaw and began to rummage around in the SUV beside them. He grabbed a handheld radio and turned it on. The LED, which should have lit up nice and green, remained dark. Joe fiddled with the power switch a few times and then keyed the mike. He got nothing: no squelch, no static. The battery was dead.

  Looking for a charger, Joe noticed that the keys were still in the SUV’s ignition. He also noticed that both doors were open and yet the dome lights were dark, and the dash wasn’t emitting any kind of annoying ping.

  He reached over and turned the key. He twisted it to OFF and then back to the ACC position. Nothing changed. No warning lights, no voice telling him the door was ajar, nothing.

  “That’s odd.”

  He climbed out of the SUV and grabbed his rifle. Moving quickly from one vehicle to the next, he checked them all. Each one of them was as dead as the last.

  Six new vehicles. Not one with an ounce of juice. A rack of radios and two cell phones in the same condition. A flashlight in the glove box of the last vehicle had just enough power to make the old-style filament glow for a second or two, but then it too went dark.

  Joe felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He glanced at the sky. This was exactly the kind of thing that happened right before the mother ship arrived.

  He moved back to Bradshaw. “Why are all the batteries dead?”

  “Dead?”

  “The cars, the radios, they’re all dead,” Joe explained. “You need to be medevaced, but I can’t find a way to call for help.”

  Bradshaw’s eyes went glassy. He had no answers. Joe wasn’t even sure he was hearing the questions anymore.

  Joe stood up and glanced out over the water. Bradshaw needed to be moved ASAP, but the only vehicle with any power was the amphibious rig now sitting a half mile from him in the center of the poisoned lake.

  Kurt donned a wet suit and approached the small one-man submarines that rested near the back end of the flatbed. The bright yellow machines were affectionately called speeders. They resembled Jet Skis, with a set of small dive planes forward and a clear canopy that the driver pulled down and locked into place once he or she was seated on the vehicle.

  The machines were rated to five hundred feet, powered by a lithium-ion battery pack similar to those in modern electric cars and equipped with a pair of grappling claws, headlights, and an internal air/water bladder.

  The canopy and much of the body were made from hyperstrong polymers designed to resist the pressure at great depths. Though they’d yet to be tested on a deep dive, Kurt had great faith in them. Joe was the main designer, and Kurt had found all of Joe’s designs to be even stronger than the specs indicated.

  After a quick series of checks, he was ready to go. He released the strap holding the speeder in place and then set the flatbed gradient lever at thirty degrees. The hydraulics kicked into gear, and the flatbed began to tilt like the back of a dump truck.

  Kurt climbed onto one of the speeders and pressed the switch that closed the hatch. The canopy quickly locked into place, covering Kurt snugly. Straddling the seat with his arms stretched forward and his legs out behind him, Kurt felt like he was on a nautical motorcycle.

  The tail end of the flatbed reached the lake, and water came up around the sides of the speeder. Through the canopy Kurt noticed the hue of the water. Pink at the very top but darker red as the light was absorbed.

  He wondered for a second just how toxic the mess was. Then he twisted the throttle and drove off the ramp, wondering about the sanity of anyone who would dive into a soup like this.

  At first, the speeder cruised a few feet beneath the surface. Then Kurt adjusted the dive lever, and the ballast tank filled with water. Pushing the handlebars forward caused the dive planes to tilt downward, and the speeder began to descend.

  Kurt continued forward for twenty seconds or so and then leaned to the left, bringing the unit around in a wide turn. By the time he was eighty feet deep, the water around him looked like red wine. Fifty feet deeper, it was the color of dried blood. Whatever compounds were suspended in it, they filtered out the light very efficiently. But as he dropped lower, Kurt was able to make out the top of the dome.

  It was smooth but mottled in appearance, as if some kind of mineral had precipitated out on the curved surface. Perhaps it was calcium or copper or manganese, but, whatever it was, it reflected more light than the surrounding water.

  As he finished his pass across the dome, Kurt feathered the throttle and ejected the last of the ballast air. The speeder began to sink again.

  Kurt stared into the blackness. The roof of the laboratory structure rested about seventy-five feet below the top of the dome. He hoped its surface would be covered with the same minerals and that he’d spot the roof before he banged into it and let everyone inside know he was there.

  “Two hundred and ten,” he said, reading the depth gauge out loud. “Two hundred and twenty.”

  He scanned the void around him. Nothing but darkness. It was like he was sinking into a black hole.

  “Two hundred and thirty,” he said quietly.

  If the gauge was reading correctly, he would hit the lab’s roof in twenty feet or so. Still, he saw nothing.

  He pumped a smidgen of air into the bladder like a motorist trying to top off his tires to the perfect pressure. One quick hiss, then another one. The descent slowed.

  The depth gauge soon read two hundred and forty feet, and Kurt still saw nothing outside. At two hundred and forty-five, he put a slight bit of pressure on the air switch again. And by two and forty-seven, his nerves gave out.

  He jabbed the switch until the speeder reached neutral buoyancy. The descent stopped, and the speeder hung motionless in the dark.

  Kurt slid his thumb upward and tapped the light switch. He hit it just hard enough to send some juice through the circuit, but not enough to fully switch it on. The lights flashed dimly and went dark again. In a brief flash, they revealed a world of neon red and the corroded top of the laboratory a mere three feet below him.

  “At least I’m in the right place,” he muttered.

  If this ungainly construction was indeed a laboratory, there had to be a way in. Toxic water or regular, the safest, most efficient way to build an airlock in a marine environment was to put it underneath the structure.

  Kurt risked another flash, got a bearing on the edge of the structure, and went over the side. Dropping downward once again, he began to make out a soft glow around the bottom of the lab: illumination spilling from the airlock.

  “Nice of someone to leave a light on for me,” Kurt muttered.

  At just that moment, the speeder tilted violently to the right, and a strange metallic twang reverberated through the water.

  Kurt knew instantly what had happened. Drifting down, he’d hit one of the guide wires that held the dome and its shaft of pipes in place. The impact had wrenched him to the side and spun him around. Far worse, it sent a vibration through the water lik
e the striking of a gigantic guitar string. The noise reverberated off the walls of the pit and came back at him in a shadowy echo.

  Kurt righted the ship and looked around for leaks. The cockpit appeared to be secure. He breathed a sigh of relief and continued on downward, hoping to avoid any more trouble.

  • • •

  “WHAT WAS THAT NOISE?”

  The question was posed to Janko by one of his men, who was nervously placing a block of plastic explosives beneath a set of computer servers.

  “I’m not sure,” Janko admitted. He’d listened to all kinds of creaks and groans during his time on the station, especially when the techs were testing the dome or drawing power from it, but nothing like the strange reverberation they’d just heard.

  “Water has a way of distorting sound,” one of the techs mentioned.

  That was true, but Janko was not alone in wondering if the structure was safe. One didn’t need to be a scientist to imagine acids slowly etching their way through the metal walls.

  “Who knows what the chemicals in this lake have been doing to our hull all these years,” he said. “Finish setting the explosives. I want to get out of here and blow this thing before it dissolves around us.”

  The men seemed to agree. They doubled their labors, and moments later the demolitions expert slid out from under the computer bank. “All set.”

  “Good,” Janko said. The explosives would tear apart the circuit boards and memory banks. The fire that followed would melt the remnants to sludge before the water poured in. Even assuming they had the ability and fortitude to recover the remnants from beneath nearly a thousand feet of poisoned water, the high-tech labs of the world’s intelligence agencies would get nothing from what they found.

  That meant only one job remained.

  He turned around and pointed his rifle at a pair of gagged figures sitting on the floor. One man, one woman. Both with their hands tied behind their backs.

  The man was either law enforcement or military. Strong willed, he stared at Janko, almost daring him to shoot them. The woman was softer, pretty, with strawberry blond hair, and fear in her eyes. Janko figured he would shoot her first. Put her out of her misery. He raised the weapon.

  “Are you insane?!” the tech shouted.

  Janko glared at him.

  “We’ve turned the oxygen to full,” the tech explained. “We also opened the acetylene tanks. This whole station is filling with flammable gas. If you pull that trigger, the whole place might go up in flames. You want to kill them, use a knife.”

  Janko lowered the rifle and looked back at the captives. Had they realized this? Had they been goading him into destroying himself? It didn’t matter. They would face the painful fate of an explosion and fire on their own in a few minutes.

  “Set the timer,” he said. “We’re getting out of here.”

  Janko watched as the demolitions man set the timer to 10:00 and pressed INITIATE. The clock ticked over to 09:59 and began winding down. Without glancing back, Janko turned and made his way toward the main ladder. Their submarine awaited.

  • • •

  JOE STOOD ON THE BEACH, considering his options. As much as he believed Kurt would make it back one way or another, waiting around for him to return wasn’t going to work for Bradshaw. Nor was Joe interested in a half-mile swim through a toxic lake to retrieve the amphibious truck.

  His mind turned to the dead vehicles. They had chargers in them. Assuming he could get one of them started, he could power up the radios and call for help. It would come in the form of a helicopter or three—one to whisk the gravely injured chief of the ASIO to a hospital and two or three more filled with military commandos or SWAT teams to surround and secure the lake.

  It was a two-hour drive to Alice Springs but only thirty minutes by air. For Bradshaw, that might be the difference between life and death.

  “If only these things came with hand cranks,” Joe muttered, thinking of vintage cars.

  He considered push-starting one of them. The two Jeeps had manual transmissions, and the beach sloped down to the water. That would help, but he wasn’t sure he could get up enough speed.

  He reached into one of the Jeeps, put the transmission in neutral, and put his shoulder into the doorframe. Pushing with all his might, Joe got the rig moving. But the sand was soft, and he couldn’t get the speed up beyond the pace of a slow walk. He stepped aside as the vehicle reached the water’s edge.

  He expected to see the front wheels roll into the water and stop, but the nose of the vehicle went over, and the cabin filled with water from the open door. Seconds later, it plunged downward and disappeared beneath the surface. The last thing he saw was the trailer hitch that stuck out from the rear bumper like the battle flag on the aft end of a sinking ship.

  He glanced over at Bradshaw, who appeared to be out cold. “You didn’t need to see that anyway.”

  Joe stood perplexed for a second, wondering about what had just happened. Then it made sense. Like most open-pit mines, the entire excavation was done in terraces. A steep slope, then a flat section, and then another steep cut. The beach was nothing more than a wide terrace. A sixty-foot wall lay behind them at an almost vertical angle. A similar drop must lie just beyond the water’s edge.

  Joe looked around at the remaining vehicles, and a new plan formed in his mind. It would cost the ASIO at least one more vehicle, but if Joe was right, it would get the other Jeep started.

  • • •

  KURT LOOKED UPWARD into a pool of cherry-colored light. He’d brought the speeder in beneath the station and found the airlock.

  Carefully, he maneuvered into the bay and surfaced. The pool and the surrounding deck space appeared empty.

  Kurt nudged the throttle and bumped it up onto a shelf of some type. He popped the canopy back and stepped out onto the deck. A moment later, he was through the primary airlock and into an equipment room.

  A pair of tanks and two full-face helmets sat nearby. The same type of equipment the ASIO had in one of their trucks.

  The dive team had made it this far, he thought. But where were they now?

  Kurt had managed to bring the short-barreled M4 carbine, but the odd, almost nervous energy that he’d quickly begun to feel told him he was breathing a high-oxygen mix. That was surprising.

  He would have expected a tri-mix of gasses, or even an oxygen-helium mixture, that worked better at sustained depths. To be sure he wasn’t imagining it, Kurt spoke briefly. “Four score and seven years ago . . .”

  He should have sounded like Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck, but he sounded exactly like himself. There was no helium in the air, or very little of it anyway. He put the rifle aside. There would be no gunfight at the bottom of the Tasman Lake. One shot would destroy the entire place.

  He pulled a large dive knife from a sheath on his leg, wondering if this turn of events made his odds better or worse.

  Twenty feet down a hall, he found water at the base of a ladder. He went up it and explored the next floor, finding two rooms filled with stacks of batteries. A wall panel displayed power states, most in the green and a few odd ones in yellow or red. Kurt wondered where they were getting the power to charge the huge stack or what they were using it for.

  He went up another level and found what looked like the crew’s living quarters. Empty lockers and unmade beds gave him the impression the place had been abandoned.

  He moved back to the central ladder, ascended to a third level, and found the next hatch resting on its stops. He was about to open it when he heard the sound of footsteps pounding down the ladder toward him.

  He held completely still.

  Voices echoed. “Come on,” someone shouted. “Move.”

  Kurt was about to slide back down a level and hide, when the footsteps abruptly moved to the left, pounding on the deck above, and headed away from him. It sounded l
ike several people in a hurry.

  He opened the hatch just a sliver and looked through. No one there.

  Quietly, he pulled himself up and peeked around the corner. Three men stood in front of another airlock. This one reminded Kurt of the revolving doors in a center-city office building. As it opened, two of them went in and the third waited.

  The sound of more footsteps descending the ladder came next. Kurt looked up just as another man dropped in beside him.

  “What the . . .”

  Kurt clapped a hand over the man’s mouth and plunged the carbon steel blade into the man’s chest, slamming him against the wall in the process. A second man dropped in, landing on Kurt’s arm and knocking the knife to the floor.

  Kurt spun around and threw an elbow into the second attacker’s temple. It sent the man sprawling to the deck near the airlock.

  By now, a third man had come down the ladder, his hands and feet sliding on the rails instead of using the rungs. He landed and grabbed Kurt from behind, wrapping an arm around Kurt’s throat and trying to choke the life out of him.

  Kurt pushed backward, ramming the man into the bulkhead wall. The grip loosened only a bit. Kurt pushed back again, this time trying to snap his head back in a reverse head butt of sorts.

  The second impact shook the man loose, just as the airlock pinged like an elevator in a hotel lobby. Kurt was pushed to the ground as this third assailant rushed past.

  By the time he got up, the airlock door was closing. The four remaining men were crammed into it, looking back at him. One of them shook his head, smiling sadistically.

  Four against one, and they’d run off. Kurt could only think of a single reason for that: they were about to scuttle the station.

  A quick glance at the dead man in the ladder well confirmed it. He carried wire strippers in his breast pocket, a roll of electrical tape on his belt, and a length of red-and-blue flat cable. In all likelihood, the station was set to explode.

  Kurt grabbed the wire cutters and continued up the ladder. Based on the escaping group’s show of haste, he doubted there was much time.