tools for a moment. Devlin noticed their faces were drawn but their bodies fit.
With the armed foreman and his assistant checking the explosives, he took a chance. “What’s your name?” he asked a black man who stood beside him.
“My name is Masinga,” the man replied in a distinct South African accent.
Devlin nodded. “I’m Patrick,” he said. “Sometimes, people call me Padi. What is this place?”
“Don’t you know?”
Devlin shook his head.
“Diamond mine,” Masinga said.
Devlin studied the crumbled rock sitting on the motionless conveyor belt. “I don’t see any diamonds.”
“They’re in the rock,” Masinga explained. “Not much of a miner if you don’t know that.”
“I’m not a miner,” Devlin said.
“Then what are you doing here?”
“I was bloody well shanghaied,” Devlin swore under his breath. “Weren’t you?”
“No,” Masinga said. “I signed a contract. We all did. Paid us twice the rate De Beers was offering. Only when it came time to leave, we were kept on against our will.”
“Have you tried to escape?”
The man laughed. “Do we look like fish? We’re on an island in the middle of the ocean. Where would we escape to?”
“But your families,” Padi said. “Surely, they can protest.”
“They’ve been told we died in an accident,” another man said. He sounded like he might be from South America. “And they never knew where we were in the first place. None of us did until we got here.”
It sounded like madness to Devlin, but then little had made sense since he’d spotted the
“What about you?” Masinga asked. “Maybe someone will come looking.”
“Not likely,” Padi said, remembering that Keane was unconscious when he found the
“You are, then,” Masinga said. “We all are.”
“Tartarus,” Devlin mumbled, prison of the underworld. Now it made sense to him.
“Fire in the hole!” the foreman called out.
The burly man pressed a switch. A dozen small charges went off in rapid succession. The wall bulged out, holding its shape for an instant and then crumbling in a great clamor and cloud of dust.
Fans designed to draw the dust and heat out of the room kicked on, and the cloud was evacuated up a large vertical shaft that led to the surface. It swirled past them, sticking to their sweat-covered bodies. By the time it cleared, Padi’s face was as dark as Masinga’s. In fact, all of them were the same gray color no matter the shade of their skin.
The foreman looked over, the shotgun resting on his shoulder. “Break’s over,” he shouted. “Back to work.”
Masinga and the others rose up and wearily began moving into position. Against his will, Devlin followed.
THIRTY-ONE
Fifteen hours after abruptly ending his chess game, Gregorovich stood over the lighted chart table as another new course line was drawn. This one led off to the northwest.
Kirov stood across from him with one of the commandos at his side. “That’s the ninth course change he’s ordered.”
The MV
“Approaching new heading,” the navigator called out nervously. “Three hundred twenty-three degrees.”
“He’s toying with us,” Kirov said dangerously. “And you’re indulging him.”
Gregorovich stared. The presence of the second commando was Kirov’s idea. A show of force. No doubt the mutiny he felt brewing was close to being launched.
The men were getting nervous. It was palpable. They were land-based commandos far from home in a dangerous situation with deteriorating conditions. The ship was rolling appreciably in the growing swells, and the sky had turned gray-white. It looked like snow would be falling soon. At Austin’s direction, they’d come so far south they’d begun dodging small icebergs, an effort not helped by the reduced visibility.
Worst of all, they’d heard in detail how the
“At least we’re heading north,” he said, turning to the navigator. “What’s in this direction?”
The navigator tapped the screen, and the map zoomed out slowly until finally Gregorovich spotted a yellow dot directly in their path.
“Heard Island,” the navigator said.
By tapping the screen at the island’s location, Kirov was able to bring up a block of information about it.
“Australian territory,” he said, reading from the screen. “Volcanic. Last appreciable eruption 2005. Covered in glaciers and completely uninhabited.”
Kirov looked up, a grin plastered from ear to scabbed-over ear. “That’s it,” he said. “Heard Island is the target. That’s where Thero’s hiding. Austin finally showed his hand. We can kill him now along with his crew and finish the job without worrying about them.”
Gregorovich didn’t like the idea of losing his counterweight. Nor did he think, after proving so crafty for so long, that Austin would have been dumb enough to blunder into revealing his secret with such ease.
“Zoom out,” he ordered.
The Vietnamese navigator did as he was told, and the map expanded again. Another set of dots appeared. These were roughly two hundred and seventy miles beyond Heard Island, directly on the same course line, 323 degrees.
Austin had maneuvered the
“French Southern and Antarctic lands,” the navigator said.
“What kind of a name is that?” Kirov blurted.
“One you won’t forget, I trust,” Gregorovich said. “The same course line takes us to both of them. Thero could be hiding on either one. Or Austin could take us a little closer and then turn us in a new direction. We can’t kill him until we know for sure.”
“And once we know for sure?”
“Can you not think more than one move ahead?” Gregorovich asked. “Suppose Thero’s lab is on Heard Island. Our orders are to destroy it with a nuclear weapon. It’s Australian territory. Do you not see the advantage of leaving a few charred and radiated American bodies at the outer limit of such a blast?”
Kirov nodded.
“Launch the long-range drones,” he said. “If anything’s moving on Heard Island, I want to know about it.”
The noisy hum of piston engines caught Joe Zavala’s attention as he neared the ship’s mess with Hayley Anderson at his side.
“What’s that?” Hayley asked.
Joe cocked his head to listen. The sound reminded him of unmanned military aircraft he’d worked with a few months back. “The Russians are launching something up on deck,” he said. “A small plane, or maybe a drone.”
