Frozen Fire (2 page)

“Captain Broadhurst, the sun is up. Can we get under way?” she asked quietly, even though there wasn’t a crew member within earshot.

“I’m English, Micki. The proprieties must be observed,”
he’d said earlier, giving her that smile. She’d wanted to roll her eyes but had stopped herself.

“In a few more minutes. I’m still reviewing your dive plan.”

She turned to face him full on with a mildly amused expression on her face and one slim eyebrow cocked. Deploying her silkiest Alabama drawl, she answered him. “I know it’s unorthodox, Captain. But, as we’ve discussed, that unorthodoxy is necessary. Vital.”

“You ought to have briefed me
before
we left port,” he replied.

Tradition and the law of the sea gave him absolute authority on his ship. However, both Micki and the captain knew that, as the second in command of Taino’s security forces, she outranked him on land, and that’s what she was leveraging out here in the soft predawn light. And that’s why the censure in his tone was more mild than it would have been had she been anyone else.

“Your dive plan flouts protocol, and may thereby endanger yourself and my crew,” he continued in his starchiest, high-street voice. “You’re not to dive alone without tracking capabilities. I shouldn’t allow it.”

Micki looked down and made her lips twitch as though they were concealing laughter, then looked him in the eyes as she let loose a smile that left him a bit dazzled, as intended.

“But you will allow it, Captain, despite its unorthodoxy, won’t you?” she said softly. “This is a high-priority mission and one that will be over quickly. I’ve tried to make it clear that we have to place this equipment this morning.”

Simon let a silent moment slide by, then folded his arms across his broad, uniformed chest, all the while maintaining eye contact. “I’m not certain you understand the risks, Ms. Crenshaw. They’re substantial.”

“Oh, I understand them, Captain. I also understand, to a degree that you can’t, that the risk faced by
not
executing this mission is one that will be felt by everyone connected with Taino. I thought I’d made it clear that the
placement and purpose of this equipment is top secret, and that’s why I have to do the dive alone and without you tracking my movements.” She let her voice fumble, stopping short of overdoing the emotion. “The accountability for undertaking this mission is mine and mine alone, Captain, and I willingly accept that.”

“Ms. Crenshaw—”

“Captain Broadhurst—Simon—please don’t make me get all official on you,” she said, interrupting him with a near-whisper. “Darlin’, this little dive of mine is a national security issue and your failure to assist me with it would be a grave violation of the oath you took when you became an officer of the Taino Security Force. As a senior official, I wouldn’t be able to overlook something like that.” She paused and gave him a sad smile. “You really only have two options, Simon. You can help me execute this mission, or you can refuse to help.”

Her quiet words hung in the air, as did the words she didn’t have to say. Under Taino’s laws, if he didn’t help her, she could relieve him of his command and have him secured to his quarters. Then she’d carry out the mission anyway.

Clearly displeased at having his options so neatly delineated, however softly Micki might have done it, the captain gave clipped orders to his crew, his now-cool gaze never leaving Micki’s face. She acknowledged his surrender with a nod that held a convincing hint of feminine contrition, but inside triumph reigned. Then she turned her attention to the approaching crew member who would help her into the one-atmosphere diving tube. She was going down. That’s all that mattered now.

In one easy movement, she pulled off the wind pants she wore over her swimming suit, then slid the matching anorak over her head. She reveled for a moment in the cool breeze that brushed her bare flesh and pretended not to notice the surreptitious looks Simon and the small, all-male crew were giving her almost-naked body.

A few feet way, the crew was doing their final checkout on the dive tube they’d christened
Flipper
. It was sleek, gray, and highly maneuverable underwater, but that’s where the resemblance to everyone’s favorite dolphin ended. It was just another useful high-tech toy, as far as Micki was concerned. She’d trained in it, as all the security personnel had trained in this and all the other high-tech dive equipment her commander in chief, Dennis Cavendish, kept acquiring. Despite never having actually used the tube for any purpose other than training, Micki was confident that she could carry
out her duty and be topside before anyone could learn that the entire mission was a fabrication.

This dive was an extremely daring act, but it was a necessary part of the plan. It was a heady feeling to know that the years she’d put into gaining her boss’s trust and into learning everything there was to know about the nation of Taino—and the reality behind its clever façade—would soon pay off. All the condescension she’d endured at Dennis’s hands was a small price to pay to ensure that the money and energy Dennis and his minions had put into achieving his megalomaniacal dream of controlling the world’s next-generation energy source would be wasted. The world would be shown once again, vividly, that greed and arrogance led inevitably to incalculable damage to the Earth and all Her inhabitants.

Yes, Dennis, in a few days, you will have changed the world forever. For the worse
.

Fully ensconced in the one-person diving tube, Micki mentally counted the clicks and hisses as the crew secured the seals that would keep her separate from the sea and safe from its frigid pressures. As she waited for the dive master to speak to her through the headphones, she kept her eyes trained on the small black boxes she’d carefully secured to the platform at the front of the tiny vessel.

When she’d approached Simon about this unscheduled trip, Micki had told him the twin units were a pair of new, state-of-the-art surveillance devices made by a boutique firm in Switzerland. With a deprecating roll of her eyes, she’d added that they were being deployed as a favor to the company’s owner, a business associate of Dennis’s. The boxes were beta units and Dennis had agreed to let Taino be their first real-world test bed because he believed the technology held promise and would provide them with useful data if it worked as planned. Micki had added, as offhand as ever, that even she wasn’t entirely sure what the devices were meant to do; she had been told only that she was to place them in specific secure locations without her movements being tracked.

Everything she’d said was a lie, of course. The units were highly sophisticated bombs, the brainchild of Garner Blaylock, Earth activist, unsung genius, and Dennis Cavendish’s worst nightmare. When activated remotely by Micki, the black boxes would exploit the one vulnerability that Victoria Clark, Taino’s white-hat paranoiac secretary of national security and Micki’s immediate boss, hadn’t taken into account in all of her continual brainstorming about terrorism: sabotage. The kind that could be carried out by an
insider, a member of Victoria’s trusted, handpicked inner circle. All those endless hours of security audits and exhaustive tabletop exercises would have been for nothing.

Micki couldn’t wait to see the look on Victoria’s face when she realized it.

Talk about a blind spot
.

Working side by side with Victoria for the last few years and overseeing the ubiquitous background checks, covert surveillance, network trolling, and physical searches on the employees, it had become apparent to an incredulous Micki that Victoria hadn’t taken any precautions against the most obvious option. She’d never considered that someone she trusted implicitly—and had investigated so thoroughly—could set a bomb and destroy everything Victoria was meant to protect. This ludicrous arrogance was a rather alarming character flaw in Victoria, who prided herself on her emotionless perfectionism. In a moment of supreme and deliberate irony, Micki had even suggested the notion of a mole, an insider with malicious intent.

Victoria had considered it carefully, of course. She considered everything carefully. But then she dismissed insider cooperation as a viable threat. For such a plan to be carried out would require there to be too many gaps in her heavily fortified, overtly redundant security perimeter. Micki had listened in awe as Victoria, one of the most highly respected security experts in the world, told her that—on Taino, on
her
turf—such a threat fell into the category identified by security experts as having extremely high impact but extremely low probability. Micki had even argued with her, pointing out that that was the same category into which the notion of people flying airliners into tall office buildings had once been placed. But Victoria was adamant. Not on Taino. Not with
her
security parameters in place.

It was a significant source of amusement to Micki that Victoria had never considered that the very person responsible for maintaining those parameters could be the black hat Victoria never stopped looking for. And it was a source of tremendous pride to Micki that she was able to create those vital, improbable gaps, leaving Taino’s computer and security networks riddled with hidden virtual tunnels.

And today, in less than an hour, she would place the matched set of small explosives into critical fissures in the cliff walls that loomed above
Atlantis
, the top secret, deep-sea habitat and methane-hydrate mining operation on which Dennis Cavendish was staking the world’s future.

Later, Micki would detonate the devices, triggering a submarine landslide that would destroy the entire installation. All of Dennis’s proprietary
technological advances would be lost and his minions would be sacrificed—horrible but necessary deaths. Dennis Cavendish, the man who’d crowned himself a king and wanted to be a god, would be hated and reviled, his name cursed, his legacy ruined, his dreams literally crushed.

The plan was so simple, so clean, so elegant that it had made Micki want to laugh out loud each time she’d thought about it over the past few months. When Garner had told her to get inside Dennis’s organization eight years ago, neither she nor Garner had had any idea that such an opportunity would present itself. All she was meant to do was simply spy on the organization: observe, dig around when and where she could, and report back. That she was hired to be in charge of so much internal security had been beyond either of their most ambitious fantasies. All they had hoped to do was discover what Dennis Cavendish and his Climate Research Institute were doing, and use that information against him. It had worked in small ways over the years by stopping some of his pet projects, but being able to disrupt not just Dennis’s machinations, but to impact the world’s future so dramatically was a gift from the gods, a mandate from Earth. Micki would not, could not, fail. That she’d come up with the plan to sabotage
Atlantis
herself, and that Garner had seized on it as viable, just added to the buzz in her bloodstream.

“All set, Ms. Crenshaw?” The dive master’s voice came through the headphones clearly and Micki fought back a smile at the rush of excitement.

“I’m ready when you are,” she replied, briefly nodding at the beautiful and still-furious Simon Broadhurst through the porthole in front of her.

The dive master issued a command and Micki felt a low vibration begin as the ship’s winch was brought to life. Seconds later, the pod encasing her was lifted from the tender ship’s dive platform. The deck disappeared from her view as the dive tube swung slowly away from the ship to hang in midair above the surface of the calm early-dawn sea. She felt a brief shudder as the winch’s gear shifted and then the sensation of falling in slow motion took over.

The splashdown was easy and controlled, and the dive tube’s motors started flawlessly when she initiated the ignition sequence. Less than ten minutes after she’d been given the captain’s grudging clearance to dive, she heard the loud metallic clunk as the tether released her and retracted, leaving her free to maneuver the sleek unit to her destination two thousand feet below the surface, and two thousand feet above the most daring mining operation ever undertaken.

Pointing the nose down, Micki left the surface world. The first thing she did was switch off the communications link to the
Wangari
. With the faint radio static gone, the only noises she could hear were the muted hum of the pod’s motor and the sparkling rush of bubbles past the porthole. The sounds soothed her as she aimed the vessel away from the well-lit surface and toward the dark, dramatic cliff created by a tectonic shift thousands of years ago. Time seemed suspended as she moved quickly and effortlessly through the water.

As she neared the shallow, twilit floor of the continental shelf, she cut her speed so she could enjoy what would be her last trip to this pristine undersea paradise. She felt no regret about what she was intending to do. She’d been granted an opportunity to right some of humanity’s wrongs, and the vista before her was her early reward.

Coral and anemones and brightly colored fish, doing what they’d done for millennia, displayed no curiosity toward the noisy monster that moved past them in the watery dusk. Micki slowed further, gliding just above the smooth seafloor.

Octopi slithered away. Eels and their clueless prey watched her from their crevices among the rocks and maddening human debris that littered the bottom. Curiosity got the best of a pair of shy hammerhead sharks and they swam toward her, arcing up and away seconds before they would have made impact. Moving at a speed that barely registered, Micki steered the submersible to the stark, jagged line where the seafloor gave way to the abyss and hovered there, pointing downward, for a few seconds.

Then, with an abrupt burst of acceleration, she sent the dive tube surging forward past the edge. The deepest dark appeared beneath her, replacing the half-light reflected by the pale, sandy bottom now behind her. Her body braced itself against the sensation of falling that her intuition insisted was taking place, though the tube was stable in the water.