Devil's Gate nf-9

by Clive Cussler

  Now it made sense. Every time the CIA, FBI, or Interpol got a lead on Andras, he seemed to vanish into thin air like a ghost, only to pop up somewhere else a month later. It was like an international game of Whack-A-Mole. But no one had been able to figure out how he did it. Turned out he was like an evil version of Juan Cabrillo.

  “What’s the name of this ship?” Kurt asked.

  “It could be any ship,” Ion said.

  Kurt pushed him toward the door.

  “I swear,” Ion said. “Do you think he would tell me?”

  Kurt relaxed. He had a better idea. “When was he last in Singapore?” he asked. “The exact dates.”

  “The last I saw him was February fourth,” Ion said. “I know because it was the day after Chinese New Year, a holiday here.”

  Kurt sensed that Ion was telling the truth. He glanced at Joe, who closed the door of the snake enclosure tight. The python had retreated to the back of the enclosure and coiled itself up defensively anyway.

  Kurt released Ion and stood over him. “We’re leaving,” he said. “Don’t even think about warning Andras. If you do, he’ll know you ratted on him. And you’re right. He’ll do far worse than feed you to the snakes.”

  “What are you going to do?” Ion asked, looking up and rubbing at his neck where the collar had choked him.

  “I told you, I’m going to kill him,” Kurt said. “For your own sake, you’d better hope I succeed.”

  45

  KURT AUSTIN SAT huddled over a laptop computer in his room. He and Joe had arrived back safely at the hotel and reported seeing a leopard in the shopping district to the proper authorities. And then they’d promptly gotten down to business.

  For Joe that meant a hot shower and tending to his various wounds. For Kurt it meant toweling off his face and hair, changing into dry clothes, and getting on the horn to NUMA headquarters. He needed downloads of information, some which NUMA had access to, some which they had to beg Interpol, the FBI, and other agencies for.

  Fortunately, NUMA had a long and positive history with these agencies, and there were enough markers to call in to still be on the right end of the balance sheet.

  He’d been working at it for nearly forty-five minutes before Joe reappeared through the room’s adjoining door.

  “What took you so long?”

  “I was cleaning the gravel out of my knee.”

  Kurt laughed. “That’s what you get for wearing Italian shoes to foot-race in the rain.”

  “I didn’t know we were going to be running all over town,” Joe said.

  Truthfully, neither did Kurt. “How’s your arm?”

  Joe held it out. The claw marks were bandaged but clearly visible. “That’s gonna make a great story one day. Maybe even for your old girlfriend at the zoo.”

  Joe did not seem too amused. “Very funny,” he said. “Just tell me my favorite Armani shirt didn’t die in vain.”

  Kurt turned back to the computer. “A valiant sacrifice, my friend. And not without results.”

  He brought up parallel lists.

  “On the right, we have official confirmed sightings of our friend Andras, courtesy of Interpol, the FBI, and someone Dirk knows at the Agency.”

  As Joe studied the list, Kurt read the names off. “Pyongyang eighteen months ago. Singapore five weeks later, on the exact date Ion gave us.”

  “Score one for snake intimidation,” Joe said.

  “Yeah,” Kurt said. “It gives a whole new meaning to squeezing information out of a suspect.”

  Joe laughed, and Kurt continued.

  “After Singapore, we find Andras in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. He’s there for twenty-four hours, at which point he disappears for three months until a possible sighting in Yemen. Six weeks later he was confirmed in Madagascar.”

  “Madagascar?”

  Kurt nodded. “Another possible in Cape Town, South Africa, back to Madagascar again, and then three months ago an extended stay in Lobito, Angola. Well, extended for him. Four sightings in approximately three weeks before he vanished. The next time he pops up is when I ran into him on the Kinjara Maru. But if Dirk’s theory is right and he was part of the crew that loaded that superconducting material onto the ship, that would put him in Freetown, Sierra Leone, less than a month ago.”

  “Okay,” Joe said. “So we know his course. How do we figure out what he’s traveling on? He could be on an oceangoing yacht, a freighter, a garbage scow. Maybe the submarine we’re looking for is his.”

  “I don’t think so,” Kurt said. “My encounter with him on Santa Maria occurred almost simultaneously with the attack on Paul and Gamay five hundred miles away. The submarine they’re looking for has to be under someone else’s command. But the rumor about Andras is, he doesn’t trust anyone enough to even have a second-in-command. He works on a totally flat command structure. It’s him and a bunch of pawns. That way, there’s no one in a natural position to challenge or usurp him.”

  “Sounds paranoid,” Joe said.

  “Absolutely,” Kurt said. “And that means if he had a submarine, he wouldn’t hand the keys to someone else, especially not someone he picked up at Mr. Ion’s Shop of Mercenaries.”

  “Good point,” Joe said. “So it’s a surface ship. But there are probably ten thousand ships capable of making the journeys he’s made.”

  “Maybe more,” Kurt said. “But think about it this way. Starting with Singapore and its harbormaster’s records, we can substantially narrow that list down. If we assume he was there on February fourth, and that his vessel was in the harbor or nearby, we can eliminate ninety-eight percent of the vessels in the world’s inventory right off the bat.”

  He looked at his notes. “During the days Andras was here, one hundred seventy-one oceangoing vessels were either docked here or anchored offshore and submitted papers to customs officials.”

  “That’s not a small number, Kurt.”

  “No,” Kurt said. “But if we cross-reference it with the other places Andras was seen and the ships docked in those places at the time, we narrow it down substantially.”

  “I’m guessing we don’t have records for Yemen, Madagascar, or Angola,” Joe said.

  “No,” Kurt said, “but we have satellite images of their harbors on pretty much every day of the year, including those days that Andras was reported present.”

  “And?”

  “With the exception of South Africa, one ship has been present or in close proximity to every spot our friend Andras has been in the past year and a half. And only one.”

  Kurt clicked on a name from the list on the right-hand side of the screen. A photo came up, displaying a large tanker with a black-painted hull, a white main deck, and a Liberian flag flying from its mast.

  “The Onyx,” Kurt said proudly.

  Joe looked impressed but skeptical. According to the stats at the bottom, the ship was a 300,000-ton supertanker. “You’re telling me this guy has that kind of funding?”

  “Didn’t you ever read Sherlock Holmes?”

  “I saw the movie,” Joe said. “Does that count?”

  “It’s elementary, my dear Zavala,” Kurt said. “Rule out the impossible, and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. This ship was docked offshore in every port Andras appeared in over the last year except Cape Town. But the sighting there was debatable. Also, she’s too wide for the Suez Canal, which may explain the long route around Africa to Freetown before they pulled their little bait and switch on the Kinjara Maru.”

  Joe began to look convinced. “Who’s she registered to?”

  “Some corporation out of Liberia that no one’s ever heard of,” Kurt said.

  Joe stepped back, still looking concerned. “So let’s tell Dirk and Brinks we think this ship might have our suspect on it, call it a day, and go fishing.”

  Kurt shook his head. They needed hard evidence. And if by any chance Andras had the scientists on the ship, they needed the element of surprise. Otherwise the people he was int
erested in saving — Katarina, in particular — would be in worse danger than ever.

  “Since when has the machinery of government sprung into action because a regular Kurt or Joe thinks any particular thing?”

  Joe looked away. “Not often.”

  “Exactly,” Kurt said. “We need proof.”

  “You want to get on board that ship?” Joe guessed.

  Kurt nodded.

  Joe looked resigned to helping him as usual but seemed none too happy about where this was going.

  “And how exactly do you plan on boarding a hostile vessel, crewed by terrorist thugs and killers who are undoubtedly watching for any type of advance from any quarter or direction, without them knowing about it?”

  Kurt smiled. He had a plan. It may have been even crazier than his last plan, but that one had worked.

  “The same way you remove a tiger’s teeth,” he said. “Very carefully.”

  46

  USS Truxton, July 1

  PAUL TROUT SAT with a sonar operator in the air-conditioned comfort of a darkened control room on the USS Truxton. The space around them was given over to flat-screen monitors and computer controls. Part of it resembled a mixing studio, which was appropriate as the recorded sounds were sliced and diced and spliced back together in segments.

  Part of the problem in getting any coherent information out of the signal was the nature of the Matador’s sonar system. It was twenty years old and had been designed to map the seafloor in broad swaths for various survey teams. In its active mode, a sound wave would be sent from a bell on the bottom of the Matador and bounced off the floor and collected by the system’s hydrophones. In passive mode, it simply listened and picked up ambient noises.

  Another limitation was that each hydrophone pointed downward, covering a thin but widening swath as it penetrated into the depths, like a cone of light beneath a streetlamp. The problem was, like the metaphorical streetlamp on an incredibly dark night, nothing outside the cone was visible.

  One of the Truxton’s anti-submarine warfare operators, Petty Officer Collier, was with them. A wiry young man with a calm demeanor, Collier had been slicing and dicing the tapes with them for hours. While Paul found it tedious, the petty officer seemed to latch onto even the smallest thing and get enthusiastic about starting the process over.

  “Okay, here we go,” he said for the fiftieth time.

  Paul put a hand to the soft-padded headset and pressed it into his ears. He saw Gamay click a pen into writing mode and tilt her head in anticipation. The young petty officer pressed “Play,” and Paul heard the familiar sounds of the tape beginning for the umpteenth time. Each time there had been a slight difference as the ensign and his computers filtered out background noise or other sounds. This time, he’d added something.

  “To better orient you with what you’re actually hearing,” Petty Officer Collier said, “we’ve synced up your voice records from communications with the surface with the tape.” This time, as the playback ticked over, Paul heard his own voice — it was he and Gamay, bantering with the Matador on the surface and then with each other.

  It was all so surreal. It was him, he knew it was him, but he couldn’t recall saying any of the things he was hearing. Couldn’t recall what he was doing while the words were being spoken.

  Gamay looked over at him. “Anything?” “You mean memory-wise?”

  She nodded.

  “No.”

  She looked back at her notes, and the tape continued. Finally, it reached the point of the initial attack.

  Paul pressed the headphones against his ears once again but kept his eyes on Gamay. Each time it reached this point she got agitated. And this run-through was no different. She’d already begun tapping her pen nervously.

  “I’m taking her deeper into the ship,” he heard Gamay say on the tape in reference to Rapunzel.

  A slight change in the background noise was detected, marked by a spike in certain frequencies on the computer screen.

  Several seconds later the Matador’s controller spoke.

  “Paul, we’re picking up a sonar contact.” “What kind?”

  “Unknown. West of you and very faint. But moving fast.” Paul listened to the sound. It was more discernible this time, as if it had been enhanced.

  He heard his own voice ask if the sound was mechanical or natural, and then, as the signal grew louder, the controller’s voice changed in pitch as well, suddenly gaining half an octave.

  “Mechanical or natural?”

  “Unknown… It’s small…” “It’s a torpedo. Two of them, heading your way.” “Stop the tape,” Paul said. “Play back the last twenty seconds.” “I don’t think we need to, Paul,” Gamay said. “It’s useless.” “No,” Paul said. “I heard something. Something I didn’t hear last time. Play it back.” Gamay turned from him, looking frustrated and pensive. Her fingernails were chewed down to nothing, and she kept looking around, focusing on the door and the clock like a kid in the last class on the last day of school.

  Paul guessed that listening to the tape over and over again was forcing her to relive the incident and he understood how it might be affecting her, but despite his repeated suggestions she would not leave him to do it alone.

  The tape played again, and Paul listened closely.

  As it finished, he asked for one more listen.

  He saw Gamay gulp at an imaginary lump in her throat as the tape ran forward again.

  “Paul, we’re picking up a sonar contact.” “What kind?”

  “Unknown. West of you and very faint. But moving fast.” “Stop!” Paul said. “Right there.” Gamay took her headset off and put it down on the table. “I have to get some air,” she said.

  Paul nodded and watched her leave the room. In a bizarre way his memory loss seemed to be helping them, as he had no emotional attachment to what had gone down. It was an investigation like all the others. A mystery he wanted to solve. But it dredged up no particular feelings for him.

  “Can you isolate the vibration and remove the voice track?” Paul asked.

  “Sure,” the petty officer said.

  It took a minute, and then it was ready and playing again. There was something else blocking the sound. Paul looked at the computer screen. A frequency chart showed a bunch of low-level background noises and two major vibration sources. One was on a slightly lower band than the other.

  “What’s this?” he asked, pointing to the spike on the chart.

  “That’s the Grouper’s motor signature,” the ensign said.

  “Can you pull it out?”

  Collier nodded, and a few seconds later indicated that he was ready.

  “Go,” Paul said.

  This time, as the playback went through, Paul was sure of what he was hearing. He didn’t know what it meant, but it wasn’t his imagination.

  He pointed to the other frequency spike. “Can you eliminate all other background noise and just play this? And can you enhance it?” “Mr. Trout,” the petty officer said, “the government makes sure we have the best equipment in the world. I can make it play the ‘Star-Spangled Banner,’ if you want.” Paul laughed. “Just make this sound wave louder,” he said, “and stretch it out a bit.” This time, as the playback came, it sounded a little like a moped speeding toward him on an empty city street. No other noise, no urgent shouts of inbound torpedoes, just a whiny vibration that grew slightly louder and then lowered its pitch, not once but twice. As if it had passed them and was turning away.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Paul asked.

  The petty officer played the tape one more time and nodded.

  “Compression,” he said. “The initial sound is compressed to high frequency because the source is coming toward the Grouper, and on the last three seconds of tape the sound is stretched out to lower frequency because the source is moving away from the Grouper.” “Like a train whistle,” Paul said, “or a car passing you on the street. The vehicle is still making the same sound, but your perception i
s different. So it can’t be the torpedoes.” “Nope,” the petty officer said. “It’s definitely a vehicle. From the sound of it, I’d say it’s two vehicles.” Paul nodded; that’s what he was thinking. “But why didn’t we hear them before?” “All the distortion,” Collier said. “And the torpedoes. In fact, the signature is being picked up in almost the same frequency bands as the torpedoes.” “What does that mean?”

  “To me, Mr. Trout, that means you were attacked by something small and fast. Submarines making high rpms with small propellers, much like a torpedo.” “Not one big submarine but two small ones,” Paul said. He wasn’t sure what that meant, but he guessed it would bring the mother ship theory back into play. At the very least, they were making progress.

  Collier ran it one last time just to be sure. The sound was only audible for a couple of seconds in real time before the noise of the torpedoes drowned it out.

  Collier took his headset off. “I’ll inform the captain. And we’ll do some more work on this.” “You want me to stick around?” Paul asked.

  “I think you have some work of your own to do, Mr. Trout.” He nodded upward as if to suggest Paul go topside.

  “Right,” Paul said. He put his headset down, got up, and made his way through the bulkhead door.

  Two minutes later he stepped out onto the Truxton’s aft deck.

  Sunshine, fresh air, and the sound of thumping helicopter blades greeted him. A stone gray SH-60B Seahawk was descending toward the helipad with a payload suspended beneath it.

  He found Gamay watching it and moved up beside her.

  “I think we’ve found something,” he shouted over the noise.

  She didn’t respond except to acknowledge that he was there.

  “I think we’ve isolated the acoustics of the sub that attacked us,” he explained. “It was actually two subs.” “Good,” she said, sounding anything but excited.