Zero Hour nf-11

by Clive Cussler

  Despite the fear she felt, Hayley’s mind was racing. “We?” she said. “Is George alive? Is he here with you?”

  Thero nodded.

  “Is he okay?” she asked, hopeful that George could help her put a stop to this madness and yet fearful that he might be horribly burned and scarred like Thero.

  “He’ll be along shortly,” Thero said. “He knows you’re here. In fact, it was he who suggested we talk to you alone. That perhaps you might understand.”

  She smiled genuinely. George was the only hope. “I’m thankful to hear that. What about Tessa?”

  “No,” Thero said. “They murdered her.”

  Hayley cast her gaze down. George and Tessa had been like siblings. She’d hoped somehow both were alive, though she’d doubted it was possible. At least George had survived. Maybe there was a chance, she thought. Maybe reason could triumph at this last moment.

  “My heart breaks for Tessa,” she said, “though I’m thankful that you and George are still alive. How did you survive the explosion?”

  “I’d begun working on a new theory,” Thero said. “By using a spherical projector instead of a dome-shaped one, I thought the wave might be more stable. We’d only just begun the excavation when the shooting began. George and I escaped and sealed ourselves in while they shot the others.”

  She stared.

  “There was nothing we could do,” Thero insisted.

  “I know,” she said softly. “I understand.”

  He glared at her for a moment before continuing. “After the shooting ended and we heard nothing but silence, we unsealed the door. Seconds later, the explosions flashed. I was burned badly, though George was mostly spared. He cared for me until we made it to a hospital. We paid enough to keep it quiet. I didn’t want them finding us after escaping with our lives. But we couldn’t stay long. We had to find a place where we’d be safe.”

  “And you came here?”

  “Not at first,” he said, “but eventually. We needed a place where no one would ever find us. A place with advantages. Here, we have geothermal power. We have food from the seals and the birds and the fishing grounds. And my study of geography proved most valuable when we discovered diamonds. A series of kimberlite pipes rich enough to fund our operations after the money Tokada had given us ran out.”

  “Why not just take the money and run?” she asked. “Live your life. You’ve given so much already.”

  “What life?!” he shouted. “We’re hunted wherever we go. Banished here as much by their jealousy and hatred as by our own need to work without interference. You see, the world was not willing to let my light shine upon them. So now I will blind them and burn them instead.”

  She considered her precarious position and Thero’s obvious madness. She decided she’d better pander to his ego.

  “The world is full of jealous fools,” she said. “But wouldn’t it be glorious to prove them wrong and become rich rather than begin a war that will only bring more death?”

  “What good is wealth to a man who can’t show his face or breathe the air?” he said. “My lungs will burn without the proper humidity. My skin crawls if it meets the sunlight. I am no longer part of the world. I am doomed to live here on Tartarus, to live forever in darkness. So what good does the light afford me? Revenge is all I have left.”

  “Revenge against Australia?”

  “Against all of them,” Thero bellowed. “Against an entire world set against us. Against any who challenge me!”

  Hayley shrank back. It only seemed to anger Thero more.

  “You have no reason to fear me,” he insisted.

  “I have plenty of reason,” she replied. “You’ve become a murderer. The man I knew was never like that. You wanted peace.”

  “And this is what it got me!” He pulled off his mask to reveal a face horribly scarred by melted and burned skin. His nose had been burned off, the skin over his right eye scarred and twisted until that eye bulged grotesquely.

  Thero stepped toward her angrily. She tried to back away but tripped and fell. Thero’s gaze flicked off to the right and then settled back on her.

  “Why shouldn’t I?” he said aloud. “She’s a traitor. She betrayed us like all the rest.”

  Hayley stared up at him, one hand raised to defend herself. She looked around but saw no one else in the room.

  Still poised to assault her, Thero glanced over his shoulder. Finally, slowly, he lowered his hand and centered his gaze upon her once again. “They’re using you,” he told her.

  “Who?”

  “All of them,” he replied. “The ASIO, the Americans, the Russians. All of them are out to destroy us together.”

  Thero’s paranoid delusions had always run to the grandiose. Strangely, his radical actions had now united much of the world against him.

  “They forced me to come along,” she said, thinking quickly and playing to his thoughts. “They were going to put me in prison if I didn’t help. They claimed I was collaborating with you.”

  Thero stared down at her. His scarred face showed no trace of emotion. She felt sorry for him in a way. Sorry and afraid and confused.

  Thero glanced off to the side once again, staring into the distance. She found it frightening.

  He shook his head as if responding to a question. “No,” he muttered. “No, I don’t agree. We must be cautious. What makes you think she can be trusted?”

  Once again, Hayley looked in the direction of Thero’s gaze. There was no one there, not even in the distant shadows. Her mind whirled. She took a chance.

  “George?” she whispered. “George, I promise I’ve come to help you.”

  Thero turned her way again.

  “I looked for you both,” she insisted, gazing up into his eyes, her face quivering. “I went to Japan after the explosions. I flew there to find you even though I was afraid to get on the plane. You know how I hate to travel. I was there at the memorial services for you and your father and Tessa. You have to know this. Now I’ve come all the way here to find you.”

  Thero straightened a bit, he eased back. “I told him you were always loyal,” he said in an odd tone.

  He held out his hand, his left hand this time. The skin was smooth, unscarred. George had been left-handed, Thero used his right. She reached over and grasped the smooth palm.

  “Come with me,” Thero said. “I’ll show you what Father and I have built.”

  Father and I.

  She now understood. Part of her recoiled at the thought, but she could not reject it any further. George was dead. She was certain of it. He’d died along with Tessa in Japan. Thero alone had survived. The pain and guilt of it had broken his already fragile mind and split his personality in two. Both the threat of destruction and the slim chance at salvation had come from the same body. In life, George Thero had been called his father’s conscience. Now, after death, he’d become just that.

  Hayley felt an all-encompassing sadness at this realization, but some part of her mind realized she needed to act. If she could use this break from reality to save her country, she must try, however distasteful it might be.

  She reached out a hand and touched Thero’s scarred face, looking into his eyes as if she were gazing at her old friend.

  “It’s good to see you, George,” she said. “It’s so good to see you again.”

  The tears in her eyes were genuine. They seemed to touch this aspect of Thero’s personality. “It’s good to see you too,” he replied softly. “Father and I have missed you for so long.”

  FORTY-ONE

  Hours of hiking through the blizzard and the frigid darkness brought Kurt to what geologists call a lateral moraine, a ridge of material deposited along the side of a glacier. Just beyond it, he could see the imposing wall of ice that made up the Winston Glacier.

  Having made his first landmark, he turned south and began hiking down the slope toward the lagoon and the series of hot spots photographed by the Russian drones.

  As he traveled, h
e received a low-battery warning on the night vision goggles.

  He’d known the cold would drain the batteries and had been using them sparingly, turning them on, studying the terrain, and then switching them off as he hiked. Now as he forced his way down the rugged slope, he needed them almost constantly. When they finally shut down, Kurt was left in utter darkness.

  Removing the goggles, Kurt trudged onward, holding the hood of his parka across everything but his eyes. He stumbled on a pile of unseen rocks, cursing under his breath as he smashed his shin. He fought his way over uneven terrain, and then he took a bad step in the dark.

  He dropped and slid down a steep incline, causing a minor avalanche that took him for a ride and spat him out on flattish ground moments later.

  Kurt allowed himself to rest for just a moment, but he knew better than to linger. The cold and fatigue would try to drag him into a sleep from which he would never awake. He found a spot to push off and forced himself to stand.

  Breathing deeply, he noticed something. Not a sight or sound, but an odd scent. He couldn’t quite place it, but it smelled like food cooking. Bad, greasy food, mixed with smoke. He couldn’t exactly call it a pleasant smell, but it wasn’t his imagination.

  His fatigue was instantly forgotten as he thought about the reconnaissance photos and the hot spots near the front edge of the glacier.

  “Even people who live underground need to eat,” he whispered.

  Kurt sniffed the air in an attempt to locate the source of the smell, but he was no bloodhound. The best he could do was get a general sense that it was traveling upslope toward him. He eased forward until he found a treelike column of snow and ice.

  He pulled the flashlight from a pocket, covered it, and then switched it on, allowing a tiny portion of light to escape from beneath his glove.

  The column rose about ten feet. A few yards away, a second column stood only four feet high. And thirty or forty feet from that, he saw a third and a fourth and a fifth.

  Kurt shut off the light and made his way to the shorter column. He found it was open at the top and roughly circular. As the wind gusted, it made a hollow sound, like someone blowing across the top of an open wine bottle.

  He leaned over and peered down into the mouth of the icy tube. It was about the size of a manhole on a city street. Looking down into it, he saw nothing but darkness, nor did he detect a strong scent of food or grease. Still, he could feel warmth rising up and bathing his face. It felt almost surreal after so many hours in the cold. It also felt humid.

  Kurt put a hand on the edge of the column and broke a piece off. It was just ice, and not very thick at that. It was also blackened with soot. He began to understand what he was looking at.

  He’d been in Iceland a few years before and found similar structures near the geothermal vents up on the slopes of the active volcanic mountains. As the heated air from inside made its way to the surface, it brought humidity with it, some of which cooled and froze almost instantly as it mixed with the frigid outside air. Slowly, like coral building up a reef or the black smokers in the depths of the ocean, the freezing water vapor created chimneylike tubes. Since they were merely thin sheets of ice, they tended to topple in high winds. But as long as the vent was active, they would regrow.

  Kurt risked another quick flash from his flashlight, aiming it down into the opening.

  He could see nothing. He felt heat but didn’t smell sulfur, like he’d have expected if they were volcanic.

  He pulled out his Zippo lighter and one of the oily rags. He held the lighter against it and lit it, sheltering the rag from the wind until a third of it was burning. Next, he dropped it into the tube.

  It fell through the darkness like a small meteorite, illuminating the smooth sides of the tunnel as it went, until suddenly it hit something and stopped.

  As the rag burned, Kurt saw the outline of a grate. The chimney was not volcanic, it was man-made, designed to evacuate heat or smoke or something else undesirable from down below. It had to lead to Thero’s lair. It had to.

  Quickly, Kurt set up his rope. He found a section of the ice and rubble in the lateral moraine and hammered in three anchors to secure the rope. He didn’t have a harness, or time to improvise one, but it didn’t matter, he would rappel down, using his hands to control the descent.

  He dropped the rope in and eased over the edge. The fit was tight. He could barely see past his boots. Twenty feet down, the tunnel was free of ice and consequently slightly wider. Kurt continued to descend. By the time his feet hit the grate, he figured he’d dropped about a hundred feet.

  Pressing himself against one edge of the chimney, he studied the metal grate. He could see a dusty floor ten feet below it. He heard no sound of movement.

  Bouncing up and down a bit, he tested the strength of the grate. On his third little hop, he felt it give.

  “Time to drop in,” he muttered to himself.

  He looped the rope through one of the bars and tied it. Then he jumped hard, and the grate broke free.

  The sound of rock splinters hitting the floor was no louder than a whisper, and both Kurt and the heavy grate remained suspended by the rope.

  Kurt lowered them both down gently and touched down without a sound.

  He was in.

  Exactly what he’d made his way into was another question entirely.

  FORTY-TWO

  Paul Trout stood on the bridge of the Gemini as the ship surged through the waves toward the MV Rama. The merchant vessel had been traveling northeast since finishing its Orion-like pattern, and the Gemini had been racing to intercept it for the last eight hours. They were finally closing to within shouting distance.

  “Think we’re going to be able to do this alone?” Gamay asked from a spot beside him.

  “We’ve got a fighting chance,” Paul said. He would have preferred some backup, but they were so far off the beaten track, there wasn’t a military or coast guard vessel for a thousand miles.

  “If it wasn’t for the weather, we could at least get some air support,” she said. “A few threatening passes by a formation of military jets or an Australian antisubmarine aircraft circling the ship relentlessly might have helped.”

  Paul agreed completely, but the leading edge of a gale had reached the area. It was whipping up the seas and slinging freezing rain across the Gemini’s deck. Not the kind of conditions aircraft made low, showy passes in. Especially fifteen hundred miles from the nearest land.

  All of which meant the unarmed Gemini was the only hope of stopping the MV Rama and finding out if any of the Orion’s crew were aboard.

  “What’s the range?” Paul asked.

  They had the Rama painted on the radarscope, but with visibility at a quarter mile, they hadn’t seen her in the dark yet.

  “A thousand yards,” the radar officer said.

  “That’s it?” Paul replied. “She must be running without lights.”

  “In this soup, we might collide with her before we spot her,” the captain added.

  “No, we won’t,” Gamay said, looking through a pair of binoculars. “I’ve got her. Just off the port bow.”

  Paul followed her directions, spotting the shadow of a vessel plowing through the dark.

  “Light her up,” the captain ordered.

  The executive officer flicked a series of switches, and a trio of powerful spotlights came on, piercing the dark and the rain and converging on the lumbering vessel. At three times the Gemini’s size, the Rama pitched and rolled less noticeably in the swells, but there was a wallowing quality to her progress.

  “Time to put on the show,” Paul said, handing his binoculars to the captain.

  “I’ll bring us up alongside of her,” the captain said. “You get ready to play commando.”

  “I don’t have to tell you to be careful,” Gamay said.

  “No,” Paul replied grinning. “No, you don’t.”

  With that, Paul left the bridge and raced down the stairwell. Minutes later, he was
standing just inside the forward hatch with a dozen other volunteers. They all wore black, with hastily made arm patches that displayed an approximation of the Australian flag’s blue field, with its stars of the Southern Cross and the Union Jack in the corner.

  “Weapons, everyone,” Paul said. The Gemini’s weapons locker held six rifles and two pistols. The rest received wooden approximations of the M16 rifle that had been painted black. The volunteers from the crew laughed and pointed the guns at one another.

  “What do we do if they don’t surrender?” one man asked.

  “Either dive overboard or swing these things like Reggie Jackson,” another one replied.

  Paul hoped neither act would be necessary.

  He cracked the hatch a few inches and peered through the rain and fog. The MV Rama was just across from them, bathed in the spotlights, as the whoop-whoop of Gemini’s alarm blared like a coast guard siren.

  They chased and harried the Rama like this for several minutes to no effect. Finally, the intercom buzzed.

  “They’re not responding to our radio calls,” Gamay’s voice announced.

  “Understood,” Paul said. “I’ll man the rocket launchers. Tell the captain to get us in close. Real close. And be ready to give them your spiel over the loudspeaker.”

  “Will do,” Gamay said. “Good luck.”

  Paul looked at the chief. “I’m heading forward. Get ready to take your positions on the deck.”

  “We’ll be ready,” the chief said.

  Paul made his way to another door and pushed out through the hatch and onto the pitching deck. He crossed the foredeck to a squared-off structure that looked convincingly like a warship’s turret, with multiple rocket-launching tubes on either side.

  A hydraulic crane used to lift ROVs in and out of the water had occupied the spot hours before. The boom had been dismantled and the sheet metal façade of a turret welded onto the crane’s turntable-like base. Metal air-duct tubing had been removed from parts of the ship, cut to the right length, and affixed to the sides. Painted battleship gray, with a fake antenna dish mounted on the top, the “turret” gave off a reasonable impression of a lethal-weapons system.