Protocol 7 (32 page)

As the team members pulled on the three separate layers of the suits and attached the communication devices to their wrists, the stark reality of being hundreds of feet below the ice became a real notion to them for the first time.

“Hayden, I need you in the front while I suit up,” Max said.

The inventor goggled at him. “No!” he blurted. “I mean…I…I’m not a pilot. I don’t actually drive these things, I just build them.”

“So who better to sit behind the console?” Max said, standing up. “Look, there’s nothing to it; we’re barely moving at the moment. Just watch this indicator and this attitude gauge, and adjust as needed. Easy as that.” He didn’t wait for an answer; he just stood up, pulled Hayden into the command chair, and slid back toward the ready room and beyond.

For the first time in his life, Hayden was in command of one of the ships he actually built. A sense of claustrophobia set in. He questioned why he had gotten himself involved in the operation in the first place. I’m a goddamn reclusive genius, he told himself, not Indiana Jones.

Meanwhile Andrew had wormed his way to the crucial juncture between the smart skin and the datastream connectors, just below the command console of Spector VI. Ironically, he was the only one not wearing one of the temperature-regulating eco-suits, but he was the closest to the freezing water rushing past, literally inches away and making the chamber icy cold. He shivered as he lay on his side, barely holding onto his flashlight, desperately wishing the fuselage lights hadn’t been turned off.

This is it, he told himself. His hands were only twelve inches away from the fiber optic connectors, each one as thick as a finger, but they were almost completely surrounded by silver contacts, sizzling with discharge from the smartskin. Any sudden move, any momentary contact, would end his life instantly.

Twelve inches, he told himself. Might as well be twelve miles. He pushed his body forward slowly, very slowly, stretching out one arm, extending three fingers to reach the connection. Careful…he told himself. Careful…

Above and behind him in the ready room, all but two members of the team had suited up and returned to their work on the bridge. Simon and Nastasia still remained.

Simon was cinching up his boots when he saw Nastasia struggling with the third layer of her rig, getting it twisted and putting it on half upside-down. He moved over and took the limp sleeve from her. “Let me help you with that,” he said.

“I think I am all right,” she responded.

He ignored the stubbornness and moved closer. “Here. The battery pack connects with the exterior suit like this,” he said. He took it gently from her fingers, reversed it, and plugged it effortlessly into the socket she’d been struggling with for ten minutes.

“Hmm,” she said, quirking her mouth. “I suppose I could use some help.”

He tried to untangle the connector as she pulled her hair up through the suit…and in that moment, Simon’s childhood flashed in front of him.

He caught a quick glimpse of a tattoo on Nastasia’s neck, right at the nape, just below the hairline. It was a hauntingly familiar design—identical to the one he had seen since he was boy on his father’s briefcase, identical to the one on the door to his father’s mysterious study in Corsica—the symbol that had haunted him all his life.

Simon had always associated the symbol with his father, but Oliver had never explained what it was. And now here it was again—on Nastasia’s neck. A chill ran through him.

Nastasia sensed something had changed. She turned back to him and frowned when she saw that he was white with shock.

“Are you all right?” she said. “You look as if you have seen a ghost.”

He stared at her for a long time and then nodded. “I’m fine.”

He noticed something more as she looked at him: her eyes. It wasn’t their shape as much as the color—a strange light blue, pale and almost colorless in certain kinds of light.

The only other person he knew who had eyes that color was his father.

Ryan interrupted the moment with a nervous call to Sam, who was still hovering over the open maintenance hatch. “Sam!” he said sharply. “What’s going on with Andrew downstairs?”

Before she had a chance to respond, Andrew’s voice came up through the deck-plates: “We’re good to go!”

They could hear him rattling and scraping, crawling back the way he had come. Hayden began to activate the holo-displays and monitors immediately, one after another, moving into the seat next to Max to begin the calibration process.

“Andrew!” Hayden shouted, “I’m not getting a thing! Which channel did you use, there’s no—”

Andrew’s head popped out of the maintenance hatch so suddenly it made Samantha jump back in surprise. “Use the standby mode! That should work!” He lifted his arms, and Ryan and Samantha helped pull him free of the tunnel and close the hatch, while Hayden struggled to reconnect the passive sensor functions to the displays.

It happened all at once. The display in front of Max flickered and burst into brilliant full-color life, showing the view in front of the ship as clearly as a well-cleaned picture window. Three different hologram displays—one complete sphere of the space around the ship out to three hundred feet, one deep scan aft, and one deep scan forward—blossomed to life in an almost blinding rainbow of color, filling the entire forward section of the bridge.

And all of them showed exactly the same thing: they were drifting nose-first into a solid wall of ice.

“Brace yourselves!” Max bellowed and lunged at the command console. Before the team had a chance to react, he reversed the thrusters and tilted the submersible violently upward, throwing everyone off balance.

“Collision alert!” the voice of the Spector called. “Collision alert!”

“Sir, we just lost a drone,” the Surveillance Officer said, sitting in front of a holo-display.

Roland spun on him. “What the hell are you talking about?” he shouted. Before the officer had a chance to respond, the commander continued. “How could you lose a drone? You’re sitting right there navigating it.”

“I think I hit something, sir.”

“You hit something?” Roland bent over his shoulder and peered at the display. “Get the rest of the drones on its tail. What were your coordinates?”

He reeled them off without taking his eyes from the screen. “At 1,032 feet, sir,” he said.

Roland turned to the digital holograph of Fissure 9, thinking it still displayed the beacon of the intruder. But the tiny blinking light had disappeared.

“God damn it,” he hissed. The vessel it represented could be almost anywhere in the labyrinth by now, but given its last known location, its direction and speed, he knew exactly where it was going. “Whatever the hell this is, it’s made its way to the loading station,” he said. Then he turned to his team. “We’ve got to get there as soon as possible.”

He tapped his shoulder again, trying to connect to Central Command. After relaying his password he asked, “What’s the status on Dragger Pass?”

Mathias came on immediately this time. He didn’t sound happy. “We’ve dispatched four units, fully armed. They’re on their way to you now. ETA is twenty-eight minutes.”

Too damn long, Roland said only to himself, then tapped his shoulder and disconnected. Once again, he turned to his team. “We don’t have a goddamn half an hour,” he said. “Load up the DITVs. We’re going to take care of this ourselves.”

The officer in charge of special operations stood up suddenly. “Sir,” he said, crisp and cool, “if I may, it will take us more than twenty-five minutes to reach the loading station ourselves with the DITV. Only the third tunnel up to the Dragger Pass is available. Tunnel Two has caved in.”

Roland was furious. “Damn it!” he said again, and smashed his fist against the console. Then he spun away and stalked from the room, throwing his last command over his shoulder with venomous contempt. “I’m getting the goddamn flares!” he snapped.

* * *

Three thousand feet below them, four CS-23s, the dreaded Crevasse Spiders dispatched from Central Command, crawled through a pitch-black opening to Dragger Pass. They were marvelous machines: 160-foot wide, eight-legged robotic transport and weapons platforms, designed to travel everywhere and anywhere through the deep ice. Each robotic craft housed a crew of eight special operations soldiers in the main cabin; that spherical cabin rotated 360 degrees, keeping the crew level while the main body of the Spider violently twisted and turned on its sixty-foot expandable legs, rotating and extending for extreme flexibility and speed. This CS-23 could climb any icy terrain by compressing against the walls or stretching across wide crevices; it could travel vertically with ease or streak like lightning along a flat horizontal surface at more than thirty miles an hour. The tips of the retractable legs even had specialized heated anchor joints that could penetrate the ice and lock the leg into place, allowing the robot to hang from no more than three of its eight legs if necessary.

Only the cockpits were illuminated as the Spiders pressed against the walls of ice and crawled upward at tremendous speed. Below them, the dark fissure of Dragger Pass dropped another several thousand feet straight down to the ice-locked bedrock below. The Spiders looked like apparitions coming up from the depths of Hell itself; even their mechanical sound was no more than a whisper; a subtle mechanical hissing made by the constant rotation of their arms.

They were closing in. Fast.

* * *

Roland wasted no time. He made his way to the armament room and pulled down a crate of the special rifles that Vector5 had nicknamed “flares.” The long-barreled weapons, stored in racks of twenty with thirty-cartridge magazines, were designed for illumination more than offense; they actually shot luminescent bullets that, once in the ice, could be turned on remotely to make the translucent walls glow with a penetrating, bluish light. Although these were not used as standard rifles, they had powerful destructive potential as well; the shells could easily pierce the armor of any sub-ice vehicle.

Roland wanted a full rack of flares in his DITV, along with two extra crates of ammunition. He was certain of his goal: he needed to stop whatever had entered Fissure 9 before whoever was inside got a look at the loading cranes above the dome. He knew that the fate of the planet rested on the secrecy of the operation. He knew there could be no half measures.

He didn’t like it, but Roland was prepared to take lives if he had to. There was no other solution.

Six Vector5 soldiers under Roland’s command followed him silently onto the Deep Ice Transport Vehicle. The transport looked like something out of a science-fiction movie: three gigantic tires, bigger than a jumbo jet’s—two in front, one in back. The two front tires extended outward through a complex structure protruding from the central part of the body like a cat ready to lunge forward. Below the main cabin that hovered eight feet above the ice was a ramp that lowered to make an entrance into the vehicle. But what made the DITV unique was its fragmented surface, as if it had been covered with the shards of a shattered mirror. It was stealth technology—a variation on the same stealth-tech that every Vector5 vehicle employed.

Although the depth of their operation was too great for satellites to detect, Vector5’s engineers were taking no chances: the surfaces of all its vehicles were broken up into polygons, making radar detection almost impossible, and they were covered with non-reflective, sound-absorptive coatings to make them even harder to scan. What’s more, they were silent, powered by tremendously efficient batteries that allowed them to generate great power and speed. A sophisticated AI unit ran the entire vehicle without any help. It was almost entirely self-guided, requiring only audio commands but rarely needed physical manipulation of certain components.

As the Vector5 team entered the vehicle, the commander took the central seat. It offered a 360-degree view of his surroundings through digital displays. The DIT Vehicle had no windows; they were unnecessary. The crew had better visibility with the advanced camera systems on board.

Roland shifted restlessly as the crew ran through the standard systems check. There was no time to waste; he knew that. It would take them more than twenty-five minutes to ascend the thirty-degree incline, up through Tunnel 3 to the loading station at Fissure 9—where the mysterious visitor would be waiting, he was sure.

The vehicle’s door closed with a hissss, compressing the atmosphere in the airtight cabin even before the soldiers had taken their positions. The pilot, his eyes fixed on his guidance console, spoke the words: “Destination: Loading station. Via: Tunnel 3.”

In less than three seconds, the DIT Vehicle adjusted its wheels and rotated toward the direction of the specified tunnel. The movements were so fluid the crew could barely feel the turn of the wheel from inside the compartment; the first clue was the sudden, serious push of the invisible hand of momentum on Roland’s chest as the DIT accelerated swiftly and smoothly, like a rocket-powered tank, moving with eerie silence into Tunnel 3 without hesitation.

“Let’s have the readout of the drones,” Roland said, still restless. The DITV’s AI instantly connected him to the recon station they had just left.

One of the soldiers on board, deep-scanning their destination, raised his head. “Sir, I’m spotting an unusual type of submersible, in Fissure 9, not far from the loading station,” he said.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Roland shouted. “Are you sure it’s not one of ours?”

“Sir, the computers have cross-referenced all possible embedded codes given off by our subs. Nothing is showing up.”

Slanting forward and adjusting the handgun on his side, Roland said, “This better not be the Chinese! If it is, their goddamn military satellites have already followed the entry.”

“Sir, the submersible gave off no signals, not even to our own satellites,” the surveillance officer said. “If they did, we would have picked up the incision ourselves.”

“Nothing can be that stealth,” Roland said flatly. “Check for anomalies in the Southern Sea within the past month. Look for sighting, undocumented arrivals, unexplained sinkings—anything.” Something would give away the source of the intruder. It had to.