Devil's Gate

The fast boat leapt forward like a stallion as the pilot slammed the throttle home. Right out into daylight.

The castle crashed into the water no more than twenty feet behind them. A surge of foam hurled them along and then spat them out like a surfer ejecting from a massive breaker.

Seconds later the Kinjara Maru was gone.

As they sped away, heavy rumbling sounds rose up from the depths, along with surges of air and debris.

Kurt looked at the woman. She was covered in soot and oil, her shoulder was either broken or separated, her wrists were gashed by the wire that had cut into them, and her eyes were swollen and almost as red as the blood that soaked her clothes. Using her less injured hand, she placed pressure on the gash on her other wrist.

“We have a doctor aboard the ship,” Kurt said. “He’ll tend to your injuries as soon as we board.”

She nodded. At least she was alive.

“To the Argo?” the helmsman asked.

Kurt nodded. “Unless you have somewhere else in mind?”

The helmsman shook his head. “No, sir,” he said, and pointed the boat toward the Argo.

TEN MINUTES LATER, they were back on board the Argo. While the ship’s doctor tended to the young woman and the away team stowed the fast boat, Kurt stepped onto the bridge.

The ship was already accelerating and changing course.

“You look like hell,” Captain Haynes said. “Why aren’t you in sick bay?”

“Because I’m not sick,” Kurt replied.

The captain eyed Kurt strangely and then looked past him. “Somebody get this man a towel. He’s dripping all over my bridge.”

An ensign tossed him a towel, which Kurt used to dry his face and hair. “Can we catch them?” he asked.

Haynes glanced at the radar screen. “They’re faster than us, doing forty knots. But a little boat like that didn’t bring these boys all the way from Africa. I’ll bet you a steak dinner they’re heading for a mother ship somewhere.”

Kurt nodded. Pirates had become more sophisticated in recent years. While most still operated from little hamlets along the coasts of poor Third World nations, some had larger vessels that took them out to sea. Mother ships, disguised as old freighters and such.

They hid their tricked-out speedboats inside and often used semi-legitimate voyages to disguise their true purpose. Kurt had heard from one authority that the pirates would be easy to catch if someone would just look for the freighters that constantly dropped off cargo without ever picking any up. But then the buyers were too smart to ask where goods came from when they were getting such great deals.

“Anything on radar?” Kurt asked.

“Nothing yet,” Haynes said.

As dry as he was going to get, Kurt tossed the towel and picked up the captain’s binoculars, gazing out toward the target.

The fleeing boat itself was hard to see, but the long white wake it left was a giant arrow pointing right to it. They were five miles off, and putting the Argo farther behind, but it would take hours for them to escape radar range, and by that time…

A flash caught Kurt by surprise, momentarily blinding him through the binoculars. Immediately following it, Kurt saw debris flying in all directions and an expanding cloud.

“What in the world…”

A few seconds later the sound reached them. A single low boom, like a massive firework had gone off. When the view cleared, the speedboat was gone; obliterated in a single, thundering explosion.

7

KURT AUSTIN HAD BEEN in the communications room of the Argo for over an hour. The last forty minutes of that he’d been talking with NUMA’s director of operations, Dirk Pitt.

Kurt got along well with the Director, having known him when Pitt was still doing fieldwork for NUMA. Considering the kind of missions NUMA’s Special Operations Team often ended up taking on, it helped to have a boss who’d “been there and done that,” as Pitt had pretty much been everywhere and done everything.

Moving to the head office hadn’t dulled Pitt’s senses, even if it did place him in the crosscurrents of the political world.

As the Argo patrolled a wide circle near where the Kinjara Maru had gone down, Kurt explained what they knew and what they didn’t. Pitt asked questions. Some of which Kurt couldn’t answer.

“The strangest part,” he said, “is that they sank the ship deliberately instead of taking her for a prize. And they killed the crew. It was more like a terrorist action than a pirate raid.”

A flat-screen monitor on the wall displayed Pitt’s rugged features. He seemed to clench his jaw while thinking.

“And you never found a mother ship?” he asked.

“We did a fifty-mile leg in the direction they were heading,” Kurt said. “Then Captain Haynes took us on a dumbbell pattern south for five miles and back north for ten. Nothing on radar in any direction.”

“Maybe their course was a false track. To draw you off until they put some distance between you and them,” Pitt offered.

“We thought about that,” Kurt said, considering a conversation with the captain as the search began to look fruitless. “Or they might have even had enough gas on board to get back to the coast. A drum or two lashed to the boat could explain the explosion.”

“Still doesn’t explain what they were doing on that ship,” Pitt noted. “What about hostages?”

“Maybe,” Kurt said. “But we have the captain’s wife with us. They left her deliberately to hold us up. She said there was no one unusual on board. In fact, if anyone were to bring a ransom she seemed like the best candidate to me, but it wouldn’t be that much.”

On screen, Pitt looked away. He rubbed a hand over his chin for a second and then turned back to the screen.

“Any thoughts?” he asked finally.

Kurt offered a theory. “My dad and I did a lot of salvage work when I was younger,” he began. “Boats go down for plenty of reasons, but people send ’em down for only two. Insurance money or to hide something on board. One time we found a guy shot in the head but still strapped into the seat of his boat. Turned out his partner shot him and sunk the boat, hoping to cover it up. Didn’t count on the insurance company deciding they could salvage the wreck and get some money out of it.”

Pitt nodded. “You think this is the same kind of thing?”

“Kill the crew, sink the ship,” Kurt said. “Someone’s trying to keep something quiet.”

Pitt smiled. “This is why you make the big bucks, Kurt.”

“I get big bucks?” Kurt said, laughing. “I’d hate to see what you’re paying everybody else.”

“It’s a scandal,” Pitt said. “But it’s a heck of a lot more than the admiral paid me when I started.”

Kurt laughed at the thought. Pitt had told him once that his first month’s pay for NUMA wouldn’t cover a broken arm, even though he’d risked his life half a dozen times in that month. Then again, neither of them did it for the money.

Kurt continued. “Kristi Nordegrun, the woman who survived, said she didn’t know what happened, but the lights flickered and blew out, her head seemed to ring, and she lost her balance and consciousness. She believes it