Abyss km-15

by David Hagberg

  “What do they say?”

  “They want us to turn around and go back to Biloxi, and they’re willing to send someone over to negotiate with us.”

  “What do you tell them?” McGarvey asked.

  “Al’s given his crew strict orders not to respond under any circumstances,” Defloria said.

  “Even in an emergency?”

  “They have enough boats to handle just about anything, including communications with the Coast Guard, and I was told by the company to keep out of it, no matter what. Our job is to see that Vanessa gets to Florida without delay.”

  “Very good,” McGarvey said and he started to turn away but Defloria stopped him.

  “Let me know if something should develop.”

  “If possible. But it’ll be fast.”

  “Goddamnit, what the hell are we supposed to do if the bastards start shooting at us?” Stefanato demanded angrily.

  “Keep out of sight, someplace where you can abandon ship if need be,” McGarvey said.

  “Christ,” the construction engineer said.

  * * *

  Eve Larsen’s techies generally avoided the construction crew and only four of Defloria’s people were in the dining room when McGarvey came in and got his dinner, ordering his steak rare with French fries and a small salad. The food was very good around the clock, and although there was no alcohol aboard there was plenty of iced tea and soft drinks and the coffee was outstanding.

  He was just sitting down when Gail showed up and joined him. “Buy a girl dinner?” she asked. She was smiling, which McGarvey had learned was usually a cover-up when something was bothering her.

  “Sure, anything on the menu,” he said. “What’s the problem?”

  “It’s the waiting,” she said, almost too quickly. “And the constant noise. And the feeling that we’re overlooking something right in front of our noses.” She was strung out. “It’s like the cartoons where a ten-ton weight has been pushed over a cliff, and like a dummy you’re standing at the bottom without a clue what’s about to happen to you.”

  It was the lack of knowledge that was driving both of them crazy.

  “We know the name of our contractor,” he said, and she brightened.

  “Jesus, you talked to Otto?”

  “He’s an ex-South African Buffalo Battalion lieutenant colonel by the name of Brian DeCamp,” McGarvey said, and he told her everything that Otto and Eric had come up with, along with the likelihood that Joseph Bindle was a legitimate journalist.

  “So it still leaves us with no clear description of the bastard, other than what my receptionist at Hutchinson Island gave me and what I saw in the corridor, and it’s a safe bet he was in disguise.”

  “Otto’s following the money trail. Somebody somewhere must have come in physical contact with him at some point. The real him.”

  “And lived,” Gail said. “And in the meantime we sit it out waiting for the ten tons to drop.”

  “Five days,” McGarvey said. “Maybe six.”

  “And what are we supposed to do in the meantime? Same old?”

  “Something like that,” McGarvey said.

  Gail looked away for a moment, and when she turned back she wasn’t smiling. “What about your lady scientist and her mob?”

  What about them? McGarvey asked himself for the hundredth time, because something wasn’t right. Call it a gut feeling, even paranoia, but he was convinced that not all was as it seemed in her shop. He knew enough about scientists, especially of Eve Larsen’s and Don Price’s caliber, to understand that professional jealousy was the norm — the supernorm. But everyone up there absolutely loved their doc, loved her work, loved the fact she’d won the Nobel Prize, even though it wasn’t for physics.

  What about them indeed.

  “They’re doing their thing, and we’re going to stay out of the way for now.”

  “And wait?”

  “And wait,” McGarvey said.

  She nodded a little grumpily. “How about that dinner you promised?”

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Eve Larsen had not slept well for at least a week, even though she’d thrown herself into the work of getting the rig ready for Hutchinson Island and the impellers, and the work was going well, and everyone seemed to be having the time of their lives. Normally under circumstances like these she would have collapsed into bed at odd times for a few hours of deep sleep, then wake with a hundred new ideas bursting inside her head like shooting stars.

  But instead of ideas, she’d been having the dream; not one in which monsters were chasing her down a long dark tunnel, not even the one in which she had to be someplace, and she knew where it was, but she just couldn’t seem to get there, no matter how hard she tried, and no matter the urgency of the thing. This was the one where she was called back to Oslo in disgrace to give back the Nobel Prize. It was the same room at city hall, with the king and queen and the same people in the audience, only no one was applauding her; everyone, including the king, was booing. Shouting that she was a fraud, that she wasn’t a real scientist, that she was a liar and user whose wish was fame, not discovery. Outside, the gunman’s aim had been perfect and she could almost feel the bullet plowing into her brain.

  And the most frightening part of the nightmare wasn’t the shame, or the hostile reception she was getting, it was the certainty in her own mind that they were right. She was a fraud. And each night the dream got worse; she could see how the impellers in the Gulf Stream and the Humboldt Current and the Agulhas would never produce the electricity she’d predicted, and she’d developed the mathematics to prove it. She could see the partial differential equations marching in front of her mind’s eye so clearly that when she would awake in a cold sweat she would try to write them down. But as close as they were in her head, she was unable to do it. And it was all the more frustrating, because when she was awake she knew that she could prove her dream equations wrong so that her self-confidence would return.

  Last night the nightmare got even worse, much more intense. This time it was Bob Krantz in the audience in Oslo and he threw the copy of Nature in which she’d proposed her World Energy Needs project up on the stage.

  “You know that this thing doesn’t work!” he’d shouted. “It’s impossible to do what you want. There will be unintended consequences that you’re hiding from us. Catastrophic consequences. Change the weather indeed. Who do think you are, God?”

  And in her dreams she knew that Bob was correct. She was able to see exactly why her experiment was bound to fail, and yet she knew that she could never admit it publically. The shame and humiliation would be too awful to bear. She would be alone and isolated, and just before she’d awakened this morning she’d dreamed that she was back home in England. It was winter, and no one was there at the train station to meet her, just like no one had come to see her off to America.

  And when she awoke at dawn she was freezing cold, and during the day she’d had the chills so bad at times that Don had asked her if she was coming down with something and he’d put the back of his hand to her forehead.

  He’d seemed nervous off and on all day, and his concern had touched her. Getting ready now to go down to the dining hall for dinner, she went over to where he was seated at one of the computer monitors working on his study of mid-Gulf eddy currents against temperature, salinity, and suspended particle gradients. It was a continuation of his own project that they all hoped might have some bearing on the placement of the impellers. Perhaps a little far-fetched, in Eve’s estimation, but she’d never suppressed independent studies by anyone on her team so long as they did their primary work.

  “Anything interesting showing up?” she asked.

  He was startled and he looked up at her, his eyes a little wide as if he were a kid just caught with his hand in the cookie jar. But he recovered nicely and smiled. “Still collecting data, but my programs haven’t turned up anything useful yet.” His hypothesis was that the formation of some eddy currents might depend in part o
n a physical event or trigger presence, like raindrops forming around particles of dust.

  “I’m going to get something to eat. Do you want to come along?”

  “Might as well,” he said. “Everyone else has already gone down.”

  And Eve had been so absorbed in her own work that she’d actually not noticed it was just her and Don up here, and that it was beginning to get dark outside. “I thought it was too quiet without Lisa’s wisecracks,” she said a little sheepishly.

  Don got out of the program he was working in and they left the control room and headed downstairs. He’d brought a GFDL windbreaker with him and he gave it to her. “You might need this, it’s a little chilly outside now that we’re at forty-two-double-oh-three.”

  For just an instant she had no idea what he was talking about, and she could see that it made him nervous. But then she understood. “My God, I wasn’t keeping track,” she said.

  Forty-two-double-oh-three was a navigation buoy out in the middle of the Gulf, anchored in nearly 1,800 fathoms of water, more than 10,000 feet. It essentially marked the halfway point between Biloxi and the westernmost end of the Florida Keys where they would make their turn to the east toward the Atlantic. Don and the others had planned a celebration, modeled after the kinds of initiations that sailors went through after crossing the equator.

  And she also understood why he’d been on edge for the past couple of days. According to McGarvey, if trouble were coming their way it could happen any time now, something she’d practically, though not completely, forgotten in the press of her work.

  “Everybody okay with this?” she asked. “I mean, considering the threat.”

  Don gave her an oddly bleak look. “I don’t think we have any choice. It’s either that or hide in our cabins. Anyway the religious freaks haven’t done a thing except make noise, your gun-toting pals are keeping watch, and we need a break.” He managed a thin smile. “Lisa’s called you a slave driver from the beginning, and now everybody is starting to believe it.”

  And Eve had to smile, too. Maybe a celebration was exactly what they needed to break the tension. “Even you?” she asked.

  “Especially me.”

  It was a little cool on deck, but the wind from the north had subsided to near zero so that their slow forward motion canceled the apparent wind to absolutely nothing. It was fully dark now, but because of the lights on the rig the stars were invisible as was the horizon, and even the lights on the flotilla were mostly hard to pick out. But the noise of the horns and boat whistles was constant as it had been for nearly one week, but now it was mostly background noise, almost below the level of notice unless you stopped to listen for it.

  Eve and Don walked past two of the completed impeller tripods and a third one that was nearly finished. Everyone aboard had been given the evening off for the celebration, and when they came around the corner of one of the storage containers about the size of a semi-truck trailer, lashed to the deck, where a long table laden with drinks and food was laid out, music suddenly began. And it wasn’t a recording, because it was, if not terrible, amateuristic and Eve had heard it before. A few of her techs had a little musical ability and they’d formed what they called the Test Tube Jug Band. Two out of tune guitars, an electronic keyboard Richard played hesitantly, missing a lot of notes, a set of drums that just about drowned out everyone else, and Lisa on vocals. There she is, Miss Queen of the Seas, Come from Neptune’s Locker, Or maybe Mars, We can’t really tell.

  All of it badly performed without rhymes, more or less to the tune of Bert Parks’s “Here She Is, Miss America.” And everyone was laughing, cheering, and singing, Lisa with tears in her eyes. An emotional group, tired, strung out, but they were on their way and they were one hundred and ten percent behind their doc, their Nobel Prize doc.

  And when the song, which was embarrassing but wonderful in Eve’s estimation, was finally over, and after everyone had hugged her and kissed her cheek, the champagne was poured.

  “To the Queen of the High Seas,” Lisa said into the microphone, her voice now louder than the drums, which caused even more laughter, and everyone raised their glasses.

  Everybody drank the toast, and a couple of her techies called for a speech, but she waved them off.

  “No speeches,” she told them. “We’re taking the night off, and getting drunk, and hopefully some of you are getting laid—” Everyone laughed uproariously again. They loved her. “And you’d best enjoy it, because in the morning we’re back at it, this time full tilt. So don’t fall overboard in the middle of the night.”

  Then they cheered, poured more champagne, and started on the hors d’oeuvres.

  Defloria was there with some of his people, and she congratulated them.

  “You’re almost finished with the third tripod,” she said. “Good work, thank you.”

  “We’re ahead of schedule,” Stefanato said, and he winked at her. “Nice bunch of kids. Smart.”

  “They are,” Eve said.

  Don went to get her more champagne and Defloria and Stefanato left, and a minute later McGarvey and Gail came over. They looked worn-out and Eve was uneasy. Cops and watchdogs were never supposed to be tired. But McGarvey was smiling. “You have a happy crew,” he said.

  “Most scientists are,” Eve said. “At least most of the time. And they’ve been working pretty hard for the past eighteen months, so whenever they get the chance they like to blow off a little steam.”

  Gail nodded. “Understandable. But maybe tonight should be the last of it until we get to Hutchinson Island.”

  If someone was actually coming after them with the intention of sinking the platform, now or certainly in the next few days would be the time to do it. At these depths any sort of a recovery operation would be impractical. Once Vanessa was on the bottom she would stay there. At the very least, the project would be set back one year, probably longer. Funding would certainly dry up, Eve was sure of it, and depending on how many people got hurt, the entire project, concepts and all, might end up on the floor of the Gulf as well.

  “So maybe now it’s time to call for some help,” she said, ignoring Gail, because lately she had felt nothing but animosity from the woman, and she didn’t understand the change. “Once they start shooting missiles at us, or dropping bombs or whatever, it’ll be too late.”

  “Nothing like that’s going to happen, Doctor,” Gail said.

  “Are you sure?” Eve demanded, her voice rising a notch.

  “No,” McGarvey said. “We’re not even one hundred percent sure that anyone’s going to try to attack us, but if they do it’ll only be a few people — maybe a half dozen. And they don’t know that we’re aboard so the advantage would be ours.”

  “Anyway it’s a lot harder to hit a moving target than a stationary one,” Gail said. “And there are a lot more people aboard than there’ll be once you’re at anchor. Defloria’s guys wouldn’t exactly be a knock over.”

  Don came back with the champagne. “Who wouldn’t be a knock over and for what?” he asked, his eyes squinty.

  He was angry again, and Eve understood why, he thought that he was in competition with McGarvey. The man-of-the-mind scientist versus the man-of-action warrior. And it also suddenly dawned on Eve that Gail Newby might be of the same mind, she could feel that she was in competition for McGarvey. The lady warrior versus the female egghead.

  “Just speculating,” Gail said, and she and McGarvey nodded pleasantly then headed away.

  “What was she talking about?” Don asked. He was on the verge of arguing.

  Eve shook her head. She didn’t want to get into it with him. “I haven’t a clue,” she said. “Let’s join the party, okay?”

  FIFTY-NINE

  From one hundred meters out, DeCamp and the others aboard Forget It , a forty-nine-foot Gulfstar extended aft deck charter motor yacht could hear the off-key music and singing on the main deck of Vanessa Explorer even over the noise of the boat horns, theirs included.

 
Wyner was dressed all in black, camouflaged greasepaint on his face, the same as DeCamp. He was hanging off the stern in the four-man Avon RIB dinghy, the outboard idling. They’d painted the ten-foot rigid inflatable boat’s hull and the engine cowling black on the way to join Schlagel’s flotilla, keeping it out of sight until now, lest someone in the flotilla wonder why they’d done such a thing.

  DeCamp handed him down a nylon bag with a pair of Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns in the SD6-silenced version, along with six thirty-round box magazines of 9mm x 19 Parabellum ammunition.

  Helms, one of the four contractors from London, watched from just inside the bridge, and he waved when DeCamp looked up. Bob Lehr, one of the other new contractors, was at the wheel, and over the past few hours he’d slowly positioned them about twenty meters to the port of the Pascagoula Trader, which was the largest boat in the flotilla and the one with the small Bell Jet Ranger lashed to the after deck. His orders were to close the gap between the two boats as soon as DeCamp and Wyner were off.

  Tony Ransom, one of Schlagel’s top aides, more or less in charge of the “operation,” as he called it, was aboard and DeCamp had been invited over for a drink a couple of nights ago. “You need anything, anything at all, Mr. Schlagel says to help you out. Says you met at the rally in Biloxi.”

  DeCamp had nodded. “Great man, the reverend,” he’d said, smiling. “Maybe you can do me a favor, but later on. We’ll see.”

  The seas were calm tonight, the wind relatively light, and as DeCamp hesitated at the back rail Forget It ’s automatic foghorn sounded. When Gunther Wolfhardt had shown up at his home above Nice, he’d made the decision that when this job was completed he would walk away from the business. And from Martine. Yet at this moment his blood was up, had gotten up over the past few days and especially this afternoon after they’d passed forty-two-double-oh-three, and he was having second thoughts. This thing that was going to happen tonight was the very reason he’d been born. Being deserted by his parents had been his real birth in the sense that he’d not come alive until he’d been taken in by Colonel Frazer, and eventually the SADF, where he’d learn to kill, quietly if the need arose, but above all efficiently and without remorse. “The bastard who you kill would certainly not shed a tear if it was you instead of him dead,” the tactical instructors drilled into them.