Frozen Fire (29 page)

“Oh, God. We’re in trouble now,” Stephanie muttered, causing Cyn to turn around.

Approaching the boat were two wetsuited people on Jet Skis. The wakes revealed they had just emerged from a small, nearly hidden cove along the shore.

There was a low shout, and almost immediately the boat began to slow as the sails dropped.

“You.” Günter spoke from close behind her.

Cyn started, then composed herself and said, calmly, “What?”

“You get in the inflatable and go over there and talk to them. I am not about to get arrested. You got us into this, you can get us out. Why don’t you use your press card?” he finished grimly.

An unhealthy churn started in the lower section of her stomach as Cyn walked to the stern of the boat. One of the silent Dutchmen helped her down the ladder; another waited in the small rubber dinghy.

She made it into the rocking inflatable, landing unceremoniously on her butt as the sailor gunned the engine and arced away from the clipper before she’d secured a seat.

In a few minutes the crew member cut the engine as the slowing Jet Skis pulled alongside the inflatable.

The Taino security agent nearest the inflatable shoved his goggles up to just above his eyebrows. “You’re in restricted waters. We have to ask you to leave. This area is secure.”

The security guy’s Gomer Pyle accent might have been amusing if he hadn’t been built like the side of a barn and covered in a clinging, black wet-suit with a gun-shaped lump strapped to one thigh and a sheathed but brutish-looking knife strapped to the other, and sporting what looked like body armor beneath the straps of his high-tech life vest.

Okay. I’m intimidated
. Cyn tried to smile. “We’re on a clipper cruise. We were given permission—”

“No, ma’am. All visitor permissions have been suspended. You would have been notified about that. You must leave the area immediately.” He didn’t have to raise his voice or even get aggressive. There was no way Cyn or any other rational human being would have argued with him, or his silent, female colleague, who was similarly dressed and just as heavily armed.

“Hey, I think we’ll leave. No offense,” Cyn replied with a weak smile.

“Thank you, ma’am. You just head toward the open water. We’ll go tell your captain what we told you. The crew can pick you up out there.”

The sailor next to Cyn was moving to restart the motor when a loud shout from the deck of Günter’s ship reached them and all of them—security team, sailor, and Cyn—turned toward the clipper. Everyone on the boat seemed to be moving like scurrying insects, and Cyn’s eyes followed
their pointing arms to a sight so incomprehensible that at first she thought she was hallucinating.

Cyn watched incredulously as a section of the surface of the sea erupted into crashing, burping turbulence a few hundred yards away from the boat’s stern. The patch swelled and churned, filling the air with a low, unearthly growl that gradually became more of a roar.

The choppy sea surrounding the frothing patch was calm by comparison.

The raw sound of Velcro being torn apart yanked Cyn back to the present and she turned to see both security agents lifting binoculars to their eyes.

“What is it? I mean, that can’t be from a whale, can it? No whale is that big.” The words burst out of her mouth before she could stop herself.

“No, ma’am. Looks more like a submarine emptying its tanks in a hurry,” the woman agent replied. “But there are no subs over there.”

“It could be an underwater volcano,” the sailor offered in broken English, peering at the patch through the small binoculars he’d taken from the inflatable’s safety kit.

“That’s no volcanic eruption. It’s too small, and there’s no ash or solids coming up,” the woman snapped, her voice rapid-fire with nerves. “Whatever that’s coming from is—”

As suddenly as it had begun, whatever it was stopped and the water returned to normal.

No one said anything for a full minute, as they looked to one another for silent confirmation that they’d actually seen what they saw.

A hoarse, panicked shout from the sailor made Cyn swing her head toward the clipper’s bow in time to see a large circle of water turning to what looked like foam very close—too close—to the boat. The circle was expanding rapidly in all directions, turning paradise into a watery shop of horrors.

At a shout from Günter, the people clustered in the bow jumped into action. They raced around the deck, trying to raise the sails and get the boat under way even as it drifted closer to the turbulent patch.

“Those are my friends on that boat,” Cyn growled as she grabbed the binoculars from the Dutch sailor’s hands. As she brought them into focus, she saw Grace fling a hand to her chest and begin clawing at her throat as her eyes went wide and she took on the expression made famous by Edvard Munch’s
The Scream
.

Cyn watched her girlfriend’s face go purply blue. Grace fell to the deck,
body convulsing, eyes still wide with panic. Bloody foam appeared at the sides of her gaping mouth. Neither of the two women Grace had been working alongside stopped to help as her body flipped through the rails and into the water. Those women had also fallen, clutching their throats, their bodies seizing and arching spastically into shapes Cyn had never seen a human body attain.

Cyn was frozen physically and emotionally, hearing but not absorbing the sailor’s almost frantic attempts to start the inflatable’s motor and the security guards’ orders to stop. Cyn kept staring—not at her clearly dead friends but beyond them at the surface of the water.

From where she sat one hundred yards away looking through binoculars, the ocean’s surface looked like fine white foam. It wasn’t churning as furiously as the other patch had been. It was effervescing smoothly, like much dish soap in a rapidly filling sink.

Cyn watched in mute horror as the patch continued to widen. It edged closer to the clipper, which kept moving toward it despite Günter’s visible heroics as he wrestled with the wheel and bellowed orders at the terrified surviving passengers and feverishly working crew.

The creeping foam met the clipper’s bow. The ornately carved prow of the ship tilted into the foam and the stern rose out of the water in defiance of logic. The screams of the people on deck reached her ears as she saw them pitch forward, soaring parallel to the upended deck until they, and the boat, disappeared from view.

Letting loose a primeval shriek, the Dutch sailor gunned the engine and the inflatable lurched forward, bow completely out of the water. Cyn fell backward, grabbing at the sides for security. She realized in a stark, panic-filled moment that the little vessel was heading straight for the deadly foam.

Without making any conscious decision to move, Cyn flung herself over the side, landing on water as hard as concrete and bouncing violently before sinking into the wet coolness. Between the inflatable’s wake and the slight wind, churning water swamped her. Choking, gasping, she sought to brush the seawater out of her eyes, retch it out of her throat.

A large hand gripped her upper arm and pulled. Pain ripped a scream from her; pinpoints of blackness swam into the edges of her vision. Instantly the hand released her and then she felt it slide around her other arm. This time there was no pain.

Another hand slid into her armpit and she felt herself being hauled out
of the water and onto the saddle of a Jet Ski. One arm hung uselessly at her side at an unnatural angle. Blood streamed from her leg on the same side of her body.

“Are you all right, ma’am?”

The security guard’s face floated before her, frightening and fantastical with the pushed-up goggles looking like bulging, insect eyes emerging from his forehead. She nodded, still choking, and then felt herself drift forward, blackness claiming her mind.

The two additional security guards who’d been dispatched from the crash site to deal with the trespassers rounded a small point on the south end of the island. Seconds later they brought their Jet Skis to a stop with a pair of hard banking half-turns a few hundred yards short of where their colleagues bobbed. Both shoved their goggles onto their foreheads and pulled off the hoods of their wetsuits before slowly turning to stare at each other. Despite their experience and training, both were wide-eyed and breathing heavily.

“What the fuck is that?” the first officer asked, turning back to the bizarre scene unfolding before him. A former Navy SEAL, he figured he’d seen just about everything there was to see, but this had beat all. Like something out of a brain-bending horror flick, whatever was out there causing the sea to foam up had just swallowed an eighty-foot clipper ship and a small inflatable without hesitation.

“No fuckin’ idea, but I’m not goin’ anywhere near it,” his colleague drawled, her voice revealing every bit of twisted, unbelieving wonder that he was also feeling.

He looked at her again. They’d known each other for a decade, and she’d been his commanding officer on a few SEAL missions before they both opted to work in the private sector.

“Chicken?”

“You want me to start cluckin’, sailor? God-damned right I’m chicken,” she snorted, her Texas attitude resurfacing. “I don’t know what’s goin’ on over there, but I never seen seawater looks like shavin’ cream.”

“What should we do?”

“You do what you like, son. I know where your next of kin live. But I say we get Barker and Timmons and that civilian and head back to port on the double. Then I’ll write a report and send it up the line, and the
eggheads can figure it out. If this isn’t what you call a Situation FUBAR, I don’t know what is,” she drawled, then pulled her hood over her head again and secured her goggles.

Revving her engine, she made the Jet Ski leap forward toward the area where their colleagues sat in, no doubt, stunned disbelief. Her partner shook his head one more time at the white patch of water in an otherwise blue sea, then followed her lead.

9:00
A.M
., Sunday, October 26, Taino

Dennis stood absolutely still, adrenaline roaring through his body for the second time that day as he stared at the bank of monitors that framed his desk. Most of them were blank, as they had been for the last few hours. They should have been providing him with a shark’s-eye view of the habitat and the mining operation or, with the tap of a keystroke, showing him exactly what was going on in the habitat’s control room, at the surface docks, on his beach, or in the pilot house of any one of his research ships. The monitors should have been displaying real-time readings of the systems and operations of the habitat—its air quality, its power consumption, its personnel roster. Instead, they were dark.

He looked at Micki, who had arrived in his office seconds after the tremor. She’d convinced him to stay put while she made a quick trip to the comms hut to see what she could find out. Now that she’d returned, he could see that her face had gone ashy beneath her golden-girl tan. Her eyes were huge and she was trembling visibly.

“What the fuck is going on?” Dennis had intended to shout, but instead his words were muted and his voice hoarse. It was as if every muscle in his body had gone rigid. Even breathing seemed difficult.

“Initial reports indicate that an underwater landslide occurred at roughly two thousand feet.” Micki’s voice was raspy with emotion and her hands were flexing and clutching at air as they hung at her sides.

“An earthquake? Hardly anything up here moved—”

“No quake. No epicenter. Just a landslide,” she whispered.

“With no warning?”

I’m in a daze
. Dennis blinked and tried to shake off the numbness.
I’m conscious but inert, with no synapses firing and no will left to summon. I can’t do a fucking thing except fight to breathe. It’s madness
.

He couldn’t pull his gaze from Micki’s face. Something was wrong. Not just with him. With her. Her face. Her expression. There was shock there and something else he couldn’t quite identify, but it scared the hell out of him.

There were thirty-six people down there. They may be dead. And she’s . . . studying me
.

“Where did it happen?” he asked.

“On the western slope, about two thousand feet directly above
Atlantis
,” she whispered. “Some people were able to evacuate. The emergency signals from three submersibles came through. Just three. We lost the signals from two of them within twelve minutes. We lost the signal from the third—Marie’s—about two minutes later. None of the other subs managed to—” Micki stopped and closed her eyes as a shudder ran through her body.

Swallowing hard was a deliberate, labored motion. Then she pulled in a slow, deep breath. “We have a few minutes of video footage from the external cameras. We lost the signal around the same time the turbidity got bad. The footage shows boulders hitting the habitat. You can see one pod of the habitat implode just before the signal goes dead.”

Horror crashed into Dennis’s gut with the power of a brass-knuckled roundhouse and he bent over, clutching the corner of his desk and wondering if he was going to puke.

“God Almighty.” He sank, practically fell into his chair. The crew—his people, his pioneers—gone. Gone. Horribly dead, their bodies unrecoverable, their lives and dreams irreplaceable.

“God Almighty, Micki,” he said again, his voice a harsh rasp in his throat. “Are you sure we don’t have any Maydays? Something weak? Are you sure that none of the—”

“There’s no audio to speak of.” She waved a hand abruptly, distractedly. “A few seconds, a few interchanges relating position and head count,
that’s about it. They were too deep, too far away to pick up much and what’s there is hardly intelligible over the background noise. Then the signals crashed. All we can confirm is that only three subs detached, Dennis. Their sonar was pinging as expected, and those signals were picked up by the guys at the dock. Then they went dark.”