The Tomorrow Code (17 page)

“It’s just one day,” Tane mumbled. “I’m sorry.”

“Tane, something bad is going to happen. We don’t know what and we don’t know when. One day extra might mean one day too late. We already talked about this.”

Crap!
Tane thought.
Crap!

Rebecca’s eyes were frosty, but she shut them for a while, and when they finally opened, they were clear.

“What a tragedy,” she murmured, watching a school of colorful fish flit through the encrusted handrail on the point of the bow.

“The guy who died?” Fatboy asked.

Fernando Pereira, a Dutch photographer, had drowned when French secret agents bombed the
Rainbow Warrior
in Auckland harbor.

“That too,” she said softly.

They spent the third night at sea on the wave-washed bottom of a bay just south of Cape Brett, which they had flown over a few weeks earlier in the Grumman Super Widgeon with its underage-looking pilot.

The island was closer now, and in Tane’s mind it loomed large and frightening. Breaking and entering was against the law. And what if there was some virus loose on the island? The uncertainty and fear grew as a storm blew up overnight, and even on the seafloor, the ferocity of the crashing waves above thudded against the little yellow boat, seesawing them from side to side and shunting them small amounts across the sand of the bay.

By ten-thirty, when they were just bunking down for the night, the nerves and the uncertainty became overwhelming.
I can’t do this,
Tane realized.
I can’t go onto an island in the middle of the night and break into a science laboratory that might be infected with a superplague.

He would be letting them down. He knew that. But what choice was there?
I can’t go through with this,
he thought again as another violent wave rocked the sub from side to side. He took a deep breath and held it for a moment before opening his mouth to speak. They’d think him a coward, but he had to let the others know.

“I’m really not sure if I can go through with this,” Fatboy said while Tane’s mouth was still open like a fish. He shut it with a snap.

“What do you mean?” Rebecca asked, emotion rising in her voice.

“I’ve done a few dodgy things in my life,” Fatboy said, “but I’ve never broken the law. Well, not a big law. Not the kind of law they put you in jail for. Maybe we should just wait and try to talk to Vicky again.”

Rebecca said in a small but determined voice, “That won’t help. And if we don’t do this, who else will?”

“I’m just not sure if I can go through with it,” Fatboy said again quietly.

“It’s gotta be done,” Tane said firmly, as if he had never considered any alternative. “And we’ve got to do it.”

There was a long pause.

“I know,” Fatboy said at last, reluctantly.

The next day they rounded the tip of Cape Brett, passing Motukokako Island and its famous Hole in the Rock, then into the Bay of Islands itself.

“Waewaetoroa Passage,” Fatboy said, looking at the chart. “That’s Waewaetoroa Island on the right and Urupukapuka Island on the left. We could go all the way around, but it would be quicker to go through the passage between the islands.”

“Any reason why not?” Rebecca asked.

“Not really.” Fatboy frowned. “There are a lot of big rocks and shoals, and it gets quite shallow at the other end, but boats navigate through there all the time.”

“On the surface of the water,” Tane noted.

“Yeah, but I think we’ll be okay.”

Fatboy drove the sub, as he had proved the most adept at handling its idiosyncrasies, and in the confined space and currents of the passage, that might prove to be vital.

The mouth of the passage slipped past them before they realized it. Just two gradual upward slopes on the seabed that slowly resolved into the underwater sides of the two islands.

Beneath the surface of the water, the Waewaetoroa passage was far from a straight and clear path between the islands.

Rocks jutted out at odd angles from the sides of the islands, which were at times shoals and other times sheer vertical cliffs. Huge boulders on the seabed rose up to meet them, well beneath the keels of the pleasure boats that frequented the passage but big enough to stop larger ships from traveling this way. And certainly big enough to keep Fatboy on his toes.

He had to slam the boat into reverse at one point as they rounded a curve on the side of one of the islands and were confronted by an unexpected underwater ridge, almost a reef, teeming with fish of many kinds and colors.

Rebecca sat in the codriver’s seat and pored over the chart holder, marking rocks and sketching in ridges and rises with a pencil.

Huge fronds of seaweed reached out toward them from the sides of the islands and from many of the scattered boulders. At times the weed blocked visibility, and at other times it threatened to wrap itself around the main propeller and draw them into a watery grave.

It was a scary, underwater obstacle course.

“I’m glad we’re taking this slowly,” Fatboy said at one point.

“And in daylight,” Tane added.

Finally the massive shapes to each side began to fall away, and deeper water beckoned. They continued on for a while as Tane raised the buoy and opened the iris on the video camera.

A fuzzy green shape bounced around on the screen as the light chop above rocked the buoy about.

“That’s Motukiekie,” Tane breathed.

Motukiekie Island. Their second visit, but a vastly different trip from the first one in every possible sense.

Motukiekie. Professor Green. The Chimera Project. It was suddenly very real. Far too real. The dangers that lay ahead of them were exposed on the video screen in front of them, a fuzzy green shape on a blue ocean.

Rebecca heard it first. “What’s that?” she said.

It started off as a kind of far-off rumble, but quickly became a throbbing, whooshing sound that reverberated through the hull of the sub.

“I don’t know,” murmured Tane, twisting the joystick to spin the small camera around on the flat gray buoy above.

The answer was suddenly there on the screen before them.

“Dive, dive, dive!” Tane yelled. Fatboy had already rammed the controls forward and hit the manual override for the trim tanks, flooding them all at once to make the
Möbius
sink like a stone.

“What is that?” screamed Rebecca.

Tane grabbed at the switch for the winch that lowered the buoy, but his fingers slipped and it took him two goes to get the motor winding and the buoy lowering.

The bow of a Navy frigate looks large from any angle, but bearing down on you in the water, it looks like the end of the world.

“I hope it’s deep enough,” Fatboy muttered as the hull hit the sand and the ocean floor with a thud that jarred the vehicle.

The rumble of the engines in the ship grew louder as it closed in on them, and they could hear each individual rotation of the huge propellers.

The sound passed right overhead, shaking the hull and its terrified occupants, but then the ship, and the stark terror, passed them by.

“What the hell is a frigate doing here?” Tane wanted to know, raising the buoy again once he was convinced there were no more surprises like the first one.

The ship had slowed once it had passed them and was rapidly disappearing around the end of the island.

“What is it?” Rebecca asked. “One of ours?”

Tane nodded. The New Zealand flag was clearly visible on the short pole at the stern of the ship. “Must be the
Te Mana
or the
Te Kaha.
”

“Probably on exercises,” Fatboy said.

“Will that stop us?” Rebecca asked.

Tane and Fatboy looked at each other.

“I don’t see why,” Tane said after some thought. “They won’t be interested in Motukiekie. Just cruising past, I think.”

Even so, they stayed on the ocean floor for more than an hour, to make sure the frigate would not return, before resuming their journey to the island.

When the last rays of the sun were a long-ago memory, they took the wet suits off the top bunk.

“Who’s coming with me?” Rebecca asked, pulling the wet-suit trousers up over her bikini.

“I am,” Tane said.

Fatboy said, “I can go if you like, Tane. I’d be happy to do it.”

“No,” Tane said firmly, “I started this, and I’m going to help finish it.”

He put on his weighted belt, heavy enough to compensate for the buoyancy of the wet suit.

Fatboy helped Rebecca with hers, then handed them the oxygen bottles. Not full scuba gear, just small pressurized metal bottles, about the size of a small Coke bottle. There were no straps; they simply gripped the mouthpieces tightly with their teeth. Waterproof flashlights dangled from their wrists on flexible cords.

It was three a.m. when Tane and Rebecca slipped out through the open top hatch of the
Möbius
and slowly swam toward the island.

L
AUNDRY
P
ILES

They came ashore on the
beach at the base of the wharf. Moonlight silvered the waves in the channel, but here in the shadow of the island, it was dark. A large boat was moored back along the wharf, but there were no lights and it looked deserted, so they decided to ignore it and carry on. If anyone was on board, they were well asleep at this time of the morning.

They hid the fins, weight belts, and oxygen bottles behind a pillar beneath the end of the wharf but left on their masks to hide their faces from the security cameras.

Rebecca started off down the wharf but stopped after just a few yards and touched her hand silently to Tane’s arm to stop him also.

She squatted and cupped her hand around the end of her flashlight so it couldn’t be seen from a distance. Before turning it on, she instinctively also put her back to the island, to shield the light from any watching eyes. In the dim light, Tane could see something on the ground.

Tane squatted with her and examined the find. It was a cloth of some kind. Made of a soft pink material. He picked up one end of it. It immediately resolved into a distinct shape. It was a woman’s nightie. A smaller, separate shape slipped out of the end as he raised it, and Rebecca caught it with the light. It was a sensible, white pair of ladies’ panties.

“Seems a strange place to leave your laundry.” Rebecca’s voice, low and soft in his ear.

Tane nodded his head, unsure of what to say. It was a disturbing thing to find.

It took them a while to find the entrance to the path, even though they had been here once before. Tane risked a quick flash of his flashlight.

“Over there,” he whispered, and followed Rebecca as she trod lightly and carefully up the concrete pathway.

He looked back at the water just once, before it was obscured by the trees surrounding the track. It was dark and deep and peaceful. It had been that way for millions of years and would still be the same in another million. Just looking at the expanse of water gave him a steadiness and a resolve to complete this mission, no matter what.

He caught up to Rebecca and whispered in her ear, “Kids will read about this in history books one day.”

He felt her smile rather than saw it in the darkness.

After only a few paces, Rebecca stopped again. Another pile of clothing, this one a small mound. She separated it with her flashlight. A white lab coat. Inside of that a bright red T-shirt and a pair of jeans. Inside the jeans, which were still done up, a pair of blue boxer shorts. Underneath the clothes was a pair of Nike’s, complete with socks. A watch fell out of the sleeve of the lab coat when she moved it.

“This might explain the nightie,” Tane said with a grin. “Maybe a couple of scientists out skinny-dipping for a bit of a lark.”

Rebecca nodded, as if she agreed, but said, “In other circumstances maybe. But not here. Not now. And why are the jeans still fastened?”

The pathway leveled out as they approached the top of the rise and emerged from the native bush into the cleared area that housed the laboratory complex. Here they were no longer in the shadow of the island, and the flat area in front of them was bathed in moonlight.