Zero Hour, стр. 51

The soldiers stirred nervously. Gregorovich stared at Kirov.

“Perhaps you were going to leave with them,” he said to his rival. “To put a bullet in my back and then run home like a coward.”

“No,” Kirov insisted.

“But you do know how to fly?” Gregorovich clarified. “It’s on your dossier.”

“Yes, but—”

Gregorovich blasted him down before he could finish his sentence. Kirov fell backward, red blood staining the white snow beneath him.

“Wrong answer,” Kurt muttered to Joe.

“I know what to say if he asks me,” Joe replied.

The Russian commandos looked on in shock. “How are we supposed to get out of here when the job is done?” one of them asked.

“I will fly you out myself,” Gregorovich said. “I spent three years piloting attack craft in Afghanistan. Mi-17s and Mi-24s. These are not so different.”

“And somehow we’re all going to fit on just one?” another soldier asked.

Gregorovich nodded. “Without the equipment, there will be plenty of room. But no one is going anywhere until we find Thero’s lair and set the bomb.”

The tension between the Russians felt like a pile of gunpowder just waiting to be lit. But Gregorovich had so completely seized the upper hand that the men could do nothing. Not if they ever wanted to see home again. In fact, they might need to guard Gregorovich with their lives.

They began to stow their weapons.

“Lucky for us,” Joe muttered. “Caught in the middle of a Bolshevik revolution.”

“More like Cortes burning his ships in the harbor at Veracruz,” Kurt replied, “to prevent his men from leaving Mexico.”

“This guy doesn’t miss a trick,” Joe said.

“At some point, he will,” Kurt said. “Whatever you do, don’t tell him you’re a pilot.”

Joe nodded, and Kurt began to hike back through the swirling snow to where Hayley stood.

“It’s okay,” he said.

“No,” she replied harshly. “It’s not okay. I’m pretty sure nothing will ever be okay again.”

He climbed on the snowmobile and felt Hayley climb on behind him. As she wrapped her arms around his waist, he could feel her shaking. It wasn’t from the cold.

There was nothing he could say to erase what she’d just seen. What’s more, he was pretty certain it wouldn’t be the last bloodshed they’d witness in the hours ahead.

Gregorovich waved his arm, and the lead commando gunned his throttle and moved off. Kurt strapped on a pair of orange-tinted goggles as Joe followed the lead sled.

A moment later, it was Kurt’s turn. With a twist of the throttle, he accelerated and tucked in behind the Russians, gliding in their tracks. Gregorovich brought up the rear, unwilling to let anyone out of his sight.

The terrain map showed a seven-mile ride in the shadow of Big Ben, then a two-hundred-foot climb down a ridge. From there, it was a two-mile hike over the crevasse-infested field. Once across the far side, they’d reach the edge of the Winston Glacier, look for the hatches, and blast their way into Thero’s stronghold.

It was a simple plan, Kurt thought, only about a million things could go wrong. But with a little luck, they’d be inside the lion’s den by dusk with at least ten hours to spare.

THIRTY-FOUR

Half the world away, Dirk Pitt had been forced to make a painful decision. With no answers from Hiram Yaeger, he had to risk the Gemini.

“You have the ship battened down?” he asked over the speakerphone.

“All watertight doors are sealed,” Paul Trout replied. “The crew have donned survival suits and moved to the upper decks. The boats are ready. If this thing blows a hole in the bottom, or if Thero locks onto us and sends some kind of discharge our way that batters the ship, we’ll be off the Gemini in sixty seconds.”

Full precautions, Pitt thought. There was nothing more he could do. “Let’s hope we’re just overreacting.”

“How’s the telemetry link?” Paul asked.

Pitt glanced at the computer screen. “We’re receiving your data without any hiccups,” he said. “The solar activity has faded a bit.”

“Good,” a female voice said. “If we blow ourselves up, you’ll be the first to know.”

“I thought you were ordered topside,” Pitt said to Gamay.

“She was,” Paul replied. “But she suddenly came down with a case of hearing impairment and missed that order.”

“I understand,” Pitt said. “Whenever you’re ready.”

A few seconds of silence came next, and then Paul’s voice. “Initiating power-up sequence in five… four…”

“Wait!” a voice shouted from Pitt’s outer office. “Wait!”

Hiram Yaeger rushed in with a set of papers in his hands. “I’ve found something.”

“Stand by,” Pitt said into the phone. “What do you have, Hiram? Tell me it’s Thero.”

“Not exactly.” He handed over a printed page with a blue background and a jagged line crisscrossing it. It looked like a game of connect the dots.

“What is this?” Pitt asked.

“It’s a ship’s course over the last forty-eight hours,” Yaeger said.

“What ship?”

Hiram was panting. He’d run all the way up from the tenth floor when the elevator didn’t respond fast enough. “I don’t know what ship exactly,” he said. “But it’s important — I’m sure of it.”

Pitt didn’t doubt his friend but he needed clarity. “What exactly are you talking about?”

“There’s a storm brewing down there,” he said. “Any ships in the area should be getting out of the way, or at least transiting with all due haste, but this one is changing course at odd hours and intervals and all but driving in circles. It’s taken her two full days to arrive where she is now. Had she traveled straight, she could have done the trip in ten hours. In and of itself, that means nothing. But it is suspicious.”

Pitt didn’t disagree. But there were reasons some ships took odd courses. One in particular came to mind.

“There’s a lot of illegal fishing down there,” he said. “The Aussies are always chasing ships off. Every year, they even capture a few. Those ships trawl for the biggest catch. But they stay out of the shipping lanes, and they don’t stay in one place very long because they don’t want to get caught.”

“My first thought,” Yaeger said, “but this isn’t a fishing trawler, it’s a containership of some kind. And those turns are not as random as they seem. There’s a pattern to them.”

Pitt looked at the jagged line. “I don’t see a pattern.”

Yaeger had a second item in his hand. It was a transparent overlay. He’d printed something on it.

“The angles are slightly off,” he said, “and the legs aren’t exactly the right lengths, but it’s pretty close.”

He placed the overlay down and lined up the edges of the page. The left side of the pattern on the transparent sheet matched closely with the legs and courses the wandering mystery ship had taken.

Pitt recognized the full pattern instantly. “The constellation of Orion.”

Yaeger nodded. “For reasons I can’t begin to guess at, this lost containership has been tracing out half of the constellation. It’s a mighty accurate effort at that.”

“Could it possibly be a coincidence?” Pitt wondered aloud.

Yaeger shook his head. “Ten million to one for a ship to randomly make these turns and steam legs of the proper length. Add in the fact that our Orion just went down hours before this pattern started in the very same area, and the odds might hit a billion to one.”

Pitt nodded. Someone on that ship, someone in control of that ship, was trying to tell the world something. He couldn’t fathom what circumstances might be creating this oddity, but he had a good idea who might be sly enough and intelligent enough to pull it off.

“Kurt,” he said almost unconsciously.

Yaeger nodded. “He’s the biggest astronomy buff in the department. He’s always up on that roof with his telescope.”