Devil's Gate nf-9

by Clive Cussler

  Pitt grabbed his own cell phone and sent an emergency text that would reach all NUMA personnel in the vicinity. He called the office to follow up.

  For his part, Brinks looked stricken, fumbling with a cell phone, trying to call his wife. Dirk understood that; he was thankful that his wife, Loren, and his children, Summer and Dirk Jr., were on the West Coast this week or he’d have been doing the same frantic dance.

  Brinks hung up and wandered unsteadily over to Pitt, of all people.

  “Voice mail,” he said as if in a trance. “What a time to get voice mail.”

  “Keep trying,” Pitt told him. “Ring that phone off the hook.”

  Brinks nodded but continued to act as if he’d been drugged. The shock had stunned him into inaction.

  He looked at Pitt through starry eyes. “Did your man get on that ship?” he asked quietly.

  Pitt nodded. “As far as I know.”

  Brinks swallowed, perhaps his pride. “I guess he’s our only hope now.”

  Dirk nodded. One man on a tanker in the middle of the Atlantic now held the fate of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, in his hands.

  59

  ABOARD THE ONYX, Kurt ran and fired and ran again. He emptied his second magazine, loaded another, and kept moving, pushing Katarina ahead of him.

  Clear of pursuers for a second, they ducked into an alcove between two of the ship’s storerooms and listened.

  Some kind of strange alarm had begun sounding. It almost resembled the Whoop, Whoop heard on a submarine before it was about to dive.

  “What’s that?” Katarina asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Seconds later a recorded voice came over the ship’s loudspeaker. “Fulcrum deploying. Stand clear of midships array. Repeat. Stand clear of midships array.”

  “We’re running out of time,” Katarina said. “Can’t be more than a couple minutes left.”

  “And we’re going the wrong way,” Kurt said.

  They’d had no choice, each pack of crewmen they’d run into had forced a detour. Since they’d left the cabin, they’d actually moved farther forward instead of aft.

  In their favor, the ship was mammoth yet crewed by no more than a hundred or so. Some of those had to be at duty stations to pull off whatever Andras was doing with this Fulcrum array. And at least six were now dead.

  Working against them was the ship’s architecture. The Fulcrum compartment was between them and the coolant room at the aft end of the ship. Since the Fulcrum took up the top half of the ship, and ran from beam to beam, the only way to get past it was to go deep into the ship and use one of the bottom decks to cross under it.

  The alarm and recording continued, and Kurt imagined the giant fan-shaped array, larger than a football field, emerging through huge doors on the top of the Onyx’s hull.

  “Let’s go,” he said, pulling Katarina up and getting on the move once again.

  She was struggling to keep up but had yet to make the slightest complaint.

  Kurt found a ladder that dropped through a hole in the deck. He took it, sliding down with his feet on the outside rails.

  “Come on,” he said. As Katarina came down the ladder he noticed the rag around her hand was soaked right through in red.

  He went to look at it.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Keep going.”

  Another ladder dropped them down a few feet to one more deck. And this time, Kurt stopped. He could hear machinery throbbing in an odd pattern, on, off, and back on.

  It gave him an idea.

  “Wait here,” he said.

  Kurt crept forward. Markings on a pair of closed hatchway doors read “Thruster Unit.”

  Behind him, Katarina leaned against the wall and slid down it in slow motion.

  “I’m okay,” she said as he started back toward her. “Just… taking… a little rest.”

  She wasn’t going to make it much farther. At least not running through the ship at breakneck speed. And they were running out of time anyway.

  The Whoop, Whoop alarm stopped, and even down in the bowels of the ship the hull shuddered slightly as something big locked into place.

  “How much time?” he asked.

  “A minute,” she said through her exhaustion. “Maybe less.”

  She slumped onto her side, the blood-soaked rag over her hand smearing blood across the metal deck.

  He couldn’t help her now. He had to do something about the Fulcrum before it was too late. With a fire ax he pulled from a bracket on the wall, he broke open the lock on the door in front of him. The sound of throbbing machinery echoed throughout the room.

  He stepped inside. Down below were the powerful electric motors of the bow thrusters. By the way the system was acting, it was struggling to keep the ship in some kind of perfect alignment.

  Kurt guessed that redirecting a particle beam would require exact precision. If he could stop the thrusters, or throw them off, that might ruin either the beam’s cohesiveness or its aim.

  OFF THE COAST OF SIERRA LEONE, Djemma Garand studied the field of battle from his vantage point in the control room of platform number 4. He had forced the Americans back. Twice he had repelled their assaults. Now he would strike with a vengeance.

  “Bring all units back to full power!”

  Cochrane was beside him, looking nothing like a man who was about to become infamous for all eternity. He looked like a rodent who would rather have scurried under a bush and hid than a man ready to claim his place in history. But he did as he was told, and he had trained Djemma’s other engineers well enough to operate the machinery if he balked.

  “All units at a hundred one percent design load,” Cochrane said. “Magnetic tunnels are energized and reading green. The heavy particle mix is stable.”

  He looked over at one more screen, a telemetry display from the Onyx. “The Fulcrum array is locked in position,” he said. “You may fire when ready.”

  Djemma savored the moment. The Americans had attacked him with missiles and aircraft, and now his sonar readings detected two of their submarines entering the shallows. They were breaking themselves on his strength, and now, as he promised, they would feel his bite.

  Once he gave the order, the system would energize. It would take fifteen seconds for the charge to build up in the tunnels of his massive accelerator, and a quarter of a second later the energy burst would race forth, cross over the Onyx, and be directed down onto Washington, D.C.

  For a full minute it would spread across the American capital, panning back and forth and wreaking havoc and destruction.

  He looked over at Cochrane. “Initiate and fire,” he said calmly.

  IN THE THRUSTER ROOM of the Onyx, Kurt found what he needed: the thick high-voltage lines he’d seen in the reactor room. The blue lines, he thought, remembering the schematic. They were routed through the accelerator and then back to the Fulcrum.

  That was his only shot. He stepped toward them, swinging the ax and releasing it at the last instant to avoid being electrocuted when it cut into the cables.

  The blade hit, and released a massive shower of sparks. A blinding flash of electricity snapped across the gap like man-made lightning, and the entire ship was plunged into darkness.

  Kurt was thrown to the deck by the blast. His face felt burnt. For several seconds the compartment was in absolute darkness. The motors of the bow thrusters rattled loudly and began winding down. Finally, the emergency lights came on, but, to Kurt’s great joy, nothing else seemed to have power.

  He hoped it was enough. He hoped it had been done in time.

  UP ON THE SHIP’S BRIDGE, Andras stared. The ship had gone black, and in the dark of the night it seemed as if the world had vanished. Seconds later the emergency lights had come on.

  At first he feared the array had somehow overloaded the system. He reached forward, tapping at the Fulcrum’s controls and flicking the toggle switch on the side of the unit. He got no response, not even a standby light.


  A second later some of the basic systems came back online, and Andras looked around hopefully.

  “It’s just the one-twenty line,” one of the engineers said. “The high voltage is still down.” The man was flicking a few switches of his own to no effect. “I have no thrusters, no power to the array. No power to the accelerator.”

  Andras leaned forward to check the Fulcrum array visually. It stood there, spread out like the canopy of a giant tree that had somehow sprouted from the center of the ship, but it was dead. Not even the blinking red warning lights were illuminated anymore.

  He grabbed the joystick that had raised it into position and fiddled with it for a second, then flung the controller aside with great bitterness.

  “Damn you, Austin!” he shouted.

  After a moment to reflect he realized that power could be restored. He just needed to make sure Austin wasn’t around to cut it a second time. He grabbed his rifle and checked the safety.

  “Get somebody down there to reroute the high-voltage lines,” he ordered. “We’ll try again, once it’s up and running.”

  The engineer nodded.

  Another man looked over at Andras from the far corner of the bridge. “What do we tell Garand if he calls?”

  “Tell him… he missed.”

  With that, Andras stormed out of the bridge, a single thought burning his mind: Austin must be destroyed.

  60

  THE TENSION in the Pentagon’s Situation Room had grown as tight as a drum. The proverbial pin dropping would have sounded like a cannon shot.

  One of the staffers, with a hand to the earphone of the headset he wore, relayed a message.

  “We’re confirming a discharge from the Quadrangle site,” he said. “Continuous discharge… Duration at least sixty seconds.” No one moved. They all stared at the screen and waited for the inevitable. Unlike ballistic missiles with their seventeen-minute approach time, it should have taken only a blink.

  Ten seconds later the lights were still on, the computers still running.

  Everyone began to look around.

  “Well?” Vice President Sandecker asked.

  A female staffer spoke up. “The networks are still broadcasting live,” she said. “No sign of impact or damage.” Brinks’s face began to fill with color again. He turned to Dirk Pitt. “Your man did it,” he said hopefully.

  “His name’s Austin,” Pitt said.

  “Well, you give him my thanks along with the country’s,” Brinks said. “Along with my apology for being a bigmouthed idiot.” Pitt nodded, guessing that Kurt Austin would enjoy all three. He turned to the Navy brass in the room. “He’s going to need a way off that ship.” “Already on it,” one of them replied, smiling.

  That pleased Pitt. But they weren’t out of the woods yet.

  Up on the monitor the icons that represented the USS Memphis and the USS Providence were flashing. A new ship’s status was being reported. They were going into battle.

  THE USS MEMPHIS had come up from the depths, just beyond the edge of the continental shelf. Holding station there, it had begun pinging away madly with the powerful sonar in its bow.

  This was not normal operating procedure, as it gave away the ship’s position, but the plan was to draw Garand’s fleet of small subs out from its bay and allow the Trouts and Rapunzel to sneak in behind them.

  A further effect of the violent sonar emissions would likely be confusion and even terror on the part of the enemy.

  Inside the sub’s control room the sonar operator could see the plan working almost too well.

  “Five targets approaching,” he called out. “Labeled bravo one through bravo five.” “Do we have firing solutions?” the sub’s skipper asked.

  The fire control officer hesitated. His computer kept flashing green for yes and then red for no.

  “The subs are so small, and continually changing direction, the computer can’t create a solution.” “Then fire on acoustic mode,” the captain ordered. “On my mark.” “Ready, sir.”

  “Fire from all tubes.”

  Over a period of five seconds compressed air launched six Mark 48 torpedoes from the Memphis’s midships tubes.

  Seconds later the sonar man heard a different sound. “Incoming torpedoes,” he called out. “Bearing zero-four-three and three-five-five. At least four fish.” There were torpedoes approaching from the right front quadrant and the left. It took away their ability to maneuver.

  “Hard to starboard,” the captain shouted. “Full revolutions, bow planes full up. Deploy countermeasures.” The ship turned, accelerated, and rose toward the surface. The countermeasures designed to draw off the approaching torpedoes were dumped in the water behind them.

  Submarine battles were slow-motion versions of aerial dogfights. And the wait as a torpedo tracked inbound could be interminable.

  Ten seconds passed and then twenty.

  “Come on, go,” the skipper grunted.

  The sub rose fast.

  “One miss,” the sonar man reported. Then seconds later, “We’re clear.” They’d managed to avoid the incoming weapons. But the Memphis wasn’t as nimble as the small craft it was fighting. Like a bear tangling with a pack of wolves, she wouldn’t last long. As if to prove it, the sonar man called out again.

  “New targets, bearing zero-nine-zero.” “Full down angle,” the captain ordered.

  In the distance a series of explosions rocked the depths as two of the torpedoes from the Memphis found their marks in quick succession. But there was no celebration; their own troubles were too close.

  “Bottom coming up fast, skipper,” the helmsman reported.

  “Level off,” the captain said. “More countermeasures.” The bow angle eased. Another explosion rocked them from far off, but the sonar man looked stricken.

  He turned to the captain, shaking his head. “No good.” An instant later the Memphis was hit. Anyone not seated and belted in was thrown to the floor. The main lights went down. The sound of alarms wailed throughout the ship.

  The captain got to his feet, managed a quick look at the damage board. “Emergency surface,” he ordered.

  The Memphis blew all tanks and began to rise.

  MILES AWAY, Paul and Gamay Trout couldn’t see any screen or hear any radio calls describing the action. But the ocean carried sound much more effectively than the air, and echoes from the booming explosions reached them one after another like the sound of distant thunder.

  Neither of them spoke, except as necessary for navigation.

  Finally, Paul slowed the craft. They’d dropped from the Navy helicopter, descended into the far end of the canyon, and wound their way back toward the platforms.

  “We’re at two hundred feet and holding,” Paul said. “If the inertial system is right, the platforms are less than a mile away.” Gamay was already activating Rapunzel ’s program. She wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible.

  “Detaching umbilical,” she said.

  She felt herself sweating once again despite the cold. And then she felt Paul’s hand on her shoulder, massaging it softly.

  Another series of explosions rumbled through the depths, these far bigger, closer, and more menacing than any that had come before.

  “Do you think that was one of ours?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Don’t think about it. Just do what you have to do.” She tried to block it out, even as another, smaller boom reached them, but there was nothing to see through her visor except darkness.

  Seconds passed.

  “How far?” she asked.

  “You should be almost there,” Paul said.

  Something was wrong. “She’s not moving,” Gamay said.

  “What?”

  Gamay studied the data feed from the little robot. “Her motor is operating, but she’s not moving. She’s stuck.” “How is that possible?” Paul asked.

  Gamay, with a flip of her right hand, switched on Rapunzel’s exterior light. The answer to Pa
ul’s question came through instantly.

  “She’s stuck in a net.”

  Gamay put Rapunzel in reverse and pulled her back a few yards. The net was no fluke; it was draped from above.

  “Antitorpedo nets,” Paul said. “We must be right beside the platform.” Gamay switched on Rapunzel’s cutting tool. “I’m cutting through it.”

  THE MEMPHIS had broken the surface but was taking on water fast. The order to abandon ship was given, and men were scrambling from the hatches and into boats or just into the sea itself.

  But the survivors were well inside the Event Horizon line. If their enemy wanted to, he could fry them all with a single burst from his weapon.

  ON THE ONYX, Kurt noticed the lighting returning to normal. He was thankful that the bow thrusters hadn’t come back to life. He hoped that meant the high voltage was still out and the Fulcrum array was still off-line.

  He moved back to where Katarina sat in the hall. “Ready for one more run?” he asked.

  “I don’t think I can,” she said.

  He studied her hand. The blood flow had slowed, the wound was finally clotting.

  “Come on,” he said. “You’re a champion. Prove it to me.” She looked into his eyes and clenched her jaw. He helped her up, and they began to move.

  “Do you still want to get to the coolant room?” she asked.

  He nodded. “They’ll get this power back on soon enough. We have to permanently disable this thing.” “I know another way to get there,” she said. “They’ll never expect us to use it.” She led him forward until they came to another hatch. This one was sealed tight.

  Kurt dropped beside it and grabbed the wheel.

  After two full rotations it spun easily. He opened it to see a ladder dropping down through a shaft. Dim red lights lit the rungs, and glacial air wafted up toward him. Kurt suddenly thought of Dante’s Inferno, which depicted some of Hell’s outer layers as frigid, Arctic-like zones.