Dragon (Dirk Pitt 10)

e reached up and adjusted his glasses, surprised they had remained perched on his nose during the incomprehensible devastation.

Slowly the dark curtain of shock parted, and his first thought was of Old Gert. Straight from a nightmare he could see the submersible damaged and out of contact in the blackness of the deep.

He crawled across the deck in a daze on hands and knees, fighting back the pain, until he could reach up and grasp the receiver to the underwater telephone.

"Gert?" he burst out fearfully. "Do you read?"

He waited several seconds, but there was no reply. He swore in a low monotone.

"Damn you, Plunkett! Talk to me, you bastard!"

His only answer was silence. All communications between the Invincible and Old Gert were broken.

His worst fears were realized. Whatever force had battered the survey ship must have traveled through the water and mangled the submersible that was already subjected to incredible pressures.

"Dead," he whispered. "Crushed to pulp."

His mind suddenly turned to his shipmates, and he called out. He heard only the groan and screech of metal from the dying ship. He moved his eyes to the open doorway and focused on five bodies sprawled in untidy, stiff attitudes like cast-off display mannequins.

He sat fixed in grief and incomprehension. Dimly he felt the ship shudder convulsively, the stern slipping around and sliding beneath the waves as though caught in a whirlpool. Concussions reverberated all around him. The Invincible was about to take her own journey to the abyss.

The urge to live surged within him, and then Knox was scrambling up a slanted deck, too dazed to feel the pain from his injuries. Charging in panic through the door to the crane deck, he dodged around the dead bodies and over the devastated steel equipment that sprawled everywhere. Fear took the place of shock and built to a tight, expanding ball inside him.

He reached the twisted remains of the railing. Without a backward glance, he climbed over and stepped into the waiting sea. A splintered piece of a wooden crate bobbed in the water a few meters away. He swam awkwardly until he could clasp it under one arm and float. Only then did he turn and look at the Invincible.

She was sinking by the stern, her bows lifting above the Pacific swell. She seemed to hang there for a minute, sailing toward the clouds as she slipped backward at an ever increasing speed and disappeared, leaving a few bits of flotsam and a cauldron of churned water that soon subsided into a few bubbles tinted in rainbow colors by the spilled oil.

Frantically Knox searched the sea for other members of the Invincible's crew. There was an eerie hush now that the groans of the sinking ship had passed. There were no lifeboats, no heads of men swimming in the sea.

He found himself the only survivor of a tragedy that had no explanation.

Beneath the surface, the shock wave traveled through the incompressible water at roughly 6,500

kilometers per hour in an expanding circle, crushing all sea life in its path. Old Gert was saved from instant destruction by the canyon walls. They towered above the submersible, shielding it from the main force of the explosive pressure.

Yet the submersible was still whirled about violently. One moment it was level, the next it was tumbled end over end like a kicked football by the turbulence. The pod containing the main batteries and propulsion systems struck the rocklike nodules, cracked and collapsed inward from the tremendous pressure. Fortunately, the hatch covers on each end of the connecting tube held, or the water would have burst into the crew's sphere like a pile driver and mashed them into bloody paste.

The noise of the explosion came over the underwater telephone like a thunderclap almost in unison with the express-train rumble from the shock wave. With their passing, the deep returned to a beguiling silence. Then the calm was broken again by the screech and groan of tortured metal as the ravaged surface ships fell through the deep, buckling and compressing before plunging against the seafloor in great mushroom clouds of silt.

"What is it?" Stacy cried, clutching her chair to keep from being thrown about.

Whether from shock or radical devotion to his work, Salazar's eyes had never left his console. "This is no earthquake. It reads as a surface disturbance."

With the thrusters gone, Plunkett lost all control of Old Gert. He could only sit there in helpless detachment as the sub was tossed across the field of manganese nodules. Automatically he shouted into the underwater telephone, skipping all call sign formalities.

"Jimmy, we're caught in unexplained turbulence! Have lost our thruster pod! Please respond."

Jimmy Knox could not hear. He was fighting to stay alive in the waves far above.

Plunkett was still trying desperately to raise the Invincible when the submersible finally ended her erratic flight and struck the bottom at a forty-degree angle, coming to rest on the sphere surrounding the electrical and oxygen equipment.

"This is the end," Salazar murmured, not really knowing what he meant, his mind mired in shock and confusion.

"The hell it is!" snapped Plunkett. "We can still drop ballast weights and make it to the top."

He knew as he spoke that releasing all the iron ballast weights might not overcome the added weight of the water within the shattered pod, plus the suction from the muck. He activated the switches, and hundreds of pounds of dead weight dropped free from the submersible's underbelly.