by Tom Clancy
Recessed overhead lighting bathed the structure’s interior in a soft, even glow. Burkhart entered with a quick step, Langern and three of the other men following closely, lowering the door behind them, the rest of his team taking watch positions outside the dome. After all he had led them through, knowing the dangerous return journey they faced, it was odd to consider they would only need minutes to execute their job. But something would have to go very wrong for it to take longer.
He scanned the enclosure from behind his goggles, listening to the continuous hum of working machinery. On a large steel platform, an array of three water-distillation, treatment, and storage tanks — their respective functions stencil-painted on their exteriors — was connected to an intricate mesh of pumps, intake and outlet valves, hoses, PVC pressure lines, and electronic metering and control consoles. A pair of wide main pipelines curved downward from the distillation tank through the platform and then deep into the ice underneath. These, in turn, led outward to branching feed ducts, where seawater melted by recaptured exhaust heat from the base’s power generators was forced up through reverse-osmosis filters into the tanks.
It was a clean and energy efficient system, Burkhart mused. An impressive system. That he would have to cripple it gave him a strange twinge he’d experienced on occasion throughout his career as a soldier of fortune. Perceived but unidentified, the feeling would brush past him like a stray, vagabond brother who’d been missing since childhood, his existence nearly faded from memory.
And then, as always, it was gone. Burkhart stepped up onto the platform and called for one of the men to join him. An Austrian named Koenig, he approached briskly, well prepared for his role in the operation.
“Place the TH3 under here.” Burkhart moved to the distillation tank’s inflow pump, touched a hand to the metal plate over its motor. He thought a moment, then indicated the valve where the seawater pipeline connected to the pump. “And here. On these plastic lines as well. It will simply look as if the fire spread to them from the motor housing. “Du seist das?” He paused. “Be sure to give the charges a five-minute delay.”
Koenig nodded, waiting to see if there was more.
Burkhart thought again, but decided to leave his instructions at that. There were bound to be heat sensors, an alarm of some kind, and his band would have to be away from here before anyone responded. They also needed time to see that their tracks were scattered as they retraced them, though much of what had been underfoot as they approached was blue ice, and he believed the wind would take care of the light imprints they’d made. The trick was to be careful of overkill, balance his objectives against the risk of discovery, cause sufficient damage to take the plant out of commission while making it appear accidental. As it was, the fire’s rapid ignition and intensity would bring about considerable flooding beyond the initial destructive burst, even if automatic cutoff occurred when the pump went down — an interrupt mechanism Burkhart had no doubt would be in place.
Prompting Koenig to get to work, he watched him remove the pump motor’s cover plate, then slip off his outer glove and reach into a belt pouch for a laminate squeeze tube of the type that might contain toothpaste or pharmaceutical ointment.
Koenig unscrewed its cap, pulled off its airtight nozzle seal, then ran the nozzle slowly over the motor’s exposed wiring and components, pinching the tube between his thumb and forefinger to dispense a spare, smooth coating of its glutinous contents. Within seconds he’d moved on to the connector valve.
Although Gabriel Morgan had never said where he’d procured the incendiary material, Burkhart’s independent sources had rumored that it was engineered in a now-defunct Canadian laboratory operated by El Tio, the head of a transnational underworld combine who was alternately rumored to be dead or in hiding. Wherever it came from, Burkhart knew the pyrotechnic solgel nanocomposite was a product of far-boundary chemical technologies.
Standard military-grade thermate — or TH3—was a fine granular mixture of iron oxide, aluminum, and barium that generated temperatures of between 5,500° and 7000° Fahrenheit when ignited, sufficient heat to melt through a one-half-inch-thick steel sheet, its combustive reaction producing a molten iron slag that could do further, extensive damage to metal surfaces and equipment. There were, however, quantitative and qualitative limitations to its precision usage. It required slightly over twenty-five ounces of TH3 powder to generate a forty-second burn of significant destructive yield, and conventional mixing processes resulted in somewhat heterogeneous and volatile compounds that could have inconsistent results. Because the distribution of ordinary thermate’s constituents was uneven, a small amount was less reliable than a larger amount — much as a pinch of mixed salt and pepper might be noticeably short one or the other ingredient, while chances were an entire shakerful would not.
The solgel process synthesized — in essence, grew—thermate’s molecular chemical components within a matrix of crystallized silica gel, encasing them in beadlike particles a thousandth of a meter in size. So uniform and energetic were the beads that each was like a microscopic incendiary grenade. For Burkhart’s purposes, they had been implanted within a pH-neutral material that resembled soft putty and contained an ethylene glycol additive to lower its freezing point to minus-30°F, allowing it to retain its malleable consistency in ECW conditions.
Burkhart wondered how many infinitesimal thermatic particles were contained in a single drop of the material. Thousands, by fast estimate. Perhaps tens of thousands. The desalinization plant was going down, and even returning it to partial functionality would be no small feat.
Now he stood quietly as Langern climbed onto the platform and got a spool of timed initiator cord and clippers from one of his packs. When he finished applying the thermate putty, Koening helped him set the lengths of cord, snapped the plate back over the pump’s motor, then looked over his shoulder at Burkhart.
“Fertig,” he said in German. “We’re ready to ignite the material.”
Burkhart looked at him, nodded.
“Do it,” he said.
Zurich, Switzerland
The woman was taller than Nessa had thought she would be, slightly younger, but unmistakably English. She crossed the breakfast room of the hotel with the air of someone who knew her place in the world — at its pinnacle.
Nessa waited for her to pick up the menu before going over to the table. The corners of the detective’s eyes scratched and her mouth was parched, but she knew those annoyances would vanish as soon as she opened her mouth.
“I beg your pardon,” said Constance Burns.
“Yes, I suppose you do,” Nessa told her. “My name is Nessa Lear and I’m with Interpol. No, thank you, sit here a wee bit, please,” she told the woman, grabbing her arm firmly and pinning it to the table.
Burns’s eyes seemed as if they might pop out and strike her in the face. Nessa flattened her right hand against the underside of the table, ready to overturn it if the bitch tried to get away.
Not that she would get very far. The building was surrounded by the Swiss police.
“My friends at the door there, the very handsome lads in the suits, are with the national police force,” Nessa told Burns. “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten the German name for it, which they seem to use here; I was never very good with languages in school, and now going from French to German with English in between has gotten my brain in a twist. Plus I’ve had no sleep, tracking you down.”
“Miss—”
“In a few minutes, my friends over there will take you away. You’re wanted in connection with an inquiry in Scotland. Some accidents. Or murders. Definitely murders. But questions have been raised concerning shipments of depleted uranium, and I suspect they will be looking to you for answers.”
Burns jerked her arm, but Nessa held it down firmly. She really was tired; she could feel the burning sensation in her muscle as she pressed against the table.
“Don’t be in such a hurry,” Nessa said. “I was hoping you might help me s
o that I could help you in your future life, such as it is. I’m seeking Marc Elata.”
“Who is he?”
“A forger. A very good one.”
Burns made a dismissive sound.
“Gabriel Morgan?” Nessa asked.
“The bastard. The bloody, sodding bastard!” Burns screamed, and pounded the table with her free hand. “He’s left me to take the blame for everything, hasn’t he?”
“Everything?”
Burns went silent. Nessa waited nearly half a minute before asking, “Nothing else?”
She waited a few more seconds, then waved over the Swiss detectives. Burns pulled her hand away as Nessa let go, holding it to her chest as if it had been hurt.
Maybe it had. It did look quite red. But perhaps because the two policemen who prodded her shoulders did not appear terribly sympathetic, Burns made no comment as she rose and walked from the room under their escort.
John Theiber, the Swiss liaison — a tall, wide-shouldered man with gorgeous blond hair — came over as they left, saying something in clipped German to the men before turning toward Nessa.
“Your office in Paris wishes you to call,” he said in an English so perfect the Queen would have assumed he was one of her subjects. “A Mr. Jairdain.”
“Thank you, Captain.”
Nessa punched the number as Captain Theiber took a few steps away to accord her privacy.
Such manners.
“Jairdain.”
“What’s up?” she asked.
“About a half hour ago, we received a strange e-mail, beaucoup strange, sent to our public e-mail address,” said the Frenchman. “It was from Elata.”
“Elata?”
“ ‘Picassos at Castello Dinelli now. Quickly. Elata.’ That’s the message.”
“That’s it?”
“There’s also a bank name and address, along with a number in America. We believe — I don’t know if I have it correct, but the FBI liaison believes it is a safety-deposit box — a safe in a bank there. They are getting an order to have it seized. Louis is taking care of it.”
Nessa looked over at the gorgeous Swiss. “Castello Dinelli?”
“An island castle in Lake Maggiore, at the Italian border. Near the border. In the fourteenth century—”
“We need to get there now,” she said, jumping up. “That helicopter you promised — where is it?”
* * *
Hal Pruitt had thought landing Pedro Martinez in the pre-season draft to be the deal of a lifetime until it was finally cut, at which point he’d realized he couldn’t live with himself for having gone ahead with it. As Captain Ahab had screamed from the Pequod’s bow moments before he went under with a long sucking sound, his topmost greatness lay in his topmost grief.
Pruitt sighed and leaned back in his seat, hands linked behind his head, elbows winged out to either side. He was alone at a computer console on the lower level of Cold Corners’ main facility, only thirty minutes into his four-hour security/communications shift. In the heat of the chase, Martinez had seemed a bargain at any price. Still did, looking at it purely from the standpoint of what the guy brought to his team’s pitching roster. This was Pedro here. Multiple Cy Young Award winner. A career earned run average of two bucks, two and change. Maybe the best arm since Koufax. Arguably the most dominating modern-day pitcher in the game, though it was Pruitt’s steadfast opinion that Roger Clemens edged him out as king of the hill by virtue of his stare-you-in-the-eye gutsiness, ability to bear down in tight situations, and of course his longevity. With eighteen major league seasons under his belt and a zillion broken strikeout records, the Rocket’s critics could wet their diapers about his high-and-ins all they wanted. He had stuff in humongous abundance. That, and a plush red carpet waiting to be rolled out for him at the door to Cooperstown.
Hal Pruitt guessed he liked Clemens better than anybody who’d ever fastballed a batter at the plate, which was why he’d outbid the McMurdo Skuas by nineteen dollars to pick him up for his own fantasy team, the Cold Corners Herbies, this year… five dollars over and above what he’d laid on the auction block for him the year before. Of course it didn’t hurt that Clemens had been wearing a New York Yankee uniform in real-world baseball since the ’99 season, but that was another story. Sort of. Anyway, Pedro was the issue right now. Pedro, whom Pruitt had gone after like obsessed old Ahab stalking the White Whale—towards thee I roll! Pedro, the final jewel in his crowning lineup of starters, guaranteed to put his team in position to outstrip the competition. Pedro Martinez, who also happened to be a star player with the real-life Red Sox, hated arch-rivals of Pruitt’s beloved Bronx Bombers since the earliest hominid species emerged from the steaming veldts of Africa to club stones at each other across diamond-shaped patches of turf.
Pruitt leaned forward on his chair, his hands poised over his computer keyboard like those of a master pianist about to launch into some intricate concerto, thinking he needed a nimble, delicate touch for the e-mail he was writing to Darren Codegan, GM of the Palmer Base Polecats, in an effort to make himself right with some kind of trade before the April 1st season kickoff. As he listened to the lunatic wind rattle outside the building walls, it was hard to imagine spring training was almost at an end within the neatly demarcated borders of civilization, where the sun went up and down rather than around and around in hanging circles. But the final exhibition games were in fact being played in Florida and Arizona, with home stadium groundskeepers getting their gorgeous green grasses groomed and ready for opening day. Pruitt knew he very definitely had to move fast.
He chose to believe that he looked at baseball with a capitalistic, pragmatic eye, treating it as a business that was more or less the same as any other. It was not without good reason that his Herbies, which he’d named after an Antarctic slang word for the very sort of hurricane/blizzard crossbreed that was now roughing up Cold Corners and the rest of his neighborhood, had won three consecutive on-line Ice League championships. If the other GMs in the league wanted to criticize him for raising the bar on individual salaries, fine. If they wanted to scoff at his handing over a quarter of his team’s capped payroll to a single player, let them go ahead. Pedro was a unique talent. Well worth $65, plus Shane Spencer and a couple of AAA infield prospects from the Yankees farm system.
Pragmatically speaking, Pruitt thought.
The problem with this latest deal was that it had suddenly banged him up hard against the limits of that pragmatism. It was true some had called his attitude into prior question because of his tendency to stack his team with players who either wore, or had once worn, the midnight-blue pinstripes and interlocking NY on their caps—see ya, Kay and Sterling, oh, exalted voices of the New York airwaves — but again Pruitt knew this was because they possessed duller entrepreneurial minds than himself. These were the Bombers they were talking about here. Winners of almost thirty World Series titles they were talking about here. You wanted the best in the big leagues, you picked from the top of the heap, so of course his franchise was going to be something like ninety-five-percent Yanks. And what about his first baseman, Jason Giambi? Or Kenny Lofton in his outfield? Neither of them had ever called the hallowed Stadium home.
Pruitt released another deep exhalation. All would have been fine and dandy if Pedro hurled for Baltimore, Kansas City, maybe Toronto. Better yet if the Devil Rays or Tigers had been the ones to steal him from Montreal back in ’98. But the fact was that Pedro Martinez pitched for Boston, the Evil Nemesis. And since a GM’s victory in fantasy baseball was determined by his players’ average rankings at season’s end, Pruitt had put himself on a torturer’s rack by acquiring him. Who was he now supposed to root for when the Yanks and Bosox had a Bronx blast or Fenway face-off? What if they were in a neck-and-neck pennant race come September? Despite Pruitt’s quest to win that Ice League pot — which came to a sweet two grand — the pull between commerce and loyalty had gotten well nigh unbearable for him weeks before the first regular season crack of home-run wood
even went echoing into the blue American sky. It was a sure thing six more months of it would sap his very will to live… especially because he’d been forced to give Shane Spencer, the Yank utility man who’d heroically worked his way back to the majors after suffering a right knee ACL tear, to GM John Ikegami’s Snow Petrels over at Amundsen-Scott in exchange for the finances he’d required to close on the Pedro deal with Cadogan’s thin-benched, low-slugging Polecats.
There was no way around it, he thought. Pedro had to be ditched. Spence had to be reacquired. A transaction had to be transacted. And Pruitt had the Machiavellian makings of one very clearly in mind.
Ichiro was the linchpin of his scheme. John Ikegami had dropped out of the frantic Suzuki auction in a frustrated snit, surrendering him to the Petrels after he’d emptied the last of his $260 purse on Hideo Nomo, Kozuhiro Sasaki, and Tomo Ohka for reasons he adamantly denied had anything to do with matters of ethnic pride. Pruitt really didn’t care about Ikegami’s reasons for coveting Suzuki, who would be a valuable asset to any team in the league. It was enough just to know he did want him with a passion. Because now Pruitt was thinking he would dangle Pedro Martinez and the heavyweight bat Jason Giambi in front of Cadogan, provided Cadogan was willing to give Ichiro to Ikegami for Spencer, the two Yank minor leaguers, and a large handful of cash, all of which Pruitt would then get in return from Cadogan as part of a three-way swap. His purchasing power recharged, Pruitt would be able to go after a replacement starting arm to fill the hole left by Pedro. Maybe Andy Pettite. With Mike Stanton to strengthen his bullpen if there were some leftover funds. Either that, or he could see what the Air Guard Herkybirds over in Christchurch were asking for Jose Visciano.
Pruitt skimmed over the language of his message again. It could use some minor refinements, one more quick but careful pass before it was ready to go.
He lowered his fingers back onto his keyboard, and was about to make the first of his changes when a loud electronic warning tone grated from the console beside him, a row of color-coded chicklet lights to one side of his console blinked on in startling sequence, and the e-mail on his display screen was displaced by the base security program’s automatic pop-up window.