Apocalypse

58

Ethan clambered down the entry ladder into the deep-submergence vehicle Intrepid and moved toward the cockpit as Lopez and Katherine Abell followed him down into the vessel. Doug Jarvis ducked his head through the hatch and called out.

‘We’ll lower the crane as soon as the hatch is sealed. You won’t have communications with the surface due to our jamming of the underwater facility, so you’re on your own.’

Lopez looked up at the old man.

‘Can’t you turn the jamming off now that the yacht’s crew is under watch?’

‘We can’t be sure that Joaquin doesn’t have other lines of communication with the shore,’ Jarvis said. ‘All he’d need is transmitters and tethered buoys and he’d be able to call in reinforcements.’

Ethan scanned the cockpit.

‘I can handle these controls,’ he said. ‘There’s enough power in the batteries for the return trip.’

‘Understood,’ Jarvis said, and flipped Ethan a serious — if upside down — salute. ‘Good luck.’

The hatch closed, and Lopez sealed it airtight before taking a seat in the cabin behind Ethan. Katherine squeezed in alongside her and they strapped in, the Intrepid swaying as the yacht’s crane lifted her off the deck and swung her out over the rolling waves. Moments later the hull shuddered as she was lowered into the ocean and the crane detached with an audible clunk.

Ethan opened the switches to the batteries, turned on the main engines and then pulled a lever on the control panel. The mechanism connecting Intrepid’s own clasps to the deck crane opened and the vessel floated free of the yacht on the rolling surface of the ocean. He grabbed both of the control columns before him and gently guided the vessel away from the yacht’s hull.

‘You sure you know what you’re doing there, cap’n?’ Lopez asked.

Ethan scanned the controls once more.

‘Could have done with Bryson’s help, but there’s not much to it,’ he replied, seeing dials registering oxygen, carbon dioxide and nitrogen levels, and others for ballast tanks, battery-charge and navigation. ‘It’s like a very slow airplane. This vessel is good for depths up to three thousand feet, and we’ll only be going down half that far.’

‘Don’t remind me,’ Lopez muttered, looking around at the walls of the hull. ‘It’s still six hundred meters. If the hull fails down there we’ll be crushed like an eggshell.’

Ethan glanced at the ballast-tank controls and turned a series of dials on the panel. The air in the tanks was expelled as seawater flushed in through the open vents, and Intrepid sank beneath the waves. Ethan watched the ocean water slapping against the thick acrylic sphere before him and then the silvery surface of the ocean took the place of the sky. A vibrant cascade of quivering bubbles spiraled up from the underside of the hull like chromium spheres, and then the sounds of the outside world and the thumping heartbeat of waves against the exterior of the hull were silenced.

‘Here we go,’ he said, and pushed one of the joysticks forward.

The Intrepid responded smoothly, her control surfaces tilting and sending the craft down. The battery-powered engines hummed as they descended. Ethan glanced at a pair of dials and saw them registering neutral buoyancy as the Intrepid sank deeper into the ocean.

‘How do we get up again if all the air’s gone from the ballast tanks?’ Katherine asked, clearly nervous.

‘Compressed air,’ Ethan replied, not taking his eyes off the artificial horizon that helped him to keep the vessel upright in the absence of external cues, just like an airplane flying at night. ‘I open the valves, the pressurized air drives the seawater from the tanks and I then close the vents. Instant positive buoyancy, and up we go.’

The thought of an airplane’s instruments punctured Ethan’s mind as he considered the possibility that Joaquin Abell could cripple the Intrepid in much the same way as his father had destroyed Montgomery Purcell’s airplane in 1964. Ethan decided not to voice his concerns, hoping that having already used his mysterious facility to create an earthquake Joaquin would be reluctant to use it again in the same day for fear of further exposing his position to passing satellites.

A small television screen on the control panel provided a computerized GPS map of their location. With communication to the outside world prevented by the electronic jamming of the Sea Hawk helicopter above, Ethan had downloaded their position into the Intrepid’s internal navigation computer before they’d left the ship. Now, he typed in the destination GPS coordinates: a triangulation based upon the electromagnetic pulses picked up by NASA during the earthquake and the gravitational fluctuations detected by the GOCE satellite.

‘There,’ he said, pointing to a small red flag on the GPS screen as Lopez leaned forward to see over his shoulder. ‘He should be there, about four hundred yards ahead of us and right on the seafloor.’

‘Any chance he’s seen us coming?’ she asked.

Ethan shrugged.

‘If you mean has he seen the future, almost certainly. But I don’t know if he realizes exactly how we’re going to find him, or whether or not his signals to the outside world are being intercepted.’ He looked over his shoulder. ‘Either way, he’s as much on his own down there now as we are.’

Katherine looked at Ethan.

‘If he’s aware of that, it might make him more dangerous, more reckless. Joaquin’s arrogance has gotten worse with every passing event. He may believe himself to be invincible, especially if he’s seen what’s on that camera of Purcell’s.’

Ethan watched the ever-darkening ocean outside as it passed by, small fish and fragments of debris floating up past the porthole.

‘Charles told us that what Joaquin sees on his cameras can often be interpreted in many different ways,’ he replied. ‘Even if he has seen some future news broadcast that shows his own success, doesn’t mean that we won’t get him in the end.’

‘I hope you’re right,’ Katherine said, sounding unconvinced.

The beams of sunlight from the surface far above had faded, and the blue of the ocean had turned to an inky and impenetrable blackness as devoid of features as the depths of space. Ethan flipped a switch and turned on both his cockpit illumination and a series of low-intensity lights around the interior of the Intrepid. The soft yellow glow of the instrument panel seemed warm and inviting compared to the frigid darkness beyond the portholes.

‘I can’t see anything,’ Lopez said, peering out into the gloom.

Ethan guided the Intrepid deeper until the pressure gauges were reading forces that could crush a human being like a grape. The GPS marker was now barely a hundred yards away from them, and as Ethan slowed his descent the external lights picked up the barren abyssal plain below. The Intrepid’s engines whipped up small vortices of sand on the surface as he leveled the vessel out some ten feet above the seafloor and glided toward where the IRIS facility should be.

Lopez and Katherine both leaned forward either side of him, their eyes straining into the blackness ahead for some sign of the base.

‘There.’ Lopez pointed ahead and just to their left. ‘Coordinates were slightly out.’

Ethan squinted into the blackness and was just able to make out the faintest light, like a star seen from the corner of the eye glimmering faintly in an endless night. He turned the Intrepid toward the light, and as they closed in more lights began to appear: small, round, glowing yellow balls that penetrated only a short distance into the gloom.

Nobody said anything as the facility resolved itself before their eyes, the Intrepid’s lights reflecting off two large, dull metal spheres surrounded by four smaller ones. Ethan guessed that each of the larger spheres was large enough to hold an Olympic swimming pool, with the smaller spheres the size of a house.

‘This is where he filtered all of that cash,’ Ethan said. ‘It would have taken millions of dollars to construct a place like this. The documents that Charles Purcell stole must have detailed the construction of this site and the funds to finance it.’

Ethan could see a broad, rectangular beam of light glowing from the underside of one of the smaller outer spheres, suggesting some kind of entrance, but all the rest appeared impenetrable.

‘Only one way in,’ Lopez observed. ‘Convenient for an ambush.’

Ethan looked at the vast construction, big enough that in the darkness he could not see across its entire circumference.

Katherine Abell watched as Ethan guided the Intrepid beneath the outer dome toward the docking station. Her face was haunted as she surveyed the complex, clearly stunned that in all of the years that she had been married to Joaquin she had never laid eyes on the site.

‘Joaquin’s father was involved with all manner of secret government experiments after the Second World War,’ Katherine said. ‘Joaquin may have acquired and improved or extended them. And anybody else who was involved in the construction…’

‘… Suffered unfortunate accidents later on,’ Ethan finished, when Katherine trailed off. ‘Joaquin is willing to do anything to cover his tracks.’

Ethan aimed the Intrepid carefully toward the opening, and as they passed underneath the dome so the glowing veil of yellow light from the interior of the docking station above filled the vessel. Ethan leaned forward and peered up through the porthole above his head. He moved the vessel into position and then reached down and flicked a pair of switches, closing the ballast vents. Ensuring that the compressed air tanks were set to ‘Cross Feed’ he turned the dials open for a brief moment.

A hiss of released gas filled the hull, vibrating gently through the floor panels as the seawater was expelled and the Intrepid rose up and broke the surface of the water into a docking bay. Light filled the cockpit as Ethan looked at the dock through the sheets of water draining across the acrylic porthole.

‘Nobody here to meet us,’ he said.

Lopez unbuckled herself from her seat. ‘They know we’re here all right.’

Ethan unstrapped, and shut down the engines and batteries to conserve power. He drew his pistol from its holster and hurried to the main hatch of the submersible with Katherine Abell just behind him. Lopez stood ready, one hand on the hatch and the other holding her own weapon.

‘Ready?’ she asked.

‘I’ve got your back,’ Ethan said. ‘The dock exit is to our left,’ he added and pulled a flash-bang grenade out, handing it to her.

‘You set that off, they’ll hear you coming!’ Katherine said in alarm.

‘We’re way past that,’ Lopez replied without looking at her. She holstered her pistol, grabbed the hatch and span the wheel. Moments later she shoved the hatch open and leapt up the ladder, pulling the pin on the flash-bang as she hurled it toward the dock’s exit corridor.