Tom Clancy's Power Plays 5 - 8

by Tom Clancy

  Now he sat at a bank of display terminals, pondering SWAN’s most recent full-sky maps of the sun . . . or more accurately, the sun’s hydrogen envelope. Each spectroscopic image had been composed over a regular three-day interval, and was color-graded to profile the radiation intensities—“hot” and “cool” spots—of different coordinates on the envelope. Because the probe was in an almost stationary position relative to earth, following its elliptical revolutions around the sun, the equatorial solar plane showed up as elongated, and each map resembled an Easter egg splashed with various shades of purple, orange, green, and yellow.

  Soon Frye’s heart was pounding. He got out his cellular phone and rang his complementary half at home.

  “Hello?”

  “Ketch, what’re you doing?”

  “Dripping shower water on my bedroom carpet at the moment,” Ketchum said. “Do you know what time it is?”

  “Time for you to get your ass over here to the center.”

  “What’ve you turned up?” Ketchum’s tone had abruptly swung from mild annoyance to sharpest curiosity.

  “Look, you remember that bullet we dodged last April . . . the solar flare that would’ve been all hell if it hadn’t missed Earth?”

  “Of course,” Ketchum said. “The X-17 . . .”

  “Well, I think we’re about to find ourselves downstream from a roarer that’ll make our X-17 look like a cap gun popping off.”

  “Are you certain you’re not overestimating—”

  “This one looks like the beast, Ketch. I mean it. The fucking beast. And it’ll be charging right at us once it’s hatched.”

  Ketchum took an audible breath at the other end of the line.

  “I’m on my way,” he said.

  Marble Point, Antarctica (77°25’ S, 163°49’ E)

  “Hey, Russ, you’re back in right the nick. Got an e-mail inside from that unbelievable redhead over at Cold Corners.”

  Russ Granger jumped from the Bell’s cockpit onto the helipad, his boots mashing down on thumbnail ripples of white powdery snow, a coat he figured had to be close to a foot deep. When he’d left two hours earlier to fly a sling-load of food rations out to the Lake Hoare camp in Taylor Valley, the landing area was clear, its markings visible from a good altitude. But that was how it was in this place. Sastrugi, as the wavy drifts of snow were called, formed quickly parallel to a rising wind, and it had picked up a great deal since his departure.

  He looked at the parka-clad station manager. Though the sky was still showing a lot of blue, snowflakes were blowing through the air from some widely spaced cloud scuds that had come in over the ice shelf.

  “Megan Breen?” Granger said.

  The station manager’s hooded head bobbed up and down. “You heard me say ‘unbelievable,’ right? Should I have added the word ‘hot’?”

  Granger pulled up his own fleece-trimmed hood against the stinging flurries.

  “That woman’s a hundred percent business, Chuck,” he said. “Take my word for it, there’s nothing in that message to make either of us sweaty.”

  Chuck Trewillen motioned to his rear. Beyond the depot’s fuel lines stood three orange Quonset huts and a couple of old dozers, their shovels heaped with snow. Beyond them was another small building that had served as Trewillen’s isolated home for the half decade he’d held his job at Marble Point. Beyond that building there was only the great sawtoothed jut of the Wilson Piedmont Glacier.

  “You ought to hear the noises that glacier makes when it’s calving bergs,” Trewillen said. “It sort of pants and moans. I’m talking loud, deep moooooans.” He shrugged. “Sometimes they’re enough to get me worked up.”

  Granger smiled, clapped Trewillen on the shoulder. “You’ve been out here alone way too long, man,” he said, and started toward the computer hut.

  Granger paused in the entrance to the air-heated Quonset, stamped caked snow off his boots, and unzipped his jacket. Then he sat at the desktop and tapped a key to erase its screen-saver—flamingos on a tropical beach, lush palms and turquoise water in the background.

  The beach scene gave way to an e-mail application’s opening window. Granger dragged and clicked to the In-box, and saw Megan Breen’s message at the top of its queue—the single new one. Its title was simply his first name in caps followed by a string of exclamation marks.

  Typical Megan, he thought.

  The message itself was also characteristically brief and straight to the point:

  Russ,

  A colleague from San Jose has come down to find our missing people and he needs your assist ASAP. Hopes to borrow you from Mac for a flyby of B. Pass. Let me know when you can make it.

  Best/MB

  Granger fished a hard pack of Marlboros from his open jacket, put a smoke in his mouth, and fired it up with his disposable lighter. Given the extreme urgency of Megan’s request, he knew that clearing it with his bosses at McMurdo wasn’t anything to worry about.

  He frowned, dragging on the cigarette.

  No, it definitely wouldn’t be a problem.

  The real problem was this “colleague” she’d mentioned, and the complications his arrival could bring about for the people who really padded Granger’s bankroll enough to make living in this stinking, abominable icebox worthwhile . . . and further down the line, the serious mess it could churn up for Granger himself.

  He took another deep hit off the cig and its tip flared. It wouldn’t be much fun springing the bad news on the Consortium, but he’d have to get in touch with them, see how they wanted him to handle the situation.

  Yeah, he thought. The thing was to contact Zurich directly, let the kingfish have it in front of him.

  ASAP.

  Inverness, Scotland

  Nan Gorrie looked again at her watch and once more at the stove, where a fine piece of mutton sat in a soup of juice and rapidly coagulating fat. Her husband usually rang ahead the few times a year he might be late; he’d been awfully distracted this past week, and she preferred to hope that he had forgotten, rather than worrying something had happened to him. There had been a few occasions as a constable that he’d gotten into scrapes, but none that had risen to the level of what she might call actual danger. As a detective, his days ran at an even pace. His nature helped pour oil on the seas, smoothing the swells; if he felt apprehension, she had rarely known it.

  But the way he’d been going lately, rising in the middle of the night, pacing and rocking, rocking and pacing . . . Frank Gorrie was not a pensive man—not a fool nor shallow by any means, but no brooder. Some men—James Fitz came to mind, the Irishman who lived in the next house but one—spent their time staring into space, contemplating the whys and wherefores of the universe. Frank was more a solid sort—a piece of mutton who knew what he was about, which had been a large part of their attraction.

  She suspected the wee child at Eriskay had distracted him. The social worker had called him twice now to report on the infant’s progress.

  She too had sympathy for the infant, but the matter went beyond that. They were well past their inability to have a child. She was. It had struck her hard but she had come to accept it, a decree from God. Artificial measures were not so commonplace fifteen years ago, and even now the idea seemed foreign.

  The doorbell rang. Nan took a towel in her hands, wiping them though they weren’t wet as she walked through the front room to the door. As her hand reached the doorknob she felt her breathing grow quite sharp.

  “Sorry to bother you, mum,” said a thin young man in a blue jumpsuit. He had a small box in his hand, an instrument of some sort. “Report of gas in the neighborhood.”

  “Here?” she said, rubbing her hands together as her breathing relaxed.

  “Trying to trace it,” he said. “Have you smelled anything?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “Well that’s a good thing then,” said the man, already heading next door.

  The phone rang as she closed the door.

  “I hadn’t real
ized the time, sweets,” said her husband when she picked up.

  “Losh, Frank—where are ya now?”

  “At the office. I have some calls to make—would you eat without me?”

  “Well of course, if I’m hungry.” She glanced back at the stove.

  He was quiet for a moment. Nan thought of saying something about the child, but couldn’t find the words.

  “I may be here a bit,” Frank told her. “Some calls to make.”

  “Well, be here by eight, would you? We have a guest coming round.”

  “Not your brother, I hope—he’ll be asking for cigars.”

  “Don’t you go encouraging him to smoke now.”

  “Who’s the guest?”

  “An American teacher. She’s been on holiday and today she came to the school to see our methods. Head-mistress brought her over. Very nice Yank.”

  “You should have invited her for dinner.”

  “And that would have been sweet, wouldn’t it, with you standing us up.”

  Actually, she had, but the American had said she had another engagement. She had seemed charming, however. A little too enthusiastic—but that was a good fault to have when you were young.

  “By eight,” she reminded her husband.

  “Count on it, Sweets.”

  In the red-lit room at UpLink’s satellite recording center in Glasgow, Glyn Lowry banged the space bar on his keyboard in frustration. For the past three nights, an intruder had been attempting to hack his way into one of the UpLink e-mail servers. The attempt seemed to be the work of an amateur, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t do considerable damage. Nor could it be allowed to continue. UpLink’s security programs easily kept the intruder at bay—but for some reason the powerful sniffers that Lowry launched to track him down had failed miserably.

  It looked like the same story tonight. The sniffer pretended to allow access to the UpLink system, downloading a large graphic file. As the file loaded on the hacker’s computer, it activated a Trojan horse. That program would then give Lowry a complete rundown of the route back to the hacker. It would also give Lowry access to the hard drives on the hacker’s computer.

  But as the seconds ticked away, it became increasingly clear that it had failed again. They were obviously being attacked by someone more sophisticated than the average thirteen-year-old.

  Had to be fourteen at least.

  His computer appeared to have hung, just as it had last night. Lowry picked up his cola and reached to reboot. Just as his fingers touched the keyboard, the cursor began running across the top of the screen.

  ACCESS ACHIEVED. DUMPING DRIVES C:, D:, E:.

  “No shit,” said Lowry. He leaned back in his swivel chair and gulped the last bit of the soda. Then he tossed the can and slid back the keyboard. “Let’s have a look at our sweetheart’s life, eh?”

  Besides the normal systems programs—Windows ME, definitely an amateur—and office suites, the hacker chap had a good store of perv pix-nudie shots that confirmed for Lowry that he was indeed dealing with a teenage boy. There were a number of word-processing files that looked like German to his admittedly unfamiliar eye. He flipped through a few, took a look at some more of the porn, and then found a directory of the standard plug-and-play hacker scripts that allowed so many idiot brats to pretend they were true geeks.

  But it was when he started to examine the contents of the lad’s D: drive that things got interesting.

  The chap liked to break into e-mail systems. He had accessed a Fleet Street newspaper, which included quite a few off-color remarks about the Queen. He’d also gotten into UKAE, the regulatory agency for British nuclear power. Lowry glanced through the texts, which were run together with the headers indicating when they had been sent. He was on the second page and giving thought to returning to the nudies when a message in the middle of the page caught his attention.

  “Eliminate Ewie Cameron. Set up as an accident. L (POUNDS) 100,000. CB.”

  The Highland Camerons were not the most renowned family in northern Scotland, but they were well known enough to have been included in several of the lectures on local history Lowry had attended over the past few months on the days he kept his mom company in Inverness; the Cameron estate was located about a mile from her home.

  As Lowry continued to read the messages, he picked up the phone and called his supervisor.

  TEN

  MOUNT EREBUS (77°53’ S, 167°17’ E) BULL PASS, ANTARCTICA

  MARCH 12, 2002

  HIGH ABOVE ROSS ISLAND, THE VOLCANO’S FULMINATING lava lake seethed and bubbled and abruptly shot a dollop of molten rock into the sky with a belch of pressurized gas. Trailing smoke and licks of flame, the red-hot ejecta hurtled toward the rim of the summit cone, and over it, and then smacked into the mountainside a mile away. It was larger than a howitzer round, and its ballistic impact threw a cloud of ash, snow, and ice crystals up from the crater’s rim.

  There the plastery magma bomb hardened in the supercooled air to lay among countless other chunks of igneous debris tossed across the slope.

  While signs of the eruption traveled across many miles in this frigid and barren land, they drew only a scattering of attention.

  It was heard clearly by National Science Foundation vulcanologists working on the mount’s upper elevations, and produced a tremor that rattled the equipment in their mobile apple huts. Its sonic precursors (vibrational pulses that signal an impending eruption) and signature oscillations (harmonic changes that indicate a discrete eruption, or series of eruptions, in progress) were registered by seismometers and broadband microphones that the researchers had installed and maintained with steady diligence throughout the Antarctic summer.

  Ten thousand feet below on another corner of the island, the discharge and resultant concussion would be audible as two dull, thudding blurts of sound to McMurdites who took notice. Few did, however. The continuous volcanic output had never inflicted damage on the station, and was for them little more than background noise.

  Eastward across the Transantarctic Mountains, the seismic precursors were detected in instantaneous-wave readouts from sensors on Erebus’s flank that had been well camouflaged from the NSF research team. As the sound of the explosive outbursts carried to Bull Pass, bouncing faintly between its craggy walls, hidden men and equipment went into clockwork action.

  Three thousand feet underground, a boom-mounted drill came alive with a percussive jolt, its tungsten carbide bit boring into solid rock. Protected from its deafening clatter inside their safety cabin, the drill controller and his assistants breathed filtered air behind the face shields of their high-efficiency, closed-circuit respirator helmets.

  Two thousand feet underground, a large jaw crusher began grinding and smashing the contents of its mineral fill chamber, the first stage in the yield’s multistage separation process.

  A thousand feet higher, a pair of specialized trolley-assisted haul trucks, slung low for tunnel clearance, started forward on an inclined concrete ramp. On a stone shelf several levels beneath the surface, their semiprocessed loads would be stored in excavated pockets until ready to be moved into the open and rigged for helicopter airlift to the coast.

  Soon after Erebus quieted, the trucks ceased to roll.

  The deep drilling continued longer, a departure from the original requirement that it start and stop in tight coordination with Erebus’s rumbling expulsions. Once needed to preserve secrecy, the precaution was now followed only when opportune. Methods had changed after a half decade of continuous production. Engineering breakthroughs, advanced sound-baffling techniques, the current depth of excavation, and a shrewd, cavalier willingness to exploit every aspect of the unique environment had all led to terrific progress since the initial investment bore first fruit.

  Five years. Expanding markets. Soaring profit margins. Things were going sensationally well. Output had reached an unbridled peak, and further growth was a given provided operations were allowed to keep running smoothly.

>   Like any other commercial organization, the Consortium was determined to ensure that no obstacles arose to interfere with its success.

  Zurich, Switzerland

  The broad subject of the meeting was UpLink International, and those in attendance had come with understandable and fairly similar concerns.

  His sky-blue eyes astute behind his reading glasses, Gabriel Morgan smiled from the head of the conference table; a great, expansive, vigorous whopper of a smile. Lots of teeth, his fleshy mastiff cheeks drawn up, his wide brow creased under a deliberately uncombed thatch of silver hair. Every facial muscle enlisted to make it the heartiest smile possible.

  This was not to say his attitude was light or blasé. Albedo was his brainchild, and he better than anyone else at the table understood that this session had been called to deal with a matter of pressing importance. But a smile could be spirited and serious at the same time, no contradiction. He’d learned that under the tutelage of his father at a very young age, the same way his father had learned from his grandfather. As chairman of the group, Morgan knew one of his fundamental responsibilities was to exude calm authority, soothe jitters, allay undue fears. Reassure his partners that he had a full awareness of the developments in Antarctica, knew their particulars top to bottom, and would by no means allow them to progress into a crisis situation. That they amounted to minor stumbling blocks, bothersome but easily remediable hassles.