Dragon (6 page)

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

B
ENEATH 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

D
ALE
N
ICHOLS, 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.”