Tides of Fire, page 21
Valya must have sensed she was trapped and in danger when the Chinese commandos arrived in Jakarta. The Chinese clearly no longer felt the need to hide behind mercenaries. Knowing that and knowing her team had failed—twice, back in Hong Kong and at the museum—Valya must have suspected her usefulness to the Chinese was coming to an end.
Guan-yin had offered her a way out, promising the assistance of the triads to help Valya make her escape.
A life for a life.
As their group neared the western side of the bridge, Seichan lifted her pistol.
I made no such promise.
Even with her back turned, Valya must have sensed the threat. She turned, skidding slightly, and lifted her Beretta at Seichan.
“Don’t!” Guan-yin ordered and stopped between the two of them. “I’ve sworn Mikhailov protection until she leaves this region.”
Such an oath was sacrosanct among the warring triads. To break it would bring dishonor to Guan-yin and the entire Duàn zhī clan.
Zhuang waved more of his men forward, to shield the bridge during this momentary impasse. Gunfire kept the Chinese pinned, but it would not last long.
“Go!” Guan-yin waved to Valya. Even after putting her body between them, Guan-yin’s anger and hatred for the assassin sharpened her words. “Take your men. Zhuang, see that the others secure passage for her group.”
Valya crossed the last of the distance, backpedaling the entire time with her pistol raised at Seichan. Seichan held her weapon up, too. She kept her arm steady, even as her body trembled with rage. She matched eyes with Valya. Both women were ready to fire, but both knew their revenge would have to wait.
Still, Seichan could not let the assassin escape yet again. She centered her aim between those ice-blue eyes.
Not this time.
12:21 A.M.
Gray rushed Seichan, fearing what would happen if Guan-yin’s guarantee of safe passage was broken. Before he could reach her, the world trembled and jolted hard.
The bridge was tossed high with a great splintering of wood. Sirens burst across the city. The jetty thrashed and tore apart around and under them.
Another quake . . .
Valya fled from the bridge onto solid ground. She was surrounded by members of the triad, including Zhuang.
Gray rushed to Seichan and Guan-yin. With Yeung’s help, he herded them toward shore, traversing the quaking shreds of the bridge. “We don’t want to be near the coast if another tsunami—”
A thunderous boom shattered over them, sounding as if the world had cracked in half. The ground bucked hard, throwing them all off the bridge and into the water. Gray splashed into the shallows. This close to the beach, the waters were only knee-deep.
He gained his legs and waded to Guan-yin, helping her up.
Seichan joined them, still holding her pistol.
Gray pointed to the shore. They had been tossed to the far side of the bridge and were momentarily shielded by pilings. Despite the quake, gunfire continued on the other side.
They waded across the trembling water. The distance was not far, but the quake’s shaking had liquefied the packed sand under their boots, turning it into a sucking muck. With every hard-won step, more booms chased them. Despite the distance, each blast felt like a punch to the gut. They finally reached the beach and clambered out of the water.
Zhuang rushed to meet them and got them moving more swiftly. He must have sent Valya ahead with a cadre of the triad, honoring Guan-yin’s oath.
“Where do we go?” Gray asked.
By now, the Chinese had also vanished from their end of the bridge. Gray and the others would need to remain wary, not that his group had anything to offer the Chinese. When Valya had left, she was still clutching the envelope of papers she had grabbed off the dock. Maybe that was her plan all along. To use this entire gambit as a way of nabbing the prize for herself, to sell it to the Chinese afterward.
Gray could not dismiss such a strategy, especially when it came to that woman.
“This way.” Zhuang led them off the beach, seeming to know where he was going. Before landing in Jakarta, the man had hinted that the triad maintained a safe house in the city.
Gray hoped that was true.
By now, the quake had ended, but the detonations continued, sounding like cannon fire. Sometimes closer. Sometimes farther off.
“What is happening?” Guan-yin asked, staring back at the bay.
Gray pointed to the east. The dark skies shone with fire, as if the sun were rising. “Volcanic eruption.”
And it was not just in that direction. All around, fiery patches dotted the horizon with distant flames. Booms continued, as if marking the end of the world.
They reached the city and fled away from the bay, knowing another tsunami would surely hit. Though the quake had not been fierce or prolonged, it must have set off a chain reaction across the volcanic chain of islands, something the geologists had predicted. Already, a hint of sulfurous brimstone reached him, blown by the stiff wind off the bay, coming from the direction of the brightest flames.
As they fled through the city, the streets grew crowded. Faces stared toward the fiery horizon. Lightning flared in jagged bolts, illuminating a black plume rising from a glowing caldera.
“Over here!” Zhuang yelled.
The triad lieutenant led them unerringly off the streets as panic and shouts grew. He drew them into an alleyway and down a crooked course, before stopping at a nondescript tall gate.
“We’ll be safe in here,” Zhuang said.
Gray doubted this, but he followed the others into a small courtyard. Three stories of balconied levels surrounded them. He stared up as the stars slowly faded, erased by the smoke rolling in.
A light fall of ash rained down. The flakes stung his cheek and forehead, still retaining the heat of the eruption.
The booming had finally gone silent, but it felt more like the world was taking a deep breath before it truly unleashed Armageddon.
Gray felt a buzzing from the inner pocket of his jacket. He removed the sat-phone—the one supplied to their group back in Singapore. Only one person had this number.
Gray lifted the phone to his ear. “Director Crowe.”
“Gray,” Painter said. “Thank God, you’re still okay. You and the others need to get out of that region. Projections are for a total geological collapse. It’s going to become hell on earth over there.”
“What about the Chinese, their submarine—”
“It’s the least of anyone’s concern.”
Gray stared toward the streets.
Not to the Chinese.
Still, Gray had his own worry. “Were you able to warn Monk and Kowalski?”
The phone remained silent for a long stretch. Gray feared he had lost the connection.
Painter finally spoke. “Kat has tried to reach them since she landed in D.C. Both the Titan X and the project’s base station in the Coral Sea have gone silent. We’re trying to access an NSA surveillance satellite, but neighboring islands—both the Kermadec chain near the Tonga Trench and the Solomon Islands near the Titan Project—started erupting two hours ago.”
Gray swallowed. That was long before the quake here.
“Reports are of heavy ash obscuring the area,” Painter said. “At the moment, we have no optical sightlines. Even our SAR satellites—which can normally pierce thick clouds and smoke—are failing to offer any clarity due to the heavy static charge of the ash clouds. Or possibly it could be due to EW jamming by hostiles. Maybe both.”
Gray stared up. The stars were completely occluded now. He sought shelter under a balcony as the ash fell heavier, swirling with fiery flakes.
“We’ll keep trying to raise them,” Painter promised. “Right now, you have to get clear of the area before all flights are grounded.”
“It may be too late for that.”
“Then get to a boat.”
Gray heard a distant rumbling and cracking coming from the direction of the bay. He recognized that ripping growl from yesterday. A tsunami had struck the coast, likely pushed out from the nearby volcanic eruption.
He remembered not only his own experience, but also the accounts he had read from two centuries ago, when Mount Tambora had erupted. He also knew who had been here. Sir Stamford Raffles. History was repeating itself, only a hundredfold worse.
While he had only a short time to review the pages recovered from the museum, he remembered Raffles’s words in the introduction of his account: The only hope for the world lies within the pages that follow.
“Gray?” Painter asked. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m staying here.”
“Why?”
It was a fair question. Though Gray had no time to digest the pages of Stamford’s account, he sensed the import. That strange mind of his, as Seichan described it, had already begun to work on a puzzle, one with too few pieces yet. But in those pages, Stamford had hinted at a means of salvation, a way to appease the gods of the underworld.
Gray listened as more booms echoed over the horizon.
Painter repeated his question. “Why do you need to stay out there?”
Gray answered as best he could, knowing it to be true. “To discover a way to speak to the gods.”
19
January 24, 2:28 A.M. NCT
Two miles under the Coral Sea
More than three hours into the evacuation of Titan Station Down, Kowalski paced the geology lab. He chewed the end of his cigar, anxious to get moving, all too aware of the two miles of water over his head.
Outside the lab, handfuls of people ran up and down the central hub, shouldering duffels or carrying laptops. Shouts and calls echoed everywhere. Still, a quarter of the station’s personnel remained down here. The evacuation was way behind schedule.
What is taking so damned long?
Every half hour, a station-wide klaxon rang out, announcing the arrival of another shuttle of submersibles that would ferry the next contingent of researchers and staff to Titan Station Up. William Byrd had used the station’s PA to urge everyone to remain calm, assuring them that the evacuation was just a precautionary measure.
It had not helped much.
Especially with the repeated quakes that followed.
Kowalski had been tempted to leave with the first subs, but Haru Kaneko had refused to abandon his post, even though the man had sent the rest of his geology team packing. William Byrd was also down here, along with his security chief, Jarrah. Apparently, the billionaire was determined to adhere to the captain’s adage of going down with his ship—even when this ship was already at the bottom of the sea.
The ongoing quakes continued to harangue the evacuation. Most were just tremors. Others had been stronger. One had been fierce enough to rip free two of the six cables anchoring them to the seabed. But even minor temblors had made it challenging for the submersibles to safely dock at the station’s airlocks. To make matters worse, reports from topside described a heavy cloud of ash sweeping over the ocean. It rose from volcanic eruptions across the neighboring islands that had started a couple of hours ago. The ash, which was highly conductive, was wreaking havoc with communications due to insulator flashovers and repeated disruptions of the Up’s generators.
All in all, it was a clusterfuck.
And Byrd knew it. “Topside comms are still down,” he reported from his station next to the geologist. “I’m sorry, Haru. I should’ve listened to you earlier and not delayed the evacuation. We should all be gone by now.”
Haru stood before his monitors, bent over a keyboard. “At least down here, I’m still receiving data from the sonobuoys and seismic monitors.”
Kowalski leaned over his shoulder. “Are any of them sending good news?”
Haru sighed. “The buoys are showing a major seabed rise along the Tonga Trench. Fifty meters and still climbing. The seabed seismographs and geophones continue to show an escalation in quakes. Only now it’s no longer limited to just one section of the Tonga. New clusters are popping up along the entire two-thousand-kilometer length of the Tonga-Kermadec subduction zone.”
Kowalski frowned. “In English, that means what?”
“That we’ve not seen the worst of it yet,” Haru said. “Not by half.”
“How much worse can it get?” Byrd asked.
Haru turned to them. “Volcanic strength is ranked by VEI—a Volcanic Explosive Index. It’s open-ended, meaning it doesn’t have an upper limit. A VEI of zero is a slow leakage of lava, like you see at Kīlauea in Hawaii. From there, it rises across eight known ranks, from explosive to mega-colossal. The modern world has never experienced an eight. The last was seventy thousand years ago, the Toba eruption. It was so devastating that it drove the human population down to a mere thirty thousand people.”
Kowalski felt a sickening drop in his stomach. “And now?”
Haru faced his screens and brought up a map of the region that was dotted with hundreds of triangles, marking the volcanoes most at risk.
“At present, twenty-four peaks have erupted over the past two hours. Most in the three to four range, a few sixes, which are still considered in the colossal range.” He tapped on his keyboard. “Here is what my son’s modeling program predicts, what the status will look like in two or three days if the tectonic instability continues to escalate.”
He tapped a button.
On the map, a number appeared above each of the volcanic triangles.
Kowalski squinted at all the fours and fives. A handful of sixes. But there were also several sevens and two eights. But it didn’t stop there.
“That can’t be . . .” Byrd moaned, as if trying to deny the numbers on the screen.
“There are three nines on that map.” Kowalski glanced at Haru. “And one ten.”
The geologist nodded. “That ten marks the center of the Sunda arc of volcanos. Mount Tambora. A peak that erupted in the nineteenth century and killed a hundred thousand people. Back then, it was only a seven.”
Byrd stood up sharply, knocking his chair away. “What can we do?”
Kowalski knew the answer.
He pulled out a lighter and lit his cigar.
That’s better.
No one even frowned at him.
Haru simply shook his head. “Unless this trench suddenly and inexplicably calms again, there is nothing we can do. Beyond the immediate cataclysm, such devastation will raise a planet-shrouding ash cloud. One that will last decades. It’ll mark the end of life on Earth. The only hope—”
A loud klaxon made them all jump.
They waited out the three short bursts. It heralded the arrival of the next group of submersibles. Out in the central hub, several stragglers ran upward, hoping for a berth on this second-to-last flotilla.
Kowalski studied a CCTV monitor at the workstation. It showed the tier above them. The last of the personnel crowded and milled in front of the ring of airlocks, all anxious to leave—not that the surface would be any safer for much longer.
Byrd turned toward the door. “I should get up there and organize the next group of evacuees. Try to reassure the rest. Then I’ll be back.”
Byrd swung around to leave, motioning for Jarrah to come with him to help maintain order. Before the men could step away, Kowalski grabbed Byrd’s arm and pointed at the CCTV screen.
“We got company.”
By now, several of the airlocks had opened. People crushed forward—but they were forced back as figures in black armor entered the station. They came in with helmets, masks, and rifles. Muffled gunshots echoed from above. Several researchers dropped. Screams followed.
The assailants were judicious with where they fired, clearly understanding the danger of an errant shot at these depths. But that was not their only means of coercion. All their weapons had bayonets mounted on them. Several carried tasers, felling several more researchers into trembling submission.
Kowalski remembered Jarrah’s report of an incoming military ship that had refused to respond to any hails. With the evacuation, the quakes, the volcanic eruptions, no one had paid any more heed to the silent vessel as it crossed the seas nearby.
Only it must not have sailed past.
Kowalski now suspected the communication blackout over the past half hour had nothing to do with power outages. The ship must have jammed any transmissions.
Kowalski shoved Byrd toward the door. “We can’t stay here.”
Jarrah nodded his agreement. He reached to his belt and freed a steel baton, snapping it to its full extendable length. The security head grabbed Haru and yanked him to follow. They rushed out of the lab but approached the central stair warily.
Delphin Tier lay directly above them. They needed to put some distance between them and the assailants. So far, the enemy seemed focused on securing the level above, but their group couldn’t count on that lasting for long.
Kowalski reached under his coat and pulled out a Mark XIX Desert Eagle. He pointed the fifty-caliber weapon up and leaned his head out into the stairwell. He spotted shadows shifting up there. A single gunshot made him cringe, but no one appeared to be looking his way. He hissed and waved the others down the stairs.
The three men scurried ahead of him, then he followed. They wound down the long spiral and paused at the next level, which looked deserted—though there could be a few laggards holed up and hiding in labs.
Byrd carried an e-tablet in hand. Kowalski leaned over his shoulder. The billionaire had patched the CCTV feed to his tablet. As more commandos arrived, station personnel were herded at gunpoint into the galley and dorms. Several commandos guarded the top of the stairwell, making no attempt to venture deeper, which Kowalski found worrisome.
“Who are they?” Byrd gasped out.
“Trouble,” Kowalski said. “That’s all we need to know for now.”
“What do we do?” Haru asked.
Byrd lowered his tablet, but Kowalski pulled it back up.
On the screen, a group of commandos clustered around a pair of plastic crates. They began handing out rectangular parcels, each affixed with a knob of electronics.
Kowalski swore, recognizing the threat from his own demolitions background.
