The Silent Sea

by Clive Cussler

  It was also a maze too tight for a car and was walled in on all four sides.

  Juan had led them into a dead end.

  TWENTY-ONE

  They had no choice but to make the best of his mistake.

  “Mark, pop smoke! Everything you’ve got.”

  As Murph started heaving more smoke grenades in their wake, Juan committed them to one of the wider lanes through the ranks of mausoleums. The cobbled path was tough on the car’s overtaxed suspension, and the path was so narrow that a slight miscalculation cost the Mitsubishi its remaining wing mirror.

  They had gone no more than fifty feet when the footpath narrowed even further because of an oversized marble crypt. They couldn’t turn around. Juan glanced over his shoulder. Another path met this one at a diagonal. He put the car in reverse and backed into it, scraping paint off the doors against the statue of some politician or other. The only saving grace was that the rain was finally letting up a bit. Visibility was still poor, especially with the smoke drifting eerily around the tombs, but it had improved. The other consolation was neither the police car nor the Cadillac would be able to follow them.

  He wondered if they would chase after them on foot and decided they probably would. The rage he had seen on Espinoza’s face could only be slaked with blood.

  The car clipped a marble bust and tore it off its memorial. The stone head rolled across the cobblestones like some misshapen bowling ball. It took all of Juan’s defensive driving lessons to keep the car from caroming into the crypt on the opposite side.

  He saw the path divide again and backed into the wider-looking route. It narrowed almost instantly, with a mausoleum that looked like a replica of a local church. He pulled forward and then backed down the other way. With so little light, it was next to impossible to keep straight, and again they scraped against one of the decorative monuments. He said a silent apology to the person’s ghost and kept going.

  To his left flashed a larger alleyway. The turn was so tight that it took him several tries, and a lot of smashed marble and crumpled sheet metal to make it. If they somehow got out of this, Cabrillo promised himself that the Corporation would make an anonymous donation to the cemetery’s keepers.

  A cat, for which this place was famous, dashed out of its hiding place right in front of the car, its fur soaked to its skin, in the glow of the only functioning headlight. Juan slammed on the brakes instinctively. The feline gave him a contemptuous look and slunk off.

  The world suddenly went white. It took a second for Juan’s eyes to adjust. Overhead, an unseen helicopter had thrown on its searchlight and created an oasis of daylight in the otherwise stygian cemetery. An amplified voice echoed down from above.

  Cabrillo didn’t need to translate for the others. Any order from a police chopper was pretty universal.

  “Linc, do something about him, will you.”

  Franklin cranked down his window and thrust his machine pistol skyward. There wasn’t enough room to lever his big torso out of the car, so he opened fire without sighting in on his target.

  Seeing the tongue of flame flickering from the car was enough to convince the chopper pilot to back off, much like Espinoza’s chauffeur had done. The searchlight vanished for only a moment before the helo came back again, flying aft of them and at a greater altitude.

  The trail through the tombs turned sharply, but Juan managed to scrape the car through without having to stop.

  If there was any coordination between the air and ground units, the pilot would be vectoring the cops from the patrol car to their position. Juan kept a sharp eye out, craning his neck left and right, as they sped past narrow passages. He saw nothing, and was moving fast enough that even had an officer been approaching from the side he would only have time for one snap shot that would surely miss.

  Then they caught a break. The path branched, and they found themselves driving on the perimeter walkway that bordered the cemetery’s exterior wall. After negotiating such close quarters, it seemed as wide as a highway.

  Their second break came almost immediately. As part of the cemetery’s refurbishment on the main gate, a section of wall had also been removed. A temporary barrier of plywood and wooden studs stood in the opening. The angle was all wrong to get any sort of speed, but Juan went for it anyway.

  “Brace yourselves,” he warned for the second time in five minutes.

  The car hit the barricade with its front fender and splintered the wood but couldn’t punch through. The wheels spun furiously on the slick cobbles, bowing the partition more and more until some critical point was met. The plucky little Mitsubishi tore through the wall and raced across a deserted sidewalk before Cabrillo could throw it into a four-wheel drift.

  They had escaped the cemetery but not the chopper, which was doubtlessly radioing their position.

  “Linda, get us back to the docks.”

  She was hunched over the GPS with her fingers dancing across the screen. “Okay, turn left at the second cross street, then get into the right lane for another sharp turn.”

  Juan did as she ordered, but, no matter what they did, they drove in a corona of hard-white light from the chopper. In his mirror, he saw two patrol cars suddenly appear. They were racing hard, their sirens rising and falling like banshee wails. There was no way on earth to outrun them.

  Linc smashed out the rear window with the butt of his H&K and sprayed a fusillade of rubber bullets. The cops kept coming. Either they knew about the nonlethal ammo from previous attacks or they just didn’t care.

  The lead car came up on their rear corner and tried to bump them into a skid. Juan countered the maneuver, his hands a blur on the wheel. Linc switched to his pistol and put two rounds through the patrol car’s passenger’s window. There was only the driver, and his courage failed him. He dropped back to a more respectful distance.

  Cabrillo was beginning to recognize his surroundings. They were getting closer to the docks. “Mark, show Tamara how to use the pony.”

  “Already on it,” Murph replied.

  Juan tapped his radio. “Mike, are you in position?”

  “I await your arrival,” Trono said breezily.

  “We’re coming hot.”

  The sub operator became more serious at hearing the Chairman’s tone. “I’m ready.”

  Shots rang out from behind them—big, concussive booms from a handgun. The passenger in the second cruiser was leaning out and firing his sidearm. A lucky shot punctured the trunk and erupted through the backseat in a flurry of foam rubber. Tamara shrieked. Linc and Mark Murphy just exchanged a look, and the big former SEAL turned to fire back.

  “Next right,” Linda called over the roar of wind whistling through the car. “That’s the dock.”

  Juan took the turn so fast that the car slid into the guard shack hard enough to shatter the plate-glass window on the side of the building. The men inside dived for the floor, thinking they were under attack. The two cruisers were seconds behind them.

  “Lower all the windows,” Juan ordered as he guided the car around rows of shipping containers.

  That last impact had damaged something vital. The car rose and fell on its suspension like the swaying of a camel. The rear axle had been damaged by the collision and Cabrillo’s frantic driving, and it snapped. The two ends dug into the pavement and threw up fountains of sparks whenever they crossed sections of concrete roadway or the steel railroad tracks for the dock’s big overhead cranes. The front-wheel drive motored on gamely despite the damage.

  Juan patted he dash affectionately. “I’ll never denigrate another Japanese compact again.”

  The pier was almost a thousand feet long, half its width shielded by a corrugated-metal roof on an open I-beam framework. Juan wrestled the car down its length. He didn’t look over when Linda tapped him on the shoulder and handed him an object about the size of a water canteen but with a hose and mouthpiece attached to one end. He clamped the mouthpiece between his teeth.

  Keeping his foot to the floo
r, he raced them to the edge of the pier. There was no need to shout a warning. Everyone could see what was coming up.

  The car hit the end of the dock and shot off into the darkness, arcing nose-first because of the weight of its engine. It hit the water in an explosion of white froth, the impact no worse than any of the others they had been put through tonight. Because all the windows were open and the rear window gone, the car filled quickly with frigid water.

  “Wait,” Juan cautioned.

  Not until the roof had gone under did he lever himself out his window. He hovered at the passenger’s door, holding on with one hand and helping Tamara out after she had crawled over Linc. It was too dark to see anything, but he gave her hand a squeeze, and she squeezed back. He could feel bubbles from her regulator rise past his face. Her breathing was a bit elevated, but, given the circumstances, so was Juan’s. Remarkable woman, he thought.

  The pony bottle contained enough air for just a few minutes, so when the others struggled out of the sinking car Juan led them back under the pier, where a tiny speck of light beckoned.

  It was a penlight attached to a pair of scuba tanks with multiple regulators. The tanks themselves were strapped to the top of the Nomad 1000 submersible. Had things gone smoothly, they would have met the minisub a couple miles from shore in the Zodiak, but there was always the contingency that the raid wouldn’t go as planned so Juan had come up with an alternative. He had ordered Mike Trono to waypoint Beta—under the pier where they had tied the inflatable.

  As soon as the group of swimmers reached the sub, Juan placed one of the regulators in Tamara’s hand and motioned for her to switch off from the pony bottle. Given her ease in the water, he rightly assumed she’d been diving before. There was just enough light for him to indicate that Linda should cycle through the air lock and into the Nomad with Tamara.

  As he waited for his turn, Juan could see flashlights playing across the surface of the water where air continued to escape their dauntless Mitsubishi. He wondered how long before the cops sent in divers, then decided it didn’t mater. They would be long gone.

  Ten minutes later, with the sub creeping away with the current, Cabrillo released the inner hatch on the minisub’s cramped air lock and stepped over the coaming. Everyone was lined up on the benches huddled in foil blankets. Tamara and Linda had toweled off their hair and somehow managed to tame it.

  “Sorry about that,” Juan said to the professor. “We had hoped it would go a lot smoother. Just bad luck the General showed up when he did.”

  “Mr. Cabrillo—”

  “Juan, please.”

  “All right, Juan. Just so long as you got me away from those”—she paused because the invective she was about to use wasn’t for polite company—“horrible people I wouldn’t have cared if we had to crawl our way over hot coals.”

  “They didn’t hurt you?” he asked.

  “I was telling Linda that I didn’t give them a reason. I answered everything they asked me. What was the point of holding back information about a five-hundred-year-old ship?”

  Juan’s face turned grim. “You probably hadn’t heard, but Argentina annexed the Antarctic Peninsula, and China is backing them. If they can find that shipwreck it will further solidify their territorial rights. This is also a bid for oil, and I’m guessing the reserves are substantial for such a big risk. Once that starts flowing, they can use the revenue to buy up votes in the United Nations. It’ll take some time, but I bet within a couple of years their seizure of the peninsula will be legitimized.”

  “I didn’t tell them where the ship sank,” Tamara said. “Because I don’t know. They believed me.”

  “There are other ways. I guarantee they’re looking for it as we speak.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  The question was almost pro forma, asked without really thinking. Just something a person says when faced with an obstacle. But to Juan, it was loaded with meaning. What were they going to do? He’d been wrestling with that since Overholt told him the White House refused to get involved.

  This wasn’t their fight. As Max would say, “This dog don’t hunt.”

  However, there was his sense of right and wrong. He certainly didn’t feel a responsibility to help out, that was never his motivator. Instead, he was bound by a code of ethics that he would never compromise, and it was telling him the right thing was to get involved—to take the Oregon down into those icy waters and take back what had been stolen.

  The rest of his crew was looking at him as expectantly as Tamara Wright. Mark cocked an eyebrow, as if to say “So?”

  “I guess we’re going to make sure they don’t find that ship.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Welcome to the Crystal Palace, Major. I’m Luis Laretta, the director.”

  Jorge Espinoza stepped off the rear ramp of a big C-130 Hercules cargo plane and grasped the man’s outstretched glove. Laretta was so heavily swaddled, it was impossible to see his features or discern his stature.

  Espinoza had made the mistake of not lowering his goggles before moving into the frigid air and he could feel the cold trying to solidify his eyeballs. The pain was like the worst migraine imaginable, and he quickly pushed the goggles into place. Behind him his men stood at attention, all of them kitted out for cold-weather combat.

  The flight down from Argentina had been monotonous, as most military flights were, and, except for landing on skis on a runway made of ice, there was little to distinguish it from the hundreds he had taken before.

  They were here to spearhead security in the wake of the annexation announcement. If the United States or any other power was going to attempt to force the Argentines out of Antarctica, it would happen soon, and most likely be attempted using commandos air-dropped by parachute. With a Chinese Kilo-class submarine recently purchased from Russia patrolling the choke point between the extreme tip of South America and the peninsula, an air assault was the only viable option.

  Espinoza and a hundred members of the Ninth Brigade were sent southward on two transports to stop them.

  The rationale was simple. When Argentina invaded the Maldives in 1982—the islands the British called the Falklands—the English had telegraphed their intentions to retake them with a months-long deployment of ships from their home ports. This time, the Argentine high command believed, there would be no warning. The reprisal would be a lightning-quick attack by Special Forces troops. If they could be met with an equally prepared group of soldiers, the first attempt to retake Antarctica, if repulsed, would most likely be the last.

  “You have to love the Army,” Lieutenant Jimenez said as he strode up to Espinoza’s side. “A couple days ago, we were sweating our butts off in the jungle, and today they’re turning colder than frozen hams.”

  “I was all that I could be,” Espinoza replied, a private joke between them referencing an old American Army slogan.

  Jimenez called out to a Sergeant to see to the men while he and Major Espinoza followed Laretta on a tour of the installation.

  They had timed their landing in the brief period when weak sunlight poured over the horizon. It wasn’t much more than twilight, but it was better than absolute darkness. The shadows they cast on the ice and snow were indistinct, more like murky outlines than hard silhouettes.

  “How many men are down here?” Espinoza asked. Laretta had a warmed-up snowcat waiting at the edge of the airfield. The men would have to hike the mile to the facility, though their gear would be transported on towed sledges.

  “Right now, only four hundred. When we ramp up oil production, there will be better than a thousand here and out on the rigs.”

  “Amazing. And no one knew a thing about it.”

  “Two years of construction, under the worst conditions imaginable, and not a hint of rumor about what we were doing.” There was well-deserved pride in Laretta’s voice. He had been in charge since the beginning. “And we lost only two men the entire time, both from the sorts of accidents you see on any large con
struction project. Nothing to do with the cold at all.”

  Laretta peeled down his goggles and pushed back his parka as soon as they were settled in the big-tracked vehicle. He had a wild mane of silvery hair, and a thick beard that spilled onto his chest. His face was pale from so many months without sun, but the deep wrinkles around his dark eyes gave him a rugged quality.

  “Of course the trick about building down here is fuel, and since we were tapping an offshore natural gas well almost from the beginning we had a steady supply. We were asked early on by the Antarctic Authority about the ship we used. We told them it was for drilling core samples, and they never bothered us again.” He chuckled. “They neglected to ask why it didn’t move for more than two years.”

  It took just a few minutes to reach the base, and almost as long for Espinoza and Jimenez to grasp the scale of what their countrymen had accomplished. So cleverly camouflaged and so artfully laid out that even the keenest observer wouldn’t see it unless they were right on top of it. The only thing out of place was the matte-gray Argentine warship sitting at anchor in the middle of the bay. There was a faint glow from her bridge, but otherwise the cruiser was dark.

  Laretta pointed. “Under those three big hills right on the edge of the bay are oil storage tanks big enough to fuel every car in Argentina for a week.”

  “How is it the bay is free of ice so early in the summer?” Espinoza asked.

  “Ah, my dear Major, that is my pride and joy. Parts of it actually never freeze. There is a series of pipes strung out along the bottom. It is very shallow, by the way. We pump superheated air through the pipes and let it escape out of millions of tiny holes. The bubbles not only heat the water but when they break the surface they crack any thin ice that’s forming. You can’t see it because it is too dark, but the bay’s entrance is narrow enough for us to run a continuous curtain of hot air to keep the water mixing with the rest of the Bellinghausen Sea.”