The Year of the Locust, page 54
“Houston, we have a problem,” he said quietly.
CHAPTER 59
Twice in my life, both on foreign missions, I have felt death’s hand on my shoulder. The first was in the abandoned village with the poisoned well in Iran. The second was on board the Leviathan.
As the damage to the sub continued to cascade, threatening to overwhelm Martinez and his team—a crisis made worse because nobody could identify its cause—I motioned to Baxter to grab a headset mic-and-earphones off the wall, did the same myself, and led him out of the command center into the controlled chaos of the submarine.
I had no idea what I would find in the secondary command post—or even if it was still operational—but if it became necessary for me to try to get the Leviathan to the surface, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to monitor the avalanche of graphs and alerts and enter the computer commands alone. Baxter might not have had any experience in submarines, but I figured a Nobel Prize–winning physicist would be no slouch on the uptake.
Almost immediately, we ran headlong into a team of men and women unreeling hoses, ready to connect them to portable submersible pumps. It meant there was water entering the sub, and I wondered if the hull had been fractured. I yelled at a mechanic’s mate doubling as the water evacuation leader. “The hull?”
“No,” he replied. “The tremor or whatever it was broke a seal on a torpedo tube—it’s taking water but they’re fitting a new one.” He tried to smile. “It could be worse.”
I nodded, not believing it. Baxter and I squeezed past and headed deeper into the belly of the beast. It was clear the boat’s computers were saving power and directing it to the most critical areas. Apparently, the corridors and companionways were not on that list.
We hugged the walls, passing more damage-control teams, and saw, up ahead, shadowy figures moving quickly, carrying small portable generators and toolboxes with them. At one junction, I saw Baxter staring, alarmed by the level of chaos around him: pipes hanging from brackets, collapsed electrical conduits, and doors torn off storage closets.
“It’s not as bad as it looks. A lot of it is superficial,” I said, hoping I was right. “At least, if the ventilation is anything to go by, the fire in the laundry has been extinguished.”
He nodded. “Are you as frightened as me?”
“No,” I replied, smiling. “I was in Pakistan as a young agent working out of the embassy when it was stormed by a huge mob. In my opinion, if there aren’t five thousand armed men coming over the wall to kill you, then it’s not an emergency.”
He laughed and we climbed to the next level. There, in front of us, crouched in the passageway, was a two-person team doing double duty as medics. They were tending to one of the nuke engineers, who had either fallen or been hit by something: his right arm was hanging limp, clearly broken.
The medics waved us through but I stopped. There was nothing either Baxter or I could do but I indicated the tool belt and flashlight clipped to the man’s waist. “Can I?” I asked.
“Be my guest,” he replied through gritted teeth. “No use to me.”
I took the belt and headed into the gloom.
CHAPTER 60
Twenty thousand miles above Earth, an Orion satellite—tilted on its axis, its huge parabolic antenna fully deployed, and a forest of cameras focused directly on the great Southern Ocean—was spinning through the vacuum of space.
Its images were playing on one of the screens in the Situation Room. Alongside was footage of the aircraft carriers superimposed over a grid, a dozen Poseidon sub hunters in the air, and an attack submarine running deep, trailing a towed sonar array for miles behind it. They were all searching.
Falcon hung up a phone connected to a landline. “Anything?” the president asked.
“No sign of it,” Falcon replied. “Not from the NSA, Langley, the National Reconnaissance Office, and even the weather service—we’re trying anybody with satellites or planes aloft.”
“What are you telling them we’re searching for?” the secretary of state asked.
“I said that an unidentified submarine is monitoring our open-sea war game and we need help tracking it. If we say we can’t contact one of our own subs, it’ll leak and we’ll have a hundred news organizations chartering planes and wanting a crew list.”
“Anyway,” the secretary of defense said, “we don’t know anything is wrong—we just can’t contact them, is all.”
“It’s not like that,” Falcon said. “The skipper’ll be waiting to hear from Deep Siren… apart from anything, he needs orders. When he doesn’t get them, they will try to contact us. Standard operating procedure.”
“Maybe they can’t reach us—for the same reason we can’t contact them. A technical fault,” the Danger replied. “I’m telling you, it’s the most likely—”
“Then why don’t they go to periscope depth and contact us through conventional means?”
The secretary of defense had no answer. “Should they have done that by now?” the secretary of state asked. “Periscope depth?”
“Wouldn’t any of us?” Falcon replied. “My guess is they have suffered some sort of failure—possibly catastrophic. But what do we do, how do we help them? The vessel is fully cloaked…”
He looked around the room. “How the hell do you find an invisible submarine?”
CHAPTER 61
Baxter and I were moving as swiftly as possible down a companionway between the crew’s tiny bunks when the next tremor hit.
Pulse rocketing, I felt it first through my feet: another ominous shudder, accompanied by the same deep rumbling, started to pass through the hull of the sub, but this time it didn’t stop—it just grew in intensity, until the whole boat seemed to suddenly twist hard on its axis. I swung fast in the companionway, trying to grab a handhold to brace myself for whatever might be coming next. Baxter did the same and succeeded, but I was too late.
The bow of the huge craft plunged downward into what felt like a free fall. My feet left the deck and for seconds I felt weightless—like an astronaut floating in zero gravity—as I hurtled across the confined space.
I hit a bulkhead hard, and only my outstretched hands prevented me from cracking my skull. I fell to the deck, thinking I was at least safe for a moment, but a stack of large steel storage boxes broke their lashings and came smashing through a heavy cupboard door ten feet away.
The heavy boxes hurtled toward us, brushing past Baxter, who was still clinging to his handhold, and narrowly missing me. But the tremor had also ripped apart the shelving holding the boxes, and long shards of metal were flying through the air right behind the boxes. I yelled a warning to Baxter and he spun out of the way, but…
A piece of metal shelving, two feet long, as sharp and narrow as a spear, flew straight toward me. Only seeing it at the last moment, I tried to hurl myself aside but didn’t have the fraction of a second I needed. It hit my left shoulder, burying itself deep, just stopping short of pinning me to the wall.
Clutching at the wound, trying not to pass out, I felt the tremor pass and the Leviathan straighten out: it had at least arrested its downward plunge. Gasping for a few moments, trying to master myself, I tentatively probed the entry point and took hold of the spear, trying to judge how firmly it was embedded.
Baxter scrambled to my side. “We have to get it out,” he said, kneeling, taking hold of the metal shaft.
“No!” I yelled through the pain. “Pull it out and the wound will open wide. I’d lose too much blood—”
“Well we can’t leave it in!” he said.
“No—but we need to be ready to pack and dress the wound.” I gasped, worried now that I was about to lose consciousness.
“How?” he demanded. “Where in God’s name do I find a first aid—”
“Don’t bother… we’ve gotta get to the control post,” I said. “Find where the women sleep.”
“The women?” he replied.
“Foot lockers are at the ends of the beds; there’s a storage area under the mattress. I need tampons and sanitary pads.”
“Okay,” he said, looking around, overwhelmed.
“Go!” I said, propelling him into action.
As he headed toward the bunks and started ripping curtains aside, I took hold of the shaft. From the angle of the steel and the movement, I was fairly certain the spear wasn’t lodged in bone, which was a blessing. It wasn’t going to be easy but removing it was at least possible.
Baxter returned holding a handful of tampons and a packet of sanitary pads.
“Good,” I said, and told him to get a tampon out of its packaging.
I took a firm grip on the spear and spoke as I tried to breathe deeply. “It’s a battlefield strategy for gunshot wounds. You get the projectile out, plug the tampon deep into the cavity, it absorbs the blood, starts to expand, and supports the walls of the wound. It stops them from collapsing. As many tampons as we need, then we pack and dress it with the sanitary pads.”
Baxter shook his head in disbelief. “Neat trick—so CIA spies don’t just kill people?”
“You can’t kill anyone if you’re dead—the first rule of espionage,” I replied, bracing myself for what was coming.
“Truly?” Baxter asked, staring helplessly at the shaft and blood. “Is that really the first rule?”
“I just made it up,” I said, feeling my face contort with pain as I started to exert pressure. It was now or never.
I planted my feet against the bulkhead and hoped to hell I wouldn’t pass out. “Now!” I said. The spear resisted and I felt the first waves of pain start to engulf me, but I knew I couldn’t stop—if I did, I wouldn’t have the energy or the mental strength to start again.
Baxter was holding my other shoulder to offer emotional support. “More,” he said, and I kept pulling; the darkness was closing in but I felt the spear start to give.
A feeling of warmth started coursing down my chest and I knew it was my own blood, but I didn’t look; concentrate on the spear, I kept telling myself. Another wave of pain hit me but I pushed past it, and after a moment’s hesitation I felt the metal start to glide.
I pulled harder, and the blood flowed more freely; I could sense the metal coming out of the wound and at last heard it clatter to the deck.
I opened my eyes. Baxter was ready and pressed a tampon into my hand. Instantly I reached into the slippery wound, felt the blood pulsing out, and pushed the white cylinder in as far as it would go. Already I felt it expanding as it filled with blood.
I withdrew my fingers and Baxter had another tampon ready. The flow of blood started to slow and the final two tampons went in far more easily and barely started to expand.
I slumped back, reached down, and grabbed a roll of electrical tape out of the tool belt. “Sanitary pads,” I said, but Baxter was ahead of me. He had them waiting and started to pack and bandage the wound as I wrapped the dressing tight with the tape.
Five turns around my shoulder and we were done. We looked at one another for a moment and I tried to smile my thanks.
“Ready?” I asked. “Now for the easy part—let’s see what we can do about this boat.”
CHAPTER 62
My injured shoulder meant that my left arm was next to useless on the ladders between floors, but I strapped the flashlight to it, leaving my good hand free and allowing us to see the path ahead and move as fast as we could.
We were heading a long way aft and saw fewer and fewer members of the crew. Nevertheless, on three occasions, we encountered teams with extinguishers heading to trouble spots where men and women with gaskets were working on ruptured pipes, blocking the path ahead. It forced us to double back, climb at least twice through the sub’s four decks, and find an alternative way forward.
That meant negotiating the steel ladders, which I was forced to climb by grabbing each rung one-handed.
Finally, having just negotiated another series of ladders, I was about to stop and try to reorient myself, wondering if—in the confusion and gloom—I had somehow ended up on the wrong deck and had missed the secondary command post.
At that moment, down a long companionway, I saw a glow of light far different from any of the emergency LEDs that were illuminating the gangways.
It grew stronger as we approached, spilling out of a doorway: at last, we had found the secondary command post. Perhaps if I hadn’t been so determined to learn what was wrong with the boat, I might not have moved so quickly.
Maybe then I might have paid attention to the tiny drops of water pooling in places on the floor, the beads of moisture around the joints of a large pipe set into the wall, or the high-pressure hum it emitted.
Instead, closely followed by Baxter, I entered the secondary command post and immediately clicked open the headset mic, hit the channel for Martinez and the command center, and tried to report that I was on station.
There was no answer. Four times I tried, and only once did I hear something apart from static: a muffled voice, someone calling in distress, and then… nothing. Baxter and I looked at each other for a long moment. He tried his best, but not very successfully, to keep the fear out of his voice. “What do we do now?”
“No choice—we gotta try to launch the emergency blow.”
I looked at the screens above the workstations and saw, thank God, more than half of them were still showing streams of data. Directly in front of me, the navigation screens were displaying our position, and the computers attached to it were recording every detail of our course. If I could get the sub to the surface and activate one of the conventional communication systems, the computer would immediately give our position when I started transmitting “mayday.”
More encouragingly, the ship control panel in the center of the room was still operating, its expanse of glass aglow with columns of red-flashing data I didn’t understand, fast-scrolling updates from scores of systems that were accompanied by pulsing yellow and orange triangles, and—in the middle of the kaleidoscope of alarm—a single element had been given more prominence than any other. A large, flashing alert said:
INITIATE EMERGENCY BLOW NOW
The computers running the sub had distilled the data down to the most dangerous threat and offered the best strategy to save the boat. I touched the alert and the screen immediately brought up a menu of prompts that would lead me through the authorization procedure. I was confident that I remembered more than enough from my time in the navy to handle it successfully and rapidly began tapping “yes” to them.
The dimmed overhead lights in the ceiling suddenly flickered. I glanced up and then looked at the computer screens in the workstations. They turned black—momentarily—and then came back to life. The overhead lights flickered again, and it wasn’t as if I needed any further encouragement.
I turned to Baxter. “If we lose power, we don’t have a chance. Thirty meters back, there’s a closet marked ‘Electrical.’ Inside is a battery-operated generator.” Baxter nodded. “Wheel it here—it’ll give us enough juice to keep us running. We’re only gonna need a few minutes.”
He turned and moved as fast as his arthritic knees would allow into the companionway and I continued scrolling through the commands. I completed four entries on the screen—
The high-pressure hum that I had barely registered was changing tone. I looked at the far wall—from the sound, the large pipe was located behind it—just as the hum suddenly flew up the scale and became a high-pitched scream.
I straightened up and started backing toward the door. My foot was still in midair when the pipe burst with shattering force, blowing a hole in the wall and sending a large chunk of metal flying through a workstation and across the room.
The debris was followed by a torrent of water that shot across the space and hit me in the chest, hurling me off my feet and across the room.
I heard Baxter yelling in alarm from partway along the companionway. “Kane! Kane—”
“The generator,” I replied, scrambling to escape the torrent of water. “Get it here now!” There was nothing Baxter or I could do about the burst pipe, but without power we were doomed.
Gasping, I clambered to my knees. Due to the diameter of the pipe and the pressure under which it was operating, the floor was already inches underwater and rising. Somewhere in the chaos I had the presence of mind to realize the water was fresh and not salt, which meant it was coming from within the boat and the hull hadn’t been breached. If that had been the case, it would have been all over within minutes.
I had to get back to the ship control panel and finish launching the emergency blow. Ignoring an alarm that started screeching overhead, I sloshed as fast as I could to the screen, only to see that it was a wasted effort. The damaged power cables hanging from the wall and the rising water meant that all electricity to the control room was being shut down. I watched the panel die. Only then did I turn to the screeching alarm: a sign above it was flashing a single command:
EVACUATE
A display indicated there were three seconds to go before something happened; I guessed what that would be and then I saw Baxter—running—toward me, hauling the small generator behind. “No!” I screamed. “Stop—get back!”
He had no idea why, but he stopped just short of the doorway. I scrambled toward the door myself—four paces, five—but I was slowed by the water swirling around my calves. One second to go, the display said—
I had no choice if I didn’t want to be sealed in a watertight coffin. I dived headlong for the doorway. In midair, I heard two explosions of compressed air from the bulkhead above ring out like gunshots. They activated a heavy steel slab—a watertight door—which immediately plunged down from a cavity in the roof.
I was flying through the opening and the slab was right above me, dropping like a stone. My body and thighs managed to get through the diminishing space but my legs were trailing, about to be hit.
