Devil's Gate nf-9

by Clive Cussler

  “Neither,” he said. “I don’t like to see people get hurt. You could have been killed down there in that wreck. Another five minutes and you would have been.”

  “So Kurt Austin is a man who cares?”

  “Absolutely,” he said, offering an intentionally warm smile.

  “Is that why you’re in the salvage business?”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Any fool can blow up a boat and send it to the bottom,” she said. “But it takes skill and dedication and far greater risks to bring one back up again. I can see you doing it for exactly those reasons: because it’s harder and because it’s better. And because you like saving things.”

  Kurt had never thought of it quite that way, but there was some truth in what she’d said. The world was full of men destroying things and throwing them away. He took pride in restoring old things instead of tossing them out.

  “I suppose I should thank you,” she added. “I’m guessing you dove down to salvage me.”

  He hadn’t been sure she was in trouble when he’d gone in the water, but he’d been glad to pull her out alive instead of dead. He considered her motivation for taking such a risk in the first place.

  “And you’re a competitor,” he said, taking his turn at amateur analysis.

  “It has plusses and minuses,” she said.

  “National competitions, world championships, the Olympics,” he said. “You’ve spent your whole life trying to prove to coaches and judges and the audience that you’re worthy of their scores, that you even belong in the arena in the first place. Despite a partially torn ligament, you nearly got the bronze in Torino.”

  “I nearly won the gold,” she corrected him. “I fell on the last jump. I finished the program on one foot.”

  “As I recall you couldn’t walk for a couple of months afterward,” he said, a fact he’d just read on Joe’s update. “But the point stands. A different skater would have backed down, saved her leg for another day.”

  “Sometimes you don’t get another day,” she said.

  “Is that what drove you on?”

  She pursed her lips, studying him and twirling her fork in her angel-hair pasta. Finally, she spoke. “I wasn’t supposed to medal,” she said. “They almost gave my spot to another skater. Most likely, I would never get another shot.”

  “You had something to prove,” he replied.

  She nodded.

  “And this whole thing — an assignment outside your laboratory — I’m guessing this is new to you,” he said. “You must have people back home to impress, maybe you feel you have something to prove to them. Or you might not get another shot.”

  “Maybe,” she admitted.

  “Nothing wrong with that,” he said. “We all want our bosses to be impressed. But there are places on this earth where you don’t take chances. The inside of a wrecked aircraft a hundred forty feet below the surface is one of them.”

  “Haven’t you ever wanted to show someone they were wrong about you?”

  Kurt paused, and then spoke a half-truth. “I try not to worry about what other people think about me.”

  “So you have no one to prove anything to?” she asked.

  “I didn’t say that,” he replied.

  “So there is someone,” she said. “Tell me who. Is it a woman? Is there a Mrs. Austin, or future Mrs. Austin, waiting for you back home?”

  Kurt shook his head. “I wouldn’t be here if there was.”

  “So who is it?”

  Kurt chuckled. The conversation had certainly turned. “Tell me the secret you’re holding, and I’ll give you the answer.”

  She looked disappointed again. “I suppose dinner ends as soon as I give you that?”

  Kurt didn’t want it to end, but then again… “Depends on the secret,” he said.

  She picked up her fork as if she could stall him just a little longer and then she put it down dejectedly.

  “Yesterday you rescued a French diver,” she said.

  “That’s right,” he said. “The guy had a hundred pounds of weight on his belt. Where you were reckless, he was just an idiot.”

  “Maybe not,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It was a setup,” she said. “While you and your partner were pulling him out of the water, another member of the French team was drilling a four-foot core sample out of the side of that rock. They’ve been bragging about it already.”

  Kurt felt an instant burst of anger. He exhaled sharply and then grabbed his napkin and threw it on the table.

  “You were right,” he said. “Time to go.”

  “Damn,” she said.

  He stood, left a handful of bills on the table, and took her by the hand. They headed for the exit.

  “But what about your secret?” she said.

  “Later,” he said.

  With Katarina in tow, Kurt pushed the door open and stepped through. Something moved in the shadows. An object swung toward him from the right. He tensed himself in the instant he had, and then a bat or a club or a pipe of some kind slammed him in the gut.

  Despite his strength, the blow jarred Kurt and knocked the wind out of him. He doubled over and crumpled to his knees.

  22

  PAUL AND GAMAY were rising fast in the Grouper. With all the ballast dumped on the bottom of the ocean, the sub’s nose pointed upward, and, the electric motor churning at full power, they rose at nearly three hundred feet a minute.

  As the depth decreased, the pressure decreased. But twenty minutes into the climb they were still ten thousand feet below the surface, and the steady flow of water was increasing.

  “The weakest part of the hull is the flange,” Paul shouted, noticing that the water was flowing in where the two sections of the submarine had been joined together like lengths of pipe.

  “We have clamps, we can help seal it,” Gamay shouted back.

  Paul reached over to the wall and tore down a Velcro-latched covering. Behind it was a set of tools that the sub’s designers thought might be useful to its occupants. Included in that package were four clamps. Large, sturdy, and designed to fit the particulars of the Grouper, they were not that much different from a standard screw clamp that one might have on a workbench at home except they worked on a ratchet system like a jack used to lift up a car. Apparently, whoever had designed the boat realized the flange between the two halves of the sub was the weakest part.

  Paul ripped down one of the clamps and handed it to Gamay; he was too big to turn around and get back there to help her.

  “You’ll find a spot on the flange with a notch in it, like the notch under a car for the jack. Slip the clamp on there. Once you get it locked, give it everything you’ve got to wrench it down. Then I’ll hand you another one.”

  She nodded and took the clamp. Running her hand along the flange, she located the notch, lined the clamp up, and began to tighten it.

  “Should I leave a little play, like when we do the lug nuts on the tires?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “Slam that sucker down as hard as you can.”

  As Gamay worked, Paul sensed the Grouper rolling a bit. He glanced back at the control panel. They were still angled up at thirty-five degrees, but the sub was yawing to the right. He figured one of the control fins had been damaged and bent. He corrected their alignment and glanced back at Gamay.

  He could see the strain on her face as she worked to get one final click on the first clamp.

  “How are we doing?”

  She slammed the handle home. “I think that one’s done.”

  He looked over at the leak. It hadn’t stopped. If anything, it was a little worse. Looking past her, he could see water pooling at the tail end of the sub, maybe a gallon or two.

  He grabbed another clamp as they passed nine thousand feet. “Here,” he said. “Hit the other side of the leak next.”

  KURT AUSTIN FELL in what seemed like slow motion to him.

  He’d seen the pipe coming
his way. And from the corner of his eye he’d caught sight of a burly man swinging it like an amateur ball player, using a big wide arc, a slower swing than it could have been.

  He’d been able to react fast enough to flinch and harden his body against the blow, but not enough to dodge it.

  As he doubled over, most of his mind focused on the intense pain across his abdomen, with just enough left over to hear Katarina scream and to realize the next blow would likely cave his head in.

  Even as his knees hit the ground he flew into action.

  He saw legs and lunged for them, pushing hard off the ground and driving his shoulder into the man’s knee.

  The joint hyperextended backward and gave out with a sickening snap. The thug let out a shout and fell backward. Kurt climbed onto him and slammed his fist into the man’s face, exploding his nose in a spray of blood.

  A second shot shattered a cheekbone or an eye socket, and the man’s head snapped sideways, unmoving.

  Whether he was dead or just unconscious, Kurt didn’t know or honestly care. He had bigger things to deal with, mainly a second thug that had jumped on his back and now had him in a sleeper hold.

  “Get out of here,” he shouted in a raspy tone to Katarina.

  He tried to pull the man’s arm loose, a natural reaction that was impossible to accomplish under the best of circumstances. In this case, with his abs screaming from the impact of the pipe, Kurt had no power or leverage, and the man knew it.

  The arms tightened, cutting off the blood supply to Kurt’s brain.

  Gasping for air, Kurt rolled and tried to slam the man against a van parked beside them. He pushed back and felt the impact. He did it again, but far weaker this time, and the man didn’t let go.

  He groped around for a weapon of any kind, a rock or a stick. Then suddenly he heard a dull thud, and the man’s grip weakened. Kurt sucked in a breath of air as a second thud followed, and the man sloughed off him like a dead vine falling from a tree.

  He tried to turn but couldn’t, tried to stand but couldn’t do that either. He could only squat there on the parking lot’s black surface. He felt hands grasping his arm, small hands but with a firm grip. They pulled him up, helping him to his feet.

  “Put your arm over me,” Katarina said.

  He threw his arm over her shoulder despite the pain it caused him. Leaning on her, they hobbled across the parking lot and made it to the small car. He just about fell into the passenger seat as she ran around to the driver’s side.

  She opened the door, tossed the pipe she’d grabbed from the first assailant into the back, and climbed into the driver’s seat

  The small engine came to life with a quick turn of the key, and seconds later they were speeding out of the parking lot onto the twisting mountain road.

  Unseen by either of them, two Audis snapped on their headlights and turned to follow.

  GAMAY HAD WRENCHED the third clamp into place and tightened it down with all the strength in her lithe body. Breathing hard, with the muscles in her arms burning, she glanced at the seam through which the water was forcing itself. The leak had slowed back to a trickle for a while but had now increased again and was becoming a continuous flow.

  “Give me the last one,” she shouted to Paul. She hoped it would make a difference. She hoped that four clamps, a couple hundred extra pounds of force holding the seam together, would be enough to offset the thousands of pounds of pressure trying to force its way inside the Grouper.

  “Here,” Paul said as he handed her the last of the clamps.

  She found the fourth notch and slotted the clamp into place. “What’s our depth?”

  “Four thousand feet,” he said.

  She began pumping the lever. The arms on the clamp closed on the flange and locked, each additional pump getting harder until she could barely move the lever.

  She let out a primal grunt as she gave the last push everything she had.

  “That’s all I can do,” she said, falling back exhausted.

  The leak had slowed, not quite to a trickle, but it no longer looked like someone had turned on a faucet and let it run.

  “What’s our rate of climb?” she asked.

  “We’re down to two hundred feet per minute,” Paul said.

  “Slower?” she said. “Why are we moving slower? Are we losing rpms?”

  “No,” Paul said. “We’re gaining weight.”

  He nodded toward the tail end of the sub, and she turned. At least thirty gallons of water had pooled in the Grouper’s tail. Thirty gallons, two hundred sixty pounds of added weight, and rising.

  Gamay now realized they weren’t just in a race against the hull splitting open, they were in a race against time. Even with the reduced leak the Grouper would slowly take on water and continue to get heavier. Survival or destruction would be determined by the balance between how much water was coming in and how fast they could continue to rise. If they didn’t get to the surface soon, they’d reach a point where the Grouper’s buoyancy was overridden by the added weight. At that moment, their long slow climb would turn into an even longer and slower descent, one from which there would be no escape.

  THE TIRES OF THE RENTAL CAR squealed on the macadam of the mountain road. Kurt looked behind them. Two sets of lights had suddenly appeared and were getting closer at every turn.

  “We should have gone back into the restaurant,” she said.

  He’d considered that, but there were only ten or so people in the building, and maybe a pair of cooks in the back. Not enough to really make it a secure location, and too many lives to endanger.

  “Keep going,” he said. “We’re dead if they catch us up here. The best thing we can do is get to the city. We can find the police down there.”

  Katarina kept her foot on the gas, whipping the car through the turns as she’d done on the way up the hill. It kept them ahead. But two long straightaways allowed the larger, more powerful Audis to catch them.

  Another series of hairpins gave them some breathing room, but if Kurt remembered it right, the longest straight section was coming up.

  “Do you have a weapon?” he asked.

  Katarina shook her head.

  Unfortunately, neither did he. The Azores had strict policies regarding guns and such. Perhaps that was a good thing. Otherwise, the thug at the top of the hill might have had a Lugar or a Glock instead of a pipe.

  Still, it led to problems here and now.

  “We’re coming up on another straight bit,” she said.

  They rounded the curve, and Katarina stomped on the gas, but the Audis all but leapt toward them, moving up fast in the rearview.

  Suddenly, the window shattered on Kurt’s side, and the sound of bullets punching holes in the sheet metal rang out. Kurt ducked down. So much for the no-gun policy.

  Katarina began swerving back and forth, trying to keep the pursuers off them. As she did, Kurt spotted something sliding around in the backseat: the pipe he’d been hit with.

  He grabbed it, glanced in the side mirror, and had an idea. The lead Audi was just a few feet back on his side.

  “Hit the brakes,” he shouted.

  “What?”

  “Just do it.”

  Katarina shifted her weight, gripped the wheel, and slammed her foot on the brake pedal. As she did, Kurt threw open his door.

  The rental car’s tires dug into the asphalt, screeching, streaming white smoke. The Audi’s driver was taken by surprise; he hit his brakes late, took the rental car’s door clean off, and then rumbled over it.

  Shocked and confused, he didn’t notice Kurt leaning out of the car, holding on to the garment handle above the door and swinging the pipe with a backhand like Rafael Nadal’s.

  The blow smashed in the windshield. A thick spiderweb of cracks spread out over the driver’s half, completely blocking the view. The Audi swerved away and then came back as if it would ram them.

  Kurt swung again, this time a forehand coming in from the side. It took out the driv
er’s window, catching the driver in the side of the head. The Audi swerved hard this time, dropping back and moving toward the cliff, then swerving rapidly to the right. It hammered the rocky slope on that side of the road, flipped, and tumbled. It slid on its caved-in roof, shedding parts and glass for a hundred yards, but avoided going off the cliff.

  “That’s gonna leave a mark,” Kurt said.

  The second Audi cut around the first one and began to accelerate. Kurt doubted the same plan would work twice. He looked ahead. Two more sets of lights were coming up the hill. They could have been locals or tourists, but they stayed abreast of each other, like one car trying to pass another and never actually making it. He was pretty sure what that meant.

  “They’re trying to corral us,” he said over the wind that was pouring through the missing doorway.

  For a moment he saw trepidation flicker across Katarina’s face, and then the young agent who had something to prove stood on the gas pedal and gripped the wheel like a madwoman. The little Focus shot forward as Katarina flipped her high beams on for good measure.

  “I’m not stopping,” she shouted.

  Kurt didn’t doubt that, but as he glanced ahead he guessed the drivers of the cars charging up toward them had no plans of stopping either.

  23

  FOR TEN SOLID MINUTES the Grouper continued to climb, but ever more slowly.

  “We’re passing a thousand,” Paul said.

  A thousand feet, she thought. That sounded so much better than sixteen thousand or ten or five, but it was still deeper than many steel-hulled submarines were able to go. She remembered a ride she’d taken with the Navy years ago on a Los Angeles — class attack submarine that was about to be retired. At seven hundred feet the side had dented in with a resounding clang. As she nearly jumped out of her skin, the captain and crew laughed heartily.

  “This is our test depth, ma’am,” the captain had said. “That dent shows up every time.”