Black Sun: A Thriller (21 page)

Together they raced away from the sunken temple, climbing gradually as they did. Fortunately, they hadn’t been down deep enough or long enough to require a true decompression stop, but rocketing to the surface was never a good idea.

They would ascend at a constant angle, giving their bodies time to reabsorb any dissolved nitrogen, and when they spotted McCarter in a minute or two they would drop the scooters and surface.

Suddenly Hawker yelled, “Look out!”

At Hawker’s shout she turned her head. A shadow flashed over, one of the hammerheads buzzing them. A second one followed, brushing her and twisting violently to the right as it passed. It raced into the distance and disappeared, but others were streaming their way, rocketing toward them like underwater missiles.

On the surface, McCarter couldn’t take his eyes off the boats flying toward them.

He grabbed the transmitter. “If you guys can hear me, you need to hurry. They’re only two miles away at most.”

If he wanted to be safe he would have to go to full throttle soon and start heading west. That was the plan, go west, call the Mexican coast guard, and hope a few helicopters were enough to scare off whoever was attacking them.

It seemed the prudent thing to do, but McCarter couldn’t stand the thought of leaving his friends behind. He bumped the throttle down, wheeled the boat around until it pointed back toward the dive zone, and then grabbed the transmitter once more.

“I’m a half mile north of where we dropped you,” he said. “I’ll wait as long as I can.”

Suddenly Yuri dropped the sunglasses, stood up, and began staring trancelike at the water ahead of them.

Danielle turned to the left, angling down to get away from the oncoming sharks, but even with the propulsion
of the DPV and her own legs kicking, the sharks were moving at three or four times her speed.

A few of the smaller ones zipped past her; another dive-bombed her from above, slamming her shoulder. She looked for Hawker. He was coming her way, his own DPV running full throttle, but the sharks were basically ignoring him. For a moment it actually pissed her off, until she realized why.

The hammerheads, the circling honor guard of the sunken temple, were homing in on the object that had drawn them there in the first place: the power-emitting stone now secured in Danielle’s pack.

None of them had tried to bite her, at least not yet. In fact they seemed almost oblivious to her presence, as stunned and surprised by the sudden impacts as she was. But they were unable to resist the sensory overload in the magnetic detectors in their brains and they continued to come on in waves.

She twisted to escape another hit but there were too many sharks to avoid. It soon became a blur, like being caught in a stampeding crowd. Her world spun: the gray tops of the sharks, the white of their underbellies, bubbles from her regulator exploding around her.

A glancing blow on one leg was followed by a thud on her right arm and then a shot to the ribs that bent her body and whiplashed her neck.

“Hang on!” Hawker shouted.

“They’re after the stone,” she managed to say.

In the next moment a large group of the juveniles hit, spinning her around and leaving her disoriented.

She saw a larger one rocketing in. She dodged the hit, but the shark crashed into the DPV, ripping it from her hands and sending the yellow device spiraling toward the bottom.

She righted herself, saw a flash of the surface above, and kicked toward it but something grabbed her. She turned to see Hawker; with an arm around her waist he pulled her close. She reached for a handhold on the DPV just as the acceleration from the propulsion unit kicked in.

Another group of sharks came racing their way. She hardened her body against the impact, but two more followed, and a third on its own.

They broke the surface and Danielle spun around. McCarter was racing toward them in the boat. Thank God he was close. He slowed and turned beside them.

She grabbed the ladder, pulling herself up as Hawker pushed her from behind.

Tumbling into the boat, she whipped around, stretching a hand toward Hawker.

He clutched at it, just as a gray-green shape split the surface, rammed him like a torpedo, and dragged him away.

She felt his hand ripped from hers.

“Follow him!” she shouted to McCarter.

McCarter punched the throttles and spun the wheel and Danielle grabbed for the speargun.

Flying through the water, pushed by the big shark, Hawker felt as if he’d been hit by a train. His mask was
torn off and the DPV wrenched out of his hands as he was pulled by forces he could not overcome or even influence.

He twisted and wrenched his body to try to free himself but the animal’s flat, angular head had wedged itself between his tanks and his back.

And then suddenly he flipped over and slowed. The shark had torn itself free after dragging him two hundred feet or so.

Kicking upward, Hawker burst through the surface, gulping the air and looking around for the boat. He spotted it circling toward him.

He guessed, and hoped, that the sharks would leave him alone now, as they had before he’d teamed up with Danielle. But as he caught his breath and began to tread water, he saw a line of color dripping down the edge of his nose. He touched his forehead and his hand came away red with blood.

Instant panic hit him. He shed his tanks and began kicking hard for the oncoming boat, trying desperately to keep his face above the water.

On the boat, Danielle saw him. She saw the blood and a pair of dorsal fins slicing through the surface right at him.

She threw out the cargo net. “Hurry!” she yelled to McCarter.

They sped toward him. Hawker grabbed the net. Danielle pulled with all her might, leaning back and throwing her weight into it.

Hawker rolled and tumbled into the boat as one of the hammerheads launched itself, arching its back, half its body out of the water.

It landed on the cutaway, tipping the small craft, almost swamping it.

The front third of the shark was inside the vessel. The head whipped around, jaws snapping for anything it could grab. Yuri screamed, Hawker kicked it, and Danielle grabbed for the speargun again.

And then it flipped back into the water and disappeared in a tremendous splash.

“Go!” she shouted.

McCarter punched the throttles and the V-hulled fishing boat leaped forward like a stallion launching itself from the gate.

Danielle locked the cutaway back into place as other sharks whipped by. They followed briefly before falling behind the speeding boat. All she could think of was Petrov’s story of being followed by sharks and killer whales. She thanked God that she’d rented the fastest boat available.

Suddenly she felt Yuri at her side. “This siren,” he said, grabbing for the stone. “This siren.”

She tried to calm him and then opened the equipment locker and pulled out a lead-lined box they’d had specially made. She placed the stone into the box, sealed it shut, then slipped the box into her backpack. Beside her, Yuri stared.

“Siren,” he said quietly. “Siren.” As Danielle placed her pack inside the locker and latched it shut, he sat next to it and stared as if it were a television.

Danielle stroked his hair and looked out in front of them. A mile off, the boats McCarter had seen were splitting up, one continuing toward them, the other heading directly west to cut them off.

Perhaps the hard part was not over.

T
he convoy of vehicles rumbled down a weathered strip of road in the high desert of western Nevada. A camouflaged eighteen-wheeler held the center position, flanked by an escort of machine-gun-toting Humvees and a pair of missile-armed Black Hawk helicopters two hundred feet above.

Fifty miles more and they’d arrive at Yucca Mountain and the erstwhile nuclear depository that had been in limbo for the better part of three decades.

The place had originally been designed to store nuclear waste, with the plan that it would accept the growing stockpiles of spent radioactive fuel from all across the nation. But the environmentalists had attacked and overwhelmed the process almost from day one. Years of litigation, impact studies, and changing political winds had left Yucca Mountain empty. As a result the vast majority of the country’s radioactive materials remained right where they were: at 107 different reactor sites, most of which were only lightly guarded and just miles from the nation’s largest population centers. Apparently, to those who fought against the project, that was a safer alternative.

Such efforts had left Yucca Mountain sitting empty and thus usable for the NRI. And so Moore’s team had removed the Brazil stone from its vault beneath the Virginia Industrial Complex and loaded it onto a military C-17. After a four-hour flight they touched down in Nevada and then continued overland toward Yucca Mountain.

The journey had been planned with meticulous precision, designed to bring the stone out of hiding during the lowest phase of its power surge, when it was all but dormant, and get it back into hiding before the wave began to grow once again. So far, the transit had gone off without a hitch. As things looked, they would be deep in the mountain bunker at least seven hours before the next burst.

Riding in the cab of the semitruck, Arnold Moore listened as one of the Black Hawks thundered overhead, moving forward to take point in the formation. He found himself amused at the overkill of their protection force.

The convoy was firmly in the heart of military controlled property, traveling an unnamed road that cut through the center of the Nellis Bombing Range. To attack them, someone would have to cross a hundred miles of open desert and then breach the most heavily guarded military base in the continental United States. Missile-armed helicopters and F-22 Raptors patrolled the skies. Cameras and infrared sensors monitored every square inch of the perimeter and, even before Moore and his cargo had arrived, the military guards had standing authority to shoot any intruders on sight. The reason was simple: This section of desert was also home
to Groom Lake, a top-secret test flight center where the Stealth bomber and other exotic aircraft had been developed. And if that wasn’t enough, the land surrounding them was the infamous Area 51.

Moore glanced through the window. He saw a barren landscape, pockmarked with bomb craters, test sites, and ugly mountains of piled-up dirt. A thousand different types of explosive had been tested here, from cluster bombs to “daisy cutters.” Even nuclear warheads had been exploded here.

The scars remained on the dry desert surface without even a hint of life to soften them. Not a blade of grass, nor a cactus, nor the smallest desert scrub could be seen. It looked like the moon or another planet. Perhaps that was why the UFO junkies were so certain that aliens had been brought here; they just might have felt at home.

The door to the trailer opened and one of the research scientists poked his head through.

“We have a problem, sir.”

Moore’s heart froze. “What’s wrong?”

“We’ve got an unexpected rise in the energy wave,” the scientist told him. “And it’s growing rapidly.”

Out on the Gulf of Mexico, Danielle studied the two boats charging toward them.

“They’re trying to corral us,” McCarter said.

“I told you we should have brought some missiles,” Hawker said.

“Next time I will,” she promised, only half joking.

Danielle watched as the gap between the two pursuing
vessels widened and she thought she saw an opportunity. She nudged McCarter from the driver’s seat and reduced the throttles slightly and a moment later reduced them further. The other vessels rapidly closed the range.

A moment later, she chopped the throttles once again, whipped the boat through a quick ninety-degree turn, and then gunned the engines.

With the throttle to the firewall they charged for the gap.

As they raced across the water, Danielle held the boat’s throttles to full, ducking down as the air and spray whipped across the deck. She was gunning for the space between the two boats that had come out after them, something the drivers of those boats must have realized as they now raced to pinch it shut.

Her eyes flicked back and forth between the two boats. It would be close.

Behind her Hawker spoke to McCarter. “Might want to get down,” he said, as he gently forced Yuri to the deck. McCarter followed suit and Danielle hunkered down as far as she could while still being able to see and drive.

The boats were racing toward one another at a combined speed of seventy to eighty knots.

Seconds apart, Danielle dropped down, still holding the wheel.

She cut between them. As the pursuing boats crossed behind her, a spread of bullets whistled overhead, not aimed at her but at the squared-off shape of the outboard engines.

It was an impossible shot, taken from a pitching deck with only an instant to aim. A thousand to one, Danielle
thought. She listened to the sound of the engines, felt the vibration, and glanced back at them. The odds had held. They’d come through unharmed.

She glanced behind them. One boat had been forced out to the north and the other craft had altered course and was now turning to follow.

From here it would be a race to the shore, one she wasn’t entirely sure they could win.

Out in the desert wastes of Nevada, Arnold Moore stared into the panic-filled eyes of the scientist. “What the hell are you talking about?” he asked.

“A major energy spike,” his man said.

Moore tried to stand and found himself held back by the seat belt.

“That’s not possible,” he said, releasing the belt and realizing that he had no idea what was or was not possible in regard to the stone.

He pushed into the back of the truck. There, in a makeshift version of the Virginia lab, two of his staffers were monitoring the glowing stone. Moore looked at the readout on the computer screen. The energy output had clearly spiked, quadruple its normal passive state and growing.

“When did this start?”