Frozen Fire (31 page)

“Any of our people hurt?”

“No, sir. We were nowhere near it.”

“Good. So what’s the problem?” He yawned again and stretched. It had been a late night spent with a circle of power donors to his campaign.
Thank God this dog-and-pony show is almost over
.

“Whatever happened occurred near the area where we think Cavendish is doing his exploratory drilling for the methane hydrate. If there was an accident related to that it could have—” Ken paused with the barest hint of triumph. “It could have a serious negative environmental impact with long-reaching consequences.”

The president stared at his campaign manager with open disgust. “Who the hell have you been listening to? Al Gore?” He snorted. “Look, Ken, I’m not in the mood for this ecobullshit. Send it to Lucy and let her deal with it. I don’t care what Katy Wirth or the Joint Chiefs say. Lucy is the only one who doesn’t have her thumb up her ass where Cavendish is concerned. Get me some coffee. And tell the colonel to turn this plane around.”

9:35
A.M.
, Sunday, October 26, off the western coast of Taino

The small pod of humpback whales, mostly heavily pregnant females or mothers with still-nursing calves, were among the first of their group to arrive in the Caribbean Sea, where they would spend the winter. Their long journey from the cold, high latitudes was over and their early appearance had delighted thousands of shipboard onlookers as the whales traveled toward the warm waters of the lower latitudes.

Some nearly sixty feet long and weighing thirty tons, the huge creatures moved in elegant arcs through the warm sea, rolling playfully and displaying their pleated throats and long, graceful flippers that were one-third the length of their body. Having reached their destination after weeks of traveling down the eastern coast of North America, the whales were at leisure to enjoy themselves in the relative sanctuary of Taino’s protected waters.

Some crested the surface and instantly blurred the air with fountains of exhaled breath, each blow emptying a gigantic body of nearly all of its breath in less than a second, and refilling those lungs nearly as fast. Others,
more playful perhaps or just following instinct, surged out of the water, their towering shapes streaming water as they curved and twisted before crashing majestically back into the waves with a showy display of enormous, distinctive flukes before disappearing from sight.

Their instincts led them to avoid the strange column of hissing water as they swam between it and the shoreline of Taino, but nothing could have warned them of what lay in wait for them at the surface.

Several of the creatures broke the water at the same time, mothers and their young, and in the fragment of a second that it took for them to empty and replenish their air supply, they began to thrash maniacally. Flippers, flukes, and huge, writhing bodies pounded the sea in helpless torment before death rapidly stilled their efforts.

Aware of a threat they could not see and could not defend against, other pod members rose to the surface. They, too, were killed instantly as the methane that had displaced the air at the sea’s surface entered their bodies, searing their lung tissue and causing the massive mammals to convulse, thrashing the calm blue surface of the sea. The terrifying chaos ended quickly, leaving the carcasses of the lifeless leviathans floating in once-again calm waters.

Panicked by the frenzy of their companions, the last few whales surfaced as well, just beyond the invisible boundary of the poisoned air. All the movement in the water pushed some of the corpses toward the living.

Instinct drove most of the herd to move on, away from whatever unseen predator had decimated their group. But instincts just as strong drove the few mothers who had avoided the methane to remain with their dead calves, gently bumping them in hope of a response and protecting them from the sleek, circling forms of familiar enemies who knew opportunity lay amid the commotion.

9:40
A.M.
, Sunday, October 26, Embassy of Taino, Washington, D.C.

The overwhelming sense of powerlessness that had reared its ugly, long-remembered face last night had frozen into implacability. There was no way Victoria was going to accept with any sort of grace the role of puppet after being the puppetmaster, and so it was an angry but subdued Victoria who arrived immediately upon request in Charlie Deen’s office. The aide who’d escorted her closed the door behind her and Victoria came to a stop in front of one of the wing chairs. She didn’t sit down, she just stared at the
back of Charlie’s balding head until he finally turned around to acknowledge her presence.

Swiveling from his place at the windows, one hand holding a phone to his ear, he gestured with the other that he’d be done shortly.

Several minutes later, having uttered only a low “Keep me informed” the entire time she was in his office, he ended the call and turned fully to face her. Despite her fury, Victoria’s heart lurched when she saw his pallor, the redness around his eyes.

“My God, Charlie, what is it?” she asked, rooted in place.

He stared at her for a few long seconds, his throat working, his cheeks flexing as he struggled to maintain his composure.

“There’s been an underwater landslide on the western side of the island.”

Atlantis
.

Victoria’s body went rigid and she reached out to grasp the arm of the chair for support.

“An earthquake? What happened?”

“Not an earthquake. They’re sure of that, but that’s about all they are sure of. Seismographs picked up two separate concussive events near the face wall at about two thousand feet below the surface. They triggered a landslide.”

Her stomach flipped. “What do you mean by ‘concussive events’?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s all I’ve been told. So far our guys are looking into the stability of the wall. There are faults there, and some parts of those slopes were honeycombed with caves. If the rock wasn’t stable, one could have collapsed and set another into collapse, and then the whole thing broke up.”

Her insides in turmoil, she stared at him and tried to remain calm. “These ‘events’ happened in sequence?”

“They happened less than two minutes apart and about three hundred feet apart,” he said, distractedly.

“When?”

“About forty-five minutes ago”

Victoria’s breath caught in her throat. “
Forty-five minutes?
And you’re just finding out about it? Why didn’t—”

He looked at her with almost vacant eyes. “The communications systems on the island failed before the blasts,” he replied.

At his words, she found herself holding her breath, and staring at him with eyes that she knew had gone wide. “They can’t fail. There are layers of backups. They can’t fail,” she repeated, her words a burning whisper.

“They
did
fail,” he said flatly, and rubbed a hand over his exhausted face. “They’re still down.”

She felt a wobble in her knees, then the cushioned surface of the chair behind her met the back of her thighs and she came to rest on its surface with a soft thump. “Who were you talking to just now?”

“Simon Broadhurst, from the
Wangari Maathai
. He was calling from aboard a U.S. Navy ship that’s hanging around the crash site. He was in touch with the topside communications team pretty soon after it happened, but they were using open radio channels, so they didn’t say much. It took him a while to get the U.S. Navy’s help.”

Good God. Bureaucracy at a time like this
. “Has anyone heard from the habitat?” she asked.

Victoria watched as Charlie squeezed his eyes shut and pulled in a deep breath, shaking his head.

“It’s gone,” he said as if the words were choking him. “Crushed. There’s some footage. It went in minutes.” He took a breath. “The landslide happened on the slope directly above it. Three subs were able to evacuate, but topside lost contact with them soon afterward. There’s no indication that anyone survived. We’re just hoping they’ll surface somewhere.”

Charlie’s words drove all coherent thought from her head as she stared at him, her stomach clenching, her breath hard to find.

Gone. The people. The building
—

She’d been in the habitat a little over twenty-four hours ago, and now it and everyone in it was gone.

She looked up at the frozen-faced ambassador. “Where’s Dennis?”

“No one has heard from him. As I said, communications went down.”

“But there should be one channel up,” Victoria protested. “Charlie, it’s automated.”

“It’s down. It’s all down,” he repeated sharply.

“No, Charlie. Micki would—” She took a deep breath and made herself focus, and realized that Micki could be injured. Or dead.

Or in charge.

She shook away the thought. “We can open a channel from here. Akil knows how to do it.”

Charlie shook his head. “He’s been trying since before the landslide, ever since the network went dark. Nothing is bringing it back online. We initiated emergency procedures and they didn’t work, either.”

“That’s ridiculous. They have to work,” Victoria snapped. “We run tabletop scenarios all the time. We did exercises this week in advance of the mining—” She stopped and looked at him, feeling the blood drain from her face. “What about the mining operation? The rig. Is it okay?”

Charlie shook his head very slightly and rubbed another hand over his shiny, bewildered face. “No word yet.” He paused, choked to a stop. “For Christ’s sake, Vic, tell me if you had anything to do with this.”

“I didn’t,” she replied forcefully, pulling herself to her feet and crossing the room to stand in front of his desk. “I didn’t. You’ve got to believe me, Charlie.”

“How can I, Vic? You’re here, and you shouldn’t be. And everything on the island—”

“Charlie, I told you last night that the Americans know who brought down our plane,” she said, leaning onto his desk. “
Wendy
was the weak link, and Micki. Not me.”

“Do you think the plane and, and this . . . are related?” he asked as the loathing she’d seen in his eyes last night slowly returned.

Victoria refused to look away. “At this point, Charlie, I’d say that’s a given. I don’t believe in coincidences, and a failure of this magnitude is no accident.
But it’s not my doing
,” she said, her voice low and almost shaking with tension. “Give me access to the systems. I’ll get the island back online. There are back doors—”

“We’ve tried them.”

“No, there are others. Ones that only I know about.”

He raised an eyebrow and the disgusted satisfaction in his eyes made her feel dirty.

“I’m the queen of paranoia, right?” she hissed. “Isn’t that what Dennis has always called me? Well, I am paranoid, but I’m not a criminal, Charlie. And I’m not a traitor. Right now I’m the only one who can help you. Trust me, Charlie, and let me do what I need to do.”

“I need to think about it.”

She let out a harsh breath and slammed her palm onto the table, shocking them both.

“Fine,” she snapped. “You go ahead and
think about it
while everyone who’s still alive down there might be dying. What more do you know? Or
what are you willing to tell me?” When he didn’t respond, she straightened her back and forced energy she didn’t possess into her voice. “Despite its location, there hasn’t been seismic activity on or beneath that slope since records have been kept. I suggest you tell whoever is analyzing those events to consider causes other than seismic.”

“Tell me what you know, Victoria.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Charlie, I don’t know anything. All we can do is try to piece things together,” she snapped and spun away from his desk in anger. “I’m going to help you, if only to clear my name.”

“Vic—”

She turned back to face him. “Look, we’re all stretched to the edges right now, but even if no one else can see things clearly, you and I have to. If I
were
the one who planned all this, I wouldn’t be here now, would I? But I am. So I’m telling you again that I was not and am not involved with any of this. So get over it.” She stopped for two deep breaths, then continued. “Here’s what I know: One of our planes exploded yesterday morning, only a few miles offshore. The Americans are pretty sure GAIA is involved. And now, almost exactly twenty-four hours later, as the mining operation is about to commence its live test, this happens. There’s only one possible option, Charlie: terrorism. Maybe it wasn’t Dennis who was the target. Maybe it was
Atlantis
and the mining operation all the time.”

“No one knows about them.”

“So we thought.” She folded her arms across her chest and leveled her gaze at him. “Consider this. I don’t care if it is a seismic region. How many landslides have two ‘concussive’ triggers that happen two minutes apart, and almost exactly three hundred feet apart? On a pockmarked undersea cliff wall that was declared stable independently by several world-renowned marine geologists? Here’s an idea: Let’s call them detonations and see if that changes anything for you.”

“Who could have planted anything there other than you?”

She flinched and tried to ignore the venom in his remark. “Only another insider could. No one else could have gotten near that wall. We all know there’s no such thing as a totally secure system. Even the most secure system—and I’d say that the island qualifies for that description—every secure system has some degree of porosity. I tried damned hard to plug every open pore, but if I couldn’t see it, I couldn’t plug it. Which means that anyone who
could
see it—or who had created it—could exploit it.”

“There would have been too much planning involved. It would take
months to put this together. Maybe more time than that. Who could go that long without being detected? And who would know where to look?”

The “other than you” was silent this time.

Determined not to show any more anger, Victoria raised an eyebrow slowly and meaningfully. “Yes, it would have taken a lot of planning, and a lot of stealth to continually circumvent all of the security measures we have in place. However, if someone
were
able to sidestep all of our security and never did anything to arouse suspicion, he or she would have had plenty of time to do whatever was necessary,” she replied, her voice cold. Turning her back to him, she began to pace the breadth of the room.