Devil's Gate (NUMA Files 9)

Joe shrugged. “Not a problem,” he said. “Everything we put inside is waterproofed and designed for a high-pressure environment.”

“Sounds good,” Kurt said.

He looked pleased. Joe knew he would be. And so he dropped the bomb.

“There is one minor problem.”

Kurt’s gaze narrowed. “What’s that?”

“Dirk called me before you got here.”

“And?”

“He gave me orders not to let you talk me into anything reckless.”

“Reckless?”

“He knows us too well,” Joe said, guessing it took one adventurous, even “reckless,” mind to know the workings of another.

Kurt nodded, smiling a bit. “That he does. On the other hand, ‘reckless’ gives us a lot of leeway.”

“Sometimes you scare me,” Joe said. “Just putting that on the record.”

“Draw up the plans,” Kurt said. “The race is in two days. After that, we’re on our own.”

Joe smiled, liking the challenge. And while he feared the wrath of Dirk Pitt if they lost NUMA’s million-dollar Barracuda, he was pretty certain that he and Kurt had built up enough markers to cover it if they did.

Besides, if the stories he’d been told were true, Dirk had lost a few of Admiral Sandecker’s more expensive toys over the years. How angry could he really get?

11

AS HE STRODE THROUGH THE PASSAGEWAY of the NUMA vessel Matador, Paul Trout had to duck each time he came to a bulkhead and its watertight door. While anyone over six feet had to crouch at the bulkheads or risk a nasty whack of the head, Paul was six-foot-eight in bare feet, with wide shoulders and long limbs. He all but had to contort himself to make it through unscathed.

An avid fisherman who preferred the outdoors, Paul was simply not designed for the tight quarters found inside a modern vessel. Naturally, he spent much of his time in one ship or another, twisting himself into small machinery-filled compartments, bending his spine like a pretzel to fit into submersibles, or even just walking the inner passageways of the ship.

On another day he would have detoured outside onto the main deck before walking the length of the ship, but the Matador was currently operating off the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. It was winter in the Southern Hemisphere, and both the wind and sea were up already.

Climbing through another hatch, Paul reached a more spacious compartment. He peered inside. The dimly lit room was quiet, with most of the light coming from glowing dials, backlit keyboards, and a trio of high-definition, flat-screen monitors.

A pair of scruffy-looking researchers sat in front of the outboard monitors, while in between them, on a plate of backlit glass marked with a grid, stood a shapely woman with hands outstretched as if she were balancing on a tightrope. A visor covered her eyes and held her wine red hair like a band, while strange-looking gauntlets with wires running from them encased her hands. On her feet a set of high-tech boots sprouted wires of their own, all of which ran to a large computer a few feet behind her.

Paul smiled to himself as he watched his wife, Gamay. She looked like a robotic ballerina. She moved her head to the right, and the picture on the monitors moved similarly, bright lights illuminating a smooth, sediment-covered surface with a jagged hole in what had once been the hull of a British naval vessel.

“Gentlemen,” she said, “there’s the entry point of the Exocet missile that sank your proud ship.”

“It doesn’t look all that bad, really,” one of the men said, his English accent as thick as his beard.

The Sheffield was the first major British casualty of the Falklands War, hit by a French-made missile that didn’t detonate but still ignited fires that raged throughout the ship.

She survived for six days after the attack before sinking during an attempt to tow her to port.

“Bloody French,” the other Englishman said. “Probably just getting back at us for Waterloo and Trafalgar.”

The bearded man laughed. “Actually, they went to great lengths to tell us the weaknesses of these missiles, and that helped us stop them, but I’d have preferred if they’d been a wee bit more cautious about who they sold them to in the first place.”

He pointed to the opening. “Can you take it inside?”

“Sure,” Gamay said.