The Seventh Angel - Страница 3

He climbed out of his bunk. Better to get up now, and make a long day of it. He’d grab a cup of coffee and head over to CIC. Maybe one of the civilian engineers would be up already, and he could get some more information on this Mouse unit they were supposed to be testing.

His fingers located the light switch. He flicked it on, blinking in the sudden illumination. He yawned hard, and reached for his coveralls.

The dead deserved to have their say. He couldn’t begrudge them that, no matter how much sleep it cost him. They could haunt his dreams as often as they wanted. They had earned that right. But Bowie’s waking hours belonged to the world of the living. He planned to keep it that way.

CHAPTER 1

MANILA, REPUBLIC OF THE PHILIPPINES

FRIDAY; 22 FEBRUARY

0302 hours (3:02 AM)

TIME ZONE +8 ‘HOTEL’

Oleg Grigoriev should not have been alive. The part of his mind still capable of rational thought was aware of that. By all rights, he should have died back there in that alley, where those Chinese bastards had dumped his body with the rest of the garbage.

But he was not dead. Not yet.

He staggered down the darkened sidewalk, following the pools of feeble yellow light cast by the street lamps. The dim circles of illumination had become his mile posts — the only method of measuring progress toward his destination.

The Americans… He had to reach the Americans.

His senses were playing tricks now. He could hear the whine of distant traffic, but not the scrape of his shoes on the cement. He could feel the damp of the sweat on his cheeks, but not the hot flow of blood down his ribs. Even his sense of distance had become weirdly distorted. His courier duties had brought him to Manila many times, and he had driven down this stretch of Roxas Boulevard more than once. It was only a few city blocks. But it had somehow stretched itself into an impossibly-long tunnel of darkness, punctuated by widely-spaced glows of sickly yellow.

His left knee buckled, and he tottered sideways, slumping against the windows of a car for support. He drew a long breath, doing his best to ignore the rattling gurgle in his chest.

It was getting harder to breathe, but at least the pain was gone. Most of it, anyway. The white-hot agony in his ribs had faded to a distant ache — disconnected — as though it belonged to someone else.

He wondered dimly if the lack of pain might be a bad sign. Was he in shock? Or was his nervous system shutting down as his bodily functions began to fail? Certainly his mind seemed to be slipping. He could no longer remember how many times the bastards had shot him.

That last thought brought a grim smile to his lips. They obviously hadn’t shot him enough times. Not enough to kill a rangy old Russian bear like Oleg Grigoriev. A few Chinese bullets would kill an ordinary man perhaps, but not a former Sergeant in the Tamanskaya Guards. Not an old Soldier of the Iron Saber brigade.

Grigoriev took another gurgling breath, and forced his eyes to focus. He could see it now in the distance, the brighter white glow of the security lights that surrounded the American Embassy.

He pushed himself upright, and swayed back to a full standing position. His knees would have to hold out a little longer. Keep walking. He had to keep walking. He had to reach the Americans.

His own people had betrayed him; that much he knew. The Chinese would not have dared to harm him without authorization from Zhukov. The bastards wanted the warheads too badly. They’d never risk blowing the deal by killing Zhukov’s courier. That could only mean that Zhukov had authorized the hit. And then he’d sent Grigoriev to Manila, to a rendezvous in a deserted alley, in this cesspool of a country where life was cheap. Straight into the hands of the Chinese killers.

Grigoriev coughed, sending a spasm of pain through his chest. He lurched forward, stumbling toward the lights of the embassy one faltering step at a time.

They wanted to throw him out with the garbage, did they? Leave him dying among the broken beer bottles and the cat piss? Trying to protect their precious secrets. Hide their plans from the Americans.

Grigoriev could taste blood in his mouth now, but the tough old Russian grinned anyway. He’d show the bastards. The Chinese. Zhukov. All of them. He’d tell the Americans everything, and then he’d sit back with a fat bottle of Moskovskaya and watch the whole thing go to hell.

CHAPTER 2

ICE PACK — NORTHERN SEA OF OKHOTSK

LATITUDE 58.29N / LONGITUDE 155.20E

FRIDAY; 22 FEBRUARY

1421 hours (2:21 PM)

TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’

The helicopter came to a hover less than a meter above the ice. It hung there for nearly a minute as the downwash from its rotors blasted snow from the rugged icescape below. The roaring vortex of mechanically-induced wind created an instant blizzard around the aircraft, reducing effective visibility to almost zero. But there wasn’t enough snow to cause a true whiteout. Within seconds, the light accumulation of powder had been blown away, revealing a circle of dirty gray ice a little larger than the sweep of the rotor blades.

This was not the smooth ice sheet of the Arctic. The ice pack in the Sea of Okhotsk was strained and twisted by the collision of two opposing ocean currents, and the relentless hammering of the Siberian wind. The ice was pocked with hillocks, ridges, and fractures — a frozen diorama of unreleased pressure.

The helicopter made no attempt to land on the torturous surface. It maintained position, while doors slid open on either side of the fuselage. Three men made the short jump to the ice, and began unloading equipment through the open doors of the aircraft. As soon as the equipment was unloaded, the helicopter lifted away, climbing to an altitude of a thousand meters where it circled while the others carried out their mission down below.

The men moved quickly and smoothly, despite the roughness of the terrain. They worked without speaking, communicating via hand signals when required, but even that was rarely necessary.

They were a well-oiled team, and they had already performed this operation four times before at other locations on the Okhotsk ice pack. This would be the fifth and final time.

Their cold weather gear was ex-Soviet military issue. The dappled grays and dingy whites of the snow camouflage were a near-perfect match for the surrounding ice. From a few hundred meters away, they would be all but invisible, not that visibility particularly mattered out here. They were the only living souls for at least two hundred kilometers.

In forty minutes, the job was done; the team was back aboard the helicopter and thundering away through the frigid Russian sky.

Already the winds were beginning to hide the evidence of their work beneath a thin layer of grubby snow. The seven new holes in the ice were rapidly disappearing, as was the network of thin wires that cross-connected the holes like a spider web.

A scrap of torn plastic fluttered and skidded across the ice, sticking for a moment against the slope of a pressure ridge. For the briefest of seconds, a single word was visible — black Cyrillic lettering stenciled against gray plastic. The word was vzryvchatka. Explosive. And then the wind caught the scrap and snatched it away, leaving no visible trace that man had ever set foot on this forbidding stretch of ice.

CHAPTER 3

NOAA SUBMERSIBLE NEREUS

NORTHERN PACIFIC OCEAN (SOUTH OF THE ALEUTIAN ISLANDS)

MONDAY; 25 FEBRUARY

0942 hours (9:42 AM)

TIME ZONE -10 ‘WHISKEY’

It was like falling into night. The deepwater submersible Nereus continued its descent into the Aleutian trench — passing from the midwater zone, where blue wavelengths of light were still visible — into the aphotic zone, where no light penetrated at all.

Charlie Sweigart stared through the Nereus’s forward view port as the last traces of light deepened from twilight blue to a shade of black that few human eyes had ever seen. A half mile above, the Nereus’s tender, the Research Vessel Otis Barton, was enjoying the bright morning sunshine. But down here, the only light came from the mini-sub’s interior lights, and the glowing faces of the instrument clusters.

“Bottom coming up in fifty meters,” Gabriella said.

Her voice sent a tiny shiver down Charlie Sweigart’s spine. Gabriella’s English was flawless, but her voice carried a musical French-Canadian lilt that never failed to give Charlie a tingle.

Charlie nodded without looking back. “Thanks.”

The cabin of the submersible was as cramped as the cockpit of the space shuttle. Charlie sat in the pilot’s seat, nearest the bow of the little submarine, surrounded by gauges, digital readouts, and equipment status lights. Gabriella’s seat at the sensor console was behind Charlie and to his left, so he couldn’t see her without turning almost completely around in his chair. That would be a bit too obvious, so Charlie made do with glimpses of her reflection in the ten-inch thick plate of curved lexan that formed the forward view port.

The reflections weren’t perfect. The curvature of the surface brought some distortion to the images. But Charlie could look at Gabriella in that imperfect mirror as often as he wanted.

Who was he kidding, anyway? What would a tall, willowy blonde want with a pudgy little sub-jockey like Charlie? A tall, willowy, smart blonde. Doctor Gabriella Marchand — on loan to NOAA from Centre océanographique de Rimouski, in Quebec — had PhDs in Oceanography, Geochemistry, and Marine Geophysics. She didn’t like for Charlie to call her doctor, but doctor she was. She was one very smart lady, and she was rapidly becoming one of the world’s leading experts on methane hydrate deposits, whatever those were.