The War Cloud (23 page)

Their heavenly voices felt heavy in the freezing air, Serena thought, weighed perhaps by the tunnel’s meter-thick walls of reinforced concrete. Or maybe it was her heart that felt so heavy.

The Doomsday Vault, as it was called when it opened in 2008, already housed more than 2 million seeds representing every variety of the earth’s crops. In time it would house a collection of 100 million seeds from more than 140 countries here on this remote island near the North Pole. It was built to protect the world’s food supply against nuclear war, climate change, terrorism, rising sea levels, earthquakes and the ensuing collapse of power supplies. If worse came to worst, the vault would allow the world to reconstruct agriculture on this planet.

But now the vault itself was in danger. Thanks to global warming, the shrinking ice caps had spurred a new race for oil in the Arctic. It was the next Saudi Arabia—if someone could figure out a way to extract and transport all that oil through a sea of ice. A few years earlier the Russians had even planted a flag 2 1/2 miles below the ice at the North Pole to claim its oil reserves. Now she feared they were preparing to start mining.

She passed through two separate airlocks and into the vault itself, blinking into the glare of the TV lights. The Norwegian prime minister was in there, somewhere, along with a delegation from the United Nations.

Serena knelt before the TV cameras and prayed silently for the peoples of the earth. But she was aware of shutters clicking and photographers’ boots shuffling for better shots of her. Whatever happened to finding a secret place to pray like Jesus taught? she wondered, unable to shake a guilty feeling. Did the world really need to see “Mother Earth” arrayed in high-definition piety 24/7? As if the prayers of the Vatican’s top linguist and environmental czar counted more than those of the anonymous, humble field laborer whose hands culled the seeds she now held.

But this was a cause greater than herself and her tormented 33-year-old soul, she reminded herself. And her purpose here today, officially, was to focus the world’s attention on its future.

As she knelt, gripping the box of seeds tightly, a feeling of dread came over her. What the vault meant, what it was built for: the time of the end, which the Bible prophesied would come soon. The words of the prophet Isaiah whispered in her ear: God is the only God. He will draw all people to Himself to see His glory.

He will end this world. And he will judge those who reject Him.

Not something TV audiences wanted to hear.

She felt a nagging sense of hypocrisy about her performance here today. A disturbing thought began to bubble up, a thought she couldn’t quite formulate. And her dread began to take shape in the words of Jesus: “If therefore you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has anything against you, leave your gift there before the altar, and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.”

She didn’t understand. She had plenty of people angry with her at the Vatican—for being a woman, for being beautiful, for drawing cameras wherever she went, and that was just within the Church. Outside, there were oil and gas companies she chided, and diamond merchants, and the exploiters of children.

But that’s not what this word from God was about.

Conrad Yeats.

She fought to push his face out of her mind, and felt the slightest tremor as her knees pressed against the concrete floor.

That rogue? That liar, cheat and thief? What could he possibly have against me? Other than I wouldn’t sleep with hi

But she couldn’t get his face—his handsome, unshaven face—out of her mind. Nor could she forget how she had left things in Washington, D.C., a few years back after he had saved her life. She had promised to leave the Church and be with him forever. But instead she had stolen something priceless out from under him and the U.S. government, leaving him with nothing.

But, Lord, you know it was for Conrad’s own good and the greater good.

When she opened her eyes and rose to her feet, she surrendered the box of African rice seeds to the Norwegian prime minister. With solemn fanfare he opened the box for the cameras to reveal sealed silver packets, each labeled with a special barcode. Then he resealed the box and slid it onto its designated shelf in the vault.

After the ceremony concluded, she went into the main tunnel and found her driver and bodyguard, Benito, waiting for her with her parka. She slipped it on and they started walking toward the main entrance to the facility.

“Just as you suspected,
Signorina
,” he told her, handing her a small blue device. “Our divers found it at the bottom of the Arctic seabed.”

It was a geophone. Oil companies used them to take seismic surveys of the earth’s subsurface in search of oil, in this case the earth two miles beneath the ice and water of the North Pole. Her visit to the Global Seed Vault had been a cover for her to meet with divers who could investigate for signs of drilling.

“So someone is planning to mine the bottom of the Arctic,” she said, watching her breath freeze as they stood before the facility’s dual blast-proof doors. Slowly and heavily the doors opened.

The Arctic air slapped Serena in the face as she stepped outside, where a van with tank-like treads was waiting to take her to the island’s airport, the northernmost in the world with regular flights. Behind her the exterior of the Doomsday Vault looked like something out of a science fiction movie —a giant granite wedge protruding from the ice.

The Norwegian island of Spitsbergen was chosen as the location for the seed vault because it was a remote region with low tectonic activity and a cold Arctic environment that was ideal for preservation. Now oil exploration posed a direct threat to this environment, she thought. It would also accelerate global warming’s melting of the ice cap, threatening coastal cities around the world.

So why was she thinking of Conrad Yeats?

Something is terribly wrong
, she thought.
He’s in danger.

But she couldn’t put her finger on why and blamed her gloomy thoughts on the sweeping vista of endless ice and water spread out before her. It only brought back memories of her adventure with Conrad in Antarctica years ago.

Benito said, “Our divers say there are thousands of them, maybe even tens of thousands below us.”

Serena realized he was talking about the geophone in her hand. “It will take them at least six months to map all the underground formations,” she said. “So we still have some time before they decide where to start drilling. That might give us a chance to stop them.”

“The Russians?” Benito asked.

“Maybe.” She flipped the geophone over and saw the manufacturer’s name: Midas Minerals & Mining LTD. “But I know who can tell us.”

I
f Sir Roman Midas loved anything in his life, it was his prized superyacht. Named after his one true love—himself—the
Midas
had a 2,000-square-foot gym, two two- person submarines and two helicopter pads, one for his chopper and one for guests. At 595 feet, the
Midas
was longer than the Washington Monument was high, and by design resembled a shining stack of sliced gold bricks. Today those bricks sat atop the sparkling blue waters of the Ionian Sea near the Greek island of Corfu.

Not bad for a Russian orphan-turned-British tycoon, Roman Midaslovich told himself as he stood on the aftdeck helipad. He watched while a joist transferred the unmarked crate to the awaiting helicopter, its blades now whirling for take-off.

Midas’s London-based trading firm, Midas Minerals & Mining, had made him the world’s richest trader in minerals and metals futures, and his patronage to the art world had won him a knighthood from the queen. It had also made him a top lieutenant inside the Alignment, a centuries-old organization whose leaders fancied themselves the political if not biological descendents of Atlantis.
Utter rubbish
, Midas thought when he first heard the Alignment’s claim to have orchestrated the rise and fall of empires across the ages. He alone was responsible for his rise from a Russian orphan working the mines in Siberia to the trading pits in Chicago. But then the Alignment orchestrated his entree to the jet set of London and awarded him seats inside some of the international organizations that truly set the world’s agenda: the Club of Rome, the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group. Now he was a believer.

He waved off the pilot and watched the chopper lift into the sky. Then he turned to see Vadim Fedorov, his No. 2, standing before him in all his steroid-

pumped muscularity.

“They’re waiting for you in the decompression chamber, sir,” Vadim said.

“They” were two of the other divers from the
Nausicaa
extraction, Sergei and Yorgi. As far as everyone else was concerned, they were the only people who had seen the
Flammenschwert
besides himself and the pilot of the submersible, whom he had already dispatched to the ocean depths. Meanwhile, the helicopter would carry the crate to the airstrip on Corfu, and Midas’s Gulfstream V private jet in turn would fly it to its intended destination.

“Is everything set?” Midas asked.

Vadim nodded. “You were right. They are FSB. Sergei sent a text message to Moscow almost immediately after they surfaced.”

“They never really went away, you know.”

Midas was speaking of Russia’s ancient secret police, which after the czars became the Soviet Union’s feared KGB. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, dismantled the KGB and renamed it the Federal Security Service, or FSB. Many deeply disillusioned agents, like Sergei and Yorgi, went into the private security businesultimately supplanting the mafia in running Russia’s “protection” rackets. Others, like Russia’s former president and prime minister Vladimir Putin, penetrated the government. Today in Russia, three out of four leading politicians boasted a background in the security forces, and almost every large Russian corporation was run by ex-KBG executives with personal ties to Putin. Sergei and Yorgi, despite their employment agreements with Midas Minerals & Mining, were Putin’s men and as such no longer of any use to Midas.

“Tell them I’ll be down in a moment. First I owe Sorath a progress report.”

Vadim nodded.

Midas entered his stateroom and poured himself a drink while he waited for the coded signal to connect. Right now, Sorath was just a codename to a voice on the other end of the phone. Midas had no idea who Sorath was or if he had even met him already. But all his questions would be answered soon enough.

“This is Xaphan,” Midas reported as soon as a light told him he was on a secure connection with Sorath. “The sword has been removed from its sheath and is en route to Uriel. A successful test has proved the design is safe for deployment and that the device’s criticality formulas are correct.”

“What of Semyaza?” the voice demanded, referring to Yeats.

“Dead.”

“Those were not your orders.” There was anger in the voice.

“It couldn’t be helped,” Midas said and quickly moved on. “We’re on schedule. T minus eight days.”

“Keep it that way.”

The line cut out and Midas stared at the images of Conrad Yeats on the large flat panel screen of his computer. He zoomed on one in particular—an image of the archaeologist’s DNA. There was nothing remarkable about it save for one thing—it spiraled to the left. All indigenous life on earth has DNA that spirals to the right. To the Alignment, that bestowed Yeats with some mystical meaning, as if the freak of nature somehow possessed some lost pieces of Atlantean blood in his genetic makeup.

Midas could care less. He closed the image on his screen and with a few taps on his keyboard connected with his trading firm mainframes in London. Then he went down to the lower decks and the yacht’s submersible launch bay.

Two double-domed “deep flight” Falcon submarines, designed to fly underwater like a private jet through the air, were docked on either side of the underwater bay, which resembled a large indoor swimming pool. Between the submersibles was the decompression chamber, its hatch wide open, with Sergei and Yorgi waiting for him inside.

Yorgi didn’t look too good, his stomach hastily patched where the late, great Doctor Yeats had stabbed him with his own harpoon dart.

“We could have been decompressing instead of waiting for you,” Sergei complained. “Are you trying to kill us?”

Midas smiled, stepped inside the chamber and allowed Vadim to close the hatch on the three of them. The air compressor started to hum and raise the internal air pressure to rid their bodies of harmful gas bubbles caused by inhaling oxygen at higher pressure during their dive for the
Flammenschwert.
The two diversbbing their itchy skin and sore joints. It was clear they were displaying symptoms of the bends—their lungs alone were unable to expel the bubbles formed inside their bodies.

“I wanted us to decompress together,” Midas said, taking his seat opposite the two FSB men. “But first I had to see off the
Flammenschwert.
“

Sergei and Yorgi looked at each other. “The arrangement was for us to take

it back to Moscow,” Sergei said.

“Nyet,”
said Midas. “I have other plans for the
Flammenschwert,
and they don’t involve the FSB.”

“You are a dead man if you betray Moscow, Midaslovich,” Sergei said. “Our organization spans the globe and is as old as the czars.”

“Mine is older,” Midas scoffed. “And now it has something yours does not—

the power to turn oceans into fire.”

“The deal was to use it in the Arctic and split the oil,” Sergei pressed.

“Like the deal you did with British Petroleum in Russia before you stole their operations and ran them out?” Midas answered calmly as the air inside the chamber started to smell like bitter almonds. “Fools. Higher oil prices may have fueled your regime, but you don’t know how to manage production. So you nationalize it and penalize real producers like me. Now that production has peaked, you have no choice but to stick your noses south into the Middle East and make war. You could have been kings instead of criminals.”