The Silent Sea (2010)

The headache was morphing into a migraine.

The Silent Sea

Chapter TWENTY-SIX

WHO DO YOU LOVE MORE THAN ME? LINDA ROSS ASKED when she strode into the op center fifteen quiet minutes later. She carried a slim manila folder and a wide grin.

Megan Fox, Mark said at once.

Beyonc+!, the duty tech at damage control called out.

Katie Holmes, Hali said.

I've always had a thing for Julia Roberts, Eric added.

Chairman, Linda asked, care to be a sexist pig, too?

The only woman I love more than you is my mom.

The other men jeered him softly.

Linda smiled. Touch+!.

Remind me again why I love you so.

Because I've found that less than a hundred miles south of here is a Norwegian whaling station abandoned back in the 1930s.

We don't need whale bones.

It has been preserved as a World Heritage Site wait for it because it has a chapel with a graveyard that is the final resting place for twenty-seven whalers who'd died in these waters. You told me to find you some bones, I give you bones.

Juan was on his feet in an instant and at her side in two strides. He had to bend way over to lay a kiss on her velvety cheek. The migraine suddenly vanished, and the pall that had formed over him lifted. What had him so down was the fact that if they hadn't found a bunch of skeletons, he would have had no choice but to leave the hostages to their fate. He doubted they were going to be an Argentine priority once things heated up, so to leave them behind meant to let them die.

Chairman, I'm picking up a transmission from the Chinese workboat, Hali said, turning back to his bank of computers.

Jam it!

He worked his keyboard for a second. I've isolated the frequency. They're dead. The computer will automatically keep following them as they search for a signal up and down the dial.

Okay. Good. If they have any news to report, they'll have to go back to base. That's two problems down in under a minute. Well done, everybody.

Max and Tamara strolled into the op center, their hands so close together that Juan suspected they'd been holding them just seconds earlier. The bullfrog and the princess, he thought, but was happy for them both.

Perfect timing, my friend.

Hanley looked at him like a buyer eyes a used-car salesman. I've got a bad feeling about this.

Cabrillo smiled broadly. And so you should. I need you to play Igor and go rob a churchyard.

Tamara looked aghast. You want him to do what?

You know, Max said, shaking his head from side to side. I have to admit there was a part of me that hoped this piece of the operation wouldn't pan out.

Come on, Juan teased, fresh air, open skies, decomposing Norwegians. It'll be great!

What are you two talking about? Decomposing who?

Max turned to her. In order for us to rescue the hostages so the Argentines don't know they're missing, we have to leave something behind to fool them.

But?

Once we get them out of the building, Juan said, we'll torch it. All they'll find are eighteen sets of charred bones. Only a pathologist would know they weren't the original men and women. We're just grateful the sizes of the winter-over crews are so small, otherwise we'd need to come up with an alternative.

Like what? Her mind reeled.

A small nuke, maybe.

From what she'd seen of the Corporation so far, she wasn't sure if Cabrillo was joking or not. She wouldn't be surprised if it were the latter.

He threw her a wolfish grin that told her nothing beyond the fact that she was surrounded by a bunch of swashbuckling adolescents. She looked to Max for guidance. He merely shrugged. She said, I guess it's a good thing you were going to use a small one.

Linda moved to her side, as if she were an anchor in their craziness, and said, Don't worry. We do know what we're doing.

I'm glad you do because I sure don't.

Hanley left twenty minutes later in an RHIB, towing an inflatable boat. He and his four-man crew shot straight out to sea for about five miles before turning southward, so there was no chance of being spotted from shore. Max brought along a gasoline-powered high-pressure pump he pla

Juan had a decidedly more difficult job today. With the Chinese surveying the bay where the wreck was located, Mike Trono and his team couldn't resume their work. That freed up the Nomad submersible, with its air lock. The perpetually twilit sky was dark enough to provide visual cover, and the Argentines' oil rigs and hot-air bubbling system would screen the sounds of his work.

Down in the underwater operations room, Cabrillo dressed to dive. Under his Viking dry suit he wore a mesh garment embedded with more than a hundred feet of tubing. Warm water would be circulated through the tubes from an umbilical attached to a jack on the submarine. He knew the Argentines were heating the bay, but he couldn't risk encountering freezing water during his trip. The umbilical also carried his communications system and his air, so there was no need for bulky tanks.

The full-face helmet was equipped with powerful lights, which he dimmed down by covering half the lenses with paint. It would make it much more difficult to work but also much harder to be spotted from the surface. He would need to keep reminding himself to never look up and send the beams flashing toward the surface.

Linda would pilot the minisub while Eddie Seng would be Juan's dive master.

As soon as they launched, Linda guided them to the Oregon's stern. Just below the naked flagpole, a hatch had been opened to reveal a huge drum of tow cable. Rather than steel, it was made of woven carbon fiber, with a quarter of the weight and five times the strength of a traditional line. As an added bonus, it was neutrally buoyant. Linda grabbed the end with the Nomad's powerful mechanical arm and fitted it into a slot where it couldn't come loose.

Then they started making their way to the Argentine base. The drag of line wasn't bad at first, but the three of them knew by the time they had enough played out the submersible would be struggling. They had timed their launch so the Nomad would ride into the bay with the tide.

It took more than an hour to reach the pylons supporting the gas-processing plant that Juan and Linc had spent so much time studying the night before. Because the bay was kept artificially warmed, sea life teemed around the thick ferroconcrete piers. Dull-brown crabs scuttled along the bottom and fish darted between the columns, which were encrusted with barnacles and shellfish.

The Nomad was sixty-five feet long, but with multiple thrusters placed strategically on her hull she was wildly maneuverable. Linda had her bottom lip pinched between neat white teeth as she moved them under the industrial complex and around one of the columns. There she lowered them to the bottom.

She switched over to the arm once again. While the carbon-fiber cable was strong, it remained susceptible to abrasion, and being scraped across the rough surface of the pier would weaken it substantially. To protect it, she used the arm to scrape away the accumulation of mussels. The small bivalves snapped their shells violently when dislodged and propelled themselves into the gloom.

Next, she swiveled the grasping hand to pull a bundled length of commercial plastic pipe from a storage bin. It was the same material used in domestic plumbing and would be a common item found anywhere at the base. Their presence, in the unlikely event they were ever found, would not raise suspicion. They would just be other pieces of junk that had fallen into the sea. The pipes had been glued together to form a semicircle that fit around the back of the pier. It would be the smooth plastic that the cable rubbed against and not the cement.