“Precisely my thinking,” Hawke said.
It was a submarine pen. An empty submarine pen.
A large rectangular opening cut into the keel in the bottom of the hull, with black seawater sloshing up onto the surrounding deck, the deck strewn with countless disconnected but live cables, hissing and spitting fire in the dampness.
The submarine was gone and Darius was aboard it.
“Lost him, boss. I’m sorry.”
“Maybe not,” Hawke said, ripping the battle radio from the Velcro on top of his black battle helmet.
“ Blackhawke, Blackhawke, Blackhawke, this is Big Red One.”
“This is Blackhawke, First Officer speaking; go ahead, sir.”
“Is Captain Carstairs on the bridge?”
“Affirmative, sir. He’s standing right here beside me. Hold on.”
“Carstairs.”
“Laddie, Hawke. Target slipped the noose. You now have a minisub in the water; judging by the size of the pen and the electronic support systems, she’s a Koi class Chinese two-man, no more than twenty meters long. Powered by proto-lithium batteries so you won’t pick up her screw signatures. You have our coordinates. The sub is probably on a heading from the mouth of the marina en route to the Strait of Hormuz and out of the Gulf. Alert the sonar officer. Tell him the minisub will present a very small, faint picture on his screen. Easy to miss. If you get a contact, initiate hot pursuit. The second he’s within torpedo range, destroy him.”
“Affirmative. What’s your exfil situation? Do you require assistance?”
“Negative. We have taken minimal casualties. We have not yet found the machine. We will continue search- and-destroy mission. We’ve posted guards on the patrol boat. If we need a hot extraction, you’ll be the first to know.”
“Understood. Blackhawke, standing by on channel eleven, sir, over.”
“Good God,” Stollenwork said, making his way into the pen. “An escape sub. Of course. Rather clever, actually.”
“He’s got a lot of help,” Hawke said, a droll expression on his face. “A higher intelligence. What the situation up there?”
“It’s not over. They seem to be regrouping inside the wall. A large force. I think they intend to storm this yacht, in the belief they outnumber us.”
“Not a belief,” Stoke said. “A fact.”
“Stony, order your second in command to position Blue and Red teams on every Cygnus deck, taking cover with direct line of sight on the gate. They’ll be at their most vulnerable funneled up at that exit point. Concentrated fire there will, at minimum, slow them down when we make for the patrol boat.”
“Aye, sir,” Stollenwork said, then raised his radio and repeated Hawke’s orders to his number two up on deck.
“Stokely, I noticed a hidden indentation in the bulkhead to our left when we reached the first platform down from the bridge. There’s no way Saffari could have negotiated three steep flights of narrow stairs in his manned aerial vehicle. I’m guessing there’s a hidden elevator opening in the hull, directly onto the dock. It would make more sense in escape mode. Go back up and check it out, would you? I need a word with Stony.”
“Done,” Stoke said over his shoulder, sprinting up the staircase.
“Stony. You took the lab out. But we’re not leaving here without destroying that bloody machine. Blackhawke can take out Saffari’s sub if he stays within her sonar perimeter. She’s got torpedo tubes fore and aft. We’ll find him and sink him somehow.”
“You’re joking.”
“You don’t know the half of it. She’s a warship with nearly as much firepower as a navy frigate.”
“Boss?”
At the sound of Stoke’s deep bass voice behind him, Hawke wheeled around.
A large section of the hull was still sliding open. Stoke was standing inside a large, stainless-steel elevator with a big smile on his face. “What goes up, must go down,” he said. “Step inside, gentlemen.”
The three men were shocked by the lift’s initial acceleration. Hawke calculated the lift was descending at one hundred feet or more per minute. The trip was ten minutes long, which put their destination at a thousand feet below the surface of the sea when the elevator slowed and bumped to a stop on the ocean floor.
They stepped cautiously, weapons at the ready, out of the lift and found themselves in a large airlock. The floor was made of some highly polished metal. To their left they could see an illuminated tunnel of some kind, constructed of clear Perspex or thick laminated glass able to withstand the enormous pressure. It was about ten feet in diameter and seemed to lead across the sea bottom.
“The machine?” Stoke said, following Hawke and Stollenwork as they entered the tunnel.
“That would be my guess, yes,” Hawke said. He was busy admiring the sea life, flora and fauna, all around him. There were large, high-powered undersea lights mounted atop the tunnel every six feet. They turned the murky depths to daylight and the effect was overwhelming.
“Holy Mother of God,” Stollenwork exclaimed.
Suddenly, all three men had come to an abrupt stop. What lay before them was the stuff of dreams, an underwater scene of majestic power and beauty.
The tunnel had suddenly angled right, and now the lights were illuminating a giant rectangular tower that rose from the seabed at least a hundred feet. The monolithic structure stood atop a circular base and seemed to be constructed entirely of jet-black glass, but faint bluish light seemed to be ricocheting around inside the thing.
Arrayed in a circle around the central tower were six black rectangular structures, identical in design and material, but about forty feet shorter than the primary edifice. It looked, Hawke thought, like Stonehenge as imagined by Stanley Kubrick, something that had stood down here for eons, before man, before machine. What made it all so breathtaking were the flashes of pure spectral and brilliant razor wire of white light that crackled constantly between the central tower and its six satellites.
It was clear that the tallest of the towers was the core AI unit, and that it was exchanging information at unfathomable rates of speed with the other six. Laserlike mental fireworks was the only thing that began to describe it, Hawke thought. And as soon as he thought it, a stunningly colorful nebula, a hologram, filled the upper third of the central edifice. He felt like he was getting a peek at the outermost reaches of the known universe.
When the tunnel reached the outer perimeter of the structures, it nosed down beneath the ocean floor, plunging them into darkness. Embedded in the floor, a fluorescent blue centerline kept them oriented within the winding tunnel. After about 150 yards it began to climb again. Hawke, leading the way, could barely contain the heart beating wildly inside his chest.
Fifty-four
“Lord Hawke, I presume.”
“Good evening,” Hawke replied, carefully considering the deep, rumbling, humanoid voice emanating from somewhere high above. Mesmerizing, that voice, as redolent of the hills and vales of Gloucestershire as had been Aphrodite’s. Not the least bit artificial. Mimicry was clearly a phantom machine’s method of making humans feel at home, at ease, off guard. He’d suspected the duplicity of Darius’s lover; now he was sure of it. No real woman could be that supernaturally alluring.
They stood inside the base of the black tower, surrounded on all four sides by soaring black glass, gazing up in awe. A distant galaxy, pinpricks of light and colorful clouds of star clusters, was visible, whirling near the uppermost reaches of the phantom’s tower. Hawke reached out and touched the glass. It was warm. Body temperature. He felt vibrations in the obsidian, rippling down from above. It made him not want to pull his hand away. It felt, no, it exuded, safety.
He could hear a single word resonating repeatedly within his brain: “Stay. Stay. Stay.” The glass against his hand felt like a mother’s cheek.
“I’ve been expecting you.” The voice resounded again within the mammoth structure.
