Devil's Gate nf-9

by Clive Cussler

  Then the inner section of the cockpit would act like an overturned bucket and fill with air for him and Joe to breathe.

  The only problem was, even though the Barracuda had hit nose down, the sub’s weight heavily favored its lower half, where the main systems rested: the engine, the batteries, the impeller. And though the sub had hit the ocean floor almost vertically on its nose, it was already trying to fall backward.

  The only force keeping it from settling keel down came from Kurt and Joe’s efforts, but they would wane in less than a minute.

  Kurt kicked hard and yanked and pulled. He could feel his lungs burning already. If they could just get the sub a few inches past vertical, the weight would become their ally.

  Straining with everything he had, Kurt’s feet found the silty ground and dug in. His left foot slipped through the muck and then jammed against a jagged rock, giving him some leverage.

  This time as he pulled, the tail of the sub moved and began to fall toward him. He pulled again, getting both feet onto the rock’s surface and leaning all his weight into it.

  Finally, the nose slipped backward and the tail fell toward them, and Kurt had to duck inside to avoid getting hit by the wing. The sub settled slightly askew, and propped up at a thirty-degree angle by the ruined canopy.

  It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough to rule phase one of his plan a success. But with his lungs screaming and his head pounding, he and Joe had precious seconds to get the air flowing or it would all be for nothing.

  Neither he nor Joe could possibly reach the switch with their cuffed hands, but their feet were a possibility. Kurt stretched for the panel, pointing his toe and pressing near the oxygen switch time and again.

  Each time nothing happened, and he felt his movements getting weaker and less coordinated. He fought the urge to open his mouth and inhale. He fought the shakes and tried one more time. He must have hit the light switch because everything went dark for a second and then lit up again.

  By now his legs and arms felt as if they were made of lead, and he couldn’t get them to do what he wanted them to do. His mind began to work against him as his subconscious whispered Give up.

  The thought made him angry, and he willed himself to make one more attempt, tensing what was left of his muscles. Before he could move, a sudden rush of bubbles came pouring into the cockpit.

  Kurt could see only the turbulence at first, but as the bubbles began to fill the upside-down cockpit he saw an air pocket forming above him in what would have been the foot well had the sub been right side up. He twisted his body, stretched his neck, and pushed his face into the rapidly forming sanctuary.

  Exhaling a huge cloud of carbon dioxide, he sucked at the air. He coughed and sputtered as he breathed in some water, but he didn’t care, he kept gulping. The air was life, another chance to roll the dice instead of dialing up a big fat seven on the bottom of the ocean.

  As the bubble filled with air, he blinked away the salt water and looked around. The smiling face of Joe Zavala was next to him.

  “What happened?” Kurt asked, realizing he had never actually taken his last shot at getting the air on.

  Joe smiled and contorted his body, bringing a foot up out of the water. It was bare. No shoe, no sock. He wriggled his toes.

  “Just like turning the tap off in the bathtub,” he said.

  Kurt felt a laugh trying to break through. He didn’t have enough air for it yet, but the feeling was grand.

  “I couldn’t hit the switch,” Kurt said. “I was blacking out.”

  “You must have been short on air,” Joe said. “Long rambling conversations with lunatics on the surface will do that to you.”

  Kurt nodded. Next time he’d just keep his mouth shut and breathe through his nose. With the Barracuda’s air starting to feed into his body, he felt his strength returning.

  “Never thought I’d owe my life to your gorilla-like feet,” he said. “Good work.”

  Joe laughed, then turned serious. “The vents are full open, and the system is trying to compensate for the bleed-off. That’ll keep us in this little oasis for a while, but the supply won’t last. Maybe twenty minutes before it’s exhausted.”

  Kurt looked around. The Barracuda rested at an odd angle, and while Kurt and Joe were able to keep their heads and shoulders in the air pocket without too much trouble their hands were still cuffed outside, and the bubbles were streaming out of an upturned corner of the cockpit.

  Kurt took a breath, ducked his head down, and swung it outside. He looked around in the muted green light. There, dangling just beyond his reach, was the key, and the knife that Andras had stabbed into the Barracuda’s hull.

  He had no idea why Andras would give them such a chance — maybe just to taunt them, maybe for some other sick reason — but Kurt didn’t care at this point. He swung around, kicked his shoes and socks off just as Joe had, and stretched for the lanyard.

  He touched it but couldn’t grasp it on his first attempt.

  He ducked his head back inside for another breath and then tried again. This time, he caught the lanyard with his toes and tangled it up around his foot. Then he brought up his other foot and kicked the knife firmly but with control.

  It moved but didn’t break loose. A second kick jarred it free, and Kurt reeled it in, gripping the length of thin twine as forcefully as his toes could.

  He ducked his head back into the cockpit, reveled in another deep breath, and brought his foot to the surface.

  Joe laughed. “I make you an honorary King Kong.”

  “I’ll take it,” Kurt replied. “But neither one of us is going to undo these cuffs with our feet.”

  Kurt took another breath, ducked his head back outside again, and swung around. With great effort he bent his knee and twisted his hip. It was awkward, but in a moment he’d brought his foot up beside their hands and the lift bar.

  He felt the edge of the knife first and then the twine of the lanyard. He grabbed it and held tight.

  Shifting his head back inside, he took another breath. He had the key in his hand. They were one step closer.

  “Are you free?” Joe asked.

  “Not yet,” Kurt said. “I’m not exactly up to speed on playing Houdini. But it’s only a matter of time.”

  Unable to see his hands from inside the cockpit, he had to go by feel. He reminded himself to be careful; above all else he could not afford to drop the key like some bungling idiot in a bad movie.

  He slowed his breathing a bit and felt for the keyhole on the cuffs. Despite the cold water that was rapidly numbing his fingers, he could feel an indentation. He angled the key, jiggled it a bit, and slid it into place. It turned, and the cuff on his left hand clicked.

  His left hand was free. He slid it out and was then able to slide the loose cuffs under the lift bar and bring them back into the cockpit.

  “Voilà!” he said, raising his hands like an amateur magician for Joe to see.

  “Beautiful,” Joe said.

  “And for your next trick?” Joe asked.

  “I will release the amateur cochampion of the greater southern Azorean islands boxing league.”

  Joe laughed. “Make it quick, my hands are getting numb.”

  Kurt nodded. The water temperature around them was probably no more than 60 degrees. Hypothermia would set in fairly soon.

  He ducked outside, went to work on Joe’s cuffs, and found there was a problem. He jiggled and forced the key in, but it wouldn’t turn. He tried again, but had no better luck. Pulling the key out, he surfaced back in the air pocket.

  “I’m still locked up,” Joe said.

  “I know,” Kurt said, studying the key. “Hold on.”

  He took a deep breath, went back into the water, and tried again. This time, he tried both cuffs but to no avail. The key could be forced in, but it didn’t slide in smoothly and it wouldn’t turn a millimeter once it was in.

  Suddenly, he remembered Andras telling Kurt his answers were “good enough fo
r half.”

  It hadn’t made sense at the time, but now it did. He’d given them one key. It matched Kurt’s handcuffs but not Joe’s. That was exactly the man Kurt remembered, never content just to defeat his foes but almost needing to torture those he’d vanquished, to cause pain before landing the killing blow.

  Whatever other reasons Andras might have had for giving Kurt a chance to escape, this twisted little game had to be part of it. He could imagine Andras watching the scene play out in his mind and snickering.

  Like some malevolent deity in Greek mythology, he’d granted Kurt a chance at life, but Kurt could only accept that gift at the expense of leaving his best friend to die.

  No way on earth Kurt was going to let that happen. He went back inside, popping up once again.

  “I think you’re misunderstanding the concept here,” Joe said. “When you come back in, I’m supposed to be free.”

  “We have a problem,” Kurt said. “The key doesn’t fit.”

  Joe stared at the key and then at Kurt. “The guy used a different key on mine. I saw it. The cuffs are different.”

  Kurt stuffed the key in his pocket and began looking around in the cockpit for a tool to break Joe loose. He found a pair of screwdrivers, a set of Allen wrenches, and some other instruments — all of them miniaturized out of necessity to fit in the tiny cockpit of the sub.

  “Anything in here that we could use for leverage?” he asked. Joe had built the sub. He’d know it far better than Kurt.

  “Not really,” Joe said.

  “What about the lift bar?” Kurt asked, referencing what Joe was cuffed to. “Can we remove it or release it somehow?”

  Joe shook his head. “Not without taking half the sheet metal off first.”

  “Can we break it?” Kurt asked, though he already knew the answer.

  “It’s the hardest point on the sub,” Joe said, beginning to shiver from the cold water. “It’s welded right to the frame. It’s designed to support the sub’s entire weight when lifted out of the water.”

  The two men stared at each other.

  “You can’t get me free,” Joe said, voicing a dreaded realization.

  “There’s got to be a way,” Kurt mumbled, thinking, and trying to fight what was becoming a mind-numbing cold.

  “Not with anything we have on board,” Joe said. “You should go. Don’t stay down here and drown with me.”

  “Why? So you could come back and haunt me?” Kurt said, trying to keep Joe’s spirits up. “No thanks.”

  “Maybe there’s a boat on the surface or a helicopter,” Joe said. “Maybe someone got our message.”

  Kurt thought about that. It seemed unlikely. And if Joe was right about how long the air supply would last on full blast, Kurt doubted they had more than fifteen minutes or so to wait. Not enough time for someone to get to them even if he could call for help.

  He needed a different answer, a third way between leaving Joe to drown and dying down there alongside him. What he needed was a hacksaw or a blowtorch to cut through the lift bar or, better yet, through the chains on Joe’s cuffs.

  And then it dawned on him. He didn’t need a full-on blowtorch, just something that burned hot and sharp. He remembered the green tank he’d seen in the Constellation’s cockpit when he’d rescued Katarina. Green tank meant pure oxygen. Pure oxygen burned hot and sharp. Modulated just right, that could be his cutting torch.

  He flipped open a small compartment door. Inside were the Barracuda’s emergency supplies. Two diver’s masks, sets of fins, and two small air tanks; ones he now wished contained one hundred percent oxygen but were filled with standard air.

  Twenty-one percent oxygen and seventy-eight percent nitrogen didn’t burn, but at least it could be breathed.

  He pulled them out.

  Behind the tanks he found a packet of flares and an emergency locator transmitter, an ELT. An uninflated two-man raft completed the kit. Enough to save them if they could get free.

  Kurt took one air tank and strapped it to Joe’s arm like a blood pressure cuff. He turned the valve and put the regulator up by Joe’s mouth.

  “Breathe through your nose until the air in the Barracuda runs out, then start drawing on this,” he said.

  Joe nodded. “Where are you going?” he asked. “Are you going to the surface?”

  Kurt was pulling on a pair of small swim fins.

  “Hell no,” he said. “I’m going to the hardware store to get us a cutting torch.”

  Joe’s gaze narrowed. “Have you lost your mind?”

  “Years ago,” Kurt said, pulling the mask down. He strapped the emergency air bottle to his own arm and turned the valve. “But that doesn’t mean I’m crazy.”

  He took a test breath off of the yellow tank’s regulator.

  Joe’s eyebrows went up. “You’re serious?”

  Kurt nodded.

  “I hope it’s not too far away, then,” Joe added.

  Kurt hoped not as well. He knew roughly where they were when they’d been captured. He thought he could make it.

  He put the regulator in his mouth and ducked his face into the water to look for one more thing that he’d need to pull it off. He found it and then submerged.

  “Hurry back,” Joe said, but Kurt was already moving.

  37

  IF JOE HAD SAID ANYTHING ELSE, Kurt didn’t hear him. He dropped down out of the Barracuda like a man swimming from the mouth of a cave and began kicking forward with powerful strokes.

  The fins weren’t full-sized, but they helped immensely, and with the mask on he could see clearly. But he still had to make a guess as to his whereabouts. He took out a piece of equipment he’d grabbed from the dash of the Barracuda: the magnetic compass.

  It was just a dial in a sealed ball half filled with kerosene. As long as it hadn’t cracked or broken, it would still perform its only function. And that was to point toward the most powerful magnetic source around. Normally, that would be the north magnetic pole. But in this case Kurt guessed it would point toward the magnetic tower of rock.

  Though he was quite certain the whole thing was a fraud of some kind, the magnetism emanating from the tower was real. Whether it was being generated by some type of device implanted within the rock that sent out an electromagnetic current or was just a result of highly charged minerals being positioned in the right place, he couldn’t say.

  He lit one of the flares and held the compass out. It spun and dipped and slowly came onto a heading. The speed with which it centered told him it was reacting to something very strong, and he felt certain that it was pointing toward the tower.

  Knowing he and Joe had been traveling basically to the east before they’d been caught, he triangulated in his head a direction to swim and lit out for the Constellation.

  Five minutes later he came upon one of the ships in the graveyard. Two minutes after that he spotted the triple tails of the old aircraft. He pumped his legs hard, knowing both that time was running short and that he needed to keep as active as possible to delay the onset of hypothermia.

  He ducked through the gaping hole in the aircraft’s side, swam forward surrounded by the bubbles he was exhaling, and made it to the cockpit.

  A skeletal form sat in the copilot’s seat, still strapped in and stripped of everything organic. Only the plastic of the life vest, a pair of rusted dog tags, and the nylon-and-metal seat belt holding him in remained. Another few years and even the bones would be gone.

  As he looked at the form for the second time, he realized that this plane’s presence had been part of what threw him. Part of what blinded him to the hoax.

  The skeleton in the copilot’s seat, the CIA records of its secret mission, its departure from Santa Maria and its subsequent crash nine minutes later, all these things had lent some official credence to the mystery.

  Putting the thought out of his mind, he reached down and released the clasp holding the oxygen tank to the floor. Picking it up, he studied the valve for signs of corrosion o
r decay. While there was some growth on the ring around the bottle’s neck, there didn’t appear to be much damage. He only hoped the thick steel tank still contained its pure cargo.

  JOE ZAVALA REMAINED TRAPPED in the inverted hull of the Barracuda. His head and shoulders protruded into the cockpit and its lifesaving air pocket. His arms remained drawn awkwardly across his body, bent at the elbows and protruding out from under the cockpit’s rim. He could no longer feel his hands or his feet. But he could still think, and he realized that running the air full blast was a mistake.

  The excess was merely pumping itself out over the side before it could be used.

  He managed to stretch his leg once again and use his toes, numb as they were, to jab at the switch.

  The jet of air bubbles ceased. The cabin of the cockpit grew deathly quiet, and Joe continued to breathe slowly and count the seconds until Kurt returned with whatever he had in mind.

  It was only a question of time, he told himself. Kurt would return no matter what. Joe knew his friend would never give him up until there was literally no other way. He just hoped that whatever Kurt had in mind worked and worked quickly.

  As he waited in the silence, Joe found counting to be utterly tedious as a method of passing time. In fact, he’d honestly begun to believe it actually slowed time down somehow.

  He decided to sing instead, both as a way to fight the silence to keep himself alert and as a way to take his mind off the fear and freezing sensation that was creeping through his body.

  At first he considered singing something related to warmth, but somehow belting out the Supremes’ version of “Heat Wave,” or a similar tune, seemed like it would make things worse in this frigid environment.

  Instead he settled on another song, one that seemed more appropriate. It took a second to bring the words together, but then he was ready.

  “We all live in a yellow submarine…” he began.

  Even Joe would have admitted it was more talking than singing at this point, but it was something to do. And it gave him some ideas.

  “Note to self,” he said. “Paint next submarine yellow. And include a heater that works underwater, even if the whole cockpit floods. And missiles, definitely missiles.”