Cutting Edge pp-6

  Cutting Edge

  ( Power Plays - 6 )

  Tom Clancy

  Martin Greenberg

  Jerome Preisler

  Africa becomes the battle ground in 21st-century war. As fiberoptic cable is laid down around the continent, two entities fight to control it. One is UpLink Communications, headed by Roger Gordian. The pan-African fiberoptic ring is his most ambitious — and expensive — endeavor to date. His nemesis, Harlan Devane, is penetrating the network. Trading in black market commodities with terrorists and rogue states, the cable offers him unlimited access to a most valuable product: information. To ensure his success, Devane makes his move halfway around the world. He hits Gordian where it hurts — and kidnaps his daughter. Now, Gordian must trust his UpLink team as never before, as they fight on land and sea to turn the tables against Devane … once and for all.

  Tom Clancy, Martin Greenberg, Jerome Preisler

  Cutting Edge

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Marc Cerasini, Larry Segriff, Denise Little, John Helfers, Brittiany Koren, Robert Youdelman, Esq., Danielle Forte, Esq., Dianne Jude; the wonderful people at Penguin Putnam Inc., including David Shanks and Tom Colgan; Joel Gotler and Alan Nevins. But most important, it is for you, my readers, to determine how successful our collective endeavor has been.

  — Tom Clancy

  ONE

  OFFSHORE GABON, EQUATORIAL AFRICA

  It was the goblin that led them toward disaster.

  Cédric Dupain was at first merely curious as their strange caller glided into his probe lights — though fascination was quick to snare him. One of his job’s strongest lures was its promise of the unexpected, and Cédric took pleasure in discovery even when it was accompanied by considerable risk. He had been at his profession for over a decade, longer counting his three consecutive tours with the French Navy. All those years, so many dives, and nothing he’d encountered in the depths had yet given him real cause for fear.

  Cédric cut his thrusters, turned his head, glanced through his faceplate at Marius, and saw he’d also come to a dead stop in the water. Then he reminded himself that faceplate was the wrong word. The correct term for the clear hemispheric panel was dome port. Just as the hardsuit’s exterior was called a pressure hull, and the glovelike hand sockets were called manipulator pods. A man who put great value on precision, Cédric knew it was also somewhat inexact to say that he and Marius Bouchard were functioning as divers — or that their suits were, in fact, suits at all. Both men would be more aptly considered pilots operating anthropomorphic underwater vehicles, submersibles that could descend to six hundred meters — two thousand feet, as Cédric’s American instructors would measure it — beneath the ocean’s surface.

  The nomenclature had been a headache to learn, but for Cédric it was an important reminder. The world below was a world apart, and his hardsuit had more in common with a spacesuit than an ordinary diving rig. Indeed, his ability to walk the seabed was as remarkable as an astronaut’s to stride across the pitted surface of the moon. He did not want to let caution slip and forget for a moment what damage the crushing pressures of the deep would wreak on vulnerable human bodies.

  Cédric stood motionless. He’d already located and videoed the source of the problem that had prompted an emergency repair call to the Africana, a medium-tonnage cable ship Planétaire Systems Corporation had contracted to maintain its undersea fiberoptic lines. But sights like the one now before his eyes gripped him with a kind of joyous awe, and were what truly pulled him to the cold depths. That he earned an excellent wage was only a convenient, if fair, rationale for doing a job he would have paid every last euro of his own to carry out.

  Perhaps twice his size, the goblin came closer, cutting a slow circle through the dusky water. Cédric watched as its orbit tightened to within seven meters of him and suddenly broke, the goblin turning away, its abrupt change of direction propelled by a chopping flick of its tail.

  The hardsuit’s mini-POD seemed to be working perfectly.

  Cédric remained watchful. Shoulder mounted in front of his thruster pack, his xenon lamps played over the veering goblin’s long body. He noticed a pink lacing of blood vessels under its smooth, whitish gray skin. Noticed racks of sharp white teeth on its protrusible jaws, thrust out of its open mouth on reflex like jagged springloaded clamps. Noticed tiny lidless eyes on either side of the thick, flat growth of meat and bone bulging from its snout… eyes that passed over him with an interest he couldn’t have described and an attitude it was impossible to gauge. There was expression in them, yes, and intelligence, but of a trackless alien variety.

  Cédric could see why the Japanese fishermen who’d discovered the species had chosen its name: Tenguzame, goblin shark. He decided right then that it might be the most spectacularly hideous creature he’d ever seen — with the possible exception of his songful operations manager topside.

  “Just look at that thing, will you?” he said over his communicator. Though the words to Marius hardly required secrecy, he had used their closed subchannel. It was something of an amusement. Gunville couldn’t resist eavesdropping from the ship’s control room, and Cédric couldn’t resist thwarting him. “I expected we might run into bulls or tiger sharks… didn’t think these monstrosities climbed above six hundred leagues.”

  “It must have been drawn to the cable.” Marius’s digitally transmitted voice was free of distortion. “Wouldn’t be the first time, judging by the number of teeth we saw in the segment that went bad.”

  “That’s no explanation.”

  “Why not?”

  Cédric hesitated a moment. Though a good and dependable fellow, Marius had been on the job less than a year, and his occasional obtuseness could be a frustration. It was true sharks sought out hidden prey with specialized sense organs, nerve-filled pores called ampullae of Loranzini that detected the electrical fields radiated by creatures of the deep… and every other living thing, for that matter. And while the fiberoptic strands at the core of the submarine lightwave cable gave off virtually no stray emissions, the current flowing through the copper tube around the fiber — in these older repeatered systems, anyway — did indeed generate a low-frequency field that would sometimes confuse a shark into mistaking a segment of cable for a potential meal.

  This, of course, presumed the SL was functional, unlike the ruptured cable that had caused a partial telecommunications failure for many thousands of the region’s broadband-reliant users. And there Marius’s supposition strayed from logic.

  “The wire’s dead. Shorted-out,” Cédric said, trying to check his impatience. However slow on the uptake Marius might be, some allowance had to be made for his relative inexperience on the job. “There isn’t any voltage to stir up the beast’s appetite.”

  Marius didn’t look surprised behind his bubbled acrylic dome port, and Cédric wondered for a moment if he might simply take amusement from hearing him state and restate the obvious. An odd thought, and improbable, but not out of the question. Could it be that he was being made a goat?

  Cédric chased the question from his mind, having more serious matters to occupy it. Such as why the goblin at least appeared to be going at the cable. Ignoring him, it had swum off toward the sandbank on his left, assumed an almost vertical attitude in the water, and then angled its horny snout down toward the crippled fiber.

  Cédric watched the shark resume stitching into the bottom sediment. He remembered that in the early days of submarine cable installation — around the late 1980s — it had been common to find dozens of shark teeth imbedded in sections of damaged line. That problem had been solved by encasing the cables in mult
ilayered armor — a tough yet flexible sheath of plastic laminate steel wrapped in a thick nylon roving. The sharks would still bite, but their teeth rarely penetrated to the electrified copper.

  Rarely wasn’t quite the same thing as never, though. As Cédric and Marius had discovered earlier.

  Still, Cédric was convinced the shark attacks were only half the story, and that the initial cable fault could be blamed on drag trawlers or dredgers — long-line fishing vessels that dropped heavy nets down to the seabed for tuna, mackerel, cubera, and, in the case of the dredge boats, shellfish. In addition to Gabon’s domestic fleet, the boats came from countries as far to the north as Morocco, Nigeria, and Libya, and as far in the opposite direction as South Africa. They came, as well, from outside Africa’s continental boundaries — Europe and Asia in particular. Fisheries based in Cédric’s native France sent their vessels here. As did companies in Japan, Korea, China, Germany, and the Netherlands. Most were licensed for deepwater operations in the Gulf of Guinea, but there were enough illegal ships that would trawl the spawning grounds nearer the coast, where tight zoning rules had been placed on commercial fishing… the Chinese being the worst offenders.

  Cédric knew environmental impact was part of the reason for the restrictions. Fishing accounted for two thirds of Gabon’s economic production, and low yield had been a problem in recent years. But another serious concern was protecting the submarine fiberoptic network that represented a cooperative investment of nearly a billion dollars for local businessmen and their foreign partners in the broadcasting and telecommunications industry.

  Unfortunately, policing the seaways was an impossible challenge for Gabon. A runt of a nation, its navy consisted of five hundred men, a couple of patrol boats, and the same number of amphibious hovercraft. This paltry force could not by any stretch keep up with poachers who were skilled at evasion and equipped with state-of-the-art countersurveillance apparatus.

  The damaged cable Cédric and Marius been sent down to examine had been terribly mangled — evidence that it had gotten raked up from its shallow burial trench by bottom dragging gear, most likely the saw-toothed iron plow bar of a clam and oyster dredge. At that stage, the cable’s surrounding nylon yarn would have been easily shredded and gashed. Cédric could see how the breach could go as deep as the third layer of armor. He could further imagine a shark attack, or series of shark attacks, finishing the destructive work once the outer armor was compromised.

  Which still left him with a significant unanswered question. The goblin… what would have brought it here now, attracted it to a lifeless cable?

  A moment later his puzzlement deepened. The shark had continued hovering in the water several yards away like a clock hand pointed to the numeral six, its nose down, its tail fins aimed toward the surface. Cédric saw it lunge straight for the seabed now, its thick, horny snout appendage drilling deep. Sediment billowed up in a turbid cloud. The goblin darted back up and sliced a rapid circle around the spot where it had struck, row upon row of fangs spiking from its open mouth. Then it speared into the sand sheet again, prodding the thick silt and muck, churning more of it from the bottom with repetitive jackhammer thrusts.

  “Je ne comprend pas,” Marius said over the pilot-to-pilot. “Our ugly friend’s in quite a froth.”

  Cédric was thoughtful. “We need to have a look at what’s agitated it.”

  “Are you sure? I don’t know I’d want to approach the creature if it was in a sedate mood.”

  “We saw a repeater in the cable about forty meters back. They’re spaced fifty meters apart. Unless my estimate’s off by a long throw, we’ll find another over by the shark.”

  “You think that could be what’s making it act up?”

  Cédric’s shrug went unseen inside the bulky aluminum alloy shell of his hardsuit.

  “The laser pump’s an expensive contraption, Marius. I’d just as soon spare it from becoming an hors d’oeuvre,” he said. “Besides, it may be holding a residual charge. That could prove your idea about the cable attracting it to be half right. Or less wrong, anyway. And I figure you’d enjoy the chance to call me an ass.”

  “In this case, I’ll settle for thinking you one.”

  Cédric chuckled a little. “Is your POD toggled on?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then we won’t have to get too close. You saw how it turned from us before.”

  Marius fell silent, conversely indicating his doubts weren’t at all quieted. But Cédric was reassured by how well the protective oceanic device had performed on the goblin’s approach. Designed to irritate the same sensory organs that allowed sharks to home in on their kills, the POD emitted a 360-degree electrical field that had apparently caused their unwelcome welcomer sufficient distress to make it avoid them.

  “Come on,” Cédric said. “I’ll lead the way so you won’t be the first of us to get chewed to pieces.”

  Before Marius could finish voicing his sarcastic thank-you, Cédric depressed the pedals inside the hardsuit’s oversize Frankenstein boots — he’d never been told what to properly call the encasements for his feet — and activated his thruster unit.

  Its motors engaged with a gentle kick. There were two blade-driven thrusters oriented for horizontal movement, another pair for vertical propulsion, any of which could be used singly or in combination to allow full omnidirectional control. Now all four whirred to life at once.

  As the motor vibrations steadied to a faint pulse, Cédric lifted off the seabed in underwater flight, his body remaining in an upright position. Marius swept along behind and to port, careful to stay wide of his backwash.

  They closed distance with the shark in a rush and immediately caught its awareness. It withdrew from the sandbank and swung around to regard them, its small round eyes cold and alert, gleaming in its ghastly head like chips of black mirrored glass.

  The men assumed stationary hovers, their horizontal propellor blades slowing.

  “Why hasn’t your friend left?” Marius said.

  “Our friend,” Cédric amended. “Give it a chance to react to our electronic security blanket.”

  The shark kept watching them, turned in their direction, stilled by their intrusive presence.

  After several long moments it lunged.

  Cédric released a gasping exhalation. He heard Marius blurt a stream of invective in his earbud. Its stiletto-toothed mouth agape, the shark came on fast, straight — and then veered away with a lashing herky-jerky motion barely three meters from where the two men hung suspended over the sandbank.

  Cédric watched it disappear from sight, felt the knot in his stomach loosen, and took a deep breath of the hardsuit’s recycled oxygen.

  “Tell me something,” Marius said. The scratchy tremor in his voice was not due to any transmission breakup. “What’s the effective range of our PODs?”

  “Seven meters.”

  “The shark should have been informed of that specification, don’t you think?”

  Cédric grunted in response and thrust forward through the water. Marius followed. Seconds later they reached the churned up patch of seabed that had been the target of the goblin’s battering frenzy, eased off their footpads, and made a floating descent.

  Cédric had scarcely alighted when he saw evidence that his suspicions had been on the mark. Plucked from the unsettled deposits was a cable segment with a lumpish bulge in it, often described as resembling a snake that had swallowed a rodent — a repeater case. It must be what had aroused the goblin’s attention, he thought. No great surprise there, though Cédric made a mental note to corner one of the ship’s cable technicians and find out for sure whether the component could hold a charge despite a widespread systemic power failure.

  He was still examining the length of cable when something unusual did catch his eye. Very unusual, in fact.

  Cédric looked down at it a moment, baffled. Not far from the repeater, a section of the cable remained partially buried under a thin layer of sand and clingy
vegetation. He reached down to clear the material away with his robotic prehensor claws, his fingers working actuators inside the manipulator pod. Then he scrutinized his discovery from a graceless bent-at-the-knees position — the hardsuit’s limited number of hydraulic rotary joints did not permit bending at the waist.

  “Marius, come have a peek,” he said.

  Beside him, Marius assumed a comparably awkward stance to look at the watertight rectangular box.

  “A splice enclosure,” he said. “I didn’t know the wire had old repairs.”

  “It doesn’t. Or it shouldn’t. None.”

  “You’re positive?”

  “None,” Cédric repeated. “You can take a look at the grid charts once we’re back on the ship. But trust me, I’d remember. I’ve been maintaining the cable almost since it was laid.” He carefully extracted the splice housing from the mud with his prehensors. “Something else. The enclosure doesn’t look like any type Planétaire’s used in the past. It’s very similar, yes. Not identical.”

  Marius produced a confused frown. “Do you think it has some connection to the service failure?”

  “No. You saw where a dredge frame tore up the cable. That was unmistakable.”

  “Then what are you trying to say?”

  “I’m not certain.” Cédric paused. “But this is a damned mystery.”

  Marius’s frown deepened. “Do we tell Gunville about this now or later?”

  Cédric silently withdrew a hand from the sleeve of his hardsuit and flipped a switch on the radio console illuminating its inner hull’s chest piece. The diver-to-surface channel opened up with a faint hollowness that he always associated with holding a paper-cup-and-string telephone to his ear in childhood.

  “Now,” he said at last. “We’d better let him know right away.”

  * * *

  In the Africana’s monitoring operations room, Captain Pierre Gunville already knew.