On the Fifth Day (47 page)

"There could be anything down here," said Parks, eagerly, as the sub pressed on into the dark.

"Or nothing," said Thomas, whose discomfort with their predicament increased with each foot the sub nosed into the base of the island.

As if on cue a large, heavy-bodied fish with wide, pale eyes that had been sitting unnoticed on a rock shelf roused itself with a flick of sand particles and eased out of their lights.

"You see that?" said Parks. "That's a deep-sea anglerfish. These caves probably have an ecosystem unlike anything we've seen before. It's a very precise and secluded environ

ment. There might be species that exist nowhere else in the world."

A shoal of guppylike fish swam in and out of view, their tails flashing with a low-grade phosphorescence. After them sped an eel-like creature with a pelican gape almost as wide as its body was long.

"What the hell was that?" asked Thomas.

"
Eurypharynx pelecanoides
," said Parks, "the umbrellamouth gulper, or something quite like it. But it shouldn't be here. We aren't anything like deep enough. The caves must simulate depth in terms of everything but pressure. This is amazing. Unheard of. It's going to make my career."

Thomas shot him a wary look. The scientist's eyes were bright, almost feverish.

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The tunnel ended abruptly, the far wall of the cavern loom

ing in the lights.

"We'll have to turn around," said Thomas, relieved.

"No," said Parks. "Look."

He was staring directly up through the bubble canopy. The tunnel continued vertically, but narrower.

"No way," said Thomas. "It's too tight and we can't see up. If we got stuck in the rock up there, we'd never get out."

"Let's just have a look, shall we?" said Parks, already an

gling the sub so that she drifted up into the crevice.

"We can't see up there!" said Thomas.

The sub's lights were forward facing, so they had no idea what the structure of the rocks above them would be. Thomas put his hand forcefully on Parks's, and the vessel bobbled as they wrestled momentarily for control.

"Okay, okay," said Parks. "We'll turn her nose up; that way we can see in and get a sonar read."

Thomas nodded and removed his hand. Parks reset the controls and the sub's attitude shifted, rocking the men back in their seats as they moved to the vertical. The light showed the brownish rock only feet from their hull, and then a large blank space.

"It's big enough to get in," said Parks. "Look at the sonar. There's a huge hollow in the rock just up there, a space the size of a basketball court. Okay?"

It wasn't a real question, and he was moving the sub into the hole before Thomas made his cautious nod. Tipped back in his chair, Thomas felt like an astronaut on the launchpad, but around him was not blue sky but rock and deep, black wa

ter. And God alone knew what else.

Two feet from the mouth of the cavern, several things hap

pened at once. The sonar beeped insistently and the screen that had shown only the cavern hollow now showed the move

ment of something large inside, something that then swam into their lights and across the cave mouth. It was dark, mot

tled yellow, big--at least as big as the sub itself--and it caught the vessel's cab first with one powerful footlike fin, 356

A. J. Hartley

then with the trailing, undulating tail, so that the submarine stalled in its motion and clanged heavily against the rock wall. Thomas glimpsed a crocodilian head full of overlapping teeth. But then the radio was squawking and through the pan

icked voices coming from the
Nara
he heard the unmistakable sound of gunfire.

CHAPTER 100

Cerniga had played every card he had, but the fact remained that he was a field agent in the FBI's Atlanta office and had lit

tle sway in matters of international counterterrorism regard

less of his personal reputation. Things were tense enough between the FBI and CIA these days without him stirring the hornet's nest, he was told, particularly if he was going to throw around accusations of incompetence or worse. In truth, he would have given the matter up after the first phone call, but Deborah Miller had a knack for the persuasive, and--he had to admit--she was often right.

So he made more calls, checked the security of the lines, and told anyone who would listen at headquarters about his fears. He called the CIA and the Air Force as well, but couldn't get past the sense that he was being dodged. When he could get anyone to actually talk about the March thirteenth attack, they took one look at the security clearance issues and shut him down. It was Deborah who pushed the angle that would crack the door open an inch, scribbling in pencil on the back of a museum flyer:

"Tell them it's going to happen again," she said. "Same lo

cation."

What had been an inconvenient investigation into past em

barrassments was now something quite different.

"Here's what we know," he said, after finally hanging up. 357

O n t h e F i f t h D a y

"The Predator drone has to be launched by a ground crew rel

atively close to the strike area."

"How close?"

"Not sure," he said. "A few hundred miles, probably. If the attack on the village where your friend's brother was killed was indeed deliberate, whoever did it did not have the author

ity to actually schedule the launch. Their mission had to be piggybacked onto a legitimate flight that was already sched

uled. Since the aircraft that stayed on course never fired a shot, the legitimate flight was probably strictly reconnais

sance, though the aircraft would have been armed in case a target presented itself while it was up."

"So for it to happen again," said Deborah, "there would need to be another scheduled mission in the vicinity of the beach."

"Right," said Cerniga. "And here's the weird thing. It makes sense that the CIA would give any credible threat a serious lis

ten, but their tone changed completely as soon as I suggested it might happen again and soon. They took the coordinates and they moved out of that 'thanks-for-your-interest' mode."

"You think another drone flight is scheduled in the Sulu Archipelago?"

"For all I know," said Cerniga, "they are already in the air."

CHAPTER 101

It was Kumi's voice on the radio and it lasted no more than three or four seconds. Thomas caught the words
helicopter
and
attack
and then there was only the rapid burst of auto

matic weapons fire followed by the static of dead air.

"Their radio is down," said Thomas. "They might be dead. We have to get to the surface."

"Wait," said Parks, who was struggling to right the sub 358

A. J. Hartley

after it had been bumped into the rock wall by the creature in the cave. "If I can get some film of that . . ."

"They need us," said Thomas. "Turn the sub around."

"They are probably dead already," said Parks, gazing out into the water, "so it doesn't matter how long it takes us to get back to the surface."

Thomas stared at him, as if seeing the man's true face for the first time.

"If I can just push the nose back into the cave and set the cameras running . . . ," Parks began. He paused at the pressure against his temple and turned very slowly. Thomas was hold

ing the flare gun to the side of his head.

"Turn the boat around," he said.

"You fire that thing in here," said Parks, "and you'll kill us both."

"Probably," Thomas shrugged. "But I'm not on the edge of a shattering discovery, am I? In fact, I'm not on the edge of much these days, and the world won't miss me."

Parks held his eyes, gauging the truth of the remark, and then he nodded fractionally and began to steer the boat down.

"Got a plan, chief?" said Parks, the perpetual sneer reap

pearing. "Or are we just going to surface next to the boat and let them shoot us full of holes?"

Thomas said nothing. He had no idea what to do. He had to assume that the
Nara
had been taken. He figured that their sonar would have picked up any substantial explosion, so the boat was probably still intact, but who was still alive and where they were he had no way of knowing. Kumi had said something about a helicopter, so they could have been taken off the boat, but surely the attackers didn't have the person

nel to comfortably guard the twenty-odd crew? And if Kumi and Jim had been taken, they could be anywhere by now. The island was the logical place to set down if the attackers wanted to stay local, if they thought there were still loose ends to tie up.

Namely you.

Exactly.

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To take the sub back to the boat would be to give them

selves up, or worse. They had to find somewhere else to beach the sub and get onto the island. That way at least they kept the initiative.

"Let me see that chart of the island," he said to Parks. He still hadn't laid down the flare gun.

Kumi recognized the guy from the Kofu railway station as one of the soldiers, but he was not the one who seemed to be giv

ing the orders. The woman was, presumably, the person who had masqueraded as a nun in Italy, though in her elegant makeup, tank top, and shorts, that was hard to imagine. The muscle were three guys in combat gear and armed with ma

chine guns. One of them was black, all of them were built like soldiers, and good ones at that. They called the leader
sir,
and unless she had misheard, the woman had called him
War.
It was bizarre and might have been funny, except that Nakamura was already dead and she had a feeling they would be too, soon, unless the situation changed radically. The helicopter had come out of nowhere, the men drop

ping onto the deck of the
Nara,
shooting before anyone had realized they were even armed. There had been no battle per se, and the captain had been killed merely to keep the rest of them in line. The radio, GPS, and other equipment on the boat had been shot up as she tried to warn Tom, so they were effec

tively marooned, cut off from the outside world. The only good thing was that in riddling the boat's communication sys

tems they had also disabled the sonar, so they had no idea where the submersible was.

The crew had been locked belowdecks, while she and Jim were bundled into a lifeboat at gunpoint and sent ashore. No guards had been posted on the boat, but with no way to send a message to anyone else, the crew wouldn't be able to do any

thing even if they broke free, and if they tried to get the boat moving again the gunmen would hunt them down from the air. The helicopter had landed on the beach and had become a 360

A. J. Hartley

kind of base camp, though it was impossible to tell how long they expected to be here. There seemed to Kumi to be an air of expectation among their captors, and there was a lot of standing around, as if they were waiting for something to hap

pen.

"Nice beach," said Jim as they got closer. "I hadn't planned a beach holiday but this is nice."

Kumi gave him an appreciative smile. He was trying to keep her cheerful, but unnecessarily. She didn't wilt under strain, merely withdrawing, tortoiselike, until she had a clear sense of the situation and how she would resolve it. She felt no panic, not yet at least, and the killing of the captain had only toughened her resolve to do whatever was necessary to see that these thugs did not win. She didn't know what they wanted, but she would do all in her power to see they didn't get it.

The boat ground hard into the sand.

"Out," said the black soldier, pointing casually with his gun.

She clambered out, losing her footing as the boat rocked, and staggered ashore. Jim followed, still smiling doggedly. His eyes had had a glazed, distant look ever since the shooting of Nakamura, as if his world had been jarred out of its orbit. One of the other soldiers approached them from the heli

copter, spun her around, and pulled her hands behind her back. In seconds she was cuffed with a thin but unyielding strand of plastic like a heavy-duty zip tie. Then she and Jim were pushed across the beach toward the palm trees and the blasted remains of a thatched hut, the wooden walls half burned away by some terrible heat.

"In there," said the soldier.

Inside, Jim sat in the sand. Kumi studied their makeshift prison. They could get out easily enough, but it was a good ten-or twelve-second sprint across the sand into the trees, twice that to the water. They'd be cut down long before they could lose themselves in the jungle. She would have to think of something else.

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* * *

"How long can we stay under in this thing?" said Thomas.

"Six hours," said Parks. "Nine at a push. If we switch to survival mode, we can make it longer, but then we have no power for anything else, including movement."

"So we need to beach, but after the sun goes down," said Thomas.

"They may know where we are already," said Parks. "If they have access to the
Nara
's sonar or they have a sonar buoy they can drop from the chopper, we're a sitting target."

"We have to assume they don't," said Thomas.

"Is that like believing that the poor get their cake after death?" said Parks, snide as ever. "A leap of faith?"

"Not sure what else we have," said Thomas. "Take her away from the boat and stay deep. We'll go around the back of the island and wait for dark before beaching."

"That will take hours," said Parks. "And once we beach the sub, it's useless. Without the
Nara
we can't get it back in the water."

"Right now I don't see where we'd be trying to go," said Thomas. "Bring her about."

Parks sighed and moved the sub away from the rock wall, staying close to the rippled sand of the seabed. He moved slowly, since they were in no rush and higher speeds increased the chance of being picked up by sonar. "Cavitating," he called it.