The Silent Sea

by Clive Cussler

  “Helm, all back one half. Quickly, man!” The dock was only a half mile away, and it looked as though they were headed toward one of the processing plants. In seconds, he realized that the wind was stronger than anything he’d ever experienced. “Full power!”

  The Oregon could handle the cruiser’s twenty thousand horses without breaking a sweat. Eric had them up to eighty percent and noted with satisfaction that they were now pulling the Admiral Brown at sixteen knots. Over the distance and the storm, he could hear a klaxon begin to scream out a collision warning.

  The cruiser was as helpless as an unmasted schooner as she arrowed straight for the gas plant. Her captain was at a loss to explain it. He’d ordered left full rudder to sheer them away from a direct collision, and the boat responded by simply crabbing sideways in the wind. Fate or destiny was going to slam her where she wanted to go, and to him it seemed the desires of man counted for nothing. A moment before impact, he looked again at their speed over the bottom and was aghast at how wind could push his warship at almost twenty knots.

  FOR CABRILLO, THERE WAS NO TIME for subtlety. Whatever happened in this building and the evidence it left behind would be incinerated when the Admiral Brown came barreling through the front wall. He deftly fitted a silencer on his FN Five-seveN and waited until Espinoza and the Sergeant were out of view.

  He used the tangle of pipes as cover and crossed closer to the door. The two guards were on the constant lookout, their eyes never at rest, but the massive hangar-sized space was poorly lit, and Juan had more than ample cover. He kept looking back to make sure the others hadn’t inadvertently flanked him. He was lining up to take his shot when a pressure-release valve directly behind him hissed out a jet of steam into the air. The guards both looked in his direction, and one of them must have spotted him because his gun came up and he loosed a three-round burst.

  How the spray of rounds didn’t puncture a critical valve and immolate them all was a miracle.

  Juan ducked but came up almost instantly and dropped one of them with a double tap to the chest. The sentry who had let Cabrillo into the building burst through the door, his weapon held high and tight against his shoulder. The second guard had dived flat behind a clutch of fifty-five-gallon drums.

  Cabrillo fired twice more, and the sentry collapsed. The doors closed behind him.

  In the distance, he could hear Espinoza barking orders.

  The guard peered out from around the barrels. Juan put a round two inches from his eye to keep him pinned in place and then charged with everything he had. The distance was less than twenty feet. He reached the barrels and pumped up in one easy bound. The guard was still flat on his stomach, never hearing the assault or expecting it.

  Juan’s mistake was assuming that because liquid poured from the side of the barrel where the high-velocity round had punctured it, all the kegs would be full. They weren’t.

  His foot touched down on the lid of one of the barrels, and his momentum toppled it and the three right next to it. He fell in the middle of the clanging mess and for a second had no idea what happened. The guard came to his wits an instant quicker. He got to his knees and swung his machine pistol toward Cabrillo. Like a greenhorn, Juan had dropped his pistol when he landed, so he kicked out with one foot and pushed one of the barrels into the guard, fouling his aim. His three-round burst pinged off the I-beam rafters.

  Cabrillo grabbed the empty barrel in a bear hug and threw himself at the guard. When they collided, the soldier went down, and Juan used his impetus to drive his full weight, plus the barrel, into the man’s chest. Ribs snapped like twigs. The man was down but not out. Juan frantically searched for his automatic, and was bending to retrieve it from between two more barrels when the wall behind him was stitched with a string of 9mm holes.

  Espinoza recognized him immediately. His eyes went wide and then narrowed with satisfaction when he realized that the man who had caused him so much difficulty and shame was twenty feet from him and unarmed.

  “I know you are alone,” he said. Sergeant Lugones appeared at his side. “Sergeant, if he moves a muscle, shoot him dead.”

  Espinoza set his machine pistol onto an electrical-transformer housing and pulled his sidearm from its holster and placed it beside it. He came up to Juan with a smug look, the look of a bully who had cornered the weakest neighborhood kid. He didn’t stop even when a nautical horn sounded an alarm outside.

  “I don’t know who you are or where you came from, but I assure you that your death is going to be especially enjoyable.”

  Juan fired off a lightning right jab that caught Espinoza square in the nose and rocked him back a pace. “You talk too much.”

  The Argentine charged in a blind range. Cabrillo let him come, and as they were about to collide chest to chest he turned to the side and shoved Espinoza in the back as he went past. He crashed into the wall hard enough to make the metal ring.

  “And you fight like a girl,” Juan taunted.

  “Lugones, shoot him in the foot.”

  The Sergeant didn’t hesitate. The single shot was especially loud, and Juan went down hard, clutching at the ruined member and screaming in agony.

  “Okay, now let’s see how you fight,” Espinoza sneered. “On your feet, or the next shot takes out a knee.”

  Juan tried twice to stand on his own and both times he collapsed back onto the cement floor.

  “Not so tough now, is he, Sergeant?”

  “No, sir.”

  Espinoza moved to Juan’s side and yanked him to his feet in a savage thrust. Cabrillo swayed drunkenly and fought to keep from crying out. Espinoza kept one hand on Juan’s arm and fired two powerful punches into his gut. Juan sagged, and nearly dragged the Argentine down to the floor with him.

  “Pathetic,” Espinoza said.

  He reached down again for a repeat performance. Juan sat meekly until Espinoza’s head was a foot away. Then he reached out with both hands, one on the man’s chin, the other on the occipital bulge at the back of his skull. From a disadvantaged position on the ground, he still managed to generate enough torque that when he twisted Espinoza’s head, the spinal column snapped cleanly.

  The corpse went rubbery as it fell, and nearly blocked him from picking up the Five-SeveN. He raised it and fired before Sergeant Lugones’s brain had processed what had just happened. The first round blew through his stomach and emerged on the other side, the second caught him in the forehead.

  The horn sounded again, one long, continuous blast of sound that originated not fifty feet from where Juan sat. He managed to get to his feet, his prosthetic leg undamaged by the bullet, and he’d started for the door when a titanic crash seemed to rock the building’s foundation and the knife-edged prow of the battle cruiser Guillermo Brown exploded through the wall of the processing plant.

  Six seconds later, the shock waves generated by collapsing steel and crushed concrete was enough to detonate the bomb.

  The building started to go up like the Hindenburg over Lakehurst.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Linc and Eddie were in position under the prison when the ship’s horn began to blare. The wind made the mournful sound warble like the dying cry of a ravaged animal. They waited a beat, and, sure enough, one of the guards stuck his head out the door to see if he could find the cause of the noise. Of course, he couldn’t see more than a dozen feet, and he quickly withdrew.

  Franklin used a small cordless drill to create a hole in the floor above him no more than an eighth of an inch in diameter. From their earlier reconnaissance, he’d approximated where the furniture was and had drilled under a threadbare sofa so the hole wouldn’t be seen by the guards. Into this, Eddie inserted the nozzle of a gas canister. The gas was a potent knockout agent that would render the average person unconscious in about five minutes, with the effects lasting up to an hour depending on the concentration. They’d earlier disabled the building’s ventilation system by merely unplugging the exterior unit.

  Very soon, the muffl
ed voices of the guards’ idle chatter grew quieter and quieter until there was the crash of bodies hitting the floor and then silence.

  The two men crawled out from under the structure and entered through the vestibule. Eddie had the parkas in a vacuum-sealed bag, to cut down on its size, while Linc carried the bag of bones. They hadn’t brought eighteen complete skeletons but rather just enough to convince the Argentines. The sack still weighed in at over two hundred pounds, yet he struggled far less than Eddie, with his sixty pounds of coats.

  Once they had their gas masks on, they hurried through the door that gave access to the guard area so as to not dilute the gas. There were four of them. Two slumped over on the couch, one on the floor, and the other at a desk with his head down as if to take a nap. Eddie released a little more of the gas below each man’s nose to keep them down, and then he and Linc rushed into the back, making sure to unlock the door first.

  The rear section of the building was divided into six rooms by a central hallway. It had been housing for oil workers before the scientists were kidnapped from their research stations. Linc stayed on guard near the door so he could hear any of the soldiers stirring.

  Eddie opened the first door on his right and flicked on the switch. Three women stared up at him from the floor. Their days of captivity had rendered them numb, so they just stared blankly. He was relieved to see that the jailers had left them their shoes. Seng peeled off his gas mask, and when they saw he was Asian their interest grew.

  “My name is Eddie Seng, and I’m going to get you out of here.” When no one said anything, he asked, “Do any of you speak English?”

  “Yes,” a stocky woman with straw-colored hair replied. “We all do. We’re Australian. Who are you?”

  “We’re here to rescue you.” He flicked open a pocketknife and cut the seal that had kept the parkas flattened. The bag expanded to three times its original size.

  “You sound American. Are you with the Army?”

  “No. It’s not important now. Are any of you hurt?”

  “They’ve treated us all right. I don’t think they’ve hurt anyone.”

  “Good. Help me free the others.”

  Minutes later, all six cells were open, and the eighteen scientists were free. Eddie was bombarded with questions about why they’d been captured, and he did his best to answer them. The questions died, however, when he opened the second bag and pulled out a human skull.

  “We need the Argentines to think you all burned in a fire,” Eddie explained before anyone could ask. “There are severe diplomatic repercussions if they suspect you escaped.”

  The horn on the Admiral Brown began blasting a long, single note. Eddie quickened his pace. He salted the right number of remains in each room while Linc went to give the guards one last dose of gas. Next came smearing the walls and floor with a purple jellied fuel. They couldn’t carry as much as they would have liked, but Eddie was more than adept at arson and knew the best patterns to lay out so the building would burn completely.

  “Hold your breath when we go through the next room,” he cautioned. “And once outside, stay in a tight group and follow me.”

  A massive explosion filled the night.

  WHEN THE WARSHIP HIT the processing plant and set off the bomb, the blast ruptured the undersea gas line coming in from the rigs. The drop in pressure registered instantly, and check valves on the offshore platforms closed to prevent a dangerous blowback. The impact of the Admiral Brown had damaged the shoreside valves so that as the great ship was dragged farther into the structure, the gas in the pipes wasn’t contained. With a fireball mushrooming over the facility, flame licked at the gas in the conduits and ignited it.

  The bay erupted.

  Miles of gas lines lit off in a cataclysmic blast that sent sheets of water soaring into the night, while the flash lit up the sky from horizon to horizon. Three of the disguised rigs were blown off their piers.

  Secondary and tertiary explosions rippled the exterior walls of the gas factory until they were blown flat and sent flaming debris out across the bay and over the buildings of the station.

  Aboard the Admiral Brown, the ship’s heavy armor protected all of her crew except the men on the bridge. They could have saved themselves by simply ducking but to a man had stood in awe as their cruiser caromed into the plant. They were sliced to ribbons when all the windows imploded, turning the bridge into a hail-storm of glass.

  Unnoticed in the maelstrom of fire, another small charge exploded under the cruiser’s bow. It was the device Juan had clamped over the tow cable to release it. When it went, the carbon fiber was pulled free of the remaining pad eyes, and the Oregon no longer had her in tow.

  AS SOON AS THE PLANT BLEW, Mark Murphy toggled the explosives Mike Trono and his team had planted in the glacier overlooking where the Silent Sea had been sunk by Admiral Tsai Song five centuries earlier. They had drilled deeply into the ice and repacked the holes with water that had frozen solid so as to contain the blast. The multiple explosions were timed precisely and built a harmonic resonance that was powerful enough to shear off a massive slab of ice as neatly as a knife. The newly calved berg was the size of a Manhattan office tower. Two hundred and fifty thousand tons of ice slammed into the bay and actually fractured when it crashed against the seafloor. The wave it spawned encompassed the entire water column and swept from shore to shore. Its momentum was such that anything caught in its path was borne away like leaves in a gutter. The magnificent Treasure Ship, so long preserved in its frigid realm, was no exception. The wave tumbled it across the seafloor and onto the long slope that led down into the deep waters of the abyssal plain. When the waters finally calmed, there wasn’t a trace that it had ever existed at all.

  ERIC STONE FELT that the second the ship was free, and he cut the power to the drive tubes.

  “That’s it,” he said, staring at the big monitor on the front wall of the op center.

  The camera that was mounted in the nose of an unmanned aerial drone revealed hell on earth, with fire shooting a hundred feet and higher over the processing plant and pockets of gas above the bay still aflame. It looked as if the very seas were burning. Gomez Adams was at the tiny plane’s remote controls, and he used a joystick to fly it across the sprawling facility. It was a testimony to his skills as a pilot that he could keep the unstable craft flying through the storm. Small pockets of fire dotted the landscape where debris blown from the gas plant continued to burn. But another fire drew his attention. A building well away from the blast had flames licking through its roof.

  “Looks like Eddie and Linc are making their move,” he said.

  A second later, Eddie’s panting voice filled the high-tech room from ceiling-mounted speakers. “Eighteen present and accounted for.”

  Max Hanley couldn’t care less. “Have you heard or seen the Chairman?”

  “Negative. Last I knew, he was in the plant. He hasn’t gotten word to you?”

  “No, damn it! All he said was, he’d find his own way out.”

  “What do you want us to do?”

  As much as Max wanted to delay, he knew that Eddie and his group of freed captives would eventually draw attention. “Get to the submersible as fast as you can. Maybe Juan’s already on his way. His radio could be dead.”

  “We’re moving.”

  Hanley tried calling Cabrillo on every preset frequency their radios picked up. He got no response. He knew in his gut that Juan hadn’t gotten clear when the gas processor blew. There hadn’t been enough time. He’d sacrificed himself to stick to their plan.

  THE SCENE ON THE GROUND was absolute pandemonium. Lieutenant Jimenez couldn’t find the Major, and the discipline they had drilled into their men seemed to have evaporated. This was the start of the American attack and yet many of his troopers abandoned their positions to gawk at the conflagration. He screamed at them to return to their posts and get ready for the assault. Noncoms added their snarls, and slowly they started getting the soldiers to pay attention to
their duty.

  Oil workers ignored the curfew and poured from their dormitories to see what had happened. When Jimenez yelled at them to return indoors, he was met with derision. Within minutes of the blast, a hundred men or more were outside.

  A Corporal approached and saluted. “Lieutenant, it’s not the Americans.”

  “What? What did you say?”

  “It’s not the Americans, sir. The Guillermo broke free from her mooring and drifted into the big processing plant. That’s what caused the explosion.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “I saw it myself. It looks like a quarter of the ship is buried inside the building.”

  Jimenez couldn’t believe it. An accident caused all this? “Have you seen Major Espinoza?”

  “No, sir. I’m sorry.”

  “If you see him, tell him I’m investigating the plant.”

  “Sir. Yes, sir.”

  Jimenez was about to start across the complex when he heard the unmistakable chatter of an automatic weapon. This was no accident. He took off at a run toward where the gunfire originated.

  WHEN THE EXPLOSION ROCKETED into the storm-torn sky, Linc started hustling the prisoners out to the entry vestibule while Eddie used a lighter to ignite the flammable jelly. It went up even better than he’d hoped. The wood paneling was the cheapest product available and was made of sawdust and glue that burned furiously. In seconds, the top layer of space was a dense cloud of smoke.

  He made sure he was the last person out. He rushed across the room where the guards still slept. They left the door open so fresh air would revive them, though the reason behind this was to feed the fire and not offer these men any humanity.

  As Cabrillo had predicted, the Argentines had temporarily lost control of the situation. Soldiers had left their patrol sectors, and civilians were mingling in with the troops.