Daniel Da Cruz – Texas 2 – Texas on the Rocks
PART I
WATER
1. SCENARIO
11 SEPTEMBER 2004
AT TEN O’CLOCK ON SUNDAY NIGHT, SEPTEMBER 11, 2004, David D. Castle stood in the center of the big parking lot of a darkened, abandoned warehouse in Bailey’s Crossroads, Virginia, seven miles from the nation’s capital. It was bitter cold, and a sharp wind swirled about his bare head. Around his neck was wrapped a wool scarf, and beneath his suit jacket he wore a heavy sweater, but they did little to ward off the chill. What warmth there was came from the heat of the curses he heaped upon the head of William S. Grayle, but it wasn’t enough to still his shivering limbs and chattering teeth.
At ten minutes past ten it began to drizzle, and Castle’s curses multiplied. He briefly considered returning to the car for his umbrella but thought better of it.
As the drizzle turned to rain, Castle turned to philosophy. At least, he comforted himself, on a night like this he had nothing to fear from muggers. And that was no small consolation considering that the briefcase he was carrying contained more money than many men made in their entire lives.
He was examining his watch yet again when, at ten twenty-two, a long black limousine slid up out of the darkness and stopped in front of the sagging gate of the warehouse. Its headlights went dark, and a spotlight flashed on. Its beam made a leisurely circuit of the empty grounds and came to rest on David D. Castle, who stood unflinchingly squinting into the beam until finally it winked out.
The headlights flashed twice. David D. Castle splashed through the puddles toward the car with smoked-glass windows parked fifty yards away. The rear door opened at his approach. A dim floor bulb revealed a little leather jump seat facing the rear. He stepped inside and took the seat, closing the door behind him.
As his eyes tried to penetrate the darkness, he heard the old man speak from the opposite side of the car.
“You brought the money?”
“Right here,” replied Castle, patting the briefcase.
“Pass it to my driver.”
Castle felt a slight current of air as the black glass slid down behind him. He passed the briefcase through.
“Count it,” Grayle instructed his chauffeur.
Castle bristled. “I beg your pardon, sir. I am a member of Congress.”
“I had forgotten. Count it twice, Brandon.”
Castle sat in aggrieved silence, his occasional sniffles muffled by the riffle of bank notes and the steady drumbeat of rain on the roof.
“Two hundred and fifty thousand, sir,” said the chauffeur.
“Drive on,” Grayle instructed.
The communicating window whooshed shut, and the limousine moved off into the night. The two men sat in total darkness, the opaque windows admitting not the dimmest ray of light. It was all of a piece with Grayle’s reputation for reclusive-ness. Although he had been whispering uncannily prescient advice into the ears of the mighty for more than forty years, very little was known of the man beyond a name and a number–no address– in the telephone directory.
The tinkle of ice in a glass, the splash of liquids, and a glass was pressed into his hand. Castle, who had begun to shiver in his wet clothes, didn’t care what it was so long as it was strong. He sipped it, then drank greedily.
A Bloody Mary, with Russian vodka, fresh lemon, and Tabasco, by God! In public, to preserve his image as a champion of local industry, Castle drank California wine. But in the privacy of his own study, a Bloody Mary was his evening solace, with Tabasco instead of Worcestershire. Somehow William S. Grayle knew. But then, why not? He was said to know everything worth knowing in Washington, D.C. It was for Grayle’s knowledge that Castle had just paid the old man $250,000, and it was going to make him, Congressman David D. Castle, President of the United States of America.
As the dean of “public affairs consultants” in the nation’s capital, William S. Grayle was believed to have retired more than a decade earlier, having molded national politics and the careers of some of the nation’s leading power brokers as well as serving as special adviser to six consecutive presidents. According to gossip around the Hill, in recent years he had undertaken only the occasional “mission impossible,” simply to add flavor to his declining years and to prove to himself that he had not lost his exquisite political touch.
Such a visionary project had been proposed to him by David D. Castle, congressman from California.
Castle had only one question: Did Mr. William S. Grayle think he could bring it off?
What a silly question, thought William S. Grayle. He acknowledged himself, without false modesty, the shrewdest political mind in the nation’s capital, but still not quite God-on-High. Who the hell did this junior congressman, ordinarily good-looking but totally lacking in charisma, well-to-do but not excessively rich, with a sound but undistinguished record during five terms in Congress, think he was, anyway?
Yet the more he pondered the sheer magnitude of the challenge, the more irresistible it became. It could be a coup to make the history books.
2. GROWLER
23 OCTOBER 2004
HE’D SHOW THE OLD MAN.
Ripley Forte shoved the eight throttles forward until the indicator needle bit into the red. The eight powerful propfan engines answered with a banshee roar that surged out across the choppy waters of the Labrador Strait and then bounced back from the craggy blue-green sides of the million-ton iceberg.
Silent and sinister, its base-shrouded in fog, the berg loomed above Forte and his jet sled like a Matterhorn suspended in space.
The sled responded to the engines’ thrust. It shot forward, the eight fourteen-foot, ten-bladed propfans clawing at the frigid morning air. Behind the sled a braided nylon cable, eleven inches in diameter, surfaced from beneath the frothing wake as the sled pulled away from the huge pinnacle iceberg. The cable drew taut, and suddenly the seasled, as big and unlovely as a Mississippi coal barge, lay dead in the water, shackled by the enormous mountain of ice.
His weathered face framed by bulbous orange ear defenders that only partially blocked out the din of the jet engines, Ripley Forte squinted through the icy spray at the inertial-navigation dial on the control panel. The readout was accurate to the hundredth of a second of arc: a little over ten inches of movement by the seasled would be discernible. But the dial didn’t move.
The tension began to tighten around his sinewy neck like a strangler’s hands. A wave of nausea rose from his empty stomach. He swallowed hard and choked it back.
“Move, damn you,” he growled, and beat his fist against the dial with its frozen needle.
Suddenly he laughed.
Well, of course the damn berg hadn’t moved. The 6,500-horsepower engines fighting the iceberg were analogous to the schoolgirl and the Queen Mary in that old physics puzzler: If she pushed long enough, would the ocean liner ease away from the pier? Of course, because the force exerted by the girl, having nowhere else to go, would be translated into motion. The same principle applied here: Those 52,000 horses straining to shift that mountain of ice were damned well going to move it.
But it was going to take time.
Meanwhile, in the barge’s flying bridge amidships, high above the slipstream of the jet engines, Ripley Forte willed himself to remain calm. At the moment, the crew needed no orders. The cable tender had deployed the buoy-supported nylon towing line around the iceberg and sheered off. The line was secured to the two barrel-sized bitts on the seasled’s fantail.
The shotman had fixed his explosive charge to the nylon towing line fifty meters abaft the barge’s stern. From his cupola the shotman watched the berg and the seabirds resting there. Gulls and petrels instinctively took wing seconds before a berg capsized. This is a common fate of icebergs, for beneath the warmer sea waters cut into the submerged ice like a woodsman’s axe. This ablation could cause the unbalanced berg to tumble forward, smashing down on the sled, and sending its crew to the bottom. If it did begin to capsize, the shotman would blow the explosive and sever the line, allowing the seasled to rocket out of harm’s way.
The thick line from barge to berg, the nexus between an almost irresistible force and an almost immovable body, quivered faintly as the two forces contended. Should it part under the strain, the severed end would snap back like a gigantic rubber band, slicing through the bridge’s steel superstructure. Forte turned back to the inertial navigation dial.
By God! They had moved. Only 130 centimeters, but they had moved!
He punched in numbers on his control console: elapsed time at full power, distance made good, relative watercurrent speed, wind speed, estimated iceberg mass, engine thrust. He plotted the distances which would be made good at five-minute intervals. The line on the screen started flat and then rose sharply, leveling off at 1,050 meters per hour. He laughed and smote his thigh in exultation.