The Tomb Of Hercules

27

Trulli raced his Discovery along the coast road from Marsh Harbour. “Are you sure you’ll be able to find where they’ve taken Eddie?” Nina asked.

“Pretty sure,” Trulli replied. “All of Corvus’s cargo ships have GPS trackers. Hopefully his planes do too.”

“And if they don’t?”

The Australian didn’t have an answer for that. Instead, he turned towards a cluster of industrial buildings along the waterline. A barrier and gatehouse blocked the road ahead. “Okay,” he said, “just try to look relaxed. Maybe a bit drunk too.”

“How can I possibly look relaxed?”

Trulli stopped at the barrier. A uniformed security guard stepped out of the gatehouse.

“Evening, Barney,” Trulli said with exaggerated casualness. “How’s things?”

“Fine, Mr. Trulli,” said the guard. He didn’t seem suspicious, just curious. “What brings you here at this time of night?”

“Well, I was gonna go for a midnight dip with my friend here,” he indicated Nina, “and then I realized I left the bloody key for my outboard in the office!”

The guard looked through the window at Nina. Heeding Trulli’s comment, she gave the man a languid wave. “Hi.”

He nodded in acknowledgment, then turned back to Trulli. “You’re not going to be long, are you?”

“No, mate! Just got to find the thing. Should only take a few minutes.”

Barney considered this. “She should really sign in, but… Okay, as long as you’re quick.”

“You’re a top fella,” Trulli told him. The guard smiled, then returned to the gatehouse. The barrier rose, and Trulli drove through.

They pulled up beside a large building at the end of a dock. Trulli jumped from the Discovery and hurried to a side door. Nina followed him inside.

Despite the urgency of the situation, she couldn’t help but stop in surprise as Trulli switched on the lights. The building was a covered dock, a huge roller shutter at the seaward end cutting into the water. Isolated from the waves outside, the pool within the building was as smooth as glass.

That wasn’t what had surprised her, though. It was a submarine, suspended above the water on cables, though its design resembled no sub Nina had ever seen before. If anything, she thought, it looked as if it ought to be piloted by Han Solo or Captain Kirk.

Trulli ignored it, considering it as everyday a workplace object as a chair. “Up here,” he told Nina, clattering up a flight of steps to an elevated room overlooking the dock. She followed him into an untidy office, where a large drafting table covered with annotated blueprints dominated the space. “Sorry about the mess,” he said somewhat sheepishly, sweeping empty cardboard coffee cups away from a computer on a smaller desk as he woke it up.

“What is that thing?” Nina asked of the submarine outside the office’s windows.

“Hmm? Oh, that’s my current project. The Wobblebug.”

Nina almost laughed. “The what?”

“Well, that’s not the official name. René wants to call it the Nautilus, but that’s kind of a clichéd name for a sub. Although if he’s dead, I guess it doesn’t matter any-more…Anyway, it’s a supercavitator.”

“A what now?”

“It goes really fast,” Trulli oversimplified, before returning his attention to the computer. “Okay, let me just log in… Great, I can get into the GPS network.” A few mouse clicks, and a list of Corvus’s ships and aircraft appeared on the screen. “You remember the tail number of that plane?”

She did; he entered it into a search field and hit return. “Okay, it’s got a tracker.”

The list was replaced by a map. Nina recognized the outlines of the Bahamas and the southern half of the eastern seaboard of the United States, from Florida up to Virginia. A line led north from Great Abaco to a point about 150 miles off the South Carolina coast, a yellow triangle marked with the tilt-rotor’s registration number at its northern tip.

“There,” said Trulli. “Heading zero-eight degrees, speed two hundred and seventy knots, altitude ten thousand feet.”

“Where are they going?” Nina asked. “Zoom out, show more of the map.”

Trulli complied. The screen now showed the whole of eastern America.

Nina felt a chill as she realized where the tilt-rotor’s course would take it. “Oh my God,” she whispered, rummaging through the scattered papers on Trulli’s desk to find a ruler. She held it against the screen, extending the course all the way to its final destination.

The chill intensified. She’d been right. “Oh my God!” she repeated, more loudly.

“Jesus,” Trulli said as he saw it too.

The ruler sliced through New York.

Her home.

“She’s going to New York,” Nina said, stunned. “She’s taking a goddamn nuke to New York!”

Trulli entered rapid commands on the keyboard, and a window popped up with more information about the tilt-rotor. “No, she can’t be. The Bell 609 doesn’t have enough range, even with extra fuel tanks. She must be going somewhere else.”

“Where, though?” Nina looked back at the map. “The only other place she comes close to on that course is Atlantic City, and why would she nuke New Jersey? Nobody would even notice!” Mind racing, she stared at the yellow triangle representing the current position of Sophia-and Chase. “Can you show the positions of Corvus’s ships on there as well?”

“Which ones?”

“All of them.”

Puzzled, Trulli did as she asked. After a few seconds, a couple of dozen new markers appeared. There were several in the Bahamas, where Corvus’s shipping line was based, more either in or close to major East Coast ports…

And one on its own, off the Virginia coast. Directly along the tilt-rotor’s course.

Nina stabbed her finger at it. “That! What’s that?”

Trulli zoomed in. “It’s the Ocean Emperor!”

Nina’s mind flashed back to the party where she had first met Sophia. “Corvus’s boat?”

“Yeah. It’s heading for New York, doing about twenty-three knots, so if it keeps up that speed it’ll get there tomorrow morning, about nine-ish.”

“It’s got a helipad,” Nina remembered. “Is it in range of Sophia’s plane?”

Trulli checked. “Yes.”

“That’s what she’s doing. If she tried to fly over the city the air force would intercept her, and there are nuclear detectors on the roads-but she can land on the Ocean Emperor and sail the nuke right into New York Harbor without anyone knowing a thing until it’s too late!”

“Jesus,” gasped Trulli. “So what do we do? We’ve got to tell somebody!”

“Yeah, but who? I can’t go to the authorities-I’m wanted for murder!”

He gave her a shocked look. “You’re what?”

“I didn’t do it! But we can’t just phone up Homeland Security-Corvus had friends in the government, they won’t send the Coast Guard to pull over his boat on an anonymous tip.”

“Corvus is dead,” Trulli reminded her.

“Yeah, but they don’t know that. Plus, if they do stop them…Sophia’ll kill Eddie. I know it.” She looked away from the computer, through the office window. “I’ve got to get on that boat.”

“Even if we had a chopper, which we don’t, it wouldn’t have the range or the speed,” Trulli protested. “There’s no way we can catch them.”

“What about that?” She pointed at the suspended submarine.

“Huh?”

“That. You said it was fast-how fast?”

“In theory, anything up to four hundred knots, but-” Trulli froze as he realized what she meant. “No way, it’s still experimental! I’ve never tested it at full power!”

“Well,” said Nina firmly, “now’s your chance.”

“This is a really bad idea,” said Trulli as he operated the electric winch controls. The Wobblebug slowly descended into the still water of the dock, the surface rippling gently around its curving hull.

“Noted,” Nina told him. “If we sink, you can say that you told me so.”

“It’s not sinking I’m worried about. It’s blowing up.”

Nina looked more closely at the submarine. In some ways it reminded her of a wingless jet fighter. Two gaping intakes near the bow, currently blocked by metal louvres, led back to much narrower rocketlike nozzles at the stern. The bow itself, however, was oddly blunt where she would have expected it to be streamlined, as if somebody had sliced off the tip of the pointed nose. “What do you mean, blowing up?”

“It’s why I called it the Wobblebug. The original Wobblebugs were steam-powered cars from like a century ago.”

“It’s steam powered?” Nina said in disbelief.

“Yeah. It’s not like it burns coal, though!” He pointed at the intakes. “Seawater goes in the front and gets superheated by electric elements, and the steam blasts out of the back like a rocket motor. Most of the hull’s full of polymer polypyrrole batteries-it’s the only way to deliver enough juice short of using a nuclear reactor.”

“Wait, it can do four hundred knots just using steam? So why isn’t everybody doing that? I thought submarines were pretty slow.”

“They are.” Trulli stopped the winch, the Wobblebug now floating in the water, and hopped onto its casing to detach the cables. He pointed at the blunt bow. “But if you make the nose the right shape, when you hit a certain speed you get supercavitation-kind of a shock wave of air bubbles around the hull that cuts the drag from the water down to almost nothing. Like underwater warp drive. The Russians have had supercavitating torpedoes called Squalls for over a decade that can do two hundred and fifty knots, no problem.” The cables at the stern released, he made his way forward, balancing on the rocking hull with the ease of a tightrope walker. “The reason nobody’s used the technology for manned subs is that it’s really hard to get the design right.”

“Until now.”

“Well,” Trulli said pointedly, “that remains to be seen, doesn’t it?” He unhooked the final cable and jumped back to the winch controls to raise the steel lines out of the way.

Nina regarded the vessel. “But assuming it works-”

“Which is a big assumption.”

“-we should be able to catch up with the Ocean Emperor long before it reaches New York, right?”

“We should. Just a couple of problems, though-first off, you’ve actually got to get aboard the Ocean Emperor from the Wobblebug.”

Nina glanced over at the cagelike storage units beneath Trulli’s office, which among other items contained coils of rope. “We’ll figure something out.”

“Uh-huh. The second problem is that it’s a one-way trip. If the Ocean Emperor’s not where we expect, we’re screwed. There’s no going back.”

“Why not?”

“You need to get up to a certain speed before the supercavitation effect starts working. And the only way to do that’s with a rocket. A real rocket, not a steam-powered one.”

Nina looked back at the Wobblebug’s stern. Recessed between the two nozzles of the steam jets was a third, broader opening. “A rocket?”

“Yeah. It’s a solid-fuel rocket, like the kind they use to launch missiles from subs. Once it’s ignited it can’t be stopped-and it only lasts for thirty seconds. When the sub slows down below supercav speed, that’s it. It can’t speed up again. It’s got backup pump-jets so it can maneuver, but they can only do twenty knots tops. Twenty-five, if you’re not worried about them burning out.”

“The only things I’m worried about right now are saving Eddie and stopping my home from being nuked,” Nina said.

“Point taken.” Trulli switched off the winch and took the end of an electric cable from a reel, uncoiling it as he boarded the sub again. He opened the top hatch. “Okay, I’ll get everything prepped, and-”

“Mr. Trulli!” They looked around to see the security guard, Barney, walking towards them. “Is everything all right?”

“Er, yeah, mate,” Trulli said unconvincingly. “No worries. Just, ah…” He looked down into the open hatch. “Think my keys might be in here.”

Barney gave Nina a suspicious glance, then walked past her to stand at the edge of the dock. “Looks to me like you’re planning to take this thing out.”

Trulli adopted a cheesy grin. “Dunno why you’d think that.”

“You know that Mr. Corvus has to give his personal permission for each launch.” Barney’s hand moved towards his holstered gun. “I think you should step back onto the dock and-unk!”

He staggered, then fell to the dock. The fire extinguisher with which Nina had just hit him over the head clanked down beside him as she put her hands on her hips and addressed Trulli. “So, Matt. Are we good to go?”

“You’ve changed since I first met you,” he muttered, then dropped into the hatch, the cable trailing behind him.

Fifteen minutes later, the unconscious Barney had been tied up and locked inside one of the storage cages, and the large door at the end of the building raised. A cold wind blew in from the sea, the Wobblebug creaking against the fat rubber bumpers hanging over the side of the dock as waves lapped along it.

Trulli’s head popped out of the hatch. “Okay, we’re ready. As we’re going to be, anyway. I’ve hooked up a GPS receiver to the onboard computer, but it won’t work until we surface, so if the Ocean Emperor changes course while we’re underwater, we’re screwed.”

“We’ll have to take that chance.”

Trulli seemed dubious, but held out a hand to her regardless. “Okay, then. Hop aboard. I warn you, it’s a bit of a squeeze.”

She took his hand and stepped onto the Wobblebug’s hull. The sub wallowed under the extra weight. Once he was sure that she wasn’t going to slip, Trulli dropped back inside the cabin. Nina carefully lowered herself inside feetfirst.

“Jeez, you weren’t kidding,” she said. The cabin was barely large enough for one person, never mind two. The small seat was crammed practically up against the controls. A steering yoke like that of a light aircraft jutted from the instrument panel, a fiendishly complex-looking bank of gauges and switches flanked by an LCD monitor screen with a keyboard duct-taped beneath it. Trulli was already in the seat, so she was forced to duck into the narrow gap to his side. “So where do I go?”

“Right where you are, I’m afraid. You’ll have to lie down and sort of wrap yourself around the seat with your backside against the aft bulkhead.”

“Oh, great.”

“Still want to do this?”

Nina squeezed awkwardly into the tight space. “I don’t want to do it. But I’ve got to.”

“I thought you’d say something like that.” Trulli flipped switches, checking the various gauges. “Okay, the batteries are at full charge, and the booster’s primed and ready to fire. Last chance to get out.” Nina frowned at him. “Yep, I thought.”

He shut the hatch. Once it was secured, he tapped the keyboard and a video image of the dock ahead appeared on the screen. “No room for a periscope,” he explained as he pushed a lever forward by a single notch. A soft vibration ran through the cabin, motors rumbling. On the screen, the walls of the dock slid past. Within thirty seconds, the Wobblebug was out in open water.

Trulli pushed the steering controls forward, increasing speed as he did so. Nina took a firmer hold of the seat as the submarine began its descent. The hull creaked ominously. “How deep will we go?” she asked, suddenly nervous.

“Supercav works best when it’s well clear of any surface turbulence, so probably around ten, twenty yards. Depends on the water conditions.”

“Have you taken it that deep before?”

Trulli hesitated before answering. “Would you feel better if I said yes?”

“Oh boy.”

He flicked through several windows on the monitor in rapid succession. “Okay, inertial guidance is set, I’ve got the waypoints programmed in. Hold on tight, it’ll be bumpy.”

“How bumpy?”

“You know how bumpy a really big roller coaster gets?”

“Uh, yeah?”

He gave her a not entirely confident grin as he flicked up the protective metal cover over a particular button. “Way bumpier than that. Okay, on three!”

Nina gripped the seat even more tightly.

“Two!”

She braced herself against the rear bulkhead. “One!”

And cringed-

“Warp speed!” Trulli cried, pushing the button. The response was immediate.

A thunderous roar filled the cabin. Sudden acceleration shoved Trulli back in his chair. Nina shrieked.

The Wobblebug shook violently as it surged forward. Nina had no idea how fast they were moving, but even through the roar of the rocket motor she could hear a rising hiss of water racing over the hull.

“This is the tricky part!” Trulli yelled.

“What do you mean?” Nina shouted back. She desperately wanted to put her hands over her ears, but if she let go of the seat she would be battered about like a pea in a whistle.

“I’ve got to time everything right! The rocket’s only got thirty seconds of fuel, but if I open the seawater intakes too soon there won’t be enough ram pressure and the engines will choke!”

“Too soon? What happens if you open them too late?”

“The heating elements melt and the sub will explode!”

“Perfect!” Nina wailed. The instruments were shaking too much for her to see any detail, but she could pick out a line of colored lights flicking on one by one.

They advanced from blue into a zone of orange, approaching a single green light. Beyond it, the color went straight to red-again with just a single light.

Presumably there wouldn’t be time for a second red light to come on before the sub blew up.

“This is it!” Trulli gripped a lever.

Orange, orange…

Nina cringed again.

Green.

Trulli yanked the lever back as hard as he could.

Nina heard a clunk as the louvres covering the intakes flicked open and seawater from the leading edge of the shock wave burst in to hit the heating elements. There was a colossal hissing shriek, a furious banshee beside her-

The Wobblebug leaped again, another burst of acceleration crushing Nina deeper into the confined space. Even Trulli screamed.

The roar of the rocket stuttered, then with an almost frightening abruptness cut out. But the piercing hiss of the steam jets continued steadily. The push of acceleration gradually eased as the submarine reached a stable speed.

Nina opened her eyes, realization that she hadn’t been blown to pieces sinking in. “How… how are we doing?” she asked, voice shaking.

“Hold on a sec,” said Trulli, sounding almost as surprised as she was that they were still alive. The sub was still shuddering, though not nearly as much as before. “Holy crap, we made it. We made it!” He whooped with delight. “We’re doing almost three-fifty knots! Suck it, Russia! Australia takes the record!”

“And is everything working properly?”

Trulli’s triumph quickly became more subdued. “Battery drain’s higher than I expected-must be from having two people aboard. The life support systems are drawing more power.”

“Will we be able to catch up with the Ocean Emperor?”

“I think so.” He double-checked the screen. “I hope so.”

“So do I,” Nina said quietly.