Finally they began to rise, climbing slowly as they crossed the island’s threshold and moved out over the ocean.
“Fly the airship,” Marchetti said to his chief. “Keep our speed up. Keep us close enough for a signal lock on Wi-Fi.”
“What are you going to do?” Gamay asked.
“I have to set up the computer,” he said.
“The computer?”
He nodded. “Just in case your friend actually knows what he’s doing.”
CHAPTER 58
THE HORRIBLE FEELING OF EVENTS SPIRALING BEYOND HIS control filled Joe Zavala with dread. The dive boat above was being pulled toward the breach where it would go over the falls in a fatal manner. And since he was attached to that boat by a steel cable and an air hose, Joe would soon follow.
Cutting the cable and the hose wouldn’t help. He couldn’t swim to the surface. Even if he dumped the weight belt, he had fifty pounds of gear on his shoulders and feet.
His feet touched down, he tried to set them but was picked up and pulled sideways once again.
“Give me more line!” he shouted. “Quick!”
He saw the boat high above, saw the phosphorescent wake behind the boat as it fought the current, angling this way and that as the pilot tried to keep its nose aimed upstream. Any side turn would be the end of them as they’d be swept away in a matter of seconds.
Finally Joe felt some slack in the line. He dropped onto the slope and began to scramble over it. He found a large boulder, half the size of a VW or even a VV.
Marching around it, he wrapped the steel cable against its bulk.
“Tighten the cable!” he said.
The cable pulled taut, constricted around the boulder and all but sung in the depths as the slack was used up. The boat up above locked into place.
“We’re holding,” the major called down. “What happened?”
“I made you an anchor,” Joe said. “Now, tell me someone up there knows what centripetal force is?”
Joe was holding tight. The cable was looped around the boulder but threatening to break.
“Yes,” the major said, “the supervisor knows.”
“Point the boat toward the rocks, take a forty-five-degree angle if the cable holds, then you should slingshot to safety. Beach the boat, and don’t forget to reel me in.”
“Okay,” the major said, “we’ll try.”
Joe held the cable tight, putting his steel boots up against the boulder.
The boat above changed course and began to move sideways. Like the Earth’s gravity directing the moon, the steel cable caused the boat’s path to curve and accelerate. The boat cut through the current and was flung forward.
A twang sounded through the water. Joe felt himself tumbling backward.
The cable had snapped in two.
At first he was dragged by the current toward the topside breach, but then the lines and hoses connecting him to the dive boat pulled him the other way.
As the boat raced into the shallows and beached on the rocks, Joe was dragged into the boulder field down below. Each blow felt like being in a car crash and Joe was suddenly thankful for the hard stainless steel helmet.
When the ride stopped, Joe was thirty feet under, the suit was filling with water and the air hose was either severed or kinked because no air was coming through. Joe knew he couldn’t swim, but he could climb. Up he went, crawling across the concrete pylons and boulders like a raccoon in a garbage dump.
He shed the weight belt and the task got easier. As he went higher, the light from the bottom of the boat grew brighter. With his air running out, Joe pulled himself to the surface, emerging like the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
He collapsed between two of the boulders, unable to hold up the helmet and shoulder harness without the buoyancy of the water. He struggled to lift it off, but it wouldn’t budge until two sets of helping hands pulled it off for him.
“Did we do it?” Joe asked.
“You did it,” the major said, hugging Joe and lifting him up. “You did it.”
CHAPTER 59
HIGH UP ON THE HELIPAD, THE EERIE, OMNIPRESENT SOUND of the microbots continued to grow louder. It came everywhere at the same time like demented electromagnetic cicadas, chirping by the billions and moving closer with every passing moment.
The noise was grating to Kurt Austin, but it seemed to be affecting Zarrina and Jinn more than him.
Zarrina looked over the edge and ran her gaze upward along the sides of the buildings between which the helipad rested. The stain of the approaching horde was now three-quarters of the way up the pyramids, the white structures becoming covered in dark gray and black.
“Give him the code,” she said.
“Never,” Jinn replied.
“You should listen to her, Jinn,” Kurt said. “She’s not a good woman, but she’s not an idiot either.”
“We have people, money, lawyers,” she reminded him. “We don’t have to die.”
“Do not speak!” Jinn demanded.
She grabbed him. “Please, Jinn,” she begged.
Jinn slapped her hand away and grabbed her by the collar of her shirt. He glared at her in fury. “You weaken me, woman!”
Before she could reply he shoved her backward, sending her over the edge.
Zarrina fell, screaming as she dropped. She hit what was now a six-inch layer of microbots ten stories below, blasting them in all directions like a cloud of dust. She lay there uncovered for all of a few seconds and then the swarm converged on her, covered her up and began to feed.
Jinn stared for a moment, anger, not pity, etched on his face. But Kurt thought he detected a little bit of fear. The speed with which the microbots devoured things was unsettling. Jinn knew that better than anyone else.
“Take a good hard look, Jinn. That’s how you’re going to die,” Kurt said. “Ready to go out like that?”
It continued to grow darker around them. The bots were only one story below, cutting off all light that shone upward. Only the few halogen lamps on the side of the hangar and the red post lights at the edges of the helipad illuminated them now.
Jinn looked slightly less sure of himself. “You’re going to die with me,” he reminded Kurt.
“For my friends. For my country. For people around the world who would suffer if you win. I don’t have a problem with that. What are you dying for?”
Jinn stared, his face flush with anger, his lip curling into a snarl as his eyes narrowed. He knew his bluff had been called. Dying got him nothing. No wealth, no power, no legacy. His whole world was his own being, his own arrogance, his own greatness. When his existence ended, even the doomsday actions of the microbots would bring him no satisfaction.
At that moment he hated Kurt with every fiber of his being. Hated him enough to lose all sense of balance.
He charged toward Kurt like a wrestler going in for the kill.
Instead of shooting Jinn, Kurt turned the rifle sideways, using it as a bar. He took Jinn’s momentum and used it against him. Falling backward, Kurt kicked a boot into Jinn’s solar plexus and flipped him. The move sent Jinn flying through the air and tumbling hard.
Kurt popped back up to his feet in time to see Jinn crash squarely on his back. Jinn got up a little slowly, more stunned than injured.
“Not used to fighting much, are you?” Kurt baited Jinn.
Jinn grabbed some type of pipe that had been tossed out of one of the airships. He came at Kurt, swinging it like a sword.
Still holding the rifle in both hands, Kurt blocked the pipe and jabbed the butt of the rifle into Jinn’s face. The blow opened a gash that bled profusely.
Jinn stumbled back, dropping the pole, putting his hands to his bloody face. Kurt stepped forward and kicked the pole off the platform.
It fell into the dark, trailing a strange whistling sound from its hollow ends.
By now the rising stain of the horde had reached the edge of the helipad, its first probing fingers curling up and onto th
e flat surface, converging toward the middle from all sides.
Kurt was running out of time.
Through a mask of blood Jinn shouted, “If you didn’t have that rifle, I would kill you with my bare hands!”
Kurt pointed the rifle at him and then flung it off the deck. “You can’t beat me, Jinn!” he yelled. “I’m better than you. I’m fighting for something that matters, all you’re doing is playing out the string. You don’t want to die. You’re afraid to die. I can see it in your eyes.”
Jinn charged again, the rage distorting his face. This time Kurt set his feet and dropped his shoulder, slamming it into Jinn’s gut. He wrapped his arms around Jinn’s torso, picked him up and body-slammed him to the deck.
From out of nowhere Jinn produced a knife. It sliced Kurt’s arm before he could grab Jinn’s wrist. Blood flowed, pain surged through him, but Kurt’s strength and determination prevailed. He slammed Jinn’s hand down on the deck, smashing it three times before Jinn released the knife.
Kurt swatted it away and it skipped into the approaching tide of microbots.
It was now or never. Jinn tried to get up, but Kurt elbowed him in the face and then slammed his head to the deck. Gripping Jinn’s hair, he twisted the man’s face to the side, forcing Jinn to look at the horde that was approaching.
“Look at them!” Kurt shouted, holding Jinn’s cheek to the deck. “Look at them!”
Jinn had given up fighting now. He stared at the advancing horde. The line was getting closer, the circle around them getting smaller.
They reached a trail of blood and swarmed into it like ants crawling all over one another. They glistened beneath the overhead lights, and the sound of their movement was overwhelming, like a monstrous swarm of bees and fingernails on chalkboard mixed together.
“Give me the code!” Kurt demanded.
The laptop sat a few feet away, the horde had already encircled it. It was literally floating on the sea of microbots.
“What good will it do you now?”
“Just give it to me!”
Kurt held him down, Jinn pushed back into him, trying to keep his face out of the approaching line of bots. His lips trembled as they crawled onto him, moving into the cut on his cheek. He spat them from his mouth, but some got into his eyes, they stung like acid.
“Now, Jinn! Before it’s too late!”
“221-798-615,” Jinn shouted.
Kurt yanked Jinn to his feet. “Did you hear that, Marchetti?”
A tinny voice came from Kurt’s pocket. “Transmitting now!”
The scraping sound continued. Kurt pulled Jinn back, but the circle of safe ground had shrunk to the size of a kitchen table and then to a manhole cover.
“Marchetti?!”
Suddenly, the horde went still. The sound of their chewing and crawling and scratching dissipated in a wave, flowing outward in all directions like a giant wave of dominoes falling.
They dropped from the sides of the buildings in huge sheets, flowing down and piling up dunes of gray and black with their bodies. A cloud of them drifted like dust across the zero deck below.
In the wake of all that terrible noise came normal sounds, the creaking of the huge metal island and the soft fans of the airships circling it.
“Good work, Marchetti,” he said. “Now, come back down here and help me clean up this mess.”
CHAPTER 60
KURT AUSTIN WAITED IN THE DARK AS THE AIRSHIPS CIRcled and finally began to approach. Standing at the edge of the helipad, he watched as the lead ship floated in, slowly sinking toward the pad. With the fans tilted down in a vertical position to slow the descent like retro-rockets on a moon lander, the microbots were blasted around like ash from a volcano.
They swirled into the air, a cloud of metallic dust, drifting and falling toward the zero deck below.
A few feet away, down on his knees, Jinn watched the cloud fall but otherwise made no movement. He was a beaten man, a broken man. He looked different, Kurt thought.
“You’ll send me to prison,” he mumbled.
“For ten times your natural life span,” Kurt replied.
“Can you see a man like me surviving in prison?” Jinn asked, looking up.
“Only long enough to go insane,” Kurt replied.
Jinn looked toward the edge. The darkness beckoned. “Let me go.”
Kurt could see what he had in mind. “Why should I?”
“As a kindness to a vanquished enemy,” Jinn mumbled.
Kurt stared at Jinn for a long moment. Without a word, he stepped back.
Jinn came up off his knees and glanced at Kurt. “Thank you,” he said and then turned away.
He took three steps and was gone.
CHAPTER 61
BY HIGH NOON IN EGYPT THE DANGER AT ASWAN HAD nearly passed. The water level in Lake Nasser had dropped twenty feet. A six-foot wave continued to pour across the crest and through the four-hundred-foot-wide gap, but it was a smoother, more controlled flow now. With the spillways, turbine gates and the diversion canal remaining wide open, it was hoped that a point of equilibrium would be reached by the middle of the next day.
Still, tragedy had not been completely averted.
As Joe stared downstream, it looked entirely different than what he’d seen the night before. The buildings were gone—not damaged, not flooded out, just gone. So were the docks and the boats and even some of the sandstone cliffs. The banks of the river remained flooded and instead of looking like a narrow river, it looked like a lake.
Above that lake, helicopters circled by the dozens like dragonflies over a pond. Small boats had been brought in and were zipping here and there. Power remained on at the dam, though there was nowhere to send it as all the transmission lines had been swept away.
Joe turned and slumped down by an Army trailer. At Major Edo’s insistence, a nurse checked on him. He could have used an IV, but he refused it. Medical supplies would run short rather quickly, he guessed, and others would need them more than him.
She handed him a bottle of water, threw a blanket over his shoulders and moved away.
Major Edo sat down and offered him a cigarette. Joe refused it, and the major stuffed them back in his pocket. “Dirty habit,” he said, trying to smile.
“How many?” Joe asked.
“At least ten thousand,” the major said sadly. “Probably twice that when we’re done looking.”
Joe felt like he’d gone twelve rounds with a heavyweight, survived, thinking he’d won, only to find out the judges had scored it the other way.
“It could have been millions,” the major said firmly. He put a hand on Joe’s shoulder. “Do you understand?”
Joe looked up at him and nodded.
A helicopter landed nearby. A private ran up to the major. “We’re loaded with wounded.”
“Where are you taking them?” the major asked.
“Luxor. It’s the nearest hospital that has power.”
“Take him with you,” the major said.
“Who is he?” the private asked.
“His name is Joseph Zavala. He is a hero of the Egyptian people.”
CHAPTER 62
ONE WEEK LATER PAUL AND GAMAY TROUT WERE SITTING around a large circular table in the luxurious Citronelle restaurant in Washington, D.C. They were joined by Rudi Gunn and Elwood Marchetti. They ordered cocktails and traded stories while waiting for the other guests to arrive.
“What’s going to become of your island?” Paul asked Marchetti.
The inventive genius shrugged. “It’s ruined beyond repair. And no one can step aboard until we’re sure all the bots are cleaned out. It may take years. By then the Indian Ocean will have battered Aqua-Terra until it sinks down to the seabed.”
“That’s dreadful,” Gamay said. “All those years of effort gone forever.”
Marchetti smiled slyly. “That’s what the insurance company is going to say when I put in a claim for irreversible infestation.”
Paul glanced over at two
empty chairs. “Where are our honored friends?”
“Not to mention our dinner benefactors,” added Rudi Gunn.
Kurt and Joe’s bet had been ruled a tie. They were glad to agree to split the tab and just thankful they were alive to host the party. Though no one had heard from them yet this evening.
“What’s the latest on the Pickett’s Islander’s Pain Machine?” Gamay asked.
“Our computer division scoured it out of long-missing files,” Gunn answered. “It was described as a secret World War Two project created to stop Japanese banzai missions. In those days, the Japanese believed it was a glorious thing to die for the Emperor. When they couldn’t attack using normal flanking maneuvers, they would make suicidal charges in human waves, shouting, ‘Banzai!’ or ‘Tenno Heika Banzai!’ which meant ‘Ten thousand years of rule to the Emperor!’
“The Pain Maker was designed to incapacitate the attacking force and allow the Americans to capture and interrogate valuable prisoners while stopping wholesale slaughter the Japanese were intent on causing themselves.”
“Why wasn’t the machine used during the war?” asked Paul.
“Soon after the John Bury went missing, the War Department determined that the machine was too easy to replicate if captured and could be used against our island assault forces.”
“And now the machines from Pickett’s Island sit in some obscure military warehouse, gathering dust,” added Gamay.
“That’s the size of it,” replied Gunn.
At that moment their attention became focused on a tall, craggy figure with dark hair and sharp green eyes who entered the private dining room.
“Please don’t get up,” Dirk Pitt said with a broad smile. He held up a small card in his hand. “One of the Agency’s credit cards. This one is on Uncle Sam.”
Gamay laughed. “Kurt and Joe will be happy.”
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