Bloodline: A Sigma Force Novel Read online

  Still, he had to admit the panorama was stunning.

  One passenger was not as impressed.

  “This is so wrong,” Kowalski said. He was seated across from Gray; the big man had one palm against the glass window, another on the ceiling. He stared between his legs. “How long is this going to take? What if we run out of air?”

  Gray recognized the space was cramped, especially for someone of Kowalski’s bulk. Jack piloted the craft from a single seat up in the nose. The four chairs in back left little room to maneuver. Even Kane had to balance on Tucker’s lap, panting at the view, ears high, trembling all over.

  Seichan sat behind Kowalski and reached a reassuring hand to touch his shoulder. “Calm down. We’ve got plenty of air.” She patted his back. “I’d be more worried about us springing a leak.”

  Kowalski swiveled in his seat, searching around the cabin with wide eyes.

  Gray gave her a scolding look. All they needed was a panicked bull in their midst.

  “How much farther?” Kowalski moaned.

  The answer came from up front. “We have to cross the entire World to reach your destination.”

  Jack tapped a button on a touch-screen interface. A heads-up display appeared above his controls, glowing against the window. It depicted a map of the surface, showing hundreds of tiny islands forming silhouettes of the seven continents.

  Gray recognized it as another of Dubai’s projects. The World was one of the city’s latest endeavors: three hundred mini-islands off the coast, each offered for sale to private buyers. But financial concerns and problems with sand erosion threatened the development. The islands remained mostly deserted, with the sea reclaiming some.

  On the display, a red blip marked their progress as they navigated through this man-made archipelago.

  Beyond the window, a dark hummock of one of the tiny islands loomed. As they circled past it, a large ray, disturbed by their passage, shook out of the sand and sailed away from the light and back into the gloom. Other sea life appeared, growing more abundant as they glided through the shallows and wound past the small isles: hermit crabs scuttled along the sandy floor, pink anemone and green sea grass waved, a lone barracuda torpedoed past them, and schools of fish flashed and swirled in shimmering silvers and dazzling colors.

  Tucker suddenly swore. Kane barked.

  Gray turned to see a shoal of hammerhead sharks come lancing out of the darkness and shoot past overhead. They all inadvertently ducked. There was no real threat, but it was a sobering reminder of the dangers ahead.

  After a few more silent minutes, they left the World behind.

  The deeper seas beckoned.

  The Ghost sailed out into the blackness, slowly sinking into the depths as the coastal shelf fell away. As they dove, the watery glow of the moon died overhead. The only lights now were their own.

  And even that had to end.

  “Going dark,” Jack warned. “You’ll find your goggles under your chairs.”

  Before Gray could find his, all the exterior lamps clicked off. Blackness crushed around them. Kowalski gasped. The small lights from the control console were the only illumination inside the submersible, and even those went dim.

  Gray’s fingers discovered the strap for his night-vision headgear and tugged them free. He pulled the goggles over his head and settled them in place. The world beyond the sub reappeared again, lit now by the infrared LED emitters along the nose of the vessel. The goggles were able to perceive this spectrum of light, turning the world into a grayscale shadow of its former brightness.

  “Don’t want to ride up to Utopia with our lights blazing,” Jack said. “Even with the sub submerged, someone might see us coming. Luckily, we don’t need lights. I incorporated this naval IR system to accommodate for night dives. Makes for less of a rude intrusion into the dark world of our deep-sea denizens.”

  Or when you need stealth, like now.

  The plan was to sneak under the island’s security net. The surface radar defense system was meant to discourage pirate ships, like those in Somalia, from reaching the island’s coast undetected. Additionally, armed security guards watched the docks and shorelines, and a small fleet of jet boats patrolled the waters around the island.

  Painter and Jack had already worked out an alternate entry point—but first they had to reach it.

  The Ghost traveled another twenty minutes, soaring swiftly with the quiet burble of its engines. Jack worked his pedals and joystick to glide them along the seabed, riding over teeming reefs and across stretches of open sand.

  Positioned ten miles from shore, Utopia had been built in waters eighty meters deep. It was an engineering marvel, the first deep-sea artificial island. The heads-up display continued to track their path away from the coast, mapping a bird’s-eye view of their passage. At the top of the screen, the tip of one leg of the star-shaped island poked into view and slowly stretched downward as the Ghost closed in on its destination. More of the island appeared, revealing its unique shape.

  But its shape was the least unique feature of the island.

  As they neared the tip of one corner of the star, a massive concrete pylon appeared out of the darkness, twenty yards wide. A forest of such towers lay farther ahead. This was the secret behind the engineering of Utopia.

  It wasn’t so much an island as a massive fixed platform with a landmass sitting on top of it.

  Gray had read the history of Utopia. Its engineering was not new or groundbreaking, but based on technologies developed many years ago, patterned after the Hibernia oil platform constructed off the coast of Newfoundland in 1997. The same engineers and construction company had been hired as consultants for this Dubai development.

  In many ways, Utopia was an easier project. The Hibernia platform had been built in deeper waters and constructed in seas prone to rogue waves, Atlantic winter storms, and floating icebergs. The waters here were calmer, and the environmental threats less severe. On top of that, this location had been chosen for Utopia because of a natural coastal ridge. The outcropping had been reinforced and built up with boulders and compacted sand to form a protective crescent, stretching four miles wide.

  Within those sheltering arms, Utopia was slowly constructed. Like Hibernia and other oil platforms, the island was basically a gravity-based structure, meaning the more weight on top, the more stable and secure it became. So, while Hibernia was taller, Utopia was wider, the equivalent of twenty such platforms connected in a honeycomb cluster to form a star-shaped base. Atop this massive foundation, whose upper surface lay submerged to the depth of five meters, the same engineering techniques that built Palm Jumeirah were employed here: laying down a thick base of massive boulders on top of the platform, then flooding and covering it with dredged sand and compacting it all to the hardness of concrete.

  And within five years, a new island had risen out of the sea.

  “Now comes the tricky part,” Jack said.

  He guided the Ghost into that Brobdingnagian forest of massive steel-reinforced concrete pylons that supported the island. The columns rose from the seabed, set amid piles of boulders and mountains of ballast. He slowed their pace to a crawl.

  Gray craned his neck, staring up through the clear roof. In the distance, he could make out the bottom of the foundation platform. He imagined the crushing weight overhead, pictured the stack of corporate towers topside.

  Kowalski groaned.

  This time, Seichan didn’t tease him.

  The sub suddenly rolled, heaving to one side.

  Jack swore, fought his controls, and righted them. “Sorry about that,” he said. “Currents are tricky under here. In fact, one of the auxiliary power sources for the island is a series of tidal turbines, driven by the daily ebb and flow of the ocean. That same flow makes maneuvering through here a thorny bitch.”

  They continued on for five more excruciatingly long minutes. The star-shaped island was two miles wide, but they only had to delve a quarter of that distance under its bulk. S
till, that journey was nerve-wracking enough.

  “Sonar says we’re here.” Jack pointed up.

  Everyone searched in that direction. Far overhead, a tiny star shone in the darkness. Jack aimed for it, spiraling around one of the columns as he headed up.

  As they rose, the star grew larger and brighter, revealing itself at last to be a crack in the foundation platform. A handful of such breaks had been engineered into the project, serving as pressure-relieving points. In turn, the city planners had taken advantage of those construction necessities and turned them into various urban design features.

  “I’m turning off the IR emitters,” Jack said. “You can take off your goggles. You should have plenty of ambient light to see.”

  Gray pulled his night-vision headgear off. The black-and-white world brightened into shades of aquamarine. The pool of light overhead bathed them in its glow.

  Jack set the sub to hovering in one spot. He dumped ballast to adjust their buoyancy, and the Ghost floated smoothly upward, rising through the crack in the foundation platform, a six-meter-thick wafer of concrete and steel. Once through, those industrial walls tilted back, sloping into sandy beaches.

  The sub slowed its ascent and glided forward until sand once again swirled a few feet under Gray’s boots. Jack studied a small monitor on his control console. Spying over his shoulder, Gray caught a glimpse of the world topside as Jack employed a digital periscope.

  “Looks clear,” the pilot concluded.

  The burble of the engines faded to nothing—then a few seconds later, the sub’s nose gently ground into the beach.

  “That’s as far as I go,” Jack said, twisting around. “The top hatch is poking a couple of inches out of the water. You should be able to reach the shore without getting more than your boots wet.”

  That proved not to be the case. By the time Gray reached solid ground, he was soaked from the knees down. Seichan fared no better. Tucker disembarked last, assisted by Kowalski. The pair worked together to get Kane out of the sub.

  Gray had his team assemble beneath a grove of palms planted at the edge of the dark pond. It was hard to believe what lay hidden beneath that placid surface: an industrial hell of pylons, boulders, and ballast. It stood in stark contrast to the world above.

  Kowalski joined them. His gaze swept the landscape surrounding the pond, his face shining with awe.

  Gently rolling hills spread outward, covered in manicured lawns and dotted by other stands of palm trees. Beyond the parklands, towers and spires rose, forming a palisade of glass and steel. Some of the buildings were dark, girdled by cranes, under various phases of construction. Others thrust brilliantly into the sky, windows aglow, their exteriors flooded by lamps, amply demonstrating signs of life and occupation.

  Closer at hand, the rolling park was broken by patches of close-cropped greens, feathered with numbered flags. Elsewhere, silvery patches marked moonlit sand traps.

  “We beached in a friggin’ golf course,” Kowalski said with a shake of his head. “You gotta hand it to the Arabs for working with what they got.”

  True enough.

  Gray returned to the pond, which served the island in multiple ways: as a landscape element, as a water hazard, and as a structural-design feature.

  Jack remained aboard the Ghost, leaning half out of the hatch. He pointed a thumb toward the middle of the pond. “I’ll be hovering just under the surface, but I’ll keep a watch for you with my scope. If you can’t make it back here, you’ve got my signaling device. Set it off and I’ll find you.”

  “Thanks.” Gray patted his shirt pocket, indicating he had it.

  Jack hesitated before ducking away. His expression turned a touch embarrassed, like he wanted to ask something but held back.

  “What is it?” Gray asked.

  Jack sighed. “Maybe it’s not my place … but how’s Lisa doing?”

  Gray had already spoken with Painter back in Dubai, so he knew the dire situation with Lisa and Kat. Worry for his friends remained a knot in his gut. But that wasn’t what Jack was inquiring about. Gray read the real question in his eyes.

  Is she happy with her life?

  Gray answered that question as honestly as he could, but in regards to what Jack had asked directly—how’s Lisa doing?—he thought it best to lie.

  “She’s doing great.”

  22

  July 2, 5:46 P.M. EST

  Charleston, South Carolina

  Get somewhere safe … off the street, but stay in public.

  The instructions rang in Lisa’s head. Agony lanced up her leg with every step down East Bay Street. She tried her best to hide her limp, baking under the late-afternoon sun.

  When Painter had shouted his warning over the phone to get out of her hotel room, she’d not hesitated. She ran four miles every morning, did yoga most nights, and her brother, who climbed mountains for a living, had taught her a few mad skills.

  Panicked, and needing her hands free, she had dropped her cell phone, twisted away from the door, and dashed to the balcony. She heard the splintering crash as the door burst open behind her—but she was already moving through the French doors and vaulting over the wrought iron. She caught one hand on the railing and swung around. With her legs dangling free, she lowered herself hand-over-hand down the second-story balcony ironwork. Once at the bottom, she let go and dropped the rest of the way to the sidewalk.

  Even wearing sensible shoes, she landed hard enough to jam her left ankle. A glance up showed a masked assailant staring down at her. He raised a pistol, but she dashed forward under the balcony, out of the line of fire. Shouting erupted above—then gun blasts.

  She ran.

  There had been no plan, except to put distance between her and the hotel. She had a choice of fleeing out into the neighboring waterfront park or into the narrow maze of historic homes with their quaint porches, filigree woodwork, and colorful gardens. She chose the latter, not trusting the open spaces of the park. Plus, tourists and locals crowded the streets, shops, and coffeehouses of the area. She instinctively knew to keep to public spaces.

  It took her another twenty minutes to calm her heart, to let the adrenaline seep from her brain enough for her to think. Still, she kept peering behind her—not that she knew whose faces to be watching for or how many were searching for her. Anyone could be a threat. With no money, no phone, she didn’t know anyone in the strange city to trust. So she reached out to the one person who could help.

  She borrowed a phone from a patron seated in a patio coffeehouse and called Painter. She couldn’t say who was more relieved to hear the other’s voice, but Painter stayed stern, authoritative. He ordered her to get off the street, out of direct sight, fearing her attackers might be closing a net around the district and looking for her.

  But stay in public …

  That meant she needed an indoor space: a bar, a restaurant, a hotel lobby.

  A commotion drew her attention down a cobbled-brick alleyway off the main thoroughfare. A clutch of women in handsome gowns and men in tuxedos gathered a short distance away, laughing and hugging their hellos. It appeared a wedding reception or engagement party was under way at a restaurant back there, and from the richness of the attire, from the haughty edge to their genteel Carolina accents, the event had the air of old money.

  Perfect.

  She hid her limp, touched her hair to assure herself she was presentable for a restaurant of this caliber. She hoped the affair was in a private room and that she could still get a seat in the main dining room or bar.

  A small gas lantern flickered above the sign.

  MCCRADY’S.

  Reaching the restaurant, she excused herself as she slipped through the partygoers—as she hoped, they were all filing upstairs to a private room. She stepped up to the host’s station.

  “Excuse me. I’m afraid I don’t have a reservation. But I was hoping I could still get a table.”

  The host, a slender man with a soft manner, smiled. “That shouldn�
��t be a problem this early in the evening. If you’ll give me a moment.”

  Lisa stepped away, but she remained standing. She was afraid if she sat down, she’d never get back up again. Her leg throbbed all the way to her knee. To distract herself, she read a small sign about the restaurant, how the building dated back to 1788. Over the centuries, it had served as a warehouse, a tavern, and even a brothel. It stated that George Washington had once attended a grand dinner party here—hopefully not when it was a brothel.

  Still, with such a pedigree, it was no wonder the upper crust of Charleston chose this place for special events. Laughter and music echoed down from above.

  Another few stragglers of the party pushed into the lobby. From the amount of lace and piles of coiffed white hair, they were clearly a few of the grandes dames of Charleston high society.

  “If you’ll follow me,” the host said to Lisa, drawing her attention away, “your table is ready.”

  One of the older women glanced in her direction, eyeing her from the lofty height of her class position—then leaned to another and whispered. Other eyes stared toward her, judging her.

  Suddenly self-conscious, Lisa smoothed a hand down her St. John dress and stepped away from them, joining the host.

  He leaned conspiratorially toward her. “It’s cotillion season. They’re having a small debutante ball upstairs.”

  Lisa glanced up, picturing a party of chiffon and diamonds, the official debut of a young woman to her high-society peers. Balls like this functioned in the past as an antiquated dating service, to present an eligible daughter to available bachelors within a select upper circle.

  Basically, a high-society livestock show.

  “It’s a very exclusive affair,” the host said as he led her to the table. He raised one eyebrow toward her. “Some grandniece or second cousin of the president.”

  Lisa felt better. Surely, no one would dare intrude here. Crossing into the main dining room, she did her best not to hobble. Still, something must have shone in her face, maybe the sheen of her skin, something in her eye.