Zero Hour

by Clive Cussler

  “Except for Thero,” Kurt guessed.

  Gregorovich seemed to brood at the mention of the name.

  “Come on,” Kurt said, “it’s not that hard to figure. Thero’s facility was blown to bits. Somehow, he survives, and now Russia ends up on his hit list. It was you guys who blew him up. Seems you got everything except the head of the snake. I’d say you failed pretty badly on that one.”

  Gregorovich lunged across the table, his hand blasting the chess pieces all over the room as it plowed through them on the way to the Makarov. He reached the pistol before Kurt could react.

  Kurt had made a different choice. His left hand went for the vodka bottle, grabbed it, and smashed it against the bulkhead wall and brought the shattered stub up to Gregorovich’s neck like a blade. It met the Russian’s neck at the very instant the barrel of the Makarov lodged against Kurt’s gut.

  The safety was off, Kurt’s liver unprotected. But so was his opponent’s jugular. Either man could have ended the other’s life in a blink, but it was a standoff. If Gregorovich fired, Kurt’s body would convulse, and the jagged glass of the bottle would slice his artery. If Kurt flipped the edge of the glass, he would mortally wound the Russian, but death would not come quick enough to stop the 9mm bullet from blasting through his liver and tearing apart his internal organs.

  They stared into each other’s eyes. Two men on the brink.

  “In chess they call this blood,” Gregorovich said. “A piece for a piece, an even trade. But our trade wouldn’t be even, would it? End my life and I end yours, but Kirov will have your crew shot before dawn. The pawns you fight desperately to protect will die along with their king. And I sense you have no stomach for that kind of outcome.”

  “That may be true,” Kurt said. “But if you kill me, you lose your only chance to find Thero, your only chance to erase your one big failure. And your pride won’t let you give that up. No matter how badly I’ve angered you.”

  The Russian began to laugh. “At least we understand each other.”

  Gregorovich released the pistol and dropped it into Kurt’s lap. He then pulled slowly away from the glass.

  Kurt grabbed the pistol and tossed the broken bottle away.

  “I will find and destroy Thero,” Gregorovich said matter-of-factly. “Whether it happens before or after he obliterates Australia, Russia, or the rest of the world matters little to me. I will hunt him down and kill him because it is personal to me. And I will do so if I have to drive every man and woman on this ship to their deaths in the process.”

  Kurt nodded. He recognized a modern-day Ahab when he saw one.

  “Why would you need to drive your men so hard,” Kurt asked. “Don’t they have the same orders as you?”

  “Orders, yes. But they lack my zeal. They’re uneasy and have been since we determined what happened to your ship. Like the men with Columbus, they’re afraid we’re sailing off the edge of the map.”

  “So that’s why you gave us the guns,” Kurt said.

  “You and your men are quite an effective counterbalance against them,” Gregorovich said. “Now they have something else to worry about beyond getting rid of me.”

  “How Machiavellian of you,” Kurt said.

  “It’s worked so far,” Gregorovich boasted. “But for how long, I don’t know. Kirov prods them and plots against me. They may find the heart to challenge me yet. If they do, you and your men will certainly die.”

  “Or fight for you,” Kurt guessed.

  “Odd as that sounds, yes.”

  “I guess we’d have no choice,” he said. “The question is: how much time do you think we have until that occurs?”

  Gregorovich shook his head. “No,” he said, “that’s not the question. The question is: how far will you go to stop Thero?”

  So that was it. Gregorovich was looking for a partner, a blood brother, in his quest for the prey that escaped him. Kurt was up for that, as long as they got there in time.

  “To stop Thero from killing millions,” Kurt said. “To the ends of the Earth, if necessary.”

  Gregorovich nodded. It was the answer he wanted to hear. It also happened to be true.

  “This far south,” the Russian said, “it would seem we’re almost there.”

  “Not quite,” Kurt replied. He stood and checked his watch. It was time for a new heading. “Tell your helmsman to change course. Our new heading should be 245 degrees.”

  “So we don’t journey to Antarctica after all?”

  “Not yet anyway,” Kurt said, keeping the truth to himself. “I’m going to my quarters so I can sleep this off. Assuming Kirov doesn’t kill me during the night, I’ll have more course changes for you in the morning.”

  Gregorovich nodded, and Kurt stepped out into the hall. One of the commandos waited there.

  “You must be the bellhop,” Kurt muttered. “Take me to my cabin.”

  He was escorted aft until he reached a pair of the Russian commandos standing outside the cabin in which the NUMA crew had been placed. He stepped past them and went inside, only to find an argument in full bloom.

  Captain Winslow and his XO were on one side, Joe and Hayley on the other.

  “. . . he’s got us this far,” Hayley insisted.

  “He’s playing a game with our lives,” the XO replied.

  “We’d be dead if he told them what they wanted to hear,” Joe added.

  Apparently, more than one mutiny was brewing on the ship.

  “Told who what they wanted to hear?” Kurt asked.

  The group turned in unison.

  “The Russians,” Captain Winslow said. “While you were out drinking with their leader, they came and took our injured crewmen to the sick bay. Only now they tell us no one will be receiving medical treatment until we give them more information.”

  Kurt didn’t like the sound of that. But there was no turning back.

  “I don’t know if this is the right course of action,” Winslow added.

  “It’s the only course left,” Kurt said.

  “We have to give them something,” Winslow said. “At least a hint.”

  “No. If they guess right, we’re all dead,” Kurt explained. “They’ll tie weights to our feet and drop us over the side to save the cost of a bullet.”

  “My crewmen are in shock,” Winslow said. “They’re dying. For God sakes, Kurt, be reasonable.”

  “There’s no room for reason,” Kurt snapped. “Can’t you see that?!”

  The others stared back at him, taken off guard at an uncommon burst of fury.

  “We’re caught in between a madman and a lunatic,” he explained. “Gregorovich is insane. This isn’t a job for him. It’s some kind of vendetta. Maybe even a suicide mission. His failure to kill Thero years ago is eating him alive. If he has to, he’ll murder every one of us just to get another shot at it. And Thero is worse. He was a schizophrenic, a sociopath, years ago. Can you imagine what time and pain have done to him since? He’s called his lair Tartarus, the Prison of the Gods. What do you think that says about him? He considers himself a god. A persecuted one at that. You think he’s going to let up on his threat?”

  They gazed at Kurt oddly. No doubt he looked half deranged himself at this point.

  “It can’t be that bad,” the XO said.

  “It can be and it is,” Kurt said. “If anyone’s making plans to survive this, I suggest you stop wasting your time because most likely we won’t. The only thing we can hope for is to prevent Thero from acting. And to do that, we need the Russians as much as they need us.”

  Joe stood with Kurt, the loyal friend that he was. Hayley seemed to understand the truth and had resigned herself to it. Even the XO seemed to soften his posture. But Winslow shook his head.

  “They’re my crew,” he said. “My responsibility.”

  Kurt understood th
at. He figured lack of sleep and guilt were weighing on the captain’s mind too.

  “Most of your crewmen already gave their lives to fight this,” Kurt said. “So did nine members of the ASIO, and at least four civilians who’ve tried to escape Thero’s grasp. The only way to give those deaths meaning is to stop Thero from winning. We have a chance to do that if we side with Gregorovich. It’s a long shot. But it’s the only shot we have.”

  Winslow seemed unsure.

  Kurt put his hand on the captain’s shoulder and looked him in the eye. “I know what you’re going through. None of us would even be in this situation if I’d kept my nose out of it. Those crewmen’s lives are on me, not you. But we can’t bring them back. We can only do our best to make sure their deaths are not in vain.”

  Winslow looked back at Kurt. He seemed to understand. “So what do we do now?”

  “We have to reduce the number of commandos at their disposal,” Kurt said. “Even the odds a little.”

  “How? They have us under guard.”

  Kurt had been thinking about this while losing in chess to Gregorovich. “They eat buffet style around here,” he said, having noted the setup on his single pass through the mess hall. “This ship is filthy. It has to be crawling with bacteria. Scrape up any kind of grunge you can find. I don’t care where you get it from, and, frankly, I don’t want to know. Collect it up and find a way to drop it in the food right around chow time—after we’ve gotten our fill of course.”

  “Germ warfare,” Joe noted.

  “If the commandos are too sick to fight, Gregorovich will have no choice but to take us along.”

  “I like it,” Joe said. “What if he leaves us behind anyway?”

  “Then we take over the ship and radio NUMA if we can.”

  Joe nodded, and Hayley offered a sad smile. Even the XO cracked a grin at the thought of going on the offensive for a change. Winslow agreed. “Okay,” he said. “I’m with you.”

  Tartarus

  Deep beneath the surface of the ice-covered island, Patrick Devlin found his ears ringing. The bone-shaking sound of a huge rock drill grinding away had all but deafened him over the past hour. When it suddenly stopped, the silence was almost painful.

  “That’s deep enough,” a burly foreman shouted.

  Devlin backed away from the wall. The heavy drill was mounted on an ore cart of sorts. Padi’s job was to keep pressure on it and drill a series of boreholes in the wall. Covered in dust and grime, he stepped back as another man placed a series of charges in the holes and began attaching wires to the caps.

  A sharp whistle sounded. “Everyone to the tunnel,” a foreman demanded.

  Spread about the large cavern, a dozen other workers busy crushing rocks and scooping the rubble onto a conveyor belt stopped what they were doing and began trudging toward a small tunnel entrance on one side of the room.

  They fit themselves inside, taking shelter under the steel-reinforced arch, weary souls glad to put down their tools for a moment. Devlin noticed their faces were drawn but their bodies fit.

  With the armed foreman and his assistant checking the explosives, he took a chance. “What’s your name?” he asked a black man who stood beside him.

  “My name is Masinga,” the man replied in a distinct South African accent.

  Devlin nodded. “I’m Patrick,” he said. “Sometimes, people call me Padi. What is this place?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  Devlin shook his head.

  “Diamond mine,” Masinga said.

  Devlin studied the crumbled rock sitting on the motionless conveyor belt. “I don’t see any diamonds.”

  “They’re in the rock,” Masinga explained. “Not much of a miner if you don’t know that.”

  “I’m not a miner,” Devlin said.

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “I was bloody well shanghaied,” Devlin swore under his breath. “Weren’t you?”

  “No,” Masinga said. “I signed a contract. We all did. Paid us twice the rate De Beers was offering. Only when it came time to leave, we were kept on against our will.”

  “Have you tried to escape?”

  The man laughed. “Do we look like fish? We’re on an island in the middle of the ocean. Where would we escape to?”

  “But your families,” Padi said. “Surely, they can protest.”

  “They’ve been told we died in an accident,” another man said. He sounded like he might be from South America. “And they never knew where we were in the first place. None of us did until we got here.”

  It sounded like madness to Devlin, but then little had made sense since he’d spotted the Voyager in the harbor off the coast of Jakarta.

  “What about you?” Masinga asked. “Maybe someone will come looking.”

  “Not likely,” Padi said, remembering that Keane was unconscious when he found the Voyager. “If I had to guess, the whole world probably thinks I’m dead too.”

  “You are, then,” Masinga said. “We all are.”

  “Tartarus,” Devlin mumbled, prison of the underworld. Now it made sense to him.

  “Fire in the hole!” the foreman called out.

  The burly man pressed a switch. A dozen small charges went off in rapid succession. The wall bulged out, holding its shape for an instant and then crumbling in a great clamor and cloud of dust.

  Fans designed to draw the dust and heat out of the room kicked on, and the cloud was evacuated up a large vertical shaft that led to the surface. It swirled past them, sticking to their sweat-covered bodies. By the time it cleared, Padi’s face was as dark as Masinga’s. In fact, all of them were the same gray color no matter the shade of their skin.

  The foreman looked over, the shotgun resting on his shoulder. “Break’s over,” he shouted. “Back to work.”

  Masinga and the others rose up and wearily began moving into position. Against his will, Devlin followed.

  MV Rama, 1745 hours

  Location 61° 37' S, 87° 22' E

  Fifteen hours after abruptly ending his chess game, Gregorovich stood over the lighted chart table as another new course line was drawn. This one led off to the northwest.

  Kirov stood across from him with one of the commandos at his side. “That’s the ninth course change he’s ordered.”

  The MV Rama could be felt turning to starboard.

  “Approaching new heading,” the navigator called out nervously. “Three hundred twenty-three degrees.”

  “He’s toying with us,” Kirov said dangerously. “And you’re indulging him.”

  Gregorovich stared. The presence of the second commando was Kirov’s idea. A show of force. No doubt the mutiny he felt brewing was close to being launched.

  The men were getting nervous. It was palpable. They were land-based commandos far from home in a dangerous situation with deteriorating conditions. The ship was rolling appreciably in the growing swells, and the sky had turned gray-white. It looked like snow would be falling soon. At Austin’s direction, they’d come so far south they’d begun dodging small icebergs, an effort not helped by the reduced visibility.

  Worst of all, they’d heard in detail how the Orion was crushed and dragged to the depths as if by a monster from the deep. So far, order remained, but Gregorovich sensed it would not last.

  “At least we’re heading north,” he said, turning to the navigator. “What’s in this direction?”

  The navigator tapped the screen, and the map zoomed out slowly until finally Gregorovich spotted a yellow dot directly in their path.

  “Heard Island,” the navigator said.

  By tapping the screen at the island’s location, Kirov was able to bring up a block of information about it.

  “Australian territory,” he said, reading from the screen. “Volcanic. Last appreciable eruption 2005. Covered in glac
iers and completely uninhabited.”

  Kirov looked up, a grin plastered from ear to scabbed-over ear. “That’s it,” he said. “Heard Island is the target. That’s where Thero’s hiding. Austin finally showed his hand. We can kill him now along with his crew and finish the job without worrying about them.”

  Gregorovich didn’t like the idea of losing his counterweight. Nor did he think, after proving so crafty for so long, that Austin would have been dumb enough to blunder into revealing his secret with such ease.

  “Zoom out,” he ordered.

  The Vietnamese navigator did as he was told, and the map expanded again. Another set of dots appeared. These were roughly two hundred and seventy miles beyond Heard Island, directly on the same course line, 323 degrees.

  Austin had maneuvered the Rama to a point where they were approaching both islands simultaneously.

  “French Southern and Antarctic lands,” the navigator said.

  “What kind of a name is that?” Kirov blurted.

  “One you won’t forget, I trust,” Gregorovich said. “The same course line takes us to both of them. Thero could be hiding on either one. Or Austin could take us a little closer and then turn us in a new direction. We can’t kill him until we know for sure.”

  “And once we know for sure?”

  “Can you not think more than one move ahead?” Gregorovich asked. “Suppose Thero’s lab is on Heard Island. Our orders are to destroy it with a nuclear weapon. It’s Australian territory. Do you not see the advantage of leaving a few charred and radiated American bodies at the outer limit of such a blast?”

  Kirov nodded.

  “Launch the long-range drones,” he said. “If anything’s moving on Heard Island, I want to know about it.”

  • • •

  THE NOISY HUM OF PISTON ENGINES caught Joe Zavala’s attention as he neared the ship’s mess with Hayley Anderson at his side.

  “What’s that?” Hayley asked.

  Joe cocked his head to listen. The sound reminded him of unmanned military aircraft he’d worked with a few months back. “The Russians are launching something up on deck,” he said. “A small plane, or maybe a drone.”