Frozen Fire (21 page)

“Synonymous with sin,”
she’d said the first time they met.

It hadn’t been just a flirtatious comment. As a woman, and as a lover, she was hot, moody, unpredictable, tempting, and inventive. It was a delicious and exhausting combination most of the time. Except for times like the present, when the extrication from another of her self-inflicted messes made his life complicated.

“You okay?” Matt asked cautiously.

Sam knew the last thing Matt wanted to do was get involved in anything remotely personal so he tried to inject a smile into his voice. “Yeah. I’ve been tryin’ to get through to her most of the day. My calls just go straight into voice mail.” He let out a heavy breath. “Hell, Matt, her hands can’t be full of piña coladas all the time. She might be just putting me on
Ignore
, but I’m beginnin’ to think something’s not right.”

Matt sighed heavily into the phone and muttered, “Like I need this. All right, buddy, let me make some phone calls. I’ll have her call you if I get through. But I warn you, by the time you talk to her, I will have chewed off at least half her ass, so don’t be expecting any thanks for being the concerned boyfriend.”

Fiancé
. “I’ll plead the Fifth. Thanks, Matt.”

8:00
P.M
., Saturday, October 25,
Atlantis
, off the western coast of Taino

Marie LaSalle sat in the snug, streamlined quarters that comprised her private office and personal living space. It was in the habitat pod next to the control center and, since she was the most senior person on the staff, her part of the modular unit was slightly larger than the rest of the staff quarters. It was comfortably decorated to her specifications and, while not spacious, it didn’t feel cramped. Despite that, and despite loving what she was doing, she still sometimes missed having the ability to step out of the door and feel sun on her face and a black sand beach beneath her feet. Now was one of those times.

She sipped the flute of sparkling water she’d poured for herself. Had the day progressed as originally intended, it would have been delicate bubbles of vintage Champagne bursting gently on her tongue. Instead, the mood of the day had been somber, the conversations quiet and occasionally grim.

Even so, the cold truth was that the news of the plane crash had had little actual impact on the personnel in
Atlantis
. A small bolt of shocked dismay had struck Marie when she received the news; her response was echoed by her crew. She had led a moment of silence for the victims, and then
everyone had returned to their tasks with markedly less animation than they had displayed moments before.

Had any outsider, even Dennis, been present, he or she would no doubt have considered the crew’s reaction cold and unfeeling. That would have been an accurate but unfair characterization. These highly focused scientists were long used to working at the boundary where reality met the imagination, where technology met untried possibilities. Emotions held but a small place in their lives. The ability to disengage was one of the more crucial traits required of everyone who had been selected to spend months at a time living in close quarters at a depth of four thousand feet. And no one in
Atlantis
had been personally acquainted with the flight crew or the passengers. The amount of emotional energy any of them would expend grieving for people they didn’t know was minuscule.

That’s not to say the news of the accident didn’t have an effect on every person in
Atlantis
. Unquestionably it did, but more upsetting to them than the loss of fifteen lives was the specter of technological failure; in
Atlantis
everyone lived within the ever-present, never-mentioned shadow of death, instantaneous and horrible and only inches—and seconds—away.

Four thousand feet beneath the sea, they were an alien society, a civilization unto themselves.

The only material comfort that they relied on surface-dwellers to provide was food, and there was a month’s supply of that on hand at all times. Everything else was taken care of on site. Special seafloor power arrays converted the limitless energy of strong ocean currents into the electricity that kept the entire structure functioning. Special rebreathing units scrubbed and recirculated the air; an oxygen generator took care of the rest. A desalination plant ensured potable water. Every contingency had been planned for, every need satisfied, every small luxury accommodated. Dennis had seen to it personally.

Underwater habitats had fascinated him for decades. He’d never doubted that people could live and work under the sea. It had been done successfully on a small scale since the early 1960s. But Jacques Cousteau’s Conshelf projects, the U.S. Navy’s Sealabs, and even the interagency Tektite projects had pushed the limits only so far. Dennis believed that thirty-odd years had been enough time to play in the shallows; it was time to take the habitats from sixty feet and six hundred feet to more challenging depths, and to put them to uses beyond mere research and within reach of more than just a few marine biologists.

In one of their earliest conversations, Dennis had told Marie—had vowed—that his structures would not only be viable long-term habitats, but that they would change the way the world worked. He had already begun to assemble a team of cowboy scientists and renegade engineers who could rise to his irresistible challenge. She’d been one of the earliest employees at the institute, and one of
Atlantis
’s earliest proponents.

Part of the miracle of
Atlantis
was that it had taken only a decade to design and build.

Every step of the design and planning of
Atlantis
had been undertaken with Dennis at the helm. His childlike enthusiasm had swept everyone along in its tide. Every person working on the project had been handpicked by Dennis, who’d used grant money, scholarships, and design competitions as lures to bring the best innovative thinkers and creative minds to him.

The result was a daring experiment that no government or corporation could ever have achieved. Sweeping aside the strangleholds routinely placed on creativity—regulations and worries over liabilities—Dennis had forged ahead, demanding loyalty, ingenuity, and hard work from his people. His only inviolable command was to make it safe and functional, because each member of the team was going to have to live in it for a few weeks at a time. The result was magnificent, a tribute to pushing the limits of the collective imagination.

And she, Marie LeSalle, was running it, entrusted by Dennis Cavendish to bring
Atlantis
to its rightful place in human history. She closed her eyes and let the realization flow over her. This day was as much about her perseverance as it was about his.

With the success they’d been striving for so imminent, trying to maintain a suitably somber attitude was next to impossible, despite the morning’s tragedy. Marie had finally had to excuse herself for a brief, private celebration. She knew she deserved it and harbored a hidden but simmering resentment that anything, even the death of fifteen people, had intruded on her triumph.

For the last several hours, she had maintained only the barest hint of a smile as she stood before the array of computer monitors in
Atlantis
’s control center watching her staff move in a muted ballet as they finalized the project’s operational details.

The methodology they’d devised for actually mining the crystals had been so simple, similar at first to techniques used for undersea recovery of petroleum and natural gas. They sank a well bore several hundred feet beneath
the crust, below the methane hydrate, and triggered a small, controlled explosion that put holes in the end of the pipeline to provide access to the material. At this point in the process, the operation moved to the fringes of known technology.

Topsiders had for years theorized that the best method for harvesting the methane would be to pump superheated water into the cavity. The methane hydrate ice crystals, warmed from below, would be altered and the released gas would be able to be harvested and moved to the surface, where it would be transferred to tanks for purification, storage, and distribution. The critical problem had always been getting enough water into the cavity—and keeping that water at the right temperature as it was pumped for thousands of feet through a frigid environment. The engineering costs would be prohibitive; the loss of heat through the pipes would be massive; the logistics of bringing such an operation online would be daunting.

Locating the entire operation right there on the seafloor neatly eliminated the problem.

Which is why, during the past day, Marie’s team had been forcing a specially created stabilizing chemical into the clathrate deposit, which would enable the first-ever large-scale, safe harvesting of methane hydrate crystals. The chemical, officially named “dennisium” in honor of the man himself, facilitated the retrieval at several stages. Injected at high pressure into the caches of intact methane hydrate crystals, it made the crystals brittle, and therefore prone to separating at significantly lower temperatures, which meant the temperature of the water they induced could be significantly lower than previously projected—in fact, it didn’t have to be much warmer than seawater. Once the stabilized, lightweight crystals were successfully harvested, they would be transferred to the surface.

And Dennis would bring the energy industry to its knees.

In the privacy of her quarters, Marie knew her triumph was justified, if perhaps insensitive at that particular moment. She and her team had overcome some of the greatest obstacles humans and technology had ever faced to design this operation and bring it to full functionality. Extraordinary-distances, extreme pressure, frigid temperatures, and fast and often unpredictable currents had been but a few of the challenges they’d faced and surmounted. Her team had prevailed, although the sea had not given way easily.

Feeling the heady rhythm of superiority pulse through her, Marie tapped a few keys on the small laptop on the table in front of her. Instantly,
the screen became her window to the outside world as she brought up real-time video footage of the mining operation as captured by cameras mounted outside the habitat’s pods.

The sight never failed to leave her both awed and humbled.

Throughout the years it had taken to build the habitat and then the mining operation, the sea had continually asserted its presence. A never-ending swirl of sea “snow,” minute bits of skeletal remains, decayed matter, and other jetsam, drifted, now and always, through swaths of brightness cast by powerful spotlights mounted on the habitat’s superstructure. Myriad bizarrely configured fish, octopi, the occasional curious shark or whale, and other fantastic, less recognizable sea creatures emerged from the impenetrable shadows that hugged the edges of the light to swim or drift among the struts, tanks, and machinery that comprised the submarine seascape.

Bizarre deep-water coral and sponges had already encased some of the pillars, which now appeared to be the spires of an undersea cathedral. Sea worms wound sinuously, ethereally among them. Tiny insectlike crustaceans moved through the water in dizzying, seemingly mechanized bursts of minute motion, in sharp contrast to the balletic glide of squid and the delicate wanderings of starfish along the seafloor. It was a view that could hypnotize her, and sometimes Marie thought it was as though the sea had given its approval to the intrusive, alien structure, and had bestowed an unearthly elegance on such a high-tech, industrial vista.

She closed her eyes for the briefest of moments and let quiet triumph wash over her. Never in her career had a project been such a challenge, never had one given her such a sense of personal pride. This was the crowning achievement of her career, of her life. Nothing could possibly surpass it.

Their success—
her
success—tomorrow would have effects that would ripple across the world and across time.

The team she and Dennis had put together, the team they had nurtured, would introduce to the world a new fossil fuel: methane hydrate. Retrieving the precious crystals would not irreparably destroy massive amounts of the earth’s surface. When the methane hydrate was burned to generate power, its only byproducts would be carbon dioxide and water. The crystals needed no belching, polluting refineries to become usable. Handled properly, the crystals could be transported easily and safely, with no risk of befouling coastlines in the event of an accident.

Whenever Dennis decided to announce it, news of the discovery of
hundreds of millions of cubic meters of methane hydrate crystals beneath the Caribbean seafloor would enliven the world’s financial markets; the news that the cache was already being mined would stun them. But only for a few seconds. Someone, somewhere—Wall Street, London, Hong Kong, Dubai—would realize that the balance of world power was about to shift. Then the trading frenzy would begin.

Announcing the mining operation was an enormous risk. Going public would put the Taino installation into the crosshairs of the petroleum industry, the natural gas, coal, and hydroelectric power industries, and the nuclear power industry, all of which would be waiting for, hoping for, and possibly plotting its failure.
Atlantis
would become the newest target for terrorism.

Even without the potential for human-generated danger,
Atlantis
was still at risk because Nature itself could rebel.

Atlantis
lay in the deepest part of the Caribbean Sea, near a fault line between two tectonic plates. The area was well known for its seismic activity—earthquakes and volcanic eruptions were familiar events in the region. Taino itself was a volcanic island.

Marie took the knowledge in stride. The potential effects of an earthquake of a magnitude 7 on the Richter scale had been used as a mea sure against the amount of torsion and shaking the rig and habitat could withstand. The compartmentalized design enabled damaged sections to be sealed off and jettisoned so as to minimize any damage to the remaining structure. The huge struts of the drilling platform were tethered to the seafloor, yet allowed for significant flexibility in the event of unusually strong currents, even the sucking pressures of a tsunami. The harvesting and transfer installation was braced against collapse. Every conceivable scenario had been considered, every vulnerability addressed. The result was a masterpiece of materials, design, and construction.