by Graham Brown
In addition he had to watch Yuri, and he found his nerves jumping anytime the boy moved away from the very center of the boat. As a precaution he’d tightened all the straps on Yuri’s life jacket and secured a second flotation device to his back.
“Think they’d be mad if they came back up and I had you tied to something?”
Yuri ignored him and McCarter had to laugh at himself.
“I used to be the normal one,” he told Yuri. “Now look at me. I’m seeing things. Hearing things.” He glanced over to Yuri, who was ignoring him and playing with the sunglasses again. “Talking to a child who finds plastic sunglasses more interesting than my learned conversation.”
He raised the binoculars to his eyes once again and looked out over the calm gulf waters. It was midafternoon and the sun was blazing from a cobalt blue sky. To the east, some large cumulous clouds had begun to grow. They were a long distance out, but seemed to be moving his way. The last thing he wanted was to be on the water in some kind of storm.
“Come on,” he whispered to his absent comrades. “Let’s not take all day.”
A slight breeze blew up, wafting audibly past his ears.
Why aren’t you paying attention today?
He spun around, looking for the source of those words. No one there, of course.
Why aren’t you paying attention today?
They were his wife’s words. Said kindly, on the days when he was distracted by some problem and not listening to her.
He looked at Yuri. The boy was staring back at him as if he’d heard something, too.
“I’m not even going to ask,” McCarter said.
Another sound caught his ear, a distant rumble of thunder to the east. The storm clouds were still many miles out but they stretched off to the south. He followed the line with the binoculars, wondering if they would cause a problem getting back to shore. And then he caught sight of something new: Two fast-looking boats were cutting across the sea toward them. They were probably five or six miles off, but hauling ass directly at his position.
“Shit,” McCarter said, pulling the binoculars down.
He glanced at Yuri. “Let’s not make those your first English words.”
The boy did not react, and McCarter turned his attention back to the boats, hoping to see a pyramid of water skiers behind them.
He didn’t. And though the boats could have been anything, he had a terrible suspicion as to what they were and who they were interested in.
He grabbed Yuri, strapped him into the passenger chair, and then started the engines.
* * *
Hawker and Danielle reached the top of the stairs. The body lay there in a sarcophagus of some type, wrapped in simple gauze. The setup was nothing elaborate, just simple wood, with carved notches on the sides, like handles for pallbearers.
Danielle peeled the strips of fabric back. The skull was human, barely. Its smooth bone was covered in tiny pores. A filament of wire ran from the empty eye sockets back into the brain cavity. The deformed ribs, the overlarge eyes, all the same defects they had seen on the body in Brazil. Another descendant of man, who’d died several thousand years before he or she would be born.
She looked at Hawker. There was only silence. Respect.
He aimed his light past the body. In the alcove beyond loomed a statue of a Mayan king in full ceremonial dress. It reminded Danielle of the monument taken from the Island of the Shroud, but its arrangement was different. Here the king was holding out his hands the way one might cup falling water. In those hands and protruding into his chest lay a smooth, glasslike object. The stone looked to be the same construction as the one they’d found in Brazil, but it was a different shape and smaller. About the equivalent of a large grapefruit.
Danielle reached over and switched off Hawker’s flashlight. As their eyes adjusted they could see a ghostly white glow coming from the stone.
Hawker walked toward it and reached for it.
“Don’t,” she snapped.
He pulled his hand back, staring at her.
“Just give me a second,” she said, looking around as if there might be a booby trap or two waiting to be sprung on them.
Trying to ignore the concern in his eyes, she stepped toward the stone and pulled it free. It was heavy in her hands, incredibly smooth and warm to the touch. It brought a tingling sensation in her fingers, a wave of energy coursing through her body. She felt a type of elation holding it.
“You all right?” Hawker asked.
His voice brought her back to the present.
“Yeah,” she said. “I just can’t believe we actually found it.”
Carefully she secured it in a pouch, which she zipped shut and clipped to her belt. Following that, she pulled out what looked like an old film camera and began taking pictures.
“Is this part of our retro look?” Hawker said, noting the old-fashioned snap-and-click camera. “To go with the jeep and the boat?”
“Remember how all our electronic equipment went down in Brazil?”
He nodded.
“I figured we’d better have something that wouldn’t be affected.”
She advanced the film with her thumb, asked Hawker to direct his light onto the surface she was shooting, then clicked off the next shot. She took pictures of the statue, the stairwell, and the hieroglyphics there. She took pictures of the ceiling and the walls and the fading murals they contained. She aimed her camera at the body on the altar and then lowered it without snapping the shutter.
Hawker seemed to agree. “Let the poor fellow be,” he suggested.
She finished up and put the camera away. When she was done she thought of destroying the carvings as she and McCarter had done at the Island of the Shroud, but there were no loose stones around and they carried no hammers or other heavy tools. Even the knives, which had been useful against the brittle coral, would be ineffective against the heavy stone of the temple.
She let it go. They didn’t have much time anyway. They still had to get back out and up to the surface within twenty minutes or they’d need a decompression stop, something she didn’t want to do in a shark-infested area.
While she put the camera away, Hawker dove back into the tunnel and retrieved both sets of air tanks. As he swam back in, he perched on the top of the ramp, as if he were sitting on the side of the pool. She climbed up beside him, her eyes settling on the air tank with the split hose.
“Those are yours,” Hawker said.
“You really are hard on equipment,” she said.
“I was trying to save you at the time,” he said.
There wasn’t much she could say to counter that. She crouched down and checked the pressure gauge. The tank’s reserve air feature had activated. Designed to keep all the air from being expended in the event of an accident, it closed an inner valve and reserved a small portion of the mixture to be used only if the diver manually switched to reserve. She disconnected the hose that Hawker had cut and turned the valve so the reserve air would only feed to the spare hose.
“I should have about fifteen minutes on this,” she said. “That ought to be plenty.”
“If not, we can buddy-breathe on this tank,” he replied. “But let’s not waste any more time down here.”
She agreed and slipped over the rim and back into the tunnel.
Just as Hawker had done on the way in, she pushed the tanks ahead of her. In a few seconds she’d made it through and back out in the open sea, thrilled beyond belief to be bathed in the clear blue light once again.
The brief second of euphoria died as her earpiece cackled. Her transceiver had picked up a call from McCarter, one that had been blocked during their time in the temple.
“… coming toward us from the southwest. Do you hear me? Two boats headed right for us at high speed.”
CHAPTER 33
Danielle had her tanks secured by the time Hawker exited the cave. By the haste of his actions, he’d heard the call, too, and was rapidly strapping his own harness ba
ck into place. He pulled it onto his shoulders and they dove for the DPVs they’d left at the entrance to the tunnel.
She grabbed hers by the handle and twisted it to full throttle. The propeller spun and Danielle kicked with her feet to assist the acceleration. In seconds she was cruising as fast as she could possibly move, with Hawker only a few yards behind her.
Together they raced away from the sunken temple, climbing gradually as they did. Fortunately, they hadn’t been down deep enough or long enough to require a true decompression stop, but rocketing to the surface was never a good idea.
They would ascend at a constant angle, giving their bodies time to reabsorb any dissolved nitrogen, and when they spotted McCarter in a minute or two they would drop the scooters and surface.
Suddenly Hawker yelled, “Look out!”
At Hawker’s shout she turned her head. A shadow flashed over, one of the hammerheads buzzing them. A second one followed, brushing her and twisting violently to the right as it passed. It raced into the distance and disappeared, but others were streaming their way, rocketing toward them like underwater missiles.
* * *
On the surface, McCarter couldn’t take his eyes off the boats flying toward them.
He grabbed the transmitter. “If you guys can hear me, you need to hurry. They’re only two miles away at most.”
If he wanted to be safe he would have to go to full throttle soon and start heading west. That was the plan, go west, call the Mexican coast guard, and hope a few helicopters were enough to scare off whoever was attacking them.
It seemed the prudent thing to do, but McCarter couldn’t stand the thought of leaving his friends behind. He bumped the throttle down, wheeled the boat around until it pointed back toward the dive zone, and then grabbed the transmitter once more.
“I’m a half mile north of where we dropped you,” he said. “I’ll wait as long as I can.”
Suddenly Yuri dropped the sunglasses, stood up, and began staring trancelike at the water ahead of them.
* * *
Danielle turned to the left, angling down to get away from the oncoming sharks, but even with the propulsion of the DPV and her own legs kicking, the sharks were moving at three or four times her speed.
A few of the smaller ones zipped past her; another dive-bombed her from above, slamming her shoulder. She looked for Hawker. He was coming her way, his own DPV running full throttle, but the sharks were basically ignoring him. For a moment it actually pissed her off, until she realized why.
The hammerheads, the circling honor guard of the sunken temple, were homing in on the object that had drawn them there in the first place: the power-emitting stone now secured in Danielle’s pack.
None of them had tried to bite her, at least not yet. In fact they seemed almost oblivious to her presence, as stunned and surprised by the sudden impacts as she was. But they were unable to resist the sensory overload in the magnetic detectors in their brains and they continued to come on in waves.
She twisted to escape another hit but there were too many sharks to avoid. It soon became a blur, like being caught in a stampeding crowd. Her world spun: the gray tops of the sharks, the white of their underbellies, bubbles from her regulator exploding around her.
A glancing blow on one leg was followed by a thud on her right arm and then a shot to the ribs that bent her body and whiplashed her neck.
“Hang on!” Hawker shouted.
“They’re after the stone,” she managed to say.
In the next moment a large group of the juveniles hit, spinning her around and leaving her disoriented.
She saw a larger one rocketing in. She dodged the hit, but the shark crashed into the DPV, ripping it from her hands and sending the yellow device spiraling toward the bottom.
She righted herself, saw a flash of the surface above, and kicked toward it but something grabbed her. She turned to see Hawker; with an arm around her waist he pulled her close. She reached for a handhold on the DPV just as the acceleration from the propulsion unit kicked in.
Another group of sharks came racing their way. She hardened her body against the impact, but two more followed, and a third on its own.
They broke the surface and Danielle spun around. McCarter was racing toward them in the boat. Thank God he was close. He slowed and turned beside them.
She grabbed the ladder, pulling herself up as Hawker pushed her from behind.
Tumbling into the boat, she whipped around, stretching a hand toward Hawker.
He clutched at it, just as a gray-green shape split the surface, rammed him like a torpedo, and dragged him away.
She felt his hand ripped from hers.
“Follow him!” she shouted to McCarter.
McCarter punched the throttles and spun the wheel and Danielle grabbed for the speargun.
* * *
Flying through the water, pushed by the big shark, Hawker felt as if he’d been hit by a train. His mask was torn off and the DPV wrenched out of his hands as he was pulled by forces he could not overcome or even influence.
He twisted and wrenched his body to try to free himself but the animal’s flat, angular head had wedged itself between his tanks and his back.
And then suddenly he flipped over and slowed. The shark had torn itself free after dragging him two hundred feet or so.
Kicking upward, Hawker burst through the surface, gulping the air and looking around for the boat. He spotted it circling toward him.
He guessed, and hoped, that the sharks would leave him alone now, as they had before he’d teamed up with Danielle. But as he caught his breath and began to tread water, he saw a line of color dripping down the edge of his nose. He touched his forehead and his hand came away red with blood.
Instant panic hit him. He shed his tanks and began kicking hard for the oncoming boat, trying desperately to keep his face above the water.
* * *
On the boat, Danielle saw him. She saw the blood and a pair of dorsal fins slicing through the surface right at him.
She threw out the cargo net. “Hurry!” she yelled to McCarter.
They sped toward him. Hawker grabbed the net. Danielle pulled with all her might, leaning back and throwing her weight into it.
Hawker rolled and tumbled into the boat as one of the hammerheads launched itself, arching its back, half its body out of the water.
It landed on the cutaway, tipping the small craft, almost swamping it.
The front third of the shark was inside the vessel. The head whipped around, jaws snapping for anything it could grab. Yuri screamed, Hawker kicked it, and Danielle grabbed for the speargun again.
And then it flipped back into the water and disappeared in a tremendous splash.
“Go!” she shouted.
McCarter punched the throttles and the V-hulled fishing boat leaped forward like a stallion launching itself from the gate.
Danielle locked the cutaway back into place as other sharks whipped by. They followed briefly before falling behind the speeding boat. All she could think of was Petrov’s story of being followed by sharks and killer whales. She thanked God that she’d rented the fastest boat available.
Suddenly she felt Yuri at her side. “This siren,” he said, grabbing for the stone. “This siren.”
She tried to calm him and then opened the equipment locker and pulled out a lead-lined box they’d had specially made. She placed the stone into the box, sealed it shut, then slipped the box into her backpack. Beside her, Yuri stared.
“Siren,” he said quietly. “Siren.” As Danielle placed her pack inside the locker and latched it shut, he sat next to it and stared as if it were a television.
Danielle stroked his hair and looked out in front of them. A mile off, the boats McCarter had seen were splitting up, one continuing toward them, the other heading directly west to cut them off.
Perhaps the hard part was not over.
CHAPTER 34
The convoy of vehicles rumbled down a weathered strip of r
oad in the high desert of western Nevada. A camouflaged eighteen-wheeler held the center position, flanked by an escort of machine-gun-toting Humvees and a pair of missile-armed Black Hawk helicopters two hundred feet above.
Fifty miles more and they’d arrive at Yucca Mountain and the erstwhile nuclear depository that had been in limbo for the better part of three decades.
The place had originally been designed to store nuclear waste, with the plan that it would accept the growing stockpiles of spent radioactive fuel from all across the nation. But the environmentalists had attacked and overwhelmed the process almost from day one. Years of litigation, impact studies, and changing political winds had left Yucca Mountain empty. As a result the vast majority of the country’s radioactive materials remained right where they were: at 107 different reactor sites, most of which were only lightly guarded and just miles from the nation’s largest population centers. Apparently, to those who fought against the project, that was a safer alternative.
Such efforts had left Yucca Mountain sitting empty and thus usable for the NRI. And so Moore’s team had removed the Brazil stone from its vault beneath the Virginia Industrial Complex and loaded it onto a military C-17. After a four-hour flight they touched down in Nevada and then continued overland toward Yucca Mountain.
The journey had been planned with meticulous precision, designed to bring the stone out of hiding during the lowest phase of its power surge, when it was all but dormant, and get it back into hiding before the wave began to grow once again. So far, the transit had gone off without a hitch. As things looked, they would be deep in the mountain bunker at least seven hours before the next burst.
Riding in the cab of the semitruck, Arnold Moore listened as one of the Black Hawks thundered overhead, moving forward to take point in the formation. He found himself amused at the overkill of their protection force.