The voices seemed to be some distance away, in a corridor or an adjoining room, but the woman’s was raised in anger and he could hear them clearly. They switched from Russian to English and he realized it was Aslan and Katya.
“These are personal matters,” Aslan said. “We will speak in English so my mujahedin do not hear this blasphemy.”
“Your mujahedin.” Katya’s voice was full of contempt. “Your mujahedin are jihadists. They fight for Allah, not Aslan.”
“I am their new prophet. Their loyalty is to Aslan.”
“Aslan.” Katya spat out the word with derision. “Who is Aslan? Piotr Alexandrovich Nazarbetov. A failed professor from an obscure university with delusions of grandeur. You do not even wear the beard of a holy man. And remember I know about our Mongol heritage. Genghis Khan was an infidel who destroyed half the Muslim world. Someone ought to tell that to your holy warriors.”
“You forget yourself, my daughter.” The voice was icy.
“I remember what I had to learn as a child. He who will abide by the Koran will prosper, he who offends against it will get the sword. The faith does not allow the murder of innocents.” Her voice was a ragged sob. “I know what you did to my mother.”
Aslan’s heavy breathing sounded to Costas like a pressure cooker about to explode.
“Your mujahedin are biding their time,” Katya continued. “They are using you until you become expendable. That submarine will be your tomb as well. All you have done by creating this terrorist sanctuary is hasten your own demise.”
“Silence!” The demented scream was followed by the sounds of a scuffle and something being dragged away. Moments later there were returning footsteps. They halted behind Costas. A pair of hands jerked his shoulders back against the chair.
“Your presence is polluting,” the voice hissed against his ear, still breathing heavily. “You are about to make your final journey.”
Fingers snapped and two pairs of hands wrenched him upright. In his world of darkness he was unaware of the blow when it came, an instant of pain followed by merciful oblivion.
Jack seemed to be in a living nightmare. He saw only pitch-blackness, a darkness so complete it eclipsed all sensory points of reference. All around him was an immense rushing noise punctuated by creaks and groans. His mind struggled to make sense of the unimaginable. As he lay contorted against the bulkhead he felt oddly lightweight, his body almost levitating as if he were caught in the grip of some demonic fever.
He now knew what it felt like to be trapped inside the bowels of a sinking ship as it plunged into the abyss. His salvation was Seaquest’s command module, its fifteen-centimetre-thick walls of titanium-reinforced steel protecting him from the crushing pressure that would by now have burst his eardrums and collapsed his skull. He could hear rending and buckling as the remaining air pockets imploded, a noise that would have spelled instant death had he failed to make it into the module in time.
All he could do now was brace himself against the inevitable. The fall seemed interminable, far longer than he had expected, and the noise increased in a shrieking crescendo like an approaching express train. The end when it came was as violent as it was unheralded. The hull crashed into the seabed with a sickening jolt, generating a G force that would have killed him had he not been crouched with his head in his arms. It took all his strength to keep from being thrown upwards as the hull rebounded, the surge accompanied by a horrific tearing sound. Then the wreckage settled and silence descended.
“Activate emergency lighting.”
Jack spoke to himself as he felt his body for further injury. His voice sounded strangely disembodied, its cadences absorbed by the soundproof panelling on the walls, yet it gave a measure of reality in a world that had lost all waymarkers.
As a diver Jack was used to orienting in utter darkness, and now he brought all his experience to bear. After his tumble through the hatch the missile impact had blown him past the weapons locker towards the control panels on the far side of the module. Fortunately Seaquest had come to rest upright. As he rose uncertainly to his feet he could sense the slant of the deck where the bow had ploughed into the seabed. He dropped back to his knees and felt his way across the floor, his intimate knowledge of the vessel he had helped design guiding him past the consoles that lined the interior.
He reached a fuse box in the wall to the left of the entry hatch and felt for the switch that connected the reserve battery in its protective lead housing to the main circuitry. His hand found the lever that activated the emergency lighting. Not for the first time that day he shut his eyes tight and prayed for luck.
To his relief the room was immediately bathed in fluorescent green. His eyes quickly adjusted and he turned round to survey the scene. The module was below the waterline, and the shells which had skewered Seaquest had passed through the hull above. The equipment and fixtures seemed shipshape and battened down, the module having been designed to survive precisely this kind of attack.
His first task was to disengage the module from the hull. He made his way unsteadily to the central dais. It seemed inconceivable that he had assembled the crew here for the briefing less than forty-eight hours before. He slumped heavily in the command chair and activated the control panel. The LCD monitor scrolled through a series of password requests before initiating the disengage sequence. After the third password a drawer sprang open and he took out a key which he slotted into the panel and turned clockwise. The electronic propulsion and atmosphere control systems would kick in as soon as the module was a safe distance from the wreckage.
Without Seaquest’s sensors, Jack would have no data on depth or local environment until the module was clear of the hull and had activated its own array. He guessed he had fallen into the chasm recorded by Seaquest to the north of the island, a gash ten kilometres long and half a kilometre wide that Costas had identified as a tectonic fault on the same line as the volcano. If so, he was mired in the dustbin of the south-eastern Black Sea, a collecting point for silt and a reservoir of brine from the Ice Age. With every passing minute the wreckage would be sinking further into a slurry of sediment more intractable than quicksand. Even if he managed to disengage, he might simply drive the module deeper into the ooze, entombing him with no hope of escape.
He strapped himself in and leaned back on the headrest. The computer gave him three chances to abort and each time he pressed continue. After the final sequence, a red warning triangle appeared with the word disengaging flashing in the centre. For an alarming moment the room reverted to darkness as the computer re-routed the circuitry to the internal battery pod.
A few seconds later the silence was broken by a dull staccato noise outside the casing to his left. Each muffled concussion represented a tiny explosive charge rigged to blow out the rivets in Seaquest’s hull and create an aperture large enough for the module to pass through. As the panel sheared off, the space surrounding the module filled with seawater and the bathymetric sensor came online. Jack swivelled towards the exit trajectory and braced himself as the water jets came to life, a low hum that increased in a crescendo as the engines bucked against the pivots that secured the module to the hull. A series of detonations erupted behind him as the module separated from its retaining bolts. Simultaneously the locking clamps retracted and he was thrown back violently in the seat, the compression as the saucer ejected equalling the multiple G force of a rocket launch.
The module had been designed to blast from a sinking ship beyond the suction vortex as the hull plummeted to the sea floor. Jack had experienced a simulation at IMU’s deep-water test facility off Bermuda, when the saucer came to a halt a hundred metres away. Here, the G force was followed by an equally violent jolt in the opposite direction, the module stopping only a few metres beyond the wreckage.