by Jack Du Brul
After quietly capitulating the Cold War in 1989, Russia had suffered a cruel peace. She was turning into a market for goods and a source of raw materials, much the way Europe had once treated the backwaters of Asia and Africa. In just a few years, the Soviet Union had toppled from superpower to colony, and the decline was far from over.
Watching dispassionately as his nation rotted, Kerikov decided that if he could not save the Rodina, then perhaps the Motherland could save him. Since Russia no longer possessed either the political clout or the financial resources to develop Vulcan’s Forge, Kerikov opened negotiations with a group of men who could.
The nine members of Hydra Consolidated, a Korean-based holding company representing billions of dollars of real estate, manufacturing, and electronics, recognized the value of Vulcan’s Forge when Kerikov approached them. They did not balk at the one-hundred-million-dollar price tag that he attached to the volcano and its unusual riches, for the strategic element being produced in the charnel guts of the volcano would make its possessor the most powerful force on earth, in both the literal and figurative sense.
Just a week after initiating talks with the Koreans, Kerikov learned of the proposed meetings in Thailand to discuss the Spratly Island situation. Sensing that the Bangkok Accords could aid his plan, Kerikov pulled in some favors and employed a little bribery and blackmail to get Gennady Perchenko assigned as the Russian delegate to the meeting. He also managed to get the Taiwanese ambassador to act on his behalf in return for some information that would ensure Minister Tren the prime minister’s office whenever he wanted it.
Even before the accord meetings began, Kerikov knew how he would use his two agents-in-place to solidify possession of the volcano when it crested through the Pacific swells.
When his second Scotch arrived, he glanced at the Piaget watch on his wrist. Perchenko would arrive at any moment. Kerikov looked at the maitre d’. It was his first night here at the Royal River, yet he seemed comfortable in his job.
The regular man hadn’t arrived for work this afternoon. His body was secured to several cement blocks in a canal about ten miles from the city.
An hour after receiving the confirmation from Borodin, Kerikov had killed the maitre d’ as the ultimate insurance that he would never discuss his dealings with the Russian delegate to the Bangkok Accords. After dispatching the young Thai, Kerikov phoned his sociopathic assistant, Evad Lurbud, in Cairo and ordered him to commence his housekeeping. This would mean killing an Egyptian arms merchant and then flying to Hawaii to take care of Takahiro Ohnishi and Kerikov’s mole.
Kerikov might have left behind some loose ends when he fled Russia, but he’d be damned if there would be any from the final gambit of Vulcan’s Forge. In just a few days, he’d be spending the one hundred million dollars from the Koreans and there wouldn’t be a soul left alive who would know how he got it.
Kerikov spotted Gennady Perchenko leaping from a Riva River taxi onto the quay of the Royal River. In a moment, the new maitre d’ would guide the diplomat to his final briefing.
Washington, D.C
The big Greyhound over-the-road bus hissed to a stop just outside the city’s main terminal, near the convention center. Mercer was stiff legged as he trailed Tish down the three steps of the bus to the already sizzling pavement. His whole body ached, not only from his ordeal in New York but from the torturous seats that all transportation manufacturers seem intent on using. He tried, without success, to knuckle the kinks from his lower back as he and Tish ambled into the bus terminal. Announcements echoed off the tiled walls, mixing with the din of the passengers arriving and departing. The terminal stank of the homeless who spent their nights on the steel benches.
“I still don’t understand why we had to take the bus back to Washington,” Tish complained, swiveling her head to stretch her tense neck muscles. They had cabbed to Newark and caught the bus there.
Mercer grimaced as he stroked the new beard that stubbled his face. “Because by now the FBI will have the train stations staked out and I needed time to think before we turn ourselves in.” He strode to a bank of telephones and dialed an international operator. “After I make this call, we’ll give up.”
Mercer waited a full five minutes for the connection to be made, then spoke in French. Tish, not understanding the language, walked over to a bench and sat down. Mercer joined her after a few minutes.
“All set,” he announced.
“What was that all about?”
“I had to call an old fishing buddy in the Ruhr Valley.”
Tish had learned not to be surprised by any of Mercer’s actions. “Did he tell you what you needed?”
“He sure did.” There was a sense of triumph in Mercer’s voice that cut through the exhaustion etched around his eyes.
They grabbed a taxi in front of the terminal and Mercer gave the driver his home address.
“Why don’t we go straight to the FBI?” Tish said, and leaned her head against his shoulder as she had for much of the six-hour ride from New York.
“If we showed up at the Hoover Building, it would take them hours to verify who we are and direct us to the person who was in charge of your protection at the hospital. This way, the agents at my house will take us straight to him.”
“Clever.”
The cab ride took nearly forty-five minutes in the snarled downtown traffic. The driver refused to use the car’s air-conditioning, so great blasts of hot air blew into the taxi, plastering Tish’s hair around her face.
“Since you fell asleep as soon as we got on the bus this morning, I just want to thank you for the way you handled yourself in New York. You came through like a true professional.”
Tish smiled at him, her beautiful lips framing dazzling teeth. “Jack Talbot didn’t raise a daughter who couldn’t take care of herself.”
Mercer laughed. “No doubt about that.”
“Mercer, what’s going to happen to us once the FBI picks us up?”
“I don’t know, Tish. I think the information we’ve gotten in the past couple of days points to the people responsible for the Ocean Seeker disaster. Once we deliver it to the FBI, we should be out of it.”
“What if they don’t believe us?” she persisted.
“We just have to make sure they do. The story I have to tell is too chilling to be ignored.”
The cab stopped in front of Mercer’s house. He paid the driver, unlocked the door of the house, and keyed off the security system. He almost had the door closed when a voice from behind interrupted him.
“Dr. Mercer, please step away from the door and place your hands over your head. This is the FBI.”
Mercer backed away and turned to the FBI agent, his smile ironic. “The last person who told me that was left tied up in an office in New York and he already had his gun drawn.”
The agent, not catching Mercer’s graveyard humor, sensed a threat and pulled his service weapon. “I said, place your hands on your head. You too, Dr. Talbot.”
The agent stepped forward. He was Mercer’s age, but had a baby face under a mop of light blond hair. Mercer noted that his gun hand was very steady. Another agent joined the first.
“I’ve been instructed to take you downtown. You’re not under arrest, so please go easily.”
“I don’t think so. You’d better make this official,” Mercer replied with a slow smile. He turned around and lowered his hands behind his back. As if by programming, the second agent came forward and slapped on a pair of handcuffs. “Think of how good you’ll look to your friends when they see you captured us in irons.”
When they were in the agents’ brown sedan heading back into the city, Tish whispered, “Why in the hell did you do that?”
“I want to see the reaction of whoever has summoned us. It might tell me a lot.”
The car ducked into the city via Route 66, and exited just north of the Lincoln Memorial, then streaked down Constitution Avenue, parallel to the Mall, where countless tourists sweated in the Was
hington heat while viewing the monuments. They turned left onto 15th Street as Mercer expected. He was certain they were headed for the J. Edgar Hoover Building, FBI headquarters, but just before reaching the Treasury Building, the car slowed and made another left onto East Executive Avenue. A moment later they entered the White House grounds through a back gate. Mercer and Tish glanced at each other, speechless.
The car pulled into an underground garage just behind the White House. The agents escorted Tish and Mercer to an already waiting elevator. Two more agents joined them there. Mercer noticed, just as the elevator doors closed, that the garage didn’t smell of oil and was absolutely spotless. He suspected that the garage was washed every day to prevent a stray spark from lighting any spilled oil.
The elevator took them up to the ground floor and disgorged them into a blue-carpeted hallway. Young staffers rushed past, reports and faxes clutched in their fists as if their jobs meant the safety of the free world. Which, in reality, they did. Only a few stopped to notice the cuffs that secured Mercer’s hands behind his back. He wondered if they thought he was a fellow staffer sacrificed to some as yet unknown scandal.
“I won’t give any of you away,” he called over the din of the countless ringing phones.
The agents pushed him roughly down the hall past numerous cramped offices until they reached a cluttered desk just outside a wide door. The presidential seal hung from the wall behind the desk.
“Miss Craig, this is Philip Mercer and Tish Talbot. Is everything set inside?”
“Yes, it is,” the plump woman said. She looked up at Tish and smiled sweetly. “You poor dear, I’ve heard about what you’ve been through. Come with me. I’m sure you’d love to freshen up a bit.”
Tish looked at Mercer, stricken.
“It’s all right. I’m sure you’ll be fine.” Tish allowed the President’s personal secretary to lead her away.
Mercer turned to the agents flanking him. “Well, gentlemen, let’s get on with it.”
They opened the door and Mercer stepped into the Oval Office.
Mercer’s first impression was that the office was much smaller than he had imagined. He envisioned the President governing the country from a much larger room. He stepped over the seal embroidered into the pale blue carpet and studied the people in the room. He recognized most of them. Seated were Admiral C. Thomas Morrison, Richard Henna of the FBI, and Catherine Smith, the President’s chief of staff. Mercer guessed that the bald man standing against the far wall was the director of the CIA. The President sat behind his desk, his large hands resting on the leather top. Ms. Smith wore a conservative suit, white blouse, and a muted bow at her throat, and the assembled men were all wearing the customary Washington uniform — conservative suit, white shirt, and muted tie. Only Admiral Morrison, in his summer whites, and Mercer, still in the black clothing from the break-in, were dressed any differently.
“Mr. President, I wish to congratulate you.” The President looked at Mercer quizzically. “I saw in the paper a couple days ago that your wife’s dog just had puppies.”
“We are not here to discuss dogs, Dr. Mercer,” Paul Barnes, the head of the CIA, said sharply, clipping each word.
“We’re not going to discuss anything until I know why Tish Talbot was brought to Washington and why she was placed under FBI protection.”
“She is no longer a concern of yours,” Barnes snapped.
“I’m beginning not to like you, friend.” There was no malice in Mercer’s voice, but his gray eyes hardened.
“Dr. Mercer, we will answer all of your questions in turn. Rest assured that Dr. Talbot’s ordeal, as you put it, is at an end. She is upstairs right now with my wife and the puppies you just mentioned. She will be looked after.” The President cut through the mounting tension.
“Christ,” Henna exclaimed as he realized that Mercer was cuffed. “Get those damn things off him and leave us.”
The two agents removed the handcuffs and skulked from the room. Mercer helped himself to a cup of coffee from the silver urn next to the fireplace and took the last available chair.
“So you wanted to see me,” Mercer said innocently, taking a sip of coffee.
“Dr. Mercer, you have a lot of explaining to do,” Henna replied. “But first we all want to express our gratitude to you for saving Dr. Talbot’s life in the hospital. How did you know that the man in the room was an impostor?”
“Lucky guess,” Mercer demurred. “We both used the same cover to get into her room. I figured your watchdogs might let in one urologist, but not two. I also noticed that his shoes were too uncomfortable looking for a doctor making his rounds. It was a calculated risk, but at worst I was risking an assault charge from an irate citizen. It turned out I was right. Who was he, anyway?”
“Josef Skadra, a Czech-born agent who used to freelance for the KGB.”
“Do you have any idea who he was working for when he went after Dr. Talbot?”
“We’re not certain,” Henna admitted. “Remember, you didn’t leave him or any of his team in the position to answer questions.”
“Dr. Mercer, you are here to answer questions, not ask them.” Barnes spoke again.
“Paul, take it easy,” the President cautioned. “Dr. Mercer is a guest here, not a prisoner.”
“Before you start asking questions, why don’t I fill you in on what I know,” Mercer said, and the President nodded.
“On the night of May 23, 1954, an ore carrier named Grandam Phoenix sank about two hundred miles north of Hawaii in the middle of the Musicians Seamounts, a five-hundred-mile-long string of undersea volcanoes. Whether she was destroyed by the nuclear blast that occurred that night or she was already sinking, I don’t know. The bomb was under about seven thousand feet of water when it went off.” Mercer’s audience was too dumbstruck to speak, so he continued. “I pinpointed the epicenter by triangulating time delays and Richter scale differences from six different stations in Asia and the United States. The sharp spike recorded on the seismograph tapes that night is identical to ones measured after underground nuclear tests. There is no natural occurrence that even remotely resembles it.
“Since that time, seven large vessels have sunk in a fifty-mile radius of the explosion’s epicenter, including, most recently, the NOAA research ship, Ocean Seeker.”
“What are you talking about?” Henna finally found his voice.
“Let me finish and you’ll see. That many ships sinking in such a relatively small area is strange enough, but there is a connection between them that defies random mishap. Of the seven ships that went down, only three had survivors — a tanker in 1968, a container ship in 1972, and the Ocean Seeker. The four other vessels, the ones where no one survived, all had something in common, very accurate bottom-scanning sonar. The trawlers lost since 1954 use them for finding shoals of fish, a cable layer sunk in 1977 would use it for locating a smooth path on the ocean floor, and a Chilean survey ship was mapping the Pacific basin in 1982 when it vanished without a trace.”
“Is that from the list of vessels you received from that law office in Miami?” asked Henna.
“Yes. I stared at it for quite a while until I saw a connection between all the ships that sank with no survivors. Once I saw that they all had bottom-scanning technology, I pieced together what it was they may have seen. I believe they were all sunk so they wouldn’t report a new volcano building its way to the surface.”
“Is this volcano connected to the nuclear detonation?” the President asked.
“I’m certain that it is. I believe that the explosion was the trigger that started the volcano’s eruption. The area around Hawaii, including the Musicians Seamounts, contains an intraplate hot spot. Put simply, a hot spot is a localized area of intense heat deep in the earth’s mantle that punches holes through the crust as a tectonic plate slides across it, forming chains of volcanoes that are progressively older the further from the spot they are.
“By detonating a nuclear bomb over a hot spot, wea
kening the crust further, magma from the lithosphere was given a new, artificial outlet.”
“Why would somebody want to do that?”
“I have no idea, but it’s proved to be worth killing for.”
“Let’s get back to more recent history,” Henna prompted.
“The Ocean Seeker was sent out on an unscheduled survey to find the cause of some whale deaths. The whales had been found beached on Hawaii about a month ago with their digestive tracts filled with lava particles. Tish Talbot was an invited guest on the expedition. Twenty-four hours after leaving port, the ship exploded and Tish was thrown into the sea. After her rescue, she was transferred to George Washington University Hospital for observation. I received a telegram the day after she was admitted to the hospital saying she was in grave danger.”
“Who sent the telegram?”
“It was signed by her father, but I later found out her father has been dead for a year, so I don’t know who sent it. It’s obvious that someone wanted me to get involved.”
“Why?”
“Mr. President, that is the million-dollar question.”
“This is a waste of time,” Paul Barnes snorted. “He’s got more questions than answers.”
“You’re right, I do have a lot of questions. Why was Tish Talbot purposely saved when the Ocean Seeker was destroyed? The Seeker has the most sophisticated sonar systems found outside the U.S. Navy, so Tish being found alive breaks a well-established pattern. Why was she held prisoner for a few days before her official ‘rescue’ by a freighter called the September Laurel? And then why did someone try to have her killed?”
“Are these all things she told you?”
“No, I’ve figured it out myself. When the ship exploded she was thrown clear by the blast and suddenly there was an inflatable raft right next to her.”
“The raft could have been dislodged by the explosion,” Admiral Morrison pointed out.
