Park Skarda-April Force: Emerald Part 23

Skarda sat up straight. "Scuttled..."

Flinders gave a sober nod. "That was at the end of the war. It's possible that the n.a.z.is deliberately sank the U-boat with the isomer bars on board to keep them hidden from the Allies. So it's quite possible they're still down there."

Staring out a rain-fogged window, April had been listening. "So all we have to do now is get to the bottom of the Black Sea and get inside a sunken World War Two German submarine."

FORTY-FIVE.

Black Sea A mile-and-a-half south of the coast of Odessa, the sea was a flat sheet stirred by small wavelets running towards the coast. In Odessa Skarda had leased a forty-two-foot retro-fitted diving support vessel and a mini ROV to explore the sunken U-boat. The records from the U-boat archive had provided the exact lat.i.tude and longitude of the sunken submarine.

Now, as he leaned against the rail under a dome of dazzling blue sky, the events of the past few days seemed far away, unreal. He glanced toward the bow, where Flinders was walking from starboard to port, looking for signs of dolphins. Her resiliency took him by surprise-and impressed him. After her experience with Jaz, he'd at first expected her to bail out. And he certainly wouldn't have blamed her. But now some of the old determination had crept back into her dark blue eyes.

"We're here!" April called out from the pilot house. She'd centered the s.h.i.+p's marine GPS system on the U-boat's recorded lat.i.tude and longitude. At this point the bottom lay approximately five hundred feet down, well within the anoxic zone layer. This meant that whatever was entombed inside the scuttled German submarine would exist in a state of perfect preservation.

Making his way to the stern, Skarda lowered the two aft anchors while April did the same at the bow. The anchors would keep the vessel moored in place while they worked.

The two women walked toward Skarda, who was attaching the umbilical cable to the scaled-down ROV that was swinging from a deck crane in rhythm with the slight pitch of the boat. Although it was no bigger than a small dog, the bright yellow ROV was equipped with two ultra-bright LED lights, a color digital still camera and video camera connected to a DVD recorder, a micro sonar, and a three-axis manipulator arm. Horizontal and vertical thrusters allowed the unit to be moved in all directions.

The crane made a low grinding noise as Skarda lowered the ROV into the sea. Although the device weighed barely forty-five pounds and they could easily have pitched it over the side with their hands, Skarda had decided to take no chances and was treating it very gingerly. It splashed down easily, foaming out a small wake. Detaching it from the crane, he opened the case of the control console, manipulating the joystick to send the device into a dive. Water swirled over the bright lights of the LED's, fracturing them into jagged scales as the ROV slowly dropped into the dark void of the sea. Skarda kept an eye on the console monitor as the ROV sank, while April and Flinders cl.u.s.tered around him. The descent to five hundred feet was surprisingly fast, where the LEDs, piercing at most twelve feet through the darkness, shone across a seabed that looked like a vast carpet of undulating colorless silt.

"Okay," he announced. "We're on the bottom. Four hundred and eighty-nine feet." He maneuvered the thrusters to pivot the ROV in a half-circle.

At first all they could see was a black curtain of darkness. Then the light s.h.i.+fted and a shape materialized out of the gloom: the unmistakable contour of a submarine's conning tower.

But pointed in the wrong direction.

Skarda pushed the ROV closer. Now they could see the reason for the strange alignment. As it sank the U-boat had come to rest on a ma.s.sive hump of silted clay, so that the bow was tilting at almost a forty-five degree angle toward the surface.

Steering with the joystick, Skarda moved the ROV nearer the hull. On the side of the conning tower the number "3531" crawled across the screen.

"This is it!" Flinders exclaimed. Then her voice sank. "I wish my parents were here."

Skarda studied the monitor. In the oxygen-starved water, the submarine's paint had been perfectly preserved, as were the pine planks of the decking, stained dark brown with wood tar. All the deck hatches were open to the sea.

"They really did scuttle her," he said in a solemn voice.

Consulting a schematic Candy Man had forwarded, Skarda maneuvered the LED's to better illuminate the bow deck. They'd decided to enter the U-boat by cutting an opening large enough to accommodate their bulky diving suits. The lamps illuminated the dark hole of an open hatch.

"This should be right behind the torpedo room," he said. "It should lead to the bunk area." Since the sub carried only a skeleton crew, the forward accommodation sleeping quarters might be a logical place to store the crates of bars in the cramped quarters aboard.

___.

Coc.o.o.ned in his atmospheric diving suit, Skarda felt like a trimmed-down version of the Michelin Man as he descended through the ever-blackening depths of the sea. The ADS itself was like a man-sized submarine, an articulated, self-contained, aluminum alloy diving suit that could withstand crush depth up to two thousand feet. Inside its gla.s.s-reinforced plastic helmet, a diver would breathe a nitrogen-oxygen mix maintained at one atmosphere so that he could easily shoot to the surface without fear of the bends or nitrogen narcosis that plagued saturation divers. Dual thrusters, mounted on each side of a pack on his back, allowed the diver to "fly" through the water in any direction he wanted.

Strangely, his usual claustrophobia wasn't bothering him inside the suit. In fact, sinking down through the depths, he was experiencing a heady sense of freedom, as if he were flying.

Manipulating the thruster pads with his feet, he angled himself toward the bottom, glancing down to see April ahead and to the right of his position, heading toward the sub. Although he'd leased an ADS for Flinders, in the end she'd been too worried about her ability to adapt quickly to the suit's controls, so they'd left her aboard the s.h.i.+p.

Through the gloom, he saw the cone of April's halogen lamp farther in front of him now, its beam sweeping over the hull of the U-boat. Giving more power to his thrusters, he swam up next to her and together they moved toward the bow, looming in the darkness like a giant finger pointing toward the surface. Hovering above the open hatch, he used his hand manipulator to unclip the cutting torch from his suit, then ignited the oxygen-fuel mixture and trained the nozzle on the wood planks. Below this, he knew, the deck plating was less than an inch thick, no match for the powerful torch. Within thirty seconds a black line appeared in the deck, widening into a ragged gap as the flame bit through the pine and cut into the steel plating in a boil of bubbles.

At last Skarda completed a large rectangle. Using her thrusters at full power, April jumped down on the deck with both feet. The steel rectangle broke away, turning on edge and falling into the blackness of the sub's interior.

She hovered, manipulating her thrusters to angle her helmet toward the hole, so that she could s.h.i.+ne her lamp into the interior of the sub.

"It's empty," she said. In Skarda's ear her voice, filtered by the suit's communicator, sounded tinny. "But there's a door on the bulkhead."

Switching on his shoulder-mounted video camera, he followed her feet-first into the opening. Immediately pitch darkness closed around him, the lights of his lamp and camera carving out long tunnels of illumination below his feet. His halogen swept across April, who was already turning the dog latches on the bulkhead door. Earlier she had explained to him that with the interior of the sub flooded and the pressure equalized, the hatches would open as normally as if they were on dry land, but he was still surprised when the door swung open easily to her touch. Following her lead, he entered the forward accommodation quarters, where the men of higher rank had kept their bunks. Skarda's ADS was bulky enough to make the squeeze a tight fit. Now he was glad they'd decided to leave the hard-wired communications umbilicals unattached to the s.h.i.+p above. In this tightly-confined s.p.a.ce, the cables could too easily become entangled.

He darted his lamp around the room, seeing only empty bunks. In one corner, a woolen blanket floated like a gray ghost. Then he froze. His beam had swept across the corpse of a man, eerily floating face-down as if he were flying, his hands and arms extended straight out in front of him. He was wearing a dark-brown leather jacket with a stand-up collar lined with black wool, and matching over-trousers held up by suspenders. His clothing displayed no officer's insignia.

April had seen the corpse, too. Together they thrusted closer. Clearly the German sailor had endured a traumatic event: his perfectly-preserved young face was contorted with what looked like an abrupt shock.

She inspected his chest, hidden by the shadows of the jacket. "Two 9mm rounds to the heart. Luger."

"They killed their own men?"

"Probably the officers had orders. Dead men tell no tales."

"I'd say that pretty much proves the bars are here."

But panning his lamp around the compartment, Skarda saw no evidence of the orichalc.u.m.

They pushed on ahead into a confined pa.s.sageway, glancing into a tiny cubicle that contained a toilet and sink. Past this, they entered another small compartment containing four bunks. Ahead the door to a flimsy-looking bulkhead stood open. Floating at eye-level just inside the dark opening were a pair of booted legs.

Activating her thrusters, April propelled herself forward to examine the second dead man. "This one's been shot, too."

Skarda's lamp cut through the darkness. Past April's shoulder he could see a larger room, filled with furnis.h.i.+ngs. Ducking under the corpse, he followed her into the compartment. He recognized it immediately as an officer's private stateroom, most likely belonging to the captain. Wood paneling lined the bulkheads and against the starboard wall an oak hutch had been bolted down next to an antique writing desk. Framed photographs which had once adorned the walls floated freely, as did an ornately carved chair. Moving forward, he pulled open several drawers, seeing nothing. Clearly the n.a.z.i submariners had prepared in advance to scuttle the U-boat.

But stacked against the walls and in the middle of the cabin were metal cases, etched with swastikas and the "KM" initials of the Kriegsmarine.

Maneuvering to the nearest case, April grasped the single padlock with her manipulator claws and wrenched it off. She threw back the lid.

Inside rows of silver-gray isomer bars reflected dull reddish glints in the light of her lamp.

Skarda thrusted to her side, giving out a low whistle in his microphone. He dipped his shoulder, aiming the lens of the video camera at the interior of the case, while she wrested the lock off the next case. It, too, was packed with isomer bars.

Inside her helmet bubble, her head turned toward him and she grinned.

___.

Manipulating his thrusters, Skarda slowly rose from the black depths toward the sunlit surface, a smile curving his lips. At last they'd finally been dealt a good hand of cards. They had what the opposition wanted, what clearly the Bad Guys were willing to kill to get. Which meant only one thing: however much of the isomer was in the t.i.tanium case at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, it wasn't enough to completely melt the ice.

In a burst of spray, his helmet broke through the surface, the transparent plastic flooding with suns.h.i.+ne. He glanced over at April.

Something in his gut lurched.

Instead of swimming to the aft end of the s.h.i.+p to be hauled out by the crane, she was staying in place, hanging onto the side of the s.h.i.+p. Inside her helmet, her head was tilted up, her face rigid.

A shadow fell over him and he looked up.

Two men in black stood above him, aiming their a.s.sault rifles at him over the gunwale.

Jaz's men.

A thought flashed through his brain: he could fire the thrusters, dropping down into the depths of the sea before the men let loose with a barrage of slugs.

But he stayed frozen in place.

Because Jaz was standing there, too, her mouth split wide by her evil grin.

And she was jamming the barrel of a Colt ACP into Flinders' mouth.

FORTY-SIX.

WITH a s.h.i.+ver of pleasure, Jaz drove the gun barrel deeper down Flinders' throat, causing her to choke and gag.

"You love it, don't you, cutie?" she cooed in her ear.

Flinders squirmed, desperately trying to back her head away from the pistol.

Snarling, Skarda tried to step forward to swing his arm at her, but the heavy suit, no longer buoyed by the water, was almost immobile. Having dragged them out of the water, Jaz's men had removed their helmets, but their bodies were still encased in the bulky ADS suits.

His face purpled in frustration. "Get your hands off her!"

With a violent wrench, Jaz threw Flinders to the deck. Immediately, rifles covered her. She marched up to Skarda and grinned in his face. "I've got to say, handsome, you are good! You just keep staying alive. I'm actually impressed."

Up close, he could see the slabs of muscle bulging on her neck and the black hairs sprouting from her nose and ears. It made his stomach roil.

"You're a freak," he snarled.

Jaz threw her head back and laughed. "You better believe it, handsome! Freaky!...freaky!...freaky!" She wiggled her b.u.t.t back and forth. "Just ask your little girlfriend over there."

Sprawled on the deck, Flinders stared up at him, close to tears.

His eyes bored holes into Jaz's face. Past her shoulder he could see a Bavaria Yachtbau Sport 33 rocking hove-to on the starboard hull, the pilot still at the wheel. Skarda realized what had happened: Flinders would have thought they were just pleasure boaters. They would have boarded the dive s.h.i.+p completely by surprise.

Jamming the Colt into her waistband, Jaz uncoupled the video camera from Skarda's shoulder, then attached it to a laptop and downloaded the files of the U-boat's interior. When she saw the bars resting inside the open cases, she barked out a triumphant laugh. "Sweet!"

The sound of an approaching boat engine reached Skarda's ears. He looked north, seeing a big yacht plowing through the light chop toward them, an eighty-foot Feretti, its bright white fibergla.s.s hull gleaming in the suns.h.i.+ne.

As the yacht slowed and drew closer, Skarda could make out the figure of a man, dressed in a business suit, standing on the flying bridge. A moment later he disappeared. Then a black-and-red Hov Pod hovercraft shot out from the stern of the yacht, bouncing over the wavelets towards the dive boat, its polyethylene body gliding effortlessly over the flat surface of the sea. The man sat in its bow section, while a pilot in a white epaulet s.h.i.+rt steered.

Jaz swung around, unperturbed by the approach of the newcomer. Shakily, Flinders climbed to her feet, throwing a fearful glance at Skarda. Then she turned, watching the Hov Pod swing hove-to against the hull of the boat. The man clambered on deck.

Flinders stared, her jaw sagging open. "Daddy?" She ran toward the man, but a commando grabbed her, throwing an arm around her shoulders and pinning her in place. "Daddy!"

Paying no attention to her, Jonathan Belisarius strode forward, walking across the deck as though he'd been born on a s.h.i.+p.

"Daddy!" Flinders struggled, but her guard kept her pinned in place. "I thought you were dead!" Her face was the color of ashes.

Belisarius ignored her. As the man got closer, Skarda could see the horrible red and purple scars that had mutilated his face. The skin on the ends of his fingers was black.

The older man crossed the deck to Jaz, who stuck out her tongue and licked his cheek like a cat. "h.e.l.lo, lover," she purred.

"What's going on?" Flinders asked. Her voice was a choked scream. "Daddy? It's me, Flinders!

"Keep her quiet," Belisarius ordered.

Jaz sprang at Flinders, grabbing her jaw and forcing her mouth closed. Then again she threw her to the deck.

Belisarius indicated Skarda and April. "These are the two that have been causing us all the trouble?"

"You got it. But they found the bars. You were right. They're on the U-boat."

"You have proof?"

She indicated the laptop screen. Belisarius peered at it, then gave a cold nod.

"All right. We have what we want. Get rid of them."

Jaz jabbed a finger at Flinders. "What about her?"

"Her, too."

Flinders gaped. "Daddy! Daddy! Why are you doing this?"

The older man had moved to the gunwale, looking down at the sea.

"Daddy!"

With sudden fury he whirled on her. "Shut up!"

She took a step back, the words. .h.i.tting her like a slap.

April spoke up, her voice quiet and level. "He shot your mother."

The blood drained from Flinders' face, her expression stunned, incredulous. "What-?"