The Victoria Stone

by Bob Finley

  "Crowd control. As if they were expecting a riot," Kim mused. And, if they were prepared for it, there had to be a reason for it.

  "So, what's the reason? A mass execution? Have the sheep been lined up for the slaughter?" He felt his skin crawl. That was a bad sign.

  It was then that he realized that there wasn't a person standing within fifteen feet of him in any direction. He slowly turned his head in both directions. Then he as slowly turned to look behind him. It was true. He'd been isolated and the hostiles had pulled back.

  He knew. And looked over at Marc, and he knew, too. His face had taken on a hard look of caution...a wild animal that had suddenly sensed danger. He saw Marc's lips move. "Get ready," they said.

  "Mr. Banner, if you please," came a cold, hard voice from the loudspeakers somewhere close to them. The voice reverberated a bit in the huge cavern, but the words were concise and easy to understand.

  "Platoon," Banner suddenly barked, "stand ready!"

  There was the sound of metal and leather, and of bolts being drawn and released, as every guard in sight unslung his weapon, cocked it, released the safety, and brought his weapon to the ready position before him.

  The group of hostages, as one, gasped and tightly regrouped as ancient herding instincts surfaced. Their faces conveyed shock and disbelief as they realized that they must surely be the reason for the action.

  Kim realized with a start that the guards had also regrouped. They'd realigned themselves so they all had a clear field of fire and wouldn't hit each other, even the ones facing him.

  Banner moved into the cleared circle and faced the larger group of prisoners. "Anybody who moves from where he's standing right now will be shot. Do you understand?" They all looked at him with blank, frightened eyes. "DO YOU UNDERSTAND?!" he roared. Most of them managed to jerk their heads up and down. "Good," he said and turned to face Kim. With one finger, he pointed at him. "You," he said with an edge to his voice. "You stay where you are, or you're dead!"

  "I am, anyway. Aren't I?" His face defied Banner to lie. Banner surprised him. He didn't laugh. He didn't even smile. He just regarded him stone-faced and returned to the perimeter, to stand with his men.

  "Mr. Matsumoto," came the voice from the speakers. "Would you please face your friends? Thank you. There is a camera behind them, up near the ceiling, and I want the world to be able to see your face. You see, I, Bereel Jambou, am transmitting this event by live television to a CNN news correspondent from your United States. She is on the aircraft carrier that a short time ago violated my sovereign air space by launching an air strike by helicopter against my country. Had it not blown up of its own accord before it could land, I would have been forced to shoot it down with one of my missiles."

  "I consider this invasion of my air space to be an act of war and a treacherous attempt by a collection of thugs and bullies to depose me from my rightful throne. I have attempted to negotiate a peace accord in good faith so that I may coexist with the other nuclear powers of the world. But they have connived to undermine the negotiations and have spurned my offers of peace."

  "Apparently, I have not made myself clear. I agreed to protect my guests so long as negotiations proceeded to a peaceful conclusion. But the militant, warmongering factions within the decadent nations involved in the process have yet to take seriously my level of commitment. I must, therefore, convince them."

  "Your military attempted to assassinate me. I will therefore execute one of the prisoners who, several days ago, attacked and destroyed one of the submarines I had deployed to protect the seas of the territorial waters surrounding my country. He has been found guilty but would have been released at the end of these negotiations except for your treacherous acts of war." Kim, confused by the switch from himself to some unseen audience, finally realized that Jambou was playing to live television.

  "You have his death on your hands. I can only hope that his death will serve to encourage negotiations to resume and be brought to a successful conclusion."

  "Mr. Matsumoto, I regret to inform you that the actions of your own countrymen have condemned you to be executed. The sentence is to be carried out immediately by electrocution. May God, if there is one, have mercy on your soul."

  Kim looked at all the faces before him. Some of the guards could hardly wait. Some seemed resigned. His friends were all wide-eyed and holding their breaths. The next few moments were an unknown.

  He backed slowly away, toward the edge of the quay, and slowly pulled down the zipper on the front of his jumpsuit. It seemed to be an absent-minded, distraught thing to do, an irrational act by a man faced with imminent death. He pulled one arm from his jumpsuit.

  "Hey, he's gonna try to swim for it!" One of the guards took a step toward him, but Banner's arm across his chest stopped him.

  With his hand free inside his overalls, Kim retrieved the transceiver from the seat of his underwear, felt for the power switch, and slid it on. He hoped. Then he turned toward the water as if he were thinking of diving off the seawall. Palming the device and shoving his hand and arm back through his sleeve, he glanced down once to see a welcome sight...the glow of a tiny green light, indicating that the device was powered up. Pivoting back toward the crowd, he slid the hand with the transceiver in it slightly behind his right leg, out of sight.

  Less than ten seconds had elapsed. Kim knew his time was almost gone. He stepped toward Banner and was struck by the hilarity of the simultaneous backward movement of the crowd as if they and he had rehearsed a dance. He took another, short step. So did the crowd.

  "Banner, I don't suppose you have any influence with the man upstairs, do you?" he asked lightly.

  "Ain't never been a religious man, myself," Banner replied uneasily.

  Kim laughed out loud. "I meant with ‘the man' in the penthouse. Jambou." Banner just looked at him as if he were babbling.

  "No, I..."

  The transceiver beeped. Kim calmly pivoted and walked to his left four brisk steps. Four, because that's as far as he got before a searing, crackling, blinding bolt of man-made lightening blasted the spot he'd occupied just ten feet before. The lights in the cavern dimmed from the massive power drain, gradually coming back up to full strength in four to six seconds. Kim's hair stood on end from the fallout of static electricity and he was glad he hadn't been looking toward the flash. Those in the crowd who had been were wishing they hadn't been, with their hands now over their temporarily blinded retinas. Kim, in a glance, saw at least a half-dozen of the guards holding their eyes and swearing, stumbling in little circles. He made an instantaneous decision. Wheeling about, he walked straight into the crowd. Those who could see went pale and wide-eyed and scattered, yelling and banging into and tripping over each other in their haste to get clear of him. Those who had suffered temporary blindness in their eagerness to see him fry had no idea what was going on and were about to pay for their foolishness.

  The transceiver beeped. This time, Kim whirled and ran the other way, ducking through the startled guards who had been watching the rest of the hostages. He dodged around the cluster of his friends, Justin urging "Go! Go!" in a stage whisper, and headed like a broken-field runner for the stone staircase. Behind him, as he cleared the group of his friends, he heard Leo's fury slap the place he'd vacated and redoubled his efforts in the dimmed lighting. Four of the guards who hadn't recovered from the first flash of light went down instantly. Two of them would never get up again. The other two were unconscious and their clothes were smoking.

  Banner was the first to recover. He let out a bellow of rage and followed it with a string of curses that seemed to have no end. By the time he'd galvanized the remaining force of mercenaries into action, though, the rest of the hostages had waded in amongst them until, in the melee, it was hard to tell the good guys from the bad. It was close to fifteen seconds before the soldiers finally broke sufficiently free of the clinging bodies by shoving and clubbing the hostages aside so that they could even consider opening fire. By then, th
e power supply had recycled enough for Leo to try and fail again, and Kim was nearing the top of the curving stone staircase, head down and elbows pumping in his desperate dash for safety.

  The fusillade of shots were hastily thrown, not aimed, in his general direction and, though he was peppered by a hail of stone chips from ricocheting bullets, he threw himself into a second-base slide at the top of the stairs and skidded into the mouth of the tunnel and out of the guards' direct line of fire.

  Heart pounding and his breath coming in throat-wrenching gasps, he knew they'd be no more than thirty seconds behind him.

  "Finally, all that exercise paid off!" he thought, as he scrambled madly to his feet and ran at what seemed an impossible speed up the tunnel, past the mess hall, and on along the now downward-sloping floor beyond. He was reminded in a flash of a 1950s Amos and Andy video he'd seen of a time when Kingfish had been caught by his wife, having spent the money she'd given him for trumpet lessons on less than artistic pastimes, actually playing like a virtuoso when she demanded a performance. Amos, who knew how the money had really been spent, expressed surprise at Kingfish's demonstration and asked him how he'd pulled it off. Pursing his lips and pulling at his chin, Kingfish had replied, "When a man's really scared, there ain't nothin' he cain't do!"

  Leo tried twice more in the tunnel to kill him, but between the beep and the power drain, Kim had the timing down pat now. What was really worrying him now, though, more than the guards, was whether he would reach a point in the tunnel where his signal wouldn't reach Yoko in the VIKING. If that happened, he was as good as dead.

  The device he now clutched in a death-grip, the transceiver that he and Cy had cooked up the night they'd sneaked aboard the ship, depended on Yoko to work. Suspecting Leo had security circuits built in that would recognize unauthorized access, they had instead circumvented them by a simple extension of logic. Simple, if there's access to a ‘Yoko’. Since they couldn't block a signal from Jambou to Leo without triggering a security response, they intercepted the signal by clamping an electronic repeater over the coax that was strung along the cavern roof from Jambou's penthouse console to the actual computer inside a room near roof level on the other side of the cave. With Jambou's catwalk bridging the two, and no one other than Breton and Banner allowed access to it, Jambou thought he had a secure facility. With the repeater that Janese had put in place at risk of life and limb, every time Jambou's terminal sent an order to Leo to locate and discharge a killing bolt of electricity at Kim, the signal was transmitted to the VIKING where, for two seconds, it was fed through an electronic loop by Yoko. With ‘her’ state-of-the-art circuitry, completely unknown to science at the time Leo was built, and therefore unrecognizable as a threat, Yoko processed the signal and spit it back at the repeater box two seconds later. Leo, not realizing there had been a delay, and receiving what appeared to be a pure and uncompromised signal, transmitted the ‘kill’ command. Two seconds late. At the instant, though, that the signal was bounced to Yoko, the transceiver in Kim's hand was triggered to light up a small, red light and make an audible beep. Overkill, maybe, but they thought it highly improbable that both the light and the audible signal would fail simultaneously.

  Just as Kim reached the wooden door at the end of the tunnel, it occurred to him that it had been at least half-a-minute since Leo had last tried to zap him. His chest heaving, and sweat dripping from the tip of his nose and running in rivulets down his back, he stopped dead in his tracks and listened. There were eerie shouts echoing far up the tunnel as the guards pursued him. It hadn't occurred to him yet that they had been slowed down by the fear that he would suddenly appear among them and expose them to Leo's wrath. Their two dead companions back in the cavern had awakened survival instincts in every one of them. They were mercenaries, but they weren't stupid. He tried to calculate the distance he'd run since Leo's last attack. His nerves stretched thin, he was poised for instant flight. But nothing happened.

  "Why? What's he waiting for?" His mind in overdrive, racing with astonishing clarity, the answer popped out.

  "Leo's not wired this far in. Nobody's even supposed to be here. And, if a guard was Leo's target, he had nowhere to go if he did run. He'd have to come out sooner or later, or starve to death. So, Jambou had no need for Leo's security coverage to go any farther down the tunnel than, probably, the sleeping quarters, or at least to the locked ‘bomb room’.

  He was safe!

  A great relief flooded over him. All of a sudden, his legs almost collapsed under him as he went weak all over. He leaned against the cool stone wall and wiped his sleeve across the sweat that was stinging his eyes.

  Never mind. The guards were sure to come this far, looking for him. But they might not be willing to go any farther, down into the ‘bowels of the earth’, as Frank had described the tunnel beyond the door before him.

  He decided. There was really no choice. He slipped the bolt out of the hasp and stepped through the doorway, pulling the wooden slab to behind him.

  It was then he realized that, having been accosted unexpectedly in the mess hall by the guards, and then dragged down into the cavern to confront Banner, he'd had no time to get a flashlight. But he couldn't afford to turn on the string of lights Frank and Janese had told him about. If he did, the guards would be sure he had come this way, and they might get reinforcements and come after him.

  "Nope. I'll just have to take my chances, and hope nothing goes ‘bump in the dark’."

  He flicked the dim row of lights on briefly to see the lay of the tunnel. Then, reluctantly, he turned them off again. Reaching out, he placed his hands on the tunnel wall and slowly began feeling his way along, down into ‘the bowels of the earth’.

  Chapter 81

  Under cover of the thick smoke, they'd launched themselves out of the helicopter in rapid succession like blind seals going off a high dive. As it turned out, they only had a twelve-foot drop to the water, but they'd had to be prepared for anything. As soon as they'd splashed, every man had kicked for all he was worth to drive himself deeply enough to escape as much of the blast and shrapnel as possible. Even so, the concussion had been tremendous and slammed their bodies like falling onto concrete. The good news was that the chunks of helicopter blown straight down into the sea by the force of the explosion didn't penetrate deeply enough in their initial projectile stage to injure or kill any of the swimmers. That was the part of the plan that had been a coin toss. That, and hoping the timing allowed everybody to get clear before the charge was detonated.

  They'd dispersed, keeping at least 50 feet from each other, and allowed their weights to drag them down, motionless, like chopper debris to 150 feet as they steered a course by their wrist compasses of 300 degrees.

  On a glide path that brought them in against the mountain 50 feet below its flat-topped roof, they buried themselves in the vegetation that streamed in the current.

  Matt Strickland did a quick head count, smiling at the illusion of six grotesque heads floating on the seaweed. Visibility looked to be between 80 and 90 yards. That was good because Strickland hated murky water. But, it was bad because if there were cameras around, they'd be easy to spot. At least, because they wore rebreathers, there were no telltale bubbles to give them away.

  Gripping a branch of Elkhorn coral to steady himself in the current, Strickland lifted the waterproofed GPS hanging on its lanyard around his neck and peered at the crystal display. The 500 or so microdot transponder "bubbles" he'd popped into the water from a small canister as he'd jettisoned from the helicopter had spread into an invisible cloud on the surface of the sea overhead and by now covered two acres. Acting as an interface buffer cloud between the Global Positioning Satellite receiver he held and the seven satellites beaming positioning data down to the surface, he was able to navigate underwater to within two feet of any target.

  Having entered the coordinates of what he hoped was a ‘back door’ into this mountain from information provided this morning by a couple of French micro
spy subs that had sneaked in during the night, it should be possible to swim straight to the target. But first, they had to get to the right depth.

  He peered at his wrist monitor, having to look closely because of the diminished blue-gray light of 25 fathoms. The main tunnel was believed to be at 262 feet ahead and below them. But the much smaller access they suspected was there was at 187 feet. They were at 156 feet now, so they needed to dive 31 feet deeper. He looked back at the others and motioned with both hands that they should hug the terrain, but go deeper and watch him. Then he porpoised upside down and began pulling himself hand over hand down the steep precipice. In a few seconds he reached the depth he wanted. Righting himself, he jammed one flipper under a coral outcropping and put his back to the cliff. He held the GPS receiver before him at chest height and watched the directional arrow slowly swim to his right. Turning to the rest of the team, he pointed with two fingers at his mask and made a ‘come here’ gesture. Slater Franz's burly figure detached itself from its hidey hole and swam briskly to Matt's position. Slater was the team's acknowledged scout. A naturalized German sergeant of questionable ancestry, he was fearless and aggressive. Sometimes, too aggressive. Strickland pointed to his right and then moved his hand, palm down, back and forth to indicate that Franz should stay at their present depth. As he started to move off, Matt grabbed his arm and motioned for him to stay close to cover. Slater nodded and faded into the waving fronds. The rest of them followed slowly and in single file, carefully choosing their next cover before moving on.

  Matt had managed to keep his scout more or less in sight, seeing a flipper here or a tank there. But he almost literally bumped into him only five or six minutes into the search. Startled at first, for a moment he couldn't understand how Slater could be hugging the cliff face so closely that he'd only be able to see his helmet, and not much of that. Then, as he moved closer, he realized that Slater's head was the only thing sticking out of the cliff .