Zero Hour

by Clive Cussler

  • • •

  A HALF MILE AWAY, Kurt was doing a yeoman’s job avoiding the stun blast of the flash-draw, but he could neither shake nor outrun their pursuer. He noticed only one advantage.

  “We have better traction,” he yelled to Hayley.

  “What?”

  “That thing turns more like a boat or a plane, it skids and slides. But when we’re not on ice, we’re able to turn inside his radius every time.”

  “How does that help us?”

  “Watch,” he said, cutting hard to the right, racing back in the direction they’d just come.

  The hovercraft dutifully followed, swinging wide, turning back on course, and then closing the gap again.

  Kurt kept the throttle at full, almost losing control as they skipped across bumpier terrain.

  Another miragelike apparition ripped past them to the right.

  “That was awfully close,” Hayley said.

  They’d come to a narrow section now, almost like a catwalk on a ski slope. The glacier dropped down to the right as a rocky ridge climbed up to the left and around the edge of Big Ben like a mountain road.

  Kurt chose the ridge, hugging the wall, as the terrain beside them fell away precipitously. He backed off the throttle just a bit.

  “They’re closing in!” Hayley shouted.

  As the ridge narrowed, Kurt hit the brake, turned the handlebars, and threw all his weight to the left side of the snowmobile. He leaned hard, like a motorcycle rider in a hairpin turn.

  The snowmobile’s skis dug in hard. And Kurt caught sight of the hovercraft, whipping into the turn behind them. Then he saw a flash of light in his mind and felt a falling sensation. It seemed as if everything went dark.

  His limp body flew off the snowmobile and slid fifty feet into a thick bank of snow. He came to rest, all but buried and completely unconscious. Hayley tumbled off the snowmobile as well, but a handlebar caught her parka, tearing it open and yanking her to a halt like an arresting wire on an aircraft carrier. She ended up only a few yards from the damaged sled.

  Kurt never saw her, nor did he see how effective his plan had truly been.

  Just as he’d hoped, the snowmobile’s sharp turn was beyond the hovercraft’s ability to match. It skidded out over the sheer face of the ridge, carried sideways by its speed and momentum. A small cliff would have been no problem, but the eighty-foot drop was too much.

  The hovercraft had to stay in close contact with the ground to generate lift, and with that ground suddenly gone, the craft dropped and rolled to the side as it fell.

  It hit hard, landing on its side and tumbling in summersaults down the slope. Pieces of fiberglass sailed in all directions. It came to a stop in a heap, and no one climbed out of it.

  • • •

  FARTHER DOWN THE SLOPE, Joe and Gregorovich were in trouble. Another of Thero’s hovercraft had found them. It was driving them toward the towering wall of the glacier.

  “He’s going to trap us against the ice,” Joe shouted.

  “I can’t get around him,” Gregorovich said.

  Joe looked over his shoulder. The hovercraft was hanging back, swerving from side to side. Any move Gregorovich made was easily countered. Joe knew he had to do something. He tried to pull the clip from his rifle, but by now his ungloved hand was completely numb. He pulled the other glove off, yanked the empty clip out, and jammed a new one in.

  “This is my stop,” he shouted.

  He pushed off Gregorovich and extended his legs, launching himself off the snowmobile, landing and tumbling through the snow for a second time.

  Joe bounced and rolled and then slid face-first, cringing as the snow was shoveled through the gap in his collar. In seconds, he was up, shaking the snow from his face and getting his bearings.

  Gregorovich was still heading toward the glacier. The hovercraft had ignored Joe and followed.

  Joe raised the rifle and locked onto the hovercraft, calculating how much to lead it by. He was about to fire when a second high-pitched whine caught his attention.

  He pulled the trigger, but the blur of Thero’s stun gun had already hit him. The flare of blinding light seen only in Joe’s mind encompassed him as it had in the outback and he collapsed in the snow, never knowing if he’d hit anything.

  Thirty minutes later, with the white sky beginning to darken, the two remaining hovercraft made a cautious approach to the ridge where Kurt and Hayley had crashed. Using an infrared scope, Janko spied the wrecked vehicle at the bottom of the drop. Seconds later, he spotted the snowmobile.

  He keyed the transmit switch on his radio. “Unit two, make your way back down the slope and check for survivors. We’re going up top.”

  “Roger that,” the other driver replied.

  As the two craft broke formation, Janko scanned the surrounding incline for heat sources. Only two signatures registered; the red-hot engine from the snowmobile and a figure lying ten feet away from it.

  He pulled off his goggles and brought the hovercraft to a stop. As it settled, he threw open the hatch.

  “Stay here,” he said to his gunner. “Keep your eyes peeled.”

  With a short-barreled submachine gun at his side, Janko climbed from the hovercraft and edged his way toward the wrecked sled. He found it to be inoperable, engine off, battery drained.

  “At least they hit something,” he said to himself.

  He moved to the body in the snow and rolled it over. To his surprise, a mop of blond hair spilled out from under the white hood of the parka.

  Janko pulled the goggles from the woman’s face. He recognized her. She was the woman he’d left tied up beside the explosives in the lab at the flooded mine.

  “So you survived,” he muttered.

  The radio crackled. “Janko, this is unit two.”

  Janko lifted the portable radio to his mouth. “Go ahead.”

  “We’ve made it to the bottom of the ridge. Unit three is demolished. The driver and the gunner are both dead. No way to get it back up. Want us to burn it?”

  “No,” Janko said. “We don’t need to draw any more attention to ourselves. The blizzard will dump a foot of snow in the next twelve hours. That will keep it out of sight.”

  “And the men?”

  “Get them out,” he said. “I want all the bodies off this glacier. Ours and theirs.”

  A double click told Janko his subordinate understood and would comply. Janko then switched channels and began a new transmission.

  “Thero, this is Janko,” he said. “Do you read?”

  “Go ahead,” Thero’s raspy voice replied.

  “We’re done out here.”

  “Did you get them all?”

  “All the snowmobiles have been accounted for,” Janko said. “We lost two hovercraft in the process.”

  “Who are they?” Thero asked tersely.

  “Australians, I think,” Janko said. “I recognize one of the survivors. A blond woman who was at the station in the outback when the ASIO tried to raid it.”

  Silence for a moment, and then: “Is she alive?”

  “Affirmative. We have two male captives as well. The rest are dead.”

  “Bring them in,” Thero said. “I want to interrogate them. We need to know if they’re alone or not.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Janko said.

  He clipped the radio back onto his belt, scooped the woman up, and threw her over his shoulder.

  Seconds later, he’d dumped her in the cargo bay of the hovercraft and was back in the cockpit, powering up the engines once again. As the sleek machine rose up off the ground, Janko eased it forward and then turned around only twenty yards from where Kurt lay.

  The deep snow he’d become buried in masked Kurt’s infrared signature, while his white camouflage, the failing light, and the continuing blizzard ma
de him all but invisible to the naked eye. As a result, neither Janko nor his gunner saw Kurt as they trundled off into the graying horizon.

  After a twelve-hour shift of breaking rocks and loading the rubble onto the endlessly moving conveyor belt, Patrick Devlin felt as if he’d been beaten with a club, run over by a truck, and forced to breathe in smoke all day.

  He was surprised by the grace of a hot shower, even if it was a communal one. The water at his feet was dark sludge from the dust covering his body. A hearty dinner of seal meat and some kind of wild bird surprised him further, but then those things were in abundance on the island, and starving workers slowed down the production line.

  After dinner, he was led to a room carved out of the rock. Bunks four high were spaced along two of the walls. Most of them were empty.

  As the door was locked behind him, he spotted Masinga and the South American, playing cards.

  “Which bunk?” he asked.

  “Pick any of them,” Masinga said. “There’s plenty of space.”

  He threw his stuff on one of the bunks and then sat down by the other men. “Why is it so hot down here?”

  Masinga played a card. “Because we’re in a volcano,” he said. “Where do you think the hot water comes from?”

  “Geothermal?”

  They nodded in unison.

  Devlin looked around. There was no shaft leading to the surface here, only a thin grate above the door for ventilation.

  “How far down are we?”

  Neither man answered. The South American played a card. Masinga looked at it briefly and then reached for it. Devlin slammed his hand down on Masinga’s. “I said how far down are we?”

  Masinga threw the table over and grabbed Devlin by the shirt, hauling him up and slamming him into a locker.

  “You think you’re the first one here with plans to get out?” Masinga shouted. “The men who run this place aren’t fools. They know that a death sentence awaits them for the things they’ve done. To think of escape is a crime, to talk of escape will land you in the torture chamber. And to actually try . . . The rule here is simple: one man fights back, three men die.”

  Devlin shook loose of Masinga’s grasp. “So you just put up with it until they work you to death?”

  Masinga glared at him. “My father spent twelve years in a South African jail for his political activities. He survived by putting up with it until salvation came from the outside. That’s the only way any of us are going to see home again, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you get us killed with your rabid tongue before that happens.”

  Devlin stared at his two roommates. “Maybe that’s how you’re going to play it, but I’m going to get out of here or die trying.”

  The South American spoke next. “There are informers everywhere,” he warned, “even among the men. Maybe even Masinga or me. So if I was you, I’d watch what I say. And who I say it to.”

  Devlin took a deep breath and came to a decision. “They brought me here on a ship. I’m going to find my way back to it at some point. If either of you are going to rat on me, then do it quick and put me out of my misery.”

  They stared at him with sullen eyes. Finally, Masinga reached over and righted the table. “And what do you know about sailing a ship, my friend?”

  Devlin sat down and grinned at his fellow prisoners. “Just about everything,” he said.

  Kurt woke up from the flash-draw as disoriented as Joe had been in the desert. He thought he’d fallen asleep on his couch at home after a long day. But he couldn’t ever remember it being so cold in his town house, even in the dead of winter.

  As he moved about, the icy sensation on his face cleared the cobwebs a bit. He opened his eyes and saw nothing but white. Realizing it was snow, he brushed it away and dug himself out.

  Once he’d burrowed clear of the snowbank, Kurt got to his feet and looked out over the escarpment. The flat light of the snowfield and the gray sky was broken only by a few jagged sections of black rock.

  He quickly remembered where he was, how he’d gotten there, and who was with him.

  He looked around, saw no trouble or any sign of movement. “Hayley!” he shouted. “Hayley!”

  He heard nothing but the wind.

  Forcing himself to stand and ignoring the aches and pains in his body, Kurt began to trudge forward to where the snowmobile lay on its side. Even if she was unconscious, Hayley should have been nearby, but she was nowhere to be seen.

  He considered the wreck and where he’d ended up. He searched the snowbank and the surrounding ledge. Not finding any hump in the snow that might have been her, he returned to the snowmobile. He found a fragment of her coat caught on the handlebar and a trail of depressions almost covered in the falling snow that led back toward the glacier. It was hard to tell, as they had almost been filled in, but the depressions looked like they had once been footprints stamped deep into the soft snow.

  He began to think Hayley had been captured. It made him wonder about the others, particularly his best friend. If either Joe or the Russians were around, they were keeping out of sight.

  He climbed to a high point and scanned the distance. In the fading light, he saw no sign of the other snowmobiles. Considering how they’d scattered, that didn’t surprise him, but it left him with a tough choice. He certainly couldn’t wander around the glacier-covered island on foot, looking for help. Time was too precious now. Besides, he’d begun to think his own escape from capture was a fluke of some kind. Considering the effect of the flash-draw and how determined Thero’s men seemed, he doubted they’d have just disappeared if they didn’t think they’d rounded up the infiltrators.

  He had to assume the worst: that Joe, Hayley, and the others had been captured.

  Stepping back to the snowmobile, Kurt grabbed the handlebars and forced the machine back up onto its tracks. The damage seemed mostly cosmetic, but a flick of the starter did nothing. Not even the lights would come on.

  “This flash-draw is really starting to annoy me,” he muttered.

  He flipped open a small cargo box on the back of the snowmobile and searched for anything useful. He found a flashlight, but it too was drained.

  “Great,” he muttered.

  He glanced up at the sky. The falling snow made it seem lighter than it really was, but the night was coming on fast. He had every intention of continuing on to Thero’s lair, but it would be almost impossible in the utter darkness that was about to envelop the island.

  He knew basically where he was. All he had to do was make his way down the cliff and across the snowfield and he’d run smack into the Winston Glacier. From there, he’d turn left and follow it toward the lagoon. Somewhere farther down, he’d encounter the hot spots photographed by the Russian drones.

  He began to pick his way down the steep face of the bluff, studying the route carefully and noticing the wreckage of the hovercraft not far from the foot of the cliff.

  When he reached the mangled shell of the vehicle, he found it half buried in the falling snow. Only the engine cowling, which was still venting heat, remained visible.

  Kurt brushed the snow away and found the hatch ajar. He forced it open and climbed inside.

  He was looking for anything useful: food, maps, radios, anything he could get his hands on. He found a flashlight and turned it on. Thankfully, it worked. He located the radio. The panel lit up as he flipped a toggle switch, but even with the headset on, Kurt heard no static. He figured something had blown. It didn’t matter. It was a short-range unit anyway. He wasn’t going to be able to reach help with it.

  A few more minutes of rummaging provided him with some extra supplies, including a Zippo lighter, a few greasy rags that might burn if he needed a marker, and, most important, a set of night vision goggles.

  Without them, the approaching darkness would have been Kurt’s worst enemy. With the moon a
nd stars blocked by thick clouds, and no source of artificial light on the island, the darkness would be like that of a cave, complete and all-encompassing.

  To navigate through it without any type of aide would be impossible. To walk with the flashlight switched on or to carry a makeshift torch of flame was just asking to be seen and shot. But with the night vision goggles, Kurt could hike through the darkness like a bat using sonar.

  He checked his watch. It was just past eight p.m. local time. They had nine hours before Thero’s promised attack. He figured a three-hour hike awaited him.

  “No time like the present.”

  He pulled his coat tight once again, forced the hatch open, and climbed out into the blowing snow. He left behind the only shelter for miles and trekked to the west, heading toward a confrontation he stood little chance of winning.

  • • •

  WHILE KURT WAS HOPING to find a way in to Thero’s compound, Joe was wondering if he’d ever see the outside world again.

  In the confines of the underground cavern, things were warmer but less hospitable. Joe was chained to a wall of black volcanic rock like a prisoner in a medieval dungeon. His hands were up high, stretched out to either side, and his feet were shackled and hooked to the floor. From the dried blood on the floor and the worn condition of the shackles, it was clear this wasn’t the first torture session this room had seen.

  Hayley and Gregorovich were chained up in similar fashion on either side of Joe. As an additional form of intimidation, the battered and broken bodies of the dead Russian commandos were paraded in and thrown in a heap on the floor one by one.

  From the looks of it, three had been shot, while the other two seemed to have died from impact injuries.

  “Tell us what we want to know or you’ll end up like them.”

  The question came from a bearded man who stood ramrod straight. His eyes were hard and his face a mask of determination. Joe had no way of knowing, but this was Janko, captain of Thero’s guard.

  Joe studied the bodies, taking in their faces. Instead of fear, the sight gave Joe some hope. Kurt was not among them.