Treasure Of Khan Part 57

With a frantic determination, Dirk began reeling himself up the air line to close in on Dahlgren. His tired arms ached in pain with each pull, made harder by the thirty-five-pound weight belt strapped around his midsection. He didn't dare jettison the belt yet, as he needed to stay at the same submerged depth as his friend.

Pulling himself up like an underwater mountaineer, he clawed his way to within ten feet of Dahlgren when his old nemesis reappeared. The dancing airlift came rushing toward him, swinging past just out of arm's reach. The big tube swung toward Dahlgren, flexed a moment, then reversed direction and bounded back. This time, Dirk stuck out an arm and caught hold of the tube as it swung by. The heavy ma.s.s of the water-filled tube nearly jerked him out of his fins as he straddled his legs around it and bounced through the water. Riding it like a bucking bronco, he carefully shimmied up to the top of the tube, where it was clasped to the thick rubber hose. Pulling out a small dive knife that was strapped to his leg, Dirk lunged at the hose with the blade and began sawing through it. The tube whipped violently beneath him as he muscled the knife through to sever the hose. The heavy plastic tube snapped away with the last cut and sank to the depths as Dirk slid off and gave it a farewell kick.

Free of the mad battering ram, Dirk turned his attention back to Dahlgren. Dirk's fight to rid himself of the airlift had caused him to lose his place on the air line and he found himself trailing Dahlgren by thirty feet again. His friend looked like a wet mop, towed through the water by the line from his neck. With his tired arms stinging, Dirk pulled himself up the line again, fighting foot by foot until he was even with Dahlgren. He coiled his own air line around his waist in a bowline knot, then kicked and swam his way over to his friend. Reaching over and grabbing Dahlgren's BC, Dirk pulled himself up and peered into his face mask.

Dahlgren was unconscious with his eyes closed. He was breathing lightly, though, as evidenced by a small stream of exhaust bubbles that floated out of his regulator every few seconds. Grabbing Dahlgren with one hand, Dirk reached down and unbuckled his own weight belt, then reached up to his buoyancy compensator and hit the b.u.t.ton on the inflation hose. What little air was left in his emergency pony bottle surged into his vest, filling it half full before running out of compressed air. It was more than enough to propel them to the surface, with Dirk kicking his legs hard to accelerate the ascent.

No sooner did they break the surface then they were dragged forward, yanked under the water like a fallen water-skier who forgets to let go of the rope. A second later, they would resurface for a moment, then get pulled under again. As they bounded up and down, Dirk reached down and ditched Dahlgren's weight belt, then managed to twist off his own dive helmet. Grabbing gulps of air when they popped to the surface, he grasped the manual inflation tube to Dahlgren's BC. While pushed under the surface, he opened the thumb valve and exhaled into it. In a few cycles, he had Dahlgren's vest fully inflated, which helped reduce the duration of their immersions.

Fearful that his friend's head or neck might get injured by the tug of the air line, Dirk cinched up a few inches of the line and ran it through a D ring on Dahlgren's BC, then tied it in a knot. As long as the line didn't snap, he would safely be towed by his vest.

With his buddy mostly afloat, Dirk let go of him to grab his own air line again. He had to get aboard the barge now and began pulling himself hand over hand toward the moving platform. There was more than forty feet of line ahead of him, and he was already heavily fatigued from his time in the water. With his strength diminished, his progress slowed to just inches at a time. He repeatedly had to will himself to shake off the pain and a creeping urge to just let go. Instead, he reluctantly placed one hand ahead of the other and pulled, repeating the process without stopping.

For the first time, he looked up at the barge, hoping to see Summer standing at the rail. But there was no sign of her or anyone else on the open deck. Dirk knew his sister would never willfully abandon him. Something had happened when the black ship came alongside and Dirk was afraid of the prospects. A renewed sense of urgency mixed with anger surged through his body, and he hauled himself up the last few feet of line in a possessed fury.

Finally reaching the side of the barge, he yanked himself up and through the railing and collapsed on the deck. He afforded himself just a few seconds of rest, then ripped off his dive gear and scanned the deck for Summer, shouting her name. Met with a silent response, he stood up and grabbed Dahlgren's air line and began reeling him toward the barge. The Texan disappeared under the water for several seconds before reappearing, as larger ocean-borne waves rolled over him. He had regained consciousness and slowly kicked his legs and arms in a mostly futile attempt at propulsion. With his arms fatigued nearly to the breaking point, Dirk pulled him alongside the barge, then tied off the air line on the rail. Reaching into the water, he grabbed Dahlgren by the collar and hoisted him aboard.

Dahlgren rolled onto the deck, then teetered to a sitting position. He clumsily pulled off his dive helmet and gazed at Dirk with blurry eyes. Rubbing the back of his neck with one hand, he winced as his fingers rolled over a baseball-sized lump.

"What in blazes happened down there?" he asked in a slurred voice.

"Before or after the airlift used your skull for batting practice?" Dirk replied.

"So that was the sucker that hit me. I remember getting yanked off the bottom, then my air went dry. I hit my pony tank and was preparing to ascend when the lights went out."

"Lucky thing you cranked on your emergency air. It took me a few minutes to ditch the airlift and get you to the surface amid the tow ride."

"Thanks for not throwing me back," Dahlgren smiled, his senses slowly returning. "So where's Summer? And why are we twenty miles from sh.o.r.e?" he asked, noting the rugged coast of Hawaii receding in the distance.

"I don't know," Dirk said solemnly.

As Dahlgren rested, Dirk searched the shack and examined the rest of the barge for signs of Summer's disappearance. When he returned, Dahlgren could tell by the look on his face that the news was not good.

"Radio is gone. Zodiac is gone. Generator is missing. And all of our mooring lines were cut at deck level."

"And we're drifting to China. Pirates in Hawaii?"

"Or treasure hunters thinking we had a gold ship." Dirk stared back toward the island. He could no longer see the cove but knew the black ship was still there.

"The ship we heard roll in?" Dahlgren asked, his vision too fuzzy to see for himself.

"Yes."

"Then Summer must be aboard her."

Dirk silently nodded. If she was on the ship, then she might be all right. It was something to hope for. But hope was fleeing his grasp by the minute as they moved farther and farther away from land. They had to help themselves before they could help Summer. Drifting across the middle of the Pacific Ocean on a powerless barge, they could float for weeks before approaching a pa.s.sing ship. Hope, Dirk thought grimly as he watched the island shrink in size, was for a quick means back to sh.o.r.e.

-45-

THE LAST PLACE IN THE WORLD that Rudi Gunn wanted to be was back in the Russian-built truck bouncing over a rough dirt road. But that's exactly where he found himself. His back, rear, and legs all ached from the constant jarring. With every rut and pothole sending his teeth chattering, he was convinced that the truck manufacturer had neglected to install shocks and springs on the vehicle.

"The suspension on this thing must have been designed by the Marquis de Sade," he grimaced as they rolled over a harsh b.u.mp.

"Relax," Giordino grinned from behind the wheel. "This is the smooth section of the highway."

Gunn turned a lighter shade of pale, observing that the highway consisted of a weathered pair of dirt tracks through the high steppe gra.s.s. They had bounced across the open lands since midday, en route to Borjin's compound of Xanadu. They had to rely on Pitt and Giordino's collective memory to find their way there and several times were forced to guess which of the myriad of tracks to follow over the rolling hills. Familiar landmarks confirmed they were on the right route as they approached the small mountain range to the southeast that they knew housed the estate.

"Another two hours, Rudi," Pitt said, gauging the distance out the windshield, "and your troubles will be over."

Gunn silently shook his head, having the distinct feeling that his troubles were just beginning. A follow-up phone call from Hiram Yaeger before they departed Ulaanbaatar had added a new sense of urgency and gravity to their mission. The revelation that an odd series of earthquakes had been occurring in Mongolia was impossible to ignore.

"We're just scratching the surface on establishing a correlation, but this much we know," Yaeger said in a weary voice. "A series of earthquakes have rocked several areas in north-central Mongolia, as well as a dispersed area in and around the southern border of China. The earthquakes are unique from the norm in that their epicenters are relatively close to the surface. They mostly have been moderately sized quakes, as measured on the Richter scale, yet have produced high-intensity surface waves, which can be particularly destructive. Dr. McCammon has discovered that the foreshocks that preceded each quake are nearly uniform in intensity, which is inconsistent with a naturally occurring earthquake."

"So you think there is some sort of man-made activity that is inducing the earthquakes?" Pitt asked.

"As unlikely as it sounds, the seismological records seem to indicate as much."

"I know that oil drilling sometimes generates earthquakes, and underground nuclear testing has suspected links. I recall that when the old Rocky Flats a.r.s.enal near Denver began injecting contaminated water deep into the ground, earthquakes shook the surrounding area. Have you determined if there is some sort of major drilling operation going on? Or perhaps some nuclear testing by Mongolia's neighbor to the south?"

"The epicenters in the northern part of the country have been located in a mountainous region east of Ulaanbaatar, a remote and rugged area, from what we've been able to determine. And a drilling-induced quake would not show the uniform preshock seismicity, according to Max. As far as the southern-area quakes, we would see it in the seismic profiles if a nuclear test blast had occurred."

"Then let me take a guess and say that brings us to the late Dr. von Wachter."

"Give that man a cookie," Yaeger said. "When Max told us that von Wachter had been killed in a landslide in the Khentii Mountains east of Ulaanbaatar, the light went on. The coincidence was too great. We concluded that his acoustic seismic array, or an offshoot of the technology, must have something to do with the earthquakes."

"That doesn't seem possible," Gunn said. "You would need a tremendous shock wave to set things off."

"That's the general perception," Yaeger replied. "But Dr. McCammon, working with Max and some other seismologists, has a theory on that. We spoke to a colleague of von Wachter's, who had been told by the doctor of his success at reflection imagery. The secret of his detailed imaging, if you will, was the ability to condense and packet the acoustic waves emitted into the ground. Normally transmitted sound waves behave like a pebble thrown into a pond, rippling out in all directions. Von Wachter developed a means of packeting the waves so that they remained concentrated in a narrow band as they penetrate the earth. The resulting waves, as they reflect back to the surface, apparently produce a crisp, detailed image far beyond any existing technology. Or so the colleague stated."

"So how do you get from a seismic image to an earthquake?" Gunn persisted.

"By two leaps of faith. First, that von Wachter's system produces a detailed image that visibly identifies active subterranean faults and fault lines. That is hardly a stretch of the imagination for shallow faults, which existing technologies can already detect."

"Okay, so von Wachter's seismic array can accurately pinpoint active faults beneath the surface," Gunn said. "You would still need to disturb those pressure points in some manner, say by drilling or with explosives, in order to produce a rupture and subsequent earthquake."

"That's our second leap. You are correct, the fault would need to be disturbed in order to trigger an earthquake. But a seismic wave is a seismic wave. The fault doesn't care if it comes from an explosion ..."

"... or an acoustic blast," Pitt said, finishing Yaeger's sentence. "It makes sense. The ten-foot hanging tripod is a transducer array system that generates the acoustic blast. From the size of the transducers and the power supply that goes with it, it looked to me like they could generate a sonic boom."

"If the acoustic blast is pinpointed at a fault line, the resulting vibrations from the seismic waves could induce a fracture, then, bammo, instant earthquake. It's just a theory, but McCammon and Max both agree it could work. Perhaps von Wachter's imaging technology was never intended as such but was discovered as an inadvertent side effect."

"Either way, it is in the hands of Borjin now. We've got to a.s.sume he possesses the technology and the ability to use it," Pitt said.