Devil's Gate

“Finish the dismantling,” Djemma ordered. “And don’t question me again or I’ll dismantle you… piece by painful piece.”

Cochrane rubbed a hand across his face. “We have eleven construction subs and forty hard suits, not enough to do both jobs. So you choose. Do you want the target lines finished or do you want that rusting hulk of a submarine recycled?”

Djemma fought to control his anger. What he wanted was both, and a designer less insolent and more competent than Cochrane. But between the reports from Andras, the Americans snooping around the Kinjara Maru, and the increasingly pointed questions coming from the World Bank and his other creditors, Djemma didn’t have time for both.

He decided the carcass of a submarine could remain. Once he took action, it wouldn’t matter if the world knew about it or not. That would be the least of their concerns.

“Finish the target lines and the emitters,” he said. “Washington, London, Moscow, Beijing. Those four must be ready in one week or we will be vulnerable.”

He waited for Cochrane’s next battery of complaints and excuses as to why he couldn’t comply, but for the first time in ages none came forth.

“They’ll be ready,” Cochrane said. “I promise you.”

26

Eastern Atlantic, June 23

GAMAY TROUT SAT in a small chair in the Matador’s sick bay with a blanket around her shoulders and a piping hot cup of decaf in front of her. The ship’s doctor wouldn’t allow her the real thing for at least twenty-four hours. She wasn’t drinking it, only using it to warm her hands, so what did it matter? Truthfully, nothing mattered to her now, nothing except the man who lay in front of her, unmoving, on the hospital bed.

The crew of the Matador had plucked her out of the water within five minutes of her surfacing. But with the darkening skies and growing swell, she had never seen Paul surface.

Twenty minutes later, after two agonizingly slow passes, a lookout had spotted Paul, floating faceup. He made no attempt to signal and was only afloat because the wet suit gave him positive buoyancy.

They’d brought him down to sick bay, where she was being treated for mild hypothermia and oxygen deprivation. Immediately, they’d pulled a sheet between the two of them, but she could hear them working feverishly. Someone had called out “No pulse,” and then the doctor said something about “cardiogenic shock.”

At that point she’d grabbed for the curtain and pulled it back. Her husband looked like a ghost, and she’d turned away and begun to cry.

Three hours later, she was up and about and functioning something like her normal self. Paul remained unconscious, covered in blankets, with an IV of warmed fluids dripping into his arm and a mask delivering pure oxygen to his nose and mouth. His eyes remained closed, and he hadn’t as much as twitched in over an hour.

Watching him lie there in such utter stillness, Gamay had to keep checking his heart monitor just to remind herself that he was alive.

She squeezed his hand; it felt like wet clay. She couldn’t remember his hands being anything but warm, even on the coldest New England winter days.

“Come back to me,” she whispered. “Don’t leave me here, Paul. Please don’t leave.”

The door behind her opened, and the ship’s doctor, Hobson Smith, came in. Almost tall enough to require ducking as he came through the door, Smith had a gray Fu Manchu mustache, sharp eyes, and a relaxed, almost fatherly style. No one on board knew how old he was, but if NUMA had any mandatory retirement age Hobson Smith would have been well past it. And the ship all the poorer for it. His presence was like that of a loving uncle.

“No change?” he said as if he were asking her.

“He hasn’t moved,” she said. “His heart rate is—”

“His heart rate is strong,” Smith said, taking over for her. “His pulse is good. The oxygen level in his blood is getting better also.”

“But he’s still unconscious,” she said, unable to use the word coma.

“Yes,” Dr. Smith said. “For now. Paul is strong. Give him a chance to heal.”

She knew he was right, she understood that his vitals were improving, but she needed him to wake up, to smile at her and say something eminently dorky and endearing.

Smith pulled up a chair and sat beside her.

“Arm out,” he said.

She extended her arm, and the doctor put a cuff around her bicep and then pumped it up to take her blood pressure. Next he checked her pulse.

“Just as I thought,” he said.

“What?”

“Your own vitals aren’t great,” he said. “You’re making yourself sicker, worrying about him.”

She exhaled. She hadn’t eaten or even had much to drink since she’d been back up on her feet. But didn’t think she could keep anything down.

“I just don’t understand,” she said. “How did I end up surfacing so much quicker than he did?”

Dr. Smith studied her for a moment as if thinking about the question. “You said he gave you a push?”

She nodded. “After the Grouper flooded he opened the hatch, pulled me through, and gave me a shove upward. I extended my legs and pushed off his hands like a springboard, but I figured he was right behind me.”

She took a breath, trying to fight back the emotion. “The sub was dropping at that point. Maybe he got pulled down with it. Maybe he had to fight to get free of the suction before he could start moving upward.”

“I’m sure that played a part,” Smith said. “On top of that, he’s denser, heavier in muscle and bone. And don’t take this the wrong way, but men on average have a lower body fat percentage than women. Add to that the fact that you were both wearing about the same amount of neoprene, and your buoyancy level would have been much higher than his. Even if he hadn’t pushed you, you would have ascended faster and reached the surface before him.”

She looked back at her husband, thinking of all the dives they’d been on, all the training.

“Besides,” Dr. Smith added, “Paul always said you were the strongest swimmer he knew. All the more reason to marry you and make you a true Trout.”

She smiled, remembering Paul making that joke a hundred times during the reception. She could barely stand to hear him say it by the end, and now she just wished he’d wake up so he could tell it again.

“He should have just gone first,” she said, the words creaking from her throat like a rusty hinge.

Dr. Smith shook his head. “No man in his right mind would go first and leave his wife behind,” he said. “Not a man like Paul anyway.”

“And what if he leaves me now?” she said, as scared as she’d ever been in her life. “I don’t know how to do this alone.”

“I believe in my heart you won’t have to,” Smith said. “But you need to get your mind off of this and start thinking about something else. For your own good.”

“And just what would you have me think about?” she said, a little sharper than she wanted to.

Dr. Smith scratched behind his ear and stood. He took Paul’s hand from hers and placed it gently back on his chest, then he took her by the hand and walked her to the next room: the ship’s laboratory.

“There was another survivor from the wreck whom you’ve forgotten about,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “Her name’s Rapunzel.”

Gamay had forgotten all about the little robot. And even though Rapunzel was an inanimate object, she couldn’t help but feel glad that the robot had survived and been recovered. After all, Rapunzel had saved their lives.

“They picked her up,” Gamay said.

“Uh-huh,” Smith said. “And she brought with her three samples.”

Gamay narrowed her gaze at the doctor. “Three?”

“A tissue sample you drilled from one of the crewmen,” Smith said, switching on a recessed fluorescent light that flickered to life and illuminated a workbench.