Ice Angel

by Matthew Hart

  “I know you guys have things to discuss,” she said when she’d finished helping Mrs. Cutler clear away the breakfast dishes. She put down a silver carafe freshly filled with coffee. A few minutes later I saw her dash across the lawn in a bathing suit. She ran onto the dock, dropped into a Laser, and went knifing out into the shining bay.

  Now we were alone. Most of my bitterness had been blown out in the run around the reservoir, but even the dregs had an acid taste.

  * * *

  Lane Turner was a hard man. He’d made a discovery so important it broke the grip of the old diamond cartel. Before the discovery, it was the cartel that had a lock on how to look for diamonds. After, it was Dad. They tried to buy the secret from him. He’d refused.

  He sold his knowledge one mineral grain at a time. Prospectors could send their exploration samples to him, and he’d tell you what they said. Some secrets he kept for himself. He’d have been a wealthy man if he’d sold the cartel what he knew, but that wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted his own discovery. He dragged my mother and me out into the African bush to find it. He failed. The man who helped others find diamond mines couldn’t find his own. It turned him into an embittered man.

  I remembered a tent at night in the Kalahari. A lion padding around the camp. We’d heard the cough. We could smell it—the rank, animal odor. My father hissed for his rifle. But it wasn’t in the tent. It was in the truck.

  In the morning, he couldn’t let it go, blaming my mother. Sneering at her. Useless, he called her. When she brought him his eggs, he grabbed the plate and dumped the contents on her dress. She started to cry. He jeered at her in front of the camp helpers. I was six, and the shame stung me like a lash.

  “Why didn’t you bring the gun?” I shouted. The camp fell silent.

  His eyes snapped to me. “Eh?”

  My mother grabbed my arm to pull me away, but I yanked free. My eyes were brimming with hot tears. “Why didn’t you bring the gun!”

  His hand snaked out faster than a striking snake. My face had the mark for days.

  “You don’t approve of Annie coming here,” he said. His eyes glittered with malice. Men are always what they used to be. The old lumber lies piled in a corner. The right spark will kindle it again. I was that spark. He couldn’t conceal his antagonism. It twisted his mouth.

  “I think you know the kind of man I am, Dad,” I said. “You should keep it in mind.”

  “You’re vengeful,” he spat.

  I kept my eyes fixed on his. “She’s young,” I said.

  “You think I can’t be trusted.” His spite was like a physical ailment for which there was no cure. “Then suddenly you need me. So I have a use after all. Until you get what you want. Then I’m garbage.”

  “Jimmy Angel,” I prompted.

  “Did you bring them?”

  I took out the garnets and placed them on the table. Even through the dull plastic of the Ziploc bag they glowed with a dark intensity. At the sight of them, the venom drained from his face. The hunger that replaced it was the driving force of his whole life, from the time he was a young chemist with the ink just dry on his PhD. He’d got a postdoc at Harvard and started looking for a way to make his name. And found it.

  He took the Ziploc and pushed back his chair and led the way to the little lab. A workbench faced the bay through a wall of windows. A large microscope, a digital scale, and other instruments stood in an orderly array. He placed the bag of garnets beside a pad of bright white paper. He pulled out a stool, sat, and opened the bag. With tweezers, he plucked out a single garnet and placed it on the paper.

  He sat as if hypnotized by the stone. It surged with color, deep purple and crimson. He moved it with the tweezers, and the garnet throbbed in the light. Finally he placed it on a glass plate beneath the microscope. He flicked a switch, and a thin beam of light lanced out. A purple flame shivered under the lens. He leaned forward and placed his eye to the instrument. He stared at it for what seemed like minutes. When he sat back, he fished a handkerchief from his back pocket, wiped his eye, and replaced the garnet with another.

  “I’ve only seen garnets like these once before,” he said harshly. “Until now, the best ever.” He gave me a stern look. “But these are just as good. Classic G10s. Pyrope garnets, very high in chrome. And as you know, because you had to listen to it as a boy,” he said, trying on a rueful smile and then letting it go, “high chrome points to diamonds.”

  “Who sent them?”

  He tightened his lips and exhaled through his nose. “You know I can’t tell you that,” he said. “My clients expect privacy. You know perfectly well how vital that is.” He switched off the microscope with an irritated flick.

  “Can you say when the client sent them?”

  He stared out at the water. “Brought them in person. About a month ago. I shouldn’t even tell you that.” Far out in the bay, the Laser flashed yellow in the sun. “Let’s say I’m doing it for her.” He plucked the garnet from the microscope and dropped it with the others. “Maybe we could actually be civil to each other.”

  I unfolded a copy I’d made of Jimmy’s map and spread it out on the bench. He bent over the familiar diamond field. His face recorded anger, and then despair, as he took in the ragged coast of Lac de Gras. He knew the geology well. He’d never set foot in the Arctic, but his work on indicator minerals had helped Jimmy Angel find the first pipe—the discovery that launched the staking rush and uncovered the fabulously rich new diamond zone. After that, other diamond explorers sent him their minerals too.

  “You’ve analyzed garnets from all through here,” I said. “If I leave you one, can you tell me where it came from?”

  He took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. He raked the garnets together in a tight group, like raking the embers of a fire. The stones flickered darkly. “Maybe. I don’t know. I’ll have to go through my old records. The problem is, to say for certain where a mineral comes from, you have to have a good sample of minerals from the same place. Then you have a big enough data set to identify shared characteristics.”

  I pulled out the small parcel with the garnet I’d taken at Clip Bay. It contained a handful of dirt and loose stones. “This one has surrounding soil. Is it enough?”

  “I’ll try to do something with it.” He gazed at the glowing stones. “If these G10s are all from the same pipe,” he said, his voice cracking with bitterness, “it will be the richest diamond pipe on the planet.”

  * * *

  He did his best to look cheerful for Annie when we left, but his posture betrayed him. He sagged with defeat.

  “Do you hate him, Dad?” she said when we were going through Mattituck. “I’m not a child. I know he was mean to you when you were a kid.”

  “I don’t hate him, Annie.”

  She let it go at that. There was a lot of other material to cover, including an engrossing account of how grape skin can be turned into a material that feels like leather. “I need you to promise me, Dad, you will never wear a garment made from the skin of a real animal.”

  She dropped me off at Teterboro airport and gave me a bone-crushing hug and drove off in her red sports car.

  You have to be happy when that happens.

  That’s what I kept telling myself.

  25

  A light drizzle was falling as Tabitha and I left Peterson Air Force Base and skirted Colorado Springs. The big, long-haul rigs that own the night boomed overhead as we went under the I-25. Tabitha drove.

  We took Colorado Route 115 south for a couple of miles, exited right onto NORAD Road and began the crawl uphill through the switchback turns that ended at the floodlit entrance to the Cheyenne Mountain Complex.

  The air was cool when we got out and heavy with the sweet perfume of ponderosa pines. Two young women in gray air-force fatigues waited at the guard post, one of them with a sidearm in a white canvas holster. The other wore the single bar of a first lieutenant. She watched carefully as we showed our IDs to the gate staff, then led
the way through a series of concrete obstacles and into the mountain.

  “Been here before, sir, ma’am?” the lieutenant asked as we turned right down a second tunnel. We said no, and the officer gave a brief description of the command headquarters of the joint US-Canada North American Air Defense Command.

  In the 1960s, miners took five years to excavate 693,000 tons of rock from the granite mountain. That left 2,500 feet of granite to protect the spring-mounted surveillance and battle-fighting center inside from a direct missile strike. Two twenty-five-ton blast doors would dead-bolt into the rock in the event of an attack, and while the rest of the world faced nuclear holocaust, less than two hundred people would sit inside the rock and fight World War III.

  “There’s six million gallons of water and 510,000 gallons of diesel fuel in reservoirs cut out of the rock, and a 10.5-megawatt power plant.”

  At the end of a maze of passageways, the lieutenant opened a door to a dim room where two young men, one with a sergeant’s stripes, sat at a console watching a strip of desert scroll by on a screen.

  “This is what you wanted to see, ma’am,” the lieutenant said to Tabitha. She left and closed the door behind her, and Tabitha and I sat down.

  “This crew is flying a drone in Syria,” Tabitha said. “You know how it works. Troops on the ground laser-paint the target, and these guys manage the kill. I wanted to see how this new warhead works. This is a simulation.” She leaned forward. “Go ahead,” she said.

  “One minute to target acquisition,” the sergeant said. “We are flying a Reaper armed with a Hellfire variant, the R9X.” He turned to Tabitha and grinned. “We call it the Ninja.”

  An open truck appeared in the distance. The camera on the Reaper zoomed in to reveal a group of figures seated in the back. Cloth dummies. A red dot appeared in the middle of the group. “Target acquired,” said the sergeant. “Fire.” The missile scratched a line of vapor into the air, and a moment later two of the figures on the truck exploded into shreds. The sergeant turned to Tabitha.

  “Almost zero collateral damage, ma’am.”

  “And those are, like, swords?”

  “We call it a kinetic warhead,” he said. “No explosive. Six blades snap out into position. Excellent on soft targets.”

  A sharp knock sounded on the door, and the lieutenant stuck her head in. “They’re ready, ma’am. The event is underway.”

  “They’re expecting you, Alex,” Tabitha said. “I have another meeting. I’ll see you after.”

  * * *

  The Global Strategic Warning and Space Surveillance Center was a cavernous hall awash in dim green light. At a curved console, servicemen in headsets monitored the satellite feeds. An outline of North America glowed on the enormous central screen. The map included the surrounding oceans and the encroaching landmass of eastern Russia.

  “Our target arrived a little earlier than we-all thought,” the three-star general said in a southern drawl. He nodded to an officer at the console. “Switch it, Corky.” The map of North America vanished, and the big screen changed to a solid, murky green.

  “This is underwater real-time surveillance of a passage through the Bering Strait. It’s not a camera picture. This here’s an image constructed by software from sensors and data collectors tethered to the seabed. We don’t operate the system, but our navy friends patch it through when we ask.” He glanced at the console. “Corky?”

  “A thousand yards, sir. Sixteen knots.”

  “Chinese boomer,” the general said. “Coming up pretty fast. We’ve been tracking her since she left Yulin two days ago.”

  “Five hundred yards.”

  “Here she comes,” the general said.

  A hush fell on the immense space. The quiet chatter at the console stopped entirely. All eyes were fixed on the central screen. It was hard to see at first. Just a blurry patch of darker green that formed in the center of the screen. As the submarine advanced, the image swiftly changed. It darkened, then hardened into a black onrushing shape with stubby dive planes and a conning tower. The screen snapped to a side view. It was like watching a train go by. No one moved. A clock peeped out the seconds until the image slid away and the map jumped into view again. A winking red light appeared in the middle of the Bering Strait.

  “Jin class nuclear submarine,” the general said. “Carries twelve JL-2 ballistic missiles, each with a range of 4,600 miles. Just to put that in terms we can all understand,” he said, making it clear he meant me, “a missile fired from that sub right now would arrive in Houston in twenty minutes. Every city in Canada and the United States is within range.” He turned to a Canadian brigadier standing beside him. “General, I think you have some observations?”

  “Thank you, sir. Here’s the situation,” he said to me. “The polar region is rich in resources such as oil and minerals. Climate change has lengthened the shipping season in the Arctic. Those resources are therefore increasingly easy to get at. The Chinese are a resource-starved nation. They want a share of the Arctic. They now describe themselves as a ‘near-Arctic power.’ Chinese submarines and surveillance ships have increased their presence in the Arctic Ocean.”

  He was a stocky sparkplug of a soldier, as straight as a pipe. His fatigues crackled with starch, and he spoke in the clipped monotone of a military briefing. But now his eyes took on a sharper look.

  “Of the keenest interest now,” he said, “would be any Chinese industrial activity in the Canadian north. Any industrial activity capable of retasking—we would consider that to be strategic.” You could have heard a pin drop. He looked carefully at me to satisfy himself that I understood. Then he snapped his eyes to his superior. “I believe I have articulated the view of the command, sir.”

  “Y’all nailed it, General,” the three-star said, patting him on the shoulder. The brigadier kept a stony face. He didn’t look like the kind of man to pat, even if you had three stars, as the one who did have them now seemed to realize. He dropped his hand and nodded stiffly at the officers around him. “I’ll show you out,” he said to me, and led the way to an exit. The first lieutenant was waiting for me.

  “Y’all understand what he meant by ‘strategic’?” the three-star said.

  “Time to stop talking.”

  “There you go.”

  I thought he was going to pat me on the shoulder too, but the central screen went to green again, and in the quiet of the vast room, the low voices died away. The countdown clock began to peep.

  “Five thousand yards,” a voice intoned. “Seventeen knots.” The three-star walked away and joined his officers. Another Chinese boomer was coming through the strait.

  26

  The morning sun was flicking darts of green light through the pines when we came out of the mountain. A fall of snow glistened on the nearby peaks. We turned our passes in at the gate and went snaking down the mountainside. A pair of red-tailed hawks rode the thermals, waiting for the sun to coax a cottontail from its hiding place.

  When we got back to Peterson, an escort car met us at the gate and led us to a distant corner of the base, where a wooden house nestled in a thick grove of pines. The house was painted dark brown. It had a balcony that made it look like a Swiss chalet. A crewcut man with a master sergeant’s insignia on his sleeve hopped out of the escort car’s front seat and opened Tabitha’s door.

  “Your car will be here at fourteen hundred hours, ma’am,” he said to her. “Yours, sir, a little later. We’ll have an exact time as soon as your flight is confirmed.” He delivered a sharp salute, hopped back in the car, and we were alone.

  We’d hardly spoken on the flight from New York. Tabitha had been tied up in a back-and-forth with White House staff. The plane she’d be catching later would take her to San Diego, where the president was delivering a major speech about American naval power, with the home port of the Pacific fleet as her backdrop.

  This was a Tabitha I hadn’t seen before. The cog in the gearwheel of world power. A hard package, but immacu
lately wrapped. Her mass of hair was pulled back from her face into a knot speared with an ivory pin. She wore a dark gray jacket with a white silk T-shirt. The shirt didn’t look as if it had been made from orange peels. The black pencil skirt emphasized her slender hips and long, bare legs. The stiletto heels made a sharper click than her usual slingbacks as she led the way up a flagstone path and into the house.

  The main room had a pair of sofas in front of a stone fireplace. An open kitchen took up one side of the room. She tossed her briefcase on a sofa, strode across the white broadloom, and made her way behind the granite counter. Shoving her phone in a pocket, she yanked open the huge Sub-Zero fridge and grabbed a carton of apple juice. She opened it and took a gulp straight from the carton. A thin dribble of juice glistened on her chin. She wiped it away and stared at me across the room. The phone in her pocket made an urgent buzz. She grabbed it and glanced at the screen.

  “Fuck,” she muttered, and took the call. “Kowalski.”

  She listened, her lips tightening.

  “No,” she said sharply. “The Chinese don’t have as many boomers as we do. They have half as many boomers. Jesus Christ, Todd. It’s not the darkest secret in the world. You can look it up on Wikipedia. The point the president will make is that they have six more under construction. She’ll say that their intention is to surpass us, and that’s why they are a clear and present danger.”

  She ended the call without another word, put the phone down on the counter, and kicked off the stilettos. They banged against a lamp and landed on the carpet. She took another swig of apple juice.