‘Jesus wept! And this!’ Buckingham stabbed at her iPad screen and a blaring headline: US F
URY
O
VER
C
HINESE
P
URCHASE FROM
P
RIVATE
O
WNER
.
‘It’ll come to nothing,’ Secker said.
‘Oh, really? You’re sure about that, Hans? Why the hubris? The Chinese have bought Dalton Island a few miles from Howland in the Pacific and the area is rich in resources. The Yanks
wanted to get their greedy mitts on it. The Chinese have swiped it first; some clever deal offering one per cent share of resources profits. What’s there to be nonchalant about?’
‘I admit we could have been more vigilant.’
‘It pisses me off,’ Buckingham snapped. ‘We could have got that island for a pittance.’
‘Which is why, Glena, we need something like this facility.’ He nodded out of the window.
Buckingham was shaking her head. She knew he was right. ‘We didn’t have our eye on the ball, Hans. China’s latest acquisition is about as isolated as it gets. The only thing it
was famous for was that Amelia Earhart’s plane was supposed to have crashed near there in 1937. Who would have thought the place was perched on a shitload of the black stuff?’
The chopper banked again and through the windows the passengers could see the rugged outline of Flotta, a smudge of an island a little over three miles long by a few hundred yards across. It had
barely seen the imprint of humanity until the twentieth century, when the Royal Navy had established a massive naval base at Scapa Flow. In the 1970s an oil refinery had been constructed on the
island. Eurenergy had bought the far northern tip of the island, one hundred and twenty acres called Roan Head, and two years ago Buckingham had given the go-ahead to build there the most advanced
satellite surveillance facility in the world. From this base, technicians controlled a network of forty-one satellites in close-earth orbit, each probe packed with the latest optical and thermal
imaging technology and used to accurately detect hidden resources – especially oil, gas and uranium – anywhere in the world.
As the chopper descended through a brisk crosswind, swaying as it came in, Secker and Buckingham could see an array of white spheres and satellite dishes. The spheres were each fifty yards in
diameter, the dishes clustered around a line of a dozen concrete towers. Secker started to count them but gave up at thirty-two as the chopper turned, descended fast and touched down on a
helipad.
The two visitors unbuckled and got up from their seats as the door opened, a blast of freezing air rushing into the cabin. Two men in anoraks, fur-lined hoods drawn down about their necks, stood
ducking as the rotor blades slowed, the roar of the chopper quietening. One of the men stepped forward and helped Glena Buckingham down a set of metal steps to the tarmac helipad. Secker followed
and the two men gestured to follow them into a single-storey building at the edge of the landing pad.
Soon, all four were inside a warm white-walled room lit by a soft glow from some invisible source. A large window opened out to the flat bleakness of the island and the metal towers of the old
refinery topped by red flame like Roman candles in the distance.
One of the anoraked men nodded silently and disappeared through a door at the rear of the room. The other, a middle-aged ginger-haired man with a ruddy complexion, strode over to the new
arrivals.
‘Ms Buckingham, Mr Secker. It is a pleasure to welcome you to Flotta.’
‘Dr Freeman?’ Buckingham asked.
He nodded.
‘You’re shorter than I remember you being.’
Unsure how he should respond, Freeman produced a wan smile and gestured towards the door.
They entered a wide, brightly lit corridor, doors opening off to left and right, men in white coats crossing from room to room, a pair of overalled techs carrying a bulky device which they were
manoeuvring into a lab to the left.
‘This is the main storage and repair area,’ Freeman said.
On the wall were signs, black lettering on stark white backgrounds: ‘Main Control Hub’ straight on, ‘Accommodation’ to the right, ‘Canteen’ and
‘Ancillary Laboratories’ to the left. They followed Freeman through a set of double swing doors, more doors off to each side, and across a junction. Staff passed them
disinterestedly.
At the end of the corridor they came to a bank of lifts. Freeman held the door back as Buckingham and Secker stepped inside.
‘This will take us down ten floors,’ he explained. ‘Our sat dishes are positioned about a hundred yards from this building and the signals are fed down to us in the Control Hub
via fibre optic.’
‘We saw the dishes coming in,’ Secker said.
‘There’s a second, larger bank of receivers on a small artificial island we have constructed off the northern tip of Roan Head.’ Freeman nodded to his left.
The lift slowed and stopped smoothly, the doors opened and they were in the Main Control Hub, a circular room like the apse of a cathedral, a vaulted ceiling strewn with lights and gantries.
From the gantries hung four massive flat screens arranged as the sides of a square. Below these were arranged two banks of control panels. Four men and three women sat at one of the banks, another
pair of men in white coats stood close to the other.
As Freeman stepped out of the lift with Buckingham and Secker, the people at the desks stopped working. Freeman waved a hand towards his team and made the introductions.
‘As you know, we have only been online three weeks, but already my group are gelling,’ he said to Buckingham as they walked towards a bank of control panels.
‘I’m amazed they don’t go stir crazy on this tiny island,’ Secker observed.
‘They are dedicated scientists,’ Freeman responded. ‘They are working with the best equipment available and employed for a noble cause – to find hidden fuels for future
generations. Besides, they have access to amazing facilities and they’re on a civilized rotation, here for three months then home for a month.’
Freeman stopped at one of the banks of controls. ‘But I guess you’re not here just to meet the staff, Ms Buckingham.’ Freeman eyed the CEO cautiously. ‘We’ve
prepared a demonstration for you.’
Freeman leaned in to talk to the operative at the nearest control panel and then stood back beside Buckingham and Secker. ‘OK, we have the satellites at your disposal, Ms Buckingham. Where
in the world would you like to take a look? Any hunches?’ He turned with a smile to see Buckingham’s set expression.
‘Pacific Ocean,’ she said, staring at the big screen hanging from the ceiling. ‘Dalton Island, the place the fucking Chinese have just bought for a few cents!’
Freeman walked over to the panel and gave the operative instructions. The screen turned blue then flicked back to an image of the earth from space; the view from Satellite 21 in geosynchronous
orbit above the equatorial Pacific. The image seemed to grow on the screen as the camera zoomed in, the edges dropping away as the satellite honed in on the coordinates punched into the mainframe
of the station computer, 0° 46' 16"N 176° 35' 03"W.
The centre of the screen displayed a green oblong. According to a scale on the side of the monitor, it was a little over three hundred yards north–south, sixty yards east–west at its
widest point. A mere pinprick in the vast ocean, a featureless dimple skirted by sand.
‘Dalton,’ Freeman said. ‘Doesn’t look much, does it?’
‘It is what’s beneath it that’s interesting,’ Buckingham said. ‘What’s that?’
The image shifted westward and refocused. They could see a large drilling vessel.
‘I would say that is an exploratory drilling rig. The Chinese must have got permission from the owners of the island to do some test boring . . . to see what they were buying.’
‘Now it’s theirs they can do want they want. I imagine the heavy plant will be on its way from the port of Shanghai as we speak . . . the bastards.’
‘OK, let’s see what’s down there,’ Freeman said.
The view on the monitor changed, the satellite image moved south-west to close in on the expanse of ocean near the island, probing the depths to the ocean floor. The data on the screen informed
them the rocky seabed lay at an average depth of 2,450 feet. The camera showed an undulating seascape of coral rich in a variety of marine life.
‘Switch to hi-res ultra spectral,’ Freeman told the operative. ‘Watch,’ he added to Buckingham and Secker.
The screen filled with a red glow. Freeman whistled. ‘A whole lot of oil.’
‘Pan back out,’ Buckingham instructed, ‘keep focused on the top end of the spectrum.’ The operator followed orders and they all watched as the image expanded, pulling
outward to show an area of some ten square miles of sub-terrain. The red shape filled half the field, shimmering, iridescent.
‘That has to be at least a couple of billion barrels,’ Secker said, barely able to believe what he was seeing.
‘OK, Freeman, zoom back in,’ Buckingham said calmly. ‘Skirt around the edge. I want to see if we can get an idea of its depth.’
Freeman helped the operative at the control panel and the image on the screen changed once more. Flicking back to a normal spectrum, the camera zoomed in, breaking the surface again and
descending towards the ocean floor.
It was then that a strange object flitted in and then out of view.
‘Stop!’ Buckingham said.
Freeman looked confused, but the operative had halted the pan.
‘Back. Same speed, about three, four seconds.’
The image shifted, the panning slowed and they shot past the object again.
Buckingham did not need to say anything, the operative knew. He nudged the controls, panning back at a crawl. The ocean floor flowed across the monitor, rocks, coral, a giant school of small
fish . . . and stopped. There on the screen they could all see a white object like a distorted cross.
‘Jesus fucking Christ!’ Buckingham exclaimed.
Off Howland Island, Pacific Ocean. The next day.
‘Oxygen at ninety-eight per cent, Kate,’ Lou said and pulled round to face her.
‘Same,’ she said, checking his tank, giving him the thumbs up before turning to the two junior team members, Gustav Schwartz and Connor Maitland. ‘Keep comms open at all times,
guys. We’ll be at seventy feet so we only have thirty minutes at the wreck.’
‘Cool,’ Gustav said.
Lou Bates and Kate Wetherall sat on the side of the exploration vessel
Inca
, an eighty-five-footer leased by their employers, the Institute of Marine Studies in Hampton, Virginia. The
boat was in the shallow reefs off Howland Island in the mid-Pacific close to the equator. The pair, along with two of their team from the institute, had boarded in the Gilbert Islands, three days
away. They had been anchored here for the past twenty-four hours, preparing for the first in a planned series of dives to an old wreck, the
Victoria.
A few miles to the west of Howland lay the tiny atoll of Dalton. Kate and Lou and the crew of the
Inca
had been following the news on the BBC website concerning international outrage at
the recent Chinese purchase of the island. Earlier that day they had heard the boom of shallow ocean explosions resonating from Dalton. The BBC had shown aerial photographs and satellite images of
Chinese exploratory vessels already beginning to exploit their new acquisition.
Falling backwards into the water, Kate and Lou were instantly cocooned in the near-silent world of the Pacific Ocean, the sunlight shimmering on the surface above them, the coral-laden reef
below. They were experienced divers who had explored dozens of wrecks during the three years they had worked together. To date, their most important work had been their key role eighteen months ago
in finding a radiation source buried in the wreck of the
Titanic.
They had been brought into the investigation by a commander at Norfolk Naval Base, Captain Jerry Derham. What had begun as
an incredible adventure exploring the inside of the
Titanic
had turned into a tangled drama in which the couple had skirted death several times in the space of a few days. Jerry Derham had
saved their lives on at least two occasions, and they had grown very close to him.
Lou and Kate’s involvement with tracking the source of radiation from the
Titanic
and the sensational story behind it had propelled them briefly into the public spotlight. They
had been interviewed by
Time
, appeared on breakfast TV on both sides of the Atlantic, and they had just delivered to their New York publishers the first draft of
Messages from the
Deep
, a co-written account of their adventures. Now, though, it was nice to be working on a small project – something a little out of the way. And this was special for another reason.
They had married a week ago in Maryland, making this a working honeymoon.
The
Victoria
lay in seventy feet of water, with Dalton the nearest land. Beyond that was the island of Howland, and the nearest habitation was the Gilbert Islands, some 800 miles to the
west.
The precise location of
Victoria
, a British trading vessel bound for Hawaii, had remained a mystery since it sank in a tropical storm in August 1889. Only two of the seventy-nine people
aboard the ship had survived and reached the Gilbert Islands. They claimed to have been slaves, two of twenty-four men and women taken from the island of Vanuatu.
The British governor of the Gilbert Islands, Sir Jonathan Southling, had refused to believe their story because slavery had been abolished throughout the British Empire over fifty years earlier.
The two men, known only as Daniel and Alfred, had been sent back to Vanuatu without compensation and forgotten about until their story was rediscovered soon after the end of the Second World War.
During the 1950s, British marine archaeologists had begun to wonder about the validity of Daniel and Alfred’s claim. But it was not until a year ago that the wreck was spotted by a NASA
satellite and the Institute of Marine Studies in Hampton acquired funding to investigate the wreck.