He scanned the printed legend. It was written in seven or eight languages. He could identify French, German, Spanish, Russian, characters that looked Chinese, squiggles that might have been Arabic or Farsi–and English, his native tongue. Apparently the same terse message was repeated the length of the plastic ribbon.
While his partner held the ribbon steady, he flashed his light on it and read: “The material on which this warning is written is extremely light-sensitive. Its exposure to visible radiation of the order of one-hundredth of a lumen will trigger a delayed-action fuse. The fuse will ignite charges which will be lethal to anyone within the vicinity. You have precisely ten minutes to get clear.”
He tapped the other diver on the shoulder and signaled an immediate return to the SDC. Less than a minute later they were inside, the leader grabbing the phone from the hand of the startled duty communications man.
“Benny, get the captain!” he shouted.
“Captain’s down below, having dinner,” came the reply from above.
“Well, get him topside, on the double! This anchor down here is wired to blow us all to kingdom come. We’ve got to get clear within ten minutes–make that seven.”
“Well, can’t you disarm them? You’re an old bomb disposal man.”
J.B. felt his heart thumping but tried to keep a grip on himself. “The mine–mines–we can’t see them. Just get that goddamn scow moving. If you don’t, we’re dead– understand?” J.B. looked at his watch. Six minutes.
“Sure, J.B., but you know nobody can order the ship under way but the… Here he comes now.”
“What’s up, J.B.?” said the captain, plainly annoyed.
“Captain, you’ve got to get underway at once.”
“So Benny told me,” the captain replied coldly.
“This anchor down here is rigged to explode in”– J.B. looked at his watch–“two minutes.”
“What makes you think so? Is there a sign down there reading ‘This anchor will explode in three and a half minutes’?” He laughed at his pleasantry. “Now suppose you settle down and tell me what the hell is going on down there. You know we can’t afford…”
J.B. stopped listening. There was a block of ice where his stomach should have been. Eighty seconds.
“J.B.?”
“Yes.” J.B.’s voice was a whisper. No matter what happened now, it was too late.
“You really think I should haul you up?”
J.B. shrugged. What use was a reply now?
“Okay, okay,” said the captain. “But we’ll have to reschedule the operation for tomorrow night, and God knows what–”
A shock wave from far below jolted the ship, knocking him off his feet, rolling the Elmira over on its side, and dislodging the loose gear on deck in a lethal avalanche that crushed half the crew then topside. At that moment, the tackle supporting the starboard lifeboat gave way, and the boat lurched from its davits and crashed down upon the captain, killing him instantly.
The Elmira rolled crazily in the water, burying first the port rail beneath the waves and then the starboard. But slowly the oscillations subsided, and the ship steadied. As the battered crew struggled to their feet, in the engine room oil from a ruptured fuel tank trickled toward a boiler.
* * *
Far to the south, the pilot of a commercial aircraft en route from Johannesburg to Freetown, Liberia, made a wry face.
“Meteorologists!” he remarked to the copilot.
“Huh?” said the other, looking up from his comic book.
“Didn’t you see that flash of lightning?”
“Nope.”
“And the idiots said it wasn’t going to rain.”
27. KING NEPTUNE
21 FEBRUARY 2008
“NICE TRY, RED,” SAID RIPLEY FORTE TO JENNIFER RED Cloud as he held the chair for her in the number one wardroom aboard the Sun King.
“Thank you very much,” she replied as she took her seat and sipped her cold fresh orange juice. She scanned the breakfast menu.
“I’m not very hungry this morning,” she told the white-jacketed steward waiting to take her order. “I think I’ll just have half a pink grapefruit, two duck eggs over light, four rashers of bacon, crisp and well blotted, a stack of thin cakes with honey, whole-wheat toast, and a pot of your Ethiopian coffee. Oh, and home fries on the side, of course.”
“Yes, ma’am. And yours, sir?”
“The same will do for me,” said Forte. “I’m not hungry, either.”
Mrs. Red Cloud was reading the headlines of the faxed international news section of The New York Times that had come in during the night. There was nothing new this morning: race riots in Kansas City; famine in central Africa; the announcement of the Nobel peace prize to Ecuador’s Minister of Justice Enrico Perez-Padilla, a former urban guerrilla; floods in China; drought in Mexico; and the prospect of new missile meltdown talks between Russia and the United States. She put the paper aside and took another sip of juice.
“And just what is the occasion for your backhanded congratulations?” she enquired.
“The Elmira.”
She looked at him blankly. “What is supposed to be my response to this incomprehensible utterance? Is it the opening sally in some new kind of word game?”
“The Elmira and the Blakely, names of the ships you sent to sabotage my anchors.”
“How could you possibly know that?” Jennifer Red Cloud said.
Forte declined to rise to the bait. She was guilty, all right, guilty as hell. And if she tried once, she would certainly have no compunction about trying again if she saw a better chance of success. Forte had no intention of giving her that chance. If she learned that an integrated defense system surrounded every anchor installation and sent telemetry via satellite back to SD-1 in Houston, she and her stooges might find some way to get around it, although for the life of him he couldn’t imagine how.
“How did we know there had been intruders? Well, because when the Sun King linked up with AN-146, while passing over AN-145, its demersal-water intakes pulled up some debris that clogged the filters.”
“Debris? What kind of debris?”
“Parts of two frogmen, still in wet suits.”
“How charming.”
Although her appetite had fled, she carved the stack of pancakes into bite-sized bits, wishing it were Ripley Forte’s heart. Her hand grew moist. Her concern had always been with the big picture, and unlike Forte’s, her staff had never bothered her with the gory details.
After breakfast, Mrs. Red Cloud had been promised the usual traditional ceremony to celebrate her first crossing of the line on a surface craft. She was still a pollywog; at a few minutes past ten o’clock, when the Alamo passed from the southern hemisphere to the northern, she would become a shellback.
“What should I wear?” she asked Forte after breakfast.
“As little as possible, I should imagine–which won’t cause you any distress.”
Captain Eric Wills, skipper of the Alamo and senior man afloat, would act as King Neptune and dictate the tenor and tempo of the ceremony. A bewhiskered old salt, he had often been observed giving the eye that was glad to Mrs. Red Cloud. According to venerable naval custom, King Neptune and his court would try the two score initiates aboard the Sun King and Alamo and find them all guilty of being–horror of horrors!–pollywogs. Appropriate punishments would follow.
When he crossed the equator near Brazil in 1832, Charles Darwin had observed that among the initiation rites one “most disagreeable operation consists in having your face rubbed with paint and tar, which forms a lather for a saw which represents the razor, and then being half drowned in a sail filled with seawater.” Wills and his merry company of shellbacks, even though dressed in bizarre costumes and disguises, probably wouldn’t chance anything hazardous or off-color with Mrs. Red Cloud, but you never could tell with an imaginative old man like Captain Eric Wills.
Jennifer Red Cloud appeared at nine-thirty on the main deck of the Sun King in a demure–for her–outfit of virginal white shorts and a matching halter and not-so-virginal white pumps with three-inch spike heels. Forte, himself an old shellback, was rigged out as a seventeenth-century pirate, in floppy boots, ragged pants, black handlebar mustaches, a cutlass and brace of wheellock pistols tucked in a broad red sash, rakish black hat with a peacock feather and the brim turned up, and black eye patch. Mrs. Red Cloud observed that the costume could not be more appropriate to their respective characters, that is, beauty and the beast.
It was a brilliant summer day, and already Forte was sweating as he led her down the passageway between the raised solar panels to the docking station of the aerial tramway.
The tramcar was rigged on number two tow line between the Sun King and the Alamo. They took their seats aboard
with twenty-odd other participants in King Neptune’s coming trial and were swiftly borne up and away. The drive wheels of the power train sang against the big braided nylon cable as they propelled the vehicle at a shallow angle up toward the Alamo a kilometer astern. On both sides of the iceberg the seas ran high and choppy as the Benguela Current collided with the eastward-flowing Guinea Current, moving counterclockwise around the western bulge of Africa. Below them, though, the ocean was as smooth and level as a Texas prairie, ironed flat by the passage of the Sun King.