Lost City Page 9

  "Sorry," Zavala said. "With all the weight in the back, this thing handles like a bumper boat."

  "Try to remember that you're not behind the wheel of your Corvette."

  Zavala smiled. "I wish I were."

  Austin inspected the passengers, saw that they were holding up, and swam ahead to the next set of columns. He held his breath as the vehicle and its load eased through without incident. Zavala was getting the hang of controlling the sub and they successfully navigated several more sets of columns. Austin kept a count in his head. Only three more sets of pillars to go.

  As he approached the next set of columns he noticed something was off-kilter. He squinted through his mask and was not reassured by what he saw. He had cut the middle column out and now the supports on either side of the opening looked like a pair of bowed legs. A quick movement caught his eye and he glanced upward. Bubbles were streaming through a narrow fissure in the ceiling.

  Austin didn't have to be a structural engineer to figure out what was happening. The ceiling weight was too much for the remaining supports to bear. They could collapse any second, entombing the submersible and its passengers in the tunnel forever.

  "Joe, we've got a problem ahead," Austin said, doing his best to keep his voice calm.

  "I see what you mean," Zavala replied, leaning forward to peer through the bubble. "Those columns look like a cowboy's legs. Any advice on how we navigate this mousetrap?"

  "The same way porcupines make love. Carefully. Make sure you walk in my footprints."

  Austin swam toward the bowed supports and easily passed through with space on either side. He turned and shielded his eyes against the sub's bright halogen lights, then waved Zavala ahead. Zavala successfully maneuvered the vehicle through the opening without touching either column. But he ran into trouble from an unexpected quarter. Part of the net trailing off the rear end of the submersible snagged on the stub of the column Austin had cut. Zavala felt the tug and instinctively applied power without thinking. It was the worst possible thing he could have done. The vehicle hesitated as the thrusters dug in, then the net tore free and the sub lurched ahead out of control, smashing into the right-hand column of the next set with all of its substantial weight. Zavala quickly compensated for the wild swing. But it was too late. The damaged column buckled.

  Austin watched the slow-motion disaster unfold. His eyes darted to the ceiling, suddenly obscured by a massive cloud of bubbles. "Move out!"

  Austin shouted. "The roofs coming down!" Curses in Spanish filled Austin's earphones.

  Zavala applied full power to the thrusters and aimed for the next gap.

  The vehicle passed within feet of Austin. With perfect timing, he reached out and grabbed on to the fishnet, dangling like a Hollywood stunt man on a runaway stagecoach.

  Zavala was more intent on haste than precision and didn't bother to fine-tune his steering. The vehicle clipped a column. It was only a tiny dent, but the column bent and snapped. Austin had managed to scramble back on to the deck by then and he held on grimly as the vehicle spun completely around and regained its proper heading. One more opening loomed ahead.

  The submersible made a clean pass through the space without touching a column. But the damage had already been done.

  The ceiling burst asunder and crashed down in a crushing avalanche of huge boulders, releasing the water stored in the glacial pocket.

  Thousands of gallons of water poured into the confined space of the tunnel. A powerful pressure wave hit the SEAmobile and pushed it through the tunnel like a leaf through a sluice.

  The wave rushed toward the entrance, carrying the vehicle on its crest.

  Unaware of the drama unfolding in the dark recesses below the glacier, the support crew had drifted back to the helicopters. The lone crewman who'd been keeping watch for the vehicle had stepped outside the tunnel for air when he heard the roar issue from the bowels of the earth. His legs reacted before his brain did and carried him away from the tunnel mouth. He was off to one side, hiding behind a boulder, when the vehicle shot out of the tunnel's entrance into the open air.

  The wave's full force expended itself outside the cave, leaving the vehicle high and dry. Dazed and battered passengers untied the lines that held them and dropped off the deck. They spit out the regulators and sucked fresh air into their lungs in great coughing gulps.

  Zavala was out of the cabin running back toward the tunnel. He stepped aside when a secondary, weaker wave burst from the tunnel, surged around the vehicle and disgorged a struggling figure in an orange suit.

  Austin's cracked face mask was askew. The communicator helmet had been ripped from his head and the force of the wave was rolling him like a ball caught in the surf.

  Zavala reached down, caught Austin in mid-roll and helped him to his feet.

  He was as unsteady as a drunk and his eyes were as glassy as marbles.

  Austin spit out a mouthful of foul water and barked like a wet dog.

  "Like I said, Joe. You really have to do something about your driving."

  The French rescue team arrived an hour later. The helicopter dropped down in front of the power plant like an osprey on a fish. Even before its runners had touched the ground, six dashing and rugged mountain climbers piled out the door, lugging carabiners and coils of rope. Their leader explained that they brought mountain climbing equipment because they understood people were trapped on the glacier, not under it.

  When the leader learned that his team's services were not needed, he shrugged and admitted philosophically that even a crack mountain team would have been useless in a water rescue. Then he broke out a couple of bottles of champagne he had brought along. Raising his glass high in a toast, he said there would be other opportunities; people were always getting into trouble in the mountains.

  After the impromptu celebration, Austin supervised the submersible return to the Mummichug, and then he returned to the power plant with Zavala. The survivors had been shuttled to the plant for showers and hot food. Dressed in a motley assortment of borrowed clothes, they had gathered in the plant's recreation room to tell their story.

  The reporters ran the videotapes of the attack on Renaud, but they were of poor quality and showed only a blurred glimpse of the gunman's face.

  The audiotape revealed little except for the brief exchange between Renaud and his assailant.

  Austin was nursing his bumps and bruises with a bottle of Belgian beer from the power plant's larder. He sat with his chin cradled in his hand, feeling his anger grow as Skye and the others trapped in the tunnel described details of the cold-blooded act that almost condemned several innocent people to a horrible death under the ice.

  "This is a matter for the police," said Drouet, the power plant supervisor, after he had heard the full story. "The authorities should be notified immediately."

  Austin held his tongue. By the time the gendarmes arrived, the trail would be colder than the beer in his hand.

  Renaud was anxious to leave. Brandishing his hand as if it were a fatal wound, he bullied his way and found a seat on the power plant helicopter. Rawlins and the reporters were eager to file details of their story, which had gone far beyond the discovery of the frozen body. The reporters called in the chartered float plane that had delivered them to the glacier.

  The plane's pilot cleared up one mystery. He said he'd been waiting on the lake for the reporters to return from the glacier, when a big man he had brought in showed up at the beach in LeBlanc's Citröen. The man said the other reporters were staying overnight, and that he needed a ride out immediately.

  Skye watched the float plane skim across the lake for a takeoff and she broke into laughter. "Did you see Renaud? He was using his injured hand to push other people out of the way so he could get on first."

  "The mocking tone of your voice suggests that you are not sorry to see Renaud leave," Austin said.

  She pretended she was washing her hands. "Good riddance to bad rubbish, as my father used to say."

&n
bsp; Lessard was standing next to Skye, and he had a sad look in his eyes as he watched the float plane leap from the lake and head toward a valley between two mountain peaks.

  "Well, Monsieur Austin, I must go back to work," he said in a mournful voice. "Thank you for the excitement you and your friends have brought to this lonely outpost."

  Austin grasped Lessard's hand in a firm grip. "The rescue would have been impossible without your help," Austin said. "I don't think you'll be alone for long. When the story gets out, you'll be inundated with reporters. The police will be sniffing around here as well."

  Lessard looked more pleased than annoyed. "You think so?" He beamed.

  "If you'll excuse me, I'd better get back to my office to prepare for visitors. I'll have a truck drive you back to the lake if you'd like."

  "I'll walk with you," Skye said. "I've got to pick up something I left in the plant."

  Zavala said of Lessard, "That gentleman apparently isn't content with his fifteen minutes of fame. Now, if you are through with my services…."

  Austin put his hand on Zavala's shoulder. "Don't tell me you want to leave this garden spot so you can to get back to Chamonix and your French pastry."

  Zavala's eyes followed Skye. "It appears I'm not the only one partaking of the local delicacies?"

  "You're way ahead of me, Joe. The young lady and I haven't even had our first date yet."

  "Well, I'm the last guy to stand in the way of true romance."

  "Nor am I," Austin said, walking Zavala to the helicopter. "See you in Paris."

  11

  THE TRAFFIC JAM was horrendous even by Washington standards. Paul Trout had been sitting behind the steering wheel of his Humvee, staring with glazed eyes at the wall-to-wall carpet of cars clogging Pennsylvania Avenue, when he turned suddenly to Gamay and said, "My gills are starting to close up."

  Gamay rolled her eyes in the way of a wife long used to her husband's eccentricities. She knew what was coming. Paul's family said only half-jokingly that if a Trout stayed away from his ancestral home for too long, he would start gasping for breath like a fish out of water.

  Therefore she wasn't surprised when he made an illegal U-turn, displaying the contempt for rules of the road that seems born into Massachusetts drivers.

  While Paul drove as if he were on Desert Storm maneuvers, she used her cell phone to call the airline for reservations and to let their NUMA office know they would be away for a few days. They whirled through their Georgetown town house like twin tornadoes, packed their overnight bags and dashed to the airport.

  Less than two hours after their shuttle flight landed in Boston, they were on Cape Cod, strolling along Water Street in the village of Woods Hole, where Trout had been born and raised. Woods Hole's main thoroughfare is about a quarter of a mile long, squeezed between a salt pond and a harbor, and bordered on both sides by buildings that house organizations devoted to marine and environmental science.

  The most conspicuous of these is the world-renowned Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Nearby, in a vintage brick-and-granite edifice, is the Marine Biological Laboratory, whose research programs and library of nearly two hundred thousand volumes attract scholars from around the globe. Within walking distance of the MBL is the National Marine Fisheries aquarium. On the outskirts of the village are the U.S. Geological Survey and dozens of sea education institutions and private companies that produce the high-tech underwater gadgets used by ocean scientists the world over.

  A breeze was coming off the harbor from the direction of the Elizabeth Islands. Trout paused on the tiny drawbridge that separates Eel Pond and Great Harbor and he filled his lungs with salty air, thinking that there must be some truth to the gill-closing story. He could actually breathe again.

  Trout was the son of a local fisherman and his wife, and his family still owned the low-slung Cape Cod cottage where he had been raised.

  His intellectual home was the Oceanographic Institution. As a boy he used to run errands for some of the scientists who worked at the institution and it was at their encouragement that he had specialized in deep-ocean geology, a move that would bring him eventually to NUMA and its Special Assignments Team.

  Within hours of their arrival, Paul had checked on his house, touched base with several relatives and stopped off for lunch with Gamay at a local watering hole where he knew everyone at the bar. Then he began to make the rounds. He was visiting the Institution's Deep Submergence Lab where an old colleague was bringing him up-to-date on the latest in autonomous underwater vehicles, when the phone rang.

  "It's for you," his colleague said, handing Trout the phone. A voice boomed on the line. "Hello, Trout. This is Sam Osborne. Heard down at the post office that you were back in town. How are you and your lovely wife?"

  Osborne was a phycologist, one of the world's foremost experts in the science of algology, or the study of algae. After years of teaching, he still talked in a range that was two or three decibels above that of a normal human being.

  Trout didn't bother asking how Osborne had tracked him down. It was impossible to keep anything secret in a village the size of Woods Hole.

  "We're fine, thank you. Nice of you to give me a call, Dr. Osborne."

  Osborne cleared his throat. "Well, er, actually I wasn't calling you. I wanted to speak to your wife."

  Trout smiled. "I don't blame you for that. Gamay is much prettier than I am."

  He handed the phone to his wife. Gamay Morgan-Trout was an attractive woman, not gorgeous or overly sexy, but appealing to most men. She had a flashing smile with a slight gap in her upper teeth like the model-actress Lauren Hutton. She was tall, five feet ten, and 135 pounds, slim for her height. Her hair, which was long and generally worn swirled, was dark red, the reason her father, a wine connoisseur, had named her after the grape of Beaujolais.

  More open and vivacious than her husband, she worked well with men, a talent that went back to her tomboy days in Wisconsin. Her father was a successful developer who had encouraged her to compete with men, teaching her to sail and shoot skeet. She was an expert diver and marksman.

  Gamay listened for a moment, and then said, "We'll be right over."

  Hanging up, she said, "Dr. Osborne has asked us to come by the MBL. He says it's urgent."

  "Everything is urgent to Sam," Paul said.

  "Now, now. You needn't be snide just because he wanted to talk to me."

  "I don't have a snide bone in my body," Paul said, linking arms with Gamay.

  He bid good-bye to his colleague in the Submergence Lab and he and Gamay set off along Water Street. A few minutes later, they were climbing the wide stone steps at the Lillie Research Building, where they went through an arched doorway into a quiet lobby.

  Dr. Osborne was waiting for them just inside. He pumped Paul's hand and embraced Gamay, whom he'd had as a student when she was studying marine biology at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California.

  Osborne was in his mid-fifties, and his receding, curly white hair seemed to be slipping off the back of his skull. He had a big-boned physique and large workman's hands that looked more suitable for handling a pickax than the delicate strands of marine vegetation that were his specialty.

  "Thanks for coming over," he said. "I hope that this is no imposition."

  "None at all," Gamay said sweetly. "Always a pleasure to see you."

  "You may not think so when you hear what I have to tell you," Osborne said with an enigmatic smile.

  Without further explanation, he led them to his office. Although the MBL was known all over the world for its research facilities and library, the Lillie Building lab was an unprepossessing place. Exposed pipes ran along the ceilings, the doors lining the hallways were of dark wood with pebbled glass panels, and in general it looked exactly like what it was, a venerable old lab building.

  Osborne ushered the Trouts into his office. Gamay had remembered Osborne as fanatically neat and organized, bordering on the anal, and she saw that he hadn't change
d. Where many professors of his stature surrounded themselves with piles of paper and reports, his office consisted of a computer table and chair and a couple of folding chairs for visitors. His only luxury was a tea maker, which he had picked up in Japan.

  He poured three cups of green tea and after a brief exchange of pleasantries, he said, "Pardon me for being so brusque, but time is short, so I'll get right to the point." He leaned back in his chair, tented his fingers and said to Gamay, "As a marine biologist, you're acquainted with Caulerpa taxifolia?"

  Gamay had received a degree in marine archaeology from the University of North Carolina before changing her field of interest and enrolling at Scripps, where she'd attained a doctorate in marine biology. Gamay smiled inwardly as she remembered being a student in Osborne's class.

  He typically asked questions in the form of a statement. "Caulerpa is an alga that's native to the tropics, although it's often seen in home aquariums."

  "Correct. And you know that the cold-water strain that thrives so well in aquaria has become a major problem in certain coastal areas?" Gamay nodded. "Killer seaweed. It's destroyed large expanses of the seabed in the Mediterranean and has spread to other places as well. It's a strain of a tropical alga. Tropical algae don't normally live in cold water, but this strain has adapted. It could spread anywhere in the world."

  Osborne turned to Paul. "The weed we're talking about was inadvertently released into the water beneath the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco in 1984. Since then it has spread to thirty thousand hectares in the coastal floor off six Mediterranean countries, and it's a problem off Australia and San Diego. It spreads like wildfire. The problem goes beyond speed. The Caulerpa colonies are extremely invasive. The weed spreads out with runners and forms a dense green carpet that crowds out other flora and fauna, depriving plants and animals of sunlight and oxygen. Its presence destroys the base of the marine food web, damages native species with devastating consequences for ecosystems."

  "Isn't there any way to fight this stuff?"