The Storm nf-10 Page 15

  “Enough of this.” He turned.

  “This country is falling apart,” Kurt shouted. “Even your money and power won’t keep you safe if anarchy strikes. And I’m guessing you have other problems in the outside world or you wouldn’t have to kill off your guests and hide down here in the first place. I’m offering you a way out. Release us and let us report what we saw, and my government will contact you in a more professional manner.”

  Jinn didn’t even consider the offer, despite Kurt’s well-played deception. He turned and smiled. “Before long, men from your government, among others, will be begging me to contact them. And your bleached bones lying in the sand won’t make a bit of difference.”

  Jinn waved to the guards. “Teach this one a lesson, and then take them to the well. I will meet you there.”

  Jinn walked out, Sabah followed, and the four men who remained moved forward.

  A few punches landed first to soften them up and then another series of blows from extendable metal batons. The strikes were heavy, but Kurt had taken worse and he managed to twist and bend so they landed in a more glancing fashion.

  Joe did the same, ducking and moving like the boxer he was.

  One baton caught Kurt above his eye, splitting the skin and leaving a bleeding gash. Kurt pretended it had knocked him woozy. He slumped in the chains, and the men around him seemed to lose their enthusiasm. A halfhearted kick hit him in the back, and the men laughed among themselves.

  One of them said something in Arabic, and then they reached down and hauled Kurt up to his feet. They undid his cuffs and dragged him out. Through eyelids intentionally at half-mast he saw Joe being forced to march next to him.

  They were out of the frying pan. The question was, where would they land?

  The first part of that answer arrived as they reached the main entrance to the cave. Sunlight beamed through in orange shafts. It was late afternoon, the hottest part of the day. They were marched outside and led to the tail end of an SUV. While the other guards held their arms, a rather vicious-looking man tied their hands to a hitch with two-foot lengths of rope.

  “This can’t be good,” Joe said.

  “I think we’re about to get keelhauled, desert style,” Kurt replied.

  The vicious-looking man laughed, climbed into the SUV and began to rev the engine repeatedly. Kurt tried to come up with a way out. His only thought was to climb onto the SUV before it took off, but the outside of the vehicle was smooth, and with their hands tied there was no way to hang on to it.

  The engine revved again.

  Joe looked over at him.

  “I got nothing.”

  “Great.”

  The SUV lurched forward, Kurt and Joe were yanked along, they stumbled and nearly fell, but they got their feet going and managed to stay up with the vehicle by running. To Kurt’s surprise the driver didn’t accelerate beyond that. He merely rolled along at an idling speed, dragging the two prisoners at the pace of a fast jog.

  The guards behind them laughed as Kurt and Joe struggled to keep up.

  The SUV moved out past the entrance to the cave and onto a track that crossed the sand.

  “What about now?” Joe asked. “Anything come to you?”

  Kurt was jogging hard, his feet sinking into the soft sand. “No,” he said.

  “Come on, Kurt,” Joe said.

  “Why don’t you come up with something?”

  “You’re the brains of this team, I’m the good looks,” Joe said.

  “Not after you get dragged face-first through the sand, you won’t be.”

  Joe didn’t reply. They’d begun to climb a low hill and it was even harder to keep up. The rear tires of the SUV were kicking sand into their faces. They topped the hill and came down the other side. Kurt was glad to see another flat section.

  The desert sun was beating down on them, the air temperature close to a hundred degrees. After two or three minutes of running in the heat, both of them were drenched with sweat, more water their bodies couldn’t afford to lose. In the far distance, Kurt saw another rock formation. It had to be at least a mile off, but it seemed to be in their line of travel.

  Joe caught his foot on something, tripping and almost falling.

  “Stay up,” Kurt yelled, looking ahead.

  Joe managed to keep running. Kurt tried to think.

  If they made it to the rocky section coming up, he would look for a stone to scoop up. It would be risky to try to grab something off the ground, but there was no way he and Joe could keep running much longer.

  Before either of those things happened, the SUV turned south and approached a group of parked vehicles. It rolled to a stop, and both Kurt and Joe fell to the ground.

  Lying on the sand, trying to catch his breath, Kurt saw Jinn and several of his men standing beside what looked like an old abandoned well.

  Jinn walked over. He must have seen Kurt’s eyes lingering on the well. “Thirsty?” he asked.

  Kurt said nothing.

  Jinn leaned close. “You don’t know the meaning of thirst until you’ve crossed a desert in search of the smallest oasis. Your throat closes up. Your eyes feel like they’re boiling dry inside your head. Your body can’t sweat because it has no more water left to give. That is the life of a Bedouin. And he would not fall after a mile or two in the desert.”

  “I’m pretty sure he’d be riding a camel and not getting dragged by a truck,” Kurt rasped.

  Jinn turned to his men. “Our guests would like some refreshment,” he said. “Bring them to the well.”

  The guards untied Kurt and Joe and hauled them up, pushing and shoving them toward the well. As they reached the opening, Kurt realized they wouldn’t be getting a drink. The smell of death rose up from below.

  He turned and kicked one of the guards, shattering the man’s ankle and lunging for his weapon. Joe sprang into action at almost the same instant, ripping his arm free and coldcocking the man to his left.

  The speed of the assault seemed to take the guards by surprise. These men had been denied food and water for the entire day. They’d been beaten and dragged through the desert. They’d looked all but dead lying on the sand only moments before.

  Four of Jinn’s men rushed in to help their comrades, but the Americans fought like spinning whirlwinds. For each man who landed a punch, another took a blow to the face, a kick to the knee or an elbow to the gut.

  One guard tried to tackle Kurt, but Kurt dodged and tripped him, sending him into another guard. As those two crashed into the sand, Kurt jumped to his feet. He saw a pistol on the ground and lunged for it. But like a football player diving for a fumble, he was immediately covered by three of Jinn’s men, also grabbing for the gun.

  It discharged, and one of Jinn’s men cried out in pain, his fingers blown off. But before Kurt could fire it again, a heavy blow hit the back of his head, and the gun was ripped from his grasp.

  Beside him, Joe had been tackled as well.

  “Pick them up!” Jinn shouted. “Throw them in!”

  Kurt struggled mightily, but Jinn’s men had him by his arms and legs. They carried him toward the well like a spectator crowd surfing at a rock concert.

  Joe was faring no better. One guard had him in a half nelson, pushing him forward, about to shove him over the edge.

  As Kurt reached the well, he shook a leg free and kicked one of the men in the face. The man fell back, caught his ankle on the low adobe wall and tumbled backward, headfirst, into the well. His scream echoed for a second and then abruptly stopped.

  The group holding Kurt wobbled like a table on three legs and then heaved him toward the opening.

  As they released Kurt, he twisted, saw the low wall and the small A-frames made of iron jutting up from it. He threw his arms out, caught it and held on.

  A second later Joe was shoved into the pit. He grabbed Kurt’s legs, perhaps instinctively.

  The added weight pulled Kurt down until only a death grip on the scalding-hot bars held them up.


  A shadow moved in front of the setting sun.

  Jinn held a baton in his hand. He swung it back and whipped it forward toward Kurt’s fingers. Before it hit, Kurt let go.

  He and Joe dropped straight down. They fell twenty feet, crashed into a pile of sloping sand and slid another ten feet to the bottom.

  The impact jarred Kurt, but the slope of the sand and a pair of decaying bodies acted like an air bag of sorts, absorbing much of the impact. He ended up in an awkward position, facedown against the floor.

  Stunned and all but knocked cold, Kurt forced his eyes open. Joe lay a foot to the left, piled up against the wall like a rag doll thrown in the corner. His arms were under him, one leg was bent up at an odd angle. He wasn’t moving.

  A sound above caught his ear, Kurt didn’t dare move, but from the corner of his eye he saw Jinn leaning over the edge of the well. A group of shots rang out, and dirt and chinks of rock flew around the bottom of the well. Something sharp cut Kurt’s leg, and a bullet or rock fragment hit inches in front of his face, kicking dirt into the air.

  Kurt held still, not flinching, not moving, not even breathing.

  He heard shouting in Arabic and distorted words from far above. A flashlight came on, pointed down the well. The beam danced around them almost hypnotically. Kurt remained still. He wanted them to see him as nothing more than another dead body at the bottom of the well.

  More words were exchanged. The light snapped off and the faces disappeared.

  A minute later the sound of engines starting up echoed down the gullet of the well. Kurt listened to the vehicles driving off until he could no longer hear them. He and Joe had been left for dead. At least for the moment they weren’t, but if they didn’t get out of the well, it was just a matter of time.

  CHAPTER 26

  GAMAY WALKED INTO THE MAKESHIFT LAB TO CHECK ON Marchetti. She found him hunched over an experiment that involved a heat lamp, several temperature probes and a tall, narrow beaker full of water, the top layer of which looked murky.

  “Am I right to assume there are microbots in that beaker?”

  Marchetti sat straight up. “Oh, Mrs. Trout,” he said, holding his chest. “You snuck up on me.”

  “Not really. You’re just very into your work.”

  “Yes,” he said, tinkering with one of the probes and checking a display.

  “Care to tell me what it is?”

  “I’m just trying to figure something out,” he said, sounding as if he’d rather not talk about it.

  She sat across from him and stared into his eyes. “Why is it men don’t like to share their hunches?” she asked. “Are you so afraid to be wrong?”

  “I’ve been wrong a million times,” Marchetti said. “I’m more afraid to be right, actually.”

  “About what?”

  “I have a hunch as to what might be occurring out there.”

  “And yet you’re keeping it a secret,” she said. “Like most men I’ve known, you want proof before you speak, or at least a reasonable amount of corroborating evidence.”

  She waved her hand over the setup. “This looks like an attempt to get that to me.”

  “You really have a marvelous sense of intuition, Mrs. Trout. I bet Paul can’t get away with anything.”

  “He’s learned not to try.”

  “A wise man,” Marchetti said, offering a sheepish grin. “You’re right of course. I have a hunch that the microbots are indeed responsible for the temperature anomaly. I remember hearing of a plan to stop global warming. It involved years of continuous rocket launches and the dispersal of millions upon millions of reflective discs in orbit around the planet or perhaps only over the poles, I really can’t recall for certain. These reflective discs would block a portion of the sunlight, reflecting it back into space. A small percentage. Just enough to counteract the effect we’ve begun feeling.”

  She remembered hearing something about it.

  “Obviously there were huge problems with the idea,” Marchetti continued, “but the concept intrigued me. I’ve often wondered if it would really work.”

  “There are precedents,” Gamay said. “After large volcanic eruptions, the ash in the air spreads around the globe, doing much the same thing as these discs you’re talking about. Famines in the sixth century have been blamed on ash dimming the sun’s output and causing crop yields to fall. Eighteen fifteen has been called the year without a summer because the average temperatures around the globe were surprisingly low. The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia is the prime suspect.”

  “I feel a similar principle may be at work here,” Marchetti said. “Not in the atmosphere but in the sea.”

  He pointed to the experiment. “I’ve attempted to re-create a solar warming-and-cooling cycle in this water sample. But there’s a problem with my theory. Even with the murky layer of bots at the top, it behaves almost like regular salt water.”

  “Meaning?”

  “The microbots absorb some of the heat, but nowhere close to what would be required to cool the water in the manner we’ve seen.”

  “How large is the difference?”

  “Very substantial,” he said. “Close to ninety percent deviation. And that’s a lot in anyone’s book.”

  “You mean in your experiment you found—”

  “Only ten percent of the cooling we’ve recorded out there in the open ocean. Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.”

  She looked around. She didn’t have to ask if he’d done the experiment right or if he wanted to try it again. He’d been secluded up here for hours, and he’d been an engineer before becoming a computer programmer. She guessed he knew what he was doing. Besides, she saw six other setups that looked identical to the one in front of them. She assumed they were controls.

  “So what does that mean?” she asked. “And this time pretend you’re a woman and share.”

  “There are two possibilities,” he said. “Either something else is responsible for the majority of the cooling or the microbots are cooling the ocean through some other process or mechanism that we’ve yet to observe or discover.”

  “All the more reason to keep sailing toward them,” she said.

  “I’m afraid so,” he replied.

  Before Gamay could say anything more, an alarm began to sound throughout the lab. It was sharp, piercing, and accompanied by flashing strobes.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Fire alarm,” Marchetti said. He reached for an intercom switch and pressed it. “What’s happening, chief?”

  “We have multiple heat signals,” the chief replied, sounding as if he was still checking. “We have confirmation,” he added. “There’s a fire in the engine room.”

  CHAPTER 27

  PAUL TROUT HEARD THE ALARMS AND RACED DOWN THE hall until he reached the makeshift lab. Marchetti was on the intercom in a rapid-fire discussion with his chief of engineering. Gamay stood next to him with a concerned look on her face.

  “Fire,” she said.

  “I figured that,” Paul replied.

  He began to smell smoke and the distinctive odor of diesel fuel burning. “Engine room?”

  She nodded.

  Marchetti asked into the microphone. “Can you get the robots back online?”

  “They’re not responding.”

  “What about the fire-suppression system?”

  “Also not responding.”

  Marchetti looked ill. “Keep working on it,” he said, pressing the intercom button again. “We’ll have to fight it by hand. Have Kostis and Cristatos meet me there. Have the others stand by.”

  Marchetti looked over to Paul and Gamay. “Either of you have firefighting experience?”

  “I do,” Paul said. “I’ll go with you.”

  Now Gamay looked ill. “Paul, please,” she said.

  “I’ll be okay,” he replied. “I’ve had plenty of training. Get yourself to somewhere safe.”

  “The control room,” Marchetti said. “My chief is there.”
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  Gamay nodded. “Be careful.”

  Paul raced out the door with Marchetti and they took a stairwell down toward the main deck. From there a second stairwell took them into the hull and then along a hall that led to the engine room. The smoke thickened as they neared the aft end of the island.

  “This is the fire station,” Marchetti said, reaching a storage area with several tall doors.

  They were fifty feet from the engine room. The smell of fuel was sickening, and the heat of the fire could be felt and heard.

  Marchetti opened the panel marked fire. Inside on pegs were bright yellow firefighting suits made of Nomex and accented with reflective stripes of orange. On a shelf above each suit, the familiar air tanks and masks rested. Each SCBA, or Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus, included a fire- and heat-resistant mask with an integrated regulator, a communications system and a heads-up display. A harness supported flashlights and other tools, along with low-pressure air cylinders that would mount on men’s backs.

  Marchetti grabbed a fire suit, Paul did also. As they pulled them on, Kostis and Cristatos arrived and did the same.

  Pulling his mask into place, Paul opened the regulator valve. He gave a thumbs-up. The air was good.

  Marchetti reached over and flicked a switch on the side of Paul’s mask. Paul heard static for a second and then the sound of Marchetti’s voice came through headphones.

  “Can you hear me?”

  “Loud and clear,” Paul said.

  “Good. The respirators are equipped with radios.”

  Paul was ready. The two crewmen were almost ready. Marchetti moved to the stanchion on the wall and began unfurling the hose.

  Paul slotted in behind him, and they began to move forward.

  As they approached the open bulkhead door to the engine room, Paul asked, “What’s the plan?”

  “While the chief tries to get the robots back online, we do the best we can to fight the fire.”

  “Why not just seal it off?”

  “One of my men is in there,” Marchetti said.

  Paul took a look at the burning engine room. He could barely imagine anyone surviving what was fast becoming a conflagration, but if there was a chance, they had to search.