Trident Code (A Lana Elkins Thriller)

by Thomas Waite

  Those fossil-fuel companies would pop the bubbly when they found out. Russian ones, that is, because the others? Well, they wouldn’t be drilling so much anymore. They would have other problems. Some would say crises. Especially with their offshore platforms. Make BP in the Gulf seem like Roman candle.

  AAC would be earth’s thermostat. World too hot? Okay, whoosh, suck out more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Too cold? Take out less. Auction off nice climates: “And the winner is Great Britain with a bid of 230 trillion rubles.”

  God save the Queen.

  Think about that. Start droughts, drum up more floods, make haywire weather. Why not? Or be nice and let the world live in peace—as long as you pay proper tribute to your master.

  But first the world had to be brought to its senses, especially big boys like the U.S., Europe, and China. Which meant bringing them to their knees. Best position for learning. Ask Federal Security Service. And that was where the submarine came in handy. Very soon Oleg would tell those other Arctic nations to leave the gas and oil and minerals for Russia. And if they didn’t—and, of course, they wouldn’t—there would have to be a terrible catastrophe.

  But that was so simple with a sub on your side because the world was already facing an extraordinary threat of a catastrophe of such massive proportions that nobody would even talk about it much publicly. Lots of scientists knew. Galina, good Greenpeace girl, knew, though not what Oleg was up to. The precipice was so well known it even went by an acronym in certain circles.

  And when something teeters on a precipice, what does it need? A nudge. That was all. One teensy-weensy nudge. And a sub with missiles could nudge and nudge and nudge. And then everyone would hear the biggest plop in the history of the planet. But what will happen after the plop? Now that would be the most memorable sound of all.

  Three years of planning and now he was down to less than a week, and everything that had sounded so ambitious in the beginning was falling into place. Oleg smiled over his private pun.

  But he was still Papa Plutocrat’s son, and PP had summoned him to cottage country outside Moscow.

  In the Soviet era, they called them “dachas,” special places where party officials with influence could rest and relax with one another and their mistresses—or, in Stalin’s case, make fun with his pen and sign tens of thousands of death warrants and condemn hundreds of thousands to slave labor camps while he sat on his bulletproof couch. But most dachas were tiny places on tiny plots. Who wanted one anymore? Not fit for men of means.

  “Why don’t you just call it my country mansion?” Oleg had once needled PP.

  “Not a mansion. A cottage.”

  Okay, a cottage that was twelve thousand square feet with an indoor pool, ice-skating rink, ballroom, movie theatre, and two kitchens, one for the servants and one for the family. It looked like a French castle, complete with dungeon. Oleg wasn’t sure what his papa did down there, and even as a boy he knew better than to ask. He’d been forbidden to enter the castle’s north wing, under which the dungeon lay like a sleeping snake.

  Still, he was a boy’s boy so he’d snuck down there and looked around. Very interesting dungeon. Iron rings on the wall. And a rack, too. He had been only fifteen but thought the rack was the coolest thing he would ever see. Such big gears and a hand crank. When he turned it the rack went clickety-click and the table spread apart. Clickety-click-click-click and it spread even more. Beautiful manacles had clearly been hand forged to fit feet and wrists. Superb workmanship, which he came to admire more as he grew older. The same artist had made the iron rings for the wall, and when Oleg had seen them close-up he’d been doubly impressed.

  He had led his half brother Dmitri downstairs the very day he’d discovered the dungeon and swore the mutt—born to an ex-peasant mother—to secrecy. Then he told him to lie down on the “bed.”

  “I’m going to make you big like Papa, stretch your bones a little. How’s that sound? No more ‘little’ Dmitri. Make you a big boy fast.”

  “Big like Papa? You can do that?”

  “Yes, big like Papa. Like me.”

  “I want to be big like Papa.”

  Whatever.

  Oleg chained him up. Dmitri was not a good specimen, though. He started wailing with the first clickety-click. You can imagine what it was like after a couple more. So sweet Oleg had to shove one of his father’s old boot socks in the boy’s mouth. But he still had to threaten him with head injuries if he didn’t shut the fuck up.

  After a few more clickety-click-click-clicks, he cranked the table back together.

  “Now I’m going to take out Papa’s sock. But if you scream, I’m sticking it back in.”

  He unchained his brother and said, “Look, you’re so much bigger.”

  Dmitri had looked down, all wet-eyed, and shook his head. “No, my pants are still in the same place.”

  Five years old and already an empiricist. That pissed Oleg off, so he led Dmitri toward the Iron Maiden replica, open and showing its broad array of sharpened spikes. With a cry, the peasant brother tried to run screaming from the room, but Oleg grabbed him before he could flee up the stairs.

  “I will show you something else, and you can do it to me,” he’d told Dmitri.

  “I can hurt you?” the boy said with more vengeance than Oleg would have liked.

  “Sure.”

  Oleg walked him over to a medieval skull crusher. Dmitri stared at it.

  “What is it?” the boy asked.

  He told him.

  “I’m not putting my head in there,” the boy said.

  “I will, if you’ll keep everything secret that we’ve done down here.”

  “Get in,” Dmitri said.

  Oleg placed his chin on the base of the torture device and told his brother to turn the wooden crank that would drive a metal cap down onto his noggin.

  The child did it with abundant enthusiasm, but when Oleg felt the cap pressing down on him, he’d reached up and stopped his brother.

  “No, I want to hurt you,” Dmitri yelled, yanking on the crank. Then he grabbed the saliva-slick sock Oleg had used on him and tried to push it into his brother’s mouth.

  But he was no match for Oleg, who reached up and unscrewed the cap.

  “No fair,” Dmitri said.

  “Someday you’ll get your turn,” Oleg told him.

  “That’s not what I mean,” Dmitri yelled.

  “But you will,” Oleg had vowed.

  Oleg now drove past lots of peasants on his way to cottage country. The last of the ordinary poor lived only a mile from the big green walls that surrounded the country homes of some of Moscow’s richest men. Twenty-five years ago the Russian people owned everything, according to Soviet propaganda of the time, which meant, in fact, they owned nothing. There were no millionaires, much less billionaires. Now, after free-market reforms, most still owned very little but Moscow had seventy billionaires, more than any other city in the world, and those men owned a quarter of the country’s entire economy. Even Oleg had to admit that his father’s friends had raised the bar, but not to a truly towering height. Not for him.

  At last, Oleg’s red Maserati pulled up to the green wall that surrounded his father’s cottage. He didn’t even have to press a button. An electronic eye opened the gate. Good-bye potato-faced peasants, hello handsome happy people. Oleg didn’t disdain the peasantry. Not as much as the billionaires in cottage country. They had plundered old industries—mining, petroleum, steelmaking, shipbuilding—but most couldn’t even work the simple computers of that era. But they all knew how to come up with fistfuls of rubles when the whole economy had come up for grabs. They’d thought that meant they were smart. They had confused greed with intelligence.

  But the sharpest ones had sent their sons to school—Caltech, MIT, University of Cambridge, and Moscow’s own Institute of Physics and Technology.
And the lucky offspring studied computer science, software engineering, and the emerging fields of cybersecurity and information assurance. That was what he had done. His father was always saying, “Come work for me. You can make millions.” But Oleg didn’t want millions. He wanted billions so his father could work for him.

  He slowed to motor across the drawbridge at Papa’s castle. Another electronic eye recognized the Maserati and the portcullis rose, revealing silver-tipped spikes on the bottom.

  Oleg drove into the interior courtyard, one huge English garden with a dozen varieties of roses and pergolas and lush grass and striped canvas chairs. Like a Saturday fair every day of summer. Sometimes PP even had magicians dazzling guests, and musicians strumming and strolling, playing Russian folk tunes.

  He drove into a car elevator, which lifted him to the second floor, then turned like a wheelhouse till he was pointed at his reserved place. As he parked, his phone vibrated. The Ukrainian hacker again, telling him 146 crew members were dead. “Even the captain.”

  Yes! Oleg pumped his fist. Just the ones he needed alive. Like he’d planned.

  “This is very good,” Oleg said. Then he affirmed that a news blackout was holding.

  “So I think it’s time to send a message, don’t you?” the Ukrainian asked.

  Oleg agreed.

  “We want all—”

  “Not ‘we want,’” Oleg corrected. “We demand. They expect demands. Let’s not disappoint.”

  “We demand that all Arctic nations renounce their claims to the region’s oil, gas, and minerals and make it a non-exploitation zone.”

  “Yes, that sounds good. Very progressive.”

  “Or else?” the hacker asked.

  “What do you mean, ‘Or else?’” Oleg asked.

  “What will we do if they don’t renounce their claims?”

  Oleg laughed quietly at the Ukrainian hacker. He thought the demand applied to Russia, too. That was why he was working so hard. He wants Russia to get screwed, too, the way Russia screwed the Ukraine by claiming Crimea, then backed the rubes in the eastern half of the country with guns and bombs so they might realize their dreams of separatism. Hilarious.

  “We have a submarine with nuclear missiles, right?” Oleg didn’t wait for an answer. “We don’t have to say what we’ll do. They know.”

  “When do we bomb them?”

  The hacker sounded excited to get on with it. That worried Oleg, but not too much. He had him by the short hairs in so many ways. The hacker had kids. “Hostages to fortune,” as some English philosopher once said. PP liked to quote him. Such a paterfamilias. But Oleg knew that kiddies kept daddies in line. Not all, but this Ukrainian daddy, definitely.

  “We don’t bomb them,” Oleg said cryptically. “Better than that.”

  “What could be better than that?”

  “You’ll see.” Oleg cut off the call. He wasn’t getting into a discourse right now, not with PP on the monitor right in front of Oleg’s parking place. He was wrinkling his forehead. Oleg could read his lips. “Come in. Come in.” PP the Prince of Impatience. So fond of saying, “Patience is a vastly overrated virtue.” But only true for plutocrats.

  Oleg spotted Dmitri on the screen hovering in the background. He saw the resemblance between father and second-born son. Both handsome. PP was a “silver-haired devil” in the words of wife number six. He was seventy-six years old, but still tall and straight with shoulders that hadn’t begun to slump. Clear blue eyes. He appeared twenty years younger. By all rights he should have looked like a ham hung in the smokehouse too long. He’d been puffing all his life. But he had very few lines on his face. The picture of health.

  Dmitri was as well. But a skull injury had scrambled too many brain cells. The neurologist had said the accident had severely damaged the boy’s brain. “It was an accident, right?” the doctor asked.

  Which had made PP stare at Oleg, who’d claimed he found him at the bottom of the dungeon stairs. Oleg had nodded at the doctor and said, “I don’t know what he was doing there.”

  In any case, Dmitri’s skull had been crunched and his brain hadn’t looked so good. A lot of bleeding in both hemispheres, and it had gone on for too long before he got help. Oleg knew exactly how long: four and a half hours. He’d figured that was long enough—and he’d been right.

  So Dmitri looked good on the outside, but not so good where it counted. At least he didn’t drool anymore, a big plus, and if he’d had any life in his eyes and didn’t try to talk, just played the silent mysterious type, he could probably have gotten laid a lot—on his own. But instead, PP had to pay his “special friends” to play with him. Dmitri didn’t seem to mind. Nothing wrong with the south end of the complex. PP’s friends and the ten-meter waterslide for the heated indoor pool kept Dmitri very happy, except . . . he was missing Galina.

  He called her “Gull,” like the English word for that disgusting seabird. Oleg always told him “Gull” had flown away. “Doesn’t like you anymore.”

  Which meant nothing to him.

  “Oleg, my firstborn son,” PP said when he walked into the castle. That had always been the old man’s greeting. It was as if he were reminding himself of the birth order, which actually made Oleg wonder if PP had another firstborn, the real one, still stashed away in a dacha somewhere like a lot of Party hacks had done in the old days. Of course, that would have meant that the real firstborn might have been a grandfather by now. PP had been “rutting like crazed weasel” for more than six decades, which he let everyone know after a few bottles of Stoli.

  He told his son to sit in a big stuffed chair in the living room that he had redone to look like the one in Downton Abbey after wife number six insisted that as a “lady of sorts”—an ex-stripper—she should have some gilded bookshelves, furniture, and woodwork to “grace” her eyes. So she had. Even gilded books. PP bought them by the pound. Oleg found a complete collection of Karl Marx’s works beautifully bound and preserved. He never told PP. He guessed the old man would have just shrugged and said, “Let the free marketplace of ideas compete on a level playing field.” Or some such platitude widely embraced by monopolists.

  “Dmitri, tell your brother what you told me.” As an aside to Oleg, PP said Galina had been making great strides with him.

  “Galina? She was here?” News to Oleg. His lovely lady had gone behind his back? Not good.

  “Yes. She’s so helpful,” PP said to him. “You remember how Dmitri was saying ‘Gull, Gull, Gull’ all the time? Well, Galina came over Sunday. You were busy. She’s going to keep coming over. I think it’s a good idea.” Turning to second-born son, PP said, “Go ahead, tell him what you can say now. After just one session with Galina,” PP added in a second aside to Oleg.

  He watched his little brother, who was much bigger than him now, struggle to say something other than his mangled attempt at Galina’s name. His lips twisted grotesquely, and all Oleg could hear at first was “Skkkk,” like he was trying to say “skank,” maybe. Must have been eavesdropping by PP’s big bedroom. Boy was learning.

  But then the last sound came out and it went straight to Oleg’s solar plexus: “Skkkkuullll.”

  “What?” Oleg shook his head.

  “That’s what I said,” PP agreed. “Why when my baby boy hasn’t said a word in ten years, except for ‘Gull,’ does he suddenly say ‘Skull’? And then baby boy dragged me to the dungeon.”

  Oleg reminded himself to keep a poker expression. He shrugged. Why would he say that? That’s so weird. But the news had shaken him so that he didn’t actually speak those words. When he finally said them, he had to force them out. And though he knew it was not possible, he imagined his lips twisting and his voice struggling just like baby brother’s.

  “So the rose is going to keep coming. See if we can make him bloom some more.” PP’s eyes looked clearer than ever. “Isn’t this wonderful? I think D
mitri is trying to tell us something, or maybe he’s remembering the names of my museum pieces. I can’t wait to hear it all. Now, tell me what you’ve been doing, but take that device out of your ear. I’m talking to you.”

  Oleg removed his phone’s Bluetooth earbud, but all he wanted to know was what the hell happened down in the dungeon, so he asked.

  “That’s the sad part of the story,” said PP. “He started to cry on the bottom step and wouldn’t go any farther. We’ll see if Rose can get the rest out of him, yes?”

  Oleg shrugged. His shoulders felt set in concrete.

  PP yammered about the massive icebreaker his company was building so they could mine methane in the Arctic. The Japanese were already trying to do it in their own waters, but the Siberian shelf was so rich with methane—and the waters so relatively shallow—that the gas was bubbling up from the bottom of the sea.

  Dmitri hovered over his father most of the time PP talked, but on three occasions he drifted toward Oleg, only to veer away quickly.

  “So it’s time you stopped playing with computers and came to work for me. Or I will have to put you on a budget,” PP said.

  Oleg almost laughed. Everything was playing out as he had planned for years. In no time he’d buy his father’s companies and put him on a budget. And if he didn’t want to sell? Oleg would have the clout to make him.

  But for now he smiled and repeated “Yes, Papa” every few seconds before getting up to leave.

  But who got the last word?

  “Skkkkuullll!”

  Using his Maserati like the race car it had been designed to be, Oleg made it to Galina’s apartment in record time. She lived in a nice neighborhood near the Institute. Much better than student housing, but still Bohemian for someone with sweet milky thighs and big bouncy breasts. Three bedrooms, two baths, with a beautiful view of—what else? Onion domes. Enough space for little Alexandra to have her own room. And one for Oleg, too, Galina had told him many times.

  Now she could tell him why she was planning to spend Sundays in cottage country.