Devil's Gate

25

Continental shelf, off the coast of Sierra Leone, June 23

DJEMMA GARAND SAT in the passenger cabin of an EC155 Eurocop-ter. The sleek modern design included a ducted tail rotor, an all-glass instrument panel, and a leather-clad interior stitched by the same company that did the seats on custom Rolls-Royces.

It was fast, relatively quiet inside, and the epitome of luxury for any self-respecting billionaire or dictator of a small country.

For the most part, Djemma hated it. He preferred boating or going by car to any place he needed to be. His days in the field had shown him firsthand how vulnerable small helicopters were to ground fire. An RPG exploding nearby could bring down many rotary aircraft, let alone a direct hit. Small-arms fire could do the same.

But more than an actual attack, Djemma felt it was too easy for small planes and helicopters to have unexplained accidents, accidents that seemed to plague the leaders of small war-torn nations at a rate completely out of proportion to the amount of time they spent traveling.

Air crashes usually had no witnesses, especially over mountainous or jungle terrain. Without a forensic team to sift through the debris, there was almost no way to tell if a craft came down on its own, had been hit by a missile or gunfire, or had been blown to pieces by a saboteur’s bomb.

Normally, Djemma wouldn’t travel in them. But in this case he’d made an exception. He’d done so because speed was of the essence, because events and even trusted allies seemed to be conspiring against him, because if the lid blew off his plan he had to know if his weapon was ready.

The EC155 crossed the shoreline and headed out into the Atlantic. Ten miles off the coast, four little dots appeared on the horizon. As the helicopter grew closer, they resolved into sharper forms: huge offshore oil rigs, set up in a perfect square, with several miles between them. At least a dozen boats patrolled the waters around the rigs, and huge barges with equipment sat moored to one of them.

“Take us down to number three,” Djemma ordered.

The pilot complied, and a few minutes later Djemma was removing his headset and stepping out of the gleaming red-and-white helicopter and striding across the platform.

The rig’s superintendant and his senior staff waited in a formal line.

“My President,” the superintendant said. “It is an honor to have you—”

“Spare me,” Djemma said. “And take me to Cochrane.”

“Right away.”

Djemma followed the man across the helipad toward the main block of the oil rig. They stepped inside, passing an area filled with coolant pipes, thick with condensation and frost, and then into a climate-controlled area filled with computer screens and flat-panel displays.

On the most prominent centrally mounted screen, a strangely shaped design appeared. It looked like the schematic of a racetrack or a rail yard. It could best be described as an elongated oval connected to a wider circle, off of which two dozen straight lines stretched, fanning out like tangents.

Small data marks, unreadable from any distance, seemed to indicate conditions within each section defined by the tangents. The sections were also color-coded. Djemma noticed that most were illuminated in green. This pleased him.

“All sections of the loop have power?”

“Yes, President,” the superintendant replied. “We activated them this morning. Currently we are only operating at test levels, but Cochrane confirmed that we are within specs.”

“Excellent,” Djemma said. “Where is he now?”

“In one of the targeting tunnels,” the super said. “He is overseeing the final phase of construction.”

“Show me,” Djemma ordered.

They crossed the climate-controlled room and arrived at an elevator barely large enough for two men. It took them down through the rig and beneath it in a clear Plexiglas tube like those used at amusement parks and places like SeaWorld.

Brilliant light shimmered and danced through the water. Schools of fish swam everywhere, as they often did near oil rigs and other man-made structures. Below them, a scar crossed the ocean floor in a long line from east to west.

The line appeared straight only because the curve was so gradual; but had the ocean been drained, it would have been easy to see from space that this line matched exactly the circular design displayed inside the control room. At the far end, men in hard-shell dive suits and small submarines no larger than a family car worked on filling in the last section.

Farther off, at the very limits of underwater vision, Djemma spotted another submarine, lying on its side. This was no small vessel but a giant, its hull cut open like a whale that had been gutted. Unlike the other things he saw, this sight angered him.

The elevator car approached the sandy bottom and then went beneath the seafloor, continuing in the tube in the dark another forty feet before stopping. The darkness was banished when the doors opened to a concrete hall lit by fluorescent lights.

The superintendant stepped out, and Djemma followed him. He noticed that the hall was not square but built in an oval shape, a design like the arches of ancient Roman aqueducts, that helped the tunnel support the outside pressure of rock and water. He also noticed something else.

“It’s wet in here,” he said, noticing pools of water on the floor and wet spots on the walls.

“Until it finishes curing, the concrete is porous,” the super said. “We have treated it and buried it forty feet beneath the seafloor, but we still have seepage. It’ll clear up in a month or so.”

Djemma hoped he was right. He continued on through the tunnel until he reached an intersection point.

A ladder led down.

Djemma climbed down and came out in a different type of tunnel. This one was perfectly circular in cross section, wide enough to drive a small car through, and lined with power conduits and cooling tubes like those seen above. Pinpoint LED lighting and shiny metallic rectangles on three sides ran as far as the eye could see.

In the other direction, he spied Cochrane.

“You are almost done,” Djemma said. “This pleases me more than you know.”

“The construction is almost done,” Cochrane said. “We still have to test it. And if you think you’re going to get me the kind of power you keep demanding, you’d better have something up your sleeve. Because, as it stands, I can only get you sixty percent of what you require.”

“I no longer am surprised or grow angry at your failures,” Djemma said. “I’ve grown used to them. Have you heard of this Devil’s Gate near the Azores?”

“I don’t get a lot of news down here,” Cochrane said. “But, yeah, I heard of it. Some type of naturally occurring superconductor.”

“That is the report,” Djemma said. “I have men there. I believe that will be the answer.”

Cochrane put down some type of fiber-optic testing device he was working with and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “I’m not sure you understand,” he said. “We just worked in three hundred tons of material your sub brought us from the freighter. We don’t have space for anything else.”

“Space,” Djemma said. “Interesting that you should use that word. Because I am worried about space and what can be seen from it.”

“What are you talking about now?” Cochrane asked.

“The Russian submarine that we took the reactors from. You were told to have it dismantled and dispersed by now. I don’t want anyone spotting it from a satellite.”

“It’s on its side, fifty feet down, covered in netting,” Cochrane said. “And they’re not looking for it,” he insisted. “The Russians sold it. They don’t care what happens to it. And the only submarines the Americans care about are the ones carrying ballistic missiles out there in the depths. Only you and Comrade Gorshkov know where this one went to, and even Gorshkov doesn’t know what you’re doing with it.”

“Finish the dismantling,” Djemma ordered. “And don’t question me again or I’ll dismantle you… piece by painful piece.”

Cochrane rubbed a hand across his face. “We have eleven construction subs and forty hard suits, not enough to do both jobs. So you choose. Do you want the target lines finished or do you want that rusting hulk of a submarine recycled?”

Djemma fought to control his anger. What he wanted was both, and a designer less insolent and more competent than Cochrane. But between the reports from Andras, the Americans snooping around the Kinjara Maru, and the increasingly pointed questions coming from the World Bank and his other creditors, Djemma didn’t have time for both.

He decided the carcass of a submarine could remain. Once he took action, it wouldn’t matter if the world knew about it or not. That would be the least of their concerns.

“Finish the target lines and the emitters,” he said. “Washington, London, Moscow, Beijing. Those four must be ready in one week or we will be vulnerable.”

He waited for Cochrane’s next battery of complaints and excuses as to why he couldn’t comply, but for the first time in ages none came forth.

“They’ll be ready,” Cochrane said. “I promise you.”