34
AS THE BARRACUDA raced for the surface, Kurt could hardly
contain the anger he felt at being so foolish. He’d jumped to
conclusions early on, assuming he and the Argo were the targets of these madmen even though
in hindsight it was obvious that they held little real
value.
He and Joe had to get
a call off. They had to reach the surface so the shortwave radio
could be used to contact the Argo
thirty miles away in the harbor at Santa Maria.
He thought of the
dead French scientists, wondered why they hadn’t been taken, and
then remembered that it seemed as if they’d put up a hell of a
struggle. He guessed all of the scientists would face the same
choice, fight or surrender. Most would give in; some would
die.
He wondered what
would happen to Katarina. He hoped she and her “chaperone” from the
State were already at the airport and boarding a
plane.
“Forty feet,” Joe
called out.
Kurt eased back on
the throttle just a tad. Crashing the surface at full speed was a
good way to catch air, and possibly even flip the sub.
He leveled out and
they broke the surface.
“Make the call,” he
said.
He didn’t have to
give the order. He could hear Joe flipping the switches and the
sound of the surface antenna extending.
“Argo, this is Barracuda,” Joe said. “Please come in. We have an
urgent transmission to complete.”
While both of them
waited, Kurt held the Barracuda steady.
She was designed to fly underwater, but she rode less well on the
surface.
“Argo, this is Barracuda.”
The next voice they
heard was Captain Haynes’s, which was a surprise in and of itself,
although Kurt could understand him waiting up all night worrying
about the dangerous operation Kurt and Joe believed they were
attempting.
“Joe, this is the
captain,” Haynes said. “Listen, there’s a problem here. We’ve tried
to—”
A sharp crack rang
out, and the cockpit canopy was suddenly covered with dimples and
pits. A shadow crossed toward them from the left. Another crack
sounded, and Kurt realized it was a shotgun blast. This time, he
saw a gaping hole appear in the left wing.
He gunned the engine
and turned hard to the right.
Looking over, he saw
a powerboat bearing down on them.
It looked like it was
about to cut them in half. He had no choice. He pushed the nose
down, and they went under. Water poured in through tiny holes in
the canopy. The boat crossed over them, passing with a roar and a
loud bang that jerked the Barracuda
sideways.
Kurt looked to the
right, seeing that the winglet that acted as a rudder had been torn
off the right side. He felt water pooling at his feet, and noticed
how sluggish the sleek little sub had already become.
He pulled back on the
stick, and the Barracuda turned upward,
breaking the surface and skipping across a wave before coming back
down.
“Be quick,” he said
to Joe.
“Captain, are you
there?” Joe said.
He could see the
speedboat turning back toward them on a wide curve to the right.
Out beyond it he saw another powerboat racing in to join the fight.
He didn’t know what they were going to do to escape, but he knew
they had to finish the call. He heard Joe keying the mike, but
there was no feedback, no static.
“Argo, this is Barracuda,” Joe said. “The scientists are the
target. Repeat, the scientists are the target.”
Kurt heard a click as
Joe let go of the transmit switch. They waited.
“No answer,” Joe
said.
Kurt turned his head,
ready to order Joe to try again, when he saw the tail end of the
Barracuda. The high-frequency antenna
was gone. The sheet metal looked as if it had been chewed up by the
prop of the passing boat.
“I got nothing,” Joe
said.
The powerboats were
racing toward them again, in a staggered formation. The
Barracuda had no hope of outrunning
them. And the only other radio on board was the underwater
transceiver, which had a max range of about a mile.
“Use the speed tape,”
Kurt said. “Plug over these holes.”
As Kurt angled away
from the approaching boats and slammed the throttle to the
firewall, Joe thrashed around in his seat.
In a moment he’d
retrieved the tape from a small compartment and was ripping short
lengths from the roll and trying to seal up the holes in the canopy
caused by the pellets from the shotgun blast.
“Here they come,”
Kurt said.
“You know this won’t
hold at depth,” Joe said.
“I’ll try to stay
near the surface,” Kurt said.
He heard the ripping
and slapping of the speed tape, the roar of the approaching boats,
and the muted boom of another shotgun blast. This time, the spray
of pellets missed, splashing a foamy hole in the wave beside
them.
“Dive,” Joe
said.
Kurt pushed the nose
down. The water swirled over the canopy, and the Barracuda tucked in underneath the waves, leveling
off at ten feet. Plenty of water was still seeping in, but it
wasn’t spraying like before, and Joe continued to peel and slap on
the tape.
As soon as he was
finished, he grabbed what looked like a tube of toothpaste but was
actually an epoxy resin hardener. Ammonia-like fumes filled the
cockpit as Joe smeared the resin all over the tape. The hardener
would react with other resins in the speed tape and harden the
patches in under a minute.
Eight feet under,
Kurt watched as one wake and then another flashed across the top of
them. He immediately turned left, a direction the Barracuda seemed to favor after the damage they’d
suffered.
“You see any other
holes?” Joe asked.
Kurt looked around.
The patches and smeared resin made it look like someone had sprayed
graffiti over half the cockpit. The fumes had his head pounding and
eyes burning already. But the water was no longer pouring in. And
as the patches hardened it would almost cease.
“Good work, Joe,” he
said.
“Not my most
aesthetically pleasing job,” Joe said, “but it’s not meant to be
patched while submerging under fire.”
“Looks like art to
me,” Kurt said, straining to see past the mess and locate the
powerboats he knew had to be approaching.
“In a future life I’m
going to work on a NASCAR pit crew,” Joe said.
“Let’s just work on
extending our current lives a little bit,” Kurt said. “Can you
think of any way to contact the Argo?”
Silence reigned as
both of them racked their brains. Kurt certainly
couldn’t.
“The data link,” Joe
said. “We can e-mail them.”
“E-mail?”
“Not exactly, but we
can send them a data message. It goes up to a satellite and then
comes down. As long as someone sees the telemetry equipment go on,
they’ll get it.”
Kurt wondered how
likely that was, picturing the screens on the telemetry unit coming
on and no one there to see them. Certainly there was no reason for
anyone to be monitoring them right now.
“Anything
else?”
“Either that or we
paddle all the way back to Santa Maria and use semaphores,” Joe
said.
“That’s what I
thought,” Kurt said. “Key up the telemetry system, let me know when
you’re ready.”
“We’ll need thirty
seconds on the surface for the satellite to lock.”
“I don’t think we’ll
have that long,” Kurt said. As if to prove the point, he saw one of
the wakes coming back toward them, not racing this time but rather
matching their speed and then paralleling their course. The second
wake did the same on the other side and to the rear.
Kurt turned hard to
the left, back toward the undersea graveyard. The boats
followed.
“They can see us,
Kemo Sabe,” Joe said.
“We’re like a dying
fish leaving a trail of blood,” Kurt said, thinking of the bubbles
the sub was probably venting.
A strange concussive
sound reached them, and Kurt saw spray patterns in the water above
and ahead. He guessed their pursuers were shooting into the water
with the shotguns. Not a real danger, but one more sign of an
impossible situation.
Maybe if they went deeper.
He put the nose down
a few degrees.
The depth meter read
15 and then 20 and then—
Crack!
One of the taped
sections broke away, and a new spray of water came in.
As Joe slammed the
section back into place and began taping it over, Kurt brought the
sub back up, leveling off at ten feet. He changed course again but
to no avail.
“They’re probably
wearing those Maui Jim sunglasses,” Joe said. “You know, the ones
that let you see fish in the water.”
Kurt felt like a fish
in a barrel. Or a whale being hunted from above by a couple of
harpoon boats. Sooner or later they had to surface, if not to send
the message, just to survive.
Despite Joe’s
efforts, the Barracuda was slowly
taking on water, not just from the buckshot holes in the windshield
but from the damage in other places. Compartments normally sealed
against water were now filling with it.
And, like whales,
Kurt and Joe were faced with pursuers above that were faster,
bigger, and well armed. At this point they had to do little more
than follow Kurt and Joe in the Barracuda and wait for them to come up for
air.
A flash lit the sea
ahead and to the right. A concussion wave shook the sub even as
Kurt turned hard left. A few moments later a second flash went off
directly in front of them. Kurt actually saw the water expand,
contract, and then crash into the nose of the Barracuda.
“Grenades,” he
said.
Cracks were beginning
to appear in the canopy. Tiny almost invisible lines were spidering
out from behind Joe’s tape job as the Plexiglas weakened and began
to fail.
When another
explosion shook them, Kurt knew they didn’t have much time. “Get
your message ready,” he said.
“We won’t last ten
seconds up there.”
“We will if we
surrender,” Kurt replied, realizing that once Joe hit “Enter,”
there would be no visible sign of the data message being sent, and
they could stand there with their hands up, hoping not to be shot
as a distraction.
Joe said nothing, but
Kurt heard him tapping away at the keyboard. “Ready,” Joe
said.
Kurt pointed the nose
toward the surface, hoping they wouldn’t get machine-gunned on
sight. Just as they breached the surface, he cut the
throttles.
The Barracuda slowed instantly, and the pursuing boats
passed them.
“Now,” he
said.
Joe hit the “Enter”
key as Kurt pressed the canopy switch and the cockpit
rose.
“Come on,” Joe was
muttering. “Rápido, por
favor.”
Kurt stood, hands
raised high in surrender, as the boats circled back toward
him.
The Barracuda rocked back and forth on the waves, and
the powerboats pulled up next to them. A half mile off Kurt saw a
larger boat headed their way too.
“We surrender,” Kurt
said.
Two men with shotguns
pointed their weapons at him.
An almost inaudible
beep chirped from the rear of the cockpit, and Joe stood up as
well.
“Message sent,” he
whispered.
Kurt nodded almost
imperceptibly. Whatever happened now, whatever fate held for them,
at least they’d sent their warning. He only hoped it was in
time.
Across from him, one
of the men put his weapon down and threw them a line. In a moment
the Barracuda was tied up to the larger
of the two powerboats, and Kurt and Joe were standing on board it
with their wrists chained in proper cuffs.
Apparently, their
foes had come prepared.
The larger boat
approached, a 60-foot motor yacht of a design Kurt had never seen,
it appeared far more utilitarian than anything he could remember in
that class. It almost looked like a military vessel done up to pass
as a pleasure craft.
It sidled up next to
them, and Kurt saw a man in jungle fatigues standing at the bow,
gazing down at him. It was the same man he’d seen the night before
and also on the Kinjara Maru. The grin
of a conqueror beamed from his face, and he jumped down onto the
deck of the powerboat before the yacht had even bumped up against
it.
He strode toward Kurt
and Joe in their defenseless positions, looking ready to inflict
pain. Kurt stared him down the whole way, never blinking or looking
away. “Andras,” he said through gritted teeth.
“Friend of yours?”
Joe asked.
Before Kurt could
answer, the man hauled off and slugged him in the jaw, sending Kurt
crashing to the deck.
Kurt looked up, blood
dripping from his mouth, his lip split open.
“Sorry,” Joe said.
“Forget I asked.”