“We’ve been spotted! Hurry!” yelled Jennifer. She shot into the driver’s seat, found the key already in the ignition, and turned it. The metallic wa-wa-wah of a weak battery and ailing starter motor greeted her.
“Come on, you bastard!” she screamed. She was fumbling with the vehicle controls, struggling with the handcuffs and the iron ring assembly still attached to her wrist. Richard jumped into the passenger seat, then turned around and pulled out Marak’s gun. He pointed it at the Jeep parked directly behind theirs. Jennifer was too busy trying to start the Jeep to ask him what he thought he was doing.
“Wa-wa-wa-wah,” went the stalling motor. A beam of light started to play across the driveway, and within a second would come across the Jeep. The engine started up just as the first gunshot was fired from the roof. Richard fired twice, then a third time, and then a fourth. A hail of bullets rained down on them as the Jeep spun gravel and whirled out of the driveway, taking what they both hoped to be the downward direction.
“What the hell were you shooting at behind us? Those assholes were on the roof, not in the driveway!” Jennifer fumed as they went racing down the road.
“I was shooting at the other Jeeps.”
“What the hell for? You’ll never disable a Jeep with a handgun,” she shouted.
“Only too true. But those Jeeps don’t have headlights anymore. And Jen, put yours on bright, please.”
“Oh for God’s sake, Richard, it’s almost dawn. We won’t need headlights in a few more minutes.”
They drove for a few minutes. Then she giggled.
“What’s funny?” Richard asked. “We’re one hell of a long way from being out of the woods here.”
“Doh-see-doh, Richard? Doh-see-doh? What the hell was that?”
“Square dance moves, partner,” he said. “For some reason it was the only thing I could think of to say.”
“That’s actually ’dosado,’ but I’m not sure those assholes care much about that distinction right now.”
They both laughed, sharing the momentary relief of being out of the cell and in motion. Jennifer shot an almost affectionate glance in Richard’s direction, then did a double take.
“Richard, you look like hell,” she observed cynically. “There’s blood in your hair, on your face, and all over your clothes. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“No, I’m not, actually,” said Richard, still clutching Zak’s tibia. “I’ve taken about 50 shots to the head. I’ve been knocked out three or four times. I’ve got major head wounds. I just had the snot beat out of me. I heard my best friend’s voice in that dungeon. And I’m in a lot of pain,” he said, popping a few more Vicodin out of the container. “But I’m still up and kicking. Just get us the hell away from this place. That guy has got to be totally pissed by now. If they catch up with us, whatever they did to Zak will seem like a walk in the park.” He paused for a minute and held the chunk of bone in front of him. “Right, Zak?”
Jennifer shuddered. It was 4AM, Pakistan time.
Back in his cell at Inzar Ghar, Zak had listened in shock to the sound of footsteps running up the stairs. He couldn’t believe they’d escaped already, and with so little trouble. When one of them turned and headed down again, he decided to take his chances. There was a world of possibility, if it worked. And what was there to lose, really?
“Richard!” he called, trying to make his voice carry as far as he could, while still keeping the pitch low.
He stood stock still, praying. There was dead silence on the stairs, and then the sound of a fierce argument. He knew that Richard had heard him. But of course the woman wouldn’t have, and wouldn’t believe Richard when he told her what he’d heard. He could hear the two of them shouting at each other in whispers, each trying to convince the other. Then the woman won. Zak smiled wryly. He wasn’t surprised — Richard’s heart was usually in the right place, but his will had never been as strong as it should have been. The two of them raced up out of the stairway, and Zak listened nervously to the sound of yelling, gunshots, and a dead motor trying to turn over. Finally, whatever vehicle they had found started up, and they sped away from the fortress, unknowingly leaving Zak behind to fend for himself.
Zak sighed deeply, and started digging again. He was glad that Richard had escaped so easily, but knew that he couldn’t brood on the close call for long; he had far more important things to think about. Things like his own escape. The grate in his cell had indeed connected to a tunnel, which he was now widening. He put renewed force into his digging, determined to make it out before the sun rose. Dig, dig, rest. Dig, dig, rest…
45
At that moment, in the American southwest, Kumar was getting ready to demonstrate his latest toy for Yousseff. Beaming, he pulled down a lever on the inside of the trailer. Two elongated steel beams slid out of the rear of the trailer, and then further beams, on metal wheels, and then a whole array of smaller metal rails and parts. The wizards at KDEC had created a beautifully designed and engineered ramp. It had been constructed in Karachi and delivered to Long Beach by one of the ships from the Karachi Star Line. When the device had stopped feeding itself out of the truck, Kumar pulled back on a second large lever.
There was a whirr of electrical motors, and the PWS-14, which Kumar had nicknamed the “Pequod” after Ahab’s ill-fated vessel in Moby Dick, rolled itself silently out of the rear of the large trailer. It came to rest at the top of another ramp and roller system built into the facility floor. From the top of this ramp it would, with a small push, roll into the passage of water that divided the center and front portions of the facility.
“She’s gorgeous, Kumar,” said Yousseff, surveying the strange but exquisite craft. The modified PWS-14 was one of a kind — this was the working prototype of Pacific Western Submersible’s newest model. It had been two years in the making, and Kumar was looking at mass producing it. It was larger, longer, and more powerful than all the preceding models, and came equipped with two multi-jointed arms, complete with complex pincer claws that were capable of holding and manipulating a wide variety of power tools. Kumar had been impressed with Gallo’s work in exploring the Titanic, and was determined to outdo him. It was something that he was fully capable of accomplishing. His company had acquired an international reputation. None of Kumar’s competitors could match his research and development budget, or the incredible things that came out of his workshop. But then, his competitors were not saddled with the burden of laundering drug money.
“I will hate to lose her,” Kumar replied. “But all the information we need to reproduce her is in our computers. She’s served well as a prototype, and we’re going to manufacture these on a larger scale in a couple of months.” He looked at Yousseff’s frown and added, “In Karachi, of course.”
Yousseff nodded, surveying Kumar’s latest creation with fascination. He thought back to the old smuggling days on the Indus, and what the first underwater creation had looked like. A small, leaky, one-person submarine, no more than ten feet in length, without any navigation equipment, with a maximum depth of five feet. They’d come a long way.
“What I have in the smaller trailer is even more interesting,” said Kumar, walking to the van. “Watch this. Ethan Byron’s engineers started to call this thing the Ark. No one has ever seen anything like it before. This is what those Egyptian engineers and mathematicians designed, based on the technology that they stole from Livermore National Laboratories. On a much larger scale.”
“They guaranteed it would work,” said Yousseff. “But then, lots of people guarantee lots of things. If it doesn’t, we’ll just lick our wounds and carry on.”