Callsign: Deep Blue - Book 1 (A Tom Duncan - Chess Team Novella)

by Robinson, Jeremy

He slid into the water and took in the scene around him. The flakes were falling everywhere. Fish, thousands of them, were either eating eagerly, twitching in violent death throws, or already dead. A few small, white-tip sharks picked off the twitchers in the distance. The sharks didn’t pose much of a threat, but he would have to watch out for tigers and bulls. All this action could draw their attention, which meant he could easily be mistaken for one of the twitchers—not that tiger sharks cared. He could be a car and they’d still take a bite.

  He kicked out from under the Aquarius cylinder and looked up. What he saw made no sense.

  The normally blue surface of the ocean...

  ...was red.

  4

  Miller scanned the fuchsia waves above, looking for some sign of dumping—a thicker plume of material, for example, or better yet, a ship’s hull. When he found what he was looking for, he intended to rise from the depths like the Kraken and bring a world of hurt to the people responsible. But he could see nothing to direct his anger towards, just an endless sea of red. Visibility had been cut in half, not just by the fog falling from above, but because much of the sun’s light was being blocked by the maroon film covering the ocean’s surface.

  Miller looked down. The normally sandy brown seabed was coated in the ruddy ash; the coral reef had been buried. Dying fish thrashed about, sending plumes of the foreign substance upward like dust.

  How had he missed this? It couldn’t have just started. There was too much. He hadn’t been outside Aquarius for days, but had he really not bothered to look out one of the portals?

  A ladyfish struck his side, its silver body twitching as the last of its neurons fired. He took the fish by the tail and pulled it closer; its body went rigid, giving way to death. Pulling its mouth open, he peered inside. Red sludge lined the dark cave, thick as paint. He checked the gills and found the same phenomenon.

  His eyes darted back to the snowy scene of death surrounding him. Some fish and the sharks in the distance had taken to eating the recently dead instead of chasing after the poisonous flakes. Perhaps they would survive? He hoped so. A massive die-off in the Florida Keys would have a profound effect on the surrounding ecosystems, not to mention the many migratory species that passed through. A pod of blue whales had recently been spotted heading north. The red cloud, which looked like krill, would be absolutely irresistible to the 100-foot giants.

  A fluttering piece of red material, about the size of a cornflake, caught his eye. He reached out and caught it in his palm, then grasped it between two fingers. It was surprisingly firm. He squeezed and it broke apart. He rubbed his fingers together, releasing a blood-like cloud as the material dissolved.

  He took a deep breath from his regulator, tasting the metallic flavored air, and let it out slowly, releasing a cascade of bubbles, which fled to the surface. His eyes followed them. He knew the answer to this mystery lay up there. The more he saw, however, the less he wanted to know what was happening.

  But he had no choice.

  He kicked hard, pumping his muscles, an action that ate up the air in his tank more quickly than would a leisurely swim. He checked the pressure gauge—still plenty of air remaining. This would most likely be a short dive, so he could take the risk. Besides, the wet porch was only fifty feet below and he could free dive that if he had to. Holding your breath for long periods of time is a handy talent to have as a SEAL, and one he had worked on over the years. The skill had yet to save his life, but he had a feeling it would, eventually.

  As he neared the surface, the material grew dense, which meant it was definitely coming from above and not being pushed into the area by ocean currents. The material had to be coming from a boat, or a plane, or... Well, he didn’t want to consider the last possibility, and wouldn’t, until he confirmed it with his own eyes.

  Through the haze he found the umbilical cord that connected Aquarius to its Life Support Buoy, or LSB. The LSB supplied power and provided wireless communications and telemetry to the station and held air compressors, as well. It also made for a convenient viewing platform. While standing on top of the LSB, which was shaped like a super-sized, yellow chess piece, Miller would be able to see from horizon to horizon. If someone was dumping this garbage, he’d spot them.

  Approaching the buoy, Miller kicked harder, building speed so he could launch himself onto the platform. As he broke the surface, clumps of wet slime slid from his back and arms. A glob clung to his hair, but he paid it no attention. What he was seeing distracted him from doing anything else. He didn’t stand, remove his goggles or take out his regulator. He simply gaped.

  The world was red. As far as he could see, a crust, like refrigerated pudding, coated the surface of the ocean. There wasn’t a cloud to be seen, yet crimson flakes fell like snow from a sky that looked more purple than blue.

  Heart beating hard, he stood up and looked in every direction. He spotted a sailboat off to the north, its sail limp as wilted lettuce, but nothing else caught his eye.

  Miller tentatively held out a hand and caught another flake. Its surface felt rough and porous to his touch, like a petrified snowflake. Curious, he removed his regulator and placed the flake on his tongue. The flavor of blood struck him immediately. He gagged and spit several times, then took a deep, shaky breath. The air did no good. He felt winded, as though he’d just run a sprint.

  He took another breath. His chest began to ache. He grew lightheaded.

  He took a third, deeper breath—

  —and fell to his knees.

  Was it poison? Could these flakes kill so quickly?

  Spots danced in his vision as he realized the truth.

  He was suffocating.

  Drowning in the open air like a fish.

  He shoved the regulator back into his mouth and breathed deeply, this time relishing the metallic tasting air. He continued taking deep breaths until his head cleared and he felt relatively normal again. It wasn’t until then that he let his mind fill in the blanks.

  He couldn’t breathe in the open air! What did it mean? What...

  Oh shit! Miller thought. I can’t breathe because...there’s no oxygen!

  ###

  -SAMPLE-

  RESURRECT by KANE GILMOUR

  Available for $2.99 on Kindle: Click here to buy!

  DESCRIPTION:

  In the 1850s, a madman proclaims himself the Son of God and raises an army, taking over half of China.

  A century and a half later, his descendent and legions of devoted followers plan to take over more than just China.

  When alpine engineer and mountaineer Jason Quinn, a man with a past mired in tragedy and violence, meets archeologist Dr. Eva Rayjek after a plane crash in the high Himalaya, neither of them are expecting wave after wave of Chinese assassins.

  Pursued to America, the frozen ice of the Gulf of Finland, and the heights of Hong Kong, Quinn and Eva connect her investigations with the machinations of charismatic shipping magnate and cathedral-builder, David Hong. As a scheme to obtain a private audience with the Pope at the Vatican comes to fruition, Hong’s fanatical followers are preparing for global warfare.

  If Quinn fails to stop Hong’s plan, the entire Catholic Church just might crumble.

  RESURRECT is the first book in the Jason Quinn series. Fans of Matthew Reilly, Jeremy Robinson, James Rollins, and Clive Cussler should all enjoy this first adventure in the exploits of mountaineer Jason Quinn.

  EXCERPT:

  CHAPTER 14

  “Doesn’t he look like a damn gunslinger?” Curtis asked Eva with a smile.

  They had been hiking for a while. Johnson carried the backpack with the climbing gear, and Quinn was loaded up with the camping equipment, two ice axes hanging from the waist belt of his harness by short slings with carabiners. These axes had been specially designed for him with carbon-fiber blades made from Buckminster-Fullerene, a special form of carbon reputed to be harder than diamond. On his feet were huge clunky white plastic boots that looked to Eva like skiing boots
, but these had metal teeth that retracted into the toes and soles. Eva knew what ice-climbing crampons looked like, but she had never seen any that were a part of the shoe itself. Usually, she knew, they resembled a foot-shaped metal cage with teeth, and were attached to the bottom of climbing or hiking boots. What she didn’t know was that the boots on Quinn’s feet had also been made specifically for him, and to his own original design specs. The climbing crampon teeth were spring-loaded and could be ejected from the soles of the boots at the push of a button.

  Eva had protested the fact that the men hadn’t given her a pack to carry, but the men had looked at each other and then proclaimed that there wasn’t anything left to carry—almost as if they had planned it that way.

  “Yes. But he’s a cute gunslinger. More young Clint Eastwood than Jack Palance,” Eva replied, loud enough for Quinn to overhear as he walked slightly ahead of the other two.

  “Hear that? She thinks I’m the cute one.” Quinn added. “Guess that makes you scraggly ol’ Lee Marvin.”

  They all chuckled at that one. They had been joking like this for a while, as the terrain was becoming more and more bleak and depressing. They had seen no signs of any kind of life. No plants or trees grew in this part of the Himalaya. The mountains were a palette of muted brown and gray colors—when they did actually show through the ice and snow. As they progressed along the barren winter landscape, they encountered the brown less frequently as the drifted snow became more difficult to negotiate, often getting waist deep.

  After a night camping, they moved on again. By the middle of the day, the level of accumulated snow was decreasing, and the browns and grays were more apparent once again. The three lunched by a frozen river, and soaked in the sun, which was warming in spite of the altitude. The conversation focused on guessing the origin of their dehydrated packaged food.

  When they had finished and Quinn and Johnson had packed the gear and hefted their backpacks, Eva sauntered off ahead of them as they neared the frozen river. Earlier, Johnson had suggested a way through the hills that followed a valley on the other side of the river. When Eva reached the edge of the stream, she took a tentative step on the surface of the ice, finding that it held her weight nicely.

  “It should be fine. We’ll go across one at a time though,” Johnson told her.

  She was about three quarters of the way across when Quinn and Johnson watched her plunge clean through the ice, and into the rushing waters below, disappearing instantaneously.

  “Not good,” Quinn said calmly as he began sprinting toward the ice. Curtis was right behind him, running hard. Quinn lunged from the shore landing on his knees on the ice about ten feet downstream of the spot where Eva had gone in. He frantically swept the snow aside to find that he was right on top of her. She was moving fast, being slid along the underside of the ice by the current. Quinn hacked at the ice above her with his ice ax, but the ice was too thick at this part of the river, and he was barely making a dent, as small chips and flakes of ice flew in an arc behind each swing. She was moving too fast.

  “I can’t get her, Curtis! She’s getting away!” Quinn was nearly panicked. The strain in his voice was apparent to Johnson, who was already sprinting along the edge of the stream, past Quinn. Johnson was anticipating where the current would take Eva, and trying to get there first.

  “Move your ass, Quinn!” Curtis yelled. Quinn was up and chasing Curtis along the bank. Curtis was well ahead by now, and removing his pack. He clipped a carabiner to his belt, and tossed the pack onto the ice as he kept running. Quinn could see that the neon green and pink climbing rope from the pack was spooling out as Curtis ran. The other end was now clipped to Johnson’s belt. Then Quinn watched in awe of his friend, as Curtis leapt from the riverbank and pulled his knees to his chest in mid-air. Curtis Johnson executed a perfect cannonball directly into the center of the frozen stream, and crashed through the ice, leaving behind a nearly perfect, round hole in the surface. He disappeared and Quinn understood as the climbing rope quickly slithered into the hole.

  “Got it,” Quinn said, as he leapt headfirst out over the ice as if to dive into the shallow end of a swimming pool. He hit the ice smoothly and his yellow environment suit’s nylon surface slid across the ice with little friction. He was moving fast, head first, across the ice toward the pack Curtis had dropped. But now the rope pulled taught on the other carabiner that secured the rope to the inside of the pack. The pack began to slide toward the hole at an amazing speed.

  “Current’s picked up. Damn it!” Quinn reached for the pack with his left hand and still clutched the ax in his right. He was a few feet from the hole when his finger felt a nylon strap. He clenched his fist and swung the ax down hard. It sank into the surface up to the shaft, and his body pivoted from the momentum. He clutched the pack firmly and let his body jerk to a hard stop. His shoulder felt torn, but he gripped the pack strap as hard as he could. He looked behind him to see that his feet were now dangling over the hole Curtis had made. Another second and they all might have been dead, their corpses washing ashore somewhere in India. Now Quinn pulled a leg up by the sunken head of the ice ax and clicked a plastic button on the side of his boot by smacking the boot on the ice. The spring-loaded climbing crampons extended with a snapping sound. Then he brought the boot down hard, digging the metal teeth into the ice. Next, he pulled the pack to his body, and wrapped the rope around his arm twice. Now he was an anchor. Curtis would have to do the rest.

  It took a few seconds that seemed longer, before Quinn felt a steady pull on the rope. He waited. It seemed to take forever. His right arm ached, as he clutched the ax, and he prayed that the ice below him didn’t crack. A minute passed, and still there was nothing.

  Then she was there. Eva broke the surface with a gasp, sucking in air, and clinging to the pack that Quinn held. She was about to say something to Quinn, when to his surprise, she literally launched out of the hole, and over Quinn, where she landed on the ice in a crumpled wet mess. Quinn’s eyes shot back to the hole where Johnson’s arm was extended after having shoved Eva up and out of the water. From the position of the hand, Quinn guessed that it had been on Eva’s backside, and he barked a harsh laugh, as Johnson hauled himself out of the hole and gulped in frigid mountain air.

  “Good thinking,” Quinn told him.

  Johnson took in the scene with the pack, the ice ax, and the boot crampons, and nodded. “Good save.”

  “Good teamwork,” Eva managed through her violent shivering. “Now let’s get off this damn ice and get warm.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Curtis thought Quinn’s shoulder looked terrible. It was obviously dislocated. The flesh had turned purple from torn blood vessels, and the head of the humerus, the long bone in the upper arm, was now located about a fist’s width to the front of Quinn’s shoulder joint. In all their years of climbing together, it was the worst injury he had ever seen Jason Quinn sustain.

  Curtis had always held a secret belief that Quinn was charmed with regard to personal injury. The man rarely got injured, and when he did, he tended to heal extremely fast. One time when climbing on Pinnacle Peak in Arizona, Johnson looked on in concern as Quinn showed the 6-inch gash to his forearm he received on a tough lieback crack called “Lizard’s Lips”. Quinn had wrapped it in gauze and they had headed home. The next day, Johnson was stunned to see Quinn’s cut sealed, and a week later, it was gone, with hardly a trace of a scar. As a result, Johnson was rarely alarmed when Quinn got slightly injured. But this one looked harsh.

  “Oh, it looks fine. I don’t think we need to do anything with it,” Curtis commented nonchalantly.

  Quinn was lying on the snow-covered ground with the top of his environment suit off, and pulled down to his waist. He wore only a thin Capilene tank top, and he was already beginning to shiver from the cold.

  “Can the sarcasm and just do it,” he said.

  “I can’t watch this. This is just too gross.” Eva said as she turned away.

  Curtis held Q
uinn’s outstretched hand, pulled the arm outward slightly, and raised the heel of his mountain boot. In one swift movement he brought his foot down on Quinn’s disfigured shoulder joint, driving the head of the humerus down into the joint where it belonged. The sound reminded Johnson of the report of a Colt 44 pistol. The crack was loud, and Quinn cringed at the pain but didn’t cry out. He refused to let his pain do anything other than make him angrier at the killers who had murdered his team. His resolve to get answers and justice only grew stronger with the blaze of red and black that filled his vision as the pain vibrated through his whole skeleton.

  After a moment of breathing heavily, Quinn got up and helped Johnson set up their tent. It was another garishly bright yellow TNF geodesic-dome tent. Quinn’s pack contained a miniature version of the futuristic stove Eva had seen back at the Sunnydale camp. After it was set up in the tent, the heat from the stove took only a few minutes to dry Curtis’s and Eva’s still damp synthetic fiber clothing after Quinn had wrung the garments out. In the meantime, they huddled in compressible micro-fiber fleece blankets. Since he wasn’t wet, Quinn hung his blanket from the gear loft near the tent’s ceiling, effectively creating a wall separating the tent into two halves, so that Eva could undress in private.

  They sat in silence. Eva thought about her deceased colleagues. Johnson thought about the seismologist Val, and how he was supposed to have had a date with her once they had all returned to the States. That wouldn’t be happening now. Instead, he would be attending a lot of funerals—if they made it back to the States.

  Quinn saw only a blistering haze of crimson as his thoughts turned repeatedly to revenge. He hadn’t been truly involved in his heart or his head with Eva’s mysterious plane crash, although he was attracted to her. He had been willing to believe that there was some explanation for the plane crash. But now there was no mystery. Someone had deliberately tried to kill Eva and the other two archeologists. And now the bastards that were after her had come back and tried again. Only this time they had murdered his entire team. Eight people whose lives were entrusted to him were dead, he himself had been buried alive three times in one day, and Johnson and Eva were nearly drowned.