Zero Hour

“Are you insane?!” the tech shouted.

Janko glared at him.

“We’ve turned the oxygen to full,” the tech explained. “We also opened the acetylene tanks. This whole station is filling with flammable gas. If you pull that trigger, the whole place might go up in flames. You want to kill them, use a knife.”

Janko lowered the rifle and looked back at the captives. Had they realized this? Had they been goading him into destroying himself? It didn’t matter. They would face the painful fate of an explosion and fire on their own in a few minutes.

“Set the timer,” he said. “We’re getting out of here.”

Janko watched as the demolitions man set the timer to 10:00 and pressed INITIATE. The clock ticked over to 09:59 and began winding down. Without glancing back, Janko turned and made his way toward the main ladder. Their submarine awaited.

Joe stood on the beach, considering his options. As much as he believed Kurt would make it back one way or another, waiting around for him to return wasn’t going to work for Bradshaw. Nor was Joe interested in a half-mile swim through a toxic lake to retrieve the amphibious truck.

His mind turned to the dead vehicles. They had chargers in them. Assuming he could get one of them started, he could power up the radios and call for help. It would come in the form of a helicopter or three — one to whisk the gravely injured chief of the ASIO to a hospital and two or three more filled with military commandos or SWAT teams to surround and secure the lake.

It was a two-hour drive to Alice Springs but only thirty minutes by air. For Bradshaw, that might be the difference between life and death.

“If only these things came with hand cranks,” Joe muttered, thinking of vintage cars.

He considered push-starting one of them. The two Jeeps had manual transmissions, and the beach sloped down to the water. That would help, but he wasn’t sure he could get up enough speed.

He reached into one of the Jeeps, put the transmission in neutral, and put his shoulder into the doorframe. Pushing with all his might, Joe got the rig moving. But the sand was soft, and he couldn’t get the speed up beyond the pace of a slow walk. He stepped aside as the vehicle reached the water’s edge.

He expected to see the front wheels roll into the water and stop, but the nose of the vehicle went over, and the cabin filled with water from the open door. Seconds later, it plunged downward and disappeared beneath the surface. The last thing he saw was the trailer hitch that stuck out from the rear bumper like the battle flag on the aft end of a sinking ship.

He glanced over at Bradshaw, who appeared to be out cold. “You didn’t need to see that anyway.”

Joe stood perplexed for a second, wondering about what had just happened. Then it made sense. Like most open-pit mines, the entire excavation was done in terraces. A steep slope, then a flat section, and then another steep cut. The beach was nothing more than a wide terrace. A sixty-foot wall lay behind them at an almost vertical angle. A similar drop must lie just beyond the water’s edge.

Joe looked around at the remaining vehicles, and a new plan formed in his mind. It would cost the ASIO at least one more vehicle, but if Joe was right, it would get the other Jeep started.

Kurt looked upward into a pool of cherry-colored light. He’d brought the speeder in beneath the station and found the airlock.

Carefully, he maneuvered into the bay and surfaced. The pool and the surrounding deck space appeared empty.

Kurt nudged the throttle and bumped it up onto a shelf of some type. He popped the canopy back and stepped out onto the deck. A moment later, he was through the primary airlock and into an equipment room.

A pair of tanks and two full-face helmets sat nearby. The same type of equipment the ASIO had in one of their trucks.

The dive team had made it this far, he thought. But where were they now?

Kurt had managed to bring the short-barreled M4 carbine, but the odd, almost nervous energy that he’d quickly begun to feel told him he was breathing a high-oxygen mix. That was surprising.

He would have expected a tri-mix of gasses, or even an oxygen-helium mixture, that worked better at sustained depths. To be sure he wasn’t imagining it, Kurt spoke briefly. “Four score and seven years ago…”

He should have sounded like Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck, but he sounded exactly like himself. There was no helium in the air, or very little of it anyway. He put the rifle aside. There would be no gunfight at the bottom of the Tasman Lake. One shot would destroy the entire place.

He pulled a large dive knife from a sheath on his leg, wondering if this turn of events made his odds better or worse.

Twenty feet down a hall, he found water at the base of a ladder. He went up it and explored the next floor, finding two rooms filled with stacks of batteries. A wall panel displayed power states, most in the green and a few odd ones in yellow or red. Kurt wondered where they were getting the power to charge the huge stack or what they were using it for.

He went up another level and found what looked like the crew’s living quarters. Empty lockers and unmade beds gave him the impression the place had been abandoned.

He moved back to the central ladder, ascended to a third level, and found the next hatch resting on its stops. He was about to open it when he heard the sound of footsteps pounding down the ladder toward him.

He held completely still.

Voices echoed. “Come on,” someone shouted. “Move.”

Kurt was about to slide back down a level and hide, when the footsteps abruptly moved to the left, pounding on the deck above, and headed away from him. It sounded like several people in a hurry.

He opened the hatch just a sliver and looked through. No one there.

Quietly, he pulled himself up and peeked around the corner. Three men stood in front of another airlock. This one reminded Kurt of the revolving doors in a center-city office building. As it opened, two of them went in and the third waited.

The sound of more footsteps descending the ladder came next. Kurt looked up just as another man dropped in beside him.

“What the…”

Kurt clapped a hand over the man’s mouth and plunged the carbon steel blade into the man’s chest, slamming him against the wall in the process. A second man dropped in, landing on Kurt’s arm and knocking the knife to the floor.

Kurt spun around and threw an elbow into the second attacker’s temple. It sent the man sprawling to the deck near the airlock.

By now, a third man had come down the ladder, his hands and feet sliding on the rails instead of using the rungs. He landed and grabbed Kurt from behind, wrapping an arm around Kurt’s throat and trying to choke the life out of him.

Kurt pushed backward, ramming the man into the bulkhead wall. The grip loosened only a bit. Kurt pushed back again, this time trying to snap his head back in a reverse head butt of sorts.

The second impact shook the man loose, just as the airlock pinged like an elevator in a hotel lobby. Kurt was pushed to the ground as this third assailant rushed past.

By the time he got up, the airlock door was closing. The four remaining men were crammed into it, looking back at him. One of them shook his head, smiling sadistically.

Four against one, and they’d run off. Kurt could only think of a single reason for that: they were about to scuttle the station.

A quick glance at the dead man in the ladder well confirmed it. He carried wire strippers in his breast pocket, a roll of electrical tape on his belt, and a length of red-and-blue flat cable. In all likelihood, the station was set to explode.

Kurt grabbed the wire cutters and continued up the ladder. Based on the escaping group’s show of haste, he doubted there was much time.