AOE Chapter 17 [15:11m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (8313)

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Now as Luke and Marshall made their way to the bottom corridor of the vessel, Luke chatted casually. “Those folding berths in the guest quarters look an awful lot like the sleeping berths on a nuclear submarine. Did you know that?”

“Let me guess, more Military Channel?” Marshall was thinking that somebody at the Pentagon ought to check out those guys over at the Military Channel. There seems to be way too much information leaking out of the cable television sets in the country – information that used to take the lives of spies to obtain. And now it seems you could just set your TIVO and become a military expert – well almost.

Luke just laughs. “You should check it out. You’d be surprised what kind of information is floating around out there.” The door to the hyperbaric chamber was still latched open against the side bulkhead. Luke went in first. “I’ll set down the sleeping cots from the wall. We can put the kids on them and keep their IV’s on the latch above the bed.” He stopped a little past the panel that Marshall had used to control the hyperbaric oxygen and lower the pressure.

Marshall stops and turns around as he bends over to set the chamber for the same setting they had earlier. He starts to tell Luke what he is doing – he’ll show him which knobs, too. “OK, I’ll set the gas mixture. Almost pure oxygen and half atmospheric pressure, right?” Marshall turns back around and looks up to show Luke what he’s doing. He didn’t see Luke standing there, like he expected. What he saw was Luke opening the door at the far end of the long radiation shielded pressure tube. Before Marshall can react, Luke has the door open. Marshall jumps up and sprints to the other end of the chamber. He’s cursing himself for not putting a lock on this pressure door as well. It had never seemed necessary. Anyone inside had already passed the keypad security. And anyone coming from the other direction would—

He didn’t have time to finish his thought. Before he can reach him, Luke jumps into the room on the other side of the door. Marshall gets to the door in time to see Luke stand up from the seven step leap. Luke was standing on a platform over another small flight of stairs that went down to the bottom of the boat. Where there should have been a pair of gigantic diesel engines, there were instead…

Marisse makes a satellite telephone call…