Jimenez and the man holding the rocket moved at the same time. Mike Trono lit off the Stinger missile the same instant the Argentine soldier unclipped his safety harness. The rocket’s infrared system only had a fraction of a second to come to life, find the heat plume billowing from the helicopter’s exhaust, and make a minute adjustment. Jimenez leapt from the chopper just before the missile slammed into the turbine housing directly below the spinning rotor. The six-pound warhead detonated. The bulk of the engine saved Jimenez’s life, but he was still caught in a flaming overpressure wave that ignited his clothing and slammed him into the water as if he’d jumped from twice the height. Had he not landed feetfirst in the roiling waves churned up by the RHIB’s outboards, the impact would have been no different than landing on cement. The water extinguished his burning uniform and prevented the burns on his face and hands from going past second-degree. He came thrusting back to the surface, coughing up a lungful of river, his skin feeling like it had been dipped in acid.
Fifty feet ahead of him, the Eurocopter crashed into the river, smoke pouring out the doors and blown-apart windshield. Jimenez didn’t have time to fill his lungs, as the craft tipped and the rotors hit the water. They came apart like shattering glass, shards of composite material filling the air. Several skimmed across the river surface inches above Jimenez’s head and would have decapitated him had he not ducked under the waves.
Through the water he could see flames licking at the chopper’s shattered carcass, a wavy, ethereal light that silhouetted the pilot still strapped in his seat. The dead man’s arms swayed in the current like tendrils of kelp.
He struggled to the surface once again, the roar of fire filling his ears. Of the RHIB, there was no sign, and with the chopper down and the border patrol’s two Whalers destroyed the thieves had a straight run to Paraguay. As he started the painful swim to shore, his burned hands screaming with every stroke, Lieutenant Jimenez could only hope they would be stopped before they could sneak across.
“NICE SHOT,” JUAN SHOUTED as the Argentine helicopter fell from the sky in their wake.
“That was for Jerry,” Trono said, laying the Stinger on the deck to reload it with the second missile stored in one of boat’s several secret weapons caches. Mark Murphy was at the bows, watching for anyone else coming at them. He asked, “Are we still going to stick to the original plan?”
Cabrillo thought about it for a moment. “Yeah,” he replied. “Better safe than sorry. The cost of the RHIB will just become one more line item in the CIA’s black budget.”
While Juan continued to drive, and Mark acted as lookout, Mike prepared for the final part of the operation, so when they finally cut the engines five miles from the border with Paraguay all their equipment was ready. The men slipped into their wet suits again and strapped the bulky Draeger sets to their backs. Juan overfilled his buoyancy compensators because he would be carrying the power cell.
After slicing open the remaining air bladders ringing the boat, they opened the sea cocks. The RHIB began sinking by the stern, dragged under by her heavy engines. They waited aboard her even after she slipped under the surface, making sure she settled on the bottom. The current had pushed them south another quarter mile, but they needed to ensure the boat stayed under. The bottom of the river this close to the bank was a jumbled snarl of rotting trees. They tied off the bow painter line to one of the more sturdy limbs and then started northward, propelled through the water by near-silent dive scooters.
Fighting the current, it took them the better part of two hours to reach the border, and another two until they judged it safe to surface. The scooters’ batteries were on their last bit of power and the rebreathers nearly depleted. But they’d made it.
The men took a break before starting out on the six-hour slog back to the elevated hut they had slept in thirty-six hours ago. There they had stashed a small aluminum boat with a motor that they had towed into place with the RHIB.
When they reached base, Mike set himself against a tree and promptly nodded off. Juan envied him. Though Trono had been closer to Jerry than Cabrillo, Mike wasn’t shouldering any guilt for his death. Just sorrow. Mark Murphy, with his love of all things technical, studied the power cell.
Juan moved a little ways off and pulled a satellite phone from a waterproof pouch. It was time to check in.
“Juan, is that you?” Max Hanley asked after the first ring. He could picture Max sitting in the Oregon’s op center since the mission began, downing cup after cup of coffee and chewing on the stem of his pipe until it was nothing but a gnarled nub.
The phones were so heavily encrypted that there was no chance of them ever being listened in on, so there was no need for code phrases or aliases.
“We got it,” he replied with such weariness it sounded as though he would never recover. “We’re six hours out from waypoint Alpha.”
“I’ll call Lang right away,” Hanley said. “He’s been bugging me every twenty minutes since you started off.”
“There’s one more thing.” Cabrillo’s tone was like ice over the airwaves. “Jerry paid the butcher’s bill on this one.”
There was almost thirty full seconds of silence before Max finally said, “Oh, Jesus. No. How?”
“Does it really matter?” Juan asked back.
“No, I guess it doesn’t,” Max said.
Juan blew a loud breath. “I tell you, buddy, I’m having a real hard time getting my mind around this.”
“Why don’t you and I take off for a few days when you get back? We’ll fly down to Rio, plant our butts on the beach, and ogle a bunch of hard bodies in string bikinis.”
Time off sounded good, though Cabrillo didn’t particularly relish the idea of leering at women half his age. And he knew that after three failed marriages, Max wasn’t really on the prowl either. Then Juan remembered the crashed blimp and Mark’s suggestion to give closure to the families of men who’d perished on her. That was what his soul needed. Not staring at pretty girls but offering a bunch of strangers a little peace of mind after fifty years of wondering.
“I like the concept,” Juan said, “but we need to work on the execution. We’ll talk about arrangements when we get back to the ship. Also, you might as well go into my office. In the file cabinet should be Jerry’s last will. Let’s get that ball rolling right away. He didn’t have too much love for his ex-wife, but he did have a child.”
“A daughter,” Max replied. “I helped him set up a trust for her, and he made me the trustee.”
“Thanks. I owe you. We should be home by dawn tomorrow.”
“I’ll have the coffee waiting.”
Juan replaced the phone into its pouch and sat back against the tree, feeling like he was feeding every mosquito within a fifty-mile radius.
“Hey, Chairman,” Mark called a few minutes later. “Check this out.”
“What have you got,” Juan crawled over to where Mark sat with his legs bent like pretzels.
“You see this here and here?” He pointed to two tiny indentations on the glossy metal surface.
“Yeah.”
“These correspond with two matching holes in the nylon carrying harness. They’re bullet strikes fired up at us from when we took off in the chopper.”
“Those were nine-millimeter from point-blank range,” Juan said. “Barely made a mark. That thing is as tough as NASA boasted.”
“Okay, but look at this.” Mark struggled to turn the seventy-pound cell over so the top was facing up and then pointed at an even deeper pit gouged into the satellite fragment.
Juan gave his weapons expert a questioning look.
“Nothing matches it on the harness. That was put there before we got our hands on it.”
“Something the Argentines did to it?”
Mark shook his head. “We watched them dig it up, and it was out of our sight for only a few minutes before they loaded it into the pickup. I don’t recall hearing a shot. You?”
“No. Could it have happened when t
he logs slammed into the truck?”
“I don’t think so. I have to do some calculations to be sure, but I don’t think there was enough energy in the collision to cause something like this. And remember, the truck flipped into muddy ground. There wasn’t anything hard enough and small enough to cause such a smooth divot.”
A flash of understanding struck Cabrillo. “It happened when the rocket blew. More than enough energy there, right?”
“That’s the answer,” Mark replied as if he’d known that all along, but there was little triumph in his voice. “The problem is this is the top of the power cell. It would have been protected from the explosion by both the rocket’s vertical speed and the bulk of the cell itself.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m not sure. I’d love to do some tests on this back aboard the Oregon, but we’re turning it over to some CIA flack in Asunción. We’ll never get answers.”
“What’s your gut telling you?”
“The satellite was intentionally shot down by a weapon that only two countries in the world possess. Us—”
“And China,” Juan finished.
NINE
HOUSTON, TEXAS
TOM PARKER NEVER KNEW WHAT HE WAS GETTING himself into when he joined NASA. In his defense, he’d grown up in rural Vermont, and his parents never had a television because the reception on the side of the mountain where they raised dairy cows was terrible.
He knew something was up on his first day at the Johnson Space Center when his secretary placed a beautiful blown-glass bottle on the credenza behind his desk and said it was for Jeannie. He’d asked her to explain, and when she realized he had no clue as to Jeannie’s identity she’d chuckled and said cryptically that he’d soon find out.
Next came a pair of hand-painted bellows delivered anonymously to his office. Again, Parker didn’t know what this meant and asked for an explanation. By now, several other women in the secretarial pool knew of his ignorance, as did his supervisor, an Air Force Colonel who was a deputy director in the astronaut-training program.
The last piece of the puzzle was an autographed picture of a man in his mid- to late fifties, with receding red hair and bright blue eyes. It took Parker a while to figure out that the signature was that of Hayden Rorke. Internet research was at its infancy then, so he had to rely on a local library. This lead him to eventually discover that Rorke was an actor who played a NASA psychiatrist named Alfred Bellows who was continually vexed by astronaut Anthony Nelson and the genie he’d found on a beach.
Dr. Tom Parker was a NASA psychiatrist, and the I Dream of Jeannie jokes never stopped. After almost ten years with the program, Parker had dozens of glass bottles similar to the one Jeannie called home, as well as autographed pictures of most of the cast and several of Sidney Sheldon’s scripts.
He adjusted the webcam on top of his laptop to accommodate the request of Bill Harris, his current patient.
“That’s better,” Harris said from Wilson/George. “I was seeing a picture of Larry Hagman but hearing your voice.”
“He’s better looking at least,” Parker quipped.
“Leave the camera on Barbara Eden and you’ll make my day.”
“So we were talking about the other members of your team. You leave Antarctica in a couple of days. What’s their mood?”
“Disappointed, actually,” the astronaut said. “A front’s closed in on us. The weather boys at McMurdo say it’s only going to last a few days, but we’ve all seen the data. The storm’s covering damned-near all of Antarctica. We’re socked in for a week or more, and then it’ll take a few more days to clear their runway and ours.”
“How do you feel about it?” Parker asked. He and the former test pilot had spoken enough over the past months to have an honest dialogue. He knew Harris wouldn’t sugarcoat his answer.
“Same as everyone else,” Bill said. “It’s tough when a goal gets pushed back on you, but this is what we’re here for, right?”
“Exactly. I especially want to know how this has affected Andy Gangle.”
“Since he can’t wander outside anymore, he’s pretty much stayed in his room. To be honest, I haven’t seen him in twelve or more hours. The last time was in the rec room. He was just passing through. I asked him how he was, he muttered ‘Fine’ and kept on going.”
“Would you say his antisocial behavior has gotten worse?”
“No,” Bill said. “It’s about the same. He was antisocial when he got here and he’s antisocial now.”
“I know you’ve mentioned you’ve tried to engage him over the last few months. Has anyone else?”
“If someone has, they’ve been shot down. I said before, I think the screeners who allowed him to winter down here made a mistake. He’s not cut out for this kind of isolation, at least not as a functioning part of a team.”
“But, Bill,” Parker said, leaning closer to his laptop camera for emphasis, “what happens if you’re on the space station or halfway to the moon when you realize that the doctors who screened your crewmates made a similar mistake?”
“Are you saying you’re going to screw up?” Harris asked with a chuckle.
“No,” Parker grinned, “but the other members of the screening committee might. So what would you do?”
“Above all else, make sure the person is pulling their weight. If they don’t want to talk much, fine, but they have to do their job.”
“And if they refuse?”
Bill Harris suddenly looked over his shoulder as if he’d heard something.
“What is it?” the psychiatrist asked.
“Sounded like a gunshot,” Harris replied. “I’ll be right back.”
Parker watched the astronaut get up from his chair. He was halfway to the open door of his room on the remote ice station when a sudden blur moved across the threshold. Harris staggered back, and then something hit the webcam, and Parker’s view was completely blocked. He watched for several seconds. Soon the blackness on his laptop took on a faint purplish cast. As more time elapsed, the view turned lighter and lighter, going from the deepest plum to light eggplant, and finally to red.
It took him a moment to realize what had hit the camera was a clot of blood that then oozed off the lens. Parker could make out few details because of the bloody film, but there was no sign of Bill Harris, and the audio feed was picking up the unmistakable wail of a woman screaming.
A full minute elapsed before her voice was cut off abruptly. Parker kept watching, but when something passed the doorway again it was an indistinct blur. It certainly looked like the outline of a man, but it was impossible to know who.
He double-checked that his computer was automatically recording, as he did all sessions with his distant patient. Everything was safely on the hard drive. As a precaution, he e-mailed the first part of the file to himself so he had backup imagery and cc’d his boss.
Leaving his computer recording the now-silent webcam at Wilson /George base, he picked up his phone and dialed his supervisor’s direct line.
“Keith Deaver.”
“Keith, it’s Tom. We’ve got a situation at Wilson/George. Check the e-mail I just sent. Forward through the file until the last five minutes. Call me back when you’re done.”
Six minutes later, Tom snatched up the handset before it had finished its first ring. “What do you think?”
“I know for a fact there aren’t any guns on that station, but I’m positive that was a gunshot.”
“I think so, too,” Parker replied. “To be sure, we need an expert to listen to it, do that stuff like you see on the cop shows. This is bad, Keith. I don’t know if you overheard Bill and I talking, but McMurdo can’t send in a plane for a week or more, not even to do a visual reconnaissance.”
“Who has lead on that place?”
“Penn State is monitoring it full-time, if that’s what you mean.”
“Do you have a contact there?”
“Yes. Ah, I think his name’s Benton. Yeah, that’s it,
Steve Benton. He’s a climatologist or something.”
“Call him. See if their telemetry’s still coming through. Also, see if they have other webcams up and running right now. We should get in touch with McMurdo, let them know what’s happening, and see if they really can’t get an aircraft to Wilson/George sooner.”
“I have a contact there, too,” Palmer said, “at the U.S. Antarctic Program. They’re run through the National Science Foundation.”
“Okay. I want hourly updates, and make sure someone’s watching your computer from now on. I’ll send you warm bodies if you need them.”
“I’ll get my secretary in here while I make the calls, but I’ll probably take you up on that offer later in the day.”
As bureaucracies go, the amount of time it took to get things in motion was remarkably short. By the end of the day, a Houston police officer had listened to the audio from the webcam but couldn’t determine if the sound was a gun or not. He gave it a seventy-five percent assurance that it was but wouldn’t say definitively. The tower dispatcher at McMurdo confirmed that all their planes were grounded due to weather, and no emergency was grave enough to risk a flight crew. Conditions were even worse at Palmer Station, the only other American base on the Antarctic Peninsula, so there was no chance of them checking in on Wilson/George. Feelers had gone out to other nations with research centers nearby, but the closest was an Argentine research facility, and, despite the common bonds among the scientific community, they had rebuffed the request in no uncertain terms.
By eight o’clock that evening, the news of the situation had been sent to the President’s National Security Advisor. Because Wilson/ George was so close to an Argentine base and there was inconclusive evidence of gunfire, there was the possibility they had been attacked for some reason. Ideas were discussed late into the night, and a request was sent to the National Reconnaissance Office for a satellite to be retasked in order to photograph the isolated research station.