Prehistoric Clock Read Free

powerful impact had rippled the ocean bed.
    Verity swallowed hard. A bomb had to have just exploded somewhere close to the pipeline. Had a BAC officer, just like her, been blown to bits while trying to defuse it? Too late to back out now. She looked up. The black cylinder stretched deep into the gloom on either side. Unmoved, assimilated by weeds and crustaceans, it resembled the charred remains of some colossal leviathan skeleton from ancient times. A kraken…which must not be cracked. Thank God her reliable bad puns were still intact.
    She located the aft hold, partially collapsed, and crept through the splintered iron hatch. It was too dark inside, so she lit a flare from her tool belt and dropped it at the hatchway. Rose light flooded the hold, skewing the shadows of strewn boxes against buckled walls. In the middle of the floor, a shiny silver-and-black clarinet lay untouched. The last object she’d expected to find there. Silver bubbles from her valves collected on the sloping roof and rolled above a stack of long metal boxes marked EXPLOSIVO.
    Christ. There were at least six boxes! FRZ-3 clockwork explosives were not difficult to defuse—the detonating coil could be removed with a screwdriver and a portable oxyacetylene cutter, both of which she had in her belt—but the explosive material itself was quite unstable. A heavy blow to any FRZ-3 bomb would explode it without the need for a detonator. Therefore she must be careful not to let anything hit the device or— God forbid— let one of the boxes spill.
    She unfastened the cords holding the boxes in place and carefully, one at a time, lowered the five-foot-long containers flat onto the floor. Her pruned fingers shivered but the operation was well within her capabilities. She’d performed this job countless times on ships and in shallow water, usually on redundant British mines. Time, rather than difficulty, was now her biggest concern. Every minute she spent underwater prolonged the time she would have to decompress in the bell later on. If she were to surface too quickly, the gases in her bloodstream might create a dangerous, perhaps fatal bubble—an air embolism.
    But she would have to take her chan—
    The entire hold shook. A deep, twisting grind felt like something was tunnelling up through the iron wreck. She gazed up in horror as several rivets shot loose from the ceiling, allowing her bubbles to squirm through a gap. The metal began to warp inward, downward…onto the explosives!
    A tremendous weight pressed the iron panels. She stumbled sideways over a fallen crate. Seawater gushed up her nose, making her cough. She righted herself instantly in mid-fall but lost her bearings. Still the ceiling warped, lower and lower. A few more feet and she’d be a memory.
    Think, Verity, think. How can you save yourself and the pipeline? You can’t defuse the bombs now. Not here. What about—
    That was it! She dragged the boxes out through the hatchway one at a time, barely sliding the last one away before the full weight of a huge steam funnel rent the iron apart. It crushed the hold completely.
    The enormity of her narrow escape seeped in. She panted and watched a cloud of white smoke rise from the split funnel and envelop the black pipeline. It could so easily have been the shock heard throughout the empire. Major damage to the industries. The end of Verity Champlain. For some reason, the latter struck her as being the less important of the two. Why is that? She didn’t want to die. So what the deuce was she doing here, a martyr to deep sea petroleum? And why hadn’t that occurred to her before? The notion gouged a chilling void in the pit of her stomach. What insane confluence of events had led her to this spot? What destiny? Orders? She frowned and tugged a slimy stem of sea grass free from its roots in the sand.
    A twitch on the slenderest thread of life had almost brought her whole world crashing down, and for what?
    Maybe it was the pressure