Cutting Edge pp-6

by Tom Clancy

  His eyes circles of bright green fire in a smooth, mocha brown face — at fifty-two years old, Gunville was sufficiently vain to pride himself in a complexion free of lines, wrinkles, or sagging skin — he stood watching an alarm light flash on a signal column in front of him, sliding his right forefinger over a rudimentary mustache, and silently mouthing the words to a folk ballad he’d learned long, long ago. Its expression of a heart captured by desire, of grace through love’s devotion… not in the five hundred years since the song’s composition had anything surpassed it.

  “Belle qui tiens ma vie, captive dans tes yeux, wui m’as l’ame ravie, d’u souris gracieux…”

  “Sir, Dupain’s hailing on the transceiver.” Seated with his back to Gunville, one of the half dozen handpicked crewmen at the consoles glanced over from the marine radio’s surface station, his earphones pulled down off his head. “How do you want me to respond?”

  The red alarm light continued its steady blinking. Gunville stood in his customary place at the operation room’s rear, moved his finger back and forth over the faint dash of hair above his upper lip, and whispered remembered verses of song. He’d been growing the mustache for less than a week, and it was at the irksome stage where it was neither here nor there — an adolescent’s whiskers. But Jacqueline had told him she found mustaches appealing on men of his type, though she hadn’t elaborated on just what type that was, and by her lack of specificity might as well have said she found it appealing on a mulâtre. Gunville could read between the lines and accept social enlightenment for the theatrical prop it was. Still, he had to admit to being beguiled by the siren. And everything balanced out in the end. Gunville would show her the fullness of his passion, then leave her stung by his spite.

  “Sir—”

  “I know. Dupain calls.” Gunville was disappointed by Andre’s skittishness. The find below had been anticipated. Only its timing had been at question. “You can tell him I’m busy with a mechanical problem at the aft crane. Or in the engine room. Or that I’m holding a conference, or napping in my cabin. I don’t care what you say. Just stall until this problem’s been solved.”

  “Yes.”

  Gunville looked at him.

  “Another thing,” he said. “Contact the tether winch detail. I want to be sure there are no unassigned hands on deck except the tenders. No witnesses, comprendez-vous?”

  After a moment’s hesitation, the radio man nodded, put the cans over his ears, and returned his attention to the console.

  Gunville studied the back of his head. Andre was a likeable sort. Married, young children. Of Bantu descent, as had been Gunville’s mother. And he’d worked aboard the Africana for years. But the nature of the ship’s business had rapidly evolved, and it seemed Andre had failed to adapt. Gunville himself felt a great deal of stress, but also realized that he simply had to bear it, putting confidence in his new business alliance and their joint ability to execute contingency plans.

  It was sad, he thought. So sad.

  Andre would have to go, but at the same time he could not be allowed to move on elsewhere. Leaving him to become a casualty of change. A failure of evolution like poor Cédric and Marius.

  Gunville took a mournful breath, reached down into his memory, and again began to move his lips in a low whisper: “Libre de passion, mais l’amour s’est fait maitre, des mes affections, et a mis sous sa loi…”

  Immersed in the song’s romantic sentiment, finding comfort in its lyrics and melody, he soon felt very much better.

  * * *

  The yacht rolled over the calm, dimpled sea between the quays of Port-Gentil and the long band of oil platforms extending southward off the Gabonese coastline. These resources, trading port and near-shore petroleum fields, framed an economic success that gave the little nation’s citizens average head-for-head incomes surpassed only by South Africans among their territorially advantaged regional neighbors.

  Though of high style, the yacht, or superyacht — as the vessel’s 130-foot length, structural enhancements, and sophisticated onboard technologies truly classed it — was not at all a conspicuous sight as it ran a gentle northerly course toward the Gulf of Guinea, waters abounding with giant blue marlin, tarpon, and other potential brittle-scaled, rubber-finned sportfishing trophies. Individual opulence sparkles amid general prosperity, and the few may taste rare luxury where there is common satisfaction — the queen bee in her honeyed chamber knows.

  Inside the Chimera’s four spacious decks, every detail was of plush yet tasteful elegance. There were lacewood and sycamore finishes, walls covered with embroidered Canton silk damask, marble veneers imported from the stone quarries of Pordenone, Italy. On its exterior starboard quarter, a single touch of ostentation flared at the eye: a decorative painting of the ship’s mythological namesake, a creature with the head of a lion, body of a goat, and a sinuous serpent’s tail. In this particular depiction, the monster was shown breathing flames.

  The owner of the yacht had an appreciation for fables, relishing the age-old stories for their grand scope, color, and subtext. He had much the same fondness for word-play. Constrained in manner, offering a dispassionate face to the world, he was a man who privately enjoyed the artful lark, the inside jest, the nuanced turn of phrase.

  Etymologically, Chimera is the word root of chimerical, an adjective that can be used to describe something — or someone — of a nature that is deceptive and slippery to the mind.

  In ichthyology, Chimera is a genus of fish, distantly related to the shark, that has existed in the world’s oceans for four hundred million years — a phenomenal triumph of survival attributed to its swimming at great, lightless depths beyond the safe reach of those who would hunt and trap it.

  In genetic science, a chimera is defined as an organism spawned of two or more genetically distinct species. Chimeral plants are propagated by horticulturists and fancied by collectors. Laboratories have created mixed-species test rodents in vitro. Fueled by calls for artificially grown transplant organs and tissues, recombinant-DNA technologies have produced the means to spawn human-animal chimeras through manipulation of embryonic stem cells. Some have been given European patent approvals.

  A man of disparate business interests, the yacht’s owner was the prime, and silent, financial backer for a Luxemburg-based biotech firm that held two species-joining patent claims. It was a minor gamble for him, a diversionary fling, but one that might yield profit over the stretch. And in this adventure, too, he saw subtle shades of meaning. Sometimes in his secret reflections, he would imagine himself the spawn of a paternal pig and mother rhea, a flightless bird of garish plumage. On these instances, he saw the comedy of life to be blacker than clouded midnight and as fiery-sharp as the point of a cauterizing needle.

  Now he was a tolerable distance from such thoughts. On the large flying bridge of the Chimera he sat on an elevated mango-colored sofa to one side of the pilot-house, his right leg hung over his left, his thin fingers laced together on his lap, watching the slow slide of sea and shore through a panoramic curve of windows. He was dressed lightly for the torrid heat in a pale blue, short-sleeved, collared shirt; cream trousers; and tan deck shoes. Around his neck was a mariner link necklace with a small pendant charm, both of them hand-tooled out of silver from Bolivia’s cooperative Cerro Rico mines. Another of his quirkish notions, the ornament was a representation of the miner’s god, whose shrine occupied a niche behind the entrance to every dangerous sulfur-stinking shaft — a horned, squatted, vaguely wolfish being with a phallic thrust between its thighs, said to hold the power of life and death over the impoverished, ragtag campesino workers who labored to extract his mineral bounty, placating him with gifts of coca, tobacco, and pure-grain alcohol and honoring him with orgiastic celebrations of vice and excess.

  Like many gods and monsters of folklore, this lord of the underworld was known by more than one name. Mountain villagers descended from the Inca called him Supai. Most Bolivian peasants knew him as El Tío. The sly uncl
e who cast a neutral eye on virtue and sin, caring only for tributes offered. A demon that desperate men had sainted in exchange for his inconstant favors.

  The owner of the pleasure yacht knew, and he well understood.

  He looked out the bridge’s sweeping windows, past the stations where his helmsman and engineers sat in their epauleted white uniform blouses. Looked out at the sun-stippled water and the crowded international harbor and the fixed oil platforms standing with their tall booms, derricks, and wellheads.

  Here was wealth, he thought. Tremendous wealth, all visible right on the surface. But none of it interested him. The treasure that had made his migration to Africa something more than a flight from the wide nets of his pursuers, the continent’s greatest bounty, was the light pulsing through fine veins of glass that ran deep where the sun did not reach.

  There was no chance in the world that he would let anyone stop him from tapping it.

  “Casimir,” he said, his tone soft. “Are you ready?”

  His pilot had a brief exchange in the Bandgabi tribal dialect with a man at the console beside him. Then he nodded.

  “Yes,” he said, switching to English. “We’ve completed a modem upload-download test… real-time streaming telemetry and multimode sensors are online… everything checks.”

  “Why haven’t you deployed, then?”

  “Gunville. We were waiting for his confirmation.”

  “And he’s given it?”

  “Just now,” the helmsman said. “His men are in position aboard the Africana.”

  The yacht’s owner unlaced his hands and fluttered one in front of him. He was eager to be rid of those glorified utility workers below.

  “Take us on to the next stage,” he said. “Please.”

  An instant later he felt the mildest of bumps run through the yacht, and focused his eyes on the monitor boards.

  The killfish had launched from its chamber.

  * * *

  The deployment chamber in the Chimera’s lower starboard hold was little different from a torpedo tube, but the minisub housed within bore no resemblance to a conventional weapon or remote underwater vehicle. Nor was there was anything conventional about it.

  What it looked like before ejection was a metal shoe-box with a considerable distension around the middle, as if it had been overfilled until its sides were pushed outward. As it left the chamber and its lateral, rear, and top stabilizer/orientation fins unfolded, its appearance grew closer to that of a fish with an egg-swollen belly.

  Each of these comparisons was appropriate.

  The killfish was full and, after a fashion, pregnant.

  “What’s holding up Gunville?” Marius said.

  “I don’t know,” Cédric replied. They were back on their closed voice link. “Andre told me that he’s gone to the engine room. Some kind of problem.”

  “Bullshit. They’ve got phones in there, and he could reach for one if he chooses,” Marius said. “I’ll bet that son of a bitch is on the pot with his trousers around his ankles, serenading his true love.”

  Cédric grinned. And fondling it, no doubt—l’e petite amour. He wasn’t about to argue Gunville’s case, though.

  “We’ve been down at extreme depth for almost four hours,” Marius said. “Why push things to the limit? We should video the splice and call it quits.”

  “Let’s not work ourselves into a premature snit. Five hours might be pushing.” Besides, Cédric thought, the repair technicians might prefer to receive live imagery from them, observe his curious find from angles of their own choice before lowering their grapple to raise the cable. “We’re bound to hear from the songbird any minute. Meanwhile, we can still do what you suggest, take some pictures—”

  Cédric became distracted by a sudden movement at the far right periphery of his vision. He cocked his head inside the dome port for a better look, but it reduced his field of view just enough so he realized he’d have to turn his whole body.

  He applied the slightest bit of pressure to his left footpad for a thruster assist and was nudged the opposite way.

  A quick spin of his blades, and Marius shifted to face in the same direction. “Don’t tell me the shark’s returned in spite of our PODs being activated.”

  “Probably not. Whatever I glimpsed didn’t seem that large.”

  Cédric was quiet for a moment. There weren’t many forms of aquatic life down here that presented even the slightest hazard, but he was always on the lookout for an unusual specimen, making him an underwater equivalent of a bird-watcher, he supposed. Though it seemed a stretch to believe he’d have two exceptional sightings in a single dive, maybe he’d gotten fortunate. The Ogooué Basin was stocked full of unique tenants, including deepwater octopuses and nautiluses.

  He scanned the underwater dimness, kicking his shoulder lamps to their brightest settings with the touch of a switch inside his hardsuit. Then his gaze fixed on a speedily approaching object about six meters distant at three o’clock.

  He raised an arm to point. “Marius—”

  “I see it,” his partner said. “What the hell is that thing?”

  Cédric’s silence did not stem from any lack of desire to respond. He simply hadn’t the vaguest clue.

  For an instant he entertained the thought that he really had lucked into another sighting. That whatever was coming toward them was a strange, wide-bodied fish to be imaged and subsequently identified for his personal archive of marine animals. As it got closer, however, he realized it was neither fish, nor cephalopod, nor any other type of living creature.

  “I think — Marius, it looks like some kind of unmanned probe.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense… we’d have been informed if one was operating in this area.”

  Cédric was silent again. Marius was right, it didn’t make sense. Just as a splice that shouldn’t have been in the cable made no sense. Yet there it was lying uncovered on the seabed only a few steps from where he stood. And there in the bright fan of his lights was an autonomous underwater vehicle unlike any he’d seen in his entire diving career.

  Then it struck him that it did resemble something he’d seen before — and that flash of sudden recall instantly branched off into another like electronic data through a signal splitter. Cédric’s first clear memory was of a fish he’d often spotted skimming through the sea grass while on a year-long Planétaire telecom project in the Caribbean. His second was of an article he’d read mentioning the same creature — a fish, family Ostraciidae — in one of the scientific monthlies he read with compulsive diligence. National Geographic’s French edition, perhaps, but that didn’t really matter. The important things for him were that the boxfish was distinguished by the hard outer carapace that deterred predators but also made its body rigidly inflexible… and that the boxfish’s means of locomotion, which gave it exceptional stability and maneuverability despite the unbending armor, had been studied by American military researchers interested in using it as a model for the steering and propulsion systems of future generation AUVs.

  All this passed through Cédric’s brain in milliseconds, flashing along parallel but independent paths of recollection toward a sharp, startling convergence as he focused on the robotic craft bearing toward him. If he’d had time to consider them, the implications of what he saw might have caused a slow trickle of fear to filter through his surprise — but he didn’t.

  When fear did overtake him it would be in a cold, blustering rush.

  The AUV had closed to within five meters of the hardsuit pilot and leveled in a stationary position. Cédric noticed a small lenticular window on its underside, a nubby black projection at its front end, and did not like the looks of either.

  Then an opening appeared on the starboard side of the vehicle’s flat hull. Cédric would never know whether the hatch, lid, panel, or whatever it was had recessed into the hull or sprung inward like a trap door — it happened too quickly for him to tell. The opening appeared. And before he could react, a compartme
nt behind the opening released its implausible contents into the water.

  The twenty or so dispersing spheres looked to him like metal ball bearings, although they were somewhat larger than racquetballs in size. Each of them had four tiny screw propellers — one on the upper axis, one on the lower, another two on opposite points across its diameter.

  His eyes wide with amazement, Cédric thought crazily of a toy called a Pokéball he’d once gotten his youngest nephew for his birthday, something that opened up like an egg to release a little cartoon imp.

  He was still thinking of it when the spheres assembled into tight cluster formation and came swarming toward the spot where he stood with his dive partner.

  “Cédric… what’s going on?” Tension brimmed in Marius’s voice. “What are those things?”

  Cédric couldn’t waste an instant with guesswork. He switched to the diver-to-surface freq.

  “Africana, we have a situation,” he said.

  He got an earful of silence in response.

  “This is a mayday, Africana. Repeat, mayday, can you read?” he said.

  More dead silence from topside.

  “God damn it, come in, what’s wrong with you up there?”

  Still nothing. And the rapidly moving spheres were almost on them.

  Cédric abandoned the radio, looked at Marius. He had no shred of a plan in his head, and the knowledge that their thrusters weren’t designed for speed hardly inspired confidence one would come to him. But Cédric had been a navy man for a very long time, and he did not like it at all that the lens-shaped aperture and black projection on the minisub were reminiscent of the guidance and homing packets of seeker torpedoes.

  The robotic swarm meant danger.

  “We have to get away,” he said. The declaration sounded blandly, hatefully obvious. “Try to—”

  They were the last words he managed to get out of his mouth before the spheres came swooping down on them.

  He felt three quick, clapping thumps on the back of his thruster unit, a fourth against the POD encasing his right hand, followed by a fifth and sixth on his left. There were some hard claps to his chest and the side of his neck, and the next instant a staggering thump-thump-thump against his foot that almost threw Cédric off balance into the muddy sediment.