Park Skarda-April Force: Emerald Part 19

"You sure?" Skarda asked.

She turned her head and looked him full in the face, her expression determined. "I'm sure. I'm just scared, I guess."

April's smile didn't have a lot of warmth. "Scared can keep you alive."

Flinders shrugged, her face defiant.

"Okay," he said. "Fair enough. You're in." He hunched forward. "So let's go over what we know. The n.a.z.is turned the orichalc.u.m into bars and transported them somewhere during the war. We know Jaz and whoever she works for want the orichalc.u.m badly, probably because they want to melt the Arctic ice cap to get at the oil. And whoever Zandak works for, they want it badly, too."

April finished off a kebab and licked her fingers. "Options?"

Flinders pushed the grape leaf of a dolma with the tines of her fork, then set it down and adjusted her gla.s.ses. "I've been thinking about what my parents were working on when they disappeared. Remember I told you about the n.a.z.is and their search for Vril? Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, head of the Schutzstaffel, the feared SS, were obsessed with Aryan mysticism and occultism, and with the search for Vril, the energy source supposedly derived from the Schwarze Sonne, the mythical Black Sun. They believed that whoever possessed Vril would become masters of the world. In the late thirties. .h.i.tler was sending out teams to explore caves and mines all over Europe to look for Vril. He was also looking for a race of supermen living in subterranean caverns who were descendants of an advanced antediluvian civilization whose city was inundated by a great flood-in other words, Atlantis. But the n.a.z.i's version of Atlantis was that the continent of Hyperborea or Thule, located in Antarctica, and its supermen were the originators of the Aryan race, whose duty it was to exterminate all 'lower' races. Obviously, Vril was what the n.a.z.is called orichalc.u.m, but I don't think Hitler really knew what it was. They just developed their own mythology, according to their needs. But in the end, it's all the same isomer, and now we know that both the Atlanteans and the n.a.z.is mined it.

"But back to my parents. On May 9, 1926, Richard Byrd, who was then a U.S. Navy aviator, and his pilot Floyd Bennett claimed to have flown over the North Pole in a Fokker F-VII Tri-motor, starting from the Svalbard Islands, north of Norway in the Greenland Sea. The flight made him a national celebrity, even though it's doubtful that he ever reached the Pole.Subsequently, he flew several missions over Antarctica and was promoted to Rear Admiral.

"During World War Two the n.a.z.is were supposed to have established a secret U-boat base in ice caverns in Neuschwabenland in Antarctica, so in 1947 Byrd-already experienced with polar flight-took part in 'Operation Highjump', a task force sent to investigate the claim.

"Now here's where it gets interesting. During his research my father came across a secret diary written by Byrd in his own hand. It gave the details of a clandestine mission Byrd flew over the Arctic in 1946 to look for a secret n.a.z.i research base established there during the war, just like the one in Antarctica. Byrd wrote that he had seen the entrance to an ice cavern with supply crates outside it, marked with swastikas. This is why my parents went to the Arctic. My father was fascinated by Vril."

Skarda lifted up his chin, considering her line of thought. "So what are you saying? The n.a.z.is might have brought the isomer bars to the Arctic to experiment on them?"

"Why not?" Flinders asked. "By the end of the war they knew they were losing, so they were experimenting with the atomic bomb-anything to find a way to win. So why not the isomer? But they wouldn't have known what we know-that you need a concentrated beam of light to activate its potential energy."

"Where is this diary now?" April asked.

"I don't know. I guess my father took it with him."

"Do you remember where this base was?" Skarda asked.

A apologetic expression crumpled her face. "You can't forget-I was about twelve. I was more interested in boys than in archaeology. But I do remember my father talking about Ostrov Gukera Island, which is part of the Franz Josef Land archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. If Byrd took off from the Svalbard Islands, he would just have to fly northeast for two hundred or so miles to reach Ostrov Gukera."

Skarda reached for his Stealth.

___.

Gulf of Mexico When Skarda's message came through, Candy Man was chomping a huge bite out of his latest creation: frozen pepperoni pizza smothered in chocolate sauce and chunks of Dove candy bars.

The words appeared on the screen: "Need NASA GPR data for Ostrov Gukera Island, Franz Josef Land, Arctic Ocean. Looking for an ice cavern big enough to be a concealed research base."

Candy Man's fat fingers flew over the keyboard. "no prob."

THIRTY-EIGHT.

Istanbul IN the muggy night Skarda sat alone on the terrace of their suite, watching the sprinkling of lights on the Asia side of the strait. His eyelids drooped and his muscles ached, but he couldn't turn off his thoughts. He knew it was useless to try to go to sleep.

The sound of a soft footstep made him turn his head. Flinders stepped out onto the terrace, easing down into the chair next to him.

"Can't sleep?" she asked.

He smiled at her, nodding. "Yeah."

"Me, too. I guess I can't put the day out of my head. I'm still shook up."

"It's peaceful out here."

"Yes." For a while she looked out over the water, watching a luxury yacht, its sails lowered, powering to the south and the Sea of Marmara. Then she broke the silence. "You and April make a good team. You complement each other."

He was watching the yacht, too. It disappeared around a distant clump of land. He nodded. "She's amazing. In the Army she was the best sharpshooter they'd even seen. She wanted to join the Rangers, but Army policy is still 'no girls allowed'. But they made her part of a sniper team anyway and everybody just looked the other way." He paused. "She's my sword arm. I'd be half a man without her."

Flinders leaned back in her chair, adjusting her gla.s.ses. She let half a minute slide past in silence. Then she said, "She told me...your wife..." The rest of her sentence drifted off.

Skarda said nothing. For a long time he just kept his face toward the water, not moving.

Her face colored. "I'm sorry. I guess I shouldn't have brought it up-"

He held up a placating hand. "It's not that. I was just thinking." Another long pause hung between them before he went on. "When Sarah and I got married, we made a decision to go after our dream while we were still young, which was to find undiscovered treasure. Both of us were divers, and we knew that there are plenty of treasure troves all over the world, just waiting to be found. So we sold everything we had and moved to Madrid. For almost three years we haunted libraries all over Europe, working lousy part-time jobs to get by, living in run-down studio apartments, eating sc.r.a.ps. It wasn't fun, but we were determined to do it, win or lose. And that kept us going. Finally we wound up in Ma.r.s.eilles, at a tiny library on a little side street near the docks. And we found what we were looking for.

"It was a report of an unknown French pirate who had been hanged in 1730. For years he had been raiding rich Spanish and Portuguese s.h.i.+ps off the Portuguese coast and stas.h.i.+ng the loot on Corvo Island in the Azores. So we sold everything we had and took a tramp s.h.i.+p to Corvo. We figured out the general area where the treasure should be, then looked for evidence. We got lucky. We found a secluded cove where the tide rushed in with rip currents. Under the surf line was a natural shelf, which in the 1700's probably was above water. One morning I saw a flash of gold. I anch.o.r.ed myself with a line and went into the surf. The current was powerful, but I could swim inside the shelf and squeeze myself into it. The rock angled up above the waterline into a huge natural chamber in the bedrock of the island. It was crammed floor-to-ceiling with gold and jewels. It was a fortune.

"I took some broken links of chain and three gold cruzadoes back to the surface to show Sarah and then went down again. By that time the riptide had become fiercer and I was struggling against the current, barely holding on with my tether.

"Then suddenly she came cras.h.i.+ng into the water with her throat cut, streaming blood. But she had no tether and the riptide carried her out to sea."

"Oh, my G.o.d! Park! That's horrible!"

"By the time I climbed back on land whoever had killed her was gone and so were the pieces I'd brought up." He stopped and took in a deep breath. "So she died for a few hundred dollars worth of gold."

"I'm sorry, Park. I really am."

"It turned out the treasure was worth millions. The Portuguese government took some of it, but it left me with enough to live very well."

"So that explains the house on Gozo."

"Yeah...no way I could afford that on government pay! I've got another one on a cliff on Big Sur, overlooking the Pacific."

"Nice!"

"Yes, but it's an empty victory. After she died I was hollow inside, a husk. Without her, the money meant nothing. But I'd always had an interest in intelligence work, so I applied at the CIA, scored well on their tests, then went into a training program and got recruited by OSR." He glanced at her, his features drawn and ragged. "It's hard to forgive myself. I should have been able to save her."

"How could you? There was nothing you could do."

He didn't answer. Below, on the black surface of the river, another sailboat drifted past.

Then she said, quietly, "You can't undo the past, Park. You can't save the whole world from getting hurt."

His head turned toward her. Even in the darkness his intense cerulean blue eyes seemed to glow. "You can try."

___.

Half an hour later Skarda lay on his back in his bed, staring at the ceiling. In vain he'd been trying to cudgel his brain into a black void, the way April had taught him, to let sleep embrace his consciousness and grant him a momentary peace. But sleep wouldn't come. Thoughts raced through his head in overdrive. He understood what Flinders was trying to tell him-by fighting the evil of the world he was trying to undo what had happened to Sarah. And she was right. You can't undo the past.

But was it really guilt that was driving him? Or maybe something even more basic-an animal l.u.s.t for vengeance? In his gut he knew there was more to it than that. It was about balance. Sarah's death had violently upset his concept of the universal scales and it was up to him to set them right again. That was the only way he knew how to approach it. The only way he could make peace. Until then he would remain at an emotional impa.s.se, unable to move on.

But how many people did he need to help, how many lives did he need to save until the scales were restored?

He didn't know. That was why he was thankful he had April to rely on. She brought her own sense of balance. In her philosophy, good and bad happened without cause or reason. Things were just the way they were. He'd meant what he said when he'd told Flinders he was half a man without her.

A hesitant knock sounded at the door.

"Come in," he called out.

The door opened and Flinders stepped into the room. She had taken off her gla.s.ses and was wearing a oversized pink T-s.h.i.+rt that reached down to her knees.

She took a few steps toward him. "I can't sleep," she said.

For several long seconds a terse silence hung in the room. Then he said, "I'm not ready for-"

Padding forward, she put out her index finger and pressed it against his lips to cut him off. "I know. I know you're not. It's okay. I just don't want to be alone tonight. Okay?"

For a few heartbeats Skarda let his eyes close. Then he moved his head.

Crawling into bed with him, she turned her back to his face and settled into the pillow. He looked over at her, a soft mound in the darkness. It would be so easy to reach out and touch her shoulder...

His whole body ached to do it.

But his hand stayed in place as if it were stricken.

Drawing in a breath, he let his eyes close.

Flinders' voice was a bit m.u.f.fled when she said, "I'm glad you do what you do."

___.

In the bedroom of her suite, April stared out into the darkness.

Then she closed her eyes and went back to sleep.

THIRTY-NINE.

Arctic Ocean THE pack ice screeched, cracking with the sound of a cannon boom.

From the navigation workstation inside the pilothouse of the United States Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Circle, Captain Albert Hudson felt the s.h.i.+p shudder as the thirty-five-foot steel wall of the bow slid up over a slab of multi-year ice and slammed its ma.s.sive weight down on top of it, rupturing a crazed patchwork of chunks two meters thick in the rubble yard of pack ice. A familiar grinding noise reached his ears: the shattered chunks of ice slip-sliding against the hull. His coffee mug skated across the console and he grabbed it before it could tip over. It made him feel right at home.

As he'd been doing in four-hour s.h.i.+fts for the past few weeks, Hudson let his gaze run over the console of the workstation, mentally checklisting each system: chart table, ADCP, Bathy2000 depth sounding and sub-bottom profiling system, SeaBeam 2112 multibeam sonar system, ECDIS, primary DP, helm controls. It was his job to a.s.sess the ice and plot the s.h.i.+p's course, to follow the dark leads and exploit existing cracks, avoiding as much of the heavy ice as possible. Yesterday the sky had been an endless, eye-searing blue, graduating to a golden haze at the horizon with the sun casting dark blue shadows from ice hummocks and pressure ridges. The ice itself had looked like a snow-covered crystalline prairie, strewn with the s.h.i.+mmering azure holes of melt pools. In the narrow ribbon of open water between hull and water, ringed seals cavorted, the frigid air resounding with their sharp barks and clicks. But by morning the blue had deadened to the color of lead and a forty-knot wind was whipping up white-capped swells, pummeling the s.h.i.+p with white-out snow and flecks of spray that hit like shotgun pellets. It was hard enough in good weather, but today he had to rely on his years of experience as much as his readouts, because he couldn't see a thing past the thick gla.s.s of the pilothouse windows.

It was like driving a car with your eyes closed.

The Polar Circle was sailing southeast, towards the Barents Sea and Franz Josef Land with twenty-five scientists of all nationalities aboard, allied with the National Geophysical Data Center and the Extended Continental Shelf Project. Hudson grinned. One of the women, a graduate student studying undersea seismic reflection profiles, had turned green the moment the s.h.i.+p had first encountered the pack ice, thinking they had rammed into an iceberg like the t.i.tanic. And the constant booming of the shattering ice slabs had frayed her nerves to the breaking point.

It was her first time in the Arctic. She'd learn.

Along their path they'd launched a number of Seagliders, unmanned undersea vehicles that looked like small pointed torpedos, to dive deep under the ocean where they would spend months measuring temperature, salinity, and depth for thousands of miles, then transmit the collected data to the Glider Operations Center at the Naval Oceanographic Office at Stennis s.p.a.ce Center in Mississippi.

It was all Greek to Hudson. He only knew that in the past thirty years there was water in the Arctic where there used to be ice, and if these people could do something about that, he was happy to help.

Hudson glanced up. First Mate Jeffrey Williams stalked into the pilothouse, his face plastered with a look of cranky irritation. He didn't like storms. In fact, he hated storms.

Hudson smiled, wanting to needle him a little. "I guess we're in for it for a while."

The mate stared sourly at the clock, silently calculating out the time left on his s.h.i.+ft. "Another hour and thirty-seven minutes, I'll be safe and warm in my bunk."

Hudson grinned. "Some guys have all the luck."

Then he turned his attention to the gray-and-white world outside, straining his eyes to search for black cracks in the ice.

___.

Popping open a hatch, Jaz jumped out onto the slick deck of the submarine, feeling the buffet of rain and wind despite the insulation of her immersion suit. Less than five hundred yards in front of her the warm aft lights of the Polar Circle were running southward, blurred by the gusts of snow driven horizontally by the storm. Inside her faceplate, the fat vein on her forehead squirmed as her lips drew back in a wide grin.

The big icebreaker had no clue they were there.

Hanging onto a tether, she watched two men emerge and bolt the EMP pulse gun into its brackets, its heavy cables snaking down the hatch.

When they had finished, she spoke into her throat mike. "Go."

The men stepped back as the tube emitted a low-pitched hum. Jaz kept her eyes on the pa.s.sing icebreaker.

Then, like a switch being thrown, the big s.h.i.+p's lights went black.

Jaz opened her mike again. "Get the Zodiacs."

___.

When the s.h.i.+p went dark, Williams swore.

Instinctively Hudson reached for his intercom mike, barking an order into it before he realized it was dead, too. He could make out the silhouette of the mate in what little light there was from the storm.