the Silent Sea (2010) tof-7 Page 4

  With cumbersome overmittens covering his gloves, Andy needed both hands to turn the doorknob. The real cold hit him hard. It would take several seconds for the air trapped in his clothing to warm against such a thermal onslaught. He shivered for a moment, then rounded the corner that protected the exit from the wind. He clutched the handrail as he made his way down the stairs to the rocky ground. There wasn't much wind today ten knots, maybe and for that he was grateful.

  He grabbed up a five-foot length of metal conduit pipe as thick around as a fifty-cent piece and headed out.

  The sun was a pale promise that circled the horizon but wouldn't emerge above it for another week, but it gave enough light for Andy to see without using his headlamp. His moon boots were inflexible and made walking difficult, and the terrain didn't help much. This part of the Antarctic Peninsula was volcanic, and not enough time had passed since the last eruption for the elements to have eroded the rock to a glassy smoothness like he'd seen pictures of during orientation training.

  Another thing he'd learned during his orientation was to never sweat outside. Ironically, that was the ticket to fast-onset hypothermia because the body shed heat so much faster when exertion opened the skin's pores. Therefore, it took Andy twenty minutes to reach his search area. If Greg Lamont was right and this was his last day to be outside until extraction, Gangle felt this might be the best spot. It was closer to the beach from where he'd made his discovery but in line with a low range of hills that afforded protection. For the next two hours, he walked back and forth, his goggled eyes sweeping the ground. Whenever anything promising appeared, he would use the steel pipe to probe the ice and snow or lever rocks out of the way. It was mindless work, for which he was particularly well suited, and the time seemed to slip away. His only distraction came when he felt the need to run in a circle for a few minutes. He managed to stop himself before he worked up a sweat, but his breath had frozen to the three scarves he had wrapped around his nose and mouth. He pulled them off to retie them so the icy snot was around the back of his head.

  He figured this was a good enough time to call it a day. He studied the distant ocean for a moment, wondering what secrets it harbored below its iceberg-laden surface, then turned back to Wilson/George, the conduit slung over his shoulder like a hobo's pole.

  Andy Gangle had made the discovery of a lifetime. He was content with that. If there were others out here, then someone else could find them while he spent the rest of his life basking in luxuries he'd never dreamt would be his.

  The Silent Sea

  Chapter THREE

  CABRILLO GAVE THE DARK RIVER ANOTHER LOOK BEFORE turning back to the abandoned hut they were using as a base. It was built on stilts partially over the water, and the ladder up to the single room was made of logs lashed together with fiber rope. It creaked ominously as he climbed, but it held his weight. The thatch roof was mostly gone, so the twilit sky was bisected by wooden trusses still covered in bark.

  Coffee's ready, Mike Trono whispered, and handed over a mug.

  Trono was one of the Corporation's principal shore operators, a former para rescue jumper who'd gone behind enemy lines in Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan to rescue downed pilots. Slight of build, with a mop of fine brown hair, he had quit the military to race offshore powerboats only to find the adrenaline rush wasn't enough.

  Next to him slouched the large sleeping form of his partner in crime, Jerry Pulaski. Jerry was a qualified combat veteran, and it would be his responsibility to lug the seventy-pound power pack once they found it. Rounding out the tight squad was Mark Murphy, also asleep.

  Murph's main job in the Corporation was handling the Oregon's sophisticated weapons, and he could fight a ship like no one Juan had ever encountered, though he'd never been in the military. He was an MIT graduate with a fistful of letters after his name, including Ph.D., who'd taken his genius into the development of military hardware. Cabrillo had recruited him some time back with his best friend, Eric Stone, who was the now Oregon's chief helmsman. Juan thought of them as the dynamic duo. When they were together, he could swear they communicated telepathically, and when they spoke in the arcane vernacular of their oft-played video games, he figured they were speaking in tongues. Both young men considered themselves geek chic, though few on the crew were too sure of the chic part.

  Mark had had his first real taste of close-quarter combat during the Corporation's rescue of the Secretary of State, and Linda Ross's assessment was that he handled himself like a pro. Juan wanted him along on this mission in case there were any technical issues with the plutonium-containment vessel. If there was a problem, Murph was the best the Corporation had at figuring it out.

  In deference to the humidity, which made the air thick enough to practically drink, all four men were shirtless, their skin slathered in DEET against the hordes of insects circling just outside the mosquito net they had hung from the rafters. Sweat clung to the hair on Cabrillo's chest and snaked down his lean flanks. Where Jerry Pulaski had heavy slabs of muscle, Cabrillo had a swimmer's physique, with broad shoulders and a tapered waist. Not one to worry about what he ate, he kept himself trim by swimming countless laps in the Oregon's marble-lined swimming pool.

  Another hour until sundown, Cabrillo said, taking a sip of the instant coffee cooked on a little folding stove. The taste made him look into the mug suspiciously. He'd grown accustomed to the gourmet Kona brewed aboard ship. We have just enough light to get the RHIB ready. Leaving an hour later will put us at the border a little before midnight.

  Just before the third watch takes over and the second's thinking about their beds, Mike said, then kicked Pulaski's ankle. Up, Sleeping Beauty, your breakfast awaits.

  Jerry yawned broadly, stretching his thick arms over his head, his dark hair tussled from using his shirt as a pillow. God, you sure are ugly to wake up next to.

  Watch it, my friend. I've seen some of the girls you've dragged home.

  Is that coffee? Mark Murphy asked, rubbing sleep from his eyes. He usually kept his hair long, but for this mission Juan had had him cut it to a more practical length.

  Calling it that is being generous, Cabrillo said, and gave the weapons genius his cup.

  After changing clothing they assembled under the ramshackle hut. Tied to one of the stilts, and lying dangerously low to the water, was their river conveyance, a matte-black ridged hulled inflatable boat, or RHIB. It was essentially a fiberglass-bottomed craft with inflatable fenders ringing its gunwale for added buoyancy. Two massive outboards hung over the boat's transom. The only crew amenity was a stand-up cockpit shielded by bulletproof glass in the center of the twenty-five-foot deck. It had been modified aboard the Oregon so it could fold flat.

  They had airfreighted the RHIB in a steel container into Paraguay and loaded the crate directly onto a rented truck. Juan had no idea if the Argentines had spies watching its neighbor's airports for suspicious activity, but if he were in charge of the military dictatorship, he would. The truck was driven to an isolated town about fifty miles upriver from the Argentine border, and it was there they unloaded it and all the other gear they had brought along. Their current location was another thirty miles south of the town.

  Juan had opted for a riverine approach versus infiltrating Argentina by helicopter because radar coverage along the border was simply too tight, even flying nap-of-the-earth, and because a tributary of this river ran less than five miles from their search target. The clincher was the fact that the cloud cover he'd seen on the pictures turned out to be a massive slash-and-burn logging operation close to where the satellite fragment crashed. The chances of being spotted were too great.

  He took a lesson from World War II, specifically Germany's Operation Greif at the outset of the Battle of the Bulge, in which English-speaking commandoes crossed through the Allied lines during the opening hours of the fight in order to change signposts, disrupt traffic, and generally create chaos among the Allied forces. Cabrillo recalled reading the story of one SS Corporal who
was part of Operation Greif. He admitted that crossing the lines during the battle was the most frightening part of the plan because gunfire was directed at them from both directions. Once on the other side, the German had written, he carried out his duties without the slightest fear, knowing his disguise and command of English would protect him. He hadn't been captured and was eventually wounded defending Berlin against the Russians.

  Cabrillo had no desire to get caught in a cross fire from nervous border guards, so rather than cross this particular line he was going to go under it.

  The RHIB was loaded to the gunwales with iron plates tons of them enough to quadruple the shipping costs of sending the boat unladen. Mark Murphy and Eric Stone had figured out the exact amount needed to pull off Juan's stunt, and now they were about to find out if his two resident geniuses were right.

  Wordlessly, they got to work. Jerry and Mike installed the engine covers and made sure they were watertight while Mark double-checked that all their dive bags full of equipment and weapons were securely tied down. After inspecting the open cabin for anything that might get damaged by emersion, Juan handed over the four Draeger rebreathers. Unlike Scuba tanks, there was no telltale trail of bubbles from the German-made device. They worked by scrubbing carbon dioxide from the closed-loop system and adding oxygen from a small tank when gas ratios tipped dangerously.

  The men wore micro-thin black diving suits, not so much for thermal protection the water was blood warm but to cover their white skin. Their dive shoes had thick rubber soles and detachable flippers in case they needed to leave the water in a hurry.

  Would be nice if we could do this closer to the border, Jerry Pulaski commented. It was an observation hiding a mild complaint.

  Sure would be, Juan agreed, suppressing a grin. Satellite pictures showed the next town on the river was five miles downstream. Again, if he was part of the Argentine junta, he would pay some local wharf rat to drop a dime if he saw or heard anything suspicious. In this part of the world, patriotism was a poor substitute for a full belly, so the team was in for a long night. Cabrillo turned to Murphy. You want the honors?

  Hell no, Mark said. If we got it wrong, you're going to make Eric and me pay for the boat.

  Juan shrugged. Good point.

  Standing chest-deep in the current, he reached over one of the inflatable fenders and opened a release valve. Air hissed from the valve under high pressure until the black rubber was limp. He nodded to Jerry to do the same on the other side, and soon they had half of them emptied. Water sloshed over the gunwale as the boat sank deeper into the river. Cabrillo and Pulaski pushed down on the hull. The boat sank farther and remained submerged, though the bow soon rose to the surface. More air was released until the RHIB was neutrally buoyant and perfectly balanced.

  Not surprisingly, the calculations for the added ballast had been spot-on.

  The team struggled into their rebreathers, fit full masks over their faces, and performed a communications check. There was little chance of running into crocodiles or caimans, but all had spearguns fitted into holsters strapped to their thighs.

  Juan sliced the rope securing the RHIB to the hut and let the current take them. With each man holding a line attached to the boat, they swam their ungainly charge into the middle of the river. To Cabrillo, it felt like they were trying to herd a hippopotamus.

  They stayed close to the surface for the first few miles, swimming lazily with the river's not-insignificant current. This far from the light pollution of any cities, the sky was a vaulted dome of glittering stars, so bright and so numerous it seemed as though night in this part of the world was silver and not black. It was more than bright enough to see both banks of the river and to keep the wallowing boat in the center of the channel.

  Only when they neared the next village did the men dump air from their buoyancy compensators and take the RHIB down close to the bottom. Juan had taken a compass bearing before slipping below the surface, and he steered them by watching the dial's luminous face. It was an eerie feeling, swimming in water as dark as ink. With the temperature close to his own body's, it was as though he'd been denied all tactile sensation. They drifted for a mile, the men lazily finning to maintain steerage, before Cabrillo ordered them back to the surface.

  The isolated village was well behind them, and they found they had the river to themselves. Even had there been traffic, their black gear, and the fact that only parts of their heads were exposed, would lead any native to believe the team was just a couple of branches being slowly swept down toward Argentina.

  Hours rolled away. It was a faint glow emanating around the next bend that told them they were approaching the border. During their briefing, they had all seen satellite shots of the area. On the Paraguay side was a three-hundred-foot concrete quay fronting tumbledown warehouses and a customs shed. The sleepy little town was maybe four streets deep and equally wide. A white-steepled church was the tallest building. In response to the troop buildup, the local military commander had brought a detachment of soldiers to town. They were camped just north of the village in a field that ran right to the river's red-clay bank.

  The Argentine side was almost identical, except there were at least five hundred soldiers garrisoned there, and they had strengthened their position by deploying search lights on spidery towers to sweep the black river, and strung thickets of concertina wire on the dirt road connecting the two towns. The satellite pictures showed two slim boats tied to the pier near where it looked like the military was headquartered. To Juan's eye they appeared to be Boston Whalers, and, if he had to guess, they were probably armed with machine guns and possibly grenade launchers. They would be a problem if things got hairy.

  Keeping close to the bottom, but not touching it so the hull didn't disturb the silt and leaves and kick up a telltale wake, the men swam through the formidable gauntlet. They knew they had reached the Argentine position when a shaft of light pierced the dark water. They were too deep and the river too muddy for anyone on shore to see them, but they steered away from the silvery glow anyway. On the surface, the two men in the tower watched whatever the beam revealed empty water slowly flowing southward.

  Cabrillo and the team remained submerged for another hour, only coming up when the border was miles behind them. It took another hour of drifting silently to reach a nameless tributary seen earlier from the satellite pictures. This time, the men had to work against the current, wrestling the unwieldy craft against the flow. Twenty minutes of struggle gained them only a hundred yards, but Juan called a halt, judging they were far enough upstream to keep them from potentially prying eyes.

  He sighed as he stripped off the heavy Draeger set and laid it into the half-sunk boat. That feels good.

  My fingertips look like white prunes, Mark complained, holding them up to the moonlight.

  Quiet, Juan admonished in a whisper. Okay, boys, you know what's next. The quicker we get it done, the more shut-eye we get.

  The steel plates used to lower the RHIB's profile weighed fifty pounds each, a not-unreasonable load for men in peak physical condition, but there were hundreds of them that had to be lifted over the gunwale and dumped into the river. The men worked like machines, Jerry Pulaski especially. For every plate Murph or Mike Trono got over the side, he moved two. Slowly, so slowly, the boat began to emerge like some slimy amphibian from the primordial ooze. Once the sides cleared the surface, Murph engaged a battery-powered pump. The steady stream of water sounded like a babbling brook.

  It took an hour, and when they were finished all four rolled onto the still-wet deck and lay like dead men.

  Juan was the first to rouse himself. He told his men to sleep, and let Jerry know he would have second watch. The night sounds of the jungle were punctuated by the occasional snore.

  Two hours later, shortly after dawn, the RHIB left the small tributary and returned to the river proper. The air cells they had emptied remained limp, but on such smooth water, and with such a light load, it wouldn't affect the
boat's capabilities.

  The four men now wore Argentine combat fatigues with the insignia of the Ninth Brigade and their trademark maroon berets. The Ninth was a well-trained and -outfitted paramilitary unit that answered only to General Coraz+|n. In other words, a death squad.

  Pretending to be a Ninth Brigade officer, Cabrillo knew he would be able to talk them into or out of any situation that could arise.

  He stood at the RHIB's helm, wearing aviator-style glasses favored by members of the Ninth, his beret at a cocky angle on his head. Behind him, the twin outboards threw up a volcanic wall of white froth while the bow planed over the still surface like a rocket. Mike and Murph stood at his sides, Heckler and Koch machine pistols, a Ninth Brigade staple, slung across their backs. Jerry was still curled up on the fiberglass floorboards like a dog, somehow able to sleep despite the motor's roar.

  The speedometer quivered just below forty miles per hour.

  Twenty minutes downriver, they came to their first village. It was impossible to tell how long ago it had been destroyed the amount of vegetation creeping into the burned-out shells of thatched huts led Juan to think months rather than weeks. Land behind the village that had been cleared for agriculture was also succumbing to the jungle's intractable advance.

  I know what those guys must have felt going upriver in Apocalypse Now, Mike said.

  There were no bodies lying on the ground animals had seen to that shortly after the assault but the savagery was still in clear abundance. The hamlet's score of cement-block buildings had been destroyed by high explosives. Chunks of concrete had been blown as far as the river's edge, and the few remaining sections of wall were riddled with machine-gun holes. There were countless impact craters from the mortar fire used to drive the frightened people into their fields, where the Argentines would have set up a perimeter picket of men. The villagers would have raced into a slaughter.