Arctic Floor

by Mark Aitken

  ‘You’re the spokesman mentioned in here?’ said Gallen, tapping the newspaper.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Last night,’ said Joyce. ‘Halfway through the family meal and this journalist is on the line.’

  ‘He tell you what he knew about the Russians and the TTC?’

  ‘I told Aaron this,’ said Joyce, swigging at a bottle of water.

  ‘So tell me.’

  Joyce sat back on the sofa, closing his eyes. ‘He asks if I’ve heard the rumours about Durville doing a secret deal with the Russians to control the drilling rights on the Arctic sea bed.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I said no.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I think I asked him where the hell he was getting this from.’

  ‘Flint tell you?’

  Joyce shook his head. ‘He went straight into these allegations about Oasis’s support for the TTC, and once that started I just hung up.’

  Gallen stole a glance at Aaron, who mouthed the word ‘no’: Dave Joyce didn’t know about the Newport Associates report or the burglary at Florita’s house.

  ‘Dave, did it sound like this reporter was reading from something?’ said Gallen. ‘Or was it more like he had half the story, trying to flush you out? ‘

  ‘The second one,’ said Joyce, sitting up. ‘With a major story like that, the reporter would email the evidence across to me or they’d tell me where it came from. It would strengthen their own story, make it bigger and more solid.’

  ‘You dealt with Flint before?’

  ‘No, he doesn’t usually write on business.’

  Gallen didn’t understand. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘On newspapers, there’s a business and finance section,’ said Joyce. ‘Flint doesn’t work there. He’s a senior writer, usually does think-pieces, op-ed and he writes the editorials.’

  ‘Op what?’ said Gallen.

  ‘Op-ed,’ said Joyce. ‘You know: opposite the editorial, the opinion pieces.’

  ‘But not in the business and finance section?’

  ‘No,’ said Joyce. ‘He’s never written about business, to my knowledge. He usually weighs in with opinions about cuts in defence spending, increasing the deployment in Iraq, that sort of thing.’

  ‘You speak to him this morning?’

  ‘Receptionist couldn’t put me through.’

  ‘Couldn’t? Or wouldn’t?’

  ‘She said his line wasn’t answering,’ said Joyce, slumping. ‘This is the worst time for this crap. The very worst.’

  Gallen looked to Aaron and Florita for a clue, then turned back to Joyce. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘This,’ said Joyce, tossing a glossy Oasis marketing folder across the coffee table. Picking it up, Gallen saw a white cover that proclaimed ‘Ariadne: Queen of the Arctic’. On the bottom right were the words: Media Pack, Ariadne Launch, April 10.

  Opening it, Gallen saw press releases, photos and diagrams of the flying saucer-type structure he’d seen on CNN, which also sat in model form against the wall.

  ‘April tenth, that’s . . .’

  ‘This Friday,’ said Joyce, as if Gallen was simple. ‘You did know about the Ariadne launch? ‘

  Looking at Florita and Aaron, Gallen made a face. ‘Well, of course I didn’t.’

  Aaron cleared his throat. ‘It wasn’t going to be an issue, Gerry, until Florita decided she wanted to go down on the first journey.’

  There was silence in the room as Gallen stared at Florita.

  ‘I was going to tell you this morning,’ said Florita. ‘Feedback from the Street wasn’t good.’

  ‘Wall Street?’

  ‘Yep,’ said Florita. ‘There’s an idea that a female can’t run an oil company. We thought this would be a good way to make the analysts and fund managers see me as a chief executive, not a woman.’

  ‘By going to the bottom in this tin can? ‘ said Gallen, holding up the photo. ‘You coulda gone sky diving, taken a raft down some rapids.’

  ‘It’ll be a photo op,’ said Joyce, defending what was obviously his idea. ‘She won’t go to the bottom. That’s almost a thousand feet.’

  ‘So?’ said Gallen.

  ‘We’ll submerge her with the Ariadne for the networks and news channels, but only fifty feet down. Then we’ll just bring her to the surface.’

  ‘Oh, you will?’ said Gallen. ‘How will you do that, Dave?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Joyce looked at Aaron.

  ‘Gerry, the take-off would be your team,’ said Aaron.

  Breathing out, Gallen tried to stay calm. ‘I think everyone in this room should remember that two weeks ago the former chief executive of this company—sorry, the managing director—was bombed out of the sky in his corporate jet. I remember it well ‘cos it was my third day on the job.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Gerry,’ said Florita. ‘This was dreamed up yesterday, after a link-up with our New York PR firm. They thought it was time to redefine the story; take it away from Harry and the plane wreck, make it about the future.’

  ‘It’s high-impact stuff,’ said Joyce, leaning his elbows on his knees as he gained confidence. ‘After BP’s image disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, this is a game-changer: female CEO, ecologically responsible drilling, might even have a penguin swimming nearby, right, Gerry? Networks will love that.’

  Gallen looked at the communications man in his four-thousand-dollar suit and Italian shoes and all he could see was the kind of administration fool that the Pentagon produced like spring flies.

  ‘That’s great, Dave,’ he said. ‘But penguins live in Antarctica, okay?’

  ‘Really?’ said Joyce, trying to make a joke of it.

  ‘Yeah, really. Secondly, I think BP’s spill in the Gulf was slightly more than an image disaster.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Joyce said, waving it away, now red in the face.

  ‘And lastly, Dave, let’s talk about high impact.’

  Joyce gulped.

  ‘High impact is a hit team killing Harry Durville and trying to bring the rest of us down with him.’

  As he waited for Joyce to leave, Gallen could feel Aaron’s gaze on him.

  ‘So that went well,’ said Florita, walking to the side-board and pouring herself a glass of water. ‘Can we finish with the pissing contest already?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Gallen. ‘I’ll work up a security plan for the dive, but I think we have to find this newspaper reporter.’

  Florita grabbed the TV remote as the Oasis logo appeared behind a business anchorwoman. The woman told the audience that Oasis had lost eleven per cent of its stock price in early trading on the NYSE based on unconfirmed rumours that the late Harry Durville had been secretly dealing with the Russians over Arctic Ocean oil.

  The anchorwoman switched her attention to Microsoft sales and Florita hit the mute button again. ‘Right now, I need less details, more results.’

  ‘We’re on it,’ said Aaron, gesturing for Gallen to leave the office.

  ~ * ~

  Gallen raced south along the river to the southern rail yard precinct of Calgary, an area known as Ogden. The text message from Winter had been brief: 2 @ Fallback 1.

  He was driving too quickly and his head was filled with plans and contingencies: the CEO was going down in the submersible, only to be taken off to a waiting boat. That’d be a job for Mike Ford. The reporter on the Calgary Herald would have to be collared and questioned. He still had the broader question of who bombed the plane. And where was Paul Mulligan?

  Pulling off the Deerfoot Trail, he negotiated the maze of warehouses and truck loading hubs and drove along alleys filled with containers and machinery, loaders and security dogs.

  At the end of a cul-de-sac called Ogden Dale Plaza, Gallen aimed under a sign for Britannia Oil Refining and drove into an abandoned oil storage area that Oasis had bought and mothballed six years earlier. Parking beside a white Chev van, Gallen scanned the area for unwanted eyes
and climbed the outside stairs that led to the old administration offices looking over the Britannia switching yards and storage tanks.

  Pushing into the building that doubled as the ‘Fallback 1’ in Winter’s text message, Gallen pulled the SIG from his waistband. ‘Anyone home?’ he called as he scanned the panoramic view available from the elevated offices.

  The internal door inched open twenty seconds later and a handgun was pointing at his chest.

  ‘What have we got? ‘ said Gallen, as Winter lowered the gun and walked to him.

  ‘Two unfriendlies.’ A shiner was starting around Winter’s left eye. ‘Followed them into the motel room and persuaded them to leave with us.’

  ‘Put up a fight?’

  ‘Sure did,’ said Winter, reholstering his SIG. ‘The big dude wanted to fight—Mike dropped him with a leg shot.’

  ‘Cops?’ Gallen looked across the vast rail yards for movement.

  ‘I think we’re clean,’ said Winter.

  ‘Think?’

  ‘No tails, but you never know with these guys.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Winter shrugged. ‘If they’re Agency, then they’re being tracked as we speak.’

  ‘You got their phones?’

  ‘No phones.’

  That was good news and also bad news.

  Moving towards the door, Gallen realised Winter wasn’t getting out of the way.

  ‘What’s up, Kenny?’ he said, trying to look over the big man’s shoulder.

  ‘I don’t know who they work for, but I’ve seen these guys before. One is that lawyer dude from behind the Spanish bar in Del Rey.’

  ‘The other one?’

  ‘Remember I told you I saw someone in the back of that Bell cable van at Roy’s?’

  ‘Big black dude? Stuck his head between the front seats? That’s when you knew it was a surveillance truck.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Winter, biting on a new smoke and offering Gallen one. ‘Him.’

  ‘They alive? Talking?’

  ‘Yep, and just.’ Smoke streamed through Winter’s nostrils. ‘Mike’s playing good cop, getting them coffee and donuts. I’m Freddy Krueger.’

  Inhaling and looking away, Gallen thought about the next few minutes and how it could be crucial not only to doing their job for Oasis, but staying alive in the medium term. One lesson he’d learned in Mindanao and Afghanistan was that the intelligence fraternity was much harder on itself than it ever was on civilians or the hapless mules who got in the way. Once you declared for one side in the spy world, you were playing for keeps. When Gallen walked in that room and started insisting on answers, there’d be no going back. It would move from a simple snatch that could be explained away as an accident to a hostile act that would certainly be responded to.

  ‘Before we go in there,’ said Gallen, ‘I need Roy off the farm.’

  ‘It’s done,’ said Winter.

  Gallen’s blood pressure was ticking. ‘Where?’

  ‘Asked him not to tell me,’ said Winter.

  ‘What about his cell?’

  ‘In the mail to a history lecturer at the University of Texas, in Austin.’

  Gallen sucked on the smoke and ground it into the floor as he exhaled. ‘Let’s do this, Kenny.’

  The room was a wooden-floored space that would have accommodated a tennis court. Natural light streamed through the glass panels in the roof as Gallen strode towards the backs of the two people duct-taped to the chairs. One was a normal-sized Anglo, judging by his shape, and the one on the right was larger—a leg wound was making a pool of blood around his left boot.

  Nodding a greeting to Ford, who was making coffee at a small kitchenette, Gallen rounded the chairs and stood in front of the two captives.

  The smaller man looked upset, quite unlike his cocky act behind the Spanish bar in Del Rey. The big one had a strapped leg and a smashed nose. He tried a smile. ‘Howdy doody, cap’n.’

  Gallen froze. He was looking at his old gunnery sergeant, Bren Dale.

  ~ * ~

  CHAPTER 44

  The revving of diesel locomotives wafted into the room, along with the clanking of rail cars and yelling brakemen. Gallen dragged a chair in front of Dale as Mike Ford escorted the other captive out the door.

  Then they were two war veterans left with shared memories and not much more.

  ‘You want to tell me what this is about?’ said Gallen, sipping at the surprisingly good coffee.

  ‘Why don’t you start?’

  ‘Okay. A special forces guy leaves 1st Recon and goes spying,’ said Gallen, lighting a smoke. ‘But he’s spooking on his old CO, being a pest.’

  Dale’s head shook slowly, the pain from his leg obvious on his face. ‘Shit, cap’n. Let me out of this, and we all walk away.’

  ‘Like I walked away from that bomb in Harry Durville’s plane?’

  Bren Dale eyeballed Gallen. ‘Didn’t bomb no plane, boss.’

  ‘Someone did.’

  Dale looked away. ‘I didn’t ask for this.’

  ‘You like going to my childhood home, pretending to be a fucking cable guy?’ said Gallen softly. ‘That a fitting finale to what we did on Basilan?’

  ‘You like creeping round my daddy’s offices?’ Dale took a deep breath, his broken nose running with blood. ‘Remember I asked you to reposition our direct action, that night on Basilan?’

  ‘I do,’ said Gallen.

  ‘Remember I told you that the intel from the Philippines side was no good? That it was a fricking ambush?’

  ‘I do,’ said Gallen again, remembering a night that triggered a three-day retreat from the Moro stronghold. ‘Christ. You were a spook all along?’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ said Dale, in a tone that meant Gallen had got it right. ‘Point is, I told you something and you acted; you saved a lot of lives and you got a promotion out of it, last I heard. Now I’m telling you again.’

  ‘Fuck, Bren,’ said Gallen. ‘You were DIA? Why didn’t I know?’

  ‘War on Terror, all that shit. The units had their staff intel briefings, business as usual. But DIA had their own embedded guys.’

  Gallen could feel the anger welling in his neck. ‘Why would DIA do something like that?’

  ‘Same reason we invaded Iraq when we hadn’t secured Afghanistan: clowns running the circus, know-it-alls who know nothing. Point is, I tried to warn you off this time round too.’

  ‘When?’ said Gallen.

  ‘Suddenly pulling out of the gig,’ said Dale, his face softening. ‘Shit, boss, I thought you’d work it out: ol’ Brenny just bails out, won’t return your calls? He must be workin’ again.’

  ‘So who’re you working for?’

  Dale shook his head. ‘The who don’t matter.’

  ‘What don’t matter is that you hold out, Bren,’ said Gallen. ‘Kenny wants a close chat with that boy of yours.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Dale, shaking his head and closing his eyes. ‘You know about Winter? ‘

  ‘Some.’

  ‘No, I mean, you seen his sheet?’

  ‘The Assaulters? ISAF?’

  ‘You know what he did before they cut him loose?’

  ‘Canadians set him up for a DD. Sign this or we fuck you.’

  ‘Canadians had nothing the fuck to do with nothing, boss,’ said Dale. ‘He was on payback duty for the Agency.’

  ‘Payback for what? ‘ said Gallen, lighting another smoke.

  ‘For that Jordanian bomber up in Khost,’ said Dale, talking about the al-Qaeda double agent who talked his way into the CIA compound in Khost and detonated his bomb, killing seven Agency officers.

  Gallen checked his surprise. ‘Kenny?’

  ‘Made six hits in thirteen days,’ said Dale, smiling with the information ascendency. ‘High-level dudes—al-Qaeda bankers and lawyers. Gaza, Penang, Amman and , . . Colombo I think it was.’

  ‘Bullshit, Bren. Kenny was on secondment.’

  ‘Bullshit, yourself,’ said Dale. ‘W
hat you think all them Canadian and Aussie special forces dudes were doing in Kabul in the first place? Helping the Eurocrats fill out their paperwork? ‘