The Tomb of Hercules_A Novel

by Andy McDermott

  He passed the third level and took a glow stick from his belt, bending it to mix the fluorescent chemicals within. Something loomed out of the blackness below in the murky orange light.

  The base.

  Chase quickly located the air lock hatch, right where Trulli had said it was. He brushed away a thin layer of silt and turned the protruding wheel to unseal it. The chamber below, barely large enough for a single person with a scuba tank, had flooded automatically when he started opening the hatch. He dropped into it.

  Once the hatch was closed, he checked the air lock controls. A heavy lever was in the up position. He shoved it down, and air bubbles immediately surged up around him. The water drained away as air was pumped in. The hissing noise echoing around the small chamber was almost earsplitting.

  Chase endured the din with a grimace, waiting until the water was down to his ankles before facing the inner hatch. Another locking wheel awaited him. As soon as the hiss of compressed air stopped, he turned it until the seals were released and the hatch opened.

  Beyond lay a dimly lit concrete corridor, dripping with water—not from leaks, but from condensation. The passage was cold, this part of the habitat being unheated. He quickly stripped off his scuba gear and laid it out ready for when he left, keeping only the knife and the camera. He wished he had a gun, but that was something Trulli hadn’t been able to provide.

  Metal hatches led to side rooms, but Chase ignored them, heading along the corridor to a circular chamber. A ladder led up to a hatch in the ceiling: access to the central core. He shook off as much of the water from his body and wet suit as he could, then climbed the ladder and cautiously raised the hatch.

  The cross-shaped compartment above reminded him of the interior of the control room, sleek and curvaceous despite its functionality, the futuristic space station vibe back in full effect. Hatches at the end of each arm opened into the connecting spokes leading to the bottom deck’s habitation modules. Two of the bulkheads, Chase knew, housed power lines and life support systems. A third contained an elevator.

  He went to the fourth—the emergency ladder—and carefully opened the hatch, listening intently for any sounds of activity above. All he could hear was the rumble of machinery.

  There were at least eight people inside the habitat—Sophia, Komosa, the nuclear technician, the four men he’d seen, and presumably the tilt-rotor’s pilot. Possibly more. And all he had to face them with were a knife and his fists.

  “Doddle,” he told himself, starting his ascent.

  The central chamber of the next deck was a carbon copy of the one below. He cautiously stepped through the hatch and padded to the door leading to the spoke adjoining Corvus’s quarters. Drawing his knife, he opened the door a crack and looked through.

  The tubular passage was empty. So far, so good.

  Chase hurried down the corridor. A small porthole at the end looked out into the sea, with more doors to the left and right. He went right, the knife poised ready to strike…

  Nobody was there. The gold ingots gleamed under the bright light clusters set into the ceiling.

  So did the steel casing of the nuke. Apart from the addition of the arming device, the bomb was just as he remembered it from Switzerland.

  He looked down into the base, between the three steel rails supporting the cap. A faint silver-gray sheen of uranium showed at the bottom. That was the slug, which would be fired up into the larger mass of uranium in the cap—but its path was currently blocked by two thick steel bolts. A safety measure, to prevent the slug from moving during transit and getting too close to the other uranium—which, while not triggering a nuclear explosion, would still release a lethal burst of radiation. Presumably the bolts would retract before detonation.

  The whole thing was designed to be foolproof in function. What would be the best way to sabotage it?

  The answer came to him in an instant, as brutally simple as the bomb itself. “Just smash the fucker!”

  Placing the tip of the knife against the timer’s screen, he prepared to pry it off and rip out whatever wires he found beneath—

  The door through which he had entered flew open.

  Chase jumped up as two men rushed in. One with black-framed glasses carried a crowbar; the other was unarmed.

  Chase ran at them, the knife raised.

  “Get him, Gordon!” yelled the unarmed man. The man with the crowbar drew back his arm to swing it—leaving himself open to a strike at his lower body.

  Chase delivered one, smashing the ball of his heel against the man’s kneecap. Cartilage crunched. The man shrieked, the crowbar’s swing suddenly abandoned.

  Chase ignored him, already turning on the second attacker without skipping a beat. This man had received better combat training than his companion, balanced more lightly on his feet to dodge any kicks, arms raised to deflect a knife strike.

  Chase stabbed the knife straight at his face, a crude and direct attack. The man almost mockingly swept up one forearm to knock the blow aside—only for Chase’s other hand to snap forward like a cobra and clamp around his wrist, pulling it towards him.

  Before the man had a chance to realize what had happened, the blade plunged down into his forearm, passing between the bones to burst through the bottom of his sleeve with a spurt of blood. Chase twisted the knife as he yanked it back out, ripping apart the muscles and tearing through tendons and arteries. More blood poured from the wounds.

  Even before the second man started screaming, Chase swung around and slammed his elbow into the first man’s face, breaking his glasses in two and flattening his nose into mush. His head snapped back and banged against the compartment’s outer wall. He slumped nervelessly to the floor, leaving a bloody trail down the bulkhead.

  The other man was now desperately squeezing his arm to stem the bleeding, howling in pain. Chase didn’t care, completing his turn by driving the knife deep into his throat. The howling stopped abruptly. With no emotion beyond contempt, Chase twisted the knife again to sever the carotid artery. The man was involved in a plot to set off a nuke; he deserved whatever he got.

  He pulled out the bloodied knife, and the man collapsed, twitching and gurgling.

  The whole fight had lasted mere seconds. Maybe he still had time to destroy the arming device before the rest of the habitat’s occupants arrived—

  Clap. Clap. Clap.

  “Oh, Eddie,” said Sophia in mock sorrow from the compartment’s other entrance, “he was only two days from retirement!”

  Chase whirled to see her giving him a slow hand clap. Komosa stood beside her, his Browning aimed at Chase. The nuclear technician was behind them both.

  The knife was still in Chase’s hand. He could throw it—

  “Don’t,” Komosa warned, quashing the thought before it could be completed. The gun’s laser sight flicked on and danced across Chase’s face, dazzling him. Reluctantly, he dropped the knife to the deck.

  “Check the bomb,” Sophia ordered the technician before stepping farther into the room. “I have to admit, Eddie, I’m genuinely surprised and impressed to see you again. Did Nina survive as well?”

  “She’s fine,” Chase said coldly.

  “What a shame. Still, lesson learned—next time, I won’t assume that you’re dead until I’ve actually seen your body.”

  “There won’t be a next time, Sophia. This is over.”

  “So are you,” said Komosa. The laser spot slid down onto Chase’s chest, then back to his face. “I’ve been looking forward to this, Chase. Where do you want it?”

  “Is little toe an option?”

  Komosa snorted and fixed the laser between Chase’s eyes—

  “Not yet,” said Sophia.

  Komosa gave her a look of disbelief. “Sophia!”

  “Just can’t bear to live without me?” Chase asked sarcastically.

  Sophia shook her head. “Hardly. There’s nothing I’d like more, but the fact remains that when I saw you last, you had no transport, no passport,
no money and no idea where I was going. Yet twenty-four hours later, here you are.” She regarded him icily. “You had help. Government help. Who else knows you’re here, Eddie?”

  “Oh, just MI6, the CIA, NSA, KLF and the RSPCA. They should all be dropping by in about five minutes from now.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Sophia, folding her arms. “If they knew that”—she nodded at the bomb—“was here, we would have been blown out of the water by the Americans already. But you’ve told somebody. Who was it, Eddie?”

  Chase merely shrugged. Komosa lowered his gun, bringing the laser down onto Chase’s crotch. “I’ll make him talk.”

  “We don’t have time,” said Sophia. She looked over at the technician. “Heinrich! Is it all right?”

  “As far as I can tell, Lady Sophia,” he replied.

  “Just out of interest,” said Chase, stalling for time, “how did you know I was in here?”

  Sophia smiled. “This habitat has a very sophisticated life-support system that warns the control room of any unexpected buildup of carbon dioxide. The first time you exhaled, we knew we had an extra person aboard.”

  “I’ll hold my breath next time.”

  “As you said, there won’t be a next time. But I still need to know who you’ve told about the bomb.” Chase said nothing. Sophia sighed and reached behind her back, taking something from the waistband of her trousers. “You always were irritatingly stubborn, Eddie. Well, since you’ve forced me to advance my schedule, we’ll have to continue this discussion later.” She brought her hand out from behind her back, holding an oddly designed gun.

  “Hey, wait a—” Chase began, before a dart thumped painfully into his stomach. “Oh, bollocks …”

  Darkness consumed him.

  “Something’s happening!” Nina said, sitting bolt upright as she saw movement through the binoculars. People had appeared on the landing platform, standing out clearly in the glare of the spotlights. “Oh, crap, it’s Sophia! She’s getting into the plane!”

  She watched intently as more figures emerged from the habitat, two of them carrying something small but heavy between them. “Shit! I think that’s the bomb!”

  The boat rocked as Trulli clambered forward. “Are you sure?”

  “Eddie told me what it looks like. That must be it.”

  Trulli looked nervously at the water around them. “Christ, I hope he got out okay …”

  The blood froze in Nina’s heart. “He didn’t,” she gasped. Through the binoculars, Komosa’s giant form stood out clearly from the others—and she was intimately familiar with the man he was effortlessly carrying over one shoulder. “Oh my God, they’ve got him!”

  She watched, helpless, as Komosa brought Chase to the tilt-rotor and dumped him inside its cabin before entering himself. Sophia, the bomb and the two men carrying it were already aboard. Less than a minute later, the hatch was closed, the landing platform was cleared and the oversized propellers were turning.

  There was absolutely nothing Nina could do except watch as the tilt-rotor lifted off and rose into the night sky. Its engines pitched forward and it sped off to the north, rapidly becoming nothing more than one more star among thousands.

  “Oh, Jesus …” Nina whispered. “I’ve lost him.”

  27

  Trulli raced his Discovery along the coast road from Marsh Harbour. “Are you sure you’ll be able to find where they’ve taken Eddie?” Nina asked.

  “Pretty sure,” Trulli replied. “All of Corvus’s cargo ships have GPS trackers. Hopefully his planes do too.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  The Australian didn’t have an answer for that. Instead, he turned towards a cluster of industrial buildings along the waterline. A barrier and gatehouse blocked the road ahead. “Okay,” he said, “just try to look relaxed. Maybe a bit drunk too.”

  “How can I possibly look relaxed?”

  Trulli stopped at the barrier. A uniformed security guard stepped out of the gatehouse.

  “Evening, Barney,” Trulli said with exaggerated casualness. “How’s things?”

  “Fine, Mr. Trulli,” said the guard. He didn’t seem suspicious, just curious. “What brings you here at this time of night?”

  “Well, I was gonna go for a midnight dip with my friend here,” he indicated Nina, “and then I realized I left the bloody key for my outboard in the office!”

  The guard looked through the window at Nina. Heeding Trulli’s comment, she gave the man a languid wave. “Hi.”

  He nodded in acknowledgment, then turned back to Trulli. “You’re not going to be long, are you?”

  “No, mate! Just got to find the thing. Should only take a few minutes.”

  Barney considered this. “She should really sign in, but… Okay, as long as you’re quick.”

  “You’re a top fella,” Trulli told him. The guard smiled, then returned to the gatehouse. The barrier rose, and Trulli drove through.

  They pulled up beside a large building at the end of a dock. Trulli jumped from the Discovery and hurried to a side door. Nina followed him inside.

  Despite the urgency of the situation, she couldn’t help but stop in surprise as Trulli switched on the lights. The building was a covered dock, a huge roller shutter at the seaward end cutting into the water. Isolated from the waves outside, the pool within the building was as smooth as glass.

  That wasn’t what had surprised her, though. It was a submarine, suspended above the water on cables, though its design resembled no sub Nina had ever seen before. If anything, she thought, it looked as if it ought to be piloted by Han Solo or Captain Kirk.

  Trulli ignored it, considering it as everyday a workplace object as a chair. “Up here,” he told Nina, clattering up a flight of steps to an elevated room overlooking the dock. She followed him into an untidy office, where a large drafting table covered with annotated blueprints dominated the space. “Sorry about the mess,” he said somewhat sheepishly, sweeping empty cardboard coffee cups away from a computer on a smaller desk as he woke it up.

  “What is that thing?” Nina asked of the submarine outside the office’s windows.

  “Hmm? Oh, that’s my current project. The Wobblebug.”

  Nina almost laughed. “The what?”

  “Well, that’s not the official name. René wants to call it the Nautilus, but that’s kind of a clichéd name for a sub. Although if he’s dead, I guess it doesn’t matter any-more…Anyway, it’s a supercavitator.”

  “A what now?”

  “It goes really fast,” Trulli oversimplified, before returning his attention to the computer. “Okay, let me just log in… Great, I can get into the GPS network.” A few mouse clicks, and a list of Corvus’s ships and aircraft appeared on the screen. “You remember the tail number of that plane?”

  She did; he entered it into a search field and hit return. “Okay, it’s got a tracker.”

  The list was replaced by a map. Nina recognized the outlines of the Bahamas and the southern half of the eastern seaboard of the United States, from Florida up to Virginia. A line led north from Great Abaco to a point about 150 miles off the South Carolina coast, a yellow triangle marked with the tilt-rotor’s registration number at its northern tip.

  “There,” said Trulli. “Heading zero-eight degrees, speed two hundred and seventy knots, altitude ten thousand feet.”

  “Where are they going?” Nina asked. “Zoom out, show more of the map.”

  Trulli complied. The screen now showed the whole of eastern America.

  Nina felt a chill as she realized where the tilt-rotor’s course would take it. “Oh my God,” she whispered, rummaging through the scattered papers on Trulli’s desk to find a ruler. She held it against the screen, extending the course all the way to its final destination.

  The chill intensified. She’d been right. “Oh my God!” she repeated, more loudly.

  “Jesus,” Trulli said as he saw it too.

  The ruler sliced through New York.

  Her
home.

  “She’s going to New York,” Nina said, stunned. “She’s taking a goddamn nuke to New York!”

  Trulli entered rapid commands on the keyboard, and a window popped up with more information about the tilt-rotor. “No, she can’t be. The Bell 609 doesn’t have enough range, even with extra fuel tanks. She must be going somewhere else.”

  “Where, though?” Nina looked back at the map. “The only other place she comes close to on that course is Atlantic City, and why would she nuke New Jersey? Nobody would even notice!” Mind racing, she stared at the yellow triangle representing the current position of Sophia—and Chase. “Can you show the positions of Corvus’s ships on there as well?”

  “Which ones?”

  “All of them.”

  Puzzled, Trulli did as she asked. After a few seconds, a couple of dozen new markers appeared. There were several in the Bahamas, where Corvus’s shipping line was based, more either in or close to major East Coast ports …

  And one on its own, off the Virginia coast. Directly along the tilt-rotor’s course.

  Nina stabbed her finger at it. “That! What’s that?”

  Trulli zoomed in. “It’s the Ocean Emperor!”

  Nina’s mind flashed back to the party where she had first met Sophia. “Corvus’s boat?”

  “Yeah. It’s heading for New York, doing about twenty-three knots, so if it keeps up that speed it’ll get there tomorrow morning, about nine-ish.”

  “It’s got a helipad,” Nina remembered. “Is it in range of Sophia’s plane?”

  Trulli checked. “Yes.”

  “That’s what she’s doing. If she tried to fly over the city the air force would intercept her, and there are nuclear detectors on the roads—but she can land on the Ocean Emperor and sail the nuke right into New York Harbor without anyone knowing a thing until it’s too late!”

  “Jesus,” gasped Trulli. “So what do we do? We’ve got to tell somebody!”

  “Yeah, but who? I can’t go to the authorities—I’m wanted for murder!”