The Silent Sea

by Clive Cussler

  Juan felt the beginnings of a headache and rubbed his temples absently. Of course there was the other problem that he had no idea how to tackle. He’d already run his idea by Kevin Nixon, but the special-effects master said any fakes he made would be spotted in a second. It was the real deal or nothing. For their plan to work so the Argentines never suspected a thing, Cabrillo needed to find eighteen human skeletons.

  The headache was morphing into a migraine.

  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.

  “Beyoncé,” 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. “Touché.”

  “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 planned to use to excavate the bones. The needle of heated water it threw could be dialed up to four thousand psi, more than enough to melt away the permafrost covering the bodies. As he said when they left, “No picks and shovels for Mrs. Hanley’s favorite son.”

  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 t
he 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.

  She fitted the protective half sleeve into place and looped the submersible around the far side of the column.

  “Good job,” Juan said as they slowly backed away. The black towline slid easily over the bundle of PVC pipes. “One more stop to go.”

  She pivoted the Nomad and started back across the bay. The weight of the line and the need now to fight the tide, which had yet to slacken, strained the submersible’s engine. The batteries drained almost twice as fast as normal, and their speed was down to a crawl, but they still made headway.

  Twenty minutes later, they were under the Admiral Guillermo Brown. Her anchor was paid out and rested on its side on the rocky seabed, its heavy chain rising up to the surface. Less than twenty feet of water separated her keel from the bottom.

  “Strange name for an Argentine ship. Brown,” Eddie said as he handed Juan his helmet.

  “His name was really William Brown, and he was born in Ireland and then emigrated to Argentina. He’s credited with forming their Navy in the early 1800s to fight the Spanish.”

  “How could you possibly know that?” Linda asked from the cockpit.

  “What? I Googled him when we first saw the cruiser. I thought it was an odd choice of name, too.”

  Juan waddled to the tiny air lock, laden with a belt from which he hung his tools. Strapped to his back like a World War II flame-thrower were two cylinders. Once he was in and the door secure, he jacked his umbilical into a port and checked over his connections, making certain that warm water was flowing through his suit and that he had good airflow and good comms with the sub. Only when Eddie was satisfied did he open the valve that flooded the closet-sized compartment.

  Water foamed and hissed as it climbed his body, pressing the rubber suit against his legs when the pressure grew. It was a comfortable temperature, but he wouldn’t discount running into icy pockets once he was outside. He could see Eddie watching him through a small window in the air-lock door. Juan gave him the traditional divers signal that everything was okay. Eddie returned it.

  Moments later, the water had closed in on the ceiling. Juan reached overhead to open the outer hatch. A few stray bubbles burst free as it swung up. He climbed out of the sub, making sure to keep his head down and his lights pointed away from the surface. He felt reasonably confident that the Argentines didn’t have lookouts posted in such freezing conditions, but he hadn’t thought he and Linc would run into a guard last night either.

  The low vibration in the water came from the cruiser’s secondary power plant, which produced enough energy to run the ship’s systems and keep the men warm. The main engines were off. He knew this already by observing that only a small amount of smoke escaped the warship’s single raked funnel.

  He jumped free of the sub, floating down to the bottom in a graceful arc. His boots hit and kicked up a little silt that drifted gently away. One of the six-inch-thick conduits for the bubbler was to his left. Air rose from its length in thin streams of silver.

  Juan turned his attention to the Admiral Brown’s anchor. It looked to be about eight feet long and would probably weigh in at about four tons—more than enough to keep the ship stationary against the tides. A small pile of extra chain lay next to it in a rust-colored heap.

  “How are you doing out there?”

  “No problem so far. I’m looking at the anchor now.”

  “And?”

  “I should be able to unshackle it from the chain. The lynchpin is held in place with bolts.”

  Cabrillo bent over the anchor and pulled an adjustable wrench from his belt. He fitted it over the first bolt and used his thumb on the oversized adjusting wheel until it was snug. It fought him the entire way. Tiny bits of paint lifted from the bolt head when it first moved an eighth of a turn, and it would turn no more than that. Juan heaved on it until finally bracing his legs against the anchor and pulling until he though he was going to pass out. The bolt gave another eighth turn. It took ten backbreaking minutes to remove that first bolt, and Juan was bathed in sweat.

  “Shut down the hot suit, Eddie. I’m dying out here.”

  “It’s off.”

  The next bolt spun out so easily that, once he had it started, he could twist it with his fingers. The third and fourth weren’t quite as easy, but nowhere near as bad as the first. He clipped the wrench back to his belt and grabbed a rubber mallet. He used rubber to avoid making any noise.

  He swung at the lynchpin, the water hindering his actions, but the blow was enough to knock it an inch out of alignment. Three more shots, and it was almost free of the anchor. It would still hold the ship in position against the normal flow of water into and out of the bay, but any hard jolt would slip the pin entirely, and the Admiral Brown would be left to the vagaries of the sea.

  “That’s it. Oh, man!”

  “What?”

  “I was just hit by a pocket of cold water. Damn, that is brutal.”

  “Want the hot suit back on?”

  “No. It drifted away.”

  Juan started walking across the seafloor for the minisub, gathering up loops of his umbilical as he went so it wouldn’t tangle.

  He unclipped the carbon-fiber tow cable from its slot and dragged it back to the anchor. He added a little air to his buoyancy compensator to make his ascent easier and, hand over hand, he climbed the chain. For now, he left the cable on the bottom.

  He paused when he reached the underside of the four-hundred-foot warship. Her bottom was coated with red antifouling paint and was remarkably free of marine buildup. His next task was to spot-weld eight metal pad eyes to the bow. That’s what the two tanks he carried were for. They were high-capacity batteries for a handheld arc welder. The gear was normally used to make quick repairs to the Oregon.

  He adjusted his buoyancy again and slid eye protection over his helmet so he could work comfortably next to an electric spark brighter than the sun. The curvature of the cruiser’s hull shielded him from above, and in twenty minutes he had all eight welds completed. There were so many in case one or more of the welds failed. Juan carried no illusions that he was an expert at this particular skill. Ten minutes after that, he had the tow cable threaded though all of them. Over the very tip of the cable he clamped in place a steel box about the size of a paperback book. The box served as the belay point for the cable while inside was an explosive charge. A signal from the Oregon would detonate the small amount of plastique, and the box would disintegrate, freeing the cable so it could be yanked away from the ship. The only evidence left behind was the eight pad eyes. Chances were, they wouldn’t survive what Juan had planned.

  No sooner had he returned to the Nomad and closed the outer hatch over himself than Linda powered her up and they were under way.

  “Operation Crack-the-Whip is on,” he said when Eddie helped him off with the helmet.

  “Any problems?”

  “Smooth as silk.”

  “More good news,” Linda said. “Eric’s tracking a storm headed our way. Should hit tomorrow at what passes for dawn in these parts.”

  “Call Eric back and have him pull the ship off beach a bit. Also, tell him to drain the starboard ballast tanks but leave the port side flooded. That should give the old girl a convincing list.” Juan had an anticipatory gleam in his eye. “I hope the Argentines have enjoyed their time ruling this part of world because it’s about to end.”

  By five that afternoon, the Chinese survey boat had motored past the Oregon where she lay just off the beach. She was still close enough in that an occasional large wa
ve would cause her hardened bows to slam against the bottom. There was little doubt they would report the Norego had unbeached herself and was starting her soulless wanderings once again. An hour later, an exhausted and frozen Max Hanley returned with his team and their grisly cargo.

  “That sucked,” Hanley proclaimed when the RHIB was winched inside the boat garage along the ship’s side. “Not only is it colder than a brass monkey’s you know what out there, but that cemetery would creep out Stephen King. The headstones are all carved whale bones, and there’s a fence around it made up of ribs as tall as me. The arched gate is built of skulls the size of Volkswagens.”

  “Any problem recovering the remains?”

  “Do you mean besides the eternal damnation of my soul for desecrating holy ground?”

  “No.”

  “In that case, everything went fine. The graves were only about a foot deep, and the men were laid to rest in canvas bags sewn from sails. I was surprised to find they had mostly decomposed.”

  “The ground would have been too frozen to bury them in the winter, and in spring it’s just warm enough for bacteria to do their thing.”

  “So now what?”

  “You get yourself warmed up. Mike Trono and his gang just took off back to the wreck. By the time they return and we get the Nomad prepped again, it’ll be showtime.”

  “Weather coming in?”

  “Eric said it’s going to be a bitch out there come dawn.”

  “It isn’t exactly skittles and beer now.”

  “As the saying goes, ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet.’ ”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Major Espinoza laid the weather report back on Luis Laretta’s desk. The small office, with its obligatory picture of Generalissimo Ernesto Corazón on one wall and a poster of a scantily clad girl on the other, was thick with their cigar smoke.

  “This storm would be perfect cover for an American Special Force strike. They’ll be expecting us to sit down here all snug in our bunks while they sneak around and place explosives all over the camp.” He brooded for a moment. “I’m going to push out the perimeter patrols another couple of miles. If they’re here, they would have parachuted in well back from the coast and would need to come overland.”