Shadow Zone (37 page)

“That’s ridiculous. Kirov has probably done more to keep the U.S. safe than any of them have done.”

“Don’t be defensive, Hannah,” Kirov said. “Their attitude is perfectly reasonable.”

“I don’t care. It’s stupid. We have to work together.” She turned to Matthew, who was working a few yards away. “Come on, Matthew, let’s go meet these guys. Introduce us, Lieutenant.” She glanced at Kirov, who had not moved. “Coming?”

He shook his head and leaned lazily back against the rail. “I’d prefer to stay back and observe. It’s not often I get the chance of seeing you in attack mode.”

“I’m not attacking. I just have to make them see sense.”

Kirov smiled. “Sometimes it ends up being the same. Protect your team, Dalgo.”

Dalgo gave him an annoyed look as he escorted Hannah and Matthew over to the four pilots at the stern. “I’m sure most of you recognize Hannah Bryson. And this is Matthew Jefferson, one of her test operators for the civilian version of the Piranha subs.”

As many times as Hannah had recently read and heard that name—the Piranha Project—she could not get used to it. But “Conner” now did not seem right, either. Not for these missile-equipped little brutes.

“Nice to meet you.”

There was only a noncommittal murmur from the four pilots.

“I’m not a pilot, but I designed these submersibles. I know what they can do and what they can’t do. Matthew does, too. We’re going into what might be a dangerous situation, and I need you to trust us as your wingmen down there.”

No acknowledgment. Keep pushing. “And Nicholas Kirov has more experience in submarine warfare than all of us put together. We’re lucky to have him.”

The temperature went down a few more degrees.

Great, Hannah thought. “How about some quick introductions? Pretty soon we’re all going to be just reduced to voices on a radio, so it would help for me to hear what you each sound like.”

The one female pilot, an African-American woman whose hair was pulled back in a ponytail, extended her hand. “Lieutenant Theresa Reynolds. We’ll watch your back down there, Ms. Bryson.”

Matthew smiled. “We’ll watch yours.”

Hannah shot him an exasperated look. Knock off the bravado, she wanted to tell him. We’re going to need these people.

A tall, strapping young man nodded toward Hannah. “Lieutenant Derek McCallister.” Probably a high-school football star, Hannah thought. Fullback. How on earth could he fit into some of those Navy minisubs?

“Lieutenant Commander Steve Sandford,” another of the pilots said. He was thin, not athletic, like the others. Computer geek, she guessed.

The last of the pilots looked somewhere over her head as he spoke. “Lieutenant Gary Helms.” Then he said tightly, “Are you going to tell us why we’re doing this?”

Dalgo said quickly, “We’re on a need-to-know basis here, Helms. We should concern ourselves with objectives and strategy.”

“Wait a minute,” Hannah said. “You haven’t told them the reason they’re going to risk their necks down there?”

“Ms. Bryson, perhaps if you and I can speak privately for a moment.”

“No, I don’t give a damn about ‘need-to-know.’ I figure if you’re going to put your life on the line, you should know why.” She turned toward the pilots. “I’ll make this quick. We’ve recently discovered that the Marinthian civilization was destroyed by an interaction between their polluted waste and an algal growth unique to this area. We believe that someone may be trying to harvest large quantities of this growth to use as a weapon. We need to stop them.”

Helms turned to Dalgo. “That’s not exactly what we were told.”

“Need to know,” Dalgo repeated. “We just obey orders.”

Hannah turned toward Dalgo, who was obviously annoyed that she had given away mission details that the military had wanted to keep confidential.

Too bad.

She turned and strode back toward Kirov.

“Enjoy yourself?” Kirov asked. “Yes, I can see that your adrenaline is surging.”

She knew what he meant. She did feel as if at last she was doing something. She shrugged. “I don’t know if I did any good.”

He smiled. “I believe you made a dent. I was impressed.”

Dalgo joined them a moment later. “I wasn’t expecting quite that action on your part, ma’am.”

“Expect it from now on. I won’t be anything but honest with the people I work with.” She paused. “There was some definite coolness frosting the air back there. Not that I blame them. You should have told them. Blind obedience sucks.”

“I gathered you felt that way. So did they,” Dalgo said. “Orders are orders. But I think that you managed to defrost them a little.”

“But there’s still resentment that civilians are going to take a major part.”

“And one of them is a rascally Russian,” Kirov said.

“They’ll get over it,” Dalgo said. “I’m just asking you to look at it from their point of view. This has all happened so quickly that they’re still trying to get their heads around things. They’ve been essentially vacationing in the Canary Islands for the past week, waiting to do a few low-stress runs for you. But it’s suddenly turned into something very different.”

“I’m sensing a lot of negatives.” She stared him in the eye. “Are your men up for this assignment, Lieutenant?”

He looked away from her and out at the minisubs in the water. He suddenly grinned. “Yes, ma’am. It’s my duty to look at all the negatives. But, to tell you the truth, my guys were bored out of their minds doing those low-stress runs in the Canary Islands. They’d mutiny if I didn’t let them take a shot at a duty like this.”

She motioned toward the subs on deck. “Then let’s go to Marinth.”

CHAPTER
18

Gadaire stood in the control room, as it were, of the handmade diesel submarine that he had sold to a tribe of Somali pirates two years before. Although he had brokered the purchase and sale of the vessel, he had never actually seen it and was surprised by the poor quality of the workmanship. Constructed in a mountaintop workshop outside of Bogotá, it was one of dozens of subs built by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia for the purpose of smuggling cocaine to Central America and Mexico. This particular model, forty-five feet long and capable of depths of over three hundred feet, was constructed to hold eleven tons of cocaine. More than enough to store his alga harvest from the Marinth ocean floor.

“Do you think they’re finished down there?” The sub’s “captain,” Jorge Silva, was less a naval officer than a heavy equipment operator. Silva had been part of the team that built the sub in Colombia and had gone with it to Somalia to train its new owners. Two years later, however, he had still made no effort to move back home.

“No, it’s going to take more time,” Gadaire said. He pointed to an experimental low-frequency radio he had brought to keep in touch with his minisubs on the ocean floor. “This system doesn’t work worth a damn, but stand by in case they can make contact.”

“Will do.”

Gadaire restlessly paced the length of the control room, which was manned by all six of the sub’s other personnel. The room, like the rest of the sub interior, was quite crude in appearance, with chipped black-rubber flooring and exposed hydraulics tubes running along the bulkhead. Welding scars randomly crisscrossed the superstructure, almost as if laid on the fly to plug leaks. It was a shit hole, Gadaire thought, but it would get the job done. Such subs evaded air and sea patrols along the South American coast every day, and this one would do the same here. It would be a simple matter to move his precious cargo to the Fuertenventura Airport, where he had a plane waiting. From there, he was off to Orissa, India. By the time he arrived there, Anna would have completed stage one of the plan that would change their lives—and the lives of millions—forever.

It was finally happening, he thought exultantly, and no one was going to take it away from him. Not Elijah Baker, not Nicholas Kirov, and certainly not Hannah Bryson.

Back into the void, Hannah thought. She was descending into the dark depths, piloting a vessel she hadn’t even known existed just a few days before.

“How does it handle?” Kirov asked.

“Not bad, but we’ve been in free fall for the last twenty minutes. Ask me again when we get to Marinth. How are you doing with the weapons controller?”

He raised his hands, showing off the black-and-silver controller gloves. “Good. It’s very clever of them to include this onboard simulation routine in the software. It’s helping me to learn, but even experienced users can use it to warm up and quicken their response times.”

Hannah leaned back and gazed at the dazzling 3-D graphics on the monitor in front of Kirov. “Nice. They should release it for the PlayStation in time for the holiday season. They’d make a fortune.”

Hannah checked her far-more-utilitarian sonar screen to see seven blips representing her and the other subs descending to Marinth. She would occasionally catch sight of one of their running lights through the viewing ports, but they were far enough apart that they usually existed as mere blips on the screen in front of her.

“What if we’re too late?” Hannah said. “We had to waste a lot of time on deck. What if Gadaire has already taken what he needs from here?”

Kirov shook his head. “He couldn’t have. He hasn’t had enough time.”

“If Gadaire succeeds, I could never forgive myself,” she whispered. “And India could just be the beginning.”

“You
will
forgive yourself because we’ll do everything possible. And that’s all anyone can ask of themselves.”

“He has to be stopped right here, right now.”

Kirov gently rubbed her arm. “If he’s here, he will be.”

Hannah smiled as she looked down at the controller glove on her arm.

“Watch it with that thing. You might have just launched our missiles.”

After another twenty minutes, Hannah established the audio link between her and the other Piranha subs. “We’re approaching downtown Marinth, everybody. I’m not seeing any activity on my sonar yet. Anybody else?”

The other pilots radioed their negative responses.

“Okay, slow to a holding pattern. I’m turning on the lights.”

Hannah transmitted the signal, and in a few seconds the large light towers bathed Marinth in their bluish white glow.

The common radio-communications frequency was filled with the pilots’ awestruck gasps and exclamations at the sight before them.

Dalgo cut in. “We’re not tourists here, people. We have a job to do. Eyes peeled.”

Hannah spoke into the radio. “Continue south-southwest. The only area of mapped TK44 is beyond the ruins. We’ll set up our perimeter there.”

Although Hannah had studied all the additional equipment installed in her subs, she was most impressed to see one piece of technology in action—a tiny laser projector that tracked all of the other vessels in their group, superimposing the pilot’s name over where she saw each of them in the viewport. They moved low over the city, keeping a tight formation as their running lights cast blue and green highlights over the structures.

“Incredible,” Kirov said. “I can see why Melis made this her life’s work. I’m sure there has to be a fascinating story in each and every one of those buildings.”

“That’s true,” Hannah said, but moved her shoulders uneasily. “But something’s not right here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t put my finger on it. The feeling is totally different today.” Hannah glanced out the viewports. Then it hit her. “The dolphins.”

“What dolphins?”

“That’s just it. There aren’t any. Not one. Sometimes I’ll see hundreds on the way down. Sometimes less, but there are always dolphins in some quantity.”

“Where do you think they are?”

“I don’t know.” Hannah glanced outside. “I don’t like this.”

Dalgo’s voice came over the radio. “Hannah, is everything okay?”

She had forgotten that everyone could hear her. “For some reason, the dolphin population has deserted Marinth. It could be that our sonar or radio waves are unfamiliar to them, or . . . I don’t know. This is unusual.”

An alert sounded from her instrument panel, and through the radio Hannah could hear that the other pilots were also getting it.

“Incoming,” Dalgo shouted. “Brace yourselves.”

Hannah saw a white streak ahead of her. It moved from right to left, and as she watched, it turned and headed straight for her and Kirov.

“Hold on!” Kirov flipped a switch and raised his glove to eject a mass of highly reflective particles from the upper compartment of their vessel. The missile roared overhead and exploded fifty yards behind them, shaking the tiny craft.

“Where did that come from?” Hannah shouted. “Any visual?”

“Dead ahead,” Theresa said. “I saw the ignition flash. And here’s another one!”

More shrill alarms emanated from the instrument panel. Another streak of light raced toward their formation.

“It’s not heading for us,” Kirov said. “It’s heading toward—”

“Dalgo!” Hannah shouted in horror.

A heartbeat later, Dalgo’s vessel exploded!

Hannah’s front port was filled with a retina-searing light. Her sub rocked, and the alarms sounded even more persistently. Escaping oxygen from Dalgo’s sub ignited a fireball that shot high above the rest of the formation.

“Oh, my God.” Hannah stared in disbelief at the place where his sub had been. Her front-port readout with Dalgo’s name faded out. Two people dead.

“Grieve later,” Kirov said roughly, picking up on her stunned expression. “Stay in the here and now, Hannah.”

Hannah nodded. Kirov was right. He knew about staying alive in combat situations.

Stay in the here and now.

Lieutenant Sandford shouted to the team, “Maximum depth, everyone. I repeat, maximum depth. Hug the seafloor. We’re giving them a shooting gallery here.” He spoke with such authority that Hannah had a tough time reconciling his voice with the slight, geeky man she had met on the surface.

“Check your diagnostics,” she said to the team. “Those blasts could have caused some damage. Matthew, you were closest to Dalgo. Make sure your left rear flap still has full extension.”