Gideon's War / Hard Target

“What are those?” Kate said vaguely.

Gideon’s pulse sped up. “Just fish,” Gideon said. It was nearly impossible for him to write on his slate while holding on to Kate, but he finally managed.

“Doesn’t look like fish,” she said, studying the explosives. Gideon slapped the slate urgently against the mask of her helmet.

PLEASE DON’T TALK! he’d written.

“Huh?” she said, then seemed to lose interest.

“Where’s the umbilical?” Gideon said. “Kate’s in trouble here. I think she may be hallucinating.”

“I’m not hallucinating,” she said, gri

“Kate!” Gideon said. “Just relax, okay? We’ll have some better air for you in a few minutes.”

“Okay,” she said happily.

“She’s narced to the gills,” Gideon said. “Hurry with the umbilical.”

“On its way down,” Big Al said.

Kate’s bail out bottle was in the red zone by the time Gideon managed to locate the new umbilical and hook it up.

“How long you go

“Look, she just went to a ridiculous depth. We had to bring her up way too fast,” Gideon said. “I need to keep her here another ten minutes just to make sure she doesn’t get up to twenty meters and then suddenly crash.”

“You got five,” Timken said, “then I’m pulling you both up.”

Distracted by Kate’s situation, Gideon had been unable to look at the explosive charges placed on the cradle strut—much less to work on defusing them.

But he finally had the chance.

Kate and Gideon were hanging suspended a few feet below the strut. Several of the explosive charges were visible now.

Kate looked at them fixedly. She still seemed to be trying to figure out what they were. Gideon swam between her and the explosive charges, then held one finger up in front of his lips.

Kaessñ€†te frowned in concentration. Then suddenly she blinked. “Oh!” she said. “Yeah. I’m starting to remember.”

“Remember what?” Timken demanded.

There was a long pause. Gideon grabbed Kate by both arms and stared straight into her face, trying to project every ounce of urgency he could muster without saying anything.

Finally Kate nodded. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s okay, I got a little narced there. I’m getting straightened out, I just need a couple more minutes. When I get back to the cradle, I’ll be fine. We’ll get everything welded up and we’ll be set.”

Gideon smiled. He felt like giving her a huge hug. But there was no time.

He turned toward the nearest explosive charge and studied it. This was going to be tricky.

Kate squeezed his hand encouragingly.

Gideon nodded, trying to cover his own uncertainty, then turned to study the first charge.

Horst’s most important lesson to him had boiled down to this: “Observe the bomb. See the bomb. Know the bomb. Know everything. . . before you cut the first wire.”

So Gideon studied the bomb. There were twelve shaped charges, each attached to one of the twelve bolts that matched the ones he had seen up on the cradle. Each charge appeared to be identical, consisting of a plastic drinking cup inverted over the bolt head. Inside the drinking cup was a pound or so of plastic explosive. The base of the explosive would have been hollowed out into a cone. The cone likely contained a copper slug. When the charge was detonated, the resistance of the water, combined with the shape of the charge, would blast the superheated copper in a jet that would shoot straight through the bolt, acting like a cutting torch jet and simply dissolving the entire bolt.

By detonating all twelve charges in sequence, the bolts would disappear, and the immense weight of the cradle would twist the strut and then shear it away. And that would be the end of the rig.

Sticking out of the top of the closest drinking cup was a thin metal tube—a detonator. Two wires came out of the tube. If that had been all there was to it, the problem would have been easy. Snip the wires, the circuit would be cut, and it would be impossible for the detonator to fire.

Gideon circled around the drinking cup, looking to see if there was anything else he needed to know. If it was simply a matter of cutting the wire—well, this was a best-case scenario. Twelve quick snips with the wire cutters Big Al had on his dive belt and he’d be done. But if there was anything here that he was missing—security circuits, trap circuits, anything of that nature—one snip might blow him and Kate both to bits.

Then he traced the second set of wires, one entering through each side of the cup. It was undoubtedly some kind of security circuit—but without cutting open the cup and tracing the course of the wires millimeter by millimeter, there was no safe way of figuring out its precise function. It might be a monitor circuit to alert them up top that the detonator had been removed. It might be a redundant hidden detonator. Or it might be a decoy. There were a lot of possibilities.

If he just pulled the detonators out, there was a reasonable chaned ñ€†ce the charge would blow. If it did, the shock wave would liquefy his organs and kill him in about one ten-thousandth of a second.

There was no time to perform a full diagnostic analysis on the charge. He’d have to take a chance that simply cutting the wires would disarm the bomb.

Without hesitation, he reached out and snipped the wire.

After a moment, he realized he was still alive.

“I’m getting tired of waiting,” Timken said. “I’m pulling you up to the cradle.”

“Hold on,” Gideon said, cutting the second wire.

“No! I’m not holding on! Pull ’em up, Prejean.”

“I can only pull one of them at a time,” Big Al retorted.

“Then pull Gideon first.”

Gideon turned furiously toward Kate. He pointed at the charges and made a snipping motion with the cutters, then pointed at her.

She stared back, wide-eyed.

“You’ll be fine, Kate!” he said, trying to sound calm.

He tried to snip one more wire before Big Al pulled him up—but he felt a jerk and was already moving upward through the dark water before the jaws of the pliers could close.

There was nothing more he could do. He let the wire cutters drop from his grasp. They flipped end over end, their yellow rubber handles tracing an erratic path through the water, slowly disappearing from his view as the reflected light from his headlamp faded. Kate made a grab for them.

Gideon couldn’t see whether she had caught them or not. She had been swallowed in the darkness.

Major Royce was gripping the console of the C-17 cockpit to keep from being thrown to the deck by the brutal buffeting of the airplane as he watched the radar monitor. The eye of the storm was going to pass over the Obelisk. But only just barely.

“What do you think?” Major Royce asked the meteorologist, who was on loan from the USS Blue Ridge, the navy’s Seventh Fleet command boat. “How long’s our window?”

“The sweet spot, when the wind’s really dropped? Maybe ten, fifteen minutes.” The meteorologist was a lieutenant junior grade who had obviously never flown through a typhoon before and now looked completely terrified. He’d staggered to the head about five times already. The rest of the Deltas smiled as they heard his retching. Royce felt bad for the kid. He’d been through some rough flights over the years, but nothing like this.

Gideon's War and Hard Target

Royce looked at his watch. They were set to Time Zone Golf....

“We’ll be there before the bomb blows. Question is, will the eye be there in time?”

Royce glanced at the meteorologist. “Where’s the eye, Lieutenant?”

“Pardon me, siheyñ€†r,” the navy man said. “I need to hit the head again.”

Great, Royce thought, as the meteorologist rushed past him to puke.

Kate had been feeling more like herself. But she was far from 100 percent. Even under the best circumstances, some nitrogen narcosis occurred at this depth. And she was still feeling the residual effects of what she’d just been through.