Cutting Edge

Tom Clancy, Martin Greenberg, Jerome Preisler Cutting Edge

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Marc Cerasini, Larry Segriff, Denise Little, John Helfers, Brittiany Koren, Robert Youdelman, Esq., Danielle Forte, Esq., Dianne Jude; the wonderful people at Penguin Putnam Inc., including David Shanks and Tom Colgan; Joel Gotler and Alan Nevins. But most important, it is for you, my readers, to determine how successful our collective endeavor has been.

— Tom Clancy

ONE

OFFSHORE GABON, EQUATORIAL AFRICA

It was the goblin that led them toward disaster.

Cedric Dupain was at first merely curious as their strange caller glided into his probe lights — though fascination was quick to snare him. One of his job’s strongest lures was its promise of the unexpected, and Cedric took pleasure in discovery even when it was accompanied by considerable risk. He had been at his profession for over a decade, longer counting his three consecutive tours with the French Navy. All those years, so many dives, and nothing he’d encountered in the depths had yet given him real cause for fear.

Cedric cut his thrusters, turned his head, glanced through his faceplate at Marius, and saw he’d also come to a dead stop in the water. Then he reminded himself that faceplate was the wrong word. The correct term for the clear hemispheric panel was dome port. Just as the hardsuit’s exterior was called a pressure hull, and the glovelike hand sockets were called manipulator pods. A man who put great value on precision, Cedric knew it was also somewhat inexact to say that he and Marius Bouchard were functioning as divers — or that their suits were, in fact, suits at all. Both men would be more aptly considered pilots operating anthropomorphic underwater vehicles, submersibles that could descend to six hundred meters — two thousand feet, as Cedric’s American instructors would measure it — beneath the ocean’s surface.

The nomenclature had been a headache to learn, but for Cedric it was an important reminder. The world below was a world apart, and his hardsuit had more in common with a spacesuit than an ordinary diving rig. Indeed, his ability to walk the seabed was as remarkable as an astronaut’s to stride across the pitted surface of the moon. He did not want to let caution slip and forget for a moment what damage the crushing pressures of the deep would wreak on vulnerable human bodies.

Cedric stood motionless. He’d already located and videoed the source of the problem that had prompted an emergency repair call to the Africana, a medium-tonnage cable ship Planetaire Systems Corporation had contracted to maintain its undersea fiberoptic lines. But sights like the one now before his eyes gripped him with a kind of joyous awe, and were what truly pulled him to the cold depths. That he earned an excellent wage was only a convenient, if fair, rationale for doing a job he would have paid every last euro of his own to carry out.

Perhaps twice his size, the goblin came closer, cutting a slow circle through the dusky water. Cedric watched as its orbit tightened to within seven meters of him and suddenly broke, the goblin turning away, its abrupt change of direction propelled by a chopping flick of its tail.

The hardsuit’s mini-POD seemed to be working perfectly.

Cedric remained watchful. Shoulder mounted in front of his thruster pack, his xenon lamps played over the veering goblin’s long body. He noticed a pink lacing of blood vessels under its smooth, whitish gray skin. Noticed racks of sharp white teeth on its protrusible jaws, thrust out of its open mouth on reflex like jagged springloaded clamps. Noticed tiny lidless eyes on either side of the thick, flat growth of meat and bone bulging from its snout… eyes that passed over him with an interest he couldn’t have described and an attitude it was impossible to gauge. There was expression in them, yes, and intelligence, but of a trackless alien variety.

Cedric could see why the Japanese fishermen who’d discovered the species had chosen its name: Tenguzame, goblin shark. He decided right then that it might be the most spectacularly hideous creature he’d ever seen — with the possible exception of his songful operations manager topside.

“Just look at that thing, will you?” he said over his communicator. Though the words to Marius hardly required secrecy, he had used their closed subchannel. It was something of an amusement. Gunville couldn’t resist eavesdropping from the ship’s control room, and Cedric couldn’t resist thwarting him. “I expected we might run into bulls or tiger sharks… didn’t think these monstrosities climbed above six hundred leagues.”

“It must have been drawn to the cable.” Marius’s digitally transmitted voice was free of distortion. “Wouldn’t be the first time, judging by the number of teeth we saw in the segment that went bad.”

“That’s no explanation.”

“Why not?”

Cedric hesitated a moment. Though a good and dependable fellow, Marius had been on the job less than a year, and his occasional obtuseness could be a frustration. It was true sharks sought out hidden prey with specialized sense organs, nerve-filled pores called ampullae of Loranzini that detected the electrical fields radiated by creatures of the deep… and every other living thing, for that matter. And while the fiberoptic strands at the core of the submarine lightwave cable gave off virtually no stray emissions, the current flowing through the copper tube around the fiber — in these older repeatered systems, anyway — did indeed generate a low-frequency field that would sometimes confuse a shark into mistaking a segment of cable for a potential meal.

This, of course, presumed the SL was functional, unlike the ruptured cable that had caused a partial telecommunications failure for many thousands of the region’s broadband-reliant users. And there Marius’s supposition strayed from logic.

“The wire’s dead. Shorted-out,” Cedric said, trying to check his impatience. However slow on the uptake Marius might be, some allowance had to be made for his relative inexperience on the job. “There isn’t any voltage to stir up the beast’s appetite.”

Marius didn’t look surprised behind his bubbled acrylic dome port, and Cedric wondered for a moment if he might simply take amusement from hearing him state and restate the obvious. An odd thought, and improbable, but not out of the question. Could it be that he was being made a goat?

Cedric chased the question from his mind, having more serious matters to occupy it. Such as why the goblin at least appeared to be going at the cable. Ignoring him, it had swum off toward the sandbank on his left, assumed an almost vertical attitude in the water, and then angled its horny snout down toward the crippled fiber.

Cedric watched the shark resume stitching into the bottom sediment. He remembered that in the early days of submarine cable installation — around the late 1980s — it had been common to find dozens of shark teeth imbedded in sections of damaged line. That problem had been solved by encasing the cables in multilayered armor — a tough yet flexible sheath of plastic laminate steel wrapped in a thick nylon roving. The sharks would still bite, but their teeth rarely penetrated to the electrified copper.

Rarely wasn’t quite the same thing as never, though. As Cedric and Marius had discovered earlier.

Still, Cedric was convinced the shark attacks were only half the story, and that the initial cable fault could be blamed on drag trawlers or dredgers — long-line fishing vessels that dropped heavy nets down to the seabed for tuna, mackerel, cubera, and, in the case of the dredge boats, shellfish. In addition to Gabon’s domestic fleet, the boats came from countries as far to the north as Morocco, Nigeria, and Libya, and as far in the opposite direction as South Africa. They came, as well, from outside Africa’s continental boundaries — Europe and Asia in particular.