Clive cusslers dark vect.., p.26
Clive Cussler's Dark Vector, page 26
“We still can’t take the Sapphire into the bay,” Winterburn said. “Too big.”
Gamay turned to Stratton. “Can you rig up one of the drones to carry it?”
“Sure,” Stratton said. “I think we still have one left that Kurt and Joe didn’t ruin.”
CHAPTER 49
NUMA HEADQUARTERS,
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Rudi Gunn was working late when the intercom buzzed and the voice of the night receptionist came over the speaker. “Anna Biel here to see you, Mr. Gunn.”
Rudi didn’t get many visitors, certainly not this late at night. He glanced at his watch. “Tell her I’ll meet her in the . . .”
The door cracked open and Anna Biel leaned in through the gap. She had a pair of Starbucks cups in her hands, steam curling out the sipping vents in the plastic lids.
“Never mind,” Rudi told the receptionist.
“Sorry for the intrusion,” the NSA director said, “but you don’t get to the top by waiting your turn.”
Rudi took a cup and waved for her to take a seat. “Not to sound ungrateful,” he said, “but we have four coffee machines on this floor and an all-night cafeteria downstairs.”
“So do we,” she replied, “but it’s easier to add a shot of the good stuff to something in a paper cup. Don’t you agree?”
Raising the cup to his face, Rudi could smell a hint of liquor in the brew. “In that case, I accept.” He took a sip and asked the burning question. “Are you here for moral support or to deliver bad news?”
“The former,” she said. “I assume you haven’t heard from your men since the Chinese shot up Victoria Harbour.”
“No,” Rudi admitted, “but we’re not worried yet. If the Chinese had Kurt and Joe, they’d be parading them through Tiananmen Square by now. And if they’d sunk the Phantom, video of the wreckage would be all over the evening news.”
“Our thoughts exactly.”
“Are you worried that the Chinese will start pointing the finger at us for the incursion?”
“Not really,” she said. “Not publicly anyway. They can’t risk admitting that a small American craft evaded an armada of their anti-submarine forces in what’s basically a pool in their own backyard. Without wreckage to prove they’ve succeeded in beating us, they’ll stick to the terrorist story.”
Rudi raised his cup. “Here’s to Chinese prudence.”
She joined Rudi in the toast. “It still leaves us wondering what happened to Kurt and Joe. Eyewitness accounts suggest multiple depth charges were dropped and at least one anti-submarine rocket was fired in their direction. Just because the Chinese didn’t find any wreckage doesn’t mean they got out alive. Damaged submarines have a habit of limping along for a while only to fail before they make it home.”
“Obviously, that’s a concern,” Rudi said. “But the Phantom is a sturdy craft. Even if the hull cracked suddenly from some underlying damage, Kurt and Joe would almost certainly manage to get out. They’re experienced divers and cool under pressure. I can only assume they’re avoiding the most obvious places the Chinese might look, like a NUMA support ship or any American naval vessels in the area.”
“But you’re not actively looking for them?”
Rudi shook his head. “Can’t mount a search effort without leading the Chinese toward them or admitting we were responsible for the incursion in the first place.”
“Hell of a pickle to be in,” she said. “You have my sympathy.”
“Save it,” Rudi said. “I expect we’ll hear from them again before too long, even if they call collect from some out-of-the-way island resort that they’ve drifted to on a life raft.”
“I like your confidence,” she said. “And then what?”
“And then we do our best to get a message to Yan-Li, letting her know her mother and children are safe.”
Anna took a sip of coffee. “That’s no small order, considering that Emmerson isn’t likely to give her access to email, phone or texts at this point. How do you plan to pull it off?”
Rudi didn’t have an answer, but he had faith that they’d come up with something. “We’re still working on that. Worst comes to worst, I’ll hire a skywriting team to buzz across Hong Kong scribbling Call Kurt along the horizon.”
Anna smiled at the notion, then turned serious again. “Let’s just hope Kurt reappears in time to answer the phone.”
CHAPTER 50
NUMA YACHT SAPPHIRE,
KI-SONG ISLAND, SOUTH CHINA SEA
Paul stood with his head bowed, ducking to fit himself into the darkened sonar room with Stratton. Gamay and Winterburn were monitoring the results up on the bridge. All of them were straining to see the readout from the sub-bottom profiler.
“You have something there,” Paul said, calling out to Stratton, who was guiding the drone. “Bring it back over that last section.”
Since the yacht was too big to maneuver safely in the shallow, coral-filled bay, they were patrolling the entrance like a picket ship on blockade duty. Meanwhile, the small drone was zipping around the bay in a circular pattern.
The first pass at a shallow depth, scanning a wide area, had revealed nothing. A second pass at a slightly deeper depth with a narrower focus had also come up empty. But the third pass turned out to be the charm—even though the drone was forced to dodge growths of coral and scan the bottom in narrow slivers instead of wide swaths.
At such close range to the seafloor, the transmissions from the sub-bottom profiler were more concentrated. They gave a clear picture of the various layers of sediment piled on top of one another.
Everything was smooth and uniform until suddenly it wasn’t. Stratton had turned the drone around and passed over the anomaly a second time.
“Definitely something buried there,” Stratton said.
The next pass showed it again. But they were now too close to see all of it.
“Pull up a little,” Paul suggested. “Come at it from this angle, along the main axis.”
Stratton maneuvered the drone into position and put another five feet of water between the sensor and the bottom. On this pass, everything became clear as a cigar-shaped object appeared on the screen.
After several additional passes, the computer stitched the images together. The target was two hundred feet long, sixty feet wide.
“It’s a match,” Paul said, checking the size against what they knew of the treasure ship. “It’s either the Silken Dragon or someone has played a fantastic joke on all of us.”
Stratton gave him a high five and let out a triumphant shout of joy.
Paul hit the intercom button and called the bridge, where Gamay and Winterburn were watching on a remote monitor. “We’ve found it,” he called out. “It’s down there and it appears intact. Preserved in the sediment just as we expected.”
Gamay’s response was unexpectedly flat. “We’ve found something too. A craft approaching us from the north. Think you might want to get to the stern and check it out.”
As Gamay spoke, Paul heard the engines cut. Why Winterburn would stop the ship at the approach of a mysterious craft, he couldn’t say, but he didn’t much like the idea.
“Stay here,” he told Stratton. “Be ready to erase everything in case we get boarded by claim jumpers.”
Stratton nodded, set the drone into station-keeping mode and scribbled the coordinates in barely recognizable chicken scratch in the middle of a doodle-filled notepad—just in case he needed to wipe the computers.
Paul ducked out of the compartment and raced back through the ship, heading for the stern. He glanced out the salon windows as he went, but he saw no sign of a ship on either side. It had to be approaching from dead astern.
Pushing open the aft doorway, he stepped out onto the platform.
Fifty yards aft of the ship he saw a black disc-shaped craft bobbing in the sea. The highest point of its hull was only five feet above the waterline. It looked like a UFO that had gone for a swim.
Paul blinked twice as the hatch opened. Instead of little green men, he saw a familiar figure emerge.
Kurt had a thick layer of stubble on his face. “Permission to come aboard,” he said loudly. “I’ve got two crewmen that were promised grilled cheese and ice cream and another who is owed a hot bath and a glass of wine.”
The kids popped up on the deck, followed by their grandmother.
“I don’t know,” Paul replied. “You might try to steal the treasure out from under us.”
“Treasure,” Kurt said. “Did you find some?”
“Not some,” Paul replied. “All of it. The entire ship and its contents are buried in forty feet of ash.”
* * *
—
With the Phantom in tow and Yan’s family members well fed and resting, Kurt and Joe joined Paul and Gamay in the communications room.
“We’re certainly glad to see you,” Gamay said. “But why come all the way down here? Surely the Phantom’s control ship was closer.”
“We figured the Chinese would be watching it, which meant more submarine chasers between us and them,” Kurt said. “By coming this way, we made half the journey in Vietnamese waters. Much safer.”
“Besides,” Joe added, “we wanted to see how you were getting on. So, let’s hear it. What have you found?”
Paul unrolled a poster-sized version of the high-resolution scan depicting the buried ship. The image left Kurt speechless.
“The detail is incredible,” Joe said. “You got this with the sub-bottom profiler?”
“Stratton found a way to narrow the beam and get more detail,” Paul said.
“Gold star for Stratt,” Joe said.
“What about the artifacts?” Kurt asked.
“Ask and ye shall receive,” Gamay said. She placed the meticulously cleaned harquebus on the table. “We have to put these back in the tank ASAP, but I thought you’d like to see it in person.”
Kurt, who was a connoisseur of ancient weapons, gazed at the detail of the silver filigree around the stock of the ancient gun. It was still white with salts, but the worst of the concretion and oxidation had been carefully removed. “Stunning condition,” he said. “Definitely eighteenth-century workmanship.”
Gamay nodded. “But wait. There’s more.”
She brought over a second object wrapped in cloth. Placing it on the table, she unrolled the flaps of the cloth, revealing the telescope she’d uncovered a few feet away.
Like the harquebus, the telescope was exquisitely preserved by the airless environment of the volcanic ash. And now cleaned, it looked as if it might have come from a shelf in some antiques store.
“Amazing,” Joe added.
“Incredible,” Kurt said.
“Here’s the best part,” Gamay said, pointing out the engraved characters. “The first two are symbols for luck and wealth. The last two match the name of someone found in Ching Shih’s journal. Zi Jun Chu, or Master Jun.”
Kurt recognized the name. “Jun was the owner of the Silken Dragon. The man who stole the treasure from her in the first place.”
“This telescope belonged to him. It proves beyond any doubt that the wreck under the ash is the Dragon,” Gamay said.
Kurt sat back. They’d finally accomplished what Yan-Li set out to do nearly three years earlier. If there was any justice, the effort would help to save her.
“Let’s put a call in to Rudi,” Kurt said. “It’s time to make our next move.”
The video call to Rudi went far better than the call from Taipei. Rudi was so thrilled to learn that Kurt and Joe were alive—and that the Phantom hadn’t fallen into the hands of the Chinese—that he never even mentioned the words international incident nor did he ask for details regarding the damage done to the fifty-million-dollar prototype.
“Now that we have her mother and kids safely stashed away, we need a way to reach her without Emmerson knowing,” Kurt said.
“We’ve been working on that,” Rudi said. “The problem is, she’s vanished. CIA had eyes on her for a time, but she was never out of Emmerson’s sight. She was seen at his estate and at the seaplane hangar the day after you busted the place up. Since then, she’s dropped off the grid.”
“That tells me Emmerson is making his next move,” Kurt said. “Degra must have given up the location of the servers.”
“Which is when we hoped Yan might put in a call,” Rudi pointed out.
Kurt was not dismayed. Things were moving a little faster than he’d hoped but they still were following the course of events he’d expected. “Emmerson isn’t going to blurt out any more information than he has to. He’ll keep the location close to the vest until he has no choice but to share it.”
Rudi pointed out the obvious flaw. “It won’t do us any good if she contacts us at the last second or so close to the event that we don’t have a chance to intervene. And I hate to bring this up, but if she recovers the computers for him and he does away with her, we’re back to square one: trying to buy the computers from the criminals who stole them.”
“I don’t think Emmerson would sell them,” Kurt said. “That was all CIPHER’s doing. Emmerson is up to something else.”
“Like what?”
“Couldn’t say. But Joe and I found a storeroom full of high-tech splicing equipment and high-bandwidth fiber-optic cable in the seaplane hangar.”
“Not the residential stuff either,” Joe added. “We’re talking huge spools of heavily insulated commercial-grade cable.”
Gamay jumped in. “The divers in Silicon Valley were practicing deepwater splicing techniques for mating the Vector units with submerged fiber-optic cables. That can’t be a coincidence.”
“Sounds like Emmerson wants to link these computers together,” Kurt said. “But to what end?”
“Has to be some form of hacking,” Paul suggested.
“That would explain the conflict with CIPHER,” Joe suggested. “We’ve been working on the assumption that it was CIPHER muscling in on Emmerson’s turf, but maybe we had it the wrong way around.”
“All of which still leaves us in the dark regarding Emmerson’s ultimate plan,” Rudi said. “I’ll run this by Hiram and see if he can read the tea leaves for us.”
“Where is Hiram?” Kurt asked. “Figured he’d be on this call.”
“He’s still out in California,” Rudi said. “He’s spent the last five days digging into Hydro-Com’s data, trying to pull out anything that might help. I’m sure he’ll appreciate the info you’ve uncovered. In the meantime, you two should get some rest. Not sure when the next shoe is going to drop but it’d be best if you’re ready when it does.”
CHAPTER 51
MERCY HOSPITAL,
SAN MARIN, CALIFORNIA
Sabrina Lang awoke to the beeping alarm of the IV pump, which was signaling it had run out of fluids. The nurse came in, silenced the machine and checked her blood pressure and other vitals.
“How are you feeling?”
They asked that question every time they came in. Sabrina really had no answer. Physically, she was still dealing with the pain of the gunshot wound, but the meds knocked that down to a dull ache. Mentally, she was numb. She almost wished she was still unconscious. She knew Pradi was dead, even though they refused to tell her. She knew the breach of Hydro-Com’s security system was partially her fault, even if it was so cunningly accomplished.
“I’m fine,” she muttered unconvincingly.
“You don’t sound fine,” the nurse said. “But I’ll take your word for it. Are you up for a visitor?”
“Who?” she said. She’d already seen her parents and she wasn’t interested in seeing any more lawyers or special agents from the FBI or colleagues from Hydro-Com.
“A fellow computer geek,” Hiram Yaeger said, poking his head in the doorway.
To her surprise, seeing him brought a smile to her face. “Sure,” she said. “I’d hug you, but I’m hooked up to all these tubes and wires.”
The nurse waved Hiram in. “I told you to wait in the hall,” she said, scolding him. “But considering that’s the first smile we’ve gotten out of her since she woke up, I’m going to let it slide. You have thirty minutes.”
Hiram stepped into the room and pulled up a chair. He’d remained in California partly to see if he could find anything in the Hydro-Com database that might lead them to the computers and partly so he could keep checking on the injured security chief.
He felt partially responsible for her injuries. If he hadn’t raced off chasing the diver or if he hadn’t shown up to begin with, she might never have been injured. The fact that she was young enough to remind Hiram of his own daughter, who was in grad school down the road at Stanford, only made him feel more protective of her. “I’d ask if you’re feeling okay, but I’m sure you’re sick of that question by now.”
“Thoroughly,” she said.
“So instead, I’ll ask for your help,” he replied. “We’ve learned a thing or two about the men who stole the Vector units, but it’s not what we expected. I was hoping you might be able to guess what they’re really up to.”
“You need my help?”
“As much as I know in general, I don’t know what these servers are capable of,” Yaeger admitted. “No one outside Hydro-Com does. And with Pradi gone and your lead programmer on the run with the source code, there’s no one else around who knows them better than you.”
“I might dispute that,” she said, “but I’ll do what I can to help. What have we learned?”
Yaeger explained who Emmerson was and about the three-way struggle between CIPHER, NUMA and Emmerson for the Hydro-Com computers. He explained what they knew about CIPHER’s plans to sell the machines and why they thought Emmerson had something else in mind. “What can he do with those computers that would be worth more than selling them?”
