Devil's Gate nf-9

by Clive Cussler

  So far, the ship’s owners and the insurance company had been uncooperative. They seemed loath to disclose the ship’s manifest or even confirm the type of cargo on board. An odd situation, to say the least.

  “We get anything from the company yet?” Paul asked “Negative,” the controller said. “Nothing but silence.” “You know, technically this ship is a wreck,” he said. “We salvage it, and the cargo is ours.” “I don’t think Dirk is going to approve the budget for that,” Gamay said. “But there’s nothing to stop us poking around. Let’s find an opening and see if we can get Rapunzel inside.” Paul brought the Grouper toward the aft end of the big ship. The crew’s quarters and the bridge lay there, partially torn open, as the crushing impact with the seafloor had ripped away a third of the structure.

  “It looks like a cross section,” Paul said.

  “That might be good for us,” Gamay said. “Nothing like easy access.” Again Paul blushed, not sure Gamay even realized her double entendre. He brought the Grouper to a hover twenty feet away from what was left of the bridge. Moments later, Rapunzel was in the water and moving toward the gaping hole where a part of the wall had once been.

  With the autopilot keeping the Grouper in position, Paul turned to his wife. She lay flat in the aft section of the sub. The familiar visor covered her head, the wired gauntlets and boots on her hands and feet. The rest of her was clad in skintight neoprene.

  “How is it?” he asked.

  “Feels weird to be lying down,” she said. “I’m used to doing it standing up.” The intercom buzzed. “Paul, your heart rate is jumping again. Are you all right?” “I’m fine,” he replied tersely, then covered the intercom. “Honey, can you just watch what you say until we get back up topside?” She laughed, and Paul knew full well that she was teasing him. There was little she liked more than to poke holes in his reserved New England attitude. It was one of the reasons he loved her so much.

  “Sorry,” she said with a sly smile.

  Paul looked outside and watched the little mechanical figure move toward the shattered bridge and then disappear inside. On a smart phone — sized monitor he watched what Gamay saw in the visor: the view through Rapunzel’s eyes as she traveled deeper into the ship. In a corner of the bridge they discovered something.

  “Is that a body?” Paul asked.

  “Looks like it,” she said.

  “What happened to him?”

  Rapunzel moved closer.

  “Looks like he’s been burned,” Gamay said. “Except…” The cameras on Rapunzel panned around the room. The walls were clean and smooth, the gray paint unmarred. Even the chair beside the man looked undamaged.

  “No sign of fire,” Paul said.

  “As gross as this sounds,” she said, “I’m going to get a sample.” Rapunzel moved in, extended a little drill with a vacuum tube attached. The drill hit the man’s thigh and began to turn, drawing out a two-inch core. The vacuum system pulled it into a sealed container.

  “I’m taking her deeper into the ship.” With Gamay occupied controlling Rapunzel, and the autopilot keeping the Grouper on station, Paul had little to do.

  Boredom at sixteen thousand feet. It was worse than being trapped on an airliner.

  The intercom buzzed. “Paul, we’re picking up a sonar contact.” Now his heart had a different reason to race. “What kind?” “Unknown,” the controller said. “West of you and very faint. But moving fast.” “Mechanical or natural?” Paul asked.

  “Unknown…” the controller began, then, “It’s small…” Paul and Gamay could only wait in silence. Paul imagined the sonar operator staring at the screen, listening to the earphones and trying to place the nature of the target.

  “Damn it,” the controller said. “It’s a torpedo. Two of them, heading your way.” Paul grabbed the Grouper’s thrust controller, switching off the autopilot.

  “Get Rapunzel back,” he said.

  Gamay began to move, gesturing quickly as she turned the little remote explorer around.

  “Move, Paul,” the controller urged. “They’re closing fast.” Forgetting Rapunzel, Paul threw the Grouper into reverse, backing away from the wreck and then turning the small sub around.

  “I can get her out of there,” Gamay said.

  “We don’t have time.”

  Paul pushed the throttle to full and blew out some of the ballast. The Grouper began to rise and accelerate, but she was nothing like the Barracuda. Seven knots was her maximum.

  Suddenly, the controller’s voice broke in a panic. “The targets are above you, Paul. You’re climbing right into them.” Paul went back to a dive, thinking it would have been nice to have known that a few minutes ago. “Where are they coming from?” “Don’t know,” came the reply. “Head south. Toward the bow. That will take you away from their track. “ Paul put the Grouper in a turn. Unable to see or track the targets, he had to rely on the controller.

  “Keep moving,” the voice on the intercom said. “You have ten seconds.” There was no way the Grouper could avoid a torpedo that had locked onto it; their only hope was to confuse it with clutter. Paul decided to pop up, taking the Grouper over the deck, hugging the Kinjara Maru as closely as possible.

  A resounding clang told him he’d hit something protruding. The reverberation was loud but inconsequential, and Paul didn’t dare separate from the larger ship.

  “Three seconds, two… one…” “Paul?” Gamay called. She was scared, he could hear it. There was nothing he could do about it.

  A high-pitched whining sound raced overhead as the first torpedo passed. Another followed moments later, heading off into the distance. The torpedoes had missed. And as Paul listened he couldn’t hear them coming back.

  Paul breathed a sigh of relief, but he had to be sure. “Are they turning?” “No,” the controller said. “They’re continuing on. Straight and true.” Paul sighed with relief, his shoulders visibly slumping. And then a pair of reverberating explosions rocked the depths of the Atlantic.

  The shock wave slammed the Grouper. Paul hit his head and felt the craft tilt. Gamay slid into him, and the submersible banged into one of the Kinjara Maru’s crane booms.

  Another explosion followed, more distant but still strongly felt. The Grouper shuddered and then steadied as the shocks passed on.

  “Are we okay?” Gamay shouted, pulling off the visor.

  Paul glanced around, he saw no leaks. Time to get to the surface.

  “Where on earth did those come from?” Paul shouted.

  “Sorry,” the controller said. “The first two masked them. This isn’t exactly a Seawolf-class sonar array we’ve got going here.” Paul understood that the setup was designed to find small objects and map the seafloor, not track fast-moving torpedoes at great depths. Time to upgrade, he thought “Any more of them?” he asked over the comm.

  The controller was silent for a moment, as if he were checking and rechecking. “No,” the man said finally. “But we are picking up a vibration. It sounds like…” The controller’s words trailed off, an act that concerned Paul. A vibration. What did he mean?

  As Paul waited for clarification he began to feel something. Where his hand rested on the control panel he could feel a tremor of some kind. At first it was subtle, but then the Grouper began to shake and slide to the side as if some force or current was pushing it out of position. In seconds the tremor became a deep rumbling, like a freight train approaching.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “We’re reading a massive signal up here. I’ve never seen anything like it. All kinds of movement.” “Where?”

  “Everywhere,” the voice said, sounding panicked.

  There was a terrible pause as the rumbling increased and then their controller spoke again.

  “Good Lord!” the controller shouted. “There’s an avalanche coming your way.”

  17

  THE RUMBLING IN THE DEPTHS shook the Grouper. Sliding rock and sediment from the slope that the Kinjara Maru sat
on was tumbling down at an accelerating pace, released by the exploding torpedoes.

  As the avalanche came on, it forced the water out of its way, creating its own current and stirring up the sediment. Clouds of silt engulfed them, lit up by the submersible’s lights. The world outside the view port became a swirl of brown and gray.

  “Get us out of here,” Gamay shouted.

  Paul intended to do just that, but whatever vessel had fired the torpedoes at them was probably still waiting out there. And, in all honesty, being blown to bits seemed just as ghastly as getting buried alive.

  He flipped the ballast switch and dumped the rest of the iron that held them down. He pushed the throttle back to full and angled the nose of the Grouper upward, but the Grouper was too underpowered to overcome such a current, and it banged against the Kinjara Maru’s hull once again.

  Gamay put her hand on his arm as they began to rise. Then suddenly they were yanked to a stop.

  “We’re caught on something,” Gamay said, craning her head around, desperately trying to see what it might be.

  Paul threw the motor into reverse, backed up for a few feet, and then went forward at a different angle. Same result: a steady acceleration followed by sudden stop that twisted the Grouper around like a dog being yanked backward on its leash.

  Through the dust and silt Paul could see items tumbling across the deck and bits of the Kinjara’s superstructure being torn away. The rumbling sound reached a deafening pitch.

  A wave of thicker sediment hit the sub, and all went dark. Something metallic snapped, and then the Grouper started to tumble.

  Gamay’s visor and a couple of other items slid to one side and then toppled over and up the wall and then onto the ceiling. Paul held on but saw his wife was unable to brace herself. She hit the side wall and then banged against the ceiling two feet above them and then came back down.

  He realized they’d rolled over, becoming momentarily inverted. He reached out, pulling Gamay to him.

  “Hold on to me,” he shouted.

  She wrapped her arms around him as they continued to bang and twist at the mercy of the current and the landslide. Something slammed against the view port for a second, racing out of the murky water, hitting it hard, and then being swept away. The lights failed, and the wrenching sound of something being torn off the outside of the Grouper ended with a snap.

  And then it stopped.

  The rumbling sound continued for another minute or so, dissipating into the distance like a herd of buffalo had stampeded past.

  Paul held his breath. Amazingly, incredibly, they were still alive.

  In the darkness, he felt his wife breathing hard. His own heart pounded, and his body prickled with adrenaline. Neither of them said a word, as if the mere sound of their voices might set off another landslide. But after a full minute of silence, and no further sounds of danger, Paul felt his wife move.

  She looked up at him through the dim illumination of the emergency lighting, She appeared as surprised to be alive as he was.

  “Any leaks?” she asked.

  He looked around. “Nothing up here.”

  She eased off him. “When we get home, I’m finding out who built this thing and I’m buying him a bottle of scotch.”

  He laughed. “A bottle of scotch? I might put his kids through college if he has any.”

  She laughed too.

  As Gamay moved back, Paul eased over to the control panel. They were obviously resting at an odd angle, maybe forty-five degrees nose down, and rolled over thirty degrees or so.

  “The main power is out,” he said. “But the batteries look fine.”

  “See if you can get them back online,” she said, pulling on the headset that their tumble had ripped off.

  Paul went through the restart, got most of the systems back online, and then rerouted the lights through the backup line. The lights came back on. “Let’s see if we can—”

  He stopped midsentence. Gamay was staring past him, a hollow look in her eyes. He turned.

  Packed sediment had pressed itself against the glass of the view port. It looked almost like a sand painting, with a few swirls and striations.

  “We’re buried,” Gamay whispered. “That’s why it got so quiet all of a sudden. We’re buried alive.”

  18

  KURT FOUND THE FIRST SEVENTY-TWO HOURS as chaperone of the sea to be twice as bad as he’d expected. No, he thought, that was an understatement, it was at least three times as bad as he’d feared.

  Every group of researchers wanted special treatment, every group seemed to question the rules and his decisions, even his authority.

  A team from Iceland insisted that an experiment by one of the Italian groups would interfere with the baseline data they were trying to collect. A Spanish group had been caught trying to plant a flag on the tower of rock in strict contravention of the agreed-to plan. And while Kurt found their boldness somewhat endearing, the Portuguese were ready to duke it out over the incident. He half expected pistols at dawn, the way they spoke.

  Meanwhile, the Chinese were complaining about the presence of three Japanese teams, to which the Japanese responded that the Chinese didn’t need anyone there as they would just steal all the data in a cyberattack once it was downloaded anyway.

  Dealing with enough squabbling to make the UN jealous was not the only problem. Along with Joe and the rest of the Argo’s crew, Kurt also had to act as lifeguard.

  Most of the science teams had only rudimentary training in the ways of the sea, either on the surface or below. Two of the teams had already collided head-on. Their small boats suffered only minor damage, but it was enough to send them back to Santa Maria for repairs.

  Others had issues diving. One team narced itself by using the wrong mixture, and two of the Argo’s rescue divers had to corral them before they lost consciousness. Another member of a different team had to be forced to take a decompression stop he didn’t think necessary, and a French scientist almost drowned when an inexperienced divemaster put too much weight on the man’s belt and he sank to the bottom like a stone.

  In full gear, Kurt and Joe dove down and rescued the scientist, only to surface and find another team with an engine fire aboard their rented vessel. It was enough to make Kurt wish they’d never found the damn tower in the first place.

  As the sun began to head over the yardarm, the day’s madness seemed to be winding down. Most of the smaller boats were heading back in toward Santa Maria. Kurt guessed the bars would fill up quickly, and stories would be tossed around, growing more extravagant with each telling. Or perhaps not. He wasn’t really sure what scientists did with their spare time. Maybe they would plot against one another all night and come out in the morning ready to cause him and Joe more headaches.

  Either way he was already regretting his decision to play umpire when he stepped out onto the Argo’s starboard bridgewing and spotted a 50-foot black-hulled trawler he hadn’t seen before.

  “You recognize that one?” he asked Joe.

  Joe squinted off into the distance. “Wasn’t here this morning.” “I didn’t think so,” Kurt replied. “Get the Zodiac ready.”

  FIVE MINUTES LATER, Kurt, Joe, and two men from the Argo’s crew were skipping across the light swells, headed for the trawler. They reached it and circled it once.

  “You see anyone on board?” Kurt asked.

  Joe shook his head.

  “You know,” Joe said, “technically, this boat’s outside the exclusivity zone.” “Come again?” Kurt said.

  “We’re three-quarters of a mile from the tower,” Joe said. “The exclusive zone is a mile in diameter. Technically, this boat’s outside that. We’re only supposed to have authority over vessels, divers, and submersibles inside that radius.” Kurt looked at Joe oddly. “Who made that rule?” “I did.”

  “When did you start becoming a bureaucrat?” Zavala shrugged, a wry smile on his face. “You put me at the big desk and tell me to take charge, these kind of things are
going to happen.” Kurt almost laughed. Governor Joe.

  “Well, if you’re in charge, let’s widen that circle.” “We need a quorum,” Joe said.

  “Did that boxer hit you harder than I thought?” Kurt asked.

  Joe shook his head and looked at the crewmen. “All in favor of enlarging the observation zone say aye.” Kurt and the other two crewmen said aye simultaneously.

  “The rule is duly changed,” Joe said.

  Kurt tried hard not to laugh. “Great. Now get us aboard that boat.” On board the trawler they found maps, diving gear, and some type of paper with Cyrillic lettering on it.

  “It’s Russian,” Kurt said. “We have any Russian teams registered?” Joe shook his head. “We got papers from their Science Ministry requesting information, but no one signed up.” “Looks like they came anyway.”

  Kurt moved to the rear of the small boat. A long anchor had been thrown out. There was no flag up, but Kurt was pretty sure a diver had gone down that chain. He noticed a pair of shoes by the dive ladder.

  “Only one pair of shoes,” he noted.

  “Someone went down alone,” Joe guessed.

  Diving alone was crazy enough; leaving no one on the boat up above was even crazier. A little wind, a little change in the current, or the arrival of an opportunistic pirate or two, and you could surface to find yourself lost and alone in the ocean.

  “Look at this,” the Argo’s crewman said, pointing to a video screen.

  Kurt turned. On the monitor was a murky scene being broadcast from an underwater camera.

  “Could it be live?” Kurt asked.

  “It looks that way,” the crewman said, examining the setup.

  Kurt studied the screen. The dark water and swirling sediment were obvious as the camera maneuvered in what looked to be a confined space. He saw metallic walls and equipment.

  “Whoever it is, they’ve gone inside one of the wrecks,” Joe said.

  “Unbelievable,” Kurt said. Short of antagonizing a group of sharks, wreck diving was about the most dangerous thing you could do underwater. He could not believe someone would try it alone.