by Thomas Waite
Morning light began to filter through stained glass windows above a rudimentary altar.
Galina saw that Alexandra’s eyes were fixed on a crude wooden cross that was catching the reds and blues and yellows from the windows. The crossbeams were bound with thick rope.
The girl’s eyes soon pooled but she didn’t sob. Tears spilled down her cheeks soundlessly. Galina wiped them away. Alexandra still had her gaze fixed on the cross.
Galina bent close to her. “What is it, my dearest?”
“Mommy, I’m going to die and go to heaven.”
“No, you’re not going to die. I promise.”
“And you are, too,” Alexandra said. “That’s what’s so sad. You’re not even sick.”
PP turned from the video of Dmitri and Galina in the museum. “What do you make of that, Oleg? Second-born son crumples up your picture like it was your head and puts it in the skull crusher. Tell me, what does that mean?”
Oleg looked around. He hadn’t seen Dmitri tonight. The scaredy-cat kid the size of an NHL enforcer was hiding somewhere. Dmitri could make the cruelest charges—with Galina’s help, of course. She probably encouraged him to put the photo in the crusher—and Oleg couldn’t even face his accuser. It was like American Gitmo justice. Disgraceful.
“I think she put him up to it, PP. She has taken off. She’s running away. She’s guilty. The guilty always run like rats.”
“You say that about Galina?”
PP looked ready to shoot Oleg, firstborn son, maybe. Oleg was outraged that he had to fear his own father. Oleg had a gun, but it was in the Maserati. What was I thinking? He’d been in too much of a rush arriving. Special people in Russia got to carry concealed weapons. Oleg was special. But so was PP.
“Tell me where she went,” he shouted at PP, unwilling to back down from the plutocrat. A man had to maintain his dignity, his self-possession.
“She didn’t tell me. She just left.”
“Did you help her? Did you give her—”
“What if I did?”
“That would be a mistake, giving money to someone like her. She needs my help, not your money.”
“She doesn’t think so. She’s afraid of you.”
“Of me? That’s ridiculous.” Though, in truth, Oleg was flattered to hear that. To instill fear was to instill respect. “She must have said something,” he insisted.
“She said she was very sorry.”
“See, what did I tell you?”
“Sorry that poor Dmitri had to go through that horrible experience in the museum.”
That again? “Can’t you leave that alone? That’s garbage. He’s brain damaged. Stupid beyond repair. But not because of me. Because of those stupid stairs. I’m leaving.”
Oleg thought he’d better. PP had a certain look about him, and the only time Oleg had seen it before was when he was moving carnivorously against a doomed business competitor.
His father grabbed his arm. Old but strong. It felt like a metal band around his bicep. “No, I don’t want you to leave. I want you to stay. I’m enjoying our little talk. Let’s bring Dmitri into the discussion.”
“Mr. Mumbles? Into the discussion? You’re crazy. You’re both crazy. I’m the only sane one here.”
He jerked his arm free and backed away, scarcely believing he had to worry about his father shooting him in the back.
What has happened to this family?
Oleg made it to the door and stepped outside. Never had the air of the Russian countryside smelled so good.
He hurried to the Maserati and roared toward the gate, worried PP would lock it, then hunt him down.
What has happened to this family? he asked himself again. A firstborn son, maybe, should never have such sorrow. There’s a sickness here. Sick, sick, sick.
The gate opened, thank Christ, and Oleg raced out to the road. He opened the window, sucking in the untainted air, definitely in pursuit of Galina. Already calling Police Sergeant Sergey Volkov’s superior to put out an alert for Galina Bortnik. He gave him the make, model, and year of her shitty car. How far did she really think he’d let her run after taking so many secrets? Secrets about Antarctica and AAC. Secrets about a dead professor and his wife.
Secrets like little tiles that Galina could turn into a very dangerous mosaic.
CHAPTER 17
CNN KEPT REPLAYING VIDEO of the mushroom cloud taken by a satellite over the South Pole. The repetition was stomach churning, like the coverage given to the attacks on the Twin Towers. Yet Lana could hardly bear to look away, and she was not alone. Tanesa and her family, including her Aunt Eve and her four children, were all sitting around Lana’s living room paying rapt attention to the screen. Doper Don was there, too. Thankfully, he’d kept whatever conspiracy theories he still harbored to himself. Perhaps Esme’s reaction to his rants last night kept his lip buttoned.
Walking in and seeing him in the house with the others had given Lana a start, even though she knew he’d be there. It was the seeming normalcy of his presence, after so many years of absence, that she found most unnerving. It was as if somehow he’d never been away. That puzzled her almost as much as the fact that he looked none the worse for wear. She thought prison was supposed to age people—fast. Of course, he’d done his time in a federal facility with tennis courts and a kidney-shaped swimming pool.
Don wasn’t the only one keeping his peace. None of the others had piped up, either. Under normal circumstances—if they were even imaginable tonight—Lana would have suggested the younger children go to the den and watch a movie, but that felt wrong this evening. Aunt Eve’s youngest two—a three-year-old girl and a six-year-old boy—clung to her fearfully. Children, Lana reminded herself, absorbed much by osmosis, but perhaps nothing so quickly as fear.
News reports said the hackers had detonated the Trident II with its single missile as close as possible to Thwaites Glacier, without actually striking it directly, because that caused what a navy spokesperson called “maximum break impact” on the ice.
That also provided the powerful visual impact of the towering mushroom cloud, which an explosion under the ice, easily delivered by a submarine, would not have accomplished. But an undersea attack might have delivered even more damage. Scientists were openly discussing whether the hackers had favored powerful optics over a possibly more crippling explosion, even as a second missile was ready for blastoff. As it was, the Trident II was plenty terrifying—one thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb, which had killed upwards of 135,000 people.
The direct death count on Antarctica, at about thirty-three hundred, was a fraction of Hiroshima’s—and a fraction of those who were likely to die in the coming days and weeks as sea levels swallowed entire islands, along with cities and towns built during less apocalyptic times. More would die from radiation poisoning as nuclear winds carried the plutonium to the far corners of the globe.
Emma had been shaking her head slowly for minutes, as though in disbelief. Now tears spilled down her cheeks. Lana gently massaged her daughter’s neck. The girl didn’t look at her mom. She appeared completely unnerved.
When CNN returned to its newsroom for a series of predictable reports about domestic turmoil—flooding, rioting, looting—Lana asked if everyone had eaten.
“We kept it simple,” Tanesa’s mom, Esme, said. “There’s potato salad in the fridge and cold cuts. Even had a nice green salad that Eve made, and we saved some of that for you, too. I just hope we don’t have a blackout because we could lose a lot of food. I don’t think you could fit a pickle in there at this point.”
“We’ll be okay,” Lana replied, “even if there’s a—”
“We’ve had plenty of blackouts in Anacostia,” Esme said.
Lana nodded. “I have a generator built in to my electrical system.”
“Ah,” Esme nodded. “Well, that’s one less
thing to worry about.”
Lana was starving and battle weary. Her break from combat, as it were, would be brief. Holmes had asked her to call the “Internet forum woman” as soon as it was six a.m. Moscow time.
“It’s our only play right now,” he told Lana. “But don’t let that cloud your judgment because I still think it may be a means of sucking you into action just to waste your time or, worse, get you in a position for a grab.” Abduction.
“Nobody’s going to grab me,” Lana had told him, “because I won’t be moving anywhere without your approval.” And without the backup support he would undoubtedly insist upon.
Actually, nobody was without government approval. The only commercial flights permitted were those essential to evacuating people from low-lying areas. Otherwise, any airborne planes belonged to DOD, and those fighter jets and troop transport planes were very active, indeed, on both domestic and foreign fronts, from what Lana had learned.
She headed quietly into the kitchen and filled a plate with cold dinner. Every cubic inch of the fridge was packed, just as Esme had indicated, and at least a dozen bags of groceries were sitting on the kitchen counters, nonperishables, she saw with a quick survey. Esme hadn’t exaggerated when she’d said they‘d been stocking up. Still, Lana wondered whether she should ask Tanesa’s mom to come up with a ration plan. With coastal cities flooding and in widespread disarray—violent chaos, in many cases—the vast number of tankers and container ships couldn’t off-load. Many had fled harbors for open ocean where they wouldn’t be subject to the havoc of unusually powerful tidal surges set off by the sudden rise in sea level.
Even the interior of the country was slowing down as fuel supplies dwindled rapidly. The President had mandated gas and diesel rationing, with special consideration granted only to shipments of food, medicines, emergency medical supplies, and military hardware.
But as bad as that was—and the death toll already had surpassed more than fifty thousand—the U.S. was infinitely better suited to deal with the crises than its neighbors to the south, while Canada, like Russia, was weathering the unprecedented challenges in relatively good shape. The Canadians, with the world’s largest supply of fresh water, were diverting substantial reserves to hard-hit California, which had been enduring drought-induced shortages long before its frightened citizenry had started hoarding water in all forms—bottles, huge plastic containers, bathtubs, and backyard swimming pools. The irony of water shortages on that scale, amid such widespread flooding, was so obvious that all but the dimmest TV commentators—and there were more than a few—even bothered to comment on it.
The West Coast’s biggest ports—Seattle-Tacoma, Oakland, and Los Angeles-Long Beach—were turning away ships packed with vital supplies—along with countless tons of plastic crap from China—so dock workers and engineers could make desperate attempts to shore up the wharves that were indispensable to the rest of the U.S.
The crisis—and the word seemed wholly inadequate to Lana—had sent the stock market into free fall, while banks across the country were taking an emergency “holiday” mandated by the federal government.
As Lana forked up the last of her potato salad and sliced turkey, Emma sidled up to her.
“You don’t look so great, Mom.”
“And you are an honest child,” Lana said, cupping Emma’s cheek for the first time in ages. “You’re right, though. I’m tired.”
“Are you going to get some sleep now?”
“Not just yet.” She finished her last bite and put aside her plate. “I’m going to duck into my office for a while, and I’ll probably be gone before you wake up in the morning. Everybody getting along okay?”
“Oh, sure. Even Dad’s keeping his mouth shut. I think he knows it’s real—finally. Besides, Esme wouldn’t take any more of his BS, even if he still thought it was all one big lying conspiracy. But he doesn’t. He even said that if he ever got his hands on the people who did this, he’d break them into pieces.”
At last, something Don and I can agree on, Lana thought. “Where’s he sleeping?” she asked Emma.
“A cot in the upstairs hallway. He’s the only guy. Well, the only big guy, so he doesn’t get a room. You want to know the other arrangements?”
“Not if you guys have it covered.”
“You’re still in your room, but Tanesa and I will be using the sofa bed in there.”
“Fair enough.”
“Mom?”
“Yes, Em.” She watched her daughter swallow, expecting more tears. Emma surprised her:
“I’m really worried about you. The last time it got really bad you took off and almost got yourself killed. Promise me you’re not going to do anything like that this time, that you’ll just sit at your computer and that’s it.”
“I promise,” Lana said. Perhaps too blithely.
“I mean it, Mom.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” Right now.
Emma returned to the living room. Lana headed to her office, locking the door and pulling out her phone. She wondered how long service would continue. Could last for a while, she realized. It was hard to flood communication towers on mountains and hilltops, and satellites were safely removed from earthly insanity.
Before calling Galina Bortnik, she checked with her colleagues to see if there were any leads on the Delphin’s location. At this point, knowing what they did about Hector Gomez, a.k.a. Grisha Lisko, the navy was gunning for its own vessel. But finding it was the challenge. DOD announced that the service had pinpointed the launch in the Southern Ocean near the fortieth latitude, a region known as the “Roaring Forties” for its fierce westerlies, but it could easily take days to get ships there, giving the rogue sub ample time to leave quietly. And at ten knots or less, the Delphin would be all but impossible to find. Its stealth capacities were phenomenal, and the only real limit to how long it could stay out there to launch all two dozen of its missiles was food. And Grisha Lisko and whatever help he had could not eat all the provisions in two years of bombing and feasting.
Nobody believed the sub would actually go undiscovered for a year or two. It could actually fire off those missiles with no more than fifteen minutes of preparation, a sobering reality that appeared to elude the House Speaker and Majority Leader, both of whom had said the U.S. should never retreat from the Arctic because of terrorist threats. Threats? They’d just nuked Antarctica. Lana still could not believe those two cretins would make such an ignorant statement. But the President, according to Holmes, felt hemmed in by the demagoguery on Capitol Hill.
“Who cares?” Lana had replied, sitting across from Holmes in his office just hours ago.
“Everyone running in the midterm elections,” he’d replied.
“What midterm elections? There won’t be any if this keeps up. Can’t they just put that crap aside for this?” she exclaimed. If they can’t, how can the country ever survive? she wondered, but only to herself.
“No, they can’t put it aside,” the deputy director said.
It would appear the House and Senate leadership, like the sub, could outlast any stalling strategy by the White House. According to Holmes, Admiral Wourzy had advised the President’s chief of staff that the sub could also go very deep.
“How deep?” Lana had asked Holmes, who had shaken his head. That was his muted manner of saying the information was classified.
Wourzy had also said the sub could make the most of the ocean’s salinity gradients to enhance its cover. All of which would make locating the Delphin harder than trying to find the missing Malaysian passenger jet a few years back, and that aircraft had been equipped with a pinger to make location and recovery possible. Plus, the crash itself had undoubtedly left an oil spill on the ocean surface. Wourzy had also noted that in stealth mode the Delphin would slow down all its fans and shut off any major equipment that wasn’t absolutely essential to the sub’s operation. “
With its speed reduced, it’ll cover fifty miles in five hours. I know that doesn’t sound like much but that that’ll vastly increase the search radius compared to it holding steady,” the admiral had added in his briefing to the chief of staff, to which Holmes had been privy.
Which was why Holmes had begun to place special emphasis on Lana’s Russian contact. He’d wanted at least five of their colleagues to listen in, even prompt Lana if necessary, but she’d scotched the idea, pointing out that Bortnik had already demonstrated superb hacking skills. They could not risk any discovery that would undermine whatever trust Lana had developed with her so far.
She checked her watch. Almost 6:05 a.m. Moscow time. It felt much later than nine-plus Eastern.
Lana heard the children getting ready for bed. None of the exuberance that she recalled from when Emma had had sleepovers. The kids really were absorbing the fear on the faces of their parents.
She dialed Bortnik, who answered on the third ring. This time the woman didn’t wait to speak.
“I know your name,” she said to Lana.
“And I believe I know yours.”
Neither actually used the names; Lana considered that savvy on Bortnik’s part. “But there’s a problem,” Lana said.
“Go ahead.”
“How do I know that you are who you say you are?”
“You have video capability, of course. You can—”
“Yes, but that isn’t foolproof. I’ve already accessed photographs of you and your daughter. I need much more,” Lana said.
“Fingerprint and iris recognition? Would that help?”
“Yes,” Lana answered. “That would certainly be much better, but I want to see you, too. When you talk, videoconference with me.”
“Okay, but I will also send you instructions on how to access secret files about me so you’ll have all of that at your disposal.” Though Bortnik hadn’t specified, she had to be referring to FSB records, which Lana was glad she was volunteering. “But I want something in return,” Bortnik said.
