Three Marines showed.
“We need to secure that platform first. Belay me and I’ll rig it so it won’t go anywhere before we get her out.”
Cruz appeared, Ross beside him. “She’s not responding.”
“That’s cuz she’s knocked unconscious.” He kicked his boots into ice spikes and latched the straps.
“Be careful,” Cruz said. “The sensors say stable, but I don’t know for how long.”
He nodded, waiting till the Marines had the rope behind their backs and feet firmly in the ice. Two others stood by to pull Olivia’s line and prepared with another rope. He tested comms, then went over the side. Sebastian descended the first twenty feet rapidly and the Marines slung a rope down. He grabbed the end, securing the platform and sliding the rope between the slats. He looped a knot, then radioed to pull up the slack and secure from above. He let a few feet of rope slide through his fingers and called to her. She didn’t move, spinning in the air over the Viking’s ship, the mast pole a few feet below her. He suppressed his impatience and lowered methodically, stopping at eye level. He secured himself, then reached for Olivia and tipped her head up. Her pulse was strong, but her helmet was badly dented. He pushed it back and touched the bit of blood on her widow’s peak and trickling down her forehead. He steered it away from her eye.
“Olivia, talk to me.” He patted her cheek. “Come on, cherie, wake up.” She blinked and flinched, her feet working wildly, and he grabbed her, locking her legs with his. “It’s okay. You’re okay. Be still.”
She met his gaze, tears working to the surface. “This time I asked for help, damn it.” He smiled and hummed the Indiana Jones theme. “Oh, please.” She laughed shortly, though her death grip on his arm was cutting off circulation. Then he heard a sharp crack.
She looked somewhere past him, then scrambled to pull herself up the rope. “It’s going to fracture,” she said. “We have to be careful. It could crack more.”
“Why you want to work like this is beyond me,” he muttered to himself, rigging a secondary safety line.
“Oh, this from a bomb disposer guy?”
He chuckled, and secured her with back clip, then looked up. He gave the loose line a tug. “Look alive.”
“Ready to hoist, sir?” came through his PRR.
“Heave away.” He needed to keep her still as the Marines hoisted them up the tunnel of ice. Yet Olivia wasn’t buying that, inspecting the walls as they went.
“There’s a lot of cracks that weren’t here yesterday.”
He frowned. Her speech was a little slurred, and he grabbed the mini oxygen tank and made her breathe through it. It was a minute of short pulls till they reached the top platform and her foot touched. She grabbed the scaffolding anchors. Sebastian was behind her and she kept slipping, then cursed like a sailor, jammed her spike in the ice, and flung herself over the rim. A Marine dragged her from it, then offered a hand to Sebastian. Topside, he straightened, then winced when he heard noise in the dig. On her stomach, Olivia looked over the edge. Triangle-shaped chunks of ice fell, fracturing the platform over the ship.
“Shit!” She smacked the ground, dropping her head forward for a second, then scooted back to unclip from the rope. She looked ready to explode, he thought, removing his harness.
He patted a Marine on the shoulder. “Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.”
“About as exciting as it gets out here, sir.”
Esposito handed him a bottle of water and he drank, watching Olivia angrily strip off her equipment, then her helmet. She inspected the dent as she stood, then touched her forehead. She stared at the blood on her fingertips and Sebastian heard her mutter, “Oh for pity’s sake,” before she used her thermal suit for a rag.
He was just glad she was okay. She didn’t seem to care she was almost impaled on a stick and he definitely didn’t want to feel that fear again. Digging in the ice was more dangerous than he first imagined.
“Everyone back off,” she said. “No one goes down.” Her team didn’t look happy about that. “Shut down the melting, Cruz. Bring the temperatures back up and recycle the air. We’re either going too fast or we’re in for a jumpy day or two.” She called over two women and an Indian man about thirty and discussed diagnostics. She gave orders like a sergeant major, he thought, and when she was alone, he crossed to her.
“My hero,” she said a little breathy. “Thank you.”
“Shucks, ma’am.” He smiled, inspected her cut. It was minor, from the inside of her helmet. Suddenly, she gripped his jacket, pressing her head to his chest. He frowned, ran his hand down her back. “Olivia?”
“I’ll just be a sec.”
He smiled with tender humor, feeling her sway. After a moment, she tipped her head back. Her eyes looked a little dreamy still.
“I was sweating down there, and I shouldn’t be. Those bolts were eighteen inches long. No way they could work out of the ice. It took a shotgun to get them in.” She stepped back, then sank to her rear, and grabbing the mini oxygen tank, she inhaled.
He sat beside her, checked her eyes. “You’re the expert, darlin’. Hypothesize away.”
“The walls aren’t slick, it’s not melting. It’s blue ice.” When he frowned, she said, “It stays below forty degrees. Cracks, chunks falling, happens often enough, and this isn’t my first dig in the ice. No one does it because it’s dangerous.”
“Then you’ve got to look for what’s changed. Something’s heating that ice.”
“Not from in there.” She flicked at the hole. “We have alarms that tell us of any change in temperatures, shift in the ice. They extend around here for about two thousand yards as a warning system for seismic activity.” She pulled her gloves back on and stood. “We’re at the start of the Gakkel Ridge—it’s under the ice—a mountain ridge stretching twelve thousand miles to Siberia,” she explained. “Granted, it’s a deviating tectonic plate, but shifts only about a centimeter a year.” She shook her head as if to check it off the list, then suddenly turned and met his gaze. “Could be a hydrothermal vent.”
Geothermally heated water bubbling through a crack in the earth’s crust. “Not unless there were a few dozen vents, I can’t see that doing damage to a glacier. Not at these depths.”
“You’re right, it shouldn’t. I’m going with seismic activity.” She called to Cruz. “Water output levels?”
“Same as always, decreased in fact. It’s not melting.”
“Then it’s structural. No. It can’t be. To push the bolts out? The arch supports distribute weight and the blue ice shouldn’t fracture—” She sighed and pushed her fingers through her hair. “I really don’t have a clue.”
She walked across the lab to a Poindexter-looking kid and talked with him. The glaciologist, or volcanologist, he couldn’t recall. But as he neared she called for results from three scientists, then suddenly put up her hand. The talk died as she scribbled on a pad. He saw math and thought, she’s way smarter than me.
Then she met his gaze, looking horrified. “It’s not melting, it’s vibration.”
Fort Leavenworth, Kansas
Mitch sipped bad coffee and waited beside Gerardo in the secure conference room. He’d run a check-through to make certain they weren’t heard. This was not going to be pleasant for anyone. Least of all Lania Price. The door opened, the sound echoing in the nearly empty room. There were two plastic chairs and a solid steel table. Not even a trash can.
Gerardo stood, smoothed his uniform, and stepped back beside him. “Your ball game, Beckham.”
He glanced. “Sir?”
“Damn near dying over this puts you with the most to gain. I’m just here to observe.”
Mitch had interrogated terrorists. He considered Price a step below.
“Solitary confinement hasn’t softened her. I’ve been trying for over a year now. Have at it.”
Price walked in a hunched shuffle, her wrists manacled. The guard followed closely and told her to sit. Every day of her incarceration sho
wed on her face. Her hair was stone gray, made even more hideous with skin that looked like paper. Rough, he thought.
“Take these off.” She lifted her wrists.
“You’re fortunate not to be chained, Lania,” the General said.
She eyed them both. “So whose ass are you after now?”
Mitch gave her a smile he didn’t feel. “Today, it appears to be yours.”
She stared at him, then tipped her head as if to say, bring it on.
“Sir,” he said to Gerardo. “A moment alone, please.”
Gerardo didn’t react and strode out the door.
“That’s not necessary, you know.”
Mitch looked at Price. “Yes, it is.” He smiled thinly, thinking of the bastards that locked him in that closet to die and how this all came back to her and what she didn’t tell the CIA. How could they fight their enemies if their own betrayed them?
“How much did they pay you to keep quiet about the sub built in the Chechen mountains?”
Her expression didn’t change, but her skin went paler. “A lot.”
He sat on the edge of the table. She didn’t like anyone being that close to her so he leaned in farther. “Your reason for smothering the transmission’s location of where the sub went down?”
She looked away. He turned her face back and she jerked from his touch. Mitch stood and walked around behind her. He knew how to make her talk. He didn’t have to prepare. She’d sent hitters after their own, killing Americans to further her stronghold in the spy game.
Within ten minutes, she was gasping for air and begging him to stop. Mitch had barely touched her; descriptive threats were more useful. He swept his index finger behind her ear and she flinched, ducked.
“Okay o-kay! It doesn’t make a difference now.”
“You could have saved yourself all that, Lania, but then, I think you like pain.”
“Yeah well, your face looks like you do, too, Major.”
He smiled and said nothing though he really wanted to smack the shit out of her. Every wound radiating under his clothes was from hunting down her lies.
She stared through a curtain of gray hair. “What do I get out of it?”
He looked her over. “A decent bath? My fist not in your face?”
“The guards do worse than that.” She turned her head, her hair rasping against her jumpsuit. “Call in the general. I don’t want to repeat myself.”
He did and Gerardo zeroed in on Mitch. He stepped back. “Continue,” Mitch said.
“Yes. Russia built a fast attack submarine. I didn’t learn of it till it launched.”
“The German schematics?”
“I didn’t steal them,” she said, defensive. “Ex KGB Vlad Dovyestoff did, with help, I’m sure. That cow can’t walk a straight line. He sold them to Moscow. He’s probably set for life after that. Moscow kept it quiet with threats, and did all the transporting and construction at night. It took them only seven months to build it inside a Stalin-era bunker in the mountains. It launched three years ago from Chechnya.”
Seven months? That had to be the maiden voyage. “Why did you not inform E ring or the director?”
She made a rude sound. “Because it was more useful to hold it over their heads. How do you think Putin signed the SORT treaty? Or left Georgia after a month? I used it to push them out. This stuff doesn’t get done with talks, you know. With the Russians, you have to be ready to take down the government to get them to agree to a treaty.”
Blackmailing a government wasn’t how democracy worked, he thought, but, he admitted, it was useful. “Tell us about the boat.”
“It’s much smaller than a Borei class, seventy-three-man complement, and it had stealth cavitations, seven pin. It’s barely detectable even at full speed, and has deep submersion launch capabilities. That’s the German technology. It can launch vertically without surfacing. So maybe you should ask Moscow why a submarine like that was heading toward the U.S. coastline?”
Jesus. The sub could fire and be gone before we realized the missile was in the air. And she kept this quiet? Beside him, Gerardo stiffened and she swung her gaze to him. “Reports say the submarine sank in the Bering Sea.”
“We both know that’s a lie.” She scoffed rudely, and Mitch thought, what a vile woman. The polished CIA officer he’d met once before was thoroughly erased. She looked like she belonged at a truck stop waiting tables on the night shift. “If it did, you’d have more information. Come on, you know or do I have to say it?” She answered herself a second later. “Fine. I’m not leaving here, but this should get me a bottle of scotch, at least. Russia launched that thing with every intention of hitting the U.S. When it sank, the threat to the U.S. was gone, but Moscow didn’t want us or anyone else to confirm that they broke several arms treaties by coming that close with loaded ICBMs.”
That wasn’t as unfamiliar as most people thought. Russian subs were off Florida’s coast often. The United States stayed alert and watched. But Moscow sent three ships to the Barents Sea to investigate. It was all for show. “You’re saying they falsified where it sank.” That matched David’s findings.
“Yes, I am. Golubev orchestrated it. Molenko executed it. Down to killing a couple of my contacts who knew the truth.”
Golubev was the current head of the FSB. He shouldn’t be surprised her skirt lifted that high in Moscow. “Molenko is dead.” That development the CIA learned yesterday, and he suspected FSB was cleaning house, but Price’s reaction was a self-satisfied smirk.
“Justice is slow this week in the Kremlin. Golubev should be next. That disgusting slob knew they could have rescued that boat.” Mitch’s brows shot up. “The Bowman was in the water then. Neither boat was down deep. The Bowman had just started its arctic crossing in the Greenland Sea. A rescue of the entire crew was feasible, but Moscow cut us off from helping with territorial rhetoric and threats.”
“Russia attempted rescue.”
“No, Major. They didn’t even try.” She sat back and crossed her legs like she was in a boardroom meeting. “Russia had knowingly broken treaties. They had to smother it, completely.”
She glanced between him and the General before she delivered her bomb.
“Moscow cut off all communications from the sub. They intentionally silenced the Trident’s distress hail and let seventy-three of their own countrymen die an ugly death to keep it quiet.”
TWELVE
Ice Harvest
One day later
Sebastian walked into the crooked hallway and the bite of the wind instantly lessened. Maneuvering around the tubing and cables, he pulled off his ski cap and scraped his hand through his hair. He needed to check the weather. It wasn’t looking peaceful out there anymore. He strode into the dig and instinctively searched for Olivia, smiling when he spotted her near a large tank. Inside it was a frozen mummy, a short one, and he could feel her excitement from across the dig.
She looked up, smiled, and pointed to the tank. “Chinese warrior, his name is Zhu.”
“How the heck do you know that?” He crossed to her.
“The diary mentions his name but a big clue is the stole,” she said when he was close, drawing an imaginary line curving the mummy’s shoulder.
“Well damn.” Around the decayed throat was a piece of fabric and even though ice surrounded it, he could see the twist of Celtic knots.
“The monk tells of the princess giving this to Zhu before she sent them away. She made it herself.”
“Looks like you have all the pieces.”
“Quite a few. We brought up the cargo from on deck.” Sebastian went wide-eyed and she said, “Yes, there’s a crate of fabric and barrels of pepper and ginger. That says a southern route. The pressure of the ice crushed it, but some were in the ice beside it so I think maybe the ice storm was sinking the ship, or they were taking on too much water and were trying to lighten the load. There was water in their mouths. They all drowned before they froze.”
“Doctor Corrigan?�
�� She turned sharply to the excavation. “I think you need to see this.”
She crossed to another archaeologist, Dana, and Sebastian’s curiosity made him follow. A Plexiglas plate suspended with rope and wires rose out of the dig as a technician worked the pulleys. She’d been taking artifacts out of there for a steady eight hours. The tech swung the plate over to the metal table, and Olivia switched on the under-cabinet light, then put on a high-powered scope and bent over it. She prodded a small section that wasn’t encased in ice, then went suddenly perfectly still.
She looked up, pulling off the bug-eyed scope, and smiled brightly. “It’s a piece of a tartan. A small scrap, very faded when it got into the ice, and it’s embroidered.”
He glanced at the ice cube on the clear plate. “A Maguire tartan?”
“No. Mine.” He blinked, peering closer and she said, “According to the monk, she gave it to the Viking before he sailed. She was wrapped in the tartan when she was captured. I guess that was all that was left.”
Sebastian laughed to himself. “The princess was a Corrigan.”
“It is a sect of the Maguires,” she said primly.
“So…your relatives are responsible for this.”
She grinned. “It appears so.”
“Then I guess you should get the bill.”
She went breathless for a second, grabbing his arm, then her laugh melted with, “Not with my bank account, for sure. But being indirectly connected is kind of cool, huh?”
“Proves you have troublemaking in your blood.” He motioned her away from the finds already tagged and laid out on tables that were quickly running out of surface. “Any more shakes?” He looked at the forty-foot-wide hole in the ice.
“No, and I still don’t understand it. I’ve been down twice and haven’t seen a single sensor blink. Outside the dig we have a couple going off, but thermal say it’s wolves.”
“I’ll check it out.” He needed a visual, but before he could radio Max, Ross’s voice came over his PRR.
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