Dragon by Clive Cussler Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    For a few moments nothing happened, then centimeter by centimeter Old Gert pulled herself up from the bottom, rising slowly as if pushed by the hushed breaths and pounding hearts of the three people inside her main sphere.
    “Ten feet up,” announced Plunkett after what seemed an hour but in reality was only thirty seconds.
    Old Gert leveled out and they all dared to breathe again. Plunkett futilely kept trying to contact Jimmy Knox. “Jimmy… this is Plunkett. Talk to me.”
    Stacy stared so hard at the depth meter she thought the glass over the dial would crack. “Go… go,” she pleaded.
    Then their worst nightmare burst on them without warning. The sphere holding the electrical and oxygen equipment suddenly imploded. Weakened by its impact into the seafloor, it gave up its integrity and was crushed like an egg by the merciless pressure.
    “Bloody hell!” Plunkett gasped as the sub dropped back into the silt with a jarring bump.
    As if to drive home the terrifying reverse, the lights blinked out and snapped the sphere into a world of pure ebony. The malignancy of the stygian blackness is a horror only the totally blind experience. To those with sight the sudden disorientation curses the mind into believing unspeakable forces are approaching from beyond in an ever tightening circle.
    At last Salazar’s hoarse voice broke the silence. “Mother of Jesus, we’re finished for good.”
    “Not yet,” said Plunkett. “We can still make it to the surface by jettisoning the control sphere.” His hand groped over his console until his fingers touched a particular switch. With an audible click the auxiliary lights came on and refit the interior of the sphere.
    Stacy sighed with relief and briefly relaxed. “Thank heaven. At least we can see.”
    Plunkett programmed the computer for an emergency ascent. Then he set the release