Zero Hour (NUMA Files 11)

“They’re my crew,” he said. “My responsibility.”

Kurt understood that. He figured lack of sleep and guilt were weighing on the captain’s mind too.

“Most of your crewmen already gave their lives to fight this,” Kurt said. “So did nine members of the ASIO, and at least four civilians who’ve tried to escape Thero’s grasp. The only way to give those deaths meaning is to stop Thero from winning. We have a chance to do that if we side with Gregorovich. It’s a long shot. But it’s the only shot we have.”

Winslow seemed unsure.

Kurt put his hand on the captain’s shoulder and looked him in the eye. “I know what you’re going through. None of us would even be in this situation if I’d kept my nose out of it. Those crewmen’s lives are on me, not you. But we can’t bring them back. We can only do our best to make sure their deaths are not in vain.”

Winslow looked back at Kurt. He seemed to understand. “So what do we do now?”

“We have to reduce the number of commandos at their disposal,” Kurt said. “Even the odds a little.”

“How? They have us under guard.”

Kurt had been thinking about this while losing in chess to Gregorovich. “They eat buffet style around here,” he said, having noted the setup on his single pass through the mess hall. “This ship is filthy. It has to be crawling with bacteria. Scrape up any kind of grunge you can find. I don’t care where you get it from, and, frankly, I don’t want to know. Collect it up and find a way to drop it in the food right around chow time — after we’ve gotten our fill of course.”

“Germ warfare,” Joe noted.

“If the commandos are too sick to fight, Gregorovich will have no choice but to take us along.”

“I like it,” Joe said. “What if he leaves us behind anyway?”

“Then we take over the ship and radio NUMA if we can.”

Joe nodded, and Hayley offered a sad smile. Even the XO cracked a grin at the thought of going on the offensive for a change. Winslow agreed. “Okay,” he said. “I’m with you.”

THIRTY

Tartarus

Deep beneath the surface of the ice-covered island, Patrick Devlin found his ears ringing. The bone-shaking sound of a huge rock drill grinding away had all but deafened him over the past hour. When it suddenly stopped, the silence was almost painful.

“That’s deep enough,” a burly foreman shouted.

Devlin backed away from the wall. The heavy drill was mounted on an ore cart of sorts. Padi’s job was to keep pressure on it and drill a series of boreholes in the wall. Covered in dust and grime, he stepped back as another man placed a series of charges in the holes and began attaching wires to the caps.

A sharp whistle sounded. “Everyone to the tunnel,” a foreman demanded.

Spread about the large cavern, a dozen other workers busy crushing rocks and scooping the rubble onto a conveyor belt stopped what they were doing and began trudging toward a small tunnel entrance on one side of the room.

They fit themselves inside, taking shelter under the steel-reinforced arch, weary souls glad to put down their tools for a moment. Devlin noticed their faces were drawn but their bodies fit.

With the armed foreman and his assistant checking the explosives, he took a chance. “What’s your name?” he asked a black man who stood beside him.

“My name is Masinga,” the man replied in a distinct South African accent.

Devlin nodded. “I’m Patrick,” he said. “Sometimes, people call me Padi. What is this place?”

“Don’t you know?”

Devlin shook his head.

“Diamond mine,” Masinga said.

Devlin studied the crumbled rock sitting on the motionless conveyor belt. “I don’t see any diamonds.”

“They’re in the rock,” Masinga explained. “Not much of a miner if you don’t know that.”