Sea of Greed

As Kurt crouched there, waiting to attack, a large eruption of bubbles began to foam up on the surface directly in front of the crewmen. One of them stood, leaning forward for a better look. “It’s coming from the Wasp.”

As they looked on, Joe broke the surface, propelled upward by a combination of his own strength and the full energy of the powered dive suit. He surged toward the crewman like a crocodile at the edge of a muddy river.

Instead of a bite, Joe grabbed the man with both hands, yanking him forward and pulling him off the dock and into the water.

The other men stood and rushed forward in shock. They never saw Kurt coming.

Kurt clubbed one man in the back of the neck and he dropped straight down onto the metal grating without anything more than a grunt of pain.

The second man turned, took a punch to the gut, which doubled him over, and a knee to the face that finished him off.

By the time Joe surfaced with the third man — who was coughing and spitting out water and in no mood to fight — Kurt was tying the first two men up.

In a minute flat, all three were stripped of their coveralls, tied and stuffed into the passenger compartment of the strange submarine with the tanker on its hull.

“How many people do you have down here?” Kurt asked.

“Twelve,” one of the crewmen said.

“Including the three of you?”

The man nodded.

“Where did Volke and Millard go?”

“The control sphere.”

Kurt found some tape and slapped it over the mouths of the captives. Additional lengths of tape were wrapped around their ankles and wrists to ensure they wouldn’t slip their bonds.

“You three, sit tight,” Joe said.

With the men secured, Kurt and Joe took off their own helmets, stored them and pulled the crewmen’s coveralls over their dive suits. The compact rebreathers were flat enough to be hidden, especially as the lines and regulators retracted into the unit itself. And while Kurt and Joe appeared slightly hunchbacked when studied in profile, the overalls were loose-fitting enough to disguise it.

Dressed appropriately, they climbed out of the submarine and made their way into the tunnel that Volke and Millard had taken.

“Brilliant idea to turn this into a habitat,” Kurt said. “Spheres are naturally resistant to pressure. Like an archway, only in three dimensions.”

“Normally, I’d agree with you,” Joe said. “But they’ve cut a bunch of holes in them. This tunnel and the gap down below were definitely not part of the original design. From an engineering perspective, that weakens things considerably. I wouldn’t want to live and work down here, and I wouldn’t bet our lives on the structural integrity of this setup. Especially if anything goes wrong.”

Kurt laughed lightly. “What,” he asked, “could possibly go wrong?”

38

GREAT SOUND, BERMUDA

PRIYA SWAM toward the Monarch, aiming for a spot beneath the nose of the huge aircraft. If she was right, the security system would include cameras situated on either side of the bay and motion sensors protecting the grounds of the palatial estate, but nothing directly beneath the plane.

Swimming underneath the Monarch’s belly, she marveled at the size of it. The aircraft was nearly the length of a World War II destroyer. She noticed the details of the hull that weren’t visible in photographs.

The front of the hull was thicker and covered with tiny lines and ridges like those used on America’s Cup yachts. They would make the craft more slippery in the water.

Farther back, the underside of the plane took on a Coke bottle shape and, from that point on, was perforated with thousands of tiny holes that stretched from one side of the aircraft to the other. They could only be high-pressure air valves, designed to pump millions of bubbles into the space between the fuselage and the water.

The process was called supercavitation. It temporarily and drastically reduced the drag on any object moving through a fluid. Using a similar method, marine engineers, including some in NUMA, were building torpedoes and specialized submarines that could do well over a hundred knots.

Priya marveled at the ingenuity and the extent to which it had been used. Without the system, she doubted the Monarch could ever leave the water.

Continuing toward the tail, Priya reached a spot where the hull began to curve upward. Shutting off the power assist of the dive suit and setting her buoyancy to neutral, she surfaced beneath the slope of the rising tail section. It stretched upward and back at an angle, keeping her in the shadows.

“Time for you to start giving up your secrets,” she whispered to the plane.

She unzipped a small pouch and pulled out a device the size and shape of a smoke alarm. Next, twisting the top of the geotracker a quarter turn, she activated the device and then peeled a protective layer from the base, exposing the adhesive.