Atlantis: Devil's Sea (25 page)

“Go,” Miles said.

Ariana shoved Roskov out of the security of the heavy trunk lid and dove into the trunk, Miles right behind her. She heard shots fired, and as Miles pulled the lid down on top of them, saw Roskov staggering back as bullets slammed into his chest. Then they were in darkness as the trunk locked shut.

There was that thud of rounds hitting the metal all around, but nothing came through the armor. A thin beam of light punctured the darkness; Miles had a small flashlight clenched between his teeth.

“Excuse me,” he said, as he slithered on top of Ariana and pointed the muzzle of the sub at the seat back visible between the metal frame. He fired a quick burst, ripping through the material, then another and another and finally a fourth, stitching out a square pattern about two feet on each side. He pivoted, his hip digging into the small of Ariana’s back, and brought both feet to beat at the center of the square. He kicked with no result, then kicked again, and the leather and springs gave way and sunlight flooded the trunk through the small opening.

Miles crawled through, Ariana following, cursing as a spring dug a gouge out of her shoulder. By the time she was in the backseat, Miles was already in the driver’s seat and had the engine started. Bullets were smacking into the heavy glass on all sides and ricocheting off. Ariana climbed into the passenger seat as Miles threw the BMW into gear.

Ariana took a quick look around. Getty was firing while the Mercedes was also taking incoming bullets. There were men spread all across the street from the two cars that had just arrived, all with automatic weapons. The two snipers under the bridge were also firing. She could see more cars coming from both directions as Getty jumped into the temporary security of the armored Mercedes and started its engine.

Miles raced by the Mercedes only to face four white vans coming toward them. He slammed on the brakes and expertly skidded the car in a one-eighty turn. He accelerated in the other direction, Getty following. The men who had gotten out of the cars fired, bullets smacking off the bulletproof glass, leaving cracks in places. They drove out of the way as Miles continued to push down on the gas.

“Oh damn,” Miles muttered. There were four more vans blocking the way under the bridge. “Better buckle up,” he said as he threw the wheel counterclockwise, and the heavy car lifted slightly on two wheel before settling back down as they headed toward the up ramp for the bridge, between it and the Kremlin.

A bullet hit the glass right next to Ariana’s head, and she ducked as a spider web of cracks appeared. She had just managed to buckle her seat belt when the car came to an abrupt halt and she was slammed forward, the belt keeping her from bashing her brains out on the dash. She looked up. Fifty meters in front of them, the ramp was blocked by two vans parked in a V. Behind the vans, a half-dozen men with automatic weapons and one man with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher waited. The eighty-eight millimeter wide round stuck out of the forty-millimeter tube, filled with explosives and waiting to be fired. The high-explosive warhead could penetrate over a foot of tank armor, which meant the cars were vulnerable to it.

Miles’s hands were tight on the wheel, his foot on the brake. Getty pulled the Mercedes up next to them, Miles looked to the left and Getty nodded.

“What is he doing?” Ariana asked as the Mercedes began moving.

“His job,” Miles said.

She watched in horror as the Mercedes raced toward the two vans, picking up speed. The men began firing, bullets bouncing off the car. Miles switched from brake to gas, and fell in twenty meters behind the Mercedes. The man with the RPG took careful aim and pulled the trigger. Getty swerved, but the distance was too close to make him miss but not as close as Getty had hoped. The rocket grenade needed ten meters of flight to arm. He almost made it, but impact came at twelve meters. The round hit the Mercedes just below the right headlight, punched into the engine, and exploded.

Ariana ducked as the heavy engine hood of the Mercedes came flying over the burning car and smashed into the roof and the BMW, denting it. The Mercedes was still moving, four tones of momentum smashing into the point of the V, shoving both lighter vans back and clearing the way, before the car came to a halt, fire engulfing the engine.

Miles darted them through the gap, then swerved to the driver’s side of the Mercedes. “Covering fire!” he yelled at Ariana as he kicked his door open and sprayed the dazed gunmen with the MP-5.

She opened her door and fired as fast as she could pull the trigger, emptying a fifteen-round clip in four seconds. Then she looked at the driver of the Mercedes, Getty was held in place by the seat belt, but his head drooped. He was either dead or unconscious.

“Cover me,” she yelled across the top of the BMW to Miles as she abandoned the safety of the door and pulled at the driver’s door. It was locked. She looked over her shoulder, but Miles had already seen the problem and had his remote opener in hand. He pushed a button, and the lock clicked. She pulled the door open.

One of Getty’s legs was gone from the knee down, blood pulsing out. But she took the sign of the blood flowing as a positive; it meant he was still alive. She tucked her pistol in her belt and then grabbed his arms. She turned her back to him, his arms tight over her shoulders, and dragged him.

A string of bullets whizzed by her head. “Sorry,” Miles yelled as he fired another burst that narrowly missed her, giving her covering fire at whoever was behind her.

She shoved Getty into the passenger seat, then sat on top of him, pulling the door shut. Miles slid into his seat, and they were on their way. Bullets thumped on the back window as he pulled away.

As Miles raced through the streets of Moscow, darting through narrow alleys, Ariana pulled her belt off. She slid it under the stump of Getty’s right leg, then pulled it as tight as she could. Then she stuck the muzzle of the Browning under the belt and twisted, tightening down the makeshift tourniquet.

“Where are you going?” she finally asked Miles, satisfied that at least there was no more blood coming out of the stump.

“The airfield.”
She shook her head. “We need to get him to a hospital.”

“The Mafia would have him in a heartbeat if we did that,” Miles said. “We’re coming with you.”

*****

Dane flexed his knees, allowing his body to roll with the slight swell that the
Grayback
bobbed in. There was one Crab in each of the two hangers, and the one on the right was being prepped for the upcoming mission.

The Crab looked like a cross between a Bradley, Fighting Vehicle and a miniature submarine. It had a tubular body ten meters long by three in diameter with a turret on the top center that mounted the thirty-millimeter chain gun and the TOW and torpedo launchers. At the rear were dual propellers and horizontal and vertical dive fins, while along the lower half on either side were treads, both powered by the same powerful engine, the changeover made by shifting the power train to either tread or propeller. Entry was by means of doors on either side near the rear, just in front of the power plant, that were hinged on the bottom and swung down to become ramps.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” Colonel Loomis asked.

“Impressive was the B-52 bomber stuck vertically in the ground that was in the Angkor gate,” Dane said. “Impressive is destroying Iceland. Impressive is sending a tsunami to wipe out a hundred miles of the coast of Puerto Rico as a by-product of doing something else. It’s also destroying Atlantis so completely we thought it was simply a literary device used by Plato.”

“What’s your problem?” Loomis asked. “Ever since you’ve come here, you’ve been gloom and doom.”

“I should be dancing with joy?” Dane asked. He faced the officer. “I’ve been in a gate before. I watched my team get decimated. This” – he slapped the side of the Crab, producing a dull thunk—“is not going to defeat the Shadow. It’s a ride, that’s all. We have no clue what we’re going to find over there,” Dane nodded toward the dark wall on the northern horizon. “Not in the gate and especially not once we go through the portal, if we can go through the portal.”

“I know all that,” Loomis said. “But we’re taking the fight to the Shadow for the first time instead of reacting. I think you’d be a little more positive.”

“What makes you think this is the first time man has taken the fight into a gate against the Shadow?” Dane asked.

“What do you mean?” Loomis was confused.

“Nothing.” Dane said.

“We go in thirty minutes,’ Loomis snapped.

“Fine.” He noted Dr. Martsen near the bow of the
Grayback
, looking down into the water. He walked away, not saying anything else to Loomis, and headed forward. As he got close, he could see Rachel’s dorsal fin cutting through the water and then the dolphin’s head as Martsen tossed a small fish to her.

“Hello,” he said as he walked up. “I’m Eric Dane.”

Martsen was short and slender, with dark hair cut tight against her skull. There were deep lines around her eyes. “So this is your idea?”

“Who told you that?” Dane was taken aback at the anger in her voice.

“I was told you were the expert on that…” she pointed at the gate.

“As much as anyone is an expert,” Dane said.

“So it was your idea to go in there and ask for Rachel to accompany you,” she said.

“I didn’t ask for her,” Dane said. He could pick up the anger from Martsen and realized it mirrored the anger he had just shown toward Loomis. He glanced at the dark wall of the gate and realized being this close was affecting everyone.

The muscles on the side of Martsen’s mouth were working as she tried to control her temper. “Who did then?”

“I don’t know,” Dane lied. “I’m not even sure why the two of you are here, but I think Rachel has an important role to play.’

“Why do you think that?”

Dane told her about what had happened on the beach in Japan. As he spoke, he could sense her relaxing slightly.

“You can read minds?” she asked when he was done.

“I can sense things.”

She nodded. “Sometimes I feel like Rachel is communicating with me.”

“I know Chelsea does with me,” Dane said. He looked down at the water. “To be honest, I don’t know much about dolphins. Aren’t they supposed to be intelligent and able to talk among themselves?”

“Rachel’s a
Tursiops truncates
,” Martsen said. “What most people call a bottle-nosed dolphin.”

“She’s big,” Dane noted as Rachel surfaced, then dove.

“Three meters,” Martsen said proudly. “I’ve been with her for eight years now.”

“Always with the Navy?” Dane asked.

“It’s the only way to get funded,” Martsen replied defensively. “And our work has been related to submarine rescue and mine mapping. Nothing offensive.”

“How long can she stay under?” Dane asked. He was watching where Rachel had gone under, and she still hadn’t come up yet. Martsen saw him looking.

“She can stay under for fifteen minutes,” she said. “And go down six hundred meters.”

“Isn’t she an air-breather?’ Dane felt ignorant, but he had rarely been to the ocean.

“A mammal, just like you and me. Air-breathing, warm-blooded.”
“How can she dive so deep and stay under so long then?”

“Her lungs are more efficient than ours. She can exchange a much higher percentage of the contents of her lungs than we can.”

“And she’s intelligent,” Dane said.

“More intelligent than humans in some ways,” Martsen said. “They don’t have wars and kill each other.”

“I hear that,” Dane said. “One has to wonder exactly what we mean when we talk about intelligence.”

“A lot of people confuse dolphins with porpoises, but porpoises have a rounded head with no beak, and their dorsal fins are smaller. And dolphins are smarter,” she added.

Rachel surfaced. There was a puff of spray from her blowhole, then she began circling lazily.

“She shuts the blowhole when she dives and has to clear it when she surfaces,” Martsen explained.

Dane’s attention was caught by the FLIP, a quarter mile away and closer to the gate, as a bulbous bow slowly went underwater and the stern lifted. Slowly, the forward end of the ship disappeared below the waves, taking the muon generator down. In less than five minutes, the majority of the ship was underwater, the stern bobbing in the slight swell.

Martsen signed. “I know why the Navy wants her for this mission. Colonel Loomis said that they were going in blind, no electromagnetic emissions. So they’re going to use Rachel as their sonar.”

“What do you mean?” Dane asked.

“Rachel uses sonar, what we call echolocation, to navigate and find prey. She sends out a series of clicks that she makes with the blowhole and emits through her forehead. Then she picks up the bounce-back with her jaw. Her brain can then analyze the information and form a sort of picture of her surroundings using these sound images. There are some researchers who speculate the dolphins can even use their emitter to send high-frequency bursts that stun their prey.”

“Can you communicate with her?” Dane asked.

Martsen tapped a device on her belt. “This holds recordings of sounds that I’ve determined the meaning of. Many researchers say now that dolphins don’t communicate with each other or have a language, but my experience has been that Rachel clearly understands these noises.”

She pushed a button, and a high-pitched whistle came out of the box. Rachel stopped her circling and came over, staring up at them.

Dane could sense the intelligence in Rachel’s eyes, and he had the strange feeling that she was getting a reading on him also.

“That was Rachel’s name,” Martsen said. “Every dolphin has its own name, a specific sound that identifies it. A lot of dolphin language, such as it is, we can’t hear because the frequency’s too high. Rachel can hear up to one hundred fifty kilohertz, far beyond what we can. To give you an idea how far up that is, a bat can only hear up to one-twenty. So there’s a whole spectrum that most researchers ignored for many years.”

“So, how intelligent is she?” Dane remembered the pod of dolphins that had looked at him off the coast of Japan. He had no doubt that they were watching him and evaluating.