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“Fine,” Devlin said. “So he got you on with us and had you put aboard the Java Dawn. But the ship—this ship—it went down. I saw it. That was no illusion.”
Janko exhaled like a parent tiring of questions from a curious child. “No, Padi, it wasn’t.”
“How the hell did you do it, then?”
“Follow me,” Janko said. “You’re about to find out.”
Janko led Devlin in through the main hatch and then through a second, inner hatch. For the first time, Devlin noticed that the outer section of the ship was left pretty much as it had been when he’d seen it years back. It looked neglected, disused. But once they passed the inner hatch, things were different.
Soon, Devlin found himself in a modern control room. Chart tables, propulsion gauges, radarscopes, and graphic displays surrounded him. Large screens on the front wall were set up like the forward view from the bridge; in fact, they showed the gray sky and the cold sea ahead of the ship, piped in from the highest vantage point of a group of video cameras.
“When did all this get done?”
“I told you,” Janko insisted, “the changes were made before the ship was towed off the beach.”
“But we inspected it for leaks.”
“The outer hull only,” Janko reminded him. “Besides, I was with you to make sure you didn’t stray into any sensitive areas.”
Devlin remembered now. They’d checked the repair job and the lower decks, the engine room and the bilge. No one had bothered with the inner spaces of the ship.
Janko turned his attention to one of the crewmen. “Switch to infrared.”
The crewman flicked a switch, and the right-hand screen cycled. The color changed from gray to an orange hue. Suddenly, the clouds, mist, and spitting rain were gone. The visibility that had been less than a mile was no longer a problem. Like magic, the shape of a large, cone-shaped island suddenly took up the center of the monitor. The central peak soared thousands of feet into the sky. It seemed impossible to have been a mile or so out and yet have the mist hiding the island so thoroughly.
Even as his eyes were growing wide, Devlin’s ears began to pop. “What’s happening?”
“Inner hull pressurized,” one of the crewmen said, “outer hull flooding.”
On the left screen, Devlin saw the bow of the ship settling toward the sea. A few moments later, the water rushed in from all sides as air surged out of hidden vents in the decking. In seconds, the foredeck was submerged. The water level moved rapidly higher, traveling up the superstructure and engulfing the camera.
Suddenly, all Devlin saw was darkness and the swirl of water in front of the lens. It took a minute for the view to clear, but even then there was nothing in the frame but the ship’s bow.
“A submarine?” Devlin said. “You turned this ship into a bloody submarine?”
“The central section of this ship is a pressure hull,” Janko explained. “The rest is just camouflage.”
Despite his anger, Devlin found himself impressed. “How deep can it go?”
“No more than eighty feet.”
“You’ll be spotted from the air.”
“The black paint reflects almost no light, and it also absorbs radar.”
That explained why the paint was so thick and rubbery, Devlin thought.
“And all the radar masts and antennas?”
“We had to do away with them,” Janko said. “They tend to cause problems when we submerge.”
“You’ll still be picked up on sonar.”
Janko seemed exasperated. “We don’t travel around like this, Padi. We travel on the surface, like we have been. We merely do this to hide. And… to park.”
“Park?”
“Activate the approach lights,” Janko said to a crewman.
