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The Silent Sea

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G.P. Putnam's Sons
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Oregon Files 5
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Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page
































Arctic Drift


Treasure of Khan


Black Wind


Trojan Odyssey

Valhalla Rising

Atlantis Found

Flood Tide

Shock Wave

Inca Gold





Deep Six

Pacific Vortex

Night Probe

Vixen 03

Raise the Titanic!


The Mediterranean Caper



Spartan Gold


The Wrecker


The Chase




The Navigator

Polar Shift

Lost City

White Death

Fire Ice

Blue Gold





Plague Ship

Skeleton Coast

Dark Watch


Golden Buddha

Sacred Stone


The Sea Hunters

The Sea Hunters II

Clive Cussler and Dirk Pitt Revealed


Publishers Since 1838

Published by the Penguin Group




Copyright © 2010 by Sandecker, RLLLP


Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cussler, Clive.

The silent sea / Clive Cussler ; with Jack Du Brul.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-18597-1

1. Cabrillo, Juan (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Intelligence service—Fiction. 3. Ship captains—Fiction. 4. Mercenary troops—Fiction. 5. Argentina—Fiction. 6. Antarctica—Fiction. I. Du Brul, Jack B. II. Title.




While the authors have made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the authors assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,

The furrow followed free;

We were the first that ever burst

Into that SILENT SEA.

—The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,



DECEMBER 7, 1941



A GOLDEN BLUR LEAPT OVER THE SMALL BOAT’S GUNWALE just as the bows met the rocky beach. It hit the water with a splash and plowed through the surf, its tail raised like a triumphant pennant. When the retriever reached land, it shook itself so that drops flew like diamond chips in the crisp air, and then it looked back at the skiff. The dog barked at a pair of gulls farther down the beach that took startled flight. Feeling its companions were coming much too slowly, the purebred tore off into a copse of nearby trees, her bark diminishing until it was swallowed by the forest that covered most of the mile-square island just an hour’s row off the mainland.

“Amelia,” cried Jimmy Ronish, the youngest of the five brothers in the boat.

“She’ll be fine,” Nick said, shipping his oars and taking the boat’s painter line in his hand. He was the eldest of the Ronish boys.

He timed his leap perfectly, landing on the pebbled shore as a wave receded. Three long strides later he was above the tidal mark of flotsam and drying kelp, looping the rope around a sun- and salt-bleached limb of driftwood that was a crosshatch of carved initials. He hauled back on the line to firmly ground the fourteen-foot craft and tied it off.

“Shake a leg,” Nick Ronish admonished his younger siblings. “Low tide’s in five hours, and we’ve got a lot to do.”

While the air was reasonably comfortable this late in the year, the north Pacific was icy cold, forcing them to unload their gear between the lapping waves. One of the heaviest pieces of equipment was a three-hundred-foot coil of hemp line that Ron and Don, the twins, had to shoulder together to get it up the beach. Jimmy was given charge of the rucksack containing their lunch, and as he was nine years old it was a burden to his slender frame.

The four older boys—Nick at nineteen, Ron and Don a year younger, and Kevin just eleven months their junior—could have passed for quintuplets, with their towheads of floppy blond hair and their pale blue eyes. They retained the buoyant energy of youth wrapped in bodies that were rapidly becoming those of men. On the other hand, Jimmy was small for his age, with darker hair and brown eyes. His brothers teased that he looked a lot like Mr. Green-field, the town’s grocer, and while Jimmy wasn’t exactly sure what that implied, he knew he didn’t like it. He idolized his older brothers and hated anything that distinguished him from them.

Their family owned the small island off the coast and had for as far back as their grandfather could remember, and it was a place every generation of boys—for the Ronishes hadn’t produced a girl since 1862—spent adventurous summers exploring. Not only was it easy to pretend they were all Huck Finns marooned on the Mississippi or Tom Sawyers exploring the island’s intricate cave systems, but Pine Island had an inherent sense of intrigue because of the pit.

Mothers had been forbidding their boys from playing near the pit since Abe Ronish, great-uncle of the current Ronish brood, had fallen to his death in 1887. The directive was as inevitably ignored as it was given.

The real lure of the place was that local legend told that a certain Pierre Devereaux, one of the most successful privateers to ever harass the Spanish Main, had buried part of his treasure on this far northern island to lighten his ship during the dogged pursuit by a squadron of frigates that had chased him around Cape Horn and up the length of the Americas. The legend was bolstered by the discovery of a small pyramid of cannon balls in one of the island’s caves, and the fact that the top forty feet of the square pit was braced with rough-hewn log balks.

The cannonballs had long since been lost and were now considered a myth, but there was no denying the reality of the timberworks ringing the mysterious hole in the rocky earth.

“My shoes got wet,” Jimmy complained.

Nick swiftly rounded on his youngest brother and said, “Damn it, Jimmy, I told you already if I heard one complaint outta you I’d make you stay with the boat.”

“I wasn’t complaining,” the boy said, trying to keep from sniveling. “I was just saying is all.” He shook a few drops from his wet foot to show it wasn’t a problem. Nick shot him a stern look, his blue eyes glacial, and turned his attention back to the job at hand.

Pine Island was shaped like a Valentine’s Day heart that rose out of the cold Pacific. The only beach lay where the two upper lobes come together. The rest of the islet was ringed with cliffs as insurmountable as castle walls or was protected by submerged rocks strung like beads that could tear out the bottom of even the sturdiest craft. Only a handful of animals called the island home, squirrels and mice, mostly, who had been marooned there during storms, and seabirds that used the tall pines to rest and search for prey amid the waves.

A single road bisected the island, having been laboriously hacked twenty years before by another generation of Ronish men, who had made an assault on the island using gasoline-powered pumps to drain the pit, only to see their efforts fail. No matter how many pumps they ran or how much water they sucked from the depths, the pit would continuously refill. An exhaustive search for the subterranean passage connecting the pit to the sea turned up nothing. There was talk of building a coffer dam around the mouth of the bay closest to the pit, the thinking being that there was no other logical choice for the conduit, but the men decided the effort was too much and gave up.

Now it was Nick and his brothers’ turn, and he had deduced something his uncles and father had not. At the time Pierre Devereaux had excavated the pit to hide his treasure, the only pump available to him would have been his ship’s hand-operated bilge pump. Because of its inefficiency, there was no way the pirates could have drained the pit with their equipment when three ten-horse pumps couldn’t.

The answer to how the pit worked lay someplace else.

Nick knew from the stories his uncles told that they had made their assault during the height of summer, and when he consulted an old almanac, he saw the men had been working during a period of particularly high low tides. He knew that to be successful he and his brothers would have to try to reach the bottom at the same time of year Devereaux had dug the pit—when the tides were at their very lowest—and this year that fell at a little past two o’clock on December the seventh.

The older brothers had been planning their attempt at cracking the pit since early summer. By doing odd jobs for anyone who’d hire them, they’d scraped together money to buy equipment, notably a two-stroke gasoline-powered pump, the rope, and tin miner’s helmets with battery-powered lights. They’d practiced with the rope and a laden bucket so their arms and shoulders could work tirelessly for hours. They’d even devised goggles that would let them see underwater if necessary.

Jimmy was only along because he had overheard them talking about it all and had threatened to tell their parents if he wasn’t included.

There was a sudden commotion off to their right, an explosion of birds winging into the bright sky. Behind them, Amelia, their golden retriever, came bounding out of the tree line, barking wildly with her tail swinging like the devil’s own metronome. She chased after one gull that flew close to the ground and then halted, dumbfounded, when the bird shot into the air. Her tongue lolled, and a string of saliva drizzled from her black gums.

“Amelia! Come!” Jimmy cried in his falsetto, and the dog dashed to his side, nearly bowling him over in her excitement.

“Shrimp, take these,” Nick said, handing Jimmy the mining helmets and their satchels of heavy lead batteries.

The pump was the heaviest piece of gear, and Nick had devised a sling with two carrying polls like he’d seen on Saturday-matinee serials when natives carried the movie’s hero back to their camp. The poles were lengths of timber taken from a construction site, and the four older boys hoisted them on their shoulders and lifted the engine from the rowboat. It swung and then steadied, and they started the first mile-long trek across the isle.

It took forty-five minutes to haul all of their equipment across the island. The pit was located on a bluff above a shallow bay that was the only feature to mar its otherwise perfect heart shape. Waves smashed into the coast, but with the weather so fair only an occasional drop of white spume had the energy to climb the cliffs and land near the pit.

“Kevin,” Nick said, a little out of breath after their second trip to the boat and back to the bluff, “you and Jimmy go get wood for a fire. And not driftwood either, it burns too fast.”

Before his order could be carried out, natural curiosity made all five of the Ronish brothers edge closer to the pit for a quick look.

The vertical shaft was approximately six feet to a side and perfectly square, and for as far down as they could see it was ringed with age-darkened timbers—oak, in fact, most likely cut on the mainland and brought to the island. Cold, clammy air climbed from the depths in an eerie caress that for a moment dampened their enthusiasm. It was almost as if the pit were breathing raspy, echoing exhalations, and it didn’t take much imagination to think it came from the ghosts of the men who had died trying to wrest secrets out of the bowels of the earth.

A rusted metal grate had been laid over the mouth of the pit to prevent anyone from falling in. It was anchored with chains looped around metal pegs drilled into the rock. They had found the key to the padlock in their father’s desk drawer under the holstered broom-handled Mauser he had captured during the Great War. For a moment Nick feared it would break in the lock, but eventually it turned and the hasp clicked open.

“Go on and get that firewood,” he ordered, and his youngest siblings took off with a raucous Amelia in tow.

With the twins’ help, Nick dragged the heavy grate away from the opening and set it aside. Next up was the erection of a wooden frame over the pit so the rope would dangle directly into the hole from a tackle system that would allow two of the boys to easily hoist a third. This was done with the wooden carrying poles and some metal pins fitted into predrilled holes. The butt ends of the lengths of lumber were nailed directly into the oaken balks ringing the shaft. Despite its age, the old timber was more than strong enough to bend a few nails.

Nick took charge of tying the knots that would literally make the difference between life and death while Don, the most mechanically inclined, tinkered with the pump until it was purring sweetly.

By the time everything was ready, Kevin and Jimmy had a nice-sized fire going ten yards from the pit and enough extra wood to keep it going for a couple of hours. They all sat around it, eating sandwiches they had packed earlier and drinking canteens filled with sweetened iced tea.

“The trick’s gonna be timing the tide just right,” Nick said around a mouthful of baloney sandwich. “Ten minutes before and after it’s lowest is about all we’ve got before the pit floods faster than our pump can keep up. When they tried back in ’twenty-one, they never got it cleared below two hundred feet, but they knew from when they plumbed it that the pit bottoms out at two-forty. Because we’re on a bluff, I figure the bottom will be maybe twenty feet below the low-tide mark. We should be able to plug wherever the water’s coming in, and the pump’ll do the rest.”

“I bet there’s a big ol’ chest just bursting with gold,” Jimmy said, wide-eyed at the prospect.

“Don’t forget,” Don replied, “the pit’s been dragged a hundred times with grappling hooks, and no one ever brought up anything.”

“Loose gold doubloons, then,” Jimmy persisted, “in bags that rotted away.”

Nick got to his feet, wiping crumbs from his lap. “We’ll know in a half hour.”

He put on thigh-high rubber boots and slung the battery pack for his miner’s helmet over his shoulder before zipping into an oilskin jacket, feeding the power cord out his collar. He slung a second satchel of equipment over his other shoulder.

Ron lowered a cork bob down the pit on a string marked off at ten-foot increments. “One-ninety,” he announced when the line went slack.

Nick donned a web harness and clipped it to the loop at the end of their thick rope. “Lower the hose for the pump but don’t fire it up yet. I’m going down.”

He tugged the rope sharply to test the tackle block’s brake, and it held perfectly. “Okay, you guys, we’ve been practicing for this all summer. No more screwing around, right?”

“We’re ready,” Ron Ronish told him, and his twin nodded.

“Jimmy, I don’t want you coming within ten feet of the pit, you hear? Once I’m down there, there won’t be nothing to see.”

“I won’t. I promise.”

Nick knew the value of his youngest brother’s word, so when he shot Kevin a knowing look, Kevin gave him a thumbs-up. He would make sure Jimmy stayed out of the way.

“Two hundred feet,” Ron said, checking his bob once again.

Nick grinned. “We’re already at the deepest anyone’s managed to get and we didn’t have to lift a finger.” He tapped the side of his head. “It’s all in the brains.”

Without another word he stepped off the rim of the pit and dangled over the mouth of the precipice, his body twisting kinks out of the rope until coming to stop. If he felt any fear, it didn’t show on his face. It was a mask of concentration. He nodded to the twins, and they pulled a little on the line to release the brake and then fed rope through the tackle. Nick sank a few inches.

“Okay, test it again.”

The boys pulled again, and the brake reengaged.

“Now, pull,” Nick ordered, and his brothers effortlessly raised him up those same few inches.

“No problem, Nick,” Don said. “I told you this thing’s foolproof. Hell, I bet even Jimmy could haul you up from the bottom.”

“Thanks but no thanks.” Nick took a couple deep breaths, and said, “All right. This time for real.”

In smooth, controlled motions, the twins let gravity slowly draw Nick into the depths. He called up to them to halt when he was just ten feet into the pit. At this shallow depth, they could still converse. Later, when Nick approached the bottom, they had devised a series of coded tugs on the plumb bob.

“What is it?” Don yelled down.

“There are initials carved on the oak timber here. ALR.”

“Uncle Albert, I bet,” Don said. “I think his middle name is Lewis.”

“Next to it is Dad’s JGR, and it looks like TMD.”

“That’ll be Mr. Davis. He worked with them when they tried to reach the bottom.”

“Okay, lower away.”

Nick turned on his miner’s lamp at forty feet where the wooden supports gave way to native rock. The stone looked natural, as if the shaft had been formed millions of years ago when the island was created, and was damp enough to support slimy green mold even though it was well above the tide line. He cast the beam past his dangling legs. It was swallowed by the abyss just a few yards beyond his feet. A steady breeze blew past Nick’s face, and a single uncontrollable shiver shook his body.

Down he went, deeper into the earth, with nothing to support him but a rope and his faith in his brothers. When he looked up, the sky was just a tiny square dot high overhead. The walls weren’t exactly closing in on him, but he could feel their proximity. He tried not to think about it. Suddenly, below him, he could see a reflection, and as he sank lower he realized he’d reached the high-tide mark. The stone was still damp to the touch. By his calculations he was a hundred and seventy feet belowground. There was still no sign of any way water could reach the pit from the sea, but he didn’t expect to see it until the two-hundred-foot mark.

Ten feet lower, he thought he heard something—the faintest trickle of water. He gave the plumb line two tugs to tell his brothers to slow his descent. They immediately responded, and his speed was halved. The sound of water entering the pit grew louder. Nick strained to see into the darkness while droplets dripped off the walls, pattering his helmet like rain. An occasional drop was an icy flick against his neck.


He waited a few more seconds to be lowered another eighteen inches, then gave the plumb a sharp pull.

He hung loose next to a fissure in the rock the size of a postcard. He couldn’t estimate how much water was coming through it—surely not enough to defeat all the pumps his father and uncles had brought—so he decided there was at least one more channel to the Pacific. He carefully pulled a handful of oakum fibers from his bag and shoved them into the crack as deep as he could, holding them in place against the icy flow. As seawater saturated the fibers, they swelled until the surge dwindled to a drip and then stopped altogether.

The oakum plug wouldn’t hold for long once the tide came back in, which was why his time on the bottom would be so short.

Nick tugged again and started down once more, passing clusters of mussels clinging to the rock. The smell was noxious. He plugged two more similar-sized clefts and when the third was dammed completely he could no longer hear water entering the pit. He pulled the plumb four times, and a moment later the flaccid hose attached to the surface pump puffed out as it started to suck the shaft dry.

A few moments later, the surface of the water appeared below him. He tugged to halt his descent and took his own plumb bob from his oilskin’s pocket. He lowered it, and grunted with satisfaction when he saw that only sixteen feet of water remained in the shaft. Because the pit was a good two feet narrower at this depth, he figured the pump would clear it down to three feet in ten minutes.

He could see the surface receding by watching anomalies on the rock wall, and he realized his estimate was off. The pump was draining faster than he—

Something to his left caught his eye. A niche was slowly emerging as the water level sank. It appeared to be about two feet deep, and the same width, and he could tell immediately that it wasn’t natural. He could see where hammers and chisels had bitten into the crumbly stone. His heart caught in his throat. Here was more definitive proof that someone had worked in the pit. This wasn’t yet proof that this was the repository for Pierre Devereaux’s treasure, but in the nineteen-year-old’s mind it was close enough.

Enough water had been pumped from the pit for Nick to see some of the junk that had found its way to the bottom. It was mostly driftwood that had been sucked into the shaft through the channels, as well as branches small enough to fit through the grate. However, there were also some lengths of logs that been blown in before the grate was placed over the shaft. He could imagine his father and uncles throwing some of it into the pit in frustration after they failed to unlock its secret.

The pump on the surface continued its work, more than capable of defeating the small trickles escaping his oakum plugs. Off to his side the carved niche continued to grow in height. On a hunch, he had his brothers lower him farther, and he shifted his weight to start to pendulum at the end of the rope. When he swung low enough and close enough, he kicked a leg into the niche, reaching down with his foot. His boot found purchase in just a few inches of water. He let himself swing back once more and threw himself at the opening, landing solidly on both feet. He signaled for his brothers to stop the rope, and he unclipped it from the harness.

Nick Ronish was standing no more than a couple of feet from the bottom of the Treasure Pit. He could sense the loot just inches away.

The final obstacle was all the wood littering the floor of the pit in an impenetrable tangle. They would need to clear some of it in order to feel along the bottom for gold coins. He knew the work would go faster with two of them down here, so after tying a bundle of branches together and attaching it to the rope he pulled on the line to signal to his brothers to first haul it up and then send one of them down to him. Kevin and the remaining twin could operate the hoist, and, if needed, he was sure Jimmy could throw his bit of strength into the effort.

He chuckled as the dripping clutch of wood disappeared over his head. They could probably tie the rope to Amelia’s collar and let the crazy dog haul them out.

He stayed with his back to the wall of the niche in case one of the branches slipped from the rope. From two hundred plus feet, even a glancing blow would be fatal.

Three minutes later an elated Don hallooed down from twenty feet over Nick’s head. “Find anything?”

“Sticks and stuff,” Nick called back. “We need to clear some of it. But look where I’m standing. This was carved into the rock.”

“By pirates?”

“Who else?”

“Hot damn. We’re going to be rich.”

Knowing the tide would turn shortly, the two teens worked like madmen, pulling apart the snarl of interlocked branches. Nick took off his climbing harness and used it as a sling to bind at least two hundred pounds of waterlogged limbs together. He and Don waited in the niche for the rope to return. Ron and Kev were working like men possessed. They unclipped the harness, pushed off the wood, and sent the rope back down in four minutes.

Nick and Don repeated the process twice more. It didn’t matter whether they had cleared away enough of the trash. Time was running out. Leaving the rope draped over a spidery tree trunk sticking out of the water, they jumped down from the niche onto the pile. Wood shifted under their weight. Nick laid himself on a log as big around as he was and reached into the icy water. His hand brushed smooth stone. The very bottom of the pit.

Unlike his brothers, he had only half believed the stories about pirate treasure buried in the pit. That was until he saw the carved niche. Now he wasn’t sure what he believed. When he’d set out, getting to the bottom and proving himself against generations of ancestors who had tried and failed would have been success enough. But now?

He swept his arm in a wider arc, straining to feel anything lying in the silty muck. Nearby, Don was doing the same, his arm buried to the shoulder between some branches, his mouth a tight line of concentration. Nick felt something round and flat. He plucked it from the ooze, thumbing away the grime before it had cleared the surface.

The expected glimmer of gold didn’t materialize. It was nothing but an old rusted washer. He tried another area where he and his brother had cleared some debris. By feel, he identified twigs and soggy bunches of leaves, but when he encountered something he wasn’t sure of he pulled it from the water. He gave a startled grunt as he stared into the empty eye sockets of an animal skull—a fox, he thought.

High above them pressure was building behind one of the oakum plugs, forcing water through the dense fibers. What started as a trickle quickly turned into a gush when the plug shot from the hole with enough impetus to smack the far side of the shaft. Seawater came tumbling down the pit, twisting like an electrical cable carrying live current.

“That’s it,” Nick shouted over the roar. “We are out of here.”

“One more second,” Don replied, nearly his entire upper body in the water as he continued to feel around.

Nick was struggling into his climbing harness, and looked over sharply when Don gasped oddly. “Don?”

Something had shifted. A second ago, Don had been lying on a tree trunk, and now suddenly he was pressed against the far wall of the pit with the length of wood pushed against his chest.

“Nick,” he cried out, his voice strangled.

Nick rushed across the pit to his brother’s side. His frantic motion must have shifted the whole pile further because Don suddenly screamed. The wood pushing into his chest slipped even more, and in the light of his miner’s lamp Nick could see a dark stain forming on his brother’s coat.

Water continued to hammer them from above, a torrent as bad as any summer rainstorm.

“Hold on, little brother,” Nick said, grasping the tree branch. He felt an odd vibration coming from the wood, an almost mechanical sensation, as though the end hidden underwater was attached to some device.

No matter how he tried to pull it out, the branch was firmly lodged against something hidden below the water. It remorselessly continued to drive into Don’s chest in a slow, steady thrust.

Don screamed at the pain. Nick screamed, too, out of fear and frustration. He didn’t know what to do, and he looked around for some way to lever the bough out of his brother’s body.

“Just hold on, Don,” Nick said, tears mingling with the salt water sluicing off his face.

Don called his name again, weakly, for there was three inches of wood impaled into his flesh. Nick took his hand, which Don gripped, but quickly the strength afforded him by fear and pain began to ebb. His fingers slackened.

“Donny!” Nick cried.

Don opened his mouth. Nick would never know what his brother’s final words were meant to be. A clot of blood erupted from Don Ronish’s pale lips. The first eruption turned into a steady stream that turned pink in the spray as it ran down his neck and across his chest.

Nick threw his head back and roared, a primeval call that echoed off the pit walls, and he would have remained at his brother’s side forever had the second of his oakum plugs not burst, doubling the flow of water pouring into the pit.

He fumbled with the rope in the deluge, clipping his harness into the loop. He hated what he was about to do, but he had no choice. He tugged on the plumb line. His other brothers had to know something was wrong because they started hauling him from the pit instantly. Nick kept his light trained on Don until the lifeless body was just a pale outline in the stygian realm. And then it was gone.

DON RONISH’S MEMORIAL SERVICE was held the following Wednesday. The world had changed dramatically during the hours the five brothers were playing at being explorers. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, and the United States was now at war. Only the Navy had the kind of dive equipment necessary to recover Don’s body, and their parents’ request had fallen on deaf ears. His casket remained empty.

Their mother hadn’t spoken since hearing the news and had to sit through the service leaning against their father to keep from fainting. When it was done, he told the three eldest to stay where they were, and he lead their mother and Jimmy to their car, a secondhand Hudson. He returned to the graveside, a decade older than he’d been Sunday morning. He said nothing, looking from one son to the next, his eyes red-rimmed. He then reached into the jacket pocket of the only suit he owned, the one he’d been married in and the one he’d worn to his own parents’ funerals. He had three slips of paper. He handed one to each, pausing with the one he gave to Kevin. He kissed it before thrusting it into his son’s hand.

They were birth certificates. The one he’d given Kevin had been Don’s, who had been eighteen years old and thus eligible for military service.

“It’s ’cause of your Ma. She never understood. Do our family proud and maybe you’ll be forgiven.”

He turned on his heel and walked away, his rangy shoulders hanging as though they supported a weight far heavier than his body could ever carry.

And so the three boys went to the nearest recruiters, all thoughts of boyhood adventure banished forever by the memory of their brother’s unoccupied coffin, and then by the hellfires of war.




JUAN CABRILLO HAD NEVER THOUGHT HE WOULD MEET A challenge he would rather walk away from than face. He felt like running from this one.

Not that it showed.

He had an unreadable game face—his blue eyes remained calm and his expression neutral—but he was glad his best friend and second-in-command, Max Hanley, wasn’t with him. Max would have picked up on Cabrillo’s concern in a second.

Forty miles down the tea-black river from where he stood was one of the most tightly controlled borders in the world—second only to the DMZ separating the two Koreas. It was just rotten luck that the object that had brought him and his handpicked team to the remote jungle had landed on the other side. Had it come down in Paraguay, a phone call between diplomats and a little hush money in the form of economic aid would have ended the affair then and there.

But that was not the case. What they sought had landed in Argentina. And had the incident occurred eighteen months earlier it could have been handled effortlessly. Yet a year and a half ago, following the second collapse of the Argentine peso, a junta of Generals, led by Generalissimo Ernesto Corazón, had seized power in a violent coup that intelligence analysts believed had been in the works for some time. The monetary crisis was simply an excuse for them to wrest control from the legitimate government.

The heads of the civilian leadership were tried in kangaroo courts for crimes against the state involving economic mismanagement. The fortunate were executed; the rest, more than three thousand by some estimates, were sent to forced-labor camps in the Andes Mountains or deep into the Amazon. Any attempt to learn more of their fate was met with arrests. The press was nationalized, and journalists not toeing the party line were jailed. Unions were banned and street protests were met with gunfire.

Those who got out in the early chaotic days of the coup, mostly some wealthy families willing to leave everything behind, said what was happening in their country made the horrors of 1960s and ’70s military dictatorships seem tame.

Argentina had gone from a thriving democracy to a virtual police state inside of six weeks. The United Nations had rattled its vocal swords, threatening sanctions but ultimately sending out a watered-down resolution condemning human rights abuses that the ruling junta duly ignored.

Since then, the military government had tightened their control even further. Lately, they had started massing troops on the borders of Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Brazil, as well as along the mountain passes near Chile. A draft had been implemented, giving them an army as large as the combined forces of all other South American countries. Brazil, a traditional rival for regional power, had likewise fortified their border, and it wasn’t uncommon for the two sides to lob artillery shells at each other.

It was into this authoritarian nightmare that Cabrillo was to lead his people in order to recover what was essentially a NASA blunder.

THE CORPORATION was in the area monitoring the situation when the call came through. They had actually been unloading a shipment of stolen cars from Europe in Santos, Brazil, South America’s busiest seaport, as part of the cover they maintained. Their ship, the Oregon, had a reputation as a tramp freighter with no set route and a crew that asked few questions. It would just be coincidental that over the next several months Brazil’s police forces would receive tips concerning the cars’ locations. During transit, Cabrillo had his technical team hide GPS trackers on the gray-market automobiles. It wasn’t likely that the cars would be returned to their owners, but the smuggling ring would surely collapse.

Pretending to be larcenous was part of the Corporation’s job, actually abetting in a criminal enterprise was not.

The center fore derrick swung over the hold for the last time. In the glow of the few dock lights left working at the little-used section of the port, a string of exotic automobiles glimmered like rare jewels. Ferraris, Maseratis, and Audi R8s all waited to be loaded into the backs of three idling semitrailers. A customs foreman stood nearby, his coat pocket bulging slightly from the envelope of five-hundred-euro bills.

The crane’s motor took up the strain at a signal from crewmen in the hold, and a bright orange Lamborghini Gallardo emerged, looking as though it were already traveling at autobahn speeds. Cabrillo knew from his contact in Rotterdam, where the cars had been loaded, that this particular vehicle had been stolen from an Italian Count near Turin and that the Count had gotten it from a crooked dealer who later claimed it had been stolen from his showroom.

Max Hanley grunted softly as the Lambo gleamed in the weak light. “Good-looking car, but what’s with that god-awful color?”

“No accounting for taste, my friend,” Juan said, twirling a hand over his head to signal the crane operator to go ahead and lower the final car onto the dock. A harbor pilot was due to guide them out to sea shortly.

The sleek car was lowered to the crumbling concrete dock, and members of the smuggling gang unshackled the lifting sling, taking care that the steel cables didn’t scratch what Juan had to agree was a damned ugly paint choice.

The third man standing on the old freighter’s wing bridge had given his name as Angel. He was in his mid-twenties, and wore slacks of some shiny material that looked like mercury and an untucked white dress shirt. He was so thin that the outline of an automatic pistol tucked into the small of his back was obvious.

But maybe that was the point.

Then again, Juan wasn’t really concerned about a double cross. Smuggling was a business built on reputation, and one stupid move on Angel’s part would just about guarantee he’d never do another deal again.

“Okay, then, Capitão, that is it,” Angel said, and whistled down to his men.

One of them retrieved a bag from a tractor trailer’s cab and approached the gangplank while the rest started loading the hot cars into the rigs. A crew member met the smuggler at the rail and escorted him up the two flights of rusted stairs to the bridge. Juan entered with the others from outside. The only illumination came from the antique radar repeater that gave them all a sickly green pallor.

Cabrillo dialed up a little more light as the Brazilian set the bag onto the chart table. Angel’s hair cream shimmered as much as his slacks.

“The agreed-upon price was two hundred thousand dollars,” Angel said as he opened the battered duffel. That amount would almost cover the cost to buy one of the Ferraris new. “It would have been more if you had agreed to deliver three of them to Buenos Aires.”

“Forget it,” Juan said. “I’m not taking my ship anywhere near there. And good luck finding a captain who will. Hell, none would take a legit cargo into BA, let alone a bunch of stolen cars.”

When Cabrillo moved, his shin hit the edge of the table. The resulting sound was an unnatural crack. Angel eyed him warily, his hand moving slightly closer to the pistol under his shirt.

Juan made a “relax” gesture, and stooped to roll up his pant leg. About three inches below his knee, his leg had been replaced with a high-tech prosthetic that looked like something out of the Terminator movies. “Occupational hazard.”

The Brazilian shrugged.

The cash was in bundles of ten thousand. Juan divvied them up and handed half to Max, and for the next several minutes the only sound on the bridge was the soft whisper of bills being checked. They all appeared to be legitimate hundred-dollar bills.

Juan stuck out his hand, “Pleasure doing business with you, Angel.”

“The pleasure is mine, Capitão. I wish you a safe—” A loud squawk from the overhead speaker cut off the rest of his sentence. A barely understandable voice called the captain down to the mess hall.

“Please excuse me,” Cabrillo said, then turned to Max. “If I’m not back when the harbor pilot gets here, you have the conn.”

He took a flight of internal stairs down to the mess deck. The interior spaces of the old tramp freighter were just as scabrous as her hull. The walls hadn’t seen fresh paint in decades, and there were lines through the dust on the floor where a crewman had made a halfhearted attempt at sweeping sometime in the distant past. The mess hall was only moderately brighter than the dim companionway, with cheap travel posters taped haphazardly to the bulkheads. On one wall was a message board bearded with unread slips of paper offering everything from guitar lessons from an engineer who’d left the ship a decade ago to a reminder that Hong Kong would revert to Chinese control on July 1, 1997.

In the adjoining kitchen, stalactites of hardened grease as thick as fingers hung from the ventilation hood over the stove.

Cabrillo walked through the unoccupied room, and as he neared the far wall a perfectly concealed door snicked open. Linda Ross stood in the well-appointed hallway beyond. She was the Corporation’s vice president of operations, essentially its number three after Juan and Max. She was pixie cute, with a small, upturned nose, and a panache for varying hair colors. It was jet-black now, and swept passed her shoulders in thick waves.

Linda was a Navy vet who had done a tour on a guided-missile cruiser as well as spent time as a Pentagon staffer, giving her a unique set of skills that made her perfect for her job.

“What’s up?” Juan asked as she fell in beside with him. She had to take two steps for every one of his.

“Overholt’s on the phone. Sounds urgent.”

“Lang always sounds urgent,” Juan said, removing a set of fake teeth and some wadded cotton from his mouth that were part of his disguise. He wore a fat suit under his wrinkled uniform shirt and a wig of graying hair. “I think it’s his prostate.”

Langston Overholt IV was a veteran CIA man who’d been around long enough to know where all the skeletons, literal and figurative, were buried, which was why after years of trying to put him to pasture, a succession of politically appointed directors had let him stick around Langley in an advisory capacity. He had also been Cabrillo’s boss when Juan was a field agent, and, when Juan left the Agency, Overholt had been instrumental in encouraging him to found the Corporation.

Many of the toughest assignments the Corporation had taken on had come from Overholt, and the substantial fees they had collected were paid through black budget appropriations so deeply buried that the auditors for them called themselves the 49ers, after the California gold rush miners.

They reached Cabrillo’s cabin. He paused before opening the door. “Tell them to stand by in the op center. The pilot should be here soon.”

While the wheelhouse several decks above them looked functional, it was nothing more than window dressing for marine inspections and pilots. The wheel and throttle controls were computer linked to the high-tech operations center that was the real brains of the ship. It was from there that all thrust and maneuvering instructions were issued, and it was from there, too, that the array of deadly weapons secreted throughout the decrepit-looking scow was controlled.

The Oregon might have started out as a lumber carrier schlepping timber along America’s West Coast and to Japan, but after Juan’s team of naval architects and craftsmen were finished with her, she was one of the most sophisticated intelligence-gathering and covert-operations vessels ever conceived.

“Will do, Chairman.” Linda said, and she headed down the passage.

Following a rather hairy duel with a Libyan warship several months earlier, they had found it necessary to dock the ship for extensive repairs. No fewer than thirty artillery shells had penetrated her armor. Juan couldn’t fault his ship. Those shells had been fired at less than point-blank range. He’d used the opportunity to redo his cabin.

All the expensive woodwork had been stripped out, either by the Libyan guns or carpenters. The walls were now covered in something akin to stucco that wouldn’t crack as the ship flexed. The doorways were modified so they were arched. Additional arched partisans were added, giving the seven-hundred-square-foot cabin a cozy feeling. With its decidedly Arabesque décor, the rooms looked like the set of Rick’s Café Américain from Casablanca , Juan’s favorite movie.

He tossed the wig onto his desk and snatched up the handset of a repro Bakelite phone.

“Lang, Juan here. How are you doing?”


“Your normal frame of mind. What’s up?”

“First of, tell me where you are.”

“Santos, Brazil. That’s São Paulo’s port city, in case you didn’t know.”

“Thank God, you’re close,” Overholt said with a relieved sigh. “And just so you know, I helped the Israelis snatch a Nazi war criminal from Santos back in the sixties.”

“Touché. Now, what’s going on?” By the tone of Overholt’s voice, Juan knew he had something big for them, and he could feel the first feathery traces of adrenaline in his veins.

“Six hours ago, a satellite was launched from Vandenberg atop a Delta III rocket for a low-earth polar orbit.”

That one sentence alone was enough for Cabrillo to deduce that the rocket had failed someplace over South America, since polar shots fly south from the California Air Force base, that it was carrying sensitive spy gear which might not have burned up, and that it most likely had crashed in Argentina since Lang was calling the best covert operatives he knew.

“The techs don’t know yet what went wrong,” Overholt continued. “And that really isn’t our problem anyway.”

“Our problem,” Juan said, “is that it crashed in Argentina.”

“You said it. About a hundred miles south of Paraguay in some of the thickest jungle of the Amazon basin. And there’s a good chance the Argentines know because we warned every country on the flight path that the rocket was overflying their territory.”

“I thought we no longer have diplomatic relations with them since the coup.”

“We still have ways of passing on something like this.”

“I know what you’re about to ask, but be reasonable. The debris is going to be spread over a couple thousand square miles in bush that our spy satellites can’t penetrate. Do you honestly expect us to find your needle in that haystack?”

“I do, because here’s the kicker. The particular part of the needle we’re looking for is a mild gamma ray emitter.”

Juan let that sink in for a second, and finally said, “Plutonium.”

“Only reliable power source we had for this particular bird. The NASA eggheads tried every conceivable alternative, but it came back to using a tiny amount of plutonium and using the heat off its decay to run the satellite’s systems. On the bright side, they so overengineered the containment vessel that it is virtually indestructible. It wouldn’t even notice a rocket blowing up around it.

“As you can well imagine, the administration doesn’t want it known that we sent aloft a satellite that could have potentially spread radiation across a good-sized swath of the most pristine environment on the planet. The other concern is that the plutonium not fall into the Argentines’ hands. We suspect they have restarted their nuclear weapons program. The satellite didn’t carry much of the stuff—a few grams worth, or so I’m told—but there’s no sense in giving them a head start on their march for the Bomb.”

“So the Argies don’t know about the plutonium?” Juan asked, using the colloquialism for Argentines he’d picked up from a Falklands War vet.

“Thank goodness, no. But anyone with the right equipment will pick up trace radioactivity. And before you ask,” he said, anticipating the next question, “levels aren’t dangerous provided you follow some simple safety protocols.”

That wasn’t going to be Cabrillo’s next question. He knew plutonium wasn’t dangerous unless ingested or inhaled. Then it became one of the deadliest toxins known to man.

“I was going to ask if we have any kind of backup.”

“Nada. There’s a team on its way to Paraguay with the latest generation of gamma ray detectors, but that’s about all you can count on. It took the DCI and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to convince the President to let us help you that much. I’m sure you realize he has a certain, ah, reluctance, when it comes to dealing with sensitive international situations. He still hasn’t come to grips with the whole debacle in Libya a few months back.”

“Debacle?” Juan said, sounding hurt. “We saved the Secretary of State’s life and salvaged the peace accords.”

“And damned near started a war when you went toe-to-toe with one of their guided-missile frigates. This has to go ultraquiet. Sneak in, find the plutonium, and sneak right back out again. No fireworks.”

Cabrillo and Overholt knew that was a promise Juan couldn’t make, so instead Juan asked for details about the exact location at which the missile exploded and the trajectory of its fall back to earth. He pulled a cordless keyboard and mouse from a tray under his desk, which sent a signal for a flat-screen monitor to slowly rise from the desk’s surface. Overholt e-mailed pictures and target projections. The pictures were worthless, showing nothing but dense cloud cover, but NASA had given them just a five-square-mile search area, which made the grid manageable, provided the terrain didn’t go to hell on them. Overholt asked if Cabrillo had any idea how they were going to get into Argentina undetected.

“I want to see some topographical maps before I can answer that. My first instinct is a chopper, of course, but with the Argies ramping up activity along their northern borders that might not be possible. I should have something figured out in a day or two and be ready to execute by week’s end.”

“Ah, here’s the other thing,” Overholt said so mildly that Cabrillo tensed up. “You have seventy-two hours to recover the power pack.”

Juan was incredulous. “Three days? That’s impossible.”

“After seventy-two hours, the President wants to come clean. Well, cleaner. He won’t mention the plutonium, but he’s willing to ask the Argentines for their help recovering, quote, sensitive scientific equipment.”

“And if they say no and search for it themselves?”

“At best we end up looking foolish, and, at worst, criminally negligent in the eyes of the world. Plus we give Generalissimo Corazón a tidy bundle of weapons-grade plutonium to play with.”

“Lang, give me six hours. I’ll get back to you on whether we’re willing—hell—able to back your play.”

“Thanks, Juan.”

Cabrillo called Overholt after a three-hour strategy meeting with his department heads, and, twelve hours later, found himself and his team standing on the banks of a Paraguayan river, about to cross into God alone knew what.




THE SKELETON STAFF OF THE WINTER-OVER CREW COULD feel spring coming in their bones. Not that the weather was much improved. Temperatures rarely rose above twenty below, and icy winds were a constant. It was the growing number of × marks on the big calendar in the rec hall marking the advancing days that buoyed their spirits after a long winter in which they hadn’t seen the sun since late March.

Only a few research bases remain open year-round on the planet’s most desolate continent, and those are usually much larger than the Wilson/George Station, run by a coalition of American universities and a grant from the National Science Foundation. Even at full staff during the summer months starting in September, the clutch of prefabricated domed buildings atop stilts driven into the ice and rock could house no more than forty souls.

Because of money pouring into global-warming research, it was decided to keep the station online all year round. This was the first attempt, and by all accounts it had gone well. The structures had withstood the worst Antarctica could throw at them, and the people had gotten along well for the most part. One of them, Bill Harris, was a NASA astronaut studying the effects of isolation on human relations, for an eventual manned mission to Mars.

WeeGee, as the team called their home for the past six months, was out of some futurist sketchbook. It was located near a deep bay on the shores of the Bellingshausen Sea, midway along the peninsula that thrusts toward South America like a frozen finger. Had there been sunlight, a pair of binoculars on the hills behind the base was all one would need to see the southern ocean.

There were five nodes surrounding a central hub that served as the mess and recreation hall. The nodes were connected by elevated walkways that were designed to sway with the wind. On particularly bad days, people with the weakest stomachs usually crawled. The nodes were designed as laboratory space, storage, and dormitory-like rooms, with people sleeping four to a cell during the busy summer. All the buildings were painted safety red. With opaque panels in the domed ceilings and many walls, the facility looked like a group of checkerboard silos.

A short distance away, along a carefully roped path, sat a Quonset-type building that acted as a garage for their snowmobiles and the snowcats. With the weather so miserable during the winter, there had been little opportunity to use the arctic vehicles. The building used waste heat piped from the main base to keep it at a minimum of ten below so as not to damage the machines.

Most of their meteorological equipment could be remotely monitored, so there was very little for the crew to do during the sunless days. Bill Harris had his NASA study, a couple of them were using the time to finish their doctoral dissertations, and one was working on a novel.

Only Andy Gangle didn’t appear to have anything to occupy his time. When he’d first arrived, the twenty-eight-year-old postdoc from Penn State had actively overseen the launching of weather balloons and had taken his study of the weather seriously. But not long after he’d lost interest in local temperatures. He still performed his duties, but he spent a great deal of time out in the garage or, when the weather permitted, trekking solo to the shore to collect “specimens,” though no one knew of what.

And because of the strict privacy code needed to keep a group of people in isolation from getting on one another’s nerves, everyone let him be. The few times his case had been discussed, no one felt he was succumbing to what the shrinks referred to as isolation syndrome but what the team called bug-eyes. In its severest forms, a person could suffer delusions as part of a psychotic break. A few seasons back, a Danish researcher lost his toes and more when he ran naked from his base on the leeward side of the peninsula. Rumor had it he was still in a Copenhagen mental hospital.

No, it was decided that Andy didn’t have bug-eyes. He was just a sullen loner who the others were more than happy to avoid.

“Morning,” Andy Gangle muttered when he entered the rec hall. The smell of frying bacon from the cafeteria-style galley filled the room.

The overhead fluorescent lights made his pallor particularly wan. Like most of the men, he’d long since stopped shaving, and his dark beard contrasted sharply against his white skin.

A pair of women at one of the Formica tables paused from their breakfasts to greet him and then returned to their food. Greg Lamont, the titular head of the station, greeted Andy by name. “The met guys tell me this will probably be your last day to head to the coast if you’re planning on it.”

“Why’s that?” Gangle asked guardedly. He didn’t like people telling him his business.

“Front coming in,” the silver-haired ex-hippie-turned-scientist replied. “A bad one. It’s going to blanket half of Antarctica.”

Real concern etched the corners of Gangle’s lipless mouth. “It won’t affect our leaving, will it?”

“Too early to say, but it’s possible.”

Andy nodded, not in understanding but absently, as if he were reorganizing thoughts in his head. He passed through to the kitchen.

“How’d you sleep?” Gina Alexander asked. The forty-something divorcée from Maine had come to the Antarctic to, as she put it, “get as far away from that rat and his new Little Miss Perfect Bod as is humanly possible.” She wasn’t one of the researchers but rather worked for the support company hired to keep WeeGee running smoothly.

“Same as the night before,” Andy said, filling a mug with coffee from the stainless urn at the end of the cafeteria line.

“Glad to hear it. How do you want your eggs?”

He looked at her, his expression almost feral. “Runny and cold, as usual.”

She wasn’t quite sure how to take that. Andy usually never said anything more than “scrambled,” before taking his food and coffee to eat back in his room. She chuckled reproachfully. “Boy, aren’t you a bundle of sunshine this morning.”

He leaned across the dinner-tray track, speaking softly so the others in the rec room couldn’t hear him. “Gina, we’ve got one more week before we can get out of here, so just serve me my damned food and keep your comments to yourself. All right?”

Not one to back down—ask her ex about that sometime—Gina leaned over so their faces were inches apart. “Then do yourself a favor, love, and watch me while I cook, otherwise I might be tempted to spit in your food.”

“That would probably improve the waste.” Andy straightened, his face scrunched as he thought for a moment. “Paste? No, damn it. Touch? Taste. That’s it. It would probably improve the taste.”

Gina wasn’t sure what had gotten into him, but she laughed anyway. “Sonny boy, you need to be a little quicker for your insults to be effective.”

Rather than wait around feeling foolish, Andy grabbed a handful of protein bars off the counter and skulked from the room, his bony shoulders hunched up like a vultures.’ His ears rang with her parting call of “Bug-eyed twerp.”

“Seven days, Andy,” he said to himself as he made his way back to his room. “Keep it together for seven more days and you can kiss these suckers good-bye forever.”

Forty minutes later, bundled under six layers of clothing, Andy inked his name on the whiteboard hanging next to the cold lock and stepped through the heavily insulated door. The difference in temperature between the interior of the station and the small anteroom that lead to the exit was a whopping ninety degrees. Gangle’s breath turned into an opaque cloud as dense as any London fog, and each inhalation stabbed deep into his lungs. He waited for a few minutes to adjust his clothing and fit his goggles over his eyes. While the Antarctic Peninsula was relatively warm compared to the interior of the continent, any exposed skin would still get frostbitten in moments.

All the clothing in the world still wasn’t enough to defeat the cold, not in the long term. Heat loss was inevitable, and, with the wind, inexorable. It started at the extremities—nose, fingertips, and toes—then spread inward as the body shut itself down to conserve its core temperature. It wasn’t a matter of willpower, facing these extremes in temperature. One couldn’t just bull through the pain. Antarctica was as deadly to human life as the hard vacuum of outer space.

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.


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 Corazón. 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.

“Good God,” Murph gasped as they continued past. “Why? Why did they do this?”

“Ethnic cleansing,” Juan replied, his mouth a tight, grim line. “This far north the villagers were probably Indians. Intel reports I’ve seen say the government in Buenos Aires wants to eradicate the last few pockets of natives remaining in the country. And to give you an idea of the characters we’re impersonating”—he nodded in the direction of the little town—“that’s most likely Ninth Brigade handiwork.”

“Lovely,” Mike spat. He’d tucked his beret into a shoulder epaulet, so his fine hair blew free around his head.

“Same thing’s going on in the cities and towns. Anywhere they find natives, they drag them out and ship them off to either labor camps here in the Amazon or they just simply disappear. This place is a mix of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.”

“How many Indians are left?”

“There were about six hundred thousand before the coup. God only knows how many have already been killed, but if this regime stays in power for a few more years, they’re all going to end up dead.”

They passed a ferryboat, lumbering its way slowly upstream. It was big enough for eight vehicles, and maybe forty passengers on its upper deck. The trucks aboard were all painted in camouflage colors, and the men lining the rail were soldiers. They waved over at the speeding RHIB, shouting greetings in Spanish. Keeping in character, the three men standing at the helm didn’t deign to respond. When the Argentine soldiers were close enough to recognize the maroon berets, their happy calls fell to instant silence, and most of them suddenly had the need to see what was happening on the other side of the old craft.

There was little other traffic on the river, mostly hand-built pirogues with single paddlers working along the bank in search of fish. Juan felt bad when they were caught up in the RHIB’s churning wake, but slowing down would have been the last thing a Ninth Brigader would do. Truth of it was, they probably would have aimed for the dugout canoes and rammed their occupants under the water.

Two and a half hours of hard running down the river brought them to a tributary about half the size of the main branch, the Rio Rojo, and because of the high iron content in the soils upstream the water was indeed a reddish brown, like a bloody stain that spread into the current. Pulaski was awake by now, and he and Mike had been scanning the river for any sign that they were being watched. There was nothing but the river and the jungle, which was a solid wall of intertwined vegetation.

“Clear,” Mike called over the engines’ growl.

“Clear,” Jerry echoed at the bow, and lowered his binoculars.

Juan cut power just enough to make the sharp turn, and opened the throttles again as soon as the bow pointed upstream. The Rio Rojo was less than fifty yards wide, and the towering jungle seemed to meet overhead, filtering the sunlight with a greenish tinge. It was like they were making their way up a tunnel. Their wake caromed off the dirt banks, eroding clots of mud that fell into the water and dissolved.

They started upstream, keeping the speed down because, in less than five minutes, they came across an expected towboat hauling logs down from the highlands. The boat was a wooden-hulled, bow-heavy scow with black smoke belching from its exhaust and more smoke coiling from the engine housing at the stern. The tree trunks were left floating in the water with the perimeter logs chained together to keep the whole mass intact. Cabrillo estimated there were at least two hundred twenty-foot lengths of what looked to him to be mahogany. He figured a larger load would be too cumbersome in such a narrow river.

“No radio mast,” Mark Murphy said.

“Probably has a sat phone,” Juan replied. “But I’m not worried about them reporting us. He can tell we’re Ninth Brigade, and he won’t want any trouble from us.”

They stayed far to the right side of the channel as they passed the lumber boat. Neither crew made any gesture of greeting. In fact, the tug’s three-man crew kept their eyes pointed decidedly downstream the entire time.

Once clear, Juan opened the throttles further, but had to slow again just moments later. Another nearly identical boat appeared ahead. This one was making its way around a tight bend and was well into Cabrillo’s side of the river. Tradition would be for Juan to idle his boat until the floating logjam made its turn and straightened out. But arrogant soldiers of an elite paramilitary group wouldn’t care one bit about riverine customs.

In Spanish, Juan shouted, “Stop where you are and let us pass.”

“I cannot,” the boat’s captain yelled back.

He hadn’t bothered to look to see who was addressing him. He was watching the shifting mass of logs edging closer and closer to the inside bank. If they rammed into the shore, it was possible that his boat wouldn’t have the power to pull them free. It wasn’t an uncommon occurrence, and it could take hours for the crew to unchain some of the logs from the bundle in order to free themselves and hours more to set the load right again.

“I’m not asking, I’m telling,” Juan said, letting anger drop his voice to a snarled hiss.

One of the deckhands tapped the boat’s captain on the shoulder. The man finally looked over at the RHIB, with its crew of armed soldiers in maroon berets. He went a little pale under his two days’ growth of beard.

“Okay, okay,” he said with the resignation of the powerless in the face of oppression. He throttled back, and the current immediately slammed his load into the riverbank. A dozen logs as thick around as oil barrels were thrown onto shore. The impact snapped a section of chain, hurling bits of its rusted links through the air. The oily workboat slowly came across the current, pressing its load deeper into the bank while at the same time opening the channel for Cabrillo and the RHIB. Logs that had broken free were already drifting downstream.

Keeping in character, Juan threw the hapless men a mocking salute and firewalled the throttles.

Murph said, “It’s going to take the better part of the day to clean that up.”

“Had we waited for him to clear the corner, he would have been suspicious,” Mike Trono countered. “Better them inconvenienced than us questioned. Juan speaks Spanish like a native, but I get lost with the menu at a Mexican restaurant.”

They continued upstream, passing one more boat towing a mass of timber, before the handheld GPS said they were as close to the crash site as the river would take them. After cruising for another quarter mile, they found a small feeder stream, and Juan backed the boat into it. There was barely enough room for the RHIB’s hull, and the jungle scraped against the vessel’s rubber sides.

Jerry Pulaski tied a line around a moldering stump, and Juan cut the engines. After so many hours of their throaty roar, it took several seconds for Cabrillo to hear jungle sounds through the ringing in his ears. Without being told, the men set about camouflaging the boat, hacking fronds and leaves from different trees and bushes and creating an intricate screen over the RHIB’s bow. When they were done, the craft was all but invisible from five feet away.

“Well, boys,” Juan said as they gathered their communications equipment and other gear together, including a specially made harness for Jerry to carry the plutonium power cell, “our leisurely cruise downriver is over. Now the real slog begins. I’ll take point. Mike, you’ve got the drag slot. Keep low and quiet. We have to assume the Argies have their own teams out here looking for the debris, or at least investigating. Stay sharp.”

The men, their faces smeared with camouflage greasepaint, looking as fearsome as any native warrior, nodded silently as they stepped from the boat onto the spongy shore. They started inland, following a game trail that ran roughly parallel to the small stream. The temperature was a solid eighty degrees, with the humidity a few notches higher. In just a few minutes, their pores were running like faucets.

For the first mile, Cabrillo felt every muscle cramp and ache from their time in the river, but as they forged on the countless laps he’d swum over the course of his life began to show. He moved more lithely, his boots merely brushing the loamy soil. Even his stump was feeling good. He’d always been more accustomed to wide-open spaces—the sea or the desert—but his other senses were making up for what his eyes could not see. There was a faint trace of woodsmoke in the air—from the logging operation, he knew—and when a bird’s startled cry carried down from the jungle canopy, he paused and waited to learn what had disturbed it. Was it startled by a predator or by something it saw walking the same path as Juan’s team?

The mental acuity required for jungle stalking was as physically taxing as the effort to slide through the dense foliage.

Something off to his left caught Juan’s eye. He immediately dropped to a knee, hand-signaling the men strung out behind him to do likewise. Cabrillo studied the spot that had attracted his attention through his machine pistol’s iron sights. The quick squirt of adrenaline into his veins seemed to heighten his vision. He perceived no movement, not even a breeze rustling the leaves. This far below the canopy, air movement was a rarity. He cautiously swayed back, changing his angle of view in minute increments.


A dull flash of metal. Not the slick black sheen of a modern weapon trained on him but the pewter shimmer of old aluminum left out in the elements. According to the GPS, they were still several miles from where the power cell was projected to have landed, and he wondered for a moment if this was other debris from the doomed satellite.

Still in a crouch, and with the MP-5 tucked hard against his shoulder, he moved off the trail, confident that what he was taking away from his own peripheral vision would be covered by his men. He approached with the patience of one of the jungle cats. Five feet away, he saw the outline of something large through the undergrowth. Whatever this was, it wasn’t part of the doomed orbiter.

He used his weapon’s barrel to move aside a clump of vines hanging from a tree and grunted in surprise. They had discovered what looked like the cockpit of a downed plane. The windshield was long gone, and creepers had infiltrated, snaking around seats and bulkheads like a cancerous growth. But what really held his attention was what lay in the copilot’s seat. There was little left of the body, just a brown-green skeleton that would soon dissolve into its chair. Its clothing had long since rotted away, but lying in the pelvic girdle and shining brightly in the diffused sunlight was a brass strip that Juan knew had been the guy’s zipper.

He whistled softly, and seconds later Mark Murphy and Jerry Pulaski approached. Mike would remain near the trail, watching their six.

“What do you think?” Juan asked quietly.

“Looks like this plane’s been here awhile,” Jerry said, swatting at a mouse-sized bug that had landed on his neck.

Mark’s expression was thoughtful for a moment, and then his eyes widened. “This isn’t a plane,” he said with awe in his voice. “This is the Flying Dutchman.”

“Forgive my ignorance, but wasn’t the Dutchman a ghost ship?” Pulaski replied.

“The Flying Dutchman was a blimp,” Mark told him, and pointed. “Look between the seats. See that big wheel. That’s for controlling a blimp’s pitch. Rotate it forward, it engages the elevator on the fin assembly, and she goes nose down. Move it back, and the nose rises.”

“What makes you think this is the Flying Dutchman and not some lost Navy patrol from World War Two?”

“Because we’re a thousand miles inland from both the Atlantic and the Pacific, and the Flying Dutchman went missing while looking for a lost city in the jungle.”

“Okay,” Juan said. “Go back and tell it from the beginning.”

Mark couldn’t tear his eyes off the airship’s shattered gondola. “When I was a kid, I kind of had a thing for blimps and zeppelins. It was just a fad, you know, a hobby. Before that, it was locomotives from the Steam Age.” Seeing the expressions staring at him, he added, “Look, I admit it. I was a geek.”

“Was?” Jerry deadpanned.

“Anyway, I read a lot of books about airships, their history. Like the story of the L-8, a Navy patrol blimp that took off from San Francisco in August of 1942. A couple of hours into a routine patrol, the two-man crew reported seeing an oil slick. A couple hours after that, the blimp floated back over the coast, minus the men. The only clue was that two life jackets were missing.”

“What’s that got to do with this?” Juan asked a little impatiently. Mark Murphy was the smartest guy Cabrillo had ever met, but with that came his tendency to go off on tangents that highlighted his near-photographic memory.

“Well, another lost-blimp story is the Flying Dutchman. I hope I am remembering this right. After the war, a former Navy blimp pilot and some of his buddies bought a surplus airship to use as an aerial platform to fly over the South American jungle in search of an Incan city, most likely El Dorado. They converted the blimp to fly on hydrogen, which is insanely explosive, but it was something they could make themselves using electrolysis.

“Treasure hunters?” Pulaski asked dubiously.

“I didn’t say they were right,” Mark replied on the defensive. “I’m only saying they were real.”

“This is all well and good,” Cabrillo said, backing away from the ruined cockpit and its grisly occupant. “I’ve marked the location on the GPS, but we’ve got a mission to perform.”

“Give me five minutes,” Mark pleaded.

Juan thought for a second. Nodded.

Murph grinned his thanks. He crawled through the opening where the gondola’s door had been ripped off when the airship crashed into the jungle. To his left were the two pilots’ seats and controls. To the right was the cabin proper. It had the neat economy and efficiency of a travel trailer. There were two bunk beds, a tiny galley with an electric burner, and a dozen storage lockers. He opened each in turn, rummaged around for any clues, and moved on when all he found were clots of mildew and mold or old surplus mess kits the men must have used to make their meals.

In one locker he found the metal remains of a climbing harness. The webbing and ropes had dissolved to goo, but the steel remained unchanged over the years. He knew instinctively that they had used the gear to lower one of their own out the gondola for ground reconnaissance. He finally hit pay dirt when he opened the rusted remains of a coffee can that had been left on the little dinette table.

He cursed himself for not realizing its significance immediately. The can would have tumbled to the cabin floor when the blimp crashed. There was no way it should be on the table unless someone had placed it there. A survivor. Inside, he discovered a white rubber sheath about six inches in length. It took him a moment to realize it was a condom. By the feel of it, there was something stuffed inside—papers, most likely—a final log entry? The open end had been knotted shut.

After sixty years lying out here, this wasn’t the time or place to open it. He would need the preservation equipment on the Oregon if he had any chance of learning more. He carefully sealed the prophylactic in a waterproof pouch and tucked it into his fanny pack.

“Time’s up,” Juan said. The jungle was so thick that his voice was disembodied, yet he stood only a few yards away.

“I’m done.” Mark emerged from the gondola. With a last look back, he vowed to find the names of the men who had crashed here and inform their surviving relatives.




THE WINDS HAD PICKED UP, SO THE SKY SCREAMED OVER the domes, carrying with it curtains of blowing snow. Such was the oddity that was the planet’s most isolated continent that much of it, though snow-covered, is considered a desert, with only trace amounts of precipitation. The peninsula saw far more snowfall than the interior, but it was possible the flakes raking the facility had fallen hundreds of years ago.

This wasn’t yet the storm they were anticipating, just a subtle reminder that, no matter what, humanity is an interloper here.

Andy Gangle woke with a screaming headache. It wasn’t the dull pain of too much time staring at a computer screen. Rather, it was the sharp stab of drinking something too cold too quickly, and no matter what he did—like pressing chemical hand warmers to his temples, as if to defrost his brain—nothing helped.

Not the darkened room, not the pain tablets he’d dry-swallowed moments after being struck with the crippling agony. Despite his vehement need for privacy, a low moan escaped his white lips, a plaintive, albeit unintended, call for help. He lay curled in a fetal position on the sweat-soaked tangle of sheets and woolen blankets. Opposite Gangle’s bed, and staring down since his arrival, was the iconic image of Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out at the camera.

He’d won that picture in an eighth-grade science contest, and it had stayed on his wall through high school and had a place of honor in a succession of dorm rooms. It was a little tattered, but whenever he was troubled he would look at the photograph and find the absurdity in whatever was bothering him. If Einstein, with the burden of knowing his equations had helped decimate two Japanese cities, could laugh at the world, then there was nothing going to stop Andy Gangle.

He looked at it now and felt nothing but rage. A blinding rage fueled by the unmitigated agony searing his brain. What did Einstein know of burden? Andy thought. He’d made his mark in physics as a young man and spent the rest of his life doddering around. To hell with him. To hell with them all. Moving faster than he thought possible, Gangle uncoiled his gawky limbs, leapt from the bed, and clawed the poster from the wall. Clear tape adhered four little triangles of paper to the wall, but the rest came off in a sheet. Savagely, Andy tore at the poster, ripping at it with his fingers and teeth, damp confetti falling to the linoleum-tiled decking.

Gina Alexander was passing by Andy’s door on the way to her place in the kitchen, thinking that in five days, if the weather held, a big beautiful C-130 Hercules airplane would land on the ice runway a quarter mile inland from the station and that she’d be out there waiting for it. Next stop Chile, then Miami, then . . . what?

She didn’t know. Coming to Antarctica had been cathartic, and her time here had put the pain of her husband’s betrayal and their divorce into a locked corner of her heart, but she didn’t know what would come next. She hadn’t thought that far ahead. She considered the possibility of moving closer to her parents, but the very idea of living in a place called Plant City, Florida, grayed her hair and made her fingers curl with imaginary arthritis.

A sound coming from Andy’s room as she passed by had a reptilian quality, a dry, rasping hiss, like a monstrous snake or some giant lizard. She paused in midstride and listened. It did not come again. The thought of knocking on Andy’s door and asking if he was okay came and went as fast as her mind could process it. If Andy Bug-eyes was having a problem, that was just too bad. He’d alienated the entire team with his odd behavior, and Gina was a firm believer in “you reap what you sow.”

A minute later, she was greeting a few of the science types, as she warmed the griddle and dropped the first batches of bread into the restaurant-grade toasters.

It would have behooved Gina to check on Andy or tell Greg Lamont, the station commander, what she’d heard.

Andy had discovered a way to dull the pain in his head. It had happened in the frenzied seconds when he was shredding the poster. In his enraged fit to see it utterly destroyed, his coordination was off just enough so when his teeth clamped down on a section of paper, his incisors nipped the flesh to the side of his index fingernail. The blood was a warm combination of copper and salt, not unpleasant, but unexpected in that as soon as it touched his lips the pain spiking behind his eyes dimmed, like an industrial light-bulb goes from glaring white to just an amber glow and then fades to nothing.

The morsel of flesh, as he chewed it, was rubbery, like a pencil eraser that had hardened over time. He contemplated what he was doing, as his finger dripped blood. He brought his hand up to his face, staring in fascination at the patterns the blood made as it dribbled across his skin. He waved his hand to make lines of blood across his palm. He giggled, dipping his finger into the blood and writing on the wall, red smears on clean white plastic. He wrote letters, formed them into words, into a concept he should have seen all along. It was so simple, so perfect. He admitted the line he’d written was crudely formed, blood not being as easy to work with as paint, but the meaning was perfectly clear.

Mime Goering for crow Nicole.

Some instinct, some sense of self-preservation buried deep in his brain, told him to clean himself before he went to find what he needed to carry out his plan. With his finger wrapped in masking tape from his desk and the worst of the blood wiped from his lips, Andy Gangle checked that the hallway was clear and stepped from his room.


JUAN HELD UP A HAND WHEN HE HEARD THE DISTINCT sound of approaching helicopters. The noise was muted by the jungle canopy, and he couldn’t hope to spot them through the dense foliage that hung over the ground like a living shroud. But the best hunters in the world can spot the tiniest movement in the riot of vegetation, and he had no doubt that these were military choppers. They didn’t have that refined sound of executive helos built to deliver the pampered. These sounded raw, stripped down to the bare essentials in order to pack in as many men and as much gear as possible. Yet the human eye perceives motion better than pattern, so the men waited, crouched along the game trail until the sound faded. Ominously, in the direction they were heading.

“What do you think, Chairman?” Jerry Pulaski asked.

“Our welcoming committee has arrived. Let’s make sure they don’t have time to set up the party.” Juan checked the handheld GPS. “The trail is taking us slightly east of where we need to go. Time to hoof it cross-country. Same formation.”

By staying low, the men could duck under the thicker leaves and fronds, though Jerry, with his six-inch height advantage, found himself at a disadvantage in the jungle. After ten minutes, razor-sharp leaves had cut his face as though he’d been shaving with a month-old razor, and insects dove at him with the abandon of kamikaze pilots, in their hunger for such an easy meal.

To add insult to already injured bodies, the terrain started to rise. They were heading into foothills of mountains they’d seen on the recon photographs. And the smell of burning brush was growing stronger. The slash-and-burn logging operation was only a few miles away.

Juan did the best he could blazing a trail through the underbrush, and when he spotted what looked to be a large opening ahead he made the mistake of rushing through rather than checking it out first. He stepped onto a dirt road at the very instant a semitrailer went roaring past, its engine beat muffled by the bend it had just rounded. Had Juan emerged a second later, the driver would have seen him though not in time to brake.

Cabrillo froze, windmilling his arms to prevent himself from taking a final step under the empty timber hauler’s massive tires. The stakes used to contain the logs the big rig hauled down to the river flashed inches from his face, and the vortex they cut through the soggy air threatened to suck him into the hurtling steel.

And then it was past in a cloud of dust. Juan took what could have been his last step and exhaled a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Training then bypassed the fear and shock, and he dove flat onto the deeply rutted road on the off chance the driver glanced at his rearview mirror. Cabrillo lay prone until the truck rumbled out of sight, then dodged back undercover.

“Close one,” Murph rem