Gideon's War/Hard Target (23 page)

“Copy that,” Kate said. Her voice sounded confident and in control, in stark contrast to the panic on her face. And the panic became even more acute when Gideon pointed to the dark shape resolving out of the murk. Chun was coming toward them.

Kate wiped her slate clean with her gloved hand and started to swim back around the pier toward the cradle. Gideon followed. By the time Chun reached the cradle, they were busy scraping algae off the area where Kate planned to weld the big steel plate.

“I’m with them, sir,” Chun said.

“What are they doing?” Timken’s said.

“Scraping green shit off the cradle.”

“Feel free to help,” Kate said, looking at Chun.

“I told you to keep your distance, Chun,” Timken said. “Just observe. I don’t want any accidents happening to you.”

Chun moved backward a few feet, crossed his arms, and stood there on the cradle, swaying slightly in the current.

“All right, guys, the welder’s coming down,” Big Al said. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it’s swinging like a sumbitch in this wind. It’s— Watch out!”

No sooner had Big Al begun to shout when Kate flew upward, yanked by her umbilical. She stopped suddenly after shooting upward a good twenty-five feet—almost to the level of the wave troughs.

“Kate? Are you all right?” Big Al said, the concern in his voice quickly becoming panic when she didn’t answer. “The welder snagged Kate’s line.” Big Al repeated, “Kate!”

Still no answer.

Gideon could barely see her in the dark, turbulent water. He twisted the valve on his buoyancy control and began swimming up toward her. As he rose, she continued drifting laterally. She was motionless, her arms floating. Somehow her rapid ascent had caused her to lose consciousness.

“What’s going on down there, Chun?” Timken shouted.

“Something snagged her,” Chun said.

“I’m cutting the line,” Big Al said.

Now Kate was sinking—drifting sideways and sinking. Gideon saw that not only had her umbilical snapped, but a gash had appeared in the bladder of her buoyancy control device. The BC worked by inflating or deflating the bladder with the air hose, depending on whether you wanted to float uhatÑ€†p or sink down. But her weighted belt was now pulling her downward. If she didn’t regain consciousness, she’d sink slowly to the bottom, six hundred feet below. Her helmet contained valves to keep it from venting all the air in the event of a hose failure, so she wouldn’t drown immediately. But eventually the oxygen would give out and she’d suffocate. Gideon immediately vented his own BC and began swimming down after her as fast as he could.

Just as his fingers were about to close around her arm, he jerked to a stop. He’d reached the end of his own umbilical. Below him Kate disappeared into the blackness as though carried by an invisible elevator.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

“LOWER ME,” GIDEON SHOUTED. “Lower me now!”

“What depth?” Big Al asked.

“Until I tell you to stop,” Gideon shouted. “Kate’s umbilical broke and she’s dropping like a rock.”

Timken’s voice broke in: “Chun?”

“Just like he said, sir,” Chun said. “Better drop him or you’ll lose her.”

Gideon felt the resistance of the umbilical give way as Big Al began paying out the umbilical with the winch.

It seemed that he was already in the dark. But as he slid deeper, the dark became an impenetrable black force. He swam as hard as he could.

“Gideon, you’re already at fifty meters,” Big Al said. “I’m going to have to start changing your air to heliox soon. You need to slow down so I can adjust—”

Gideon interrupted. “Just keep paying out the umbilical.”

“Sixty meters. Seventy.”

The pressure in Gideon’s ears was agonizing. He tried to clear them, but he couldn’t blow hard enough or fast enough. He was already deeper than he’d ever been.

“Eighty meters. Gideon! Are you sure—”

“Keep going, dammit!”

The world had gone completely black. He couldn’t even see a slight haze of gray above him now. And the water was cold, terribly cold. He kept looking around him, the dim white cone of light from his helmet piercing weakly into the darkness. Kate was nowhere to be seen.

But for some reason, it didn’t bother him. He heard a song being hummed, some half-remembered melody he couldn’t identify. Was he humming it, or was it just a voice in his head? It didn’t matter. Nothing really mattered. He laughed. Suddenly he wasn’t worried about anything.

“Ninety meters. Jesus Christ, Gideon!”

He realized dimly what was causing this feeling of pleasant disconnectedness. He was getting narced. Applying Martini’s Law, he was seven martinis to the wind.

Focus. Gideon willed himself to concentrate.

“Gideon, there’821 T‡s only a hundred meters of line.”

And then he saw her—a smudge of yellow below him. It was her helmet. All he needed was another few feet.

Closer. He could see the valves on her helmet, torn straps on her harness where the umbilical had ripped free. She still had the bailout bottle, though. They’d be able to make it.

Her helmet had a large handle on top. He wasn’t sure what its function was—whether for hauling divers out of the water, or for allowing an assistant to take your helmet for you. But whatever it was for, it would be perfect for him to grab hold of her.

He swam hard toward her, reaching for her with each stroke. His muscles were screaming now, and he could feel the CO2 building up in his blood from all the exertion.

Closer. He was almost there . . .

Just as his fingers were about to close around the handle, he felt a gentle tug on his back and his body swung around. He’d gone as deep as his umbilical would allow.

Kate continued to fall. She was more buoyant at this level because of the air that remained in her helmet, so she was falling very slowly now. But still she was sinking.

Gideon rotated his body around the pivot where the umbilical attached to his harness. He continued stroking with his hands, trying desperately to swing his feet toward her.

And then, he felt a thud against his foot. He was touching her.

He looked down, thrust his foot into the strap of her bailout bottle harness. And with that, she came to a stop.

“I got her!” he shouted. He was so narced up now that he couldn’t contain himself.

“Is she all right?” Big Al said.

But Gideon didn’t answer. He took a shallow breath, not wanting to move. He had a single toe looped under the strap. Just a breath of current might dislodge her. She felt light as a feather.

Big Al’s questions went unanswered as Gideon pulled her slowly upward until he was able to grasp the handle on top of the helmet. Then he pulled her around so he could see her face. She wasn’t moving, and her face was gray. He quickly turned the valve on the bailout bottle. He could hear the hiss as the air shot into Kate’s helmet.

“Come on!” he shouted. “Breathe!”

“Gideon, talk to me!” Big Al said. “What’s going on down there? Is she okay?”

“Her bailout’s working. But it’s straight atmospheric air. We’re too deep for atmospheric. We’re gonna have to deco her up to the damper as fast as we can.”

“I’ve already started switching you to heliox,” Big Al said. “Don’t want you getting messed up down there, too.”

“Speak English,” Timken said. “I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”

“You know what the bends are, Timken?” Big Al barked.

“Of course I know,” Timke822ဆn said. “The oxygen in your blood starts bubbling because you decompress too fast.”

“Nitrogen, actually. But, if you don’t shut up and let me do my job—”

A desperate gasp on the radio stopped him mid-sentence.

“She’s breathing!” Big Al exhaled his relief when he heard Gideon’s voice.

Deep below the surface, Kate’s eyes blinked open. She stared at Gideon, disoriented. Her lips moved. “Where am I?”

“You’re okay,” Gideon said. Then, to Big Al, he said, “Look, I don’t have deco tables in my head—not for dives this deep. How much decompression time will she need?”

“I don’t know. We’ve never gone atmospheric this deep.”

“Well, she’s only got forty cubic feet of air in the bailout.”

“What about yours?”

“My bailout got torn off when I dove through the wave line.”

“Shit,” Big Al said. “Lemme check the decompression tables.”

Kate was still staring at him, a moonstruck expression on her face.

“We don’t have time. Just pull us to seventy and pause for five,” Gideon said. “And then pull us to . . .”

And then, suddenly it came to him, how they could pull off their mission and defuse the bombs.

“Then pull us to fifty, pause for another five, then bring her to forty and pause for fifteen. I’ll stay with her to make sure she’s okay. Meantime, you can drop another umbilical and we’ll get her hooked up to heliox before her bailout dies. Okay?”

“Huh?” Kate said. It was obvious that she was in trouble. But they couldn’t rush her up without serious danger of the bends.

“All right, Chun,” Timken said. “I want you dropping to wherever they are so you can keep an eye on them.”

Big Al’s voice broke in. “I can’t do that. I’ve got to switch Gideon to heliox so he doesn’t get totally narced down there. You have to adjust the mix every time they move. I can’t keep on top of Chun’s air mix, too. Somebody will end up dead.”

“He’s right,” Chun said. “A lot of things can go wrong at seventy meters. With only one dive tender, we’re already pushing it.”

“Listen to me carefully, Gideon,” Timken said. “I get even a whiff that you’re doing something funky down there, we’ll cut the cables and let you fall to the bottom of the fucking sea. Are we clear?”

“Crystal.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

BY THE TIME GIDEON and Kate had decompressed their way back to forty meters, Kate was still looking bleary and listless. He kept having to remind her where she was.

He swam for a while against the current until finally the piers came into view. Swimming while holding on to Kate was extremely hard work . As he had hoped, the bottoms of the cradle braces were visible just above him. He pulled himself up the umbilical until he was even with the brace, a large steel strut attached to a steel collar around the pier.

He scanned it for wires or bombs or blocks of explosive. Nothing.

He began swimming again. It took nearly five minutes before he finally reached the second pier. The cluster of white cables was the first thing he saw. It split into twelve sets of two wires.

“What are those?” Kate said vaguely.

Gideon’s pulse sped up. “Just fish,” Gideon said. It was nearly impossible for him to write on his slate while holding on to Kate, but he finally managed.

“Doesn’t look like fish,” she said, studying the explosives. Gideon slapped the slate urgently against the mask of her helmet.

PLEASE DON’T TALK! he’d written.

“Huh?” she said, then seemed to lose interest.

“Where’s the umbilical?” Gideon said. “Kate’s in trouble here. I think she may be hallucinating.”

“I’m not hallucinating,” she said, grinning at him. “That is not a fish—”

“Kate!” Gideon said. “Just relax, okay? We’ll have some better air for you in a few minutes.”

“Okay,” she said happily.

“She’s narced to the gills,” Gideon said. “Hurry with the umbilical.”

“On its way down,” Big Al said.

Kate’s bail out bottle was in the red zone by the time Gideon managed to locate the new umbilical and hook it up.

“How long you gonna stay down there?” Timken said.

“Look, she just went to a ridiculous depth. We had to bring her up way too fast,” Gideon said. “I need to keep her here another ten minutes just to make sure she doesn’t get up to twenty meters and then suddenly crash.”

“You got five,” Timken said, “then I’m pulling you both up.”

Distracted by Kate’s situation, Gideon had been unable to look at the explosive charges placed on the cradle strut—much less to work on defusing them.

But he finally had the chance.

Kate and Gideon were hanging suspended a few feet below the strut. Several of the explosive charges were visible now.

Kate looked at them fixedly. She still seemed to be trying to figure out what they were. Gideon swam between her and the explosive charges, then held one finger up in front of his lips.

Kaessñ€†te frowned in concentration. Then suddenly she blinked. “Oh!” she said. “Yeah. I’m starting to remember.”

“Remember what?” Timken demanded.

There was a long pause. Gideon grabbed Kate by both arms and stared straight into her face, trying to project every ounce of urgency he could muster without saying anything.

Finally Kate nodded. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s okay, I got a little narced there. I’m getting straightened out, I just need a couple more minutes. When I get back to the cradle, I’ll be fine. We’ll get everything welded up and we’ll be set.”

Gideon smiled. He felt like giving her a huge hug. But there was no time.

He turned toward the nearest explosive charge and studied it. This was going to be tricky.

Kate squeezed his hand encouragingly.

Gideon nodded, trying to cover his own uncertainty, then turned to study the first charge.

Horst’s most important lesson to him had boiled down to this: “Observe the bomb. See the bomb. Know the bomb. Know everything. . . before you cut the first wire.”

So Gideon studied the bomb. There were twelve shaped charges, each attached to one of the twelve bolts that matched the ones he had seen up on the cradle. Each charge appeared to be identical, consisting of a plastic drinking cup inverted over the bolt head. Inside the drinking cup was a pound or so of plastic explosive. The base of the explosive would have been hollowed out into a cone. The cone likely contained a copper slug. When the charge was detonated, the resistance of the water, combined with the shape of the charge, would blast the superheated copper in a jet that would shoot straight through the bolt, acting like a cutting torch jet and simply dissolving the entire bolt.

By detonating all twelve charges in sequence, the bolts would disappear, and the immense weight of the cradle would twist the strut and then shear it away. And that would be the end of the rig.

Sticking out of the top of the closest drinking cup was a thin metal tube—a detonator. Two wires came out of the tube. If that had been all there was to it, the problem would have been easy. Snip the wires, the circuit would be cut, and it would be impossible for the detonator to fire.

Gideon circled around the drinking cup, looking to see if there was anything else he needed to know. If it was simply a matter of cutting the wire—well, this was a best-case scenario. Twelve quick snips with the wire cutters Big Al had on his dive belt and he’d be done. But if there was anything here that he was missing—security circuits, trap circuits, anything of that nature—one snip might blow him and Kate both to bits.

Then he traced the second set of wires, one entering through each side of the cup. It was undoubtedly some kind of security circuit—but without cutting open the cup and tracing the course of the wires millimeter by millimeter, there was no safe way of figuring out its precise function. It might be a monitor circuit to alert them up top that the detonator had been removed. It might be a redundant hidden detonator. Or it might be a decoy. There were a lot of possibilities.

If he just pulled the detonators out, there was a reasonable chaned ñ€†ce the charge would blow. If it did, the shock wave would liquefy his organs and kill him in about one ten-thousandth of a second.

There was no time to perform a full diagnostic analysis on the charge. He’d have to take a chance that simply cutting the wires would disarm the bomb.

Without hesitation, he reached out and snipped the wire.

After a moment, he realized he was still alive.

“I’m getting tired of waiting,” Timken said. “I’m pulling you up to the cradle.”

“Hold on,” Gideon said, cutting the second wire.

“No! I’m not holding on! Pull ’em up, Prejean.”

“I can only pull one of them at a time,” Big Al retorted.

“Then pull Gideon first.”

Gideon turned furiously toward Kate. He pointed at the charges and made a snipping motion with the cutters, then pointed at her.

She stared back, wide-eyed.

“You’ll be fine, Kate!” he said, trying to sound calm.

He tried to snip one more wire before Big Al pulled him up—but he felt a jerk and was already moving upward through the dark water before the jaws of the pliers could close.

There was nothing more he could do. He let the wire cutters drop from his grasp. They flipped end over end, their yellow rubber handles tracing an erratic path through the water, slowly disappearing from his view as the reflected light from his headlamp faded. Kate made a grab for them.

Gideon couldn’t see whether she had caught them or not. She had been swallowed in the darkness.

Major Royce was gripping the console of the C-17 cockpit to keep from being thrown to the deck by the brutal buffeting of the airplane as he watched the radar monitor. The eye of the storm was going to pass over the Obelisk. But only just barely.

“What do you think?” Major Royce asked the meteorologist, who was on loan from the USS Blue Ridge, the navy’s Seventh Fleet command boat. “How long’s our window?”

“The sweet spot, when the wind’s really dropped? Maybe ten, fifteen minutes.” The meteorologist was a lieutenant junior grade who had obviously never flown through a typhoon before and now looked completely terrified. He’d staggered to the head about five times already. The rest of the Deltas smiled as they heard his retching. Royce felt bad for the kid. He’d been through some rough flights over the years, but nothing like this.