by Mark Aitken
‘What are we looking for?’ said Letour.
Gallen thought about it. ‘Anything that will kill us as soon as we ascend. And by the way, is Negroponte here?’
Letour and Winter looked at one another. ‘He went down with the power station, when it ejected,’ said Letour.
Gallen hissed. ‘I’ll meet you back at the control room. Let’s make sure this place is clean before we move. I need everyone accounted for.’ Turning to Du Bois, he felt his guts churning.
‘Looking for a bomb?’ said Du Bois. ‘Why would environmentalists bomb you?’
‘Greenies wouldn’t,’ said Gallen. ‘But a bunch of Mossad agents pretending to be environmentalists might.’
Du Bois’ eyes darkened in a flash then returned to their normal state. But Gallen caught it.
‘Well that’s very intriguing, Mr Gerry. Maybe you watch too much the Bruce Willis DVDs, yes?’
‘Where are your men, if they’re not on the Ariadne?’
She shrugged and smiled.
‘Where’s Florita?’
Du Bois sighed. ‘Learning the secrets of the deep.’
‘She’s down there?’ said Gallen, pointing at the floor. ‘With the STAR?’
‘Do you know how much she stood to gain personally by pushing through this contraption?’ said Du Bois, jaw jutting with defiance. ‘This nuclear-powered contraption?’
‘I don’t do the books,’ said Gallen. ‘Wrong guy.’
‘Hah!’ said the Frenchwoman, seemingly amused. ‘You are not like the Americans in the movies, yes? You are the simple ones, the red states? Republican . . . ?’
‘Redneck’s the word,’ said Gallen. ‘And I don’t vote. You been watching CNN, think every American’s wandering around worrying about Tea Parties and having a black president.’
‘You’re not? ‘
‘The only tea parties I know of happened in Wonderland and Boston,’ said Gallen. ‘And presidents? If they raise taxes or stop me shooting cougars, they can kiss my ass.’
‘Not the racist, Mr Gerry?’
‘In Wyoming, all politicians are the same colour, same religion.’
‘Four hundred million dollars US!’ said Du Bois.
‘What?’
‘That’s what Mendes will make if this project works to budget and yield.’
Gallen could hear approaching footsteps. ‘That’s a lot of money.’
‘Yes, and it only works with the self-contained pumping and maintenance rigs on the sea bed. And now we hear the full picture.’
‘Full?’
‘That takeover announcement,’ said Du Bois, standing. ‘It means Oasis controls about eighty per cent of the Arctic Ocean drilling leases. Within a decade, there’ll be two hundred nuclear reactors on the sea bed.’
‘Where is she?’ said Gallen as Winter and Ford walked in.
Martina Du Bois smiled like a snake. ‘She’s inspecting the site of the world’s latest nuclear reactor.’
~ * ~
They crowded around the circular control desk, Gallen allowing the acting commander of the vessel—Ben Letour—to take them through it.
‘We’ve got comms again with the Fanny Blankes-Koen,’ said the XO. ‘But the terrorists have disabled the ship-side air hoses. We’re on emergency oxygen bottles, and with the full complement on board we have about ninety minutes of air.’
‘And then?’ said Gallen.
‘We’ll slowly start dying, as the carbon dioxide becomes too great.’
‘And in ninety minutes we might get thirty people off this tin can with one submersible?’ said Gallen.
‘Maybe less,’ crackled Hansen’s voice through the console speaker. ‘I’ve done emergency take-offs before, my friends, and they never work as fast as the crisis manual says.’
‘Hansen,’ said Letour into the mic, ‘given our concerns about a bomb, what would you suggest?’
‘Search the vessel,’ said Hansen. ‘And then ascend. There’s no other way, and right now you’re using up oxygen.’
Gallen nodded. He already had Winter and Ford searching the vessel and trying to keep the crew out of the way—not an easy task when they were roughnecks and clearance divers, seamen and drilling engineers. People who would not politely sit back and be snow-jobbed.
‘Master Hansen,’ said Gallen as respectfully as he could, ‘the Ariadne ain’t small and we’re going as fast as we can. We also have morale problems with the personnel.’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Gallen,’ said the big Swede. ‘There’s no other way.’
Half an hour later, Letour approached Gallen as he gulped at a bottle of water, the heat and muggy atmosphere building despite the Ariadne’s climate-control system. Carbon dioxide carried its own heat and Gallen had stripped his coveralls to the waist.
‘We’re facing a mutiny,’ said Letour, flush-faced and now dressed in a white T-shirt and shorts. ‘How’re your men going?’
Gallen raised the radio handset. ‘Tango Team this is Blue Dog—sitrep please, over.’
Winter’s voice barked out clearly, ‘Situation unchanged since last sitrep eighty seconds ago, Blue Dog. Yellow Bird out.’
Letour rubbed his face. ‘What if there’s nothing here?’
‘What if there is?’
Letour nodded and slumped in the controller’s seat. ‘I guess you have bigger things to worry about, with your CEO missing?’
‘I have to go get her after this,’ said Gallen.
‘That could be a suicide mission.’
‘That’s the gig,’ said Gallen. He was still waiting on the confirmation of his suspicions. Aaron’s bio of the film crew had been checked but Gallen had asked Aaron to email the file to a secure service where it could be picked up and rechecked by Pete Morton. Morton owed him no more than he’d already given, but it might suit him to help.
‘Why Menzies?’ said Gallen. It had been annoying him: why kill the vessel’s commander?
‘Why is he dead?’ said Letour. ‘I don’t know.’
‘What did he know? You think he knew the terrorists?’
Winter walked up, red-faced, Ford and a limping Liam Tucker behind him.
‘How you doin’, Liam? ‘ said Gallen, seeing cut-away trousers and a big white bandage on the man’s left thigh.
‘Only a leg wound,’ said the former Marine. ‘Worst part was passing out, hitting my head on the bulkhead.’
Gallen turned to Winter and looked at his watch. ‘We have nine minutes before people start dropping. Are we clean?’
‘There’s nothing in the way of an IED on this vessel, boss.’
‘Checked the oxygen and nitrogen bottles?’ said Gallen. ‘They can be detonated.’
‘Went over every one—Mike did a tap test on every bottle. Nothing in them or on them.’
‘Wiring loops?’
‘Did it myself,’ said Winter. ‘The junction boxes and access points still have their wax seals. The only points accessed were the power and comms boxes, and they’re clean of IEDs.’
Gallen tapped his teeth. Everyone was looking sick. ‘Okay, Ben,’ he said to Letour. ‘I’m clearing us from a security point of view. We’re okay to ascend if you say so.’
Nodding, Letour leaned on the orange button on the console and asked Hansen to haul them up.
The wary voice of the Swedish master on the ship echoed down the line and a slight jerk shook the Ariadne. Then, as they looked at one another, the vessel made imperceptible movements, the shaking stopped and they were moving upwards.
From the various wings of the Ariadne a cheer went up as a loud sigh of relief.
Gallen swapped looks with his three men. They still had a CEO to retrieve.
~ * ~
CHAPTER 63
As the Ariadne rose to the surface at an agonisingly slow rate, Gallen thought through what had to happen next. He wanted to take Ford in a submersible to look for the vessel that had left the Ariadne with Florita apparently on board. But he needed more information on what they might
be doing down there.
The technician on the control desk looked up. ‘You Gerry Gallen?’
‘Sure,’ said Gallen, roused from his thoughts.
‘Secure email for you, sir.’
Gallen looked at the email on screen. It was from Pete Morton, telling him to go to the Gmail account he’d set up a week earlier.
The tech left him alone and he accessed the account, opening Morton’s message. There were two panels and a message from Morton: You owe me big time.
The first panel was for the person Gallen knew as Raffa, the documentary director: the panel—a translated file from Syrian intelligence by the look of it—called him Ari Fleischmann, a former IDF Navy commando who had been used by the Mossad in paramilitary work.
The second panel, also looking like a Syrian intel bromide, named a person called Marc Sadinsky—the man Winter had killed. He was a Mossad-trained assassin who had done a lot of work with various navies. There was no bounce for the third of the film crew. But it was confirmed: the crew was Mossad, and they were either dead or gone. But he still had a Frenchwoman who could be useful.
Du Bois was flexi-cuffed to the internal piping of the room he’d left her in. Her lips were white and her face red.
‘Can you turn on the air?’ she croaked.
‘You turned it off, Martina.’
‘It was supposed to be for a few minutes.’
Gallen smiled. ‘They cut the umbilical for the air and power. You’ve got one hundred people breathing from a few bottles of oxygen.’
‘I’m going to pass out,’ she said. ‘How close are we to the surface?’
‘Let me worry about that,’ said Gallen, happy the cocky act had gone. ‘We’re missing one chief engineer. Where’s he?’
‘In the power station, I assume,’ she said.
‘Where’s the power station, Martina?’
‘On the bottom,’ she said. ‘Look, I’m an asthmatic. I need air.’
‘What’s the power station doing on the bottom?’
‘A protest,’ said Du Bois. ‘A publicity event that will shut down Arctic exploitation for the next twenty years.’
‘How so?’
‘As we speak there’s an ArcticWatch statement going to every news desk in the world, and every government in the United Nations.’
‘Saying what?’
Du Bois coughed. ‘That Oasis Energy’s Ariadne has lost her illegal nuclear reactor and it’s currently sitting on the sea bed waiting to be rescued. The statement also outlines how Oasis planned to incorporate nuclear power into its sea-bed rigs—in total secrecy, of course.’
Gallen thought about Negroponte, the secrecy under which he was deployed. ‘How did you know about the nuclear plans?’
‘Raffa and Josh approached me,’ said Du Bois. ‘They came to me through good contacts. They’re environmental extremists and they told me about the Ariadne.’
‘I’m betting this wasn’t your plan?’
‘It was overseen by me, Mr Gerry,’ she said.
‘It wasn’t your idea, Martina.’
‘Maybe not,’ she gasped.
‘The plan?’
‘To drop the power station from the Ariadne, and film it on the bottom. Then broadcast it to the world with the CEO of Oasis watching.’
‘You think that’s all they’re doing?’
‘What else would they do?’ said Du Bois.
‘I think your organisation has been infiltrated by Israel’s Mossad.’
‘How stupid,’ said Du Bois. ‘You expect me to believe that?’
Someone yelled out for Gallen and he broke away, walked to the control desk, a swinging sensation under his feet: they’d stopped their ascent.
‘We have a problem,’ said Letour. ‘Part of the vessel isn’t depressurising—we think it’s the emergency lock, from what we’re hearing.’
Gallen saw a group of Ariadne personnel around the hatchway to the emergency lock.
‘What’s that mean?’
The vessel groaned, a long, whining sound, like bad plumbing.
‘It means that as we ascend the air in the emergency lock expands and blows the thing apart.’
‘That why we stopped?’
‘Hell, yeah,’ said Letour.
Tucker had been jumped by the Israelis, Gallen remembered. ‘Liam,’ he said, ‘you have that card for the emergency lock?’
Checking his pockets, Tucker came up empty. ‘They must have taken it.’
‘The swipe card has been stolen, and the commander is dead,’ said Gallen to Letour. ‘Where does that leave us?’
‘No manual override to get in there and let the pressure out,’ said Letour. ‘The power’s down so we can’t operate the valves manually. We can’t go up, we could blow any second.’
Gallen grimaced: that was the IED, that was the trap. A lock filled with air that would expand as they got near sea level and blow its steel constraints apart.
‘Do we know our depth, even without full power?’
‘Hansen says twenty-two metres.’
‘Can we swim from here?’
Letour shook his head. ‘One hundred people, Mr Gallen. You’d have to retrieve them from Arctic waters and then stabilise them.’
‘If anyone’s got the equipment for that, it would be the Fanny Blankes-Koen,’ said Gallen. Pressing on the mic button, he spoke with Hansen. ‘Letour explained the problem?’
‘Yes, he did.’
‘If we swam off, would you have enough resources on the ship to deal with one hundred exposure cases?’
‘We have enough blankets,’ said Hansen. ‘The transfer of people to the ship is the problem. We’d lose half of you just getting you on board.’
Gallen looked at the emergency lock as it groaned again, this time with a tapping sound.
‘Of course, there is another way,’ said Hansen, clearing his throat.
‘Let’s hear it,’ said Gallen.
~ * ~
Gallen waited at the console with Letour, their ghostly pallor reflected in the half-light of the battery power. The entire complement of the Ariadne was in the staff quarters and the diving rooms. The staff quarters were locked down and the diving room’s hatchways hung open, waiting for Letour and Gallen to run.
The emergency lock let out a high-pitched reverberation and Gallen could have sworn he saw the hatch lock shake.
‘Hansen, this is Letour. Commence ascent, at full power.’
‘Ascent commencing in five seconds,’ said Hansen.
Running for the opened hatch of the diving room, Gallen leapt through behind Letour into a room filled with people.
As the Ariadne started moving towards the surface again, Gallen heard a loud explosion. Turning, he saw the hatchway’s lock being propelled across the control desk at full force into the opposing bulkhead, taking the entire top row of monitoring equipment with it.
Water gushed behind it as Winter got the hatch shut and screwed it down. The vessel lunged as they went to the surface at full speed, feeling like an elevator without its side-tracks. Behind the hatch they could hear the water filling the control room and the sea splashing against the hatch with the force of a thousand punches.
‘Stay calm,’ said Gallen to the scores of mostly men who stared back from the gloom of the standby lights. ‘We’re going straight to the surface and we’re doing it without getting our feet wet.’
‘If we don’t suffocate in the meantime,’ said an Irish voice. Several had already succumbed to the low-oxygen environment.
It seemed to take forever, but according to Gallen’s G-Shock it was only three minutes forty before he felt a swinging sensation, suggesting they were lurching free of the water.
Men surged towards the hatch and Letour stopped them. ‘Have to wait,’ he gasped. ‘Let the water run out.’
Another man collapsed and his friend demanded to be let out. Gallen drew his SIG. ‘We do it the way the XO wants it done and maybe we’ll live. Okay?’ He looked the rig worker in
the eye; slowly the man backed away
There were clanking sounds outside the hatch and then it was being unscrewed. On the other side stood a seaman from the Fanny Blankes-Koen in his red suit, as the fresh air flooded in like a wave of life. The men rushed for the exit, Gallen not game to stop them now. Standing back, he and Letour watched them clamber out into the destroyed control area, where they sucked in the air. When they’d left, Gallen noticed a group of men standing around something.