Frozen Fire

by Evans, Bill; Jameson, Marianna

  “Are we friends?”

  “Hardly.”

  She gave a silent laugh, then took a deep breath. “This job, the DNI—it should have been yours.”

  “I wouldn’t have taken it. You’re the warm, fuzzy, people person, not me,” Tom said, pushing his hands into his trouser pockets and glancing out over the water.

  Lucy stared at the water, letting another silence grow before she continued speaking.

  “So in your esteemed opinion, have I lost my edge? Am I getting weak?” she whispered, her voice brittle and quavering with real emotion for the first time in decades.

  “No.”

  The speed and force of his reply bolstered her confidence and she brought her gaze back to his. Tom’s eyes were cool, his expression neutral. His hands hung loosely at his sides, fingers half curled, as if he were bracing for a fight.

  It was exactly what she needed from him.

  “Your report said Blaylock was holed up in a villa in Algeria. Outside Annaba. Didn’t it?” Lucy asked.

  “Yes.”

  She nodded and took a mea sured breath. “I just received word that the body of one of our covert officers was found about two hours ago propped against an outside wall of the police headquarters in Annaba. She hadn’t been dead long. Less than an hour, they figure.” She swallowed hard and heard Tom swear under his breath. “She’d been raped, beaten, and severely mutilated. Among other things, GAIA’s logo was carved into her face.” She stopped again and took a deep breath. “Her cover was Bridget Malloy. Was she one of the—”

  “She was the one who was the closest to Blaylock,” Tom said, interrupting her. “She wrote the code for the virus.”

  “How long was she with us?”

  “Five years. She was very good.”

  Lucy nodded once, swallowed hard again, and waited until she felt a familiar coldness that had nothing to do with the weather sweep through her. She straightened her back and met Tom’s eyes.

  “I understand the full consequences of what I’m about to say, and I want to assure you that you are in no way obligated to carry out this mission or assist in its execution in any way.” She paused. “I want Garner Blaylock dead,” she said in a voice that was barely audible but powerful despite that. She watched Tom’s eyes, aching at the knowledge that the order she’d just given had changed their relationship—as close and as strange as it was—forever.

  Tom said nothing for the space of several heartbeats.

  “Lucy,” he began.

  “Save your breath,” she said, stopping him with a look. “I know the arguments. I know the consequences. It could cost me my job. It probably just cost me what’s left of my soul, if I ever had one. I don’t care. That kid didn’t deserve what happened to her. Neither has anyone else he’s hurt or killed. He’s evil and he’s been around too long. He needs to be gone.”

  After a short pause, Tom nodded.

  “I don’t want it painless and I don’t want it pretty, but I want it done fast,” she added.

  “Understood.”

  He wouldn’t meet her eyes and Lucy knew that they both understood that she had cracked under pressure. She’d crossed the line that a true professional never crossed: She’d made a decision based on emotion rather than circumstances.

  She’d made it personal.

  3:30 A.M., Monday, October 27, Taino

  Dennis had sat for hours throughout the night, pinging the night sky in what he’d known from the start was probably a vain hope of establishing a link with the satellite Micki had targeted. The battery on the ground unit had eventually died and, with it, his last hope of contacting the outside world to let someone know what was happening on Taino. He was sure the world was already aware of a lot of it.

  There were experts who would put two and two together. And Victoria was out there—who knew how much loyalty she could be expected to maintain if things were getting bad. She’d never given up her U.S. citizenship; they could have her in custody and he knew her well enough to know that she wouldn’t take a bullet for anyone. Especially him, after he’d called her a traitor.

  Before he’d made the decision to go ahead with the mining operation, he’d had environmental impact studies done for every possible scenario, even this one. Dennis had read them all, assessed the risks, and then went ahead and took some of those risks. And now he was facing the greatest one of all, the one that he’d always thought had the lowest chance of happening.

  He knew that the dennisium would make the methane gas hug the surface of the water and the land, and that it would travel as far as the wind would take it, dissipating slowly. The wind had picked up over the last few hours. With any luck, the rising wind would diffuse the gas to the point where it wouldn’t kill people, but that wouldn’t take it out of the atmosphere, and that’s where the real problem lay for the future.

  Dennis knew that the destruction of his dream had sent a huge amount of methane into an anthropogenically altered atmosphere that was already in flux. When the methane bubbling out of his pipeline eventually began to pool at the poles, the gas would start to function as a giant two-way mirror. The sun’s ultraviolet rays would pass through the layer of gas and warm the earth’s atmosphere. At the same time, the gas would trap the heat rising from the earth’s surface the way a window traps heat in a house. Heat would continue to collect, measurably diminishing the planet’s ability to cool itself. In real time.

  The oceans would warm and become diluted with the increasing fresh-water runoff from melting glaciers and sea ice. Global circulation patterns, which relied on both temperature and salinity differentials to keep going, would slow.

  The Southern Hemisphere’s summer would be hot; the Northern Hemisphere’s winter would be warmer than any other in recorded history. What Arctic sea ice formed would be thin and patchy. The vast Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets would continue to melt, and do so at a rate faster than anyone could have predicted.

  A few months from now, the northern spring would arrive weeks sooner than anticipated. What glaciers and snowpack remained would melt faster and earlier, causing catastrophic avalanches. Rivers would run wilder, tides would be higher than expected, and the rains would be harder, each bringing more flooding to places unprepared for it.

  After the rain, the temperature would begin to soar in the northern part of the planet. Droughts would threaten harvests and livestock, heat would claim the lives of those not able to tolerate it, and severe weather would destroy property at random. Civil society would recede as water shortages everywhere primed local, regional, and national tempers for harsh and even violent resolutions. Vain and wasteful cities would learn how precarious their existence is, and idyllic suburbs and rural areas would grow desperate to protect and maintain their ways of life. Coastal areas would learn the futility of trying to hold back inevitably rising waters.

  The next winter would never arrive.

  Eventually, within a matter of years, there would be no change of seasons anywhere on the globe; there would be no autumn, no rainy or cool season to bring relief, no growing season. Deserts would evolve on once verdant land. Lake beds and reservoirs would shrink, revealing their macabre histories. Islands would disappear beneath waves the world over. Wars would begin and have no end.

  Eventually the oceans would achieve a critical warmth. Then the tens, perhaps hundreds of gigatons of methane hydrate beneath the ocean floors would begin to melt, releasing catastrophic amounts of lethal gas into the atmosphere.

  And then life, all life, would end.

  These thoughts had repeated endlessly in Dennis’s mind during the long wakeful hours he’d spent under a night sky irreparably altered at his hands. The experience had made one thing become unutterably clear to Dennis.

  It was his responsibility to rectify what had gone wrong. The fate of the earth had to come before the agonizing fate of few thousand, or even a few million, people.

  There was only one way, one ancient way, he could do it.

  He
had to burn off the methane before it could leave the vicinity.

  He had to build a fire in the sky.

  CHAPTER

  34

  4:10 A.M., Monday, October 27, Bolling Air Force Base, Washington, D.C.

  “You think it will work, or you know it will work, Dr. Briscoe?”

  Lucy Denton had been bristly and abrupt ever since the “Hole in the Water Gang,” as Sam had started calling them, had come together in the conference room half an hour ago to discuss options. Right now, he was the one under the microscope. He’d have been more comfortable with it if he’d gotten some sleep.

  “Well, ma’am, considering nothing like this has ever been attempted as far as I know, or as far as Lieutenant Commander Cartwright over there knows,” he said, pointing to the demolitions expert he’d been working with for the last twelve hours, “we’re pretty sure it will work but we’re not going to know for sure until it either does or doesn’t.”

  “Walk us through it again. Without all the math, this time. Just the action.”

  Hiding his exasperation, Sam turned to the whiteboard behind him and started diagramming as he spoke. “The underwater phase will happen in two stages. We launch torpedoes—what did you call them? Deadheads?—anyway, ones with no explosives in them toward the area where the rupture is. They’ll come in from three angles and strike the seafloor near the pipeline but outside of the degraded water column. When they hit the sediment, which is a few hundred feet thick in that region, they’ll cause minilandslides, creating significant dislodgement of the surrounding substrate. We hope they’ll dislodge enough to plug the fissure, at least temporarily. Then we’ll send in the torpedoes carrying the anaerobic methanotrophs. The tubes will explode and release the microbes. At least some ought to survive to set up shop near the point of the methane release.” He stopped writing on the whiteboard and turned back to face the group. “If we can stop the majority of the flow, or even diminish it, we’ll be in good shape. The downside is that we don’t know how damaged the subsurface structure is down there.”

  “Is that correct, Dr. Collins?”

  Sam looked at Marty, who was looking back at him with naked fear in his eyes. Sam sent him a tight smile, which Marty didn’t return.

  “Yes, Director Denton, it is,” Marty replied. “The last set of pictures from the satellites with ground-penetrating radar and magnetic imaging indicated some changes had occurred in the substrate, but the images were inconclusive as to determining the extent of the damage.”

  “What are the risks?”

  “We could end up widening the gap or even opening a new fissure. There’s also the possibility of triggering another landslide—not the small ones Sam mentioned, but a big one—or even an earthquake. With all the instability that’s been introduced in the immediate region, I wouldn’t rule out a tsunami if either of the latter scenarios occurred. The damage to the Keys and other Caribbean islands would be catastrophic. We’re very close to the edge of the continental shelf and there would be no time to issue warnings.”

  Lucy looked grim.

  “Dr. Collins, I appreciate your candor, but what are the odds that attempting to block the pipeline will make the situation worse?” Victoria asked.

  “About ten to one, Ms. Clark,” he said flatly. “Maybe worse.”

  Victoria turned to Lucy. “Perhaps—”

  “No. If there were a better idea, it would have been brought up before now,” Lucy replied. “We’re committed to this. Dr. Briscoe, please continue with your briefing.”

  Sam hesitated, and considered making one last pitch for not releasing the microbes, but realized immediately that Lucy would probably have him thrown in jail if he did that. She was on the edge.

  Hell, I’m on the edge. This had damned well better work.

  He took a breath and continued. “Irrespective of whether the attempt to block the flow is successful, we’ll immediately shift our focus to the atmosphere.” He paused. “Actually, if the underwater attempt doesn’t work, it will be even more important to deploy the atmospheric microbes. We’ll do that by shooting missiles into the plume. Their payloads will contain several varieties of microbes instead of warheads.”

  “Several varieties?” Victoria asked.

  “I’d like to say that that decision is based on careful thought, Ms. Clark, but the truth is, we’re goin’ with the spaghetti theory. You know how you throw a piece of spaghetti at the wall and if it sticks, it’s done? Well, we’re goin’ to throw everything we’ve got at that gas and see what sticks. We’re doin’ the same thing down below. It’s very likely that a lot of the bugs won’t embrace the environment. We’re just hopin’ some will.”

  He turned back to the whiteboard.

  “With regard to the missiles, we’ve got the degraded air column and the plume to consider. The plan is to deploy the missiles so they enter the tainted airspace at staggered intervals of several minutes and about nine miles from each other. Lieutenant Commander Cartwright suggested a total of five missiles, with the one nearest to the coast bursting a few miles offshore.” He shook his head and pointed to the other edge of the whiteboard. “The missile tubes will start to break up as soon as they pass through the plume due to the change in air pressure. We’ll have backup devices in them, too. The explosions will release the microbes and they’ll scatter. If they survive, they’ll start munching on methane.”

  The room was silent when Sam finished. He put the markers he’d been using in the tray and sat down, looking expectantly at Lucy.

  “I just need to remind you, ma’am, that if this all works, we’ll only be taking care of the methane. We’ve got phyrruluxine forming inside that plume, and that is a whole other big-ass world of hurt. It’s highly explosive, and it’s toxic.”

  “So is the methane,” Lucy replied. “Why is this a problem?”

  “The methane isn’t toxic, ma’am. Too much of it just pushes the oxygen out of the way so there’s none left to breathe until the concentration returns to normal. The phyrruluxine is highly toxic, and it doesn’t behave like methane. Very small amounts can be lethal.” He paused. “I don’t know what gets rid of that. We may just have to pray that stuff disperses.”

  “Thank you for the update, Dr. Briscoe.” Clearly furious, Lucy held his gaze briefly, then looked down the table to the cluster of navy officers at the other end. “Well?”

  “Director Denton, we’ll give it a shot,” the highest-ranking one replied.

  “Good.” She glanced down at her watch and then back at Sam. “The cruiser Eutaw Springs is anchored off Taino and the secretary of the navy has ID’d that ship as the base of this operation. The personnel transporting the microbes should be arriving there in a few hours. There will be an assembly and staging area set up when you get there.”

  It took Sam’s sleep-deprived brain a few seconds to register what she’d just said.

  “When I get there?” he asked, not enjoying the unexpected blood pressure spike her words had provoked.

  “You’ll be on board for the duration of the operation, Dr. Briscoe. Dr. Collins and Ms. Clark will be there, too.”

  “Wait a damned minute, Ms. Denton. I’m not—” Her look stopped him mid-sentence.

  “You won’t see this through?” she asked quietly.

  The look in her eyes, in the eyes of the four navy officers at the end of the table, in Marty’s and Victoria Clark’s eyes shamed him, made him feel like the skunk at a garden party. No, worse than that. They made him feel like a traitor.

  He shook his head and looked down, rubbing a hand over the back of his stiff neck. “Just surprised me, is all. Of course I’ll go,” he muttered. And spend every minute on that boat pukin’ my guts up. Damn it.

  “Thank you, Dr. Briscoe.” Lucy was about to continue when Sam saw her look down at the open laptop in front of her, and immediately touch a few keys. The occupants of the room remained silent as she read something on the screen, then looked up.

  “Something’s happeni
ng on Taino,” she explained. “We’ve been monitoring the island via satellite since before the crash occurred. Its communications went dark approximately twenty-four hours ago, but there was an encrypted signal sent from it yesterday afternoon. There’s been indiscriminate pinging going on for the last eight or so hours, but no contact has been made with any transponder.”

  “You didn’t tell me—” Victoria blurted, and Lucy gave her a look.

  “I’m telling you now. Three persons made it onto the island yesterday afternoon at a small beach on the north end. They disappeared into the brush almost immediately and have not been seen again. However, someone emerged from a higher point on the island’s north end approximately twenty minutes after the three figures landed on the beach. That person, presumably one of the group, sent an encrypted message that was picked up by a leased transponder on a low-earth orbit satellite owned by a Europe an telecommunications consortium. So it appears that at least one person is alive and active on the northeastern end of the island.”

  Sam looked at Victoria, who had gone very still, anger etched onto her face.

  “Ms. Clark,” Lucy continued, “do you have any idea who is on that island? Where did the people who landed on the beach go?”

  “They would have been heading for the bunker.” Victoria’s voice was cold and quiet.

  “What bunker?” Lucy asked sharply.

  Sam could have sworn he saw the hint of a smile on Victoria’s face as she turned to face Lucy. “President Cavendish had an emergency shelter built into the side of Mount Taino. It was completed several years ago.”

  Lucy was clearly not pleased at just learning this. “How many people could be in there?”

  “The bunker was constructed to house the entire population of Taino, around seventy people, or even more if it had to,” Victoria replied. “It wouldn’t be comfortable, though.”

  “Ms. Clark, please stay on point,” Lucy replied with an edge to her voice. “How many people do you think could have survived and might be in that bunker?”