The Silent Sea, Page 3

  He took a flight of internal stairs down to the mess deck. The interior spaces of the old tramp freighter were just as scabrous as her hull. The walls hadn’t seen fresh paint in decades, and there were lines through the dust on the floor where a crewman had made a halfhearted attempt at sweeping sometime in the distant past. The mess hall was only moderately brighter than the dim companionway, with cheap travel posters taped haphazardly to the bulkheads. On one wall was a message board bearded with unread slips of paper offering everything from guitar lessons from an engineer who’d left the ship a decade ago to a reminder that Hong Kong would revert to Chinese control on July 1, 1997.

  In the adjoining kitchen, stalactites of hardened grease as thick as fingers hung from the ventilation hood over the stove.

  Cabrillo walked through the unoccupied room, and as he neared the far wall a perfectly concealed door snicked open. Linda Ross stood in the well-appointed hallway beyond. She was the Corporation’s vice president of operations, essentially its number three after Juan and Max. She was pixie cute, with a small, upturned nose, and a panache for varying hair colors. It was jet-black now, and swept passed her shoulders in thick waves.

  Linda was a Navy vet who had done a tour on a guided-missile cruiser as well as spent time as a Pentagon staffer, giving her a unique set of skills that made her perfect for her job.

  “What’s up?” Juan asked as she fell in beside with him. She had to take two steps for every one of his.

  “Overholt’s on the phone. Sounds urgent.”

  “Lang always sounds urgent,” Juan said, removing a set of fake teeth and some wadded cotton from his mouth that were part of his disguise. He wore a fat suit under his wrinkled uniform shirt and a wig of graying hair. “I think it’s his prostate.”

  Langston Overholt IV was a veteran CIA man who’d been around long enough to know where all the skeletons, literal and figurative, were buried, which was why after years of trying to put him to pasture, a succession of politically appointed directors had let him stick around Langley in an advisory capacity. He had also been Cabrillo’s boss when Juan was a field agent, and, when Juan left the Agency, Overholt had been instrumental in encouraging him to found the Corporation.

  Many of the toughest assignments the Corporation had taken on had come from Overholt, and the substantial fees they had collected were paid through black budget appropriations so deeply buried that the auditors for them called themselves the 49ers, after the California gold rush miners.

  They reached Cabrillo’s cabin. He paused before opening the door. “Tell them to stand by in the op center. The pilot should be here soon.”

  While the wheelhouse several decks above them looked functional, it was nothing more than window dressing for marine inspections and pilots. The wheel and throttle controls were computer linked to the high-tech operations center that was the real brains of the ship. It was from there that all thrust and maneuvering instructions were issued, and it was from there, too, that the array of deadly weapons secreted throughout the decrepit-looking scow was controlled.

  The Oregon might have started out as a lumber carrier schlepping timber along America’s West Coast and to Japan, but after Juan’s team of naval architects and craftsmen were finished with her, she was one of the most sophisticated intelligence-gathering and covert-operations vessels ever conceived.

  “Will do, Chairman.” Linda said, and she headed down the passage.

  Following a rather hairy duel with a Libyan warship several months earlier, they had found it necessary to dock the ship for extensive repairs. No fewer than thirty artillery shells had penetrated her armor. Juan couldn’t fault his ship. Those shells had been fired at less than point-blank range. He’d used the opportunity to redo his cabin.

  All the expensive woodwork had been stripped out, either by the Libyan guns or carpenters. The walls were now covered in something akin to stucco that wouldn’t crack as the ship flexed. The doorways were modified so they were arched. Additional arched partisans were added, giving the seven-hundred-square-foot cabin a cozy feeling. With its decidedly Arabesque décor, the rooms looked like the set of Rick’s Café Américain from Casablanca, Juan’s favorite movie.

  He tossed the wig onto his desk and snatched up the handset of a repro Bakelite phone.

  “Lang, Juan here. How are you doing?”

  “Apoplectic.”

  “Your normal frame of mind. What’s up?”

  “First of, tell me where you are.”

  “Santos, Brazil. That’s São Paulo’s port city, in case you didn’t know.”

  “Thank God, you’re close,” Overholt said with a relieved sigh. “And just so you know, I helped the Israelis snatch a Nazi war criminal from Santos back in the sixties.”

  “Touché. Now, what’s going on?” By the tone of Overholt’s voice, Juan knew he had something big for them, and he could feel the first feathery traces of adrenaline in his veins.

  “Six hours ago, a satellite was launched from Vandenberg atop a Delta III rocket for a low-earth polar orbit.”

  That one sentence alone was enough for Cabrillo to deduce that the rocket had failed someplace over South America, since polar shots fly south from the California Air Force base, that it was carrying sensitive spy gear which might not have burned up, and that it most likely had crashed in Argentina since Lang was calling the best covert operatives he knew.

  “The techs don’t know yet what went wrong,” Overholt continued. “And that really isn’t our problem anyway.”

  “Our problem,” Juan said, “is that it crashed in Argentina.”

  “You said it. About a hundred miles south of Paraguay in some of the thickest jungle of the Amazon basin. And there’s a good chance the Argentines know because we warned every country on the flight path that the rocket was overflying their territory.”

  “I thought we no longer have diplomatic relations with them since the coup.”

  “We still have ways of passing on something like this.”

  “I know what you’re about to ask, but be reasonable. The debris is going to be spread over a couple thousand square miles in bush that our spy satellites can’t penetrate. Do you honestly expect us to find your needle in that haystack?”

  “I do, because here’s the kicker. The particular part of the needle we’re looking for is a mild gamma ray emitter.”

  Juan let that sink in for a second, and finally said, “Plutonium.”

  “Only reliable power source we had for this particular bird. The NASA eggheads tried every conceivable alternative, but it came back to using a tiny amount of plutonium and using the heat off its decay to run the satellite’s systems. On the bright side, they so overengineered the containment vessel that it is virtually indestructible. It wouldn’t even notice a rocket blowing up around it.

  “As you can well imagine, the administration doesn’t want it known that we sent aloft a satellite that could have potentially spread radiation across a good-sized swath of the most pristine environment on the planet. The other concern is that the plutonium not fall into the Argentines’ hands. We suspect they have restarted their nuclear weapons program. The satellite didn’t carry much of the stuff—a few grams worth, or so I’m told—but there’s no sense in giving them a head start on their march for the Bomb.”

  “So the Argies don’t know about the plutonium?” Juan asked, using the colloquialism for Argentines he’d picked up from a Falklands War vet.

  “Thank goodness, no. But anyone with the right equipment will pick up trace radioactivity. And before you ask,” he said, anticipating the next question, “levels aren’t dangerous provided you follow some simple safety protocols.”

  That wasn’t going to be Cabrillo’s next question. He knew plutonium wasn’t dangerous unless ingested or inhaled. Then it became one of the deadliest toxins known to man.

  “I was going to ask if we have any kind of backup.”

  “Nada. There’s a team on its way to Paraguay with the latest generation o
f gamma ray detectors, but that’s about all you can count on. It took the DCI and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to convince the President to let us help you that much. I’m sure you realize he has a certain, ah, reluctance, when it comes to dealing with sensitive international situations. He still hasn’t come to grips with the whole debacle in Libya a few months back.”

  “Debacle?” Juan said, sounding hurt. “We saved the Secretary of State’s life and salvaged the peace accords.”

  “And damned near started a war when you went toe-to-toe with one of their guided-missile frigates. This has to go ultraquiet. Sneak in, find the plutonium, and sneak right back out again. No fireworks.”

  Cabrillo and Overholt knew that was a promise Juan couldn’t make, so instead Juan asked for details about the exact location at which the missile exploded and the trajectory of its fall back to earth. He pulled a cordless keyboard and mouse from a tray under his desk, which sent a signal for a flat-screen monitor to slowly rise from the desk’s surface. Overholt e-mailed pictures and target projections. The pictures were worthless, showing nothing but dense cloud cover, but NASA had given them just a five-square-mile search area, which made the grid manageable, provided the terrain didn’t go to hell on them. Overholt asked if Cabrillo had any idea how they were going to get into Argentina undetected.

  “I want to see some topographical maps before I can answer that. My first instinct is a chopper, of course, but with the Argies ramping up activity along their northern borders that might not be possible. I should have something figured out in a day or two and be ready to execute by week’s end.”

  “Ah, here’s the other thing,” Overholt said so mildly that Cabrillo tensed up. “You have seventy-two hours to recover the power pack.”

  Juan was incredulous. “Three days? That’s impossible.”

  “After seventy-two hours, the President wants to come clean. Well, cleaner. He won’t mention the plutonium, but he’s willing to ask the Argentines for their help recovering, quote, sensitive scientific equipment.”

  “And if they say no and search for it themselves?”

  “At best we end up looking foolish, and, at worst, criminally negligent in the eyes of the world. Plus we give Generalissimo Corazón a tidy bundle of weapons-grade plutonium to play with.”

  “Lang, give me six hours. I’ll get back to you on whether we’re willing—hell—able to back your play.”

  “Thanks, Juan.”

  Cabrillo called Overholt after a three-hour strategy meeting with his department heads, and, twelve hours later, found himself and his team standing on the banks of a Paraguayan river, about to cross into God alone knew what.

  TWO

  THE WILSON/GEORGE RESEARCH STATION

  ANTARCTIC PENINSULA

  The skeleton staff of the winter-over crew could feel spring coming in their bones. Not that the weather was much improved. Temperatures rarely rose above twenty below, and icy winds were a constant. It was the growing number of × marks on the big calendar in the rec hall marking the advancing days that buoyed their spirits after a long winter in which they hadn’t seen the sun since late March.

  Only a few research bases remain open year-round on the planet’s most desolate continent, and those are usually much larger than the Wilson/George Station, run by a coalition of American universities and a grant from the National Science Foundation. Even at full staff during the summer months starting in September, the clutch of prefabricated domed buildings atop stilts driven into the ice and rock could house no more than forty souls.

  Because of money pouring into global-warming research, it was decided to keep the station online all year round. This was the first attempt, and by all accounts it had gone well. The structures had withstood the worst Antarctica could throw at them, and the people had gotten along well for the most part. One of them, Bill Harris, was a NASA astronaut studying the effects of isolation on human relations, for an eventual manned mission to Mars.

  WeeGee, as the team called their home for the past six months, was out of some futurist sketchbook. It was located near a deep bay on the shores of the Bellingshausen Sea, midway along the peninsula that thrusts toward South America like a frozen finger. Had there been sunlight, a pair of binoculars on the hills behind the base was all one would need to see the southern ocean.

  There were five nodes surrounding a central hub that served as the mess and recreation hall. The nodes were connected by elevated walkways that were designed to sway with the wind. On particularly bad days, people with the weakest stomachs usually crawled. The nodes were designed as laboratory space, storage, and dormitory-like rooms, with people sleeping four to a cell during the busy summer. All the buildings were painted safety red. With opaque panels in the domed ceilings and many walls, the facility looked like a group of checkerboard silos.

  A short distance away, along a carefully roped path, sat a Quonset-type building that acted as a garage for their snowmobiles and the snowcats. With the weather so miserable during the winter, there had been little opportunity to use the arctic vehicles. The building used waste heat piped from the main base to keep it at a minimum of ten below so as not to damage the machines.

  Most of their meteorological equipment could be remotely monitored, so there was very little for the crew to do during the sunless days. Bill Harris had his NASA study, a couple of them were using the time to finish their doctoral dissertations, and one was working on a novel.

  Only Andy Gangle didn’t appear to have anything to occupy his time. When he’d first arrived, the twenty-eight-year-old postdoc from Penn State had actively overseen the launching of weather balloons and had taken his study of the weather seriously. But not long after he’d lost interest in local temperatures. He still performed his duties, but he spent a great deal of time out in the garage or, when the weather permitted, trekking solo to the shore to collect “specimens,” though no one knew of what.

  And because of the strict privacy code needed to keep a group of people in isolation from getting on one another’s nerves, everyone let him be. The few times his case had been discussed, no one felt he was succumbing to what the shrinks referred to as isolation syndrome but what the team called bug-eyes. In its severest forms, a person could suffer delusions as part of a psychotic break. A few seasons back, a Danish researcher lost his toes and more when he ran naked from his base on the leeward side of the peninsula. Rumor had it he was still in a Copenhagen mental hospital.

  No, it was decided that Andy didn’t have bug-eyes. He was just a sullen loner who the others were more than happy to avoid.

  “Morning,” Andy Gangle muttered when he entered the rec hall. The smell of frying bacon from the cafeteria-style galley filled the room.

  The overhead fluorescent lights made his pallor particularly wan. Like most of the men, he’d long since stopped shaving, and his dark beard contrasted sharply against his white skin.

  A pair of women at one of the Formica tables paused from their breakfasts to greet him and then returned to their food. Greg Lamont, the titular head of the station, greeted Andy by name. “The met guys tell me this will probably be your last day to head to the coast if you’re planning on it.”

  “Why’s that?” Gangle asked guardedly. He didn’t like people telling him his business.

  “Front coming in,” the silver-haired ex-hippie-turned-scientist replied. “A bad one. It’s going to blanket half of Antarctica.”

  Real concern etched the corners of Gangle’s lipless mouth. “It won’t affect our leaving, will it?”

  “Too early to say, but it’s possible.”

  Andy nodded, not in understanding but absently, as if he were reorganizing thoughts in his head. He passed through to the kitchen.

  “How’d you sleep?” Gina Alexander asked. The forty-something divorcée from Maine had come to the Antarctic to, as she put it, “get as far away from that rat and his new Little Miss Perfect Bod as is humanly possible.” She wasn’t one of the researchers but rather worked f
or the support company hired to keep WeeGee running smoothly.

  “Same as the night before,” Andy said, filling a mug with coffee from the stainless urn at the end of the cafeteria line.

  “Glad to hear it. How do you want your eggs?”

  He looked at her, his expression almost feral. “Runny and cold, as usual.”

  She wasn’t quite sure how to take that. Andy usually never said anything more than “scrambled,” before taking his food and coffee to eat back in his room. She chuckled reproachfully. “Boy, aren’t you a bundle of sunshine this morning.”

  He leaned across the dinner-tray track, speaking softly so the others in the rec room couldn’t hear him. “Gina, we’ve got one more week before we can get out of here, so just serve me my damned food and keep your comments to yourself. All right?”

  Not one to back down—ask her ex about that sometime—Gina leaned over so their faces were inches apart. “Then do yourself a favor, love, and watch me while I cook, otherwise I might be tempted to spit in your food.”

  “That would probably improve the waste.” Andy straightened, his face scrunched as he thought for a moment. “Paste? No, damn it. Touch? Taste. That’s it. It would probably improve the taste.”

  Gina wasn’t sure what had gotten into him, but she laughed anyway. “Sonny boy, you need to be a little quicker for your insults to be effective.”

  Rather than wait around feeling foolish, Andy grabbed a handful of protein bars off the counter and skulked from the room, his bony shoulders hunched up like a vultures.’ His ears rang with her parting call of “Bug-eyed twerp.”

  “Seven days, Andy,” he said to himself as he made his way back to his room. “Keep it together for seven more days and you can kiss these suckers good-bye forever.”

  Forty minutes later, bundled under six layers of clothing, Andy inked his name on the whiteboard hanging next to the cold lock and stepped through the heavily insulated door. The difference in temperature between the interior of the station and the small anteroom that lead to the exit was a whopping ninety degrees. Gangle’s breath turned into an opaque cloud as dense as any London fog, and each inhalation stabbed deep into his lungs. He waited for a few minutes to adjust his clothing and fit his goggles over his eyes. While the Antarctic Peninsula was relatively warm compared to the interior of the continent, any exposed skin would still get frostbitten in moments.