Zero Hour nf-11 Read online

  Janko had the impression he was looking upon a demigod of some type, a being that should have been dead several times over — from fire, from gunshots, from radiation — and yet he still lived. Janko did not want to disappoint this demigod, but he could not bring himself to lie. He summoned all his courage.

  “We have been endangered,” Janko admitted. “Our purpose may have been compromised. Despite great effort, I’ve failed to find the one who puts our goals at risk. The failure is mine. And mine alone.”

  “You speak the truth,” Thero said. “How did it occur?”

  “The dive master is in possession of all keys. He cannot explain how Panos was able to gain access to the airlock. Either the dive master is lying or there is a conspiracy. One that goes beyond Panos and the other traitors. But there is no way to account for all the strange things that have occurred. No one single person has access to all areas that have been breached. You know how tightly things are watched.”

  Thero nodded, the soft latex of the mask catching the small amount of light that was present. The reflections danced up and down the mask, as if it was sending and receiving signals.

  “Panos was driven from here,” Thero said. “That can mean only one thing: the help comes from the outside. From one of those we have trusted to do our business in the secular world.”

  Janko did not agree, but he kept that to himself.

  Thero shifted his weight. “You see the difficulty of my position, don’t you, Janko? I no longer know who to trust. Either here or on the island. Particularly because the next diamond shipment is ready to be sent. This one is the largest yet. But I can’t count on the other men to carry out the transactions.”

  “Postpone it,” Janko suggested.

  “The longer those diamonds sit, the bigger men’s eyes get,” Thero said. “I won’t delay the cargo any further. You will return to the island and take it personally.”

  Janko’s eyes lit up. “Me?”

  “First, you will kill the others, all those who have done our business before,” Thero explained. “Then you will take possession of the shipment and travel to Jakarta, where a buyer awaits us.”

  Janko could hardly believe what he was hearing. He’d come to Thero’s chambers expecting to be tortured or even killed. Instead, he was being offered a great honor.

  He knew to grasp it immediately. Thero’s mercurial personality ran hot and cold, munificent at one moment, cruel and murderous the next. All those around him had learned to fear the strange pauses he was prone to, the odd looks he gave, as if searching the mist for something only he could see. Paranoia and power were a dangerous combination.

  “I will do as you require,” Janko said firmly.

  “Take these guards and go to your task. I will meet you on the island. I expect to see the bodies of the traitors when I get there.”

  Janko stood taller and glanced at the men behind him. They snapped to attention. “The traitors will talk and then die,” he said, doubting the other men were traitors at all but far happier to put them to death than to die himself.

  Janko turned and strode out the door with the two guards following close behind.

  Thero remained where he was, watching as the rusted steel door slammed shut behind them. In the muted silence, he considered the situation. Janko could be trusted, he thought. He’d been with them for so long.

  The sound of footsteps emerged from the darkened room behind him. Thero turned in time to see a young man coming forth from the shadows. He had cropped blond hair, a slight build, and a sad and weary look about his eyes. He wore a lab coat.

  “It won’t take long for the Australians to find us here,” the young man said. “Not now. Not after this.”

  “True,” Thero said.

  The young man was Thero’s son, George. He was also the chief designer of the latest version of Thero’s system, a weapon that would literally shake the Earth to its core.

  “You’re quite right, my son,” Thero said. “What would you have me do?”

  “There’s no reason to keep this station around,” George said. “We should leave. Have Janko stay behind and scuttle the station. Then he can join us and complete his other task.”

  “But this station will help us inflict the pain we seek,” Thero countered.

  “The main system on the island will soon be operational,” George said. “Once it is, we will be invulnerable. We should move everything of value there.”

  “When will it be up and running?”

  “Within days.”

  “Excellent,” Thero said, beaming with pride. “You’ve succeeded where so many others have failed. Soon, we’ll show the world how they’ve lived in ignorance. We’ll make the nations that shunned us pay.”

  The young man looked downcast.

  “You disagree?”

  “Proving the system works, proving that we can draw unlimited energy from the void around us, surely that’s vindication enough? That and the wealth that will follow.”

  “No,” Thero said sharply. “It’s not even close. Look what they’ve done to us. To me. To you. They’ve stolen everything. Mocked us and murdered your sister. They sent us away like we carried the plague, abandoned us to certain death. All the nations of the world are complicit in this. All the nations we could have helped.”

  Thero’s tone softened. George had always been the merciful one. George’s sister had been more like her father. “You’re too forgiving,” Thero said. “I can’t afford to be that way. I won’t hand them the gift we’ve created. Not without extracting my pound of flesh first.”

  Thero’s son looked up at him. He nodded grudgingly.

  “The system must be tested,” he reminded his father. “If we can’t fine-tune it, then neither dream will come to fruition.”

  “Only the most minor tests,” Thero said. “The world must remain in the dark until the zero hour arrives.”

  SEVEN

  Joe Zavala stood on the ramp at the Cairns airport as the speeders he’d brought with him were secured on a pallet and towed toward a waiting aircraft.

  Five foot ten, with the dark smoldering eyes of his mother and the solid build of a middleweight boxer like his father, Joe was an engineer and a connoisseur of living to the fullest.

  Life was good, Joe felt, especially his. He traveled the world having adventures, met interesting people, and worked on the most fantastic machines imaginable: high-speed boats, experimental submarines, and the occasional aircraft or car. It was like getting paid to play with one’s favorite toys in fantastic, exotic locations.

  Unlike most who had their dream jobs, Joe knew it. It kept a smile on his face and a spring in his step that usually rubbed off on those around him. So far, it was doing nothing for the burly loadmaster of the small aircraft Kurt had chartered.

  “This just can’t be correct,” the man said, repeating himself for the third time and flipping through a detailed bill of lading.

  Joe was wearing a dark suit with a white shirt and a pink tie, a disguise of sorts he’d decided to don after Kurt told him this mission was not to have any official NUMA involvement.

  “What can I tell you?” Joe said, taking on the air of a harried middle manager. “It’s got to go on board. Those are my instructions. Accompany the item to the delivery point.”

  The loadmaster’s face scrunched up, and he squinted in the sunlight. “But you’re shipping diving gear and a pair of one-man submarines?”

  “Apparently.”

  “To the middle of the desert?”

  “Really?” Joe said, feigning ignorance.

  The big Aussie nodded. “Alice Springs is out in the red center, mate. You might as well fly these things to the Sahara.”

  Joe hemmed and hawed. “Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if we did that next. This company of mine. We get a little crazy.”

  The guy sighed and handed the paperwork back to Joe. “Well, they’re too heavy with the rest of the cargo anyway,” he said. “And I’m not off-loading half my sh
ipment to put a mistake on board.”

  He turned away to halt the offending pallet’s approach, but before he could say a word Joe put his arm around the big man’s shoulders, leaning in close, all friendly-like.

  “Now, listen,” Joe said. “I know this is a mistake. And you know it’s a mistake. But if I don’t take these tubs out there in person, there’s going to be hell to pay.”

  Joe stuffed a wad of Australian cash into the man’s hand, five hundred dollars in total. “For the inconvenience,” he said, patting his newfound friend on the shoulder.

  The loadmaster thumbed through the money, keeping it low and out of sight like a man hiding his cards at the poker table. A smile crept over his face. It was a big payday.

  “This is really a waste of time,” he muttered, far more subdued than he’d been before. “But, then again, who are we to question why?”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Joe said.

  The loadmaster turned and whistled to his crew. “Pull the other pallets off and load her up with this one. And make it quick,” he grumbled. “We’re not getting paid by the hour.”

  As the ground crew went to work, a young woman from inside the charter company’s office brought Joe an ice-cold bottle of water. She smiled at him, all dimples and sparkling eyes.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “My pleasure, sir.”

  She winked and turned with a swish, and Joe had to fight hard to keep himself from following.

  He stood and considered the situation. He was accustomed to being covered in grease and neck-deep in the hands-on work. He’d certainly never considered himself the supervisor type. But as he sipped the cool drink and watched from the shade while the heavy cargo pallets were pulled off and rearranged in the strong morning sun, he began to consider it an option.

  He straightened his tie and glanced once more at the smiling customer service rep.

  “A guy could get used to this.”

  * * *

  A few hours later and a thousand miles away, Kurt Austin waited in the cab of a boxy-looking flatbed. He watched as the CASA-212 landed on the centerline of the tiny Alice Springs Regional Airport and taxied toward him.

  As the aircraft eased to a stop, Kurt put the truck in gear and drove up. While the ground crew went to work on the plane, Kurt climbed out of the cab and onto the flatbed. He activated the truck’s hydraulics and tilted the flatbed down until its far edge touched the ground like a ramp. By the time he locked it in place, the ground crew had begun wheeling the pallet with the speeders on it toward him.

  Kurt attached a cable to the front of the pallet and used the flatbed’s winch to haul it up on board. After locking it in place, he leveled the flatbed once again and jumped down.

  Joe Zavala sauntered out of the aircraft cabin a moment later, wearing a tailored suit and sunglasses.

  “Looking sharper than I remember,” Kurt said.

  “I’m in management now,” Joe said. “We have to dress for success.”

  Kurt chuckled. He and Joe had been friends for years. They’d met at NUMA, finding themselves to be kindred spirits who’d rather be doing anything than sitting around bored. They’d been called troublemakers, undesirables, and been thrown out of at least twenty bars in their lifetimes, though none in the past year or so. But in the often tense and dangerous world that NUMA worked in, there were none better at keeping their cool and getting the job done.

  “By the way,” Joe said, “you owe me five hundred dollars.”

  Kurt paused at the door. “For what?”

  “I had to grease the skids to get these things here.”

  Kurt pulled the door open and climbed in. “You’re in management now. Put it on your expense account.”

  Joe got in on the other side. “You are my expense account,” he said. “Now, how about telling me what we’re doing out here in the driest of the dry with a truckload of diving equipment.”

  “I’ll explain on the road,” Kurt said, starting the engine. “We’re burning daylight.”

  They drove off the airport grounds and were soon rumbling west, out of Alice Springs and into the desert.

  As they drove, Joe changed his clothes, and Kurt explained the situation, starting with the events in Sydney and his odd meeting with Hayley Anderson and Cecil Bradshaw of the ASIO.

  “The courier had red dust on him. It was packed into the mesh of his clothing. Bradshaw called it a palaeosol. It’s very old and infertile and commonly found here in the outback. Half the reason this place is so barren. The dead guy also had a mix of toxic metals on his skin. The kind usually found in mining operations.”

  “Again pointing in this direction,” Joe said.

  “Exactly,” Kurt said. “The problem was the decompression sickness. I’m certain the guy had the bends, but most of the lakes out here are transient. Even the year-round ones are shallow.”

  He motioned to the surroundings. There was nothing but desert and dust in every direction, right out to the horizon.

  “And yet, you’ve found a place out here where the water is both deep and poisonous.”

  Kurt nodded. “Ever hear of the Berkeley Pit?”

  Joe shook his head.

  “It’s an open-pit copper mine in Montana. It flooded when the miners went too deep and water began seeping in from aquifers in the surrounding rock. Took years to fill up, but at last check the water was nine hundred feet deep and rising. The minerals give the water an odd color, reddish orange. It’s so toxic that a flock of geese landed there a few years ago and never took off again, promptly dying from exposure to the poisons.”

  “Interesting,” Joe said. “But we’re not in Montana anymore, Toto.”

  “No, we’re not, Dorothy. But as it turns out, here in Oz the Aussies have a few open-pit mines of their own. The outback is full of them. And some of them appear to be filled with water.”

  Joe nodded, he seemed impressed. “I’ll buy that,” he said. “Are they deep enough to cause the bends?”

  “Some are deeper than the Berkeley Pit.”

  “Maybe you’re onto something,” Joe said. “But even if you are, why on earth would someone be diving in a poisoned lake?”

  “Not sure,” Kurt said. “But Bradshaw told me these guys were a threat to Australian national security. And a flooded, toxic mine like this has two attributes that might make it interesting to such conspirators.”

  “And those are?”

  “For one thing,” Kurt said, “people stay away from toxic lakes that may or may not leak poisonous gas. And for another, they’re hard to see through.”

  “You think they’re hiding something in the lake,” Joe said.

  “Hiding it very effectively from a world filled with satellites.”

  Joe nodded. “Technically, it’s a world surrounded by satellites. But I get your drift.”

  Kurt almost laughed. “Thanks for that dose of editorial genius. I’m sure it’ll come in handy when the bullets start flying.”

  After two hours on an empty highway, they were a hundred miles from Alice Springs and cruising a secondary dirt road. They hadn’t seen another soul for the last ninety minutes.

  Kurt glanced in the mirror. A thick cloud of dust trailed out behind them, enough that they might have been followed from space. But if someone was tailing them, their engine would have choked out long ago.

  He slowed the truck. They’d come to a gap in the barbwire fence that ran along the side of the road. An even more primitive trail led through it and off toward a low rise.

  “This should be it.”

  Turning the wheel to its stops, Kurt maneuvered the big truck through the opening.

  “Just so I’m clear,” Joe said, “we have no idea what’s going on. No idea what we’re getting ourselves into. But we’re doing all this because some snotty bureaucrat didn’t like your theory.”

  Kurt nodded. “Yep.”

  “You have issues, amigo. Starting with a pathological need to prove yourself right.”
/>   “The least of my flaws,” Kurt insisted as they neared the top of the ridge, “but it’s not that they didn’t believe me. They didn’t even take me seriously.”

  The big flatbed crested the ridgeline. Ahead of them was a massive depression filled with crimson water. It had once been known as the Tasman Mine, but a thousand feet down the miners had cracked into a pressurized section of the water table. Just like the Berkeley Pit in Montana, the Tasman Mine had slowly filled with poisoned water. By now, it had risen to within a hundred feet of the rim.

  Kurt eased the truck onto a sloping ramp that snaked its way around the walls of the pit and down toward the water’s edge. To his surprise, a group of vehicles were already parked there. Four dust-covered SUVs and a pair of Jeep Wranglers. They appeared to be new builds. The tinted windows and the matching colors just screamed government motor pool.

  “Looks like they took you more seriously than you thought,” Joe said.

  Kurt put his foot on the brake, slowing the truck until it lurched to a stop. There was something odd about the scene. It took a moment to notice.

  “Where are they?” Kurt asked.

  Joe shook his head.

  There were six vehicles parked at strange angles, two of them with open doors, a third had its tailgate up. There were piles of equipment strewn about on the poisoned beach as if some type of activity were in the works. But there was not a single human being anywhere in sight.

  EIGHT

  Kurt scanned the perimeter of the lake and studied the water. He saw no one.

  “Maybe they were abducted by aliens,” Joe said, glancing up at the sky.

  Kurt cut his eyes at Joe.

  “I’m not kidding,” Joe said. “I’ve been reading up on UFOs. Australia is a hotbed of sightings. And this is exactly the kind of place they love to frequent.”