Jaunt (46 page)

Two number blocks gave the distances as just two thousand meters from the trench floor, but the coordinates raised an eyebrow. Double-checking the trench coordinate grid, McKean glanced at the descending
Strela
s and said to himself, “They’re mining the other side.”

McKean programmed his Omni-Coordinated Temporal Transportation computer for the other side of the fallen ridge, in no way wanting to waste the hydrazine for a long journey. By his educated guess, that would be a distance of about seventeen hundred meters to the right of their initial jaunt. “Two to the left long ways, two to the right long ways,” McKean said to himself again, “one to the top short ways, and one to the bottom, if they went with six....”

He promptly tapped the jaunt interface and was engulfed by the Casimir vortex within seconds, plucking him from the fountain-lit side of the trench...and depositing him a second later one hundred meters above the opposite flank of the collapsed ridge, which, corresponding to its former life as a section of the trench wall, was about eighteen hundred meters higher in elevation than the main valley.

Gathering his bearings, McKean could see a glimmering light across the escarpment to his left, which provided a tantalizing glow to this side of the trench. He reminded himself of his duty and dropped his sightseeing, instead focusing his array of instruments towards the approaching warheads.

“Visual.”

Two holographic, flashing red cylinders appeared on his HUD, rotating while they expelled their remaining fuel. Looking to his lidar target, the first
Strela
was within ninety meters, close enough to gap the distance with his sled. After a slightly longer burst of hydrazine, McKean ascended towards the nearest warhead, arriving within ninety seconds.

McKean repeated his reprogramming performances of the two
Strela
s, satisfied they would explode at the frequencies to assist the Casimir chain reaction. He allowed the pair to fall into the trench crevasse, burying themselves into the deep fissures created when the ridge broke apart from the main wall almost two centuries ago.

Successful so far, McKean patiently waited for the arrival of the next two, hoping to secure the last pieces to rid the world forever of this threat.

“Three and four have successfully grounded,” the Confederation petty officer reported, looking up from his holographic screen, where four green dots blinked.

Behind him, an elderly captain nodded but did not respond, knowing full well the news was not for his ears only. Looking to his left, he said, “It appears your fears have gone unsubstantiated. Our fleet has proven to be more than a match for the Americans, Lieutenant.”

Breaking his gaze from a holographic display at his side of the North Pacific Fleet’s maneuvers, Lieutenant Vasily Nicolenko rose from his seat. “Captain Kuyneyov, one should never underestimate the resourcefulness of one’s opponent. Or has St. Petersburg been keeping you chained behind a desk so long you have forgotten?”

Kuyneyov scowled and turned back to his crewman. “Signal the
Deputatsky
that we will be loading five and six at the lieutenant’s command.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

The captain’s eyes met Nicolenko’s, and the lieutenant lowered his index finger, giving the command for a “go.”

Deep inside the submarine
Valeska
, crewmen dressed in drab coveralls lifted a
Strela
warhead horizontally into a firing tube, then closed and locked a hatch behind it. A second warhead was brought over by a mechanized arm, and placed on a running track, to which the same crewmen hoisted up and placed inside another firing tube.

A sodium klaxon light went on, coating the chamber with a yellow pall. On a command from the bridge, an ensign signaled to a crewman, who punched a firing button on an instrument board, launching the fifth
Strela
into the waters of the Kuril-Kamchatka Trench.

Night on the surface of the Okhotsk Sea was disturbed once more by the whoosh of an undersea launch. Trailing a white wake, the
Strela
vacated the
Valeska
, speeding into the trench at several dozen knots. Half-a-kilometer from its home vessel, the
Strela
pitched sharply downward at a thirty-five-degree angle, expending a small fuel tank within three minutes to get to its target at maximum velocity and inertia.

On the bridge, the petty officer counted down, “Eight hundred meters...eight fifty...nine hundred meters....”

Glancing to Kuyneyov, Nicolenko ordered the release of the final warhead, bringing the pieces to the stage to fight the Americans on equal footing, and for the first time in a century and a quarter, overtake their hated rivals. Nicolenko smiled at the thought...and remembered the words the old man and Doctor Zaryov had said to him. He was old enough not to buy into laurels and sweet words of glory, but the thought of retaking his country’s rightful place as legitimate heirs of world domination filled him with pride, even if he had to do the old ways’ bidding for now. Once this was all settled, things would be different. The equipment he possessed on this very submarine, locked away behind the securest of doors, would enable that victory.

It was just a matter of time....

Lidar pulses bounced off the hull of the fifth
Strela
warhead after McKean positioned himself on the northeast corner of the trench ridge, eagerly awaiting its arrival. Once within range, the agent extended his arms, catching hold of the falling warhead’s fuselage and maneuvering himself to open the nosecone sheath.

On this, his fifth go around in forty-seven minutes, his arms and limbs began to tire, dramatically detracting from his reprogramming time. McKean put aside the complaints of his nerves and muscles and pushed forward, allowing instinct, skill and discipline to take over for actual critical thinking. Despite this, McKean lost his patience easily with every shortened breath, making him lose efficiency, and consequently, time, in silly mistakes he wouldn’t normally have committed.

After McKean applied the last step in returning the
Strela
to its operating status, his sensor array detected a sixth gravimetric disturbance and sounded a “ping” in his helmet, forcing him to let go of the warhead earlier than he would have cared for, sending the
Strela
pitching forward at a dramatic angle into the seafloor. McKean caught a final glimpse of it in his helmet lamp, witnessing it plow into the sediment, apparently landing just as well, sending a sharp chill down his spine, but afterward, a sigh of relief. Five down....

Checking his interface for the position and distance of the final warhead southwest of the trench, he looked up to see a white trail catch the light from the fountain, a contrail soaring over the sky that was the undersea trench. Before jaunting a last time, he followed the wake a little longer, soaking the warhead with numerous lidar pulses, reducing its trajectory to a fairly straightforward course. Once he had calculated a potential course for maximum yield from the known geography of the trench, he set the coordinates in his interface and jaunted forward...to see the sixth
Strela
zero in on a nine-meter-tall barite tower a short burst of his hydrazine nozzles away.

McKean managed a “Launch now!” command to his voice response computer before the
Strela
exhausted its abnormally long-duration fuel tank and crashed into the tower, showering barite mineral shards and ripping its fuselage about the trench floor. A supercavitating bubble took McKean out of the scene quickly, rescuing him from a meter sheet of clipped shrapnel speeding towards him.

Canceling his short journey, McKean braked strongly, twisting in the water until he lost momentum and crashed into another, smaller barite tower. Grappling the outcropping, he watched the remains of the
Strela
float to the seafloor, spreading out over a field of large boulders and shallow sediment.

Pushing off the tower, McKean drifted towards the debris field and swam over it, eyeing torn metal panels, glints of rivets, bolts and other assorted junk that descended slowly across the floor. Continuing his scan, he lowered his left arm and swept the field with his lidar, hoping to find any remains of the warhead to retrieve. He spent the next few minutes combing the seafloor, fruitlessly coming up with nothing but fuselage and particulates. Dauntless regardless of the shortcomings, McKean understood he had to find the warhead’s remains soon, if they were going to recover anything at all before the detonations began.

“Incompetent fools! How could they have miscalculated?!”

Nicolenko affixed his helmet and rushed into his quarters, taking last-second stock of his equipment and weapons. Locking the door from the inside, he set the manual controls on his chest interface and accessed his Casimir chamber, beginning the long journey down with an edge of anger, an emotion he had tired of having to throw around with such imbeciles as the government employed to perform such delicate work. Did duty matter to anyone in the military anymore?

Tapping a red button, his Casimir chamber hummed, and the metal plates inside closed their rift, opening a screaming vortex through his abdomen, a sensation Nicolenko himself had never become comfortable with....

The Kuril-Kamchatka Trench burned with the light of the sun, confusing Nicolenko’s brain and his own hazard suit’s sensors. Holding up a gauntlet to eclipse the immense light, he brought up his HUD and checked his coordinates, hoping to find that he hadn’t been taken to the white sandy sea of the Caribbean instead.

His confidence sated, Nicolenko descended in a hurry to the sixth
Strela
’s last known position before the stupid drunkard had lost it. Glancing at his lidar, he took note of the shrapnel trail and the apparent cause of the crash; a large, broken tower of some mineral composition prevalent in these waters. Pausing briefly, he grappled the tower and inspected the impactor, which had cracked the tower in half, leaving grey scars three meters or more in length pitched at eighty-five to ninety degrees straight to the seafloor. Panels from the fuselage littered the floor around the impact site, but he could find no evidence of the warhead or the nosecone. Where had it gone? Stupidly, St. Petersburg had stockpiled the scores of other
Strela
s and loaded only these six aboard the
Valeska
. If one of them didn’t detonate, the others couldn’t possibly shoulder the load and yield enough to uncover the entire craft. He adjusted the lidar cannon on the right side of his helmet, hoping it would uncover the remains of the warhead.

Sifting through the accumulation of data passing on his HUD, Nicolenko glimpsed a curious current that didn’t match the rest of the trench water. Following it, his heartbeat quickened; it had to be! Releasing his grip on the tower, Nicolenko fired off a quick blast from his Reaction Control System thrusters on his waist ring, rocketing forward at three meters per second.

Ahead of him, Nicolenko’s eyes closed in on the target, still unawares. It was perfect, perfect timing! Extending his arms, Nicolenko approached at just the correct time, grappling the damnable man in the hazard suit from behind. The man tumbled forward, taking them both into the seafloor, scattering debris, pebbles and silt into the surrounding ocean water.

Regaining his strength, McKean rose and saw for the first time his attacker, who himself was recovering from his suicide dive. McKean recognized the man from Gilmour’s description: Nicolenko. Now it was McKean’s turn to delay the mad Confederate long enough for Gilmour to do whatever the Sherpa required until the
Strela
detonations blew the core halfway back in time.

“Sorry about your little missile, Lieutenant,” McKean taunted in Russian over his voxlink. “Seems to have taken a wrong turn somewhere.”

Nicolenko dusted his faceplate off and circled round McKean, who did the same, both men sizing up their respective combatant. “Where is Gilmour? Has he sent you in his stead to fight me? Has he grown to become a coward after so many of our meetings?!”

“Gilmour? Gilmour is dead,” McKean lied, giving Nicolenko something to occupy his mind while McKean surreptitiously searched his lidar scans for the warhead, which he knew had to be getting closer to.

“Dead? That seems so unlike my nemesis. I recall him appearing just about whenever I counted him out!”

“Maybe,” McKean paused, hurriedly looking for anything resembling the forty-fivecentimeter diameter, seventy-centimeter-long nosecone, “maybe you have overestimated your opponent. We are, after all, only worthless Westerners. Obviously...inferior to your sensibilities.”

Nicolenko walked around another barite tower, circling McKean, hoping his lidar could sift through the metal remains dotting the thin sediment. Everywhere he turned, echoes of metallic debris and phantom mineral signals threw his lidar out of sync, causing him no end of frustration.

“Incapable,” McKean continued, “of meeting your logic and military prowess.”

Moving his eyes to the left of his lidar target, he caught sight of a red triangular object, submerged under a thin layer of sediment, just three-point-seven meters from him. The object was precisely forty-five centimeters in diameter, matching exactly the metal alloy content. And best of all, its radiation housing was still attached, allowing it to detonate.