Mirage tof-9

by Clive Cussler

  “Possibly. Or it could work on an electromagnetic wavelength.”

  “Even acoustic,” Stoney added.

  “Any explanation about why nothing was growing on it down there?”

  “Oh, it’s loaded with cadmium. Absolutely toxic.” Seeing Juan’s concerned look, Mark explained, “Cadmium’s mostly dangerous if inhaled or ingested. It’s like mercury. You can handle the stuff, no problem, just don’t let it get into your bloodstream.”

  Maurice arrived and placed Juan’s food on the table, lifting the silver dome with a flourish. It was an omelet exactly as Cabrillo wanted — loaded with sausage.

  “Okay, you’ve told me what you know, now why don’t you give me a little speculation.”

  “When you met with Professor Tennyson, did he mention anything about the French?” Murph asked.

  “Actually, he did,” Juan said, recalling the bizarre turn in his conversation with the Tesla expert. “He said that Morris Jessup, the guy who popularized the story of the Philadelphia Experiment, was supposedly killed by French operatives in 1959, and his death made to look like a suicide.”

  “Did he seem to believe that story?”

  “That, I can’t recall. No, wait. I think he said it was a conspiracy theory, so he must have dismissed it.”

  “Maybe he shouldn’t have,” Mark said with relish. As the ship’s resident conspiracy nut, he was in his element. “Get this. In the spring of 1963, a game warden in Alaska found the remains of three people who’d died sometime during the winter. The bodies had been picked over by scavengers, so a straight identification was out of the question. Here’s the thing. He found French francs in the pocket of one of them.”

  “So?”

  “I haven’t told you the best part. The men were all wearing lab coats over shorts and T-shirts, and they were found lying on a patch of pure white sand in the middle of a boreal forest. By the time the ranger returned with a team to recover the bodies, animals had dragged them away. The only thing he could do was recover a sample of the sand.

  “He sent it to a geologist at the University of Alaska in Anchorage, who realized that the sand wasn’t pure silica but had a high concentration of ground coral in it. The ranger lost interest in the whole thing, but the geologist, Henry Ryder, kept on it.”

  Eric cut in. “It took him three years of asking around and comparing samples, but the sand they found in the middle of Alaska originated on an atoll almost in the exact center of the Pacific Ocean called Mororoa.”

  “Is that significant?” Cabrillo asked.

  Mark said with delicious thrill, “Mororoa is where the French monitored their atomic bomb tests. Back in the sixties, it had a sizable population of scientists and engineers. This Ryder guy contacted the French government and asked if they’d lost any scientists from Mororoa. He was stonewalled. This was all top secret, and the Cold War was at full boil. But he didn’t let up. With the help of a woman in the university’s French department, he made calls to the offices of France’s top engineering schools and eventually deduced that three men”—he pulled a scrap of paper from his jeans—“Dr. Paul Broussard, Professor Jacque Mollier, and Dr. Viktor Quesnel had all been missing since 1963, and that all three men were linked to France’s nuclear weapons research.

  “He reached out to their widows. Two wouldn’t talk to him at all, but one admitted that her government had sworn her to secrecy. She would only confirm that her husband had been on Mororoa Island three years earlier and that was the last she’d heard from him.”

  “Where’d you get all of this?” Juan asked, trying to wrap his head around it.

  The two exchanged a sheepish look.

  “Ah, conspiracy websites,” Murph admitted.

  “So this could all be a bunch of bull?”

  “Yes, except we called Alaska. Henry Ryder’s long dead, and so is his wife. His daughter still lives in Anchorage and does remember that her father kept a vial of sand on his desk that she wasn’t allowed to touch when she was a little girl.”

  Stone cut in again, “And he had a female friend who would come over from time to time who sounded like Catherine Deneuve.”

  “Okay,” Juan said at length. “That gives a little credence to the story. Where is all this heading?”

  “Back to the Philadelphia Experiment being something real, just not how it has been reported, and that the French killed Morris Jessup to silence him once and for all and they continued the research at their most secure facility, and that maybe something went wrong, and that some lab jockeys and the sand they were standing on was transported to Alaska via some unknown force. The same way George Westinghouse’s boat ended up in the Aral Sea years earlier.”

  “I don’t like science fiction,” Juan said in a warning tone.

  “Chairman, cell phones were science fiction not too long ago. Airplanes, rockets, nuclear submarines. The list is endless.”

  “I’m putting my money on St. Julian Perlmutter.”

  “But why?”

  “I asked him to look into the Lady Marguerite.” Perlmutter was a close friend of Dirk Pitt, and someone Cabrillo had come to rely on as well. The man possessed the largest privately held collection of maritime books, papers, and histories in the world, and he had a bloodhound’s nose for solving mysteries. “I can’t bring myself to believe in teleportation devices. I think someone hijacked George Westinghouse’s yacht and it eventually ended up in Russia. I’ve got Perlmutter trying to prove my theory.”

  “But we already looked into it. There was nothing.”

  Juan smiled. “You guys are of the belief that everything worth knowing is already on the Internet. There is ten times more information in libraries than on the Web. Probably a thousand times. You two go way beyond Google searches, but you can’t hold a candle to St. Julian when it comes to tracking down answers to esoteric questions.”

  Hali Kasim’s voice came over the intercom. He was the Oregon’s communications officer. “Chairman Cabrillo, please report to the op center.”

  Juan placed his napkin next to his cleaned plate and stood. “If you will both excuse me. We’ll talk later.”

  Hali was seated at a console on the right side of the op center when Cabrillo strode in. The Lebanese-born Kasim had a pair of earphones draped around his neck, but a line of crushed hair across his moppy head showed he’d been wearing them for a while.

  “What’s up?”

  “You have a call from the number we gave to L’Enfant, but it isn’t him.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Pytor Kenin. He asked for you specifically.”

  Cabrillo felt a wave of anger sweep through his body that he quickly crushed down. Now wasn’t the time for emotions. He took his customary chair and grabbed the handset jacked into one of the arms. He swung it up to his mouth and gave Hali a curt nod.

  “Cabrillo.”

  “Not calling yourself Chairman, eh?” Kenin said in Russian. “And I know you can understand me, so do not pretend otherwise.”

  “What do you want?” Juan asked in the same language.

  “What I want is to know why I cannot reach the K-154.”

  “That’s because it sank about ten minutes after trying to kill me.” Cabrillo waited a beat to let that sink in. “They slammed into the seafloor hard enough to open her up like a can of sardines. The U.S. Navy’s already received an anonymous tip about the accident, and I’m sure they’ll have a salvage ship over her within another twenty-four hours.”

  “What did you do?” the Russian shouted in rage.

  “Kenin, you’re the one who started this and you’re the one who drew first blood, so don’t act all incensed when we stand up to you.”

  “You are meddling in affairs that do not concern you.”

  “They started to concern me the moment Yuri Borodin died. I don’t know what kind of games you’re playing inside Russia’s military establishment, and, frankly, I don’t care. All I know is that I am going to stop you.”

  “Delusion
s, Mr. Chairman. You yourself admit you don’t know what I am doing, so how are you going to stop me? Surely not the same way you stopped me from silencing Tennyson. You are now and always will be a step behind.”

  Kenin obviously didn’t know Tennyson was still alive and safe.

  “You think that because you got to L’Enfant that I don’t have other resources?”

  “Ah yes, the enigmatic L’Enfant. Seems in the end he cares more about self-preservation than keeping his clients’ secrets.”

  “He withheld enough so that your sub commander made a fatal mistake,” Juan countered. “And he’s not the point. You are. Stop whatever it is you have planned and we end it here and now. Deal?”

  “I’m afraid not. You see, you are already too late. In fact, your interference pushed up a scheduled test and made me change my target. I want you to take what’s happened very personally. Had you left well enough alone, the Emir would still be alive, and so would the lovely Linda Ross.”

  Juan went cold. “What have you done?”

  “Convinced my client that the toy I built for them works. Check your e-mail.” The line went dead.

  Cabrillo was out of his seat and over Hali’s shoulder a second later. “Well?”

  “He routed that call through just about every relay station on earth and most of the communications satellites in orbit, but I pegged him at a military airfield outside of Moscow.”

  Juan put out a call over the ship’s net for Mark and Eric to report to the op center while Hali checked the general e-mail account for a message from Kenin. So far, nothing.

  What had Kenin done? The question ricocheted around in Cabrillo’s mind as his concern for Linda and the Emir turned his delicious breakfast into a molten ball.

  Considering the resources Kenin had put into this operation, this had to be his last big score. He’d had the opportunity to go legit and vie for a cabinet position, or at least a command staff job, or he could continue to lie and cheat his way through the system. It appeared he’d chosen the latter, and now he’d have to disappear because whatever it was he’d stolen from the Russian Navy, they would doubtlessly want it back.

  Stone and Murph arrived.

  “Kenin just called and said he’d tested whatever it is he’s been working on and has turned it over to his client. That means he’s going to try to vanish. He’s at the Ramenskoye Air Base. That’s his jumping-off point. Hack your way in and find out where he’s going. I’m going to call Langston and see if we can’t track his plane using Uncle Sam’s spy birds.”

  “Juan,” Hali interrupted. “It arrived.”

  “Same routing?”

  “Yeah. He doesn’t know we back-traced him or he wouldn’t have bothered.”

  “Good job. That’s our first leg up on Kenin since we hit the prison where they were holding Yuri. Put it up.” Juan nodded to Eric and Mark. “You two stay for a second. I don’t know what we’re about to see.”

  The e-mail contained an MPEG, which Hali opened. An image came up on the main view screen of a white ship on a rough sea; in fact, it looked like the vessel was facing the same weather conditions as the Oregon. The camerawork was jumpy, and it was obviously shot at long range from a helicopter. The time and date stamp showed this had been taken only moments earlier. The white ship was a mega-yacht, and it took Juan only a second to recognize it as the Sakir, the Emir’s pride and joy. That ship was currently three hundred miles south of them and headed for Bermuda. By the size of her wake, she looked to be traveling at about fifteen knots.

  Then off her port beam a weird blue glow grew out of the ocean like a bubble of gas escaping from the bottom of a swamp. The glow quickly engulfed the Sakir, yet it was still possible to see the three-hundred-foot supership.

  With no warning, no dramatic yawl, the yacht simply flipped over as if it were a bath toy under the ministrations of a vengeful child. Water washed over her upside-down bow and raced along her length as her momentum continued to drive her forward while her twin ferro-bronze propellers beat the air.

  The glow winked out a moment later. The men watching held their collective breath in anticipation of the huge yacht burying herself in the waves, but somehow she recovered enough for the water to pour off her red-painted bottom, and she settled into an unequal and doubtlessly short-lasting equilibrium. The video clip ended and reset itself to the opening frame.

  “Helm!” Cabrillo shouted. “Emergency full. Hali, get Gomez down to the hangar to warm up the chopper. I want to be in the air as soon as possible. Have Linc meet us there. Eric, go down to the sub bay and bring me full scuba gear including a suit. Mark, Engineering. I need cutting equipment, and from stores grab an emergency inflatable boat.”

  A ship the size of the Sakir would have a crew of ten and a staff of at least twice that number. A single inflatable could only carry ten, but Juan didn’t want to overload their helo and slow them down. Survivors would just have to take turns in the boat while the rest clung to its sides.

  Survivors. Juan didn’t know if there would be any. The weather wasn’t ideal, so he doubted there were many people on deck when she capsized, and those trapped inside would be so disoriented that they might not be able to save themselves. Rescuing even ten was being overly optimistic. And if she sank before they arrived, this could turn out to be a total loss.

  In that event, they would need the lifeboat for themselves, because their MD 520N helicopter had the range to make it out to the stricken yacht but not enough to return.

  “Go!” Juan ordered, and his people scattered.

  Afterward they would parse the video to find out how a ship the size of the Sakir could be capsized like that. This was definitely new technology, something that dovetailed into Tesla’s work, but what exactly it was and how it worked could wait until later.

  Juan made a brief stop in his cabin to change into a leg better suited for swimming and grabbed some foul-weather gear. The Oregon’s rear hatch was open, and the gleaming black McDonnell Douglas helicopter sat on the hangar bay elevator like a bird of prey. Overhead, the sky looked pained as a storm continued to brew. Of course the weather wouldn’t cooperate. At times like this, Cabrillo found, Mother Nature had a cruel sense of irony.

  “Gomez, how are we coming?”

  George Adams ducked his head out of the cockpit. “You caught me with my pants down, Chairman. I just started swapping out a radio when Hali called. I need ten minutes to put the old one back.”

  “You’ve got five.”

  Linc and Mark showed up together. Murph pushed a handcart loaded with an oxyacetylene cutter and other gear while the ex-SEAL carried the eighty-pound inflatable boat in its hard plastic capsule on his shoulder with seemingly little effort. Hali must have told him what to expect because he was dressed in Carhartt’s under a rain suit and steel-toed boots.

  “What’s up, Chairman?” Linc asked in his rumbling basso.

  “Kenin somehow capsized the Sakir. We may need to cut our way in through the hull.”

  “À la Poseidon Adventure?”

  “Exactly.”

  Next came Eric with Juan’s dive gear. This time, he wouldn’t bother with a bulky dry suit since he wouldn’t need to dive very deeply to access the ship’s interior. Hux arrived with a case of emergency medical supplies. She loaded the box into the chopper’s external storage locker as Cabrillo finished suiting up. He wedged his back against the chopper’s side so he could pull on his dive boots and then helped Eric load the rest of his gear on the chopper’s rear bench seat. Linc had already stowed the capsule behind the pilot’s seat.

  “Gomez?” Juan questioned.

  “One more minute. Might as well slow the ship now.”

  “All right.”

  There was an intercom mounted on the hangar wall. Cabrillo called the bridge, and almost immediately the sound of water gushing through her drive tubes changed as she went into full reverse.

  Max is going to kill me for that, he thought to himself, not knowing that Hanley had meted o
ut the exact same type of punishment when he was hunting the Russian Akula. As much as Cabrillo thought the Oregon indefatigable, she had her limits, and these sudden starts and stops wreaked havoc on her impeller blades and the motors that controlled their fine pitch.

  “Saddle up,” Gomez Adams announced. He tossed a bag of hand tools to one of his hangar apes — the nickname for the men who serviced the helo — and settled himself into the pilot’s seat. A hum grew from the equipment when he hit the master switch and started the takeoff procedure.

  While Juan and Linc jumped aboard, the pilot jacked his helmet into the chopper’s radios and did a communications check. “Max, you in the op center yet?”

  “I’m here. Talk about your rude awakenings.”

  Cabrillo had his own helmet on and spoke. “Have you seen the video?”

  “Hali just showed it to me. You go get her, Juan.”

  They would have reacted just the same had Linda not been on the Sakir, but her presence there made this rescue especially poignant.

  “Don’t you worry about that. Anything on the radar plot?”

  “Nothing to be concerned with.”

  “Keep an eye out. Kenin had to use either a ship or another submarine to pull that off. Ping active as you follow us, and watch for surface contacts. You know about L’Enfant?” Juan asked.

  “Hali told me the little rat sold us out.”

  “True, but he didn’t spill that we could track Kenin’s sub and had the capability to sink it. I don’t think Kenin knows we have a chopper or that the Oregon’s the fastest ship in the world for her size.”

  “Good point.”

  “Kenin underestimated us once. Let’s pray he does it again.”

  “Understood. We’ll keep an eye out.”

  “We’ll do the same.”

  The crew never wished one another luck before a mission, so Max repeated his earlier plaint. “You bring her back.”

  “Roger.”

  Juan curled his fingers in frustration while they waited for temperatures in the single turbine to reach the correct levels. Only then did Adams engage the transmission, and the rotor began to turn, lazily, at first, and then it vanished in a blur of motion. At the tail of the craft, rather than a second, smaller rotor, the chopper vented its exhaust through ducted ports for gyroscopic stability.