Dragon by Clive Cussler Read Free Book Online Page B

mechanism and turned to Stacy and Salazar. “Hold tight. It may be a rough trip topside.”
    “Anything to get the hell out of here,” grunted Salazar.
    “Whenever you’re ready,” Stacy said gamely.
    Plunkett removed the safety peg from the release handle, took a firm grip, and pulled.
    Nothing happened.
    Three times Plunkett feverishly ran through the routine. But the control sphere stubbornly refused to detach from the main section of the sub. In desperation he turned to the computer to trouble-shoot the cause of the malfunction. An answer came back in the blink of an eye.
    The release mechanism had been twisted and jammed by the angled impact with the seabed, and there was no way to repair it.
    “I’m sorry,” Plunkett said in frustration. “But it looks like we stay until rescued.”
    “Fat chance of that,” snapped Salazar, wiping the sweat that poured from his face with the sleeve of a down ski jacket.
    “How do we stand on oxygen?” asked Stacy.
    “Our main supply was cut off when the pod imploded,” replied Plunkett. “But our emergency canisters in this unit and the lithium hydroxide scrubber to remove our exhaled carbon dioxide should keep us sucking air for ten to twelve hours.”
    Salazar shook his head and gave a defeated shrug. “Every prayer in every church of the world won’t save us in time. It’ll take a minimum of seventy-two hours to get another submersible on site. And even then it’s doubtful they could lift us to the surface.”
    Stacy looked into Plunkett’s eyes for some small sign of encouragement, but she found none. He wore a remote and distant look. She got the impression he was saddened more by the loss of his precious submersible than he was at the prospect of dying. He came back on track as he became aware of her stare.
    “Raul is right,” he said tautly. “I hate to admit it, but we’ll need a miracle to see the sun again.”
    “But the Invincible ,” said Stacy. “They’ll move heaven and earth to reach us.”
    Plunkett shook his head. “Something tragic happened up there. The last sound we heard was a ship breaking up on her way to the bottom.”
    “But there were two other ships in sight when we left the surface, Stacy protested. “It might have been either one of them.”
    “It makes no difference,” Plunkett said wearily. “There is no way up. And time has become an enemy we cannot defeat.”
    A deep despair settled in the control sphere. Any hope of rescue was a fantasy. The only certainty was a future salvage project to retrieve Old Gert and their bodies long after they were dead.

6
     
     
     
    D ALE N ICHOLS, SPECIAL ASSISTANT to the President, puffed on his pipe and peered over his old-style reading spectacles as Raymond Jordan entered his office.
    Jordan managed a smile despite the sickly sweet tobacco fumes that hung in the office like smog under an inversion layer. “Good afternoon, Dale.”
    “Still raining?” asked Nichols.
    “Mostly turned to drizzle.”
    Jordan noted that Nichols was under pressure. The “protector of the presidential realm” was a class operator, but the thicket of coffee-brown hair looked like a hayfield in a crosswind, the eyes darted more than usual, and there were tension lines in the face Jordan had never seen before.
    “The President and the Vice President are waiting,” said Nichols quickly. “They’re most anxious to hear an update on the Pacific blast.”
    “I have the latest report,” Jordan said reassuringly.
    Though he was one of the five most powerful men in official Washington, Jordan was not known to the general public. Nor was he familiar to most bureaucrats or politicians. As Director of Central Intelligence Jordan headed the National Security Service and reported directly to the President.
    He lived in the spectral world of espionage and intelligence, and there were very few outsiders who were aware of the disasters and tragedies that he and his agents had saved the American people