Devil's Gate nf-9

by Clive Cussler

  He gunned the throttle, realizing the time for stealth had ended. The little fifty-horsepower engine buzzed like a swarm of angry bees, and the small wooden prop spun up to full rpms in a second.

  The gangly craft sped forward, accelerating down the grass strip and lifting off in a hundred feet or so. Kurt turned out toward the cliff, trying to put the hangar between him and the men with the guns. He heard a few sporadic shots and then nothing. By then he and Katarina were gone, out over the cliff, accelerating into the darkness and heading for the lights of Vila do Porto.

  ON THE GRASSY RUNWAY, Andras realized his mistake. They’d been had by a stroke of misdirection. He turned just in time to see the other ultralight take off. He fired at it and then ran to the hangar with his men.

  Inside was a whole fleet of the flying contraptions. Four of them looked to be in working condition.

  “Get in,” he shouted to his men. “We’ll shoot them down from the air.”

  As his other men climbed into a second aircraft, Andras went to hop into the front seat of the lead craft and stopped. A familiar object stood vertically on its point, stabbed straight down into the ultralight’s padded seat.

  Andras recognized the matte-black finish, the folding titanium blade, and the holes in the handle. It was the knife he’d plunged into the crane operator’s seat on the Kinjara Maru after cutting the hydraulic lines.

  So the man from NUMA had taken it and kept it. And now he’d returned it. There had to be a reason. Clearly, he was showing Andras that he knew who was after him, but Andras suspected something more.

  He stepped out of the ultralight, looking for danger.

  “Don’t start them,” he ordered as one of his men reached for a key.

  Andras moved to the engine of the machine he’d been about to pilot. He checked the hydraulic lines and the fuel lines, thinking those would be poetic targets for his adversary to strike — and probably deadly, had he or his men started the aircraft in the confines of the barnlike hangar. He found nothing wrong with the exposed sections of the tubing and saw no liquids dripping onto the floor below.

  He looked up.

  The wings had huge cuts in them, long, clean slices that were not easily seen. From the look of it, they’d been carefully made to avoid leaving the nylon in obvious dangling strips. The damage might not have been enough to keep the craft on the ground, but Andras had no doubt that, once airborne, the fabric would have frayed in the airstream, shredding in minutes. Had they taken off, he guessed, they would have discovered it shortly after making it out over the cliffs.

  “We should check the others,” one of his men suggested.

  Andras allowed them to do so, but he knew there was little point. They would all be the same.

  He pursed his lips, disappointed, but sensing something new in his heart: admiration. The kind of thrill a hunter feels when he realizes his prey might be bigger, stronger, more fierce and intelligent than expected. Such a thought never brought anger, only a greater exhilaration. So far, he’d given this man from NUMA some grudging respect, but he’d still underestimated him. A mistake he wouldn’t make again.

  “It’s been a long time since I faced such a challenge,” he whispered to himself. “I’m going to enjoy killing you.”

  25

  Continental shelf, off the coast of Sierra Leone, June 23

  DJEMMA GARAND SAT in the passenger cabin of an EC155 Eurocop-ter. The sleek modern design included a ducted tail rotor, an all-glass instrument panel, and a leather-clad interior stitched by the same company that did the seats on custom Rolls-Royces.

  It was fast, relatively quiet inside, and the epitome of luxury for any self-respecting billionaire or dictator of a small country.

  For the most part, Djemma hated it. He preferred boating or going by car to any place he needed to be. His days in the field had shown him firsthand how vulnerable small helicopters were to ground fire. An RPG exploding nearby could bring down many rotary aircraft, let alone a direct hit. Small-arms fire could do the same.

  But more than an actual attack, Djemma felt it was too easy for small planes and helicopters to have unexplained accidents, accidents that seemed to plague the leaders of small war-torn nations at a rate completely out of proportion to the amount of time they spent traveling.

  Air crashes usually had no witnesses, especially over mountainous or jungle terrain. Without a forensic team to sift through the debris, there was almost no way to tell if a craft came down on its own, had been hit by a missile or gunfire, or had been blown to pieces by a saboteur’s bomb.

  Normally, Djemma wouldn’t travel in them. But in this case he’d made an exception. He’d done so because speed was of the essence, because events and even trusted allies seemed to be conspiring against him, because if the lid blew off his plan he had to know if his weapon was ready.

  The EC155 crossed the shoreline and headed out into the Atlantic. Ten miles off the coast, four little dots appeared on the horizon. As the helicopter grew closer, they resolved into sharper forms: huge offshore oil rigs, set up in a perfect square, with several miles between them. At least a dozen boats patrolled the waters around the rigs, and huge barges with equipment sat moored to one of them.

  “Take us down to number three,” Djemma ordered.

  The pilot complied, and a few minutes later Djemma was removing his headset and stepping out of the gleaming red-and-white helicopter and striding across the platform.

  The rig’s superintendant and his senior staff waited in a formal line.

  “My President,” the superintendant said. “It is an honor to have you—”

  “Spare me,” Djemma said. “And take me to Cochrane.”

  “Right away.”

  Djemma followed the man across the helipad toward the main block of the oil rig. They stepped inside, passing an area filled with coolant pipes, thick with condensation and frost, and then into a climate-controlled area filled with computer screens and flat-panel displays.

  On the most prominent centrally mounted screen, a strangely shaped design appeared. It looked like the schematic of a racetrack or a rail yard. It could best be described as an elongated oval connected to a wider circle, off of which two dozen straight lines stretched, fanning out like tangents.

  Small data marks, unreadable from any distance, seemed to indicate conditions within each section defined by the tangents. The sections were also color-coded. Djemma noticed that most were illuminated in green. This pleased him.

  “All sections of the loop have power?”

  “Yes, President,” the superintendant replied. “We activated them this morning. Currently we are only operating at test levels, but Cochrane confirmed that we are within specs.”

  “Excellent,” Djemma said. “Where is he now?”

  “In one of the targeting tunnels,” the super said. “He is overseeing the final phase of construction.”

  “Show me,” Djemma ordered.

  They crossed the climate-controlled room and arrived at an elevator barely large enough for two men. It took them down through the rig and beneath it in a clear Plexiglas tube like those used at amusement parks and places like SeaWorld.

  Brilliant light shimmered and danced through the water. Schools of fish swam everywhere, as they often did near oil rigs and other man-made structures. Below them, a scar crossed the ocean floor in a long line from east to west.

  The line appeared straight only because the curve was so gradual; but had the ocean been drained, it would have been easy to see from space that this line matched exactly the circular design displayed inside the control room. At the far end, men in hard-shell dive suits and small submarines no larger than a family car worked on filling in the last section.

  Farther off, at the very limits of underwater vision, Djemma spotted another submarine, lying on its side. This was no small vessel but a giant, its hull cut open like a whale that had been gutted. Unlike the other things he saw, this sight angered him.

  The elevator car
approached the sandy bottom and then went beneath the seafloor, continuing in the tube in the dark another forty feet before stopping. The darkness was banished when the doors opened to a concrete hall lit by fluorescent lights.

  The superintendant stepped out, and Djemma followed him. He noticed that the hall was not square but built in an oval shape, a design like the arches of ancient Roman aqueducts, that helped the tunnel support the outside pressure of rock and water. He also noticed something else.

  “It’s wet in here,” he said, noticing pools of water on the floor and wet spots on the walls.

  “Until it finishes curing, the concrete is porous,” the super said. “We have treated it and buried it forty feet beneath the seafloor, but we still have seepage. It’ll clear up in a month or so.”

  Djemma hoped he was right. He continued on through the tunnel until he reached an intersection point.

  A ladder led down.

  Djemma climbed down and came out in a different type of tunnel. This one was perfectly circular in cross section, wide enough to drive a small car through, and lined with power conduits and cooling tubes like those seen above. Pinpoint LED lighting and shiny metallic rectangles on three sides ran as far as the eye could see.

  In the other direction, he spied Cochrane.

  “You are almost done,” Djemma said. “This pleases me more than you know.”

  “The construction is almost done,” Cochrane said. “We still have to test it. And if you think you’re going to get me the kind of power you keep demanding, you’d better have something up your sleeve. Because, as it stands, I can only get you sixty percent of what you require.”

  “I no longer am surprised or grow angry at your failures,” Djemma said. “I’ve grown used to them. Have you heard of this Devil’s Gate near the Azores?”

  “I don’t get a lot of news down here,” Cochrane said. “But, yeah, I heard of it. Some type of naturally occurring superconductor.”

  “That is the report,” Djemma said. “I have men there. I believe that will be the answer.”

  Cochrane put down some type of fiber-optic testing device he was working with and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “I’m not sure you understand,” he said. “We just worked in three hundred tons of material your sub brought us from the freighter. We don’t have space for anything else.”

  “Space,” Djemma said. “Interesting that you should use that word. Because I am worried about space and what can be seen from it.”

  “What are you talking about now?” Cochrane asked.

  “The Russian submarine that we took the reactors from. You were told to have it dismantled and dispersed by now. I don’t want anyone spotting it from a satellite.”

  “It’s on its side, fifty feet down, covered in netting,” Cochrane said. “And they’re not looking for it,” he insisted. “The Russians sold it. They don’t care what happens to it. And the only submarines the Americans care about are the ones carrying ballistic missiles out there in the depths. Only you and Comrade Gorshkov know where this one went to, and even Gorshkov doesn’t know what you’re doing with it.”

  “Finish the dismantling,” Djemma ordered. “And don’t question me again or I’ll dismantle you… piece by painful piece.”

  Cochrane rubbed a hand across his face. “We have eleven construction subs and forty hard suits, not enough to do both jobs. So you choose. Do you want the target lines finished or do you want that rusting hulk of a submarine recycled?”

  Djemma fought to control his anger. What he wanted was both, and a designer less insolent and more competent than Cochrane. But between the reports from Andras, the Americans snooping around the Kinjara Maru, and the increasingly pointed questions coming from the World Bank and his other creditors, Djemma didn’t have time for both.

  He decided the carcass of a submarine could remain. Once he took action, it wouldn’t matter if the world knew about it or not. That would be the least of their concerns.

  “Finish the target lines and the emitters,” he said. “Washington, London, Moscow, Beijing. Those four must be ready in one week or we will be vulnerable.”

  He waited for Cochrane’s next battery of complaints and excuses as to why he couldn’t comply, but for the first time in ages none came forth.

  “They’ll be ready,” Cochrane said. “I promise you.”

  26

  Eastern Atlantic, June 23

  GAMAY TROUT SAT in a small chair in the Matador’s sick bay with a blanket around her shoulders and a piping hot cup of decaf in front of her. The ship’s doctor wouldn’t allow her the real thing for at least twenty-four hours. She wasn’t drinking it, only using it to warm her hands, so what did it matter? Truthfully, nothing mattered to her now, nothing except the man who lay in front of her, unmoving, on the hospital bed.

  The crew of the Matador had plucked her out of the water within five minutes of her surfacing. But with the darkening skies and growing swell, she had never seen Paul surface.

  Twenty minutes later, after two agonizingly slow passes, a lookout had spotted Paul, floating faceup. He made no attempt to signal and was only afloat because the wet suit gave him positive buoyancy.

  They’d brought him down to sick bay, where she was being treated for mild hypothermia and oxygen deprivation. Immediately, they’d pulled a sheet between the two of them, but she could hear them working feverishly. Someone had called out “No pulse,” and then the doctor said something about “cardiogenic shock.”

  At that point she’d grabbed for the curtain and pulled it back. Her husband looked like a ghost, and she’d turned away and begun to cry.

  Three hours later, she was up and about and functioning something like her normal self. Paul remained unconscious, covered in blankets, with an IV of warmed fluids dripping into his arm and a mask delivering pure oxygen to his nose and mouth. His eyes remained closed, and he hadn’t as much as twitched in over an hour.

  Watching him lie there in such utter stillness, Gamay had to keep checking his heart monitor just to remind herself that he was alive.

  She squeezed his hand; it felt like wet clay. She couldn’t remember his hands being anything but warm, even on the coldest New England winter days.

  “Come back to me,” she whispered. “Don’t leave me here, Paul. Please don’t leave.”

  The door behind her opened, and the ship’s doctor, Hobson Smith, came in. Almost tall enough to require ducking as he came through the door, Smith had a gray Fu Manchu mustache, sharp eyes, and a relaxed, almost fatherly style. No one on board knew how old he was, but if NUMA had any mandatory retirement age Hobson Smith would have been well past it. And the ship all the poorer for it. His presence was like that of a loving uncle.

  “No change?” he said as if he were asking her.

  “He hasn’t moved,” she said. “His heart rate is—”

  “His heart rate is strong,” Smith said, taking over for her. “His pulse is good. The oxygen level in his blood is getting better also.”

  “But he’s still unconscious,” she said, unable to use the word coma.

  “Yes,” Dr. Smith said. “For now. Paul is strong. Give him a chance to heal.”

  She knew he was right, she understood that his vitals were improving, but she needed him to wake up, to smile at her and say something eminently dorky and endearing.

  Smith pulled up a chair and sat beside her.

  “Arm out,” he said.

  She extended her arm, and the doctor put a cuff around her bicep and then pumped it up to take her blood pressure. Next he checked her pulse.

  “Just as I thought,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Your own vitals aren’t great,” he said. “You’re making yourself sicker, worrying about him.”

  She exhaled. She hadn’t eaten or even had much to drink since she’d been back up on her feet. But didn’t think she could keep anything down.

  “I just don’t understand,” she said. “How did I end up surfacing so much quicker
than he did?”

  Dr. Smith studied her for a moment as if thinking about the question. “You said he gave you a push?”

  She nodded. “After the Grouper flooded he opened the hatch, pulled me through, and gave me a shove upward. I extended my legs and pushed off his hands like a springboard, but I figured he was right behind me.”

  She took a breath, trying to fight back the emotion. “The sub was dropping at that point. Maybe he got pulled down with it. Maybe he had to fight to get free of the suction before he could start moving upward.”

  “I’m sure that played a part,” Smith said. “On top of that, he’s denser, heavier in muscle and bone. And don’t take this the wrong way, but men on average have a lower body fat percentage than women. Add to that the fact that you were both wearing about the same amount of neoprene, and your buoyancy level would have been much higher than his. Even if he hadn’t pushed you, you would have ascended faster and reached the surface before him.”

  She looked back at her husband, thinking of all the dives they’d been on, all the training.

  “Besides,” Dr. Smith added, “Paul always said you were the strongest swimmer he knew. All the more reason to marry you and make you a true Trout.”

  She smiled, remembering Paul making that joke a hundred times during the reception. She could barely stand to hear him say it by the end, and now she just wished he’d wake up so he could tell it again.

  “He should have just gone first,” she said, the words creaking from her throat like a rusty hinge.

  Dr. Smith shook his head. “No man in his right mind would go first and leave his wife behind,” he said. “Not a man like Paul anyway.”

  “And what if he leaves me now?” she said, as scared as she’d ever been in her life. “I don’t know how to do this alone.”

  “I believe in my heart you won’t have to,” Smith said. “But you need to get your mind off of this and start thinking about something else. For your own good.”