Seismic Surge. Don Pendleton

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СКАЧАТЬ Jackson continued.

      “Safety for us. Keeping my documentation of their secrets kills any incentive for them to do the same to us.”

      Jackson looked around.

      “Kill us? Try to silence us? No go,” Gerber said. He let loose a nervous titter. “Their dirt is now in the Cloud. The whole conspiracy sphere knows and is breathing this all in now.”

      “Gerb, they wouldn’t kill federal inspectors,” Jackson countered. His strength ebbed, and he added in a softer, more nervous tone, “Would they?”

      The red-haired ex-Navy man pocketed his phone after frowning at its screen. “I wish I had brought my knife.”

      That was all Gerber had to say for Jackson’s sake. The older man brought out his walkie-talkie and keyed it. All he received was static, unfortunately. He tried again, but the radio was working; it just wasn’t receiving or transmitting any usable signal.

      “Hey! Anyone’s walkies still working?” Jackson yelled as he transferred to his own cell. “Ned?”

      “All the phones are out, Bernie,” Gerber said, deadly serious.

      In the distance he could hear spasmodic coughing erupt. A silhouetted form, Jackson couldn’t tell who, staggered into view, then clutched his throat and chest, toppling over. Sudden bright flares, vomitous blossoms of flame, erupted throughout the area. Smoke billowed from multiple sources, obscuring the scene as at least two men screamed their last.

      “Gerb, you think you can swim?” Jackson asked, his mind racing.

      “Hello! Navy submariner!” Gerber replied. He waved to the hulk, where no flames had erupted yet. “Come on!”

      Jackson followed blindly, sweeping the boatyard around him for signs of impending death or onrushing danger. He hoped that Gerber, in all of his paranoia, knew what he was doing. The coughing brought to mind choking smoke, but the men appeared to be suffocating even before the flames erupted and thick, strangling clouds spread out to suck the breath from them.

      Now all he could see behind him were yellow splashes of glow that burned through black roiling darkness that flowed into the air. Getting to the water was the means to get to safety, a place to duck from the fury of blaze and asphyxiation.

      Jackson tabbed his phone again, dialing 9-1-1, but there was still no signal.

      It didn’t make sense. Only moments before, Gerber had transmitted a call, sending data to the internet. Maybe he’d done that, or now Jackson was hot on the heels of a delusional freak, not a former military man who showed the foresight to upload conspiracy documentation.

      Gerber led him to the hull of the dead freighter, and as they passed through a door, Jackson stopped cold. What he saw was something out of a James Bond movie, a wide, empty interior dock with spaces for four submarines, two on each side of the hull, with loading cranes above to supply the subs with their gear. The covered docks were empty now, but there was no other explanation for the catwalks and support equipment inside the empty ship’s corpse.

      It was crazy.

      Or was he just influenced, mentally contaminated by the ravings of his jug-headed friend?

      Gerber pointed to the water. “We can dive out through there!”

      Jackson followed Gerber, but only visually. His feet had been rooted to the spot thanks to fear and indecision.

      That momentary pause extended the OSHA inspector’s life and allowed him to see that Gerber was right. The younger man tripped, having snagged a small wire.

      A loud hiss erupted immediately, and Gerber folded over, agonized as he passed through what must have been a cloud of poison. Gerber coughed, kicked, gurgled, then his limbs fell still.

      Behind Jackson, the boatyard was a blazing inferno, hot flames racing up the gangplank they’d left behind. On instinct, Jackson threw the hatch shut, hoping that the steel would delay the inevitable blast of heat. He then looked back at Gerber, lying twenty yards away, forever stilled by an invisible hand that crushed the life from his lungs.

      Jackson looked around. Surely there must have been some other way out. He couldn’t sit still forever, but there was an unseen assassin that killed instantly in front of him, or there was the slow, agonizing demise of burning alive behind the hatch, which was swiftly growing warmer, even as he leaned against it.

      There was a railing ahead and a twenty-yard drop into the water. Maybe he could make it through the invisible poison gas, swim beneath it and reach the small locks that emptied out into the harbor. Jackson had little else to choose from, so he hurled himself forward, vaulting the rail.

      Instead of sailing into the water with grace and speed, an agonizing spasm contorted him in midfall, his lungs feeling as if they had been filled to the brim with hot sauce. He didn’t know how much of the gas he’d sucked in, but it didn’t matter. His change in pose, midfall, granted him one small mercy.

      Dropping twenty yards to the water headfirst, without his hands breaking the surface, resulted in his neck shattering, bones driven deep into his skull.

      Instantly dead, Jackson didn’t have to worry about drowning or suffocating from the effects of the nerve gas released inside. The waters also would preserve his corpse for a month as the inferno melted steel, rendering the submarine pen an utterly unrecognizable stack of twisted, deformed and charred metal. In the cold waters off Norfolk, Bernie Jackson’s lifeless form entered a long sleep, never seeing the light of day until thirty days hence.

      * * *

      NATALIE CHASE COULD ONLY imagine the string of luck that had got her this cruise of the Spanish Canary Islands with some of the most beautiful men she’d ever seen. She ran her fingers through her blond curls, calling attention to her face as the guys walked past. Their eyes were agog with all of the women in bikinis who were out on the deck. There must have been two dozen guys, all of them with washboard abs. Not a single extra chin in the bunch.

      The crew of this yacht kept their eyes on everything, the one small hindrance to Natalie’s admonition that the way to really pick up people was to go topless, leaving nothing to the imagination. The captain of the yacht was a handsome man, if likely twice Natalie’s age of twenty-five. She couldn’t tell what kind of body he had under his uniform, but he was tall, square-shouldered, with a disciplined, finely groomed beard and piercing eyes.

      He was the most tantalizing item on this oceangoing all-you-can-eat buffet of beefcake. Captain Raul Espinoza was classically Spanish, with dark hair, skin sun-burned to a pleasing even tan, and clear, cool blue eyes. He was still virile; the salt and pepper of his beard and hair gave proof to that, in Natalie’s eyes.

      The young men around her were fit and trim and handsome, but there was an aloofness to Espinoza that made her feel as if she needed to get to him. He didn’t have wealth, but he had every ounce of manliness that Natalie could imagine.

      There were still the other crew members, swarthy, scruffy, dark-eyed, seeming more as if they belonged in a pirate movie than working on the decks of a miniature cruise ship. They had scars, and hands that looked made more of callus than flesh and bone. Their knuckles were especially distorted, swollen with pads of skin that seemed liked the armor plate on some movie superhero’s suit than the result of working on engines and such.

      “Come СКАЧАТЬ