And because of the strict privacy code needed to keep a group of people in isolation from getting on one another’s nerves, everyone let him be. The few times his case had been discussed, no one felt he was succumbing to what the shrinks referred to as isolation syndrome but what the team called bug-eyes. In its severest forms, a person could suffer delusions as part of a psychotic break. A few seasons back, a Danish researcher lost his toes and more when he ran naked from his base on the leeward side of the peninsula. Rumor had it he was still in a Copenhagen mental hospital.
No, it was decided that Andy didn’t have bug-eyes. He was just a sullen loner who the others were more than happy to avoid.
“Morning,” Andy Gangle muttered when he entered the rec hall. The smell of frying bacon from the cafeteria-style galley filled the room.
The overhead fluorescent lights made his pallor particularly wan. Like most of the men, he’d long since stopped shaving, and his dark beard contrasted sharply against his white skin.
A pair of women at one of the Formica tables paused from their breakfasts to greet him and then returned to their food. Greg Lamont, the titular head of the station, greeted Andy by name. “The met guys tell me this will probably be your last day to head to the coast if you’re planning on it.”
“Why’s that?” Gangle asked guardedly. He didn’t like people telling him his business.
“Front coming in,” the silver-haired ex-hippie-turned-scientist replied. “A bad one. It’s going to blanket half of Antarctica.”
Real concern etched the corners of Gangle’s lipless mouth. “It won’t affect our leaving, will it?”
“Too early to say, but it’s possible.”
Andy nodded, not in understanding but absently, as if he were reorganizing thoughts in his head. He passed through to the kitchen.
“How’d you sleep?” Gina Alexander asked. The forty-something divorcée from Maine had come to the Antarctic to, as she put it, “get as far away from that rat and his new Little Miss Perfect Bod as is humanly possible.” She wasn’t one of the researchers but rather worked for the support company hired to keep WeeGee running smoothly.
“Same as the night before,” Andy said, filling a mug with coffee from the stainless urn at the end of the cafeteria line.
“Glad to hear it. How do you want your eggs?”
He looked at her, his expression almost feral. “Runny and cold, as usual.”
She wasn’t quite sure how to take that. Andy usually never said anything more than “scrambled,” before taking his food and coffee to eat back in his room. She chuckled reproachfully. “Boy, aren’t you a bundle of sunshine this morning.”
He leaned across the dinner-tray track, speaking softly so the others in the rec room couldn’t hear him. “Gina, we’ve got one more week before we can get out of here, so just serve me my damned food and keep your comments to yourself. All right?”
Not one to back down—ask her ex about that sometime—Gina leaned over so their faces were inches apart. “Then do yourself a favor, love, and watch me while I cook, otherwise I might be tempted to spit in your food.”
“That would probably improve the waste.” Andy straightened, his face scrunched as he thought for a moment. “Paste? No, damn it. Touch? Taste. That’s it. It would probably improve the taste.”
Gina wasn’t sure what had gotten into him, but she laughed anyway. “Sonny boy, you need to be a little quicker for your insults to be effective.”
Rather than wait around feeling foolish, Andy grabbed a handful of protein bars off the counter and skulked from the room, his bony shoulders hunched up like a vultures.’ His ears rang with her parting call of “Bug-eyed twerp.”
“Seven days, Andy,” he said to himself as he made his way back to his room. “Keep it together for seven more days and you can kiss these suckers good-bye forever.”
Forty minutes later, bundled under six layers of clothing, Andy inked his name on the whiteboard hanging next to the cold lock and stepped through the heavily insulated door. The difference in temperature between the interior of the station and the small anteroom that lead to the exit was a whopping ninety degrees. Gangle’s breath turned into an opaque cloud as dense as any London fog, and each inhalation stabbed deep into his lungs. He waited for a few minutes to adjust his clothing and fit his goggles over his eyes. While the Antarctic Peninsula was relatively warm compared to the interior of the continent, any exposed skin would still get frostbitten in moments.
All the clothing in the world still wasn’t enough to defeat the cold, not in the long term. Heat loss was inevitable, and, with the wind, inexorable. It started at the extremities—nose, fingertips, and toes—then spread inward as the body shut itself down to conserve its core temperature. It wasn’t a matter of willpower, facing these extremes in temperature. One couldn’t just bull through the pain. Antarctica was as deadly to human life as the hard vacuum of outer space.
With cumbersome overmittens covering his gloves, Andy needed both hands to turn the doorknob. The real cold hit him hard. It would take several seconds for the air trapped in his clothing to warm against such a thermal onslaught. He shivered for a moment, then rounded the corner that protected the exit from the wind. He clutched the handrail as he made his way down the stairs to the rocky ground. There wasn’t much wind today—ten knots, maybe—and for that he was grateful.
He grabbed up a five-foot length of metal conduit pipe as thick around as a fifty-cent piece and headed out.
The sun was a pale promise that circled the horizon but wouldn’t emerge above it for another week, but it gave enough light for Andy to see without using his headlamp. His moon boots were inflexible and made walking difficult, and the terrain didn’t help much. This part of the Antarctic Peninsula was volcanic, and not enough time had passed since the last eruption for the elements to have eroded the rock to a glassy smoothness like he’d seen pictures of during orientation training.
Another thing he’d learned during his orientation was to never sweat outside. Ironically, that was the ticket to fast-onset hypothermia because the body shed heat so much faster when exertion opened the skin’s pores. Therefore, it took Andy twenty minutes to reach his search area. If Greg Lamont was right and this was his last day to be outside until extraction, Gangle felt this might be the best spot. It was closer to the beach from where he’d made his discovery but in line with a low range of hills that afforded protection. For the next two hours, he walked back and forth, his goggled eyes sweeping the ground. Whenever anything promising appeared, he would use the steel pipe to probe the ice and snow or lever rocks out of the way. It was mindless work, for which he was particularly well suited, and the time seemed to slip away. His only distraction came when he felt the need to run in a circle for a few minutes. He managed to stop himself before he worked up a sweat, but his breath had frozen to the three scarves he had wrapped around his nose and mouth. He pulled them off to retie them so the icy snot was around the back of his head.
He figured this was a good enough time to call it a day. He studied the distant ocean for a moment, wondering what secrets it harbored below its iceberg-laden surface, then turned back to Wilson/George, the conduit slung over his shoulder like a hobo’s pole.
Andy Gangle had made the discovery of a lifetime. He was content with that. If there were others out here, then someone else could find them while he spent the rest of his life basking in luxuries he’d never dreamt would be his.
THREE
CABRILLO GAVE THE DARK RIVER ANOTHER LOOK BEFORE turning back to the abandoned hut they were using as a base. It was built on stilts partially over the water, and the ladder up to the single room was made of logs lashed together with fiber rope. It creaked ominously as he climbed, but it held his weight. The thatch roof was mostly gone, so the twilit sky was bisected by wooden trusses still covered in bark.
“Coffee’s ready,” Mike Trono whispered, and handed over a mug.
Trono was one of the Corporation’s principal sho
re operators, a former para rescue jumper who’d gone behind enemy lines in Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan to rescue downed pilots. Slight of build, with a mop of fine brown hair, he had quit the military to race offshore powerboats only to find the adrenaline rush wasn’t enough.
Next to him slouched the large sleeping form of his partner in crime, Jerry Pulaski. Jerry was a qualified combat veteran, and it would be his responsibility to lug the seventy-pound power pack once they found it. Rounding out the tight squad was Mark Murphy, also asleep.
Murph’s main job in the Corporation was handling the Oregon’s sophisticated weapons, and he could fight a ship like no one Juan had ever encountered, though he’d never been in the military. He was an MIT graduate with a fistful of letters after his name, including Ph.D., who’d taken his genius into the development of military hardware. Cabrillo had recruited him some time back with his best friend, Eric Stone, who was the now Oregon’s chief helmsman. Juan thought of them as the dynamic duo. When they were together, he could swear they communicated telepathically, and when they spoke in the arcane vernacular of their oft-played video games, he figured they were speaking in tongues. Both young men considered themselves geek chic, though few on the crew were too sure of the chic part.
Mark had had his first real taste of close-quarter combat during the Corporation’s rescue of the Secretary of State, and Linda Ross’s assessment was that he handled himself like a pro. Juan wanted him along on this mission in case there were any technical issues with the plutonium-containment vessel. If there was a problem, Murph was the best the Corporation had at figuring it out.
In deference to the humidity, which made the air thick enough to practically drink, all four men were shirtless, their skin slathered in DEET against the hordes of insects circling just outside the mosquito net they had hung from the rafters. Sweat clung to the hair on Cabrillo’s chest and snaked down his lean flanks. Where Jerry Pulaski had heavy slabs of muscle, Cabrillo had a swimmer’s physique, with broad shoulders and a tapered waist. Not one to worry about what he ate, he kept himself trim by swimming countless laps in the Oregon’s marble-lined swimming pool.
“Another hour until sundown,” Cabrillo said, taking a sip of the instant coffee cooked on a little folding stove. The taste made him look into the mug suspiciously. He’d grown accustomed to the gourmet Kona brewed aboard ship. “We have just enough light to get the RHIB ready. Leaving an hour later will put us at the border a little before midnight.”
“Just before the third watch takes over and the second’s thinking about their beds,” Mike said, then kicked Pulaski’s ankle. “Up, Sleeping Beauty, your breakfast awaits.”
Jerry yawned broadly, stretching his thick arms over his head, his dark hair tussled from using his shirt as a pillow. “God, you sure are ugly to wake up next to.”
“Watch it, my friend. I’ve seen some of the girls you’ve dragged home.”
“Is that coffee?” Mark Murphy asked, rubbing sleep from his eyes. He usually kept his hair long, but for this mission Juan had had him cut it to a more practical length.
“Calling it that is being generous,” Cabrillo said, and gave the weapons genius his cup.
After changing clothing they assembled under the ramshackle hut. Tied to one of the stilts, and lying dangerously low to the water, was their river conveyance, a matte-black ridged hulled inflatable boat, or RHIB. It was essentially a fiberglass-bottomed craft with inflatable fenders ringing its gunwale for added buoyancy. Two massive outboards hung over the boat’s transom. The only crew amenity was a stand-up cockpit shielded by bulletproof glass in the center of the twenty-five-foot deck. It had been modified aboard the Oregon so it could fold flat.
They had airfreighted the RHIB in a steel container into Paraguay and loaded the crate directly onto a rented truck. Juan had no idea if the Argentines had spies watching its neighbor’s airports for suspicious activity, but if he were in charge of the military dictatorship, he would. The truck was driven to an isolated town about fifty miles upriver from the Argentine border, and it was there they unloaded it and all the other gear they had brought along. Their current location was another thirty miles south of the town.
Juan had opted for a riverine approach versus infiltrating Argentina by helicopter because radar coverage along the border was simply too tight, even flying nap-of-the-earth, and because a tributary of this river ran less than five miles from their search target. The clincher was the fact that the cloud cover he’d seen on the pictures turned out to be a massive slash-and-burn logging operation close to where the satellite fragment crashed. The chances of being spotted were too great.
He took a lesson from World War II, specifically Germany’s Operation Greif at the outset of the Battle of the Bulge, in which English-speaking commandoes crossed through the Allied lines during the opening hours of the fight in order to change signposts, disrupt traffic, and generally create chaos among the Allied forces. Cabrillo recalled reading the story of one SS Corporal who was part of Operation Greif. He admitted that crossing the lines during the battle was the most frightening part of the plan because gunfire was directed at them from both directions. Once on the other side, the German had written, he carried out his duties without the slightest fear, knowing his disguise and command of English would protect him. He hadn’t been captured and was eventually wounded defending Berlin against the Russians.
Cabrillo had no desire to get caught in a cross fire from nervous border guards, so rather than cross this particular line he was going to go under it.
The RHIB was loaded to the gunwales with iron plates—tons of them—enough to quadruple the shipping costs of sending the boat unladen. Mark Murphy and Eric Stone had figured out the exact amount needed to pull off Juan’s stunt, and now they were about to find out if his two resident geniuses were right.
Wordlessly, they got to work. Jerry and Mike installed the engine covers and made sure they were watertight while Mark double-checked that all their dive bags full of equipment and weapons were securely tied down. After inspecting the open cabin for anything that might get damaged by emersion, Juan handed over the four Draeger rebreathers. Unlike Scuba tanks, there was no telltale trail of bubbles from the German-made device. They worked by scrubbing carbon dioxide from the closed-loop system and adding oxygen from a small tank when gas ratios tipped dangerously.
The men wore micro-thin black diving suits, not so much for thermal protection—the water was blood warm—but to cover their white skin. Their dive shoes had thick rubber soles and detachable flippers in case they needed to leave the water in a hurry.
“Would be nice if we could do this closer to the border,” Jerry Pulaski commented. It was an observation hiding a mild complaint.
“Sure would be,” Juan agreed, suppressing a grin. Satellite pictures showed the next town on the river was five miles downstream. Again, if he was part of the Argentine junta, he would pay some local wharf rat to drop a dime if he saw or heard anything suspicious. In this part of the world, patriotism was a poor substitute for a full belly, so the team was in for a long night. Cabrillo turned to Murphy. “You want the honors?”
“Hell no,” Mark said. “If we got it wrong, you’re going to make Eric and me pay for the boat.”
Juan shrugged. “Good point.”
Standing chest-deep in the current, he reached over one of the inflatable fenders and opened a release valve. Air hissed from the valve under high pressure until the black rubber was limp. He nodded to Jerry to do the same on the other side, and soon they had half of them emptied. Water sloshed over the gunwale as the boat sank deeper into the river. Cabrillo and Pulaski pushed down on the hull. The boat sank farther and remained submerged, though the bow soon rose to the surface. More air was released until the RHIB was neutrally buoyant and perfectly balanced.
Not surprisingly, the calculations for the added ballast had been spot-on.
The team struggled into their rebreathers, fit full masks over their faces, and performed a c
ommunications check. There was little chance of running into crocodiles or caimans, but all had spearguns fitted into holsters strapped to their thighs.
Juan sliced the rope securing the RHIB to the hut and let the current take them. With each man holding a line attached to the boat, they swam their ungainly charge into the middle of the river. To Cabrillo, it felt like they were trying to herd a hippopotamus.
They stayed close to the surface for the first few miles, swimming lazily with the river’s not-insignificant current. This far from the light pollution of any cities, the sky was a vaulted dome of glittering stars, so bright and so numerous it seemed as though night in this part of the world was silver and not black. It was more than bright enough to see both banks of the river and to keep the wallowing boat in the center of the channel.
Only when they neared the next village did the men dump air from their buoyancy compensators and take the RHIB down close to the bottom. Juan had taken a compass bearing before slipping below the surface, and he steered them by watching the dial’s luminous face. It was an eerie feeling, swimming in water as dark as ink. With the temperature close to his own body’s, it was as though he’d been denied all tactile sensation. They drifted for a mile, the men lazily finning to maintain steerage, before Cabrillo ordered them back to the surface.
The isolated village was well behind them, and they found they had the river to themselves. Even had there been traffic, their black gear, and the fact that only parts of their heads were exposed, would lead any native to believe the team was just a couple of branches being slowly swept down toward Argentina.
Hours rolled away. It was a faint glow emanating around the next bend that told them they were approaching the border. During their briefing, they had all seen satellite shots of the area. On the Paraguay side was a three-hundred-foot concrete quay fronting tumbledown warehouses and a customs shed. The sleepy little town was maybe four streets deep and equally wide. A white-steepled church was the tallest building. In response to the troop buildup, the local military commander had brought a detachment of soldiers to town. They were camped just north of the village in a field that ran right to the river’s red-clay bank.