by AJ Frazer
“Stunning, isn’t it?” said Sagen. Dominic hadn’t noticed his approach.
“Certainly is,” replied Dominic, not taking his eyes away from the view.
“You know, the oceans cover over seventy percent of the Earth’s surface and have an average depth of four kilometers. They absorb over a thousand times more heat than the atmosphere. In fact, the sea has trapped close to ninety-five percent of the excess heat we’ve created since 1955. But it’s now acidifying at a rate we can’t even model. Even programs like ARGO, which are run by the World Ocean Circulation Experiment, are failing to predict the rapid change in sea temperature. The world’s fish stocks are perilously low and the slowing of the North Atlantic current is unrelenting. But, as usual, the science has been censored and the world is being mollycoddled by petrified politicians.”
“I don’t doubt your data and I have no facts to refute it,” said Dominic, still looking at the azure view unfurled before them.
A comfortable silence grew between the two men.
“I suppose you want to know what all this is about then?” asked Sagen at last.
“You read my mind.”
“It’s not hard.”
Dominic looked at Sagen out of the corner of his eye.
“We’re going to give Italy a wake-up call.”
“I didn’t realize they were asleep.”
Sagen smiled, and the scar below his eye fractured and creased. “We’re going to wake them from their laissez-faire attitude toward the environment. This may come as a surprise to you, but Italy is the worst environmental offender in the Mediterranean. Actually, it’s one of the world’s worst.”
“That is surprising,” replied Dominic truthfully.
“Think about the Med. Forty-six thousand kilometers of coastline surrounded by twenty-two countries across three continents: Asia, Africa, and Europe. It’s home to five hundred million people. And, guess what? It’s also a climate-change hotspot. Drinking water scarcity, industrial proximity, and reliance on climate-sensitive agriculture are all making this a very unbalanced ecosystem.”
Dominic had to hold his tongue. The busy media executive in him wanted Sagen to quit with the lecture and get to the point. Where was this all going?
“Now,” continued Sagen, “Italy has been contemptible in their blatant polluting, particularly of the Adriatic Sea. They’ve taken little or no care of their environmental endowment. Numerous studies, including our own, have found that Italy rates as one of the worst first-world polluters. They are squandering their land and, in the process, ruining the whole ecosystem for hundreds of millions of other people. And the world lets them get away with it!”
“OK. Assuming everything you’ve said is true, how do you plan to wake them up?”
“Every sixty-two kilometers of the Italian coastline there is an ongoing pollution event. Or, put another way, as many as a hundred and twenty polluted areas along their coastline. We are going to eradicate just one. The biggest one.”
“Right. Home of the tarantula?”
“Correct. More precisely, the Il Toro di Ferro steel mill, The Iron Bull. An abomination on the Earth. It is the biggest steel plant in Europe with five mega-blast furnaces. It is also the single biggest polluter in Italy and, despite numerous legal attempts to shut it down, the plant still operates and pollutes without compunction.”
“Right,” said Dominic, unconvinced. “What about the jobs? The incomes that feed families? The economy?”
“You can’t have an economy without ecology.”
More PR sound bites, thought Dominic. “You can’t have humanity without productivity,” he said. Back in your face, Sagen—have that sound bite.
“I’m not anti-jobs, Dominic. But I’m not prepared to sacrifice the planet in order to make a profit. If the Il Toro plant was to disappear, those people would find work in other steel mills or other industries.”
“So how exactly are you planning to do it?” Dominic wondered if he really wanted to know.
“With grace and panache, Dominic.” Sagen flashed a charismatic smile and had a wicked glint in his eyes.
Dominic was starting to see an inner lunatic in Sagen. The quiet, unassuming, charming kind that no one suspects, because no sane person gets close enough to see it. Perhaps that’s why he was a lone wolf, refusing to let his inner circle, like Erik, close. In case they could see the mania that drove this determined man.
“I’d expect nothing less. But how will you ensure the steel mill is closed for good?”
“All will be revealed, Dominic. All will be revealed.” Sagen’s attention drifted to the ocean.
Dominic looked at Sagen’s profile before he, too, averted his gaze out the windows. His journalistic instinct told him to take a more obtuse angle. Sagen was not the kind to be bullied or harangued into giving answers.
“So this ship, it’s Earth Ghost’s?”
“Yes. We charter it from a Finnish company through a bunch of shell companies so that it can never be traced back. It’s actually an icebreaker, once one of the best in the world. Not that it sees much ice anymore. We use it largely in the Mediterranean and sometimes in the North Sea, but I have plans for her to be back in the ice soon.”
“Impressive. How many crew?”
“We keep it lean. Sixteen dedicated to the ship, but we have double that on this trip as support for the mission.”
Dominic nodded. “You spend a bit of time on ships.”
“When you’re being hunted on every continent, the ocean becomes an island.”
“A bit different from farming. You said you came from a long line of farmers. Bit of history there?”
“My family worked the land in Southern California since the early gold rush of the 1850s. But it was my grandfather, Henry Sagen, who was the patriarch. He was a great man. Though he too was a farmer at heart, he made his fortune in retail. He eventually sold his business for hundreds of millions. The money he made secured the family and our land for generations.”
“So you were close to him?” Dominic was keen to dig around Sagen’s more personal details.
“I was a boy when he died and my father had a rather tortured relationship with him, so we didn’t spend much time together.”
“Did you have a good relationship with your father?” Dominic asked as casually as he could manage, but sensed immediately that he’d stepped into unfriendly waters.
Sagen turned his head slowly. His face a picture of calm, despite the burning eyes.
Dominic expected to be admonished for trying to delve deeper into Sagen’s personal life.
“My father was a cunt. A man so despicable and grotesque he caused my mother to kill herself, just to get away from him. So, at the ripe old age of twelve, I was left alone—with my younger sister—to deal with both our mother’s death and the drunken, depressed, immoral husk of a man that she had escaped. So, to answer your question, no, I did not have a good relationship with my father.”
Dominic swallowed, taking a moment to absorb what he’d just been told and to consider his response. “Well, it’s a miracle you didn’t turn out to be one of the most wanted criminals in the world.” He grinned sideways at Sagen.
“Ha!” Sagen slapped him on the back as he turned to leave the bridge. “It’s good to have you with us!” he called, stepping outside and letting the door slam shut.
Dominic stood there staring out at the blue expanse again. He was tinkering with the portrait he was building of Sagen in his mind, bolting new information together, gluing insight to fact, welding history to myth, and bandaging reality to fantasy. A Frankenstein approach to creating a profile of a person. At every turn, Sagen had kept him guessing: one moment the madman, next the savant, next the hero, and then, of course, the villain. No wonder he was such an enigma to the public; no one had been able to pin down one picture of the man. But Dominic was determined to succeed where others had failed.
Chapter Fifteen
Dominic walked out onto the upper deck
of the ship. He needed to breathe the fresh air and take in the vastness of the ocean. The view was dominated by a cloudless light-blue sky, contrasted with the dark-blue sea, with just a thin strip of light-brown land in between. Dominic’s world––Jagged Edge, the Veda Analytics acquisition––it all seemed so far away and so pointless as he stood on this boat in the middle of the ocean. The rhythmic rumbling of the ship, the gentle swaying motion, the expansive ocean, the briny air … it all conspired to create the feeling of displacement.
It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling, just one he’d not recognized for many years. He recalled feeling this way when he was in Syria in the early eighties. He’d been on assignment covering the occupation of Aleppo by the Muslim Brotherhood. It was a harrowing time. Forty years on, and the country hadn’t much improved as it continued to be torn apart by civil war and merciless terror attacks orchestrated by government and guerrillas alike.
One particularly deplorable event stood out above all the others during his time in the country. In the then government’s retaliation against the Brotherhood for attacks on government patrols, staunch pro-government military forces took two hundred random civilians from their homes, rounded them up at a cemetery and methodically opened fire. It had been so random that many of the victims were government workers or government supporters, and many were children. The bodies were bulldozed into pits and covered over with earth. Some were buried alive. Such a horrific event, though shocking, didn’t put a stop to the conflict, and the atrocities continued back and forth between the Muslim Brotherhood and government forces.
Ultimately, nothing changed, just a lot of tragic human suffering. After a month in the city, Dominic had seen enough. Traveling the hundred-odd miles to the coast, he caught a ship heading to Cyprus to escape the suffocating misery. He remembered looking out from the stern of the ship at the slowly disappearing Syrian coastline. Detached.
Standing on the deck of the Eclipse Horizon, Dominic was almost transported back to that day, staring out into the blue nothingness surrounding him. But he shook himself free of the memory. Living with memories such as this had brought about episodes of depression in past years. He had fought with it tirelessly, but it was an occupational malaise that only receded when his career as a war correspondent ended. What was it Louna had said about enlightenment? En-light-en. Perhaps he was still carrying around more emotional baggage than he’d thought.
He pushed off from the railings and headed to the rear deck to see if he could find Sagen or some other distraction. The warm wind was getting stronger, but it felt good on his body. He imagined the wind blowing the demons off his back as he descended the steep steel stairs leading to the stern.
On the rear platform, directly in front of the two inflatables, big hydraulic doors were opened revealing a cavernous area with a low ceiling. There were workbenches and tools running around the sides. The main space seemed to be reserved for storage. Rusty steel shackles the size of his head lay around the floor in rows.
At the back of the space, heavy black curtains hung from the ceiling. Dominic could see people moving in and out from behind the curtains and wondered what necessitated the secrecy. A journalist’s mind always.
“Dominic!”
He turned around to see Sagen beckoning him to wait. Sagen turned back to face a man with Asian features, who Dominic recognized. The man stared at Dominic with dark, suspicious eyes. It was the man he’d seen at the camp where he’d first met Sagen. Dominic couldn’t make out what the two of them were saying, but the man nodded solemnly before walking away in the other direction.
Sagen strode toward Dominic. He was wearing gray overalls, the sleeves wrapped and knotted around his waist. A dirty white T-shirt covered his torso. He had earmuffs hanging around his neck and safety goggles upon his head.
“Thought the boss didn’t have to get his hands dirty,” said Dominic.
“This isn’t like the super yachts you’d be used to on the Med!” Sagen smiled.
“Who was that you were speaking to?”
“Ah, that’s George. A very special person.”
“How so?” asked Dominic.
“Come on, there’s some people I’d like you to meet.”
Dominic was becoming used to Sagen’s ability to ignore and evade questions. He nodded and fell in behind Sagen, who headed back along the deck. Instead of going up the stairs toward the main quarters, Sagen went to a watertight door and turned the small wheel in its center to open it. They stepped through, and Sagen led the way down a narrow corridor. This part of the ship was louder, the fluorescent lights harsher and the floors vinyl, as opposed to the carpeted upstairs.
They passed a detailed plan of the ship screwed to the wall beside a red fire-hose reel. A sharp left down the corridor and two more doors until Sagen knocked once on a door and opened it, stepping in without waiting for a response.
Dominic followed him. The small windowless cabin felt hot and claustrophobic. A small group were huddled around a table. He recognized Steve and Davey, who had brought him out to the Eclipse Horizon. The captain was standing in the corner and nodded to Dominic. There were three others he didn’t recognize.
“I’m pleased to introduce you to my guest, Dominic Elliston, who will be joining us this evening on our excursion.” Sagen gestured for Dominic to take a seat.
Dominic was surprised by this. First, he hadn’t realized that he would actually be leaving the ship on this so-called excursion. Second, he didn’t think it would be happening that very night, which seemed too soon.
Nodding toward members of the team, Sagen began his brief. “Steve, Davey—Dominic will accompany you and Jared on Boat One.” Sagen pointed to Jared by way of an introduction.
He continued, “I will be on Boat Two with Karen, Lola, and Jim. Based on current weather conditions, we’ll be launching at oh-one-hundred hours. We should be able to maintain maximum cruising speed all the way to our assigned rally points. After the completion of our mission, we will rendezvous back on the ship. Then we’ll be heading immediately for Corfu. From there, Mr. Elliston and I shall disembark and make our own way.”
“Where on Corfu?” asked the captain.
“A small village called Ermones on the western side of the island. We will need to be dropped off a short distance from the town. I have made arrangements for onwards transport.”
The captain grunted. “I can have you there the next day.”
“OK, great. This is a very simple operation and, with the exception of the weather, it has minimal variables. I don’t see any threats or possible contingencies that cannot be dealt with quickly and easily during the mission. You have each been involved in far more complex operations. This is about as simple as they get for us, but I expect you to all be on your toes. No complacency. Nothing to chance. You all know the drill.
“Dominic and I are simply along for the ride, so we’ll leave you to map out the finer details. Davey has operational control and will take the lead tonight.” He looked around the room, eyeballing each of them. “Any questions?”
They each looked back at Sagen. No one spoke. No need.
“I’ve got a question,” said Dominic. “What exactly is the objective of the mission? What are we doing out there?”
Everyone looked at Dominic, then to Sagen.
“Davey, come see me when you’re done here,” said Sagen, ignoring Dominic’s question as he rose from his chair. “Dominic, shall we?”
Dominic stood and followed him out of the cramped room and into the tight corridor the way they originally came.
“I’m so thrilled you are here for this little sojourn of ours,” said Sagen cheerily.
Dominic was set to explode. There was only so much he could blithely go along with. He accepted the clandestine nature of their meetings, the cloak-and-dagger bullshit. But enough was enough. “Why won’t you tell me what this is all about? Frankly, I would prefer to be focused on interviewing you for my article. I’m really not comfortable with how
this is playing out.”
Sagen turned back and looked sideways at Dominic as they walked. “Cold feet? Perfectly natural on the eve of doing something meaningful and of service to the greater good.”
“It’s not cold feet. I just don’t enjoy walking blindly into dangerous situations without at least being vaguely aware of what I’m letting myself in for.”
“I can understand that, Dominic, I really can, but you have nothing to worry about. The people in that room are some of the most experienced and professional operatives I have ever worked with.” Sagen pushed open the watertight door leading back onto the deck and held it open for Dominic. “You’re in safe hands.” He smiled.
Dominic squinted in the bright sunlight. He couldn’t fathom the look on Sagen’s face. It was either a sincere, light-hearted smile, or the smirk of a monster about to devour its prey. Neither possibility gave him much comfort.
Chapter Sixteen
Dominic paced in his cabin. He tried to rest and relax, but it was impossible. He was contemplating his options and the risks and the mystery of what the hell Sagen had planned. Based on what he knew of Earth Ghost, the plan would likely involve violence and destruction. Dominic was philosophically fine with both, though the thought of harming innocent people filled him with dread. Indecision was an unfamiliar predicament for Dominic, yet here he was, unable to make a concise decision. A knock at the door of his cabin shattered his contemplation. He sat up on the bed.
“Coming!” Opening the door, he was greeted by a smiling Davey.
“Showtime,” said Davey, pushing past him into the room. He looked calm and relaxed.
Dominic was put out by his uninvited entrance. “Come on in!”
Davey didn’t seem to clock the sarcasm. “OK, you’ll need the wet-weather kit that you had on the trip last night, plus a few extra layers underneath. The weather is holding good, but the breeze is starting to kick in a little.”
Dominic got dressed obligingly, adding extra layers. “So, how is this going to play out?” he asked.