Sacred Stone of-2 Page 12

  “I thought it was a dead baby whale,” he said, “until it flipped over and I saw a face.”

  Just then another body surfaced.

  “Have Reyes and Kasim fish them out,” Cabrillo said to Hanley, “I’m going back across.”

  Cabrillo left the control room and stepped across to the Akbar. Seng was in the main salon when Cabrillo entered. “Meadows thinks that the object was only in here,” Seng said. “He’s looking through the rest of the ship, but so far it’s clean of radiation.”

  Cabrillo nodded.

  “Ross has found blood in the pilothouse and staterooms as well as in and around the main salon and passageways. The captain was on duty, the posted guards and the rest were sleeping. That would be my guess.”

  Cabrillo nodded again.

  “Whoever hit them, boss,” Seng said, “came in hard and fast.”

  “I’m going to the pilothouse,” Cabrillo said, walking away.

  Once there he examined the ship’s log. The last entry was only two hours old and it stated nothing out of the ordinary. Whoever the visitors were, they’d come unannounced.

  After leaving the pilothouse, Cabrillo was walking down the hall when his radio was called.

  “Mr. Cabrillo,” Huxley’s voice said, “come to the sick bay at once.”

  Cabrillo made his way through the Akbar and back across to the Oregon once again.

  Reyes and Kasim were out on the deck with boat hooks in their hands. They were pushing a body toward a lowered net hung from a cable attached to a derrick. Cabrillo made his way inside and headed down the passageway to the sick bay and opened the door.

  Ackerman was lying on an exam table covered by electric warming blankets.

  “He’s been trying to talk,” Huxley said. “I wrote it all down, but it was mostly gibberish until a few minutes ago.”

  “What then?” Cabrillo asked, staring down at Ackerman, whose eyes had started to flutter. One eye cracked open just a touch.

  “He started talking about the ghost,” she said, “not a ghost, the Ghost, as if it were a nickname.”

  Just then Ackerman spoke again. “I should have never trusted the Ghost,” he said in a voice growing weaker by the word. “He bought and paid for the un…ivers…ity.”

  Ackerman started convulsing. His body began to shake like a dog exiting the water.

  “Mom,” he said weakly.

  And then he died.

  No matter how much Huxley shocked him, his heart would not start again. It was just after midnight when she pronounced him dead. Cabrillo carefully reached up and closed Ackerman’s eyes, then covered him with a blanket.

  “You did the best you could,” he said to Huxley.

  Then he left the sick bay and walked down the Oregon’s passageway.

  Ackerman’s words were still ringing in his head.

  Walking onto the stern of the ship, he found Hanley staring over a trio of bodies. Hanley was holding an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch computer picture in his hand.

  “I enhanced the photograph with a computer to distort the face in order to account for the swelling,” he said as soon as Cabrillo walked closer.

  Cabrillo took the photograph from Hanley, bent down next to the body, and held it to the face. He stared at the face of the corpse and then the photograph.

  “Al-Khalifa,” he said slowly.

  “He must have been weighed down and tossed overboard,” Hanley noted. “The only thing was that the killers didn’t know that the bottom of the ocean around here is littered with geothermal vents. The hot water caused the bodies to quickly bloat and overcome the weight. If it weren’t for that, we’d have never found them.”

  “Have you ID’d the others?” Cabrillo asked.

  “I haven’t found any records yet,” Hanley said, “plus there are more surfacing as we speak. Probably just Al-Khalifa’s minions.”

  “Not minions,” Cabrillo said, “madmen.”

  “Now the question is…” Hanley said.

  “Who is crazy enough,” Cabrillo said, “to steal from other crazies.”

  22

  LANGSTON OVERHOLT IV was sitting in his office, bouncing a red rubber ball off a wooden paddle. The telephone receiver was cradled to his ear. The time was barely 8 A.M. but he’d already been at work for more than two hours.

  “I left a pair of my engineers on board,” Cabrillo said to Overholt. “We’re claiming salvage rights.”

  “Nice prize,” Overholt said.

  “I’m sure we can use it somehow,” Cabrillo agreed.

  “What’s your current location?” Overholt asked.

  “We are north of Iceland heading east. We’re trying to track the bugs on the meteorite. Whoever killed Al-Khalifa and stole the meteorite must be aboard another ship.”

  “You’re sure the body you recovered is Al-Khalifa?” Overholt asked.

  “We’re faxing you fingerprints and digital photographs of the corpse,” Cabrillo said, “so your people can make a positive identification. But I’m ninety-nine percent sure.”

  “After you woke me up this morning, I ordered some of my men to try to check out the ID on the passenger aboard the Eurocopter. We got nothing. I’m sending a team to Greenland to recover the bodies, then hopefully we’ll know more.”

  “Sorry about the midnight call, but I thought you should receive the news as soon as possible.”

  “No problem, I probably got more sleep than you.”

  “I managed to grab a few hours once we left the Akbar,” Cabrillo admitted.

  “What’s your gut feeling, old friend?” Overholt asked. “If Al-Khalifa is dead, then the threat of the dirty bomb seems diminished. The meteorite is radioactive, but without a catalyst the danger is a lot less.”

  “True,” Cabrillo said slowly, “but the missing Ukrainian nuclear bomb is still out there somewhere, and we don’t know that several of Al-Khalifa’s own people didn’t kill him and will now try to mount the mission themselves.”

  “That would explain a lot,” Overholt said, “like how the killers accessed the Akbar so easily.”

  “If it wasn’t some of Al-Khalifa’s own people, then we have another group to contend with. If that’s the case, we should be wary. Whoever made the assault on the Akbar were highly trained and as deadly as vipers.”

  “Another terrorist group?”

  “I doubt it,” Cabrillo said. “The operation had none of the earmarks of religious fanatics. It was more like a military operation. No emotion or fuss—just a surgical and flawless elimination of the opposition.”

  “I’ll dig around,” Overholt said, “and see what I can find out.”

  “I’d appreciate that.”

  “Good thing you managed to bug the meteorite,” Overholt added.

  “The only card up our sleeve,” Cabrillo agreed.

  “Anything else?”

  “Just before he died, the archaeologist started talking about the Ghost,” Cabrillo said, “as if he were a man and not a disembodied apparition.”

  “I’m on it,” Overholt said.

  “This is turning into an episode of Scooby-Doo,” Cabrillo said. “Find out who the Ghost is and we solve the caper.”

  “I don’t seem to remember a Scooby-Doo episode dealing with nuclear weapons,” Overholt said.

  “Update it for the twenty-first century,” Cabrillo said before disconnecting, “it’s a much more dangerous world now.”

  THE FREE ENTERPRISE was steaming through the frigid ocean water on a course toward the Faeroe Islands. The team was starting to relax—after they delivered the meteorite they’d have a break for a while. Once they repositioned the ship to Calais, they would simply wait for a call if needed. The mood aboard the ship was light.

  They had no idea a greyhound of the sea disguised as an old cargo ship was following.

  Nor did they know that both the Corporation and the might of the U.S. government would soon be aligned against them. They were in ignorant bliss.

  “IT’S
IMPORTANT,” TD Dwyer explained to the receptionist.

  “How important?” the receptionist asked. “He’s preparing for a White House meeting.”

  “Very important,” Dwyer said.

  The receptionist nodded and buzzed Overholt. “There’s a Thomas Dwyer here from Theoretical Applications. He claims that he needs to see you immediately.”

  “Send him in,” Overholt said.

  The receptionist rose and walked over to Overholt’s door and opened it. Overholt was sitting behind his desk. Closing a file, he swiveled around and slid the file into a slot in a safe behind his desk.

  “Okay,” he said, “come in now.”

  Dwyer slid past the receptionist and she closed the door behind him.

  “I’m TD Dwyer,” he said. “I’m the scientist tasked with the analysis of the meteorite.”

  Overholt walked from behind his desk and shook Dwyer’s hand, then motioned him over to a pair of chairs around a seating pit. Once they were both seated, he spoke.

  “What have you got?”

  Dwyer was less than five minutes into his dissertation when Overholt stopped him.

  He walked over to his desk and spoke into the intercom. “Julie, we need to schedule Mr. Dwyer to accompany me to the meeting at the White House.”

  “Could you ask him his clearance, sir?” Julie asked.

  “One-A critical,” Dwyer answered.

  “Then we can go in the front,” Overholt said to Julie, “as planned.”

  “I’ll call over, sir.”

  Overholt walked back to the chair and sat down. “When it’s our turn I want you to deliver your findings without hyperbole. Just lay out the facts as best you know. If you are asked for an opinion—and you probably will be—give it, but qualify it as such.”

  “Yes, sir,” Dwyer said.

  “Good,” Overholt said. “Now, just between us, lay out the rest of it, harebrained theories and all.”

  “The gist of the theory is this: There is a possibility that if the molecular structure of the meteorite is pierced, a virus could be released that might have dire consequences.”

  “Worst case?”

  “The end of all organic life on earth.”

  “Well,” Overholt said, “I can safely state you’ve ruined my morning.”

  IN THE OREGON’S control room, Eric Stone was carefully watching a monitor. He would pin down the location of the meteorite, then it would seem to move. Using all the various locations, Stone was trying to vector in on the object. Then he punched in more commands on the computer keyboard and glanced at a different screen. Stone was using space the Corporation rented on a commercial satellite.

  The image filled the monitor but the sea was hidden by a heavy cloud cover.

  “Boss,” he said to Cabrillo, “we need a KH-30 shot. The clouds are too thick.”

  The KH-30 was the Defense Department’s latest supersecret satellite. It could peer through clouds, even into the water itself. Stone had been unable to hack into the system despite repeated efforts.

  “I’ll ask Overholt the next time we talk,” Cabrillo said. “Maybe he can railroad the National Reconnaissance Office into giving him time. Good try, Stone.”

  Hanley was staring at the track map on another monitor. The Oregon was flying through the water but the other vessel had a good head start. “We can overtake them before Scotland anyway, if they stay at the current speed.”

  Cabrillo glanced at the monitor. “It looks to me like they’re on a course for the Faeroes.”

  “If that’s the case,” Hanley said, “they’ll reach port before we can overtake them.”

  Cabrillo nodded and considered this. “What’s the location of our jets?”

  Hanley pulled a world map up on the screen. “Dulles, Dubai, Cape Town and Paris.”

  “Which aircraft is in Paris?”

  “Challenger 604,” Hanley answered.

  “Direct it to Aberdeen, Scotland,” Cabrillo said. “The runway at the airport in the Faeroe Islands is not long enough to handle it, and Aberdeen is the next closest city. Have it fueled and ready if we need to use her.”

  Hanley nodded and walked over to a computer to enter the instructions. The door to the control room opened and Michael Halpert entered. He was holding a manila folder in his hands. He walked to the coffee machine, poured a cup and then approached Cabrillo.

  “Mr. Chairman,” he said wearily, “I’ve exhausted the database. There are no terrorists or other criminal elements that go by the nickname the Ghost.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  “One Hollywood actor who fashions himself a proponent of the dark side, an author who does vampire books, an industrialist, and 4,382 various e-mail identities.”

  “The actor and the author are definitely out,” Cabrillo said. “All the ones I’ve met are too stupid to plan lunch, much less an assault on a terrorist ship. Who is the industrialist?”

  “One Halifax Hickman,” Halpert said, reading from the file, “an ultrarich Howard Hughes type with a vast variety of business interests.”

  “Find out everything you can about him,” Cabrillo ordered. “I want to know everything from the color of his underwear on through.”

  “Will do,” Halpert said as he walked out of the control room again.

  It would be twelve hours before Halpert exited his office.

  And when he did, the Corporation would know a lot more than it did right now.

  IF TD DWYER claimed he was not nervous he’d be lying.

  The group that was assembled around the conference table were the blue-ribbon winners in the nation’s power struggle. More than a few of them appeared nightly on the news programs, and most were recognizable to anyone not living in a cave.

  The people assembled were cabinet officials, the secretary of state, the president and his advisors, and a scattering of four-star generals and intelligence leaders. When it was Overholt’s turn to address the group, he gave a quick overview of the situation and then introduced Dwyer for questions.

  The first question came from the heaviest of hitters.

  “Has this possibility ever been verified in a laboratory?” the president asked.

  “It is believed isotopes of helium were detected in buckyballs that were inside fragments recovered at the meteor crater in northern Arizona as well as at an underwater site near Cancun, Mexico. However, the studies were conducted by university laboratories and the results were not completely conclusive.”

  “So this is all a theory,” the secretary of state said, “not hard science.”

  “Mr. Secretary,” Dwyer said, “the entire field is a new one. It has only been around since 1996, when the Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to three men credited with discovering buckyballs. Since then, with funding cutbacks and such, the field has been mainly explored by corporations with an eye toward commercial applications.”

  “Is there a way to test this theory?” the secretary of state followed up.

  “We could recover some debris and puncture the atoms in a controlled setting,” Dwyer said, “but there is no guarantee that we would recover a sample with the virus intact. Some parts might contain it, some might not.”

  The president spoke. “Mr. Overholt, why did you dispatch contractors to Greenland and not some of our own agents?”

  “Firstly,” Overholt said, “at that time I believed we were dealing with a relatively harmless object and I had no way of knowing Echelon had been compromised. The information of the increased threat only came to me from Mr. Dwyer today. Secondly, we planned to confiscate the object, and I wanted to shield your administration from any negative blowback.”

  “I understand,” the president said. “Who did we hire for the job?”

  “The Corporation,” Overholt said.

  “They were in charge of the Dalai Lama’s return to Tibet, were they not?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I figured they’d all be retired by now,” the president said. “They hit
a financial home run with that operation. Anyway, I have no doubt as to their skill—if I had been you, I’d have done the same thing.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Overholt said.

  The air force chief of staff spoke next. “So the situation is that we have an iridium orb loose at the same time that there is a Ukrainian nuclear weapon missing. If one meets the other, we’ll have a hell of a problem.”

  The president nodded. That was the situation in a nutshell. He paused.

  “Here’s what I want done,” he said finally. “Mr. Dwyer should recover some of these extraterrestrial buckyballs and start experimenting. If there’s a chance that an extraterrestrial virus can be unleashed, we need to know about it. Secondly, I want the military and intelligence unified in an effort to locate this meteorite. Thirdly, I want Mr. Overholt to continue to work with the Corporation—they’ve been on this since the onset, so I don’t want them pulled. I’ll budget whatever funds we need for their fees. Fourthly, I want this kept quiet—if I read about this tomorrow in the New York Times, whoever leaked it will be fired. Last is the most obvious: We need both the Ukrainian nuke and the meteorite recovered as quickly as possible so we don’t start the New Year with a crisis.” He paused and looked around the table. “Okay, everyone, you know what you’re supposed to do. Just get the job done and let’s wrap this up.”

  The room started to empty but the president motioned for Overholt and Dwyer to remain. Once the marine guard had everyone herded out, he shut the door behind him and stood guard outside.

  “TD, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir,” Dwyer said.

  “Give me the sour milk.”

  Dwyer glanced at Overholt, who nodded.

  “If there is a virus in the molecules that comprise the meteorite,” Dwyer said slowly, “a nuclear detonation might be the least of our problems.”

  “Get me Cabrillo on the telephone,” the president said to Overholt.

  23

  ON BOARD THE Oregon the conference room was full.

  “At three hundred fifty miles out we can launch the Robinson,” Cabrillo said. “If we fly at a hundred miles an hour against the headwind, we should be able to arrive in the Faeroe Islands around the same time as our mystery ship.”