28
Eastern Atlantic, June 24
A POUNDING ON HIS
CABIN DOOR woke Joe Zavala. He sat straight up, almost ran for the
door as if general quarters had sounded, and then remembered he
wasn’t in the Navy anymore.
The pounding
returned. “Captain wants you on the bridge, Zavala,” a voice
shouted.
“Tell him I’ll be
right there,” Joe said, grabbing his pants and pulling them
on.
He heard footsteps as
the messenger ran off. Only then did he sense that the Argo was in motion, not turning or making steerage
or sitting at anchor near the anomaly but charging through the
water as if racing something.
Joe pulled a shirt
over his head, stuffed his bare feet into sneakers that he never
untied, and then ran out the door.
A minute later, he
was on the bridge. The Argo was indeed
moving at flank speed, the bow rising and dropping as it rode the
increasing swells.
“Captain,” Joe said,
reporting for duty even though he wasn’t technically one of the
crew.
“Where in God’s green
earth or Poseidon’s blue water is Austin?” Captain Haynes
barked.
Still a little
groggy, Joe offered up his honest thoughts. “Probably waking up to
something a lot nicer than I just woke up to.”
“What are you talking
about?”
“He’s on a date,” Joe
said.
“A date?” Haynes
shook his head. “How does a guy get a date out here in the middle
of the ocean?”
Joe scratched his
head. “That’s a good question,” he said. “I wish I could figure it
out because, honestly, it gets kind of lonely when—”
“Zavala!” the captain
shouted. “Wake up, man. This is not a dream. I need your full
attention. Who is Austin out with?”
For a second, Joe
wondered if it was a dream. The captain was acting weird. Kurt was
a grown man, and Joe had reported Kurt’s disposition to the officer
of the watch upon returning from the Zodiac.
“He’s with the
Russian scientist he rescued from one of the wrecks,” Joe said.
“She told him she had some secret information that he might find
interesting.”
“What time was he
planning on coming back?”
“Well,” Joe said, “I
guess that would kind of depend on how the date went . . .
sir.”
The captain cut his
eyes at Joe and Joe burst out laughing.
“I’m sorry,” Joe
said, “but you sound like my pop back when my brother took the
family car without asking and stayed out way past curfew. What’s
the big deal?”
The captain explained
about the attack on the Grouper, Paul
Trout’s condition, and NUMA’s theory that some type of
electromagnetic weapon had been used on the Kinjara Maru. He made a point of explaining that
whoever attacked the Grouper had used
torp edoes.
“What are they doing
now?” Joe asked.
“They’re headed due
west at full speed,” the captain said. “Sometime tomorrow they’ll
be in range of a Navy guided-missile frigate. At that point they
should be safe, and Paul will be transferred to a hospital
ship.”
“What about us? Is
that why we’re heading in?”
“The Director feels
it’s too dangerous to sit out here alone,” the captain said. “If
someone’s targeting those with knowledge, we, and Austin, could be
next. He’s going to contact the Spanish and Portuguese admirals
tomorrow and get us some backup. But until then, he wants us docked
and all hands accounted for. And that’s why I’m concerned. Because
Kurt hasn’t answered his damn phone all night.”
“Have we contacted
the local police?”
“Yes,” the captain
said. “We’ve made them aware of who Kurt is, what he looks like,
and the fact that we’re trying to find him. And they’ve made us
aware of a fight, gunfire, and a vehicular chase that ended in two
cars going off a cliff on a normally peaceful island. A man fitting
Kurt’s description was involved, but no body matching his has been
recovered.”
Thank God, Joe
thought. He gazed through the Argo’s
forward windows. The lights of Santa Maria were visible up
ahead.
“We’ll reach port in
twenty minutes. I want you to come up with a plan to find him,” the
captain said. “I don’t care if you use the phone or some flares or
you rent a damn plane to fly around trailing a banner that reads
‘Kurt Austin, Call NUMA.’ You just find him before anything else
goes wrong.”
Joe nodded. He would
start with the Russian scientist. Hopefully, someone at one of the
hotels would recognize her.
AS THE ARGO was racing shoreward, Kurt and Katarina were
descending toward the lights of Vila do Porto themselves. The
sensation was rather unlike any Kurt could remember.
The open cockpit was
designed for daytime use in warm weather. There were no lights to
see the limited instrument panel by. In addition, though the small
craft never made more than 50 knots, the damp mountain air blowing
over them at fifty miles an hour was enough to chill them to the
bone.
In daylight
conditions Kurt would have brought them down to a lower altitude as
rapidly as possible, but night flying presented a different
challenge. Piloting such a craft through the mountains in the dark
was like walking through an unfamiliar room without any lights on,
only hitting the furniture here would hurt far worse than a stubbed
toe.
At one point, he
spotted the lights of a car on the twisting road down below. He
angled toward them, knowing that the road cut through the mountain
passes. Following the car, staying far above and well behind it, he
was able to follow the road itself. But, perhaps not surprisingly,
the car turned out to be faster than the flying lawn mower he was
commanding.
As the car’s lights
became too faint to see, another set of lights came into view: the
comparatively bright streets of Vila do Porto. He angled toward
them, knowing that if he could keep them in sight no mountain could
rise up and smite them from the sky.
Katarina noticed them
too. “Are we almost there?” she said. Her teeth were
chattering.
She sat behind him in
the two-seat machine. Kurt remembered the simple black dress she
had on. Not exactly made for 50-knot winds and 40-degree
temperatures.
“You’re cold,” he
said.
“Freezing to death,”
she insisted.
She had to be turning
blue by now. “I thought you Russians were used to the
cold.”
“Yes, and we know how
to dress for it, with layers and fur hats. You don’t have one
hiding up there for me, do you?”
He had to laugh,
imagining her with a giant fur hat on.
“Lean forward,” he
said. “Press against me and put your arms around me.”
“I thought you’d
never ask,” she said.
In an instant he felt
her pressed against him, her arms wrapped around his chest. It was
a lot warmer and nicer that way.
They continued on,
buzzed their way through the last of the mountain passes, and
watched as Vila do Porto spread out before them. The town had fifty
thousand inhabitants, or thereabouts, but it looked like Metropolis
at that moment.
“Where are we going
to land?” Katarina asked.
Kurt had been
thinking about that the whole way down. The ultralight only needed
a two-hundred-foot strip to land and stop in. In the daylight there
might have been fifty places to put down safely, but at night
everything that wasn’t lit up looked the same. Thinking he was
descending toward a flat field or patch of open ground, he could
easily have them ramming a telephone pole, or a house, or a stand
of trees.
They had to land
somewhere lighted to be safe. The only problem was, most lighted
areas had power lines strewn around them. Then Kurt spotted a sight
that looked as glorious to him as the runway lights at JFK
International. A soccer field, lit for a night game and open to the
sky.
A hundred twenty
yards of smooth, flat grass without any power lines crossing it or
obstructions in the way. It was perfect. He angled toward it,
descending slightly. There was a crosswind coming off the Atlantic,
and Kurt had to crab the little plane sideways at a thirty-degree
angle to keep them from getting blown inland.
At five hundred feet,
he could see a crowd around the perimeter but no players on the
field. Katarina pressed into him tighter.
“I need my arms
back,” he said.
“Sorry,” she said.
“Don’t like flying. Especially takeoffs and landings.”
“Don’t worry,” he
said. “This one’s going to be a breeze.”
Within a minute of
saying that, Kurt wished he’d kept his mouth shut. He saw players
taking the field, either it was the start of the game or halftime
had just ended.
He and Katarina were
a hundred feet up, three hundred feet from the end of the grass.
They had to hear him. Of course hearing a plane flying around
didn’t exactly make one run for cover. He guessed that would change
in a few seconds.
The engine began to
sputter and cough.
“We’re almost out of
fuel,” he said.
“Just land, already,”
she shouted back.
He continued on,
wishing the damn thing had a horn. “Too bad I don’t have my
vuvuzela,” he shouted.
He could see the
players shaking hands, the referee standing in the center with his
foot on the ball about to blow the whistle. The engine sputtered
again, and Kurt put the nose down to pick up speed. The prop sped
up again, and he saw the players look his way. The crowd turned as
well.
He zoomed over the
crowd. A flagpole or something he hadn’t seen hit the right wing.
The frame bent, the right side dropped, and Kurt overcorrected back
to the left.
Players began running
for the sidelines as the sputtering craft descended into the
lighted area.
They hit the grass
and bounced. The ultralight almost nosed over, but Kurt corrected
and planted the wheels firmly in the middle of the field, right at
the fifty-yard line.
He reached for the
brake, pulled it, and felt the small plane skid across the wet
grass. One last player dove out of the way, and the ultralight
slammed into the goal at the far end of the field.
The net wrapped
around them, the propeller died, and the little plane
stopped.
Kurt looked up and
back. The crowd, the players, the ref, everyone, just stared in an
incredible silence. They looked at him and Katarina, and then at
one another, and then finally at the ref. He did nothing for a
second, then slowly raised one arm, blew his whistle, and yelled,
“Goooooaaaaaallll!”
The crowd shouted in
unison, raising their arms as if it were a triumph, as if it were
an overtime goal to win the World Cup for tiny Vila do Porto, and
in moments the players were reaching for Katarina and Kurt,
laughing and clapping, as they freed the plane from the net and
dragged it back out onto the field.
The players helped
Katarina climb out, admiring her form as they did. The ref helped
Kurt. And then they were escorted off the field to the
sidelines.
Kurt explained to
someone a version of what had happened, promised to pay for any
damages, and insisted that the ultralight rental outfit would come
for its plane tomorrow.
As the soccer game
began again, he and Katarina made their way out to the street.
Somewhere near the field there had to be a cab waiting or bus they
could take. A microvan pulled up with some kind of sign on
it.
“We need to go to the
harbor,” Kurt said.
“I can take you,” the
driver said.
Kurt opened the door.
Katarina went to climb in but paused.
“That was really
quite incredible,” she said, gazing into his eyes.
They’d almost been
killed three times, her rental car had been sent off a cliff and
turned into a burning hulk, and she was still almost blue from the
cold, but her eyes sparkled as if he’d just shown her the time of
her life. He had to admire that.
He reached out,
pulled her to him, and kissed her on the lips. They kissed for a
few seconds longer, her arms wrapping around him from the front
this time, until the driver coughed lightly.
They
parted.
“Was that to warm me
up?” she asked.
He smiled. “Did it
work?”
“Better than you
know,” she said, turning and climbing into the taxi. He got in
after her, and the little bubble van moved off toward the
harbor.
“You know,” she said,
“we’re only a mile or so from the house where the French team is
staying.”
“Really,” he said,
remembering what she’d told him earlier. “Do you have the
address?”
“It’s right on the
beach at Praia Formosa. The most luxurious rental in
town.”
That sounded like the
French way to him.
“Driver,” Kurt said.
“Take us to Praia Formosa.”