Warriors (17 page)

“You wasted our friend, you little scumball, now it’s your turn to die, motherfucker.”

Stoke knelt down and took Shark’s hand. “Stay with it,” he said. “Stay with it.”

C
H A P T E R
  2 1

L
ieutenant Moose Taylor was first to scramble up the rope ladder and onto the acres of steel deck. And so it was that he was first to make the earliest of many startling discoveries his men would find aboard this “rocket ship” (as the captain was now calling it) that had come from beneath the sea.

Nobody, not the captain up on the bridge or anyone else on board
Dauntless
had even gotten a glimpse of the entire structure of the sub due to the thick fog.

But from where Moose was standing, all alone amidships on this vast black steel plain, Taylor made his first amazing discovery.

There was no damn conning tower on this thing!

Really? A submarine with no conning tower? What the hell was going on here? He could see all the way to the stern . . . and there was nothing. There wasn’t even a damn periscope, communications aerials, nothing . . . which raised a question: How the hell did you
steer
the damn thing?

He adjusted his headset lip-mike to raise Stubbs down in the patrol boat. “Turtle, this is Joyboy, you copy?”

“Copy.”

“You are not going to believe this shit, brother.”

“Talk to me, papa.”

“There’s nothing up here to see. A clean deck. I mean, a vessel three football fields long with no conning tower? No abovedeck superstructure whatsoever. No nav systems, radar, or comms aerials. Nothing! Just one giant long-ass empty deck stretching for miles in both directions. It’s nuts! How the hell do they see to navigate this mother?”

“Port lights in the bow? Below the waterline? Like that
Nautilus
James Mason skippered in
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
?”

“Locate the conn in the bow? You know what, Ensign Stubbs? That’s not the stupidest idea you’ve ever had. But, still . . . okay, I’m stamping my boots on the hull. See if I get a reaction inside. . . . It’s all clear up here, Stubbie, send the first guy up the rope.”

A few minutes later, Taylor stood on the wet deck in the thick fog, helping his men scramble up onto the broad foredeck. The entire deck, far broader than any sub deck he’d ever seen, was covered with a strange, spongy black rubber grid. Like a honeycomb. It was obviously meant to be slip-proof and it felt good underfoot. Whoever had designed this crazy monster may have forgotten to give it a conning tower, but he sure as hell knew what he was doing otherwise.

“You’re not going to believe this,” he’d say as each man mounted the final step of the ladder. “Look down there. No conning tower. No periscope. No nothing.”

“Holy shit, Lieutenant,” Stubbs said, gaining the top and looking from stem to stern at the wide featureless deck. “I had to see it with my own eyes to believe you. Kinda creeps me out, Skipper.
It Came from Beneath the Sea
kinda thing, you know?”

“Boo!” Taylor said, and Stubbs jumped back but only a little and a couple of guys snickered. Taylor was the kind of young officer who could get away with stuff like that because you could do it right back to him and he didn’t get all ranky about it.

“Okay, rescue team on me,” Taylor said, and the mystified team from
Dauntless
hurried back from wandering around in awe to huddle up with their commanding officer.

With the entire team gathered round him on deck, Taylor barked out orders. Check sidearms and weapons. Be alert for any sound of survivors. He would take five men forward to inspect the vessel. Locate the hatches and listen for signs of life. Stubbs and his five-man squad would go aft and do the same.

They would meet back here amidships in ten minutes.

Taylor fanned his men out and they all walked six abreast toward the bow, eyes down, scouring the decks. He searched in vain for nonexistent hatches and found not one. But that was far from the most troublesome thing.

The really bad thing was a seemingly endless number of long-range missile silos. There were silos arrayed to port and starboard. In fact, the entire forward section of the submarine deck was an ICBM launch pad. He counted the hatch covers. Twenty to port. And twenty to starboard. Not just your everyday submarine missile launch tubes, either. Monsters.

These hatches were six feet in diameter, the covers twice as big as New York City manhole covers.

Forty giant nuclear warheads.

Forty?

On one behemoth of a sub? With no freaking conning tower and not a solitary sign of life aboard?

Whatever this goddamn thing was, it was not good news.

“YOU FOUND WHAT, SIR? LIEUTENANT?”
Stubbs asked Taylor when they regrouped amidships. The temperature was dropping rapidly, and another storm front was moving in from the west, winds topping forty knots riffling the surface, sweeping across the seas and plowing up huge, heaving waves in endless ranks toward the horizon.

Taylor told him about the forty launch tubes he’d seen forward. “What about you guys? Anything?”

“Nothing,” Stubbs said. “Nothing nearly as interesting as what you found.”

“Nothing,” Taylor repeated.

“A whole lot of nothing, sir, that’s what we found. I don’t know exactly how to tell you this but . . . there are no hatches on this boat, Lieutenant. Not a one.”

“Yeah, I know. Did you hear anything? Anything human, I mean. Banging a coffee cup on the overhead like the old WWII movies?”

“Nada, sir.”

“There’s got to be a way inside this damn thing.”

“You’d think.”

“Well, we can always go back and tell the skipper, sorry, we couldn’t find the crew, sir.”

“That would be a very bad idea, sir.”

“So we’ll torch our way in. There’s a broad section of bare deck just aft of the missile silos. We’ll use acetylene and go in there. Cut a hole in her and see what we see.”

“I’ve got two men with torches, sir.”

“Good. Let’s get moving.”

IT WAS THE WORK OF
about twenty minutes to cut a three-foot-diameter hole in the center of the hull. Taylor dropped to his knees on the rim and peered down inside. It was dark, but he could make out a fairly wide companionway going fore and aft. Oblong shaped. No visible lighting. No sign of life at all.

And eerily quiet.

“We are a boarding party from the USS
Dauntless,
” he called out through his loud-hailer. “Do you require assistance?”

He got only a hollow echo in reply.

He repeated the message twice more to no effect; as he got to his feet, he heard his radio squawk in his headset. It was the captain.

“Lieutenant Taylor, what the hell is going on over there? Any survivors?”

“No exterior hatches, sir; we had to cut our way in. They’re not answering our hails, sir.”

“For crissakes, Lieutenant.”

“They’re either all dead or they’re trapped in a different watertight hull section from the one we penetrated. If I had to guess, sir, I’d say any survivors would have ended up in the stern sections after that insane high-speed ascent straight up.”

“Agree, Lieutenant. Go find ’em and report back when you do.”

“Aye-aye, Captain,” Taylor said and signed off.

“Wait. Look at that!” Ensign Stubbs said. He dropped to one knee and peered inside.

“What have you got?”

“Some kind of a hazy red light. Just started blinking. Seems to be in the companionway, way forward of our entry point.”

Moose said: “Same drill below as topside. Two details, one goes forward, one aft. My detail goes aft. I want to find survivors. And I want to get a look at the reactors. Stubbs detail goes forward. Find out what kind of missiles this ghost ship is packing. Weapons at the ready. No LED lamps unless it’s an emergency. Use your night vision. Clear every goddamn room and call it. Got it? And watch your asses. This thing spooks me. It feels like a colossal goatfuck just waiting to happen.”

FIVE MINUTES LATER, THEY WERE
all belowdecks and gathered inside the belly of the beast.

Standing in the grey and misty sunlight directly below the gaping hole they’d cut in the hull, Taylor said a silent prayer for the safety of his men. Then he lowered his NV goggles and led them aft toward the stern. They moved in single file, slowly along the length of the dark tube, ready for anything. The ship had clearly powered down after the furious ascent.

It may have been dead in the water.

But it was a killing machine. And it exuded a kind of dark kinetic energy they could feel in the marrow of their bones.

C
H A P T E R
  2 2

T
here was a small hamlet in the rather flat countryside situated about thirty miles from Cambridge Town called Haversham. It was not a picture postcard village by any stretch, just a rather drear little place, forlorn, really, with a couple of dingy pubs, a sad, ill-lit curry house, fish and chips, and a petrol station.

One of its few notable distinctions was that the Greenwich prime meridian line passed directly beneath the eighteenth-century Anglican church at the heart of town.

The only other thing of any real note could be found in a heavily wooded forest at the end of a long dirt cart path, a seldom used road winding between fenced sheep pastures and farmland. Hidden deeply from sight within the folds of a vast stand of great birch was an epic structure dating to the fifteenth century.

That’s when it was known as the Palace of the Bishop of Ely.

The palace, now a less holy structure, had definitely seen better days. The mere fact that the towers, domes, and crenellated walls were still standing defied physics, but the new owner had no misgivings about her purchase of it. Decay was one of her private fetishes.

The palace was remote, private, and removed from the public eye, the fact that it was overgrown with climbing
Hedera helix,
or ivy, vines, had more than a few windows missing, and was in a fairly advanced state of decomposition did not trouble her in the slightest.

Tiny veins of moss had grown into the cavities of the stones until, viewed near at hand, the entire edifice seemed shaggy with vegetation. The slender and corroded mullions of the windows had old panes, the glass flecked with oblong bubbles and tinged with lavender. The foreboding entrance in the forecourt boasted two massive stone ravens to either side of the doorway.

“Well, then, what do you think of my find?” Professor Moon said, hands on her hips, leaning back to admire her newly acquired dream house.

“My God, Chyna, it looks like something out of a 1930s horror film,” her young friend Lorelei Li had said as they’d gotten out of the backseat of Moon’s silver 1930s vintage Rolls-Royce.

“I knew you’d like it, Lorelei,” Chyna Moon said with a smile that couldn’t mask her condescension. “It’s perfect, right? Look, it’s even got a moat!”

“You mean an algae pond. And, please, look at those old walls,” Lorelei said. “Even those are covered with slime! Sorry, but it’s gross.”

“It is not slime, darling,” Chyna said, “it is moss.
Barbula unguiculata
. Bird’s claw, look it up. C’mon, girl, let’s have a look inside.”

“Tell me it doesn’t have a dungeon.”

“Oh, no, darling, I think it actually does. And acres of gardens full of poisonous plants once used for, as they say, medicinal purposes.”

Lorelei had wandered off into the overgrown gardens, stumbling upon a bizarre edifice.

“A poison garden? Oh my God, you’ve really lost it. Hello, look here. What is this, pray tell?”

Chyna peered around a bush.

“Why, it’s a Victorian aviary! How absolutely divine. Imagine the birds!”

“An aviary? Whatever on earth are we to do with an aviary?”

“Oh, I’ll think of something, darling, don’t worry your pretty head about that.”

She’d written a cashier’s check for the property that very day.

CHYNA MOON GRINNED AS HER
vintage Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle skidded to a stop near the secret entrance to her drive. The roads were sheer black ice in this part of the countryside, but she was a crack rider and had barely reduced her speed on the way home.

She checked her rearview mirrors quickly before reaching for the toggle switch mounted on the shiny black fuel tank. The radio signal would part the overgrown hedgerow and admit entrance to her property. The clouds of snow had settled, and the path behind her was clear. She thought she’d seen a car, a black Audi A7, pick her up on the M14 roundabout just outside of Cambridge. But she was fairly certain she’d lost the bugger on the narrow and twisty roads leading to Haversham.

There was a normal gated entrance to the estate, of course, but she seldom used it. The massive wrought-iron gates were guarded round the clock and Chyna liked to come and go as she pleased. And she came and went at all hours, being one of those ultra-beings whose need for sleep seemed nonexistent.

She depressed her left boot, geared down, and accelerated rapidly and noisily up the gravel drive. The road to the palace wound through the dense, dark wood, and she arrived at the back entrance of her home five minutes later.

A houseman, a young kitchen boy she was rather keen on, was waiting to take her helmet, goggles, and briefcase full of papers. She’d given an important university lecture that morning on the deteriorating state of Asian political affairs. The BBC had been there with a film crew, hence the tight black Chanel skirt riding dangerously high on her thighs despite the cold.

She gave the kid a deliberate flash of palest pink panties while dismounting the bike and was happy to see him blush scarlet as he took her things with shaky hands.

“Welcome back, Dr. Moon,” he said, waiting for her to shrug her way out of her tight-fitting vintage leather racing jacket.

“Is Miss Lorelei at home?”

“No, Madame. She’s out riding with the new trainer. Over to Huntingdon or St. Ives, they went. She said to tell you she left something important for you with the mail on the front hall table. Courier brought it up from London, midday. Important, she said.”