Floating City (21 page)

Fedorov had been in the Soviet Air Force for more than twenty years, and he knew every flying trick in the book. At Vladivostok, he had logged in a refit flight on the Tupolev-10, an old long-distance military transport, had stayed within the radar fields, then, along the coast, had taken the aircraft to an altitude below effective radar range, putting out a spurious distress call that would lead Soviet search planes north while they headed steadily south.

The two four-by-five-by-eight-inch ingots had a total weight of just over three hundred pounds, and the DU cases themselves were each just under half a ton. Abramanov and Fedorov had replaced the guts of a pair of the MiG-29’s AA-10 Alamo laser-guided air-to-air missiles with the cases, using the automated gantry servos used to load bombs.

At the Vladivostok airfield, the military was already in such chaos that it was a relatively simple matter for the two of them to transfer the cargo to the Tupolev in utter secrecy.

Having felt firsthand the power of the MiG-29’s twin Tumanskii jet engines, Abramanov had wished to continue their flight in that swift aircraft. But this had proved impossible. Besides the fact that he had to log the MiG-29 in with the field commander, Fedorov had pointed out that if the Chinese or Vietnamese radar picked up the configuration of a warbird outside Soviet airspace, they would initiate an international disaster of incalculable proportions.

Now, in the fierce grip of the subtropical storm, Abramanov wished for the 4,700-kph thrust such a plane would give them. At least they would have a chance to outrun the storm. In the wallowing Tupolev, they were completely at the sky’s mercy.

Too late, he thought of the consequences should the two 114m cases come in contact with each other or—just as terrifying—if their DU shielding should be damaged in the coming crash.

“I can’t hold it!” Fedorov shouted, giving life to Abramanov’s worst fears. “We’re going down!”

The colonel unstrapped, while Abramanov sat in his chair, paralyzed with dread. He was not thinking of himself, but of the 114m.

“Damn you, come on!” Fedorov grabbed Abramanov by the front of his flight suit, hauled him out of his seat.

The Tupolev was canted crazily, its nose dragged down as if by a lead weight. Rain pelted the cockpit cowling and the fuselage, setting up a fearful din. Great gusts of wind slammed the aircraft over and down.

“We have to jump now!” Fedorov shouted in Abramanov’s ear.

As if in a trance, Abramanov hesitated, reluctant to part with the cases of 114m. “Our cargo—”

“You idiot, fuck the cargo!” Fedorov screamed, hauling him toward the door. “The autopilot won’t hold us up for long. A moment more and we’ll be too low for the chutes to open in time!”

Fedorov leaned on the cargo door, sliding it open. Wind and rain flew in, bouncing around the cabin like ricocheting bullets. The elements plucked at them like a living thing, taking Abramanov’s breath away.

“Now!” shouted Fedorov at the edge of the doorway.

“I can’t leave! I—”

But Fedorov had already released his hold on the fuselage, his body sucked out of the aircraft. Abramanov watched with an almost detached curiosity as Fedorov’s dark form dwindled, tumbling over and over. Then the quick bloom, startling in its paleness, as his parachute opened.

The Tupolev was shuddering and groaning as the storm, let loose inside it, threatened to rip it apart. Abramanov’s teeth were chattering. As if in a dream, he watched his fingers give up their white-knuckled grip on the edge of the doorway. He felt a sudden burst of kinetic energy, as if the hands of a giant had slammed into the small of his back, and he was hurled into the heart of the black storm.

Upside down, the wind howling in his ears, drenched to the bone, he scrabbled for the rip cord. He saw the underside of the Tupolev yaw away from him and wondered that he could not discern the massive roar of its engines above the primal howling of the storm.

Disoriented, he could not find the rip cord, and he panicked, tasting bile in his mouth. He thought of the ocean, so far below him, rising up to slam him into oblivion. His belly turned to ice, and he almost lost a grip on his bowels. Then his hands closed around the plastic handles and he jerked them down. The abrupt break in his downward momentum felt like the intercession of God. As he righted, he gave a prayer.

Below him was the sea and, to his right, the top of Fedorov’s chute, a comforting flower in an inimical world, and Abramanov felt dissipate a measure of the tension that had racked him ever since they hit the leading edge of the storm.

In retrospect, it seemed as if he knew what would happen a split second before it actually took place. An eerie sense of immediate déjà vu gripped him as he saw Fedorov slice sideways, driven by a fierce gust of wind. Almost simultaneously, a rent in his main chute appeared, a dark, grinning mouth, widening madly until the chute collapsed into segments and Fedorov commenced to plunge downward at a terrifying rate.

Abramanov tried to shout a warning, but the sound was snatched from his lips, lost within the violent whorls and eddies of the storm.

He was close enough to the heaving ocean to see what happened to Fedorov as his friend struck it. It was as if the sea rose up to meet him. Abramanov could see approaching a gigantic wave, shot through with darkness, a demon with glass teeth, a beast out of a nightmare, trembling with feral fury. Fedorov’s head canted at an impossible angle as his body struck the leading edge of the wave and disappeared into that lost world. The passage of life into death was momentarily marked by the stain of the shredded parachute, before it, too, was sucked beneath the waves.

Abramanov felt an overwhelming urge to vomit. The sea was so high, so close now, that he could taste the salt and phosphorus it gave off as if it were radiation. Abramanov thought that perhaps his friend’s fate was the better of two evils. Instantaneous death must be preferable, he told himself, to drowning. A sudden squall of wind caught him as it had Fedorov, jerking him from side to side as if he were trapped on a ride in an amusement park, and Abramanov thought for a moment that God was going to grant his wish.

But his chute held, driven sideways over the ocean, propelled by the wind. Above him, he could see, like a leviathan descending toward the ocean’s floor, the Tuρolev-10. The shadow of its passage was like an eclipse. Even the monstrous storm seemed to pause for an instant.

Then, like a celestial object thrown off course, the aircraft dove into the water nose first, and above the storm’s incessant roar, Abramanov heard the squeal of tortured metal, felt the shock wave as if it were a bomb blast.

He swung vertiginously just above the waves, then, as the storm resumed its fury, he was dashed into the bosom of the South China Sea, closer to the Tupolev-10 and its unnerving cargo than he wanted to be.

Something tore, splintering. Pain lanced through his body.
Oh, God, my leg!
he thought as the first, enervating torrent of water engulfed him.

Rock breathed deeply of the sea air, scenting phosphorus and brine, decomposing seagrape and barnacles, fish heads baking in the sun. The boat rolled deeply in the green and indigo swells.

“We’re almost there,” Abramanov said.

Rock looked up from his methodical cleaning of a black magic—an M16A1 army rifle—saw Abramanov hulking like a brown bear across the deck. Not so long a trip, he thought, but on the other hand, before they were finished, it might be longer than a journey to the end of the world.

Rock had been in Asia for so long it was the only home he knew. He remembered another one, dimly and with a combination of rage and fear. In nightmares he experienced again his father looming over him, drunk and out of work again.

C’mon,
his father would say to him in his nightmare.
Just you an’ me, Junior, without your mother to save your stinking, worthless ass.
Then his father would strip the bedcovers off him, strike him beside his ear with such stunning force that Rock would almost pass out. Then again and again. Nightmare or remembered past?

Rock did remember the day he had faced his father down and—after years of beefing up at the gym, at army boot camp, and on the first and only leave he had used to return home—with one stunningly quick left hook, had set him down on the pavement in front of the Pittsburgh ghetto tenement in which Rock had been brought up.

His father’s only response had been to smile slyly as he spat blood.
I been waiting a long fucking time, Junior,
he had said.
Just remember I made you what you are.

Now, as he stood upon the pitching deck of one of the many boats he owned, Rock watched the Russian crossing unsteadily toward him. That leg had been a mess when one of Rock’s patrol boats had scooped Abramanov out of these storm-dark waters six months ago. Rock, who had access to the best of everything in Southeast Asia, had had his people do their best. But even so, he lacked the facilities and the personnel of a Walter Reed Hospital. Bones had been reset, but nerve damage was irreversible, at least in this part of the world. Of course, he hadn’t told Abramanov that; the man had been grateful enough to be saved from drowning in an angry sea. Abramanov, like many people with thoroughly analytical minds, had an irrational fear. Rock supposed it was his good karma that Abramanov’s phobia was drowning. He wasn’t too crazy about sharks, either, which made him all the more grateful for the timely rescue.

Rock stood at the railing with Abramanov. He removed his sunglasses, squinted as the first line of nimbostratus occluded the sun. The tight had abruptly turned leaden. “If the weather holds,” he said, “we’ll have the robot down to the plane within an hour.”

He stared down into the ocean, trying hard to imagine the Soviet aircraft lying on an outcropping at the edge of an abyss of unimaginable depth. But already the water was darkening to the color of pitch.

The storm had blown in while they were too far out to sea. The captain of Rock’s patrol boat was a small Vietnamese who knew these waters better than many men twenty years his senior. “The storm, when it comes, will be a bad one,” he said in his lilting voice. “But if we turn back now, we will be heading broadside into the brunt of it, and I don’t believe I want to do that.”

Rock nodded. “Good, neither do I. Hold your position, then, and we’ll go to work.” He turned to Abramanov. “How will the robot perform in this weather?”

To prove his gratitude, Abramanov had spent the months of his rehab constructing a submersible robot, a seven-foot titanium shell housing a network of laser-guided telemetry, mini-computers, navigation transducers, sonar, a complement of turbo thrusters, articulated arms with sophisticated fingerlike pincer ends, video cameras, tungsten spotlights, backup lithium batteries, and the like, all connected with the shipboard computer via a fiber-optic cable bundle.

The complex creation appeared to be child’s play for Abramanov, who cobbled most of the robot’s component parts from Rock’s vast storehouse of military ordnance. Part of the robot’s design was based on the specialized manipulator “hands” Abramanov had built for his high-flux neutron-field hot room in Arzamas-16.

“The robot will be fine,” Abramanov said. “It will be six hundred feet below the surface and won’t feel a thing. It’s us that will be the problem if the storm really kicks in. If we can’t hold our position and can’t get the robot up in time, the cable could be severed and we’d lose the robot.”

“Get it over the side,” Rock said.

“But—”

“Now, before the swells get too high to get it in the water.”

Rain was spitting at them in irregular bursts, and the ceiling had lowered significantly just in the time they had been talking. Clouds streaked past, dark and gravid with precipitation. In the distance it appeared as if the swelling sea was heaving up to meet the angry sky.

Rock gave the signal to the team manning the special winch and the electronic monitoring devices in their airtight housings. A moment later, a bulky chalk-white object was lowered over the side of the boat. There was a dull clang as the robot, caught in the rising current just beneath the surface of the sea, struck the hull of the boat. They all held their breath. Then it was clear, descending toward its destiny.

Abramanov had built this robot as a tabula rasa. It possessed great skills, but lacked the brain to implement those skills. It would be up to Abramanov to fill the steel, ceramic, and fiber-optic networks with purpose.

“Halfway down,” Abramanov muttered to Rock as he clung to the coping of the hatch leading into the main cabin below. He was clearly uncomfortable with the rolling and pitching of the boat and appeared ready to duck into the safety of belowdecks at a moment’s notice. “Everything okay. The swaying has stopped. It’s calm down there.”

Rock went to check their position with the captain. Despite the increasingly foul weather, the captain remained confident he could keep them stable. Rock told him to inform him immediately of any change in that status.

For the time being satisfied, he turned away, stood next to Abramanov as the Russian adjusted the remote transceiver he had clipped to his belt. Then, with a nervous glance at Rock, Abramanov slipped on the wire ear- and mouthpiece and switched the system on.

“It’s very dark down there. Color values are nil. I’m switching on the tungsten floods.”

“Are you nervous, Abramanov?”

“Yes. I am very fearful. We are close to the objective now.”

“I can read you. You want this every bit as much as I do. Do you want the cargo to sit underwater until some undersea quake breaks open the DU casings?”

“God forbid! The consequences of such an event would be catastrophic.”

“So you’ve said. Is the robot on the ridge yet?”

“I am still suspended.”

Abramanov had a curious habit when connected with the camera eyes and claw hands of the robot to put himself in its place.

Rock pulled up the hood of his slicker, went out on deck. Seawater washed across his ankles as the deck canted, then righted itself; the water sluiced away.