Medusa

CHAPTER 44

MINUTES LATER, THE SHUTTLE SETTLED ON THE LANDING pad and the open roof over it closed again like two halves of a clamshell. Powerful pumps kicked into action and rapidly cleared the airlock of water, but Chang nonetheless was seething with impatience. He finally burst from the shuttle like a moray eel springing from its den and slogged toward the exit door as the last few inches of water gurgled down the drains. The weasel-faced Dr. Wu followed a couple of paces behind.

When the door to the airlock hissed open, Phelps was standing in the adjacent chamber next to the control console. He stepped up to Chang and greeted him with a lopsided grin.

“You got here fast, boss. Musta put the pedal to the metal.”

Chang stared at Phelps with barely concealed contempt. American jargon was lost on him, and it annoyed him when Phelps used it. He had never fully trusted Phelps and suspected his loyalty extended only to the next paycheck.

“Enough talk!” Chang snarled. “Where is the vaccine?”

“Dr. Mitchell has it,” Phelps said. “She’s been waiting in the mess hall for you to arrive. The NUMA guy is with her.”

“And the laboratory staff? Where are they?”

“They’re all tucked away in their quarters.”

“Make sure they stay there. You have disabled the minisubs, as I ordered?”

Phelps dug out four flat, rectangular boxes tucked in his belt.

“These circuits control the subs’ power supplies,” he said.

Chang snatched the circuit boards from Phelps, dropped them on the metal floor, and ground them to pieces with his heel. He barked an order to his men, who had emerged from the shuttle carrying wooden boxes in their arms. They stacked the boxes near the console and then returned to the cargo hold for more.

Printed on the boxes in big bold red letters was

HANDLE WITH CARE EXPLOSIVES

Phelps rapped the top of a box with his knuckles.

“What’s going on with the firecrackers, Chang?” he asked.

“It’s fairly obvious,” Chang said. “You’re going to use your expertise with explosives to blow up the lab. It has fulfilled its function.”

Phelps poked at the smashed electrical circuits with the toe of his boot.

“One problem,” he said. “How are the scientists going to get off the lab with the minisubs disabled?”

“The scientists have fulfilled their function. They’ll stay with the lab.”

Phelps stepped in front of Chang and faced off.

“You hired me to hijack the lab,” Phelps said. “Killing a bunch of innocent people wasn’t in my job description.”

“Then you won’t prepare the explosives?” Chang asked.

Phelps wagged his head.

“That’s right,” he said. “You can count me out of this deal.”

Chang stretched his liverish lips in a death’s-head grin.

“Very well then, Mr. Phelps. You’re fired.”

Chang’s hand reached down to his holster and, in a lightning move, drew his pistol and shot Phelps point-blank in the chest. The impact at such close range threw Phelps backward, and he crashed to the floor. Chang gazed at Phelps’s twitching body with the expression of a craftsman who considered his job well done. He ordered one of his men to prepare the explosives, and then he charged off. Dr. Wu followed a few paces behind.

Chang burst into the mess hall, and his jade-green gaze fell on Joe Zavala and Lois Mitchell, who were tied to their chairs and sat back-to-back under the watchful eye of the same hard-faced guards who had come down with Phelps. Chang leaned close to Zavala.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

“You’ve got a short memory,” Zavala said. “We met on the Beebe. You left with your tail between your legs while Kurt Austin and I entertained your friends.”

“Of course,” Chang said. “You’re the NUMA engineer. My men deserved their fate. We won’t be so careless next time. How did you find us?”

“One of our planes flew over the atoll and saw something suspicious.”

“You’re lying!” Chang grabbed the front of Zavala’s shirt. “I don’t like being taken for a fool. If that were the case, planes and ships would be swarming around the atoll. My observers report that all is peaceful.”

“Maybe it’s what you don’t see that you should worry about,” Zavala said.

“Tell me how you found us.”

“Okay, I confess. A little bird told me.”

Chang backhanded Zavala across the jaw.

“What else did your little bird tell you?” Chang asked.

“He told me that you are going to die,” Zavala burbled through bloody lips.

“No, my friend, it is you who are going to die.”

Chang let go of Zavala’s shirt and turned to Lois Mitchell, who was staring in horror at Joe’s bloodied face.

“Where is my vaccine?” Chang demanded.

She glared at Chang, and said, “In a safe place. Untie me and I’ll get it for you.”

At a nod from Chang, his men untied her. She stood and rubbed her wrists, then went over and opened the door to the walk-in refrigerator used to store food for the mess. Stepping inside, she came out carrying a large plastic cooler, which she placed on the floor. Dr. Wu unlatched the lid of the cooler.

“The cooler holds the microbial cultures that will allow you to synthesize the vaccine in quantity,” she said.

Packed in foam were a number of the shallow, wide petri dishes. Wu smiled.

“This is a miracle,” he said.

“Actually,” she said, “it’s nothing more than very innovative genetic engineering.”

She bent down and removed the top rack of petri dishes. Underneath were three stainless-steel containers, also packed in foam.

“These are the three vials of the vaccine that you requested,” she said. “You will be able to make more with the cultures.” She replaced the rack, closed the lid, and stood up. “Our job here is done. Mr. Phelps said that we would be free to go once we completed the project.”

“Phelps is no longer in our employ,” Chang said.

Her face went ashen at the ominous tone of the announcement.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

He ignored the question, and ordered his men to tie her up again.

“Your friend Austin escaped me again,” Chang said to Zavala,

“but it will only be a matter of time before we meet. And when we do, I will take great pleasure in describing your last moments to him.”

Chang took the cooler from Wu’s hand and ordered the doctor and his guards to return with him to the shuttle. Austin stepped out of the walk-in refrigerator seconds later after they left, holding the Bowen in his left hand.

“Good thing old bullethead left when he did,” Austin said. “I was starting to feel like a side of beef in there.”

He tucked the revolver under his right arm. Using a kitchen knife, he sliced the bindings holding Zavala, who reached for a napkin to staunch his bleeding lips. Despite the cuts and bruises, he was in good humor.

“Chang isn’t going to be happy when he finds out that the vaccine cultures you gave him are bogus,” he said to Lois Mitchell.

She gave Zavala a knowing smile, and went back into the freezer. She came out with another cooler, almost identical to the first.

“Wait until he learns that we’ve got the real thing,” she said.

CHANG WAS ALREADY far from happy. He uttered an angry curse as he entered the airlock chamber and saw that Phelps’s body was gone. A trail of blood led off toward a corridor. Phelps must have survived the gunshot and dragged himself down one of the passageways.

No matter. Phelps would die when the lab blew into a million pieces. Chang inspected his sapper’s handiwork and ordered him to set the timer. Then he herded his men into the shuttle, and the pilot used a remote control to activate the pumps. The airlock quickly filled with water. As the shuttle rose through the opening halves of the clamshell roof, Austin stood in the airlock control room watching the ascent on the instrument console’s television monitor. He spun around at the sound of a footfall, only to lower the Bowen a second later.

Phelps stood at the entrance to the passageway with his lips contorted into a strained grin. He was stripped to the waist, and a makeshift bandage soaked with blood covered the upper left part of his chest. His face was pale, but his dark eyes were defiant.

“You look like crap,” Austin said.

“Feel like it too,” Phelps said.

“What happened to you?”

“I figured Chang was going to be on hair trigger, thanks to you NUMA boys, so on my trip back to Kane’s office I grabbed a soft body-armor vest. It only covered my vitals, and I didn’t account for Chang’s bad aim. Bastard nicked me in the shoulder.”

“Why did he shoot you?”

“He got testy when I told him I wouldn’t rig the C-4 he and his boys brought down in the shuttle.”

“He planned to destroy the lab with people in it?”

“Oh, hell, they put down enough explosives to wreck the Great Wall of China. Sloppy work, though. Lucky they didn’t blow themselves up.”

Phelps tossed a bundle of colored wires on the floor in an expert’s gesture of disdain for amateurish work.

“What’s Chang going to do when he discovers that his explosives didn’t go off?” Austin asked.

“My guess is, he’ll send somebody down to check it out.” Phelps cocked his head. “On second thought, he’ll probably come back to shoot your friends so he can tell you about it.” He gingerly touched the bandage. “Chang’s kinda bad-tempered that way.”

“I’ve noticed,” Austin said. “We’ve got to get everyone off the lab in the minisubs.”

Phelps pointed at the black discs that had been pulverized under Chang’s heel.

“These are circuits for the subs’ controls,” he said. “Chang stomped them.”

“Damn!” Austin said. “The subs were our only hope.”

“Still are,” Phelps said. “I gave Chang some other discs for his temper tantrum. The originals are still in the subs.”

Austin gazed at Phelps, thinking that he still had a lot to learn about human nature.

“What say you get the subs ready while I round up the scientists,” Austin said.

Phelps gave a quick salute and headed for the transit hub while Austin hurried back to the mess hall. Zavala had already rounded up the entire staff. The expressions on their faces ran the gamut from joy that they’d been freed to fear about what would happen next.

Austin introduced himself, asked everyone to be quiet for a minute, then announced: “We’re abandoning the Locker.” He shushed the group again and warned them to move as quickly as possible. Questions would be allowed later.

The weary and frightened scientists climbed down to the minisub hatches. A few hesitated, and there were angry shouts when they saw Phelps, but Austin told them to pipe down and get into the subs. With some grumbling, they did as they were told.

“Are the subs likely to encounter Chang on their way out of the crater?” he asked Phelps.

“Not if they move fast. Chang would have gone back to his freighter to wait for the big boom. If the subs stay submerged as long as they can, they’ll be well past Chang’s ship, and can put out a Mayday.”

Austin passed Phelps’s advice along to the pilot of each sub. He delegated the shuttle pilot to take the lead vehicle. Mitchell got in one of them and held the cooler with the real vaccine cultures in it tightly on her lap. Then, one by one, the subs detached from the underside of the hemispheric hub and followed the leader across the bottom of the crater and through the tunnel.

With the staff on its way, Austin turned to the next order of business: the Typhoon. As they got back in their wet suits, Zavala filled Austin in on the situation aboard the Russian submarine. Austin’s view of the situation was less optimistic than Zavala’s. Feeling was returning to Austin’s right arm, but he still wouldn’t be able to raise and fire the heavy Bowen revolver with any degree of accuracy. Phelps would be of limited help.

When Phelps tried to get into his wet suit, the snug neoprene top pressed painfully against his wound. Zavala used Austin’s knife to cut the arm of the suit off and part of the chest area to relieve the pressure.

Phelps noticed that two sets of scuba gear were missing and surmised that the pair of guards who had escorted Zavala from the sub had gone back to join their comrades. More bad news: the guards were now back to their full complement.

Zavala helped Austin lower Phelps into the pool and guide him down the shaft to open water. With Austin on one side of Phelps and Zavala on the other, all three slowly rose from the bottom up toward the Typhoon, whose gigantic shadow loomed near the surface.

By prearrangement, Austin and Phelps entered the hatch on the starboard deck of the giant sail and Zavala used the port hatch. Once inside the escape chambers they closed the hatch, pumped out the water, then opened the lower watertight door and descended the ladder. They whipped their masks off to see Captain Mehdev standing there with a curious look on his face.

The captain had been in the control room when an alarm went off signifying the airlocks were in use. The two guards had returned earlier from the lab, so he went to see who had entered his submarine. He wasn’t surprised to see Phelps and Zavala, but he raised a bushy eyebrow when he saw the broad-shouldered stranger.

Zavala said, “Kurt, this is Captain Mehdev, the commander of this incredible boat and keeper of the vodka cabinet.”

Austin extended his uninjured left arm for a handshake.

“Kurt Austin. I’m Joe’s friend and colleague at NUMA.” Noticing the hostile glance Mehdev shot in Phelps’s direction, he added, “Mr. Phelps is no longer working for the people who hijacked your sub. He is helping us now.”

“Yes, but for how long?” Mehdev asked, making no secret of his skepticism.

“Good question,” Phelps said. “Sorry, can’t answer that. But I’m going to help you guys take your sub back.”

Mehdev shrugged.

“What can my men and I do?” the captain said. “We are sailors, not Marines.”

“Start by telling us where the guards are and what they are doing,” Austin said.

“Three are asleep in the officers’ quarters in the starboard hull,” Mehdev said, “and the others are gambling in the wardroom or they’re in the mess hall. They like to be close to the gym and the sauna, which were made off-limits to my men.”

“I think it’s time we end their little sojourn at Club Med,” Austin said. “Let’s take care of the snoozers first.”

Phelps pretended to be guarding Zavala and Austin in case the four encountered a wandering guard. They filed through the control room, where Mehdev, who had been in the lead, whispered in Russian to the crewmen, who passed the word on to others, that it would be a good idea to stay out of sight. The captain then picked up some rolls of duct tape from the machine shop and continued through the labyrinth of pressurized compartments until they came to the first of the officers’ state-rooms.

Three off-duty guards awoke in the first room to find themselves looking down the barrel of Austin’s revolver. They were trussed up by Zavala, had their mouths taped, and were tucked back in their bunks.

The raiding party headed toward the smell of cooking food. Mehdev entered the mess hall alone and smiled at two guards who sat at a table drinking tea while watching Jackie Chan on DVD. They glanced at the captain only briefly, then went back to their DVD.

Mehdev spoke in Russian to the quartermaster, who was tending the steam table. He nodded in understanding and slipped out of the mess hall. Then Austin and Zavala stepped into the room, brandishing their weapons. The stunned guards were pushed, belly down, to the floor, then given the duct-tape treatment to keep them immobile and quiet.

With Mehdev again in the lead, Austin and Zavala kept moving through the sub until they came to the wardroom. The captain poked his face through the doorway and asked with a smile if anyone needed anything. One guard looked up from his cards and answered with a growl that needed no translation. Still smiling, the captain withdrew.

“Four places but only three players,” Mehdev whispered to Austin and Zavala. “Half a bottle of vodka gone.”

Austin didn’t like having a stray guard wandering around the submarine, but he wanted to press his advantage. He nodded to Zavala, and they stepped into the wardroom with guns leveled. The slightly drunk guards were slow to react. Minutes later, they were facedown on the floor bound with duct tape. Then the hunt was on for the missing guard.

They found him a few minutes after that. Or, rather, he found them. As the men entered the compartment that housed the sauna, the door opened and the guard stepped out wearing only a bathing suit. This time, it was Austin and Zavala who were slow to react. The guard was young and fast, and he reached into a nearby locker, grabbed a holster with a handgun in it, and bolted through the hatch into the next compartment. Austin gave chase, but he tripped on some pipes and went down on one knee. He was up in an instant, but by then the guard had disappeared into the innards of the submarine.

Austin would have lost his prey if not for the crewmen who pointed him in the direction of the fleeing guard. With Zavala right behind him, he kept moving until he came to a closed door. He and Zavala were pondering their next move when Mehdev caught up to them.

“What’s on the other side of that door?” Austin asked.

Huffing and puffing, the portly captain said, “The missile battery was replaced with a cargo hold. A freight elevator goes up to a loading hatch on the deck. A catwalk from the elevator crosses over the bays to another elevator on the forward side of the hold, which is filled with empty containers that were supposed to be used for cargo. You’ll never find him in there. Just secure the door.”

“Could he still cause trouble if we let him alone?”Austin asked.

“Well, yes,” the captain answered. “There are electrical and other conduits that run through the hull. He could disable the sub.”

“Then I think we should disable him,” Austin said.

He asked the captain to have his men keep watch over the guards who had been neutralized, then plucked a flashlight off the bulkhead wall, turned the compartment lights off, and slowly opened the door. He stepped into the next compartment, flicked the flashlight on, and played the beam over the open elevator shaft. The elevator cables were thrumming inside the shaft. The elevator car then clanged softly to a halt at the top.

Austin went over and pressed the elevator’s DOWN button. He and Zavala stood to either side of the doors with their weapons ready, but when the elevator car returned it was empty. Zavala took a fire extinguisher from the wall and stuck it between the doors to keep the car in place.

After a quick conference, Zavala climbed the stairs to the catwalk to drive the guard toward Austin, who then would cut him off at the other end of the hold. Austin had spent a lot of time at the shooting range using both hands and was confident that he could get off a reasonably accurate left-handed shot if he had to.

The vast interior hold, which had once housed missile silos and twenty city busters, took up almost a third of the sub’s length. When the silos were removed, large loading-dock doors had been installed in the deck overhead and partitions installed to separate one cargo from another in their own bays.

Austin stepped into the first bay and found a light switch. Floodlights hanging from the catwalk turned night into day. He made his way along a corridor between the metal containers until he came to a partition. He stepped through an opening into the next bay and repeated his search.

As Austin made his way through the hold bay by bay, Zavala kept pace along the catwalk. Austin had crossed the hold without incident until he came to the last bay. Haste made him careless.

Austin assumed that the guard was still ahead of him, caught in the pincers of their maneuver. But the prey had figured out the intention of the maneuver and had hidden in a narrow space between container stacks. He waited for Austin to pass and then silently emerged behind him. Moving quietly on bare feet, the guard lifted his gun with both hands and carefully took aim between Austin’s shoulder blades.

“Kurt!”

The shout came from Zavala, who was peering over the rail of the catwalk. Austin glanced up and saw his friend’s pointing finger. Without a backward glance, he ducked around a big metal container as a bullet twanged off its corner. Then another gunshot rang out, this one from above. A moment later, Zavala called down.

“You can come out, Kurt, I think I got him.”

Austin peered around the corner of the container, then he waved up at Zavala. The guard lay dead in his bathing suit on the floor. Even shooting down at such a difficult angle, Zavala had drilled him through his chest.

Austin remembered then what Phelps had said about the Chinese fetish for numbers. He shook his head. When your number was up, your number was up.