The Silent Sea (22 page)

His chest was still pumping when he finally started walking toward the beach. The Argentine who’d fallen from the JetRanger lay facedown about fifteen feet from shore. Max kept his pistol trained on the man and waded into the frigid waters, sucking air through his teeth when it reached his waist. He grabbed the man’s hair and lifted his head free. The eyes were open and fixed. Max turned the body. His shot had hit the guy square in the heart, and, had he actually been aiming there, it would have been a remarkable shot. As it turned out, though, it was just dumb luck.

There was no ID in the man’s pockets, only a little cash plus a sodden pack of cigarettes and a disposable lighter. Max unburdened the man of his money and towed the body toward the beach. When it was shallow enough, Hanley started stuffing rocks into the man’s clothes. It took him a few minutes, but eventually the body began to sink. Max dragged him back into deeper water again and let go. With the body weighted and the tide ebbing, the corpse would never be seen again. He grabbed up the pistol he’d dropped and started back.

While he wanted to run, his body simply wasn’t up to it. He had to settle for a loping trot that still made his knees scream in protest. It had taken him less than seven minutes to reach the coastline, but it took more than fifteen for the return journey.

Max expected to see Juan, but there was no sigh of the Chairman. To his dismay, the winch hadn’t reeled up the cable. He looked at the control box and realized he had hit the down button by mistake. A glance at the front bumper revealed that the cable drum had completely paid out the line.

He lowered himself onto the SUV’s rear seat and settled the headphones over his mouth. He frowned when he saw the feed from Juan’s camera showed nothing but electronic snow.

“Juan, do you copy, over?” Max should have been able to hear the Chairman breathing inside his dive helmet, but all he heard was silence, a silence with a sense of finality behind it. “Hanley to Cabrillo, do you copy, over?”

He tried three more times, his concern deepening with each unanswered hail.

He decided not to reel in the cable but instead jumped out of the Ford and hauled up the seperate fiber-optic line hand over hand. After just a few seconds, he knew it was no longer attached to anything. Thin filament tangled at his feet as he frantically yanked it from the earth.

When the end appeared at last, he held it up to examine the break. It didn’t look like it had been sheared cleanly. The plastic coating around the delicate cable was shredded, like it had been abraded between two rough surfaces. He’d seen the video himself. There was nothing in the Treasure Pit that could have caused such damage. This was when he engaged the winch and stood fretfully as the cable slowly rose from the depths. Like the fiber-optics, the braided steel appeared severed.

Max bellowed down into the dank shaft until his throat went hoarse, but all that returned was the echo of a very worried man.

 

 

 

A
GAINST A BACKDROP OF TOWERING ICEBERGS THAT HAD been carved into fantastic shapes by wind and wave, and a sky stained red from horizon to horizon, the
Oregon
still managed to look like a garbage scow. Even this pristine Antarctic environment couldn’t add to the derelict tramp freighter’s tired façade. Even a beautiful frame can’t help an ugly painting.

Linda Ross had done a remarkable job driving them southward. Fortunately, the weather had cooperated, and they had encountered little ice until they were alee of the Antarctic Peninsula. Once there, Gomez Adams scouted a lane through the bergs in their MD-520. The severe storm front that had gripped most of the continent had finally died down, but he reported it was still some of the hairiest flying of his life—and this from a man who used to make his living inserting Special Forces teams behind enemy lines.

Linda looked at herself in the antique mirror in her cabin and decided she would make the perfect wife for the Michelin Man. She knew there was a hundred-and-sixteen-pound woman under all the layers of arctic clothing, but the mirror sure wasn’t showing it. And she still had one more overcoat to go once she got down to the boat garage.

She glanced at her desktop computer, which was linked to the ship’s sensor system. The outside air temperature was minus thirty-seven, with a windchill that would make it feel twenty degrees colder. The ocean was a tick above freezing. Atmospheric pressure was holding steady, but she knew that could change without a moment’s notice.

It was everything she had left northern Minnesota for.

Linda had grown up in a military family, and it was never in doubt that she would also serve. She did Navy ROTC at Auburn and spent five years in the service. She had loved her job, especially sea duty, but she knew her career would have limitations. The Navy rewarded merit better than any other branch of the military; however, she knew that with her elfin looks and almost helium-high voice she would never be tapped for command. And a ship of her own is what she wanted most of all.

Following an eighteen-month stretch working for the Joint Chiefs, she’d been offered a promotion and another staff job. What strings she was able to pull would get her nowhere near a ship, let alone a command. Linda saw the writing on the wall and packed it in. Within a month, she was first officer on an oil-service boat in the Gulf of Mexico, with the understanding that it would be hers within a year.

But then her life took one of those quirky changes that set a person on a course they never anticipated. An Admiral she had never met before called her and told her about a job opening with a real hush-hush outfit. Asked why her, the Admiral had replied that the Navy had made a mistake not giving her what she deserved and this might be a way of making things right.

What Linda would never know was that Langston Overholt at the CIA had put out feelers among the top brass in all branches of the service for people they felt would serve the Corporation well. It was how Cabrillo had recruited most of his crew.

She clicked off her computer, the thought of such cold filling her with apprehension, and stepped out from the cabin. Her insulated boots made her walk like Frankenstein’s monster.

The boat garage was located amidships on the starboard side. Linda took her time. One of the first rules of arctic survival was: Never perspire. Even with everything unzipped, she could feel her body temperature rising. A few of the crew she passed made comments on her size in the bulbous white clothing, but it was in good humor.

The door outside the garage was insulated, but when she pressed her fingers to it to push it open she recoiled at the numbing cold that soaked through. She zipped up her many layers before turning the handle.

The Teflon-coated launch ramp was down and the outer door open, so she was hit with the full force of the Antarctic climate. It made her gasp aloud and brought tears to her eyes. Outside the ship, the water was black and roiled by the wind. Small bergs, called growlers, drifted past. The rest of her three-person team was already waiting. Franklin Lincoln, easily the largest member of the crew, looked positively enormous. All she could see of him was his black face smiling from a mound of white fabric. Mark Murphy looked lost in his gear, like a little boy trying on his dad’s suit for some family pageant.

A crewman handed her an outer overcoat and a full-face mask with integrated communications. He checked her over for any loose seams, using white duct tape to strap down her mittens, and then helped her on with her rucksack and handed her a weapon. They would carry L85A2s, the Heckler and Koch rework of the British bullpup assault rifle. These had been further modified by the ship’s armorer. With the magazine behind the trigger, it was easy to remove the trigger guards to allow them to be fired without the shooter removing their mittens. Powerful halogen lights had been fitted under the stubby barrels.

“I am your father, Leia,” Linc said in a perfect imitation of James Earl Jones’s Darth Vader. With his mask on, he looked a lot like the archvillain.

“I’d just as soon kiss a Wookiee,” she said, throwing a line from
Star Wars
back at him. “Comm check. You with us, Mark?”

“Um, yeah, but what’s a Wookiee and who’s Leia?”

“Nice try, nerd boy,” Linc replied. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you changed your middle name to Skywalker.”

“Please, if anything it would be Solo.”

“Eric,” Linda called out. “Are you on the net?”

Eric Stone was at his customary seat at the navigator’s station in the op center. He’d been on duty during the roughest passages of their journey down here for the simple reason that he was the best ship handler they had when the Chairman wasn’t aboard. “I read you, Linda.”

“Okay, as soon as we’re away I want you to pull back until you’re over the horizon. If we need fast evac, Gomez can come get us in the chopper. But until I know what we’re dealing with I don’t want the
Oregon
exposed to anyone onshore.”

A private smile passed Linda’s lips. Oh yeah, this was
her
command.

“Roger that,” Eric said. “We’ll be just another chunk of ice floating out to sea.”

“Okay, guys, let’s saddle up.” Linda vaulted into the Corporation’s spare RHIB.

A hydraulic ram could launch the boat out of the
Oregon
like a dragster if necessary, but they opted for a smooth descent into the frigid water. Linda fired the big outboards as soon as they were submerged. They had already been brought up to temperature in the garage, so she eased the throttles, and the RHIB’s bow began to lift. They were five miles from shore, but in the bay where the Wilson/George Station was located was a sea of drifting bergs. She had to cut right and left to find a path through the ice. Most of them were not much larger than the RHIB, but several were mountain-sized behemoths that towered into the darkling sky.

Linda was dutifully impressed by the stark beauty of the earth’s most isolated continent.

Off to the side of the boat, a disturbance in the water revealed itself to be the canine snout of a seal. It eyed them for a moment, then disappeared under the waves.

It took them twenty minutes to reach the coast. Rather than run up onto the beach, Linda steered them to a low cliff overhanging the water. It would hide the RHIB from casual observation and made it so they didn’t have to wade ashore. Linc was the first one up. He tied off the boat’s line around a stone outcrop and used his immense strength to hoist the other two out of the boat.

The beach was as forlorn as any Linda had ever seen. It was covered with a light snow, a remnant of the storm. A sudden gust knocked her into the immovable form of Franklin Lincoln.

“We need to put some meat on those bones, girl.”

“Or keep me out of Antarctica,” Linda rejoined. “The station is about a mile inland.”

They had discussed the possibilities ad nauseam and would make their approach assuming the base had been taken by hostile forces. It took an hour to make their cautious approach. They found a low ridge overlooking the station and studied it through binoculars.

The futuristic structure with its domes and interconnecting tubes looked abandoned. The sound of a generator should have carried to them, but all they heard was the whistle of wind and the occasional slap of a door moving on its hinges. It was the personnel entrance to the adjacent garage building that flapped in the breeze. The station’s windows were all dark.

A chill ran down Linda’s back that had nothing to do with the weather. Through the green optics of her night vision binoculars, Wilson/George Station had an eerie feel unlike anything she had ever seen. Blowing wisps of snow took on the shapes of earthbound spirits doomed to haunt this desolate place.

“What do you think?” Linda asked to break herself out of the dark visions.

Mark turned to her. “A couple of days ago, I thought I was on the set of
Apocalypse Now
. Now I feel like I’m staring at the base from
The Thing
.”

“Interesting observation, but not what I’m talking about.”

“I’d say no one’s home,” Linc said.

“Looks like it to me.” Linda stuffed her binoculars back in her bag. “Let’s go, and stay low.”

Her arctic clothing was doing its job of keeping out the cold, but there was nothing she could do about the knot tightening in her stomach. The sense of foreboding built with each slow pace toward the station. Something bad had happened here, she felt, something very bad.

There were no tracks around the base, meaning nothing had moved here since the storm, though it was possible someone had come right before or during it. Linc climbed the stairs at the entrance, his assault rifle at the ready. Mark moved into position next to him, and Linda carefully reached for the handle. It pulled outward, revealing a dim vestibule beyond. The main entry door into the facility was ajar, meaning whatever latent heat that might have been trapped by the station’s thick coating of insulation had long since dissipated. There was no hope of any of the scientists surviving such prolonged exposure.

Linda indicated that Linc take point. The former SEAL nodded and peered through the station’s door. He recoiled slightly, then turned.

He mouthed, This ain’t good.

Linda moved up to his side and looked for herself. The room was in shambles. Clothing was strewn across the floor. Lockers had been emptied and overturned. A bench where workers once donned their boots had been flipped onto an object that truly held her attention. It was the body of a woman, turned blue from the cold. She was wearing a hoarfrost death mask, tiny icicles that clung to her skin and made her eyes opaque. What was worse was the blood, a pool of it frozen solid on the floor under her. Her chest was covered in it, and streaks and splashes decorated the walls.

“Gunshot?” Linda whispered after taking off her face shield.