He turned to look at the men sitting behind him. He studied Emmanuel’s smooth Incan features. Then his eyes moved to Remo, then to the rear seat of the large Ford van, where three men sat: Harry Kreiton, a mercenary hired in South Africa; King Francone, large, black and mysterious, almost never speaking, whom Suarez had hired in France; and finally Augusto Suave, Suarez’s half-brother.
“We’ll stop at your mother’s, Auggie. Maybe stay a day in Arica. I don’t know.”
None of the other men said anything.
Suarez turned back to the front and studied the scenery as the van rounded a steep barren curve that presented a magnificent view of the gorge they were following.
“I’m not one to explain myself,” he said, “but I know what you’re all thinking. You have a right to wonder if you’ll be shoved out of the van, like our friend Paco. Now that we’re done planting the last of the radio relays, your work is done. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to dispose of you, too. When this thing is over, each of you will be rich. You will have a lifetime’s supply of securities deposited in a bank of your choice. I am a man of my word, with my friends and certainly with my brothers. Paco had to go. He would have talked. You all know that, eh?”
He turned and studied the faces behind him. The men nodded in unison.
Putting his arm over the back of the seat and resting his bearded chin on it, Suarez continued to address his companions. “You are my inner circle, my trusted ones. The gods have made us brothers in flesh and in spirit. They have told me this. You feel this, no?”
Again the men nodded. By now each of them had had enough personal dealings with Suarez to know he kept his word and made good on his deals. They had watched him closely during the years it had taken him to concoct this outrageous mission. They had seen him through every step of the trip to the Ross Ice Shelf and watched him endure the hardships along with them. Rudolfo Suarez was a ruthless man, but he was also an excellent businessman who honoured his commitments. He had impressed them all when he’d taken it upon himself to shoot the stranger they’d encountered on the ice. Any other leader might have given orders and delegated the business of murder to others. Not Rudy. Suarez could
feel
the trust his men had for him; the reassurance he’d given them had been unnecessary. He’d chosen them carefully, and they knew by now the rewards for aiding him would be handsome indeed. Anyone else who’d figured into the plan along the way had been adequately misled. The pilot whose airstrip they’d used to land their helicopters in Tierra del Fuego had been assisting a group of Norwegians who wanted to study weather in the southern Andes. The captain of the icebreaker who’d helped them transport the helicopters and their equipment knew only of a mission to study icebergs in the Southern Pacific; he’d had no idea they were doing anything more than sample ice cores.
The hardest part of the entire project had been the return from the ice shelf and the landing in rough seas of the two oversized helicopters. But the captain had bought their story of the lost equipment because he knew how risky research in the Antarctic can be. And he had been paid well for his services.
No one had questioned the need for having extra fuel tanks built into the helicopters.
The hired hands who’d helped Suarez and his men plant the nuclear devices had had no idea what the mission was about. They’d been careful y chosen oil workers with few family ties, eager to find work of any kind. The explosion of their helicopter had been miles from the coastline of Tierra Del Fuego and at low altitude; no one knew of the incident; no questions would be asked that might link their disappearance to Suarez. Cover stories and false documentation were, after all, his speciality.
These men who now rode the rim of the gorge towards Arica, his inner circle, were the only ones who knew the master plan. The rest who’d been on the ice and waited for their chief in Santiago were mercenaries who knew the cardinal rule: never ask questions. They guarded his home in the Andean foothills and operated the communications links that kept him in touch with his enterprises all over the world.
He had made his fortune through speculative drilling for oil in many areas of the world, so the building of lightweight rigs had been nothing noteworthy. And all the equipment he had contracted had been obtained under the auspices of three legitimate oil-development companies in Argentina.
Suarez had known that, when the nukes detonated, he’d have to have all his tracks covered. Of course, the early explosion of the first helped with that aim. The oil rig and the tractor, buried not far from the place where Henry and Hayes had searched the ice, had been vaporized with all the other evidence.
Now all the convoluted plans and hard work were behind him. The three relay stations that kept him in touch with the world and with the two remaining nuclear devices had been set in place long before the mission began. This last radio relay, now installed, was his backup – his insurance that he could detonate the nukes from anywhere in South America.
As Suarez and his inner circle headed towards Arica, the men finally relaxed as much as was ever possible around the boss. Relaxing completely near Rudy was out of the question. They knew he had strange ideas about life, power and loyalty. They had heard him discourse more than once about the power of the sun and of the Incan gods, and about his conviction that he was a reborn Incan prince, sent to reclaim the glory taken from him so long ago by the invaders from the east. They had been with him to the ruins of Machu Pichu, to the plains of Nazca and the ruins of Tijuanaco, and had heard him lament the civilization ruined by the corruption of the European usurpers.
His men, especial y Remo, had gotten used to listening to stories of the old glories every time they visited the historical sites. Only Remo, however, had been allowed to walk the hall owed path at the ruins of Tijuanaco to the sacred stone once lined with gold. He’d listened mutely as Rudy muttered obscenities about the casual tourists who stomped all over “his” sacred site, and hadn’t ever complained when Rudy insisted he take off his shoes when they visited the place.
It wasn’t that Suarez felt Remo was especial y worthy. Rather, he thought that even the Prince of the Sun God and the rightful heir to the Inca gold needed protection. So he had extended his cloak of imagined holiness to embody Remo, as though he were some extended organ of the Sun God himself.
If Remo thought that such opinions were the ravings of a lunatic, he kept this to himself. The only comment he’d ever made to anyone was, “You don’t have to be sane to be solvent.”
Today, as they rode towards Arica, there was no hint of the boss’s delusions. He was full of clear reassurances to his inner circle. But Remo wondered if Rudy’s protection extended to his half-brother. Rudy was, after all, the Sun God, delivered to the Earth in the talons of a condor. Even though Auggie was a passive sort, given more to surfing and chasing underage girls than to empire-building, he was still the obvious heir to Rudy’s throne. Did Rudy ever worry that his half-brother might get impatient, overambitious? Was Auggie really under Rudy’s wing of protection?
For that matter, were any of them?
Remo knew that, in the end, there could be only one heir to the Power of the Sun.
Five
Henry had talked the admiral into fencing off part of Aft Deck C so Shep wouldn’t go chasing a ball into the sea. Of course, the
other
reason the fence was there was so Henry wouldn’t spend most of his time out there thinking
he
was going to fall into the sea. Now a neon-orange latticework of polystyrene caged in a section of the deck, maybe a hundred feet long and twenty feet wide, where Henry could exercise Shep safely away from the bustling flight deck.
On their fifth morning at sea Henry was on Aft Deck C, as was his routine every dawn and dusk. At those times the ship was generally free of “airport traffic”, as Henry called it. He’d managed to appropriate a pair of deckchairs, which he’d set beside the hatchway, out of the wind. He sat in one of these and watched as Shep tore up and down the fenced area. The dog seemed intent on making the most of his exercise time. Back and forth he tracked the fence that looked out on the sea. He seemed to be watching it as he ran, pretending he was crossing the big ice, getting cues from the lay of the land. Henry knew there was nothing the dog wanted more than to rise at dawn, have a good scrap with one of the other dogs, and then tuck into a good old sled pul. Here he had to fake it.
Finally Shep stopped running and returned to Henry’s side, panting hotly and dripping saliva onto his master’s shoes. Henry put his arms around the dog and gave him a bear hug. Shep grunted softly. Although the dog continued to stare dispassionately off at the sea, Henry knew this was Shep’s body language for love and acceptance.
Shep sniffed at the breeze. A shift in the wind hinted a change in the weather.
Henry sensed it too. He squinted at the horizon. “I see it, guy. Storm in the north. Half a day in front of us, I’d say.”
He stood up. As he did so, something odd caught his eye. Perhaps twenty yards away a man was standing on his hands, feet straight in the air, at the very edge of the flight deck. At first Henry’s mind couldn’t accept the evidence of his eyes. The figure stood so still he thought it must be an apparition or a bizarre prank.
But Shep saw the man too, and barked twice. Henry trotted to the end of the safety fence. From here he could see that the man was Kai Grimes.
Grimes was poised there, feet aloft, rod-straight, with the flats of his hands pressing into the rough grooves of the flight deck. He had increased the level of difficulty by doing his handstand facing the ocean; if he relaxed normally he would fall forward over the edge and into the sea.
Henry could see the man was staring out to sea and, stranger still, was smiling.
Then Grimes saw him out of the corner of his eye.
“Hey, hero,” he yelled above the rush of the breeze.
“Careful you don’t fall out of your pen there. It’s a long way down to those waves.”
“Shit, Grimes! I hope you’re not doing this for my benefit. I’ll tell ya right now, if you go over the edge doin’ that, I’ll tell ’em nothing. Say I never saw you.”
Grimes laughed and looked back out seawards again. His face was beet-red. A strong gust of wind made him nearly lose his balance. “You flatter yourself,” he shouted.
“So what ya trying to prove, Kai?” Henry was beginning to get agitated. “Why pul a risk? Or are you just an asshole?”
Grimes’s arms were beginning to show strain. They quivered slightly as he held his balance.
“Kai. . .” said Henry.
The SEAL suddenly flipped himself backward to a standing position, his back to the ocean. “Sorry to upset the ladies,” he said, scuffing deck grit off his hands. “I real y didn’t notice you there at first, Henry.”
Thinking about what he’d seen, Henry found his knees weakening as he looked out at the rough sea. Whitecaps were smashing against the side of the ship with enough power to cause a jolt that could be felt forty feet above on the carrier deck. No longer was the
Enterprise
so steady that it was hard to remember he was on board a ship.
Putting a cigarette in his mouth, Grimes walked towards Henry. He leaned over the fence and patted Shep. “How’s the shitmeister today, hero?”
“What if you’d fallen in?”
Grimes glanced over his shoulder. “Swim, I guess,” he said with a shrug. “At least I wouldn’t be so fucking bored.”
Shep seemed to have taken to Grimes, despite the constant stream of insults. He licked the man’s hand and wagged his tail while Grimes obligingly scratched his neck.
“I bet you can’t wait to get your paws into some snow, right?” The SEAL patted the dog hard and Shep barked with apparent delight.
“What do you think we’re going to do when we reach Chile?” asked Henry, thinking over what Hayes had said at the second briefing.
“One step at a time, I guess. Maybe some señoritas? A little ski ng?” Then a wave of seriousness seemed to overcome Grimes. “I’ll tell you, hero, I feel it in my gut we’re on the right trail.”
“I don’t know. The general said the Navy has carriers positioned off New Zealand, South Africa, all around the South Pole. Half the fleet. He said the perps could be anywhere in the southern hemisphere. So why are we looking in Chile, so far away from the Ice Shelf? The odds. . .”
“Haven’t you learned anything from living with these dogs, Henry? You gotta trust yer nose.” Grimes tapped his own nose with a finger. “And you gotta use yer ass!” he added, tapping his head.
Henry smiled and looked down at Shep. The dog’s blue-grey eyes looked back at him as if to say that he agreed with Grimes. “Well, whose nose, would you say, is this ship following?”
“Mine,” said the SEAL, turning to leave. “And the President’s.”
Henry watched him walk away. He looked down at Shep again. “You know, Shep, I used to think his kind was cool when I was twelve. If he ever lands on Earth, he might be worth a shit. Now he just gets on my nerves.”
Grimes paused to watch a Harrier bomber slow to a midair stop as it passed a hundred feet above the flight deck. Then, encouraged by an orange-suited flagman who waved it down frantically, the jet slowly descended. The thunder of the engines grew louder as it touched down. Henry was astonished to feel the deck shake under his feet.
The SEAL glanced back at Henry and saw he was watching the Harrier too. He waited for the whine of the engines to quiet a bit before he cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled, “Ain’t these some apples, hero? There’s some real shit goin’ down!”
Without waiting for an answer, he turned and entered a hatch.
Shep had left Henry’s side and was waiting for him at the hatch as far from the aircraft as he could get. Obviously the Harrier had impressed him, too. Henry decided they’d both had enough of the excitement on deck. He leashed the malamute and led him back to their cabin.
Although it was still early in the day, he felt tired, and he soon found himself lying on his bunk staring at the institutional grey ceiling.
He ruminated on Hayes’s latest briefing. The news was now public, and the world was already planning for a worst-case scenario. Nowhere was there greater panic than in the twin financial metropolises of New York and Tokyo, where a fifteen-foot rise in sea-level would mean flooded subways and ruined infrastructure, not to mention billions of dollars in terms of useless real estate. Hayes hadn’t gone into any great detail, but it was clear the big financial structures were establishing duplicate setups as quickly as possible in cities on higher ground. Printers in the Midwest had stopped working on newspapers and junk mail in order to have the capacity to handle all the hard-copy downloads of bank records, insurance data, credit vouchers and thousands of other supposedly priceless sets of data. Meanwhile the world’s population was talking about nothing else but Deep Ice – the nickname given to the crisis. The phrase had leaked from somewhere on Capitol Hill and quickly spread to the US tabloids, then to the back pages of the mainstream press, and finally into conversations on talk radio and television. Oprah Winfrey’s show – the day after the “Nightline: Fire in the Ice” special about the eruption of Mount Erebus – had broken the daytime Neilson records and made the Ross Ice Shelf a topic of discussion on every street corner and in every coffee shop around the world.
Henry wondered what it would be like if the public got the whole story, if the military admitted that a nuclear bomb had melted a huge hole in the ice. He thought of Grimes’s madness on deck. It only added to the surreal quality of his life; like the Mad Hatter in Wonderland, Grimes was the centre of the tea party. And here on the
Enterprise
they were just as isolated from the real world as Alice had been from hers.
Henry let his gaze roam over the details of his quarters. Bulkheads, tasteful y painted a practical warm white. Like a prison, or a safe, or a laboratory. He looked over at Shep, already asleep beside his bunk. A wave of jealousy swept over him. Why couldn’t he just forget the world and sleep like the dog? What sense did it make to lie here and worry?
There was a soft tap at his door. He guessed it was Sarah, and it was. When he saw her face he knew she was staying with the team.
“I’m in for the duration.” Her dimples were showing.
“General Hayes called me over and. . .”
“Yeah, he said he’d talk to you. I guess all he had to do was call the Pentagon.”
Sarah smiled even more broadly. “He said that, if there was a chance my being on the team might help with the situation, they wanted me here.”
Henry pushed the door closed behind her as she continued her story. He sat near her on his bunk and took out a Lucky Strike, which he put in his mouth but made no attempt to light.
She stopped mid-sentence and gave him a quizzical look. “You don’t smoke.”
“I’m
not
smoking,” he said. “So, don’t they need you at the FBI?”
“No. See, according to Hayes the reason they were planning to send me back was for
my
benefit. They didn’t think I wanted to be here on the
Enterprise
.”
“Well, do you?” asked Henry, looking around for a match.
Sarah seemed surprised at the question. “Sure,” she said.
He shook his head and threw the cigarette at the wall. Shep lifted his head and looked at it.
“What?” said Sarah with alarm.
“I don’t like being cooped up in this floating box. I guess that’s what’s eating me.”
Sarah considered the dog. “If he can handle it, I should think it’d be a piece of cake for you. Besides, is the company so bad?”
“I just want to be out on the ice.” He took another cigarette and put it in his mouth.
She seemed relieved. “Oh, that’s it. You want your day job back.”
“I guess you could say that. I just need to be doing something, I guess. I feel useless.”
Having found nothing with which to light his cigarette, he put it back in the pack.
“Have you ever seen the aurora?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Not since I was a little girl. I’d like to.”
Suddenly Sarah remembered Henry had attended the most recent briefing. She hadn’t been invited.
“It’s that briefing, isn’t it? That’s what’s bothering you. They told you something. What?”
Henry thought for a moment.
“Maybe you’re right,” he began. “The briefing covered a lot of ground, but most of it was about the world.”
“ ‘The world’?”
He told her General Hayes had received so many questions from the crew that he’d decided to share what he knew. The story had leaked to the press, and now everyone was worried about the Ross Ice Shelf. “The thing is, everyone apparently thinks the volcano caused the problem. Apparently only the military knows about the bombs.”
Sarah’s eyes filled with tears. “No one really knows the truth. Not even us.”
“Well, we know more than most, if that’s worth anything.” He took her hand. “I’m sorry to upset you, Sarah. Now you know why I didn’t want to talk about it.”
Sarah smiled. A spent tear dripped onto the back of Henry’s hand. She noticed and lifted his hand to her lips, giving him a playful look, licking the tear away.
Her eyes met his again. “At least we’re in this together.”
A moment later they were on his bunk. This time they didn’t make love, simply held one another for a long while, as though letting go would send them falling into an abyss of despair.
Tears flowed from Sarah.
“I’m sorry. This is completely insane,” she whispered. “It’s not real.”
“You mean,
us
?”
“Everything,” she said. “I have a life, too. Now all of it might be gone.”
Henry didn’t argue. He just held her close, trying to enfold and protect her.
Soon they were asleep.
#
Four hours later the USS
Enterprise
, flagship carrier of the US Navy, sailed within sight of Valparaiso, the main port of Chile. The admiral made no secret of it. All the bul horns were blaring with the news.
Henry’s eyes opened to the announcement. Amazed and delighted to find Sarah asleep in his arms, he looked across her plain green sweater to see a disembodied hand moving beside her. Before he could become alarmed he realized it was his own, numb from lack of circulation. When he pulled on it to try to get it out from under her, Sarah began to awake.
Why is it,
he asked himself,
that women look so beautiful when they’re lying down?
He gazed into her sleepy green eyes. No way to stop the smile she brought to his face. He knew this wasn’t just a sex thing. Not this time. After all, they were full y clothed. Sarah didn’t seem to want to leave either. She made no effort to stir, just lay there absorbing whatever it was that Henry was sending.
“Ever seen Chile?” he asked.
“Only in a bottle,” she answered with a wry smile.
He grinned. “I did some climbing there about five years ago. Very high country – twenty thousand feet or more. The height of the Rockies is low ground by Andes standards.” He studied the green-blue striations of Sarah’s irises; they reminded him of a rare gem, sparkling and priceless, seen but never possessed.
“The Basques, from Northern Spain, settled most of it, mixed with the descendants of the Incas.”
“Incas?” She raised an eyebrow.
“You know, one of the oldest civilizations on the planet. They were mummifying everybody long before the Egyptians thought of it. Somehow I grew up thinking they were latecomers to the American Indian world. But they had a civilization that was highly organized. Tijuanaco. Amazing. Agriculture, irrigation for twenty miles or more, very civilized. . .”