Clive Cussler - Dragon

“You figure on setting off the bomb inside the B-Twenty-nine,” Pitt said, his eyes half closed in weariness.

“Not exactly.” Meeker sighed. “It will have to be removed and placed a short distance away.”

“Damned if I can see what damage it will cause to an island almost forty kilometers away,” Giordino muttered.

“A group of the finest oceanographers and geophysicists in the business think that an underwater atomic blast can take out the Dragon Center.”

“I’d like to know how,” Stacy said as she swatted at a mosquito that had found one of her bare knees.

Meeker refaced the blackboard. “Major Dennings could not have known, of course, that his aircraft crashed into the sea and fell to the seafloor close to a perfect location to remove a serious threat to his country forty-eight years later.” He paused and drew another jagged line that traveled under the sea bottom from the plane to Soseki Island and then curved southward. “A section of a major Pacific seismic fault system. It travels almost directly beneath the Dragon Center.”

Nogami shook his head doubtfully. “The center was constructed to withstand a major earthquake and a nuclear strike. Exploding an old atomic bomb, providing it can still detonate after five decades under saltwater, to cause a shift in the fault would prove a wasted effort.”

“Dr. Nogami has a sound argument,” said Pitt. “The island is almost solid rock. It won’t sway and shift during a heavy shock wave.”

Meeker said nothing for a moment, only smiled. Then he swung the axe. “No, it won’t sway and shift,” he repeated with a fiendish smile, “but it will sink.”

63

ABOUT FIFTY KILOMETERS northeast of Sheridan, Wyoming, as the crow flies, just south of the Montana border, Dan Keegan sat on a buckskin quarter horse searching for signs of trespassing hunters. While washing up for supper he had heard the distant rumble of two gunshots and immediately told his wife to put his fried chicken in the oven to warm. Then he gathered up an old Mauser bolt-action rifle and saddled up his favorite riding horse.

Hunters who ignored his fences and no-trespassing warning signs were a constant source of irritation to Keegan. Less than two months back a stray shot had dropped one of his herd’s calves. The hunter had fired at a six-point buck and missed, his bullet carrying over a slight rise and striking the calf almost two kilometers distant. Since then, Keegan wanted no part of hunters. They could just damn well shoot on somebody else’s property.

Keegan followed a trail that ran along Hanging Woman Creek. He never knew where the name came from. The only woman he recalled being hanged in Wyoming was Ella Watson, known as “Cattle Kate.” Prominent ranchers under the guise of vigilantes had strung her up for rustling in 1889. But that event occurred along the Sweetwater River, three hundred kilometers to the southwest.

The rays of the setting sun were intensified by the biting cold air, painting the surrounding hills in glowing yellow-orange tones. He came out onto a flat plain and began studying the ground. Keegan quickly picked up the tire tracks, following them from a spent shell casing to a rash of booted footprints and a pool of blood soaking the sandy soil. The hunters and their fallen game were gone.

He was too late and mad as hell. To drive a car on his range, the trespassers must have either cut his fence or shot off the lock on the gate across his private road leading to the highway. It would be dark soon. He decided to wait until morning to send one of his ranch hands to ride fence and check the gate. He mounted up and turned the horse for home.

After riding a short distance, he reined up.

The wind carried the faint sound of an automobile engine. He cupped one ear and listened. Instead of retreating as he thought the hunters had done, the sound grew louder. Someone was approaching. He urged the horse up the slope of a small mesa and scanned the flatland below. A vehicle was speeding up the road, trailing a cloud of dust.

He expected to see a pickup truck or a four-wheel-drive emerge from the brush bordering the road. When it finally came close enough to recognize, Keegan was surprised to see it was an ordinary car, a brown four-door sedan, a Japanese make.

The driver soon braked and stopped at an open spot in the road. The car sat there for a few moments as the dust drifted over the roof and settled onto the range grass. The driver slipped from behind the wheel and opened the hood and leaned under for a few moments. Next he walked around to the rear of the car, raised the trunk lid, and lifted out a surveyor’s transit. Keegan watched in curiosity as the intruder set the transit on a tripod and aimed the lens at several prominent landmarks, jotting down the distance readings on a clipboard and comparing them on a geological map that he spread on the ground.

Keegan was experienced with a transit himself, and he’d never seen a survey conducted like this. The stranger seemed more interested in merely confirming his location than in establishing a baseline. He watched as the man casually tossed the clipboard into the underbrush and stepped to the front of the car and stared at the engine again as if hypnotized by it. Only when he seemed to shake himself from his thoughts did he reach inside the car and pull out a rifle.

Keegan had seen enough to know the trespasser was acting too strange for a county surveyor who was out to shoot a little game on the side, and certainly not while dressed in a business suit and knotted tie. He rode his horse closer, coming up quietly behind the stranger, who was intent on trying to insert a shell into the rifle, an act that seemed foreign to him. He didn’t hear Keegan approach from his rear. Any sound from the hooves of the horse was muffled by the soft earth and dry grass. Keegan reined in when he was only eight meters away and eased the Mauser from a leather case tied to his saddle.

“You know you’re trespassin’, mister?” he said, resting the gun in the crook of one arm.

The driver of the brown car jumped and wheeled around, dropping a shell and banging the gun barrel on the door. Only then did Keegan recognize him as an Asian.

“What do you want?” the startled man demanded.

“You’re on my property. How did you get in here?”

“The gate was open.”

It was as Keegan thought. The hunters he’d missed had forced the gate. “What are you doin’ with a surveyor’s transit? Who do you work for? You with the government?”

“No… I’m an engineer with Miyata Communications.” The English was heavily Japanese-accented. “We’re scouting a site to set up a relay station.”

“Don’t you fellas ever get permission before you run around private property? How in hell do you know I’ll let you build one?”

“My superiors should have contacted you.”

“Damn right,” Keegan muttered. He was anxious to return home for supper before daylight faded. “Now you better move along, mister. And the next time you want to drive on my land, you ask first.”

“I deeply regret any inconvenience.”

Keegan was a pretty good judge of character and could tell by the man’s voice he wasn’t the least bit sorry. His eyes warily kept focusing on Keegan’s Mauser, and he seemed edgy.

“You plan on doing any shootin’?” Keegan nodded at the highpowered rifle the man still awkwardly gripped in one hand, muzzle wavering toward the darkening sky,

“Target shooting only.”

“Well, I can’t allow that. I have cattle roamin’ this section. I’d appreciate it if you’d pack up your gear and leave by the way you came in.”

The intruder acted agreeable. He quickly broke down the surveyor’s transit and tripod, placing them in the trunk of the car. The rifle he placed in the back seat. Then he came around to the front of the car and peered under the open hood.