The Eighth Trumpet (The Jared Kimberlain Novels) (8 page)

In one of three dark rooms located in the rear, a man with thick glasses looked up from a developing machine. Switching the developed material to a hypersensitive computer-keyed enhancer, he took another look and then turned his stare through the red half-light at Danielle.

“There it is,” he announced. “Not terrific, but the best I can do.”

Danielle moved her eye to the lens to see whatever he’d been able to reconstruct of the burned pages. She had left for Washington as soon as the preliminary results had been revealed to her. During the long flight across the Atlantic she tried to sleep, but every time she dozed off she was seized by a fuzzy dream of her parents, seen only from the rear since she had no real memory of them. The dreams always came at times of maximum stress, as if to remind her of the path that had brought her to where she was. Her parents were mere shadows in her memory, dark and without definition. More vividly she remembered an endless succession of refugee camps in Lebanon. In each she was given a different name, but the real hell did not begin until she was twelve. Thin and frail, yet mysteriously attractive, she was lighter-skinned than the other girls but with the darkest eyes of any.

The first man to force himself upon her smelled of liquor and sweat and drove a pain through her like none she thought possible. And when he was done, he had dragged her bloodied body into his tent, where more men were ready to take their turn. As the first of them mounted her she felt the pain even worse than before. She wanted to scream but lacked the strength; she thought of holding her breath until she was dead.

Suddenly three well-dressed men stormed into the tent. The savage on top of her was yanked off and his throat slit as guns were drawn on his fellows. Then a concerned-looking man who smelled good gently lifted her from the floor as she passed out.

When she came to, it was daytime and she was being led out of a car with vague memories of flying in a jet larger than those that buzzed the camps constantly. She was wearing clean, fresh-smelling clothes that were almost her size. Before her was a camp not at all like the others. It had gardens and buildings instead of tents, and there were spacious grounds and woods. The compound was enclosed by a waist-high stone fence rather than the barbed wire she had grown up staring at. The buildings contained rooms laid out in dormitory fashion with six children in each. By the time she was escorted to hers, more fresh new clothes had been stacked neatly in a chest of drawers, and still more hung in her closet. Dinner that night was the greatest meal of her life, the food hot and plentiful, and Danielle—though she had not yet come to be called that—almost cried with happiness.

There were fifty or so other children present, and she was among the oldest. Many of the others looked to be no more than five or six. Danielle watched as a new world began to open up for her. She had never seen so many different kinds of people with different skin, hair, and eyes. All seemed happy to be there.

The lessons started almost immediately. Danielle had had virtually no schooling up to this point, and the work was hard, including courses in math, science, and a variety of languages including French, English, and German. She learned fast, completed her work diligently, and often had to be prodded to go outside to play with the others in the neatly sculptured gardens. Her world began at the stone fence and ended in the woods. Still, it was a massive world compared to what she had been used to for as long as she could remember. The children were encouraged to run free in the rolling expanse of wooded land at the back of the compound. Hide-and-go-seek was the favorite game, and it grew more elaborate as the months passed. The children’s training had begun though they didn’t know it, even as their numbers slowly dwindled. Occasionally at night a child would disappear without question or explanation.

For her own part Danielle was too engrossed in her studies to notice. She thoroughly enjoyed the new challenges presented her almost daily, and she began to thrive. She mastered the languages with ease, along with other complex subjects such as world currency tables and various laws for entry and exit visas. Here again she did not question; she simply learned.

The years passed and Danielle grew taller and more ravishing. Of her original batch of children, barely a third remained. Friendships were not encouraged, and she had made none. She knew she was being singled out by the men who were her instructors, knew she was excelling in the complicated field games added to the classroom work. Drilling in hand-to-hand combat and weaponry had started, and the remaining children accepted this as easily as everything else. After all, the one thing that held all of them together was that before coming here they had all lived with violence. With such a perspective, nursed almost from birth, there was no resistance to the training they were now required to undergo. It was simply a part of life.

Danielle excelled at the training. She approached the drills and practice sessions diffidently yet with the same precision with which she attacked her studies. The ones who failed, both boys and girls, seemed to be trying too hard. For her it all came easy. In the camps she had known neither failure nor success, just depression and destitution. Her new life taught her that failure need not exist at all. Everything depended on attitude, and she learned to become the master of hers.

If only she had known, then …

Then what? That night in the woods when the second phase began, when she became Danielle, maybe she would have let herself die. But they had pushed the right buttons to activate the desired response. They had made her in the image they desired, and she had become
their
prisoner, instead of a prisoner of the camps. That night in the woods had accomplished the final forging of her persona, determining her shape through years to come until …

“ … so I couldn’t make any sense of the contents of the pages under standard infrared or ultraviolet,” the man with thick glasses was explaining. Danielle realized her mind had drifted while her eye had been pressed to the lens. She looked up from it. “So what I did,” the man continued, “was I retreated the pages entirely. Risky business since we mighta lost everything in the process, but I laid the overcoating on by hand to assure the smoothest impression, and”—dramatically now—“
voilà!
”

Danielle returned her eye to the lens and spun the focusing wheel. The picture that sharpened was the government seal that had drawn her here in the first place.

“Yes,” she commented. “I told you about that.”

“You told me it was just government. Actually it’s a Defense Department seal reserved for the touchiest documents. Top secret, highly classified, and all that sort of stuff. Anyway, you actually brought me fragments of two separate documents, from what the salvaged excerpts indicate. The one you’re looking at now was the most damaged. It was probably lifted off microfilm which would have meant loss of resolution even without the fire. Best I could do was that one seal and a single word noteworthy for its repetition.”

“What word?”

“Spiderweb.”

“That’s all?”

“That and the fact it was under what they call
ULTSEC
for ‘ultra-secret.’ The second document wasn’t as badly burned, and it was infinitely more interesting.” The man carefully slid the piece of retouched Kodak paper aside and placed another sheet beneath the computer-keyed lens. “Here we go. Have a look.”

Danielle rotated the lens. What she saw was a mass of lines, measurements, and notations that were meaningless to her. “Plans,” she said simply.

“Yes,” the man acknowledged, and he slid the page to place a specific section under the lens. “Now look.”

Danielle’s vision sharped to recognize a pair of letters. “EB … Electric Boat?”

“The very boys up in Groton, Connecticut, who make some rather impressive subs.”

“Then these are plans for a submarine?”

“Fragments of them, yes, and not just any sub either. From what I can gather, you’re looking at the midship of the new Jupiter class of super-Tridents. Soviets would pay a fortune to get their hands on these.” He paused. “Is that what this is about?”

She looked down through the lens again and then back up at the man. Her eyes hardened.

“Okay,” he said fearfully, “just forget I asked.”

Danielle went back to the lens, mostly to keep the man from seeing any fear in her own face.

The plans for a new class of Trident submarines.

Something in the Defense Department called Spiderweb.

And somewhere a connection between the two.

Chapter 8

COMMANDER MCKENZIE BARLOW
lay twisting on his cot fighting against sleep. The battle was between a body that craved rest and a mind terrified that more hours lost would make more distant the awesome task still ahead.

Seventeen days now. Seventeen days of confinement and disgrace aboard his own ship. Seventeen days. In that period Mac had been allowed out of his quarters on only five occasions and then only to transmit a code signaling that all was well on board the
Rhode Island
.

A lie. A great big fucking lie.

The
Rhode Island
was the prototype for a new class of super-Trident submarines, twenty percent larger than the last generation and at least that much faster. She could remain submerged indefinitely, and the transport of her deadly cargo of twenty-eight nuclear missiles was totally at the discretion of her commanding officer.

At least it had been.

Those missiles, with more than ten thousand times the explosive force of the bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were deadly accurate, thanks to the wonders of microchip technology. The
Rhode Island
’s Jupiter-class missiles alone made her the third-greatest nuclear power on Earth, capable of knocking out seventy-three percent of the Soviet populace on her own. But aside from her power and speed, the
Rhode Island
’s greatest feature was that she couldn’t be tracked—not by Soviet forces, and not by her American counterparts. Even her routine messages were bounced off so many beacons that only a rough estimate of her position could be gained. In fact, one of the major purposes of the
Rhode Island
’s maiden voyage was to see whether SOSUS (sonar surveillance system) could come close to tracking her. The system, composed of hundreds of powerful sensors lodged on the bottom of the sea, was designed to follow the paths of Soviet Victor and Charlie subs. It was the most sophisticated in the world, and if the
Rhode Island
’s silent running could evade detection by it she could evade detection by anything.

In actuality, no sub as fast as the
Rhode Island
could operate silently. Instead of trying to, she sent out contradictory signals that sensors normally read as schools of fish. Electric Boat had set out to build the perfect warship, and the feeling on the eve of the
Rhode Island
’s maiden voyage was that they had come very close.

Mac heard footsteps approaching, then a key being turned in his door. It wasn’t mealtime, so he must have miscounted the days. Today must be the eighteenth, not the seventeenth, time for his three-day signal pass to
COMSUBLANT
—Commander of the Submarine Force in the Adantic. No matter, for he’d already composed in his mind the masked message he intended to send to advise
COMSUBLANT
of what was really going on aboard the
Rhode Island
.

At fifty-three he had considered himself too old for such a command and had let himself be talked into it against his better judgment. If the Jupiter class of super-Tridents was to be utilized to its utmost potential, he was told, it needed men of Mac’s savvy and stature at the helm.

That stature might have been defined by many things, but size was not one of them. McKenzie Barlow stood barely five and a half feet tall. He had been christened “Mighty Mac” back in his early training days when he fought to join the SEALs, the navy’s elite commando company, against concerted antagonism from those who believed he didn’t fit the image. Mac had proved them wrong then and later in Vietnam, where his specialty was underwater demolitions. Though records weren’t kept, he had probably spent more time behind enemy lines than anyone else serving with Navy stripes.

On one mission the Cong locked on to the gunboat transporting him and a team out of a fire zone, and Mac had risked capture and death by venturing back into the flames on four separate occasions to carry out the rest of the crew. The incident left him with multiple skin grafts on his arms and permanently damaged shoulder joints from the pressure of carrying two of the men for three miles through enemy jungle.

That was the last combat Mac ever saw as a SEAL, but his subsequent rise though the Navy chain of command was swift, culminating in his holding the con of the Trident sub
Florida
for six years prior to his retirement. They had lured him back into the command chair to take the
Rhode Island
only after assuring him that this maiden voyage would be strictly window dressing: in other words, no nuclear armaments on board. The order of business was thirty days at sea just to check out the silent-running systems and give the press something to write about. Mac even agreed to participate in the christening ceremonies at Electric Boat in Groton. He was on board running systems checks when sealed orders arrived from the vice-admiral of
COMSUBLANT
to steam out of Groton for Newport News, Virginia, to take on a full complement of twenty-eight Jupiter-class missiles prior to deep-lie mission. If he had known … But who was he kidding? He was Navy all the way; he would never have said no to them, no matter what. He was miffed that they had kept him in the dark, but he knew it was nothing personal, just a matter of security. The very existence of the Jupiter-class missile hadn’t been made public yet, and a leak prior to the
Rhode Island
’s maiden voyage could sink her faster than any charge from a Victor or Charlie.

Mac fumed until the first hours at sea refreshed him and he lost himself in his command. The first two days out of Newport News by way of Groton were totally without incident. The
Rhode Island
drove like a sports car, and Mac treated her as such, airing her out beneath the sea that to him was like one giant superhighway without a speed limit. As a boy he had loved driving his bike through the back roads of Wisconsin, turning and twisting until he was hopelessly lost. Deciding on a course for this Jupiter-class prototype was much the same, except the instruments were always there to tell him where he was. Took some of the fun out of it, if you asked McKenzie Barlow.