He gave himself ten minutes to recover. By the time he was ready to go, the acrylic-domed Discovery 1000 with Eric Stone at the controls had joined him. Eric and Little Geek stayed with him during the mind-numbingly long ascent, hovering nearby as he went through hours-long decompression stops. Despite the cold and his exhaustion, he took it slow and safe. He knew he’d probably have to sleep in the Oregon’s cramped decompression tank with Mike, but one night was all he was willing to put in.
Most all the crew were lining the moon pool when he finally emerged from the ocean, and he was greeted with a standing ovation and wild cries and whoops. Max looked especially pleased with himself, and even the doc smiled over her professional concern for his well-being.
He was helped out of the water, and workers shucked his gear in record time.
“How are you feeling?” Julia Huxley asked, shouldering her way to his side. “Any symptoms?”
“I’m cold,” he stammered through chattering teeth. “I’m hungry, and I need a bathroom in the worst possible way.” He turned to Hanley, who was hovering right behind Julia. “I never doubted you.”
“Why would you?” Max said, all nonchalance. “I’ve never let you down before.”
“Thanks.”
“You can owe me.”
“Enough with the male bonding,” Hux cut in. “Juan, you’re going into decomp with Mike so I can monitor you both for signs of decompression sickness.”
“He and Eddie are okay?”
“Eddie has a possible concussion, and Mike’s fine. This is only a precaution.”
“Did he keep the sample of that framework or was this all for nothing?”
“I don’t know,” Hux replied, while, behind her, Max produced the sample with a conjurer’s flourish.
“Ta-da. Mark already took a quick look and says he has no idea what it is.”
Juan took the foot-long rod as he was hustled to the decompression chamber at the back wall of the sub bay. It had a rough texture, but unlike anything he’d held before. If he had to give a single-word description of its texture, he’d say “alien.”
He handed it back to Max. “Get me some answers.”
“Mark and Eric will be up all night on this one, that I guarantee. Now get into your sarcophagus with Mike, and I’ll have the kitchen send down some food. Should be interesting to see Maurice give white-glove service through an air lock.”
Juan stepped through the heavy door to the first section of the two-part steel chamber and had a seat on the thinly padded bench. The air pressure would be brought up to about half of what he and Mike had experienced on the bottom, and then he could enter the second chamber, where Trono now waited. The facilities were primitive and stark, looking like something out of a 1960s Navy training film, but, for safety’s sake, Juan didn’t mind putting himself through the tedium.
He cleared his ears as the pressure in the chamber rose, ran through what had happened over the past hours, and chalked it up as the luckiest escape of his life.
Dr. Huxley released the two divers at seven thirty the following morning. Cabrillo went straight to his cabin, noting that the weather was picking up and causing a pronounced roll as he walked the corridors. He’d spent thirty minutes in the tiny shower closet in the decompression chamber to warm up, so he took another brief shower and shaved using the same straight razor his grandfather had used for forty years as a barber. After patting both the blade and his face dry, he threw on a touch of aftershave, dressed in chinos and a black mock turtleneck, and headed to the mess for breakfast. He stopped first at his desk for his tablet to check their position and noted they were making good time on their rendezvous with the Emir’s yacht, the Sakir.
He took a table in the middle of the dining room and had barely settled before Maurice poured him coffee in a bone china cup.
“Good morning, Captain.” As an ex–Royal Navy man, the chief steward didn’t abide by the team’s corporate structure and never referred to Juan as Chairman. The Oregon was a ship. Cabrillo was in charge. He was, therefore, Captain. “No ill effects from your adventure?”
“Other than a sore back from sleeping on a lousy cot, I’m fine. Thank you.” He sipped at the strong coffee with appreciation. “And now I’m even better. Whatever you bring me for breakfast, double the amount of sausage, please.”
“Have you checked your cholesterol recently?”
“Hux cleared me for double rations of morning pork just last week.”
“Very good, Captain.”
Eric and Mark entered the sedate dining room with the propriety of charging rhinos, spotted the Chairman, and rushed right over. Both wore the same clothes they’d had on the night before and had the wired jittery look of people about to overdose on caffeine.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” Juan said broadly. “What has you two buzzing like a couple of bees?”
“Red Bull and research,” Mark replied.
Cabrillo dropped his pretense of disinterest and asked, “What is that material?”
Eric spoke first. “Something that was just discovered a few years ago.”
“It’s a metamaterial,” Mark said as if that was an explanation.
“That means . . .”
“It’s a material engineered almost at a nanoscale. Its design is what gives it its unique properties, like manipulating light or sound waves.”
“Think of the egg cartons garage bands put up to deaden echoes in their practice spaces. Multiply that by a hundred, and then shrink it down to the nanoscale. The material maintains the precise angles to deflect about anything you want.”
“Would it deaden sound?” Cabrillo asked, thinking he understood.
“Absolutely, only in frequencies we can’t hear.”
Juan realized he didn’t get it at all. “What’s the point?”
“Their shape gives them properties that they wouldn’t normally have. Like the reflective panels on the stealth fighter. Its shape, not the composition of its skin, gives it its stealth characteristics.”
“The skin has stealth properties too,” Mark corrected automatically, because any deviation from absolute truth drove him nuts.
“I’m trying to make a point, if you don’t mind.”
“Fine.”
“So what does this particular metamaterial do?”
“No idea,” Eric said.
“Not a clue,” Murph chimed. “The design of the entire frame determines its exact purpose. The metamaterial makes it happen.”
“Could it bend light around the ship? Make it invisible?”
“Possibly. Or it could work on an electromagnetic wavelength.”
“Even acoustic,” Stoney added.
“Any explanation about why nothing was growing on it down there?”
“Oh, it’s loaded with cadmium. Absolutely toxic.” Seeing Juan’s concerned look, Mark explained, “Cadmium’s mostly dangerous if inhaled or ingested. It’s like mercury. You can handle the stuff, no problem, just don’t let it get into your bloodstream.”
Maurice arrived and placed Juan’s food on the table, lifting the silver dome with a flourish. It was an omelet exactly as Cabrillo wanted—loaded with sausage.
“Okay, you’ve told me what you know, now why don’t you give me a little speculation.”
“When you met with Professor Tennyson, did he mention anything about the French?” Murph asked.
“Actually, he did,” Juan said, recalling the bizarre turn in his conversation with the Tesla expert. “He said that Morris Jessup, the guy who popularized the story of the Philadelphia Experiment, was supposedly killed by French operatives in 1959, and his death made to look like a suicide.”
“Did he seem to believe that story?”
“That, I can’t recall. No, wait. I think he said it was a conspiracy theory, so he must have dismissed it.”
“Maybe he shouldn’t have,” Mark said with relish. As the ship’s resident conspiracy nut, he was in his element. “Get this. In the spring of 1963, a game warden in Alaska found the remains of three people who’d died sometime during the winter. The bodies had been picked over by scavengers, so a straight identification was out of the question. Here’s the thing. He found French francs in the pocket of one of them.”
“So?”
“I haven’t told you the best part. The men were all wearing lab coats over shorts and T-shirts, and they were found lying on a patch of pure white sand in the middle of a boreal forest. By the time the ranger returned with a team to recover the bodies, animals had dragged them away. The only thing he could do was recover a sample of the sand.
“He sent it to a geologist at the University of Alaska in Anchorage, who realized that the sand wasn’t pure silica but had a high concentration of ground coral in it. The ranger lost interest in the whole thing, but the geologist, Henry Ryder, kept on it.”
Eric cut in. “It took him three years of asking around and comparing samples, but the sand they found in the middle of Alaska originated on an atoll almost in the exact center of the Pacific Ocean called Mororoa.”
“Is that significant?” Cabrillo asked.
Mark said with delicious thrill, “Mororoa is where the French monitored their atomic bomb tests. Back in the sixties, it had a sizable population of scientists and engineers. This Ryder guy contacted the French government and asked if they’d lost any scientists from Mororoa. He was stonewalled. This was all top secret, and the Cold War was at full boil. But he didn’t let up. With the help of a woman in the university’s French department, he made calls to the offices of France’s top engineering schools and eventually deduced that three men”—he pulled a scrap of paper from his jeans—“Dr. Paul Broussard, Professor Jacque Mollier, and Dr. Viktor Quesnel had all been missing since 1963, and that all three men were linked to France’s nuclear weapons research.
“He reached out to their widows. Two wouldn’t talk to him at all, but one admitted that her government had sworn her to secrecy. She would only confirm that her husband had been on Mororoa Island three years earlier and that was the last she’d heard from him.”
“Where’d you get all of this?” Juan asked, trying to wrap his head around it.
The two exchanged a sheepish look.
“Ah, conspiracy websites,” Murph admitted.
“So this could all be a bunch of bull?”
“Yes, except we called Alaska. Henry Ryder’s long dead, and so is his wife. His daughter still lives in Anchorage and does remember that her father kept a vial of sand on his desk that she wasn’t allowed to touch when she was a little girl.”
Stone cut in again, “And he had a female friend who would come over from time to time who sounded like Catherine Deneuve.”
“Okay,” Juan said at length. “That gives a little credence to the story. Where is all this heading?”
“Back to the Philadelphia Experiment being something real, just not how it has been reported, and that the French killed Morris Jessup to silence him once and for all and they continued the research at their most secure facility, and that maybe something went wrong, and that some lab jockeys and the sand they were standing on was transported to Alaska via some unknown force. The same way George Westinghouse’s boat ended up in the Aral Sea years earlier.”
“I don’t like science fiction,” Juan said in a warning tone.
“Chairman, cell phones were science fiction not too long ago. Airplanes, rockets, nuclear submarines. The list is endless.”
“I’m putting my money on St. Julian Perlmutter.”
“But why?”
“I asked him to look into the Lady Marguerite.” Perlmutter was a close friend of Dirk Pitt, and someone Cabrillo had come to rely on as well. The man possessed the largest privately held collection of maritime books, papers, and histories in the world, and he had a bloodhound’s nose for solving mysteries. “I can’t bring myself to believe in teleportation devices. I think someone hijacked George Westinghouse’s yacht and it eventually ended up in Russia. I’ve got Perlmutter trying to prove my theory.”
“But we already looked into it. There was nothing.”
Juan smiled. “You guys are of the belief that everything worth knowing is already on the Internet. There is ten times more information in libraries than on the Web. Probably a thousand times. You two go way beyond Google searches, but you can’t hold a candle to St. Julian when it comes to tracking down answers to esoteric questions.”
Hali Kasim’s voice came over the intercom. He was the Oregon’s communications officer. “Chairman Cabrillo, please report to the op center.”
Juan placed his napkin next to his cleaned plate and stood. “If you will both excuse me. We’ll talk later.”
Hali was seated at a console on the right side of the op center when Cabrillo strode in. The Lebanese-born Kasim had a pair of earphones draped around his neck, but a line of crushed hair across his moppy head showed he’d been wearing them for a while.
“What’s up?”
“You have a call from the number we gave to L’Enfant, but it isn’t him.”
“Who is it?”
“Pytor Kenin. He asked for you specifically.”
Cabrillo felt a wave of anger sweep through his body that he quickly crushed down. Now wasn’t the time for emotions. He took his customary chair and grabbed the handset jacked into one of the arms. He swung it up to his mouth and gave Hali a curt nod.
“Cabrillo.”
“Not calling yourself Chairman, eh?” Kenin said in Russian. “And I know you can understand me, so do not pretend otherwise.”
“What do you want?” Juan asked in the same language.
“What I want is to know why I cannot reach the K-154.”
“That’s because it sank about ten minutes after trying to kill me.” Cabrillo waited a beat to let that sink in. “They slammed into the seafloor hard enough to open her up like a can of sardines. The U.S. Navy’s already received an anonymous tip about the accident, and I’m sure they’ll have a salvage ship over her within another twenty-four hours.”
“What did you do?” the Russian shouted in rage.
“Kenin, you’re the one who started this and you’re the one who drew first blood, so don’t act all incensed when we stand up to you.”
“You are meddling in affairs that do not concern you.”
“They started to concern me the moment Yuri Borodin died. I don’t know what kind of games you’re playing inside Russia’s military establishment, and, frankly, I don’t care. All I know is that I am going to stop you.”
“Delusions, Mr. Chairman. You yourself admit you don’t know what I am doing, so how are you going to stop me? Surely not the same way you stopped me from silencing Tennyson. You are now and always will be a step behind.”
Kenin obviously didn’t know Tennyson was still alive and safe.
“You think that because you got to L’Enfant that I don’t have other resources?”
“Ah yes, the enigmatic L’Enfant. Seems in the end he cares more about self-preservation than keeping his clients’ secrets.”
“He withheld enough so that your sub commander made a fatal mistake,” Juan countered. “And he’s not the point. You are. Stop whatever it is you have planned and we end it here and now. Deal?”
“I’m afraid not. You see, you are already too late. In fact, your interference pushed up a scheduled test and made me change my target. I want you to take what’s happened very personally. Had you left well enough alone, the Emir would still be alive, and so would the lovely Linda Ross.”
Juan went cold. “What have you done?”
“Convinced my client that the toy I built for them works. Check your e-mail.” The line went dead.
Cabrillo was out of hi
s seat and over Hali’s shoulder a second later. “Well?”
“He routed that call through just about every relay station on earth and most of the communications satellites in orbit, but I pegged him at a military airfield outside of Moscow.”
Juan put out a call over the ship’s net for Mark and Eric to report to the op center while Hali checked the general e-mail account for a message from Kenin. So far, nothing.
What had Kenin done? The question ricocheted around in Cabrillo’s mind as his concern for Linda and the Emir turned his delicious breakfast into a molten ball.
Considering the resources Kenin had put into this operation, this had to be his last big score. He’d had the opportunity to go legit and vie for a cabinet position, or at least a command staff job, or he could continue to lie and cheat his way through the system. It appeared he’d chosen the latter, and now he’d have to disappear because whatever it was he’d stolen from the Russian Navy, they would doubtlessly want it back.
Stone and Murph arrived.
“Kenin just called and said he’d tested whatever it is he’s been working on and has turned it over to his client. That means he’s going to try to vanish. He’s at the Ramenskoye Air Base. That’s his jumping-off point. Hack your way in and find out where he’s going. I’m going to call Langston and see if we can’t track his plane using Uncle Sam’s spy birds.”
“Juan,” Hali interrupted. “It arrived.”
“Same routing?”
“Yeah. He doesn’t know we back-traced him or he wouldn’t have bothered.”
“Good job. That’s our first leg up on Kenin since we hit the prison where they were holding Yuri. Put it up.” Juan nodded to Eric and Mark. “You two stay for a second. I don’t know what we’re about to see.”
The e-mail contained an MPEG, which Hali opened. An image came up on the main view screen of a white ship on a rough sea; in fact, it looked like the vessel was facing the same weather conditions as the Oregon. The camerawork was jumpy, and it was obviously shot at long range from a helicopter. The time and date stamp showed this had been taken only moments earlier. The white ship was a mega-yacht, and it took Juan only a second to recognize it as the Sakir, the Emir’s pride and joy. That ship was currently three hundred miles south of them and headed for Bermuda. By the size of her wake, she looked to be traveling at about fifteen knots.