Frozen Fire

by Evans, Bill; Jameson, Marianna

  7:45 P.M., Saturday, October 25, aboard the Wangari Maathai, off the coast of Taino

  Leaning against the doorjamb in the cockpit of the Wangari Maathai, his research-boat-turned-rescue-vessel, Captain Simon Broadhurst picked up the radio handset and called to the captain of his ship’s twin, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas, whom he could see standing on the deck of her ship.

  An unseen member of her crew called to her and, stopping to give Simon a tired wave, she turned to go into the bridge.

  “This is Maggy on the Marjory, Wangari. Go ahead.”

  “Simon here. Any news?”

  “Lots of metal and upholstery. Luggage. Some—”

  Captain Maggy Patterson paused and Simon knew without her having to say it that pulling dismembered human body parts from the water had taken its toll on her.

  “Got a few ourselves,” he said, clipping his words. “Would you like to do the inventory, or shall I?”

  “Oh, God.” Maggy choked out the words.

  “Right. I’ll do it, then. E-mail me a list, Patterson. Not much left to be retrieved out here. This is the Wangari out.”

  “I’ll send the list,” Maggy replied. “Thanks, Simon. Marjory out.”

  Simon checked in with the other search boat and, in minutes, was looking at a gruesome, updated inventory of the body parts the searchers had found and were storing in the ships’ onboard refrigeration units.

  Most of the victims were accounted for, at least in part. Simon shuddered at the unintentionally macabre pun. None of the bodies had been intact.

  A mixture of anger and grief knifed through him, not for the first time today, and sent his head into his hands. He’d seen the plane coming in, its elegant, streamlined white body vivid against the tropical blue sky. Seconds later, it became a memory suffused in smoke and fire, and he’d spent the day picking body parts and seat cushions out of the water where it had fallen.

  This is insanity.

  A sudden wave of exhaustion washed over him, leaving him feeling uncomfortably vulnerable. To stave off any emotion—a useless expenditure of energy under the circumstances—Simon looked at his watch and swore under his breath. He’d been on the water for nearly twelve hours. He brought his gaze up to the sea, still slicked with rainbowed patches of jet fuel, and made a decision. Picking up the radio handset again, he called ashore for permission to change the operation from search and rescue to search and recovery.

  7:45 P.M., Saturday, October 25, Gainesville, Florida

  Not sure whether he was more bored or annoyed, Sam flicked the television remote and sent the screen to darkness, then slumped against the back of the couch. He glanced idly through his ground-floor living room windows and watched the palm trees in his front yard swaying gently in the breeze. The street lights behind them cast languid shadows across the room’s walls, the dark screen of his television, and his body.

  Ordinarily the shifting light bothered him and he just kept his blinds shut. Tonight, though, he wasn’t thinking about it. He’d been trying for two hours to get through to Cyn on her BlackBerry. His calls kept getting sent to voice mail and she never called back. Undoubtedly she’d shut the damned thing off, and he was seriously pissed about it.

  She might be furious at him, but she’d never not returned a call before. At least not for this long. And she couldn’t be that busy. She wasn’t official crew and the weather was perfectly calm where she was. The nearest thing to a storm was a small tropical depression a couple of hundred miles to the east, probably the last gasp of an otherwise uneventful hurricane season.

  She must really be furious at him. Or in jail.

  If she’d convinced her girlfriends and the captain of the boat to go along with her cockeyed plans to trespass into a restricted zone, she could be somewhere on Taino, or on a ship, locked up or being questioned.

  He blinked once and stared hard out the window at the dark sky.

  Locked up. Getting engaged and arrested in the same day. Wouldn’t that just beat all?

  Who the hell knew what they did to trespassers on Taino? Dennis Cavendish was well known for being a privacy freak. And on that Caribbean speck of volcanic rock, he was the law. From what little Sam knew about it, Taino was the current poster child for banana republics, ruled by an autocrat and guarded by highly trained but no doubt extremely bored ex-military guys. Who probably hated journalists.

  Damn it. He reached for the phone again and dialed the number of the television station where Cyn worked as a news producer. At the first sound of the automated greeting, he punched in the extension of her boss and his occasional pool-shooting partner.

  “Matt Frits.” The bored, abrupt voice made Sam’s mouth tilt upward at the corners. It was the first time he’d smiled since Cyn had wakened him with a kiss this morning.

  “Dude.”

  “Don’t give me that ‘dude’ shit, Briscoe,” the station manager snorted. “You’re almost as old as I am.”

  “Not at heart, my man. Besides, I’m trying to remain cool and hip to maintain my appeal to my students,” Sam protested with a forced laugh, pacing the room and eventually coming to a stop at the window. He leaned against it.

  “Fine. Get a ‘Kurt Cobain Lives’ tattoo on your forehead and pierce a few visible body parts. But when you talk to me, talk like a freaking grown up.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Now that we’ve gotten the pleasantries out of the way, what can I do for you, Sam?”

  “I’m wonderin’ if you’ve heard from Cyn lately.”

  “Not since this morning, when she was begging for permission to break a few international laws and put my ass in a boiling water bath.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “That she wasn’t Gainesville, Florida’s answer to Christiane Amanpour. What the hell do you think I told her?”

  Sam rolled his eyes. “Yeah. But I mean, what did you actually say to her?”

  “I reminded her that she was my producer and on vacation, not an investigative reporter on assignment. I told her anything she did down there was as a free agent, that I don’t do hostage negotiation, and that bail for employees isn’t in my bud get,” he said bluntly. “She went in anyway, didn’t she?”

  Sam clenched his gut against a distinct slamming sensation. Cyn lied to him when she said she’d gotten the station’s okay.

  A few hours after you agree to marry me, you’re lyin’ to me. Damn it, woman, what the hell are you up to?

  It was what Cyn mockingly called “an Oprah moment”; a moment in time that exes refer to in tabloid, tell-all interviews, or in tawdry barroom confessions: It was the moment Sam knew their relationship was over.

  It’s so like Cyn to make it happen from a distance.

  He cleared his throat. “She told me that you okayed it.”

  “My fat, lily-white ass I did,” Matt snapped. “That kind of publicity I don’t need. Not that I thought for a second she’d do anything other than what she wanted to do but, for the record, Sam, I told her unambiguously to stay the hell away from the crash site and anything else having to do with Taino, and let the networks handle it. They’re the ones with the bail funds and satellite coverage.” He paused. “You argued?”

  “Let’s call it a difference of opinion. You know Her Highness when she’s determined.”

  “And now she’s not answering her phone.”

  It was a statement, not a question, and Sam looked up to the shifting light on the ceiling. “Yeah.”

  Damn her. For much of their relationship—most of it, maybe—he’d been lazy and she’d been horny. Lately, though, he’d begun to think that three years of fun times and easy boundaries wasn’t enough, that all the convenience of their relationship had left a few gaps that he now wanted filled.

  With a rueful smile, Sam admitted to himself that he knew getting serious about her would be dangerous. It was plain stupid because Cyn had made it clear that she didn’t ever want to be in a relationship that would require more than merely pullin
g up stakes at the end.

  Matt had known her much longer than he had, and had had the foresight to tell Sam to steer clear of her three years ago. It was advice Sam had ignored with a smile. He should have known better. She’d even let him know this morning he’d made a mistake in proposing to her.

  Sam Hill Briscoe, you’re some kind of fool. A woman who doesn’t want to wear her engagement ring thirty seconds after getting it doesn’t want to get married.

  He’d met Cyn in New York; he’d been at a weather conference at Columbia University and had taken a behind-the-scenes tour at one of the television networks’ flagship stations. She’d been finishing her master’s degree in broadcast journalism and serving as an intern at the station. They’d met in the canteen, and had spent every minute of their free time together for the next two days. A year later, she’d given him a call, saying she’d just landed a job in Gainesville and if he wasn’t married, was he still interested?

  He’d been bowled over by her long legs and boundless confidence, and the easy, laughing way she completely lived up to her nickname: Cyn.

  “Synonymous with sin,” she’d said the first time they met.

  It hadn’t been just a flirtatious comment. As a woman, and as a lover, she was hot, moody, unpredictable, tempting, and inventive. It was a delicious and exhausting combination most of the time. Except for times like the present, when the extrication from another of her self-inflicted messes made his life complicated.

  “You okay?” Matt asked cautiously.

  Sam knew the last thing Matt wanted to do was get involved in anything remotely personal so he tried to inject a smile into his voice. “Yeah. I’ve been tryin’ to get through to her most of the day. My calls just go straight into voice mail.” He let out a heavy breath. “Hell, Matt, her hands can’t be full of piña coladas all the time. She might be just putting me on Ignore, but I’m beginnin’ to think something’s not right.”

  Matt sighed heavily into the phone and muttered, “Like I need this. All right, buddy, let me make some phone calls. I’ll have her call you if I get through. But I warn you, by the time you talk to her, I will have chewed off at least half her ass, so don’t be expecting any thanks for being the concerned boyfriend.”

  Fiancé. “I’ll plead the Fifth. Thanks, Matt.”

  CHAPTER

  12

  8:00 P.M., Saturday, October 25, Atlantis, off the western coast of Taino

  Marie LaSalle sat in the snug, streamlined quarters that comprised her private office and personal living space. It was in the habitat pod next to the control center and, since she was the most senior person on the staff, her part of the modular unit was slightly larger than the rest of the staff quarters. It was comfortably decorated to her specifications and, while not spacious, it didn’t feel cramped. Despite that, and despite loving what she was doing, she still sometimes missed having the ability to step out of the door and feel sun on her face and a black sand beach beneath her feet. Now was one of those times.

  She sipped the flute of sparkling water she’d poured for herself. Had the day progressed as originally intended, it would have been delicate bubbles of vintage Champagne bursting gently on her tongue. Instead, the mood of the day had been somber, the conversations quiet and occasionally grim.

  Even so, the cold truth was that the news of the plane crash had had little actual impact on the personnel in Atlantis. A small bolt of shocked dismay had struck Marie when she received the news; her response was echoed by her crew. She had led a moment of silence for the victims, and then everyone had returned to their tasks with markedly less animation than they had displayed moments before.

  Had any outsider, even Dennis, been present, he or she would no doubt have considered the crew’s reaction cold and unfeeling. That would have been an accurate but unfair characterization. These highly focused scientists were long used to working at the boundary where reality met the imagination, where technology met untried possibilities. Emotions held but a small place in their lives. The ability to disengage was one of the more crucial traits required of everyone who had been selected to spend months at a time living in close quarters at a depth of four thousand feet. And no one in Atlantis had been personally acquainted with the flight crew or the passengers. The amount of emotional energy any of them would expend grieving for people they didn’t know was minuscule.

  That’s not to say the news of the accident didn’t have an effect on every person in Atlantis. Unquestionably it did, but more upsetting to them than the loss of fifteen lives was the specter of technological failure; in Atlantis everyone lived within the ever-present, never-mentioned shadow of death, instantaneous and horrible and only inches—and seconds—away.

  Four thousand feet beneath the sea, they were an alien society, a civilization unto themselves.

  The only material comfort that they relied on surface-dwellers to provide was food, and there was a month’s supply of that on hand at all times. Everything else was taken care of on site. Special seafloor power arrays converted the limitless energy of strong ocean currents into the electricity that kept the entire structure functioning. Special rebreathing units scrubbed and recirculated the air; an oxygen generator took care of the rest. A desalination plant ensured potable water. Every contingency had been planned for, every need satisfied, every small luxury accommodated. Dennis had seen to it personally.

  Underwater habitats had fascinated him for decades. He’d never doubted that people could live and work under the sea. It had been done successfully on a small scale since the early 1960s. But Jacques Cousteau’s Conshelf projects, the U.S. Navy’s Sealabs, and even the interagency Tektite projects had pushed the limits only so far. Dennis believed that thirty-odd years had been enough time to play in the shallows; it was time to take the habitats from sixty feet and six hundred feet to more challenging depths, and to put them to uses beyond mere research and within reach of more than just a few marine biologists.

  In one of their earliest conversations, Dennis had told Marie—had vowed—that his structures would not only be viable long-term habitats, but that they would change the way the world worked. He had already begun to assemble a team of cowboy scientists and renegade engineers who could rise to his irresistible challenge. She’d been one of the earliest employees at the institute, and one of Atlantis’s earliest proponents.

  Part of the miracle of Atlantis was that it had taken only a decade to design and build.

  Every step of the design and planning of Atlantis had been undertaken with Dennis at the helm. His childlike enthusiasm had swept everyone along in its tide. Every person working on the project had been handpicked by Dennis, who’d used grant money, scholarships, and design competitions as lures to bring the best innovative thinkers and creative minds to him.

  The result was a daring experiment that no government or corporation could ever have achieved. Sweeping aside the strangleholds routinely placed on creativity—regulations and worries over liabilities—Dennis had forged ahead, demanding loyalty, ingenuity, and hard work from his people. His only inviolable command was to make it safe and functional, because each member of the team was going to have to live in it for a few weeks at a time. The result was magnificent, a tribute to pushing the limits of the collective imagination.

  And she, Marie LeSalle, was running it, entrusted by Dennis Cavendish to bring Atlantis to its rightful place in human history. She closed her eyes and let the realization flow over her. This day was as much about her perseverance as it was about his.

  With the success they’d been striving for so imminent, trying to maintain a suitably somber attitude was next to impossible, despite the morning’s tragedy. Marie had finally had to excuse herself for a brief, private celebration. She knew she deserved it and harbored a hidden but simmering resentment that anything, even the death of fifteen people, had intruded on her triumph.

  For the last several hours, she had maintained only the barest hint of a smile as she stood before the array of computer
monitors in Atlantis’s control center watching her staff move in a muted ballet as they finalized the project’s operational details.

  The methodology they’d devised for actually mining the crystals had been so simple, similar at first to techniques used for undersea recovery of petroleum and natural gas. They sank a well bore several hundred feet beneath the crust, below the methane hydrate, and triggered a small, controlled explosion that put holes in the end of the pipeline to provide access to the material. At this point in the process, the operation moved to the fringes of known technology.

  Topsiders had for years theorized that the best method for harvesting the methane would be to pump superheated water into the cavity. The methane hydrate ice crystals, warmed from below, would be altered and the released gas would be able to be harvested and moved to the surface, where it would be transferred to tanks for purification, storage, and distribution. The critical problem had always been getting enough water into the cavity—and keeping that water at the right temperature as it was pumped for thousands of feet through a frigid environment. The engineering costs would be prohibitive; the loss of heat through the pipes would be massive; the logistics of bringing such an operation online would be daunting.

  Locating the entire operation right there on the seafloor neatly eliminated the problem.

  Which is why, during the past day, Marie’s team had been forcing a specially created stabilizing chemical into the clathrate deposit, which would enable the first-ever large-scale, safe harvesting of methane hydrate crystals. The chemical, officially named “dennisium” in honor of the man himself, facilitated the retrieval at several stages. Injected at high pressure into the caches of intact methane hydrate crystals, it made the crystals brittle, and therefore prone to separating at significantly lower temperatures, which meant the temperature of the water they induced could be significantly lower than previously projected—in fact, it didn’t have to be much warmer than seawater. Once the stabilized, lightweight crystals were successfully harvested, they would be transferred to the surface.