“Did you see who it was?” Kurt asked. “Where they came from?”
“No,” Bradshaw managed. He seemed about to fade out.
“We have to get you out of here,” Kurt said, trying to lift the big man. “Joe, help me.”
Joe ducked under one of Bradshaw’s arms while Kurt ducked under the other.
“Hayley…” Bradshaw mumbled.
Kurt looked around. He didn’t see her among the dead. “Was she with you?”
Bradshaw nodded. “She went down.” He pointed toward the lake. “She went down with the other diver.”
“What’s down there?”
“A structure of some kind. We thought it might be the device. But it’s huge. More like… some kind of lab. She went down to look because only she would know. But they hit us, and then…”
“And then what?”
The chief wavered but recovered, his face displaying great pain.
“And then they went down after her,” he said. “They’re down there now. All of them.”
NINE
Kurt and Joe dragged Bradshaw to a spot by one of the SUVs. He had three bullet wounds. He’d lost a lot of blood. Kurt doubted he would survive for long.
He grabbed a first-aid kit and tossed it to Joe.
“Do what you can for him,” he said. “And find a way to call for help. If you can’t reach anyone, get him out of here.”
“What are you going to do?”
Kurt was climbing onto the back of the flatbed, yanking the tarp off the one-man submersibles. “I’m going in.”
“But you don’t know what’s down there.”
“A laboratory and a device,” Kurt said, repeating Bradshaw’s cryptic explanation as he dropped from the side of the flatbed and landed back down on the beach. “And a young woman who’s in way over her head.”
“So what are you going to do?” Joe asked. “Just swim around looking for this device?”
Kurt jumped back into the cab of the boxy truck and turned the key. “No,” he said. “I’m going to drive.”
The big diesel rumbled to life. Kurt jammed the truck into gear and began to roll forward. He turned slightly to the left, toward the deadly lake, and pressed down harder on the throttle.
Had anyone but Joe Zavala been watching him, Kurt might have explained in greater detail what was about to happen, but Joe knew vehicles like no one else. He’d eyed the truck strangely at the airport and most likely put two and two together shortly thereafter. If he hadn’t figured it out already, he’d understand any moment now.
The rig accelerated across the slope, its heavy tires carving deep tracks in the soft red sand as Kurt drove it straight into the water. It quickly came up off the wheels and began coasting forward.
As soon as he was afloat, Kurt grabbed a stainless steel lever on the dashboard and forced it upward and over into a notch, where it locked. The truck’s big wheels rose up, pulling free of the water, while a propeller attached to the drive shaft extended from the rear.
Kurt glanced at a monitoring board. All the lights were green. That was good news. It meant the prop was connected to the power train and there were no detectable leaks.
Kurt stepped on the gas. The prop churned the red water behind him, and the amphibious craft began to plow forward, completing its conversion from slow-moving truck to an even slower-moving boat. It drove like a nose-heavy barge, but fortunately Kurt didn’t have far to go.
Flipping another set of switches, Kurt activated a sonar system he’d brought along. A weighted spring kicked the small towed array off the back of the truck. It began to sink, spooling out a cable behind it and bouncing mid-frequency sound waves off the bottom of the lake. A pattern soon appeared on the display screen.
As Kurt moved away from the sloping edge of the pit, the bottom dropped away sharply. The pit was a mile across at the very top but shaped like a giant elongated V, with a wide, flat bottom.
“Six-forty and dropping,” he said to himself as the numbers continued to change. “Let’s see how deep you are.”
The top of the rim was over a thousand feet from the original bottom, but the water level was at least a hundred feet below the rim, and most likely years of erosion had begun to fill in the pit. He noticed a leveling at eight hundred and fifty. It was hard to fathom being in the middle of the desert and floating on a lake so deep that a World War Two submarine would be crushed if it went more than halfway down, but there he was.
At roughly the center of the lake, the sonar picked up a dome-shaped object. It appeared something like a sleek water tower, rising above the cornfields of the Midwest, bulbous at the top, with a group of pipes descending from the bottom in a tight bunch. As far as Kurt could tell, they went right down into the center of the lake bed.
He wondered what he was looking at. What was its purpose?
Bradshaw had used the term
* * *
Joe spent a few minutes tending to Bradshaw and trying to patch him up with the meager offerings of the first-aid kit. Despite the effort, Bradshaw looked bad, ghostly pale, with skin that was cool to the touch. He needed
Looking for a charger, Joe noticed that the keys were still in the SUV’s ignition. He also noticed that both doors were open and yet the dome lights were dark, and the dash wasn’t emitting any kind of annoying ping.
He reached over and turned the key. He twisted it to OFF and then back to the ACC position. Nothing changed. No warning lights, no voice telling him the door was ajar, nothing.
“That’s odd.”
He climbed out of the SUV and grabbed his rifle. Moving quickly from one vehicle to the next, he checked them all. Each one of them was as dead as the last.
Six new vehicles. Not one with an ounce of juice. A rack of radios and two cell phones in the same condition. A flashlight in the glove box of the last vehicle had just enough power to make the old-style filament glow for a second or two, but then it too went dark.
Joe felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He glanced at the sky. This was exactly the kind of thing that happened right before the mother ship arrived.
He moved back to Bradshaw. “Why are all the batteries dead?”
“Dead?”
“The cars, the radios, they’re all dead,” Joe explained. “You need to be medevaced, but I can’t find a way to call for help.”
Bradshaw’s eyes went glassy. He had no answers. Joe wasn’t even sure he was hearing the questions anymore.
Joe stood up and glanced out over the water. Bradshaw needed to be moved ASAP, but the only vehicle with any power was the amphibious rig now sitting a half mile from him in the center of the poisoned lake.
TEN
Kurt donned a wet suit and approached the small one-man submarines that rested near the back end of the flatbed. The bright yellow machines were affectionately called speeders. They resembled Jet Skis, with a set of small dive planes forward and a clear canopy that the driver pulled down and locked into place once he or she was seated on the vehicle.
The machines were rated to five hundred feet, powered by a lithium-ion battery pack similar to those in modern electric cars and equipped with a pair of grappling claws, headlights, and an internal air/water bladder.
The canopy and much of the body were made from hyperstrong polymers designed to resist the pressure at great depths. Though they’d yet to be tested on a deep dive, Kurt had great faith in them. Joe was the main designer, and Kurt had found all of Joe’s designs to be even stronger than the specs indicated.
After a quick series of checks, he was ready to go. He released the strap holding the speeder in place and then set the flatbed gradient lever at thirty degrees. The hydraulics kicked into gear, and the flatbed began to tilt like the back of a dump truck.
Kurt climbed onto one of the speeders and pressed the switch that closed the hatch. The canopy quickly locked into place, covering Kurt snugly. Straddling the seat with his arms stretched forward and his legs out behind him, Kurt felt like he was on a nautical motorcycle.
The tail end of the flatbed reached the lake, and water came up around the sides of the speeder. Through the canopy Kurt noticed the hue of the water. Pink at the very top but darker red as the light was absorbed.
He wondered for a second just how toxic the mess was. Then he twisted the throttle and drove off the ramp, wondering about the sanity of anyone who would dive into a soup like this.
At first, the speeder cruised a few feet beneath the surface. Then Kurt adjusted the dive lever, and the ballast tank filled with water. Pushing the handlebars forward caused the dive planes to tilt downward, and the speeder began to descend.
Kurt continued forward for twenty seconds or so and then leaned to the left, bringing the unit around in a wide turn. By the time he was eighty feet deep, the water around him looked like red wine. Fifty feet deeper, it was the color of dried blood. Whatever compounds were suspended in it, they filtered out the light very efficiently. But as he dropped lower, Kurt was able to make out the top of the dome.
It was smooth but mottled in appearance, as if some kind of mineral had precipitated out on the curved surface. Perhaps it was calcium or copper or manganese, but, whatever it was, it reflected more light than the surrounding water.
As he finished his pass across the dome, Kurt feathered the throttle and ejected the last of the ballast air. The speeder began to sink again.
Kurt stared into the blackness. The roof of the laboratory structure rested about seventy-five feet below the top of the dome. He hoped its surface would be covered with the same minerals and that he’d spot the roof before he banged into it and let everyone inside know he was there.
“Two hundred and ten,” he said, reading the depth gauge out loud. “Two hundred and twenty.”
He scanned the void around him. Nothing but darkness. It was like he was sinking into a black hole.
“Two hundred and thirty,” he said quietly.
If the gauge was reading correctly, he would hit the lab’s roof in twenty feet or so. Still, he saw nothing.
He pumped a smidgen of air into the bladder like a motorist trying to top off his tires to the perfect pressure. One quick hiss, then another one. The descent slowed.
The depth gauge soon read two hundred and forty feet, and Kurt still saw nothing outside. At two hundred and forty-five, he put a slight bit of pressure on the air switch again. And by two and forty-seven, his nerves gave out.
He jabbed the switch until the speeder reached neutral buoyancy. The descent stopped, and the speeder hung motionless in the dark.
Kurt slid his thumb upward and tapped the light switch. He hit it just hard enough to send some juice through the circuit, but not enough to fully switch it on. The lights flashed dimly and went dark again. In a brief flash, they revealed a world of neon red and the corroded top of the laboratory a mere three feet below him.
“At least I’m in the right place,” he muttered.
If this ungainly construction was indeed a laboratory, there had to be a way in. Toxic water or regular, the safest, most efficient way to build an airlock in a marine environment was to put it underneath the structure.
Kurt risked another flash, got a bearing on the edge of the structure, and went over the side. Dropping downward once again, he began to make out a soft glow around the bottom of the lab: illumination spilling from the airlock.
“Nice of someone to leave a light on for me,” Kurt muttered.
At just that moment, the speeder tilted violently to the right, and a strange metallic twang reverberated through the water.
Kurt knew instantly what had happened. Drifting down, he’d hit one of the guide wires that held the dome and its shaft of pipes in place. The impact had wrenched him to the side and spun him around. Far worse, it sent a vibration through the water like the striking of a gigantic guitar string. The noise reverberated off the walls of the pit and came back at him in a shadowy echo.
Kurt righted the ship and looked around for leaks. The cockpit appeared to be secure. He breathed a sigh of relief and continued on downward, hoping to avoid any more trouble.
* * *
“What was that noise?”
The question was posed to Janko by one of his men, who was nervously placing a block of plastic explosives beneath a set of computer servers.
“I’m not sure,” Janko admitted. He’d listened to all kinds of creaks and groans during his time on the station, especially when the techs were testing the dome or drawing power from it, but nothing like the strange reverberation they’d just heard.
“Water has a way of distorting sound,” one of the techs mentioned.
That was true, but Janko was not alone in wondering if the structure was safe. One didn’t need to be a scientist to imagine acids slowly etching their way through the metal walls.
“Who knows what the chemicals in this lake have been doing to our hull all these years,” he said. “Finish setting the explosives. I want to get out of here and blow this thing before it dissolves around us.”
The men seemed to agree. They doubled their labors, and moments later the demolitions expert slid out from under the computer bank. “All set.”
“Good,” Janko said. The explosives would tear apart the circuit boards and memory banks. The fire that followed would melt the remnants to sludge before the water poured in. Even assuming they had the ability and fortitude to recover the remnants from beneath nearly a thousand feet of poisoned water, the high-tech labs of the world’s intelligence agencies would get nothing from what they found.
That meant only one job remained.
He turned around and pointed his rifle at a pair of gagged figures sitting on the floor. One man, one woman. Both with their hands tied behind their backs.
The man was either law enforcement or military. Strong willed, he stared at Janko, almost daring him to shoot them. The woman was softer, pretty, with strawberry blond hair, and fear in her eyes. Janko figured he would shoot her first. Put her out of her misery. He raised the weapon.