He was watching the yacht, too. It disappeared around a distant clump of land. He nodded. “She’s amazing. In the Army she was the best sharpshooter they’d even seen. She wanted to join the Rangers, but Army policy is still ‘no girls allowed’. But they made her part of a sniper team anyway and everybody just looked the other way.” He paused. “She’s my sword arm. I’d be half a man without her.”
Flinders leaned back in her chair, adjusting her glasses. She let half a minute slide past in silence. Then she said, “She told me...your wife...” The rest of her sentence drifted off.
Skarda said nothing. For a long time he just kept his face toward the water, not moving.
Her face colored. “I’m sorry. I guess I shouldn’t have brought it up—“
He held up a placating hand. “It’s not that. I was just thinking.” Another long pause hung between them before he went on. “When Sarah and I got married, we made a decision to go after our dream while we were still young, which was to find undiscovered treasure. Both of us were divers, and we knew that there are plenty of treasure troves all over the world, just waiting to be found. So we sold everything we had and moved to Madrid. For almost three years we haunted libraries all over Europe, working lousy part-time jobs to get by, living in run-down studio apartments, eating scraps. It wasn’t fun, but we were determined to do it, win or lose. And that kept us going. Finally we wound up in Marseilles, at a tiny library on a little side street near the docks. And we found what we were looking for.
“It was a report of an unknown French pirate who had been hanged in 1730. For years he had been raiding rich Spanish and Portuguese ships off the Portuguese coast and stashing the loot on Corvo Island in the Azores. So we sold everything we had and took a tramp ship to Corvo. We figured out the general area where the treasure should be, then looked for evidence. We got lucky. We found a secluded cove where the tide rushed in with rip currents. Under the surf line was a natural shelf, which in the 1700’s probably was above water. One morning I saw a flash of gold. I anchored myself with a line and went into the surf. The current was powerful, but I could swim inside the shelf and squeeze myself into it. The rock angled up above the waterline into a huge natural chamber in the bedrock of the island. It was crammed floor-to-ceiling with gold and jewels. It was a fortune.
“I took some broken links of chain and three gold cruzadoes back to the surface to show Sarah and then went down again. By that time the riptide had become fiercer and I was struggling against the current, barely holding on with my tether.
“Then suddenly she came crashing into the water with her throat cut, streaming blood. But she had no tether and the riptide carried her out to sea.”
“Oh, my God! Park! That’s horrible!”
“By the time I climbed back on land whoever had killed her was gone and so were the pieces I’d brought up.” He stopped and took in a deep breath. “So she died for a few hundred dollars worth of gold.”
“I’m sorry, Park. I really am.”
“It turned out the treasure was worth millions. The Portuguese government took some of it, but it left me with enough to live very well.”
“So that explains the house on Gozo.”
“Yeah...no way I could afford that on government pay! I’ve got another one on a cliff on Big Sur, overlooking the Pacific.”
“Nice!”
“Yes, but it’s an empty victory. After she died I was hollow inside, a husk. Without her, the money meant nothing. But I’d always had an interest in intelligence work, so I applied at the CIA, scored well on their tests, then went into a training program and got recruited by OSR.” He glanced at her, his features drawn and ragged. “It’s hard to forgive myself. I should have been able to save her.”
“How could you? There was nothing you could do.”
He didn’t answer. Below, on the black surface of the river, another sailboat drifted past.
Then she said, quietly, “You can’t undo the past, Park. You can’t save the whole world from getting hurt.”
His head turned toward her. Even in the darkness his intense cerulean blue eyes seemed to glow. “You can try.”
___
Half an hour later Skarda lay on his back in his bed, staring at the ceiling. In vain he’d been trying to cudgel his brain into a black void, the way April had taught him, to let sleep embrace his consciousness and grant him a momentary peace. But sleep wouldn’t come. Thoughts raced through his head in overdrive. He understood what Flinders was trying to tell him—by fighting the evil of the world he was trying to undo what had happened to Sarah. And she was right. You can’t undo the past.
But was it really guilt that was driving him? Or maybe something even more basic—an animal lust for vengeance? In his gut he knew there was more to it than that. It was about balance. Sarah’s death had violently upset his concept of the universal scales and it was up to him to set them right again. That was the only way he knew how to approach it. The only way he could make peace. Until then he would remain at an emotional impasse, unable to move on.
But how many people did he need to help, how many lives did he need to save until the scales were restored?
He didn’t know. That was why he was thankful he had April to rely on. She brought her own sense of balance. In her philosophy, good and bad happened without cause or reason. Things were just the way they were. He’d meant what he said when he’d told Flinders he was half a man without her.
A hesitant knock sounded at the door.
“Come in,” he called out.
The door opened and Flinders stepped into the room. She had taken off her glasses and was wearing a oversized pink T-shirt that reached down to her knees.
She took a few steps toward him. “I can’t sleep,” she said.
For several long seconds a terse silence hung in the room. Then he said, “I’m not ready for—“
Padding forward, she put out her index finger and pressed it against his lips to cut him off. “I know. I know you’re not. It’s okay. I just don’t want to be alone tonight. Okay?”
For a few heartbeats Skarda let his eyes close. Then he moved his head.
Crawling into bed with him, she turned her back to his face and settled into the pillow. He looked over at her, a soft mound in the darkness. It would be so easy to reach out and touch her shoulder...
His whole body ached to do it.
But his hand stayed in place as if it were stricken.
Drawing in a breath, he let his eyes close.
Flinders’ voice was a bit muffled when she said, “I’m glad you do what you do.”
___
In the bedroom of her suite, April stared out into the darkness.
Then she closed her eyes and went back to sleep.
THIRTY-NINE
Arctic Ocean
THE pack ice screeched, cracking with the sound of a cannon boom.
From the navigation workstation inside the pilothouse of the United States Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Circle, Captain Albert Hudson felt the ship shudder as the thirty-five-foot steel wall of the bow slid up over a slab of multi-year ice and slammed its massive weight down on top of it, rupturing a crazed patchwork of chunks two meters thick in the rubble yard of pack ice. A familiar grinding noise reached his ears: the shattered chunks of ice slip-sliding against the hull. His coffee mug skated across the console and he grabbed it before it could tip over. It made him feel right at home.
As he’d been doing in four-hour shifts for the past few weeks, Hudson let his gaze run over the console of the workstation, mentally checklisting each system: chart table, ADCP, Bathy2000 depth sounding and sub-bottom profiling system, SeaBeam 2112 multibeam sonar system, ECDIS, primary DP, helm controls. It was his job to assess the ice and plot the ship’s course, to follow the dark leads and exploit existing cracks, avoiding as much of the heavy ice as possible. Yesterday the sky had been an endless, eye-searing blue, graduating to a golden haze at the horizon with the sun casting dark blue shadows from ice
hummocks and pressure ridges. The ice itself had looked like a snow-covered crystalline prairie, strewn with the shimmering azure holes of melt pools. In the narrow ribbon of open water between hull and water, ringed seals cavorted, the frigid air resounding with their sharp barks and clicks. But by morning the blue had deadened to the color of lead and a forty-knot wind was whipping up white-capped swells, pummeling the ship with white-out snow and flecks of spray that hit like shotgun pellets. It was hard enough in good weather, but today he had to rely on his years of experience as much as his readouts, because he couldn’t see a thing past the thick glass of the pilothouse windows.
It was like driving a car with your eyes closed.
The Polar Circle was sailing southeast, towards the Barents Sea and Franz Josef Land with twenty-five scientists of all nationalities aboard, allied with the National Geophysical Data Center and the Extended Continental Shelf Project. Hudson grinned. One of the women, a graduate student studying undersea seismic reflection profiles, had turned green the moment the ship had first encountered the pack ice, thinking they had rammed into an iceberg like the Titanic. And the constant booming of the shattering ice slabs had frayed her nerves to the breaking point.
It was her first time in the Arctic. She’d learn.
Along their path they’d launched a number of Seagliders, unmanned undersea vehicles that looked like small pointed torpedos, to dive deep under the ocean where they would spend months measuring temperature, salinity, and depth for thousands of miles, then transmit the collected data to the Glider Operations Center at the Naval Oceanographic Office at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.
It was all Greek to Hudson. He only knew that in the past thirty years there was water in the Arctic where there used to be ice, and if these people could do something about that, he was happy to help.
Hudson glanced up. First Mate Jeffrey Williams stalked into the pilothouse, his face plastered with a look of cranky irritation. He didn’t like storms. In fact, he hated storms.
Hudson smiled, wanting to needle him a little. “I guess we’re in for it for a while.”
The mate stared sourly at the clock, silently calculating out the time left on his shift. “Another hour and thirty-seven minutes, I’ll be safe and warm in my bunk.”
Hudson grinned. “Some guys have all the luck.”
Then he turned his attention to the gray-and-white world outside, straining his eyes to search for black cracks in the ice.
___
Popping open a hatch, Jaz jumped out onto the slick deck of the submarine, feeling the buffet of rain and wind despite the insulation of her immersion suit. Less than five hundred yards in front of her the warm aft lights of the Polar Circle were running southward, blurred by the gusts of snow driven horizontally by the storm. Inside her faceplate, the fat vein on her forehead squirmed as her lips drew back in a wide grin.
The big icebreaker had no clue they were there.
Hanging onto a tether, she watched two men emerge and bolt the EMP pulse gun into its brackets, its heavy cables snaking down the hatch.
When they had finished, she spoke into her throat mike. “Go.”
The men stepped back as the tube emitted a low-pitched hum. Jaz kept her eyes on the passing icebreaker.
Then, like a switch being thrown, the big ship’s lights went black.
Jaz opened her mike again. “Get the Zodiacs.”
___
When the ship went dark, Williams swore.
Instinctively Hudson reached for his intercom mike, barking an order into it before he realized it was dead, too. He could make out the silhouette of the mate in what little light there was from the storm.
“Get below and make sure the generator gets cranked.”
“Aye, aye, Captain.” Williams disappeared.
Hudson toggled switches, punched a keyboard.
Nothing.
Damn.
The hull vibrated as it pulverized a chunk of ice. But there was a different feel to it.
Hudson knew his ship well.
The Polar Circle was slowing to a stop.
___
They’d waited until the icebreaker crunched through the pack ice to a complete stop, dead in the water. Then Jaz and ten commandos in Zodiac H-733’s bounced through the lane of black water opened in the wake of the stern. Now she stood up in the inflatable as it maneuvered next to the huge rudder of the stricken icebreaker. She’d changed into an anti-exposure worksuit and Lowa boots. Aiming a T-PLS line gun, she shot a titanium grappling hook to catch the deck rail above, then climbed the Kevlar line to the aft deck. At the rail, she secured a cable boarding ladder and let it unfurl down to her crew.
Armed men began to climb.
___
Williams raced into the bridge as Hudson was trying to click on his third flashlight. The batteries were as dead as the rest of the electronics.
“Generators are out, too.” The man was out of breath and shivering. He’d had to run up several outdoor companionways instead of taking the bridge elevator. “What the hell’s going on? People are starting to panic.”
In the dark, Hudson shook his head in frustration. No power, no communication, no lights, no heat. Already the cold was beginning to seep into the bridge. “All right. Let’s round up everybody, calm them down. Then we can put our heads together and come up with a plan of action.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Willliams turned to head for the hatch, but a beam of light speared him, pinning him in place.
“Hold it right there.”
It was a female voice, but rough and husky.
Hudson took a step forward. “Who the hell are you?” He strained to let his eyes adjust to the white shaft of light.
More beams flicked on, all stabbing at the two officers. Hudson could make out the woman now, flanked by two hard-looking men in black Arctic survival gear, all pointing assault rifles in his direction.
The woman spoke again. “You must be the captain.” Her tone held a faint note of mockery. She knew she had the upper hand.
Hudson chafed at her arrogance. “I’m Captain Hudson. Who are you and what have you done to my ship?”
Jaz smiled, pulling down her hood. “Nothing much. Just an EMP pulse generator. Your electronics are fried.”
Hudson started when he saw the woman’s bloated, distorted face, but his eyes flared with anger. “This is a United States Coast Guard vessel. Have you got any idea what you’re doing?”
She laughed. “I always know what I’m doing. We needed a ship to sink. No time to buy one. So you’re it.” She gestured with her rifle. “And now, Mr. Captain Hudson, it’s time we go downstairs and hook up with the rest of the crew.”
Hudson showed her a defiant scowl. “You really think I’m going to let you sink this ship? I’m not leaving this bridge.”
Jaz shrugged. “Okay. Your choice.”
She lifted her gun and sprayed Hudson and Williams with bullets. Their bodies hit the deck with solid thunks.
She turned to her men. “Okay, boys, let’s roll. We’ve got work to do.”
FORTY
Ostrov Gukera Island
THE Antilles G-21G Super Goose skidded across the choppy waters of Tikhaya Bay, its pontoons creaming out twin wakes as April throttled back the turbine engines, gradually applying back elevator pressure. Gliding around in a half-circle, the seaplane rocked to a stop. Fat globules of wind-driven rain smacked against Skarda’s window, trickling down in branching streamers. Tatters of gray mist obscured what little they could see of the shore. Peering through the canopy, he could just make out the swaybacked hump of Rubini Rock, its blackish-brown flanks blurred and robbed of their color.
During the flight, Flinders had lapsed into an uncharacteristic silence, withdrawing into herself, and now, in the rear seat, she had grown even more quiet as they approached the island. Skarda glanced over at her, seeing the tight line of her mouth and rigid arc of her spine as she stared out the porthole at the mist-shroude
d island. Coming to the place where her parents might have died was a palpable weight on her shoulders. It must have been terribly hard, he reflected, for an intelligent, sensitive girl of twelve to lose them, especially in a frigid, lonely outpost like this, so far from home.
Climbing out of the cockpit, he looked up at the sky. High above the island the rain clouds were breaking up, revealing open patches of blue Arctic twilight that at this time of the year preceded the deep polar night, but tatters of heavy mist still scudded across his vision. On the surface of the ocean April had already inflated a Zodiac tender. Skarda put his arms up to help Flinders climb down from the cabin, steadying her against the pitch of the inflatable. Even though the temperature had risen to the low twenties, they were wearing Aramark Arctic survival parkas, six-layer gloves, and waterproof boots. Under her coat April had strapped the knife sheath across her chest and stuck the Glock in her waistband. In her right hand she carried the Steyr AUG.
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