Текст книги "Medusa"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

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FIFTY MILES FROM Davy Jones’s Locker, the rolling surface of the dark sea erupted in an explosion of foam and spray. A twenty-foot-long aluminum tube burst from the center of the churning geyser, sped skyward at a sharp angle, leaving a white fan-shaped trail behind it, and quickly dove back toward the waves in a curving trajectory.

Within seconds, the cruise missile had leveled out, until it was traveling twenty-five feet above the wave tops, so low that its passing left a wake in the water. Powered by its solid-fuel rocket booster, the missile quickly accelerated, and by the time it had shed its rocket and the fan-jet engines had kicked in it had achieved its cruising speed of five hundred miles per hour.

A series of sophisticated guidance systems kept the cruise missile on track as unerringly as if it were being steered by a skilled pilot.

The speeding missile’s unsuspecting target was a large, gray-hulled ship anchored near the red-and-white buoy that marked the location of the undersea lab. The name on the hull was PROUD MARY, and it was registered in the Marshall Islands as a survey ship. The Proud Marywas anchored near the buoy waiting for the shuttle sub to return with Phelps.

The ship’s owner was a shadowy corporation that provided vessels to international security companies in need of naval services. They supplied everything from small, fast, and heavily armed speedboats to ships large enough to land an army of mercenaries anywhere in the world.

Assigned to protect the undersea laboratory, the Proud Marycarried two dozen guards proficient in the use of every type of small arms as well as an array of electronic sensing gear that could pick up vessels or planes approaching the lab. The ship also served as a parking garage for the shuttle that ferried supplies and people to and from the lab.

In its leap from the ocean, the cruise missile had blipped on the ship’s radar screen for only a few seconds. Inactivity had dulled the operator’s edge, and he was engrossed in a motorcycle magazine when the missile made its brief appearance, before dropping from surveillance’s view. The ship also had infrared sensors, but even if the missile had been flying at altitude they would have failed to pick up the low-temperature heat from its engines.

Undetected, the missile streaked toward the Proud Marycarrying a half ton of high explosives in its warhead.

LOIS MITCHELL AND GORDON PHELPS were making their way along the connecting tube to the control room when they heard a loud whumpthat seemed to come from far over their heads. She stopped in her tracks and pivoted slowly, ears cocked, concerned that it indicated a systems failure.

“I’ve never heard anything like thatbefore,” she said. “It sounded like a truck slamming into a wall. I’d better check to make sure all the lab systems are operating as they should be.”

Phelps glanced at his watch. “From the sound of it, things seem to be moving a little ahead of schedule.”

“I’d better check the situation in the control room.”

“Good idea,” Phelps said amiably.

They started walking toward the door at the end of the passageway. A few steps from the control-room module, the door hissed open, and Frank Logan burst through. His pale face was flushed with excitement, and he was grinning.

“Lois! I was coming to get you. Did you hear that weird noise-”

Logan stopped short, his grin vanishing. Lois turned to see what he was staring at.

Phelps was holding a pistol in his hand, dangling it loosely next to his thigh.

“What’s going on?” she said. “We don’t allow weapons in the lab.”

Phelps gave her a hangdog look. “Like I said, no security system is totally foolproof. Lab’s under new management, Dr. Mitchell.”

He was still soft-spoken, but his voice had lost the obsequious quality that Lois had found so irritating and now had an edge that hadn’t been there before. Phelps told Logan to stand next to Lois so he could keep an eye on him. As Logan complied, the control-room door hissed open again, and a lab technician stepped through. Phelps instinctively brought his gun around to deal with the interruption. The lab tech froze, but Logan, seeing Phelps’s momentary distraction, tried to grab his gun.

They struggled, but Phelps was younger and stronger and would have gotten the upper hand even if the gun had not gone off. The noise was muffled to a soft puttby a silencer on the pistol barrel, but a red stain blossomed on the front of Logan’s white lab coat. His legs gave out, and he crumpled to the floor.

The lab tech bolted back into the control room. Lois ran over and knelt by Logan’s motionless body. She opened her mouth in a scream but nothing came out. “You killed him!” she finally said.

“Aw, hell,” Phelps said. “Didn’t mean to do that.”

“What didyou mean to do?” Lois said.

“No time to talk about that now, ma’am.”

Lois stood up and confronted Phelps. “Are you going to shoot me too?”

“Not unless I have to, Dr. Mitchell. Don’t do anything crazy like your friend. We’d hate to lose you.”

Lois Mitchell stared defiantly at Phelps for a few seconds before she wilted under his unrelenting gaze. “What do you want?”

“For now, I want you to round up all the lab folks.”

“ Thenwhat?” she said.

Phelps shrugged. “Then we’re going for a little ride.”

CHAPTER 6

THE B3 PASSENGERS HAD DECIDED TO REPORT THEIR OBSERVATIONS like sportscasters. Joe Zavala would do the play-by-play, Max Kane would provide the color using William Beebe’s writings.

At two hundred eighty-six feet down, Kane announced, “The torpedoed ocean liner Lusitaniais resting at this level.”

At three hundred fifty-three feet, he noted, “This was the deepest any submarine had ever gone when Beebe made his bathysphere dives.”

When the bathysphere reached six hundred feet, Kane slipped the lucky skullcap from his head and held it in his hands.

“We’ve entered what Beebe called the Land of the Lost,” he said in a hushed tone. “This is the realm that belongs to the human beings who have been lost at sea. Going back to the Phoenicians, millions of human beings have descended this far, but all of them have been dead, the drowned victims of war, tempest, or act of God.”

“Cheery thought,” Zavala said. “Is that why you said hello to Davy Jones’s Locker . . . where drowned sailors go?”

Zavala had rigged a switch to turn off the TV camera and microphone. Kane reached out and said, “Joe and I are taking a short break. We’ll be back with more observations in a few minutes.” He pushed the button. “I need a breather,” he said with a smile. “You asked about the Locker . . . It’s the nickname my colleagues gave to the lab.”

“The marine center at Bonefish Key?” Zavala said.

Kane glanced at the camera. “That’s right, Bonefish Key.”

Zavala wondered why anyone would compare a sunny Florida island on the Gulf of Mexico with the grim domain of the drowned. He gave a mental shrug. Scientists were strange birds.

“Beebe sounds morbid, but he had a relatively benign view of the ocean,” Kane said. “He knew the dangers were real, but he thought the hazards of the deep overblown.”

“The millions of drowning victims you mentioned might disagree,” Zavala said. “I respect everything Beebe and Barton did, Doc, but from an engineer’s point of view I’d say they were just plain lucky they didn’t become part of that Land of the Lost. The original bathysphere was an accident waiting to happen.”

Kane greeted the blunt assessment with a chuckle.

“Beebe was a realist as well as a dreamer,” he said. “He compared the bathysphere to a hollow pea swaying on a cobweb a quarter of a mile below the deck of a ship rolling in midocean.”

“Poetic but not inaccurate,” Zavala replied. “That’s exactly why I built safety features into the new diving bell.”

“Glad you did,” Kane said. He switched the microphone back on and turned his attention to the scene visible through the porthole.

The B3 rocked slightly from time to time, but its descent was signaled more by changes in the light coming in through the portholes than by any sense of motion. The most drastic color change comes at the start of a dive. Red and yellow are wrung from the spectrum as if from a sponge. Green and blue dominate. Deeper still, the water color shifts to navy and finally becomes an intense black.

In the early stages of the dive, pilot fish, silver eels, motelike clouds of copepods, and strings of lacelike siphonophores drifted past the windows like tiny ghosts, along with shrimp, translucent squid, and snails so tiny that they resembled brown bubbles. Long, dark shapes could be glimpsed at the extreme range of the B3’s searchlight beam.

At seven hundred feet, Zavala switched the searchlight off. He looked out the window and murmured an appreciative exclamation in Spanish. Zavala had grown up in Santa Fe, and the view through the porthole looked like a New Mexico sky on a clear winter’s night. The darkness sparkled with stars, some alone, others in groups, some continuously flashing, others just once. There were floating threads of luminescence, and glowing smudges that could have been novas or nebulas in a celestial setting.

The cabin was as hushed as a cathedral; the loudest sound was the low hum of the air-circulation motor, so when Kane saw an undulating form float by the porthole his response was like a gunshot.

“Wow!”Kane exclaimed. “An Aurelia jellyfish.”

Zavala smiled at Kane’s excitement. Although there was no denying the beauty in the jellyfish’s undulating motion, the creature outside the bathysphere’s porthole was only a few inches across.

“Had me for a second there, Doc. Thought you’d seen the Loch Ness Monster,” Zavala said.

“This is so much better than Nessie. The medusae are among the most fascinating and complex animals on the face of the earth or under the sea. Look at that school of fish lit up like the Las Vegas Strip . . . lantern fish . . . Hey,” Kane said, “what was that?”

“You see a mermaid, Doc?” Zavala asked.

Kane pressed his face against the porthole. “I’m not sure whatI saw,” he said, “but I know it was big.”

Zavala flicked on the searchlight, a green shaft of light edged with purple-blue stabbing the darkness, and he peered through the porthole.

“Gone,” he said, “whatever it was.”

“Beebe spotted a big fish he thought might have been a whale shark,” Kane said to the camera. “Until the bathysphere’s dive, his fellow scientists never believed that he had seen fish with glowing teeth and neon skin. He got the last laugh when he proved the abyss abounded with such strange creatures.”

“They’re getting stranger all the time,” Zavala said, pointing at himself. “The locals swimming around out there must think that you and I are pretty unsavory-looking additions to their neighborhood.”

Kane’s loud guffaw echoed off the bathysphere’s curving walls.

“My apologies to the listening audience out there, hope I didn’t blow out your speakers. But Joe is right: humans have no right being where we are at this moment. The pressure on the outside of this sphere is half a ton per square inch. We’d look like jellyfish ourselves if it weren’t for the steel shell protecting us . . . Hey, there’s some more lantern fish. Man, they’re beautiful. Look, there’s– Whoops!”

The bathysphere’s descent had been smooth and without deviation, but suddenly a strong vibration passed through the sphere as Kane was talking. The B3 first lifted up, then dropped, in slow motion. Wide-eyed, Kane glanced around, as if expecting the sea to come pouring in through the sphere’s shell.

Zavala called up to the support vessel. “Please stop yo-yoing the B3, Kurt.”

An unusually mounding sea had rolled under the ship, and the cable suddenly had gone limp. The operator of the crane noticed the change and goosed the winch motor.

“Sorry for the rough ride,” Austin said. “The cable went slack in the cross swell, and we moved too fast when we tried to adjust.”

“Not surprising, with the length of cable you’re handling.”

“Now that you bring up the subject, you might want to check your depth finder.”

Zavala glanced at the display screen and tapped Kane on the shoulder. Kane turned away from the window and saw Zavala’s finger pointing at the gauge.

Three thousand thirty feet.

They had exceeded the original bathysphere’s historic dive by two feet.

Max Kane’s mouth dropped down practically to his Adam’s apple. “We’re here!” he announced, “more than half a mile down.”

“And almost out of cable,” Kurt Austin said. “The sea bottom is around fifty feet below you.”

Kane slapped Joe Zavala’s palm a high five. “I can’t believe it,” he said. His face was flushed with excitement. “I’d like to take this moment to thank the intrepid William Beebe and Otis Barton,” he continued, “for blazing the trail for all who have followed. What we have done today is a tribute to their courage . . . We’re going to be busy for a while shooting pictures of the sea bottom, so we’re signing off for a few minutes. We’ll get back to you when we’re riding to the surface.”

They cut television transmission, positioned themselves next to the portholes with still cameras, and shot dozens of pictures of the strange glowing creatures that the bathysphere’s lights had attracted. Eventually, Zavala checked their time on the bottom, and said the bathysphere would have time to head back up.

Kane grinned and pointed toward the surface. “Haul away.” Zavala called Austin on the radio and told him they were ready to make the ascent.

The B3 swayed slightly, vibrated, then jerked from side to side.

Zavala pulled himself back up to a sitting position. “Getting bounced around down here, Kurt. Sea picking up again?” he inquired.

“It’s like a mirror. Wind’s died down and the swells have flattened out.”

“Joe,” Kane shouted, “there it is again . . . the monster fish!” He jabbed his index finger at the window.

A shadow passed near the edge of the searchlight beam and turned toward the bathysphere.

As Zavala pressed his face against a porthole, every hair on his scalp stood up and saluted. He was looking into three glowing eyes, one of them over the other two.

He had little time to analyze his impressions. The sphere jerked again.

“We’re seeing cable oscillations near the surface,” Kurt’s voice came over the speaker. “What’s going on?”

There was another jerking movement.

“There’s something out there,” Zavala said.

“What are you talking about?” Austin asked.

Zavala wasn’t sure himself, so he simply said, “Haul us up.”

“Hang tight,” Austin said. “We’re starting the winch.”

The bathysphere seemed to stabilize. The numbers on the fathometer blinked, showing that the sphere was moving up toward the surface. Kane broke into a relieved grin, but the expression on his face froze as the bathysphere jerked once more. A second later, the men in the B3 were levitating as if plunging on a runaway elevator.

The bathysphere had gone into free fall.

CHAPTER 7

AUSTIN LEANED AGAINST THE SHIP’S RAILING AND SAW THE B3’s tether cable oscillating like a plucked violin string. He spoke into the headset microphone that connected him with the bathysphere. “What’s going on, Joe? The cable is going crazy.”

Austin heard garbled voices, the words inaudible against a background of metallic clanging. Then the cable abruptly stopped its wild gyrations, and the line went dead.

Austin strained his ears. Nothing.Not even a whisper of static. He removed the headset and examined the connections. Everything was in place. He unclipped his belt radio and called the captain in the ship’s bridge.

“I’ve lost voice communication with the B3. Is the video transmission coming through?”

“Not since it was cut off,” the captain reported.

“Have you checked the redundant systems?” Austin asked.

Unlike the original bathysphere, which was connected to the surface with a single telephone line, the B3’s hauling cable incorporated several different communications routes in case one went out in the hostile deep-sea environment.

“Ditto, Kurt, nothing.All systems are out.”

A frown crossed Austin’s tanned face. It made no sense. If one system failed, another system should have taken over. Zavala had bragged that the instrumentation he’d designed for the B3 equaled that of a jetliner.

Austin instructed the crane operator to reel the cable in. As it slithered out of the water and around the drum, the operator’s voice came over Austin’s headset.

“Hey, Kurt, something’s wrong. There’s no weight resistance at the other end. The cable’s coming up too fast and easy. It’s like cranking a spinning reel after you’ve lost your fish.”

Austin asked the crane man to speed up the retrieval of the bathysphere, and the cable slinked from the sea at an even faster rate. The launch crew was pressed against the railing, silently watching the streaming cable. The NUMA film crew, sensing the tension in the air, had stopped filming.

“Almost at the surface,” the crane operator warned. “Heads up!”

The operator slowed the winch, but still the cable snapped like a bullwhip when it came out of the water, the bathysphere no longer attached. He swung the dangling cable over the ship and put the winch in reverse, letting several yards of the cable coil on the deck. Austin went over to the coil and picked up the end of the cable.

A cameraman standing nearby saw Austin holding the free end of the cable. “Damned thing snapped!” he said.

Austin knew that the cable could hold ten times the weight of the B3. He examined it closely. The strands were as even edged as the bristles of a paintbrush. He turned to the NUMA oceanographer who had chosen the dive site.

“Is there any feature down there, a coral ridge or overhang, that could have snagged the cable?” he asked.

“The bottom is as flat as an ironing board,” the oceanographer said, almost insulted at the question. “There’s a carpet of marine growth, but that’s it. Nothing but mud. That’s why we selected this spot. We did intensive bottom profiling before we made our recommendation.”

Watching from the bridge, Captain Gannon had seen Austin examining the cable. He hustled down to the deck, and he swore lustily when Austin showed him the sheared-off end. “What the hell happened?”

Austin shook his head. “I wish I knew.”

“The press boats have been calling in,” the captain said. “They want to know what happened to the video transmission.”

Austin scanned the cordon of encircling boats being kept away from the area by a Coast Guard patrol. “Tell them that there was a problem with the fiber-optic cable. We need time to figure this thing out.”

The captain called the bridge, relayed Austin’s suggestion, and snapped the radio back onto his belt.

“It’s going to be all right, isn’t it, Kurt?” Gannon asked with worry in his eyes. “The B3’s flotation bags will bring them to the surface, right?”

Austin squinted against the glare coming off the surface of the water. “The bathysphere is a long way down; let’s give it a while. But we should ready an ROV in case we need to take a look.”

Despite his apparent serenity, Austin knew that each passing minute diminished the possibility of a flotation-bag ascent. The bathysphere could rely on battery power for light, but its air would eventually peter out. He waited a few more minutes, then called the captain and recommended that they launch the ROV.

The remotely operated vehicle, or ROV, has become the workhorse of undersea exploration. Controlled by means of a tether, an ROV can dive deep, maneuver into the tightest spaces, and transmit television images, allowing the operator to travel to the depths without leaving the dry comfort of the ship.

The captain had chosen a medium-sized vehicle, about the size and shape of an old steamer trunk, that could operate at a depth of six thousand feet. Six thrusters positioned the vehicle with pinpoint accuracy; it was equipped with two manipulators for collecting samples, and several cameras, including high-resolution color video.

A telescoping starboard boom swung the ROV off its cradle and lowered it into the sea. Austin watched it sink under a mound of pale green bubbles, trailing its tether behind it, then stepped into the remote-sensing control center located in a cargo container on the main deck.

The video feed through the ROV’s tether was connected to a console from which the remote’s movement was controlled by a pilot with a joystick. Images from the feed were transmitted to a big screen above the console. The ROV’s heading and speed were displayed in combination letters and numbers at the top of the screen, along with elapsed time.

Moving in a descending spiral, the ROV traveled in minutes the same distance it had taken the bathysphere hours. The remote blasted through schools of fish, scattering them like leaves, as it corkscrewed into the sea.

“Leveling out,” the pilot said.

She put the remote into a shallow-angled dive like an airplane preparing to land. Its twin searchlights picked out brownish green bottom vegetation that looked like leaves of spinach undulating in the current. There was no sign of the Bathysphere 3.

Austin said, “Start searching, in parallel passes, a hundred feet long.”

The ROV cruised about twenty feet over the vegetation. It finished its first hundred-foot pass, then traveled back with fifteen feet separating it from the first pass. The speed indicator showed the ROV was doing five knots.

Austin clenched and unclenched his fists, impatient with the glacially slow pace. Other crew members now gathered around the screen, but no one spoke except for the quick communication between Austin and the ROV pilot. Austin mentally excluded everything in the room, pouring himself into the monitor as if he were riding atop the ROV.

Five more minutes passed.

The ROV’s methodical back-and-forth movement was similar to that of a lawn mower. The picture transmitted by its electronic eye was the same unchanging monotonous carpet of brownish green.

“Wait,”Austin said. He had seen something. “Go to the left.”

With a jiggle of the joystick, the pilot pivoted the vehicle so that it was perpendicular to its original path. The twin searchlights picked up mud splatter around the rim of a crater. A mud-covered, domelike shape protruded from the center of the crater. Now Austin saw why the B3 hadn’t surfaced; its flotation bags were buried deep in the mud. He asked the pilot to blow mud away from the bathysphere. The ROV’s thrusters kicked up a thick brown cloud that hardly made a dent in the heavy muck.

At Austin’s request, the pilot put the ROV on the bottom and pointed its searchlights at the sphere. Austin stared at the image, plumbing his training and experience.

He was pondering the technical challenge involved in freeing the B3 from the clutches of the sea when a shadow appeared on the right-hand side of the monitor. Something was moving. It was there for an instant, then gone.

“What was that?” the pilot asked.

Before Austin could venture a guess, the screen went blank.