by Bob Finley
Kim's sigh was audible.
"You'd better sit down for this one," Marc suggested.
Kim had to think a moment before he remembered the pull-out seat built into the forward bulkhead. He'd never used it...had never seen a need for it. He pulled it out and slipped into it.
"Belt," Marc said.
Kim fumbled for the seatbelt and snapped it. Doing so heightened his dread of what was coming.
"Going vertical in ten seconds! Everybody face forward and hold on to something! Kim, shoot him in the belly-button. It'll blow his compressors!"
Kim grabbed the dual grips of the sound cannon, touched his finger to the trigger, and hung on. Just in time.
"Going up," Justin announced in a calm voice that seem out of place the next instant when he snatched the joystick to six o'clock and kicked in the afterburners.
The VIKING lurched, the turbines screamed into emergency power, and the most advanced nuclear submarine in the world stood on its tail and blasted off like a ballistic missile.
The passengers gasped as they suddenly found themselves lying on their backs while being pushed inexorably into the cushioned chairs by the acceleration. Kim, without a head restraint, had to strain forward to keep from being bent backwards over the seat into which he was now gratefully strapped.
"You'll see 'em in ten seconds. You'll have less than three seconds to fire. Stand by. Five...four...three...two...there he is!
Silhouetted against a gray ceiling, the minisub's belly was fully exposed to the rushing attack like a minnow to a shark. Kim had no time to aim. He instinctively fired a two-second burst at the largest part of the target, its mid-section. The sub explosively disappeared in a cloud of bubbles as the compressor on board ruptured, almost severing the fuselage. And then the world turned upside down, as Justin pulled the VIKING into a high-gee loop, caromed into a sliding right turn, and slowly righted as they plunged back into the depths at 118 miles per hour.
Fully ten seconds went by as Marc let the ship have its head. He gradually eased back into his chair, took a deep breath, and deliberately and slowly let it out. He looked over at Kim. Even in the red running lights, the rivulets of sweat on Kim's face stood out in bold relief. In slow motion, Kim returned his look. His eyes still had a wild look to them.
"Adrenaline’s a kick, ain't it?" Marc asked in short breaths. Kim didn't answer, just turned back to stare out the darkened glass before him. What if he'd been wrong about the subs being unmanned?
A half-mile out Marc slowed to 20 miles per hour, brought the VIKING around in a lazy curve to circle back toward the seamount, and rose to within a hundred feet of the surface. The sun's rays on the speckled surface above them were subdued and striking the waves at a low angle. Justin glanced at the split/clock in one corner of the console. By satellite tracking, it gave readouts on both his home base in Miami and the time for whatever his present location might be. It was almost five-thirty in the afternoon above them; lunchtime in Miami.
"Get me a satshot with a ten-mile radius," he said to Kim.
Kim unbuckled, slid the seat back into place, and crossed to the CommPuter. He keyed in the request and waited. It took a little over twenty-one seconds for the satellite to receive the VIKING's encrypted request, verify the access code, isolate the coordinate parameters, and fire the telemetry burst by tight beam to the onboard digital translator. There was a hum, a beep, and a high resolution color photograph was ejected from a slot and dropped onto the counter. Kim picked it up.
"You looking for local traffic?" he asked.
"Uh huh."
Kim shook his head. "There isn't any," he advised.
Marc looked over at him. "No surface ships?" he said, surprised.
Kim shook his head again. "Nope."
Marc leaned back into his chair. He tilted his head absently this way and that, staring vacantly into the gray-blue sea beyond. It was an unconscious part of his thought processes. The pursed lips and stone-faced look always reminded Kim of pictures he'd seen of Easter Island statues. But he wasn't likely to tell his boss that.
Marc sighed. "I thought there'd be a surface support ship. Or ships."
"Supporting what?" Kim asked.
"The subs."
"Oh," Kim was reminded of the two mini-subs they'd just destroyed. "I hadn't thought of that," he added ruefully.
"There's a lot we haven't thought of," Marc observed. "Or should I say, ‘haven't figured out’."
"Like, ‘what are we doing here’?" Janese Cramerton said from Number Three. Marc, startled at the intrusion, quickly turned to look at the monitor.
"You come in here like the Great White Hunter and destroy the first thing that crosses your path, without even a ‘hello’. Is this the way you usually solve problems, Captain? If it is, I hope you never consider me to be a ‘problem’!
Justin's jaw set and he stared hard at the monitor. "That's a thought," he said evenly. Janese's eyes widened and her mouth dropped open.
"Marc, I didn't get a real close look at those two minisubs, we went by them so fast, but..." Frank Sheppard intervened.
"Yeah, ‘but...’" Marc was drawn off the scent.
"...but, they looked a lot like the one in the photograph I saw on the wall back in your office."
It was Justin's turn to be caught off guard. When he quickly turned, he saw the same look on Kim's face.
"That's why firing on those subs bothered me so," Kim blurted out. "They're ours!"
"What do you mean, ‘ours’?" Janese Cramerton demanded.
Justin turned back to her image in the monitor. "We built them," he said. "That is, one of our companies built them."
"You shot down your own subs?!" she asked in disbelief.
"Well, they aren't really ‘ours’. Somebody, somewhere, bought them. We're just a little bit possessive about our products."
"Yes,” she said, somehow managing to get a hiss out of the word, "I can see how much you care for and take care of your toys!"
"Miss Cramerton," Frank Sheppard mediated, "I'm sure that whatever the Captain did, he thought it was in all our best interests."
Janese turned to Frank, hands defiantly on her hips, and glared.
"Well," Marc drawled lazily, "at least not everything was a total loss back there."
"Oh, really?!" Cramerton turned her acidic glare back on Marc. "I guess you're not counting those submarines?"
"That's the good part," Marc said.
"What?!" she said in an exasperated voice.
"Now they've gotta buy some more subs." He grinned wolfishly. "Money in the bank!"
The look on her face was too much. And the laughter that followed was also too much. She threw herself back into her chair and tried to ignore them all.
The laughter was short-lived. It was a welcome break to the tension they'd been under, but after two days and four thousand miles, they still weren't much closer to the answers they were searching for. Or...were they?
"Let's recoup," Marc said to the group more soberly. "What do we know? The Navy thought they had a vessel down. We found it, intact. The crew...most of the crew...was missing, allegedly kidnapped or taken as hostages. But a trail of breadcrumbs led into the forest: mention by the kidnappers...several times...of a mysterious seamount a thousand miles away. Why? So we'd follow? Why? What do they want from us...if there is a 'they'...that they don't already have? If this is a terrorist group, they aren't following the usual game plan...they haven't...so far...killed anybody, destroyed anything, or made any demands. If the Centinela Seamount thing was a clue, who was it for? MARS is supposedly a civilian research project, privately funded. Who could know that most of its funding comes from the U. S. Navy? That's secret information. Why would somebody set up an obscure civilian research project as a lure? If its civilian, wouldn't the civilian owners be the ones to come looking for it? Why would anybody want to lure civilians to the project, and then...if we're right...on to Centinela Seamount? Makes no sense." He paused thoughtfully.
/> "On the other hand, if someone knew for sure that the military was involved, why would they lure the military into anything? Isn't that grabbing the tiger by the tail?" He paused again. "And finally: for anybody...anybody...to play this kind of game two miles down, they've got to have a lot more money than they have sense. Just to get to the MARS vehicle under that much water takes a massive investment in equipment and technically-competent, highly-paid people. How do you find it? How do you sneak past its surveillance systems? How do you board it without an alarm being sounded by the person on watch? How does any crew member escape?"
Each point Justin made was an arrow that flew straight and true toward its target. One by one every head turned to look at Cyrus Wojecki, as if following the trajectory of the arrows to their point of impact. Wojecki, trussed and silent behind the duct tape, turned sullen eyes on them, then looked away.
"That's a lot of questions. Are there any answers?" Justin paused to organize his thoughts.
"All I can think of is more questions," Frank Sheppard mused.
"I know what you mean, Frank," Marc empathized. "But if we cut through the smokescreen, what shakes out?" He looked at Frank and Janese in turn, and then at Kim, who knew enough to wait.
"How 'bout this: MARS never was ‘missing’. It was sabotaged. Deliberately. So that it would be forced to set down for repairs, at a pre-arranged location. The saboteur slips something in a cup of coffee or maybe in the food and drugs the other two. When they're out, he signals whoever's waiting on the surface, a minisub is sent down, the two drugged crew members are loaded aboard, and the saboteur settles down to wait for the cavalry to arrive."
"That's us, the ‘cavalry’," Frank chimed in.
"Yes," Marc conceded, "but it could have been anybody. It wouldn't have mattered whether it was the navy or us, or someone else. Just so somebody showed up for the dog-and-pony show."
"I don't understand what you're getting at," Janese Cramerton said, no longer sulking. "Why wouldn't it matter who came looking for the MARS?"
"Because I think MARS was just a way to get attention, and whoever came along would do."
"To ‘get attention’ for what?" Janese pressed.
"I don't know...but I think we will soon," Justin answered ominously.
"You think Cy had something to do with this?" she asked.
"I think" Marc said, "that the only person who isn't a hostage was bought. He was already a crew member on MARS. As such, he had access to military secrets, knew what it would take to make the sabotage look like a mechanical or electrical glitch, and could time it to coincide with the pre-arranged rendezvous point; he could drug the other two crew members without their suspecting anything; could signal the pickup ship topside; could override the ‘all clear’ transmissions that would automatically trigger a search; and could cast the Centinela Seamount bait to whatever white knight showed up. Yes, I think it was an inside job. And, there's one other thing you don't know." He told them about the air supply in the minisub Wojecki had come close to ramming them with back at the MARS III. That clinched it. The evidence, though circumstantial, was overwhelming.
Janese Cramerton went and stood in front of Cy Wojecki. He wouldn't look at her.
"Cy, is this true?" she demanded. He continued to gaze sullenly into space. She reached down and gently pulled the tape from his mouth.
"Is it true?" she asked again, this time more gently.
He turned his head to her and his eyes drilled her.
"Of course, it's true, you stupid little bleeding-heart purist!" he hissed. "Look at your manicured nails and your just-so hair. Look at your figure! How many days a week do you spend at your exclusive little health club and tanning spa, sweating and paying through the nose to keep it that way? How much do you spend on clothes? Or do you even know? Do you even keep up with such mundane things as what it costs? Or is mummy and daddy's money paying the way while you decide what you really want to be when you grow up?"
Janese Cramerton involuntarily stepped back under the barrage. The vehemence of Wojecki's attack had caught her completely off guard.
"People like you have no idea how people like me, the little people, have to live! I've worked for the same company for twelve years. Twelve years! I'm loyal. I volunteer for overtime. I always do good work! Always! But, do I get the promotions? Do I get the raises, the big bucks? No! I don't. Somebody else always gets it...somebody who doesn't deserve it, who didn't earn it. I don't have it handed to me, like..." he sneered openly at her..."some people."
"I don't know what..." Janese began, defensively, with just the beginning of a retaliatory tone. But Wojecki cut her off.
"Shut up! Just shut up! You don't know anything about hardship. But I do!" He took a shuddering breath. "I do," he said again, half to himself. He met her look defiantly.
"But no more." He clamped his lips tightly together and shook his head. "No more. I finally realized how stupid I was. He made me see that." He laughed. "When this is over, I'll be rich! Rich! No more groveling and crawling. I'm going to be somebody. I can do anything I want to do! And nobody can stop me."
"What do you mean, ‘when this is over’?" Frank Sheppard demanded.
Wojecki turned as if he hadn't noticed him there before. He smiled wickedly and scoffed.
"You'll know that soon enough," he taunted.
Frank took a quick step toward him, and Wojecki jerked his head to one side and shut his eyes as if expecting to be struck. Frank got no further than a clenched fist.
"Put the tape back on his mouth!" Justin ordered over the intercom. "I've heard about all I want to out of him."
"Let's make him tell us what's going on," Sheppard grated through clenched teeth.
"Don't think so, Frank. His loyalty's been bought. I doubt he'd get paid if he runs his mouth too much, and he knows it. Let's just shut him up for now."
Janese Cramerton surprised Frank when she took the roll of duct tape from him, ripped off a length, and more forcefully than necessary, stuck it over Cy Wojecki's mouth. As she turned away from the bound man, the look on her face told Frank Sheppard to go to his corner and lie low.
"Okay," Marcus Justin sighed. "Let's go see what's at the end of the yellow brick road." He broke off the slow circumnavigation he'd been making of Centinela Seamount and pointed them directly into the jaws of uncertainty.
Chapter 23
"Marc, we might have something here," Kim said.
Justin glanced over at his Number Two, who was in close communion with Yoko.
"Whatcha got?"
"I've had Yoko reviewing all databases...acoustic and visual...of the 'mount since we got here. Remember the noise we heard that we thought was coming from inside the mountain? Well, using where we first heard it as a reference point, we did a geothermal, acoustic filtration, and contour aberrations scan. Look at this." Marc Justin was quietly amused by his assistant's use of ‘we’. He knew that when Kim said ‘we’, he didn't mean himself and Marc. He meant himself and Yoko. Or was it himself/Yoko?
One of the nine monitors in Marc's console popped on as Kim routed Yoko's output to it. He was looking at a replay of videotape shot just before they were accosted by the two now-defunct minisubs. He saw nothing unusual and said so.
"Yeah, but that's just straight visuals," Kim said with suppressed excitement. "Now, look what happens when we overlay the geothermals."
The image on the monitor froze. Justin still saw nothing out of the ordinary, until Yoko painted in a mauve splotch of color.
"What's that?" Marc asked.
"That's heat. See, the water temperature here...there's a thermal layer at this depth...is, according to the sensors, 51 degrees."
"Yeah?"
"But there's a heat leak. That colored overlay patch registers 64 degrees." Kim waited expectantly for a reaction. He was delighted when all he got from his boss was a deepening of the furrows in his forehead. He loved it when he got a chance to bomb the boss.
"Now, check this." He made so
me rapid keystrokes. "I asked Yoko to look for patterns and geometric shapes." He grinned even wider when Marc still didn't connect. "Watch."
On top of the colored splash, Yoko played a three-second game of connect-the-dots. A pattern emerged. Finally, Justin saw it.
"A circle," he said, surprised.
"Yep."
"In the side of a mountain? An undersea mountain?"
"Uh-huh."
Justin was silent a moment while he thought that over. Abruptly, he asked, "What depth is that? And bearing?"
"Bottom right corner of the screen," Kim answered and leaned closer to read it himself. "319 feet down and...two-five-five degrees, on the west-south-west side of the mountain," Kim observed redundantly.
"On the seaward side. And too deep for sport divers," Marc muttered. He gunned the VIKING and pulled her head around into a port turn. Glancing at his board, he saw that they were at a hundred and five feet. He eased the joystick forward and the ship nosed downward, dropping effortlessly to 350 feet.
"What does that mean, the fact that it's on the 'seaward' side, and that it's 'too deep for sport divers'?" Janese Cramerton's voice startled him. He'd forgot anyone else was there.
"Don't know for sure. Maybe nothing."
"Obviously it means something, or you wouldn't be checking on it," she persisted.
"Nag, nag, nag," he thought.
"In a minute," he said.
She rolled her eyes at Frank Sheppard, who carefully sidestepped the unspoken gesture.
He'd looped the ship out to sea a quarter-mile and doubled back on a heading of seventy-two degrees, which lined him up on the earlier sighting of the...whatever it was.
"Full sensors."
"Roger," Kim acknowledged.
Marc reduced headway and allowed the VIKING to drift upwards a little.
"Two-two-five yards and closing," Kim advised.
"One-to-one scale on the sonar," Marc ordered.
"Roger, one-to-one," Kim responded, checking to be sure the HolarScope was in a one-to-one ratio for highest accuracy.
"Three hundred feet and closing."
"Two hundred...contact! I have a visual." The vast mountain materialized out of the gloom of three hundred-plus feet, stretching away on either side into infinity.
