Arctic Floor

by Mark Aitken

  ‘Let’s wait, Gerry,’ said Dale. ‘We still got business.’

  The gunshots abated and male voices yelled from another part of the building. Gallen’s instincts were to take shelter, find a weapon, organise a defence or counter-attack. He could now see a second doorway at the other end of the empty showroom and he wondered what was behind it.

  As the voices got closer, Gallen noticed Dale’s expression changing.

  ‘Stay there,’ said Dale, checking his pistol as he moved towards the door Simon had just exited.

  Gallen moved in behind Dale, not wanting to stand out in the open.

  ‘You deaf, Gerry?’ said Dale, swinging around and levelling the handgun. ‘I said stay there.’

  Gallen raised his hands slightly and stopped. As Ern Dale turned back to the door, a dark-clad figure appeared in the doorframe, his handgun rising at Dale and Gallen.

  ‘Shit,’ said Gallen, diving for the wall to his right. It was Paul Mulligan.

  The gunfire started as Gallen slid against the wall and dropped to a crouch. Splinters flew off the doorframe where Mulligan had just been as Dale returned fire.

  ‘Ern, it’s me—Mulligan,’ came the voice from around the corner. ‘Paul Mulligan.’

  ‘The fuck are my boys,’ yelled Dale, aimed-up at the door. ‘What you do with my guys?’

  ‘It’s a misunderstanding, Ern,’ came Mulligan’s syrupy voice. ‘Gallen’s got something of mine, that’s all.’

  ‘So join the club,’ said Dale.

  ‘We’ve got Winter already,’ came the spook’s voice. ‘Let me have Gallen and you walk. I got no fight with you.’

  ‘Got no fight with you neither, Mulligan,’ said Dale, ‘so you be on your way and I’ll get on with my business.’

  Gallen had heard enough. If Mulligan and Dale were going to make a deal, he’d be the loser. Eyeing his backpack on the floor at the far wall, Gallen broke from his position and sprinted the twenty yards to the second door.

  Spinning, Dale let a shot go at Gallen and it zinged into the lino in front of his feet, making him stumble. As he dived behind the picnic table and chairs, sliding into his backpack, he watched Dale swing back to the main doorway in time for Mulligan to enter again, this time with an M4 assault rifle.

  Grabbing the backpack, Gallen got to his feet in a panic and made the door as Dale took a hit and went down. Bullets smashed up the doorframe and the ceiling of the stairwell on the other side as Gallen burst through.

  Panicked, gasping for air, he took the stairs three at a time as he made for the fire exit at the bottom of the stairwell. As he hit it and threw his weight into the locking bar, he felt his shoulder almost break as he bounced off and fell to the concrete.

  Locked. Who the hell locked a fire door?

  Looking around, Gallen struggled for air. There was no other exit. He was trapped. He’d just disobeyed one of the first commandments of special forces training: don’t enter a situation you can’t get out of.

  He thought about running back up the stairs, but as he looked up a leg kicked back the shredded door and then Mulligan was standing on the landing, black overcoat over a dark suit with no tie. With the M4 carbine held across his midriff, he looked more like a Chicago gangster than a Pentagon spook.

  ‘You like making me work for this, Gerry?’ he said. ‘This is how you want it?’

  ‘You employed me, Paul,’ said Gallen, not getting enough air. ‘This has been a wall-to-wall cluster.’

  ‘Let’s make it simple, Gerry, ‘cos the cops are on their way and I’m not hanging around.’

  ‘Where’s Kenny?’ said Gallen.

  ‘Here’s a better question,’ said Mulligan, padding down the steps but keeping the black carbine trained on Gallen’s chest. ‘Is the Newport report in that bag?’

  ‘You know the answer to that,’ said Gallen.

  ‘Throw it here and that’s your end, okay, Gerry?’

  Gallen smiled. ‘Trust me, I’m a spy. Right?’

  ‘Throw it here or I shoot you and pick it up myself.’

  Gallen had nothing left, but he had a reputation and that might be worth a bluff. ‘Can you shoot me dead before I draw down the SIG in this bag, Paul?’

  Mulligan stopped on the steps, his shoes crunching on dry concrete as they looked at one another.

  ‘That’s your gamble,’ Gallen continued. ‘Office guy making a fifteen-yard shot? You might hit me, but if you don’t kill me then I draw down and put three slugs into you before I even hit the deck.’

  Gallen watched Mulligan’s throat bob, then the M4 was rising to Mulligan’s eye-line. Gallen started his prayers: there was no SIG in the bag, there’d be no shoot-out, and to take down his opponent he’d have to run up twenty stairs.

  The gunshot came quickly and Gallen winced, hoping he got it straight through the heart. He embarrassed himself by shutting his eyes.

  But he wasn’t hit. Opening his eyes he saw a spray of blood, then Mulligan’s legs folded and he spilled face-first down the remaining stairs in a clatter of rifle and shoes, and came to rest at Gallen’s feet. At the top of the stairs, Ern Dale lay on the concrete, collapsed, pistol still in his right hand.

  Grabbing the M4, Gallen bounded up the stairs. Rolling Dale onto his back, he saw several gunshot wounds in the man’s chest and one in the bowel. Ern was not going to make it.

  ‘Gerry,’ said the old warhorse, ‘I weren’t gonna hurt ya.’

  ‘I guess not, but I still don’t know about the money.’

  ‘Two Dales in two days,’ said Ern, eyes rolling back as his big voice fell to a whisper. ‘I thought I was smarter than that.’

  ‘Hey, Ern?’ said Gallen, as Dale went still. ‘Thanks for the cover.’

  Pushing down Dale’s eyelids, Gallen stood and moved to the doorway. Pausing at the threshold, he checked the M4 for load in the breech and quickly examined the clip: he had more than twenty rounds left.

  Getting a shoulder on a weapon he knew very well, Gallen controlled his breathing and eased into the empty showroom, covering the room with several sector-arcs of the M4, keeping his shoulders and face lined up with the weapon. It was clear and he jogged lightly across the lino to the other door. Looking around the corner, he saw a corridor with office spaces off it.

  Moving along the hallway he checked off the rooms as he jogged from door to door. At the fourth one on the left, he found an old steel-framed bed with leather manacles at each corner. If Winter had been there, he wasn’t anymore.

  Straining his ears for sound, Gallen moved out into the corridor and had started to his left when he heard it: a vehicle being revved, down in the car park.

  Pushing through the door opposite, he got to the window and looked down. In the weed-infested parking apron, he saw the white Oasis van. A dark Crown Vic pulled up beside the van with a squeal. The doors flew open and the muscular, cowboy-legged form of Mike Ford dashed to the corner of the building as a puff of concrete flew up three feet behind him. From the other side of the car, Liam Tucker ran to the cover of a dumpster as the side windows were shattered.

  Racing down the hallway, Gallen took a set of stairs to the ground level, dodging a wounded man who moaned at the foot of the stairs. Kicking the man’s rifle away from his feet, Gallen leaned out the door and assessed the ground: the Crown Vic was still running and he thought of making a dash for it. As he moved into the sunlight, more gunfire started from around the corner and then Ford and Tucker appeared, dragging the slumped form of Kenny Winter between them.

  Laying down covering fire as he ran, Gallen reached the car, leapt into the driver’s seat and gunned the engine. Keeping his door open he lifted the M4 between the car pillar and the doorframe, clattering off the rifle’s magazine on full auto at a mound of gravel and weeds that seemed to be the source of the incoming.

  Ford reached the car, tore the back door open and climbed in: it was easier to pull an unconscious man into a vehicle than to push him. Gallen kept his fire rate up and Tucker shot too,
until Winter was in the back seat.

  Flooring the accelerator as Tucker dived into the front passenger seat, Gallen pulled a three-sixty and hit the gas as Ford and Tucker shot at the gravel piles, the windscreen getting a star in the top left-hand corner as Gallen steered them to safety.

  Hitting the main road, panting with fear, he saw the police cars coming from the opposite direction, lights flashing. ‘He okay? ‘ he yelled.

  ‘He’ll live,’ said Ford.

  Gallen kept the car at a steady, legal pace as the police vehicles flashed past in the opposite direction. When they’d gone, he turned to Ford in the back seat. ‘Nice timing. How’d you find us?’

  ‘Thank this feller,’ said Ford, lighting a smoke and nodding at Winter’s unconscious form. ‘He managed to dial his phone while he was being worked over. Went to last number dialled —me.’

  ‘How’d you find the location?’ said Gallen.

  ‘Aaron has a cell-tower locator box,’ said Ford. ‘It told us the call was coming from a tower called East Village, so we drove around a bit.’

  ‘Saw the van?’ said Gallen, heading for downtown.

  ‘No mate,’ said Ford. ‘Heard a gunfight.’

  ~ * ~

  CHAPTER 55

  The night air was cold and Gallen caught a look at his watch as he breathed deeply. It was 10.23 pm, Thursday, and the off-the-books doctor that Aaron had provided had declared Winter’s gunshot to be a ‘flesh wound’—no bones hit, no arteries nicked. Gallen and Winter crossed the dark car park behind the surgery, pausing as they got to a long black car.

  As they climbed into the Oasis limo, Dave Joyce, the PR guy, smiled from the rear seat. He nodded at Winter. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s nothing,’ said Winter, looking down at his leg.

  ‘We clear?’ said Florita, who sat beside her PR guy.

  Gallen shrugged. ‘Mulligan killed Ern; Ern killed Mulligan. I attacked Simon, got a pistol off him, but I didn’t kill him.’

  ‘We gotta talk.’ Aaron climbed into the limo and pulled the door shut.

  ‘The Ariadne launch is tomorrow,’ said Florita, crossing her legs. ‘You saw the briefing notes?’

  ‘Yep,’ said Gallen. ‘Still don’t get why you want a bunch of greenies down there.’

  ‘It’s simple, Gerry,’ said Florita, waving a hand at Winter’s cigarette smoke. ‘The media only cover oil companies when we spill crude or launch one of these monsters. So the media spread is fifty-fifty good and bad—it’s our job to ensure we get as much mileage as we can from the good because when the bad news comes around, the media and environmentalists will spin it out for months.’

  Gallen and Winter swapped a look.

  ‘So when we have a close relationship with an organisation like ArcticWatch, and the head of that group wants to make a documentary on the Ariadne, then we’re going to bend over backwards to make it play well for us, okay, Gerry?’

  ‘Just so long as this Du Bois stays away from you,’ said Gallen, ‘I’m good.’

  ‘Well, they’re doing their doco on me, so—’

  Gallen stiffened. ‘They?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Joyce. ‘A film crew. This is a doco, Gerry.’

  Gallen was too tired for this. ‘I thought they were environmentalists. Who are they?’

  ‘Filmmakers, Gerry,’ said Florita. ‘Martina wants a broadcast-quality documentary. Dave teed it up.’

  ‘Martina, is it?’ said Gallen. ‘You best friends with this woman now?’

  Joyce smirked. ‘They gave us five Polar Bears, Gerry.’

  ‘I don’t care if they gave you a panda’s paw for an ashtray. I don’t like the idea of an enemy being allowed on this vessel.’

  ‘It’s a done deal,’ said Florita, grabbing a bottle of water from the centre console. ‘Dave’s done an amazing job designing all this. His media briefing spells it out.’

  Gallen had Joyce’s media brief; he’d seen how he and the crew were going to usher Fox News through the Ariadne separately to CNN, so both networks felt they were getting access to an area the other hadn’t been shown; how the BBC would be given information about the North-West Passage and Northern Sea Route and the Wall Street Journal would be given a lecture about how the submersible was going to lift the yield of the entire venture, giving a whole new shareholder-return profile to the site. Newspapers like the New York Times and Guardian were going to be briefed on how many seals and Inuit could be saved by having the maintenance and pumping side of the rig on the sea bed, not on a semi-submersible rig or a processing ship.

  Gallen had already had Mike Ford plan the take-off of Florita, an irritating gap in security but one that the Aussie would handle better than anyone. Gallen simply hated the idea of the enemy coming inside the perimeter; it went against all his training.

  ‘So,’ said Aaron, ‘you find what you were after?’

  Gallen drew the Newport Associates report from the backpack, threw it to him.

  ‘Holy shit,’ said Aaron, flipping through the document and handing it to Florita. ‘Where was it?’

  ‘Where no one was going to find it,’ said Gallen. ‘But we wanted it out of play.’

  Florita pored through the document. ‘Is it all here?’

  ‘It’s all there,’ said Gallen, reaching for one of Winter’s smokes.

  Florita hugged the file. ‘Well that’s one thing less to worry about.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Gallen as they sped for the airport. But it still left a list of the other things he’d be losing sleep over.

  ~ * ~

  The flight refuelled at Baker Lake and Gallen awoke and made a quick trip to the head. At the front of the cabin, his three guys slept under blankets.

  He washed his face and headed back to his seat, and saw Aaron looking up at him.

  ‘You okay, Gerry?’

  ‘Tired of being shot at.’

  Aaron stood, taking care not to wake Joyce in the facing seat, and led Gallen to the kitchenette. ‘I caught your tone in the limo,’ said Aaron, looking over the seat next to him to check Florita was sleeping. ‘You really worried about the ArcticWatch film crew?’

  Gallen poured a paper cup of water. ‘I’m worried about everything, Aaron. Paranoia can be a life saver.’

  Aaron leaned over to his briefcase and pulled out a file. ‘Every person aboard the Ariadne is profiled.’

  ‘The film crew’s okay?’ Gallen took the file and flipped through it to the ArcticWatch crew.

  ‘I rang their last references. They check out.’

  Gallen saw the intel bio for Martina Du Bois, followed by two French males and one Spanish: the director, sound guy and cameraman. They looked healthy, tanned and sure of themselves. Gallen had no idea what he was looking for. He wouldn’t know a film director if one ran up and kicked him on the leg.

  Fanning the file, he was about to give it back when the sheaf opened at a page profiling NEGROPONTE, John S, the chief engineer of the Ariadne. The name grabbed Gallen’s attention because he remembered a Tony Negroponte, a US Navy captain based in Okinawa. The photo showed a round-faced, smiling bald guy—probably not related, thought Gallen, given that Tony Negroponte had thick black hair and a long face.

  Handing back the file, Gallen remembered his query on the Newport Associates report. ‘You had a look at the Newport file?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  Gallen shrugged. ‘Harry wrote a few comments in the margins.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Like, he underlined a phrase in a section on technology risk, I think it was, and then he wrote, Star Okay. Something like that.’ Aaron made a face.

  ‘Want me to ask about it?’

  ‘Just thought you’d know,’ said Gallen.

  ‘Well it’s too late anyway.’ Aaron yawned and stretched. ‘She had it pouched from the airport in Calgary. It’s been destroyed by now.’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ said Gallen, moving back to his seat.

  As Gallen sat back in his forward-facing
seat, he turned sideways to where Winter was sleeping across the aisle. The Canadian opened an eye and shut it quickly.

  ‘Don’t think I’ve forgotten about you, Kenny,’ said Gallen, pulling his blanket up to his neck.

  ‘I didn’t steal their money,’ said Winter, raising his head to check on Mike Ford, snoring in the opposite seat.

  ‘Well, they don’t believe you and they certainly don’t believe me.’