Dragon

“Pitt has been compared to other popular adventure heroes, but Cussler has created a one-of-a-kind … [DRAGON is] an imaginative and suspenseful novel.”

—Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

DRAGON

Hideki Suma: The blue-eyed multimillionaire was the most powerful ultranationalist in Japan—with a plan to destroy any nation that dared to thwart the rise of his new empire …

Moro Kamatori: The collector of antique weapons also collected human heads on Suma’s private island, where he would make his most pleasurable hunt of all—for Dirk Pitt!

____________

“From one hair-raising scene to another, DRAGON is an incredible and satisfying thriller… . Full of swashbuckling drama and enough twists and turns to keep the reader’s attention to the last page… This worthy successor to the ongoing Dirk Pitt saga … is certain to entertain and engross suspense fans.”

—Chattanooga News—Free Press

“Cussler once again bounces to the top of his field by combining current events with an active imagination. … A fine writer. … A spectacular ending.”

—Ocala Star-Banner

“The master storyteller of undersea adventures… has provided a superb story… Thrill-per-page momentum … [an] incredible finale.”

—Press-Enterprise (Riverside, CA)

Dirk Pitt® Adventures by Clive Cussler

Flood Tide

Shock Wave

Inca Gold

Sahara

Dragon

Treasure

Cyclops

Deep Six

Pacific Vortex

Night Probe!

Vixen 03

Raise the Titanic!

Iceberg

The Mediterranean Caper

By Clive Cussler and Craig Dirgo

The Sea Hunters

Clive Cussler and Dirk Pitt Revealed

From the NUMA Files by Clive Cussler with Paul Kemprecos

Serpent

Blue Gold

Available from POCKET BOOKS

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

Copyright © 1990 by Clive Cussler Enterprises, Inc.

First Pocket Books printing July 1991

Dennings’ Demons

August 6, 1945

Shemya Island, Alaska

THE DEVIL CLUTCHED a bomb in his left hand, a pitchfork in his right, and smirked impishly. He might have appeared menacing if it wasn’t for the exaggerated eyebrows and the half-moon eyes. They gave him more of a sleepy gremlin look than the fiendish expression expected from the ruler of hell. Yet he wore the customary red suit and sprouted regulation horns and long forked tail. Oddly, the clawlike toenails of his feet were curled over a gold bar that was labeled 24 K.

In black letters above and below the circled figure on the fuselage of the B-29 bomber were the words Dennings’ Demons.

The aircraft, named for its commander and crew, sat like a forlorn ghost under a sheet of rain driven southward over the Aleutian Islands by a wind from the Bering Sea. A battery of portable lights illuminated the area beneath the open belly of the plane, casting wavering shadows from the ground crew on the glistening aluminum body, Flashes of lightning added to the haunting scene, stabbing the darkness of the airfield with disturbing frequency.

Major Charles Dennings leaned against one of the twin tires of the starboard landing gear, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his leather flight jacket, and observed the activity around his aircraft. The entire area was patrolled by armed MP’s and K-9 sentries. A small camera crew recorded the event. He watched with uneasy trepidation as the obese bomb was delicately winched into the modified bomb bay of the B-29. It was too large for the bomber’s ground clearance and had to be hoisted out of a pit.

During his two years as one of the top bomber pilots in Europe, with over forty missions to his credit, he had never laid eyes on such a monstrosity. He saw it as a gigantic overinflated football with nonsensical boxed fins on one end. The round ballistic casing was painted a light gray, and the clamps that held it together around the middle looked like a huge zipper.

Dennings felt menaced by the thing he was to carry nearly three thousand miles. The Los Alamos scientists who assembled the bomb at the airstrip had briefed Dennings and his crew the previous afternoon. A motion picture of the Trinity test explosion was shown to the young men, who sat stunned in disbelief as they viewed the awesome detonation of a single weapon with the power to crush an entire city.

He stood there another half hour until the bomb-bay doors were swung closed. The atom bomb was armed and secure, the plane was fueled and ready for takeoff.

Dennings loved his aircraft. In the air he and the big complex machine became as one. He was the brain, it was the body, a unity he could never describe. On the ground it was another story. Exposed by the shining lights and beaten by the rain that became sleet-cold, he saw the beautiful ghostlike silver bomber as his crypt.

He shook off the morbid thought and hurried through the rain to a Quonset but for his crew’s final briefing. He entered and sat down next to Captain Irv Stanton, the bombardier, a jolly round-faced man with a great walrus mustache.

On the other side of Stanton, his feet stretched out in front of him, slouched Captain Mort Stromp, Dennings’ co-pilot, a complacent southerner, who moved with the agility of a three-toed sloth. Immediately behind sat Lieutenant Joseph Arnold, the navigator, and Navy Commander Hank Byrnes, the weapons engineer, who would monitor the bomb during the flight.

The briefing led off with an intelligence officer unveiling a display board showing aerial photographs of the targets. The industrial section of Osaka was the primary target. The backup, in case of heavy cloud cover, was the historic city of Kyoto. Directional bomb runs were advised as Stanton calmly made notes.

A meteorology officer displayed weather charts and predicted light headwinds with scattered clouds over the targets. He also warned Dennings to expect turbulence over northern Japan. Just to be on the safe side, two B-29s had taken off an hour earlier to scout ahead and report visual assessments of weather over the flight route and cloud cover above the targets.

Dennings took over as polarized welder’s goggles were passed around. “I won’t give you a locker-room pep talk,” he said, noting the relieved grins on the faces of his crew. “We’ve had a year of training crammed into one short month, but I know we can pull this mission off. In my humble opinion you’re the best damned flight crew in the Air Force. If we all do our jobs, we may well end the war.”

Then he nodded at the base chaplain, who offered a prayer for a safe and successful flight.

As the men filed out toward the waiting B-29, Dennings was approached by General Harold Morrison, special deputy to General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan bomb project.

Morrison studied Dennings for a moment. The pilot’s eyes showed a weariness around the edges, but they glowed with anticipation. The general held out his hand. “Good luck, Major.”

“Thank you, sir. We’ll get the job done.”

“I don’t doubt it for a second,” said Morrison, forcing a confident expression. He waited for Dennings to reply, but the pilot had gone silent.

After a few awkward moments, Dennings asked, “Why us General?”

Morrison’s smile was barely visible. “You want to back out?”

“No, my crew and I will see it through. But why us?” he repeated. “Excuse me for saying, sir, but I can’t believe we’re the only flight crew in the Air Force you’d trust to fly an atomic bomb across the Pacific, drop it in the middle of Japan, and then land at Okinawa with little more than fumes in the fuel tanks.”

“It’s best you know only what you’ve been told.”

Dennings read foreboding in the older man’s eyes and voice. ” ‘Mother’s Breath.’ ” He repeated the words slowly, without tone, as one would repeat the name of some unspeakable terror. “What warped soul came up with such a cockamamie code name for the bomb?”

Morrison made a resigned shrug. “I believe it was the President.”

Twenty-seven minutes later, Dennings gazed past the beating windscreen wipers. The rain had increased, and he could only see two hundred yards through the wet gloom. Both feet pressed the brakes as he ran the engines up to 2,200 rpm’s. Flight Engineer Sergeant Robert Mosely reported number-four outboard engine turning over fifty revolutions slow. Dennings decided to ignore the report. The damp air was no doubt responsible for the slight drop. He pulled the throttles back to idle.

In the co-pilot’s seat to the right of Dennings, Mort Stromp acknowledged the control tower’s clearance for takeoff. He lowered the flaps. Two of the crew in the waist turrets confirmed the flap setting.

Dennings reached over and switched on the intercom. “Okay, guys, here we go.”

He eased the throttles forward again, compensating for the tremendous torque by slightly advancing the left engines over those on the right. Then he released the brake.

Fully loaded at 68 tons, Dennings’ Demons, her tanks filled to their filler caps with over 7,000 gallons of fuel, her forward bomb bay holding a six-ton bomb, and carrying a crew of twelve, began to roll. She was nearly 17,000 pounds overweight.

The four 3,350-cubic-inch Wright Cyclone engines strained at their mountings, their combined 8,800 horsepower whipping the 16.5-foot propellers through the wind-driven sheet of water. Blue flame erupting from exhaust manifolds, wings enveloped in a cloud of spray, the great bomber roared into the blackness.

With agonizing slowness she picked up speed. The long runway stretched out in front of her, carved out of the bleak volcanic rock and ending at an abrupt drop eighty feet above the cold sea. A horizontal bolt of lightning bathed the fire trucks and ambulances spaced along the runway in an eerie blue light. At eighty knots Dennings took full rudder control and advanced the right engines to their stops. He gripped the wheel grimly, determined to get the Demons in the air.

Forward of the pilots, in the exposed nose section, Stanton the bombardier apprehensively watched the runway rapidly diminish. Even the lethargic Stromp straightened up in his seat, his eyes vainly attempting to penetrate the darkness ahead for the change in black where runway ended and the sea began.

Three quarters of the runway passed, and she was still glued to the ground. Time seemed to dissolve in a blur. They all felt as though they w re flying into a void. Then suddenly the lights of the jeeps parked beside the end of the runway burst through the curtain of rain.

“God almighty!” Stromp blurted. “Pull her up!”

Dennings waited another three seconds, and then he gently eased the wheel toward his chest. The B-29’s wheels came free. She had barely clawed thirty feet out of the sky when the runway vanished and she struggled over the forbidding water.

Morrison stood outside the warmth of the radar but under the downpour, his four-man staff dutifully standing behind him. He watched the takeoff of Dennings’ Demons more in his mind than his eyes. He saw little more than the lurch of the bomber as Dennings thrust the throttles forward and released the brakes before it was lost in the dark.

He cupped his ears and listened to the engine’s pitch diminish in the distance. The uneven sound was faint. No one but a master flight mechanic or an aircraft engineer could have caught it, and Morrison had served in both capacities during his early Army Air Corps career.

An engine was slightly out of tune. One or more of its eighteen cylinders was not firing continuously.

Fearfully, Morrison listened for some sign the bomber was not going to lift off. If Dennings’ Demons crashed on takeoff, every living thing on the island would be incinerated within seconds.

Then the radar man shouted through the open door, “They’re airborne!”

Morrison exhaled a tense sigh. Only then did he turn his back on the miserable weather and walk inside.

There was nothing to do now but send a message to General Groves in Washington informing him that Mother’s Breath was on her way to Japan. Then wait and hope.

But down deep the general was troubled. He knew Dennings. The man was too stubborn to turn back with a bad engine. Dennings would get the Demons to Osaka if he had to carry the plane on his back.

“God help them,” Morrison muttered under his breath. He knew with dread finality his part of the immense operation didn’t stand a prayer.

“Gear up,” ordered Dennings.

“Am I ever glad to hear those words,” grunted Stromp as he moved the lever. The gear motors whined and the three sets of wheels rose into their wells under the nose and wings. “Gear up and locked.”

As the airspeed increased, Dennings dropped the throttle settings to save on fuel. He waited before beginning a slow and gentle climb for altitude until the airspeed touched 200 knots. Unseen off the starboard wing, the Aleutian Island chain slowly curled northeast. They would not sight land again for 2,500 miles.

“How’s that number-four engine?” he asked Mosely.

“Pulling her share, but she’s running a tad hot.”

“Soon as we hit five thousand feet, I’ll drop her back a few rpm’s.”

“Wouldn’t hurt, Major,” Mosely replied.

Arnold gave Dennings the course heading they would maintain for the next ten and a half hours. At 4,900 feet Dennings turned control over to Stromp. He relaxed and stared into the black sky. No stars were in sight. The plane was feeling the turbulence as Stromp threaded it through the ominous mass of thunderclouds.

When they finally cleared the worst of the storm, Dennings unbuckled himself and climbed out of his seat. As he twisted around, he could see through a port window below the tunnel leading to the waist and tail section of the plane. He could just make out a piece of the bomb suspended in its release mechanism.

The crawl tunnel had been narrowed to receive the immense weapon into the bomb bay and was a tight fit. Dennings wiggled through past the bomb bay and dropped down on the opposite end. Then he swung open the small airtight door and slipped inside.

Pulling a flashlight from a leg pocket, he made his way along a confined catwalk running the length of the two bomb bays that had been modified into one. The weapon’s huge size made for an incredibly snug fit. Its outer diameter measured less than two inches away from the longitudinal bulkheads.

Hesitantly, Dennings reached down and touched it. The steel sides felt ice cold to his fingertips. He failed to visualize the hundred thousand people it could burn to cinders within a short second, or the ghastly toll from burns and radiation. The thermonuclear temperatures or the shock wave from the Trinity test could not be sensed in a black-and-white movie film. He saw it only as a means of ending a war and saving hundreds of thousands of his countrymen’s lives.

Returning to the cockpit, he stopped and chatted with Byrnes, who was running through a schematic of the bomb’s detonation circuits. Every so often the ordnance expert glanced at a small console mounted above his lap.

“Any chance of it going off before we get there?” asked Dennings.

“Lightning strike could do it,” answered Byrnes.

Dennings looked at him in horror. “A little late with a warning, aren’t you? We’ve been flying through the middle of an electrical storm since midnight.”

Byrnes looked up and grinned. “We could have gone up just as easily on the ground. What the hell, we made it, didn’t we?”

Dennings couldn’t believe Byrnes’s matter-of-fact attitude. “Was General Morrison aware of the risk?”

“Better than anyone. He’s been on the atomic bomb project from the beginning.”

Dennings shuddered and turned away. Insane, he thought, the operation was insane. It’d be a miracle if any of them lived to tell about it.

Five hours into the flight and lighter by 2,000 gallons of expended fuel, Dennings leveled the B-29 off at 10,000 feet. The crew became more upbeat as the dawn’s orange glow tinted the eastern sky. The storm was far behind them, and they could see the rolling swells of the sea and a few scattered white clouds.

Dennings’ Demons was cruising to the southwest at a leisurely 220 knots. Thankfully, they had picked up a light tail wind. Full daybreak showed them alone in the vast emptiness of the North Pacific Ocean. A solitary airplane going from nowhere to nowhere, Bombardier Stanton mused as he gazed absently out the windows of the nose.

Three hundred miles from Japan’s main island of Honshu, Dennings started a slow, gradual climb to 32,000 feet, the altitude at which Stanton would release the bomb on Osaka. Navigator Arnold announced they were twenty minutes ahead of schedule. At the current rate of speed, he figured they should be landing at Okinawa in a shade under five hours.

Dennings looked at the fuel gauges. He suddenly felt cheerful. Barring a hundred-knot headwind, they should make it with four hundred gallons to spare.

Not everyone was wallowing in good cheer. Seated at his engineer’s panel, Mosely studied the temperature gauge of engine number four. He didn’t like what he read. He routinely tapped the dial with his finger.

The needle twitched and wavered into the red.

He crawled aft through the tunnel and stared through a port at the underside of the engine. The nacelle was streaked with oil and smoke was trailing from the exhaust. Mosely returned to the cockpit and knelt in the narrow aisle between Dennings and Stromp.

“Bad news, Major. We’re going to have to shut down number four.”

“You can’t prod her along for a few more hours?” asked Dennings.

“No, sir, she can swallow a valve and catch fire at any minute.”

Stromp looked over at Dennings, his face somber. “I vote we shut four down for a while and let it cool off.”

Dennings knew Stromp was right. They would have to maintain their present altitude and nurse the other three engines to keep them from overheating. Then restart number four during the ascent to 32,000 feet and the bombing run.

He hailed Arnold, who was bent over his navigator’s board tracing the flight path. “How long before Japan?”

Arnold noted the slight drop in speed and made a swift calculation. “One hour and twenty-one minutes to the mainland.”

He nodded. “Okay, we’ll shut number four until we need it.”

Even as he spoke, Stromp closed the throttle, flicked off the ignition switch, and feathered the propeller. Next he engaged the automatic pilot.

For the next half hour everyone kept a wary eye on number four engine while Mosely called out the temperature drop.

“We have a landfall,” announced Arnold. “A small island coming up about twenty miles dead ahead.”

Stromp peered at it through binoculars. “Looks like a hot dog sticking out of the water.”

“Sheer rock walls,” observed Arnold. “No sign of a beach anywhere.”

“What’s it called?” asked Dennings.

“Doesn’t even show on the map.”

“Any sign of life? The Nips could be using it as an offshore warning station.”

“Looks barren and deserted,” answered Stromp.

Dennings felt safe for the moment. No enemy ships had been sighted, and they were too far from shore to be intercepted by Japanese fighters. He settled down in his seat and stared unseeing at the sea.

The men relaxed and passed around coffee and salami sandwiches, immune to the droning engines and the tiny speck that appeared ten miles away and 7,000 feet above their port wingtip.

Unknown to the crew of Dennings’ Demons, they had only a few minutes to live.

Lieutenant Junior Grade Sato Okinaga saw the brief glint from the reflected sun below him. He banked and went into a shallow dive for a closer inspection. It was an aircraft. No question. A plane from another patrol, most likely. He reached for the switch to his radio, but hesitated. In a few seconds he’d be able to make a positive identification.

A young and inexperienced pilot, Okinaga was one of the lucky ones. Out of his recently graduated class of twenty-two, who were rushed through training during Japan’s desperate days, he and three others were ordered to perform coastal patrols. The rest went into kamikaze squadrons.

Okinaga was deeply disappointed. He would have gladly given his life for the Emperor, but he accepted boring patrol duty as a temporary assignment, hoping to be called for a more glorious mission when the Americans invaded his homeland.

As the lone aircraft grew larger, Okinaga didn’t believe what he saw. He rubbed his eyes and squinted. Soon he could clearly make out the ninety-foot polished aluminum fuselage, the huge 141-foot wings, and the three-story vertical stabilizer of an American B-29.

He stared dumfounded. The bomber was flying out of the northeast from an empty sea, 20,000 feet below its combat ceiling. Unanswerable questions flooded his mind. Where had it come from? Why was it flying toward central Japan with one engine feathered? What was its mission?

Like a shark knifing toward a bleeding whale, Okinaga closed to within a mile. Still no evasive action. The crew seemed asleep or bent on suicide.

Okinaga had no more time for guessing games. The great winged bomber was looming up before him. He jammed the throttle of his Mitsubishi A6M Zero against its stop and made a circling dive. The Zero handled like a swallow, the 1,130-horsepower Sakae engine hurtling him behind and beneath the sleek, gleaming B-29.

Too late the tail gunner sighted the fighter and belatedly opened fire. Okinaga squeezed the gun tit on his control stick. His Zero shuddered as his two machine guns and two twenty-millimeter cannons shredded metal and human flesh.

A light touch of the rudder and his tracers ate their way into the wing and the B-29’s number-three engine. The cowling ripped and tore away, oil poured through holes, followed by flames. The bomber seemed to hover momentarily, and then it flipped on its side and spun toward the sea.

Only after the choked-off cry of the tail gunner and his short burst of fire did the Demons realize they were under attack. They had no way of knowing from what direction the enemy fighter had come. They barely had time to recover when the shells from the Zero ate into the starboard wing.

A strangled cry came from Stromp. “We’re going in!”

Dennings shouted into the intercom as he fought to level the plane. “Stanton, jettison the bomb! Jettison the goddamn bomb!”

The bombardier, wedged against his bombsight by the centrifugal force, yelled back. “It won’t fall free unless you straighten us out.”

The number-three engine was blazing now. The sudden loss of two engines, both on the same side, had thrown the plane over until it was standing on one wing. Working in unison, Dennings and Stromp struggled with the controls, fighting the dying aircraft to an even keel. Dennings pulled back on the throttles, leveling out but sending the bomber into a flat, sickening stall.

Stanton pulled himself to an upright position and popped open the bomb-bay doors. “Hold it steady,” he yelled futilely. He wasted no time adjusting the bombsight. He pushed the bomb release button.

Nothing happened. The violent twisting motion had jammed the atomic bomb against its tight quarters.

White-faced, Stanton struck the release with his fist, but the bomb stubbornly remained in place. “It’s jammed!” he cried. “It won’t fall free.”

Fighting for a few more moments of life, knowing that if they survived they must all take their own lives by cyanide, Dennings struggled to ditch the mortally wounded aircraft in the sea.

He almost made it. He came within two hundred feet of settling the Demons on her belly in a calm sea. But the magnesium in the accessories and crankcase on number-three engine flared like an incendiary bomb, burning through its mounts and wing spar. It dropped away, ripping away the wing control cables.

Lieutenant Okinaga slipped the Zero off one wing, spiraling around the stricken B-29. He watched the black smoke and orange flame curl from the blue sky like a brush stroke. He watched the American plane crush itself into the sea, followed by the geyser of white water.

He circled, searching for survivors, but saw only a few bits of floating debris. Elated at what was to be his first and only kill, Okinaga banked around the funeral pyre of smoke one last time before heading back to Japan and his airfield.

As Dennings’ shattered aircraft and its dead crew settled into the seabed a thousand feet beneath the surface, another B-29 in a later time zone and six hundred miles to the southeast set up for its bomb run. With Colonel Paul Tibbets at the controls, the Enola Gay had arrived over the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

Neither flight commander was aware of the other. Each man thought only his aircraft and crew was carrying the first atomic bomb to be dropped in war.

Dennings’ Demons had failed to make its rendezvous with destiny. The stillness of the deep seabed was as silent as the cloud that settled over the event. The heroic attempt by Dennings and his crew was buried in bureaucratic secrecy and forgotten.

Part 1

Big John

1

October 3, 1993

Western Pacific Ocean

THE WORST OF the typhoon had passed. The mad thrashing seas had subsided, but the waves still climbed the bows and came green and leaden over the decks, leaving a welter of foam behind. The thick black clouds broke apart and the wind died to a gusty thirty knots. To the southwest, shafts of sunlight broke through, painting blue circles on the tumbling swells.

Braving the winds and spray, Captain Arne Korvold stood on the open bridge of the Norwegian Rindal Lines passenger-cargo liner Narvik and aimed his binoculars at a huge ship wallowing dead in the whitecaps. She was big, a Japanese auto carrier by the look of her. Her upper works stretched from blunt bow to a perfectly squared stern, like a rectangular box laid horizontal. Except for the bridge and the crew’s quarters on the upper deck, there were no ports or windows on her sides.

She seemed to have a ten-degree permanent list but rolled to twenty as the swells smashed into her exposed port broadside. The only sign of life was a wisp of smoke from her stack. Korvold grimly noted that her lifeboats had been launched, and a sweep of the restless sea failed to find any sign of them. He refocused the binoculars and read the English name spelled out beneath the Japanese characters on the bow.

She was called the Divine Star.

Korvold returned to the comfort of the central bridge and leaned into the communications room. “Still no response?”

The radio operator shook his head. “Nothing. Not a peep wince we sighted her. Her radio must be closed down. Impossible to believe they abandoned ship without a distress call.”

Korvold stared silently through the bridge windows at the Japanese ship drifting less than a kilometer off his starboard rail. Norwegian by birth, he was a short, distinguished man who never made a hurried gesture. His ice-blue eyes seldom blinked, and his lips beneath the trimmed beard seemed constantly frozen in a slight smile. Twenty-six years at sea, mostly in cruise ships, he had a warm and friendly disposition, respected by his crew and admired by the passengers.

He tugged at his short graying beard and swore quietly to himself. The tropical storm had unexpectedly swung north onto his course and put him nearly two days behind schedule on his passage from the port of Pusan, Korea, to San Francisco. Korvol had not left the bridge for forty-eight hours and he was exhausted. Just as he was about to take a welcome rest, they sighted the seemingly derelict Divine Star.

Now he found himself faced with an enigma and a time-consuming search for the Japanese car carrier’s boats. He was also burdened with the responsibility of 130 passengers, most seasick to the gills, who were in no mood for a benevolent rescue operation.

“Permission to take a boarding crew across, Captain?”

Korvold looked up into the sculpted Nordic face of Chief Officer Oscar Steep. The eyes that stared back were a darker blue than Korvold’s. The chief officer stood lean and as straight as a light pole, skin tanned and hair bleached blond from exposure to the sun.

Korvold didn’t immediately answer but walked over to a bridge window and gazed down at the sea separating the two ships. From wave crest to trough the waves were running three to meters. “I’m not of a mind to risk lives, Mr. Steep. Better wait until seas calm a bit.”

“I’ve taken a boat through worse.”

“No hurry. She’s a dead ship, dead as a body in the morgue. And from the look of her, her cargo has shifted and she’s taking on water. Better we leave her be and search for her boats.”

“There may be injured men over there,” Steen persisted.

Korvold shook his head. “No captain would have abandoned ship and left injured crewmen behind.”

“No captain in his right senses maybe. But what kind of a man would desert a sound ship and lower boats in the midst of a sixty-five knot gale typhoon without sending a Mayday signal?”

“A mystery all right,” Korvold agreed.

“And there’s her cargo to consider,” Steen continued. “Her waterline indicates a full load. She looks capable of transporting over seven thousand automobiles.”

Korvold gave Steen a shrewd look. “You thinking salvage, Mr. Steen?”

“Yes, sir, I am. If she’s totally abandoned with a full cargo, and we can sail her into port, our salvage claim should be equal to half her value or better. The company as well as the crew could share in five or six hundred million kroner.”

Korvold considered for a few moments, a tantalizing thought of greed wrestling with a deep feeling of foreboding. Greed won out. “Pick your boarding crew, and include the assistant engineer. If there’s smoke from her funnel, her machinery must still be in working order.” He paused. “But I still prefer you wait for the water to settle.”

“No time,” Steen announced flatly. “If her list increases another ten degrees, we may be too late. I’d better go quickly.”

Captain Korvold sighed. He was going against his better judgment, but it also occurred to him that once the Divine Star‘s situation was known, every salvage tug within a thousand miles would come full speed toward their position like tow-truck operators flocking to a highway accident.

Finally he shrugged. “When you’re assured none of the Divine Star‘s crew is on board, and you can get her under way, report back and I’ll begin a search for her boats.”

Steen was gone almost before Korvold finished speaking. He assembled his men and was lowered down into the swirling water within ten minutes. The boarding party consisted of himself and four seamen—the assistant chief engineer, Olaf Andersson, and the communications man, David Sakagawa, the only crewman on board the Narvik who could speak Japanese. The seamen were to probe the vessel while Andersson examined the engine room. Stem was to take formal possession of the auto carrier if it was found abandoned.

With Steen at the helm, the double-ender launch plowed through the heavy seas, struggling over the crests of the waves that threatened to swamp her before plunging down into the troughs. The big Volvo marine engine growled without a miss as they bore down on the auto carrier with the wind and sea astern of them.

A hundred meters from the Divine Star they discovered they weren’t alone. A school of sharks circled the listing ship as though some inner sense told them it was going to sink and maybe leave behind some tasty scraps.

The seaman at the wheel slipped the boat under the stubby bow on the lee side. It seemed to them the Divine Star was going to roll over on them with each wave that broke against her hull. When the great ship rolled down, Steen heaved up a light nylon boarding ladder with an aluminum grappling hook on one end. On the third try the hook caught on the top edge of the bulwark and gripped.

Stem scrambled up the rope ladder first and over the side. He was quickly followed by Andersson and the rest. After assembling beside the huge anchor winches, Steen led them up a fire escape-like stairway that was attached to the windowless forward bulkhead. After climbing five decks, they entered the largest bridge area Steen had ever seen during his fifteen years at sea. After the small, efficient wheelhouse on the Narvik, this one looked as vast as a gymnasium, and yet the impressive array of electronic equipment filled only a small section in the middle.

It was empty of life but littered with charts, sextants, and other navigation equipment that spilled from open cabinets. Two briefcases lay open on a counter as if their owners had just left the room for a short time. The exodus appeared to be bathed in panic.

Stem studied the main console. “She’s fully automated,” he said to Andersson.

The chief engineer nodded. “And then some. The controls are voice operated. No pushing levers or giving helmsmen course instructions here.”

Steen turned to Sakagawa. “Can you turn this thing on and talk to it?”

The Norwegian-born Asian leaned over the computerized console and silently studied it for several seconds. Then he pushed a pair of buttons in quick succession. The console’s lights blinked on and the unit began to hum. Sakagawa looked at Steen with a slight smile. “My Japanese is rusty, but I think I can communicate with it.”

“Ask it to report the ship’s status.”

Sakagawa rattled off Japanese into a small receiver and waited expectantly. After a few moments a male voice answered in slow, distinctive tones. When it stopped, Sakagawa stared at Steen blankly.

“It says the sea cocks are open and the flood level in the engine room is approaching two meters.”

“Order it to close them!” snapped Steen.

After a short exchange, Sakagawa shook his head. “The computer says the sea cocks are jammed open. They can’t be shut off by electronic command.”

“Looks like I’ve got my work cut out,” said Andersson. “I’d better get down there and get them turned off. And tell that damned robot to start the pumps.” While he spoke he motioned for two of the seamen to follow him, and they disappeared down a companionway on a dead run toward the engine room.

One of the remaining seamen came up to Steen, his eyes wide in shock and face as white as plaster. “Sir… I found a body. I think it’s the radioman.”

Steen hurried into the communications room. An almost shapeless corpse sat in a chair hunched over the radio transmitter panel. He might have been a human when he stepped on board the Divine Star, not now. There was no hair, and but for the fully exposed teeth where the lips had been, Steen couldn’t have told whether he was looking at the front or back. The pathetic abhorrence looked as though his skin had been blistered off and the flesh beneath burned and partially melted.

Yet there wasn’t the slightest indication of excessive heat or fire. His clothes were as clean and pressed as though he’d just put them on.

The man seemed to have burned from within.

2

THE HORRIBLE STENCH and the shocking sight staggered Steen. It took him a full minute to recover. Then he pushed the chair with its hideous owner off to one side and leaned over the radio.

Fortunately the digital frequency dial was labeled in Arabic numerals. After a few minutes of trial and error, he found the correct switches and hailed Captain Korvold on the Narvik.

Korvold answered immediately. “Come in, Mr. Steen,” he replied formally. “What have you discovered?”

“Something sinister has happened here, Captain. So far we’ve found a deserted ship with one body, that of the radio operator, who was burned beyond recognition.”

“Is there fire on board?”

“No sign. The computerized automated control system shows only green lights on its fire warning systems.”

“Any indication as to why the crew took to the boats?” asked Korvold.

“Nothing obvious. They seemed to have left in a panic after attempting to scuttle the ship.”

Korvold’s mouth tightened, his knuckles turned ivory as he squeezed the phone. “Say again.”

“The sea cocks were turned and jammed open. Andersson is working to close them now.”

“Why on earth would the crew scuttle a sound ship with thousands of new cars on board?” Korvold asked vaguely.

“The situation must be viewed with suspicion, sir. Something on board is abnormal. The body of the radio operator is ghastly. He looks like he was roasted on a spit.”

“Do you wish the ship’s doctor to come over?”

“Nothing the good doctor can do here except perform a postmortem.”

“Understood,” replied Korvold. “I’ll remain on station for another thirty minutes before I leave to search for the missing boats.”

“Have you contacted the company, sir?”

“I’ve held off until you’re certain none of the original crew is alive to challenge our salvage claim. Finish your investigation. As soon as you’re satisfied the ship is deserted I’ll transmit a message to our company director notifying him of our taking possession of the Divine Star.”

“Engineer Andersson is already at work closing the sea cocks and pumping her dry. We have power and should be under way shortly.”

“The sooner the better,” said Korvold. “You’re drifting toward a British oceanographic survey vessel that’s holding a stationary position.”

“How far?”

“Approximately twelve kilometers.”

“They’re safe enough.”

Korvold could think of little else to say. At last he said simply, “Good luck, Oscar. Make port safely.” And then he was gone.

Steen turned from the radio, his eyes avoiding the mutilated body in the chair. He felt a cold shudder grip him. He half expected to see the spectral captain of the Flying Dutchman pacing the bridge. There was nothing as morbid as a deserted ship, he thought grimly.

He ordered Sakagawa to hunt up and translate the ship’s log. The two remaining seamen he sent to search the auto decks while he systematically went through the crew’s quarters. He felt as though he was walking through a haunted house.

Except for a few bits of scattered clothing, it looked as if the crew might return at any minute. Unlike the mess on the bridge, everything seemed lived in and ordinary. In the captain’s quarters there was a tray with two teacups that had miraculously failed to fall on the deck during the storm, a uniform laid out on the bed, and a pair of highly polished shoes side by side on the carpeted deck. A framed picture of a woman and three teenage sons had dropped flat on a neat and clean desk.

Steen was hesitant to pry into other men’s secrets and their memories. He felt like an uninvited intruder.

His foot kicked something lying just under the desk. He leaned down and picked up the object. It was a nine-millimeter pistol. A double-action Austrian Steyr GB. He pushed it into the waistband of his pants.

The chiming of a wall-mounted chronometer startled him, and he swore he felt his hair rise. He finished his search and beat a quick path back to the bridge.

Sakagawa was sitting in the chart room, his feet perched on a small cabinet, studying the ship’s log.

“You found it,” said Steen.

“In one of the open briefcases.” He turned back to the opening pages and began to read. ” ‘Divine Star, seven hundred feet, delivered March sixteenth, nineteen eighty-eight. Operated and owned by the Sushimo Steamship Company, Limited. Home port, Kobe.’ On this voyage she’s carrying seven thousand, two hundred and eighty-eight new Murmoto automobiles to Los Angeles.”

“Any clues as to why the crew abandoned her?” Steen asked.

Sakagawa gave a puzzled shake of his head. “No mention of disaster, plague, or mutiny. No report of the typhoon. The last entry is a bit odd.”

“Read it.”

Sakagawa took a few moments to be sure his translation of Japanese characters into English was reasonably correct. “The best I can get out of it is: ‘Weather deteriorating. Seas increasing. Crew suffering from unknown illness. Everyone sick including Captain. Food poisoning suspected. Our passenger, Mr. Yamada, a most important company director, demands we abandon and sink ship during hysterical outburst. Captain thinks Mr. Yamada has suffered nervous breakdown and has ordered him placed under restraint in his quarters.’ “

Steen looked down at Sakagawa, his face expressionless. “That’s all?”

“The final entry,” said Sakagawa. “There is no more.”

“What’s the date?”

“October first.”

“That’s two days ago.”

Sakagawa nodded absently. “They must have fled the ship shortly after. Damned funny they didn’t take the log with them.”

Slowly, unhurriedly, Steen walked into the communications room, his mind trying to make sense out of the final log entry. Suddenly he stopped and reached out to support himself in the doorway. The room seemed to swim before his eyes and he felt nauseous. Bile rose in his throat, but he forced it down. Then, as quickly as the attack came, it passed.

He walked unevenly over to the radio and hailed the Narvik. “This is First Officer Steen calling Captain Korvold, over.”

“Yes, Oscar,” answered Korvold. “Go ahead.”

“Do not waste time on a search effort. The Divine Star‘s log suggests the crew left the ship before they were struck by the full force of the typhoon. They departed nearly two days ago. The winds would have swept them two hundred kilometers away by now.”

“Providing they survived.”

“An unlikely event.”

“All right, Oscar. I agree, a search by the Narvik will be useless. We’ve done all that can be expected of us. I’ve alerted American sea rescue units at Midway and Hawaii and all vessels in the general area. Soon as you regain steerageway we’ll resume course for San Francisco.”

“Acknowledged,” Steen replied. “I’m on my way to the engine room to check with Andersson now.”

Just as Steen finished transmitting, the ship’s phone buzzed. “This is the bridge.”

“Mr. Stem,” said a weak voice.

“Yes, what is it?”

“Seaman Arne Midgaard, sir. Can you come down to C cargo deck right away? I think I’ve found something—”

Midgaard’s voice stopped abruptly, and Steen could hear the sounds of retching.

“Midgaard, are you sick?”

“Please hurry, sir.”

Then the line went dead.

Stem yelled at Sakagawa. “What button do I push for the engine room?”

There was no reply. Stem stepped back into the chart room. Sakagawa was sitting there pale as death, breathing rapidly. He looked up and spoke, gasping the words with every breath.

“The fourth button… rings the engine room.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Steen asked anxiously.

“Don’t know. I… I feel… awful… vomited twice.”

“Hang on,” snapped Steen. “I’ll gather up the others. We’re getting off this death ship.” He snatched the phone and rang the engine room. There was no answer. Fear flooded his mind. Fear of an unknown that was striking them down. He imagined the smell of death pervading the whole ship.

Stem took a swift glance at a deck diagram that was mounted on a bulkhead, then leaped down the companionway six steps at a time. He tried to run toward the vast holds containing the autos, but a nausea cramped his stomach and he weaved through the passageway like a drunk through a back alley.

At last he stumbled through the doorway onto C cargo deck. A great sea of multicolored automobiles stretched a hundred meters fore and aft. Amazingly, despite the buffeting from the storm and the list of the ship, they were all firmly in place.

Stem shouted frantically for Midgaard, his voice echoing from the steel bulkheads. Silence was his only reply. Then he spotted it, the oddity that stood out like the only man in a crowd holding aloft a sign.

One of the cars had its hood up.

He staggered between the long rows, falling against doors and fenders, bruising his knees on the protruding bumpers. As he approached the car with the open hood, he shouted again. “Anyone here?”

This time he heard a faint moan. In ten paces he had reached the car and stared frozen at the sight of Midgaard lying beside one tire.

The young seaman’s face was festered with running sores. Froth mixed with blood streamed from his mouth. His eyes stared unseeing. His arms were purple from bleeding beneath the skin. He seemed to be decaying before Steen’s eyes.

Steen sagged against the car, stricken with horror. He clutched his head between his hands in helplessness and despair, not noticing the thicket of hair that came away when he dropped them to his sides.

“Why in God’s name are we dying?” he whispered, seeing his own grisly death mirrored by Midgaard. “What is killing us?”

3

THE DEEP-SEA SUBMERSIBLE Old Gert hung suspended beneath a large crane that sat on the stern of the British oceanographic vessel Invincible. The seas had calmed enough to launch Old Gert for a scientific probe of the seafloor 5,200 meters below, and her crew were following a tight sequence of safety checks.

There was nothing old about the submersible. Her design was the latest state of the art. She was constructed by a British aerospace company within the past year and was now poised for her maiden test dive to survey the Mendocino fracture zone, a great crack in the Pacific Ocean floor extending from the coast of Northern California halfway to Japan.

Her exterior was a complete departure from other aerodynamic submersibles. Instead of one cigar-shaped hull with a pregnant pod attached beneath, she had four transparent titanium and polymer woven spheres connected by circular tunnels that gave her the appearance of a jack from a child’s game. One sphere contained a complex array of camera equipment, while another was filled with air and ballast tanks and batteries. The third held the oxygen equipment and electric motors. The fourth sphere, the largest, sat above the other three and housed the crew and controls.

Old Gert was built to withstand the immense pressures found at the deepest parts of the world’s seabeds. Her support systems could keep a crew alive for forty-eight hours, and she was powered to travel through the black abyss at speeds up to eight knots.

Craig Plunkett, the chief engineer and pilot for Old Gert, signed the last of the check-off forms. He was a man of forty-five or fifty, with graying hair combed forward to cover his baldness. His face was ruddy and his eyes a medium brown with a bloodhound droop. He had helped design Old Gert and now treated her as his own private yacht.

He pulled on a heavy woolen sweater against the expected chill from the cold bottom water and slipped his feet into a pair of soft fur-lined moccasins. He descended the boarding tunnel and closed the hatch behind him. Then he dropped into the control sphere and engaged the computerized life-support systems.

Dr. Raul Salazar, the expedition’s marine geologist from the University of Mexico, was already in his seat adjusting a bottom sonar penetrating unit.

“Ready when you are,” said Salazar. He was a small dynamo with a huge mass of black hair, his movements quick, black eyes darting constantly, never staring at any one person or object for more than two seconds. Plunkett liked him. Salazar was the kind of man who accumulated his data with a minimum of fuss, made the right decisions without clouding the facts, and was accustomed to engineering a deep-sea probe from more of a business viewpoint than an academic project.

Plunkett glanced at the empty seat on the sphere. “I thought Stacy was on board.”

“She is,” answered Salazar without turning from his console. “She’s in the camera sphere making a final check of her video systems.”

Plunkett bent over the tunnel leading to the camera sphere and found himself staring at a pair of sweat-socked feet. “We’re ready to launch,” he said.

A feminine voice accompanied by a hollow tone came back, “Be finished in a sec.”

Plunkett eased his feet under his control panel and was settling into his low half-reclining seat when Stacy Fox wiggled her way backwards into the control sphere. Her face was flushed from working nearly upside down.

Stacy wasn’t what you’d call disturbingly attractive, but she was pretty. Her long, straight blond hair fell around her face, and she often hurled it back with a brief shake of the head. She was slim and her shoulders were broad for a woman. The crew could only speculate about her breasts. None had ever seen them, of course, and she always wore loose fitting sweaters. But occasionally, when she yawned and stretched, her chest gave an indication of firm substance.

She looked younger than her thirty-four years. Her eyebrows were thick, her eyes wide apart, irises reflecting a soft pale green. The lips above a determined chin easily parted in a bright, eventoothed smile, which was almost constant.

Stacy was once a California beach golden girl, majoring in the photographic arts at the Chouinard Institute in Los Angeles. After graduation she migrated around the world recording marine life that had never been captured on film. Twice married, twice divorced, with one daughter living with her sister, her presence on board Old Gert to photograph the deep ocean was actually a cover for a more demanding assignment.

As soon as she gained her seat on the right side of the sphere, Plunkett signaled an okay. The crane operator nudged the submersible down a slanted ramp through the ship’s open stern and gently lowered it into the sea.

The chop had died, but the swells still rolled past from one to two meters high. The crane man timed the entry so Old Gert touched a wave crest and continued into the trough, where she settled and rose in perfect sequence with the swells. The lift cables were electronically released, and several divers made a last minute check of the exterior.

Five minutes later the surface controller, a jolly Scot by the name of Jimmy Knox, reported to Plunkett that the sub was cleared for descent. The ballast tanks were flooded, and Old Gert quickly passed under the sparkling sea and began her trip to the bottom.

Though Old Gert was the newest submersible off the drawing boards, she still descended by the old tried and true system of filling ballast tanks with seawater. For rising to the surface, variable-sized iron weights were dropped to increase buoyancy, because current pump technology could not overcome the opposing pressures at great depths.

To Stacy, the long fall through the vast liquid void came like a hypnotic trance. One by one the spectral colors from the scattered light on the surface faded until they finally vanished into pure black.

Except for their separate control consoles mounted around the inner diameter of the sphere, they had an unobstructed 180-degree view ahead. The transparent polymer with the thin threading of titanium made vision equal to that of the resolution on a large-screen television set.

Salazar paid no attention to the blackness or the occasional luminescent fish that swam outside, he was more concerned about what they would find on the bottom. Plunkett monitored the depth and the life-support instruments, watching carefully for any bugs as the pressure increased and the temperature dropped with every passing moment.

The Invincible carried no backup submersible in case of an emergency. If disaster unexpectedly occurred and they somehow became wedged in rocks or the equipment malfunctioned, preventing Old Gert‘s return to the surface, they could jettison the control sphere and allow it to sail to the surface like a giant bubble. But it was a complex system never tested under high-pressure conditions. A failure here and they had no hope for rescue, only the certainty of death by suffocation and a lost grave deep in the eternal night of the abyss.

A small eel-like fish slithered past, its luminous body giving off flashes of light as though a stream of traffic was passing around a series of curves. The teeth were incredibly long in proportion to its head and fanged like a Chinese dragon’s. Fascinated with the interior light of the submersible, it swam up to the control sphere unafraid and cast a ghostly eye inside.

Stacy aimed her battery of still and video cameras and caught it in seven lenses before it was gone. “Can you imagine that thing if it was twenty feet long?” she murmured in awe.

“Fortunately blackdragons live in the depths,” said Plunkett. “The pressure of deep water prevents them from growing more than several centimeters.”

Stacy hit the exterior lights, and the blackness was suddenly transformed into a green haze. The void was empty. No life was to be seen. The blackdragon was gone. She turned off the lights to conserve the batteries.

The humidity rose inside the sphere, and the increasing cold began to seep through the thick walls. Stacy watched the goose bumps rise on her arms. She looked up, clutched her shoulders with her hands, and made a shivering gesture. Plunkett caught the signal and turned on a small heating unit that barely held off the chill.

The two hours it took to reach the bottom would have passed tediously if everyone hadn’t been busy at their own jobs. Plunkett found a comfortable position, and watched the sonar monitor and the echo sounder. He also kept a wary eye on the electrical and oxygen-level gauges. Salazar kept busy plotting their probe grid once they reached the bottom, while Stacy kept trying to catch the denizens of the deep off guard with her cameras.

Plunkett preferred the strains of Johann Strauss for stereo background music, but Stacy insisted on using her “new age” music in the cassette player. She claimed it was soothing and less stressful. Salazar called it “waterfall” music but went along.

Jimmy Knox’s voice from the Invincible sounded ghostly as it filtered down on the underwater acoustic telephone.

“Bottom in ten minutes,” he announced. “You’re closing a bit fast.”

“Righto,” replied Plunkett. “I have it on sonar.”

Salazar and Stacy turned from their work and stared at the sonar screen. The digital enhancement showed the seabed in contoured three dimensions. Plunkett’s gaze darted from the screen into the water and back again. He trusted the sonar and computer, but not ahead of his own vision.

“Be on your guard,” Knox alerted them. “You’re dropping alongside the walls of a canyon.”

“I have it,” returned Plunkett. “The cliffs plunge into a wide valley.” He reached for a switch and dropped one of the ballast weights to slow the descent. Thirty meters from the bottom he dropped one more, giving the submersible almost perfect neutral buoyancy. Next he engaged the three thrusters mounted on the outer ends of the lower spheres.

The bottom slowly materialized through the jade gloom into a broken uneven slope. Strange black rock that was folded and twisted into grotesque shapes spread as far as they could see.

“We’ve come down beside a lava flow,” said Plunkett. “The edge is about a kilometer ahead. After that it’s another three hundred-meter drop to the valley floor.”

“I copy,” replied Knox.

“What are all those wormy rocks?” asked Stacy.

“Pillow lava,” answered Salazar. “Made when fiery lava strikes the cold sea. The outer shell cools, forming a tube through which the molten lava keeps flowing.”

Plunkett kicked in the altitude-positioning system that automatically kept the submersible four meters above the bottom slope. As they glided across the scarred features of the plateau, they spotted the trails of deep crawlers in scattered pools of silt, perhaps from brittle stars, shrimp, or deep-dwelling sea cucumbers that lurked in the darkness beyond the lights.

“Get ready,” said Plunkett. “We’re about to head down.”

A few seconds after his warning, the bottom dropped away into blackness again and the sub nosed over and fell deeper, maintaining its distance of four meters from the steep drop of the canyon walls.

“I have you at five-three-six-zero meters,” echoed Knox’s voice over the underwater phone.

“Righto, I read the same,” replied Plunkett.

“When you reach the valley floor,” said Knox, “you’ll be on the plain of the fracture zone.”

“Stands to reason,” Plunkett muttered, his attention focused on his control panel, computer screen, and a video monitor now showing the terrain below Old Gert‘s landing skids. “There’s no bloody place left to go.”

Twelve minutes passed, and then a flat bottom loomed up ahead and the sub leveled out again. Underwater particles swirled by the sphere, driven by a light current like flakes of snow. Ripples of sand stretched in front of the circular lit pattern from the lights. The sand was not empty. Thousands of black objects, roundly shaped like old cannonballs, littered the seabed in a thick layer.

“Manganese nodules,” explained Salazar as though tutoring. “No one knows exactly how they formed, although it’s suspected sharks’ teeth or whale ear bones may form the nucleus.”

“They worth anything?” asked Stacy, activating her camera systems.

“Besides the manganese, they’re valued for smaller quantities of cobalt, copper, nickel, and zinc. I’d guess this concentration could run for hundreds of miles across the fracture zone and be worth as high as eight million dollars a square kilometer.”

“Providing you could scoop it up from the surface, five and a half kilometers away,” Plunkett added.

Salazar instructed Plunkett on what direction to explore as Old Gert soared silently over the nodule-carpeted sand. Then something gleamed off to their port side. Plunkett banked slightly toward the object.

“What do you see?” asked Salazar, looking up from his instruments.

Stacy peered downward. “A ball!” she exclaimed. “A huge metal ball with strange-looking cleats. I’d guess it to measure three meters in diameter.”

Plunkett dismissed it. “Must have fallen off a ship.”

“Not too long ago, judging from the lack of corrosion,” commented Salazar.

Suddenly they sighted a wide strip of clear sand that was totally devoid of nodules. It was as though a giant vacuum cleaner had made a swath through the middle of the field.

“A straight edge!” exclaimed Salazar. “There’s no such thing as prolonged straight edges on the seafloor.”

Stacy stared in astonishment. “Too perfect, too precise to be anything but manmade.”

Plunkett shook his head. “Impossible, not at this depth. No engineering company in the world has the capability to mine the abyss.”

“And no geological disturbance I ever heard of could form a clean road across the seabed,” stated Salazar firmly.

“Those indentations in the sand that run along the borders look like they might match that huge ball we found.”

“Okay,” muttered Plunkett skeptically. “What kind of equipment can sweep the bottom this deep?”

“A giant hydraulic dredge that sucks up the nodules through pipes to a barge on the surface,” theorized Salazar. “The idea has been tossed around for years.”

“So has a manned flight to Mars, but the rocketry to get there has yet to be built. Nor has a monster dredge. I know a lot of people in marine engineering, and I haven’t heard even a vague rumor about such a project. No mining operation of this magnitude can be kept secret. It’d take a surface fleet of at least five ships and thousands of men working for years. And there is no way they could pull it off without detection by passing ships or satellites.”

Stacy looked blankly at Salazar. “Any way of telling when it happened?”

Salazar shrugged. “Could have been yesterday, could have been years ago.”

“But who then?” Stacy asked in a vague tone. “Who is responsible for such technology?”

No one immediately answered. Their discovery did not fit accepted beliefs. They stared at the empty swath with silent disbelief, a fear of the unknown trickling down their necks.

Finally Plunkett gave an answer that seemed to come distantly, from outside the submersible. “No one on this earth, no one who is human.”

4

STEEN WAS ENTERING into a state of extreme emotional shock. He stared numbly at the blisters forming on his arms. He trembled uncontrollably, half mad from the shock and a sudden abdominal pain. He doubled over and retched, his breath coming in great heaves. Everything seemed to be striking him at once. His heart began beating erratically and his body burned up with fever.

He felt too weak to make it back to the communications compartment and warn Korvold. When the captain of the Norwegian ship received no replies from his signals to Steen, he would send another boarding party to see what was wrong. More men would die uselessly.

Steen was drenched in sweat now. He stared at the car with the raised hood and his eyes glazed with a strange hatred. A stupor descended over him, and his crazed mind saw an indescribable evil in the steel, leather, and rubber.

As if in a final act of defiance, Steen took vengeance against the inanimate vehicle. He pulled the Steyr automatic he’d found in the captain’s quarters from under his waistband and raised the barrel. Then he squeezed the trigger and pumped the bullets into the front end of the car.

• • •

Two kilometers to the east, Captain Korvold was staring through his binoculars at the Divine Star when she blew herself out of existence, vaporizing in the final blink of his eyes.

A monstrous fireball erupted with a blue brilliance whose intensity was greater than the sun. White hot gasses instantly burst over an area four kilometers in diameter. A hemispherical condensation cloud formed and spread out like a vast doughnut, its interior quickly burned out by the fireball.

The surface of the sea was beaten down in a great bowl-like depression three hundred meters across. Then an immense column consisting of millions of tons of water rose into the sky, its walls sprouting thousands of horizontal geysers, each as large as the Narvik.

The shock wave raced from the fireball like an expanding ring around Saturn, speeding outward with a velocity approaching five kilometers a second. It struck the Narvik, pulping the ship into a formless shape.

Korvold, standing in the open on the bridge wing, did not see the holocaust. His eyes and brain had no time to record it. He was carbonized within a microsecond by thermal radiation from the explosion’s fireball. His entire ship rose out of the water and was tossed back as if struck down by a giant sledgehammer. A molten rain of steel fragments and dust from the Divine Star cascaded the Narvik‘s shattered decks. Fire burst from her ruptured hull and engulfed the shattered vessel. And then explosions deep in her bowels. The containers on her cargo deck were tossed away like leaves before a gust from a hurricane.

There was no time for hoarse, tortured screams. Anyone caught on deck flared like a match, crackled, and was gone. The entire ship became an instant funeral pyre to her 250 passengers and crew.

The Narvik began to list, settling fast. Within five minutes of the explosion she rolled over. Soon only a small portion of her bottom was visible, and then she slid under the agitated waters and vanished in the depths.

Almost as suddenly as the Divine Star evaporated, it was over. The great cauliflower-shaped cloud that had formed over the fireball slowly scattered and became indistinguishable from the overcast. The shimmering fury of the water calmed, and the surface smoothed but for the rolling swells.

Twelve kilometers across the sea the Invincible still floated. The incredible pressure of the shock wave had not yet begun to diminish when its full force smashed into the survey ship. Her superstructure was gutted and stripped away, exposing interior bulkheads. Her funnel tore from its mountings and whirled into the boiling water as the bridge disappeared in a violent shower of steel and flesh.

Her masts were bent and distorted, the big crane used to retrieve Old Gert was twisted and thrown on one side, the hull plates saucered inward between her frame and longitudinal beams. Like the Narvik, the Invincible had been beaten into a formless shape that was almost unrecognizable as a ship.

The paint on her sides had blistered and blackened under the fiery blast. A plume of black oily smoke billowed from her smashed port side and lay like a boiling carpet over the water around her hull. The heat bored right through anyone exposed in the open. Those below decks were badly injured by concussion and flying debris.

Jimmy Knox had been thrown violently into an unyielding steel bulkhead, bouncing backward and gasping for air as if he was in a vacuum. He wound up flat on his back, spread-eagled, staring up stunned through a gaping hole that appeared as if by magic in the ceiling.

He lay there waiting for the shock to pass, struggling to concentrate on his predicament, wondering in a fog what had happened to his world. Slowly he gazed around the compartment at the bent bulkheads, seeing the heavily damaged electronic equipment that looked like a robot with its guts pulled out, smelling the smoke from the fires, and he felt the hysteria of a child who had lost his parents in a crowd.

He looked through the slash above into the bridge housing and chart room. They had been gutted into a tortured skeleton of deformed beams. The wheelhouse was a smoldering shambles that was now a crypt for burned and broken men, whose blood dripped into the compartments below.

Knox rolled to his side and groaned in sudden agony caused by three broken ribs, a twisted ankle, and a sea of bruises. Very slowly he pushed himself to a sitting position. He reached up and adjusted his glasses, surprised they had remained perched on his nose during the incomprehensible devastation.

Slowly the dark curtain of shock parted, and his first thought was of Old Gert. Straight from a nightmare he could see the submersible damaged and out of contact in the blackness of the deep.

He crawled across the deck in a daze on hands and knees, fighting back the pain, until he could reach up and grasp the receiver to the underwater telephone.

“Gert?” he burst out fearfully. “Do you read?”

He waited several seconds, but there was no reply. He swore in a low monotone.

“Damn you, Plunkett! Talk to me, you bastard!”

His only answer was silence. All communications between the Invincible and Old Gert were broken. His worst fears were realized. Whatever force had battered the survey ship must have traveled through the water and mangled the submersible that was already subjected to incredible pressures.

“Dead,” he whispered. “Crushed to pulp.”

His mind suddenly turned to his shipmates, and he called out. He heard only the groan and screech of metal from the dying ship. He moved his eyes to the open doorway and focused on five bodies sprawled in untidy, stiff attitudes like cast-off display mannequins.

He sat fixed in grief and incomprehension. Dimly he felt the ship shudder convulsively, the stern slipping around and sliding beneath the waves as though caught in a whirlpool. Concussions reverberated all around him. The Invincible was about to take her own journey to the abyss.

The urge to live surged within him, and then Knox was scrambling up a slanted deck, too dazed to feel the pain from his injuries. Charging in panic through the door to the crane deck, he dodged around the dead bodies and over the devastated steel equipment that sprawled everywhere. Fear took the place of shock and built to a tight, expanding ball inside him.

He reached the twisted remains of the railing. Without a backward glance, he climbed over and stepped into the waiting sea. A splintered piece of a wooden crate bobbed in the water a few meters away. He swam awkwardly until he could clasp it under one arm and float. Only then did he turn and look at the Invincible.

She was sinking by the stern, her bows lifting above the Pacific swell. She seemed to hang there for a minute, sailing toward the clouds as she slipped backward at an ever increasing speed and disappeared, leaving a few bits of flotsam and a cauldron of churned water that soon subsided into a few bubbles tinted in rainbow colors by the spilled oil.

Frantically Knox searched the sea for other members of the Invincible‘s crew. There was an eerie hush now that the groans of the sinking ship had passed. There were no lifeboats, no heads of men swimming in the sea.

He found himself the only survivor of a tragedy that had no explanation.

5

BENEATH THE SURFACE, the shock wave traveled through the incompressible water at roughly 6,500 kilometers per hour in an expanding circle, crushing all sea life in its path. Old Gert was saved from instant destruction by the canyon walls. They towered above the submersible, shielding it from the main force of the explosive pressure.

Yet the submersible was still whirled about violently. One moment it was level, the next it was tumbled end over end like a kicked football by the turbulence. The pod containing the main batteries and propulsion systems struck the rocklike nodules, cracked and collapsed inward from the tremendous pressure. Fortunately, the hatch covers on each end of the connecting tube held, or the water would have burst into the crew’s sphere like a pile driver and mashed them into bloody paste.

The noise of the explosion came over the underwater telephone like a thunderclap almost in unison with the express-train rumble from the shock wave. With their passing, the deep returned to a beguiling silence. Then the calm was broken again by the screech and groan of tortured metal as the ravaged surface ships fell through the deep, buckling and compressing before plunging against the seafloor in great mushroom clouds of silt.

“What is it?” Stacy cried, clutching her chair to keep from being thrown about.

Whether from shock or radical devotion to his work, Salazar’s eyes had never left his console. “This is no earthquake. It reads as a surface disturbance.”

With the thrusters gone, Plunkett lost all control of Old Gert. He could only sit there in helpless detachment as the sub was tossed across the field of manganese nodules. Automatically he shouted into the underwater telephone, skipping all call sign formalities.

“Jimmy, we’re caught in unexplained turbulence! Have lost our thruster pod! Please respond.”

Jimmy Knox could not hear. He was fighting to stay alive in the waves far above.

Plunkett was still trying desperately to raise the Invincible when the submersible finally ended her erratic flight and struck the bottom at a forty-degree angle, coming to rest on the sphere surrounding the electrical and oxygen equipment.

“This is the end,” Salazar murmured, not really knowing what he meant, his mind mired in shock and confusion.

“The hell it is!” snapped Plunkett. “We can still drop ballast weights and make it to the top.”

He knew as he spoke that releasing all the iron ballast weights might not overcome the added weight of the water within the shattered pod, plus the suction from the muck. He activated the switches, and hundreds of pounds of dead weight dropped free from the submersible’s underbelly.

For a few moments nothing happened, then centimeter by centimeter Old Gert pulled herself up from the bottom, rising slowly as if pushed by the hushed breaths and pounding hearts of the three people inside her main sphere.

“Ten feet up,” announced Plunkett after what seemed an hour but in reality was only thirty seconds.

Old Gert leveled out and they all dared to breathe again. Plunkett futilely kept trying to contact Jimmy Knox. “Jimmy… this is Plunkett. Talk to me.”

Stacy stared so hard at the depth meter she thought the glass over the dial would crack. “Go… go,” she pleaded.

Then their worst nightmare burst on them without warning. The sphere holding the electrical and oxygen equipment suddenly imploded. Weakened by its impact into the seafloor, it gave up its integrity and was crushed like an egg by the merciless pressure.

“Bloody hell!” Plunkett gasped as the sub dropped back into the silt with a jarring bump.

As if to drive home the terrifying reverse, the lights blinked out and snapped the sphere into a world of pure ebony. The malignancy of the stygian blackness is a horror only the totally blind experience. To those with sight the sudden disorientation curses the mind into believing unspeakable forces are approaching from beyond in an ever tightening circle.

At last Salazar’s hoarse voice broke the silence. “Mother of Jesus, we’re finished for good.”

“Not yet,” said Plunkett. “We can still make it to the surface by jettisoning the control sphere.” His hand groped over his console until his fingers touched a particular switch. With an audible click the auxiliary lights came on and refit the interior of the sphere.

Stacy sighed with relief and briefly relaxed. “Thank heaven. At least we can see.”

Plunkett programmed the computer for an emergency ascent. Then he set the release mechanism and turned to Stacy and Salazar. “Hold tight. It may be a rough trip topside.”

“Anything to get the hell out of here,” grunted Salazar.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Stacy said gamely.

Plunkett removed the safety peg from the release handle, took a firm grip, and pulled.

Nothing happened.

Three times Plunkett feverishly ran through the routine. But the control sphere stubbornly refused to detach from the main section of the sub. In desperation he turned to the computer to trouble-shoot the cause of the malfunction. An answer came back in the blink of an eye.

The release mechanism had been twisted and jammed by the angled impact with the seabed, and there was no way to repair it.

“I’m sorry,” Plunkett said in frustration. “But it looks like we stay until rescued.”

“Fat chance of that,” snapped Salazar, wiping the sweat that poured from his face with the sleeve of a down ski jacket.

“How do we stand on oxygen?” asked Stacy.

“Our main supply was cut off when the pod imploded,” replied Plunkett. “But our emergency canisters in this unit and the lithium hydroxide scrubber to remove our exhaled carbon dioxide should keep us sucking air for ten to twelve hours.”

Salazar shook his head and gave a defeated shrug. “Every prayer in every church of the world won’t save us in time. It’ll take a minimum of seventy-two hours to get another submersible on site. And even then it’s doubtful they could lift us to the surface.”

Stacy looked into Plunkett’s eyes for some small sign of encouragement, but she found none. He wore a remote and distant look. She got the impression he was saddened more by the loss of his precious submersible than he was at the prospect of dying. He came back on track as he became aware of her stare.

“Raul is right,” he said tautly. “I hate to admit it, but we’ll need a miracle to see the sun again.”

“But the Invincible,” said Stacy. “They’ll move heaven and earth to reach us.”

Plunkett shook his head. “Something tragic happened up there. The last sound we heard was a ship breaking up on her way to the bottom.”

“But there were two other ships in sight when we left the surface, Stacy protested. “It might have been either one of them.”

“It makes no difference,” Plunkett said wearily. “There is no way up. And time has become an enemy we cannot defeat.”

A deep despair settled in the control sphere. Any hope of rescue was a fantasy. The only certainty was a future salvage project to retrieve Old Gert and their bodies long after they were dead.

6

DALE NICHOLS, SPECIAL ASSISTANT to the President, puffed on his pipe and peered over his old-style reading spectacles as Raymond Jordan entered his office.

Jordan managed a smile despite the sickly sweet tobacco fumes that hung in the office like smog under an inversion layer. “Good afternoon, Dale.”

“Still raining?” asked Nichols.

“Mostly turned to drizzle.”

Jordan noted that Nichols was under pressure. The “protector of the presidential realm” was a class operator, but the thicket of coffee-brown hair looked like a hayfield in a crosswind, the eyes darted more than usual, and there were tension lines in the face Jordan had never seen before.

“The President and the Vice President are waiting,” said Nichols quickly. “They’re most anxious to hear an update on the Pacific blast.”

“I have the latest report,” Jordan said reassuringly.

Though he was one of the five most powerful men in official Washington, Jordan was not known to the general public. Nor was he familiar to most bureaucrats or politicians. As Director of Central Intelligence Jordan headed the National Security Service and reported directly to the President.

He lived in the spectral world of espionage and intelligence, and there were very few outsiders who were aware of the disasters and tragedies that he and his agents had saved the American people from.

Jordan did not strike a stranger as a man with a brilliant intellect who possessed a photographic memory and was conversant in seven languages. He seemed as ordinary-looking as his men and women in the field. Medium height, late fifties, healthy head of silver-gray hair, solid frame with slight paunch, kindly oakbrown eyes. A faithful husband to his wife of thirty-seven years, they had twin daughters in college, both studying marine biology.

The President and Vice President were engaged in quiet conversation as Nichols ushered Jordan into the Oval Office. They turned instantly and faced Jordan, who observed that they were as uptight as the President’s special assistant.

“Thank you for coming, Ray,” said the President without fanfare, nervously motioning to a green couch beneath a portrait of Andrew Jackson. “Please sit down and tell us what in hell is going on out in the Pacific.”

Jordan always found himself amused by the painful uneasiness that gripped politicians during an impending crisis. No elected official had the seasoned toughness and experience of career men such as the Director of Central Intelligence. And they could never bring themselves to respect or accept the immense power Jordan and his counterparts possessed to control and orchestrate international events.

Jordan nodded to the President, who towered a good head above him, and sat down. Calmly, with what seemed to the others agonizing slowness, he set a large leather accountant’s style briefcase on the floor and spread it open. Then he pulled out a file as a reference.

“Do we have a situation?” the President asked impatiently, using the formal watchword for an imminent threat to the civilian population, such as a nuclear attack.

“Yes, sir, unfortunately we do.”

“What are we looking at’?”

Jordan glanced at the report purely for effect. He’d already memorized the entire thirty pages. “At precisely eleven-fifty-four hours, an explosion of great force took place in the North Pacific, approximately nine hundred kilometers northeast of Midway Island. One of our Pyramider spy satellites recorded the flash and atmospheric disturbance with cameras and recorded the shock wave from clandestine hydrophonic buoys. The data was transmitted directly to the National Security Agency, where it was analyzed. This was followed by readings from seismographic array stations linked to NORAD, who in turn relayed the information to CIA technicians at Langley.”

“And the conclusion?” the President pushed.

“They agreed the explosion was nuclear,” he said calmly. “Nothing else could be that massive.”

Except for Jordan, who seemed as relaxed as if he was watching a soap opera on television, the expressions of the other three men in the Oval Office looked positively grim at the abhorrent thought that was finally thrown out in the open.

“Are we on DEFCOM Alert?” inquired the President, referring to the scale of nuclear readiness.

Jordan nodded. “I’ve taken the liberty of ordering NORAD to go immediately to a DEFCOM-Three Alert with standby and staging for DEFCOM-Two, depending on the reaction by the Soviets.”

Nichols stared at Jordan. “Are we airborne?”

“A Casper SR-Ninety recon aircraft took off from Edwards Air Force Base twenty minutes ago to verify and collect additional data.”

“Are we certain the shock wave was caused by a nuclear explosion?” asked the Vice President, a man in his early forties who had spent only six years in Congress before being tapped for the number-two job. The consummate politician, he was out of his depth on intelligence gathering. “It might have been an underwater earthquake or volcanic eruption.”

Jordan shook his head. “The seismographic recordings showed a sharp pulse associated with nuclear detonations. The reflection from an earthquake goes back and forth for a longer length of time. Computer enhancement confirms that fact. We should have a good idea of the energy in kilotons after the Casper collects atmospheric radiation samples.”

“Any guesses?”

“Until all the data is in, the best guess is between ten and twenty kilotons.”

“Enough to level Chicago,” Nichols murmured.

The President was afraid to ask the next question, and he hesitated. “Could… could it have been one of our own nuclear submarines that blew up?”

“The Chief of Naval Operations assures me none of our vessels were within five hundred kilometers of the area.”

“A Russian maybe?”

“No,” Jordan replied. “I’ve notified my USSR counterpart, Nikolai Golanov. He swore all Soviet nuclear surface ships and submarines in the Pacific are accounted for, and quite naturally blamed us for the event. Though I’m one hundred percent sure he and his people know better, they won’t admit they’re in the dark as much as we are.”

“I’m not familiar with the name,” said the Vice President. “Is he KGB?”

“Golanov is the Directorate of Foreign and State Security for the Politburo,” Jordan explained patiently.

“He could be lying,” offered Nichols.

Jordan shot him a hard look. “Nikolai and I go back twenty-six years together. We may have danced and shined, but we never lied to one another.”

“If we aren’t responsible, and neither are the Soviets,” mused the President, his voice gone strangely soft, “then who is?”

“At least ten other nations have the bomb,” said Nichols. “Any one of them could have run a nuclear bomb test.”

“Not likely,” answered Jordan. “You can’t keep the preparations a secret from Global Bloc and Western intelligence gathering. I suspect we’re going to find it was an accident, a nuclear device that was never meant to go off.”

The President looked thoughtful for a moment, and then he asked, “Do we know the nationality of the ships in the blast area?”

“All the details aren’t in yet, but it appears that three vessels were involved, or at least innocent bystanders. A Norwegian passenger-cargo liner, a Japanese auto carrier, and a British oceanographic ship that was conducting a deep-bottom survey.”

“There must have been casualties.”

“Photos from our satellite before and after the event show that all three ships vanished and were presumed sunk during or immediately after the blast. Human survivability is very doubtful. If the fireball and shock wave didn’t get them, the heavy radiation will in a very short time.”

“I take it a rescue mission is planned,” said the Vice President.

“Naval units from Guam and Midway have been ordered to the site.”

The President stared at the carpet steadily, as if seeing something. “I can’t believe the British were secretly conducting a bomb test without notifying us. The Prime Minister would have never gone behind my back.”

“Certainly not the Norwegians,” said the Vice President firmly.

The President’s face made a mystified expression. “Nor the Japanese. There’s no evidence they ever built a nuclear bomb.”

“The device might have been stolen,” suggested Nichols, “and clandestinely transported by the unsuspecting Norwegians or Japanese.”

Jordan shrugged offhandedly. “I don’t think it was stolen. I’m willing to bet a month’s pay an investigation will prove it was deliberately being carried to a scheduled destination.”

“Which was?”

“One of two California ports.”

They all looked at Jordan in cold speculation, the enormity of the whole thing growing in their minds.

“The Divine Star was bound from Kobe to Los Angeles with over seven thousand Murmoto automobiles,” Jordan continued. “The Narvik, carrying a hundred and thirty passengers and a mixed cargo of Korean shoes, computers, and kitchen appliances, sailed from Pusan for San Francisco.”

The President grinned mildly. “That should put a small dent in the trade deficit.”

“Good God,” muttered the Vice President, shaking his head. “A frightening thought. A foreign ship smuggling a nuclear bomb into the United States.”

“What do you recommend, Ray?” demanded the President.

“We dispatch field teams immediately. Preferably Navy deepsea salvage vessels to survey the sunken ships and learn which ship was transporting the bomb.”

The President and Nichols exchanged knowing glances. Then the President stared at Jordan. “I think Admiral Sandecker and his ocean engineering people at NUMA are better suited for a deep-water operation. I’ll leave it to you, Ray, to brief him.”

“If I may respectfully disagree, Mr. President. We can keep a tighter security lid on the event with the Navy.”

The President gave Jordan a smug look. “I understand your concern. But trust me. The National Underwater and Marine Agency can do the job without a news leak.”

Jordan rose from the couch, professionally annoyed that the President knew something he didn’t. He made a mental note to dig at his first opportunity. “If Dale will alert the admiral, I’ll leave for his office immediately.”

The President extended his hand. “Thank you, Ray. You and your people have done a superb job in so short a time.”

Nichols accompanied Jordan as he left the Oval Office to head for the NUMA Building. As soon as they were in the hallway Nichols asked in a low voice, “Just between you and me and the furniture, who do you think is behind the bomb smuggling?”

Jordan thought for a moment and then replied in an even, disquieting tone. “We’ll know the answer to that within the next twenty-four hours. The big question, the one that scares hell out of me, is why, and for what purpose.

7

THE ATMOSPHERE INSIDE the submersible had become rank and humid. Condensation was dripping from the sides of the sphere, and the carbon dioxide was rising into the lethal range. No one stirred and they seldom spoke, to conserve air. After eleven and a half hours, their life-preserving oxygen supply was nearly gone, and what little electrical power was left in the emergency batteries could not operate the CO, scrubbing unit much longer.

Fear and terror had slowly faded to resignation. Except for every fifteen minutes, when Plunkett switched on the lights to read the life-support systems, they sat quietly in the dark, alone with their thoughts.

Plunkett concentrated on monitoring the instruments, fussing with his equipment, refusing to believe his beloved submersible could refuse to respond to his commands. Salazar sat like a statue, slumped in his chair. He seemed withdrawn and barely conscious. Though he was only minutes away from falling into a final stupor, he could not see prolonging the inevitable. He wanted to die and get it over with.

Stacy conjured up fantasies of her childhood, pretending she was in another place, another time. Her past flew by in fleeting images. Playing baseball in the street with her brothers, riding her new bicycle Christmas Day, going to her first high school prom with a boy she didn’t like but who was the only one who asked her. She could almost hear the strains of the music in the hotel ballroom. She forgot the name of the group, but she remembered the songs. “We May Never Pass This Way Again” from Seals and Crofts was her favorite. She had closed her eyes and imagined she’d been dancing with Robert Redford.

She cocked her head as if listening. Something was out of place. The song she heard in her mind wasn’t from the mid-1970s. It sounded more like an old jazz tune than rock.

She came awake, opened her eyes, seeing only the blackness. “They’re playing the wrong music,” she mumbled.

Plunkett flicked on the lights. “What was that?”

Even Salazar looked up uncomprehendingly and muttered, “She’s hallucinating.”

“They’re supposed to be playing ‘We May Never Pass This Way Again,’ but it’s something else.”

Plunkett looked at Stacy, his face soft with compassion and sorrow. “Yes, I hear it too.”

“No, no,” she objected. “Not the same. The song is different.”

“Whatever you say,” said Salazar, panting. His lungs ached from trying to wrest what oxygen he could from the foul air. He grabbed Plunkett by the arm. “For God’s sake, man. Close down the systems and end it. Can’t you see she’s suffering? We’re all suffering.”

Plunkett’s chest was hurting too. He well knew it was useless to prolong the torment, but he couldn’t brush aside the primitive urge to cling on to life to the last breath. “We’ll see it through,” he said heavily. “Maybe another sub was airlifted to the Invincible.”

Salazar stared at him with glazed eyes and a mind that was hanging on to a thin thread of reality. “You’re crazy. There isn’t another deep-water craft within seven thousand kilometers. And even if one was brought in, and the Invincible was still afloat, they’d need another eight hours to launch and rendezvous.”

“I can’t argue with you. None of us wants to spend eternity in a lost crypt in deep ocean. But I won’t give up hope.”

“Crazy,” Salazar repeated. He leaned forward in his seat and shook his head from side to side as if clearing the growing pain. He looked as though he was aging a year with each passing minute.

“Can’t you hear it?” Stacy uttered in a low croaking voice. “They’re coming closer.”

“She’s crazy too,” Salazar rasped.

Plunkett held up his hand. “Quiet! I hear it too. There is something out there.”

There was no reply from Salazar. He was too far gone to think or speak coherently. An agonizing band was tightening around his lungs. The desire for air overpowered all his thoughts save one, he sat there and wished death to come quickly.

Stacy and Plunkett both stared into the darkness beyond the sphere. A weird rat-tailed creature swam into the dim light coming from inside Old Gert. It had no eyes, but it made a circuit of the sphere, maintaining a distance of two centimeters before it went on about its business in the depths.

Suddenly the water shimmered. Something was stirring in the distance, something monstrous. Then a strange bluish halo grew out of the blackness, accompanied by voices singing words too garbled by the water to comprehend.

Stacy stared entranced, while Plunkett’s skin crawled on the back of his neck. It had to be some horror from the supernatural, he thought. A monster created by his oxygen-starved brain. There was no way the approaching thing could be real. The image of an alien from another world crossed his mind again. Tense and fearful, he waited until it came nearer, planning on using the final charge of the emergency battery to switch on the outside lights. A terror from the deep or not, he realized it would be the last thing he’d ever see on earth.

Stacy crawled to the side of the sphere until her nose was pressed against its interior. A chorus of voices echoed in her ears. “I told you,” she said in a strained whisper. “I told you I heard singing. Listen.”

Plunkett could just make out the words now, very faint and distant. He thought he must be going mad. He tried to tell himself that the lack of breathable air was playing tricks on his eyes and ears. But the blue light was becoming brighter and he recognized the song.

Oh, what a time I had with Minnie the Mermaid

Down at the bottom of the sea.

I forgot my troubles there among the bubbles.

Gee but she was awfully good to me.

He pushed the exterior light switch. Plunkett sat there motionless. He was used up and dog-weary, desperately so. His mind refused to accept the thing that materialized out of the black gloom, and he fainted dead away.

Stacy was so numbed with shock she couldn’t tear her eyes from the apparition that crept toward the sphere. A huge machine, moving on great tractorlike treads and supporting an oblong structure with two freakish manipulator arms on its underside, rolled to a stop and sat poised under the lights of Old Cart.

A humanlike form with blurred features was sitting in the transparent nose of the strange craft only two meters away from the sphere. Stacy closed her eyes tightly and reopened them. Then the vague, shadowy likeness of a man took shape. She could see him clearly now. He wore a turquoise-colored jumpsuit that was partially opened down the front. The matted black strands on his chest matched the dark shaggy hair on his head. His face had a masculine weathered, craggy look, and the mirth wrinkles that stretched from a pair of incredibly green eyes were complemented by the slight grin on his lips.

He stared back at her with a bemused interest. Then he reached down behind him, set a clipboard in his lap, and wrote something on a pad. After a few seconds he tore off a piece of paper and held it up to his view window.

Stacy’s eyes strained to focus on the wording. It read, “Welcome to Soggy Acres. Hang on while we connect an oxygen line.”

Is this what it’s like to die? Stacy wondered. She’d read of people going through tunnels before emerging into light and seeing people and relatives who had died in the past. But this man was a perfect stranger. Where did he come from?

Before she could match the puzzle pieces, the door closed and she floated into oblivion.

8

DIRK PITT STOOD ALONE in the center of a large domed chamber, hands shoved into the pockets of his NUMA jumpsuit, and studied Old Gert. His opaline eyes stared without expression at the submersible that sat like a broken toy on the smooth black lava floor. Then he slowly climbed through the hatch and dropped into the pilot’s reclining chair and studied the instruments embedded in the console.

Pitt was a tall man, firm muscled with broad shoulders and straight back, slightly on the lanky side, and yet he moved with a catlike grace that seemed poised for action. There was a razor hardness about him that even a stranger could sense, yet he never lacked for friends and allies in and out of government who respected and admired him for his loyalty and intelligence. He was buoyed by a dry wit and an easygoing personality—a trait a score of women had found most appealing—and though he adored their company, his most ardent love was reserved for the sea.

As Special Projects Director of NUMA he spent almost as much time on and under water as he did on land. His main exercise was diving—he seldom crossed the threshold of a gym. He had given up smoking years before, casually controlled his diet, and was a light drinker. He was constantly busy, physically moving about, walking up to five miles a day in the course of his job. His greatest pleasure outside his work was diving through the ghostly hulk of a sunken ship.

There was the echo of footsteps from outside the submersible, footsteps crossing the rock floor that had been carved smooth under the curved walls of the vaulted roof. Pitt dewed around in the chair and looked at his longtime friend and NUMA associate, Al Giordino.

Giordino’s black hair was as curly as Pitt’s was wavy. His smooth face showed ruddy under the overhead glow from the sodium vapor lights, and his lips were locked in their usual sly Fagan-like smile. Giordino was short, the top of his head came just up to Pitt’s shoulder line. But his body was braced by massive biceps and a chest that preceded the rest of him like a wrecking ball, a feature that enhanced his determined walk and gave the impression that if he didn’t come to a halt he would simply walk through whatever fence or wall happened to be in his path.

“Well, what do you make of it?” he asked Pitt.

“The British turned out a nice piece of work,” Pitt replied admiringly as he exited the hatch.

Giordino studied the crushed spheres and shook his head. “They were lucky. Another five minutes and we’d have found corpses.”

“How are they doing?”

“A speedy recovery,” answered Giordino. “They’re in the galley devouring our food stores and demanding to be returned to their ship on the surface.”

“Anyone brief them yet?” asked Pitt.

“As you ordered, they’ve been confined to the crew’s quarters, and anyone who comes within spitting distance acts like a deaf mute. A performance that’s driven our guests up the walls. They’d give their left kidney to know who we are, where we came from, and how we built a livable facility this deep in the ocean.”

Pitt gazed again at Old Gert and then motioned a hand around the chamber. “Years of secrecy flushed down the drain,” he muttered, suddenly angry.

“Not your fault.”

“Better I left them to die out there than compromise our project.”

“Who you kidding?” Giordino laughed. “I’ve seen you pick up injured dogs in the street and drive them to a vet. You even paid the bill though it wasn’t you who ran over them. You’re a big softy, my friend. Secret operation be damned. You’d have saved those people if they’d carried rabies, leprosy, and the black plague.”

“I’m that obvious?”

Giordino’s teasing look softened. “I’m the bully who gave you a black eye in kindergarten, remember, and you bloodied my nose with a baseball in return. I know you better than your own mother. You may be a nasty bastard on the outside, but underneath you’re an easy touch.”

Pitt looked down at Giordino. “You know, of course, that playing good samaritan has put us in a sea of trouble with Admiral Sandecker and the Defense Department.”

“That goes without saying. And speaking of the devil, Communications just received a coded message. The admiral is on his way from Washington. His plane is due in two hours. Hardly what you’d call advance notice. I’ve ordered a sub readied to head for the surface and pick him up.”

“He must be psychic,” mused Pitt.

“I’m betting that weird disturbance is behind his surprise visit.”

Pitt nodded and smiled. “Then we have nothing to lose by raising the curtain for our guests.”

“Nothing,” Giordino agreed. “Once the admiral gets the story, he’ll order them kept here under guard until we wrap up the project anyway.”

Pitt began walking toward a circular doorway with Giordino at his side. Sixty years in the past, the domed chamber might have been an architect’s vision of a futuristic aircraft hangar, but this structure covered no aircraft from rain, snow, or summer sun. Its carbon and ceramic reinforced plastic walls housed deep-water craft 5,400 meters beneath the sea. Besides Old Gert, the leveled floor held an immense tractorlike vehicle with an upper body housing shaped similar to a cigar. Two smaller submersibles sat side-by-side, resembling stubby nuclear submarines whose bows and sterns had been reattached after their center sections were removed. Several men and one woman were busily servicing the vehicles.

Pitt led the way through a narrow circular tunnel that looked like an ordinary drain pipe and passed through two compartments with domed ceilings. There were no right angles or sharp corners anywhere. All interior surfaces were rounded to structurally resist the massive outside water pressure.

They entered a confined and spartan dining compartment. The one long table and its surrounding chairs were formed from aluminum, and the galley wasn’t much larger than the kitchen on an overnight passenger train. Two NUMA crewmen stood on each side of the doorway keeping a tight eye on their unwelcome guests.

Plunkett, Salazar, and Stacy were huddled at the opposite end of the table in muffled conversation when Pitt and Giordino entered. Their voices stopped abruptly, and they looked up suspiciously at the two strangers.

So he could talk with them at their own level, Pitt planted himself solidly in a nearby chair and glanced swiftly from face to face as if he was an inspector of police examining a lineup.

Then he said politely, “How do you do. My name is Dirk Pitt. I head up the project you’ve stumbled upon.”

“Thank God!” Plunkett boomed. “At last, somebody who can speak.”

“And English at that,” added Salazar.

Pitt gestured at Giordino. “Mr. Albert Giordino, chief mover and doer around here. He’ll be glad to conduct a grand tour, assign quarters, and help you with any needs in the way of clothing, toothbrushes, and whatever.”

Introductions and handshakes were traded across the table. Giordino ordered up a round of coffee, and the three visitors from Old Gert finally began to relax.

“I speak for all of us,” said Plunkett sincerely, “when I say, thank you for saving our lives.”

“Al and I are only too happy we reached you in time.”

“Your accent tells me you’re American,” said Stacy.

Pitt locked onto her eyes and gave her a devastating stare. “Yes, we’re all from the States.”

Stacy seemed to fear Pitt, as a deer fears a mountain lion, yet she was oddly attracted to him. “You’re the man I saw in the strange submersible before I passed out.”

“A DSMV,” Pitt corrected her. “Stands for Deep Sea Mining Vehicle. Everyone calls it Big John. Its purpose is to excavate geological samples from the seabed.”

“This is an American mining venture?” asked Plunkett incredulously.

Pitt nodded. “A highly classified suboceanic test mining and survey project, financed by the United States government. Eight years from the initial design through construction to start-up.”

“What do you call it?”

“There’s a fancy code word, but we affectionately refer to the place as ‘Soggy Acres.’ “

“How can it be kept a secret?” asked Salazar. “You must have a support fleet on the surface that can be easily detected by passing vessels or satellites.”

“Our little habitat is fully self-sustaining. A high-tech life-support system that draws oxygen from the sea and enables us to work under pressure equal to the air at sea level, a desalination unit for fresh drinking water, heat from hydrothermal vents on the seafloor, some food from mussels, clams, shrimp, and crabs that survive around the vents, and we bathe under ultraviolet light and antiseptic showers to prevent bacteria growth. What supplies or equipment replacement parts we can’t provide on our own are dropped into the sea from the air and retrieved underwater. If it becomes necessary to transfer personnel, one of our submersibles rises to the surface where it is met by a jet-powered flying boat.”

Plunkett simply nodded. He was a man living a dream.

“You must have a unique method of communicating with the outside world,” said Salazar.

“A surface relay buoy tethered by cable. We transmit and receive via satellite. Nothing fancy but most efficient.”

“How long have you been down here?”

“We haven’t seen the sun in a little over four months.”

Plunkett stared into his coffee cup in wonder. “I had no idea your technology had developed to where you can tackle a research station this deep.”

“You might say we’re a pioneer expedition,” said Pitt proudly. “We have several projects going at the same time. Besides testing equipment, our engineers and scientists analyze the sea life, geology, and minerals on the seabed and file computerized reports of their findings. Actual dredging and mining operations come in future stages.”

“How many people in your crew?”

Pitt took a swallow of coffee before answering. “Not many. Twelve men and two women.”

“I see your women have traditional duties,” Stacy said sourly, nodding at a pretty redheaded lady in her late twenties who was dicing vegetables in the galley.

“Sarah volunteered. She also oversees our computer records, working two jobs, as do most of us.”

“I suppose the other woman doubles as your maid and equipment mechanic.”

“You’re close,” Pitt said, giving her a caustic smile. “Jill really does help out as a marine equipment engineer. She’s also our resident biologist. And if I were you, I wouldn’t lecture her on female rights on the bottom of the sea. She took first in a Miss Colorado bodybuilding competition and can bench press two hundred pounds.”

Salazar pushed his chair from the table and stretched out his feet. “I’ll wager your military is involved with the project.”

“You won’t find any uniformed rank down here,” Pitt sidestepped. “We’re all strictly scientific bureaucrats.”

“One thing I’d like you to explain,” said Plunkett, “is how you knew we were in trouble and where to find us.”

“Al and I were retracing our tracks from an earlier sample collection survey, searching for a gold-detection sensor that had somehow fallen off the Big John, when we came within range of your underwater phone.”

“We picked up your distress calls, faint as they were, and homed in to your position,” Giordino finished.

“Once we found your submersible,” Pitt continued, “Al and I couldn’t very well transport you from your vessel to our vehicle or you’d have been crushed into munchkins by the water pressure. Our only hope was to use the Big John’s manipulator arms to plug an oxygen line to your exterior emergency connector. Luckily, your adapter and ours mated perfectly.”

“Then we used both manipulator arms to lock onto your lift hooks,” Giordino came in, using his hands for effect, “and carried your sub back to our equipment chamber, entering through our pressure airlock.”

“You saved Old Gert?” inquired Plunkett, quickly becoming cheerful.

“She’s sitting in the chamber,” said Giordino.

“How soon can we be returned to our support ship?” Salazar demanded rather than asked.

“Not for some time, I’m afraid,” said Pitt.

“We’ve got to let our support crew know we’re alive,” Stacy protested. “Surely you can contact them?”

Pitt exchanged a taut look with Giordino. “On our way to rescue you, we passed a badly damaged ship that had recently fallen to the bottom.”

“No, not the Invincible,” Stacy murmured, unbelieving.

“She was badly broken up, as though she suffered from a heavy explosion,” replied Giordino. “I doubt there were any survivors.”

“Two other ships were nearby when we started our dive,” Plunkett pleaded. “She must have been one of them.”

“I can’t say,” Pitt admitted. “Something happened up there. Some kind of immense turbulence. We’ve had no time to investigate and don’t have any hard answers.”

“Surely you felt the same shock wave that damaged our submersible.”

“This facility sits in a protected valley off the fracture zone, thirty kilometers away from where we found you and the sunken ship. What was left of any shock wave passed over us. All we experienced was a mild rush of current and a sediment storm as the bottom was stirred into what is known on dry land as a blizzard condition.”

Stacy gave Pitt an angry look indeed. “Do you intend to keep us prisoners?”

“Not exactly the word I had in mind. But since this is a highly classified project I must ask you to accept our hospitality a bit longer.”

“What do you call ‘a bit longer’?” Salazar asked warily.

Pitt gave the small Mexican a sardonic stare. “We’re not scheduled to return topside for another sixty days.”

There was silence. Plunkett looked from Salazar to Stacy to Pitt. “Bloody hell!” he snapped bitterly. “You can’t hold us here two months.”

“My wife,” groaned Salazar. “She’ll think I’m dead.”

“I have a daughter,” said Stacy, quickly subdued.

“Bear with me,” Pitt said quietly. “I realize I seem like a heartless tyrant, but your presence has put me in a difficult position. When we have a better grip on what happened on the surface, and I talk with my superiors, we might work something out.”

Pitt paused as he spotted Keith Harris, the project’s seismologist, standing in the doorway nodding for Pitt to talk outside the room.

Pitt excused himself and approached Harris. He immediately saw the look of concern in Harris’ eyes.

“Problem?” he asked tersely.

Harris spoke through a great gray beard that matched his hair. “That disturbance has triggered a growing number of shocks in the seabed. So far, most all are small and shallow. We can’t actually feel them yet. But their intensity and strength are growing.”

“How do you read it?”

“We’re sitting on a fault that’s unstable as hell,” Harris went on. “It’s also volcanic. Crustal strain energy is being released at a rate I’ve never experienced. I’m afraid we could be looking at a major earthquake of a six-point-five magnitude.”

“We’d never survive,” Pitt said stonily. “One crack in one of our domes, and the water pressure will flatten the entire base like leas under a sledgehammer.”

“I get the same picture,” said Harris dismally.

“How long have we got?”

“No way to predict these things with any certainty. I realize it’s not much comfort, and I’m only guessing, but judging from the rate of build I’d guess maybe twelve hours.”

“Time enough to evacuate.”

“I could be wrong,” Harris came back hesitantly. “If we actually experience initial shock waves, the big quake might he only minutes behind. On the other hand, the shocks could taper off and stop just as easily.”

He’d no sooner gotten the words out when they both felt a slight tremor beneath their feet and the coffee cups on the dining table began to clatter in their saucers.

Pitt stared at Harris, and his lips pulled into a tense grin. “It seems that time is not on our side.”

9

THE TREMORS INCREASED with terrifying swiftness. A distant rumbling seemed to move closer. Then came sharp thumping sounds as small rocks tumbled down the canyon slopes and struck against the suboceanic buildings. Everyone kept glancing up at the great arched roof of the equipment chamber, fearful of an avalanche breaching the walls. One tiny opening, and the water would burst inside with the shattering power of a thousand cannons.

All was calm, no panic. Except for the clothes they wore, nothing was carried but the computer records of the project. Eight minutes was all it took for the crew to assemble and ready the deep-sea vehicles for boarding.

Pitt had known instantly that a few must die. The two manned submersibles were each designed to carry a maximum of six people. Seven might be crammed on board for a total of fourteen—the exact number of the project team—but certainly no more. Now they were burdened with the unplanned presence of the crewmen from Old Gert.

The shocks were coming stronger and closer together now. Pitt saw no chance of a sub reaching the surface, unloading survivors, and returning in time to rescue those left behind. The round trip took no less than four hours. The suboceanic structures were slowly weakening under the increasing shocks, and it was only a question of minutes before they would give way and be crushed by the onslaught of the sea.

Giordino read the dire signs in the fixed expression on Pitt’s face. “We’ll have to make two trips. Better I wait for the next—”

“Sorry, old pal,” Pitt cut him off. “You pilot the first sub. I’ll follow in the second. Get to the surface, unload your passengers into inflatable rafts, and dive like hell for those who must stay behind.”

“No way I can make it back in time,” Giordino said tautly.

“Think of a better way?”

Giordino shook his head in defeat. “Who gets the short end of the stick?”

“The British survey team.”

Giordino stiffened. “No call for volunteers? Not like you to leave a woman.”

“I have to place our own people first,” Pitt answered coldly.

Giordino shrugged, disapproval in his face. “We save them and then sign their death warrants.”

A long, shuddering vibration shook the seabed, chased by a deep, menacing rumble. Ten seconds. Pitt stared down at his wristwatch. The shock lasted ten seconds. Then all was silent and still again, deathly silent.

Giordino stared blankly for an instant into the eyes of his friend. Not the slightest fear showed. Pitt seemed incredibly indifferent. There was absolutely no doubt in his mind that Pitt was lying. There was never any intention to pilot the second sub. Pitt was set on being the last man out.

It was too late now, too late for arguments, no time for drawnout goodbyes. Pitt grabbed Giordino by the arm and half pushed, half heaved the tough little Italian through the hatch of the first submersible.

“You should be just in time to greet the admiral,” he said. “Give him my best.”

Giordino didn’t hear him. Pitt’s voice was drowned out by falling rock that smashed against the dome and reverberated all around them. Then Pitt slammed the hatch shut and was gone.

The six big men stuffed inside seemed to fill every square centimeter of the interior. They said nothing, avoiding each other’s stares. Then, as if all eyes were following a thrown football in the last seconds of a game, they watched expectantly as Giordino weaved like an eel through their packed bodies into the pilot’s seat.

He swiftly switched on the electric motors that ran the submersible over rails into the air lock. He rushed through the checklist and had just programmed the computer when the massive interior door closed and water began surging through special restriction valves from the ice-cold sea outside. The instant the lock was filled and equalized with the immense water pressure, the computer automatically opened the exterior door. Then Giordino took over manual control, engaged the thrusters to maximum power, and drove the sub toward the waves far above.

While Giordino and his passengers were in the lock, Pitt quickly turned his attention to the boarding of the second submersible. He ordered the NUMA team women to enter first. Then he silently nodded for Stacy to follow.

She hesitated at the hatch opening, shot him a strained, questioning look. She was standing quite still as though stunned by what was happening around her.

“Are you going to die because I took your place?” she asked softly.

Pitt flashed a madcap smile. “Keep a date open for rum collins at sunset on the lanai of the Halekalani Hotel in Honolulu.”

She tried to form the words for a reply, but before they came out the next man in line pushed her none too gently into the sub.

Pitt stepped over to Dave Lowden, chief vehicle engineer on the project. About as perturbed as a clam, Lowden pulled up the zipper on his leather bomber jacket with one hand while pushing his rimless glasses up the bridge of his nose with the other.

“You want me to act as co-pilot?” Lowden asked in a low voice.

“No, you take her up alone,” said Pitt. “I’ll wait for Giordino to come back.”

Lowden could not control the saddened expression that crossed his face. “Better I should stay than you.”

“You have a pretty wife and three kids. I’m single. Get your ass in that sub, and be quick about it.” Pitt turned his back on Lowden and walked over to where Plunkett and Salazar were standing.

Plunkett also showed no shred of fear. The big ocean engineer looked as content as a sheepherder casually eyeing his flock during a spring shower.

“Do you have a family, Doc?” Pitt asked.

Plunkett gave a slight shake of his head. “Me? Not bloody likely. I’m an old confirmed bachelor.”

“I thought as much.”

Salazar was nervously rubbing his hands together, a frightened light in his eyes. He was achingly aware of his helplessness and a certainty that he was about to die.

“I believe you said you had a wife?” Pitt asked, directing his question to Salazar.

“And a son,” he muttered. “They’re in Veracruz.”

“There’s room for one more. Hurry and jump in.”

“I’ll make eight,” Salazar said dumbly. “I thought your submersibles only held seven.”

“I put the biggest men in the first sub and crammed the smallest and three ladies in the second. There should be enough space left over to squeeze in a little guy like you.”

Without a thank-you, Salazar scrambled into the submersible as Pitt swung the hatch cover closed against his heels. Then Lowden dogged it tight from the inside.

As the submersible rolled into the air lock and the door closed with a sickening finality, Plunkett slapped Pitt’s back with a great bear paw of a hand.

“You’re a brave one, Mr. Pitt. No man could have played God better.”

“Sorry I couldn’t find an extra seat for you.”

“No matter. I consider it an honor to die in good company.”

Pitt stared at Plunkett, mild surprise in his eyes. “Who said anything about dying?”

“Come now, man. I know the sea. It doesn’t take a seismographic genius to know your project is about to collapse around our ears.”

“Doc,” Pitt said conversationally through a heavy tremor, “trust me.”

Plunkett gave Pitt a very skeptical look. “You know something I don’t?”

“Let’s just say, we’re catching the last freight out of Soggy Acres.”

Twelve minutes later, the shock waves came in an endless procession. Tons of rock cascaded down from the canyon walls, striking the rounded structures with shattering force.

Finally the battered walls of the undersea habitat imploded and billions of liters of icy black water boiled down and swept away man’s creation as completely as though it had never been built.

10

THE FIRST SUBMERSIBLE burst through a trough between the swells, leaping like a whale before belly-flopping into the bluegreen sea. The waters had calmed considerably, the sky was crystal clear, and the waves were rolling at less than one meter.

Giordino quickly reached up to the hatch cover, gripped the quadrant of the handwheel, and twisted. After two turns it began to spin more easily until it hit the stops and he could push the cover open. A thin stream of water spilled inside the sub, and the cramped passengers thankfully inhaled the pure, clean air. For some it was their first trip to the surface in months.

Giordino climbed through the hatch and into the small ovalshaped tower that protected the opening from the waves. He’d expected to find an empty ocean, but as he scanned the horizons his mouth gaped in horror and astonishment.

Less than fifty meters away a junk, the classic Foochow Chinese sailing ship, was bearing down on the floating submersible. Square projecting deck over the bow and high oval-like stern, it carried three masts with square matting sails stretched by bamboo strips and a modern type jib. The painted eyeballs on the bows seemed to rise up and peer down at Giordino.

For a brief instant, Giordino could not believe the incredulity of the encounter. Of all the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, he’d surfaced at precisely the right spot to be rammed by a ship. He leaned over the sub’s tower and shouted inside.

“Everybody out! Hurry!”

Two of the junk’s crew spotted the turquoise submersible as it rose on a swell, and they began yelling at their helmsman to steer hard to starboard. But the gap was almost closed. Pushed by a brisk breeze, the gleaming teak hull bore down on the people spilling out of the sub and leaping into the water.

Nearer it came, the spray flying from the bows, the massive rudder swinging hard against the current. The crew of the junk stood rooted at the railing, staring in amazement at the unexpected appearance of the submersible in their path, fearful of an impact that could shatter the junk’s bow and send it to the bottom.

The surprise, the reaction time of the spotters before they shouted a warning, the delay of the helmsman before he understood and twisted a modern wheel that replaced the traditional tiller, all worked toward an inevitable collision. Too late the ungainly vessel went into an agonizingly slow turn.

The shadow of the great projecting bow fell over Giordino as he grasped the outstretched hand from the last man inside. He was in the act of heaving him out when the junk’s bow raised on a swell and came down on the stern of the submersible. There was no loud tearing noise of a crash, there was hardly a noise at all, except a soft splash followed by gurgling as the sub rolled to port and the water poured in through the open hatch.

Then came shouting on the decks of the junk as the crew pulled on the sails, dropping them like venetian blinds. The ship’s engine coughed to life and was thrown into full astern as life rings were thrown over the side.

Giordino was pitched away from the junk as it slipped past only an arm’s length away, yanking the last passenger through the hatch, grating the skin from his knees, and falling backward, forced underwater by the body weight of the man he saved. He had the foresight to keep his mouth closed but took saltwater up his nose. He snorted clear and gazed around. Thankfully, he counted six heads bobbing on the swells, some floating easily, some swimming for the life rings.

But the submersible had quickly filled and lost its buoyancy. Giordino watched in rage and frustration as the deep-sea craft slid under a swell stern-first and headed for the bottom.

He looked up at the passing junk and read the name on her ornately painted stern. She was called Shanghai Shelly. He swore a storm at the incredible display of dirty luck. How was it possible, he cursed, to be rammed by the only ship within hundreds of kilometers? He felt guilty and devastated for failing his friend Pitt.

He only knew that he must commandeer the second sub, dive to the bottom, and rescue Pitt no matter how vain the attempt. They had been closer than brothers, he owed too much to the maverick adventurer to let him go without a fight. He could never forget the many times Pitt had come through for him, times when he thought all hope had vanished. But first things first.

He looked about. “If you’re injured, raise a hand,” he called out.

Only one hand went up—from a young geologist. “I think I have a sprained ankle.”

“If that’s all you’ve got,” grunted Giordino, “consider yourself blessed.”

The junk came about and slowed, coming to a stop ten meters to the windward of the sub’s survivors. An older man with snow-white hair in a windblown mass and a long curling white mustache bent over the railing. He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “Is anyone hurt? Shall we lower a boat?”

“Drop your gangway,” Giordino directed. “We’ll climb aboard.” Then he added, “Keep a sharp watch. We’ve another sub about to surface.”

“I hear you.”

Within five minutes of the exchange, all of the NUMA crew were standing on the deck of the junk, all except the geologist with the bad ankle who was being lifted by a net over the side. The man who had hailed them walked up and spread out his hands apologetically.

“God, I’m sorry you lost your vessel. We didn’t see you until it was too late.”

“Not your fault,” said Giordino, stepping forward. “We came up almost under your keel. Your lookouts were more alert than we had any right to expect.”

“Was anyone lost?”

“No, we’re all accounted for.”

“Thank God for that. This has been one crazy day. We picked another man out of the water not twenty kilometers to the west. He’s in a bad way. Says his name is Jimmy Knox. He one of your men?”

“No,” Giordino said. “The rest of my people are following in another submersible.”

“I’ve ordered my crew to keep their eyes peeled.”

“You’re most courteous,” Giordino said mechanically, his mind taking one step at a time.

The stranger who seemed to be in command glanced around the open sea, a puzzled look on his face. “Where are you all coming from?”

“Explanations later. Can I borrow your radio?”

“Of course. By the way, my name is Owen Murphy.”

“Al Giordino.”

“Right through there, Mr. Giordino,” said Murphy, wisely putting his curiosity on hold. He motioned toward a doorway in the large cabin on the quarterdeck. “While you’re occupied, I’ll see your men get into some dry clothes.”

“Much obliged,” Giordino threw over his shoulder as he hurried aft.

More than once, after the narrow escape from the submersible, the picture of Pitt and Plunkett standing helpless as millions of tons of water thundered down on them flashed through Giordino’s mind. He was coldly aware that he was probably already too late, the chances of their being alive were somewhere between zero and nonexistent. But the thought of abandoning them, giving them up for dead, was never remotely considered. If anything, he was more determined than ever to return to the seabed, regardless of the nightmare he might find.

The NUMA submersible piloted by Dave Lowden surfaced half a kilometer off the junk’s beam. Thanks to the skilled ship handling of Murphy’s helmsman, Shanghai Shelly came to a smart stop less than two meters from the sub’s hatch tower. This time, all the submersible’s crew, except Lowden, stepped aboard dry.

Giordino rushed back on deck after alerting Admiral Sandecker of the situation and advising the pilot of the flying boat to land alongside the junk. He stared straight down at Lowden, who was standing half in and half out of the sub.

“Stand by,” hailed Giordino. “I want to take her back down.”

Lowden waved negatively. “No can do. We developed a leak in the battery casing. Four of them shorted. Not nearly enough power left for another dive.”

Lowden’s voice trailed away in icy silence. In the blank numbness of total failure, Giordino struck his fist against the railing. The NUMA scientists and engineers, Stacy and Salazar, even the crew of the junk, stared mutely into the beaten expression that lined his face.

“Not fair,” he muttered in a sudden seething anger. “Not fair.”

He stood there a long time, staring down into the unsympathetic sea as if penetrating its depths. He was still standing there when Admiral Sandecker’s aircraft appeared from the clouded sky and circled the drifting junk.

Stacy and Salazar were shown to the cabin where Jimmy Knox lay barely conscious. A man with balding gray hair and a warm twinkle in his eyes rose from a chair by the bed and nodded.

“Hello, I’m Harry Deerfield.”

“Is it all right to come in?” Stacy asked.

“Do you know Mr. Knox?”

“We’re friends from the same British survey ship,” answered Salazar. “How is he?”

“Resting comfortably,” said Deerfield, but the expression in his face suggested anything but a fast recovery.

“Are you a doctor?”

“Pediatrics actually. I took a six-week hiatus to help Owen Murphy sail his boat from the builder to San Diego.” He turned to Knox. “You up to some visitors, Jimmy?”

Knox, pale and still, lifted the fingers of one hand in the affirmative. His face was swollen and blistered, but his eyes looked strong, and they brightened noticeably when he recognized Stacy and Salazar. “Bless the Lord you made it safely,” he rasped. “I never thought I’d see the two of you again. Where’s that mad Plunkett?”

“He’ll be along soon,” said Stacy, giving Salazar a keep-quiet look. “What happened, Jimmy? What happened to the Invincible?”

Knox weakly shook his head. “I don’t know. I think there was some kind of explosion. One minute I was talking to you over the underwater phone, the next the whole ship was ripped apart and burning. I remember trying to raise you, but there was no response. And then I was climbing over debris and dead bodies as the ship sank under me.”

“Gone?” Salazar muttered, refusing to accept what he heard. “The ship sunk and our crew gone?”

Knox gave an imperceptible nod. “I watched her go to the bottom. I shouted and kept a constant lookout for the others who might have survived. The sea was empty. I don’t know how long I floated or how far before Mr. Murphy and his crew spotted me and picked me up. They searched the immediate area but found nothing. They said I must be the only survivor.”

“But what of the two ships that were nearby when we began our dive?” asked Stacy.

“I saw no sign of them. They had vanished too.

Knox’s voice died to a whisper, and it was obvious he was losing a battle to keep from slipping into unconsciousness. The will was there but the body was exhausted. His eyes closed and his head rolled slightly to one side.

Dr. Deerfield motioned Stacy and Salazar toward the door. “You can talk again later, after he’s rested.”

“He will recover?” asked Stacy softly.

“I can’t say,” Deerfield hedged in good medical tradition.

“What exactly is wrong with him?”

“Two or more cracked ribs as far as I can tell without an X ray. Swollen ankle, either a sprain or a fracture. Contusions, first-degree burns. Those are injuries I can cope with. The rest of his symptoms are not what I’d expect from a man who survived a shipwreck.”

“What are you talking about?” Salazar asked.

“Fever, arterial hypotension, a fancy name for low blood pressure, severe erythema, stomach cramps, strange blistering.”

“And the cause?”

“Not exactly my field,” Deerfield said heavily. “I’ve only read a couple of articles in medical journals. But I believe I’m safe in saying Jimmy’s most serious condition was caused by exposure to a supralethal dose of radiation.”

Stacy was silent a moment, then, “Nuclear radiation?”

Deerfield nodded. “I wish I was wrong, but the facts bear me out.”

“Surely you can do something to save him?”

Deerfield gestured around the cabin. “Look around you,” he said sourly. “Does this look like a hospital? I came on this cruise as a deckhand. My medical kit contains only pills and bandages for emergency treatment. He can’t be airlifted by helicopter until we’re closer to land. And even then I doubt whether he can be saved with the therapeutic treatments currently available.”

“Hang them!” Knox cried, startling everyone. His eyes blinked open suddenly, gazing through the people in the cabin at some unknown image beyond the bulkhead. “Hang the murdering bastards!”

They stared at him in astonishment. Salazar stood shaken. Stacy and Deerfield rushed toward the bed to calm Knox as he feebly tried to lift himself to an upright position.

“Hang the bastards!” Knox repeated with a vengeance. It was as though he was uttering a curse. “They’ll murder again. Hang them!”

But before Deerfield could inject him with a sedative, Knox stiffened, his eyes glistened for an instant, and then a misty film coated them and he fell back, gave a great heaving sigh, and went limp.

Deerfield swiftly applied cardiopulmonary resuscitation, fearful that Knox was too devastated by acute radiation sickness to bring back. He continued until he was panting from fatigue and sweating streams in the humid atmosphere. Finally he acknowledged sadly that he had done everything within his limited power. No man or miracle could bring Jimmy Knox back.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured between breaths.

As if under a hypnotic spell, Stacy and Salazar slowly walked from the cabin. Salazar remained quiet while Stacy began to softly cry. After a few moments, she wiped away the tears with her hand and straightened.

“He saw something,” she murmured.

Salazar looked at her. “Saw what?”

“He knew, in some incredible way he knew.” She turned and looked through the open doorway to the silent figure on the bunk. “Just before the end, Jimmy could see who was responsible for the horrible mass death and destruction.

11

YOU COULD TELL from his body, slim almost to the state of emaciation, that he was a fitness and nutrition fanatic. He was short, chin and chest thrust out like a banty rooster, and nattily dressed in a light blue golf shirt with matching pants and a Panama straw hat pulled tight over closely cropped red hair to keep it from blowing away. He had an exactingly trimmed red Vandyke beard that came to a point so sharp you’d swear he could stab flesh with it if he lunged suddenly.

He stormed up the gangway of the junk, a huge cigar poked in his mouth throwing sparks from the breeze, as regally as if he was holding court. If style awards were handed out for dramatic entrances, Admiral James Sandecker, Director of the National Underwater and Marine Agency, would have won hands down.

His face looked strained from the grievous news he’d received from Giordino while in flight. As soon as his feet hit Shanghai Shelly’s deck, he raised his hand at the pilot of the flying boat, who gave an acknowledging wave. The aircraft turned into the wind and bounced forward over the crests of the waves until it was airborne and soaring in a graceful bank southeast toward the Hawaiian Islands.

Giordino and Murphy stepped forward. Sandecker focused his gaze on the junk’s owner. ,

“Hello, Owen. I never expected to meet you out here.”

Murphy smiled and shook hands. “Likewise, Jim. Welcome aboard. It’s good to see you.” He paused and pointed to the grimfaced NUMA team who were crowded around them on the open deck. “Now maybe someone will tell me what that big light and thunder show was on the horizon yesterday, and why all these people are popping up in the middle of the ocean.”

Sandecker did not reply directly. He looked about the deck and up at the draped sails. “What have you got yourself here’?”

“Had it custom built in Shanghai. My crew and I were sailing her to Honolulu and then on to San Diego, where I plan to dock her.”

“You know each other?” Giordino asked finally.

Sandecker nodded. “This old pirate and I went to Annapolis together. Only Owen was smarter. He resigned from the Navy and launched an electronics company. Now he’s got more money than the U.S. Treasury.”

Murphy smiled. “Don’t I wish.”

Sandecker suddenly turned serious. “What news of the base since you briefed me over the radio?” he asked Giordino.

“We’re afraid it’s gone,” Giordino replied quietly. “Underwater phone communications from our remaining sub have gone unanswered. Keith Harris thinks the major shock wave must have struck shortly after we evacuated. As I reported, there wasn’t enough space to evacuate everybody in two subs. Pitt and a British marine scientist volunteered to stay below.”

“What’s being done to save them?” Sandecker demanded.

Giordino looked visibly cast down, as though all emotion had been drained away. “We’ve run out of options.”

Sandecker went cold in the face. “You fell down on the job, mister. You led me to believe you were returning in the backup submersible.”

“That was before Lowden surfaced with shorted batteries!” Giordino snapped back resentfully. “With the first sub sunk and the second inoperable, we were stonewalled.”

Sandecker’s expression softened, the coldness was gone, his eyes saddened. He realized Giordino had been dogged by ill luck. To even suggest the little Italian had not tried his best was wrong, and he regretted it. But he was shaken by Pitt’s apparent loss too.

To him, Pitt was the son he never had. He’d have ordered out an entire army of specially trained men and secret equipment the American public had no idea existed if fate granted him another thirty-six hours. Admiral Sandecker had that kind of power in the nation’s capital. He didn’t arrive where he was because he’d answered a help wanted ad in the Washington Post.

He said, “Any chance the batteries can be repaired?”

Giordino nodded over the side at the submersible rolling in the swells twenty meters away, tethered on a stern line to Shanghai Shelly. “Lowden is working like a madman trying for a quick fix, but he’s not optimistic.”

“If anyone is to blame, it’s me,” Murphy said solemnly.

“Pitt could still be alive,” said Giordino, ignoring Murphy. “He’s not a man who dies easily.”

“Yes.” Sandecker paused, then went on almost absently. “He’s proven that many times in the past.”

Giordino stared at the admiral, a spark glowing in his eyes. “If we can get another submersible out here…”

“The Deep Quest can dive to ten thousand meters,” Sandecker said, coming back on keel. “She’s sitting on our dock in Los Angeles Harbor. I can have her loaded aboard an Air Force C-Five and on her way here by sundown.”

“I didn’t know a C-Five could land on water,” Murphy interrupted.

“They can’t,” Sandecker said definitely. “The Deep Quest, all twelve metric tons of her, will be air-dropped out the cargo doors.” He glanced at his watch. “I’d guess about eight hours from now.”

“You’re going to drop a twelve-ton submersible out of an airplane by parachute?”

“Why the hell not? It’d take a week to get here by boat.”

Giordino stared at the deck thoughtfully. “We could eliminate a mass of problems if we worked off a support ship with launch and retrieval capacity.”

“The Sounder is the closest ocean survey ship to our area that fits the picture. She’s sonar-mapping the seafloor south of the Aleutians. I’ll order her captain to cut his mission and head toward our position as fast as he can push her.”

“How can I be of help?” asked Murphy. “After sinking your sub, the least I can do is offer the services of my ship and crew.”

Giordino smiled inwardly as Sandecker lifted his arms and gripped Murphy’s shoulders. Laying on the hands, Pitt used to call it. Sandecker didn’t just ask an unsuspecting subject for a favor, he made his victims feel as if they were being baptized.

“Owen,” the admiral said in his most reverent tone, “NUMA will be in your debt if we can use your junk as a fleet command ship.”

Owen Murphy was no slouch when it came to recognizing a con job. “What fleet?” he asked with feigned innocence.

“Why, half the United States Navy is converging on us,” answered Sandecker, as if his secret briefing by Raymond Jordan was common knowledge. “I wouldn’t be surprised if one of their nuclear submarines was cruising under our hull this minute.”

It was, Murphy mused, the craziest tale he’d ever heard in his life. But no one on board Shanghai Shelly, excepting the admiral himself, had the slightest notion of how prophetic his words were. Nor were they aware that the rescue attempt was the opening act for the main event.

Twenty kilometers away, the attack submarine Tucson was running at a depth of 400 meters and closing on the junk’s position. She was early. Her skipper, Commander Beau Morton, had driven her hard after receiving orders at Pearl Harbor to reach the explosion area at full speed. On arrival, his mission was to run tests on underwater radiological contamination and salvage any floating debris that could be safely brought aboard.

Morton casually leaned against a bulkhead with an empty coffee cup dangling in one hand, watching Lieutenant Commander Sam Hauser of the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory. The Navy scientist was indifferent to Morton’s presence. He was intent on monitoring his radiochemical instruments and computing beta and gamma intensities received from probes trailing behind the submarine.

“Are we glowing in the dark yet?” asked Morton sarcastically.

“Radioactivity is pretty unevenly distributed,” replied Hauser. “But well below maximum permissible exposure. Heaviest concentration is above.”

“A surface detonation?”

“A ship, yes, not a submarine. Most of the contamination was airborne.”

“Any danger to that Chinese junk north of us?”

Hauser shook his head. “They should have been too far upwind to receive anything but a trace dosage.”

“And now that they’re drifting through the detonation area?” Morton persisted.

“Due to the high winds and turbulent seas during and immediately after the explosion,” Hauser explained patiently, “the worst of the radiation was carried into the atmosphere and far to the east. They should be within safe limits where they are.”

The compartment phone gave off a soft hi-tech chime. Hauser picked, it up. “Yes?”

“Is the captain there, sir?”

“Hold on.” He handed the receiver to Morton.

“This is the captain.”

“Sir, Sonarman Kaiser. I have a contact. I think you should listen to it.”

“Be right there.” Morton hung up the phone, wondering abstractedly why Kaiser didn’t routinely call over the intercom.

The commander found Sonarman First Class Richard Kaiser leaning over his console listening through his earphones, a bewildered expression furrowing his brow. Morton’s executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Ken Fazio, was pressing a spare set of phones against his ears. He looked downright dumbstruck.

“You have a contact?” asked Morton.

Kaiser didn’t answer immediately but went on listening for a few more moments. At last he pulled up the phone over his left ear and muttered, “This is crazy.”

“Crazy?”

“I’m getting a signal that shouldn’t be.”

Fazio shook his head as if agreeing. “Beats me.”

“Care to let me in on your secret?” Morton asked impatiently.

“I’ll put it on the speaker,” said Kaiser.

Morton and several officers and men who had received the news of a strange contact by osmosis gathered around the sonar enclosure, staring up at the speaker expectantly. The sounds were not perfect but they were clear enough to be understood. No high-pitched squeak of whales, no whirring crick of propeller cavitation, but rather voices singing.

And every night when the starfish came out.

I’d hug and kiss her so.

Oh, what a time I had with Minnie the Mermaid

Down in her seamy bungalow.

Morton fixed Kaiser with a cold stare. “What’s the gag?”

“No gag, sir.”

“It must be coming from that Chinese junk.”

“No, sir, not the junk or any other surface vessel.”

“Another submarine?” Morton inquired skeptically. “A Russian maybe?”

“Not unless they’re building them ten times tougher than ours,” said Fazio.

“What range and bearing?” Morton demanded.

Kaiser was hesitant. He had the look of a little boy who was in trouble and afraid to tell the truth.

“No horizontal compass bearing, sir. The singing is coming from the bottom of the sea, five thousand meters straight down.”

12

YELLOWISH OOZE, MADE up of microscopic skeletons from a marine plant called the diatom, slowly drifted away in serpentine clouds, shrouded by the total blackness of the abyssal deep.

The bottom of the gorge where the NUMA mining station once stood had been filled by silt and rock slides into a broken, irregular plain littered with half-buried boulders and scattered wreckage. There should have been a deathly silence after the final rumblings of the earthquake died away, but a warped chorus of “Minnie the Mermaid” rose from under the desolated wasteland and rippled out into the liquid void.

If one could have walked over the debris field to the sound source, they’d have found a single antenna shaft, bent and twisted, poking up through the mud. A grayish-pink ratfish briefly inspected the antenna but, finding it unsavory, flicked its pointed tail and lazily swam into the dark.

Almost before the ratfish disappeared, the silt a few meters from the antenna began to stir, swirling in an ever widening vortex that was weirdly illuminated from below. Suddenly a shaft of light burst through the ooze, joined by a mechanical hand shaped like a scoop and articulated at the wrist. The steel apparition paused and straightened like a prairie dog standing on its haunches and sniffing the horizon for a coyote.

Then the scoop arched downward, gouging through the seabed, excavating a deep trench that began to ascend at one end like a ramp. When it struck a boulder too large to fit in the scoop, a great metal claw appeared magically alongside. The claw’s talonlike pincers bit around the boulder, yanked it free from the sediment, and dropped it clear of the trench in a billowing mud cloud. The claw then swung clear, and the scoop continued digging.

“Nice work, Mr. Pitt,” said Plunkett, grinning with relief. “You’ll have us out and driving through the countryside by teatime.”

Pitt lay back in a reclining seat, staring up at a TV monitor with the same attentive concern he usually reserved for a football game. “We’re not on the road yet.”

“Boarding one of your Deep Sea Mining Vehicles and running it into the air pressure lock before the major quake hit was a stroke of genius.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Pitt muttered while programming the vehicle’s computer to slightly alter the angle of the scoop. “Call it theft of Mr. Spock’s logic.”

“The air-lock walls held,” Plunkett argued. “But for fickle providence, we’d have been crushed like bugs.”

“The chamber was built to withstand four times the pressure of the other project structures,” Pitt said with a quiet unarguable assertion. “Fickle providence, as you call it, gave us time to pressurize the lock, open the outer door, and move forward enough for the scoop and claw to operate before the avalanche struck. Otherwise we’d be trapped for longer than I care to think about.”

“Oh, bloody hell.” Plunkett laughed. There was little that fazed him. “What does it matter so long as we cheat the grave?”

“I wish you wouldn’t use the word ‘grave.’ “

“Sorry.” Plunkett sat in a seat beside and slightly to the rear of Pitt. He stared around the interior of the DSMV. “A damned fine machine. What’s its power source?”

“A small nuclear reactor.”

“Nuclear, heh? You Yanks never cease to amaze me. I’ll wager we can drive this monster right across the bottom and onto Waikiki Beach.”

“You’d win your bet,” said Pitt with a faint grin. “Big John’s reactor and life-support systems could get us there. The only problem being a flat-out speed of five kilometers per hour. We’d die of starvation a good week before we arrived.”

“You didn’t pack a lunch?” Plunkett asked humorously.

“Not even an apple.”

Plunkett gave Pitta dry look. “Even death would be a treat if I didn’t have to hear that blasted tune again.”

“You don’t care for ‘Minnie’?” Pitt asked in mock surprise.

“After hearing the chorus for the twentieth time, no.”

“With the telephone housing smashed, our only contact with the surface is the acoustic radio transmitter. Not nearly enough range for conversation, but it’s all we’ve got. I can offer you Strauss waltzes or the big band sounds of the forties, but they wouldn’t be appropriate.”

“I don’t think much of your musical inventory,” Plunkett grunted. Then he looked at Pitt. “What’s wrong with Strauss?”

“Instrumental,” Pitt answered. “Distorted violin music can sound like whales or several other aquatic mammals through water. Minnie is a vocal. If anyone on the surface is listening, they’ll know someone down here is still sucking air. No matter how garbled, there’s no mistaking good old human babble.”

“For all the good that will do,” said Plunkett. “If a rescue mission is launched, there’s no way we can transfer from this vehicle to a submersible without a pressure lock. A commodity totally lacking on your otherwise remarkable tractor. If I may speak realistically, I fail to see anything in the near future but our inevitable demise.”

“I wish you wouldn’t use the word ‘demise.’ “

Plunkett reached into a pocket of his big woolen sweater and produced a flask. “Only about four swigs left, but it ought to keep our spirits up for a while.”

Pitt took the offered flask as a muffled rumble shook the big tracked vehicle. The scoop had screeched into a mass of stone and attempted to lift it clear. Far beyond its load safety level, it struggled and groaned to hoist the debris. Like an Olympic weight lifter straining for the gold, the scoop heaved its massive burden above the seafloor and dumped it in a growing mound along the trench.

The outside lights failed to penetrate the mud clouds, and the monitors inside the control cabin showed only constantly merging colors of yellow and gray. But the computer monitor gave a three-dimensional sonar image that displayed the extent of the excavation.

Fully five hours had elapsed since Pitt began the digging operation. At last he could see an enhanced display showing a narrow but reasonably clear corridor slanting toward the surface of the seabed.

“We’ll scrape some paint off the fenders, but I think we can squeeze through,” Pitt said confidently.

Plunkett’s face lit up. “Kick her in the butt, Mr. Pitt. I’m sick to death of staring at this filthy muck.”

Pitt’s head tilted slightly and he gave a wink of one green eye. “As you wish, Mr. Plunkett.” He took over manual control from the computer and rubbed his hands like a pianist about to play. “Cross your fingers the tracks get a firm grip on the sediment or we’ll have to take up permanent residence.”

He gently eased the throttle control forward. The wide track crawlers on the sides of Big John slowly began to move, churning through the soft ooze, turning faster as Pitt increased the power. Gradually they inched forward. Then one track caught and gripped on a layer of small stones, stewing the giant mining machine into the opposite side of the trench. Pitt fought to correct, but the wall gave way and the mudflow spread over one side of the vehicle.

He rammed the throttle against its stop, then pulled back as he shifted into reverse, then full forward again as he rocked Big John back and forth. The compact nuclear reactor had the power, but the tracks could not find the traction. Rock and silt flew from the pivoted cleats as they ripped through the slimy gumbo.

Still the DSMV remained stuck in its narrow prison.

“Maybe we should call a halt and scoop the mud off,” said Plunkett, dead serious. “Or better yet, sit back and review the situation.”

Pitt spared a few moments to give the big Britisher a hard, icy stare. Plunkett swore Pitt’s eyes burned out a goodly number of his brain cells.

“A lot of my people and I worked hard and long to build the first deep-water community,” he said in a voice that bordered on satanic. “And someone, somewhere, is responsible for its destruction. They’re also the cause behind the loss of your submersible, your support ship, and its crew. That’s the situation. Now, speaking for myself, I’m going to bust through this crap if I have to tear the guts out of this thing, get to the surface in one piece, find the scum behind the disaster, and punch their teeth down their lungs.”

Then he turned and sent the tracks thrashing through the encasement of silt and rock. With an awkward wobble, the great machine dug in and lurched a meter forward, then two meters.

Plunkett sat like a tree, thoroughly intimidated yet quite convinced. By God, he thought, I think the man might damn well do it!

13

EIGHT THOUSAND KILOMETERS distant, deep in a shaft carved out of volcanic rock, a crew of diggers stepped aside as two men moved forward and peered through an excavated break in a concrete wall. A sickening stench drifted from the opening, filling the twenty-man mining crew with a dread of the unknown.

The floodlights illuminating the narrow shaft cast eerie distorted shadows in what appeared to be a large tunnel beyond the one-meter-thick concrete. Inside, an old rusty truck could be distinguished, surrounded by what looked to be a vast bed of graybrown scrubwood.

Despite the cool damp air deep under the battle-scarred slopes of Corregidor Island at the entrance to Manila Bay, the two men who peered through the hole were sweating heavily. After years of research, they knew they were on the brink of discovering part of the huge World War II cache of war loot known as “Yamashita’s Gold,” named after General Yamashita Tomoyuki, commander of Japanese forces in the Philippines after October of 1944.

The immense hoard that was seized by the Japanese during the war—from China, the Southeast Asian countries, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines—consisted of thousands of metric tons of exotic gems and jewelry, silver and gold bullion, and Buddhas and Catholic altarpieces encrusted with priceless gems and cast in solid gold.

Manila had been the collection point for future transshipment to Japan, but because of heavy shipping losses in the later stages of the war from American submarines, less than twenty percent of the loot actually arrived in Tokyo. With nowhere to go and faced with certain invasion by the avenging Americans, the Japanese guardians of the treasure were in a dilemma. They weren’t about to give it back to the nations and people they had pillaged. Their only option was to hide the immense hoard in over a hundred different sites on and around the island of Luzon, hoping to return after the war and smuggle it home.

Conservative estimates of the stolen treasure on the current money markets were put at between 450 and 500 billion dollars.

The digging in this particular location on Corregidor, a few hundred meters west and a good kilometer deeper than the lateral tunnel that served as General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters before he was evacuated to Australia, had gone on for four months. Using copies of old OSS maps recently found buried in CIA archives at Langley, American and Philippine intelligence agents worked as a team directing the excavation. It was exhausting and very slow going.

The map instructions were deciphered from an ancient Japanese dialect unused for a thousand years. The shaft to the treasure location had to be approached from a side angle because the original access tunnel was booby-trapped with several one and two-thousand-pound bombs and designed to collapse from a direct entry. The penetration through the twenty-mile labyrinth burrowed by the Japanese during their occupation of Luzon had to be precisely calculated or the miners might have wasted months by excavating on the wrong level and missing the treasure tunnel by centimeters.

The taller of the two men, Frank Mancuso, gestured for a large flashlight. One was passed, and he thrust it through the breach in the wall. His face turned pale in the yellow half-light. With numbed horror he realized what the scrubwood really was.

Rico Acosta, a mining engineer attached to the Philippine security forces, moved in closer to Mancuso. “What do you see, Frank?”

“Bones,” Mancuso said, his voice just above a whisper. “Skeletons. God, there must be hundreds of them in there.” He stepped back and nodded at Acosta.

The short little man motioned the diggers toward the opening. “Widen it up,” he ordered.

It took less than an hour for the crew of Philippine miners to smash a hole with sledgehammers large enough for a man to pass through. The cement forming the tunnel walls was of poor quality, crusty and crumbling, and easy to break away. It was looked upon as a piece of luck, since none of them wished to run the risk of a cave-in by using explosives.

Mancuso sat off to one side and lit a stubby curved pipe while he waited. At forty-two, he still kept the long-limbed, thin body of a basketball player. His long brown hair draped around the nape of his neck in oily strands badly in need of washing, and his soft, round Germanic face seemed better suited to an accountant than a get-dirty engineer. His blue eyes had a dreamy quality that never seemed to focus, and yet they took in everything in view and then some.

A graduate of the Colorado School of Mines, he’d spent his early years wandering the world prospecting and working mines in search of precious gems. Opals in Australia, emeralds in Colombia, and rubies in Tanzania, with varying degrees of success. There was also a fruitless three-year hunt on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido for the rarest of the rare, red painite.

Shortly before he reached thirty, he was courted and recruited by an obscure intelligence agency in Washington and appointed a special agent under contract. His first assignment was to search for Yamashita’s gold as part of a Philippine security force team.

The excavation was carried out in the strictest secrecy. None of the gold or gems were to be turned over to their former owners. All treasure found was to be kept by the Philippine government to decrease the debt burden and pump up the sagging economy devastated by the incalculable financial rape of the Marcos reign.

His counterpart, Acosta, had also served as a mining engineer before joining the security forces. He was tall for a Filipino, and his eyes indicated more than a trace of Chinese ancestry.

“So the stories are true,” said Acosta.

Mancuso looked up. “Sorry?”

“The Nips forcing Allied prisoners to dig these tunnels, and then burying them alive so they could never reveal the location.”

“It looks that way. We’ll know better when we get inside.”

Acosta lifted his hard hat and wiped one sleeve across his forehead. “My grandfather was in the Fifty-seventh Philippine Scouts. He was taken prisoner and thrown in the Spanish dungeon at Fort Santiago. He never came out. Over two thousand POWs died either from suffocation or starvation. The count was never known.”

Mancuso nodded heavily. “Later generations can’t imagine the ungodly barbarism that stained the Pacific theater of the war.” He drew from the pipe and exhaled a puff of blue smoke before continuing. “The terrible statistic is that fifty-seven percent of the Allied soldiers in Japanese prison camps died, versus only one percent of those held by the Germans.”

“Strange the Japanese didn’t come back and make an all-out effort to snatch the treasure,” said Acosta.

“Groups posing as construction companies did try to obtain contracts for postwar rebuilding so they could covertly excavate for the gold, but once Ferdinand Marcos learned of the treasure, he slammed the door and searched for it himself.”

“And he found some,” added Acosta. “Maybe thirty billion U.S. dollars’ worth, which he smuggled out of the country before he was thrown out of office.”

“Plus what he stole from your own people.”

Acosta spit on the shaft floor disgustedly. “He and his wife were sick with greed. It will take us a hundred years to recover from their rule.”

The foreman of the diggers waved a hand, beckoning them. “You should be able to squeeze through now,” he said.

“Go ahead.” Acosta nodded to Mancuso. “You first.”

The odor was rotten and nauseating. Mancuso tied a bandanna around his lower face and wiggled through the narrow breach in the tunnel wall. He heard a soft snap followed by a splashing sound as his boots met a small puddle. Standing clear, he waited a moment, hearing water dripping from cracks in the arched ceiling. Then he switched his flashlight on, aiming its naked beam downward.

He had stepped on and broken an outstretched bony arm that was attached to a skeleton dressed in the moldering remains of a uniform and covered with slime. A pair of encrusted dog tags lay off to one side of the skull, the tiny chain still strung around the neck.

Mancuso knelt and held one of the tags under the light. He rubbed off the grime with one index finger and thumb until he could make out a name, William A. Miller.

There was an Army serial number, but Mancuso let the tag drop. Once he notified his superior of what he found, a graves registration team would be sent to Corregidor, and William A. Miller and his long-dead comrades would be returned to their homes for honored burial fifty years late.

Mancuso turned and swung the flashlight in a full circle. As far as the beam could reach, the tunnel was carpeted with skeletons, some scattered, some heaped in piles. He’d studied several more ID tags before Acosta entered with a small floodlight on a cord.

“Holy mother of Jesus,” he gasped as he viewed the grisly remains. “An army of the dead.”

“An Allied army,” said Mancuso. “American, Philippine, even a few British and Australian. Looks like the Japs brought prisoners to Manila from other sectors of the war for slave labor.”

“Only God knows the hell they suffered,” Acosta muttered, his face reddening with anger, the bile rising in his throat. He fingered a cross hanging around his neck. “How were they murdered?”

“No sign of bullet injuries. They must have suffocated after being sealed in.”

“Those who gave the orders for this mass execution must pay.”

“They’re probably dead, killed in the slaughter around Manila by MacArthur’s army. And if they’re still breathing, their trail is cold. The Allies in the Pacific were too forgiving. No prolonged manhunt was launched after those responsible for atrocities, like the Jews did with the Nazis. If they haven’t been found and hanged by now, they never will.”

“They must still pay,” Acosta repeated, his anger turned to frustrated hatred.

“Don’t waste thoughts on revenge,” said Mancuso. “Our job is to locate the gold.”

He walked toward the first truck in a long column that stood parked amid the dead. The tires were flattened and the canvas top over the bed had rotted under the constant drip of the water. He jerked down the rusty tailgate and shone his light inside. Except for a litter of wood from broken crates it was empty.

A foreboding began to squeeze Mancuso’s stomach. He rushed to the next truck, carefully stepping around and over the dead, his boots splashing in the slime-covered water. His sweat from the dampness had turned cold. He needed a strong effort of will to go on, a growing fear now of what he might not find.

The second truck was empty, as were the next six. Two hundred meters into the tunnel, he came to a blockage from a cave-in that his miner’s eye recognized as caused by explosives. But the shocker was the sight of a small auto house trailer whose modern aluminum construction did not fit in the time frame of the 1940s. There were no signs on the sides, but Mancuso noted the manufacturer’s markings on the tires.

He climbed a metal stand of steps and stopped in the doorway, playing the beam of his flashlight around the interior. It was furnished as an office, the kind often seen on construction sites.

Acosta came up, followed by four of his men who unreeled the cable to his floodlight. He stood back and lit the entire trailer in a bright halo.

“Where in hell did this come from?” Acosta said in astonishment.

“Bring your light inside,” said Mancuso, his worst fear realized.

With the added brightness they could see the trailer was clean. The desks were uncluttered, the wastebaskets emptied, and no ashtrays were to be seen anywhere. The only sign of previous occupancy was a construction worker’s hardhat perched on a hook and a large blackboard hung on one wall. Mancuso studied the lined columns. The numerals were in Arabic, while the headings were written in katakana symbols.

“A schedule?” asked Acosta.

“An inventory of the treasure.”

Acosta sank into a chair in back of a desk. “Gone, all of it smuggled away.”

“About twenty-five years ago, according to a date on the board.”

“Marcos?” asked Acosta. “He must have gotten here first.”

“No, not Marcos,” Mancuso answered as though he’d always known the truth. “The Japanese. They returned, took the gold, and left us with the bones.”

14

CURTIS MEEKER PARKED his wife’s Mercury Cougar and casually strode the three blocks to Ford’s Theater between E and F streets on Tenth. He buttoned his overcoat against the brisk fall air and fell in step with a group of senior citizens who were on a late Saturday evening walking tour of the capital city.

Their guide stopped them in front of the theater where John Wilkes Booth had shot Abraham Lincoln and gave a brief lecture before taking them across the street to the Petersen House where the President had died. Unobtrusively, Meeker slipped away, flipped his federal shield at the doorman, and passed into the lobby of the theater. He conversed briefly with the manager and then sat down on a sofa, where he appeared to be calmly reading a program.

To any late first-nighters who quickly passed by Meeker to their seats, he looked like an indifferent theatergoer who was bored with the restaging of a late-nineteenth-century play based on the Spanish-American War and preferred to sit it out in the lobby.

Meeker was definitely not a tourist or a theatergoer. His title was Deputy Director of Advanced Technical Operations, and he seldom went anywhere at night except to his office, where he studied satellite intelligence photos.

He was basically a shy man who rarely spoke more than one or two sentences at a time, but he was highly respected by intelligence circles as the best satellite photo analyst in the business. He was what women refer to as a nice-looking man, black hair specked with gray, kind face, easy smile, and eyes that reflected friendliness.

While his attention seemed locked on the program, one hand slipped into a pocket and pressed a button on a transmitter.

Inside the theater Raymond Jordan was fighting to stay awake. Under his wife’s sideways glare he yawned as a defense against the hundred-year-old dialogue. Mercifully, to the audience sitting in the old-style hard seats, the plays and acts at Ford’s Theatre were short. Jordan twisted to a more comfortable position in the hard wooden seat and allowed his mind to drift from the play to a fishing trip he’d planned for the following day.

Suddenly his revery was broken by three soft beeps on a digital watch on his wrist. It was what was called a Delta watch because of the code it received, and was labeled as a Raytech so it looked ordinary and wouldn’t stand out. He cupped one hand over the crystal display that lit up on the dial. The Delta code alerted him to the severity of the situation and indicated someone would fetch or meet him.

He whispered an excuse to his wife and made his way to the aisle and then to the lobby. When Jordan recognized Meeker, his face clouded. Though he welcomed any interruption, he was not happy that it concerned some kind of crisis.

“What’s the situation?” he asked without preamble.

“We know which ship carried the bomb,” answered Meeker, rising to his feet.

“We can’t talk here.”

“I’ve arranged with the manager for the theater’s executive suite. I can brief you privately in there.”

Jordan knew the room. He led off with Meeker trailing and entered an anteroom furnished in 1860s decor. He closed the door and stared at Meeker. “Are you certain? There is no mistake?”

Meeker shook his head solemnly. “Photos from an earlier weather bird showed three ships in the area. We activated our old Sky King intelligence satellite as it passed over after the explosion and factored out two of the ships.”

“How?”

“With computer enhancement of the radar-sonar system that enables us to see through water as though it was transparent.”

“Have you briefed your people?”

“Yes.

Jordan stared Meeker in the eye. “Are you satisfied with your conclusions?”

“I haven’t a doubt,” Meeker replied squarely.

“The proof is solid?”

“Yes.”

“You know you’ll share the responsibility if you’ve screwed up.”

“As soon as I’ve made my report, I’m going home and sleep like a baby… Well almost.”

Jordan relaxed and settled into a chair beside a table. He looked up at Meeker expectantly. “Okay, what have you got?”

Meeker pulled a leather-bound file folder from a deep pocket inside his overcoat and laid it on the table.

Jordan smiled. “You don’t believe in briefcases, I see.”

“I like my hands free,” Meeker said with a shrug. He opened the file and spread out five photographs. The first three showed the ships on the surface with incredible detail. “Here you see the Norwegian passenger-cargo liner circling the drifting Japanese auto carrier. Twelve kilometers away, the British survey ship is in the act of lowering a submersible into the sea.”

“The before shot,” said Jordan.

Meeker nodded. “The next two are from the Sky King taken after the explosion, revealing two shattered hulks on the bottom. The third has disintegrated. Except for a few scattered pieces of her engines on the seabed, there is virtually nothing left of her.”

“Which one was she?” Jordan asked slowly, as if anticipating the answer.

“We made positive IDs on the two that sank intact.” Meeker paused to turn from the photographs and look into Jordan’s eyes as if to underscore his answer. “The ship that was transporting the bomb was the Japanese auto carrier.”

Jordan sighed and leaned back in the chair. “It doesn’t come as a great shock that Japan has the bomb. They’ve had the technology for years.”

“The giveaway came when they built a liquid-metal fastbreeder reactor. Fissioning with fast neutrons, the breeder creates more plutonium fuel than it burns. The first step in producing nuclear weaponry.”

“You’ve done your homework,” said Jordan.

“I have to know what to look for.”

“Like an elusive, yet-to-be-discovered factory for nuclear weapons production,” Jordan said acidly.

Meeker looked at him unwaveringly, then smiled. “Your ground intelligence hasn’t got a clue where they’re making them either.

“True,” Jordan admitted. “The Japs have accomplished an incredible cover-up. I’ve a hunch their government leaders are in the dark as well.”

“If their production facility was aboveground, our new satellite detection array would have nailed it.”

“Odd there are no areas of unusual radioactivity.’

“We’ve detected nothing outside their electrical power reactors and a nuclear waste dump near a coastal town called Rokota.”

“I’ve seen the reports,” said Jordan. “They sank a four-thousand-meter shaft to throw their waste. Could it be we’ve overlooked something?”

Meeker gave a negative shake of his head. “We’ve yet to detect indications of extensive construction or the right type of traffic in and out of the area.”

“Damn!” Jordan snapped. “Japan freely sails the oceans with nuclear bombs destined for United States ports while we sit on our thumbs without knowing the site where they’re manufactured, their final destinations, or the plan behind the whole operation.”

“You did say ‘bombs,’ plural?” asked Meeker.

“The readings from the seismographic center in Colorado show there was a second detonation a millisecond after the first.”

“Too bad you couldn’t have launched a major operation to find the answers ten years ago.”

“With what funding?” Jordan grunted. “The last administration gutted intelligence-gathering budgets. All that politicians are interested in are Russia and the Middle East. The last people the State Department will allow us to probe are our good buddies in Japan. Two retired agents we’ve had to keep under contract are all we’re allowed there. Israel is another nation that’s off limits. You wouldn’t believe the times we were ordered to look the other way while the Mossad pulled off deceptions the Arabs took the blame for.”

“The President will have to give you full discretionary power when you show him the seriousness of the situation.”

“I’ll know first thing in the morning after I brief him.” Jordan’s smooth, polished mask was showing a tiny crack, and his voice turned ice cold. “No matter how we attack this thing, we’ll be playing catch-up. What scares me, really puts the fear of God in me, is that we’re already too late to cut off the plot in midstream.”

The sounds of voices came through the door. The play was over and the audience was flowing into the lobby.

Jordan came to his feet. “I’ll have to break off and make an appearance or my wife will play iceberg on the ride home. Thanks for alerting me to your bird’s discovery.”

“There is one more thing,” said Meeker. He slipped another photograph out of the file folder and held it up to the light.

Jordan peered at an object in the center of the photo. “Looks like some kind of big farm tractor. What’s the significance?”

“What you see is an unknown deep-sea vehicle driving over the sea bottom five thousand meters below the surface, not more than twenty kilometers from the explosion area. You know who owns it or what it’s doing there?”

“Yes…” Jordan said slowly. “I didn’t, but I do now. Thank you, Curtis.”

Jordan turned from a totally mystified Meeker, opened the door, and melted into the throng leaving the theater.

15

TRUE TO HIS WORD, Pitt drove the mauled DSMV free of its buried prison. The metal tracks shrieked as they ground their way through the lava rock, a centimeter at a time. With tortured sluggishness the great vehicle clawed its way to the surface of the sea bottom, shook off the stone and ooze that trailed in a huge cloudy river from its rear end, and rolled onto the barren terrain.

“We’re clear,” Plunkett cried in delight. “Jolly well done.”

“Jolly well done,” Pitt mimicked. He switched on computer control and called up a series of geographical displays on the monitor. “A miracle we broke out with no pressure leaks or mechanical damage.”

“My dear fellow, my faith in you is as deep as the sea… ah, we’re under. I didn’t doubt your fortitude for a minute.”

Pitt spared him a curious stare. “If you’re taken in that easily, I have a bridge in New York I’d like to sell you.”

“What was that about a bridge’?”

“Do you play?”

“Yes, I’m quite good. Won more than a few tournaments. And you?”

“I deal a mean hand of Old Maid.”

The exchange was slightly less than bizarre considering their predicament, but they were men absorbed in their element and well aware of the danger of being trapped in the abyssal depths. If either Pitt or Plunkett felt any fear, he didn’t show it.

“Now that we’ve escaped the landslide, what’s the plan?” asked Plunkett as calmly as if he was requesting another cup of tea.

“The plan is to go up,” Pitt answered, pointing toward the roof.

“Since this magnificent old crawler has no buoyancy and we’ve a good five kilometers of ocean above us, how do you expect to accomplish the impossible?”

Pitt grinned.

“Just sit back and enjoy the seascape. We’re going to take a little ride through the mountains.”

“Welcome aboard, Admiral.” Commander Morton gave a razor-edge salute and extended his hand, but the greeting was purely official. He was not happy and made no attempt at hypocrisy. “A rare occasion when we’re ordered to surface at sea during a cruise to take on visitors. I have to tell you I don’t like it.”

Sandecker smothered a smile as he stepped from the Shanghai Shelly’s launch onto the bridge of the partially surfaced sail tower of the Tucson. He shook Morton’s hand with a casual unconcern and a dominating posture that, if anything, made his presence seem like an everyday affair.

“I didn’t pull strings to have you deviate from operational procedure so I could drop in for cocktails, Commander. I’m here on presidential order. If it’s an inconvenience, I’ll be happy to return to the junk.”

A pained expression crossed Morton’s face. “No offense, Admiral, but Soviet satellites—”

“Will photograph us in vivid color for the entertainment of their intelligence analysts. Yes, yes, but we don’t really care what they see or think.” Sandecker turned as Giordino climbed aboard. “My assistant project director, Al Giordino.”

Unconsciously almost, Morton acknowledged Giordino with a half salute and showed them through a hatch down to the control center of the sub. They followed the commander into a small compartment with a transparent plotting table with a recessed interior that provided a three-dimensional sonar view of the seabed.

Lieutenant David DeLuca, the Tucson’s navigation officer, was leaning over the table. He straightened as Morton made the introductions and smiled warmly. “Admiral Sandecker, this is an honor. I never missed your lectures at the academy.”

Sandecker beamed. “I hope I didn’t put you to sleep.

“Not at all. Your accounts of NUMA projects were fascinating.

Morton flicked a glance at DeLuca and nodded down at the table. “The admiral is most interested in your discovery.”

“What can you show me, son?” Sandecker said, placing a hand on DeLuca’s shoulder. “The message was you’ve picked up unusual sounds on the seabed.”

DeLuca faltered for a moment. “We’ve been receiving strange music—”

” ‘Minnie the Mermaid?’ ” Giordino blurted.

DeLuca nodded. “At first, but now it sounds like John Philip Sousa marches.”

Morton’s eyes narrowed. “How could you possibly know?”

“Dirk,” Giordino said definitely. “He’s still alive.”

“Let’s hope so,” Sandecker said with mounting joy. He stared at DeLuca. “Can you still hear the music?”

“Yes, sir. Once we obtained a fix, we were able to track the source.

“It’s moving?”

“About five kilometers per hour across the bottom.”

“He and Plunkett must have survived the earthquake and escaped in Big John,” Giordino concluded.

“Have you attempted contact?” asked Sandecker of Morton.

“We’ve tried, but our systems are not designed to transmit in water deeper than a thousand meters.”

“We can contact them with the underwater phone in the submersible,” said Giordino.

“Unless…” Sandecker hesitated. He glanced at Morton. “Could you hear them if they were trying to contact a surface vessel, Commander?”

“If we can hear their music, we could hear their voice transmissions. Might be garbled and distorted, but I think our computers could piece together a coherent message.”

“Any such sounds received?”

“None,” replied Morton.

“Their phone system must be damaged,” Sandecker speculated.

“Then why are they able to transmit music?”

“An emergency amplifying system locator in case the vehicle had a breakdown,” answered Giordino. “A rescue vehicle could home in on the sound. But it wasn’t built for voice transmission or reception.”

Morton stirred in slow anger. He did not like losing control of a situation on board his own command. “May I ask who these people are in Big John, as you call it, and how they came to be traipsing over the bottom of the Pacific Ocean?”

Sandecker gave a negligent wave of his hand. “Sorry, Commander, a classified project.” He turned his attention back to DeLuca. “You say they’re on the move.”

“Yes, sir.” DeLuca pressed a series of buttons and the display recessed in the table revealed a section of the sea bottom in a three-dimensional holograph. To the men crowded around the table, it felt as though they were looking down into a submerged Grand Canyon from the top of an aquarium. The detail was enhanced by advanced computer and sonar digital mapping that showed the images in muted color heavy on blues and greens.

The Mendocino fracture zone dwarfed the famous tourist sight of northern Arizona, its steep escarpments averaging 3,000 meters high. The uneven rims along the great crack in the earth’s submarine surface were serrated with hundreds of ridges, giving it the appearance of a huge gash through a series of sand ripples.

“The latest underwater visual technology,” Morton offered proudly. “The Tucson was the first sub to have it installed.”

“Code-named The Great Karnak,” Sandecker said loftily. “Knows all, sees all. Our NUMA engineers helped develop it.”

Morton’s face, now curiously red and sullen, looked abjectly defeated in the game of one-upmanship. But he took control and made a brave comeback. “Lieutenant, show the admiral his toy in action.”

DeLuca took a short wandlike probe and traced a light beam across the floor of the display. “Your underwater vehicle emerged at this point in a small canyon just off the main fracture zone and is now traveling in a zigzag pattern up the slopes toward the top of the fracture zone’s edge.”

Giordino stared somberly at the flattened area where the mining project once stood. “Not much left of Soggy Acres,” he said sadly.

“It wasn’t built to last forever,” Sandecker consoled him. “The results more than paid for the loss.”

Without being asked, DeLuca enlarged the display until the fuzzy image of the DSMV could just be seen struggling up the side of a steep slope. “This is as sharp as I can bring her in.”

“That’s just fine,” Sandecker complimented him.

Looking at the tiny speck against the infinite desolation, it was impossible for any of them to believe there were two living, breathing men inside it. The moving projection seemed so real, they had to fight to keep from reaching out and touching it.

Their thoughts varied to the extreme. DeLuca imagined he was an astronaut peering down at life on an alien planet, while Morton was reminded of watching a truck on a highway from an aircraft flying at thirty thousand feet. Sandecker and Giordino both visualized their friend struggling against a hostile atmosphere to stay alive.

“Can’t you rescue them with your submersible?” queried Morton.

Giordino clutched the rail around the display table until his knuckles went ivory. “We can rendezvous, but neither craft has an air lock to transfer them from one to the other under tons of water pressure. If they attempted to leave Big John at that depth, they’d be squashed to a third their size.”

“What about hoisting them to the surface with a cable?”

“I don’t know of a ship equipped to carry six kilometers of cable thick enough to support its own weight and that of the DSMV.”

“The Glomar Explorer could do it,” said Sandecker. “But she’s on an oil drilling job off Argentina. Impossible for her to cut off operations, re-equip, and get here inside of four weeks.”

Morton began to understand the urgency and the frustration. “I’m sorry there is nothing my crew and I can do.”

“Thank you, Commander.” Sandecker sighed heavily. “I appreciate that.”

They all stood silent for the next full minute, their eyes focused on the image of the miniature vehicle as it crept across the display like a bug climbing the side of a culvert.

“I wonder where he’s headed,” murmured DeLuca.

“What was that?” asked Sandecker as if he had suddenly awakened.

“Since I’ve been tracking him, he’s been traveling in a set direction. He’ll go into a series of switchbacks when the slope steepens, but after it flattens out again he always returns to his original course.”

Sandecker, staring at DeLuca, suddenly knew. “Dirk’s heading for high ground. Lord, I almost wrote him off without considering his intentions.”

“Plot an approximate course destination,” Morton ordered DeLuca.

DeLuca programmed his navigational computer with the data, then eyed the monitor, waiting for the compass projection. The numbers flashed almost instantly.

“Your man, Admiral, is on a course bearing three-three-four.”

“Three-three-four,” Morton repeated firmly. “Nothing ahead but dead ground.”

Giordino looked at DeLuca. “Please enlarge the sector ahead of the DSMV.”

DeLuca nodded and broadened the display area in the direction Giordino requested. “Looks pretty much the same except for a few seamounts.”

“Dirk is making for Conrow Guyot,” Giordino said flatly.

“Guyot?” asked DeLuca.

“A seamount with a smooth summit,” Sandecker explained. “A submarine volcanic mountain whose top was leveled by wave action as it slowly sank beneath the surface.”

“What’s the depth of the summit?” Giordino questioned DeLuca.

The young navigation officer pulled a chart from a cabinet under the table and spread it across the transparent top. “Conrow Guyot,” he read aloud. “Depth three hundred and ten meters.”

“How far from the DSMV?” This from Morton.

DeLuca checked the distance with a pair of dividers against a scale at the bottom of the chart. “Approximately ninety-six kilometers.”

“At eight kilometers per hour,” Giordino calculated, “then doubling the distance to allow for uneven terrain and detours around ravines, with luck they should reach the top of Conrow around this time tomorrow.”

Morton’s eyes turned skeptical. “Climbing the guyot may bring them closer to the surface, but they’ll still be three hundred meters or nearly a thousand feet short. How does this guy—?”

“His name is Dirk Pitt,” Giordino helped him.

“Okay, Pitt. How does he expect to make it topside—swim?”

“Not from that depth,” said Sandecker promptly. “Big John is pressurized to one atmosphere, the same as we’re standing in at sea level. The outside water pressure down there is thirty-three times heavier. Even if we could supply them with high-tech dive gear and a helium-oxygen gas mixture for deep-water breathing, their chances are nil.”

“If the sudden increase in pressure as they left Big John didn’t kill them,” Giordino added, “decompression sickness on the way to the surface would.”

“So what does Pitt have up his sleeve?” Morton persisted.

Giordino’s eyes seemed to peer at something beyond the r head. “I don’t have the answer, but I suspect we’d better t of one damn quick.”

16

THE STERILE GRAY expanse gave way to a forest of oddly sculptured vents protruding from the seafloor. They rose like distorted chimneys and spouted hot-365 Celsius-clouds of black steam that was quickly smothered by the cold ocean.

“Black smokers,” announced Plunkett, identifying them under the probing lights of Big John.

“They’ll be surrounded by communities of sea creatures,” Pitt said without removing his eyes from the navigational display on his control monitor. “We charted over a dozen of them during our mining surveys.”