The Silent Sea

by Clive Cussler

  “Well, this sure has been an interesting afternoon,” Hanley said with nonchalance.

  “What happened?”

  “They tried to land near the beach, but their pilot got cold feet when I fired off a few clips at him. I got one of them, too. Care to tell me where the hell you’ve been?”

  “You wouldn’t believe it if I did.”

  “Try me.

  Cabrillo explained what he had found while they were packing up their gear and driving back to the beach. The last big item in the Ford’s cargo area was an inflatable raft and an outboard. While Hanley got it ready for the crossing back to the mainland, Juan used his dive knife to spear the SUV’s gas tank. The vehicle had been rented using an untraceable false ID, but there was forensic evidence on the truck so it would have to burn.

  They waited on the beach to make sure nothing remained of the Explorer but a charred husk. It took less time to motor to shore and reach the native village of La Push than it did to find a ride back to a good-sized town. They ended up bumming a ride in the cab of a semi transporting a load of timber, which made Juan remember his recent adventure in the Argentine jungle with a nearly identical rig.

  THE ROAR OF A BIG diesel engine outside signaled that the Argentines had fired up their snowcat and were leaving Wilson/George Station. Fifteen minutes had passed since Linda had taken refuge in the ceiling crawl space. Now that she felt confident they had gone, she broke out a chemical heat pad and applied it to her face. She’d managed to keep her toes and fingers from going numb by curling them repetitively in her boots and gloves. However, the apples of her cheeks and her nose were moments away from frost-bite. The pain when sensation started rushing back was excruciating but welcome because it meant there had been no permanent damage.

  And since she’d heard no more gunfire, she knew the rest of her team had remained safely hidden.

  Linda climbed stiffly from her perch and remained silent until she made her way to the station’s main door to verify the snowcat was gone. Linc and Mark appeared by the time she returned to the rec room.

  “I heard shooting,” Linc said, concern corrugating his broad forehead. “Are you okay?”

  She nodded. “It was a close call, but yeah. Where’d you guys hide?”

  “I just laid down next to one of the bodies,” Mark said. “The guy checking the room didn’t give me a second look.”

  “I was in the back of a closet under a pile of clothes. I think they were pretty spooked by what they saw. Their search was cursory.”

  “I know how they feel,” Linda agreed, trying not to think about the grisly tableau around her. “Linc, you said you found something in the vehicle shed?”

  “Yeah, but you’ll need to see it for yourself.”

  With their masks back in place, the three of them trooped along the staked trail to the arch-roofed building. The door still flapped in the wind, a metronomic rattle that was the base’s only sign of life. The power was out, and the garage was so heavily shadowed that the back wall was lost in the gloom. Their flashlights cast brilliant beams that cut the murk like lasers. The two snowcats looked like a hybrid cross between tanks and passenger vans. The tops of the studded Caterpillar tracks came up to Linda’s thigh. Bright orange paint covered the bodywork so they could be easily spotted out in the snowfields behind the station.

  “Over here.” Linc led them to a workbench along the side of the garage.

  Amid the usual clutter—tools, oil cans, and frozen rags—was a trunk measuring three feet in length. Linc opened the lid.

  It took Linda a moment to understand what she was seeing. There was another body in the trunk, but, unlike the others, it had clearly been dead and exposed to the elements for some time. It was more mummy than corpse, and much of the face had been eaten away by scavengers before the body became too frozen to eat. Its clothing was unfamiliar. It wasn’t dressed in contemporary arctic gear but rather a padded jacket of brown wool and pants too thin for the environment. The hat perched atop frozen black hair looked odd. It had two peaks and a short brim.

  “I’d say this guy’s been down here for a hundred years or more,” Mark said as he examined the body.

  Linda said, “Maybe a whaler who got lost over the side of his ship?”

  “Could be.” Mark looked at Linc. “Did you go through his pockets?”

  “Not me, man. I took one look and closed the lid. But our missing man sure did.”

  Linda had forgotten they hadn’t accounted for all fourteen members of Wilson/George. “You found Andy Gangle?”

  “Is that the dude’s name? He’s at the back of the garage. And he is messed up.”

  Andy had taken his own life in the end, driven to suicide by the same madness that made him kill his companions. He had sat down, with his back against a rack of spare tools, and pulled so hard on his lower jaw that he’d nearly broken it loose. He’d died, either from exposure or blood loss, with his fist stuffed into his mouth as if he were trying to get at whatever affected his brain.

  Something glinted brightly in his other hand. Mark pried it from the stiff fingers. It was a piece of gold, misshapen now, but at one point it had to have been ornamental. There was a hammer on the floor next to Gangle’s body. When Mark shone his light on it, he could see where bits of gold had transferred to the head.

  “He smashed it with this hammer?”

  “Why?”

  “Why’d he do any of this? He was sick.”

  “What was it?”

  “Hard to tell. A figurine of some sort.”

  “Is it pure gold?”

  “I’d say at least two pounds. Say, thirty thousand dollars.” Mark peered into a knapsack that also was within Gangle’s reach. It made a sound like broken glass scraping together when he lifted it. He peered inside, then dumped the contents on the floor.

  It was impossible to know what had been in the bag originally because all that fell out was opaque greenish sand and small bits of similar-colored rock. Like with the golden statuette, Andy Gangle had hammered at something until all that remained was dust and fragments no bigger than a thumbnail.

  There was also an odd tube made of what looked like cast bronze in the bag. One end was closed off and the other was shaped like a dragon’s open mouth. The body of the tube was scalloped to resemble a dragon’s scaly skin. Mark examined it more closely.

  “This is a pistol.”

  “What?”

  “Look, here at the closed end there’s a small hole for a wick or taper. It’s a single-shot muzzle-loading pistol.”

  “Looks Chinese, with the dragon and all.”

  “And ancient,” Linda added. “I assume all this stuff, whatever it was, goes with our mystery friend in the box?”

  “That’s my read,” Linc replied.

  “Weird,” Mark opined.

  Linc asked, “What now?”

  “Report our findings back to the Oregon so we can let the CIA know what happened. My guess is, Overholt will want us to pay a visit to the Argentine base to see what’s happening there. In the briefing material I read, it said no one has laid an eye on their facility in two years. I say we anticipate him and head out on our own.”

  “I’m not walking thirty miles across Antarctica,” Mark griped.

  Linda tapped the front of the nearest snowcat. “Neither am I.”

  After making a radio call to their ship and fulfilling Dr. Huxley’s request for tissue and blood samples from Andy Gangle and the mummy in the trunk, it took almost an hour to get one of the big vehicles fired up. Without electricity for the plug-in engine warmer, the oil had turned as viscous as tar. It had to be drained and warmed over a camp stove twice since the first time it cooled too quickly to crank the motor. Despite his nerd chic, Mark Murphy was a nimble mechanic.

  Heat from the snowcat’s ventilators was a welcome breath, and only a few miles from Wilson/George it was warm enough for them to unzip their outer parkas and remove the heavy mittens over their Gore-Tex gloves. Linc drove, and Lin
da relinquished the shotgun seat to Murph.

  She decided they should circle out into the snowy expanse behind the base and approach the Argentine camp from the east. Compasses were useless this close to the South Pole, but the snowcat was equipped with satellite navigation. This, too, was a little spotty because the constellation of satellites used for triangulation was often hidden by the horizon. The system was not developed with polar navigation in mind. There were base relay stations to aid GPS, but most of them were on the other side of the continent where most of the research bases were located.

  The landscape was an unbroken vista of white. Even the distant mountains were still covered in winter ice. Some would melt as the spring thaw deepened to reveal gray granite slopes, but for now they towered under a mantle of frozen snow.

  Unlike other areas of Antarctica, where the ice was miles thick, there was little chance of driving into hidden crevasses here, so Linc drove fast, the crawler treads having little difficulty hauling them across the wind-scarred surface.

  “It’s believed,” Mark said to cut the boredom, “that the mountains to our left are a continuation of the Andes in South America.” He stayed quiet when no one engaged him.

  Three hours of monotonous driving found them two miles behind the Argentine research station. Given the militaristic nature of the current regime in Buenos Aires, they expected there would be perimeter security of some kind, most likely patrols on snow machines. Linda judged two miles was close enough. From here, they would proceed on foot.

  Linda and Linc tightened up their arctic clothing. Mark was to remain with the snowcat so he could start the engine occasionally to keep it warm and also to be able to move it if trouble approached. They grabbed up their weapons and leapt to the ice. It was dark but the clouds had moved on, allowing the moon’s glow to glitter off the snow.

  The night had an eerie stillness. It seemed the only sound in the world was their breathing and the crunch of their boots. It was as though they were walking on another, inhospitable planet. And in a sense they were, because without their protective suits they wouldn’t last five minutes.

  Linda had pocketed a bunch of nuts and washers from a storage bin in the snowcat. She dropped one every fifty or so feet. The metal looked black against the ice and was easily seen. She carried a handheld GPS, but the little trail of metal bread crumbs was her low-tech backup.

  They’d gone a mile when Linc suddenly dropped flat. Linda threw herself to the ground and started scanning the horizon.

  “I don’t see anything,” she whispered.

  Linc wiggled forward on his elbows. She matched him move for move and then she spotted what he’d seen. There were tracks in the ice from a snowmobile. They’d been right to be cautious. The Argentines did patrol around their base.

  “Makes you wonder what they’re protecting,” Linc said.

  “Let’s find out.”

  They got to their feet again and continued onward. As a former SEAL, Franklin Lincoln was always on guard, but he moved with even more vigilance than usual. His head turned side to side as he studied the barren terrain around them, and every couple of minutes he would pull down his parka’s hood to listen for the telltale buzz of an approaching snowmobile.

  The back of the Argentine base was protected by low jagged hills. Here the snow and ice had been blown away in spots to reveal rocky crags as black as midnight. It wasn’t a particularly difficult climb, but they moved with slow deliberation. Their thick boots weren’t suited to the task, and they were on constant lookout for patrols.

  They reached the top and got their low-light binoculars ready before peering over the crest.

  Linda didn’t know what to expect. She assumed the Argentines would have something similar to Wilson/George, but what lay below them between the hills and the sea was astonishing. It wasn’t an isolated little research station as had been claimed, but rather a sprawling town so cleverly camouflaged it was impossible to tell its size. There were dozens of buildings built on what at first looked like an ice shelf but was in fact an artificial construct made to look like ice. Because nature abhors a straight line, all the buildings were constructed with curved shapes to hide their outlines from satellite observation.

  Huge white tents hid even more of the base. She imagined these were made of Kevlar to withstand the elements. They had also constructed a large dock with several piers, again made to look like ice.

  The natural bay the facility abutted was ice-free, except for a dozen tall iceburgs. She zoomed in on one. Something wasn’t right about it. It looked real enough, but it was too tall for its base. It should have toppled over during the latest storm. They all should have. That’s when she realized they were artificial, too.

  Oil platforms. That’s what they were—small offshore oil-drilling rigs.

  Now that she understood the nature of what the Argentines had built here, she recognized that three odd hills near the pier were actually giant storage tanks that had been buried under earthworks redoubts. These weren’t just exploratory wells out there. They were about to go into full-scale production. The dock may not be large enough for the latest-generation supertankers, but it could certainly handle a hundred-thousand-tonner.

  She knew what she was seeing flew in the face of one of the most important treaties in existence. Since the early 1960s, the Antarctic Treaty had maintained that the continent was a scientific preserve and that no nation could claim sovereignty over any part of it. The accord also stated that it was illegal for signatories to mine for raw materials or drill for oil, on land or offshore.

  Linc tapped her on the shoulder and pointed farther south. She saw what he was pointing at, a separate building away from the others, but she wasn’t sure what piqued his interest. She shot him an inquiring glance.

  “I think that’s a missile battery.”

  If he was right, that was another violation, she believed. She clicked off more than a dozen pictures with her camera, shooting through the night vision binoculars. They weren’t the best pictures, but they were at least proof.

  Linc slithered back over the crest of the hill. “What do you think?” he asked when they were clear.

  “I’d say the Argies have been busy. Did you notice the icebergs in the bay?”

  “Yeah. Oil derricks.”

  Linda nodded. “We’ve got to report this.”

  A wind was starting to pick up. It wasn’t enough to cause a whiteout, but visibility was down dramatically, and after so much time exposed Linda felt the cold starting to seep through her clothes. Remarkably, she could still see her trail of nuts and washers.

  Linc continued to scan all around them, so he was the one to spot the snowmobile. He pushed Linda to the ground hard enough to cause the air to explode from her lungs. They didn’t know if they’d been spotted, and a tense few seconds passed as the machine’s single headlamp bounced through the darkness.

  Time stretched, and it looked like the driver hadn’t seen them moving, or, if he had, he though it was a trick of the wind. The sled’s motor was a piercing whine, but he continued to angle away from them. At the last second, the sentry jerked the handlebars hard over and drove straight for the prone pair.

  Linc cursed, and brought his assault rifle to his shoulder.

  He couldn’t see what the driver was doing because of the glare of its headlamp, but the crack of a shot carried over the engine’s beat. The shot went wild because the snowmobile was racing over rough terrain. The snowmobile was almost on them. Linc fumbled in his oversized mittens to flick off the safety, and when he realized he wouldn’t have time he lurched to his feet and swung the rifle like a baseball bat.

  The gun hit the driver in the neck, and the kinetic energy of his forward motion coming against Linc’s tremendous strength ripped him off the back of the machine and sent him sprawling across the ice.

  Without its driver, the snowmobile’s engine automatically cut out when the safety key, which was tethered to the man’s wrist, was ripped from the dash
. It rolled onward for a few feet and came to a stop, its headlight reflecting flakes of snow drifting on the wind.

  Linda ran to the downed Argentine. He lay completely still. She peeled off his helmet. The way his head flopped when she did it told her his neck had been broken by the brutal impact. She stood.

  “Dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Him, her, us,” Linc said with a career soldier’s fatalism.

  He lifted the body and brought it closer to the snowmobile. He set the corpse gently on the ice and took hold of the handlebars. Bracing his legs, he flexed his muscles and threw the five-hundred-pound machine on its side as if it were no more than a toy. He adjusted the body to fit what would look like a tragic accident.

  “Wish we could take it and ride it back to the snowcat,” Linda said, although she knew they couldn’t.

  “Walk will do you good,” Franklin Lincoln grinned.

  “First, I need meat on my bones, and now you say I need exercise. Which one is it?”

  Linc knew that answering that was a trap, even if she was teasing, so he wisely said nothing and continued the long slog to Murph and their warm ride back to Wilson/George.

  SIXTEEN

  In Bremerton, Washington, the only requirement Juan and Max had for their hotel was that it have an Internet connection because Cabrillo wanted to transmit the pictures he’d taken in the pit to Eddie Seng aboard the Oregon and get a translation as quickly as possible.

  By the time they’d finished stuffing themselves on Wallapa Bay oysters and Dungeness crab at a nearby restaurant, Eddie had a preliminary report for them.

  Seng was another former CIA agent and had been with the Corporation almost since its inception. Ironically, though they had served at the same time, he and Cabrillo had never met in the halls of Langley. Born in New York’s Chinatown, Eddie was fluent in both Cantonese and Mandarin.

  He regarded the world through heavy-lidded dark eyes, and in them Juan could see Eddie had discovered something interesting. Behind the Corporation’s chief of shore operations, Juan could see the back of the op center, so he figured his image was on the main display above the helm and weapons stations.