Frozen Fire

by Evans, Bill; Jameson, Marianna

  Everything she’d said was a lie, of course. The units were highly sophisticated bombs, the brainchild of Garner Blaylock, Earth activist, unsung genius, and Dennis Cavendish’s worst nightmare. When activated remotely by Micki, the black boxes would exploit the one vulnerability that Victoria Clark, Taino’s white-hat paranoiac secretary of national security and Micki’s immediate boss, hadn’t taken into account in all of her continual brainstorming about terrorism: sabotage. The kind that could be carried out by an insider, a member of Victoria’s trusted, handpicked inner circle. All those endless hours of security audits and exhaustive tabletop exercises would have been for nothing.

  Micki couldn’t wait to see the look on Victoria’s face when she realized it.

  Talk about a blind spot.

  Working side by side with Victoria for the last few years and overseeing the ubiquitous background checks, covert surveillance, network trolling, and physical searches on the employees, it had become apparent to an incredulous Micki that Victoria hadn’t taken any precautions against the most obvious option. She’d never considered that someone she trusted implicitly—and had investigated so thoroughly—could set a bomb and destroy everything Victoria was meant to protect. This ludicrous arrogance was a rather alarming character flaw in Victoria, who prided herself on her emotionless perfectionism. In a moment of supreme and deliberate irony, Micki had even suggested the notion of a mole, an insider with malicious intent.

  Victoria had considered it carefully, of course. She considered everything carefully. But then she dismissed insider cooperation as a viable threat. For such a plan to be carried out would require there to be too many gaps in her heavily fortified, overtly redundant security perimeter. Micki had listened in awe as Victoria, one of the most highly respected security experts in the world, told her that—on Taino, on her turf—such a threat fell into the category identified by security experts as having extremely high impact but extremely low probability. Micki had even argued with her, pointing out that that was the same category into which the notion of people flying airliners into tall office buildings had once been placed. But Victoria was adamant. Not on Taino. Not with her security parameters in place.

  It was a significant source of amusement to Micki that Victoria had never considered that the very person responsible for maintaining those parameters could be the black hat Victoria never stopped looking for. And it was a source of tremendous pride to Micki that she was able to create those vital, improbable gaps, leaving Taino’s computer and security networks riddled with hidden virtual tunnels.

  And today, in less than an hour, she would place the matched set of small explosives into critical fissures in the cliff walls that loomed above Atlantis, the top secret, deep-sea habitat and methane-hydrate mining operation on which Dennis Cavendish was staking the world’s future.

  Later, Micki would detonate the devices, triggering a submarine landslide that would destroy the entire installation. All of Dennis’s proprietary technological advances would be lost and his minions would be sacrificed—horrible but necessary deaths. Dennis Cavendish, the man who’d crowned himself a king and wanted to be a god, would be hated and reviled, his name cursed, his legacy ruined, his dreams literally crushed.

  The plan was so simple, so clean, so elegant that it had made Micki want to laugh out loud each time she’d thought about it over the past few months. When Garner had told her to get inside Dennis’s organization eight years ago, neither she nor Garner had had any idea that such an opportunity would present itself. All she was meant to do was simply spy on the organization: observe, dig around when and where she could, and report back. That she was hired to be in charge of so much internal security had been beyond either of their most ambitious fantasies. All they had hoped to do was discover what Dennis Cavendish and his Climate Research Institute were doing, and use that information against him. It had worked in small ways over the years by stopping some of his pet projects, but being able to disrupt not just Dennis’s machinations, but to impact the world’s future so dramatically was a gift from the gods, a mandate from Earth. Micki would not, could not, fail. That she’d come up with the plan to sabotage Atlantis herself, and that Garner had seized on it as viable, just added to the buzz in her bloodstream.

  “All set, Ms. Crenshaw?” The dive master’s voice came through the headphones clearly and Micki fought back a smile at the rush of excitement.

  “I’m ready when you are,” she replied, briefly nodding at the beautiful and still-furious Simon Broadhurst through the porthole in front of her.

  The dive master issued a command and Micki felt a low vibration begin as the ship’s winch was brought to life. Seconds later, the pod encasing her was lifted from the tender ship’s dive platform. The deck disappeared from her view as the dive tube swung slowly away from the ship to hang in midair above the surface of the calm early-dawn sea. She felt a brief shudder as the winch’s gear shifted and then the sensation of falling in slow motion took over.

  The splashdown was easy and controlled, and the dive tube’s motors started flawlessly when she initiated the ignition sequence. Less than ten minutes after she’d been given the captain’s grudging clearance to dive, she heard the loud metallic clunk as the tether released her and retracted, leaving her free to maneuver the sleek unit to her destination two thousand feet below the surface, and two thousand feet above the most daring mining operation ever undertaken.

  Pointing the nose down, Micki left the surface world. The first thing she did was switch off the communications link to the Wangari. With the faint radio static gone, the only noises she could hear were the muted hum of the pod’s motor and the sparkling rush of bubbles past the porthole. The sounds soothed her as she aimed the vessel away from the well-lit surface and toward the dark, dramatic cliff created by a tectonic shift thousands of years ago. Time seemed suspended as she moved quickly and effortlessly through the water.

  As she neared the shallow, twilit floor of the continental shelf, she cut her speed so she could enjoy what would be her last trip to this pristine undersea paradise. She felt no regret about what she was intending to do. She’d been granted an opportunity to right some of humanity’s wrongs, and the vista before her was her early reward.

  Coral and anemones and brightly colored fish, doing what they’d done for millennia, displayed no curiosity toward the noisy monster that moved past them in the watery dusk. Micki slowed further, gliding just above the smooth seafloor.

  Octopi slithered away. Eels and their clueless prey watched her from their crevices among the rocks and maddening human debris that littered the bottom. Curiosity got the best of a pair of shy hammerhead sharks and they swam toward her, arcing up and away seconds before they would have made impact. Moving at a speed that barely registered, Micki steered the submersible to the stark, jagged line where the seafloor gave way to the abyss and hovered there, pointing downward, for a few seconds.

  Then, with an abrupt burst of acceleration, she sent the dive tube surging forward past the edge. The deepest dark appeared beneath her, replacing the half-light reflected by the pale, sandy bottom now behind her. Her body braced itself against the sensation of falling that her intuition insisted was taking place, though the tube was stable in the water.

  Embraced by the primordial darkness of the abyss, Micki closed her eyes as something close to an orgasmic rush tightened every muscle, electrified every nerve. Her gasp echoed in the tight space and it took more than a moment for her to catch her breath, to bring her mind back to the task at hand.

  Hands shaking from both excitement and a sliver of fear, she set the controls to pick up speed as she resumed her dark descent, moving past the craggy outcropping of the abyssal walls. Turning on the external flood-lights was an option that she refused to exercise. Part of the thrill, part of the delicious risk was slicing through the silent, lethal, dimensionless darkness guided only by the ghostly glow of the head-up display in front of her.

  As she approached a depth of ei
ghteen hundred feet, the small sonar screen at the left of her field of view showed her first destination coming into range. Now she flipped on the vessel’s powerful outside lights and the stark, forbidding face wall became clearly visible as she continued to descend parallel to it.

  Moments later, she brought the vehicle to a stop opposite a small cave two thousand vertical feet above the habitat and approximately two hundred feet north of it. Setting the auto station keeping thrusters to stabilize her position and maintain pitch and attitude, Micki began initiating the sequences needed to extend the small robotic arm from its sheltered tube at the front of the pod.

  Carefully, she maneuvered the arm to allow one of its pincers to open and slide beneath the handle at the top of the first ceramic box. The pincer firmly locked in place, Micki released the clamps that had held the box secure for the descent, and delicately negotiated the box out of its “nest” on the platform. Once the box was clear of the diving unit’s structure, she gently rotated the arm holding the deadly, precious cargo and extended its reach deep into the stygian depths beyond the cave’s narrow opening.

  Her gaze glued to the real-time video playing on the other small screen on the dashboard, Micki worked as hard at keeping her breathing even and her hands dry and steady on the controls as she did at maneuvering the bomb past the random outcroppings and occasional creatures in the cave. She was operating practically blind. Her only guidance came from the small but powerful light mounted on the end of the arm and the live video feed from the even smaller camera next to it. She moved the box forward at a painstakingly slow pace.

  Fully extended, the mechanical arm had a range of twelve feet. When it had reached that distance into the cave, Micki set the ceramic box carefully onto a clear space on the floor, released it from the pincers, and began retracting the arm as slowly and carefully as she’d inserted it. Its placement so far into the cave would preclude the box from being seen by anyone who might be sent to these coordinates to investigate her actions—which would only happen if Simon disobeyed her orders and began tracking her movements. Not that it really mattered. Even if Simon could convince Victoria to send an investigative team to find out what she’d been doing, it would be too late. Investigators would not be facing an abyssal wall. They would be facing a blank expanse of ocean, still turbid with the debris of a catastrophic submarine landslide.

  The arm fully retracted, Micki moved forward three hundred feet along the wall and repeated the procedure with the second box. Her mission accomplished, she aimed the pod upward and moved in a slow arc back toward the tender ship. When she broke the surface, Micki reactivated the communications channel and announced to the dive master that she was ready to be retrieved.

  It wasn’t easy keeping the triumph out of her voice.

  CHAPTER

  1

  4:30 A.M., Saturday, October 25, Miami, Florida

  Dennis Cavendish became aware that he was drifting toward consciousness and forced himself to open his eyes, demanded his brain kick into high gear. Too much was going to happen today for him to allow himself the luxury of a slow awakening, or even another round with the pair of warm, lush redheads flanking him. He pulled himself to a sitting position, then gave the woman on his left a light slap on her well-shaped behind.

  “Time to go.”

  He shook the other woman’s shoulder, and both began to make small murmurs, indicating that waking them would not be an easy task. He climbed over one of them, took a moment to stretch his pleasantly aching muscles, then ripped the covers off both women. The chill in the air-conditioned room sent them into fetal crouches.

  He flipped on one of the lamps next to the bed. “I said it’s time to go.”

  One of the women pushed herself upright on one elbow, brushing hair out of her eyes with her other hand. “Is something wrong? What time is it?” She looked at him blearily, her eye makeup smudged.

  “It’s four-thirty and you have to go. I’ve got work to do,” Dennis lied smoothly. “Get your friend to wake up. You have to be out of here in five minutes. There will be a car waiting for you when you get downstairs.”

  Still confused and squinting, the woman nevertheless pushed her companion until she woke up. With barely a word spoken between them, the women threw on most of their clothes, and Dennis escorted them to the elevator door in the living room of his condo. They departed with wary, friendly waves. The moment the door slid shut, Dennis went to the shower to brace himself for the day ahead.

  Forty-five minutes later Dennis was airborne, the engines of his Lear jet screaming as his pilot executed a steep takeoff from Miami International Airport. He would be on the ground on his island, Taino, in twenty minutes. Not long after that he would be in a small submarine headed four thousand feet to the bottom of his slice of the Caribbean. It wouldn’t be a joy ride; it would be the last trip to see the dream of his lifetime while it still belonged just to him: Atlantis, the first fully staffed habitat ever built at that depth—and the operations center for the newest and best means of changing the way the world worked.

  In a few hours, Atlantis would begin to retrieve methane hydrate crystals from beneath the seafloor and introduce the world to the next, arguably the only, clean fuel that the planet had to offer.

  From entertaining the first glimmer of a thought to watching the last beams being sunk into place, Dennis had known that this was what life was about. This was the brass ring, the golden goose; attaining this kind of power was what every hackneyed cliché referred to, what every fairy tale was about, what every emperor and despot had ever dreamed of—the power to make the world change at one person’s command. He was that person.

  He picked up his phone and punched a single number. Less than a minute later, he heard a sleepy female voice, that of Victoria Clark, his secretary of national security and chief paranoiac. The woman whose job it was to keep him safe and happy.

  “Hi, Dennis.”

  “Hi, Vic. I’m on my way to the island. Meet me at my office in half an hour.”

  “Is something wrong? Is everyone with you?”

  The thought of dragging the senior executives of some of the world’s major corporations out of bed and onto a plane before dawn made him smile. “No, I’m alone. I want to get the day going. It’s going to be unforgettable, Vic. Let’s get ’em, tiger. See you in thirty.”

  “Wait. Don’t hang up.”

  Dennis could tell by the soft noises in the background that she was pushing herself to sitting position, getting focused. It rarely took Vic this long to focus on anything, but then, he didn’t usually get her up in the middle of the night.

  Vic was his workhorse, his closest confidante, and the person who knew more of his secrets than anyone. She was the person he trusted the most—at least that’s what he told people. The reality was that Dennis trusted no one but himself.

  He had to let people into his circle, but he knew the closer he let them get, the more they had on him, the more he was worth to them. The market price of betrayal was something that never lost value, and Vic was the one person who could command the highest fee for betraying him.

  Betrayal was a lesson he’d learned the hard way and, as such lessons do, it had altered his thinking in an instant. Since the first time Dennis had been stabbed in the back by someone he trusted, the degree of closeness and his level of real trust in a person had moved along opposing axes. As one went up, the other went down. Treating betrayal as a “when” rather than an “if” made life much easier.

  It was his only gospel, and it worked.

  “Dennis, you need to fly with your guests. You need to be there with them—”

  “I’ve been with them for two days nonstop. I’ll see them when they get in, in a few hours. Look, I want to go straight down to the habitat when I get there, okay? With you.”

  “I—”

  “Not interested in all the many reasons you can’t or won’t go there, Vic,” he interrupted. “You’re going.”

  Dennis disconnec
ted before she could reply and sat back to sip his coffee.

  In less than twenty-four hours, the world would be a different place. Victoria Clark was one of the few people who knew just how different it would be, and she was going to be at his side today. All day. Today of all days the risk was inordinately high.

  4:30 A.M., Saturday, October 25, Miami, Florida

  Lieutenant Colonel Wendy Watson lay naked on the rough sheets, staring at the shifting patterns of light playing on the cheap popcorn ceiling of an apartment that wasn’t hers. Being there, next to a man she’d only met three months ago, a man who had changed her life and its purpose, was an atypical move for her. And that was a word she’d rarely—make that never—known to be applied to herself. If there was one word that she’d heard used to describe her more than any other, despite all the obstacles she’d overcome in her life, despite everything she’d accomplished, that word was “typical.”

  It wasn’t a fair description nor was it an accurate one. That didn’t matter to the many people who had uttered it, under their breath derisively or more loudly with intimations of expectations met, upon hearing what Wendy Watson had done, was doing, or was intending to do. She’d heard it when she’d graduated at the top of her class from the most prestigious public high school in Connecticut. When she’d graduated at the top of her class from the United States Air Force Academy. When she’d been selected to train for the elite Combat Search and Rescue force. When it was announced she’d received enough commendations to make her the most highly decorated female air force officer serving in Afghanistan.