Zero Hour nf-11

by Clive Cussler

  “Actually,” the man said, “in your case, I wouldn’t be. I’ve read your file. Trouble seems to find you. And when it doesn’t, you go looking for it.”

  “My file?” Kurt asked. “Why would you have a file on me?”

  “Because I’m Cecil Bradshaw, deputy chief of counterterrorism for the ASIO, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. And you are a wayward member of the National Underwater and Marine Agency as well as a former specialist with the CIA.”

  “I agree with everything but the wayward part,” Kurt said. “I’m here on vacation.”

  Bradshaw looked like he didn’t believe that. “Really? And your vacation just happened to land you in the middle of the most sensitive operation we’ve conducted in years.”

  Kurt could imagine how it looked, especially considering his background. “Bad timing,” he insisted. “I’m not a spy or anything. I’m a nautical engineer and head of NUMA’s Special Projects Branch, which generally involves research and development, though we do get into our share of scrapes. As for the CIA, I did salvage work mostly. Refloating sunken ships. Retrieving important parts from inside them, or blowing them up to keep others from doing the same. And even that was a long time ago.”

  “So it says in your file,” Bradshaw replied.

  “Look,” Kurt said, “I’m just here for the conference. And, once it’s over, I plan on surfing, diving, and knocking back a few Fosters. But I don’t stand around and watch people burn to death or let them get shot, if I can help it. That’s how I got involved.”

  Bradshaw seemed to be weighing this, perhaps acknowledging Kurt’s actions in his mind. His tone softened a bit, but his face remained gruff.

  “Okay, Austin, I’m going to cut you a little slack,” he said. “I’m also going to assume you’re not dumb enough to open your mouth about what you’ve seen here. But if you’re not sure you can stay quiet, I can find a nice ovenlike jail out beyond the Black Stump where you can sit and think about it to your heart’s content.”

  Kurt wasn’t sure where exactly the Black Stump was, but it sounded far away. Like a trip to Siberia only hotter.

  “I remember the drill,” he said. “You want me to sign something? See a hypnotist to forget this ever happened? That’s fine too. Just show me the way out, and I can head to the beach like I intended. But you might want to check your own ranks for a leak because someone knew this little meeting of yours was going down.”

  Hayley and Bradshaw exchanged a glance. Something unspoken passed between them.

  Bradshaw turned back to Kurt. “Not likely,” he said with a smug look on his face, then changed subjects. “But since you’re here, maybe you’d care to offer your professional opinion.”

  “On what?”

  “Start with the dead man’s last word: Tartarus. Does that mean anything to you?”

  Kurt looked at the setup once again. They were prepared to digest a lot of information. At least three analysts were on-site, plus Bradshaw. Whatever they were hoping for, it came in short. Way short.

  “Only what I told Hayley,” he said.

  “We’re dealing with a threat to Australian national security,” Bradshaw insisted. “Maybe even to other countries. We have four dead contacts, two before this event. One of them led us to a shipload of exotic mining equipment. You said Tartarus was underground.”

  “That’s right,” Kurt said. “In Greek mythology.”

  He glanced at the desk where the laptop was. “As you’ve no doubt discovered, it’s a mythological prison for the gods. But unless you know something I don’t, it’s not real. Whatever that guy was trying to tell you, I doubt he meant it literally. Tartarus is probably a code word or a cipher for something. Maybe related to the papers he gave you.”

  Bradshaw took a second to digest this and then waved Kurt over to the conference table. “You claim to be an engineer. These look like schematics to me. You see anything here that might ring a bell?”

  Kurt studied the cryptic papers. There was so much blood on them, the writing was obscured and smeared in places. What he could see looked like gibberish. He saw complex equations populated by symbols he didn’t recognize. The second page was definitely part of a schematic, but it seemed to describe a circular-shaped dome.

  “Afraid not,” Kurt said. Despite his earlier guess, he couldn’t imagine a single word unlocking the clutter he was looking at.

  “What about the boat?” Bradshaw asked. “Did you see anything in it before it burned? A backpack? A suitcase? A computer?”

  “Is that what they were bringing you?”

  “Just answer the question.”

  “No,” Kurt said, “I didn’t see anything like that.”

  “What about the driver?”

  Kurt’s mind drifted back to the scene on the promenade. “He asked me to leave him and help this guy. He called him Panos.”

  “That’s it?”

  “We didn’t exactly have a long conversation.”

  Hayley looked away sadly, and Bradshaw sighed with disappointment. “Well, you’ve been a tremendous help,” he said sarcastically.

  “He did save my life,” Hayley pointed out.

  “That he did,” Bradshaw agreed, speaking with a note of humility in his voice for the first time. He stepped toward the door. “Sorry to be so nasty, Mr. Austin, but it’s been a damned awful day. Enjoy your vacation.”

  “Hold on a second,” Kurt said.

  His mind was drifting back to the incident. He couldn’t recall any luggage in the boat or anything else out of the ordinary except that he remembered Panos wincing in pain when he was dragged from the boat. He recalled the odd way the man’s fingers had curled up and how he struggled to walk. There was something strange about his hunched-over appearance as he lumbered away from the boat. Something familiar too. Kurt had seen that gait before.

  “That guy was your informant?”

  Hayley went to speak, and Bradshaw stopped her.

  “Come on,” Kurt snapped, “either you want my help or you don’t.”

  “The dead men were couriers,” Bradshaw said reluctantly. “Bringing us something.”

  “Do you know where they came from?”

  Bradshaw shook his head. “If we knew that, there would be no need for this lovely conversation.”

  “I suggest you start looking underwater,” Kurt said, “because that man was suffering from DCS.”

  “DCS?”

  “Decompression sickness,” Kurt said. “Bubbles of nitrogen in the joints. It causes horrendous pain and a hunched-over appearance — if the patient can even walk, that is. You get it from deep, prolonged diving, then surfacing too quickly. Normal treatment is one hundred percent oxygen and time in a hyperbaric chamber to force the gas back into suspension. But wherever this guy came from, I’m guessing he didn’t have the time to go back down. Kind of hard to do when you’re running for your life.”

  Bradshaw all but snickered. “He’d just been in a crash, playing stuntman without a seat belt or a helmet. More likely, he was injured in the wreck.”

  “He wasn’t limping,” Kurt noted, “he wasn’t favoring one side. He was bent over like the Hunchback of Notre-Dame and unable to straighten up. Those are the most typical effects of a disease commonly called the bends.”

  Bradshaw seemed to be considering Kurt’s guess. He sucked at his teeth and then shook his head. “Not a bad thought,” he said, “but here’s why you’re wrong.”

  He pointed to a brownish red smear on the bloodstained papers. It was oddly iridescent under the light.

  “He was covered in this,” Bradshaw said, “every pore, every fiber of his clothes. So was the last courier we found dead.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a type of soil, called a palaeosol,” Bradshaw explained. “Common in the outback. Not found underwater. If it tracks with the other guy, it’ll contain a mix of heavy metals and various toxins, including traces of manganese and arsenic. Which tells us these guys are opera
ting in the desert somewhere. Not from a submarine.”

  “He could have been in a lake and gotten dirty afterward,” Kurt pointed out.

  “Have you ever been to the outback?” Bradshaw asked. “The lakes out there are mostly transient. Even during the rainy season — which it is not right now, by the way — they’re shallow and wide. Like your Great Salt Lake.”

  Kurt was stumped. “Don’t know what to tell you,” he said, “but I’d stake my reputation on it. That man came up from a depth where he was exposed to great pressure.”

  “Thanks for your opinion,” Bradshaw replied. “We’ll be sure to check into it.”

  He waved a hand toward the exit.

  “So this is what it means to be shown the door,” Kurt said.

  Hayley looked as if she’d have preferred to leave with him. Kurt felt differently about her now. A damsel in distress. He wondered once again what her deal with Bradshaw might be.

  “Good-bye,” she whispered sadly. “Thank you.”

  Kurt hoped it wasn’t quite final. He guessed that suggesting as much would annoy Bradshaw. A win-win situation.

  “Until we meet again,” he said. And then he stepped out through the door and left her and Bradshaw behind.

  FIVE

  Two hours after the incident, Kurt found himself back in his suite at the Intercontinental Hotel. He’d taken a shower, sent a long e-mail to NUMA headquarters, and finished a tumbler of scotch before climbing into bed.

  Forty minutes later, he was still wide awake, staring at the ceiling and listening to the hum of the air conditioner. The events played on an endless loop in his mind. As they did, the questions chased one another in circles.

  What was the ASIO dealing with? Why would a man covered in desert dust also be suffering from decompression sickness? And what part was Hayley Anderson playing in all of it? She seemed to be there by her own choice, but she didn’t seem happy about it.

  Despite a little voice that told him to leave it alone, Kurt found he couldn’t let it go.

  He glanced over at the nightstand. He’d covered the bright face of the alarm clock with a towel to keep the light out of his eyes, but his Doxa watch was resting beside it. He scooped it up, checked the luminous hands, and realized it was almost two o’clock in the morning.

  He threw the covers off, climbed out of bed, and walked over to the desk. If he couldn’t find sleep, maybe he could find some answers.

  He opened his laptop and took a drink of water while it booted up. A quick Internet search regarding the ASIO brought up numerous articles. He didn’t expect to find a list of secret operations, but he thought there might be something indicating what they were dealing with. Maybe something obscure enough that he could put two and two together.

  With no luck there, he thought about Hayley.

  “Who are you, Ms. Anderson?” he muttered. “And what are you mixed up in?”

  He ran a Google search on her, and a wealth of links appeared.

  To Kurt’s surprise, Hayley was a scholar: a theoretical physicist tenured at the University of Sydney. She’d authored a number of papers with incomprehensible titles. There was a more easily read article about her turning down an invite to Oxford. He found another where she was trying to explain something about gravity and why Einstein was wrong in his understanding of it.

  Kurt poured himself a glass of scotch. He found himself more baffled than before. What on earth was a young woman who could prove Einstein wrong doing in the middle of a terrorist investigation?

  Finding no answer to that question, or any public link between her and the ASIO, he turned his attention to the dead informant.

  Kurt was certain the man had been suffering from decompression sickness. The question was: how did he get it?

  DCS had once been called caisson disease, because it was originally noticed in construction workers who were toiling away in the pressurized caissons used to build the foundations of great bridges. But it was most commonly seen in scuba divers.

  The dead man Panos had arrived in a boat, racing across Sydney Harbour. That also suggested he might have been diving. But he wore grimy street clothes, not a wet suit, and he smelled like days of perspiration, not the fresh salt of the sea. That, along with the mining connection and the ASIO’s belief that some terrorist group was operating in the outback, weighed against Kurt’s theory.

  He found a register of lakes in Australia and painstakingly scanned through them. Just as Bradshaw insisted, most of them appeared to be shallow or even transient, drying up completely in the summertime.

  “Not the kind of places one gets the bends,” Kurt said.

  He put the list down and began scanning a satellite image of Australia. Moving westward from Sydney and out over more arid territory, it was easy to see how quickly the terrain became barren. Occasionally, he came across a swath of green.

  Much like the American Southwest and the Egyptian Nile, wherever a stream or river flowed, vegetation grew up around it. Even if it didn’t flow year-round, there was often underground water to be had. But that water was locked away in permeable sands and aquifers, not hidden lakes that one could swim in. And even if he could find a lake, that didn’t explain the toxins on the man’s skin.

  About ready to shut down, Kurt used the touch pad to scan a few more sections of the map. He stopped when a strangely colored spot caught his eye. He tapped the ZOOM IN command a couple of times and waited.

  The map blurred and refocused, with the iridescent spot taking up a quarter of the screen.

  He was staring at a lake. A lake of brilliant rainbow hues, brighter than anything in nature had a right to be.

  Right away, Kurt knew what he was looking at. The pieces came together quickly after that. He knew why the lake was so outrageously colorful, and he also knew why the informant had both DCS and metal toxins all over his body.

  It seemed he and Bradshaw were both correct.

  He reached for the phone, dialed up a number from memory, and waited for an answer.

  “Come on, Joe,” he whispered to himself.

  A click on the line followed.

  “Hello,” a sleepy American voice said.

  Joe Zavala was Kurt’s best friend, his most loyal and trusted ally. Others would use the term partner in crime.

  “I hope the women of Cairns haven’t worn you out,” Kurt said, “because I need your help on something.”

  A yawn came over the line. “I have to ask: is it dangerous, illegal, or otherwise likely to result in serious bodily injury?”

  “Would you believe me if I said no?”

  “Probably not,” Joe said. “Especially considering what you’ve been up to down there.”

  “You heard?”

  “HQ called and left a message. Aside from that, you’re all over the news,” Joe explained. “CNN is reporting that an ‘unnamed American’ brought down the house in Sydney.”

  “That’s witty of them,” Kurt said. “Too bad they weren’t performing the 1812 Overture, it would have been a showstopper of an ending.”

  “And you said the conference was boring.”

  “Seems I was wrong,” Kurt said. “So do you want to join in the fun or not?”

  “Well,” Joe said, “I’m supposed to show off our new diving speeders to a group of reporters and a fifth-grade honors class from Cairns tomorrow as part of the Great Barrier Reef Project, but considering how repetitive their questions are, I think I’d rather throw my lot in with you. What do you need me to do?”

  “Have the speeders been tested?”

  “We checked them out today.”

  “Perfect,” Kurt said. “Pack them up and bring them to the airport. I’ll have a plane chartered for you.”

  “You got it. So what are we doing with them?”

  “Just following up on a hunch,” Kurt said.

  “You know you could phone it in,” Joe suggested. “Let the Aussies handle it.”

  “If I had any brains, I would,” Kurt replied, “bu
t my last conversation with them didn’t go so well. I figure I’ll have to show them instead of telling.”

  “Sounds about par for the course,” Joe said. “So where are we going anyway?”

  “Not entirely sure yet,” Kurt said. “But you’ll find out when you get to the airport. I’ll meet you at our destination.”

  “You know you can count on me,” Joe said. “Hasta mañana, amigo.”

  Before Joe could hang up, Kurt spoke again. “One more thing,” he said. “Keep this under your sombrero. It’s not exactly an approved NUMA operation.”

  SIX

  Janko Minkosovic stood in the center of the octagonal room. The lighting was dim and subdued, the air around him chilled below fifty degrees. Despite that, Janko was sweating. That the room was kept near one hundred percent humidity didn’t help, but fear and anxiety were the real causes.

  He tried to control it, but the longer he stood in silence, the more his mind wandered.

  All those who’d been called to this room felt great trepidation. Their master resided here. He ruled from here like a dictator, gave pronouncements from here like a judge.

  No one knew that better than Janko. He’d brought many here against their will and dragged them out of the room afterward, either sentenced to some awful punishment or dead.

  Two members of the guard stood behind him. Short-barreled versions of the American M16 rifle were clutched in their hands.

  In a way, they were Janko’s men. After all, he was Captain of the Guard. He chose not to look at them. They were not here to support him, they’d received an order to bring him in.

  Across from the group, staring out a window into utter darkness, their master waited. “What’s your main function, Janko?”

  The imposing figure spoke without turning. There was a strange hushed quality to the voice. It came from scorched and damaged vocal cords.

  “I am chief of security, as you well know,” Janko replied.

  “And how do you judge your performance in light of recent events?”

  Maxmillian Thero turned around. Janko saw familiar burn scars that ran up the man’s neck and onto his face. Only Thero’s mouth was visible, twisted into a scarred cut by what must have been a horrible fire. The nose, eyes, the right ear, and the rest of the face lay beneath a black latex mask. The mask hid features too hideous to show, but it also put a sense of fear into those who looked upon it. It separated him from them. It made him seem less, or perhaps more, than human.