Dragon by Clive Cussler Read Free Book Online

felt the hysteria of a child who had lost his parents in a crowd.
    He looked through the slash above into the bridge housing and chart room. They had been gutted into a tortured skeleton of deformed beams. The wheelhouse was a smoldering shambles that was now a crypt for burned and broken men, whose blood dripped into the compartments below.
    Knox rolled to his side and groaned in sudden agony caused by three broken ribs, a twisted ankle, and a sea of bruises. Very slowly he pushed himself to a sitting position. He 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.

5
     
     
     
    B ENEATH 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