They squatted near the floor and Javier looked down. A faint indication of light emerged from behind the metal. “A door?”
“Probably, or a false wall.”
Javier nodded. “See if you can figure out how to open it.”
They worked quietly, on the assumption that if anyone was behind the wall, they wouldn’t want to be found. It was actually a common trick for illegal fishing ships to have secret areas on board. They usually used them to smuggle illegal immigrants, but it wasn’t unheard of to find drugs inside. Secret chambers were often fitted by master welders, then painted and covered with the same kind of grime as the rest of the place. They could be nearly impossible to spot unless you knew exactly what to look for.
On one memorable occasion, after a ship had been captured and towed to port, the supposedly empty craft suddenly started its engines and attempted to make a break for the open ocean. Only quick thinking by the captain of a Coast Guard vessel stopped them. On boarding, it was discovered that five men had hidden away in a concealed drug vault.
“Here,” the sailor whispered. He pointed at a raised area in the wall, a rounded rivet at head height that didn’t appear to be serving any structural purpose, and whose paint had been rubbed to the metal.
Javier pointed to two of the men. “Cover me,” he whispered, and pressed the button.
A click echoed in the storeroom and the panel ahead of them shifted to expose a well-lit crack.
With a final look back to see whether his sailors were paying attention, Javier slammed his shoulder into the door, quickly took his bearings on the other side and rolled to the right, behind a tall, long table. It wouldn’t provide much cover, but until anyone inside realized they could simply shoot under the table, he might have enough time to take stock.
The room was white and brightly lit. It appeared to occupy the entire extreme front portion of the ship. It was long and tapered at the end, forming the unmistakable wedge of the ship’s prow, where some kind of high-tech equipment, much more modern-looking than the rest of the room’s content, was connected by wires to the hull. It looked like a room from a completely different ship.
Two long white tables—laboratory tables, complete with high stools—ran along the sides of the room, ending in a V-shape at the end. Each table had two stainless sinks in them, and the pipes below were of steel as well. Glass-fronted cabinets stood behind them in the wider part of the room until space ran out at the front. The cabinets held nothing but an assortment of glass labware.
This room did smell: it smelled of paint and glue and gave the feeling that it had never been used before. Beside the door through which he’d entered, Javier saw a gun rack. It held six shotguns, all of which were present and locked down by a metal bar and a big padlock.
Other than that, it appeared empty. “Clear,” he called back. And then stopped to listen. “No, wait. I think I hear something. Hold position near the door.”
The sound was like an animal, panting and whining somewhere in the room. It sounded like a large animal. There was a rustle.
He looked under the tables, but saw nothing.
There was no choice; he had to go deeper. He wondered if the crew had owned a pet dog and entered carefully. Dogs could be quite territorial and aggressive, especially on ships where the crew might have mistreated them. He’d feel pretty silly getting hurt by a dog.
A few feet inside the room and it was quite clear that nothing was hiding under the tables. The angle where the two sides of the hull joined together to form the prow, likewise, was visibly empty. That left the nooks between the cupboards.
He tried to understand which of those the sound might be coming from and, once he convinced himself that he had the right one, Javier scooted carefully over to just out of sight from the place he’d selected as the most likely hiding spot… and then rolled in front of it, gun drawn.
Something screamed and he jumped backwards.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his troops take a few steps forward and held up his hand. “No! Wait!”
They stopped.
His mind finished processing what he’d seen: the sound, the violent swirling hair, the wide, bloodshot eyes. He placed his gun on the ground and crawled forward. “Hello?” he said in English, which he assumed a Korean crew would be much more likely to understand than if he spoke to them in Spanish.
Javier eased himself around the corner of the cabinet and into view. Frightened eyes looked back at him.
They belonged to a woman with pale skin and black, shoulder-length hair. Her eyes were the ice blue of deep mountain glaciers… and she certainly didn’t look Korean.
Javier held out his hands to show he was unarmed and approached very slowly. She cowered back into the corner formed by the wall and the cabinet and made incoherent yelping sounds.
Then he saw the blood. She was wearing a blue jacket that was torn around one arm and stained completely black. The woman hugged that arm to her side. “Juan, call the Irizar and tell them to send a doctor right now. Tell them to send the helicopter. I think this woman needs more help than we’re going to be able to give her.”
Having said that, he turned back to her. “Just calm down,” he said in what he hoped was a soothing voice. “You’re going to be all right.”
His eyes looked to the ground beneath her. A rivulet of bright red was running from a pool next to her foot.
“Can you get out of there?”
He didn’t want to move her, but he did want her out of that corner, preferably lying on her back where he could hold the wounded arm above the level of her heart. So he inched closer.
The woman continued to scream at him, eyes wide, obviously in an uncontrollable panic. Her screams formed words, but not words he could understand. Maybe, he thought, she was Korean after all.
He put a hand on her shoulder. The woman pulled away but there was no space for her to retreat to and he soon had a firm enough grip to be able to ease her out. When she realized what he was doing, she struggled briefly and then went unexpectedly slack. He had to hold her head to keep it from hitting the deck.
He was worried, but the fact that she’d fallen unconscious at least made it possible to pull her out of the corner and to get her onto the floor. Fortunately, this room appeared to be much cleaner than that of the factory space.
“Does anyone have a knife?” he asked the sailors who were now crowding around to see the injured woman, all thoughts of ghost ships and sea curses forgotten.
One of the men produced a commando blade. What he thought he might achieve by carrying it on the raid, however, was a question for another time. Javier used it to slice into the woman’s jacket and carefully peel away the fabric from the skin. The sleeve of her sweater and a shirt beneath suffered the same fate.
“Oh my God,” Javier said.
One of the men behind him rushed off, and the sounds of retching could be heard from the factory. Javier couldn’t blame him.
The woman was badly hurt. A piece of flesh as long as his hand had been torn away, leaving muscle and gristle exposed. A splintered bone speared out at an unnatural angle.
She was holding something in her hand. Whatever it was was covered in blood and torn cloth, but when he tried to pull it away, she refused to surrender it. He gave up, preferring not to hurt her in an unnecessary struggle.
He abandoned his plan of keeping the arm above her head and let it lie next to her in a position that seemed least likely to cause any further harm, placing it carefully over the discarded cloth. That was filthy with gore, but at least it was her own blood. He certainly didn’t want to risk any infection by laying the exposed flesh on the floor.
“You. Go see if anyone brought bandages and if there’s a stretcher on the boats that brought us here.”
Then, all he could do was wait. They told him later that the doctor had reached them in under ten minutes… but it seemed like days to him as he held the hand of the woman’s uninjured arm, cold as if she were already dea
d, occasionally checked her for a pulse and watched her bleed.
The doctor did arrive, and he was all business. He took one look and ordered everyone out except Javier, who he told to keep her hand still and two sailors who he told to shut up and stand against the wall. Then he applied a gauze bandage from a sterile package and a tourniquet and used a modified splint to hold her arm in place.
“You two, take her legs,” he ordered the men. The doctor himself grasped her shoulders and they lifted her just enough to get her onto a stretcher. “Now move. I need to get her into the surgery on the ship as soon as possible. I should be able to save her arm, but I don’t want that tourniquet on for any long period of time.”
They rushed through the passages they’d so carefully explored on the way in and then jumped onto the chopper. The doctor and Javier seated themselves next to her.
“Will she be all right?” Javier said.
“I think so. But it depends on a lot of factors I don’t know yet. I couldn’t get a great look at her wound. But that’s not the thing that worries me most.”
“What is that?”
“The wound looks like a bite mark. Did you find what bit her?”
Javier shook his head. He’d thought it was some kind of shrapnel wound… but now that it had been pointed out, the shape of the injury could only be a bite mark.
“I didn’t think so. Had to be something pretty big though.”
Chapter 5
Breen fumed as he watched the abandoned fishing vessel disappear into the distance, left to drift until the salvage team arrived. He’d found out about the woman and the hidden lab too late to do anything about it, and now it would take a message from the White House to get the Argentine government to allow an American observer on board with the recovery crew—more likely to be a team from Argentine intelligence than from a shipyard bent on profit, at least initially—that were due to arrive in a few hours.
At least he’d been on site to report the incident. As coincidences went, it was a pretty positive one. Had this happened at any other time, the U.S. would likely never have learned of it. Argentina, of course, was probably convinced that the hidden lab was nothing more important than a drug kitchen.
He would do nothing to disabuse them of the idea. He’d been told enough about the situation to be able to speculate on what the “Koreans” were doing.
The woman who’d been rescued was another matter, though. He’d taken her photo as she was being brought into the ship’s infirmary, and had sent it to Fort Belvoir, Military Intelligence headquarters, for identification. He expected it to be a couple of days. Whoever this woman might be… she was probably not on America’s radar. He suspected the Russians, and the Russians had gotten much better at hiding their agents lately. After years of bumbling, including the famous British poisoning affair, they were reaching Cold War levels of efficiency in that regard.
But, as he stared out over the sea just a couple of hours later, he was surprised to find a message from home with a name and a suite of photographs of the woman looking decidedly better than she had when they wheeled her into surgery.
Natasha Voldoyeva, 33 years old, zoologist, University of Oxford. Born in St. Petersburg. No known ties to military or SVR operations.
“Yeah?” he said under his breath as he opened the file with a longer biographical summary. “It looks like she’s got a few ties after all. I’d say up to her neck.” Just another example of the newfound Russian covert effectiveness.
The trace on the ship had drawn a blank. Though sailing under the South Korean flag, the vessel’s name tracked back to a holding company in Hong Kong. His contact at HQ told him that they’d pinged the CIA at Langley to see whether they had anything on the company… but unless they’d been caught being naughty before, and therefore landed on someone’s watch list, it was likely that some digging would need to be done, and that would take some time.
He drifted towards the medical sector, trying to make it look like he was out for an innocent walk and certain that no one would buy that ruse. He’d passed the two operating rooms—a legacy of the Falklands War, when the Irizar had been used as a hospital ship—during the initial tour of the ship and been impressed by the modern equipment inside. His briefing about Argentina had said that, though the country was still developing as measured by most economic indicators, it had a long tradition of medical excellence.
For Natasha’s sake, he hoped they were right: she’d been bloody and unresponsive as they wheeled her from the chopper.
He arrived at the door of the operating room to find Javier pacing the corridor outside.
“Any news?” Breen said.
“The doctor assured me that she’d survive, but other than that, I have no clue. For all I know, they’ve cut her arm off.”
Breen digested this. “You look like it matters to you.”
“You didn’t see her. She was scared, Carl. More scared than I’ve ever seen anyone. We tried to calm her down… but it almost looked like she didn’t even realize we were human. If she hadn’t passed out, we would have had to drag her back kicking and screaming.”
Breen grunted. He’d seen that reaction before, usually in the heat of battle in the shadow of some godsforsaken mountain in Pakistan where surrender wasn’t an option. Those had been hardened soldiers. A civilian woman as this zoologist appeared to be—despite her obvious employment by some agency or other—might have had that reaction from some relatively innocuous cause. Her injuries, however, suggested otherwise and his gut agreed. There was something big going on.
Javier looked at him suspiciously. “And what brings you here?”
“Curiosity, mainly. The woman didn’t look Korean to me. She looks Russian, and if the Russians are operating something in these waters, especially something that can cause an entire crew to disappear with signs of violence, my government is interested in it. In fact, I’m pretty confident that someone knew about this, and it’s one of the reasons they sent me on the Irizar instead of airlifting me to the base directly.”
That was complete bullshit, of course. He’d been put on the Irizar because the boys in Washington wanted to watch the Argentines to see how much they actually knew. The main action was supposed to be on Antarctica, but the possibility of listening in on his hosts’ conversations in the process of getting there was simply too good an opportunity to pass up. From his briefing, it was clear that the Russian connection in the case was more than forty years old, they’d had ample time to establish terrestrial operations and no one expected to find them operating in these waters… and yet, there they were. If Argentina knew why, it would be extremely valuable intelligence.
Telling Javier that he was watching Russians would remove some of the suspicions the man might have about why he’d been shipped instead of airlifted. Anything that made the Argentines a bit more malleable might come in handy later.
For his own part, the Colonel looked surprised at the frank admission. He nodded once. “We’re surprised too. Argentina’s not a drug producing country, and we really don’t have that much of a consumer base either, but we have been used as a transport hub. No one looks at people coming from Argentina quite as closely as they do Colombians or Mexicans. A floating lab might be something someone would try… although I think it’s a losing bet; the Navy can be a bit trigger happy.”
Breen chuckled. The sinking of an illegal Chinese fishing ship by the Argentines was the stuff of legend. While everyone else on the planet was trying to placate the Asian giant, the yahoos in the local Coast Guard had decided to fill a vessel that refused to heed its commands to halt with holes, presumably to see what would happen or to keep their cannons from rusting. Only the fact that no one had been killed in the incident had prevented it from becoming a serious diplomatic shitstorm.
The time had come when the appearance of honesty would serve him best. Against every fiber of his being, he confided in the Argentine—after all, he seemed to be keeping his promises about not blowing his cover
and giving him the run of the ship. “I don’t think it’s about drugs, Colonel. If this is what I think it is, it’s something that’s been dragged along since the Cold War.”
“What is it?”
“I can’t tell you that. But it’s definitely tied to my main reason for being here. I need to ask a favor. Do you think you can allow me to speak to the woman?”
“In due course…”
“I mean soon. It might be important.”
Javier hesitated. “Let’s see how she’s doing. If the doctor says it’s all right…”
Breen nodded. He did believe it might be important. Perhaps not critical to the Argentines or even to most world governments, but the woman and the ship might shed light on certain Soviet activities in the 1970s that included a weapons program that the Russians had kept under the strictest veil of secrecy… and which some people in Washington suspected was still ongoing.
On the other hand, if he pressed too hard, Javier might start asking questions.
They waited, and waited some more. An hour and a half later, the doctor emerged and pulled down his surgical mask. His face was haggard. He spotted Javier. “We’re done. The woman is going to have a nasty scar… but she should get nearly all the movement in that arm back. She was lucky the major artery wasn’t severed. It was a close thing. She would have bled out before you got there.”
“Good work, doctor,” Javier said. “How long before we can speak to her?”
“She’s already awake. But you won’t be able to get much out of her. She doesn’t speak any Spanish, or any English for that matter.”
Breen thought that strange for a woman who’d graduated from Oxford with high marks, but he kept his mouth shut.
“Where is she from?”
“One of my nurses, Hilda, had a Russian grandmother. She said her words sounded Russian,” the doctor gave him a shrug. “So I guess we’ll need to look for someone in the crew who speaks the language.”
The conversation had been going on in Spanish, his knowledge of which Breen had been endeavoring to keep secret. But the opportunity was much too good to squander. “I speak some Russian,” he said. “I can try.”
Ice Station Death Page 5