Firestorm

by David Klass

  I’m sure I’m going to die. Time stands still. I feel someone there with me. See ghostly hands holding the handlebars. Old but strong hands. Feel a presence on the bike with me. Guiding me. Warning me. My father’s raspy voice. “Close, Jack. You’re close.”

  “Close to what?” I try to ask. “Close to death? Help me out here!”

  “Beware,” he whispers, fading as quickly as he came. “Snarks. Find Snarks, but beware …”

  He’s gone. It must have happened in a fraction of a second. I’m still flying through the air on my ATV. Haven’t tumbled forward or lost control. Thanks, Dad.

  Hidden bay reveals itself far beneath me. Trawlers tied up at a secluded marina. Must be more than a dozen of them, each the size of the Lizabetta. And a strange little domed building made all of tinted green glass.

  Corporate retreat for dwarfs? Mini-laboratory or high-tech outhouse or Snark shelter? Definitely needs investigating …

  If I make it. Can’t stay airborne long with three thousand pounds of metal beneath me.

  Land with a CRASH. Big, knobby tires skid and scrape, clawing for traction on gravelly slope. Engine roars and howls like Godzilla with strep.

  I arm-wrestle handlebars. Nearly roll ATV. Somehow manage to regain control.

  Dargon watching me. Looks surprised but pleased that I made it. And on we go, racing down the hill, side by side, neither turning or giving an inch.

  Make it to the bottom, still neck and neck. Brake to a stop near glass dome. I take off my helmet. Sweaty. Scared. Thrilled. Pumped.

  “You drive well,” Dargon says. “Have you gone off road a lot?”

  “First time,” I tell him.

  “You’re kidding?”

  “I only joke with friends.”

  “Then you should feel proud,” he says. “Experienced drivers have died trying to do what you just did.”

  “I don’t take pleasure in other people’s deaths.”

  He climbs off his ATV and I dismount from my own beast. “Come,” he says. “Try to lose that bad attitude for a few minutes. I want to show you my business secrets.”

  64

  As we walk toward the gleaming little building, I feel a stronger pulse from Firestorm. It’s much closer. Maybe inside these green-tinted glass walls.

  Is Firestorm alive? A force? An intelligence? Does it know I’m coming? I feel some deep personal connection.

  No doors visible. Dargon steps to a hidden camera. “Open,” he says. Flash from camera. “Iris scan and computerized voice analysis,” he tells me. “More personalized than any fingerprint.”

  “Since it’s your island, I wouldn’t think security would be a problem.”

  “Security is always a problem.” The glass doors slide open. We walk in.

  No security guard behind a desk to greet us. No Firestorm. Also no Snarks, whatever they are.

  Strange. Where have I heard the word before?

  Nothing inside glass dome. Just an empty room. “Stand here,” Dargon says, walking to the center.

  I join him.

  “Down,” he says.

  We sink into floor. Elevator platform goes down shaft at an angle. Rock walls all around us. Light dwindling …

  Platform slows and stops. We are in darkness.

  “Lights,” Dargon says.

  They come on overhead.

  We walk down long hallway. “Where are all the people?” I ask him.

  “Rule one of protecting business secrets,” he explains. “The more people who work for you, the more who can steal from you.”

  We reach big double doors. “Open,” Dargon intones. His voice registers and I hear a series of bolts unlatch. The doors swing open. I catch my breath.

  The scene reminds me of the war room in an old World War II movie, with generals clustered around a giant map of Europe as assistants move mock-ups of ships and troops.

  But there are no generals or admirals here. Only a half-dozen young men and women, dressed informally. They could be nerdy grad students at Cal Tech or MIT, hanging out in a student lounge, brainstorming on a common problem.

  They’re not pushing models of tanks around Europe. They’re using computers to plot the courses of simulated trawlers on enormous “maps” of all the world’s oceans.

  “Maps” is too simple a word. These are massive art projections, beautiful and functional. Contours of ocean basins and other topographical features like trenches and seamounts are “sketched in” with three-dimensional holographs.

  I walk over to the Atlantic “map” and follow the Mid-Atlantic Ridge eastward with my eyes, toward Africa. Find the Azores island chain. North of that chain, off by itself, a tiny island blinks with a distinctive blue light.

  I suspect that’s where we are now—Dargon’s island. Simulated trawlers are clustered there, no doubt the part of his fleet I saw right outside, moored to the long dock that juts out into the hidden bay.

  Oscillating red lines surround the Azores. Similar red lines are visible in all the world’s oceans, blinking like an endless chain of warning signals. Most are close to land, but the red lines also wink on and off in mid-ocean.

  “Red for reefs?” I ask Dargon.

  He nods, pleased. “You’re looking at the most accurate model of ocean reefs extant in the entire world.”

  “Based on information you were able to bribe or steal from research organizations?”

  A few of the young technicians glance at me. I guess no one questions Dargon in his inner sanctum.

  He shrugs. “My information comes from many sources, Jack. You saw half of my fleet outside, being refitted with special new nets that are virtually unbreakable. I have forty trawlers, each of them equipped to fish the deepest coral reefs. That’s more than a third of the global trawling fleet. And I’m steadily increasing my market share. Since the world’s need for fish protein is skyrocketing, the next ten years look very profitable indeed.”

  “Till you wipe out your inventory,” I say.

  Again, several technicians look in my direction, and then quickly go back to work. Do they feel guilty about what they’re doing? Is he paying them enough not to care?

  Dargon doesn’t even bother to lower his voice as he explains: “Once we fish out the deep-ocean reefs, there are thousands of shallow-water reefs with billions of dollars’ worth of exotic fish. Enough to keep my fleet busy for another ten years at least.”

  “You’re still just postponing the inevitable,” I point out. “So you get another ten years. How does it make sense to destroy a resource that can never be replaced?”

  I look around at the young scientists. “And how do the rest of you deal with it?” I ask them. “Doesn’t it keep you up at night? And by the way, do any of you know what a Snark is?”

  A gentle-looking young woman turns away from her computer for a moment and says, “Isn’t that a made-up animal in Alice in Wonderland?”

  “Thanks,” I tell her. It comes back to me. Not Alice in Wonderland. “The Hunting of the Snark.” By Lewis Carroll. A masterpiece of poetic nonsense. But not very helpful to Jack Danielson.

  “You’re not going to find anyone too sympathetic here,” Dargon assures me, ushering me out of the vast chamber. The doors click locked behind us, and he leads me back to the elevator platform. “Your problem is actually a matter of vantage point,” he says. “Up, please.”

  And up we go, through darkness to sunlight. The glass dome appears overhead. We step off the platform.

  “If you kill all the fish, and there’s nothing left to catch or eat, how can you possibly come out ahead?” I ask him.

  He smiles. “You’ve been indoctrinated, Jack. Are you willing to open your mind?”

  “To what?”

  “A slightly more solipsistic approach.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Then allow me to broaden your horizon.” Dargon leads me out the sliding door.

  The warmth and the sunlight hit us full on. He steps toward the long dock
where the trawlers are moored. “You’re a survivor,” he says. “I like that about you, Jack. You make up your own mind.”

  I have a gut feeling that my survival skills are about to be tested in an extreme manner.

  We walk down the dock, passing one enormous trawler after another. Half of Dargon’s fleet. A significant part of the entire world’s fleet. At the very end is a particularly odd-looking boat. It must be forty feet long but only eight feet wide. Small cockpit in the back. Enormous engines. Looks like a floating rocket.

  Dargon heads right for it.

  “Where are we going?” I ask him.

  “Since you’re so fond of sea life, I thought I’d show you mine,” he says.

  “Your what?”

  “My reef. It’s one of the finest in the world. It’s where I keep my special pets.”

  65

  Strange-looking boat. Jack and Dargon standing in padded cockpit in bow. Looking up long and narrow hull. Nothing else in cockpit but tightly secured yellow barrel. Extra gasoline? Expandable safety raft for when we crash?

  “Called a cigarette boat,” Dargon informs me as he uses a small motor to guide us slowly away from the dock. “Ocean racer. They don’t make many of them anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “People flipped them. Hulls shattered. Too dangerous. But it all depends on perspective. I have a less complicated perspective than you do, Jack.”

  He touches his hand to his forehead. Left eye pops out. Empty socket exposed.

  I’m grossed out, but I’m also thinking: He shouldn’t have shown me that. A weakness. If I ever fight this guy, that’s the side to attack from.

  “But I’ve seen your pupil move,” I say.

  Dargon shakes his head. “Don’t be fooled. It’s useless. And yet, in a way, perhaps it helps me to see more.” He pops it back in. “Something I have in common with my role model. Hannibal lost an eye crossing the marshes on the back of an elephant. I lost mine on an even stranger journey.”

  “Across time?” I guess.

  He doesn’t deny it. Just speeds us out into the bay. Something about the way he looks as he steers the boat provokes me. The smugness with which he’s dragging me along on this death-defying journey, from yacht to ATV to rocket boat. He knows where we’re going and why. I don’t have a clue.

  “You’re from the future, aren’t you?” I demand. “Why did you come back a thousand years to start a fishing business? Who sent you? What the hell do you want from me?”

  An amused shrug. The brown hair blows in the wind. “I didn’t start this trawling company. I just took it over from the gentleman who did, when he met an untimely demise. I promise to answer your other questions very soon. But we were talking about Hannibal. Do you like mysteries, Jack?”

  “I have enough of them.”

  “This is one of the great riddles in military history. Hannibal was raised from the cradle by his father, Hamilcar, with a single great mission in mind: to conquer Rome. In 221 B.C. he got his chance. Carthage declared war and Hannibal crossed the Alps into Italy. He destroyed one Roman army after another. But he never laid siege to Rome. He spent the next fifteen years marching around Italy with his army, never once defeated in battle, but he also never tried to knock down the walls of Rome and take the city he had come so far to destroy.”

  “Why not?” I ask.

  “Military historians have had a field day with that,” Dargon informs me. “Hundreds of theories. Carthaginians weren’t good at siege warfare. Hannibal was waiting for his brothers. He was betrayed by the merchants of Carthage, who didn’t want to spend money on the necessary reinforcements. None of the theories make sense. Why would the most brilliant and inventive general in history spend fifteen years marching in circles around the countryside? If he couldn’t take Rome, for whatever reason, why didn’t he simply go to some Plan B?”

  “You know why?” I ask him.

  “I have my own personal theory,” Dargon admits, and switches on the power boat. The loudest roar in the history of overjuiced engines erupts from the outboard.

  The ocean racer darts out into the bay.

  “LIKE IT?” Dargon shouts.

  “NO,” I tell him honestly, holding on for dear life.

  He laughs and starts up the second outboard. A much louder roar. Thunder in a tin can. The boat leaps forward.

  I fall back against cockpit padding. Bump hard into yellow barrel. Spray splashes us. Wind howls around us.

  “LIKE IT?” Dargon wants to know.

  “YOU’RE GONNA KILL US.”

  “WE ALL HAVE TO DIE SOMETIME,” he shouts back and switches on third outboard.

  Forget thunder. Much too tame. This roar is beyond deafening. Outside earsplitting.

  The boat leaves the water and takes off. Literally. The only parts that are still touching are the propellers. We are soaring between sea and sky with wind and spray whipping our faces and a rocket engine blasting at our backs. The hull is vibrating, crying out, shaking apart.

  We’re going to die. He’s brought me here to kill me on this rocket boat. Don’t know why, but it’ll be over in seconds …

  And then, quiet. Dargon shuts off the engines and the boat glides forward in silence. I let out my breath.

  “Did you enjoy that?” he asks.

  “I thought you were going to kill us.”

  “I was tempted to,” he admits. “But I thought, why take the easy way out? Are you ready?”

  “For what?”

  “A swim,” he says, and dives gracefully over the side. I instantly think of starting up the engines and driving the hell away. But whatever’s down in his reef can’t be as dangerous as this rocket boat.

  At least I hope not. I dive in after him.

  66

  Two surprises.

  First, Firestorm. It’s very close. And it somehow knows that I’m in the neighborhood. Pulsing, tugging, drawing me in. At last. You’ve come. Finish. Find me.

  Second surprise is how cool the water is. For some reason I thought it would be tropical. Wrong. The weather may be bright and sunny, but this is still the Atlantic.

  Crystal-clear cold water. Less than forty feet from surface to bottom. I have a strong intuition we’re about to go down.

  I consider swallowing a red bead from Eko’s necklace. But Dargon is watching me. I decide to try it without the bead. Can’t show a guy like this weakness. If he can tolerate this, I can, too. It’s mano a mano from now on.

  We’re treading water five feet apart. “Ready to swim with the sharks?” he asks.

  I’m not crazy about the sound of that. “You’re speaking metaphorically, right?”

  “Come and see,” he invites, and dives.

  I suck in a deep breath and follow him down.

  Not a reef so much as an underwater volcanic playground. There are lava caves, grottoes, and chimneys.

  Sea life is everywhere.

  We’re not talking about small fish, either. Groupers that must weigh two hundred pounds chug along like tugboats. A dolphin and a tuna, sleek as race cars, flash by in a duel of speed demons.

  Dargon swims well. He smiles at me and dives deeper.

  I feel pressure in my ears, but no way I’m going to wimp out. I couldn’t dive to the wreck in the Outer Banks without help, and I needed one of Eko’s oxygen beads to make it to the seamount, but here I can see the bottom. I summon my courage and follow him down.

  A loggerhead turtle, big as a Ping-Pong table, paddles past. Dargon playfully hitches a ride on its back, just as Eko once did. It’s so strange to watch him on the turtle’s back—the despoiler of the ocean playing with the gentle old giant of the seas.

  For a second I flash to the sea turtle I dragged across the deck of the Lizabetta, while its shell went pap, pap, pap. The look of pain in its eyes as I shoved it down the stern ramp. If only this one knew.

  Suddenly a shadow seems to fall over the entire ocean floor. Bigger than the shadow of the cigarette boat. Longer. Wider.
r />   I look up and see it.

  My first cetacean! I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure it’s a sperm whale. Blunt head. Underslung jaw. Wrinkled, brownish body, with light streaks and scratches.

  How can something so big swim so effortlessly?

  I try to hail it on all frequencies. Hello, whale. Yo, Moby. Here I am swimming with the devil. Stick around and protect me. And, listen, where’s Firestorm?

  The big whale doesn’t even give me a glance. Swims majestically away. Eko could have gotten through to it. Gisco, too. Too bad I don’t have that phone line.

  Running out of air. Maybe twenty seconds left. Should definitely head back to the surface.

  But instead I follow Dargon a little farther down. My competitive side. Always gets me into trouble.

  An enormous manta ray skims the bottom like a hovercraft. The biggest lobster I’ve ever seen in my life emerges from a dark grotto to shake its claw at me.

  Firestorm calls out to me. So very close. Come, Jack. Find me. Finish. Feels like I could almost touch it with my hand.

  Could it be in that lobster’s grotto? Or in the mysterious lava cave leading away into darkness?

  I’ll find it on the next dive. My lungs are starting to burn. I made my point. Time to head up.

  As if on cue, that’s when I first sense it. Uh-oh. Something evil swimming nearby. I remember the electric current of pure evil I sensed from the bull shark that attacked Eko and me in the Outer Banks. This is far more powerful.

  Whatever is directly above me is of another whole order of evil magnitude. But I’m running out of air, so I have no choice but to swim up toward it.

  Dargon follows me. He knows what’s up there, so he intentionally lags, letting me go first.

  I can’t hesitate or I’ll open my mouth and swallow seawater. No time to fumble with Eko’s necklace and try to unstring a red bead.

  I head for the narrow shadow of the boat. The evil vibe amplifies. The whole ocean is buzzing with it.

  Hidden in the shadow of the boat, another, darker shadow moves.

  I know what it is before I see its rows of teeth. Before I see its massive jaws.