Devil's Gate nf-9

by Clive Cussler

  “What’s down there?” he asked.

  “The accelerator tunnels,” she said.

  That didn’t sound like a safe place to be, but the sound of feet pounding on the metal deck above changed his mind.

  He helped her onto the ladder, climbed down behind her, and shut the hatch. At the bottom they dropped into a tunnel.

  It reminded Kurt of standing on a subway platform, like the Washington Metro, only narrower. The familiar high-voltage lines and liquid nitrogen conduits raced down each wall and also along the ceiling and floor. Rows of the shiny gray rectangles that Kurt knew to be the superconducting magnets traveled off into the distance, curving slightly at the limit of his vision.

  Kurt exhaled a cloud of ice crystals. He was already chilled to the bone. It reminded him of the Fulcrum’s compartment only colder.

  “If we go this way,” she said, “we can pop up through the rear access hatch. One level down from the coolant room.” Kurt began walking, with Katarina leaning heavily on his shoulder. It was a great plan. The crew would never search for them down there, he was sure of it.

  “What if they turn this thing on?” he asked.

  “Then we’ll be dead before we even know what’s happened.” “All the more reason to hurry,” he said.

  61

  BY NOW DJEMMA GARAND could feel the danger clawing at his own throat. Washington, D.C., stood untouched by his weapon. Andras would not answer and the crew of the Onyx reported commandos aboard.

  Swirling around him, the American military showed no signs of backing off, no matter how hard he pounded them.

  “Where’s Andras?” he demanded into the radio.

  “He is looking for the American,” came the reply.

  “What about the array?”

  “It’s still down. We have no power.” The crewman from the Onyx sounded panicked, though he could not be facing what Djemma was facing.

  He put the headset down. It would end in failure. He could see that now.

  He looked out over the waves. One of their submarines had been destroyed and forced to surface. The other continued to fight, firing from deeper waters.

  Through a pair of huge binoculars, he saw the crew of the American submarine bobbing in their orange life rafts.

  “Target their position,” he said calmly.

  Cochrane hesitated.

  “We are going to die, Mr. Cochrane,” he said. “All we can do now is take as many of them with us as possible.” Cochrane stood back from the controls. “Forget it,” he said. “You want to go down in flames, that’s your business. I’m not dying here.” Djemma had been waiting for this moment. He pulled out his old sidearm and blasted three holes in Cochrane.

  Cochrane fell back in an unmoving heap. Djemma fired a few more shots into his worthless hide just for the sheer pleasure of it.

  “And you are proved wrong yet again, Mr. Cochrane,” he said.

  He stepped to the controls, glaring at the engineers. “Target the life rafts and fire!”

  GAMAY TROUT had finished cutting through the net and had eased Rapunzel and her harness of explosives through. Since then, she’d been looking for what the Truxton’s captain had described.

  “Head two-nine-zero,” Paul said.

  She turned Rapunzel onto the course and got her moving again. She considered shutting off the floodlight, but she didn’t want to run into any more obstacles. Besides, they were almost there — up ahead she could see the base of some large structure.

  A large tube ran up to it, like a city’s oversized sewer pipe. She guessed this was part of the accelerator.

  “That’s it,” she said. “It’s got to be.” “I think you’re right,” Paul said, excitedly. “Find the base where it connects to the seafloor.

  Gamay looked around, shining Rapunzel’s light in the darkness. Then she directed her to the base of the huge pipe.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “Wedge her in there between the bottom and the pipe where it starts to angle out of the water,” Paul said. “It’ll give the explosion more force.” Gamay did as he suggested. “That’s as far as she’ll go.” Paul grabbed the detonator, flipped the safety cap up.

  “Do it,” Gamay said.

  He pressed the switch.

  “Good-bye, Rapunzel,” she said, thankful for the little machine and sorry to see her go.

  The feed to Gamay’s visor cut out, and she lifted it up. Two seconds later the concussion wave reached them. It hit with a shuddering rumble, shaking the sub for a moment and then fading away.

  UP ON THE PLATFORM Djemma saw all the indicators on his weapon turn red. He saw a great eruption of water and silt just behind the emitter. A moment later the raised portion of the accelerator tunnel collapsed into the sea.

  How? he wondered. How had they done it?

  At almost the same moment, one of his men called from the radar console. “More missiles inbound. One minute to impact.” Djemma ignored him. He walked out of the control room, moving forward onto the platform. The wind buffeted him. The darkness of the night swirled, and the water churned where his weapon had been breached.

  He looked up to the horizon. He could see the tiny dots of fire approaching: the tail end of the Harpoon missiles that were zeroing in on him. There was no escape.

  “And so I shall fall,” he whispered to himself. “Like Hannibal before me.” The missiles hit to his left and right almost simultaneously. The explosions merged together, vaporizing him into a fireball that could be seen for miles.

  62

  KURT AND KATARINA continued toward the aft end of the Onyx. Kurt kept one arm around her waist and held her close beside him because she was weakening and barely able to keep up with his pace.

  The tunnel itself was filling up with a dense white fog and a cold that chilled them to the bone. With the high voltage off-line, the liquid nitrogen was beginning to warm and expand. It would boil off as soon as it got above negative 321 degrees. Kurt guessed a system like that would have relief valves that might vent the gas into the tunnel.

  They pushed forward, feeling their way through the frigid cloud. At times, visibility in the tunnel was no more than three feet. They moved slowly, looking for the aft-most hatch.

  Finally, Kurt’s hand fell on a curved seam. He recognized the recessed handle and the shape of an access hatch.

  “Our way out of here,” he said, reaching up and turning the wheel that sealed the hatch shut.

  After pulling it open, he helped Katarina onto the ladder. She began to crawl up the rungs. Kurt was ready to join her when a familiar voice cut through the dense mist like a knife.

  “Kurt Austin.”

  Katarina stopped on the ladder.

  “Go,” Kurt whispered. “And don’t wait for me.”

  She pushed off, moving upward, and Kurt held still.

  “Do you realize you’re quite possibly the most aggravating man alive,” Andras said, still hidden in the vapors.

  Certain the killer was setting up to spray the tunnel with automatic weapons fire, Kurt dropped flat to the deck and pointed the barrel of his nine millimeter into the white blanket of mist.

  Andras wasted no time sending a volley of gunfire into the passageway. The shots rang like thunder on a warm drizzly night. The shells thudded against the steel bulkheads and ricocheted like a flight of deadly wasps.

  As Kurt hoped, the bullets all passed above him, but he let out a groan and spoke as if he were in agony. “It doesn’t matter what you do to me,” he grunted. “You’ve lost.”

  He waited for a reply but none came.

  Kurt could hear the catwalk creaking underneath him. He surmised that Andras was taking a new position and zeroing in on the sound of Kurt’s voice. Kurt needed to get him talking so he could do the same thing, since it didn’t take a wizard to predict that Andras was not standing in the middle of the tunnel but was either lying on the deck like Kurt or pressed up against the bulkhead on one side or the other.

 
Breathing heavily for effect, Kurt spoke again. “If I was you… I’d be… getting out… of here.”

  He was counting on Andras having enough of an ego to feel he had mortally wounded his prey. But, so far, the man had made no mistakes.

  “Give me your weapon,” Andras said, his voice coming from the shroud of gas like an unseen evil ghost.

  Austin lay there with the cold seeping in his skin. His face was so numb, he could hardly feel anything. He held the Beretta in hands nearly frozen, his elbows placed on the deck.

  “Let the girl go,” he said, cupping a hand to one ear like a radar directional finder and waiting for a response.

  “Of course,” Andras said, his words echoing in the tunnel. “Everyone goes free. I’ll send them all off with roses, and mints on their pillows. Now, slide over your weapon!”

  “I’ll… try,” Kurt muttered brokenly.

  Kurt inched to his left, thumped his pistol onto the metal walkway as if he had dropped it and scraped it along the deck, to make it seem as if it were sliding over metal before stopping.

  With that, Kurt rolled quickly to the other side of the tunnel. A burst of three shots rang out, pinging off the deck where he’d just been.

  “Sorry, Mr. Austin,” Andras said as if he were bored. “I don’t trust you any farther than I can throw this ship.”

  And then several more bursts shook the tunnel. The muzzle flash lit the fog like lightning in a cloud. The glare was too diffused to give Andras’s position away, but Kurt spotted something else. He couldn’t see the bullets themselves fly, but he noticed they created tiny shock waves in the thick, frigid mist.

  He fired back, unleashing an eight-shot salvo that blasted through the fog. When he finished, the slide of his gun locked in the open position. His clip was empty.

  The silence that followed was haunting. Kurt stared into the fog, wondering, hoping, he’d made a killing shot.

  Andras had not fallen or Kurt would have heard it. Nor had he fired back.

  Beginning to worry, Kurt checked what remained of his ammo. Only one bullet remained in another clip that he hadn’t emptied.

  He pulled back the receiver, slid the round into the breach, and thumbed the slide release. The weapon locked, his last shot in the chamber.

  Finally, he heard movement through the icy shroud. It came like a drunk shuffling along a sidewalk. A vague, ghostly form slowly appeared: Andras, limping, dragging his leg.

  He held an assault rifle, the stock pushed into one armpit, the muzzle pointed at an awkward angle toward the deck and Kurt Austin. Blood seeped from his mouth, indicating a shot to one lung. His face was stained crimson as blood flowed from a deep crease on the top of his scalp. For a second Kurt thought he would fall, but he didn’t.

  The eyes, Kurt noticed, burned with an intensity beyond all madness. It was the picture of a man shocked at finding out he was vulnerable to any other man. He pulled himself to a stop six feet from where Kurt lay. He stared at Kurt through his bloody mask, appearing amazed that, after all his fire, Kurt had survived without a scratch.

  Kurt had his own dilemma. With one 9mm shell left, he wasn’t sure he could finish Andras off, not without a head shot. And as soon as he fired, Andras would open up with his rifle, shredding Kurt at such close range.

  It had become a standoff.

  Kurt eased off the deck and stood. They were only yards apart, aiming their weapons at each other. Kurt’s right hand held the Beretta, his left had found a knife in his pocket. The same knife he and Andras had traded back and forth three times already. He couldn’t open it, but he still could use it.

  He flipped the knife at Andras, who caught it deftly and smiled as he stared at it.

  “Out of ammunition, Mr. Austin? Pity you didn’t open the knife before you threw it.” Now confident, Andras moved slowly. He raised the assault rifle in preparation to fire.

  Kurt beat him to the draw, took an instant to aim, and fired at the liquid nitrogen pipe just above Andras. The liquid burst out under high pressure, dousing Andras heavily on the right side of his body, washing over his arm and the assault rifle he held.

  The rifle fell and broke open as it struck the deck. Andras stumbled and hit the tunnel’s wall. He watched uncomprehending as his arm, hand, and fingers shattered into a thousand fragments like a crystal vase crashing from a top shelf to the floor. A scream of agony froze in his throat.

  In seconds the nitrogen began filling the tunnel. It blanketed Andras, his body already frozen like a block of ice. It swept down the hall toward Kurt as he raced to the hatch and pulled himself up the ladder.

  The frigid mist followed him like a wave in the surf, but Kurt climbed as fast as his hands and feet could take him and made it out through the top of the passage.

  He slammed the upper hatch shut. Feeling it lock into place, he lay on his back and relaxed for the first time in more hours than he could calculate.

  After one minute, and one minute only, he rose to his feet and searched for Katarina. He found her sitting by a stairwell as if she was waiting for a miracle.

  “How are you doing?” he asked.

  She turned and looked at him, her face lighting up like a cloud under the sun. “Oh, Kurt,” she said. “How many times did I think you were dead?”

  “Luckily, it’s Andras who is dead.”

  Her smile widened in a mixture of doubt and joy. “Are you sure?”

  Kurt nodded. “I watched him fall to pieces with my own eyes.”

  63

  KURT AND KATARINA arrived at the same stairwell Kurt had come down hours before. He looked up. There was no way Katarina could climb eight flights of stairs.

  “Is there another way out?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “This way,” she said, leading him past the stairwell.

  Twenty yards on, another door beckoned. Kurt opened it. Sitting in a pool, secured to the edges of a metal dock, were three submersibles. Two of them looked suspiciously like the XP-4 he had rescued a week ago. The larger one dwarfed them, and he assumed this was the Bus.

  He noticed that the XP-4-looking craft had torpedoes mounted on either side, like pontoons.

  Beside them was the 60-foot motor yacht that Katarina had been prisoner on.

  “This is where I came in,” she said.

  Kurt looked for the door controls. “Are we above the waterline?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  He pressed a switch but nothing happened. The high voltage was still down. He found a manual release and threw the lever over. A capstan-like wheel began to spin as the door fell with the force of gravity.

  Seconds later he and Katarina were in one of the XP-4s, moving out into the darkness of the night.

  With Andras dead, the high voltage disabled, and the liquid nitrogen blasting out into the particle accelerator tunnel, Kurt figured he’d lived up to his claim of being a gremlin, but he had one last act up his sleeve.

  He turned the small sub around and circled to the very aft end of the ship.

  He fired both torpedoes into the ship’s propellers and rudder assembly.

  The explosion was blinding. Almost immediately Kurt could see that the ship’s wake was turning to mush. The props were damaged or gone, and seawater was likely flooding the bottom deck.

  The ship itself wouldn’t go down. The torpedoes were relatively small, and a vessel the size of the Onyx could take on massive amounts of water before she foundered. With all the damage near the tail end, that wasn’t going to happen, but she wouldn’t be going anywhere either. Not to Russia or China or any other unfriendly nations.

  With that done, Kurt turned the submersible away from the Onyx and began to put some distance between them. Both he and Katarina would struggle to keep awake for the next three hours, but shortly after dawn a U.S. Navy helicopter spotted them, swooped down, and picked them up.

  Kurt asked for news.

  The medic told him of the panic in Washington but that nothing had happened. He asked ab
out Sierra Leone and was told that an engagement off the coast of Sierra Leone had been completed. Lives had definitely been lost, but the threat had been eliminated. Kurt asked if there had been any mysterious crashes of old Russian cargo jets and was thankful to hear a firm negative to that question.

  He went to ask about the missing scientists when the medic held up a hand.

  “You’re going to be all right,” the medic said, “but you need to stop talking now.”

  Kurt understood.

  He watched over Katarina as they flew past the smoking hull of the Onyx, now swarming with U.S. Marines. From there they turned west and began a ninety-minute journey that would bring them to the guided missile frigate from which the helicopter had been launched.

  With the news he’d been told, Kurt felt a sense of peace he hadn’t known in weeks. That feeling, his exhaustion, and the rhythmic thumping of the helicopter blades, everything around him seemed determined to soothe him and lull him to sleep. He closed his eyes and went with it.

  EPILOGUE

  IN THE DAYS AFTER THE INCIDENT the world seemed to spin a little slower. The situation in Sierra Leone had stabilized with the help of a UN peacekeeping force and troops from the African Union. Many political prisoners had been freed, including Djemma Garand’s brother, who was now being asked to help build a coalition government.

  The missing scientists had been found and returned to their respective countries. Several were injured, but only one had died. The U.S. attack force had suffered the brunt of the losses. Thirty-one men and women from the Memphis were dead or missing. Eleven naval aviators — pilots and radar officers — had been killed. But their sacrifices, and the efforts of the NUMA civilians, had prevented a catastrophic incident from occurring.

  Not a single death was recorded in the last-minute emergency in Washington. Dozens of car crashes, hundreds of injuries, but people had remained remarkably calm in their efforts to reach safety.