Dragon

by Clive Cussler

  "I'm sorry," he murmured between breaths.

  As if under a hypnotic spell, Stacy and Salazar slowly walked from the cabin. Salazar remained quiet while Stacy began to softly cry. After a few moments, she wiped away the tears with her hand and straightened.

  "He saw something," she murmured.

  Salazar looked at her. "Saw what?"

  "He knew, in some incredible way he knew." She turned and looked through the open doorway to the silent figure on the bunk. "Just before the end, Jimmy could see who was responsible for the horrible mass death and destruction.

  <<11>>

  You could tell from his body, slim almost to the state of emaciation, that he was a fitness and nutrition fanatic. He was short, chin and chest thrust out like a banty rooster, and nattily dressed in a light blue golf shirt with matching pants and a Panama straw hat pulled tight over closely cropped red hair to keep it from blowing away. He had an exactingly trimmed red Vandyke beard that came to a point so sharp you'd swear he could stab flesh with it if he lunged suddenly.

  He stormed up the gangway of the junk, a huge cigar poked in his mouth throwing sparks from the breeze, as regally as if he was holding court. If style awards were handed out for dramatic entrances, Admiral James Sandecker, Director of the National Underwater and Marine Agency, would have won hands down.

  His face looked strained from the grievous news he'd received from Giordino while in flight. As soon as his feet hit Shanghai Shelly's deck, he raised his hand at the pilot of the flying boat, who gave an acknowledging wave. The aircraft turned into the wind and bounced forward over the crests of the waves until it was airborne and soaring in a graceful bank southeast toward the Hawaiian Islands.

  Giordino and Murphy stepped forward. Sandecker focused his gaze on the junk's owner. ,

  "Hello, Owen. I never expected to meet you out here."

  Murphy smiled and shook hands. "Likewise, Jim. Welcome aboard. It's good to see you." He paused and pointed to the grimfaced NUMA team who were crowded around them on the open deck. "Now maybe someone will tell me what that big light and thunder show was on the horizon yesterday, and why all these people are popping up in the middle of the ocean."

  Sandecker did not reply directly. He looked about the deck and up at the draped sails. "What have you got yourself here'?"

  "Had it custom built in Shanghai. My crew and I were sailing her to Honolulu and then on to San Diego, where I plan to dock her."

  "You know each other?" Giordino asked finally.

  Sandecker nodded. "This old pirate and I went to Annapolis together. Only Owen was smarter. He resigned from the Navy and launched an electronics company. Now he's got more money than the U.S.

  Treasury."

  Murphy smiled. "Don't I wish."

  Sandecker suddenly turned serious. "What news of the base since you briefed me over the radio?" he asked Giordino.

  "We're afraid it's gone," Giordino replied quietly. "Underwater phone communications from our remaining sub have gone unanswered. Keith Harris thinks the major shock wave must have struck shortly after we evacuated. As I reported, there wasn't enough space to evacuate everybody in two subs. Pitt and a British marine scientist volunteered to stay below."

  "What's being done to save them?" Sandecker demanded.

  Giordino looked visibly cast down, as though all emotion had been drained away. "We've run out of options."

  Sandecker went cold in the face. "You fell down on the job, mister. You led me to believe you were returning in the backup submersible."

  "That was before Lowden surfaced with shorted batteries!" Giordino snapped back resentfully. "With the first sub sunk and the second inoperable, we were stonewalled."

  Sandecker's expression softened, the coldness was gone, his eyes saddened. He realized Giordino had been dogged by ill luck. To even suggest the little Italian had not tried his best was wrong, and he regretted it. But he was shaken by Pitt's apparent loss too.

  To him, Pitt was the son he never had. He'd have ordered out an entire army of specially trained men and secret equipment the American public had no idea existed if fate granted him another thirty-six hours.

  Admiral Sandecker had that kind of power in the nation's capital. He didn't arrive where he was because he'd answered a help wanted ad in the Washington Post.

  He said, "Any chance the batteries can be repaired?"

  Giordino nodded over the side at the submersible rolling in the swells twenty meters away, tethered on a stern line to Shanghai Shelly. "Lowden is working like a madman trying for a quick fix, but he's not optimistic."

  "If anyone is to blame, it's me," Murphy said solemnly.

  "Pitt could still be alive," said Giordino, ignoring Murphy. "He's not a man who dies easily."

  "Yes." Sandecker paused, then went on almost absently. "He's proven that many times in the past."

  Giordino stared at the admiral, a spark glowing in his eyes. "If we can get another submersible out here. . ."

  "The Deep Quest can dive to ten thousand meters," Sandecker said, coming back on keel. "She's sitting on our dock in Los Angeles Harbor. I can have her loaded aboard an Air Force CFive and on her way here by sundown."

  "I didn't know a C-Five could land on water," Murphy interrupted.

  "They can't," Sandecker said definitely. "The Deep Quest, all twelve metric tons of her, will be air-dropped out the cargo doors." He glanced at his watch. "I'd guess about eight hours from now."

  "You're going to drop a twelve-ton submersible out of an airplane by parachute?"

  "Why the hell not? It'd take a week to get here by boat."

  Giordino stared at the deck thoughtfully. "We could eliminate a mass of problems if we worked off a support ship with launch and retrieval capacity."

  "The Sounder is the closest ocean survey ship to our area that fits the picture. She's sonar-mapping the seafloor south of the Aleutians. I'll order her captain to cut his mission and head toward our position as fast as he can push her."

  "How can I be of help?" asked Murphy. "After sinking your sub, the least I can do is offer the services of my ship and crew."

  Giordino smiled inwardly as Sandecker lifted his arms and gripped Murphy's shoulders. Laying on the hands, Pitt used to call it. Sandecker didn't just ask an unsuspecting subject for a favor, he made his victims feel as if they were being baptized.

  "Owen," the admiral said in his most reverent tone, "NUMA will be in your debt if we can use your junk as a fleet command ship."

  Owen Murphy was no slouch when it came to recognizing a con job. "What fleet?" he asked with feigned innocence.

  "Why, half the United States Navy is converging on us," answered Sandecker, as if his secret briefing by Raymond Jordan was common knowledge. "I wouldn't be surprised if one of their nuclear submarines was cruising under our hull this minute."

  It was, Murphy mused, the craziest tale he'd ever heard in his life. But no one on board Shanghai Shelly, excepting the admiral himself, had the slightest notion of how prophetic his words were. Nor were they aware that the rescue attempt was the opening act for the main event.

  Twenty kilometers away, the attack submarine Tucson was running at a depth of 400 meters and closing on the junk's position. She was early. Her skipper, Commander Beau Morton, had driven her hard after receiving orders at Pearl Harbor to reach the explosion area at full speed. On arrival, his mission was to run tests on underwater radiological contamination and salvage any floating debris that could be safely brought aboard.

  Morton casually leaned against a bulkhead with an empty coffee cup dangling in one hand, watching Lieutenant Commander Sam Hauser of the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory. The Navy scientist was indifferent to Morton's presence. He was intent on monitoring his radiochemical instruments and computing beta and gamma intensities received from probes trailing behind the submarine.

  "Are we glowing in the dark yet?" asked Morton sarcastically.

  "Radioactivity is pretty unevenly distributed," replied Hause
r. "But well below maximum permissible exposure. Heaviest concentration is above."

  "A surface detonation?"

  "A ship, yes, not a submarine. Most of the contamination was airborne."

  "Any danger to that Chinese junk north of us?"

  Hauser shook his head. "They should have been too far upwind to receive anything but a trace dosage."

  "And now that they're drifting through the detonation area?" Morton persisted.

  "Due to the high winds and turbulent seas during and immediately after the explosion," Hauser explained patiently, "the worst of the radiation was carried into the atmosphere and far to the east. They should be within safe limits where they are."

  The compartment phone gave off a soft hi-tech chime. Hauser picked, it up. "Yes?"

  "Is the captain there, sir?"

  "Hold on." He handed the receiver to Morton.

  "This is the captain."

  "Sir, Sonarman Kaiser. I have a contact. I think you should listen to it."

  "Be right there." Morton hung up the phone, wondering abstractedly why Kaiser didn't routinely call over the intercom.

  The commander found Sonarman First Class Richard Kaiser leaning over his console listening through his earphones, a bewildered expression furrowing his brow. Morton's executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Ken Fazio, was pressing a spare set of phones against his ears. He looked downright dumbstruck.

  "You have a contact?" asked Morton.

  Kaiser didn't answer immediately but went on listening for a few more moments. At last he pulled up the phone over his left ear and muttered, "This is crazy."

  "Crazy?"

  "I'm getting a signal that shouldn't be."

  Fazio shook his head as if agreeing. "Beats me."

  "Care to let me in on your secret?" Morton asked impatiently.

  "I'll put it on the speaker," said Kaiser.

  Morton and several officers and men who had received the news of a strange contact by osmosis gathered around the sonar enclosure, staring up at the speaker expectantly. The sounds were not perfect but they were clear enough to be understood. No high-pitched squeak of whales, no whirring crick of propeller cavitation, but rather voices singing.

  And every night

  when the starfish came out.

  I'd hug and kiss her so.

  Oh, what a time I had

  with Minnie the Mermaid

  Down in her seamy bungalow.

  Morton fixed Kaiser with a cold stare. "What's the gag?"

  "No gag, sir."

  "It must be coming from that Chinese junk."

  "No, sir, not the junk or any other surface vessel."

  "Another submarine?" Morton inquired skeptically. "A Russian maybe?"

  "Not unless they're building them ten times tougher than ours," said Fazio.

  "What range and bearing?" Morton demanded.

  Kaiser was hesitant. He had the look of a little boy who was in trouble and afraid to tell the truth.

  "No horizontal compass bearing, sir. The singing is coming from the bottom of the sea, five thousand meters straight down."

  <<12>>

  Yellowish ooze, made up of microscopic skeletons from a marine plant called the diatom, slowly drifted away in serpentine clouds, shrouded by the total blackness of the abyssal deep.

  The bottom of the gorge where the NUMA mining station once stood had been filled by silt and rock slides into a broken, irregular plain littered with half-buried boulders and scattered wreckage. There should have been a deathly silence after the final rumblings of the earthquake died away, but a warped chorus of "Minnie the Mermaid" rose from under the desolated wasteland and rippled out into the liquid void.

  If one could have walked over the debris field to the sound source, they'd have found a single antenna shaft, bent and twisted, poking up through the mud. A grayish-pink ratfish briefly inspected the antenna but, finding it unsavory, flicked its pointed tail and lazily swam into the dark.

  Almost before the ratfish disappeared, the silt a few meters from the antenna began to stir, swirling in an ever widening vortex that was weirdly illuminated from below. Suddenly a shaft of light burst through the ooze, joined by a mechanical hand shaped like a scoop and articulated at the wrist. The steel apparition paused and straightened like a prairie dog standing on its haunches and sniffing the horizon for a coyote.

  Then the scoop arched downward, gouging through the seabed, excavating a deep trench that began to ascend at one end like a ramp. When it struck a boulder too large to fit in the scoop, a great metal claw appeared magically alongside. The claw's talonlike pincers bit around the boulder, yanked it free from the sediment, and dropped it clear of the trench in a billowing mud cloud. The claw then swung clear, and the scoop continued digging.

  "Nice work, Mr. Pitt," said Plunkett, grinning with relief. "You'll have us out and driving through the countryside by teatime."

  Pitt lay back in a reclining seat, staring up at a TV monitor with the same attentive concern he usually reserved for a football game. "We're not on the road yet."

  "Boarding one of your Deep Sea Mining Vehicles and running it into the air pressure lock before the major quake hit was a stroke of genius."

  "I wouldn't go that far," Pitt muttered while programming the vehicle's computer to slightly alter the angle of the scoop. "Call it theft of Mr. Spock's logic."

  "The airlock walls held," Plunkett argued. "But for fickle providence, we'd have been crushed like bugs."

  "The chamber was built to withstand four times the pressure of the other project structures," Pitt said with a quiet unarguable assertion. "Fickle providence, as you call it, gave us time to pressurize the lock, open the outer door, and move forward enough for the scoop and claw to operate before the avalanche struck. Otherwise we'd be trapped for longer than I care to think about."

  "Oh, bloody hell." Plunkett laughed. There was little that fazed him. "What does it matter so long as we cheat the grave?"

  "I wish you wouldn't use the word `grave.' "

  "Sorry." Plunkett sat in a seat beside and slightly to the rear of Pitt. He stared around the interior of the DSMV. "A damned fine machine. What's its power source?"

  "A small nuclear reactor."

  "Nuclear, heh? You Yanks never cease to amaze me. I'll wager we can drive this monster right across the bottom and onto Waikiki Beach."

  "You'd win your bet," said Pitt with a faint grin. "Big John's reactor and life-support systems could get us there. The only problem being a flat-out speed of five kilometers per hour. We'd die of starvation a good week before we arrived."

  "You didn't pack a lunch?" Plunkett asked humorously.

  "Not even an apple."

  Plunkett gave Pitta dry look. "Even death would be a treat if I didn't have to hear that blasted tune again."

  "You don't care for 'Minnie'?" Pitt asked in mock surprise.

  "After hearing the chorus for the twentieth time, no."

  "With the telephone housing smashed, our only contact with the surface is the acoustic radio transmitter. Not nearly enough range for conversation, but it's all we've got. I can offer you Strauss waltzes or the big band sounds of the forties, but they wouldn't be appropriate."

  "I don't think much of your musical inventory," Plunkett grunted. Then he looked at Pitt. "What's wrong with Strauss?"

  "Instrumental," Pitt answered. "Distorted violin music can sound like whales or several other aquatic mammals through water. Minnie is a vocal. If anyone on the surface is listening, they'll know someone down here is still sucking air. No matter how garbled, there's no mistaking good old human babble."

  "For all the good that will do," said Plunkett. "If a rescue mission is launched, there's no way we can transfer from this vehicle to a submersible without a pressure lock. A commodity totally lacking on your otherwise remarkable tractor. If I may speak realistically, I fail to see anything in the near future but our inevitable demise."

  "I wish you wouldn't use the word `demise.' "

/>   Plunkett reached into a pocket of his big woolen sweater and produced a flask. "Only about four swigs left, but it ought to keep our spirits up for a while."

  Pitt took the offered flask as a muffled rumble shook the big tracked vehicle. The scoop had screeched into a mass of stone and attempted to lift it clear. Far beyond its load safety level, it struggled and groaned to hoist the debris. Like an Olympic weight lifter straining for the gold, the scoop heaved its massive burden above the seafloor and dumped it in a growing mound along the trench.

  The outside lights failed to penetrate the mud clouds, and the monitors inside the control cabin showed only constantly merging colors of yellow and gray. But the computer monitor gave a three-dimensional sonar image that displayed the extent of the excavation.

  Fully five hours had elapsed since Pitt began the digging operation. At last he could see an enhanced display showing a narrow but reasonably clear corridor slanting toward the surface of the seabed.

  "We'll scrape some paint off the fenders, but I think we can squeeze through," Pitt said confidently.

  Plunkett's face lit up. "Kick her in the butt, Mr. Pitt. I'm sick to death of staring at this filthy muck."

  Pitt's head tilted slightly and he gave a wink of one green eye. "As you wish, Mr. Plunkett." He took over manual control from the computer and rubbed his hands like a pianist about to play. "Cross your fingers the tracks get a firm grip on the sediment or we'll have to take up permanent residence."

  He gently eased the throttle control forward. The wide track crawlers on the sides of Big John slowly began to move, churning through the soft ooze, turning faster as Pitt increased the power. Gradually they inched forward. Then one track caught and gripped on a layer of small stones, stewing the giant mining machine into the opposite side of the trench. Pitt fought to correct, but the wall gave way and the mudflow spread over one side of the vehicle.