Mirage tof-9

by Clive Cussler

  The ship itself was a slender, arrow-bowed craft, with good proportions to her superstructure and a single up-and-down funnel placed just aft of amidships. She had no name, but under the accumulated rime of sea growth the number 821 could be seen painted next to her main anchor hawsehole. It appeared that she’d settled evenly. There were no crushed hull plates, but the superstructure was showing signs of decay as portions of some decks had collapsed after nearly seventy-five years of the ocean’s corrosive assault.

  “Would you guys turn on your helmet cams so we can get a visual up here?” Max prompted.

  Juan turned on both his camera and his own lights while Mike Trono did the same.

  As they edged closer, more details emerged, and Juan saw the odd frame built around the ship that Eric Stone had mentioned. The metal trusswork looked like it extended to just below the waterline and covered the entire ship in what was essentially a cage with openings of about two feet square. It was going to be a tight fit to get through the frame and actually explore the ship.

  There was something really strange about the structure, whose purpose he couldn’t begin to guess. And then it occurred to him. While the rest of the ship was rust-streaked and matted with marine growth, the frame was shiny, and not a single organism had tried to make it their home. No clams grew there, like the colonies infesting the ship’s deck, no starfish clung to it, not even a stray coral polyp. It was as if the sea creatures shied away from the metal scaffold.

  “Mike,” Juan called, “take a sample of that frame. Priority one.”

  “Copy. You want a sample of the frame,” Trono repeated back so there was no confusion.

  Eddie settled the Nomad onto the seafloor about ten feet from the wreck. Cabrillo and Trono switched over to their own trimix tanks, waiting a minute to make certain they had regular airflow, then they pushed off from the mini-sub.

  Eddie had positioned them so that the Nomad’s hull blocked the worst of the brutal current, and it was an easy swim over to the wreck. While Mike got busy with a diamond-toothed saw on one of the frame members, Cabrillo managed to ease himself through one of the square openings by first taking off his main tank and pushing it through ahead of himself. Once he had the tank strapped back in place, he swam over the open aft deck, where the ship had once deployed and repaired mines. Now that he was out of the Nomad’s protection, he kept one hand on part of the ship at all times. The cage would prevent him from being carried clear off the ship, but impacting the trusswork, should he slip up, could damage equipment or break bone.

  He reached a door that led into the ship’s interior. Before doing anything, he rapped on it with the steel butt of his handheld dive light to test the metal’s strength. Near the edge of the door, the door flaked some, but its integrity seemed good.

  “I’m going in,” he announced.

  “Roger,” Max said. Standard procedure would have been to have Mike stationed at the door should anything go wrong, but the Chairman’s dive partner was only seconds away.

  The passage was a standard hallway, with doors leading left and right. Each room was inky black until Cabrillo swept his light across the walls. It looked as though the ship had been completely stripped as part of her being scrapped. There was no furniture in any of the rooms, and he could tell by the plumbing that toilets and sinks had been removed from the enlisted men’s head.

  He came to a stairwell, and his light caught a sudden movement that made him rear back. A silver fish, he had no idea what species, blasted past him in a blur of fins and tail.

  “What happened?” a concerned Hanley asked. As bad as it was for Juan, the jerky video wouldn’t have shown what had so startled him.

  “Just a fish.” Normally, Juan would have made a lame joke, but communicating humor in a helium-induced falsetto was next to impossible.

  He figured that whatever equipment Tesla installed would be on a lower deck rather than up above, near the bridge. He swam down the stairs — really, a steeply canted ladder — and came upon a room where mines had once been stored. Rather than being empty as he’d expected, most of the compartment was taken up by an odd piece of machinery. Juan snapped some pictures with his high-res camera.

  “What am I looking at?” Max asked in frustration because of the poor video quality despite the equipment’s expense.

  “A machine,” Juan told him. “Never seen anything like it.”

  It was a boxy contraption, with wires running from various parts in a dizzying whirl of loops. Some of the machine had been attacked by sea life, while other parts, much like the cage surrounding the ship, hadn’t been touched. Thick cables ran out of the top of the machine and up through the ceiling where they probably attached to the frame. Behind the machine was an electrical dynamo with exposed copper coils now rendered to verdigris-colored ruin. He could see no evidence of what Professor Tennyson said transpired in this room nor did he really expect to.

  And while he was no engineer, Cabrillo was versed enough in technology to know he was looking at something completely new. That this was Tesla’s work wasn’t in doubt, but its purpose certainly was. Optical camouflage? Teleportation? Death ray? Rumors all, but this thing had definitely scared people enough to see it buried in a watery grave. He also saw evidence that someone had dived this wreck before because it looked as though parts of the machine were missing.

  It was at that moment when he realized that his mind was drifting from the technical aspects of the dive that he heard a shrill alarm over the comm. It was coming from the Oregon.

  “Max?” Seconds passed and there was no reply. So again he cried in his helium-altered voice, “Max!”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The alarm’s wail was followed up with red flashing strobes as the Oregon’s automated systems went into combat mode. A sultry female voice came over the intercom. “All crew to battle stations. All crew to battle stations.”

  “Report,” Hanley barked from the command chair.

  Mark Murphy was seated at his normal position toward the front of the room, where his primary job was to monitor the ship’s vast array of weaponry. He was there this morning to watch the dive.

  “Second.” He typed furiously, his skinny fingers moving with the virtuosity of a concert pianist. “Oh damn.”

  “What is it?”

  “Passive sonar detected the sound of a submarine opening two of its outer hull doors.”

  “Distance and bearing?”

  “Eight thousand yards off our starboard side.”

  “Whose is it?”

  “Coming up now.” The United States Navy kept a database of identifiable noises made by nearly every submarine in the world so that individual boats could be identified during combat situations. Mark had happened to work with one of the data specialists who updated the lists and who had lousy computer-security skills. “It’s a Russian Akula-class. Hull number one five-four. She must be just creeping along, because there are no machinery or screw noises.”

  Max glanced over at the radar plot. There were no ships within twenty miles of the Oregon. That meant there were no other targets if the submarine’s intentions were hostile. The fine hairs on the back of his neck began to prickle.

  “Chairman, we’ve got a Russian sub parked about four and a half miles off our starboard beam. She just opened two torpedo tubes.”

  “Get out of there,” Juan ordered.

  “Shot fired!” Mark yelled. “Torpedo in the water.”

  It would take a few seconds to accurately calculate the torpedo’s course, but all the men listening knew instinctively that the torpedo was on a course toward the Oregon. The only real question was whether she was the target or they were gunning for the derelict ship she was hovering over.

  Max wasn’t the strategist Juan was. He was a nuts-and-bolts kind of guy who left planning to others, so he took his cue off Cabrillo’s last order. “Helm, flank speed.”

  The inertia of eighteen thousand tons of steel idling on the ocean’s surface was a massive fo
rce unto itself, but it was no match for the magnetohydrodynamic engines. The cryopumps spun up and went infrasonic as they pumped liquid nitrogen around the magnets that stripped free electrons from the water forced through the drive tubes. A creaming explosion of froth erupted at the Oregon’s fantail, and within ten seconds of Max’s command the big former freighter was moving.

  That they were under way also meant that within seconds they would be beyond their radio’s limited range to communicate with the divers or Eddie in the submersible.

  “Max, just before you gave the order I heard a second torpedo launch,” Mark told him. With the ship under way, the passive sensors were deaf to everything except the noises the Oregon herself produced, the shriek of her engines and the building hiss of water against her hull.

  “Juan, did you catch that?”

  “A second torpedo.” Cabrillo didn’t hesitate before issuing his orders. The underwater radios weren’t encrypted, so the Russian captain knew there were people on the wreck. What he’d done was cold premeditated murder. “Sink ’em.”

  There were only about seven minutes until impact. The Oregon would be safely outside the torpedoes’ sonar range, but the wreck was a sitting duck.

  “You got it. Mark, let’s tell this guy he picked the wrong dance partner. Hit him with the active sonar, maximum gain, and keep hitting him until I tell you to stop.”

  Murph gave a wicked grin and fired off sonar pings. The returns showed the Akula hadn’t yet started to make her escape.

  “She’s still sitting there, and her torpedoes are staying deep.”

  “Waiting around to see her fish hit the wreck. Bad mistake, my friend,” Max said. “You should have hightailed it the moment you fired. ’Course, you couldn’t know that we were listening or know that we can track you.”

  Eric Stone rushed into the op center and took the helm seat next to Murph. With the exception of the Chairman himself, young Mr. Stone was the best helmsman aboard and could thread the Oregon through the eye of a needle if necessary.

  “Eric, bring us about and let’s get him within range of our torpedoes.” The Akula could take such a relatively long shot because she was firing at a stationary target, but to hit a moving opponent required a shortening of the distance. “Wepps, get our own fish readied.”

  “Roger that. Looks like the sonar woke ’em up. The Akula’s starting to move. The continental shelf drops away about twenty miles from here, and once she goes over, she’ll dive like a stone and we’ll lose her for sure.”

  The Oregon began cutting a long arc through the sea as she chased the fleeing Russian sub, and with her vastly superior speed, there was little chance the sub would get away.

  “Tubes one and two are flooded,” Mark announced moments later. “Outer doors are still closed. And, just to remind you, we need to slow to twenty knots for them to open. Otherwise, we can damage the torpedoes.”

  “Noted,” Max replied.

  They’d cut the range down to six thousand yards, and Hanley kept at them. Five minutes had elapsed since the first shots were fired. The torps would hit the wreck in about two more. Max needed to end this quickly if he was to get back on-station and coordinate any necessary rescue operation.

  “Contact!” Mark shouted. “He’s fired on us! Torpedo coming straight in.”

  “Helm, full reverse. Slow us to twenty knots. Wepps, open those doors as soon as you can and fire. Eric, once the torpedo’s away, take us back up to thirty knots.”

  At that speed, they wouldn’t be traveling much slower than their own weapon. The two men didn’t understand Max’s strategy but carried out his orders nevertheless.

  The ship physically shuttered as the impellers went into reverse, glasses rattled on tables, and crewmen were forced to brace themselves against anything solid due to the massive deceleration.

  “Twenty knots,” Eric called out.

  “Firing.” Mark pressed the key to fire their own torpedo and flipped the toggle to close the doors.

  Eric Stone had watched him and reversed the engines once again. Again, the ship gave a mighty shiver as if all that power was trying to tear her apart.

  “Sorry, old girl,” Hanley said under his breath and patted his seat’s armrest. He then spoke aloud. “Prepare autodestruct of our torpedo as soon as it’s abreast of the incoming Russian fish.”

  “Ah,” Mark said with understanding.

  Because they were still blasting the sea with active sonar pulses, they could track the two torpedoes in real time, unlike the Russian, who wasn’t pinging but relied on passive listening to find its prey.

  In one corner of the main view screen, Hanley brought up a computer-enhanced sonar “picture” of the seas ahead of them. Between them and the Akula, the two torpedoes were hurtling toward each other at a combined speed nearing ninety knots.

  “Helm, be prepared to slow again for another shot. The explosion’s going to ruin his ability to listen to us. When they blow, come right five points, so if he pops off a blind shot, he won’t get lucky.”

  The two torpedoes raced at each other with mindless abandon and would meet less than a half mile off the Oregon’s bows. Just a few seconds more. Murph’s hand hovered over the autodestruct button, his eyes unblinkingly on the screen. If this didn’t work, they would have little time for evasive maneuvers.

  The Akula’s captain never would have suspected his quarry would dare to keep charging at them. But there was a truism he obviously wasn’t aware of: Never play a game of chicken with a man you don’t know.

  “Now!” Max, Eric, and Mark shouted at the same time.

  Stone set about changing their course while ahead of the ship, a mushrooming ball of water was thrown twenty feet into the air.

  Both torpedo icons disappeared from the screen, replaced by a hazy cloud of distorted acoustical returns.

  “Okay, Helm, slow us down to twenty. Wepps, fire at will.”

  Moments later, the Oregon unleashed her second torpedo, and the range was so close that the Akula didn’t have a chance. She was racing along the bottom, eking everything she could out of her machinery in hopes of reaching the edge of the continental shelf. The cacophony of sonar pings the Oregon was throwing into the sea would overwhelm the Akula’s displays should she try to go active herself.

  They all saw it simultaneously. On the sonar screen they could see their torpedo racing in the Akula’s wake when the sub came to a stop in a little less than half her length.

  Hanley reacted fastest of any of them. “Wepps, autodestruct now!”

  Mark peeled his gaze from the monitor and typed in the appropriate command. The torpedo was so deep that there wasn’t even a ripple on the surface when it exploded less than five hundred yards from its target.

  “What happened?” Eric asked.

  “She hit something, a seamount of some kind, a boulder. Something,” Max posited. “Back off the engines so we can listen on passive.”

  “Why’d you blow our torpedo?”

  “Because when and if that sub is ever found, the investigators will conclude, rightly, that this was an accident. No need to advertise that they were being chased when they did a nosedive into the seafloor.”

  By the time the ship slowed enough for the sensitive microphones to be deployed, the Akula was as silent as the grave.

  Max roused himself. “Helm, get us back to the wreck ASAP.” He shot a glance at the battered Timex on his wrist. “Their torps would have hit eight minutes ago. The Chairman and the others are on borrowed time.”

  He wouldn’t let himself think about the more likely scenario that they were all dead.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Panic kills divers. That was the first lesson from his crusty dive instructor when Juan had earned his scuba certification as a teenager. That was the last too. Panic kills divers.

  He and Mike and Eddie had between six and eight minutes to get away. Plenty of time. No need to panic.

  Cabrillo shoved his camera back into the dive bag strappe
d to his waist, took one last glance at Tesla’s remarkable contraption, and headed back toward the staircase.

  “Mike, are you on your way to the Nomad?” Cabrillo asked, irked that the helium made him sound like a little girl.

  “Yes. I even got a sample from the frame.”

  “Good. Eddie, we’re going to have to jam ourselves into the air lock. Once we’re in, emergency ascent.”

  “Roger. Emergency blow once you and Mike are aboard.”

  That’s going to cost me, Juan thought.

  In an emergency ascent, the cylindrical hull of the submersible disconnected from the rest of the craft, all the motors, battery packs, and ancillary equipment. The crew compartment would shoot to the surface like a cork, taking them out of the blast range, but it also meant that about a million dollars’ worth of sub components would be left behind to be blown into oblivion.

  Cabrillo misjudged as he moved up the staircase and bumped his trimix tank into a bulkhead. It wasn’t much of a hit, but to the old derelict it was a deadly punch. Steel bracings, weakened by decades of immersion, gave way, and the walls around the staircase collapsed in a slow pirouette of destruction. The water filled with an impenetrable cloud of rust particles that turned the light from Cabrillo’s lamps into a meager brick-colored glow.

  He managed to push himself away from the worst of the collapse, saving himself from being sliced apart by the avalanche of plate steel.

  His careless action had to have caused a chain reaction because he could hear additional rumblings as the old wreck tried to find some new equilibrium.

  He remained curled in a ball until everything finally settled down. A piece of steel had landed across his back. His tanks had protected him, but now as he tried to push it off he realized it was either heavier than its impact indicated or it was wedged in place.