Devil's Gate (NUMA Files 9)

Eastern Atlantic, June 24

A POUNDING ON HIS CABIN DOOR woke Joe Zavala. He sat straight up, almost ran for the door as if general quarters had sounded, and then remembered he wasn’t in the Navy anymore.

The pounding returned. “Captain wants you on the bridge, Zavala,” a voice shouted.

“Tell him I’ll be right there,” Joe said, grabbing his pants and pulling them on.

He heard footsteps as the messenger ran off. Only then did he sense that the Argo was in motion, not turning or making steerage or sitting at anchor near the anomaly but charging through the water as if racing something.

Joe pulled a shirt over his head, stuffed his bare feet into sneakers that he never untied, and then ran out the door.

A minute later, he was on the bridge. The Argo was indeed moving at flank speed, the bow rising and dropping as it rode the increasing swells.

“Captain,” Joe said, reporting for duty even though he wasn’t technically one of the crew.

“Where in God’s green earth or Poseidon’s blue water is Austin?” Captain Haynes barked.

Still a little groggy, Joe offered up his honest thoughts. “Probably waking up to something a lot nicer than I just woke up to.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He’s on a date,” Joe said.

“A date?” Haynes shook his head. “How does a guy get a date out here in the middle of the ocean?”

Joe scratched his head. “That’s a good question,” he said. “I wish I could figure it out because, honestly, it gets kind of lonely when—”

“Zavala!” the captain shouted. “Wake up, man. This is not a dream. I need your full attention. Who is Austin out with?”

For a second, Joe wondered if it was a dream. The captain was acting weird. Kurt was a grown man, and Joe had reported Kurt’s disposition to the officer of the watch upon returning from the Zodiac.

“He’s with the Russian scientist he rescued from one of the wrecks,” Joe said. “She told him she had some secret information that he might find interesting.”

“What time was he planning on coming back?”

“Well,” Joe said, “I guess that would kind of depend on how the date went… sir.”

The captain cut his eyes at Joe and Joe burst out laughing.

“I’m sorry,” Joe said, “but you sound like my pop back when my brother took the family car without asking and stayed out way past curfew. What’s the big deal?”

The captain explained about the attack on the Grouper, Paul Trout’s condition, and NUMA’s theory that some type of electromagnetic weapon had been used on the Kinjara Maru. He made a point of explaining that whoever attacked the Grouper had used torp edoes.

“What are they doing now?” Joe asked.

“They’re headed due west at full speed,” the captain said. “Sometime tomorrow they’ll be in range of a Navy guided-missile frigate. At that point they should be safe, and Paul will be transferred to a hospital ship.”

“What about us? Is that why we’re heading in?”

“The Director feels it’s too dangerous to sit out here alone,” the captain said. “If someone’s targeting those with knowledge, we, and Austin, could be next. He’s going to contact the Spanish and Portuguese admirals tomorrow and get us some backup. But until then, he wants us docked and all hands accounted for. And that’s why I’m concerned. Because Kurt hasn’t answered his damn phone all night.”

“Have we contacted the local police?”

“Yes,” the captain said. “We’ve made them aware of who Kurt is, what he looks like, and the fact that we’re trying to find him. And they’ve made us aware of a fight, gunfire, and a vehicular chase that ended in two cars going off a cliff on a normally peaceful island. A man fitting Kurt’s description was involved, but no body matching his has been recovered.”

Thank God, Joe thought. He gazed through the Argo’s forward windows. The lights of Santa Maria were visible up ahead.

“We’ll reach port in twenty minutes. I want you to come up with a plan to find him,” the captain said. “I don’t care if you use the phone or some flares or you rent a damn plane to fly around trailing a banner that reads ‘Kurt Austin, Call NUMA.’ You just find him before anything else goes wrong.”