“Equalizing pressure,” the copilot said.
Volke felt his ears popping.
“Pressure matched. Releasing the hatch.”
A hatch opened directly above them. The copilot went out first, followed by Millard. Volke went through last and found the nearest crewman. “Is the next shipment ready?”
“You’ll have to check with the foreman,” the crewman said. “There was a problem with the new cultures.”
Volke glared at Millard for a moment. He suspected the problem was the scientist’s doing. “Come with me.”
With Millard in tow, Volke walked along the metal grate, each footstep echoing off the curved steel walls around them. They made their way to the opening of a steel tube six feet in diameter. This was the conduit that had been welded into place between the docking sphere and the tank next to it, which they called the control sphere.
“After you,” Volke said.
Millard disappeared into the tube and Volke followed just a few steps behind.
* * *
• • •
KURT AND JOE slipped through the gap in the bottom of the docking sphere far more easily than the bulky submarine.
Looking upward, Kurt noticed the same shimmer on the sonar readout that he’d seen when looking to the surface before. There was air on the other side of that shimmering line. “They’ve turned this into an underwater habitat.”
“We should examine their work,” Joe said.
“I thought you’d never ask.”
Kurt shut off the sonar system and studied the layout, using only the visible light. The submarine with the tanker was docked above them to the left. The illumination was brightest in that area. On the other side of the sphere was another submersible, the small, disk-shaped craft they’d battled in the Gulf of Mexico.
“Follow me,” Kurt said.
He swam beneath the disk submersible and surfaced behind it. As expected, there were no crewmen in that area. Joe surfaced moments later and the two of them gazed across the water toward the larger submarine with the tanker on its back.
Three crewmen were working on it, blasting jets of hot air into the couplings of the tanker truck and then following that up with another gas.
“What do you think they’re doing?” Kurt asked.
“Nitrogen,” Joe said. “They’re making sure there’s no water or other impurities in the couplings that might contaminate what they’re about to load. Assuming it’s the bacteria Paul and Gamay discovered, I can’t say I blame them.”
With a second hose connected to the tanker, the men sat down on overturned buckets and waited while the entire truck was pumped full of inert gas.
“How long do you think that will take?”
“Depends on the pressure level,” Joe said. “Speaking of which”—he looked at the screen on his arm—“we have eleven minutes down here before we’re going to need to make a decompression stop. Wouldn’t want to have to tread water at sixty feet with this group chasing us.”
Kurt nodded. “Eleven minutes should be plenty of time to throw a monkey wrench in their plans.”
“What do you suggest?”
“This crew isn’t exactly on high alert,” Kurt said. “You go play Flipper and distract them from the water, I’ll sneak around behind them and put them to sleep.”
“And then?”
“We steal their overalls and walk around like we own the place. Possibly pressing a few buttons and throwing a few levers and doing whatever we can to put this place out of whack.”
Joe slid back into the water while Kurt took off his fins, climbed carefully onto the decking and crept around the semidarkened sphere to a spot behind the three crewmen who were servicing the tanker.
As Kurt crouched there, waiting to attack, a large eruption of bubbles began to foam up on the surface directly in front of the crewmen. One of them stood, leaning forward for a better look. “It’s coming from the Wasp.”
As they looked on, Joe broke the surface, propelled upward by a combination of his own strength and the full energy of the powered dive suit. He surged toward the crewman like a crocodile at the edge of a muddy river.
Instead of a bite, Joe grabbed the man with both hands, yanking him forward and pulling him off the dock and into the water.
The other men stood and rushed forward in shock. They never saw Kurt coming.
Kurt clubbed one man in the back of the neck and he dropped straight down onto the metal grating without anything more than a grunt of pain.
The second man turned, took a punch to the gut, which doubled him over, and a knee to the face that finished him off.
By the time Joe surfaced with the third man—who was coughing and spitting out water and in no mood to fight—Kurt was tying the first two men up.
In a minute flat, all three were stripped of their coveralls, tied and stuffed into the passenger compartment of the strange submarine with the tanker on its hull.
“How many people do you have down here?” Kurt asked.
“Twelve,” one of the crewmen said.
“Including the three of you?”
The man nodded.
“Where did Volke and Millard go?”
“The control sphere.”
Kurt found some tape and slapped it over the mouths of the captives. Additional lengths of tape were wrapped around their ankles and wrists to ensure they wouldn’t slip their bonds.
“You three, sit tight,” Joe said.
With the men secured, Kurt and Joe took off their own helmets, stored them and pulled the crewmen’s coveralls over their dive suits. The compact rebreathers were flat enough to be hidden, especially as the lines and regulators retracted into the unit itself. And while Kurt and Joe appeared slightly hunchbacked when studied in profile, the overalls were loose-fitting enough to disguise it.
Dressed appropriately, they climbed out of the submarine and made their way into the tunnel that Volke and Millard had taken.
“Brilliant idea to turn this into a habitat,” Kurt said. “Spheres are naturally resistant to pressure. Like an archway, only in three dimensions.”
“Normally, I’d agree with you,” Joe said. “But they’ve cut a bunch of holes in them. This tunnel and the gap down below were definitely not part of the original design. From an engineering perspective, that weakens things considerably. I wouldn’t want to live and work down here, and I wouldn’t bet our lives on the structural integrity of this setup. Especially if anything goes wrong.”
Kurt laughed lightly. “What,” he asked, “could possibly go wrong?”
38
GREAT SOUND, BERMUDA
PRIYA SWAM toward the Monarch, aiming for a spot beneath the nose of the huge aircraft. If she was right, the security system would include cameras situated on either side of the bay and motion sensors protecting the grounds of the palatial estate, but nothing directly beneath the plane.
Swimming underneath the Monarch’s belly, she marveled at the size of it. The aircraft was nearly the length of a World War II destroyer. She noticed the details of the hull that weren’t visible in photographs.
The front of the hull was thicker and covered with tiny lines and ridges like those used on America’s Cup yachts. They would make the craft more slippery in the water.
Farther back, the underside of the plane took on a Coke bottle shape and, from that point on, was perforated with thousands of tiny holes that stretched from one side of the aircraft to the other. They could only be high-pressure air valves, designed to pump millions of bubbles into the space between the fuselage and the water.
The process was called supercavitation. It temporarily and drastically reduced the drag on any object moving through a fluid. Using a similar method, marine engineers, including some in NUMA, were building torpedoes and specialized submarines that could do well over a hundred
knots.
Priya marveled at the ingenuity and the extent to which it had been used. Without the system, she doubted the Monarch could ever leave the water.
Continuing toward the tail, Priya reached a spot where the hull began to curve upward. Shutting off the power assist of the dive suit and setting her buoyancy to neutral, she surfaced beneath the slope of the rising tail section. It stretched upward and back at an angle, keeping her in the shadows.
“Time for you to start giving up your secrets,” she whispered to the plane.
She unzipped a small pouch and pulled out a device the size and shape of a smoke alarm. Next, twisting the top of the geotracker a quarter turn, she activated the device and then peeled a protective layer from the base, exposing the adhesive.
Reaching up, she stretched out of the water as far as possible and pressed the device against the flat skin of the aircraft’s tail. It bonded instantly. In thirty seconds, it would be impossible to pry off without a crowbar.
Dropping back down into the water, Priya disappeared beneath the surface without a splash. She swam beneath the aircraft, using only her arms to pull her along, before reactivating the dive suit.
She swam past the nose, made a half turn and set course for home. With a great sense of accomplishment, she left the amphibious aircraft behind.
* * *
• • •
AS PRIYA SWAM away from the Monarch, Tessa Franco was in her office on the aircraft’s upper deck, dealing with her chief engineer.
“I’m not talking to your investors again,” Brian Yates informed her. “Not if you’re going to have me lie about the state of our technology.”
Yates was a genius designer and brilliant chemist, he was also stubborn and had very few interpersonal skills. If he hadn’t been so highly regarded by the tech community, Tessa wouldn’t have trotted him out in front of her possible benefactors.
“They’re not my investors,” she said. “They’re our investors and we won’t have a company without them.”
“We won’t have a company with them,” Yates countered. “Not the way things are going.”
“What are you saying?”
“Exactly what I’ve been saying for months,” he snapped. “The fuel cells don’t work. Certainly not as well as you’re representing. And they never will, not without extensive design changes. They’ll also cost twice as much to manufacture as you’re claiming. You realize there will be no profit at all on the final product. And, I’m not going to stand up in front of a bunch of investors who trust me and tell them otherwise. I have a reputation to protect as well.”
Tessa realized Yates had an overinflated view of his importance, to the point where she’d caught him referring to the fuel cells and the company as if he were the driving force.
“Listen to me, Yates, and listen to me carefully,” she said. “It’s your job to fix that. I’m protecting you, not the other way around. Everything you’ve worked for, everything you’ve been promised, it all goes away if the world suspects there might be a problem with what we’re building. Do you understand?”
Yates was undeterred. “There’s a difference between keeping it quiet and lying. I’m not going to lie anymore. You can find someone else to be your mouthpiece. The next time someone asks me about the system, I’m telling them the truth.”
As Tessa stared, Yates took his conference ID badge and tossed it at her feet.
She ignored the tantrum, her blood running cold instead of hot.
Yates seemed disappointed. He turned his back on her and walked out. She allowed him to reach the hall before pulling out a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson .380 automatic.
“Mr. Yates,” she said coldly. “I will not allow you to ruin me.”
Yates turned, saw the pistol but never got the chance to retract his resignation.
Tessa fired repeatedly, hitting him four times squarely in the chest and sending him to the deck in a pool of spreading blood.
The gunshots echoed through the aircraft and the commotion brought Woods down the corridor.
He stopped and stared at Yates’s body. “What . . . ?”
“Don’t ask,” she said. “Just get rid of him. Take him out to sea and dump him.”
Woods looked at the body and shook his head. “Fine,” he said. “But, we have another problem.”
“Seems to be the night for them,” Tessa said with a sigh. “What is it now?”
“A diver,” Woods said. “A woman, by the looks of it. She swam underneath the plane and then back out into the harbor. We caught sight of her on one of the underwater cameras. She attached something to the fuselage near the tail. I have one of the men checking it out.”
“Tell me you tracked her,” Tessa said.
“We didn’t have time to get a swimmer in the water, but I tracked her with one of the underwater drones. She swam back into Great Sound at a fairly rapid pace. We trailed her to a yacht named Lucid Dream.”
“That’s Hatcher’s yacht,” Tessa growled.
“The investor?”
Tessa shook her head. Things were going from bad to worse. “Something tells me he’s not an investor. Get your men together. Get rid of Yates, then I want Hatcher and this woman brought back here.”
“And if they don’t want to come?”
Tessa glared at him. “I’m not sending you to deliver an invitation.”
39
LNG CARRIER, AT A DEPTH OF ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY FEET
KURT OPENED the watertight door to the control sphere with deliberate caution. There was no hiss of air, which told him the two spheres were kept at equal pressure and that there was also no one directly on the other side.
He stepped through onto the same type of metal grating that had been used in the docking sphere. Ahead of him stood racks of equipment and machinery, all connected by a maze of pipes that ran overhead. Pumps and cooling units could be heard humming, while a stack of the orange and gray fuel cells he’d seen on Tessa’s plane ran along the left side of the sphere.
“No shortage of power,” he whispered.
Near the fuel cells was a control area, with a wall of gauges and a computer screen displaying a diagram of the liquids and gas flowing through the pipes and the various valves.
On the far side, he saw a pair of large vats and several dozen tanks stacked up in racks. The tanks were long and cylindrical, like those used at gas stations to hold propane.
Because the space was a near-perfect sphere, sounds echoed at them from every direction. Footsteps, valves opening and closing, voices. Someone on the far side dropped a tool and the sound reverberated around the sphere multiple times.
Kurt took a path to the left, moved behind the nearest rack of equipment and continued forward, slowing to listen to an echoing voice.
“This . . . this . . . this . . .”
“Pressure at one-zero-five . . . zero-five . . . zero-five . . .”
“Primary vat ready for transfer . . . transfer . . . transfer . . .”
A loud bang sounded as a valve was thrown open and the echo circled them half a dozen times, drowning out the odd bits of conversation.
Kurt glanced through a gap in the machinery. Volke and Millard were at the console near the wall of gauges in the center of the room. They appeared to be having a heated discussion.
“Ever been to Statuary Hall?” Kurt whispered, leaning close to Joe’s ear.
Joe grinned. “You’re thinking of John Quincy Adams.”
Kurt nodded. “Rumor had it, he would pretend to sleep at his desk while eavesdropping on his opponents as their voices echoed off the domed ceiling. If we can find the right spot, we might be able to overhear everything Volke and Millard are saying.”
“Great idea,” Joe said. “We’ll cover more ground if we split up.”
“You go that way,” Kurt said, “I’ll go this w
ay. Keep an eye on the hatch. If anyone heads for the submarine, we need to beat them to it.”
Joe nodded and walked off. Kurt went in the opposite direction, grabbing a clipboard from a hook and carrying it with him.
He wandered from one section of equipment to the next, passing the bank of fuel cells. The acoustics were such that he reached one spot where the machinery noise was amplified and painful to hear. A few feet away, it was almost completely silent.
He moved in closer to propane-style tanks. Each was labeled to hold five hundred gallons of liquefied gas. Oddly, the tanks were hot to the touch. Wandering among them, pretending to check the gauges, Kurt counted forty tanks in all, stacked two high on a scaffold and connected to one another by copper pipes, some of which led back to the large vats.
“We need more storage . . . storage . . . storage . . .”
The words came out of nowhere, but with a French accent. It had to be Millard.
“Pressure getting too high . . . high . . . high . . .”
Kurt moved to the right, heard less, and then moved back to the left.
“I don’t have time to wait around . . . around . . . around . . .”
Kurt assumed the second voice was Volke’s. He moved crouched down as if looking more closely at one of the gauges and found the sweet spot.
“That petrol truck was supposed to be used for siphoning off the gas,” Millard said. “Nine thousand liquefied gallons of it. We’re far beyond safe storage down here already. If you fill it with bacterial cultures instead, this whole production facility will be in danger of shutting down or, worse, blowing up.”
“Relieve the pressure another way,” Volke said. “Vent some of the gas into the sea, if you have to.”
“It reacts with water,” Millard reminded him. “You might as well send up a flare telling the whole world we’re down here.”
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