Clive Cussler - Cyclops

Resting his feet for a few minutes, Hagen sat on a couch in an appliance store and watched an entire wall of twenty television sets all tuned to the same channel. The pictures showed an hour-old rerun of the space shuttle Gettysburg as it lifted off from California. Over three hundred people had been launched into space since the shuttle's first flight in 1981, and except for the news media, nobody paid much attention anymore.

Hagen wandered up and down, pausing to gawk through a large window at a disk jockey spinning records for a radio station that was located in the mall. He rubbed shoulders with the crowds of female shoppers, but he concentrated on the occasional man. Most seemed to be on their lunch break, probing the counters and racks, usually buying the first thing they saw, in contrast to the women, who preferred to keep searching in the forlorn hope they could find something better at a cheaper price.

He spotted two men eating submarine sandwiches at a fast-food restaurant. They were not carrying any purchase bags, nor were they dressed like store clerks. They wore the same casual style as Dr. Mooney at the Pattenden Lab.

Hagen followed them into a large department store. They took the escalator down to the basement, passed through the shopping area, and entered a rear hallway marked with a sign that read "Employees Only."

A warning bell went off inside Hagen's head. He returned to a counter stacked with bed sheets, removed his coat, and stuck a pencil behind one ear. Then he waited until the clerk was busy with a customer before picking up a pile of sheets and heading back into the hallway.

Three doors led to stock rooms, two to restrooms, and one was marked "Danger-High Voltage." He yanked open the latter door and rushed inside. A startled security guard sitting at a desk looked up. "Hey, you're not supposed to be--"

That was as far as he got before Hagen threw the sheets in his face and judo-chopped him on the side of the neck. There were two security guards behind a second door, and Hagen put them both down in less than four seconds. He crouched and whipped around in anticipation of another threat.

A hundred pairs of eyes stared at him in blank astonishment.

Hagen was confronted by a room that seemed to stretch into infinity. From wall to wall it was filled with people, offices, computer and communications equipment. For a long second, he stood stunned by the vastness of it all. Then he took a step forward and grabbed a terrified secretary by the arms and lifted her out of a chair.

"Leonard Hudson!" he snapped. "Where can I find him?"

Fear shone from her eyes like twin spotlights. She tilted her head to the right. "Th-the office w-with the blue d-door," she stammered.

"Thank you very much," he said with a broad smile.

Hagen released the girl and walked swiftly through the hushed complex. His face was twisted with malevolence, as if daring anyone to stop him.

No one made the slightest attempt. The growing crowd of people parted like the Red Sea as he passed down a main aisle.

When he came to the blue door, Hagen stopped and turned around, surveying the brain trust and communications center of the Jersey Colony program. He had to admire Hudson. It was an imaginative cover. Excavated during the construction of the shopping center, it would have attracted little or no suspicion. The scientists, engineers, and secretaries could come and go amid the shoppers, and their cars simply melted into hundreds of others in the parking lot. The radio station was also a work of genius. Who would suspect they were transmitting and receiving messages from the moon while broadcasting Top 40 records to the surrounding college community.

Hagen pushed inside the door and entered what seemed to be a studio control booth.

Hudson and Eriksen sat with their backs to him, staring up at a large video monitor that reflected the face and shaven head of a man who stopped speaking in midsentence and then said, "Who is that man behind you?"

Hudson made a cursory glance over his shoulder. "Hello, Ira." The voice mirrored the eyes. Hagen could almost hear the cracking of ice cubes. "I wondered when you'd show up."

"Come in," said Eriksen in an equally frigid tone. "You're just in time to talk to our man on the moon."

<<40>>

Pitt had cleared Cuban waters and was well into the main shipping lane of the Bahama Channel. But his luck was running out. The only ships that came within sight failed to spot him. A large tanker flying the Panamanian flag steamed by no more than a mile away. He stood as high as he dared without tipping over the tub and waved his shirt, but his little vessel went unnoticed by the crew.

For a watch officer on the bridge to aim his binoculars at the precise spot at the precise instant when the bathtub rose out of a trough and climbed the crest of a swell before dropping from sight again was a bet no self-respecting bookie would make. The awful truth plagued Pitt, he made too small a target.

Pitt's movements were becoming mechanical. His legs had gone numb after rolling around the sea in the cramped bathtub for nearly twenty hours, and the constant friction of his buttocks against the hard surface had raised painful blisters. The tropical sun beat on him, but he wore a good tan and the least of his problems was sunburn.

The sea remained calm, but still it was a continuous effort to keep the bow of the tub straight into the swells and bail out the water at the same time. He had emptied the final drops from the fuel cans into the outboard motor before refilling them with seawater for ballast.

Another fifteen or twenty minutes, that was all he could expect the motor to keep running before it starved for gas. Then it would be all over. Without control, the tub would soon swamp and sink.

His mind began to slip away-- he hadn't slept in thirty-six hours. He fought to stay awake, steering and bailing with leaden arms and water-wrinkled hands. For hour after endless hour his eyes swept the horizon, seeing nothing that was traveling toward his tiny area of the sea. A few sharks had bumped the bottom of the slow-moving tub. One made the mistake of coming too close to the spinning propeller and got his fin chewed up. Pitt eyed them with a detached air. He dumbly planned to beat them out of a meal by opening his mouth and drowning, before realizing it was a stupid thought and brushing it aside.

The wind gently began to rise. A squall passed overhead and deposited an inch of water in the tub. It wasn't the cleanest, but it was better than nothing. He scooped up a few handfuls and gratefully gulped it down, feeling refreshed.

Pitt looked up at the shimmering horizon to the west. Night would fall in another hour. His last spark of hope was dying with the setting sun. Even if he somehow kept afloat, he could never be seen in the darkness.

Hindsight, he mused. If only he'd stolen a flashlight.

Suddenly, the outboard sputtered and then caught again. He slowed the throttle as much as he dared, knowing he was only pushing off the inevitable by a minute or two.

Pitt fought off the cloud of morale collapse and steeled himself to bail until his arms gave out or a wave struck the drifting, helpless little tub on the beam and swamped her. He emptied one of the gas cans of seawater. When the tub sank, he reasoned, he would use the can as a float. So long as he could move a muscle, he wasn't about to give up.

The faithful little outboard coughed once, twice, and then died. After hearing the beat of the exhaust since the night before, Pitt felt smothered by the abrupt silence. He sat there in a doomed little craft on a vast and indifferent sea under a clear and cloudless sky.

He kept her afloat for another hour into the twilight. He was so tired, so physically exhausted that he missed a small movement five hundred yards away.