The Silent Sea (40 page)

“Through diplomatic channels, we got word to them that if they did call the debt we would slap them with tariffs so no one here would buy their goods. In essence, they dared us. They don’t care if their people are out of work and starving. When it comes to economic attrition, they can bury us. We’ve outsourced and borrowed ourselves into a corner and now we’re going to pay the price.”

“They said ‘overt act’?”

“Overt. Covert. It doesn’t matter. They have us over a barrel. End of story. The President has ordered any U.S. warships in the Atlantic to stay above the equator, and he’s recalling all our fast-attack submarines to show the Chinese that we won’t interfere with what they and the Argentines have done. As of today, the United States has ceded its superpower status to the Chinese.”

Coming from a man who had played a significant role in ending the Soviet Union’s bid for world domination, those last words were especially painful to hear. Juan didn’t know what to say, and as of this moment wasn’t sure what he was going to do.

The right thing was to keep with his plan and let the chips fall where they may. However, he had to consider what would happen to the people back home. What Overholt described would make the Great Depression sound like a boom time—sixty or seventy percent unemployment, hunger and the violence it inevitably spawned, the breakdown of the rule of law. In essence, it would be the end of the United States.

He finally found his voice. “Well, you don’t have to worry about us. Like I told you, we’re on our way to South Africa.”

“I guess I’m glad to hear it,” Langston said wearily. “You know, Juan, we still might not get out of this so easily.”

“What do you mean?”

“We can placate the Chinese, but North Korea’s demanding we draw down the number of soldiers we have in the south or risk a military confrontation. And last night a small bomb went off near the Presidential Palace in Caracas. The Venezuelans are claiming it was an assassination plot perpetrated by Colombian Special Forces. They’ve vowed revenge, and a check of satellite imagery shows them moving troops to the border. Interestingly, they started a couple of days ago.”

“Which means they probably set it off themselves for a pretext.”

“That’s my read on it, too, but it doesn’t matter. China’s heavily invested in Venezuela, so you can imagine our reaction if they do invade Colombia.”

“Thumb twiddling?”

“That might be seen as too provocative,” Overholt said with gallows humor. “We’ll probably sit on our hands instead. Listen, I’ve got a full slate of meetings this morning. I’ll talk to you later about any new developments. Give my best to the Kuwaiti Emir if we don’t speak before you get there.”

“I’m sure we will,” Juan replied.

He replaced the handset and threw off his blankets. The floor was as cold as a hockey rink, and just as slippery under Juan’s woolen hunting sock. He wasn’t sure who was better at playing the game. Him for lying to Overholt or Langston for trying to manipulate him. The veteran CIA minder did think that the
Oregon
was heading for Cape Town, but he’d told Juan about North Korea and Venezuela to get him to turn back.

“Do the right thing,” Juan’s father had often told him. “The consequences are easier to deal with, no matter what you think.”

He dressed quickly and was in the op center with a cup of coffee from a silver urn on a back table. With the ship firmly grounded, Maurice had pulled out their finest Royal Doulton. It was the steward’s subtle way of getting back at him for his earlier crack. If Juan recalled properly, the cup in his hand had cost seventy-five dollars.

“How did Mike and his team make out?” he asked. Murph and Stoney were in their customary seats toward the front of the room.

“They got back at about four this morning,” Eric Stone replied. “He left word that it went well, but they need at least one more night. But there’s a problem.”

“Isn’t there always?”

“The workboat with the sonar gear went south this morning.”

Juan cursed. If he could find the wreck in a submersible so quickly, it was a safe assumption that the Chinese would, too. “I bet the other bay is iced over, so they’re checking on the right one.”

“What do you want to do about it?” Mark asked.

“Not sure,” Juan replied. “We can’t catch them in either of the submersibles, and if we go after them in an RHIB they might radio back to base about an unknown craft approaching them.”

Hali Kasim was sitting at his customary station. He offered, “So what if they find it today? All they’ll be able to do is take some grainy underwater pictures. It proves nothing, and by this time tomorrow the wreck will be destroyed.”

“Playing devil’s advocate,” Eric said, “if they find the wreck, who’s to say they don’t stay overnight? That’ll mess up our schedule.”

Juan felt the beginnings of a headache and rubbed his temples absently. Of course there was the other problem that he had no idea how to tackle. He’d already run his idea by Kevin Nixon, but the special-effects master said any fakes he made would be spotted in a second. It was the real deal or nothing. For their plan to work so the Argentines never suspected a thing, Cabrillo needed to find eighteen human skeletons.

The headache was morphing into a migraine.

 

 

 

W
HO DO YOU LOVE MORE THAN ME?” LINDA ROSS ASKED when she strode into the op center fifteen quiet minutes later. She carried a slim manila folder and a wide grin.

“Megan Fox,” Mark said at once.

“Beyoncé,” the duty tech at damage control called out.

“Katie Holmes,” Hali said.

“I’ve always had a thing for Julia Roberts,” Eric added.

“Chairman,” Linda asked, “care to be a sexist pig, too?”

“The only woman I love more than you is my mom.”

The other men jeered him softly.

Linda smiled. “Touché.”

“Remind me again why I love you so.”

“Because I’ve found that less than a hundred miles south of here is a Norwegian whaling station abandoned back in the 1930s.”

“We don’t need whale bones.”

“It has been preserved as a World Heritage Site—wait for it—because it has a chapel with a graveyard that is the final resting place for twenty-seven whalers who’d died in these waters. You told me to find you some bones, I give you bones.”

Juan was on his feet in an instant and at her side in two strides. He had to bend way over to lay a kiss on her velvety cheek. The migraine suddenly vanished, and the pall that had formed over him lifted. What had him so down was the fact that if they hadn’t found a bunch of skeletons, he would have had no choice but to leave the hostages to their fate. He doubted they were going to be an Argentine priority once things heated up, so to leave them behind meant to let them die.

“Chairman, I’m picking up a transmission from the Chinese workboat,” Hali said, turning back to his bank of computers.

“Jam it!”

He worked his keyboard for a second. “I’ve isolated the frequency. They’re dead. The computer will automatically keep following them as they search for a signal up and down the dial.”

“Okay. Good. If they have any news to report, they’ll have to go back to base. That’s two problems down in under a minute. Well done, everybody.”

Max and Tamara strolled into the op center, their hands so close together that Juan suspected they’d been holding them just seconds earlier. The bullfrog and the princess, he thought, but was happy for them both.

“Perfect timing, my friend.”

Hanley looked at him like a buyer eyes a used-car salesman. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

Cabrillo smiled broadly. “And so you should. I need you to play Igor and go rob a churchyard.”

Tamara looked aghast. “You want him to do what?”

“You know,” Max said, shaking his head from side to side. “I have to admit there was a part of me that hoped this piece of the operation wouldn’t pan out.”

“Come on,” Juan teased, “fresh air, open skies, decomposing Norwegians. It’ll be great!”

“What are you two talking about? Decomposing
who
?”

Max turned to her. “In order for us to rescue the hostages so the Argentines don’t know they’re missing, we have to leave something behind to fool them.”

“But?”

“Once we get them out of the building,” Juan said, “we’ll torch it. All they’ll find are eighteen sets of charred bones. Only a pathologist would know they weren’t the original men and women. We’re just grateful the sizes of the winter-over crews are so small, otherwise we’d need to come up with an alternative.”

“Like what?” Her mind reeled.

“A small nuke, maybe.”

From what she’d seen of the Corporation so far, she wasn’t sure if Cabrillo was joking or not. She wouldn’t be surprised if it were the latter.

He threw her a wolfish grin that told her nothing beyond the fact that she was surrounded by a bunch of swashbuckling adolescents. She looked to Max for guidance. He merely shrugged. She said, “I guess it’s a good thing you were going to use a small one.”

Linda moved to her side, as if she were an anchor in their craziness, and said, “Don’t worry. We do know what we’re doing.”

“I’m glad you do because I sure don’t.”

Hanley left twenty minutes later in an RHIB, towing an inflatable boat. He and his four-man crew shot straight out to sea for about five miles before turning southward, so there was no chance of being spotted from shore. Max brought along a gasoline-powered high-pressure pump he planned to use to excavate the bones. The needle of heated water it threw could be dialed up to four thousand psi, more than enough to melt away the permafrost covering the bodies. As he said when they left, “No picks and shovels for Mrs. Hanley’s favorite son.”

Juan had a decidedly more difficult job today. With the Chinese surveying the bay where the wreck was located, Mike Trono and his team couldn’t resume their work. That freed up the Nomad submersible, with its air lock. The perpetually twilit sky was dark enough to provide visual cover, and the Argentines’ oil rigs and hot-air bubbling system would screen the sounds of his work.

Down in the underwater operations room, Cabrillo dressed to dive. Under his Viking dry suit he wore a mesh garment embedded with more than a hundred feet of tubing. Warm water would be circulated through the tubes from an umbilical attached to a jack on the submarine. He knew the Argentines were heating the bay, but he couldn’t risk encountering freezing water during his trip. The umbilical also carried his communications system and his air, so there was no need for bulky tanks.

The full-face helmet was equipped with powerful lights, which he dimmed down by covering half the lenses with paint. It would make it much more difficult to work but also much harder to be spotted from the surface. He would need to keep reminding himself to never look up and send the beams flashing toward the surface.

Linda would pilot the minisub while Eddie Seng would be Juan’s dive master.

As soon as they launched, Linda guided them to the
Oregon
’s stern. Just below the naked flagpole, a hatch had been opened to reveal a huge drum of tow cable. Rather than steel, it was made of woven carbon fiber, with a quarter of the weight and five times the strength of a traditional line. As an added bonus, it was neutrally buoyant. Linda grabbed the end with the Nomad’s powerful mechanical arm and fitted it into a slot where it couldn’t come loose.

Then they started making their way to the Argentine base. The drag of line wasn’t bad at first, but the three of them knew by the time they had enough played out the submersible would be struggling. They had timed their launch so the Nomad would ride into the bay with the tide.

It took more than an hour to reach the pylons supporting the gas-processing plant that Juan and Linc had spent so much time studying the night before. Because the bay was kept artificially warmed, sea life teemed around the thick ferroconcrete piers. Dull-brown crabs scuttled along the bottom and fish darted between the columns, which were encrusted with barnacles and shellfish.

The Nomad was sixty-five feet long, but with multiple thrusters placed strategically on her hull she was wildly maneuverable. Linda had her bottom lip pinched between neat white teeth as she moved them under the industrial complex and around one of the columns. There she lowered them to the bottom.

She switched over to the arm once again. While the carbon-fiber cable was strong, it remained susceptible to abrasion, and being scraped across the rough surface of the pier would weaken it substantially. To protect it, she used the arm to scrape away the accumulation of mussels. The small bivalves snapped their shells violently when dislodged and propelled themselves into the gloom.

Next, she swiveled the grasping hand to pull a bundled length of commercial plastic pipe from a storage bin. It was the same material used in domestic plumbing and would be a common item found anywhere at the base. Their presence, in the unlikely event they were ever found, would not raise suspicion. They would just be other pieces of junk that had fallen into the sea. The pipes had been glued together to form a semicircle that fit around the back of the pier. It would be the smooth plastic that the cable rubbed against and not the cement.

She fitted the protective half sleeve into place and looped the submersible around the far side of the column.

“Good job,” Juan said as they slowly backed away. The black towline slid easily over the bundle of PVC pipes. “One more stop to go.”

She pivoted the Nomad and started back across the bay. The weight of the line and the need now to fight the tide, which had yet to slacken, strained the submersible’s engine. The batteries drained almost twice as fast as normal, and their speed was down to a crawl, but they still made headway.

Twenty minutes later, they were under the
Admiral Guillermo Brown
. Her anchor was paid out and rested on its side on the rocky seabed, its heavy chain rising up to the surface. Less than twenty feet of water separated her keel from the bottom.