Dark Fathom

"Morrisey may be the Clive Cussler of the Christian market. Beck Easton is the kind of hero readers love to love, and his well plotted, exciting adventures lack nothing." Romantic Times Book Club Magazine Software architect Beck Easton is a secret member of the National Security Agency. He is also ready to give up his double life when an unexpected assignment-and the captivating Angela Brower-change his plans. Following the trail of an Al-Quaeda operative, Beck uncovers a plot that could kill thousands. Suddenly an already perilous assignment turns into a race against time, complicated by Angela's presence and Beck's growing attraction to her. Caught in a web of intrigue and danger, Angela and Beck must join forces to stop a deadly enemy before it is too late. In this taut page-turner, Dark Fathom takes you deep into a world of espionage, ocean diving adventure, and faith lived out in the face of deadly high stakes.

Dark Fathom
Copyright 2005 by Tom Morrisey
Maps 2005 by Tom Morrisey
Requests for information should be addressed to:
Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Morrisey, Tom, 1952 –
Dark fathom / Tom Morrisey.
p. cm. — (A Beck Easton adventure)
ISBN-13: 978-0-310-24408-0 (softcover)
ISBN-10: 0-310-24408-0 (softcover)
1. Divers — Fiction. I. Title.
PS3613.O776D37 2005
813'.6 — dc22
2005015815
All Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.
Excerpt from Wild by Nature: True Stories of Adventure and Faith, by Tom Morrisey.
Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 2001. Used with permission; all rights reserved.
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Interior design by Beth Shagene
Printed in the United States of America
05 06 07 08 09 10 11 • 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Prologue
May 6, 1945
49,000 Feet above the Northwest Territories, Canada
“Captain, fuel pressure’s dropping — number-two drop tank.”
The flight deck, illuminated only by the red instrument
lamps, was full of the sound of the engines, a background noise
too loud to ignore and too monotonous to notice. Not even the
leather flight helmets with their padded intercom headsets could
cancel it out. It was like sitting under an avalanche with cotton
stuffed in one’s ears.
“Captain?”
Luftwaffe Captain Ernst Grüber glanced at the altimeter; his
aircraft was nearly fifteen kilometers above the dark and frozen
earth. He was cold, his feet nearly numb despite the rabbit-fur-
lined f light boots, his fingers thick and wooden within
silk-lined, shearling-cuffed gloves. He switched on a red-lensed
flashlight, checked the flow from his oxygen bottle, and turned
it up. Almost immediately, his head became clearer and feeling
crept into his limbs. He turned to the flight engineer.
“How long since we emptied number one?”
The engineer, a lieutenant, pushed up his jacket sleeve and
glanced at his watch. “Five minutes, sir.”
Grüber nodded. The designers from Horten had said that the
wing tanks would run dry within seven minutes of one another.
That prediction was turning out to be accurate, just as all of their
predictions had turned out to be accurate, beginning with the
outrageous pronouncement that an aircraft such as this — with no
vertical stabilizer, no rudder, and no fuselage to speak of — would
fly at all.
“Watch the fuel pressure,” Grüber said. “Tell me when it hits
zero.”
He was tired. Dog-tired already and only six hours into what
was scheduled to be a twenty-two-hour mission. Fatigue was
edging the Dahlem accent back into his German, a guttural
undertone that he tried to hide from the high-blooded Berliners
on his aircrew. But if anyone noticed, they did not show it.
“Zero now, sir.”
“Very good.” Grüber put both hands on the control yoke. He’d
logged a hundred hours in training on this aircraft, but it still
felt strange to have no rudder pedals beneath his feet. “Eject on
my mark . . . now.”
The engineer pulled a pair of levers. There was a distant,
metallic thunk as the two huge, twenty-kiloliter, aluminum
tanks dropped away into the night. The instruments registered
the change — the airspeed rising, the altimeter creeping higher.
Grüber allowed the aircraft to climb and seek its own equilibrium.
To give it the range required for this mission, the bomber
had not been equipped with the belly guns, nose guns, or tailcannons
that had been part of the original design. The ball turret
behind the flight deck had been replaced with a simple Perspex
dome from which the navigator, who was also the radio operator,
could make star-sightings every fifteen minutes, guiding them
on their journey with the same technology used for centuries by
ships under sail.
With no guns, no armor to speak of, no weapons other than
the single bomb in its bomb bay, the bomber’s sole means of
defense was altitude. It could not outrun most Allied fighters,
but it could outclimb them; its service
ceiling and range were a
full two kilometers higher and 10,000 kilometers farther than
any other aircraft in the world. That was the beauty of it.
That was the horror of it, as well.
The Horten Ho-18 Amerikabomber was unlike any other aircraft.
It was a true flying-wing design, powered by six BMW 109-003
jet engines, capable of reaching well in excess of five hundred
miles per hour in level flight. Sixty meters wide from wingtip
to wingtip, the airplane was beautiful, a design seemingly
snatched from some future time. With no nose and no tail, it was
a shallow, batlike chevron in the evening sky. There was nothing
about it that did not seek the heavens.
But that was also its principal flaw: one that Ernst Grüber
had spotted within moments of first seeing a scale model of the
aircraft.
“It has no vertical stabilizer,” Grüber had told the Horten
representative who’d first briefed him.
“The side-to-side motion of the airplane, the yaw; it is controlled
by the thrust of the engines, yes?” The Horten man had
smiled as if what he’d just said was supposed to be obvious.
The thrust of the engines. The jet engines. And Grüber knew
about jet engines. They were more powerful than piston engines,
and much more efficient at altitude, but they could also be amazingly
fragile. He’d been standing on the flight line in Cologne a
year earlier when one of the new Me-262 jet fighters was being
run up. A line mechanic’s glove had been sucked into one of the
intakes; that was all it had taken to disintegrate the engine in
rather spectacular fashion.
Which was why Grüber had asked his next question:
“And what happens when the thrust falls out of balance?”
That had gotten Grüber a look. “Then you must rebalance it,
of course. We used this design on a fighter prototype last year. If
the thrust goes out of balance and is not corrected immediately?
Then the aircraft will spin. Quite violently, in fact. You would
not be able to recover.”
That had gotten the Horten engineer a look. “I’m flying this
aircraft into combat,” Grüber had told him. “It sounds a bit delicate,
does it not?”
The engineer had shrugged. “For a fighter, yes. But for a bomber?”
He’d shrugged again. “Just stay high, so they don’t shoot you.”
“Let us remember Dresden,”

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Excerpted from Dark Fathom by Tom Morrisey
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