by Karen Dionne
There was an element of danger. Ben’s boss was on the ship—a competitive megalomaniac who would stop at nothing to get what he wanted, according to Ben. But Zo wasn’t worried. The way to handle a narcissist was to play to their ego. She’d pretend to have an interest in the iceberg operation, even flirt a little if she had to. She wasn’t bad looking beneath the bandages and bruises.
Besides, even if he caught her obtaining samples, nothing he could do could compare to what she’d just been through.
Chapter 48
Donald stood at the window of the observation room and looked down at the woman at the rail. She and Ben had been deep in conversation for a good half hour before Ben wandered off. What they were talking about, Donald didn’t care. Nothing Ben Maki could say or scheme could touch him. Ben was finished, as dangerous as a castrated lapdog, the woman as intimidating as something the cat had refused.
He smiled. After Adam called him up in Alaska and Donald flew down to pick up Ben’s pieces, he hadn’t known precisely what he would find. That Ben was one of the four bedraggled survivors was a bonus. Dead, Ben would be a martyr. Alive, he was fair game. The Times story Donald had planted throwing suspicion on Quentin’s death had gone a long way toward discrediting the microwave operation, but any publicist worth their fee knew it was hard enough to create a buzz, let alone sustain it. Now, Maki’s Misadventures would make feature fodder for weeks to come.
His smile faded as he thought of his brother-in-law. Quentin had been a good man, devoted to the end. That kind of loyalty took time to cultivate. He still had one man on the berg, but Donald was a believer in redundant systems. Not knowing in advance which one of them he could turn, he’d brought gifts for them all: fresh fruit and vegetables for Toshi, exotic cheeses for Phil, and for Eugene, a case of fine wine.
He turned away from the windows and sat down at one of the small, fixed tables. The observation room wasn’t the most comfortable place to set up his office, but nothing on the ship was. At least this room had the bank of windows he preferred.
He opened his laptop to review his notes. He’d spent hours researching the satellite interface program on the flight down. He was sure he had a handle on it, but when the stakes were this high, there was no such thing as too much preparation. Adam had faxed the site plans and schematics. The layout revealed a backup server in the pumphouse for off-site data storage. It wouldn’t be difficult to contrive access now that Donald was the boss. Adam had also sent the password to Toshi’s program. Donald knew exactly which keystrokes would disable the interface beyond repair. With Ben’s reputation in ruins, his microwave process was as good as dead, but Donald never stopped until he’d buried the body.
There was a knock on the door, and a seaman came in carrying a lunch tray. Donald indicated an unoccupied table. He lifted the lid off a steaming dish. Ostiones al pil pil, with an order of empanadas on the side. He picked up the bottle of wine the ship’s steward had thoughtfully supplied to go with it, and tsked.
Cabernet with scallops?
Chapter 49
Los Angeles, California
For ten years, the table in Rebecca Sweet’s dining room had been set with papers. Yellow legal pads in front of each chair, stacks of major newspapers and scissors for cutting clippings in the center, cardboard filing boxes filled with more papers on the floor. An ancient PC sat on one end of the table; the telephone cord connecting it to a brand-new three-in-one fax machine on an antique sideboard snaked across the floor.
The family took their meals at a wooden table in the kitchen, or carried plates into the living room in front of the television, or when the sun wasn’t too hot or the wind too strong, under the mesquite tree in the yard.
This morning, six people were seated around the dining room table. Rebecca’s husband, Antonio, stood at the door. Trouble was more likely to come via electronic surveillance, but Antonio was older than her by a decade and had served in the Gulf War. His enemies were flesh and blood, not bits and bytes.
She looked at her people. Her own excitement was mirrored in their faces. She smiled. The electricity emanating from POP’s executive committee could have lit up a ballfield. Tomorrow, at long last, Soldyne’s tanker was due.
“Why so early?” Neil Walks-as-Bear, Rebecca’s cousin and POP’s treasurer, wanted to know. “I thought the tanker was going to take at least another week.”
“It’s only half full, so they made good time,” the group’s secretary and chief intel gatherer, Julie Walks-as-Bear said. Neil’s sister.
“Too bad.” Raoul, Julie’s fiancé, shook his head. “If the water in the hold is below the waterline, the blast charges will have to be set underwater as well. Won’t be much of a statement if no one can see the explosion.”
Rebecca had been disappointed when she heard about this, too. Video footage of Soldyne’s ill-gotten gains pouring out of the side of the ship would have played well on the news.
“Besides, Raoul continued, “an underwater blast won’t even be effective. The iceberg water won’t flow out; all that will happen is seawater will flow in.”
“I agree,” Sherry Kowalski, one of the few non-Diné in Rebecca’s inner circle, said. “This stinks. I guess we can settle for contaminating Soldyne’s water, but that wasn’t the point. We wanted to make a statement. Something big that will get people’s attention. Something dramatic and visual.”
“It still might work,” Julie said. “If the tanker’s only half full, it will be riding high in the water, right? So some of the water in the hold might be above sea level. It’s possible we can still have our big bang.”
“We need to stop speculating about this and find out,” Neil snapped. “Someone should talk to Ramon.”
“I already have,” Rebecca said. “He’s on it. Don’t worry.” She studied their faces, earnest, worried, but as always, sincere. These were good people. Loyal. Dedicated not to her, but to the cause. Self-sacrificing. Willing to put the needs of the many over the needs of the few. Like the 3 billion people all over the earth who lacked clean water and sanitation.
POP could have chosen any of a million other globe-threatening problems on which to concentrate their efforts: hunger, global warming, pollution, desertification, loss of wetlands, nuclear proliferation, ozone depletion, war. But the Navajo’s respect for the spiritual quality and importance of water in people’s everyday lives made water issues a natural. Under that umbrella fell still more issues: pollution, abuse of the aquifer, irrigation, sanitation. POP’s executive committee had elected to focus on Soldyne as their target because, simply put, Soldyne was a thief. Access to clean water was a fundamental human right; water could not be allowed to become a commodity sold to the highest bidder. And yet all over the world, multinational corporations like Soldyne were buying up vast tracts of wilderness that included whole water systems, then reselling the water at exorbitant rates, sometimes to the very people from whom it had been taken. Tens of billions of gallons of precious groundwater stolen, bottled, and sold.
Soldyne’s microwave process was their downfall. The image of a microwave beam shooting down from space and melting icebergs into drinking water was so compelling, it was the perfect vehicle for highlighting the problem. Big, romantic, and fresh. People were burned out on pictures of dusty landscapes and dying children.
“In other news,” she went on. “I talked to Ross this morning. You won’t believe where he called from.” She looked around the table. “At this very minute, Ross is heading for the iceberg on Soldyne’s supply ship.”
The room erupted in excited exclamations. “How?” someone asked. “Do they know he’s one of us?”
Rebecca held up her hand. “They don’t have a clue. All Soldyne knows is that he’s a microbiologist who works at Raney. I don’t know how he managed to get on board. I’m guessing the supply ship detoured to Raney, and Ross talked his way in. I’m sure he’ll tell us all about it when he gets home.” Their telephone conversation had been brief. Ever since her arrest, sh
e presumed Homeland Security had her phone bugged. “However, he did manage to tell me that he’s going to make sure they give him the grand tour.”
“Excellent,” Neil said. “Does he have a camera?”
“No doubt. Ross is always on top of things. There’s not much that catches him by surprise, but one thing did: He told me Donald Gillette is on the ship.”
“Unbelievable,” Julie said, and it was. That Ross had managed to contrive the opportunity to follow Soldyne’s executive vice president around as he toured the iceberg was nothing short of miraculous. The intelligence he would bring back was beyond price.
Ahéhee, Rebecca whispered to the gods above. Thank you. Things couldn’t have worked out better if she had planned them.
Chapter 50
lceberg, Weddell Sea, 68° S, 60° W
Ben stood on the deck of the Polar Sea looking up. The stairs leading from the harbor to the top weren’t stairs at all. The ledges looked more like bleacher seating for a ball game played by giants, a series of short, irregular, horseshoe-shaped plateaus that had been carved out by wave action over who knew how many eons of time. Some of the steps looked like they were going to be an easy climb, but most would require more effort. For the taller ones, they were bringing a ladder. Not the easiest route to access the berg, but now that the helicopter was no more, the amphitheater was the only way to get onto the berg—or off.
He stuck his gloves between his knees and tied his hood tighter around his face. The harbor may have been considered sheltered from a seaman’s point of view, but the half-moon-shaped walls surrounding them chilled the air like a refrigerator. He glanced over at Gillette and noted with satisfaction that he was shivering, too.
He put his gloves back on and stuck his hands under his armpits. He’d known all along that Donald’s threat to confine him to quarters was only posturing. No one knew the layout on top of the berg as well as he did, and Donald couldn’t make the climb alone. The only reason he’d threatened to leave Ben behind was to massage his inflated ego, but even an egomaniac knew when to be practical.
Ross and Zo were coming along as extra hands. Ben would have liked to have had at least a dozen bodies; the amount of gear and personal effects that needed to be off-loaded onto the ship was substantial. But in view of what had happened to his pilot, understandably the captain was disinclined to involve his crew.
The crew lowered the gangplank and they set off, Gillette in the lead, Zo next, Ross and Ben carrying the ladder in the rear. As they reached the other side, they paused to regroup.
“One hundred seventy-five feet,” Ross told them. “That’s what one of the crew members said.”
Zo put her hands on the first chest-high ledge and swung her legs up and around. She stood up, and looked down. “Make that one seventy.”
Halfway to the top, they stopped for a break. Ben peeled the foil from an energy bar as he dangled his legs over the edge. The sky was gray, but not threatening. There was a black dot on an ice floe far below that looked like it might be an elephant seal. He wished he had his camera. He’d been chronicling his Antarctic adventures for Sarah from the beginning, but ever since the incident with the stolen picture book, he’d stepped up the pace. If she wanted pictures of Antarctica that badly, all she’d had to do was ask.
Behind him, Ross was setting up the ladder. Zo was behind an ice hummock relieving nature. Women definitely had it tougher than men. He’d read about a device women could wear in the field; an anatomically contoured funnel called the “piss-phone” or the “whizzomatic” that allowed them to unzip and urinate like a man. He wondered if Zo was wearing one.
Gillette was sitting on an ice boulder to his left. His backpack lay unopened at his feet. Donald was handling the climb remarkably well, moving from ledge to ledge with a fluidity that hinted at rock-climbing experience. Ben was surprised until he realized he had no context for Gillette beyond what he saw of him at the office. He probably worked out at the gym.
He stood up as the cold worked through his jeans. It wasn’t smart to let your clothes get wet. His boots hadn’t dried out before he’d had to put them on again, either, which worried him. When you were out in the cold, the most important thing was to keep your feet dry, Ben’s dad had drilled into his head. Eino Maki had cut pulpwood for a living, jack pine in the summer and swamp cedar in the winter. Ben used to run pole for his dad during Christmas break. While his dad limbed the downed trees, Ben laid the measuring pole alongside so the logs could be cut to the correct length. It was piecework, fourteen cents a stick, and Ben had to hustle to keep up, wading through snow over his knees, stepping in and around the brush, the cedar boughs tripping him up or acting like snowshoes until a foot would break through. They’d stop only twice, at ten and at two, when Ben’s dad would make a pile of boughs and light a fire. With the saw shut off, the air was cold and still. Ben would stand beside the fire eating his sandwich and drinking hot tea from his thermos, listening to the trees crack from the cold and the chickadees whistle. Once, a flying squirrel whose nest had been disturbed mistook him for a tree and landed on his shoulder.
Clear-cutting was the reason Ben became an environmentalist. The paper giants wanted the public to believe that trees were a renewable resource, but Ben had seen the results of cutting them down firsthand. The forests never grew back the same; scrub pines and poplar sprouted from the left-behind brush; once-rich, loamy soil turned acrid. The cut-over areas were hot, dry places that were only good for growing blueberries, and when you went out to pick them, you made sure to wear a hat and carry plenty of water. Trees in exchange for berries. What kind of trade-off was that?
He finished the energy bar and zipped the wrapper into his pocket. Idly, he brushed the crumbs off the ledge, then realized they were actually small, brown pellets, and frowned.
They made the top a half hour later and found four snowmobiles waiting. An extravagant number, in Ben’s opinion; they could have doubled up and made the ride with only two. But Gillette was the boss, and if he’d ordered one each, then so be it. Ben supposed he was going to have to get used to someone else making the decisions.
Next to the snowmobiles was a staging area piled high with boxes. The crew had been busy. Gillette must have called ahead. Ben looked down at the ship and was glad Ross and Zo had come along.
“Everyone know how to ride?” Gillette asked.
They answered in the affirmative, Ben chafing at the way Gillette had managed to insult three seasoned pros under the guise of solicitation. Gillette in the lead, they took off for the op center, a small, silver glint on the horizon. The ride was uneventful, and fast. Granted, snowmobiles weren’t difficult to drive; where Ben grew up, kids as young as six or seven rode their own; but Gillette managed his as if he’d been born to it. Ben wondered what else about his ex-boss he didn’t know.
They pulled up outside of the op center. Ben hung his helmet over the handlebars and hurried inside. The crew welcomed him with hugs and high fives, then fell silent when Gillette strode in behind.
If Gillette noticed the change, he didn’t let on, greeting everyone by name and making introductions, handing out compliments and presents like he was wearing a red suit. No wonder he’d risen in Soldyne’s echelons; the man could charm the glow off a lightbulb.
Gillette explained the situation in a surprisingly accurate if sanitized rendition, then instructed everyone to pack while he went out to the melt zone.
“We’ve already shut things down out there,” Eugene objected. “Everything’s turned off and locked up tight. Well, in a matter of speaking.” He grinned. “It’s not like we have to worry about break-ins.”
Gillette sent him a withering look, but Eugene didn’t melt. Why was Gillette going to the melt zone? Ben wondered. Had he somehow gotten wind of Ben’s plan? It hardly seemed possible. He and Zo had discussed it only once, outside standing at the rail. Even if Gillette had been watching from the conning tower, their backs had been turned toward him the entire time. If Gillet
te was on to them, Ben was going to have to add mind reading to the man’s talents.
“I’d like to go, too,” Zo said, shooting a quick glance at Ben. “I’d love to see what your operation is all about.”