Dirk Pitt 22 - Poseidon's Arrow Page 16

  Pablo took a seat across the desk and waited for his employer to speak.

  “So what went wrong in Tijuana?” Bolcke asked, the words tinged with a German accent.

  “You know that Heiland destroyed his own boat during our initial operation,” Pablo said. “This, of course, upset our planned extraction. Before we could get an appropriate recovery vessel there, the Americans arrived and raised the test model. They were from their civilian group NUMA, though, so we had no trouble getting the device from them at sea. But two of their men managed to follow us to shore in Mexico. And there was also a female investigator involved.”

  “Yes, so I hear.”

  Surprised at Bolcke’s comment, Pablo cleared his throat. “There was a traffic incident in the streets of Tijuana as we were making our way to the airport. The device was destroyed, and Juan was killed in the collision. I lost my man Eduardo as we made our way out of the situation.”

  “Quite the blown opportunity,” Bolcke said, his eyes narrowing. “At least there appear to be no repercussions.”

  “All the men I work with are trained mercenaries from Colombia with manufactured identities and no criminal records. There will be no connection to you.”

  “A good thing, as the team you sent to Idaho was also killed.”

  Pablo stiffened in his chair. “Alteban and Rivera are dead?”

  “Yes. They were killed in a ‘traffic incident’ after departing Heiland’s cabin,” Bolcke said, his expression stern. “The female investigator, one Ann Bennett, and the Director of NUMA, whom you apparently met in Tijuana, were responsible. Fortunately, I was able to arrange the recovery of the research plans in Washington.”

  Bolcke reached into a desk drawer, retrieved a thick envelope, and slid it across the desk. “You shall enjoy a fine payday, my friend. Your own wages, plus those of your four dead comrades.”

  “I cannot accept this,” Pablo said as he reached over and grabbed the envelope.

  “No, I pay for the job, not the results. In light of the events, however, I have decided to rescind the bonus I had intended to pay for your good work at the Mountain Pass Mine.”

  Pablo nodded, grateful to get his hands on the envelope. “You have always been generous.”

  “I will not be so generous should there be any more failings. I presume you are prepared for the next assignment?” He crossed his hands on the desk as he gave Pablo a fixed stare. Pablo avoided the gaze, instead looking at Bolcke’s hands. That’s what gave the man away, the hands. They were thick, gnarled, and blemished by the sun. They weren’t the hands of a man who had spent his life in corporate boardrooms, as Bolcke appeared to be. They were the hands of a man who had spent a lifetime digging rocks.

  Born and raised in Austria, Edward Bolcke had spent his youth scouring the Alps for gold and rare minerals. It was his means of escape after his mother had run away with an American GI, leaving him in the care of an alcoholic father prone to violence. The young Bolcke’s mountain hikes fostered a love of geology, which led to a degree in mineral resources engineering from Austria’s University of Leoben.

  He took a job at a copper mine in Poland, and before long was hopscotching the globe, working tin mines in Malaysia, gold mines in Indonesia, and silver mines in South America. With an uncanny ability to locate the richest ore concentrations, he boosted recovery rates and profits everywhere he went.

  But in Colombia, life threw him a twisted bone. Bolcke took an ownership interest in a small silver operation in the Tolima district. His astute analysis of the claim revealed a more valuable deposit of platinum alongside his property. He secured the rights and struck a major deposit, making him wealthy in a matter of months. While celebrating his good fortune in Bogotá, he met the vivacious daughter of a Brazilian industrialist and soon married.

  He led a storybook life for several years, expanding his riches from the mine—until one day he returned to his home in Bogotá to find his wife in bed with an American consulate worker. With a fury he never knew he possessed, he shattered the man’s skull with a rock hammer. His wife came next, her throat crushed by his thick, burly hands.

  A Colombian jury, well greased by his defense attorneys, acquitted him on the grounds of temporary insanity. He walked away a free man.

  He was free physically, but not psychologically. The event reopened childhood scars of abandonment, while slashing new wounds. A bloodthirsty anger flooded his soul—and refused to recede. He sought revenge, turning to the easiest victims he could find: helpless young women. Cruising the slums of Bogotá at night, he would hire young prostitutes, then beat them unmercifully to vent his rage. Nearly gunned down one night by a watchful pimp, he finally abandoned that outlet for his rage and left Colombia, selling his remaining interest in the mine.

  Bolcke had invested in an underperforming gold mine in Panama and he relocated there. Years earlier, he had studied the mine’s operations and knew it had been mismanaged. A privately held American firm with other holdings owned it, and to take control he was forced to purchase the entire company. But to enable the deal, he had to forfeit a portion of the mine’s equity to Panama’s corrupt government, headed at the time by Manuel Noriega. When the U.S. military ousted Noriega, the succeeding government laid claim to the mine and harassed Bolcke into amassing a mountain of legal bills before he reacquired ownership at a considerable cost. He blamed the Americans for his losses, inflaming an already deep-seated hatred against the country.

  As part of the mining conglomerate, he found himself ironically owning a small enterprise in America: a trucking firm, several commercial freighters, and a small security business. What began as a minor annoyance turned into a major opportunity for revenge.

  Every night the vision of his wife with the American officer haunted his dreams, replaying his childhood abandonment, and every morning he woke enraged. The perpetrators, though both long dead, remained targets of wrath, and, by association, their country of origin. The anger never left him. But rather than venting it through random violence, he turned down a new path of vengeance. Using the skills and knowledge from a lifetime of mining, he initiated his own economic war of retribution.

  Bolcke’s joyless dark eyes, set in a lean, hardened face, probed his visitor while his hands flattened on the desk.

  Pablo spoke uneasily. “I am not eager to return to America right away. My understanding was that I would remain in Panama City for several weeks before the next phase.”

  “We had an outdated delivery schedule, and now the time line has been moved up. The shipment is being made in four days. You’ll need to return at once.”

  Pablo didn’t balk. The ex–Colombian Special Forces commando never refused an order. He’d worked for the old Austrian for more than a dozen years, since first being hired to help quell a labor unrest at the mine. His unwavering loyalty had been well rewarded over the years, particularly as his boss drifted further over the line.

  “I will need to assemble a new support team,” Pablo said.

  “There is no time. You will be assisted by two American contractors.”

  “Outside help cannot be trusted.”

  “We will have to take that chance,” Bolcke snapped. “You lost your entire team. I can give you some of Johansson’s men, but they are untrained in your line of work. My Washington representative assures me these contractors are reliable. And besides,” he said, looking Pablo in the eye, “they accomplished what your team could not. They recovered the supercavitation data.”

  Bolcke slid Pablo a smaller envelope.

  “The phone number of our man in Washington. Contact him when you get in and he will arrange a meeting with the contractors. All other arrangements are in place, so you simply need to make the acquisition and delivery.”

  “It will be done.”

  “The company jet will be standing by tomorrow to take you into the country. Any questions?”

  “This female investigator and the people from NUMA—are they a problem?”

  �
�The woman is of no concern.” Bolcke sat back in his chair and further contemplated the question. “I don’t know about the NUMA personnel. Perhaps they are worth monitoring.” He gazed back at Pablo. “I will take care of it. Proceed with the plan. I will be in Beijing waiting for your confirmation.”

  His eyes grew darker as he leaned forward. “I have been working toward this moment for many years. Everything is in place. Do not fail me, Pablo.”

  Pablo puffed out his chest. “Do not worry, Jefe. It will be like taking sweets from a baby.”

  31

  ANN HIT THE OFFICE RUNNING AT SEVEN IN THE morning, inspired to investigate Pitt’s potential link with the ship hijacking. Her first stop was Joe Eberson’s replacement as the DARPA director of Sea Platforms Technology, Dr. Roald Oswald. She had met the scientist a few days earlier and wasn’t surprised to find him already at his desk, working on a status report.

  She poked her head through the doorway. “May I intrude on your morning silence?”

  “Of course, Miss Bennett. I could use a diversion from the depressing state of our new submarine’s delivery schedule.”

  “Please, call me Ann. Will there be a launch without the supercavitation device?”

  “That’s our dilemma. The collective loss of Eberson and Heiland has put us back months—if not years. The vessel’s capabilities are cut to the bone without the device. There will still be merit in testing the propulsion system, I suppose, if we can ever complete the final assembly.”

  “What’s holding you up?”

  “Critical material delays, I’m told.”

  “Would any of those materials include rare earth elements?”

  Oswald took a draw from his coffee and probed Ann with his pale blue eyes. “I don’t have enough information here to answer that. But, yes, certain rare earth elements play a significant part in the Sea Arrow’s design—especially in the propulsion system and some of the sonar and electronic systems. Why do you ask?”

  “I’m exploring a possible link between Dr. Heiland’s death and a hijacked shipment of monazite ore containing high concentrations of neodymium and lanthanum. How important are those elements to the Sea Arrow?”

  “Very. Our propulsion system relies upon a pair of highly advanced electric motors, which in turn power two external jet pumps, as well as the rest of the vessel’s operating systems. Both components contain rare earth elements, but especially the motors.” Oswald took another sip of coffee. “They utilize permanent high-intensity magnets to achieve a multigenerational leap in efficiency and output. These magnets are produced under exacting standards at the Ames National Laboratory, and they contain a mixture of several rare earths, most certainly including neodymium.” He hesitated a moment. “We believe that Heiland’s supercavitation system relies on some rare earth components as well. I suspect you may be onto something.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “The Sea Arrow’s motors have yet to be installed. The first motor was just completed at the Naval Research Lab at Chesapeake Bay and is ready for shipment to Groton. The second has been delayed due to a disruption in the materials’ supply chain. I haven’t caught up with all the information, but I understand that a shortage of rare earth elements is holding us up.”

  “Could you find out exactly which materials are involved?”

  “I’ll make some calls and let you know.” He sat back in his chair with a look of introspection. “Joe Eberson was a friend of mine. We used to go fishing in Canada every summer. He was a good man. Make sure you find his killers.”

  Ann nodded solemnly. “I intend to.”

  She had been back at her desk for only a few minutes when Oswald called with an alphabet soup list of elements whose short supplies were delaying the Sea Arrow: gadolinium, praseodymium, samarium, and dysprosium. At the top of the list was neodymium, the very element in Pitt’s monazite sample from Chile.

  A quick online search revealed the market prices for those elements had recently skyrocketed. Commodity analysts cited two factors for the increase. One was a fire that had devastated the facilities at Mountain Pass, California, the site of the only active rare earth mine in the U.S. The second was something Ann already knew, an announcement by the owners of Australia’s Mount Weld Mine that they would temporarily cease production to modernize and expand the mine.

  As she digested all this, Ann picked up the sheet Fowler had left on her desk. It was the file of biographies for all the nonmilitary personnel who had toured the Sea Arrow. Skipping those who worked at DARPA and ONR, she studied the remaining names. Her eyes widened when she scanned the bio of White House aide Tom Cerny. She reviewed it a second time, jotted down some notes, and printed the entire file.

  Fowler appeared at the door and stepped into her office with a donut and coffee. “You’re rustling the leaves early. Where is the hunt taking you today?”

  “Would you believe the South Pacific?” She told him of Pitt’s suspicions about the ore carrier in Chile and his plans to protect the ship inbound from Australia.

  “It’s carrying rare earth elements?”

  “Yes. I think he said she was called the Adelaide, sailing from Perth.”

  “You’re not going to join him, are you?”

  “I considered it, but he’s leaving tomorrow. It’s probably a wild-goose chase, and frankly, I feel like I’m making some progress here.”

  She slid the bio of Tom Cerny across the desk to him. “I’m not prepared to pronounce a leak in the White House, but look at Cerny’s background.”

  Fowler read aloud a few of Cerny’s biographical entries. “Ex–Green Beret officer, served as military adviser in Taiwan, later Panama and Colombia. Left Army for a stint at Raytheon as a program manager for directed energy weapons programs. Later moved to Capitol Hill as a defense specialist. Served on the board of directors of three defense contractors before joining the White House. Married to the former Jun Lu Yi, a Taiwanese national. Operates a child education charity in Bogotá.” He set the paper down. “Interesting range of experiences.”

  “He seems to have been in the vicinity of a few defense systems that the Chinese have duplicated,” Ann said. “The Colombia bit certainly caught my eye.”

  “Worth looking into. I suspect you could make some discreet inquiries without raising any red flags.”

  “I agree. I’m not ready to throw away my career by barging into the White House, but I’ll press the fringes a bit more. How are things going with your internal reviews?”

  He shook his head. “I’ve double-checked every DARPA employee working on the program. To be honest, I haven’t found a single nugget of suspicious behavior. I’ll pass the files to you when I finish the interviews.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll trust your review. Where are you headed next?”

  “I figured on making site visits to our three largest subcontractors. Maybe you should join me? It would make the work go faster.”

  “I’m thinking of looking at a few of the smaller subcontractors. These three caught my eye.”

  “Too far down the food chain,” Fowler said. “They’d likely have only limited access to anything classified.”

  “No harm in a little probing,” Ann said. “You know the saying about the blind pig finding the acorn.”

  Fowler smiled. “Suit yourself. I’ll be around the rest of the day if you come up with any nuts to share.”

  Late in the day, she got her next break. After more follow-ups with the FBI, she went back to her list of subcontractors. The first two companies were publicly traded, so she readily obtained background information on their businesses. But the third firm was privately held and required more digging. She found an article about it in an engineering periodical and rushed into Fowler’s office.

  “Dan, take a look at this. One of the subcontractors, a firm called SecureTek, provides secure data lines for engineers in remote locations to share their work. Without having their own security clearance, they could gain access to private engineering work
.”

  “That’s probably harder to pull off than you think.”

  “More interesting is this. SecureTek is part of a small conglomerate based in Panama that also owns a transportation company in the U.S. and a gold mine in Panama.”

  “Okay, but I don’t see where that leads.”

  “The company holds a minority interest in Hobart Mining. Hobart owns a mine in Australia called Mount Weld.”

  “All right, so they’ve expanded their mining operations.”

  “Mount Weld is one of the largest producers of rare earth elements outside of China. Dr. Oswald told me this morning how vital rare earth elements are in the Sea Arrow’s development—and how shortages have delayed the program. There could be a connection.”

  “Seems a bit tenuous,” Fowler said, shaking his head. “What’s the motivation? The mine owner should be happy we’re buying what he produces, not cutting off one of his best customers. I think you’re letting Dirk Pitt lead you astray.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “It seems like we’re grasping at straws.”

  “That happens. Maybe things will look different in the morning. I find exercise helps me in solving problems. Every morning, I take a run along the Potomac, and find it’s a great way to relax my mind. You should try it.”

  “Maybe I will. Just do me one favor, will you?” she said. “Add SecureTek to the list of contractors on your site visits.”

  “That I’ll be happy to do,” he said.

  Ann took his advice and stopped at a health club on the way home and ran a few miles on a treadmill before grabbing a chicken salad to go at a café. She thought of Pitt on the way home and called him the second she entered her town house. There was no reply, so she left a lengthy message about her findings and wished him luck on his voyage.

  As she hung up, a deep voice grumbled from the hallway.

  “I hope you remembered to say good-bye.”