The Silent Sea
NEAR THE PARAGUAY-ARGENTINE BORDER
PRESENT DAY
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 Corazon, 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.
CABRILLO WAITED FOR THE WINCH TO START HAULING him up, but nothing happened. Then he realized that wasn't true, more of the line was coming down the shaft and forming an ever-enlargening loop just below where he hovered in the water. Max had hit the wrong button. Juan tried to hail him over the comm link but received no reply. Hanley had gone off alone to deal with the Argentine threat. And in his haste had trapped Juan in the Treasure Pit.
The prudent thing to do would be to surface according to the dive tables he'd memorized decades ago and wait for Max to return. But Juan wasn't one to let opportunity go to waste, so he inverted himself and swam back for the bottom. There was no sense leaving until he was positive he'd missed nothing.
He examined the niche first, going so far as to press himself into it to see if it activated any kind of device. The chiseled stone around him remained innocuous. He sank lower still. The silt he'd kicked up earlier had settled back to the bottom. He cleared away an area where the wall met the floor. And something caught his attention. He pulled his dive knife from the sheath strapped to his calf and ran it along the seam. The tip vanished into a tiny gap between the floor and wall. He tried again at another spot and found the same thing.
Three more attempts convinced him that the floor of the Treasure Pit was fitted like a plug. There was something deeper in the earth, something buried below this false bottom.
He thought for a moment. There had to be a way to get there. The Ronishes had figured it out. Cabrillo swam a slow circuit of the floor, his dive light shining on the joint. It was in a corner. A stone was wedged tightly between the floor and a small irregularity projecting from the wall.
Juan didn't touch it. Instead, he pulled his knees up to his chest and thrust them down onto the floor. The impact sent pain shooting up from his heels but also made the entire floor of the pit bobble ever so slightly. He glanced back up at the niche.
Clever, he thought. Very, very clever.
He returned to the rock wedge and got himself ready. He had no idea how much time he had, but he assumed he'd have to be quick. Reaching out a hand, he pulled the stone free, then finned for the grotto as fast as he could. Where a second ago all he could hear was the sound of his breathing, the pit was suddenly filled with the scrape of stone against stone.
The bottom of the chamber was an enormous float, kept in place by the wedge. Juan threw himself into the niche just as the silt-covered floor reached it. He pressed himself as far back as possible. The pit's designers hadn't had bulky scuba tanks, so the fit was tight. He watched in awe as the floor rose higher and higher. It climbed past his knees, then waist, and continued upward. It wasn't so buoyant that it raced for the surface, but rather it ascended at a stately pace.
He realized that his fiber-optic cable was trapped between the float and the wall, and said a silent prayer that it wouldn't get cut. No sooner had he thought it than the frayed end drifted down over him, the plastic abraded away. A second later, the loose end of his lifeline drifted past, too.
He had no idea how the float would stop but he figured it must, otherwise the Ronish brothers would have perished down here seventy years ago.
One mystery was solved when he got his first look at the side of the giant float. The top layer was just a thin veneer of slate while the rest of it was metal. When he tapped it, it rang hollow. The metal had withstood centuries of immersion in salt water because the designer had covered it in a layer of fine gold flake. Gold never corrodes, and could protect the metal float for centuries.
Surely you can find the Silent Sea in a day or two. You know she's out there.
We do, but the seafloor drops away just outside the bay to more than five thousand feet. It could take a month or longer, and we still might not find her. My government is not willing to risk our searching for that long.
That was the final nail in the coffin. At dawn the next morning, the Hercules took off again for Argentina, carrying the first wave of men off the peninsula. Unlike Caesar, they had crossed the Rubicon only to be beaten back by what they thought was fate but in truth were Juan Cabrillo and the Corporation.
A DARK PALL HUNG OVER the Oregon as she cruised northwest on her way to South Africa. They would be a couple of days late to provide security for the Kuwaiti Emir's state visit, but a quick renegotiation on their fee had settled the matter.
The ship was like a zombie now. She could function, but she had no soul. Juan's presence was everywhere aboard her, therefore so was his absence. Four days had passed since his death, and the crew were no further along in their grieving than the first instant when they realized he wasn't coming back.
Without Juan to lead it, there was talk of dissolving the Corporation altogether, talk that Max Hanley was doing nothing to quell.
Mark Murphy was seated at his desk in his cabin, playing mindless games of Internet backgammon. It was well past midnight, but the thought of sleep was impossible. More than anyone, he feared for the future. His IQ had kept him socially isolated his entire life, and it wasn't until he'd joined the Corporation that he found a place where he not only fit in but flourished. He didn't want to lose this. He didn't want to return to a world where people thought he was a freak or used him as a walking computer, like when he'd worked in the defense industry.
The people on the Oregon were his family. They embraced his idiosyncrasies, or at least tolerated them, and to Murph that was enough. If they cashed out, he had enough money socked away and would never need to work again, but he knew that the sense of isolation that had plagued him his entire life would come roaring back.
He polished off another player, his eleventh in a row, and was about to start a new game when he saw his e-mail icon blinking. Hoping for a more interesting distraction than another round of 'gammon, he toggled to his e-mail page. Three messages. Their mainframe did a good job of filtering spam for the rest of the crew, but, for whatever reason, Mark allowed a lot through to his computer. Junk messages were better than none.
One was spam. One was a move in a long-running series of chess matches he was playing against a retired Israeli professor. He'd have the man in mate in another four moves, and the old physicist didn't yet see it coming. He dashed off his reply, and glanced at the address for the final message.
He didn't know anybody at Penn State, but the subject line looked intriguing. It read Lonely. Probably some lame college dating service, he thought, but he opened it anyway.
Hi there. Remember me? Until recently, I was the chairman of a major corporation. Now I'm the king of a penguin colony here at the Wilson/George Research Station. My friends had to leave me behind.