Devil's Gate nf-9

by Clive Cussler

  “And just what would you have me think about?” she said, a little sharper than she wanted to.

  Dr. Smith scratched behind his ear and stood. He took Paul’s hand from hers and placed it gently back on his chest, then he took her by the hand and walked her to the next room: the ship’s laboratory.

  “There was another survivor from the wreck whom you’ve forgotten about,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “Her name’s Rapunzel.”

  Gamay had forgotten all about the little robot. And even though Rapunzel was an inanimate object, she couldn’t help but feel glad that the robot had survived and been recovered. After all, Rapunzel had saved their lives.

  “They picked her up,” Gamay said.

  “Uh-huh,” Smith said. “And she brought with her three samples.”

  Gamay narrowed her gaze at the doctor. “Three?”

  “A tissue sample you drilled from one of the crewmen,” Smith said, switching on a recessed fluorescent light that flickered to life and illuminated a workbench.

  “I remember that,” she said. “Can’t recall taking any other samples.”

  “Can’t you?” With a product demonstrator’s wave of the hand, he directed her attention to another bench. A length of steel cable lay on a flat surface.

  “Still in Rapunzel’s grasp when she hit the surface,” Smith said.

  The cable that had held them down, she thought. She remembered cutting through it with Rapunzel’s acetylene torch, and then putting Rapunzel into a climb. She’d never directed Rapunzel to drop the cable.

  “And what’s the third?” she asked.

  “A piece of plastic wedged into part of Rapunzel’s frame. A broken triangular-shaped piece, probably became embedded when she was in the freighter getting knocked about.”

  Dr. Smith walked over to the cable. Gamay followed. He pointed out several blackened marks.

  “What do you suppose those are?”

  She leaned closer. Touching the black spots, she could feel a different texture when compared to the rest of the cable, almost as if the metal had been lying on something hot enough to begin melting it.

  “They remind me of spot welds,” she said.

  “I thought so as well,” he said. “But I’ve never heard of someone spot-welding a cable before, and it certainly wasn’t attached to anything.”

  “Maybe the cutting torch,” she suggested.

  “I checked the video,” he said. “Rapunzel cut the cord in one quick move. She held the cable in place with her claw and burned through it with her torch. This section, two feet to the left, was never touched.”

  Gamay looked up, intrigued, at least, a bit. “Maybe after Paul is feeling better we can—”

  “Gamay,” Dr. Smith said. “We need you to do this.”

  “I’m not exactly up for it,” she said.

  “Director Pitt talked with the captain this morning,” Smith said. “He wants you looking at this. He knows it’s tough sledding for you right now, but someone’s gone to great lengths to keep us from finding out what happened on that ship, and he wants to know why. These are the only leads we have.”

  “He ordered you to make me look at this?” she said, surprised.

  Dr. Smith nodded. “You know Dirk. When there’s a job to be done…”

  For the first time she could remember, she was actually angry with Dirk Pitt. But, deep inside, she knew he was right. The only hope of finding the people who’d harmed Paul began with figuring out who might want that ship on the bottom and why.

  “Fine,” she said, attempting to put her feelings aside. “Where do we start?”

  He led her over to the microscopes. “Take a look at the plastic samples.”

  She set herself over the first microscope and peered into the eyepiece, blinking until everything became clear.

  “Those are shavings from the plastic,” Dr. Smith said.

  “Why are they different colors?” she asked.

  “Two different types of plastic. We think it came from some type of storage case. The darker plastic is much harder and denser, the lighter-colored piece is also a lighter grade of material.”

  She studied them both. Oddly, the darker plastic seemed to be deformed. The color was swirled in places; there were distortions in the material itself.

  “It looks like the darker plastic melted,” she said. “But the lighter plastic doesn’t seem to have been affected.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” he said.

  “That seems backward,” she said, looking up. “Lighter plastic should have a lower melting point, and even at the same temperature would have less ability to absorb heat without deforming because there is less material to act as a heat sink.”

  “You are very good at this, Mrs. Trout,” he said. “Sure you don’t want to work in the lab?”

  “After what just happened,” she said, “I might never leave it.”

  He smiled, crinkles forming around his eyes.

  “You’re saving the tissue sample for last,” she noted.

  “Because it’s the most interesting,” he said.

  She slid over. “May I?”

  “By all means.”

  She squinted into the microscope, increased the magnification once, and then once again. She found herself looking at cellular structures, but something was wrong.

  “What happened here?”

  “You tell me, my marine biology expert,” Dr. Smith said.

  She moved the focal point, scanning along the sample. “The cells on the right-hand side are skin cells,” she said. “For the most part, they look normal. But the cells on the left—”

  “You took a two-inch core out of the man’s thigh. The cells on the right are surface cells. Those on the left are the deeper muscle cells.”

  “Yes. They look odd. Almost as if they’ve exploded from the inside.”

  “They have,” Dr. Smith said. “The deeper you go, the more damage you see. The highest level of epidermal tissue shows no damage at all.”

  “Could it be a chemical burn?” she asked, unable to take her eyes off the ruined cells. “Maybe something that soaked in and then reacted.”

  “There’s no residue present,” Smith said. “And any chemical strong enough to do that would wreak havoc with the epidermis on its way in. You ever get strong bleach on your hands?”

  “Good point,” she said. “But what else could do this?”

  “What could do all of this?” he said. “That’s the question we have to ask ourselves.”

  She sat up and turned to face him. “One cause. Three events.”

  “If you can think of one thing that would fit the bill…” he said.

  Her mind began to churn, not in hopeless, powerless circles, as it had while she sat over Paul, but in forward motion. She could almost feel the synapses waking up and firing, like lights going on one by one in a dark office tower.

  “It looks like thermal damage,” she said. “But high heat or fire would damage the surface layer of the epidermis the most.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “That’s the whole reason we have an epidermal layer of dead skin cells. As thin and weak as it is, it’s basically a shell designed to keep moisture in and other things out.”

  She turned back to the microscope and glanced at the cells one more time. She thought about the plastic slivers under the other scope to her side. What could possibly deform thick, heavy plastic without melting thinner lighter plastic, cause carbon deposits on metal as if it had been arc-welded, and destroy human tissue from the inside out?

  Gamay looked up from the microscope again. “Mrs. Nordegrun told Kurt she’d seen things in her head.”

  Smith scanned through the notes. “She told Kurt that she’d seen stars in front of her eyes right before she went down. She said, ‘I don’t want to sound crazy, but it looked like miniature fireworks going off in front of my eyes. I thought I was seeing something, but when I closed my eyes tight they were still there.’”

  “I once read about
astronauts experiencing something similar,” Gamay said. “On a shuttle mission a few years ago, they saw sparks or shooting-star patterns even when they closed their eyes.”

  Smith sat up a little straighter. “Do you remember the cause?”

  She thought back. “They were in orbit during a solar flare event. Despite the shielding on the crew’s quarters, some of the high-energy rays made it through. As these rays impact the cones and rods in the eye, they trigger neurological responses that register as starbursts in front of their eyes.”

  “Not a hallucination?”

  “No,” she said. “They’re actually seeing these things the same way I see you right now. Cones and rods transmitting a signal to the mind.”

  Dr. Smith listened and nodded thoughtfully. He stood up, walked over to the microscope, and took another peek at the tissue sample himself.

  “When I was in the Air Force, probably before you were born, I remember a young man who walked in front of one of our Phantom jets during the middle of a radar test. He was just a kid, an enlisted guy a month out of basic. Nobody saw him coming. Unfortunately for him, that particular jet was what we called a Wild Weasel, designed to emit powerful radar bursts and flood the enemy screens with so much signal that they couldn’t pick out our planes from the mess on their screens.”

  “What happened?”

  “He let out a shout, fell to his knees, and then flat on the floor,” Smith said. “The chief shut the radar off, and we dragged the kid to the infirmary, but he was already dead. Strangely, his skin was not hot to the touch. Turned out he’d fried from the inside out. As horrible as it sounds, he’d basically been cooked like a meal in a microwave. I was just a medic at the time, but I remember looking at his tissue under a microscope. It looked an awful lot like this.”

  Gamay took a breath, trying to put away the horror of what she’d just been told and focus on the scientific evidence.

  “And the metal looks as if it’s been arc-welded,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “High-energy discharges can cause the resistance in the air to break down and electrical energy to jump the gaps,” she said. “I’ve spent enough time with Kurt and Joe to know that that’s exactly what arc welding is.”

  “Man-made lightning,” Smith said. “That’s why fuel and ordnance have to be handled in certain ways on base. Even a static-electric charge can ignite petroleum fumes.”

  “The marks on that cable look like a lot more than a static discharge,” she said.

  He nodded again, a sober look settled on his face. She guessed the doctor had a theory of what had happened. She guessed it would match what she was about to suggest.

  “The lights blew,” she said. “The equipment failed, even the emergency beacon. Otherwise, someone would have heard a distress signal. The captain’s wife saw stars, and the poor crewmen on the upper levels were cooked from the inside out.”

  She looked him straight in the eye. “That ship was hit with some type of massive electromagnetic burst. It would have to be of ultrahigh intensity to do the damage we’ve seen.”

  “A thousand radar emitters turned on to full power wouldn’t do what we’ve seen,” the doctor said.

  “Then it’s something more powerful,” she said.

  Dr. Smith nodded, looking grave. “Has to be.”

  She paused, trying not to let her thoughts run away with her. “Do we even want to consider that it might be naturally occurring?” she asked, thinking about the anomaly Kurt and Joe were investigating a few hundred miles to the east.

  “And the pirates just happened upon the stricken ship in the right place at the right time? And then someone accidentally tried to kill you and Paul for investigating it?”

  Of course not, she thought. “Then it has to be a weapon,” she said. “Something powerful enough to fry a five-hundred-foot vessel without any warning.”

  Smith offered a sad smile. “I concur,” he said. “As if the world doesn’t have enough to worry about.”

  She sensed it was she who was concurring with him, but it didn’t matter.

  “I have to talk to Dirk,” she said.

  Dr. Smith nodded. “Of course,” he said. “I’ll keep an eye on Paul.”

  27

  Washington, D.C., June 23

  THE VIEW FROM DIRK PITT’S OFFICE on the twenty-ninth floor of the NUMA headquarters building included much of Washington, D.C. From the generous rectangular window he could watch over a section of the shimmering Potomac, the Lincoln and Washington monuments, and the Capitol building, all of which stood lit up in brilliant white for the evening.

  Despite the view, Dirk’s attention was directed elsewhere, toward the monitor of his computer, on which a three-way teleconference was proceeding.

  In one corner, the smiling face of Hiram Yaeger, NUMA’s resident computer genius. Yaeger looked as if he’d just come off the road on a Harley; he wore a leather vest and had his long graying hair pulled back into a ponytail.

  In the other corner of Pitt’s screen, a drawn and waifish version of Gamay Trout gazed up at him. Her deep red hair was also pulled back, but out of necessity rather than style. Occasionally, as she spoke, a stray lock worked itself loose and fell in front of her eyes. She would diligently push it back behind her ear or keep talking as if she didn’t notice.

  Despite her obvious pain, and eyes Pitt had never seen so dark, she seemed to be holding it together. Certainly she’d helped them take a big step forward in solving the mystery of what happened to the Kinjara Maru.

  As she explained a theory she and the Matador’s doctor had come up with, Pitt had to admire her tenacity and devotion to duty. Such qualities were in abundance at NUMA, but they always shone the brightest under the darkest circumstances.

  While Pitt listened and asked what he thought were pertinent questions, Yaeger took notes and mostly grunted the occasional “Uh-huh” and “Okay.”

  When Gamay was done speaking, Pitt turned to Yaeger. “Can you run a simulation on what she described?”

  “I think so,” Yaeger said. “Gonna be a shot in the dark, to some extent, but I could put you in the ballpark.”

  “Ballpark’s not good enough, Hiram. I want box seats down the third baseline.”

  “Sure,” Yaeger said, drawing the word out slowly. “But the closest I can come is telling you what kind of power might be needed and how this might have accomplished it. So you might be on the third baseline, but you’re still gonna be up in the nosebleeds unless we get more data.”

  “You start working,” Pitt said. “I’ll bet you a case of imported beer that we’ll get more data before you’re done with your first run-through.”

  “Canadian?” Hiram said.

  “Or German. Winner picks.”

  “Okay,” Yaeger said. “I’ll take that action.”

  His portion of the screen went blank, and Dirk turned to Gamay. “I’m not going to ask how you’re holding up,” he said. “Just want you to know I’m proud of you.”

  She nodded. “Thanks,” she said. “And thank you for ordering me to study the samples. It helped me… helped me get back to being me.”

  Pitt was confused. “I never gave any order like that,” he said.

  “But the doctor…” she began. A smile creased her face for the first time.

  “Doctor’s orders,” Pitt guessed.

  “Apparently, part of my treatment,” she said.

  “Hobson’s a crafty old guy,” Pitt said, thinking warmly of the doctor. “And he’s smart. If someone out there has developed a weapon like this, our best defense may be to find it and neutralize it before it gets used again. Thanks to you two, we have a chance.”

  “What help can we expect?” she asked.

  “I’ve already talked to the admiral,” Pitt said. “The Vice President, I mean. He’s going to take what we’ve found directly to the President and Joint Chiefs. I’m sure they’re going to be pretty damn interested, but as for getting involved… We’ve got to find them som
ething tangible to get involved in. Right now, this is just a ghost that came to visit and left a mark. We have to put a body with that ghost, something they can deal with. You’ve given us the first step.”

  The rebellious strand of hair fell down across her face again, and Gamay dutifully tucked it back behind her ear. “Dr. Smith and I theorized that the crew might have been killed because of what they saw. In other words, having survived the electromagnetic burst, they had to be killed, and the ship scuttled, to keep things quiet.”

  “It’s reasonable,” Pitt said. “Dead men tell no tales.”

  “I know,” she said. “But I was thinking there has to be something more. I mean, they fired torpedoes at us. We have to assume they could have done the same to the freighter when she was afloat.”

  Pitt considered this. Sometimes you learned more by what wasn’t done than what was. “Would have been easier than boarding the ship.”

  “And quicker,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Pitt said, “that it would. So why didn’t they?”

  “And why hit this particular ship in the first place?”

  Another good question. He guessed there could be only one reason. One answer to both.

  “There was something they wanted on that ship,” he said. “Something they had to get before it went down. And whatever that something was, whoever was behind this didn’t want the world to know it had gone missing.”

  On the screen, Gamay nodded. “That’s the conclusion I reached too.”

  It explained a few things. The CEO of Shokara was an old friend of Dirk’s — more of an old acquaintance, actually, in the sense that Dirk had once saved his life — but for a man who’d often insisted he’d do anything Dirk or NUMA ever needed, Haruto Takagawa had suddenly become very hard to reach.

  Shortly after the freighter went down, Pitt had left a message for the man. But, so far, he hadn’t received a call back. Perhaps that was understandable, considering the circumstances, but it was at least a yellow flag.

  A few days later, just to cover all the bases, Pitt had sent a pair of NUMA’s eager young associates to Takagawa’s New York offices to get the type of information the Coast Guard would have required if the ship had gone down in U.S. waters. Primarily, the ship’s manifest.