Clive Cussler - KA03 - Fire Ice

by Fire Ice(lit)

  When Kaela approached her colleagues and excitedly poured out the story of the abandoned Soviet submarine base, they lost no time planning a side trip. The sub base might make a good backup if the search for Noah's ark fell apart, as it probably would. The fishing boat had been hired to take them to a rendezvous with a research vessel from the National Underwater and Marine Agency.

  Captain Kemal, the boat's owner, was paid by the day, and said he knew of the sub base and would be happy to go there before they hooked up with the NUMA vessel. However, the fishing boat had engine trouble as they neared the base and the captain wanted to turn back to port - he'd had a similar problem before and it would take only a few hours to fix it once he had the part - but Kaela had persuaded him to drop her and her crew off and come back for them the next day. Mehmet, who was the captain's cousin, had volunteered to run them ashore in his Zodiac.

  Now, the Zodiac was approaching a wide beach that rose gradually to a ridge of sand dunes. The waves grew higher and closer together, and Mehmet reduced their speed to half. The old Russian sailor had said that the base was underground, near an abandoned scientific station, and they would have to search for telltale air vents. Kaela wiped the water from her sunglasses and squinted toward the grassy hills, but saw no sign of human presence. The countryside was bleak and desolate, and she began to wonder if they had bitten off more than they could chew. The bean counters at U.M. frowned at unproductive expenditures.

  "See anything?" Lombardo shouted over the buzz of the outboard.

  "No billboards, if that's what you mean."

  "Maybe this isn't the right place."

  "Captain Kemal says this is it, and I have the map from the Russian."

  "How much did you pay that scam artist for the map?"

  "One hundred dollars."

  Lombardo looked as if he had sucked on a lemon. "Wonder how many times he's sold the same map."

  Kaela pointed toward land. "That high spot over there looks promising."

  Thut!

  Kaela jerked her head back at the weird sound. Then she saw the ragged hole that had opened in the rubberized fabric a foot to the right of her head. She thought one of the many patches on the inflatable's skin had popped off from the beating the Zodiac was taking, and she turned to tell Mehmet - but the Turk had risen from his kneeling position, an odd expression on his face, his hand clutched to his chest. Then he crumpled as if the air had gone out of him and pitched overboard. With no hand to steady the tiller, the boat went broadside and was caught by an incoming wave. The breaker lifted the boat at a sharp angle, then it was caught by another wave and flipped over, spilling the passengers into the sea.

  The sky whirled over Kaela's head, then cold water shocked her body. She went under a few feet, and when she came up, sputtering, to the surface, the lights had gone out. She was under the overturned raft. She ducked her head and came up in the open. Lombardo's bald head bobbed up, then Dundee surfaced.

  "Are you okay?" she yelled, swimming closer.

  Lombardo spit out the remnants of his cigar. "What the hell happened?"

  "I think Mehmet was shot."

  "Shot? Are you sure?"

  "He grabbed his chest and went over the side." With Lombardo following, she swam over to the front of the boat. "This is where the first bullet hit a second before the second one got Mehmet."

  "Jeez!" Lombardo said, sticking his finger in the hole.

  "Poor bastard." Dundee breaststroked over to join the other two and they all drifted together, holding on to the raft. They agreed to stay with the raft where Kemal would find them, rather than risk going ashore. The Zodiac was low in the water, but some compartments still held air. Several times they tried to flip the boat over, but the weight of the outboard and the slipperiness of the rounded sides made it impossible. They were tiring fast and the waves were pushing them ever closer to the beach.

  "That's it," Lombardo said, after an unsuccessful effort that left them all breathless. "Looks like we're going in after all."

  "What if the guys who shot at us are still there?" Dundee said.

  "You got a better suggestion?"

  "The gunshots look as if they came from directly ahead," Kaela said. "Let's hide under the raft and move it off at an angle."

  "We don't have a hell of a lot of choice," Lombardo said. He ducked underneath.

  When the other two joined him, he was smiling. "Look at this," he said, grabbing onto the waterproof bags that were suspended from the seats, where they had been tied. "The cameras are okay."

  Kaela let out a whooping laugh that had a damp echo in the enclosed space. "What are we supposed to do if somebody points a gun at us, Mickey, take their picture?"

  "You'll have to admit it would make a good story. What'ya think, Dundee?"

  "I think you two Yanks are bloody crazy! But so am I, or I wouldn't be here with you. Tell me, luv," he said to Kaela, "didn't your Russkie friend say this place was abandoned?"

  "He said the Russians had left a long time ago."

  "Maybe it's like one of those islands in the Pacific where the Japanese soldiers hid in the jungle, not knowing the war was over," Lombardo suggested. "Maybe the guys here haven't heard the Cold War ended." He was clearly excited at the prospect.

  "Sounds pretty far-fetched," Kaela said.

  "Yeah, I agree, but do you have a better idea of who took the potshots at us?"

  "No, I don't," Kaela said. "But if we don't start kicking, we're going to find out real soon. I'll check things out." She disappeared for a few moments. When she returned, she said, “The beach looks deserted. I suggest we start moving this thing off to the right. Otherwise we'll drift straight in."

  They grabbed onto the boat, and began to kick. The Zodiac moved, but the rollers pushed them toward shore. The muffled roar of waves breaking on the beach grew louder. No more gunshots came their way and they began to hope that the shooters were gone. That optimism would have eroded quickly if they had been able to see beyond the grass crowning the dunes. A line of razor-sharp sabers was raised high in the sun like the blades of a giant threshing machine, ready to cut them to ribbons as soon as they crawled ashore.

  -4- HIGH ABOVE THE overturned Zodiac, a turquoise aircraft that resembled a winged canoe wheeled in a lazy circle. The broad-shouldered man at the controls rolled the ultralight airplane into a tight banking turn and peered down through tinted goggles, squinting against the reflected glare with eyes the color of coral underwater. His wind-burnished face was creased in a look of puzzlement.

  Moments before, he had seen swimmers in the water next to the overturned inflatable. He glanced away to get his bearings, and when he looked again the swimmers were gone.

  Kurt Austin had been chasing the Zodiac like an aerial motorcycle cop hot on the tail of a speeder, and had seen the boat flip over. He couldn't figure out why it had gone out of control. The seas were moderate, and no rocks or other submerged objects were visible. Austin wondered if the inflatable, or the fishing boat he had seen steaming away from the coast, had anything to do with the television crew he was looking for. Probably not. The crew should be on its way to meet the NUMA survey ship Argo, not heading for this desolate stretch.

  Austin was aboard the Argo as a deep-ocean consultant on loan from his duties as leader of NUMA's Special Assignments Team. The other members of the team, Joe Zavala and Paul and Gamay Trout, had been given different and undemanding assignments in scattered projects around the globe. NUMA director James Sandecker had insisted that they take working vacations after the team had crossed swords with the hired killers of a megacorporation that wanted to take over the freshwater resources of the world. He had been particularly worried about Austin's attachment to the beautiful, brilliant Brazilian scientist who had sacrificed herself to bring down the conspiracy.

  The Argo was in the Black Sea, collecting information on wave and wind action for an international data bank. With his master's degree in systems management from the University of Washington and his
vast practical knowledge as a diver and undersea investigator, Austin had been invaluable in helping to set up the sophisticated remote-sensing survey instruments.

  As the cruise had gone on and systems were set in place, however, his expertise became less necessary. He read some philosophy books he'd brought from his extensive library, but he started to grow bored and restless. The ship seemed like a prison surrounded by a very wide moat. Austin was aware that his psyche had been bruised and that Sandecker had his best interests at heart, but he needed strenuous physical and mental activity, not a cruise ship atmosphere.

  The serious scientists aboard the ship had been grumbling about the impending visit from the TV crew. They saw them as intruders who would interrupt their work with dumb questions. The fact that they were from a tabloid show on a mission to find Noah's ark didn't add to their appeal. Austin's outlook was the exact opposite. He looked forward to their arrival as a diversion from his shipboard boredom.

  The television people had been due that morning, but they'd never arrived and attempts to reach them by radio were unsuccessful. After lunch, Austin had climbed to the wheelhouse to run an idea past the skipper. The Argo's commander, Captain Joe Atwood, was clearly annoyed at the TV crew's failure to show up or contact his ship. He'd paced from one side of the bridge to the other, scanning the sea with binoculars. The Argo was supposed to be moving to another station, and the captain was unhappy about the delay.

  "Any word on our guests?" Austin said, although he knew from Atwood's dour expression what the answer would be.

  Atwood scowled at his watch. "I think they're lost," he declared sharply. "The next time those idiots in public affairs want me to entertain some crazy TV people, I'm going to tell them to stick their request where the sun don't shine."

  The captain was in no mood to be told that the job done by NUMA's public affairs department in proclaiming the agency's accomplishments helped loosen the congressional purse strings and attracted grants for projects like the Black Sea survey.

  "I've got a suggestion," Austin volunteered. "I'm not busy. What say I take a spin around the neighborhood and see if I can spot them?"

  The captain's frown dissolved into a knowing grin. "You're not fooling me, Austin. You've wanted to get the Gooney into the air since the day you stepped aboard."

  "It would serve a dual purpose. I could test-fly the bird and look for our wayward guests at the same time." And it would be a perfect antidote for his developing case of cabin fever.

  Atwood ran his fingers through his pale red hair. "Okay, pal. Go for it. But keep us appraised of your position every few minutes. I've got enough trouble with those missing TV types. I don't want to chase you allover the Black Sea as well."

  Austin thanked the captain, and, with a noticeable spring in his step, went down to get the Gooney ready. The ultralight seaplane had been developed as a way to extend a boat's visual reach. The radar that most NUMA ships carried could pick up a gnat at ten miles, but at times there was no substitute for the human eye. Joe Zavala, whose mechanical mind bordered on brilliant, had designed the aircraft. Zavala had asked Austin to take the plane aboard the Argo to test it under real-life conditions, but the ship had been on the go for most of its mission and Austin had been reluctant to ask the captain for time to make a test flight.

  The single-seat plane was named after the gooney bird, the nickname sailors gave the albatross, a seabird known for its exquisite beauty in flight, and clumsiness taking off and landing. Austin inspected the aircraft in its deck hangar. The stubby, ungainly appearance didn't bother him. Austin had flown ultralights before, and what was important was stability and ease of operation.

  The letters NUMA were painted in black on the side. The flat-bottomed fiberglass hull had an upturned canoe nose, and fiberglass floats supported by aluminum struts hung from both sides of the hull. Attached to the floats and flanking the hull was the manually operated retractable landing gear that allowed the Gooney to set down on waterways or runways.

  The plane was hauled out onto the deck and its narrow, thirty-foot Dacron-covered wings were unfolded and locked in place. Austin eased into the snug cockpit, and some of the Argo's crew pushed the Gooney down the ship's broad, slanting stem ramp into the sea. Austin started the power plant, threw off the safety line and taxied to open water to get the feel of the controls. The aircraft handled well on water, and he decided to see what it would do in the air. He pointed the Gooney down an imaginary airstrip and gave it the throttle.

  Powered by the compact forty-horsepower engine, the Gooney got on plane quickly with no skidding. The aircraft skimmed the wave tops for about a hundred feet, then lifted into the air and climbed until it was above the survey ship. Austin circled the Argo once, tipped his wings in salute, then headed in a line toward the Bosporus Strait that connected the Black Sea with the Mediterranean. He reasoned that the TV people, based in Istanbul, would be coming from that direction.

  The Rotax two-stroke, twin-cylinder engine driving the rear-mounted propeller could push the blunt-nosed plane at a top speed of sixty-five miles per hour. Not exactly supersonic, but the plane handled like a dream, turning, climbing and diving without a hint of a stall. Austin felt as free as the seabirds he'd seen wheeling high above the Argo in search of scraps from the galley. He flew at about a thousand feet, an altitude that allowed him to see miles in every direction, cruising at fifty-five miles per hour. The five-gallon tank gave the plane a range of about one hundred and fifty miles.

  The air was as clear as fine crystal, and the bright sun cast a silvery sheen on the rippled surface of the water. He set up a rough search pattern, running a series of parallel lines that would cover the greatest amount of territory in the shortest time. The TV people had sent a short radio message before they'd left Istanbul, requesting the Argo's position and giving their estimated time of arrival. They said they would be traveling on a fishing boat. Austin saw a number of trawlers, but none appeared to be on a direct course for the Argo.

  The back-and-forth flight pattern quickly used up his fuel. He was down to a third of a tank, enough to get back to the ship with a narrow margin of error. He checked his compass and was about to turn back to the ship, when he spotted the wake of a boat approaching the Russian coast at a high rate of speed. Curiosity got the best of him, and he decided to make a swing close to land. He brought the Gooney down so that he was flying less than five hundred feet over the water, and had almost caught up with the boat when suddenly it was caught by a wave and flipped over.

  As Austin circled, pondering his next step, he noticed that the capsized inflatable was behaving oddly. Although it was caught in the pull of waves, it was moving toward shore at an angle.

  Austin picked up his microphone and clicked the On button.

  "Gooney to NUMA ship Argo. Come in, please."

  "Argo here." Austin recognized the voice of the ship's captain. "How's the little seabird handle?" Atwood said.

  "Like a trained pterodactyl. She practically flies herself. I'm just along for the ride."

  "Glad to hear that. Any sign of those unbelievable TV idiots from Unbelievable Mysteries?"

  Keeping his eye on the boat below, Austin said, "The only mystery out here is an overturned Zodiac. I saw some people hanging on to it, but they're gone."

  "What's your position?"

  "I'm right off the coast." Austin scanned a craggy point of land that jutted into the sea. "I'm looking at some medium-high sea cliffs, with a beach and dunes in between them. There's a rock profile on a headland that reminds me of Admiral Sandecker's profile. Beard and all."

  "I'll ask the navigator. He's sailed these waters hundreds of times." After a pause, the voice came back. "That's Imam's Point. Supposedly the face of an old holy man."

  "The boat's drifted into the surf line. Too rough for me to set down at sea."

  "What do you want us to do?"

  "I'm going down for a peek. I'm going to need help if I find anyone. The Gooney wasn't made to carry p
assengers."

  "We're on our way. ETA in about an hour."

  "Roger. Will land and see if I can find a bar that serves decent Stoli martini."

  Austin clicked off the mike and checked the boat again. He smiled tightly. He hadn't been imagining things. Three swimmers had broken away from the Zodiac and were stroking toward the beach.

  The ultralight landed best into the wind, which was coming off the water. Austin dropped down to a hundred feet and headed toward shore, setting his sights on a long rolling dune overlooking the beach. He intended to make a U-turn over the dune and bring the aircraft down lightly onto the sand.

  The Gooney flew over the figures struggling through the surf. The swimmers were making good progress, riding the crests to save their strength. Austin had a brief glimpse of some low-lying buildings inland, but a brilliant flash of light from the ground caught his eye. The Gooney could turn on a dime. Taking advantage of its quick handling, Austin pushed the rudder control. The plane seemed to spin in midair, and he had a clear view of the shallow valley behind the dune.