Arctic Drift

by Clive Cussler

  “In that case, I suppose we can turn to Mitchell Goyette the unrepentant capitalist, who can recognize a profit opportunity blindfolded and will stop at nothing to keep his financial empire expanding.”

  “You flatter me,” Goyette replied sarcastically. “But you have made the decision easy. I can’t afford to have the Northwest Passage revert to a solid chunk of ice. The recent melting is what has allowed me to gain control of the Melville Sound gas fields and monopolize transportation in the region. Maybe ten or fifteen years from now, when the oil sands and gas reserves are nearing depletion, I can go save the planet. By then, the ruthenium may even be exponentially more valuable.”

  “Spoken like a true capitalist.”

  Goyette reached over and picked up two thin pages of paper lying on his desk. They were the journal entries Zak had stolen from the Miners Co-op.

  “The basis for this whole ruthenium claim still seems rather flimsy,” he said, examining the pages. “A trader purchased the ore in 1917 from an Inuit whose grandfather acquired the stuff some seventy years earlier. The grandfather was from Adelaide but claimed the ruthenium came from the Royal Geographical Society Islands. On top of that, he called it Black Kobluna and said the source was cursed with dark spirits. Hardly the basis of a scientific mining claim.” He peered at Zak, unsure whether the whole thing might be a ruse on the part of the paid assassin.

  Zak stared back without blinking. “It may be a long shot. But the Inuit ruthenium had to come from somewhere, and we’re talking one hundred and sixty years ago in the middle of the Arctic. The journal has a map of the island, showing exactly where it was mined. The Inuit didn’t have front-end loaders and dump trucks back then, so they would have had to pretty much find the stuff lying on the ground. There has to be more there. While this Mid-America Company has appeared in the area, they’re looking for zinc, and on the opposite side of the island. Yes, Mitchell, it may well be a long shot. But there could be an enormous payoff if it’s there, and an enormous cost to you if someone else gets to it first.”

  “Aren’t we the only ones who know about the Inuit deposits? ”

  Zak squinted slightly, his lips pressed in a tight grimace.

  “There is the possibility that Dirk Pitt is aware of the trail,” he said.

  “Pitt?” Goyette asked, shaking his head in nonrecognition.

  “He’s the Director of the National Underwater and Marine Agency in the United States. I ran into him at the research lab in Washington and noticed him giving aid to the lab manager after the explosion. He appeared again in Ontario, at the Miners Co-op, just after I took these journal entries. I tried to arrange an accident on the road out of town, but some old man helped him escape. He’s obviously aware of the importance of ruthenium in triggering the artificial-photosynthesis process.”

  “He might be on to you as well,” Goyette said, a crease crossing his troubled brow.

  “I can take care of that easily enough,” Zak said.

  “It’s not a good idea to be blowing up high-visibility government officials. He can’t do anything from the States. I’ll have him tailed just to make sure he stays there. Besides, I’ll need you to go to the Arctic and investigate the Royal Geographical Society Islands. Take a security team with you, and I’ll send along some of my top geologists. Then figure out a way to put Mid-America out of business. I want you to find the ruthenium. Obtain it at any cost. All of it.”

  “That’s the Mitchell Goyette I know and love,” Zak said with a twisted smile. “We haven’t talked about my share.”

  “It’s a pipe dream at the moment. Ten percent of the royalties is more than generous.”

  “I was thinking of fifty percent.”

  “That’s absurd. I’ll be incurring all of the capital costs. Fifteen percent.”

  “It’s going to take twenty.”

  Goyette clenched his teeth. “Get off my boat. And enjoy the cold.”

  40

  DESPITE LOREN’S PLEAS FOR HIM TO STAY IN BED and rest, Pitt rose early the next morning and dressed for work. His body ached worse than it had the day before, and he moved slowly until his joints gradually limbered up. He contemplated drinking a tequila with orange juice to deaden the pain but ultimately thought better of it. The aches of injury took longer to vanquish, he thought, cursing the mark of time and its toll on his body.

  Loren summoned him to the bathroom, where she cleaned the scrape on his head and applied a fresh bandage.

  “At least your hair will cover that one up,” she said, scraping her finger across several scars on Pitt’s chest and back. Numerous bouts with death in the past had left their share of physical marks, as well as a few mental ones.

  “A lucky blow to the head,” he quipped.

  “Maybe it will knock some sense into you,” she replied, wrapping her arms around his torso. While Pitt had told Loren of the events in Ontario, he had neglected to mention that the landslide had not occurred by accident. She reached up and lightly kissed his scalp, then reminded him that he had promised to take her to lunch later in the day.

  “I’ll pick you up at noon,” he promised.

  He reached his office by eight o’clock and sat through a pair of research briefings before phoning Dan Martin later in the morning. The FBI director sounded excited to hear from Pitt.

  “Dirk, your tip yesterday was a good one. You were correct, the janitorial service at the George Washington University lab works in the evenings. We reviewed the lab’s security video and found a clean shot of your wayward morning janitor. He fit your description to a tee.”

  Sitting in the airport lounge in Elliot Lake, Pitt had finally made the connection between the man at the Co-op and the janitor he had bumped into at the lab just prior to the explosion.

  “Have you been able to identify him?” Pitt asked.

  “After confirming that he was not part of the building maintenance and janitorial staff, we ran his photo through the Home-land Security identification database. Not an exact science, mind you, but we came up with a potential hit list and one pretty good match in particular. On this side of the border, he goes by Robert Ford of Buffalo, New York. We’ve already confirmed that the registered address is a fake, as well as the name.”

  Pitt repeated the name Robert Ford, then thought of the alias he had used in Blind River, John Booth. Too coincidental, Pitt thought. John Wilkes Booth was the man who had shot Lincoln, while Robert Ford had killed Jesse James.

  “He has an admiration for historical assassins,” Pitt offered.

  “Might be his line of work. We crossed our records with the Canadian authorities, and they think they have him pegged as a fellow named Clay Zak.”

  “Are they going to pick him up?”

  “They would if they knew where to find him. He’s a suspect in a twenty-year-old murder at a Canadian nickel mine. His whereabouts have been unknown ever since.”

  “A nickel mine? Might be a tie to his use of dynamite.”

  “We’re following up on that now. The Canadians might not find him, but if he sets foot in the country again we’ll have a good chance at picking him up.”

  “Nice work, Dan. You’ve accomplished a lot in short order.”

  “A lucky break that you recalled your encounter. There’s one more thing that you might be interested in knowing. Lisa Lane’s lab assistant, Bob Hamilton. We were able to obtain a search warrant on the guy’s financial records. It seems that he just had fifty thousand dollars wired into his bank account from an offshore entity.”

  “I suspected something was amiss with that one.”

  “We will do a little more digging, then bring him in for questioning at the end of the week. We’ll see if there is a connection, but I have to say, things look promising at the moment.”

  “I’m glad the investigation has legs. Thanks for your efforts.”

  “Thank you, Dirk. You’ve given us a nice jump on the case.”

  Pitt wondered how his own research was going and took the stairwe
ll down to the tenth-floor computer operations center. He found Yaeger seated at his console conversing again with Max, who stood before a large projection screen. A flattened map of the globe was displayed, with dozens of pinpoint lights flashing from scattered points across the oceans. Each light represented a buoy that relayed sea and weather info via satellite link to the headquarters building.

  “Problem with the sea buoy system? ” Pitt asked, taking a seat beside Yaeger.

  “We’ve had an uplink problem with a number of segments,” Yaeger replied. “I’m having Max run some software tests to try and isolate the problem.”

  “If the latest software release had been properly tested before going operational, we wouldn’t be incurring this problem,” Max injected. Turning to Pitt, she said good morning, then eyed Pitt’s bandage. “What happened to your head?”

  “I got in a slight fender bender on a rocky road,” he replied.

  “We’ve tracked the information on the jet tail number that you phoned in about,” Yaeger said.

  “It can wait. Fixing the sea buoy data is more important.”

  “I can multitask with the best of them,” Max offered with a touch of indignation.

  “She’s running a test that will take twenty minutes,” Yaeger explained. “We can exercise her until the results come back.”

  Turning to the holograph image, he said, “Max, bring up the data on the Canadian Gulfstream jet.”

  “The aircraft is a brand-new Gulfstream G650 eighteen-passenger jet, manufactured in 2009. According to Canadian aeronautical records, the tail number C-FTGI is registered to Terra Green Industries, of Vancouver, British Columbia. Terra Green is a privately held company, chaired by a man named Mitchell Goyette.”

  “Hence the TGI in the tail number,” Yaeger said. “At least he didn’t flaunt his personal initials, like most filthy rich jet owners.”

  “Goyette,” Pitt mused. “Isn’t he big into green energy?”

  “His holdings include wind farms, geothermal and hydroelectric power plants, and a small number of solar panel fields,” Max recited.

  “Being privately held tends to obscure things,” Yaeger said, “so we did a little digging. Found over two dozen other entities that trace their ownership to Terra Green. Turns out, a number of the holdings were related to gas, oil, and mining exploration activities, particularly in the Athabasca region of Alberta.”

  “So Terra Green is apparently not all that green,” Pitt quipped.

  “It’s worse than that. Another Terra Green subsidiary apparently controls a recently discovered natural gas field in the Melville Sound. Its value could conceivably outweigh his other holdings combined. We also found an interesting nautical link to NUMA. It seems that over the past few years, Terra Green has contracted for the construction of several big icebreakers from a Mississippi Gulf shipyard, along with a number of very large LNG and bulk-carrier barges. It was the same yard that built our last research ship, which was delayed in launching due in part to their work for Terra Green.”

  “Yes, the Lowden Shipyard in New Orleans,” Pitt recalled. “I saw one of those barges in dry dock. It was a massive thing. I wonder what they’re transporting?”

  “I have not attempted to locate the vessels, but I can try if you like,” Max said.

  Pitt shook his head. “Probably not important. Max, can you determine if Terra Green is conducting any research related to artificial photosynthesis or other countermeasures to greenhouse gas emissions?”

  Max stood motionless as she scanned her databases for published research reports and news releases.

  “I find no references to Terra Green and artificial photosynthesis. They operate a small research facility devoted to solar research and have published work in carbon sequestration. The company has in fact just opened a carbon sequestration facility in Kitimat, British Columbia. The company is known to be in discussions with the Canadian government to build an unknown number of additional sequestration facilities across the country.”

  “Kitimat? I just received an e-mail from Summer, who was writing from there,” Yaeger said.

  “Yes, the kids apparently stopped there for a few days on their way down the Inside Passage testing the local sea alkalinity,” Pitt said.

  “Do you think the carbon sequestration plants figure in as a motive to halt Lisa Lane’s research?” Yaeger asked.

  “I can’t say, but it could be a possibility. It’s clear that Goyette is after the ruthenium.” He explained his visit to the Miners Co-op and the chance encounter with the man he’d seen at the GWU lab. He recited the portion of the journal entry he had read, and pulled out his notes for Yaeger.

  “Max, last time we talked, you indicated that there was little, if any, mining of ruthenium taking place,” he said.

  “That’s correct, just a small quantity of low-grade ore being produced from a mine in Bolivia.”

  “The mining Co-op has a finite inventory left. Do you have any data on potential deposits in the Arctic?”

  Max stood motionless for a moment, then shook her head. “No, sir. I find no mention in any recorded surveys or mining claims that I have access to, which mostly date from the 1960s.”

  Pitt eyed his journal notes, then said, “I have a record from 1917 that a quantity of ruthenium called Black Kobluna was obtained some sixty-eight years earlier by a number of Adelaide Peninsula Inuit. Does that mean anything to you, Max?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, I still don’t find any relevant mining references,” she replied, a hurt look in her transparent eyes.

  “She never calls me sir,” Yaeger muttered quietly.

  Max ignored Yaeger as she tried to generate an added response to Pitt.

  “The Adelaide Peninsula is located on the north coast of Nunavut, just to the south of King William Island. The peninsula is considered an essentially uninhabited landmass, historically occupied at certain seasons by small groups of migrating Inuit.”

  “Max, what is meant by the term ‘Black Kobluna’?” Yaeger asked.

  Max hesitated while accessing a linguistics database at Stanford University. She then tipped her head at Yaeger and Pitt with a confused look on her face.

  “It is a contradictory phrase,” she said.

  “Please explain,” requested Yaeger.

  “Kobluna is an Inuit term for ‘white man.’ Hence it is a mixed translation of ‘black white man.’ ”

  “Contradictory, indeed,” Yaeger said. “Perhaps it means a white man dressed in black or vice versa.”

  “Possibly,” Pitt said. “But that was a remote section of the Arctic. I’m not sure a white or black man had even set foot there by that point in time. Isn’t that true, Max?”

  “You are nearly correct. Initial exploration and mapping of the Canadian Arctic came in a British-inspired quest for a northwest passage to the Pacific Ocean. A large portion of the western and eastern regions of the Canadian Arctic had been well charted by the mid-nineteenth century. The middle regions, including a number of passages around Adelaide Peninsula, were in fact some of the last areas charted.”

  Pitt glanced at his notes from the Miners Co-op. “The record indicates that the Inuit recovered the ruthenium in or around 1849.”

  “The historical record shows that an expedition under the guise of the Hudson’s Bay Company surveyed a region of North American coastline in the vicinity between 1837 and 1839.”

  “That’s a little too early,” Yaeger remarked.

  “The next known forays were made by John Rae in 1851, during his search for survivors of the Franklin Expedition. He was known to have traveled along the southeast coast of Victoria Island, which is still approximately a hundred miles from the Adelaide Peninsula. It was not until 1859 that the area was reached again, this time by Francis McClintock, who visited nearby King William Island, just north of Adelaide, during another search for Franklin.”

  “That’s a little late in the game,” said Yaeger.

  “But there’s Franklin,” Pitt sa
id, searching his memory. “When did he sail into those waters and where was he lost?”

  “The Franklin Expedition sailed from England in 1845. They wintered the first year at Beechey Island, then traveled south until becoming trapped in the ice off King William Island. The expedition ships were abandoned in the spring of 1848, with the entire crew later dying onshore sometime later.”

  Pitt mulled the dates in his head, then thanked Max for the information. The holographic woman nodded and turned aside, resuming her software test calculations.

  “If Franklin’s men left their ships in 1848 well north of the peninsula, it doesn’t figure they would be lugging some minerals around with them,” remarked Yaeger.

  “It’s possible that the Inuit erred in the date,” Pitt replied. “The other point to consider is Max’s comment about the Adelaide Peninsula being an Inuit migration stop. Just because the Inuit were known to camp on the peninsula doesn’t mean that it’s where they acquired the mineral.”

  “Good point. Do you think there’s a connection with the Franklin Expedition?”

  Pitt nodded slowly. “Might be our only real link,” he said.

  “But you heard what Max said. The entire crew perished. That would seem to eliminate any hope of finding an answer there.”

  “There’s always hope,” Pitt said, with a glint to his eye. He looked at his watch, then rose to leave. “As a matter of fact, Hiram, I fully expect to be on the right path just this afternoon.”

  41

  PITT BORROWED AN AGENCY JEEP AND PICKED UP

  Loren on Capitol Hill, then drove across downtown D.C.

  “You have time for a long lunch?” he asked, sitting at a stop-light.

  “You’re in luck, I have no hearings scheduled for today. I’m just reviewing some draft legislation. What did you have in mind? ”

  “A side trip to Georgetown.”

  “To my condo, for a little afternoon delight?” she asked coyly.

  “A tempting proposition,” he replied, squeezing her hand, “but I’m afraid we have a lunch reservation that can’t be canceled.”