Gideon's War / Hard Target

In the middle of the silence, an air force major spoke to the head of SOCOM. “General Ferry, we’ve got an update on the weather. The typhoon seems to be changing course slightly south.”

“What’s that mean for the Delta drop?” President Diggs called from across the room. “Is the eye still going to pass over the rig?”

“Yes, Mr. President. On its present course it will. The problem is, since only the edge of the eye will now pass over the Obelisk, it means the window will only be open for a few minutes. And it’ll come later.”

“What time?”

“Roughly seven-forty-five.”

“I thought you were getting them there with an hour to spare. That only gives Delta a fifteen-minute window before the terrorists blow the rig,” the president said.

“That’s all the time the Deltas need,” General Ferry said.

The president nodded tersely. “It better be.”

As Gideon began sinking into the black water, he realized why he couldn’t breathe. The air hose was shut. He reached for the regulator valve on his bailout bottle but it wasn&#the D‡8217;t there. It took him a moment to figure out that he had flipped over because the umbilical had caught on his bailout bottle. Not only had it turned him upside down, but the umbilical had also stripped the bottle right off of his harness.

He had no backup.

His instincts told him to yank the umbilical free, but he knew that would only make things worse. He needed to be methodical. He had a good minute before he’d black out. If he made good use of his time—

The next wave trough reached him and suddenly there was no water for him to maneuver in. The wind whipped him around in a crazy circle as he hung in midair by his leg, looking up the long ragged slope of the next oncoming wave, which hit him hard before rolling over him.

“Pull him up, Al. Pull him up!” He heard Kate in his ear.

Gideon knew at once that it was a mistake. He needed slack on his line, not tension. But before he could respond to Kate’s order, he felt a sharp jerk as the line reversed, hauling him up. The wind immediately caught him and spun him around. If he didn’t get the line fixed before he cleared the next wave, the wind would slam him into the rig on the way back up and kill him.

As rapidly as he could—while upside down in churning water— Gideon worked at the umbilical. He could feel himself getting lightheaded. His vision began to narrow and darken. Suddenly the umbilical came free. Air gushed into his helmet.

“I’m clear,” he shouted breathlessly. “Drop me!”

Big Al lowered the winch, and the water grabbed Gideon. This time he felt no impact at all. He simply slid into the wave as though he were slipping into a wading pool. And the world above him fell away.

Kate had said they would need to be lowered as quickly as possible for the first thirty or forty feet to get below the turbulence of the waves. If they didn’t, there was a strong chance of getting spun around or dragged away, tangled in the lines and drowned.

Gideon sank uneventfully, except for the water pressure, which hit him like a pair of ice picks in his eardrums. Gideon yawned, trying to clear his ears. He kept looking toward the surface, sca

Once he’d reached a depth of about forty feet, his descent seemed to slow—or Kate’s seemed to speed up. It was hard to tell in the disorienting darkness. Seeing Kate’s headlamp, he remembered that there was a light on his helmet. He thumbed the button, gratified when the arm of blue-white light appeared in front of him, illuminating Kate as she floated down to the same depth.

Together, slowly, they descended. When they reached the damper cradle, they would need to work quickly and to get lucky. They hadn’t anticipated that Timken would send Chuy fÑ€†n down to watch them. As soon as they located the charges, Gideon would disarm them one at a time, getting to as many of them as he could before Chun reached them. As soon as Chun got there, Kate would have to find a way to distract him long enough for Gideon to finish the job. If he couldn’t disarm all the charges, hopefully he’d get to enough of them to limit the damage of the sequenced detonations.

“You okay?” he said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Although for a minute, I thought you were in trouble.”

“Minor blip,” he said.

After that, they didn’t speak as they descended through the darkening water.

Unlike the limpid oceans he’d explored before, diving among sun-dappled reefs swimming with colorful fish, this water was dark, cold, and seething. A merciless hell. Specks of plankton and crud were visible in the shifting darkness, suspended in the green-black water. The only sound was the relentless roar of the waves passing overhead and crashing into the rig. As he and Kate sank deeper, the sound receded but didn’t cease, a constant reminder of the enormous destructive forces above them. Less light reached them now. And the light that did writhed and twisted, as if it had been forced to endure some kind of torture in order to penetrate the deep.

Gideon’s pulse hammered in his temples. It wasn’t just an effect of the increasing pressure. It was fear. Gideon was not fearful by nature, but he felt small and fragile in the inky blackness, at the mercy of forces against which the human body was no match.

“You should be reaching final depth pretty soon.” Big Al’s voice was coming through the headphones. “Forty feet. Forty-five.”

Gideon was able to see only a dozen feet or so in front of him, the light from his headlamp falling away into the surrounding blackness.

CLUNK!

Even though Gideon knew the rig wasn’t in danger of collapsing, the great hollow boom of the 400-ton weight sounded like the crack of doom as it whacked into the edge of the cradle. The vibration rattled his chest. “Man, that sounds bad,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said, her voice tight. “Let’s get to work. We don’t have much time.”

They were suspended in blackness. No piers, beams, or damper housing were visible. Nothing at all.

“You sure we’re at the right depth?” Gideon said.

Kate tapped the depth gauge on her wrist. “The current and the waves are pulling us away from the rig. We have to swim to get back to the cradle. Watch the way the bubbles are moving, and swim in the opposite direction.”

Gideon followed awkwardly as she began swimming slowly through the water. As extensive as his diving experience was, this was different. Not only did he not have swim fins, but he was dragging the weight and resistance of sixty meters of cable and hose. He sure hoped she knew where she was going.

After a minute, something began to rise out of the gloom. “There’s the damper,” Kate said. It looked like a flying saucer from an old science fiction movie, its surface covered with mossdivÑ€†y green algae.

Divers communicate underwater in one of two ways. If they have microphones and hard helmets, they can talk by wire. But if for whatever reason speech isn’t possible, they communicate by writing on slates— small rectangular tablets that function like old-fashioned blackboards. Even surface air divers carried them as backups in case their electronics failed. For Timken’s benefit Kate kept talking about welding the plate as she pulled the writing slate off her belt and scrawled: NEED TO FIND EXPLOSIVES BEFORE CHUN GETS DOWN.