Devil's Gate

“Get me closer,” Joe said.

Kurt nudged the thrusters again, and the Barracuda angled toward the rear section of the XP-4 to a point where a handle extended from its hull. On the surface, the XP-4’s mother ship would lock onto this handle with a crane to hoist the sub out of the water. Kurt and Joe would try to do the same down below.

“Maybe this could help our salvage grade,” Joe said.

“Just grab the sub,” Kurt said.

The claw extended and missed. Kurt adjusted their position, and Joe tried again and missed again.

“Something’s wrong,” Joe said.

“Yeah, your aim,” Kurt said.

“Or your driving,” Joe said.

Kurt didn’t want to hear that, but it was true. And yet each time he adjusted for the current, the Barracuda seemed to get pulled off-line again. He glanced outside at the sediment in an attempt to get the best read on the current.

“Ah, Kurt…?” Joe said.

Kurt ignored him. Something definitely was wrong. Unless his eyes had been damaged somehow, the Barracuda was drifting in the opposite direction of the current. And, strangely enough, the XP-4 was moving as well, albeit at a slower rate as she was dragging along the bottom.

“Kurt,” Joe said with more urgency.

“What?”

“Look behind us.”

Kurt turned the sub a few degrees and craned his neck around. The sandy bottom gave way to darkness. They were drifting toward a cliff of sorts. On the charts it appeared as a deep circular depression with a rise in the middle: the caldera of a volcano that had once been active here thousands of years before.

Thoughts of the damaged XP-4 tumbling down the edge of that caldera with two men trapped inside were enough to make Kurt forget about the strange movements of both subs. All he wanted to do was grab the XP-4 and get out of there.

He pressed forward until they were nose to nose with the other sub. Joe stabbed at the small handle with the grappling claw but could not catch it. Sediment began to stir up around them as Kurt goosed the thrusters.

They’d reached the point where the ground had started sloping away.

Whatever was going on, they were being dragged toward the caldera. Kurt used main power, blocking the XP-4, pumping the throttle, in an attempt to hold them back.

The XP-4 began to swing, pivoting against the nose of the Barracuda. It was being pulled past her. The caldera yawned behind them.

“It’s now or never, Joe.”

Joe grunted as he worked the controls. The arm extended, and the claw locked on.

“Got him,” Joe said.

The XP-4 had reached the edge and was tumbling; Kurt had no choice but to let the Barracuda fall with it for a moment. If he gu

They slipped off the edge, drifting backward and out into the dark. Kurt turned the nose of the Barracuda away from the XP-4. The grappling claw pivoted until it was pointing to the rear, and the two subs fell sideways as Kurt brought the main thruster slowly up to power.

Slowly, the Barracuda pulled the XP-4 away from the caldera’s wall and began to level off. Both vessels were still sinking, still being strangely drawn toward the center of the volcano.

The Barracuda began to accelerate, with the XP-4’s torpedo-shaped body trailing behind them. As long as Kurt towed them and didn’t twist or bend the arm, he was fairly confident it would hold.

“We’re still descending,” Joe said.

Kurt was aware of that but couldn’t explain it.

“Maybe they took on some water,” he guessed. He added more power until the thruster was almost fully on. The descent slowed, and they began to pick up speed, speed they would need to climb.

A shape loomed up ahead, a hundred-foot column of rock that rose up from the center of the caldera like a chimney. If he had to guess, Kurt would have said it was the volcanic plug that cooled and hardened when this particular vent for the earth’s heat had gone dormant. Problem was, it lay directly in their path.

“Should I blow the tanks?” Joe asked.

“No, we’ll lose them,” Kurt said. He went to full power and slowly pulled the nose up. They were approaching the tower of rock awfully fast.

“Come on,” Kurt urged.

It felt as if the tower of rock was drawing them in like a black hole. And with the weight they were towing, they seemed almost incapable of rising at anything more than the slowest of speeds.

“Climb, damn it,” Kurt grunted.

They were heading right into it, like a plane flying into a cliff. All light from the surface was cut off by the shadow of the rock. They were rising but not fast enough. It looked like they were going to hit it head-on.

“Come on,” Kurt said.

“Kurt?” Joe said, his hand over the ballast control.

“Come on, you—”

Suddenly, they saw light again, and at the last second they rose up over the tower. Kurt leveled off, allowing their speed to increase.

“Think we scraped the paint,” Kurt said.

Behind him, Joe breathed a sigh of relief. “Look at the magnetometer,” he said.

Kurt didn’t really hear him.

“It’s pointing dead aft, right at that tower of rock. This is some kind of high-intensity magnetic field,” Joe said.

At any other time, Kurt would have found that interesting, but ahead of him, lit up by the blazing yellow-green lights, he gazed upon a sight he found hard to believe.

The mast of a great ship sprouted from the ocean floor like a single limbless tree. Beyond it lay a smaller fishing vessel, and just to the left of that was what might have once been the hull of a tramp steamer.

“Joe, do you see this?” he asked.

As Joe angled for a better view, Kurt took the Barracuda right over the three vessels. As he did, they spotted several more. Cargo vessels that looked like the old Liberty ships, rusting hulks covered in a thin layer of algae and sediment. All around them, boxy containers lay strewn about as if they’d been dumped over the side of some ship at random.

He saw the wing of a small aircraft, and four or five more unrecognizable objects that appeared to be man-made.

“What is this place?” Kurt wondered aloud.

“It’s like some kind of ship graveyard,” Joe said.

“What are they all doing here?”

Joe shook his head. “I have no idea.” They passed over the wrecks, and the ocean bottom slowly returned to normal, mostly sediment and silt, with plant life and bits of coral here and there.

Wanting to go back but realizing they had a more important rendezvous with the surface, Kurt put the Barracuda into a nose-up climb once again. Slowly, the seafloor began to recede.

Then, just before their lights lost contact, Kurt saw something else: the fuselage of a large aircraft, half buried in the silt. Its long, narrow cabin swooped back in graceful flowing lines until it ended in a distinctive triple tail.

Kurt knew that plane. When he was younger, he and his father had built a model of it, which Kurt and a friend had blown to pieces with fireworks they’d found.

The aircraft with the sweeping lines and the triple tail was unique. It was the beautiful Lockheed Constellation.

13

New York City, June 19

THE NEW YORK OFFICES of the Shokara Shipping Company occupied several floors of a modern glass-and-steel structure in midtown Manhattan. An international operator of a hundred seventeen merchant vessels, Shokara kept track of its ships from a control room on the forty-sixth floor, wined and dined potential clients on the forty-seventh, and handled its accounting on the forty-eighth. The forty-ninth floor was reserved for VIPs and corporate executives, and was usually empty except for the cleaning crews, who kept the feng shui — designed space immaculate.