Текст книги "Mirage"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

Соавторы: Jack Brul
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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

CHAPTER THREE

Borodin came out of his warmth-induced torpor. He slapped Cabrillo on the shoulder, his shout of warning muffled by his helmet but his urgent squirming making his consternation well understood.

Juan cranked up the throttle, heedless of the rough terrain.

At the same time, a call came over his satellite link. Juan heard Max: “Bogey just appeared on your six. He came out of the backclutter of the mountains and is flying nap of the earth. We never saw him coming.”

“Are you jamming?”

“Across everything but this frequency,” Hanley replied.

Juan did the calculations in his head and came up short every time he ran the scenario. The chopper would catch them before they reached the ship. He was just about to order Max to shoot the advancing chopper out of the sky when Yuri pounded on his back again more urgently than before. Cabrillo chanced a look over his shoulder to see the sky light up around the Mil like the corona of a black sun.

Multiple launch, most likely from a UB-32 rocket pod suspended off the side of the Mil’s fuselage. The range was extreme, and the unguided missiles had a tendency to flare out in a wide swathe, but their explosive warheads were designed to come apart like shrapnel grenades.

Even as he turned to face forward again, Cabrillo could hear Max over the radio link giving the order to fire.

Two miles ahead of them, and still hidden by the ice hillocks, the hatch covering one of the Oregon’s multiple 20mm Gatling guns snapped open and the already-spinning pack of six barrels poked from its redoubt. With the sound of some hellish industrial machine, the gun spit out a solid curtain of tungsten rounds. The ship’s weapons control systems were so accurate that there was no need to include tracers in the mix of munitions. The chopper and its pilot and crew never saw what was reaching out from the night for them.

The five-second burst filled the air with four hundred rounds, and nearly all of them hit the Mil dead-on or plowed into the flying debris as the aircraft came apart. Then the Mil bloomed as its volatile fuel erupted in a fireball that hung in the sky for many long seconds before gravity took hold and slammed it into the ice like a shooting star coming to earth.

Two rounds had managed to hit the small incoming rockets by pure chance, but still thirty more arced over the ground, fanning out and bracketing the Chairman and Yuri Borodin in a deadly box.

In those last frantic seconds, Cabrillo tried to steer them out of the deadly inbound swarm, but it was as though the ice was actively trying to thwart his efforts. To either side, ridges rose shoulder high and were too steep for even the Lynx to power over. They were trapped in a shallow canyon with no means of escape but through sheer speed.

In an ironic quirk of design, snowmobiles don’t do as well on ice as on snow. The tread tends to heat up and cause excessive wear, but at this moment Juan couldn’t care less if the track came apart just so long as it did so after they reached the ship.

The first explosions rang out behind them and were muted by the walls of ice, but almost immediately other rockets began landing all around the Lynx, each detonation a bright flower of fire and ice. And steel shrapnel.

The sea ice was shredded by the blasts in a continuing rush of mini-eruptions that turned the air into a whirling boil of snow. More rockets came in what seemed to be an unending assault. Juan felt the odd tugging as bits of shrapnel passed through his bulky snowsuit, and he had his head thrust to the side when one careened off his helmet’s tough plastic shell.

That same moment of impact, Yuri gave a choking, wet gasp and slumped heavily against Cabrillo’s back.

Juan knew his friend had been hit but had no idea how badly. The last of the missiles were exploding in their wake as they motored out of the Kill Box. He reached a hand behind him, feeling along Borodin’s side, and when he brought his hand back, the white nylon appeared black with blood. With the chopper down, he flicked on the Lynx’s headlight. In its glow, he looked more carefully at his hand. The blood was loaded with tiny bursting bubbles, like a thick cherry soda.

Borodin had been lung-shot.

They had a mile to go.

“Max, do you copy?”

“We’re right here. Tell me you weren’t anywhere near those rockets.”

“Smack-dab in the middle of them. Yuri’s hit in the lungs and is hemorrhaging badly. Get Julia down to the boat garage.” Julia Huxley, a Navy-trained physician, was the Oregon’s chief medical officer.

“You still want to transfer to the RHIB?” Max asked.

“No time. Move the ship as close as you can to the edge of the ice.”

“That’s gonna leave a gap of about two hundred feet.”

Juan didn’t hesitate in his reply, “No problem.” Secretly he thought, Big problem.

The wind had eroded the ice into a ridge that ran eastward in a long arcing curl, as if one of the rolling breakers off Waikiki had been flash-frozen. Juan took the Lynx into it, the throttle cranked until his wrist ached. He could feel Yuri’s weight shift down as the machine climbed the ice chute and then was straightened again by the centripetal force of their speed. They dropped out of the flume at its end. The ice became as rough as corrugated steel, forcing Juan to slow fractionally. Every bump and jostle wracked his body like he was being worked over by a prizefighter. He hoped that Borodin had lost consciousness if only to spare him further pain.

He shot the Lynx between two icy hummocks, around a third, and there before him, so tantalizingly close, lay the Oregon, every light ablaze so that she looked as cheerful and festive as a cruise ship. Wisps of sea smoke coiled up from the water trapped between the ship and the ice.

From this low vantage he couldn’t see that Max was using the ship’s bow and stern thrusters to edge the 550-foot vessel closer to the ice sheet, but he knew his old friend was doing everything he could to close the gap.

Terrain be damned, Juan pushed the snow machine until its motor screamed in protest and a rooster tail of ice particles burst from under the studded tread. It looked like they were roaring out of a fogbank of their own creation. He aimed amidships, where a large, garage-style door had been opened. This was the bay where they could launch any number of small watercraft, from eight-man RHIBs to sea kayaks. Light filled the space within, a beacon to Cabrillo and his gravely injured passenger.

“Hold on,” Juan said unnecessarily as they neared the end of the ice pack.

There wasn’t a sharp delineation from ice to ocean but instead a gradual fragmentation of the surface below the machine. What was once solid turned into bobbing chunks, and thinned further until the machine was supported by mush the consistency of a convenience store Ice-E. The tread’s metal studs found no purchase. It was only their momentum, and what little thrust the track got from skimming across the slurry, that kept them afloat.

And then they were over clear water that was as still as a millpond and hazed by vaporous fingers of fog. Still, the Lynx kept them going, its wake of icy mist turned into a proper tail of creaming water. Juan leaned back as far as he dared to keep the skis from plowing into the sea, a real possibility that would cartwheel the two of them like rag dolls. He saw they were drifting a point or two from their destination and compensated by shifting his body, mindful that Yuri’s weight would also factor into the maneuver. Cabrillo had been snowmobile skipping, as this move was called, a few times, but never with a passenger on the back of the sled and never with the stakes so high.

The Lynx’s Rotax engine performed flawlessly, and they skimmed across the water, not with the jerky hops of a flattened stone skipped by a child but with the even power of a craft seemingly built for the task. As they drew closer, the ship loomed larger and larger until it completely blocked Cabrillo’s view of the ocean beyond. He realized that speed had become a factor in another way. They were going much too fast to hit the Teflon-coated ramp into the garage. At their current velocity, they would fly up the ramp like a water-skier and crash into the far wall with so much force that the safety netting would tear them to shreds. Yet if he backed off too soon, the Lynx would drop off plane and sink like a brick.

He eased the throttle slightly to get a feel of how the machine would react and a panicked second later opened the taps to full again as the tips of the skis dipped sharply. There were no calculations he could perform. In truth, there were, but he’d need a supercomputer or Mark Murphy’s brain to do it. This was by gut alone.

To those on the Oregon, it looked as though the Lynx’s driver was hell-bent on suicide as the sled flew across the water at fifty miles per hour, shooting for the steel side of a freighter that towered over them like a castle over a pair of riders on a horse.

Juan felt he’d left it a moment too late and instinctively tensed his body for a crushing hit. In fact, his timing was perfect. Just yards shy of the ramp, he eased off the accelerator and let the Lynx slow until it was pushing a heavy bow wave that ate up even more momentum. The craft entered the hull as it began to founder, and then the skids hit the submerged ramp, and she crawled out of the sea with such perfect control that Cabrillo barely had to tap the brakes to bring them to a gentle stop.

There was a half-second pause, when everything seemed still in his mind, before a team began swarming from behind bulkheads and equipment, wading through churned-up water that sloshed across the ramp and still cascaded off the snowmobile like a gundog shedding water after a retrieve. A warning alarm went off, indicating the garage door was closing. Hands reached for Yuri Borodin to move him onto a waiting stretcher. No sooner was he disentangled from Juan’s snowsuit than Juan had flung his helmet aside to check on his friend.

Julia Huxley – Hux or Doc to most of the crew – was already standing over Borodin while an orderly kept the Russian from falling off the gurney. Dressed in scrubs, and mindless of the freezing water in which she stood, the Navy-trained physician first flipped up the visor of Yuri’s helmet.

As if held back by a dam, a wall of blood poured out of the visor opening and down the lower part of his helmet and splashed like a wave across his chest. The helmet had been so tight that whenever Borodin coughed up blood from his punctured lung, it pooled around his jaw and steadily rose with each violent paroxysm. She unstrapped his helmet, certain he had already drowned. But as soon as it came free, dripping more blood into the water still sluicing around her feet, he coughed, spattering her medical face shield and chest.

Juan gave them room as an orderly slapped a scalpel into Julia’s hand. She began cutting away the bulky white snowsuit while another aide prepped an IV, ready to refill Yuri’s nearly drained veins with Ringer’s lactate, as a stopgap until they could get him transfused from the ship’s blood bank.

The heavy-duty arctic gear fell away under Hux’s knife until Yuri’s painfully thin and pale chest was exposed and one arm was laid bare for the IV drip. Froth oozed from the hole in Yuri’s skin every time his chest fought to expel air from his body and seemed to suck back into the obscene little mouth on each inhalation. The rest of his exposed body was a sea of welts and mottled bruises from weeks of beatings.

From the red medical case on a nearby rolling tray Hux grabbed an occlusive patch and tore away the wrapper. This type of battle dressing allowed air to be expelled from the wound but would not let air back in, giving Yuri’s collapsed lung a chance to reinflate. She and her team gently rolled Borodin onto his injured side. This position made it easier for the uninjured lung to function. Only then did she whip the stethoscope from around her neck and check for Borodin’s heartbeat. She hunted across his bruised and whip-scarred chest like someone with a metal detector sweeping a beach. And like the beachcomber, it appeared she hadn’t found what she was looking for.

“BP?” she asked.

“Barely registering,” replied the orderly monitoring the cuff.

“Same with the heartbeat.” Julia looked up to see the Ringer’s were flowing wide-open and knew she could do no more here. “Okay, people, let’s get him to medical.” Her voice had the crisp command of a person who was in complete charge.

She exchanged a glance with Cabrillo, her somber dark eyes telling him everything he needed to know.

“Nyet,”Borodin wheezed. Somehow he levered open his eyes.

“Sorry, no nyetyet,” Hux said, laying a hand on Yuri’s arm. “Let’s move it!”

“Nyet,”Borodin managed to rasp again. “Ivan?” He called to Juan, using his Russian name.

Juan leapt forward so he stood over Yuri’s supine body. “Easy, my friend. You’re going to be okay.”

Borodin smiled a bloody smile, his teeth stained crimson like a shark’s after a meal. “Nyet,”Yuri said a third time. “Kenin.”

“I know all about Pytor Kenin,” Juan assured him.

“Chairman,” Hux said edgily.

“One second.” Juan didn’t want to look at the rebuke on her face. He knew as well as she did that every second counted. He also knew that Yuri Borodin understood this fact even better than them.

Borodin coughed, and the effort seemed to tear something deep within his body. He winced, his eyes screwed tight as he rode a wave of pain. “Aral.”

The word dribbled from his lips.

“The Aral Sea?” Juan asked. “What about it?”

“Eerie boat.”

“I don’t understand.” Juan could see – all of them could see – that Borodin had seconds left.

“What about the Aral Sea and an eerie boat?”

“Find Karl Petrov – Pe-trov—” The syllables came further and further apart. Juan bent down so his ear was barely an inch from his friend’s bloody mouth. “Petrovski.”

The effort to get the name out was the last gasp of a dying man. His skin, if possible, looked even paler, more translucent, like the waxy rind of one of Madame Tussauds dummies.

“Yuri?” Juan called with a desperation he knew would go unanswered. “Yuri?”

Borodin’s Adam’s apple gave one final thrust, one more attempt to speak. With his lung so full of blood, there was hardly enough air to form his dying word. It whispered past his unmoving lips already laced with the icy touch of death. “Tesla.”

Julia pushed Juan out of the way, rolled Borodin onto his back, and leapt atop the gurney so she was astride her patient like a jockey on a horse. She was a curvy though petite woman, but when she started chest compressions she did it with strength and vigor. The orderlies took up positions to guide the rolling stretcher to the Level 1 trauma center within the labyrinthine corridors of the Oregon’s secret passages.

Cabrillo watched them disappear through a watertight door, blew out a long breath, and then moved to an intercom box mounted on a wall. He barely noticed the crewmen securing the boat garage from battle stations.

“Op center,” came the voice of Max Hanley. Not knowing the situation, Max wisely kept his usual repertoire of bad humor and sarcastic remarks to himself.

“Max, get us out of here,” Juan said, as if leaving the scene of the act could somehow bury the fact. “This mission was a bust.”

“Aye, Chairman,” Max replied gently. “Aye.”

CHAPTER FOUR

He sat slouched against the corner of his desk for the next fifteen minutes, his cabin lights dim, his eyes pointed at the floor but seeing nothing. The space had been his home for years. Its current inspiration was the set of Rick’s Café from the movie Casablancaand had been pulled off with some of Kevin Nixon’s Hollywood set-designing friends. Usually it was a place of solace for Cabrillo. Until the phone rang, it was merely a void.

The replica Bakelite phone trilled, and he snatched up the handset before the first ring ended. He said nothing.

“I’m sorry, Juan.” It was Julia Huxley. “I just called it. He’s gone.”

“Thanks, Hux,” Cabrillo said in a monotone. “I know you did all you could.”

He settled the heavy handset back onto its cradle.

From the brief exchange of looks he’d shared with the ship’s physician back in the boat garage, he’d known the inevitability of Yuri’s death but couldn’t motivate himself to do anything until he’d received verification. He’d failed. It didn’t matter that he’d busted Yuri out of the prison and got him to within a mile of the Oregon. Juan blew out another long breath.

Cabrillo stripped off the remains of his snowsuit and stuffed it and his prison garb and the bloody boots into a plastic bag for incineration. He strode into a green-marble bathroom and hit the brass taps of a multiheaded, glass-enclosed shower that was big enough to hold six. As steam began pouring over the top of the enclosure, he unstrapped his artificial leg, gave the toughened skin of his stump a quick massage, and then stepped into the hot spray.

There were usually just two items in his shower, a bar of plain soap and generic shampoo. Though Juan was a bit of a clotheshorse, like most men his personal grooming was minimalist.

Today there was a third item and from it he poured some yellowish gel into his palm and felt its chemical burn over the heat of the water. He smeared his hand across his bald head and began working it into his skin. Kevin Nixon had explained the chemical process that would dissolve the ersatz tattoos he’d painted across half the Chairman’s body, but formulae and reactivity coefficients were meaningless when the solution felt like it was not only melting off the ink but his skin as well.

The water sluicing off his head turned gray as the ink began to run.

It took fifteen minutes of searing agony to remove the tattoos to the point they looked like faint, week-old contusions that would fade away completely in a couple of days. He could have spared himself the pain and let them wane on their own, but having them on his body somehow reminded him of the mark of Cain.

He toweled off and swiped clear a spot in the mirror over the vanity, deciding at first glance that for a while, at least, a hat was in order. The baldness was shocking enough – he usually sported thick blond hair trimmed neatly by the ship’s barber – but the faint blue cast left by residual ink made him look like a reject from Dr. Frankenstein’s lab.

He looked past the faded ink and decided that if his hairline ever did go into retreat, as it had with two uncles on his mother’s side – an ill omen – he would shave it all off. With his broad swimmer’s shoulders and height, he thought he could pull it off. He thought he looked more Yul Brynner than Telly Savalas.

He hopped through his cabin to the closet. The leg he’d worn on the mission would go down to the Magic Shop for cleaning and maintenance. Lined up like boots at a shoe store, the back of his walk-in had a selection of artificial limbs for any number of occasions. Some were designed to mimic his real leg right down to the coarseness of his hair, while others were metallic monstrosities out of science fiction. He chose a flesh-colored plastic limb and snugged the top sock over his stump, making sure there were no wrinkles that would later chafe his skin.

It had been more than five years since a shell fired from a Chinese gunboat had severed the limb below the knee, and not a day went by that the missing portion of his leg didn’t hurt. Phantom pain, doctors called it. To those who suffered through it there was nothing phantom about it.

He dressed in a pair of jeans, an Oregon State sweatshirt, and a pair of sneakers. He’d gone to UCLA for his undergraduate degree. The Oregon shirt was a hat tip to the ship. He slipped on an original L.A. Raiders baseball cap that had belonged to his grandfather, a season ticket holder for the twelve years they were in the City of Angels, and worn only at home games. He hadn’t worn it in so long, he had to reshape the bill.

It was only as he turned away from the walk-in closet that he noticed the plastic bag containing his soiled clothes had been removed and a silver server had been placed on the white alabaster bar in the corner of his cabin. Next to it was a single glass of wine that glowed like liquid ruby in the subdued lighting.

He chuckled a little ruefully.

An hour ago he’d been so hyper-aware of his surroundings that he still retained the muscle memory of every turn, bounce, and shudder of the ride from the forest until the moment the snow machine came to rest in the Oregon’s boat garage. Yet now, back in what had been his home for so many years, his guard had so dropped that he hadn’t noticed when one of the ship’s stewards, most likely the septuagenarian chief steward Maurice, had padded into his cabin as he was in the shower and removed the dirty clothes while bringing Cabrillo his supper. Had the man been an assassin, Juan wouldn’t have stood a chance.

He plucked the silver dome off the serving tray and was greeted by a rich, spicy aroma. He justified to himself that if there was any safe place for him on the planet, it was aboard the Oregonsurrounded by her amazing crew. The embossed card resting on the plate said the meal was bison chili served in a French bread boule, and the wine was a Philip Togni cabernet sauvignon.

Maurice, who’d spent his career in the Royal Navy as the personal steward for at least a dozen admirals, was a superb sommelier, and Juan was certain the wine paired beautifully with the dish, but tonight wasn’t a wine night. There was a minifridge tucked under the bar, and from it Cabrillo slipped out a bottle of plain Stolichnaya vodka and two chilled shot glasses. No sooner had he filled them than there was a knock on the door. Max Hanley came through without being invited.

“In the movie,” Max said, crossing the room to take the barstool next to Cabrillo, “Bogie eventually asked Sam to play ‘As Time Goes By.’ Just so you know, I can’t even play ‘Chopsticks.’”

Juan smiled a bit. “Truth is, I didn’t have room for a piano in here anyway.” He handed one of the shot glasses to Max and hoisted the second. “To Yuri Borodin.”

“To Yuri,” Max echoed, and they both downed the vodka.

Max Hanley was the first person Cabrillo hired when he’d formed the Corporation on the recommendation of his CIA mentor Langston Overholt IV. Hanley had been running a scrapyard in Southern California at the time and had given Juan’s offer less than a minute’s thought before accepting. Prior to that he’d been involved in marine engineering and salvage, and before that he’d commanded Swift Boats on nearly every navigable inch of river in South Vietnam.

Heavyset, with a florid complexion, a crescent of ginger hair ringing the back half of his skull, and a nose that had been broken enough times that he could have been mistaken for a professional boxer, Max was the details man of the outfit. No matter how crazy the scheme Cabrillo dreamt up, Max was there to see it pulled off.

“I already broke the news to Misha Kasporov,” Hanley said without looking Juan in the eye.

That task rightly fell to the Chairman, but Cabrillo was grateful his number two had told Mikhail Kasporov of his boss’s fate. He toasted Hanley with a refill and downed it with a little shudder.

“He asked that we bury Yuri at sea with Russian military honors,” Max went on. “I had Mark pull up the appropriate ceremony off the Internet.” He handed Juan a piece of paper.

Cabrillo scanned the ceremony. Typical Russian, it was maudlin and somewhat bombastic but with a dutiful sense of patriotism, which, he supposed, summed up Yuri. “Tell the crew we’ll hold the ceremony at 07:30.”

“And not that you particularly give a damn tonight,” Max continued, “but Misha held to the contract to get Yuri out of jail. The rest of the money’s been transferred to our temporary account on the Caymans.”

Juan raised another shot. “Honor amongst thieves.”

“Amen.” Hanley pointed at Cabrillo’s dinner. “Are you going to eat that?”

Cabrillo pulled the plate closer. “Actually, I am. I’m starved. You can have my wine if you want.”

Max went around the bar to retrieve two fresh icy shot glasses from the fridge and refilled them from the bottle of Stoli. “Pass.”

“Misha knows his life isn’t worth a plug nickel,” Juan said as he dipped a spoon into his chili.

“We discussed that. He knew the score and is already on the move. He says he has a bolt-hole someplace in Africa where Kenin will never find him.”

Cabrillo nodded noncommittally. He knew of dozens of dead or jailed fugitives who thought they’d never be found. But Kasporov wasn’t his responsibility. “Any word from Linda?”

Linda Ross was the Oregon’s number three. An elfish woman who had hit the glass ceiling in the Navy, she was currently on another assignment with one of the Corporation’s regular clients.

“She and the Emir have left Monaco on his yacht and are en route to Bermuda.”

The Emir of one of the United Arab Emirates insisted that he travel with members of the Corporation whenever he left his native land even though he was always accompanied by a virtual army of bodyguards. Usually he insisted that the Oregonshadow his 300-foot mega-yacht, Sakir, but the ship was needed to rescue Yuri, so he’d been mollified by having Linda as his traveling companion.

Max went on, “We’ll have no trouble catching up with them once we clear some of the ice still floating around up here.”

When Juan converted the Oregoninto the hybrid warship/intelligence-gathering vessel she was today, the modifications included the ability to break through ice nearly three feet thick. However, in these northern waters, drifting bergs posed the most serious threat, and the Oregon, even with her armored sides, could be torn open as easily as the Titanicby a glancing blow. It wouldn’t be until they were clear of the danger that they could open the taps on the most powerful engines afloat. Her revolutionary magnetohydrodynamic engines could push the ship through the water at a rate not much below some offshore power racers.

“Is the Emir behaving himself?” Juan asked with fatherly concern.

“He’s eighty. Linda says apart from a few perfunctory passes, he reminds her of her grandfather.” Max had a bulldog face, a canvas of a lifetime of experiences writ large. Suddenly his jowls seemed to grow and his brow furled until it was corduroyed. “Something tells me that Linda’s going to be on her own for a while longer, yes?”

“Not sure,” Juan said, tearing a hunk of crusty, chili-soaked bread from the bouleand popping it in his mouth. “Just before Yuri died, he implicated Admiral Pytor Kenin—”

“No surprise there,” Max interrupted.

“No,” Juan agreed. “Kenin is behind the frame-up, but I don’t think that’s what Yuri was talking about.”

“What, then?”

“He mentioned the Aral Sea and someone named Petrovski. Karl Petrovski.”

Max leaned back into his barstool, his bullet head cocked to the side. “Never heard of him.”

“Me neither. Then Yuri said something like ‘eerie boat.’”

“Eerie boat?”

“Eerie boat. Don’t ask. I have no idea. But his last word was ‘Tesla.’”

“As in Nikola?”

“I have to assume so. The Serbian inventor who basically created the modern electrical grid.”

“And a heck of a lot more,” Hanley added. “Everyone knows about Thomas Edison and his contributions to modern society, but few have ever heard of Tesla. Well, apart from the new electric sports car named after him. Tesla was an über-genius. Some of his ideas—”

Juan cut him off, a classic case of who knew more about what. “I saw a documentary on cable about how Edison tried to convince people that his DC theory was safer than Tesla’s alternating current by electrocuting elephants in New York City.”

“This was the dawn of a new age,” Max said. “The stakes couldn’t have been higher.”

“But, come on. Electrocuting elephants to prove a point?”

“In the end, showmanship did pay off, in a way. AC won out over Edison’s DC system, yet we all know Edison’s name, and Tesla remains a footnote in history. Sometimes history favors the activist more than the activity.

“So where does this leave us?”

“Trondheim,” Juan replied.

“Excuse me?”

“Trondheim, Norway. I need to get to the Aral Sea as soon as possible. I assume Trondheim is the closest city with an airport. You can drop me off on the way to the North Sea, and eventually the Atlantic and Bermuda.”

Max took in Juan’s suggestion for a second, his jaw drooping. When he spoke, he chose his words very carefully. “Eerie boat. Aral Sea. Karl Petrovski.” He waited a beat. “You see a connection?”

“No. I don’t. But Yuri did.” Cabrillo wiped his mouth with his napkin and set it on the bar next to his mostly cleared plate. He crossed to his desk phone, checked his watch, and dialed an extension. He found Eric Stone in his cabin as he’d expected.

“What’s up, Chairman?” Stone was another Navy veteran, but an R and D guy, not a blue water sailor.

“Is Mark with you?” Stone and Mark Murphy were practically conjoined twins.

“Yeah, we’re moderating a debate on the Net between Hunger Gamesfans.”

Cabrillo was vaguely aware those were a series of books and movies but had no idea what they were about or how two of his crewmen could be involved in an online debate. Nor did he particularly care. But Eric added, “Mark got his masters with the studio wonk charged with Internet promotions.”

“You have my sympathies.”

“We need them. I had forgotten how catty teenage girls can be, and they use language that certainly makes this sailor blush.”

“I need you two to do some digging for me. First, though, I want you to book me the fastest flight from Trondheim to the airport closest to the Aral Sea.”

“That would be Uralsk Airport in Kazakhstan,” Eric interjected.

How Stone retained such arcane information was a mystery to Cabrillo, but it made him one of the best researchers in the business. “Next, I want you to dig up everything you can find on a Karl Petrovski.” Cabrillo spelled it out for him. “That name won’t be too uncommon, so concentrate on anyone connected to the Aral Sea, Admiral Pytor Kenin, or Nikola Tesla.”