The Seventh Angel

by Jeff Edwards

  He made no move to wipe them away. The commanding officer of a warship is not supposed to cry, but Bowie thought—as he always did after the dream—that his tears were an honest tribute to Rachel Vargas, and Alex Sherman, and Clint Brody, and the rest of them. They deserved his tears. And, like it or not, Bowie knew that he deserved the dream.

  He supposed that it was technically a nightmare, but he rarely thought of it that way. In his mind, it was something different. It was a reckoning. It was a balancing of karma: a none-too-subtle reminder that human lives depended on his actions and his orders, and that he did not always wield that power with perfect judgment.

  He fumbled for his watch in the darkness, found it, and pushed buttons until the dial lit up. It took him a couple of seconds to focus his eyes well enough to read the time. It was 02:07, just a few minutes after two AM.

  Bowie tugged the sheets away from his legs and groaned. Two in the morning. Damn.

  He could have used more rest than that, but he knew from past experience that it was no good to try again. Once it got started, the dream was with him for the night. If he went back to sleep now, the dream would come again. And again.

  He climbed out of his bunk. Better to get up now, and make a long day of it. He’d grab a cup of coffee and head over to CIC. Maybe one of the civilian engineers would be up already, and he could get some more information on this Mouse unit they were supposed to be testing.

  His fingers located the light switch. He flicked it on, blinking in the sudden illumination. He yawned hard, and reached for his coveralls.

  The dead deserved to have their say. He couldn’t begrudge them that, no matter how much sleep it cost him. They could haunt his dreams as often as they wanted. They had earned that right. But Bowie’s waking hours belonged to the world of the living. He planned to keep it that way.

  CHAPTER 1

  MANILA, REPUBLIC OF THE PHILIPPINES

  FRIDAY; 22 FEBRUARY

  0302 hours (3:02 AM)

  TIME ZONE +8 ‘HOTEL’

  Oleg Grigoriev should not have been alive. The part of his mind still capable of rational thought was aware of that. By all rights, he should have died back there in that alley, where those Chinese bastards had dumped his body with the rest of the garbage.

  But he was not dead. Not yet.

  He staggered down the darkened sidewalk, following the pools of feeble yellow light cast by the street lamps. The dim circles of illumination had become his mile posts—the only method of measuring progress toward his destination.

  The Americans… He had to reach the Americans.

  His senses were playing tricks now. He could hear the whine of distant traffic, but not the scrape of his shoes on the cement. He could feel the damp of the sweat on his cheeks, but not the hot flow of blood down his ribs. Even his sense of distance had become weirdly distorted. His courier duties had brought him to Manila many times, and he had driven down this stretch of Roxas Boulevard more than once. It was only a few city blocks. But it had somehow stretched itself into an impossibly-long tunnel of darkness, punctuated by widely-spaced glows of sickly yellow.

  His left knee buckled, and he tottered sideways, slumping against the windows of a car for support. He drew a long breath, doing his best to ignore the rattling gurgle in his chest.

  It was getting harder to breathe, but at least the pain was gone. Most of it, anyway. The white-hot agony in his ribs had faded to a distant ache—disconnected—as though it belonged to someone else.

  He wondered dimly if the lack of pain might be a bad sign. Was he in shock? Or was his nervous system shutting down as his bodily functions began to fail? Certainly his mind seemed to be slipping. He could no longer remember how many times the bastards had shot him.

  That last thought brought a grim smile to his lips. They obviously hadn’t shot him enough times. Not enough to kill a rangy old Russian bear like Oleg Grigoriev. A few Chinese bullets would kill an ordinary man perhaps, but not a former Sergeant in the Tamanskaya Guards. Not an old Soldier of the Iron Saber brigade.

  Grigoriev took another gurgling breath, and forced his eyes to focus. He could see it now in the distance, the brighter white glow of the security lights that surrounded the American Embassy.

  He pushed himself upright, and swayed back to a full standing position. His knees would have to hold out a little longer. Keep walking. He had to keep walking. He had to reach the Americans.

  His own people had betrayed him; that much he knew. The Chinese would not have dared to harm him without authorization from Zhukov. The bastards wanted the warheads too badly. They’d never risk blowing the deal by killing Zhukov’s courier. That could only mean that Zhukov had authorized the hit. And then he’d sent Grigoriev to Manila, to a rendezvous in a deserted alley, in this cesspool of a country where life was cheap. Straight into the hands of the Chinese killers.

  Grigoriev coughed, sending a spasm of pain through his chest. He lurched forward, stumbling toward the lights of the embassy one faltering step at a time.

  They wanted to throw him out with the garbage, did they? Leave him dying among the broken beer bottles and the cat piss? Trying to protect their precious secrets. Hide their plans from the Americans.

  Grigoriev could taste blood in his mouth now, but the tough old Russian grinned anyway. He’d show the bastards. The Chinese. Zhukov. All of them. He’d tell the Americans everything, and then he’d sit back with a fat bottle of Moskovskaya and watch the whole thing go to hell.

  CHAPTER 2

  ICE PACK - NORTHERN SEA OF OKHOTSK

  LATITUDE 58.29N / LONGITUDE 155.20E

  FRIDAY; 22 FEBRUARY

  1421 hours (2:21 PM)

  TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

  The helicopter came to a hover less than a meter above the ice. It hung there for nearly a minute as the downwash from its rotors blasted snow from the rugged icescape below. The roaring vortex of mechanically-induced wind created an instant blizzard around the aircraft, reducing effective visibility to almost zero. But there wasn’t enough snow to cause a true whiteout. Within seconds, the light accumulation of powder had been blown away, revealing a circle of dirty gray ice a little larger than the sweep of the rotor blades.

  This was not the smooth ice sheet of the Arctic. The ice pack in the Sea of Okhotsk was strained and twisted by the collision of two opposing ocean currents, and the relentless hammering of the Siberian wind. The ice was pocked with hillocks, ridges, and fractures—a frozen diorama of unreleased pressure.

  The helicopter made no attempt to land on the torturous surface. It maintained position, while doors slid open on either side of the fuselage. Three men made the short jump to the ice, and began unloading equipment through the open doors of the aircraft. As soon as the equipment was unloaded, the helicopter lifted away, climbing to an altitude of a thousand meters where it circled while the others carried out their mission down below.

  The men moved quickly and smoothly, despite the roughness of the terrain. They worked without speaking, communicating via hand signals when required, but even that was rarely necessary.

  They were a well-oiled team, and they had already performed this operation four times before at other locations on the Okhotsk ice pack. This would be the fifth and final time.

  Their cold weather gear was ex-Soviet military issue. The dappled grays and dingy whites of the snow camouflage were a near-perfect match for the surrounding ice. From a few hundred meters away, they would be all but invisible, not that visibility particularly mattered out here. They were the only living souls for at least two hundred kilometers.

  In forty minutes, the job was done; the team was back aboard the helicopter and thundering away through the frigid Russian sky.

  Already the winds were beginning to hide the evidence of their work beneath a thin layer of grubby snow. The seven new holes in the ice were rapidly disappearing, as was the network of thin wires that cross-connected the holes like a spider web.

  A scrap of torn plastic flutter
ed and skidded across the ice, sticking for a moment against the slope of a pressure ridge. For the briefest of seconds, a single word was visible—black Cyrillic lettering stenciled against gray plastic. The word was vzryvchatka. Explosive. And then the wind caught the scrap and snatched it away, leaving no visible trace that man had ever set foot on this forbidding stretch of ice.

  CHAPTER 3

  NOAA SUBMERSIBLE NEREUS

  NORTHERN PACIFIC OCEAN (SOUTH OF THE ALEUTIAN ISLANDS)

  MONDAY; 25 FEBRUARY

  0942 hours (9:42 AM)

  TIME ZONE -10 ‘WHISKEY’

  It was like falling into night. The deepwater submersible Nereus continued its descent into the Aleutian trench—passing from the midwater zone, where blue wavelengths of light were still visible—into the aphotic zone, where no light penetrated at all.

  Charlie Sweigart stared through the Nereus’s forward view port as the last traces of light deepened from twilight blue to a shade of black that few human eyes had ever seen. A half mile above, the Nereus’s tender, the Research Vessel Otis Barton, was enjoying the bright morning sunshine. But down here, the only light came from the mini-sub’s interior lights, and the glowing faces of the instrument clusters.

  “Bottom coming up in fifty meters,” Gabriella said.

  Her voice sent a tiny shiver down Charlie Sweigart’s spine. Gabriella’s English was flawless, but her voice carried a musical French-Canadian lilt that never failed to give Charlie a tingle.

  Charlie nodded without looking back. “Thanks.”

  The cabin of the submersible was as cramped as the cockpit of the space shuttle. Charlie sat in the pilot’s seat, nearest the bow of the little submarine, surrounded by gauges, digital readouts, and equipment status lights. Gabriella’s seat at the sensor console was behind Charlie and to his left, so he couldn’t see her without turning almost completely around in his chair. That would be a bit too obvious, so Charlie made do with glimpses of her reflection in the ten-inch thick plate of curved lexan that formed the forward view port.

  The reflections weren’t perfect. The curvature of the surface brought some distortion to the images. But Charlie could look at Gabriella in that imperfect mirror as often as he wanted.

  Who was he kidding, anyway? What would a tall, willowy blonde want with a pudgy little sub-jockey like Charlie? A tall, willowy, smart blonde. Doctor Gabriella Marchand—on loan to NOAA from Centre océanographique de Rimouski, in Quebec—had PhDs in Oceanography, Geochemistry, and Marine Geophysics. She didn’t like for Charlie to call her doctor, but doctor she was. She was one very smart lady, and she was rapidly becoming one of the world’s leading experts on methane hydrate deposits, whatever those were.

  Charlie had read the research proposals and goals for this project. He’d been to the pre-dive briefings, and studied the mission plans carefully. This was their seventh dive, so he knew the plan inside and out. He had the navigational waypoints all programmed into the Nereus’s computers. He knew the currents in the Aleutian trench, and he knew how to compensate for the drift they’d try to put on his boat. He could put the submersible within inches of every sampling site on the Dive Plan. But the real work on this project was up to Gabriella. Charlie was just the bus driver.

  He glanced at the glide angle indicator, and eased back on the control yoke to slow the boat’s rate of descent. Outside of the pressure hull, the submersible’s four propulsor pods rotated slightly, canceling some of the vessel’s negative buoyancy with vectored jets of water.

  “Forty meters to bottom,” Gabriella said.

  Charlie suppressed another shiver. Gabriella’s bottom was considerably closer than forty meters, but it was not a good idea to think about that.

  Charlie nodded again. “Forty meters. Thanks.”

  He was just sneaking another peek at Gabriella’s reflection when a different voice came from behind him.

  “So, what color is it?”

  Charlie flinched. He’d almost forgotten that Steve was even there.

  Steve Harper, the other permanent member of the Nereus crew, sat at the engineering station, behind Charlie and to his right. Steve was a good guy. He could be a jackass when the mood struck him, but he was usually pretty easy to be around. He was also a skilled technician and an excellent button masher. Charlie liked working with him, at least when Steve wasn’t startling the hell out of him.

  Charlie cocked his head. “Huh?”

  “I asked you what color it is,” Steve said.

  “What color is what?” Charlie asked.

  “The Porsche,” Steve said. “Didn’t you just buy a new Porsche?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Charlie said. “Well, it’s not new. But it’s in really good shape.”

  “You’ve got a Porsche?” That was Gabriella.

  “Yeah,” Charlie said. “It’s a ninety-eight Turbo Carrera. Low mileage. It’s pretty nice. Good paint. Nice interior. Excellent mechanical condition.”

  “I like the nineties-models better too,” Gabriella said. “I think they changed the suspension in the new ones. I don’t like the way they handle as much.” She seemed to be taking it for granted that Charlie’s decision to buy a used model was a matter of preference rather than finance.

  “What color is it?” Steve asked again.

  Charlie grimaced. “It’s – uh, red. Sort of a light red.”

  Steve whistled through his teeth. “Dude, you got a red Porsche turbo? You are sooooo set!”

  “What’s our distance to bottom?” Charlie asked. It was time to derail this conversation. He did not want to talk about the Porsche.

  “Thirty-two meters to bottom,” Gabriella said.

  Charlie nodded. “Thanks.” He eased back on the yoke a little more. They were still a little too far away from the bottom to see anything, but this was as good a time as any to heat up the exterior lights. “Floods coming on,” he said, and he flipped three switches near the top of his console.

  Outside the hull, three banks of sealed halogen floodlights flared to life, casting a sphere of light around the little submersible. The darkness was not banished; it hung just beyond the reach of the floods, like an impenetrable curtain of blackness. This was where night lived. On the surface, the sun ruled half of the planet at any given time. But down here, night was always master.

  The thought gave Charlie a mild case of the creeps, despite the fact that it had occurred to him a hundred times before. It was a little creepy. But it was also cool. Because this was Charlie’s domain. Anywhere else in the world, he was just a geeky looking guy with a spare tire around his waist. But down here, Charlie flew like Icarus through the secret realms of darkness. He’d had that thought before too, but it never failed to bring a smile to his lips.

  He dimmed the cabin lights, to make it easier to see through the view port. Gabriella’s reflection faded with the interior illumination.

  Steve snorted. “What exactly is a light red? Is it like a candy apple red? Or a fire engine red?”

  Damn it. He wasn’t going to let it drop. “No,” Charlie said with a sigh. “It’s more of a whitish red.”

  “A whitish red?” Steve’s voice was incredulous. “You mean like a pink?”

  “It’s not pink!” Charlie snapped. He stopped and corrected himself. “I don’t like to think of it as pink, okay?”

  Steve’s laugh sounded like the cackle of a hen. “Dude! You bought a pink Porsche?”

  Charlie tapped a pressure gauge with unnecessary force. “Will you kindly shut the hell up?”

  “Aye-aye, sir!” Steve said it in a theatrically-formal voice. “Shutting the hell up as ordered, sir!”

  If past behavior was anything to judge by, it was a fair guess that Steve had accompanied the words with a brisk simulation of a salute, pointed in the direction of Charlie’s back.

  A laugh from Gabriella confirmed the suspicion.

  Charlie opened his mouth to call Steve an asshole, when the control yoke gave a strange twitch. All thoughts of playful banter vani
shed instantly from his mind. “Steve, did you feel that?”

  “Did I feel what, Porsche Boy?”

  “I just felt some kind of a jerk in the control yoke,” Charlie said.

  “Yeah, yeah … Let me guess, it was me, right? I’m the jerk?”

  “Knock it off,” Charlie snapped. “I’m not joking!”

  The control yoke twitched again, harder this time—an abrupt twist to the right that nearly wrenched the pistol-shaped grips out of his hands. The submersible rolled about ten degrees to starboard, in instant response to the movement of the controls.

  Charlie snatched the yoke back to the left, and then centered up quickly, compensating for the sudden roll. The sub righted itself, but he could feel a definite starboard drag.

  “I’ve got some kind of steering casualty,” Charlie said. “Switch me to backup, now!”

  “I’m on it,” Steve said. “Switching to backup steering now!” He punched a button and relays clicked softly.

  “Thanks,” Charlie said. The drag on the control yoke vanished as the backup steering circuits kicked in. For a half-second, he considered trying to finish the dive on backup steering. But the deep ocean is unforgiving. When something went wrong a half mile under water, the smart thing to do was head for the surface before a little problem could become a big problem.

  He checked the dive clock on the instrument panel above his head. “I’m declaring a mission abort at time zero-nine-five-seven. Call it in.”

  “Got it,” Steve said. “Mission abort, time zero-nine-five-seven. Is this an emergency abort, or a deliberate abort?”

  Charlie thought about that for a few seconds. An emergency abort meant releasing the fifteen hundred pound lead ballast plate built into the bottom of the submersible. The boat would instantly gain three-quarters of a ton of positive buoyancy. They’d shoot for the surface like a cork. Their assent would not be easily controllable, and there was the possibility of ramming into their tender ship as they broke the surface. Charlie was a good pilot, and he was pretty certain that he could steer clear of the Otis Barton, but there was a degree of risk.