Devil's Gate

28

Eastern Atlantic, June 24

A POUNDING ON HIS CABIN DOOR woke Joe Zavala. He sat straight up, almost ran for the door as if general quarters had sounded, and then remembered he wasn’t in the Navy anymore.

The pounding returned. “Captain wants you on the bridge, Zavala,” a voice shouted.

“Tell him I’ll be right there,” Joe said, grabbing his pants and pulling them on.

He heard footsteps as the messenger ran off. Only then did he sense that the Argo was in motion, not turning or making steerage or sitting at anchor near the anomaly but charging through the water as if racing something.

Joe pulled a shirt over his head, stuffed his bare feet into sneakers that he never untied, and then ran out the door.

A minute later, he was on the bridge. The Argo was indeed moving at flank speed, the bow rising and dropping as it rode the increasing swells.

“Captain,” Joe said, reporting for duty even though he wasn’t technically one of the crew.

“Where in God’s green earth or Poseidon’s blue water is Austin?” Captain Haynes barked.

Still a little groggy, Joe offered up his honest thoughts. “Probably waking up to something a lot nicer than I just woke up to.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He’s on a date,” Joe said.

“A date?” Haynes shook his head. “How does a guy get a date out here in the middle of the ocean?”

Joe scratched his head. “That’s a good question,” he said. “I wish I could figure it out because, honestly, it gets kind of lonely when—”

“Zavala!” the captain shouted. “Wake up, man. This is not a dream. I need your full attention. Who is Austin out with?”

For a second, Joe wondered if it was a dream. The captain was acting weird. Kurt was a grown man, and Joe had reported Kurt’s disposition to the officer of the watch upon returning from the Zodiac.

“He’s with the Russian scientist he rescued from one of the wrecks,” Joe said. “She told him she had some secret information that he might find interesting.”

“What time was he planning on coming back?”

“Well,” Joe said, “I guess that would kind of depend on how the date went… sir.”

The captain cut his eyes at Joe and Joe burst out laughing.

“I’m sorry,” Joe said, “but you sound like my pop back when my brother took the family car without asking and stayed out way past curfew. What’s the big deal?”

The captain explained about the attack on the Grouper, Paul Trout’s condition, and NUMA’s theory that some type of electromagnetic weapon had been used on the Kinjara Maru. He made a point of explaining that whoever attacked the Grouper had used torp edoes.

“What are they doing now?” Joe asked.

“They’re headed due west at full speed,” the captain said. “Sometime tomorrow they’ll be in range of a Navy guided-missile frigate. At that point they should be safe, and Paul will be transferred to a hospital ship.”

“What about us? Is that why we’re heading in?”

“The Director feels it’s too dangerous to sit out here alone,” the captain said. “If someone’s targeting those with knowledge, we, and Austin, could be next. He’s going to contact the Spanish and Portuguese admirals tomorrow and get us some backup. But until then, he wants us docked and all hands accounted for. And that’s why I’m concerned. Because Kurt hasn’t answered his damn phone all night.”

“Have we contacted the local police?”

“Yes,” the captain said. “We’ve made them aware of who Kurt is, what he looks like, and the fact that we’re trying to find him. And they’ve made us aware of a fight, gunfire, and a vehicular chase that ended in two cars going off a cliff on a normally peaceful island. A man fitting Kurt’s description was involved, but no body matching his has been recovered.”

Thank God, Joe thought. He gazed through the Argo’s forward windows. The lights of Santa Maria were visible up ahead.

“We’ll reach port in twenty minutes. I want you to come up with a plan to find him,” the captain said. “I don’t care if you use the phone or some flares or you rent a damn plane to fly around trailing a banner that reads ‘Kurt Austin, Call NUMA.’ You just find him before anything else goes wrong.”

Joe nodded. He would start with the Russian scientist. Hopefully, someone at one of the hotels would recognize her.

AS THE ARGO was racing shoreward, Kurt and Katarina were descending toward the lights of Vila do Porto themselves. The sensation was rather unlike any Kurt could remember.

The open cockpit was designed for daytime use in warm weather. There were no lights to see the limited instrument panel by. In addition, though the small craft never made more than 50 knots, the damp mountain air blowing over them at fifty miles an hour was enough to chill them to the bone.

In daylight conditions Kurt would have brought them down to a lower altitude as rapidly as possible, but night flying presented a different challenge. Piloting such a craft through the mountains in the dark was like walking through an unfamiliar room without any lights on, only hitting the furniture here would hurt far worse than a stubbed toe.

At one point, he spotted the lights of a car on the twisting road down below. He angled toward them, knowing that the road cut through the mountain passes. Following the car, staying far above and well behind it, he was able to follow the road itself. But, perhaps not surprisingly, the car turned out to be faster than the flying lawn mower he was commanding.

As the car’s lights became too faint to see, another set of lights came into view: the comparatively bright streets of Vila do Porto. He angled toward them, knowing that if he could keep them in sight no mountain could rise up and smite them from the sky.

Katarina noticed them too. “Are we almost there?” she said. Her teeth were chattering.

She sat behind him in the two-seat machine. Kurt remembered the simple black dress she had on. Not exactly made for 50-knot winds and 40-degree temperatures.

“You’re cold,” he said.

“Freezing to death,” she insisted.

She had to be turning blue by now. “I thought you Russians were used to the cold.”

“Yes, and we know how to dress for it, with layers and fur hats. You don’t have one hiding up there for me, do you?”

He had to laugh, imagining her with a giant fur hat on.

“Lean forward,” he said. “Press against me and put your arms around me.”

“I thought you’d never ask,” she said.

In an instant he felt her pressed against him, her arms wrapped around his chest. It was a lot warmer and nicer that way.

They continued on, buzzed their way through the last of the mountain passes, and watched as Vila do Porto spread out before them. The town had fifty thousand inhabitants, or thereabouts, but it looked like Metropolis at that moment.

“Where are we going to land?” Katarina asked.

Kurt had been thinking about that the whole way down. The ultralight only needed a two-hundred-foot strip to land and stop in. In the daylight there might have been fifty places to put down safely, but at night everything that wasn’t lit up looked the same. Thinking he was descending toward a flat field or patch of open ground, he could easily have them ramming a telephone pole, or a house, or a stand of trees.

They had to land somewhere lighted to be safe. The only problem was, most lighted areas had power lines strewn around them. Then Kurt spotted a sight that looked as glorious to him as the runway lights at JFK International. A soccer field, lit for a night game and open to the sky.

A hundred twenty yards of smooth, flat grass without any power lines crossing it or obstructions in the way. It was perfect. He angled toward it, descending slightly. There was a crosswind coming off the Atlantic, and Kurt had to crab the little plane sideways at a thirty-degree angle to keep them from getting blown inland.

At five hundred feet, he could see a crowd around the perimeter but no players on the field. Katarina pressed into him tighter.

“I need my arms back,” he said.

“Sorry,” she said. “Don’t like flying. Especially takeoffs and landings.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “This one’s going to be a breeze.”

Within a minute of saying that, Kurt wished he’d kept his mouth shut. He saw players taking the field, either it was the start of the game or halftime had just ended.

He and Katarina were a hundred feet up, three hundred feet from the end of the grass. They had to hear him. Of course hearing a plane flying around didn’t exactly make one run for cover. He guessed that would change in a few seconds.

The engine began to sputter and cough.

“We’re almost out of fuel,” he said.

“Just land, already,” she shouted back.

He continued on, wishing the damn thing had a horn. “Too bad I don’t have my vuvuzela,” he shouted.

He could see the players shaking hands, the referee standing in the center with his foot on the ball about to blow the whistle. The engine sputtered again, and Kurt put the nose down to pick up speed. The prop sped up again, and he saw the players look his way. The crowd turned as well.

He zoomed over the crowd. A flagpole or something he hadn’t seen hit the right wing. The frame bent, the right side dropped, and Kurt overcorrected back to the left.

Players began running for the sidelines as the sputtering craft descended into the lighted area.

They hit the grass and bounced. The ultralight almost nosed over, but Kurt corrected and planted the wheels firmly in the middle of the field, right at the fifty-yard line.

He reached for the brake, pulled it, and felt the small plane skid across the wet grass. One last player dove out of the way, and the ultralight slammed into the goal at the far end of the field.

The net wrapped around them, the propeller died, and the little plane stopped.

Kurt looked up and back. The crowd, the players, the ref, everyone, just stared in an incredible silence. They looked at him and Katarina, and then at one another, and then finally at the ref. He did nothing for a second, then slowly raised one arm, blew his whistle, and yelled, “Goooooaaaaaallll!”

The crowd shouted in unison, raising their arms as if it were a triumph, as if it were an overtime goal to win the World Cup for tiny Vila do Porto, and in moments the players were reaching for Katarina and Kurt, laughing and clapping, as they freed the plane from the net and dragged it back out onto the field.

The players helped Katarina climb out, admiring her form as they did. The ref helped Kurt. And then they were escorted off the field to the sidelines.

Kurt explained to someone a version of what had happened, promised to pay for any damages, and insisted that the ultralight rental outfit would come for its plane tomorrow.

As the soccer game began again, he and Katarina made their way out to the street. Somewhere near the field there had to be a cab waiting or bus they could take. A microvan pulled up with some kind of sign on it.

“We need to go to the harbor,” Kurt said.

“I can take you,” the driver said.

Kurt opened the door. Katarina went to climb in but paused.

“That was really quite incredible,” she said, gazing into his eyes.

They’d almost been killed three times, her rental car had been sent off a cliff and turned into a burning hulk, and she was still almost blue from the cold, but her eyes sparkled as if he’d just shown her the time of her life. He had to admire that.

He reached out, pulled her to him, and kissed her on the lips. They kissed for a few seconds longer, her arms wrapping around him from the front this time, until the driver coughed lightly.

They parted.

“Was that to warm me up?” she asked.

He smiled. “Did it work?”

“Better than you know,” she said, turning and climbing into the taxi. He got in after her, and the little bubble van moved off toward the harbor.

“You know,” she said, “we’re only a mile or so from the house where the French team is staying.”

“Really,” he said, remembering what she’d told him earlier. “Do you have the address?”

“It’s right on the beach at Praia Formosa. The most luxurious rental in town.”

That sounded like the French way to him.

“Driver,” Kurt said. “Take us to Praia Formosa.”