He unclipped the carbon-fiber tow cable from its slot and dragged it back to the anchor. He added a little air to his buoyancy compensator to make his ascent easier and, hand over hand, he climbed the chain. For now, he left the cable on the bottom.
He paused when he reached the underside of the four-hundred-foot warship. Her bottom was coated with red antifouling paint and was remarkably free of marine buildup. His next task was to spot-weld eight metal pad eyes to the bow. That’s what the two tanks he carried were for. They were high-capacity batteries for a handheld arc welder. The gear was normally used to make quick repairs to the Oregon.
He adjusted his buoyancy again and slid eye protection over his helmet so he could work comfortably next to an electric spark brighter than the sun. The curvature of the cruiser’s hull shielded him from above, and in twenty minutes he had all eight welds completed. There were so many in case one or more of the welds failed. Juan carried no illusions that he was an expert at this particular skill. Ten minutes after that, he had the tow cable threaded though all of them. Over the very tip of the cable he clamped in place a steel box about the size of a paperback book. The box served as the belay point for the cable while inside was an explosive charge. A signal from the Oregon would detonate the small amount of plastique, and the box would disintegrate, freeing the cable so it could be yanked away from the ship. The only evidence left behind was the eight pad eyes. Chances were, they wouldn’t survive what Juan had planned.
No sooner had he returned to the Nomad and closed the outer hatch over himself than Linda powered her up and they were under way.
“Operation Crack-the-Whip is on,” he said when Eddie helped him off with the helmet.
“Any problems?”
“Smooth as silk.”
“More good news,” Linda said. “Eric’s tracking a storm headed our way. Should hit tomorrow at what passes for dawn in these parts.”
“Call Eric back and have him pull the ship off beach a bit. Also, tell him to drain the starboard ballast tanks but leave the port side flooded. That should give the old girl a convincing list.” Juan had an anticipatory gleam in his eye. “I hope the Argentines have enjoyed their time ruling this part of world because it’s about to end.”
By five that afternoon, the Chinese survey boat had motored past the Oregon where she lay just off the beach. She was still close enough in that an occasional large wave would cause her hardened bows to slam against the bottom. There was little doubt they would report the Norego had unbeached herself and was starting her soulless wanderings once again. An hour later, an exhausted and frozen Max Hanley returned with his team and their grisly cargo.
“That sucked,” Hanley proclaimed when the RHIB was winched inside the boat garage along the ship’s side. “Not only is it colder than a brass monkey’s you know what out there, but that cemetery would creep out Stephen King. The headstones are all carved whale bones, and there’s a fence around it made up of ribs as tall as me. The arched gate is built of skulls the size of Volkswagens.”
“Any problem recovering the remains?”
“Do you mean besides the eternal damnation of my soul for desecrating holy ground?”
“No.”
“In that case, everything went fine. The graves were only about a foot deep, and the men were laid to rest in canvas bags sewn from sails. I was surprised to find they had mostly decomposed.”
“The ground would have been too frozen to bury them in the winter, and in spring it’s just warm enough for bacteria to do their thing.”
“So now what?”
“You get yourself warmed up. Mike Trono and his gang just took off back to the wreck. By the time they return and we get the Nomad prepped again, it’ll be showtime.”
“Weather coming in?”
“Eric said it’s going to be a bitch out there come dawn.”
“It isn’t exactly skittles and beer now.”
“As the saying goes, ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet.’ ”
TWENTY-SEVEN
MAJOR ESPINOZA LAID THE WEATHER REPORT BACK ON Luis Laretta’s desk. The small office, with its obligatory picture of Generalissimo Ernesto Corazón on one wall and a poster of a scantily clad girl on the other, was thick with their cigar smoke.
“This storm would be perfect cover for an American Special Force strike. They’ll be expecting us to sit down here all snug in our bunks while they sneak around and place explosives all over the camp.” He brooded for a moment. “I’m going to push out the perimeter patrols another couple of miles. If they’re here, they would have parachuted in well back from the coast and would need to come overland.”
“Surely you don’t think they’ll attack,” Laretta said, waving his Cohiba airily.
Espinoza stared at him flatly. “I am paid to be prepared, if they do. I don’t have the luxury of opining.”
“We each have our jobs,” the facility director replied, thinking it was better the soldiers freeze out there than his people.
There came a knock on the door.
“Come,” Laretta bellowed.
In walked Lee Fong, the head of the Chinese search team. He was grinning ear to ear.
“Fong, how are you?” Luis greeted.
“Most excellent. We found the Silent Sea.”
The director came halfway out of his chair. “So soon? That’s wonderful. Here, have one of my cigars.” When he sat back down, he retrieved a bottle of brandy and some paper cups from his bottom drawer.
“I don’t normally smoke,” the soft-spoken engineer said, “but under the circumstances . . .”
“Are you sure about your find?”
Lee pulled out his PDA and clicked through to a picture. He handed the small device to Espinoza. “After we got a solid sonar return, I sent down a camera. I admit the resolution is poor, but you are looking at the stern of one of the biggest junks ever built.”
To Jorge, the picture just looked like a dark blur. “I’ll have to take your word for it.”
“Trust me. It’s the Silent Sea. Tomorrow we will dive on the wreck and bring back irrefutable proof. I tried to report this when we were out there and have you send a boat with divers right away, but we couldn’t seem to transmit.” He accepted a drink from Laretta.
Espinoza declined. “I’m on duty.”
“Your loss.” The director saluted him, then toasted Lee Fong. “Congratulations. From this moment, there can be no questioning our rights to this land and the riches off her coast. I’ve got to be honest with you guys. Ever since we started construction, I’ve always been afraid our operation would be discovered and we’d be booted out. Well, no more. We are here to stay.”
“Have you contacted you superiors?” Espinoza asked Lee.
“Yes, just now. They are most pleased,” he beamed. “My immediate boss says I will be awarded a medal and that our company will be guaranteed a lifetime of government contracts.”
“Hold out for a big raise,” Laretta told him, pouring more brandy into his glass. “Make them know you’re worth it.”
“I might just do that. Oh, I forgot. The ship on the beach.”
“What about it,” Espinoza asked sharply. He’d been suspicious about that boat, and even seeing with his own eyes that she was a derelict didn’t allay his concerns.
“She’s off the beach and starting to float away.”
“You didn’t see any engine smoke?”
“Oh, no. And she’s leaning heavily to one side. I think she will flip over soon.”
Espinoza was regretting his moment of earlier charity. He should have let Sergeant Lugones lay some charges and blow her to pieces. It wasn’t too late. He could ask the captain of the Guillermo Brown to sink the old scow with a missile, but he could think of no valid reason why the Navy would waste such expensive munitions on his paranoia. With any luck, the storm would either sink her or blow her so far away that he wouldn’t have to worry about her presence any longer.
“Mr. Laretta, might I have some more of
your brandy?”
“It would be my pleasure,” Luis slopped some more into Lee’s paper cup.
The Major stood abruptly. Something wasn’t right. It wasn’t instinct but the cold tickling of premonition that was setting his nerves on edge. The Americans would come. Tonight or tomorrow, when the storm picked up, and they would lay waste to what these two men were so smugly proud of.
“Gentlemen, I needn’t remind you that until the world formally recognizes the Antarctic Peninsula as sovereign Argentine territory, we are at risk.”
“Come, come, my dear Major.” Laretta had no head for alcohol. He was already slurring his words. “There is no harm in celebrating our success.”
“Maybe so, but I believe you are being a little premature. Get word to your workers that curfew tonight starts in one hour, and there will be no exceptions. My men are going to be on patrol with orders to shoot. Do you understand?”
That sobered him up. Laretta nodded. “Curfew, one hour. Yes, Major.”
Espinoza turned on his heel and left the office. He’d been pushing his soldiers hard since their arrival and tonight he’d push them harder still. By the time he and Raul had them all deployed, there wouldn’t be one inch of uncovered space around the oil terminal, and, knowing the American proclivity for coming to the rescue of others, he would double the guard on their captives.
JUAN PULLED THE STRAIGHT RAZOR from his neck and swirled it in the copper basin of his sink. The Oregon’s steep list forced him to brace himself with his other hand. He made one more pass, rinsed the blade, and dried it very carefully on the towel. His grandfather had been a barber and had taught him that the secret of keeping a razor sharp was never to put it away wet.
He pressed the plunger to drain the sink and splashed his face with palmfuls of water. He looked himself in the eye in the mirror over the vanity. He wasn’t sure what he saw. He was proud of the decision he had made, yet he also thought they should have cut and run and headed for South Africa, where five million a week for the next three weeks was guaranteed for doing nothing more than babysitting a head of state who had no enemies.
He dried his face with a towel and pulled on a T-shirt. They had turned up the heat somewhat, but his arms and chest were covered in goose pimples.
He hopped across to his walk-in closet and selected a leg for the day’s mission among the five artificial limbs he owned. They were lined up on the floor like a bunch of left-only cowboy boots. A few minutes later, he was finished dressing and on his way to the moon pool. He knew he should eat something, but his stomach was too knotted.
The underwater operations center was a hive of activity, with teams of technicians working on the Nomad 1000 that had just returned with Trono and his group. Mike reported that the charges were planted and ready to go. His team had been drilling into the underside of the glacier, hanging over the bay and packing the holes with enough explosives to calve off a hundred thousand tons of ice.
Juan keyed in some of the outside cameras at a workstation. The low-light cameras revealed a world gone mad. Swirling snow buffeted the ship from every direction as the wind shifted constantly. The seas heaved up waves that ran high enough to explode across the deck, and when they hit shore they had the power to move hundred-pound rocks back and forth like pebbles. He checked the meteorological display. The temperature was minus twelve, but the windchill brought it down to thirty below.
Eddie Seng and Linc showed up a couple minutes later. Because of the number of passengers they would hopefully be returning to the ship, the raiding party had to be small. The Nomad was designed for ten people, and somehow they were going to shoehorn twenty-one into it.
As before, they wore arctic clothing to resemble the Argentine soldiers, and they’d packed enough extra parkas for the captive scientists into a waterproof bag strapped to the sub. Another similar bag contained the bones of the long-dead Norwegians. Juan still wasn’t sure how he was going to make up for disturbing their eternal rest.
Maurice appeared at Cabrillo’s side bearing a serving tray. It was three o’clock in the morning, and he looked fresh and impeccably turned out as always. “I know you rarely eat before a mission, Captain, but you need to. In these conditions, the body burns calories too fast. I don’t know if I ever mentioned, but I deployed with the Royal Navy the last time the Argies became uppity in the South Atlantic. The boys who retook the South Sandwich Islands returned as stiff as Stonehenge.”
He pulled off the cover and presented Juan with an omelet stuffed with ham and mushrooms. The aroma seemed to untie the knots in his belly. It also reminded him of something he’d forgotten, and he sent Maurice back to the kitchen on an errand.
The launching went smoothly, and they were soon on their way. The first inkling that something had changed happened when the minisub passed close to the Admiral Guillermo Brown. Juan could hear over the other ambient noise that she had fired up her main engines. The sound and vibration carried through the water and echoed inside the steel pressure hull. It wouldn’t alter their plan, but Juan didn’t take it as a good omen.
Unlike before, when they had docked near the workboats, this time they surfaced at the far end of the pier, closer to where the prisoners were being held. The storm’s fury overwhelmed the sound of the Nomad broaching under the dock.
Linc had the hatch open a moment later. He climbed from view, while Juan struggled into his parka and settled his goggles. The big SEAL came back a moment later.
“We got problems.”
“What’s up?”
“I just scoped the dock using infrared and counted three guards.”
“On a night like this?” Eddie asked.
“Exactly because it’s a night like this,” Juan told him. “If I were in Espinoza’s shoes, I’d plan for the storm to hide an assault and deploy my forces accordingly.”
Juan took the night vision binocs from Linc and did his own survey, lying flat on the pier. He saw the sentries Linc had spotted, and as he scoped the rest of the base he could see more ghostly images moving around. In one minute, he counted no fewer than ten men on duty.
“Change of plans.”
All along, they had intended to free the prisoners and get them at least into the submersible before going after the Argentine cruiser. With so many men patrolling the facility, the chance of them being discovered was too high. Now they would use the warship as a distraction. He explained what he wanted the men to do, and made sure that Max back on the Oregon was listening in.
“I don’t like it,” Hanley said when Juan was finished.
“Not much of a choice. We won’t get within ten feet of those scientists otherwise.”
“Okay. Just tell me when you’re ready.”
“Get as close to the jail as you can,” Cabrillo told the other two men with him, “and wait for my signal.”
They exited the submersible together, Linc and Eddie each taking one of the waterproof bags in tow. They had to crawl on their bellies and move inches at a time, not to attract attention. It would take twenty minutes for them to just reach the temporary prison.
Juan went in the opposite direction. The wind tore at his clothing and made each pace a struggle. It would come at his face and then reverse itself and send him staggering. His scarf drooped, and it was like his skin had been splashed with lye.
He had to time his movements for when the Argentines were turned away from him. The wind did provide one thing of use. Most of the soldiers moved with their backs toward it, giving Cabrillo a chance to cover more ground when the gusts became constant.
Visibility remained dismal, and he almost blundered on one soldier who stood in the lee of a bulldozer. He froze, no more than five feet from the sentry. The man was in profile. He was close enough to see the fur trimming around his hood whipping furiously. Juan backed up a step, and then another, but froze once again when a second guard approached.
“Jaguar,” the first guard called out when he saw his comrade.
“Capybara,” the s
econd responded.
These were their recognition codes. Juan smiled tightly. That was an intelligence coup. When he had cleared around the duo, he radioed that information to Eddie and Linc in case they were challenged.
From here on, Juan moved more swiftly, and when he came up on a guard the man turned on him sharply, his gun not at the ready but raised in an aggressive manner.
“Jaguar.”
“Capybara,” Cabrillo said confidently. The other man lowered his machine pistol.
“The only thing that makes this worthwhile,” the guard said, “is knowing that the Major is out here with us and not warm i nside.”
“He’s never one to ask us to do something he wouldn’t.” Juan had no idea if this was true, but he’d seen enough of Espinoza to think he wasn’t a lead-from-the-rear kind of soldier.
“I guess. Stay warm.” The soldier moved on.
Juan kept going. Ten minutes and three cold and bored guards later, he reached the gas-processing building. “I’m here,” he called to his men. “Where are you?”
“We’re still shy of our target,” Linc said. “It’s like Rio during Carnival out here, there’s so many people.”
“Max, are you ready?”
“Ballast is pumped clear and the engines are purring sweetly.”
“Okay. Stand by.”
Juan opened the plant’s personnel door next to the giant overhead door and moved into the entry vestibule. He was challenged by a guard instantly. “Caiman.”
Cabrillo swallowed. They had different code words for when someone came into a building. He mentally cursed Jorge Espinoza’s foresight, as he frantically ran though the names of all the native South American animals he could remember. Llama. Boa. Anaconda. Um, Sloth. From there, he drew a blank.
A half second had passed, and the sentry was about to become suspicious. Capybara is to Jaguar as what is to a Caiman? Predator and prey. Caimans eat fish. It’s a fish. Which one? He said the only one he could think of. “Piranha.”
The soldier lowered his weapon, and it took all of Cabrillo’s self-control not to show his relief.