The Ark tl-1 Read online

  “That’s right, Dr. Locke.”

  “Call me Tyler.”

  They shook hands. “I’m a diver and welder. I’m fully qualified on the lifeboats.” He was a tough guy, but there was a slight quaver in his voice.

  “Glad to have you along,” Locke said. He gestured at the open hatch. “Shall we?”

  Grant got in first and belted himself into one of the seats. The four-point seat belts barely stretched over his huge frame. Locke followed him in, and then Markson closed and dogged the hatch behind him. Locke chose the seat next to the port release lever and cinched his own belts tight.

  “We’re set for launch,” Markson said. “Are you guys ready?”

  “Ready,” Locke said.

  “Oh yeah!” Grant shouted, pumping himself up just like he did in his wrestling days. “Let’s see what this baby can do!”

  Markson gripped the lever in his hand and Locke did the same. Then he yelled, “Three…two…one…launch!” Locke yanked his lever down. A red light glowed, indicating that the release mechanism had been activated, and he felt a clunk as the hydraulic clamps sprang open. There was no turning back now, so Locke forced himself into mission mode, just like when he was in the Army. Precision, decisiveness, and calm were his watchwords from now on.

  The boat began its slide down the rails. The movement was anticlimactic. It was as if the boat was being lowered at a lakeside boat ramp off its trailer. Then the lifeboat bow dipped downward, and Locke’s stomach leapt into his mouth.

  With some goading from Grant, Locke had gone bungee-jumping one time, so the feeling was familiar. His entire body floated out of the contoured seat. The weightlessness seemed to last forever. Then the impact came.

  The crash of fiberglass splashing into the water boomed from all directions. It felt like the lifeboat hit concrete. Locke’s head slammed backward against the cushioned headrest. The sense of weightlessness was replaced by the crush of deceleration. The angle of his seat changed drastically as he saw water wash over the helmsman’s portholes.

  Locke was thrown against his seatbelt and rocked side to side as the lifeboat made for the surface. Water streamed down the cupola window, and he could see the gray sky out of the window. The lifeboat leveled out. Grant whooped in delight from behind him, but Locke was just glad they had made it down in one piece.

  “Woohoo!” Grant yelled, laughing. “Can we do that again?”

  “Not with me, you’re not,” Locke said, unbuckling himself.

  “Oh, you know you loved it.”

  “Tell that to my stomach. It’s still back on the oil rig.”

  Markson took the helmsman’s seat. Although the waves pummeled them, the lifeboat was as seaworthy as a cork. But anyone swimming in that would be fighting for their lives. Locke flashed again to the memory of Dilara’s photo and pictured her struggling to stay afloat. Markson fired up the diesel, and Locke pointed him in the direction of the crash. With the fog getting thicker by the minute, they had to hurry. Their chances of rescuing the survivors were quickly dropping toward zero.

  SIX

  Dilara Kenner struggled to keep the unconscious helicopter pilot’s head completely out of the water, but the waves crashing over them made that impossible. At least the survival suits were buoyant. The best she could hope to do was make sure that he didn’t float away. The copilot, a baby-faced blond named Logan, tried to help, but his arm was broken, so it was all he could do to keep from inhaling seawater.

  She had lost sight of the other passengers, four men who looked like they were oil workers on their way out for a three-week stint on the rig. They had been swept away by the waves, so she wouldn’t be getting aid from them, either. Before she and Logan stopped talking to conserve their energy and to avoid swallowing more seawater, the copilot had told her that the oil platform had no helicopter. The nearest one was two hours away in St John’s.

  It seemed hopeless, but Dilara had thought the same thing when she ran the Los Angeles marathon. The idea of running 26 miles without stopping was too daunting, an apparently impossible task. But if she focused on putting that next foot down, she eventually reached the end.

  So she focused her mind not on waiting for the helicopter to arrive in two hours, but instead on keeping herself alive for the next minute. The most pressing problem distracting her was the water that was seeping into her survival suit, which had snagged on a jagged piece of metal as she escaped the sinking helicopter. She could feel her limbs starting to numb.

  “I’m getting tired,” Logan said after ten minutes of being pummeled by the waves. “I think my suit’s losing flotation.”

  Dilara was on the ragged edge herself, but she knew that giving up was death. “You’re going to make it, Logan. Don’t waste your breath talking. Just keep your head up.”

  “Fog’s coming in. Won’t see us.”

  “I don’t care. They’ll find us.”

  “My legs are cramping.”

  “Logan, I’m holding up your pilot and me,” she said, trying a different tactic. “Are you saying you can’t keep up with a girl?”

  Logan saw what she was doing and smiled weakly.

  “Good,” Dilara said, seeing that her little pep talk worked. “You’re not wimping out. I like that.”

  “I’ll be here as long as you are.”

  “That’s good to hear. I didn’t come all this way to give up now.”

  The terrible irony of the crash was that she thought her entire ordeal was almost over when the crash had happened. Sam and his cryptic words had just been the start of it.

  Hayden. Oasis. Genesis. They didn’t mean anything to her. And his claim that her father had actually succeeded in his life’s pursuit…it was mind-boggling.

  The idea that Sam had been poisoned seemed ridiculous to her. The thing that nagged at Dilara was that Sam was an expert in pharmaceuticals, so if anyone would know he was being poisoned, it would be him. But why would someone want to poison him? She wanted to believe him, but the whole story was incredible.

  What convinced her was an incident that happened on the way back to her apartment.

  She had noticed a hulking man in a black trench coat on the shuttle bus. He had looked at her several times, and Sam’s words echoed in her mind.

  You have to go…or they’ll kill you, too.

  She thought she was just being paranoid but nevertheless asked the bus driver to stay by her car until she safely drove away. She drove out of the lot onto Sepulveda, a six-lane boulevard leading from LAX to her studio in Santa Monica. The traffic was relatively light going north, so she had the left lane all to herself.

  A large black SUV pulled even with her tiny Toyota hatchback. The SUV suddenly swung over and bashed into her car, pushing it into the oncoming lanes.

  The SUV had deliberately waited until the other direction was full of traffic. Dilara slammed on the brakes and tried to resist the SUV’s push, but it was twice as heavy as her own vehicle. A pickup truck was heading right at her, and instead of continuing to resist, she hit the accelerator and swung the Toyota as far to left as she could. Screeching tires and honking horns erupted around her. It was only through luck that she merely grazed the pickup and weaved her way through the rest of the traffic before skidding to a halt in a strip mall parking lot.

  The SUV sped off, leaving a tangle of vehicles and rubber smoke behind it. Dilara guessed that the SUV had followed her from the airport. The windows had been tinted, so she couldn’t see if it was the man in the trench coat, but the occupants must have been cohorts of the businesswoman who had poisoned Sam.

  The possibility that people were trying to kill her had rattled her. She quickly drove away, her hands trembling on the wheel. She kept it together long enough to make sure she wasn’t being followed before she found an empty parking lot where she could sit and let the shakes run their course.

  You have to go…or they’ll kill you, too.

  She could just blow it off and return to her normal life as if Sam were l
oony, but her gut was telling her that what Sam told her was not the rambling of an old person with dementia. People were trying to kill her. She had no proof, but she was sure of it. If she went on as usual, she’d be dead within a day.

  Eventually, her tremors subsided enough for her to drive. She tried going to the police, but that had been a dead end. The detective she spoke with took her statement, an extended version of the one she’d given at the airport, but she could tell he thought her story was ludicrous. Her friend, Sam Watson, hadn’t really died of a heart attack, but had been poisoned? Billions of people’s lives were at risk, and someone had deliberately run her off the road to get her out of the way? Even to her, it sounded crazy. But all she could think of was the SUV deliberately ramming her and Sam’s words.

  You have to go…or they’ll kill you, too.

  Dilara couldn’t go back to her apartment. It was the logical place for her pursuers to wait for her. If she couldn’t go home, she was on the run, and she always would be until she could figure who was after her and why.

  Dilara went to the closest branch of her bank and withdrew every penny in her account. Credit cards were too easy to track, and finding Tyler Locke would require travel.

  Gordian Engineering hadn’t been hard to track down. She went to a library and looked them up on the Internet. The company’s named derived from the Gordian Knot, the impossibly complex tangle cut by Alexander the Great. Apparently, Gordian was the largest privately-owned engineering firm in the world, one that provided consulting services to everyone from Fortune 500 corporations to the US military. Each of its senior engineers were partners, reminding Dilara of a law firm. The company’s specialty was failure analysis and prevention, and the web site cited dozens of areas of expertise — vehicle and airline crashes, fires and explosions, structural failures — the list went on and on.

  She used the site’s search engine to find Tyler Locke. His title was Chief of Special Operations, and his experience was impressive. Majored in mechanical engineering at MIT. PhD from Stanford. Former captain in the US Army commanding a combat engineering company. Expert in demolition, bomb disposal, mechanical systems, accident reconstruction, and prototype testing. Impressive credentials.

  Dilara had never heard of the term “combat engineer.” A military web site told her that they were the soldiers who build bridges and fortifications, clear landmines, and defuse bombs, all while under enemy fire. She looked for a more comprehensive service history for Locke, but she couldn’t find out how long he had served or in what war, just that he’d been decorated with multiple medals, including the Silver Star and Purple Heart. With his background and experience, it sounded like he’d been in the business for 35 years. There was no photo, but she imagined a bald, paunchy man in his fifties wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and pocket protector.

  It would be too easy for Locke to dismiss her story over the phone. She had to see him in person.

  When she found out he was on an oil rig in Newfoundland, she thought it was a great place to meet — thousands of miles from LA, no easy access for the people after her. She’d had to reserve her seat on the helicopter ahead of time — a requirement to fly out to the rig; she couldn’t just walk up to the counter and buy a ticket to a private oil platform — but otherwise she was as careful as she could be not to leave a trail. She flew into the airport in Gander — a 150-mile bus trip from St. John’s — just in case they were waiting for her at the St. John’s airport. Then she got to the heliport only in time to don her survival suit and board the helicopter.

  When she got into the air, she finally relaxed. Maybe she would have some answers soon. She had been looking at the enormous oil platform out the side window when the thud of an explosion came overhead. Wild screams erupted from all the passengers, including herself. The pilot had calmly compensated for the loss of control on the way down, keeping the helicopter upright all the way until they slammed into the sea.

  It took a few seconds for Dilara to shake off the cobwebs after they hit the water. One of the other passengers threw open the sliding door. The pilot was slumped in his seat, unconscious. Dilara could see that the copilot’s arm was pointing at an awkward angle. Before she could ask the others for help, they all jumped out of the helicopter. She sloshed through the water pouring in through the open door. They would only be afloat for a few more seconds.

  She yanked the seatbelt off the pilot. By that time, the water was over her waist, and the pilot floated out of his seat. The copilot, wailing in agony every time his arm hit something, staggered to the door. She wrestled the pilot to the exit just as the helicopter sank beneath the surface. With one last kick, she propelled both of them out, and the three of them rose to the surface.

  Now, as she struggled to keep the pilot’s face up, she resolved to find the people responsible for this, the same people who had murdered her father. Something that Sam had told her was so important to them that they were willing to kill at the slightest provocation. She had to find out what it was, and this Tyler Locke guy was going to help her. They didn’t realize it yet, but they would find out they had messed with the wrong woman.

  A new noise penetrated the growing gloom. An engine. She whipped her head around. The wind made the direction of the sound hard to pinpoint. Then she saw it. An odd orange vessel of some kind, shaped like a bullet. It came to a stop and bobbed on the water about 600 feet away. A hatch opened on the back, and she could see a figure step through and begin hauling people on board. The other helicopter passengers.

  She lifted the arm she wasn’t using to support the pilot and waved it madly, kicking to keep herself upright.

  “Over here!” she yelled. A sense of relief swept over her, and she let out a cry of joy. They were going to make it.

  Logan tried to join her shouting, but he was too weak. His head dipped under the water every few seconds, and each time he came up sputtering. If they didn’t get here quickly, Logan would go under and wouldn’t come back up.

  She yelled more loudly, but she couldn’t see any response. The boat bobbed in and out of her view, the hatch on the back no longer towards her. For a second, she feared they were leaving, but then the boat grew larger. It was approaching. They had seen her.

  The boat pulled alongside and stopped when the aft end was even with them. She had been paying so much attention to the lifeboat that she’d forgotten about Logan. The hatch flew open, and a tall man with tousled brown hair looked around for a moment before diving into the water right about where she’d last seen Logan.

  He stayed under for what seemed like hours but must have been only a few seconds. He surfaced, holding Logan under the chin. He handed Logan to a massive black man standing in the hatch who hauled Logan up like he was a doll.

  Next, the swimming rescuer took the pilot from her and passed him up into the boat.

  He turned to Dilara and, in defiance of the cold weather lashing at them, smiled. “Your turn, young lady.” He didn’t seem bothered at all by the cold water, simply focusing his blue eyes and perfect teeth at her. She found the effect oddly charming considering their circumstances, and it put her at ease.

  Dilara reached up to the black man, who hoisted her up with one motion. Instead of taking the closest seat, she went back to see if Logan and the pilot were okay. Logan breathed raggedly between bouts of vomiting seawater, while a third rescuer bent over the unconscious pilot.

  “Is he going to be all right?” she asked through chattering teeth.

  The third rescuer nodded. “He’s got a pretty nasty bump, but he’s still alive.”

  “Thanks to you,” said a voice behind her. She turned to see the man from the water dogging the hatch closed. She sank into a seat, exhausted and shivering uncontrollably. The man took a wool blanket from a storage bin and draped it over her. The warmth of the blanket felt wonderful.

  “How are you doing?” he asked. In the better light of the boat, Dilara could see a thin white scar trailing down the crease of his neck. His e
yes seemed to be boring into her own. He took her hands and rubbed them with his own.

  “You don’t have an espresso machine on this boat, do you?” she replied. Her teeth snapping together made her sound like she had a stutter. “Because I could use a double-shot about now.”

  The man showed that bright smile again, but Dilara could see he was just as cold as she was.

  “Our barista is out right now, but we’ll get some nice hot java in you soon,” the man said. “You must be Dilara Kenner.”

  She cocked her head in surprise. “That’s right. I didn’t expect a personal welcome. And the tall, dark, and rugged stranger who saved me is?”

  “Well, I don’t know which one of us you’re referring to, but the he-man over there is Grant Westfield, the man you saved is being attended to by Jimmy Markson, and I’m Tyler Locke.”

  For a moment, she was too shocked to speak. The very man she’d come to talk to was right in front of her. Instead of the 55-year-old geek she’d been expecting, he was a man in his mid-thirties, not much older than she was, and looked more like a brawny fireman than a nerdy engineer. She coughed and said, “Dr. Tyler Locke?”

  “I don’t think there’s a need to get formal. I prefer Tyler, but Ty works, too.”

  “What are you doing out here?”

  “I might ask you the same thing. You’ve gone through a lot of trouble just to meet with me. What’s so important that you’d risk death to find me?”

  The shock and exhaustion must have taken its toll. Before she could stop herself, the words tumbled out of her mouth.

  “I want you to help me find Noah’s Ark.”

  SEVEN

  For an hour, Captain Hammer Hamilton had been trying to raise someone on the radio of the private jet, but it was useless. All he got was static. Not that he expected anyone to answer. The only radio was in the cockpit, which he’d been staring at since he rendezvoused with the 737. The plane simply cruised along on its course with Hammer and Fuzzy shadowing it, passing over LA without incident. A mile away, the KC-10 tanker that had already refueled them once stood by in case they needed a refill, which would depend on how far the 737 made it.