Zero Hour

by Clive Cussler

  “Fine,” Devlin said. “So he got you on with us and had you put aboard the Java Dawn. But the ship—this ship—it went down. I saw it. That was no illusion.”

  Janko exhaled like a parent tiring of questions from a curious child. “No, Padi, it wasn’t.”

  “How the hell did you do it, then?”

  “Follow me,” Janko said. “You’re about to find out.”

  Janko led Devlin in through the main hatch and then through a second, inner hatch. For the first time, Devlin noticed that the outer section of the ship was left pretty much as it had been when he’d seen it years back. It looked neglected, disused. But once they passed the inner hatch, things were different.

  Soon, Devlin found himself in a modern control room. Chart tables, propulsion gauges, radarscopes, and graphic displays surrounded him. Large screens on the front wall were set up like the forward view from the bridge; in fact, they showed the gray sky and the cold sea ahead of the ship, piped in from the highest vantage point of a group of video cameras.

  “When did all this get done?”

  “I told you,” Janko insisted, “the changes were made before the ship was towed off the beach.”

  “But we inspected it for leaks.”

  “The outer hull only,” Janko reminded him. “Besides, I was with you to make sure you didn’t stray into any sensitive areas.”

  Devlin remembered now. They’d checked the repair job and the lower decks, the engine room and the bilge. No one had bothered with the inner spaces of the ship.

  Janko turned his attention to one of the crewmen. “Switch to infrared.”

  The crewman flicked a switch, and the right-hand screen cycled. The color changed from gray to an orange hue. Suddenly, the clouds, mist, and spitting rain were gone. The visibility that had been less than a mile was no longer a problem. Like magic, the shape of a large, cone-shaped island suddenly took up the center of the monitor. The central peak soared thousands of feet into the sky. It seemed impossible to have been a mile or so out and yet have the mist hiding the island so thoroughly.

  Even as his eyes were growing wide, Devlin’s ears began to pop. “What’s happening?”

  “Inner hull pressurized,” one of the crewmen said, “outer hull flooding.”

  On the left screen, Devlin saw the bow of the ship settling toward the sea. A few moments later, the water rushed in from all sides as air surged out of hidden vents in the decking. In seconds, the foredeck was submerged. The water level moved rapidly higher, traveling up the superstructure and engulfing the camera.

  Suddenly, all Devlin saw was darkness and the swirl of water in front of the lens. It took a minute for the view to clear, but even then there was nothing in the frame but the ship’s bow.

  “A submarine?” Devlin said. “You turned this ship into a bloody submarine?”

  “The central section of this ship is a pressure hull,” Janko explained. “The rest is just camouflage.”

  Despite his anger, Devlin found himself impressed. “How deep can it go?”

  “No more than eighty feet.”

  “You’ll be spotted from the air.”

  “The black paint reflects almost no light, and it also absorbs radar.”

  That explained why the paint was so thick and rubbery, Devlin thought.

  “And all the radar masts and antennas?”

  “We had to do away with them,” Janko said. “They tend to cause problems when we submerge.”

  “You’ll still be picked up on sonar.”

  Janko seemed exasperated. “We don’t travel around like this, Padi. We travel on the surface, like we have been. We merely do this to hide. And . . . to park.”

  “Park?”

  “Activate the approach lights,” Janko said to a crewman.

  In the far distance, a line of yellow-green lights came on. They ran along the seafloor. To some extent, they resembled the dashed centerline on a dark highway.

  “Five degrees to port,” Janko said. “Reduce speed to three knots.”

  As Devlin watched, the crewman to his left tapped away on a keyboard. “Auto guidance locked. Auto-docking sequence initiated.”

  The ship continued toward the dim lights.

  “In position,” the crewman said.

  “Open outer doors.”

  A few more taps on the keyboard, and a thin crack of light appeared in what looked like a wall of rock. Before Devlin’s eyes, the crack widened as huge doors slid open, revealing a narrow portal in the sloped side of the island’s submerged foundation.

  Using bow and stern thrusters, the Voyager countered the current and moved slowly into what proved to be a gigantic, naturally formed cave.

  “All stop,” the helmsman said.

  “Cave doors closing,” the other crewman reported.

  “Surface the Voyager,” Janko ordered.

  The sound of high-pressure air forcing water from the ship’s tanks became audible. It reached a crescendo just as the four-hundred-foot vessel broke the surface.

  Devlin watched in awe as the water drained away from the cameras and then shed itself from the decks. More artificial lighting came on, illuminating the cave around them, a space just slightly larger than the Pacific Voyager itself.

  A slight bump was felt.

  “Docking ramp is in position,” the crewman said.

  Janko nodded. “Bring the prisoners,” he said. “I’ll show Padi his new home personally.”

  “New home?”

  “That’s right,” Janko said. “Welcome to Tartarus. Prison of the Gods.”

  NUMA vessel Orion, 1530 hours

  1,700 miles southwest of Perth

  After thwarting the hijacking of the Ghan, Kurt, Joe, and Hayley had switched modes of transport, taking a chartered jet to Perth and then boarding a Sea Lynx helicopter that flew them to the NUMA vessel Orion when she was still three hundred miles from the coast.

  From there, the Orion had turned southwest, heading back out to sea. Three other ships in the NUMA fleet were joining them and heading in different directions. They were moving south, attempting to set up a picket line using the sensing devices Hayley had designed. The plan was simple. If Thero tested his device, they should be able to locate him.

  As Hayley began the long task of calibrating the sensors, Kurt made his way up to the bridge. He arrived just as the third watch began.

  Through the large plate-glass windows, he could see that the sky had darkened and lowered, and the sea had turned a dark iron gray. The western swell continued at four to five feet, surprisingly calm for this section of the world. Still, Kurt didn’t like the look of things.

  He grabbed two mugs with the name ORION on them and a small representation of the constellation’s stars embossed on the side. He filled them with coffee and wandered over to Joe, who was standing with the Orion’s captain, studying the charts and the weather report.

  “Captain?” Kurt said, offering one of the mugs.

  “No thanks,” Captain Winslow replied.

  “I’ll take one,” Joe said.

  Kurt handed one mug to Joe and kept the other for himself. He took a sip and then nodded toward the weather report. “What’s the word?”

  “No storm yet,” Joe said, “but the pressure’s dropping. We’re looking at a disturbance coming in from the west.”

  It was March, which meant it was early fall in the southern hemisphere. The worst of the weather would not hit for another month or so, but south of 40 degrees latitude they’d entered an area known as the Roaring Forties. At this latitude, the Great Southern Ocean encircled the Earth uninterrupted by land. It could brew up a monster storm whenever it chose.

  “So far, we’ve been lucky,” Winslow said. “But my old bones tell me this weather isn’t going to hold.”

  “Quiet before the storm?” Joe asked.<
br />
  “Something like that,” the captain said.

  “We have to keep going,” Kurt said, “even if the weather hits hard.”

  Winslow seemed determined as well, but only to a degree.

  “We won’t let you down,” he assured Kurt. “But if there’s a point at which the danger to the ship and crew becomes too great, I’ll have to make that call. The Orion’s a strong ship, but she wasn’t built for a full-on gale.”

  Kurt nodded. The captain was master of the ship, and though Kurt was in charge of the mission, the captain’s word would hold sway. “What about the others?”

  Joe pointed to the chart. “Paul and Gamay are aboard the Gemini.”

  On the map, she was a long way out of formation.

  “Why is she so far behind us?”

  “She had to come all the way from Singapore.”

  “Frustrating,” Kurt said. “But it’s worth the wait to get Paul and Gamay on the team. What about the others?”

  “Dorado’s here,” Joe said, pointing to a different section of the map well to the east, almost directly under the center of Australia.

  “And the Hudson is way over here, south of New Zealand. They just got the equipment delivered. Two days, at least, before they come online.”

  Kurt studied the chart. Four tiny ships, just dots on the map in the vast sea. They were the only real hope of finding Thero before he acted.

  “You think this is going to work?” Joe asked.

  “It all depends on Hayley’s sensors.”

  “You don’t seem as certain as before,” Joe noted.

  “She’s hiding something,” Kurt said.

  “And yet, you like her,” Joe noted.

  “All the more reason to be careful,” Kurt said.

  At this, Joe nodded. “It’s always the punch you’re not looking for that hits the hardest.”

  Kurt took a sip of the coffee and glanced out the bridge windows into the deepening gloom. He couldn’t help but wonder which direction that punch might come from.

  • • •

  EIGHTY-SIX MILES BEHIND THE ORION, a different kind of vessel loomed out in the darkness. From all appearances, the MV Rama was a containership. A check of her logs and cargo would prove that she spent most of her time transporting goods from Vietnam to Australia and back. In fact, she’d been fully loaded with electronics and only hours from Perth when Dmitry Yevchenko had bought her, lock, stock, and barrel, and diverted her to the south, turning her into a floating command ship for Anton Gregorovich and the commandos the Russian government had put at his disposal.

  The Rama was smaller than most containerships of the day, only five hundred and sixty feet at a time when seven-hundred- and eight-hundred-footers were rapidly being dwarfed by thousand-foot behemoths. But what she did not have in size, she made up for in speed, with a top rate of twenty-eight knots.

  As Gregorovich gazed at a satellite feed downloaded to them from a Russian satellite, he was thankful for that choice. The Americans had been racing south at nearly thirty knots since the moment Gregorovich had found them.

  “Why are we following them?” a man with a heavily bandaged face asked.

  “Because you failed to capture the woman,” Gregorovich said.

  “We have helicopters and jamming equipment,” Victor Kirov replied. “And twenty trained commandos on board. We could take her now with ease.”

  Gregorovich didn’t like having official Russian agents on his team, or even the Red Army commandos they’d sent him, but at least he could trust the soldiers. With an ambitious GRU man like Kirov, that was not possible.

  “You’re lucky I allowed you to come aboard, Victor. You’ve lost face with me in more ways than one.”

  Kirov bristled at the comment but didn’t respond.

  “Don’t you see?” Gregorovich asked. “The Americans know something. They wouldn’t be driving through the waves at flank speed if they didn’t. They are the hounds chasing the fox. We are the hunters on horseback. At this point, it’s best to shadow them from a distance, using the satellite granted us by the Kremlin to keep an eye on them from over the horizon. When they settle on a final location, we’ll act.”

  Kirov snorted and shook his head. “If Thero proves to have a workable weapon, the Americans will swarm here like a horde of angry bees. Our little force will be no match for them. We must find him and destroy or take what he is building before he tests it in a way that alerts the world.”

  “Take it?” Gregorovich said. “So we have alternate plans now?”

  “If some of the technology can be recovered, we are to do so,” Kirov noted.

  “Those were not my orders,” Gregorovich said.

  “They’re mine,” Kirov replied.

  This was odd, Gregorovich thought, but not totally unexpected. He shrugged it off, more concerned with the fact that he hadn’t been told than the actual task.

  “And what are we to do with the little toy you brought along?” He nodded toward a case secured to the far bulkhead. A nuclear warhead lay inside. A suitcase bomb. The mother of all suitcase bombs, really.

  The Russian designation was RA-117H. While most tactical warheads yield a few kilotons at best—enough to vaporize several city blocks and perhaps devastate a square mile or so—the RA-117H yielded far more. Nearly three times the power of the Hiroshima bomb.

  “Once we have samples of the technology, we are to activate the weapon and obliterate the site. There are to be no remnants of Thero or his experiments this time.”

  Maxmillian Thero walked past a line of his engineers and technicians, a group of misfits he’d molded into a production team. Among them was a North Korean who’d escaped Kim Jong-il, an Iranian couple who’d fallen under suspicion of the radical Ahmadinejad government when their efforts in building his bomb were sabotaged by an American or Israeli computer virus, a Pakistani scientist wanted by Interpol for selling nuclear secrets, a middle-aged German woman whose radical thoughts made her persona non grata in her homeland, and a youth from Chechnya who was brilliant beyond his years but who’d been forced into hiding under the threat of a death sentence for killing Russian soldiers.

  In a way, they were his children, Thero mused. But only in a way.

  A mixture of fear, promises, and lack of other options kept them at his side, working like devout believers.

  “You are the lost sheep whom I’ve gathered beneath my wings,” Thero said, the arrogance in his baritone voice echoing in the semidarkened control room. “Together, we shall witness the fruits of our labor. The brilliance of my genius.”

  He moved to a control panel and flipped a series of switches. Lights came on around them, and a suite of computer monitors lit up. Beyond the panels lay a large Plexiglas window. On the other side, a great cavern was illuminated. Perfectly spherical, it stretched nearly five hundred feet from the polished stone floor to the curved, domelike roof. Much of it was natural, but Thero’s believers and his slaves had worked it into the shape of a perfect sphere.

  Inside the sphere sat a mechanical orb, made of metal pipes and scaffolding. It resembled a monstrous gyroscope, and, in a sense, it could act as one, pivoting in any and all directions.

  This was Thero’s weapon, the ultimate expression of his genius. With it, he could direct vast amounts of energy toward any point on Earth. But, unlike most weapons, Thero’s would not rain destruction down from above. It would send it surging up from below.

  By disturbing the zero-point energy contained within the Earth, Thero could channel this energy through the heart of the globe if he chose to.

  One by one, a bank of indicator lights went green.

  “All systems go,” announced the Chechen.

  “Set for minimal power draw,” Thero said.

  The engineers busied themselves with Thero’s protocol. They went through checklists and pro
cedures and soon came to the point of no return.

  “Switching from geothermal input,” the German woman said. The lights dimmed for a second and then returned to full brightness.

  “Initiating the priming sequence,” the Iranian man said.

  Several seconds later, a flashing icon on the panel in front of Thero indicated the priming was complete. The moment of truth beckoned. Thero pressed the ignition switch.

  The lights dimmed again, much lower this time. Several went dark. The immense power draw of the ignition sequence was straining the electrical grid.

  On a screen placed above the viewport a flat line was displayed. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the line began to oscillate as a shallow wave pattern ran across the screen over and over.

  Out in the cavern, a dim specter of ethereal light spiraled along the tubing and around the interior of the globe-shaped room. It flashed and faded. A second pulse of energy followed. But, unlike the first, this one remained, moving back and forth like a ghost trapped in some kind of man-made purgatory.

  “Magnetic containment field holding,” the Iranian woman said.

  Slowly, the lights around them came back up.

  “We are now running on zero-point energy,” the German woman said proudly.

  As the sounds of subdued celebration spread throughout the room, Thero watched the monitor ahead of him. The peaks and troughs of the wave continued to build until a yellow indicator began to flash.

  “Something’s wrong,” the young Chechen said. He returned to his desk. “The pattern is unstable.”

  “It can’t be,” someone else insisted.

  “Look for yourself.”

  Thero stepped over to the panel and studied the three-dimensional pattern. It should have been a perfect sphere like the cave, but it was distorted in one section near the top. The lines pulled to the side, snapped back, and pulled again, like the picture on an old television getting bad reception.

  “Counteract it,” Thero said.

  Even as he spoke, a second alarm went off.

  “Modulate the field.”

  The Pakistani began tapping the keys on his computer. Out in the cave, the monstrous, gyroscope-like construction began to pivot in the huge rig. It turned slowly like a giant telescope, trying to align itself with a specific section of the sky. As it moved, the second alarm shut itself off. Only a flashing yellow marker on the oscilloscope-like screen continued.