by Mark Aitken
‘There’re no faults.’
‘Red Fox, this is Blue Dog,’ said Gallen, leaning into the mic as the Dutch sailor with Ford indicated the right pressure to leave the submersible.
‘Go ahead, Blue Dog,’ said Ford as the Dutchie moved out of frame to release the lid.
‘Red Fox, present arms and be alert, over.’
‘Everything okay?’ said Ford, and Gallen watched him pull the black SIG 9mm from his travel pouch and check the slide for load.
‘Comms is down, but no faults detected,’ said Gallen.
‘No contact from Yellow Bird?’ said Ford, crouching and turning for the open lid, which allowed fluorescent light into the submersible.
Gallen sighed. ‘No.’
Behind him, the fax machine double-beeped and the whir of a received message sounded.
‘Talk me through it, Red Fox, you’re now out of shot,’ said Gallen, as the Aussie moved away.
‘Can’t, Blue Dog. This headset plugs into the sub. I’m about to unplug.’
‘Shit!’ Gallen thumped the console. ‘Okay, Red Fox, but leave the line open. And you’re on the air again in five minutes, okay?’
‘Sure, boss,’ said Ford.
‘I’m serious. I’m running a clock. That’s fiver! ‘
Gallen stood back as the line from the sub hissed, and Aaron nudged him. ‘Ford was waiting for something?’
‘Sorry?’ said Gallen, lost in thought.
Putting a piece of fax paper in Gallen’s hand, Aaron pointed at it. ‘Got Mike’s name on it. Must have requested something. What did he want with the US Army?’
Opening the piece of thermal fax paper, Gallen took it in: the fax was a photocopy from a US Army regulations book, featuring the symbol he’d seen on Negroponte’s arm.
‘Holy shit,’ he mumbled under his breath as he read the description attached to the insignia. ‘Pull her up, Hansen.’
The big Swede looked at Aaron, who’d technically been left in charge while Florita was submerged.
‘Now look, Gerry—’
‘No, Aaron, you look.’ Gallen pushed the fax into Aaron’s chest. ‘You know about that?’
‘It’s, um . . . ?’
‘Read it.’
Aaron looked up from the paper, confused, and Hansen grabbed it.
‘It says it’s the Nuclear Reactor Operator badge,’ said Hansen in his thick accent. ‘Who does this refer to?’
‘Yeah, Gallen,’ said Aaron. ‘What’s this about?’
‘It’s the tattoo on Negroponte’s arm.’
‘Negroponte?’ said Aaron. ‘The chief engineer?’
‘The one who’s locked away in his own private engine room,’ said Gallen.
‘You have a nuclear reactor on the Ariadne and you didn’t tell me?’ said Hansen, blood rushing into his Nordic face as he turned on Aaron and Joyce. ‘Are you mad?’
Joyce looked confused. ‘Is that a bad thing?’
‘Why don’t we find out?’ said Gallen. ‘Master Hansen, can we bring the Ariadne to the surface?’
‘With pleasure,’ said the Swede, as he issued the orders.
~ * ~
CHAPTER 59
Winter appeared in the control room, having been paged. Hansen’s orders had been acted on and the crane’s cables were moving upwards.
‘What’s happening?’ said the Canadian, checking his SIG handgun and replacing it in his arctic suit.
‘Lost comms from the Ariadne,’ said Gallen, watching the cables slowly move. ‘And then I found out what that symbol was on Negroponte’s tatt.’
Winter squinted through the windows. ‘What is it?’
‘US Army insignia for Nuclear Reactor Operator,’ said Gallen.
Winter twisted to give Aaron a look.
Aaron lifted his hands. ‘It might be a mistake.’
‘So the power source on the Ariadne is nuclear?’
‘Looks like it,’ said Gallen.
‘Is it safe?’ said the Canadian. ‘I mean, some of these things are really small and really powerful these days.’
Gallen looked at him. ‘You know about this?’
‘Sure,’ said Winter with a shrug. ‘They’re called STARs—the Russians especially are building them as remote power for, you know, mining sites, oil rigs.’
‘You said star?’ said Gallen, remembering the notation in the margin of the Newport Associates report. That was Durville’s scribbled question—was that the information that was being suppressed?
‘Stands for Small Sealed Transportable Autonomous Reactor. You can load one on the back of a truck,’ said Winter.
‘Or the bottom of a submerged oil rig?’ said Gallen.
A light flashed on the console and a voice spoke; a French female voice.
‘That’s far enough, Master Hansen,’ said Martina Du Bois in a nasty purr. ‘You can stop the crane while we have a chat.’
Looking at Gallen and Aaron, Hansen turned back and issued the command to the technician. The ship seemed to shudder again as the crane stopped and the massive weight on the end of it stretched the cables for a few seconds.
Gallen pushed Aaron forward to the mic.
‘That’s better, Master Hansen.’
‘What do you want, Martina?’ said Aaron. ‘Is Captain Menzies there? Where’s Florita Mendes? Where’s her bodyguard?’
‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Mr Michaels. This is a rare chance to have a proper dialogue, n’est-ce pas?’
Aaron snapped, ‘Dialogue about what? Where’s our CEO? Who’s in charge down there?’
‘Everyone is where they have to be, Aaron,’ came the superior tone. ‘Except the media.’
‘The media’s halfway to Kugaaruk or Barrow, depending on where they’re flying out of,’ said Aaron, pushing his hair back on his head. ‘What do you want? Is this a hostage situation?’
‘I need Fox and CNN back here now, Aaron, or there’s going to be consequences,’ Du Bois said from the speaker. ‘You have thirty minutes, and the Ariadne goes nowhere until I say so.’
‘You could always film yourselves, Du Bois,’ said Gallen, trying to keep the comms open. ‘You could get the lighting and angles just right and do some hari kari—you know, for the environment and the polar bears. I’d make sure Fox News gets the footage.’
‘Ha!’ said the Frenchwoman, sounding genuinely amused. ‘I’m going to take a blind guess and say that this is our suspicious American, the one who’s been hit with a baseball bat, hmm?’
‘You’re a real little Charlie Chan, aintcha, Du Bois?’
‘I’m a real little environmental activist who’s going to tell the world what Oasis Energy is about to do to one of the few untouched areas left on earth,’ said the Frenchwoman. ‘It’s not yours to rape—it belongs to all of us.’
Gallen laughed. ‘Told the Russians this?’
‘I’ll tell the world this, Mr Gerry,’ she said, giving his name a soft’J’ sound. ‘And I’ll tell them at nine pm Eastern Time, a late news breaker.’
‘Coulda done that when the media was all here, Du Bois,’ said Gallen, trying to taunt her. ‘You’d rather kill people, that it?’
‘I’d rather talk to Fox and CNN, and you now have twenty-five minutes.’
The radio died again and the men in the control room looked down at the console as if it might hold clues.
‘Master—we got navy or coast guard nearby?’ said Gallen.
Hansen instructed an operator to get on it while Aaron moved away and grabbed Joyce.
‘You gonna get those news crews back?’ said Gallen. ‘You think that’s a good idea?’
‘Only to buy time,’ said Aaron. ‘Who knows what they have planned?’
Staring at the console, Gallen thought about it and turned to Hansen. ‘They’re at thirty-five metres.’
‘Yes,’ said Hansen, distracted as he directed the operators.
Gallen rubbed his face, felt the bruising and cuts that Du Bois had commented on. ‘We got dive gear o
n the ship that goes to thirty-five, forty metres?’
‘Of course,’ said Hansen. ‘This is a rig service vessel. We’re equipped to run fifty divers at once if we have to.’
‘Can I take one of your guys?’ said Gallen, looking to see if Aaron was listening. He wasn’t; he was getting pilots to turn their helos around.
‘A diver?’ said Hansen. ‘You sure?’
‘I need someone to set us up.’
‘Okay. But before you go in the water, you clear it with us, okay?’ The Swede pointed to Aaron.
‘I’m thinking that if they’re focused on media attention, that might be a good time to be stealthing onboard.’
‘You hear this?’ said Hansen as Aaron got off the phone and walked to the console area.
‘Hear what? ‘
‘Mr Gallen wants to dive.’
‘Where to?’ said Aaron.
‘The Ariadne,’ said Gallen.
Shaking his head, Aaron raised his phone. ‘Fox and CNN are on their way back and we might make her deadline. I don’t want to risk it—she might just want to make some big point about whales and Inuit and then be led off by the Coast Guard as a martyr.’
‘And what if she’s not?’ said Gallen. ‘I say we do it both ways: let her preach to the TV audience and at the same time we storm the fort.’
Aaron frowned. ‘How?’
‘Use the TV crews as a distraction, stealth onto the Ariadne and take these guys down.’
‘You’ve done this before, I take it?’ said Aaron, chewing his lip.
‘Hell, no,’ said Winter, cracking one of his rare smiles. ‘That’s half the fun.’
Aaron asked Hansen where the nearest navy or coast guard was.
‘The Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Amundsen is three hours away and there’s a US Navy supplies ship in the western Beaufort,’ said Hansen. ‘We’re on our own till they get here.’
‘So,’ said Aaron, looking at Gallen, ‘you’re going to swim down to the Ariadne and just climb aboard?’
‘The Ariadne can see the environment around it with cameras, right?’ Gallen said to Hansen.
Hansen nodded. ‘There’s seventeen external and eight internal cameras.’
Gallen pointed at the control room panel. ‘Show me on here the screen for the main diving lock.’
Hansen pointed to the bottom right screen. ‘If we had communications then we’d see the diving lock on this one.’
‘Same set-up on the Ariadne’s control room?’
‘Yes,’ said Hansen. ‘Identical.’
‘When Du Bois gets connected again for her address to the TV crews, we’ll be connected to the Ariadne. Can we mess with the camera systems?’
‘Mess?’ said Hansen.
‘Can we make one of the screens malfunction?’ said Gallen.
Hansen looked to his comms guru beside him.
‘Sure,’ said the Dane with the curly black hair. ‘I can do this.’
~ * ~
They wrapped and rewrapped their handguns and placed them in black nylon dive bags that would strap to their belts. The dive technicians suited them in arctic dry suits on top of arctic under suits—padded one-piece systems that sat against the body and under the bulky dry suits. The Arctic water temperature was a typical minus 1.8 degrees Celsius—the coldest you could take salt water before it froze—and they would not be using the suits that pumped boiling water between two layers of wetsuit. Those diving systems required umbilicals connected to a mother ship or diving bell and Gallen didn’t want to draw attention to themselves as they approached the Ariadne.
‘You think they were waiting for Mike?’ said Winter, letting the technician from the Fanny Blankes-Koen zip him into his silver-blue suit.
‘I think they were waiting for all of us,’ said Gallen, pulling a Thinsulate bonnet from the undergarment over his head and letting his technician zip the dry suit in place. ‘I had a bad feeling about environmentalists going down there with Florita, and I should have stopped it. I’m going soft.’
‘Wasn’t your call, boss,’ said Winter. ‘These corporate dudes will do anything to get their photo in the papers.’
‘I was a captain in US special forces,’ said Gallen. ‘My men, my call.’
Winter waved that away. ‘Assuming they get their show on primetime TV, what then?’
‘They either give up, or they want to make a bigger point than just talking. I don’t want to wait for the decision.’
‘I brought something with me; I wasn’t going to tell you,’ said the Canadian.
‘What?’
Winter pointed at his backpack, motioned for the technician to get it. Pulling a grenade from the bag, Winter shrugged. ‘Coupla flash-bangs. You never know, right?’
‘You gonna throw one of them in a tin can under the sea? You wanna cold bath, Kenny?’
‘What do you reckon?’ said Winter, smiling at his technician. ‘The tin can strong enough for this?’
The technician looked at the grenade and gabbled something in a northern European language.
‘He saying,’ said the other tech, ‘that maybe the Ariadne strong enough for a bomb, but better hold your ears, yes, ‘cos it will explode the eardrum.’
‘Happy now?’ said Gallen.
‘What’s that?’ said Winter, eyes set on a long contraption mounted on the wall of the dive room.
‘Shark gun,’ said the technician. ‘Just like a spear gun but it has the explosive tips.’
‘Fix me up,’ said Winter, squinting at the weapon.
Gallen made himself breathe deeply for thirty seconds as the tech pulled arctic mittens over his hands and restrapped his G-Shock over his suited left wrist: it showed sixteen minutes on the mission clock—fourteen minutes to get to the Ariadne and be ready for the camera malfunction that Hansen was going to initiate.
He took a few seconds to compose himself: his last dive in Arctic waters had been terrifying enough. Now he breathed through his nose and envisioned smooth breathing, rhythmic finning and being in that diving lock on the Ariadne before the cold properly set in. Then he nodded for the technicians to screw the dive helmets onto the collars of the dry suits.
He gave the thumbs-up and Winter gave him a wink.
‘Relax, boss,’ said the Canadian as his helmet came down. ‘It’s what we do.’
~ * ~
CHAPTER 60
The dive platform on the inside of the port hull receded into surrealist shapes as Gallen hit the water and submerged backwards. The cold hit him like a slap as he let himself go a few feet under and normalised his breathing, checking on the regulator and ensuring he had a proper seal on the helmet’s collar. He gave a tug on the thin line tied to his weight belt and seconds later there was a burst of bubbles and Winter sank to the same depth, where he did his own checks.
‘Okay,’ said Gallen into his mouthpiece as he tapped his G-Shock. ‘We got twelve minutes to Go. Let’s get down there.’
Checking the compass heading he’d been given by the techs, Gallen lined up with the display on his watch and finned downwards, under the starboard hull of the Fanny Blankes-Koen.
‘Now you’ll see what you were missing at that fricking lake,’ said Gallen as they descended into the gloom.
‘I’d forgotten how bad this was,’ said Winter, panting as they left the natural light of the surface. ‘I thought Nova Scotia was cold.’
Keeping their flashlights stowed, they finned downwards for three minutes until the orange-faced gauge on Gallen’s right wrist showed they were on the same plane as the Ariadne: twenty-eight metres.
‘See anything?’ said Gallen, holding his G-Shock to the face plate in his helmet and rechecking the compass heading as he fumbled to activate the watch’s backlight.
‘No, boss,’ came Winter’s rasped voice.
‘Blue Dog to Momma Bear, we have zero visuals. About to head out on two-seven-niner. Please confirm, over.’
Hansen’s voice scratched through the earpiece in the helmet
. ‘Affirm that, Blue Dog. We have you on screen. Proceed on your two-seven-niner, over.’
Hitting the backlight again, Gallen lined his shoulder up with the 279 heading on his G-Shock and resumed finning. ‘Should be right there.’