The Silent Sea (Oregon Files 7)

Espinoza was torn. On the one hand, he wanted them to come. He wanted to test himself and his men against the very best in the world. On the other, he wanted to see his country’s bold strategy so intimidate the West that they didn’t dare retaliate. As director Laretta prattled on about the facility, he realized he had no right to be torn. He was a warrior, and as such he wanted the Americans to send their finest troops. He did not want merely to repulse them. He wanted to humiliate them. He wanted to turn the ice red with their blood.

“Tell me, Luis,” he interrupted, just to stop the director from speaking on and on about the facility, “have our guests arrived?”

“Do you mean the foreign scientists from the other bases? Yes, they are being guarded by my small security force in a maintenance shed.”

“No. I mean our friends from China.”

“Oh, them. Yes. They came in yesterday, with their equipment. I assigned them a workboat. They’ve been getting it ready. Is there really an old Chinese ship sunk someplace in these waters?”

“If there is,” Espinoza replied, “then we can forget any chance of a reprisal. Our claims to the peninsula would be legitimized by history. I would like to meet them.”

“Certainly.”

He steered the snowcat off the escarpment overlooking the base and down a track worn into the ice. When they were in the facility itself, Espinoza was amazed at the level of activity. Men in arctic gear were working on oddly shaped buildings and countless personal snowmobiles zipped about, many towing sleds laden with what he assumed was oil-drilling gear. Where the natural snow had blown away in spots, he could see the composite mats made to look like ice, fitted together like the artificial runways he’d seen erected in the jungle. It could easily take the weight of their big vehicle.

There were several workboats tied up on a quay easily large enough to accommodate the Admiral Brown. They were all about forty feet long, steel-hulled, with large open spaces on their sterns and blocky pilothouses hunched over their bows. They were painted white, though much of their cargo areas had been so scraped up by material they transported out to the disguised rigs that bare wood shone through. Service boats like these were ubiquitous at offshore drilling sites all over the world.

Laretta parked alongside one of the crafts. Men bundled against the cold were working on a torpedo-shaped device sitting in a cradle under an A-frame crane mounted to the stern. None looked up from his task as the three men approached. One of them finally glanced at them when their weight made the boat bounce as they stepped aboard. He detached himself from the group and came over.

“Señor Laretta, to what do we owe the pleasure?” The man was covered head to foot, and his voice was muffled by scarves wrapped around his face. He spoke accented English.

“Fong, this is Major Espinoza. He’s the commander of our augmented security force. Major, this is Lee Fong. He heads the technicians sent out to find the Silent Sea.”

The two men shook hands so heavily gloved it was like grabbing a balled-up towel. “Is that a sonar unit?” Espinoza asked.

“Side-scan,” Fong replied. “We’ll tow it behind this boat, and it profiles a hundred-meter swath of the ocean floor.”

“You have a rough idea where the wreck is located, yes?”

“From what I understand, we have you to thank for it.”

Espinoza wasn’t sure if he liked the fact that the Chinese knew of his exploits, but then he realized his father had been bragging about him to their newest allies and he felt pride replace his trepidation. “We got lucky,” he said.

“Let’s hope we stay lucky. Wrecks are a funny thing. I’ve had GPS coordinates, loran numbers, and eyewitnesses, and I’ve still failed to find one. Other times, I’ve found them on the first pass with no information other than the ship had sunk in the general area.”

“Will the cold affect your gear?”

“That’s the other factor. I’ve never searched in waters like this. We won’t know how well the sonar will work until we get it in the water and test it here in the bay. We’re hoping for today, but the light’s going, so it will probably have to be tomorrow.”

“From what I gather of the situation, we have more than a little time,” Espinoza said. “The Americans are still reeling from our announcement, and they’re too afraid of your country’s reprisal if they launch a counterstrike.”

“Fortune favors the bold,” Fong said.

“That’s attributed to Virgil,” Luis Laretta told them. “It’s a Latin expression, Audentes fortuna juvat. There’s another, by Julius Caesar, that’s also apt—Jacta alea est. He said it on his march to Rome when he crossed the Rubicon River.”

Raul Jimenez surprisingly supplied the translation: “The die is cast.”

TWENTY-THREE

With no landmass to break its cycle, winds circled the earth at the lower latitudes in endless loops that built and built. Below the fortieth parallel,

they were called the Roaring Forties. Then came the Furious Fifties and the Screaming Sixties. A constant wind of eighty miles per hour wasn’t unusual, and gusts of a hundred were an everyday event. The effect this had on the sea was ferocious. Waves built to forty and fifty feet, huge rolling masses of water that tossed aside everything in their path. Even the great icebergs that calved off the mainland glaciers were no match for the ocean when the winds came up. Only the superbergs, as large as cities and sometimes small states, were immune.

It was into this hell that Juan Cabrillo drove his ship and crew. Everything that could be tied down had been, and all activity except essential services was suspended. Although the ship had crossed southward only a week earlier, the weather then had been downright tranquil compared to what was hitting them now.

Any other ship would have turned back or faced being torn apart by the waves. But Juan had so overengineered his beloved Oregon that she was in no real danger. Her hull could take the stresses, and there wasn’t a seam topside that the wind could exploit to start peeling back sheet metal. The davits holding her two lifeboats would not fail even in a category five hurricane. Though, right now, she only carried one of them. The other had been set adrift with a ping locator activated so they could recover it later.

But there was a real danger. Not from the ocean but from the prowling Chinese fast-attack submarine. She was somewhere between the tip of South America and the Antarctic Peninsula. This was a choke point much like the GIUK Gap that NATO used to box in Soviet submarines at the height of the Cold War. They had set up pickets of subs, like fishermen, between Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom, and waited for their catch to come to them.