Текст книги "Medusa"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

CHAPTER 39

LIKE ANY GOOD DETECTIVE, JOE ZAVALA BEGAN HIS SEARCH for Davy Jones’s Locker at the crime scene. Using a one-person submersible borrowed from the NUMA ship, he dove to the ocean bottom and made a couple of passes over the circular depressions left by the lab’s footings. Seeing nothing new, he broke away from the site and started to explore the surrounding area. The submersible’s searchlights suddenly reflected off a piece of metal.

Working the controls of the submersible’s mechanical arms, Zavala scooped a twisted piece of steel from the bottom and examined it under the lights before depositing it in a basket slung beneath the submersible.

“I just picked up a chunk of the Proud Mary,” he called up to the ship’s bridge.

“You’re sure it’s not a piece of the lab?” asked Captain Campbell, skipper of the NUMA ship.

“Reasonably sure. The metal is twisted and melted, the way it would be from a missile strike. It doesn’t look at all like the structures I saw in the diagrams. What I’ve seen fits with our theory that the lab was lifted off its site and towed away.”

“Have you checked out the canyon where the lab was prospecting for jellyfish?” asked Campbell.

“Yeah. It’s a few hundred yards from the site. I dove down into it a couple hundred feet. The canyon goes down forever. Saw a few blue medusae floating around, but that was it. I could dive deeper, but I’ve heard that the definition of insanity is repeating the same useless action over and over.”

“Come up for air, then,” said Campbell. “We’ll call the Concordand fill Captain Dixon in-Hold on, Joe. Call for you coming through the NUMA net. I’ll put it through.”

After a moment or two, a female voice came over Zavala’s earphones.

“How’s your search going, Joe?”

“Hi, Gamay, nice to hear from you. I’ve picked a piece of the support ship off the bottom, but that’s it. How about you?”

“We may have something,” she said. “We tried to contact Kurt but the call wouldn’t go through, so we tracked you down under the sea. Paul and I came across the coordinates for a place called Trouble Island. It’s about a hundred miles from the lab site. It may be where the crew of the Princessunderwent their miraculous cure. Not sure how it relates to the missing lab, but maybe it will help.”

“Give the captain the info,” he said, “and I’ll come up and check things out.”

“We’re on our way back to Washington,” she said. “Call if you need anything at this end.”

Zavala thanked Gamay and Paul, then pointed the nose of the submersible toward the surface and powered the thrusters. A crane was waiting to hoist it from the water onto the deck of the NUMA ship.

Zavala popped the hatch, climbed out, and made his way to the bridge. Captain Campbell was poring over the chart table. He pointed to a speck on a chart of Micronesian waters.

“This is the atoll closest to the position your friends gave me,” Campbell said. “Doesn’t look like much, and, as you can see, it’s within a red rectangle, which means it was searched visually. What do you think?”

Zavala pondered the captain’s question, then said, “I think I need to talk to an expert.”

A few minutes later, he was on the line with the NUMA navigational unit that supplied the agency’s worldwide expeditions with up-to-date navigational information.

“Let me see if I understand,” said the map expert, a soft-voiced young woman named Beth. “You’re looking for a Pacific island that is no longer on the charts and you don’t know if it even existed in the first place.”

Zavala chuckled softly.

“Sorry,” he said. “This must be like looking for a nonexistent needle in a very big haystack.”

“Don’t be discouraged, Joe. I like a challenge.”

“Any chance the island might have been noted on a British Admiralty chart?”

“It depends,” she said. “The Admiralty charts were ahead of their time when it came to accuracy, although the earlier ones were privately produced and had lots of errors. The Admiralty certified some maps that shouldn’t have been.”

“You’re saying that an island could be on some charts but not others?”

“Absolutely! The charts and atlases of the nineteenth century showed more than two hundred islands that never existed.”

“How could that happen?”

“Many ways. A land-starved mariner might mistake a cloud formation for an island and record its position. Figuring longitude was also a problem. Someone might mark a real island in the wrong place. Con men created phony islands to push get-rich-quick schemes. The next guy in the neighborhood looks at his chart and sees empty sea where an island should be . . . Now, tell me what you know about your phantom island.”

“I know that it was real,” Zavala said. “An American whaling ship stopped there in 1848. But the island is not on any modern map. There’s an atoll fairly close by, though.”

“I’ll start by looking for an 1848 chart or one close to it,” she said. “Next, you’ll want to compare it to Pacific Chart 2683.”

“What is so special about it?”

“It’s the gold standard of Admiralty charts. The British Hydrographic Office knew that the Admiralty maps were getting out of whack. Accurate charts were essential for the Navy and commercial interests. So, in 1875, the Admiralty brought in a chief hydrographer named Captain Frederick Evans to purge the phantom islands from all their charts. He got rid of more than a hundred islands in the Pacific alone. The corrected chart was designated with the number 2683.”

“Then it’s possible that the island never existed?” he asked.

“Possibly.But islands can disappear. Your island might have sunk into the sea after a volcanic eruption, an earthquake, or a flood. There is historical precedent: the island Tuanah supposedly sank with its inhabitants. And there are other reported cases on record. It could be a reef or rock below the surface now, and even a satellite wouldn’t pick it up. You’d have to get in for a close look.”

“Where do we start?” Zavala asked.

“A lot of this stuff is online,” Beth replied. “The British Library has the biggest collection of Admiralty charts. I’ll go there first, and then I’ll take a look at the UK’s National Archives. If I have to go to the Royal Geographical Society or the Maritime Museum at Greenwich, it might take a while. When do you need this information?”

“Yesterday,” Zavala said. “Lives may depend on what we find.”

“Are you joking, Joe?”

“I wish I were.”

After a brief pause at the other end of the line, Beth said, “Like I told you, I love a challenge.”

Zavala wondered if he had been too dire and tried to lighten the mood.

“Are you married or engaged, Beth?”

“No. Why?’

“In that case I would like to buy you dinner to show my appreciation.”

“Wow! Who says you can’t meet eligible men in the map division? Gotta go. ’Bye.”

Zavala clicked the phone off and made his way to the NUMA helipad. The helicopter was fitted out with pontoons that allowed it to land on water. Zavala gazed at the helicopter lost in thought, then went back to the ship’s bridge.

“I’ve got another favor to ask,” he said.

“We’ll do whatever we can to help,” Captain Campbell said.

“I’ve got a NUMA map expert looking into the history of the atoll the Trouts found the coordinates for. If she comes up with any leads, I’d like to borrow your helicopter to check them out.”

“I’ll make sure it’s fueled and ready to go whenever you need it.”

Zavala thanked Campbell, and went down to the supply shed on the main deck. He had set aside an emergency life raft and was wondering if he needed additional gear when his phone trilled. Beth was calling back.

“I’ve gotit!” she said.

“That was fast,” he said.

“Pure luck. I found what I was looking for in the British National Archives. Their stuff is on a database, categorized according to time period. What’s your e-mail address?”

Zavala gave Beth the information, and, before hanging up, made sure he had her personal phone number so he could call to set up a dinner date.

Zavala made his way to the ship’s communications center and borrowed a computer. He called up his e-mail address and seconds later the British Admiralty chart of 1850 filled the screen. He studied the chart for a moment, especially the dot labeled Trouble Island. Then he clicked the mouse. Pacific Chart 2683 appeared.

He put the earlier chart side by side with the corrected one. The circles on the corrected chart designated the position of nonexistent islands that the Admiralty hydrographers had removed. Trouble Island was not circled, but the name had been removed and the dot designated it as an atoll. Some time between 1850 and 1875, Trouble Island had become an atoll.

Zavala made a phone call to a NUMA colleague who specialized in old sailing ships and got an estimated sailing speed for a fully loaded whaler. Zavala then leaned back in his chair, laced his hands behind his head, and put himself in a ship captain’s place.

Song Lee had said that the plague killed within days of infection. The crew would have been in good shape immediately after leaving Pohnpei. He assumed that the ship had a fair wind filling its sails.

Zavala marked an X on the chart west of Pohnpei where the Princesswould have been at the end of the first day. By day two, the fever would have started taking men down. The ship would have lost time. He marked another X to indicate the ship’s position at the end of the second day.

Day three would have been chaotic on board the whaler. Most of the crew and officers would have been out of commission or near death. The ship might have limped along. He marked a third X closer to the second one.

Okay, Captain Zavala, he almost said aloud, you’ve got a full load of valuable whale oil, your officers and crew are dying, and you’re sick. What would you do? I’d want to get to landfall, he thought. Not Pohnpei. It was the source of the plague. And it was out of reach anyhow.

Zavala linked the computer to a surveillance satellite and zeroed in on the atoll of interest. Was it possible this unnamed atoll had once been an island? Beth had said that an island that sank into the sea might leave an atoll in its place. An eruption or earthquake would have been noted by people living on nearby islands, but there was no time to check the historic record.

He zoomed the satellite camera in on the tiny speck. Typical Pacific atoll: a minuscule island with a few palm trees encircled by a lagoon and ringed with a coral reef that was mostly solid and with no opening big enough for a massive Typhoon-class submarine to pass through with the lab in tow. Nothing could be seen in the clear waters of the lagoon.

Zavala called the Search Command ship and reconfirmed that planes had flown over the island and ships had come close for a look, but it was too insignificant to merit further investigation.

Despite his doubts and those pesky facts, he kept coming back to the name: Trouble Island. Someone had designated the island as a source of misfortune. What kindof trouble?

Zavala tried Austin’s phone number, but there was no reply. He stared into space and contemplated his course of action. He could stay on the NUMA ship and twiddle his thumbs waiting for the search flotilla to hit pay dirt or he could join in the search, well aware that he was probably wasting time and fuel.

He hated inaction. He picked up an intercom phone, called the bridge, and told the captain he would need the helicopter to take a closer look at the atoll.

Crew members helped Zavala haul the emergency raft from the storage shed and load it onto the helicopter. He got into the cockpit and started to work the controls. Moments later, the chopper lifted off the pad, made one circle around the ship, and shot off on a northerly course.

Zavala kept the helicopter at an altitude of five hundred feet and a cruising speed of one hundred fifty miles per hour. Seen from this high up, the ocean was a sun-sparkled blue-green blur. He passed a couple of ships from the search flotilla, but most of them were looking in other areas. The blinding sheen off the water prevented him from seeing the atoll until he was almost on top of it.

He banked the helicopter and looked down at a handkerchief-sized patch of sand with its few palm trees. The atoll looked exactly as he had seen it on the satellite image. He confirmed that there was no break in the reef wide enough to have allowed a boat of any size to pass through. He headed down for a closer look, and brought the helicopter onto a soft pontoon landing a few hundred feet from the atoll’s island, which was oddly located at one end of the lagoon rather than at its center.

As the rotors whirled to a stop, Zavala unbuckled himself and stepped out onto one of the pontoons. It was absolutely silent except for the whisper of the waves on the shore. Looking down into the crystal clear water, he saw a crab scuttling along the bottom.

The raft was in an orange-colored plastic container that he muscled out of the cockpit. He set it in the water and yanked an inflation cord. There was a hiss from the carbon dioxide capsule, and the raft writhed into full inflation. Zavala climbed into the raft and paddled to shore.

He pulled the raft up on the blinding white sand and walked around the perimeter of the island. He felt like a shipwreck victim on one of the miniature desert islands that cartoonists like to draw.

The tropical sun beat down like a blowtorch on his uncovered head. He sought shelter in the shade of the few pitiful palm trees. He surveyed his surroundings, absorbing the remote beauty of the atoll, with its otherworldly light and color.

He walked the perimeter of the island again, retracing his own steps. He frowned. This insignificant speck of sand could never have been Trouble Island. It was just a rinky-dink atoll. He walked back to his raft and turned for a last look. A glint of light came from near the top of a palm tree.

Zavala went back and stood under the tree. He craned his neck but couldn’t determine the source of the reflection. He clambered onto the palm’s trunk, which grew at an angle, and climbed up to where the broad fronds branched out. He found the source of the reflection immediately. Sunlight was glancing off the lens of a miniature video camera attached to the trunk.

Zavala realized, as he looked at the lens, that it was possible the camera was looking back at him. He backed down the palm’s trunk only to stop halfway. The tree had a slick, unnatural feel to it. He unsheathed the knife at his belt and dug its point into the trunk, but it went in only so far. He peeled back a section of the trunk and got another shock: it seemed to be made of woven plastic fabric covering a hard metal core.

Zavala reached up and sliced off a section of palm frond. He stuck it between his teeth and bit down: more plastic. He sheathed his knife, and shimmied down the trunk to the sand. He walked several paces to the right, then to the left. The camera swiveled to follow him.

Oh, hell.

Zavala sprinted across the atoll, shoved his raft off the beach, and dug into the water with his paddle. He had to get back to the radio in the helicopter. He looked over his shoulder, expecting all the demons of hell to be after him, but was encouraged that no attempt was being made to stop him. A few more paddle strokes and he’d be in his helicopter.

Then the oddest thing happened. The bottom of the lagoon rose up to meet him, burst from the water in a long, shiny mound directly in front of him. Then the mound parted, and a huge black fin ripped through the bottom of the lagoon, rising until it towered more than forty feet above Zavala’s head. He was looking at the conning tower of a giant submarine. Seconds later, the submarine’s deck lifted the raft into the air. The helicopter headed skyward at the same time, and it teetered for a moment before sliding off the rounded deck at an angle. When the helicopter hit the foaming water, the water poured into the cockpit.

The raft slid off the rounded sides of the submarine, and water flowed into it. Zavala tried to climb back on the sub’s deck from the upended raft, but his fingers slid off the slick, wet metal, and the fast-flowing torrents pushed him back into the lagoon.

He choked on seawater, gasping for breath like a beached fish. Then something like a baseball bat slammed into the side of his head. He saw a brief explosion of brightness before his eyes and then felt a numbing pain. Then someone pulled the shades down, and Zavala was in darkness.

CHAPTER 40

THE TOUR BOAT CAPTAIN WASN’T SURE WHAT TO MAKE OF the people he had pulled out of the Nan Madol Canal. The half-drowned young Asian woman seemed harmless enough, but he wondered about the muscular scuba diver in the wild surfing trunks.

Checking out Austin with a wary eye, the captain asked, “What happened, man?”

Austin pointed to the rental boat, which was sinking at a sharp angle, with only a foot or so of the bullet-riddled bow sticking out of the water.

“Leaky boat,” he said.

“I heard a lot of noise,” the captain said. “Sounded like guns.”

Austin clamped his hand on the captain’s shoulder and turned him around.

“See that bag floating over there?” Austin said, pointing. “That’s mine. Can we pick it up?”

The doubtful look in the captain’s round brown face suggested he was starting to regret his decision to pluck his new passengers from the water, but he sensed that Austin would not be denied. The captain moved the boat closer so Austin could lean over and retrieve the dive-gear bag. Austin unzipped the bag and pulled out his wallet. He peeled off a fifty.

“This is to cover the tickets for the boat ride.” He gave the captain another fifty-dollar bill, and said, “This is for asking no more questions.” Holding out a third fifty, he wrapped his arm around the captain’s shoulders and, speaking low so he wouldn’t be heard by the other passengers, Austin said, “How much longer is left in the tour?”

“I dunno . . . half an hour, maybe,” the captain said.

“This is yours if you cut that time in half.”

The captain grinned, and the third fifty-dollar bill followed the first two into his pocket.

“You just bought the boat, man,” he said. “You and the lady, have a seat.”

Austin and Song Lee ignored the curious gazes of the other passengers and looked for a place to sit. The boat had a canopy overhead to block the sun, but there were no seats and passengers sat on stacked life preservers. A young Japanese couple on their honeymoon made room for the new passengers.

The tour boat captain was true to his word. Fifteen minutes after Austin and Lee had climbed aboard, he told the passengers to take one last look at the mysterious ruins. Using the housing of one of the twin outboards as a seat, he goosed both engines, and before long the boat was pulling up to the dock at Kolonia.

While Lee went off to the restroom to freshen up, Austin made his way to the dive shop. He returned the scuba gear in good condition but asked the crestfallen owner to come up with a figure to replace the boat and motor. Although the price was exorbitant, Austin produced a NUMA credit card and told him to charge the replacement cost. The bean counters at NUMA who kept an eye on finances had become used to Austin’s strange purchases. He asked for a receipt anyhow.

As the boat owner was writing out the purchase order, he said, “Your friend catch up with you?”

“What friend?” Austin asked.

“Asian guy driving a pickup truck. Didn’t leave his name. Showed up a few minutes after you took off in the boat. I told him you were going out to the ruins.”

Austin did a good job hiding his surprise. He thanked the owner and went into the men’s room to change into dry clothes. He stuffed the surfing trunks in a wastebasket and dug his cell phone from the bag. He was glad to see that it was operational. He noticed that the Trouts and, most recently, the captain of the Concordhad called him. He returned Dixon’s call first.

“This is Austin,” he said. “I see that you’ve been trying to get in touch with me, Captain Dixon. I’ve been away from my phone.”

“Glad to hear from you, Kurt. I’ve got some bad news. Joe has disappeared. He borrowed a NUMA helicopter from the agency’s ship and flew to the north of here to take a closer look at an atoll. We lost him on radar.”

“Did he send off a Mayday?” Austin asked.

“Not a whisper,” Dixon answered. “Whatever happened must have happened fast.”

“How soon can you have the chopper pick me up?” Austin asked.

“It’s on its way.”

Austin clicked off and was about to call the Trouts. But Lee was coming his way, and he put his cell away to hail a taxi.

Austin was only slightly worried about Zavala. The charming young Mexican-American had an amazing talent for survival, and there was little Austin could do at this point anyhow. He was more worried about the fact that Chang had known that Austin was on the island. Someone had tailed him to the harbor, and that meant his comings and goings from the airport had been under surveillance from the time the Citation landed.

He couldn’t figure it. Only a few trusted people knew that they were in Pohnpei. He cursed himself for underestimating the Triad.

The taxi dropped them off at the airport, and they went out to the tarmac to await the return of the Seahawk. Austin started to tell Lee about Zavala’s disappearance, but she couldn’t contain her excitement.

“Do you know what we discovered in that place?” she said. “It was a hospitalor clinic, where the medusa toxin was administered to cure people! This is the immunology discovery of the century. It proves that ancient men knew the value of inoculation and used it to cure disease. I can’t wait to tell Dr. Huang about this. He’ll be thrilled.”

“Who is Dr. Huang?” Austin asked.

“He’s my friend and mentor,” Lee said. “He’s with the Ministry of Health, and was the one who brought me into the medusa project.”

“When was the last time you talked to him?”

“He asked me to keep him informed on a daily basis about what I was doing. I climbed the water tower every night at Bonefish Key to get a phone signal.”

“Every detail?” Austin asked.

“Yes,” Lee said. “I even called him when we stopped at Los Angeles and told him that we were coming to Pohnpei.”

“That explains how Chang and his buddies knew we were here.”

“Oh, no, you don’t think . . .”

Austin shrugged.

“Our mission is top secret,” he said. “Only a few trusted people knew we were coming here. But Chang must have had someone on our tail from the second we landed. How well do you know Dr. Huang?” he asked. “Could he be an informant?”

“I met him at Harvard, and he was quite helpful finding me employment.” She thought about Huang’s failure to fight her exile and his deceptive manner in bringing her into the medusa research. “Dr. Huang is a brilliant but fearful man. It would take only a little threat to bend him to someone’s will.”

“Someone or something like the Triad.”

Her mood darkened.

“Yes,” she said. “But it is my fault for letting him deceive me.”

“You did a favor for someone you thought was an old friend,” he said. “I’d suggest that you keep Dr. Huang in the dark from now on.”

The distant whup-whupof rotor blades from over the lagoon announced the imminent arrival of the helicopter from the Concord.The Seahawk set down moments later. Austin and Lee climbed in, and the chopper lifted off. It was less than an hour, but it seemed like days to Austin, before the helicopter was setting down for a landing on the aft deck of the Concord.

Captain Dixon helped Lee off the helicopter, and said, “Welcome to the Concord,Dr. Lee. Your government has been trying to get in touch with you.”

“We were somewhat delayed in Pohnpei,” she said.

“Quite all right,” he said. “I told your people that you were on the way. We’ve got a teleconferencing setup you can use. I’ll have my communications officer take you there.”

While Dixon stepped off to the side to use his hand radio, Lee turned to Austin.

“You’ll have to excuse me, Kurt. Thank you for an interesting day.”

“My pleasure,” he said. “Perhaps on our next tour of Nan Madol, we can spend more time above water.”

“That would certainly be different,” she said with a smile.

The communications officer arrived minutes later and led Lee to her teleconference. Dixon welcomed Austin back to the Navy cruiser, and said he would show him on a chart where Zavala had disappeared. On the way to the bridge, the captain said aircraft in the vicinity had made several sweeps around the atoll, but there was no sign of Zavala or the helicopter.

“No debris or oil slick?” Austin asked.

“Nothing,” Dixon said. “But we’ll keep looking.”

“Thanks, Captain, but you can’t spend any more time looking for Joe. The lab is our top priority.” Noting the frustrated look on the captain’s face, he added, “Don’t worry about Joe. He pops up when you least expect him.”

Austin studied the atoll’s location, wondering what had attracted Zavala to the tiny speck of land, and then punched in the Trouts’ number on his cell phone. Gamay answered.

“Kurt! Thank goodness you called. We’ve been worried. What’s going on?”

“We had a run-in with one of the Triad leaders in Nan Madol. Guy named Chang. The Triad had an informant. We’re back on the Concord,but now Joe is missing. Captain Dixon said Joe borrowed a helicopter and went off to check out an atoll.”

“We gave him the atoll’s coordinates,” Gamay said. “It’s located approximately where Trouble Island was, the place Captain Dobbs stopped at with his whale ship a hundred fifty years ago.”

“You found the logbook?” Austin asked.

“No,” she said. “You’re not the only one who’s discovered that the Triad has a long reach. We contacted a book dealer who said he had a lead on the log, but someone killed him and tried to jump us. We got away by the skin of our teeth.”

“Glad to hear that,” Austin said with relief. “I’m puzzled, though. If you didn’t find the log, where did you dig up the information about the atoll?”

Gamay told Austin about Perlmutter’s lead to Caleb Nye, the visits to the Dobbs mansion and Brimmer’s store, and finding Brimmer’s body in the old mill. Austin fumed as he listened to the details of Brimmer’s murder and the attempt to ambush the Trouts. Even without Dr. Huang, the vast criminal organization seemed to have eyes and ears everywhere. He asked for the longitude and latitude coordinates from Nye’s diorama and said he would check them out immediately.

“What do you want us to do in the meantime?” Gamay asked.

“Call Sandecker and bring him up to speed,” Austin said. “I’ll get back to you when I know more.”

Austin signed off with a quick thank-you, then sat down in front of a computer and called up a satellite image on the monitor using Nye’s coordinates. Nineteenth-century navigation was not exactly precise, and the atoll Austin saw on the screen didn’t match the position on the map.

But a radar reading of Joe’s trajectory showed that he seemed to be heading directly for the atoll. Austin zoomed in on the tiny speck. The monitor showed a palm-studded, handkerchief-sized patch of sand encircled by a coral reef. Nothing unusual, except for a dark streak near one side of the lagoon. He ran through the possibilities: school of fish, coral, undersea vegetation, shadows . . . Nothing seemed to fit. He looked up earlier images of the island: the streak was larger then. He kept going back in time, hour by hour.

As he dug back into the satellite photos, he saw that the streak had disappeared. He went further back, and he stopped in his tracks. A cigar-shaped object had taken the place of the streak. The conning tower protruding from the object identified it as a submarine. He enlarged the image, and did a quick Internet search for an Akula-class submarine. He found a series of pictures, extracted one that had the conning tower in roughly the same position, and placed the two images side by side. The subs were identical.

With growing excitement, Austin backed up in the photo file even further. There was no submarine in the lagoon now, not even a black streak. But he saw a dark spot which, upon enlargement, showed the unmistakable outline of a helicopter. Starting with that shot, he rapidly played the pictures forward like images in a nickelodeon: empty lagoon, helicopter, submarine, no helicopter, black streak shrinking in length.

“Thank you, Caleb Nye,” Austin said loud enough to be heard by Dixon, who leaned over his shoulder to study the computer monitor.

“Who?” the captain asked.

“He was a nineteenth-century whaler, and he just helped me find Joe.”

Austin ran through the series of satellite photos.

“Damn,” the captain said. “I think you’ve gotsomething, Kurt.”

“We need to get in for a closer look. I’m going to need your help.”

Dixon picked up the microphone that connected to the ship’s public-address system.

“I’ll call the ship’s officers together immediately,” he said.

Five minutes later, Austin was in the wardroom, running through the satellite series again for the benefit of the cruiser’s offers. A gunnery officer suggested surrounding the atoll with every ship in the fleet, then launching an invasion of it.

Austin shook his head.

“A full-fledged naval raid is out of the question, in my opinion,” he said. “There simply isn’t enough intelligence available on which to base an attack. One miscalculation might result in a massacre of the lab’s scientific team.”

The officer didn’t like being rebuffed.

“Who’s calling the shots here, Captain?” he asked. “The U.S. Navy or NUMA? That lab is Navy property.”

“That’s true,” Dixon said, “but I’ve got orders from the Navy brass to let NUMA take the lead.”

“I’m not concerned about competence,” the officer said. “It’s a question of firepower. NUMA’s a research agency, last time I heard.”

“We’ll back it up as best we can,” Dixon said. He was becoming annoyed.

The last thing Austin wanted was an argument over strategy. He intervened to help the gunnery officer save face.

“The officer makes a good point about firepower, Captain,” Austin said. “What about putting some ships within hailing distance? You could come to the rescue if I get in a jam.”

“Sure,” Dixon said. “We could position a few close by, with the rest ready to dash in if needed.”