The Silent Sea (Oregon Files 7)

“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.

THREE

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.