Devil's Gate (NUMA Files 9)

Djemma fought to control his anger. What he wanted was both, and a designer less insolent and more competent than Cochrane. But between the reports from Andras, the Americans snooping around the Kinjara Maru, and the increasingly pointed questions coming from the World Bank and his other creditors, Djemma didn’t have time for both.

He decided the carcass of a submarine could remain. Once he took action, it wouldn’t matter if the world knew about it or not. That would be the least of their concerns.

“Finish the target lines and the emitters,” he said. “Washington, London, Moscow, Beijing. Those four must be ready in one week or we will be vulnerable.”

He waited for Cochrane’s next battery of complaints and excuses as to why he couldn’t comply, but for the first time in ages none came forth.

“They’ll be ready,” Cochrane said. “I promise you.”

26

Eastern Atlantic, June 23

GAMAY TROUT SAT in a small chair in the Matador’s sick bay with a blanket around her shoulders and a piping hot cup of decaf in front of her. The ship’s doctor wouldn’t allow her the real thing for at least twenty-four hours. She wasn’t drinking it, only using it to warm her hands, so what did it matter? Truthfully, nothing mattered to her now, nothing except the man who lay in front of her, unmoving, on the hospital bed.

The crew of the Matador had plucked her out of the water within five minutes of her surfacing. But with the darkening skies and growing swell, she had never seen Paul surface.

Twenty minutes later, after two agonizingly slow passes, a lookout had spotted Paul, floating faceup. He made no attempt to signal and was only afloat because the wet suit gave him positive buoyancy.

They’d brought him down to sick bay, where she was being treated for mild hypothermia and oxygen deprivation. Immediately, they’d pulled a sheet between the two of them, but she could hear them working feverishly. Someone had called out “No pulse,” and then the doctor said something about “cardiogenic shock.”

At that point she’d grabbed for the curtain and pulled it back. Her husband looked like a ghost, and she’d turned away and begun to cry.

Three hours later, she was up and about and functioning something like her normal self. Paul remained unconscious, covered in blankets, with an IV of warmed fluids dripping into his arm and a mask delivering pure oxygen to his nose and mouth. His eyes remained closed, and he hadn’t as much as twitched in over an hour.

Watching him lie there in such utter stillness, Gamay had to keep checking his heart monitor just to remind herself that he was alive.

She squeezed his hand; it felt like wet clay. She couldn’t remember his hands being anything but warm, even on the coldest New England winter days.

“Come back to me,” she whispered. “Don’t leave me here, Paul. Please don’t leave.”

The door behind her opened, and the ship’s doctor, Hobson Smith, came in. Almost tall enough to require ducking as he came through the door, Smith had a gray Fu Manchu mustache, sharp eyes, and a relaxed, almost fatherly style. No one on board knew how old he was, but if NUMA had any mandatory retirement age Hobson Smith would have been well past it. And the ship all the poorer for it. His presence was like that of a loving uncle.

“No change?” he said as if he were asking her.

“He hasn’t moved,” she said. “His heart rate is—”

“His heart rate is strong,” Smith said, taking over for her. “His pulse is good. The oxygen level in his blood is getting better also.”

“But he’s still unconscious,” she said, unable to use the word coma.

“Yes,” Dr. Smith said. “For now. Paul is strong. Give him a chance to heal.”

She knew he was right, she understood that his vitals were improving, but she needed him to wake up, to smile at her and say something eminently dorky and endearing.

Smith pulled up a chair and sat beside her.

“Arm out,” he said.

She extended her arm, and the doctor put a cuff around her bicep and then pumped it up to take her blood pressure. Next he checked her pulse.

“Just as I thought,” he said.

“What?”

“Your own vitals aren’t great,” he said. “You’re making yourself sicker, worrying about him.”

She exhaled. She hadn’t eaten or even had much to drink since she’d been back up on her feet. But didn’t think she could keep anything down.