Dragon dp-10 Page 5

  Stacy stared so hard at the depth meter she thought the glass over the dial would crack. “Go… go,” she pleaded.

  Then their worst nightmare burst on them without warning. The sphere holding the electrical and oxygen equipment suddenly imploded. Weakened by its impact into the seafloor, it gave up its integrity and was crushed like an egg by the merciless pressure.

  “Bloody hell!” Plunkett gasped as the sub dropped back into the silt with a jarring bump.

  As if to drive home the terrifying reverse, the lights blinked out and snapped the sphere into a world of pure ebony. The malignancy of the stygian blackness is a horror only the totally blind experience. To those with sight the sudden disorientation curses the mind into believing unspeakable forces are approaching from beyond in an ever tightening circle.

  At last Salazar’s hoarse voice broke the silence. “Mother of Jesus, we’re finished for good.”

  “Not yet,” said Plunkett. “We can still make it to the surface by jettisoning the control sphere.” His hand groped over his console until his fingers touched a particular switch. With an audible click the auxiliary lights came on and refit the interior of the sphere.

  Stacy sighed with relief and briefly relaxed. “Thank heaven. At least we can see.”

  Plunkett programmed the computer for an emergency ascent. Then he set the release mechanism and turned to Stacy and Salazar. “Hold tight. It may be a rough trip topside.”

  “Anything to get the hell out of here,” grunted Salazar.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” Stacy said gamely.

  Plunkett removed the safety peg from the release handle, took a firm grip, and pulled.

  Nothing happened.

  Three times Plunkett feverishly ran through the routine. But the control sphere stubbornly refused to detach from the main section of the sub. In desperation he turned to the computer to trouble-shoot the cause of the malfunction. An answer came back in the blink of an eye.

  The release mechanism had been twisted and jammed by the angled impact with the seabed, and there was no way to repair it.

  “I’m sorry,” Plunkett said in frustration. “But it looks like we stay until rescued.”

  “Fat chance of that,” snapped Salazar, wiping the sweat that poured from his face with the sleeve of a down ski jacket.

  “How do we stand on oxygen?” asked Stacy.

  “Our main supply was cut off when the pod imploded,” replied Plunkett. “But our emergency canisters in this unit and the lithium hydroxide scrubber to remove our exhaled carbon dioxide should keep us sucking air for ten to twelve hours.”

  Salazar shook his head and gave a defeated shrug. “Every prayer in every church of the world won’t save us in time. It’ll take a minimum of seventy-two hours to get another submersible on site. And even then it’s doubtful they could lift us to the surface.”

  Stacy looked into Plunkett’s eyes for some small sign of encouragement, but she found none. He wore a remote and distant look. She got the impression he was saddened more by the loss of his precious submersible than he was at the prospect of dying. He came back on track as he became aware of her stare.

  “Raul is right,” he said tautly. “I hate to admit it, but we’ll need a miracle to see the sun again.”

  “But the Invincible,” said Stacy. “They’ll move heaven and earth to reach us.”

  Plunkett shook his head. “Something tragic happened up there. The last sound we heard was a ship breaking up on her way to the bottom.”

  “But there were two other ships in sight when we left the surface, Stacy protested. “It might have been either one of them.”

  “It makes no difference,” Plunkett said wearily. “There is no way up. And time has become an enemy we cannot defeat.”

  A deep despair settled in the control sphere. Any hope of rescue was a fantasy. The only certainty was a future salvage project to retrieve Old Gert and their bodies long after they were dead.

  6

  DALE NICHOLS, SPECIAL ASSISTANT to the President, puffed on his pipe and peered over his old-style reading spectacles as Raymond Jordan entered his office.

  Jordan managed a smile despite the sickly sweet tobacco fumes that hung in the office like smog under an inversion layer. “Good afternoon, Dale.”

  “Still raining?” asked Nichols.

  “Mostly turned to drizzle.”

  Jordan noted that Nichols was under pressure. The “protector of the presidential realm” was a class operator, but the thicket of coffee-brown hair looked like a hayfield in a crosswind, the eyes darted more than usual, and there were tension lines in the face Jordan had never seen before.

  “The President and the Vice President are waiting,” said Nichols quickly. “They’re most anxious to hear an update on the Pacific blast.”

  “I have the latest report,” Jordan said reassuringly.

  Though he was one of the five most powerful men in official Washington, Jordan was not known to the general public. Nor was he familiar to most bureaucrats or politicians. As Director of Central Intelligence Jordan headed the National Security Service and reported directly to the President.

  He lived in the spectral world of espionage and intelligence, and there were very few outsiders who were aware of the disasters and tragedies that he and his agents had saved the American people from.

  Jordan did not strike a stranger as a man with a brilliant intellect who possessed a photographic memory and was conversant in seven languages. He seemed as ordinary-looking as his men and women in the field. Medium height, late fifties, healthy head of silver-gray hair, solid frame with slight paunch, kindly oakbrown eyes. A faithful husband to his wife of thirty-seven years, they had twin daughters in college, both studying marine biology.

  The President and Vice President were engaged in quiet conversation as Nichols ushered Jordan into the Oval Office. They turned instantly and faced Jordan, who observed that they were as uptight as the President’s special assistant.

  “Thank you for coming, Ray,” said the President without fanfare, nervously motioning to a green couch beneath a portrait of Andrew Jackson. “Please sit down and tell us what in hell is going on out in the Pacific.”

  Jordan always found himself amused by the painful uneasiness that gripped politicians during an impending crisis. No elected official had the seasoned toughness and experience of career men such as the Director of Central Intelligence. And they could never bring themselves to respect or accept the immense power Jordan and his counterparts possessed to control and orchestrate international events.

  Jordan nodded to the President, who towered a good head above him, and sat down. Calmly, with what seemed to the others agonizing slowness, he set a large leather accountant’s style briefcase on the floor and spread it open. Then he pulled out a file as a reference.

  “Do we have a situation?” the President asked impatiently, using the formal watchword for an imminent threat to the civilian population, such as a nuclear attack.

  “Yes, sir, unfortunately we do.”

  “What are we looking at’?”

  Jordan glanced at the report purely for effect. He’d already memorized the entire thirty pages. “At precisely eleven-fifty-four hours, an explosion of great force took place in the North Pacific, approximately nine hundred kilometers northeast of Midway Island. One of our Pyramider spy satellites recorded the flash and atmospheric disturbance with cameras and recorded the shock wave from clandestine hydrophonic buoys. The data was transmitted directly to the National Security Agency, where it was analyzed. This was followed by readings from seismographic array stations linked to NORAD, who in turn relayed the information to CIA technicians at Langley.”

  “And the conclusion?” the President pushed.

  “They agreed the explosion was nuclear,” he said calmly. “Nothing else could be that massive.”

  Except for Jordan, who seemed as relaxed as if he was watching a soap opera on television, the expressions of the other three men in th
e Oval Office looked positively grim at the abhorrent thought that was finally thrown out in the open.

  “Are we on DEFCOM Alert?” inquired the President, referring to the scale of nuclear readiness.

  Jordan nodded. “I’ve taken the liberty of ordering NORAD to go immediately to a DEFCOM-Three Alert with standby and staging for DEFCOM-Two, depending on the reaction by the Soviets.”

  Nichols stared at Jordan. “Are we airborne?”

  “A Casper SR-Ninety recon aircraft took off from Edwards Air Force Base twenty minutes ago to verify and collect additional data.”

  “Are we certain the shock wave was caused by a nuclear explosion?” asked the Vice President, a man in his early forties who had spent only six years in Congress before being tapped for the number-two job. The consummate politician, he was out of his depth on intelligence gathering. “It might have been an underwater earthquake or volcanic eruption.”

  Jordan shook his head. “The seismographic recordings showed a sharp pulse associated with nuclear detonations. The reflection from an earthquake goes back and forth for a longer length of time. Computer enhancement confirms that fact. We should have a good idea of the energy in kilotons after the Casper collects atmospheric radiation samples.”

  “Any guesses?”

  “Until all the data is in, the best guess is between ten and twenty kilotons.”

  “Enough to level Chicago,” Nichols murmured.

  The President was afraid to ask the next question, and he hesitated. “Could… could it have been one of our own nuclear submarines that blew up?”

  “The Chief of Naval Operations assures me none of our vessels were within five hundred kilometers of the area.”

  “A Russian maybe?”

  “No,” Jordan replied. “I’ve notified my USSR counterpart, Nikolai Golanov. He swore all Soviet nuclear surface ships and submarines in the Pacific are accounted for, and quite naturally blamed us for the event. Though I’m one hundred percent sure he and his people know better, they won’t admit they’re in the dark as much as we are.”

  “I’m not familiar with the name,” said the Vice President. “Is he KGB?”

  “Golanov is the Directorate of Foreign and State Security for the Politburo,” Jordan explained patiently.

  “He could be lying,” offered Nichols.

  Jordan shot him a hard look. “Nikolai and I go back twenty-six years together. We may have danced and shined, but we never lied to one another.”

  “If we aren’t responsible, and neither are the Soviets,” mused the President, his voice gone strangely soft, “then who is?”

  “At least ten other nations have the bomb,” said Nichols. “Any one of them could have run a nuclear bomb test.”

  “Not likely,” answered Jordan. “You can’t keep the preparations a secret from Global Bloc and Western intelligence gathering. I suspect we’re going to find it was an accident, a nuclear device that was never meant to go off.”

  The President looked thoughtful for a moment, and then he asked, “Do we know the nationality of the ships in the blast area?”

  “All the details aren’t in yet, but it appears that three vessels were involved, or at least innocent bystanders. A Norwegian passenger-cargo liner, a Japanese auto carrier, and a British oceanographic ship that was conducting a deep-bottom survey.”

  “There must have been casualties.”

  “Photos from our satellite before and after the event show that all three ships vanished and were presumed sunk during or immediately after the blast. Human survivability is very doubtful. If the fireball and shock wave didn’t get them, the heavy radiation will in a very short time.”

  “I take it a rescue mission is planned,” said the Vice President.

  “Naval units from Guam and Midway have been ordered to the site.”

  The President stared at the carpet steadily, as if seeing something. “I can’t believe the British were secretly conducting a bomb test without notifying us. The Prime Minister would have never gone behind my back.”

  “Certainly not the Norwegians,” said the Vice President firmly.

  The President’s face made a mystified expression. “Nor the Japanese. There’s no evidence they ever built a nuclear bomb.”

  “The device might have been stolen,” suggested Nichols, “and clandestinely transported by the unsuspecting Norwegians or Japanese.”

  Jordan shrugged offhandedly. “I don’t think it was stolen. I’m willing to bet a month’s pay an investigation will prove it was deliberately being carried to a scheduled destination.”

  “Which was?”

  “One of two California ports.”

  They all looked at Jordan in cold speculation, the enormity of the whole thing growing in their minds.

  “The Divine Star was bound from Kobe to Los Angeles with over seven thousand Murmoto automobiles,” Jordan continued. “The Narvik, carrying a hundred and thirty passengers and a mixed cargo of Korean shoes, computers, and kitchen appliances, sailed from Pusan for San Francisco.”

  The President grinned mildly. “That should put a small dent in the trade deficit.”

  “Good God,” muttered the Vice President, shaking his head. “A frightening thought. A foreign ship smuggling a nuclear bomb into the United States.”

  “What do you recommend, Ray?” demanded the President.

  “We dispatch field teams immediately. Preferably Navy deepsea salvage vessels to survey the sunken ships and learn which ship was transporting the bomb.”

  The President and Nichols exchanged knowing glances. Then the President stared at Jordan. “I think Admiral Sandecker and his ocean engineering people at NUMA are better suited for a deep-water operation. I’ll leave it to you, Ray, to brief him.”

  “If I may respectfully disagree, Mr. President. We can keep a tighter security lid on the event with the Navy.”

  The President gave Jordan a smug look. “I understand your concern. But trust me. The National Underwater and Marine Agency can do the job without a news leak.”

  Jordan rose from the couch, professionally annoyed that the President knew something he didn’t. He made a mental note to dig at his first opportunity. “If Dale will alert the admiral, I’ll leave for his office immediately.”

  The President extended his hand. “Thank you, Ray. You and your people have done a superb job in so short a time.”

  Nichols accompanied Jordan as he left the Oval Office to head for the NUMA Building. As soon as they were in the hallway Nichols asked in a low voice, “Just between you and me and the furniture, who do you think is behind the bomb smuggling?”

  Jordan thought for a moment and then replied in an even, disquieting tone. “We’ll know the answer to that within the next twenty-four hours. The big question, the one that scares hell out of me, is why, and for what purpose.

  7

  THE ATMOSPHERE INSIDE the submersible had become rank and humid. Condensation was dripping from the sides of the sphere, and the carbon dioxide was rising into the lethal range. No one stirred and they seldom spoke, to conserve air. After eleven and a half hours, their life-preserving oxygen supply was nearly gone, and what little electrical power was left in the emergency batteries could not operate the CO, scrubbing unit much longer.

  Fear and terror had slowly faded to resignation. Except for every fifteen minutes, when Plunkett switched on the lights to read the life-support systems, they sat quietly in the dark, alone with their thoughts.

  Plunkett concentrated on monitoring the instruments, fussing with his equipment, refusing to believe his beloved submersible could refuse to respond to his commands. Salazar sat like a statue, slumped in his chair. He seemed withdrawn and barely conscious. Though he was only minutes away from falling into a final stupor, he could not see prolonging the inevitable. He wanted to die and get it over with.

  Stacy conjured up fantasies of her childhood, pretending she was in another place, another time. Her past flew by in fleeting images. Playing baseball in
the street with her brothers, riding her new bicycle Christmas Day, going to her first high school prom with a boy she didn’t like but who was the only one who asked her. She could almost hear the strains of the music in the hotel ballroom. She forgot the name of the group, but she remembered the songs. “We May Never Pass This Way Again” from Seals and Crofts was her favorite. She had closed her eyes and imagined she’d been dancing with Robert Redford.

  She cocked her head as if listening. Something was out of place. The song she heard in her mind wasn’t from the mid-1970s. It sounded more like an old jazz tune than rock.

  She came awake, opened her eyes, seeing only the blackness. “They’re playing the wrong music,” she mumbled.

  Plunkett flicked on the lights. “What was that?”

  Even Salazar looked up uncomprehendingly and muttered, “She’s hallucinating.”

  “They’re supposed to be playing ‘We May Never Pass This Way Again,’ but it’s something else.”

  Plunkett looked at Stacy, his face soft with compassion and sorrow. “Yes, I hear it too.”

  “No, no,” she objected. “Not the same. The song is different.”

  “Whatever you say,” said Salazar, panting. His lungs ached from trying to wrest what oxygen he could from the foul air. He grabbed Plunkett by the arm. “For God’s sake, man. Close down the systems and end it. Can’t you see she’s suffering? We’re all suffering.”

  Plunkett’s chest was hurting too. He well knew it was useless to prolong the torment, but he couldn’t brush aside the primitive urge to cling on to life to the last breath. “We’ll see it through,” he said heavily. “Maybe another sub was airlifted to the Invincible.”

  Salazar stared at him with glazed eyes and a mind that was hanging on to a thin thread of reality. “You’re crazy. There isn’t another deep-water craft within seven thousand kilometers. And even if one was brought in, and the Invincible was still afloat, they’d need another eight hours to launch and rendezvous.”

  “I can’t argue with you. None of us wants to spend eternity in a lost crypt in deep ocean. But I won’t give up hope.”