Zero Hour

TWENTY-TWO

Patrick “Padi” Devlin stood on the black-painted deck of the sailing abomination that had once been the Pacific Voyager. The wind was bitterly cold as it whipped around the front of the ship. Sleet had begun spitting from the steel gray sky, and mist in the air had reduced visibility to less than a mile for the past few hours.

Devlin pulled his coat tight, shoved his hands deep into his pockets, and wished mightily for a scarf. Still, he didn’t want to go back inside.

“Thank you for letting me out on deck,” he said to a figure, hovering behind him: Janko Minkosovic, his old crewmate and current jailer.

“I can’t see any harm in it. Not like you’re going to swim back to Jakarta.”

“I noticed you didn’t extend the same courtesy to the others in the hold.”

“There are twenty-six of them,” Janko said. “They come from a pair of vessels we hit. Together, they could be a danger.”

Devlin considered that. Did it mean Janko had only a small crew on board?

The wind gusted and the sleet intensified. From the temperature and the cobalt blue of the sea, Devlin guessed they’d been traveling south. He couldn’t see the sun, but he guessed they were well into the Roaring Forties now, maybe even farther south. It looked like a storm was brewing.

“Remind you of anything?” Janko asked.

“The day this hulk went down,” Devlin replied.

“The day you cut us loose.”

“You know that was the captain’s choice,” Devlin shot back. “I begged him to hold on.”

“Stop blaming him,” Janko said. “For that matter, stop blaming yourself, Padi. Look at you. You’re a worse wreck than this ship. And you thought you’d make captain someday.”

Devlin cut his eyes at Janko.

“There was nothing any of you could have done,” Janko said. “We set it up that way. If you hadn’t released the cable, we’d have cut through it ourselves.”

“Who?” Devlin asked sharply. “Who’s we? And why? To fake the ship’s destruction? She was already a derelict. She wasn’t even insured.”

“The man I work for bought her,” Janko explained, “years before. All that time in dry dock at Tarakan, he had people working on her. Making changes. When the moment came, he needed her to disappear. So he ordered us to tow her into the storm.”

Devlin stared at Janko. “But you were part of the crew. Our crew!”

“For six months, along with the other two. He arranged that with your employer.”

“Fine,” Devlin said. “So he got you on with us and had you put aboard the Java Dawn. But the ship—this ship—it went down. I saw it. That was no illusion.”

Janko exhaled like a parent tiring of questions from a curious child. “No, Padi, it wasn’t.”

“How the hell did you do it, then?”

“Follow me,” Janko said. “You’re about to find out.”

Janko led Devlin in through the main hatch and then through a second, inner hatch. For the first time, Devlin noticed that the outer section of the ship was left pretty much as it had been when he’d seen it years back. It looked neglected, disused. But once they passed the inner hatch, things were different.

Soon, Devlin found himself in a modern control room. Chart tables, propulsion gauges, radarscopes, and graphic displays surrounded him. Large screens on the front wall were set up like the forward view from the bridge; in fact, they showed the gray sky and the cold sea ahead of the ship, piped in from the highest vantage point of a group of video cameras.

“When did all this get done?”

“I told you,” Janko insisted, “the changes were made before the ship was towed off the beach.”

“But we inspected it for leaks.”

“The outer hull only,” Janko reminded him. “Besides, I was with you to make sure you didn’t stray into any sensitive areas.”

Devlin remembered now. They’d checked the repair job and the lower decks, the engine room and the bilge. No one had bothered with the inner spaces of the ship.

Janko turned his attention to one of the crewmen. “Switch to infrared.”

The crewman flicked a switch, and the right-hand screen cycled. The color changed from gray to an orange hue. Suddenly, the clouds, mist, and spitting rain were gone. The visibility that had been less than a mile was no longer a problem. Like magic, the shape of a large, cone-shaped island suddenly took up the center of the monitor. The central peak soared thousands of feet into the sky. It seemed impossible to have been a mile or so out and yet have the mist hiding the island so thoroughly.

Even as his eyes were growing wide, Devlin’s ears began to pop. “What’s happening?”

“Inner hull pressurized,” one of the crewmen said, “outer hull flooding.”

On the left screen, Devlin saw the bow of the ship settling toward the sea. A few moments later, the water rushed in from all sides as air surged out of hidden vents in the decking. In seconds, the foredeck was submerged. The water level moved rapidly higher, traveling up the superstructure and engulfing the camera.

Suddenly, all Devlin saw was darkness and the swirl of water in front of the lens. It took a minute for the view to clear, but even then there was nothing in the frame but the ship’s bow.

“A submarine?” Devlin said. “You turned this ship into a bloody submarine?”

“The central section of this ship is a pressure hull,” Janko explained. “The rest is just camouflage.”

Despite his anger, Devlin found himself impressed. “How deep can it go?”

“No more than eighty feet.”

“You’ll be spotted from the air.”

“The black paint reflects almost no light, and it also absorbs radar.”

That explained why the paint was so thick and rubbery, Devlin thought.

“And all the radar masts and antennas?”

“We had to do away with them,” Janko said. “They tend to cause problems when we submerge.”

“You’ll still be picked up on sonar.”

Janko seemed exasperated. “We don’t travel around like this, Padi. We travel on the surface, like we have been. We merely do this to hide. And… to park.”

“Park?”

“Activate the approach lights,” Janko said to a crewman.

In the far distance, a line of yellow-green lights came on. They ran along the seafloor. To some extent, they resembled the dashed centerline on a dark highway.

“Five degrees to port,” Janko said. “Reduce speed to three knots.”

As Devlin watched, the crewman to his left tapped away on a keyboard. “Auto guidance locked. Auto-docking sequence initiated.”

The ship continued toward the dim lights.

“In position,” the crewman said.

“Open outer doors.”

A few more taps on the keyboard, and a thin crack of light appeared in what looked like a wall of rock. Before Devlin’s eyes, the crack widened as huge doors slid open, revealing a narrow portal in the sloped side of the island’s submerged foundation.

Using bow and stern thrusters, the Voyager countered the current and moved slowly into what proved to be a gigantic, naturally formed cave.

“All stop,” the helmsman said.

“Cave doors closing,” the other crewman reported.

“Surface the Voyager,” Janko ordered.

The sound of high-pressure air forcing water from the ship’s tanks became audible. It reached a crescendo just as the four-hundred-foot vessel broke the surface.

Devlin watched in awe as the water drained away from the cameras and then shed itself from the decks. More artificial lighting came on, illuminating the cave around them, a space just slightly larger than the Pacific Voyager itself.

A slight bump was felt.

“Docking ramp is in position,” the crewman said.

Janko nodded. “Bring the prisoners,” he said. “I’ll show Padi his new home personally.”

“New home?”

“That’s right,” Janko said. “Welcome to Tartarus. Prison of the Gods.”