The Storm - Cussler Clive. Страница 57

“What kind of danger?” the guard asked suspiciously.

Joe looked him in the eye. “Terrorists are going to destroy the dam.”

CHAPTER 46

THE FIVE TRUCKS IN JINN’S CONVOY RUMBLED NORTH, eventually pulling off the main road and onto a dirt track. They passed the dam and continued on, traveling a perimeter road that wound along the jagged shore of Lake Nasser.

A half mile up from the dam, they came to a gate left conspicuously open and went through it. Traveling in the cab of the lead truck, Sabah ordered the lights doused and had the drivers use night vision goggles.

Blacked out in this manner, the convoy reached a boat ramp at the edge of the lake.

“Turn the trucks around,” Sabah ordered. “Back them in.”

Sabah climbed out of the lead truck and directed traffic. The big rigs lined up side by side, the wide ramp large enough to accommodate all five at once like great crocodiles basking on the shore.

Because the lake was so high from all the rain, most of the ramp was submerged. Sabah estimated a hundred feet of concrete lay hidden beneath the water before the ramp intersected the natural lake bed.

On his signal, the trucks began to ease down the ramp. The drivers took it slow, checking their progress in mirrors and through open windows.

As the flatbeds began backing into the water, Sabah took a radio controller from his pocket. He extended the antenna, pressed the power switch and pressed the first of four red buttons.

In the back of the five trailers, magnetic seals around the yellow drums popped open. The pressurized lids popped up and slid off to the side.

A green light told Sabah the activation had been successful.

Unseen by anyone, the silver sand of the microbots came alive, stirring and swirling, as if there were snakes hidden beneath the top layer, and beginning to climb over the edges of the barrels.

Unaware of what was happening in the flatbeds behind them, the drivers continued backing down the ramp, allowing gravity to do the work. None of them had done this before and most felt like they were being pulled in.

Sabah judged their progress. Their caution pleased him. It meant they weren’t paying attention to him.

“Good,” he whispered as he pressed the second of the four red buttons.

Inside the cabs, the door locks slammed down, the windows slid up into a ninety-percent-closed position and froze. The noise and movement startled the drivers.

An instant later chloroform gas began pumping from tiny canisters and filling the cabins. The men lasted only a second or two, none managed to pry open a door. One got a window half down before passing out and slumping onto the seat.

Without waiting, Sabah pressed the third button. The truck engines revved. They began to accelerate backward, crashing through the water like a herd of thundering hippos.

The engines had been modified to include a secondary air intake, disguised as an exhaust stack rising high above the roof of the truck. When Sabah activated the chloroform, the primary intake had been sealed shut and this secondary intake had opened. In effect, it acted like a snorkel, allowing the engine to breathe and continue to rev even after the entire truck was submerged.

Because of that, the motors continued to run and the wheels continued to spin in reverse, pushing the trucks down the ramp and out across the submerged rocks and gravel beyond it.

The charging trucks fanned out like the fingers of a hand, burrowing beneath the water and vanishing from view.

Momentum and the slope of the stony lake bed allowed them to continue even after their engines were finally swamped. When the trucks finally settled, they were thirty feet below the surface, one hundred and fifty feet from shore.

The unconscious drivers soon drowned. If and when they were discovered, they would be identified as Egyptian radicals. Sabah and Jinn’s connection to the incident would remain unknown, except to General Aziz, who would do well to keep silent and most likely have no choice but to return to the bargaining table.

As the waters settled, Sabah pressed the final button on his controller. A half mile away, on the wall of the dam, two separate devices began to issue homing signals.

The size of an average carry-on suitcase, but shaped something like mechanical crabs, the two devices had been placed there by a scuba diver forty-eight hours before. One was just below the waterline while the other clung to a spot on the sloping wall of the dam seventy feet below.

If the divers had done their jobs properly, ten-foot starter holes had already been bored through the outer wall and into the aggregate behind it. A batch of dedicated microbots from each crab would already be hard at work expanding those holes.

The large force now escaping from the trucks would home in on the signal and accelerate the process rapidly. In six hours a trickle of water would appear on the far side of the dam near the top. That trickle would scour out a channel, and the erosion that followed would quickly turn the flow into a torrent.

The first stage of the disaster would follow as the waters of Lake Nasser flooded over the top, widening the channel in an unstoppable flow, wreaking havoc on the Nile Valley below, but that was just the prelude.

The second tunnel, far deeper in the dam, would destabilize the core, scouring out a tunnel in the heart of the structure. Eventually it would give way and a huge V-shaped section would collapse backward all at once. The flood would become a tsunami.

In a way, General Aziz had done them a favor. Between the message about to be sent at Aswan and the actions Jinn was taking in the Indian Ocean, Sabah doubted any nation of the world would refuse their demands or dare to threaten them.

Would the Americans be willing to see the Hoover Dam crumble, Las Vegas flooded off the map and their southwestern states deprived of power and water at the same time? Would China allow the Three Gorges Dam a similar fate? Sabah thought not.

He flung the remote into the lake and began walking away. A half mile off, a camel waited for him. He would climb on, pull the kaffiyeh around his face and disappear into the desert like the Bedouin had done for a thousand years or more.

CHAPTER 47

KURT AUSTIN AWOKE IN A QUONSET HUT SEVERAL HOURS after being made a prisoner on Pickett’s Island. Imprisoned, exhausted and thinking he would need the rest later, Kurt had lain down on the floor almost as soon as they’d been locked up. He’d fallen asleep in moments. Upon waking, he was upset to find the whole thing hadn’t been a dream.

The men in fatigues dragged him from the hut to another hidden beneath the trees. Inside he found a distinctly military setting that seemed like a tribunal of some kind. Leilani and Ishmael stood beside him.

From behind a desk at the end of the hut another islander of Aboriginal and Polynesian appearance stood and was presiding over the hearing as one of the judges. He was taller and leaner than the man who’d found them on the beach and a fair bit older, Kurt thought. He had a tousle of gray in his black hair.

“I am the eighteenth Roosevelt of Pickett’s Island,” the man said.

“The eighteenth Roosevelt?” Kurt repeated.

“That is correct,” the judge said. “And who am I addressing? You will state your names for the record.”

“I’m the first Kurt Austin of the United States of America,” Kurt said. “At least the first one I know of.”

The judges and the others around them took a collective breath, and Kurt tried to make sense of what he was seeing and hearing.

On the march from the beach to the huts hidden in the trees they’d encountered fortifications, trenches, emplacements of heavy machine guns and then an area of ramshackle buildings, including the old Quonset huts with roofs patched and repaired with thatch and woven palm fronds.