The Alarmists

by Don Hoesel

  The silence that settled over the plane was tomblike and was only broken when Colonel Richards, not willing to let the mood of his team sink to a place from which he wouldn’t be able to bring it back, forced them to reengage.

  “So our job is to make sure that doesn’t happen,” he said. “Addison, is Sheffield still insisting they haven’t had a team here in three years?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you believe them?”

  “I’m inclined to, sir. Bradford helped me speed through their financials. I don’t think they’re a big enough company to have pulled off something like this.”

  “And Albert Griffiths?”

  “They claim the first time they ever heard of him was when he started calling and asking for his workman’s comp checks,” Addison said. “They say he was never on the payroll. Neither was anyone named Ben Robinski.”

  Richards grunted and turned to the window to watch the clouds roll by.

  “If we’re going to assume they’re telling the truth,” he said, “then we’re left with someone who co-opted their name, assembled a large, well-provisioned drill team, shipped them all off to Antarctica, and then drilled thousands of holes in a straight line across hundreds of miles, filling each one with an explosive so new that there should be records of every ounce of it that’s been produced.”

  “In a nutshell, sir,” Addison said.

  Listening to the back and forth, Brent couldn’t help but laugh. And as he did so, he realized that it wasn’t just for the nature of the conversation but the nature of the whole thing. The fact that he was in an airplane over Antarctica, discussing how they were going to keep the largest nonnuclear explosion in the history of the world from happening, was something he would never have imagined.

  “Something amusing, Dr. Michaels?” Richards asked.

  At the question, the laughter threatened to overtake Brent, but he did his best to keep it in check.

  “No, sir,” he said with a small wave. Except that then his eyes began to fill with tears and the laughter came even harder. And once the laughter started, he found that all the trying in the world couldn’t make it stop. At one point he glanced over at the colonel, apology in his eyes, and was gratified to see that he didn’t seem to mind. In fact, there was a twinkle in his eye that suggested he understood. When he could catch his breath, he said, “I mean, yes, sir. This whole crazy thing, it’s hilarious.”

  When the colonel arched an eyebrow, Brent said, “Colonel, if you can’t understand what it is about this situation that makes me feel like I’ve hopped down into the rabbit hole, then I’ve been reading you all wrong.”

  The moment he said it he realized the colonel could take that as an insult, but as he suspected the man would, Richards let the corners of his mouth curve upward.

  “Dr. Michaels, welcome to my world,” Richards said. “More than half of what we do is so absurd it almost reduces me to tears.”

  The whole team shared a few seconds of genuine warmth in the chill of the airplane’s cabin, although it was short-lived as the immensity of the task before them reasserted itself.

  “Colonel, there are only a few facilities producing octanitrocubane,” Addison said. “I suggest we get the feds to subpoena their records—find out if any of them have increased production enough to do something like this.”

  Even as Richards nodded his agreement, Brent suspected it was wasted energy.

  “Whoever did this wouldn’t have gone through any registered facility,” Brent said. When everyone looked at him, he offered the same half smile the colonel had volunteered moments ago. “They would have figured out how to do it themselves.”

  The coldness of that fact silenced them all. Brent waited for a few seconds and then he turned to look out the window, and he kept his eyes there until he fell asleep.

  December 18, 2012, 9:10 A.M.

  Alan Canfield understood he had set foot in his office for the last time. Yesterday’s visit to the Van Camp building had stretched the limits of good sense, with his knowledge of what the company leadership considered acceptable in the name of expedience.

  His decision to spend the night somewhere other than his home proved the right one. Instead, he rented a car—one with dark-tinted windows—and drove through his quiet neighborhood. When he did so, he came up with one of those ideas that, were he still gainfully employed by the world’s largest media company, he would have committed to a memo and sent to the Fleet Services Department. He would have told them to rotate the vehicles assigned to the security team monthly. That way, a potential target would stand less of a chance recognizing the same vehicle parked in the same spot over consecutive months.

  Canfield picked out the Altima with the scratch on the side panel right away. The GMC Jimmy was a bit harder to spot, but that was only because whoever was behind the wheel had parked it in the strip mall lot adjacent to his neighborhood. Canfield had driven right by his home, confident that whoever was conducting surveillance wouldn’t see through the dark glass of his rental car.

  With his suspicions confirmed, Canfield drove on to the bank.

  Collecting sufficient cash to remain safe for an indeterminate period of time held greater risk than just pointing the car away from Atlanta and driving until the gas tank gave its last. Yet he understood the logistics involved in trying to conduct a proper flight without adequate resources.

  He pulled into the parking lot and chose a spot with a view of the front entrance, as well as most of the other cars in the lot. From what he could see, all of them were empty and there was no obvious Van Camp security presence around the bank. But then why would there have been? He wasn’t supposed to know about the impending change in his work situation. He suspected that had he been caught unawares by the assassination team, they would have made it look like a suicide. With his termination paper work making its way through the HR Department, and with his wife not expected to recover, most crime-scene investigators would accept the suicide theory as the most likely. And since Van Camp had initiated termination proceedings, the company had plausible deniability in the face of any investigation. After all, who would murder an employee who was in the process of being fired?

  After five minutes, Canfield cut the engine and exited the car. There was no line and so he picked one of the two available tellers.

  “I’d like to close my account, please.” He slid his driver’s license and, for good measure, his passport toward her.

  “Certainly, Mr. Canfield,” she said. “Do you mind if I ask why you’ve decided to take your business elsewhere?”

  Canfield offered the woman his most winning smile. “I’ve taken a position as regional manager for one of your competitors,” he explained. “It’s probably best if I show I can trust my own company with my money.”

  It was the sort of explanation that left slim room for argument, and in less than twenty minutes Canfield left the bank with more than fifty-two thousand dollars.

  The next stop at a second bank, the one with which his company did business, proved trickier. But part of succeeding as a senior executive was imagining any number of doomsday scenarios. A month into his current role, he’d taken the liberty of producing a fair number of helpful documents, which enabled him to make his exit with considerably more than the meager sum he’d pulled from his own bank account. In this case it was a check, a very large one.

  It took a bit longer this time, requiring a phone call to the director of the Finance Department at Van Camp Enterprises, who Canfield suspected, was as much in the dark regarding his pending unemployment as he was supposed to be. There was no reason for them to deny the request, especially since the instructions to disburse funds at Canfield’s discretion had come from Van Camp himself.

  By the time he left, almost an hour after walking through the bank’s front door, he carried a briefcase holding almost two million dollars. It wasn’t the sort of sum that would set him up for life in some far-off country with feeble extradition laws, but it was
sufficient to let him burrow into hiding somewhere while he watched the whole thing play out.

  As he got into the car and set the briefcase on the passenger seat, he again considered the possibility of going to the authorities. He had enough information to implicate more than a dozen people, and while he knew nothing he could offer prosecutors would absolve him of the blood on his own hands, it might buy him his life.

  As with the other times he’d considered it, though, he dismissed the idea. Even considering his present circumstances, it was difficult to discount the possibility that he could emerge from this unscathed. With the detonator in his hands he had complete control over the ultimate success or failure of the project. And if he stayed the course, two potential paths opened before him. The first of them was flight, a permanent disassociation from everything he knew. While not ideal, it had the benefit of allowing him to live. The second was the elimination of the man who wanted him dead. He thought it could be done, but it was all about timing. It had to happen after Shackleton; there was no way around it.

  Soon after leaving the bank, he reached the hospital and then spotted the Altima within seconds. As he kept his rental car in motion, his hands tightened on the wheel. With them watching the entrance, he wouldn’t get in undetected. It meant that he would not get to see Phyllis for a while—perhaps never again. He pulled the car back onto the street and, after taking and releasing a long breath, pointed the car toward the airport.

  —

  For years, Colonel Richards’s team had operated under the radar, and he liked it that way. On rare occasions he found himself in front of someone higher up the chain of command, answering questions about something unusual discovered by the NIIU, but those instances were exceptions to the rule, which saw him and his team left alone to play with eyeballs or explore things that most people discounted out of hand.

  Had he any career ambitions beyond his present role, that might have bothered him, but he’d long accepted the fact that he was where he belonged. That made appearances like the one he’d had that morning uncomfortable. After reporting the Antarctic findings to Smithson, the general had solicited a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In Smithson’s opinion, it was time to get this thing out into the open.

  Richards did not begrudge these men and women their need to know about a threat to national security. What did irritate him, though, were the number of instances in which he had to respond to a question with the words I don’t know. Consequently, he entered a room filled with clueless bureaucrats and left that room having armed these same men and women with enough information to convince them there was a significant issue but not enough to get them to understand the full extent of the danger. What he had accomplished was a commitment of whatever resources he deemed necessary to counteract the threat, and for that he was grateful. The problem was that he wasn’t sure what resources he needed.

  It didn’t matter how fast they got a crew working to remove the explosives from the holes dotting the grounding line. According to Addison, they would never remove enough of them in time to change the outcome. And so Richards was left staying the course, trying to determine the mastermind behind the entire affair. In three days.

  That was why he didn’t feel as bad as he might have about missing his Sunday school commitment. It was a rare occasion that he missed his turn teaching the kids. To the best of his recollection it had been almost five years since the last such forfeiture of his duty. He was considering the lesson he wouldn’t be able to teach when Addison entered his office.

  “I’ve finished my analysis of what we can expect if the ice shelf is separated,” he said without preamble. Without waiting for an invitation he took the seat across the desk from the colonel. “It’s actually not without precedent. In April 2010 the Larsen B ice shelf collapsed and the entire thing was captured via satellite imagery. And of course you have Wilson. The reason that one was such a big deal was because of how quickly it happened.”

  “That’s right,” Richards agreed, although he had no idea what Addison was talking about.

  “Now, neither of those caused serious problems because, first of all, they’re both a lot smaller than Shackleton. But the main reason is that both of those ice shelves, for lack of a better word, disintegrated.”

  The colonel didn’t respond, aware that Addison would take his silence as a prompt to continue.

  “A closer scenario would be Lituya Bay,” Addison said. “In 1958, a piece of ice broke away from the North Crillon Glacier, producing a tsunami more than fifteen hundred feet high. And what we’re talking about with Shackleton is one and a half million square miles of ice dropping off the coast and displacing more water at one time than has probably ever been displaced before.”

  By the time the man finished, he was breathing harder, the prospects of such an event obviously touching his hot button.

  “Put it in layman’s terms for me, Captain,” Richards said. “If the ice shelf breaks away, what exactly can we expect?”

  “Near the point of entry, next to nothing,” Addison said. “Oh, it will look pretty impressive, because the entire ice shelf will drop and disappear below the surface for a few seconds, but then it will bob right back up. Over time, as it floats away from the grounding line, it will start to break up and we’ll wind up with colossal icebergs that will cause havoc in shipping lanes as they move north. But the real problem happens where you can’t see it.”

  Addison took a breath before going on.

  “You can’t displace that much water without it going somewhere, and if my figures are accurate it’s going to trigger a subsurface wave traveling primarily northeast.”

  “Meaning?” Richards prodded when Addison’s pause extended longer than normal.

  “Meaning that a tsunami bigger than any in recorded history is probably going to hit mainland China about thirty-six hours afterwards.”

  Richards thought it was amazing how a simple series of words strung together in a particular order could cause most of the air to escape from his lungs.

  “How far inland?” he managed to ask.

  Despite the scientist in him that enjoyed measuring the facts and figures of something like the largest tsunami in the world, even Addison seemed to channel a portion of his human side, because it was in a subdued voice that he said, “Maybe a hundred miles, Colonel.”

  Richards didn’t have to be as smart as Addison to understand the incredible loss of life such an event would entail.

  “How sure are you?”

  Addison offered a slight shrug. “Eighty-five percent.” When the colonel didn’t respond, Addison said, “But that’s not the worst part, Colonel.”

  At that, Richards’s face hardened. “We’re talking about millions of lives lost,” he snapped. “And that’s not the worst part?”

  “Sir,” Addison said, his voice quiet, “when it’s all over, and when China has the chance to send researchers to the area to study how it happened, they’re going to know that it wasn’t a natural event. They’ll look at the even split from the grounding line and they’ll see all the evidence of a series of explosions and they’ll know that someone planned it.”

  It didn’t take long before the colonel understood what the other man was implying, and the thought was almost crippling.

  “They’ll assume we did it,” he said.

  “In their eyes we’ll be the only ones capable of pulling off something like that, sir,” Addison agreed.

  Richards had the phone in his hand a few seconds later.

  —

  Those who insisted that Allah did not answer prayers simply did not understand the subtle nature of divine direction. The thought had hit Dabir as he prayed, seeking guidance as he developed a plan for dealing with Alan Canfield, the coward who had used a fake name to obscure his objectives. And when it came to him, he thanked Allah for the simple things missed by wise men.

  Canfield worked for Van Camp Enterprises, and Dabir knew enough about the workings of multinational cor
porations to know that someone with Canfield’s power did not rise to his position without the blessing of his superiors.

  And so he had begun his investigation into Arthur Van Camp, the man who had developed a media empire out of a single cable television station, and who now commanded more wealth than most men in the world. A worthy adversary—one who seldom left the protective sphere of his office or his security team. A target like Van Camp made Canfield seem like a man barely worthy of interest, even if that interest was more personal than the clinical one that encompassed his interest in Van Camp.

  What aided Dabir in seeking retribution from Van Camp was his knowledge that Canfield would not go anywhere without the knowledge of the Eritrean. That was another thing he liked about America—the preponderance of businesses that offered a foreigner the means to track a person. Alan Canfield was still in Atlanta, and when Dabir was ready, he would find him.

  For now, he had things to consider. If one was able, one did not kill a man without coming to know what that death would cost those around him.

  —

  It took Brent longer to flag the colonel down than was normally the case, and when Richards broke away from Addison and approached the professor, Brent saw that regardless of the news he had to present to him, he did not have Richards’s full attention.

  “How are you at haystack analysis?” Brent asked.

  At Richards’s puzzled look, Brent said, “Miles Standish was a member of Plymouth Colony. He was a brutal military commander who slaughtered Indians any chance he got.” Seeing that the colonel had brought his attention to bear, Brent continued, “Granted, most of what I’ve read about Standish doesn’t have much bearing on our situation. He was responsible for the protection of the colony and used any means necessary to get that done.”

  Brent paused to consult his notes.

  “But what’s interesting is that in 1625, he was sent to London to negotiate with a group called the Merchant Adventurers. According to one written report, Standish gave a speech in front of the Merchant Adventurers in Newcastle. In fact, it was such a powerful speech that a number of them voted to cancel the colony’s debt immediately.”