Zero Hour nf-11

by Clive Cussler

  Kurt pulled himself up and looked aft. A line of foam stretched out into the dark, straight as a ruler and perpendicular to their path, but he saw no retreating wave.

  “Kurt,” Hayley cried.

  He swung his eyes forward. The ocean was flickering again, a pale blue-green, just enough to show its contours in the dark. Fifty yards ahead, another line was forming on the sea. It peeled back like skin being cleaved open and formed a deep trough right in front of them. It stretched across the ocean in a straight line, but it wasn’t a wave. There was no raised vertical component to it. It was more like a gap in the water, like a drainage ditch cut across a road.

  The Orion hit this gap at a slight angle. The ship rolled awkwardly as she plunged into it.

  Kurt wrapped one arm around Hayley, crushing her to him with all his strength and lacing his other arm through the rail.

  The ship’s bow knifed into the bottom of the trough, all but submarining. It was already rising as it reached the far side, coming up in a corkscrew motion, and flinging Kurt and Hayley into the air like riders who’d been tossed off a prize bull.

  They landed on the deck just as a second curtain of icy water cascaded down upon them, soaking them to the bone.

  Kurt tasted the salt of the water. It stung his eyes and the abrasions he’d taken from the first impact. Without waiting for her to stand, he grabbed Hayley, pulled her up and began running toward the safety of the bulkhead door.

  A foot of water had covered the foredeck. It sloshed out through the drainage holes, taking Hayley’s printed papers along for the ride.

  A klaxon blared above them, and Kurt realized it was the ship’s alarm sounding for a collision. The ship was turning hard.

  “Brace for impact!” the captain’s voice called over the loudspeakers. “All hands, brace for impact!”

  Kurt glanced forward, looking past the bow. The ship’s lights had come on, illuminating a new trough directly in front of them, perhaps a hundred yards off. This one was deeper and wider than the other one, wide enough to swallow the ship. From Kurt’s angle, it looked like the edge of a great cliff in the center of the sea, an edge they were about to go over.

  The Orion leaned hard over as the rudder hit the stops. Kurt felt the vessel shudder as the props went into reverse.

  One look told Kurt it wasn’t going to be enough.

  He pulled the hatch open and shoved Hayley through, scrambling inside right behind her and slamming the steel door shut. He wrenched the handle down, locking it just as the deck began to fall out from beneath him.

  A moment of weightlessness followed, like they were on some gigantic amusement ride. Then Kurt was slammed into the deck. A tremendous boom reverberated throughout the ship, like a dozen cannons being fired off together. It was the sound a wall of water made when it struck the hull flush.

  A muted silence followed, and Kurt knew the ship had gone under. If she was buttoned up tight, she would come to the surface again. But, for the moment, Kurt couldn’t feel her rising.

  Several seconds went by before the momentum of the ship changed and she began to rise, several more before the sea released her.

  She heaved up, bursting free of the water, and then crashing back down like a breaching whale. Kurt pulled Hayley to her feet and helped her forward.

  They reached the bridge to find water sloshing about. One of the windows had been shattered and smashed in completely. The captain was hanging on the wheel, a bloody gash across his jaw. The XO was down on the floor and out cold, having been flung against the far bulkhead.

  Joe was slamming a metal plate into the slot where the shattered window had been. He wrenched a lever tight, locking it into place just as the main lights went out.

  “Power’s gone!” the captain said.

  The sea flashed again, a beautiful and deadly blue that raced outward in all directions. Another trough began opening in front of them, the waters parting like the Red Sea.

  The ship was still moving as the lip of the disturbance raced underneath them. She dropped once again.

  In the darkness it was terrifying, a free fall that lasted for seconds but seemed endless. As the ship hit the bottom of the trough, the jarring impact was accompanied by the sound of wrenching metal. Rivets popped as high up as the bridge and, somewhere deep, the keel broke. As if to finish them off, the towering walls of seawater slammed together around the Orion like giant hands clapping.

  This last act of the angry sea might have killed everyone on board, except that the two great hands spent most of their energy smashing each other. As they rebounded off each other, the current they created dragged the stricken vessel to the surface.

  She came up for only a minute and was soon awash and sinking.

  The bridge was flooded from the impact, with the remaining windows smashed out. The water was frigid, cutting into one’s skin like knives.

  Kurt still had his arm around Hayley. In the glimmer of the emergency light, he saw Joe opening a life-raft container, and Captain Winslow desperately trying to order the crew to abandon ship.

  Kurt grabbed a life jacket, pulled it over Hayley’s head and cinched it tight.

  “Stay with Joe!” he shouted.

  She nodded as Kurt waded to where the XO had fallen. Heaving him up, he passed the unconscious man to the captain and then glanced at the stairwell to the lower deck.

  He saw a crewman staggering upward as the water flooded down upon him. The man was injured. He could hardly fight the current. Kurt pulled him up and passed him to Hayley, who helped him into a life jacket of his own. Holding the rail, Kurt began to climb down.

  “There’s no use,” the crewman said, “they’re all gone. Those that weren’t pulled out when she broke are drowned. It’s all water below this deck.”

  Kurt ignored him, splashing down into the stairwell and diving into the icy black liquid. He inched forward, one hand on the wall, the other outstretched and numbly feeling around for any sign of a crewman. He found no one and turned back.

  When he came up, water was pouring in through the shattered windows again. The top of the bridge was all that remained above water.

  Joe grabbed him under the arm and yanked him free of the stairwell. “I’m not going to let you kill yourself,” he shouted, dragging Kurt to the hatch and toward the inflated orange raft.

  Joe flung Kurt onto the raft and jumped on behind him. His momentum carried them away as the Orion sank beneath the waves. It vanished to the sound of random, muffled explosions as the last air pockets in the ship were purged one by one.

  Kurt glanced around. Aside from the single crewman who’d struggled up from belowdecks, only those on the bridge had escaped.

  The hexagonal life raft rolled up on one of the low swells, and Kurt stared into the dark, his eyes straining for any sign of another raft or anyone in the water. He saw nothing. But neither did he see another flash like those that had preceded the strange ruts appearing in the sea. “Do we have any flares?”

  Joe dug into the raft’s survival kit. “Six,” he said. “Three white, three red.”

  “Fire a white one,” Kurt said. “We have to see if anyone else is out there.”

  Joe pointed the flare gun skyward and fired. With a whoosh, the blazing little sphere rocketed upward, casting a harsh glow across the rolling waves. Kurt stared and stared, his eyes darting about, as the moving carpet of the swells stretched out before him.

  Plenty of wreckage and debris had come to the surface. Insulation, packaged stores, and unworn life jackets, anything with buoyancy. He saw no sign of another raft but spotted two people bobbing among the wreckage.

  “There,” he said, pointing and grabbing an oar.

  The flare only lasted another ten seconds, but Joe had also found a flashlight. He kept it trained on the floating crewmen as Kurt and Captain Winslow rowed the life raft in their direction.

  Kurt hauled the first crewman onto the raft. She was a young woman he recognized from the radio room. The second survivo
r was the boatswain’s mate Kurt had seen on the previous night’s watch. Neither one appeared to be responsive. Two others were found, who Kurt didn’t know by sight.

  “Are… they… alive?” Hayley asked through chattering teeth.

  “Barely,” the captain said. “They’re all but frozen. Hypothermia doesn’t take long in thirty-eight-degree water. We’ve got to get them warmed up.”

  “With what?” Hayley asked.

  “Body heat,” Kurt said. “Everybody needs to huddle together. We’re all wet. We’re all going to lose our heat fast if we don’t conserve it.”

  The group began to move to the middle of the raft, leaning against one another and pulling a microfiber survival blanket over themselves. All except Kurt and Joe, who were aiming the flashlight around and looking for other survivors.

  They pulled in a few empty life jackets and several pieces of cloth and plastic, things that might prove useful at some point, but they found no other survivors. Eventually, they knew there was no more point in looking.

  “Better save the battery,” Kurt said.

  Joe waited until he and Kurt were safely in the huddle with the others before he shut it off.

  “Thirty-nine men and women,” the captain said. “What happened to the sea? What was that? I’ve never seen waves like that. They looked like craters appearing in our path.”

  Kurt glanced at Hayley.

  “Thero’s weapon did this,” she said grimly. “It distorts gravity.”

  “And that gravity affects liquids far more easily than solids,” Kurt added, repeating her earlier statement in a somber tone.

  “It’s like a bubble,” she managed. “Highly localized but very powerful. It forces the water to the side, and then, when it passes, the crater, as you called it, collapses on itself.”

  “And the water comes crashing back in,” the captain added, showing that he understood.

  She nodded. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault,” the captain said.

  “But it is,” she replied. “I helped construct the theory. And the sensor I used must have given away our position somehow. That’s the only explanation. The only way they could find us.”

  Kurt tried to comfort her, but he didn’t have the words. Nor, in his most optimistic dreams, did he have any idea how they were going to survive, let alone prevent Thero from fulfilling his venomous threat.

  TWENTY-SIX

  NUMA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.

  A twelve-hour time difference separated Washington, D.C., and the small fleet of vessels approaching Antarctica. At eight o’clock, the morning shift took over from the night owls in the NUMA communications room, a large, modern workspace that looked something like an air traffic control center.

  From there, NUMA teams and vessels were monitored and tracked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, all around the globe. Data and communications were sent and received a variety of different ways, the preferred method becoming encrypted satellite communications. It was the most efficient means, the most secure, and the most reliable. Except when it wasn’t working.

  Within five minutes of arriving, Bernadette Conry could tell that this was going to be one of those days when all the technology was more trouble than it was worth.

  A ten-year NUMA veteran with short dark hair, light green eyes, and a strong sense of duty, Bernadette Conry wore fashionable glasses, little in the way of jewelry, and was known to be a detail-oriented manager.

  Her first order of duty on any shift was to run through the list of ongoing operations with the communications specialists, with an eye toward fixing or avoiding any problems. All week long, an uptick in solar flare activity had made that a difficult task.

  After going through a lengthy list of ships and operations teams that had experienced trouble during the night, she wondered how naval commanders had even functioned in the days without satellite tracking and communications.

  Thankfully, she noticed that almost all the problems from the previous twelve hours had been cleared up. All except one.

  She eased over to a console upon which the designation REGION 15 had been marked. Region 15 included most of the Southern Ocean beneath Australia and what NUMA termed Antarctic Zone 1.

  “What’s the story with Orion?” she asked the specialist.

  “No data for the last hour,” he replied. “But it’s been up and down like that for the past two days.”

  “Are you getting data from Dorado and Gemini?”

  The technician tapped away at the keys and received a positive answer. “We lost them for a while too,” he said. “But we have clean links to both ships now.”

  That raised the supervisor’s sense of doubt. She reached over and tapped the F5 key on the technician’s computer. It brought up a map, which included the Orion’s last-known position.

  “She is a lot farther south than the other ships, but the solar activity has backed off considerably. We should be getting a signal. Have you received any radio calls?”

  “They’re on a ‘run silent’ protocol,” the specialist reminded her.

  “Who’s on board?”

  “Austin and Zavala.”

  Ms. Conry sighed. “Those two are bad enough about reporting in to begin with. Who put the run silent order on?”

  “Came from Dirk Pitt himself.”

  The vast majority of NUMA’s work went off without any type of conflict, at least nothing greater than the usual bureaucratic rigmarole found throughout the world. But right from the beginning, the organization had been willing to tangle with those who were up to no good in one way or another. If a “no contact,” “run silent,” or “monitor and track only” order was in place, it usually meant that a delicate or outright-secret assignment was in the works. That ship or team was not to be disturbed or contacted in any way that might risk alerting other parties to its presence.

  Satellite communications gave them a way around that. The bursts could be coded and then sent and received without giving a ship’s position away like radio broadcasts could if they were intercepted. But if the satellites were being interfered with by a solar storm, it left the distant ships, and the supervisors who were supposed to keep track of them, in the dark.

  “Anything unusual in their last transmission?”

  The specialist shook his head. “All data was normal when the link was broken. There was no sign of trouble. Nor has Orion’s emergency beacon been activated.”

  The emergency beacons were automatic, designed to go off when a ship sank even if there was no one around to activate them. But Bernadette Conry recalled at least one instance of a ship going down so fast that the beacon never had a chance to send out a message.

  “What’s the weather report?”

  “Nothing to write home about,” he said. “Westerly swell, five to six feet. Moderate-sized storm forming about five hundred miles from their last-known position.”

  Not bad weather at all, she thought. And it was Austin and Zavala. “Keep an eye out for any change,” she said. “I’m going to let the Director know we’ve lost their telemetry.”

  * * *

  Dirk Pitt nodded at the report. He had a sense that something was wrong. That feeling was reinforced by the next call, which came in from Hiram Yaeger.

  “The NSA just sent me a new batch of data,” Yaeger explained. “They picked up a large neutrino burst just over an hour ago. It was detected in the Orion’s general vicinity.”

  “That’s not good,” Pitt said.

  “Why?”

  “She’s gone dark,” Pitt replied. “We lost contact with her an hour ago, just as they were about to activate the zero-point detector. Either she’s suffered a massive failure or worse. Either way, our only hope of finding Thero is that the other ships can get their detectors online in a hurry.”

  Yaeger was silent for a moment. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” he said finally.

  “Why?”

  “None of us really under
stand how the sensor works,” Yaeger said. “And this zero-point energy is like a genie in a bottle, a moody genie at that. The simulations I’ve run do not yield consistent results. Considering that fact, it’s slightly possible, however unlikely, that the sensor itself interacted with the zero-point field and either shut all systems on the Orion down or caused a more catastrophic event.”

  Pitt considered the possibility before responding. “That’s not what you’re really concerned with, is it?”

  “No,” Yaeger replied. “More likely, the sensor gave away their position somehow. And if Thero knew he was being monitored…”

  “He would respond,” Pitt said.

  “Precisely,” Yaeger said. “And if he has the power to split a continent in half, attacking a small ship would be like swatting a fly.”

  Pitt thought of the Orion’s crew, there were thirty-nine men and women aboard that ship, including some of his closest friends. “Why wouldn’t she warn us?” he wondered aloud. “If there was a possibility of this, why wouldn’t Ms. Anderson make us aware of it?”

  “No idea,” Yaeger said. “But I’d say we have to leave those sensors off.”

  “It’s not that simple,” Pitt said. “We have a job to do and we’re running out of time.”

  “I wasn’t aware we were on any particular clock.”

  “A new letter has arrived,” Pitt explained. “Bradshaw from the ASIO sent it over, even used e-mail. I’ll forward it to you. Thero claims he’s waited long enough. He promises to strike Australia as the sun rises over Sydney two days from now. He’s calling the moment zero hour.”

  Yaeger remained silent.

  “I need answers and I need them fast, Hiram. Right now, those detectors are the only way of finding Thero. I need to know if they’re safe. And if they aren’t, I need you to find me another way to locate him before this zero hour hits. Or, better yet, a way to stop it from hitting even if he makes his move.”

  “I’ll do everything I can,” Yaeger said. “So far, we’ve identified a strange sequence to these energy bursts. According to Ms. Anderson’s research, they create a type of three-dimensional wave, somewhat like a bubble. Perhaps we can figure out some way to stop that bubble from forming. Or a way to collapse it once it does.”