Zero Hour - Cussler Clive. Страница 46

Winslow seemed unsure.

Kurt put his hand on the captain’s shoulder and looked him in the eye. “I know what you’re going through. None of us would even be in this situation if I’d kept my nose out of it. Those crewmen’s lives are on me, not you. But we can’t bring them back. We can only do our best to make sure their deaths are not in vain.”

Winslow looked back at Kurt. He seemed to understand. “So what do we do now?”

“We have to reduce the number of commandos at their disposal,” Kurt said. “Even the odds a little.”

“How? They have us under guard.”

Kurt had been thinking about this while losing in chess to Gregorovich. “They eat buffet style around here,” he said, having noted the setup on his single pass through the mess hall. “This ship is filthy. It has to be crawling with bacteria. Scrape up any kind of grunge you can find. I don’t care where you get it from, and, frankly, I don’t want to know. Collect it up and find a way to drop it in the food right around chow time — after we’ve gotten our fill of course.”

“Germ warfare,” Joe noted.

“If the commandos are too sick to fight, Gregorovich will have no choice but to take us along.”

“I like it,” Joe said. “What if he leaves us behind anyway?”

“Then we take over the ship and radio NUMA if we can.”

Joe nodded, and Hayley offered a sad smile. Even the XO cracked a grin at the thought of going on the offensive for a change. Winslow agreed. “Okay,” he said. “I’m with you.”

THIRTY

Deep beneath the surface of the ice-covered island, Patrick Devlin found his ears ringing. The bone-shaking sound of a huge rock drill grinding away had all but deafened him over the past hour. When it suddenly stopped, the silence was almost painful.

“That’s deep enough,” a burly foreman shouted.

Devlin backed away from the wall. The heavy drill was mounted on an ore cart of sorts. Padi’s job was to keep pressure on it and drill a series of boreholes in the wall. Covered in dust and grime, he stepped back as another man placed a series of charges in the holes and began attaching wires to the caps.

A sharp whistle sounded. “Everyone to the tunnel,” a foreman demanded.

Spread about the large cavern, a dozen other workers busy crushing rocks and scooping the rubble onto a conveyor belt stopped what they were doing and began trudging toward a small tunnel entrance on one side of the room.

They fit themselves inside, taking shelter under the steel-reinforced arch, weary souls glad to put down their tools for a moment. Devlin noticed their faces were drawn but their bodies fit.

With the armed foreman and his assistant checking the explosives, he took a chance. “What’s your name?” he asked a black man who stood beside him.

“My name is Masinga,” the man replied in a distinct South African accent.

Devlin nodded. “I’m Patrick,” he said. “Sometimes, people call me Padi. What is this place?”

“Don’t you know?”

Devlin shook his head.

“Diamond mine,” Masinga said.

Devlin studied the crumbled rock sitting on the motionless conveyor belt. “I don’t see any diamonds.”

“They’re in the rock,” Masinga explained. “Not much of a miner if you don’t know that.”

“I’m not a miner,” Devlin said.

“Then what are you doing here?”

“I was bloody well shanghaied,” Devlin swore under his breath. “Weren’t you?”

“No,” Masinga said. “I signed a contract. We all did. Paid us twice the rate De Beers was offering. Only when it came time to leave, we were kept on against our will.”

“Have you tried to escape?”

The man laughed. “Do we look like fish? We’re on an island in the middle of the ocean. Where would we escape to?”

“But your families,” Padi said. “Surely, they can protest.”

“They’ve been told we died in an accident,” another man said. He sounded like he might be from South America. “And they never knew where we were in the first place. None of us did until we got here.”

It sounded like madness to Devlin, but then little had made sense since he’d spotted the Voyager in the harbor off the coast of Jakarta.

“What about you?” Masinga asked. “Maybe someone will come looking.”

“Not likely,” Padi said, remembering that Keane was unconscious when he found the Voyager. “If I had to guess, the whole world probably thinks I’m dead too.”

“You are, then,” Masinga said. “We all are.”

“Tartarus,” Devlin mumbled, prison of the underworld. Now it made sense to him.

“Fire in the hole!” the foreman called out.

The burly man pressed a switch. A dozen small charges went off in rapid succession. The wall bulged out, holding its shape for an instant and then crumbling in a great clamor and cloud of dust.

Fans designed to draw the dust and heat out of the room kicked on, and the cloud was evacuated up a large vertical shaft that led to the surface. It swirled past them, sticking to their sweat-covered bodies. By the time it cleared, Padi’s face was as dark as Masinga’s. In fact, all of them were the same gray color no matter the shade of their skin.

The foreman looked over, the shotgun resting on his shoulder. “Break’s over,” he shouted. “Back to work.”

Masinga and the others rose up and wearily began moving into position. Against his will, Devlin followed.

THIRTY-ONE

Fifteen hours after abruptly ending his chess game, Gregorovich stood over the lighted chart table as another new course line was drawn. This one led off to the northwest.

Kirov stood across from him with one of the commandos at his side. “That’s the ninth course change he’s ordered.”

The MV Rama could be felt turning to starboard.

“Approaching new heading,” the navigator called out nervously. “Three hundred twenty-three degrees.”

“He’s toying with us,” Kirov said dangerously. “And you’re indulging him.”

Gregorovich stared. The presence of the second commando was Kirov’s idea. A show of force. No doubt the mutiny he felt brewing was close to being launched.

The men were getting nervous. It was palpable. They were land-based commandos far from home in a dangerous situation with deteriorating conditions. The ship was rolling appreciably in the growing swells, and the sky had turned gray-white. It looked like snow would be falling soon. At Austin’s direction, they’d come so far south they’d begun dodging small icebergs, an effort not helped by the reduced visibility.

Worst of all, they’d heard in detail how the Orion was crushed and dragged to the depths as if by a monster from the deep. So far, order remained, but Gregorovich sensed it would not last.

“At least we’re heading north,” he said, turning to the navigator. “What’s in this direction?”

The navigator tapped the screen, and the map zoomed out slowly until finally Gregorovich spotted a yellow dot directly in their path.

“Heard Island,” the navigator said.

By tapping the screen at the island’s location, Kirov was able to bring up a block of information about it.

“Australian territory,” he said, reading from the screen. “Volcanic. Last appreciable eruption 2005. Covered in glaciers and completely uninhabited.”

Kirov looked up, a grin plastered from ear to scabbed-over ear. “That’s it,” he said. “Heard Island is the target. That’s where Thero’s hiding. Austin finally showed his hand. We can kill him now along with his crew and finish the job without worrying about them.”

Gregorovich didn’t like the idea of losing his counterweight. Nor did he think, after proving so crafty for so long, that Austin would have been dumb enough to blunder into revealing his secret with such ease.