by Greg Cox
Khan smiled. Perhaps fortune was on his side, after all. A sudden shock wave, mild compared to the impact of the second torpedo against the Kaur’s outer hull, suggested that the oncoming torpedo had destroyed one or more of the noisy decoys rather than his submarine. A miss! Khan thought triumphantly Now it was up to the Shkval to ensure that the Akula did not have another chance to fire at the Kaur.
“Closing, closing,” Bataeo reported on the Skhval’s progress, struggling to keep up with the torpedo’s murderous velocity She sounded like an auctioneer calling out bids at a rapid-fire pace. “Got her!”
The pinging of the enemy’s sonar halted abruptly, leaving only fading echoes behind. Khan heard instead, muffled but unmistakable, the sound of forged steel being torn asunder. “She’s breaking up!” the sonar room announced excitedly. Khan could hear the unseen sailor’s relief, even over the intercom. “Target is destroyed. Repeat: target is destroyed!”
So falls another foe! Khan savored the intoxicating nectar of victory. Come not between the dragon and his wrath! He basked in the adulation of the crew, who gazed up at him with gratitude and admiration upon their sweaty, smoke-smudged faces. He marched confidently to the forward edge of the periscope platform and gave the apprehensive OOD a hearty slap on the back. “Helm, continue course to Dubrovnik.” [196] He spoke loudly and clearly, so that the entire control room could hear him. “Let us send the butcher Hunyadi our compliments.”
Cheers and laughter greeted his jest. Trusting that the crew’s morale had been restored, and that the crisis had been averted, he felt at ease enough to see to Captain Hapka. The ship’s medic, a Dr. Hoyt, had already responded to Khan’s summons, and was even now kneeling beside the injured captain, who remained unconscious on the floor of the pedestal. Hoyt shone a light into Hapka’s eyes, checking the dilation of his pupils.
“Well, Doctor,” Khan addressed the physician. “How fares the captain?”
“A severe concussion,” Hoyt reported, “possibly a hairline fracture to the left parietal bone.” Khan noted that the doctor himself had not escaped the battle unscathed; his right hand was swathed in bandages and he seemed to be missing a tooth or two. “I do not think his injury is life-threatening, but I should get him to the infirmary.”
“Of course,” Khan agreed. He was reluctant to lose any of the control room personnel while the Kaur remained in hostile waters, so he instructed the OOD to summon a pair of sailors to assist Hoyt in transporting Hapka. “What other casualties do we have, Doctor?”
Hoyt bandaged the captain’s bleeding skull as he replied to Khan’s query. “Three enlisted men were killed by an exploding bulkhead in the turbine room, and another sailor was badly burned by a fire in the galley.” The doctor’s uniform smelled of grease and smoke. “Thankfully, there’s no trace of any radiation [197] leakage from the reactor.” He shook his head dolefully at the very thought. “It could have been much worse, “Your Excellency.”
“This is so,” Khan affirmed. He regretted the loss of any lives under his command, but knew that his sovereign duty to avenge the murdered villagers of Maharashtra, and end Hunyadi’s overweening ambitions, justified whatever sacrifices were required. Such are the fortunes of war, he reflected, while resolving to see to it that the widows and children of the deceased crewmen were well taken care of, once today’s bloody business was concluded.
Khan found himself anxious to complete his mission and return to India. Glancing up at the TV screens mounted around the control room, he watched the crew battle to contain leaks and small fires all over the ship. To his relief, he spotted no fatal damage to the Kaur’s VLS missile tubes. “How soon can we launch the missile?” he asked aloud.
“Approaching launch point,” a navigation officer called out, keeping an eye on the automated plotting board. A GPS-based target plan had already been entered into the missile’s guidance system; the Kaur merely needed to reach the preprogrammed launch location to ensure an accurate strike. “Estimated time till launch point: ten minutes, sixteen seconds.”
All the better, Khan thought, anticipation setting his blood pounding. At long last, the hour of vengeance was almost at hand. “Take us up, Helm,” he commanded eagerly. The Kaur needed to ascend to periscope depth before releasing the Tomahawk, plus slow to a near stop. “Reduce speed to one-third.”
But before the diving officer could relay Khan’s [198] orders to the two men controlling the ship’s diving planes and rudder, a sudden explosion rocked the entire submarine. The periscope platform lurched starboard, throwing Khan hard against the safety rail, bruising his ribs. Blue-hot sparks flared from control panels, forcing their operators to leap backward or risk electrocution. Sundered metal shrieked in protest in the crawlspace beneath the control room, and the periscopes rattled within their housings. Helmsmen, buckled securely into their seats, wrestled with their control wheels, fighting (and failing) to keep the Kaur on an even keel. “What havoc is this?” Khan gasped in confusion. His eyes feverishly searched the shaking compartment, seeking an explanation. Another attack sub?
His Gallic countenance as pale as a raw oyster, the OOD supplied an answer. “A mine, Your Excellency!” He glanced down from the pedestal at the floor below, a look of bitter realization on his face. “It must have been hiding on the seabed, waiting for us to pass over it!”
Khan cursed himself for failing to think three-dimensionally. He had vaguely known of the existence of such mobile mines, capable of launching themselves from the ocean floor when they detected an enemy submarine above, but had worried only about the mines floating directly in his path. Would Captain Hapka have been caught so unawares? he wondered, in a rare moment of self-doubt. Only the unforgiving spirits of the sea may ever know. ...
“Your Excellency! Lord Khan!” the OOD shouted over the shrill, hysterical keening of emergency klaxons. Warning lights flashed at every station, but [199] Khan was proud to see that not one seaman had deserted his post. The OOD staggered across the pedestal, cradling a bleeding arm, until his face was only centimeters away from Khan’s. “You must flee, sire!” he said in an urgent hush, coughing from the greasy black smoke pervading the control room. “This ship will not see the sun again!”
Flee? Khan shook his head violently, whitened knuckles holding fast to the safety rail, which crumpled beneath his powerful grip. His distraught brown eyes took in the heartrending site of the doomed sailors valiantly staying at their posts amidst the wreckage of the control room. How could he abandon such people, such loyalty?
“No, no,” he murmured. The OOD tugged on Khan’s upper arm, trying to pull him toward the steps at the rear of the platform, but Khan angrily yanked his arm free. “Unhand me!” he shouted, his face contorted by rage and despair. He shoved the OOD aside, his unchecked strength sending the Frenchman flying, so that he slammed backward into the lowered optical periscope several paces away. Where has my victory gone? Khan stormed inwardly, certain vengeance snatched without warning from his grasp. What must I do now?
With laudable persistence, the cast-off OOD shrugged off his brutal collision with the periscope and limped back across the platform toward Khan. “Lord Khan,” he insisted, anguished, idealistic eyes beseeching his chosen commander. “The world needs you!”
His heartfelt plea gave Khan pause, cooling to some slight degree the volcanic emotions surging within his chest. Part of Khan wanted nothing more than to go down with his ship, yet another, more [200] calculating segment of his soul argued against that fatal temptation, reminding him that he had a responsibility to the greater realm beyond the ruptured walls of this dying sub. Perhaps there was no better way to honor the sacrifice of these gallant men and women than by ensuring that they did not die in vain. I must survive to continue the fight, he realized, for the sake of all humanity.
“Very well,” he relented, the taste of the words bitter upon his tongue. He let the limping crewman escort him down from the platform toward the exit aft of the plotting area. The floor was tilted shar
ply to starboard, making walking difficult. Severed cords and conduits dangled from the ceiling like hanging vines, which brushed against Khan as he stumbled across the askew flooring, amidst the lurid scarlet glow of the blinking emergency beacons. The sights and sounds triggered an unwelcome flashback to another frantic exodus, almost twenty years ago, when, as a four-year-old child, he had been forcibly evacuated (by Gary Seven’s transporter?) from the underground headquarters of the Chrysalis Project only minutes before the entire subterranean complex, along with his visionary mother, had been destroyed in a blaze of thermonuclear fire. I have accomplished so much since that night, he thought ruefully, galled beyond all measure that he had been reduced to a fleeing refugee once more.
“Make way! Make way!” the OOD hollered as he and Khan shouldered their way through a clot of desperate sailors struggling to keep the Kaur alive and habitable for as long as humanly possible. Khan had to step over a discarded fire extinguisher, rolling [201] noisily across the floor, to reach the compartment beyond, where the forward escape trunk rose like the base of a bolted steel redwood, a meter-and-a-half in diameter. The trunk offered Khan a means of swift egress from the sub, provided he moved quickly enough.
“Hurry, “Your Excellency!” Cassel pleaded, while Khan rapidly donned the wet suit and breathing hood contained in one of the compartment’s closets. A warning sticker alerted him to the fact that the hoods were only safe at depths of 180 meters or less; Khan recalled that the Kaur had been cruising at roughly 200 meters below when the mine struck. An ordinary man would never survive an ascent from this depth, he realized, but I am no ordinary man. ...
He heard gushing water flooding the mess area one level below, along with the agonized shouts and curses of dying men and women. Yet more lives senselessly snuffed out by Hunyadi, Khan thought furiously, adding the crew of the Kaur to the debt to which he would someday hold the Romanian pretender accountable. With Cassel’s help, he placed the hood, a watertight hybrid of life jacket and breathing apparatus, over his head. “Your sacrifice and courage will not be forgotten,” he promised the intrepid Frenchman. “And have no doubt, your death will surely be avenged!”
“I believe you, sire,” the OOD said, opening the hatch at the bottom of the escape trunk. Khan clambered inside the dense steel drum, built to withstand the full pressure of the invading sea, and filled the hood’s air reservoirs from a nozzle inside the trunk. Then, bidding the mortally wounded ship farewell, he [202] flooded the chamber and waited for the trunk’s upper hatch to open, releasing him into the frigid waters outside. Although he knew that, ultimately, he was doing the right thing, leaving the SGK Kaur and its heroic crew behind, he could not help feeling that he was abandoning his mother for a second time.
The hatch slid open and Khan rocketed toward the surface of the Adriatic, hundreds of meters above. The insulated wet suit provided him with some protection from the icy cold of the depths; his superhuman endurance protected him even more. He breathed slowly and steadily within the hood, so as to avoid getting the bends, while the ghastly sound of the Kaur’s final implosion followed him all the way up to where he broke through the waves, to find himself bobbing beneath a cold winter sky, many miles from the safety of the Italian shore.
How? he wondered, shivering amidst the spray and the sea. How had such a glorious mission gone so tragically and catastrophically awry? With an epic swim ahead of him, of so arduous and Herculean a nature that only a superior human specimen could even dream of setting foot on land once more, Khan somehow sensed the subtly manipulative hand of Gary Seven at work. But how does that American know my every move?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ISLE OF ARRAN
FEBRUARY 7, 1994
THE FIRE WAS BEGINNING TO DIE OUT, so Gary Seven tossed another log onto the smoldering timbers, then settled back into his chair to enjoy the invigorating warmth radiating from the fireplace. The cheery blaze helped to dispel the cold Scottish weather creeping in through the roughhewn stone walls of the restored farmhouse. The trick to maintaining a fire, he reflected, his pensive gaze captured by the dancing orange flames, is to keep the flames going without burning the whole house down.
His aging bones rested comfortably within the plush embrace of an upholstered Queen Anne armchair as he sipped slowly from a cup of hot peppermint tea. A velvet dressing gown was belted against the cold; felt-lined slippers protected his feet. Walnut bookshelves lined the walls of the cozy den while a framed portrait of Isis rested prominently upon the [204] mantel of the red brick fireplace. The elegant black cat posed regally within the photo, a glittering silver collar draped around her neck. “I wish you were here, doll,” he whispered nostalgically. If nothing else, Isis would have enjoyed curling up in front of the fire.
A sheaf of dossiers, on everything from the Middle Eastern peace talks to the aftermath of the recent L.A. earthquake, rested on his lap, demanding his attention, but he found it difficult to concentrate on the stapled, neatly typed reports while impatiently awaiting word of the brewing confrontation in the Adriatic. Has Khan’s sub encountered Hunyadi’s defenses yet? he wondered: And who, if anyone, has prevailed?
He looked up expectantly at the sound of footsteps rushing briskly down the stairs from the second floor, where their primary offices resided. A moment later, the door to the den swung open, admitting Roberta, who hurried into the room clutching a fistful of crumpled faxes. “You have news?” he asked, leaning forward in his chair.
“Yep,” Roberta confirmed; he heard excitement in her voice. “I still have to corroborate some of the details, but it looks like a total washout for both sides. Khan’s shiny new submarine was completely destroyed, but not before taking out at least one of Hunyadi’s secondhand Russian hunter-killers.” Her blue-green eyes searched Seven’s face, waiting for his reaction. “That’s good, right?”
Seven nodded solemnly. “As good as can be expected,” he acknowledged, “under such unenviable circumstances.” He sincerely regretted the loss of life aboard the two subs, but took solace from the knowledge that both Khan and Hunyadi had been [205] significantly weakened by their fruitless undersea engagement. Fully equipped nuclear submarines were neither cheap nor readily available; both would-be conquerors would be a while recovering from this costly imbroglio. And at least the subs’ awesome firepower had been turned on each other, rather than defenseless innocents.
It’s a dangerous game I’ve embarked upon, Seven thought soberly, playing Khan and his rival supermen against each other. But how else to minimize their potentially catastrophic impact on world affairs? That was why he had, through a complex and meticulously indirect series of go-betweens, deliberately alerted Hunyadi to Khan’s intentions to attack Bosnia via the Adriatic, thereby guaranteeing a naval confrontation between the two supermen—with exactly the results he had intended.
“So far, so good,” he informed Roberta. In a best-case scenario, the internecine competition between Chrysalis’s most megalomaniacal progeny would prevent any single superman (or superwoman) from completely warping the course of human history.
In the worst case ... well, Seven didn’t want to consider that dismaying prospect just now.
He placed the empty teacup on the varnished cherry end table next to his chair. “How public has this gone?” he asked intently, worried about the effect that news of the undersea battle might have on various precarious political situations around the world. “What sort of exposure are we looking at?”
“Minimal,” Roberta assured him. A wool tartan sweater, argyle sweatpants, and fluffy pink slippers ensured that she was adequately fortified against chilly [206] drafts. “The nice thing about submarine warfare is that it takes place largely out of sight.” Pulling a burgundy wing chair up in front of the fire, she sat down beside Seven. “I suspect that the major superpowers have an inkling of what happened under the Adriatic, but nobody seems to be in a hurry to alert the media.
“Besides,” she added with a smirk, “the entire global news app
aratus is too busy covering Tonya and Nancy to notice a little thing like a eugenics war.” Her brow wrinkled as she made a show of searching her memory, only partly in jest. “I can’t remember, were either of them conceived at Chrysalis?”
Seven had more pressing matters to worry about than a pair of feuding ice skaters, no matter how genetically gifted they might be. But he was glad to hear that, as of the moment, the fatal undersea conflict had escaped the world’s view. “Let’s keep our eyes out for any potential news leaks,” he advised Roberta; if at all possible, he hoped to keep the existence of the Chrysalis-bred supermen from becoming common knowledge, for fear of igniting full-scale genetic warfare and panic, of the sort that had destroyed entire civilizations on Alba IV or Trasker Prime. Time enough, he resolved, for future generations to uncover the true nature of this era’s conflicts.
“What about Khan?” he inquired. Of all the man-made prodigies currently contending for power, the charismatic Sikh superman held the most potential to change the world, for better or for worse. He was fundamentally saner than the rest of Chrysalis’s wild crop, thus all the more dangerous. “We know he intended to oversee the attack personally. Do we know if he survived the battle?”
[207] Seven knew he would mourn Khan’s death, remembering the brilliant and courageous youth he had tried to take under his wing. But he also admitted, if only to himself, that he would be undeniably relieved if Khan had perished beneath the waves. He glanced upward instinctively, knowing that somewhere high above them Morning Star still orbited, tempting Khan with the ability to completely destroy Earth’s ozone layer. To date, Seven had been unable to devise a foolproof way to disarm or destroy the threatening satellite, at least not without alerting Khan to their mole within his organization. That was an ace in the hole he’d just as soon hang onto right now. ...
“Our spy in Chandigarh reports that a rescue operation is under way,” Roberta replied, “which suggests that they have some reasonable expectation of finding Khan alive. I believe that the Kaur may have managed to get out some sort of coded transmission before taking its final plunge, alerting the folks back home that Khan had abandoned ship.” She shuddered, perhaps imagining the freezing temperatures of the Adriatic this time of year. “Do you really think that anybody, even Khan, could survive being lost at sea, in hostile waters, no less?”