Zero Hour (9781101600559)

by Cussler, Clive; Brown, Graham

  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 that. 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 glaciers 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.”

  “Why would they be doing that?”

  Joe considered several possibilities but put the thought aside when he saw a gaggle of the Russian commandos coming down the passageway. “No idea,” he said. “But let’s get in that chow line before those guys do.”

  Turning quickly, he ducked into the mess hall. Hayley lingered just behind him, keeping an eye on the hallway.

  Stepping to the buffet, Joe inhaled deeply. He loved Vietnamese food, the spices and all the vegetables. The ship’s cook had whipped up a pretty good spread. It almost seemed a shame to ruin it.

  “They’re coming,” Hayley whispered.

  Joe nodded, smiled at the chef, and began to load up his plate with heaping piles of everything on the menu. It was enough food for him and two others.

  As the cook stared at him in wonder, Joe rubbed his stomach. “Nothing works up an appetite like being shipwrecked in frigid waters and then being kidnapped by your would-be rescuers.”

  The cook’s face remained blank. Joe guessed English was not one of his languages. He put his hands together and bowed slightly. “Kam ung,” he said, thank you being one of the few phrases he knew in Vietnamese.

  The cook smiled, his smooth face genuine and true. In a way, the Rama’s crew were as much prisoners of the situation as the Orion’s survivors.

  Hayley sidled up to him, and began filling her own plate. “It’s now or never,” she said.

  Joe pointed behind the cook to a wok that was smoking and starting to catch fire. As the cook turned around and went to put it out, Joe slipped a pouch from his sleeve as neatly as any magician. With a quick swish of his arm, he sprinkled the contents across everything in the buffet line. When the pouch was empty, he drew his hand back and stuffed it in his pocket.

  As the Russians came in, they eyed Joe and Hayley for a moment and then moved to the head of the line. However odd they found the situation, they seemed more interested in feeding themselves than starting a confrontation they would catch hell for later.

  Joe and Hayley sat down in the corner, trying not to watch as the commandos all but inhaled generous helpings of the tainted food.

  • • •

  EIGHT HOURS LATER, Kurt found himself on the bridge, staring at photos of Heard Island and wondering if the jig was up.

  About fifteen miles long and ten miles wide, the island was roughly almond shaped and tilted at a forty-five-degree angle. A thin tail of land called Elephant Spit jutted out to the east like a breakwater, and a small blob called Laurens Peninsula clung to its northwest corner connected by a narrow isthmus.

  In profile, Heard Island was obviously volcanic. The central peak, named Big Ben, towered nine thousand feet above the sea in a classic conical shape. It was actually one of the highest peaks in Australian territory, higher than anything on the continent itself.

  A satellite view showed glaciers spreading out from Big Ben like the spokes of a wheel. They followed the steep grades down to the ocean in every direction, calving icebergs where they met the water. White chunks of ice, many larger than the MV Rama, encircled the island like pilot fish around the head of a great shark.

  As Kurt studied the photos, Kirov and Gregorovich stood quietly, looking smug and very pleased with themselves. They were more than happy to show Kurt everything they’d discovered.

  “Do you have any infrared shots?” Kurt asked.

  Gregorovich slid a new series of photos across the table toward him.

  These shots, taken by the Russian drones, showed seals and penguins and colonies of nesting birds. The next photo depicted a series of distinct heat sources grouped on the southeast coast of the island. A spot called Winston Lagoon.

  “The first group of targets are thermal vents of some kind,” Gregorovich explained. “They could be naturally occurring and linked to the volcano or they could be man-made, indicating underground activity. The other images are unequivocal. They’re men on snowmobiles. Whoever they were, they disappeared into holes in the ground moments after these shots were taken.”

  Kurt studied the location of the snowmobile photos. “Just inland from Winston Lagoon,” he said. “A good place to shelter. But I don’t see any ships there.”

  “So they were dropped off,” Gregorovich said. “This is Thero’s way. His lab in Yagishiri was underground. His experiments involve delving deep into the Earth. Those hatches lead to Thero’s compound. I’m sure of it.”

  Kurt didn’t doubt it. But nor did he doubt that Thero would be prepared for an assault. “Do you think they heard your drones?”

  “The men we spotted showed no sense of alarm,” Gregorovich said. “Our drones are nearly silent, and almost invisible to the naked eye.”

  Kurt nodded. The Rama was still over the horizon and making only enough steam to hold station in the current. “Did you scan for radar sources?”

  Gregorovich nodded. “No emissions. It seems they’re relying on stealth alone to protect them. They don’t know we’re coming.”

  “There are other, more passive ways to detect an enemy’s approach,” Kurt said. “Infrared like your drone used. Visual. He could have motion-detecting cameras or even track you by sound. You head right for him and he’ll take your helicopters out before you hit the beach. And since he’s underground, lobbing a f
ew missiles in his direction won’t do much to him either.”

  “We have no reason to believe Thero possesses antiaircraft weapons,” Kirov sneered.

  “He doesn’t need them,” Kurt said. “He has his death ray. If he spots this ship, he’ll send a massive distortion out to crush it just like he did the Orion. And if he spots your birds in the air, he’ll hit you with another weapon he’s developed. Something they call a flash-draw. He used it on the ASIO. It will shut down every system on your aircraft including the pilot’s nervous system. You’ll all be dead on impact before anyone wakes up.”

  Kurt was talking fast, urgently trying to seize the initiative before they decided they no longer needed him. The Russians stared at him as if he were making it up.

  “You’re just trying to save your neck,” Kirov guessed.

  “Well, I’m rather fond of my neck,” he said. “I’ve become attached to it after all these years.”

  Kirov didn’t seem to appreciate the humor.

  Gregorovich glanced down at the map. “We could hold our current position,” he began. “Take the helicopters out to the north, well beyond visual range, and then swing around behind the island. By coming in from the north side of the island, we’ll be using the central massif to conceal our approach. In that way, we should arrive undetected.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Kirov said. “Now we’re taking orders and tactical advice from our prisoner?”

  Gregorovich ignored him and pointed to a spot on the map near the shoulder of Big Ben. “If we come in over saddle point and set down here on the far side of Big Ben, they shouldn’t be alerted to our presence. From there, it’s no more than seven or eight miles to the Winston Lagoon. Most of it downhill.”