The Seventh Angel (3 page)

His own people had betrayed him; that much he knew. The Chinese would not have dared to harm him without authorization from Zhukov. The bastards wanted the warheads too badly. They’d never risk blowing the deal by killing Zhukov’s courier. That could only mean that Zhukov had authorized the hit. And then he’d sent Grigoriev to Manila, to a rendezvous in a deserted alley, in this cesspool of a country where life was cheap. Straight into the hands of the Chinese killers.

Grigoriev coughed, sending a spasm of pain through his chest. He lurched forward, stumbling toward the lights of the embassy one faltering step at a time.

They wanted to throw him out with the garbage, did they? Leave him dying among the broken beer bottles and the cat piss? Trying to protect their precious secrets. Hide their plans from the Americans.

Grigoriev could taste blood in his mouth now, but the tough old Russian grinned anyway. He’d show the bastards. The Chinese. Zhukov. All of them. He’d tell the Americans
everything
, and then he’d sit back with a fat bottle of Moskovskaya and watch the whole thing go to hell.

ICE PACK - NORTHERN SEA OF OKHOTSK

LATITUDE 58.29N / LONGITUDE 155.20E

FRIDAY; 22 FEBRUARY

1421 hours (2:21 PM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

The helicopter came to a hover less than a meter above the ice. It hung there for nearly a minute as the downwash from its rotors blasted snow from the rugged icescape below. The roaring vortex of mechanically-induced wind created an instant blizzard around the aircraft, reducing effective visibility to almost zero. But there wasn’t enough snow to cause a true whiteout. Within seconds, the light accumulation of powder had been blown away, revealing a circle of dirty gray ice a little larger than the sweep of the rotor blades.

This was not the smooth ice sheet of the Arctic. The ice pack in the Sea of Okhotsk was strained and twisted by the collision of two opposing ocean currents, and the relentless hammering of the Siberian wind. The ice was pocked with hillocks, ridges, and fractures—a frozen diorama of unreleased pressure.

The helicopter made no attempt to land on the torturous surface. It maintained position, while doors slid open on either side of the fuselage. Three men made the short jump to the ice, and began unloading equipment through the open doors of the aircraft. As soon as the equipment was unloaded, the helicopter lifted away, climbing to an altitude of a thousand meters where it circled while the others carried out their mission down below.

The men moved quickly and smoothly, despite the roughness of the terrain. They worked without speaking, communicating via hand signals when required, but even that was rarely necessary.

They were a well-oiled team, and they had already performed this operation four times before at other locations on the Okhotsk ice pack. This would be the fifth and final time.

Their cold weather gear was ex-Soviet military issue. The dappled grays and dingy whites of the snow camouflage were a near-perfect match for the surrounding ice. From a few hundred meters away, they would be all but invisible, not that visibility particularly mattered out here. They were the only living souls for at least two hundred kilometers.

In forty minutes, the job was done; the team was back aboard the helicopter and thundering away through the frigid Russian sky.

Already the winds were beginning to hide the evidence of their work beneath a thin layer of grubby snow. The seven new holes in the ice were rapidly disappearing, as was the network of thin wires that cross-connected the holes like a spider web.

A scrap of torn plastic fluttered and skidded across the ice, sticking for a moment against the slope of a pressure ridge. For the briefest of seconds, a single word was visible—black Cyrillic lettering stenciled against gray plastic. The word was
vzryvchatka
. Explosive. And then the wind caught the scrap and snatched it away, leaving no visible trace that man had ever set foot on this forbidding stretch of ice.

NOAA SUBMERSIBLE NEREUS

NORTHERN PACIFIC OCEAN (SOUTH OF THE ALEUTIAN ISLANDS)

MONDAY; 25 FEBRUARY

0942 hours (9:42 AM)

TIME ZONE -10 ‘WHISKEY’

It was like falling into night. The deepwater submersible
Nereus
continued its descent into the Aleutian trench—passing from the midwater zone, where blue wavelengths of light were still visible—into the aphotic zone, where no light penetrated at all.

Charlie Sweigart stared through the
Nereus’s
forward view port as the last traces of light deepened from twilight blue to a shade of black that few human eyes had ever seen. A half mile above, the
Nereus’s
tender, the Research Vessel
Otis Barton
, was enjoying the bright morning sunshine. But down here, the only light came from the mini-sub’s interior lights, and the glowing faces of the instrument clusters.

“
Bottom coming up in fifty meters,” Gabriella said.

Her voice sent a tiny shiver down Charlie Sweigart’s spine. Gabriella’s English was flawless, but her voice carried a musical French-Canadian lilt that never failed to give Charlie a tingle.

Charlie nodded without looking back. “Thanks.”

The cabin of the submersible was as cramped as the cockpit of the space shuttle. Charlie sat in the pilot’s seat, nearest the bow of the little submarine, surrounded by gauges, digital readouts, and equipment status lights. Gabriella’s seat at the sensor console was behind Charlie and to his left, so he couldn’t see her without turning almost completely around in his chair. That would be a bit
too
obvious, so Charlie made do with glimpses of her reflection in the ten-inch thick plate of curved lexan that formed the forward view port.

The reflections weren’t perfect. The curvature of the surface brought some distortion to the images. But Charlie could look at Gabriella in that imperfect mirror as often as he wanted.

Who was he kidding, anyway? What would a tall, willowy blonde want with a pudgy little sub-jockey like Charlie? A tall, willowy,
smart
blonde.
Doctor
Gabriella Marchand—on loan to NOAA from
Centre océanographique de Rimouski
, in Quebec—had PhDs in Oceanography, Geochemistry, and Marine Geophysics. She didn’t like for Charlie to call her
doctor
, but doctor she was. She was one very smart lady, and she was rapidly becoming one of the world’s leading experts on methane hydrate deposits, whatever
those
were.

Charlie had read the research proposals and goals for this project. He’d been to the pre-dive briefings, and studied the mission plans carefully. This was their seventh dive, so he knew the plan inside and out. He had the navigational waypoints all programmed into the
Nereus’s
computers. He knew the currents in the Aleutian trench, and he knew how to compensate for the drift they’d try to put on his boat. He could put the submersible within inches of every sampling site on the Dive Plan. But the real work on this project was up to Gabriella. Charlie was just the bus driver.

He glanced at the glide angle indicator, and eased back on the control yoke to slow the boat’s rate of descent. Outside of the pressure hull, the submersible’s four propulsor pods rotated slightly, canceling some of the vessel’s negative buoyancy with vectored jets of water.

“
Forty meters to bottom,” Gabriella said.

Charlie suppressed another shiver. Gabriella’s bottom was considerably closer than forty meters, but it was not a good idea to think about
that
.

Charlie nodded again. “Forty meters. Thanks.”

He was just sneaking another peek at Gabriella’s reflection when a different voice came from behind him.

“
So, what color is it?”

Charlie flinched. He’d almost forgotten that Steve was even there.

Steve Harper, the other permanent member of the
Nereus
crew, sat at the engineering station, behind Charlie and to his right. Steve was a good guy. He could be a jackass when the mood struck him, but he was usually pretty easy to be around. He was also a skilled technician and an excellent button masher. Charlie liked working with him, at least when Steve wasn’t startling the hell out of him.

Charlie cocked his head. “Huh?”

“
I asked you what color it is,” Steve said.

“
What color is
what
?” Charlie asked.

“
The Porsche,” Steve said. “Didn’t you just buy a new Porsche?”

“
Oh, yeah,” Charlie said. “Well, it’s not new. But it’s in really good shape.”

“
You’ve got a Porsche?” That was Gabriella.

“
Yeah,” Charlie said. “It’s a ninety-eight Turbo Carrera. Low mileage. It’s pretty nice. Good paint. Nice interior. Excellent mechanical condition.”

“
I like the nineties-models better too,” Gabriella said. “I think they changed the suspension in the new ones. I don’t like the way they handle as much.” She seemed to be taking it for granted that Charlie’s decision to buy a used model was a matter of preference rather than finance.

“
What color is it?” Steve asked again.

Charlie grimaced. “It’s – uh, red. Sort of a light red.”

Steve whistled through his teeth. “Dude, you got a red Porsche turbo? You are sooooo set!”

“
What’s our distance to bottom?” Charlie asked. It was time to derail this conversation. He did
not
want to talk about the Porsche.

“
Thirty-two meters to bottom,” Gabriella said.

Charlie nodded. “Thanks.” He eased back on the yoke a little more. They were still a little too far away from the bottom to see anything, but this was as good a time as any to heat up the exterior lights. “Floods coming on,” he said, and he flipped three switches near the top of his console.

Outside the hull, three banks of sealed halogen floodlights flared to life, casting a sphere of light around the little submersible. The darkness was not banished; it hung just beyond the reach of the floods, like an impenetrable curtain of blackness. This was where night lived. On the surface, the sun ruled half of the planet at any given time. But down here, night was
always
master.

The thought gave Charlie a mild case of the creeps, despite the fact that it had occurred to him a hundred times before. It
was
a little creepy. But it was also cool. Because this was Charlie’s domain. Anywhere else in the world, he was just a geeky looking guy with a spare tire around his waist. But down
here
, Charlie flew like Icarus through the secret realms of darkness. He’d had
that
thought before too, but it never failed to bring a smile to his lips.

He dimmed the cabin lights, to make it easier to see through the view port. Gabriella’s reflection faded with the interior illumination.

Steve snorted. “What exactly is a
light
red? Is it like a candy apple red? Or a fire engine red?”

Damn it. He wasn’t going to let it drop. “No,” Charlie said with a sigh. “It’s more of a
whitish
red.”

“
A
whitish
red?” Steve’s voice was incredulous. “You mean like a
pink
?”

“
It’s not pink!” Charlie snapped. He stopped and corrected himself. “I don’t like to think of it as pink, okay?”

Steve’s laugh sounded like the cackle of a hen. “Dude! You bought a pink Porsche?”

Charlie tapped a pressure gauge with unnecessary force. “Will you kindly shut the hell up?”

“
Aye-aye, sir!” Steve said it in a theatrically-formal voice. “Shutting the hell up as ordered, sir!”

If past behavior was anything to judge by, it was a fair guess that Steve had accompanied the words with a brisk simulation of a salute, pointed in the direction of Charlie’s back.

A laugh from Gabriella confirmed the suspicion.

Charlie opened his mouth to call Steve an asshole, when the control yoke gave a strange twitch. All thoughts of playful banter vanished instantly from his mind. “Steve, did you feel that?”

“
Did I feel what, Porsche Boy?”

“
I just felt some kind of a jerk in the control yoke,” Charlie said.

“
Yeah, yeah … Let me guess, it was me, right? I’m the jerk?”

“
Knock it off,” Charlie snapped. “I’m not joking!”

The control yoke twitched again, harder this time—an abrupt twist to the right that nearly wrenched the pistol-shaped grips out of his hands. The submersible rolled about ten degrees to starboard, in instant response to the movement of the controls.

Charlie snatched the yoke back to the left, and then centered up quickly, compensating for the sudden roll. The sub righted itself, but he could feel a definite starboard drag.

“
I’ve got some kind of steering casualty,” Charlie said. “Switch me to backup, now!”

“
I’m on it,” Steve said. “Switching to backup steering now!” He punched a button and relays clicked softly.