Defense Forces. The transfer is to be effected no later than 22 June 2008, the estimated time of arrival of the Alamo in Matagorda Bay. Delivery instructions follow. You will receive compensation for force majeure repossession as stipulated in your contract with Raynes Oceanic Resources. You are also authorized to purchase the next-but-one Brown-Ash (Mark X), scheduled for delivery in mid-November. I regret any inconvenience this may cause you and Iceberg International, Inc., and thank you in advance for your cooperation.
/s/ N. Danilchik, General, USAF Deputy Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff
Forte smiled and then reread the message from the Texas Medical Center.
The instructions were simple. Two tablets of any of the listed antihistamines. He went to the head and opened the medicine cabinet. Among the drugs he found a bottle containing Pertussamine. It was on his list. He took three tablets.
His next stop was the sick bay. Frank Gilbey was alone in a two-bed room. Forte walked in and closed the door behind him.
“How’ya doing, Frank?” said Forte to the man propped up in bed, reading a science-fiction novel.
“Hey, Mr. Forte,” said Gilbey cheerfully. “What brings you down this way?”
“Heard there were complaints about the food. Wanted to see for myself.”
“Hell, whoever complained about the chow must really be sick. It sure wasn’t me.”
“What’s yours?” asked Forte.
“Bum kidneys. Doctor says I gotta go back to the States for tests. Leave this afternoon on the courier plane.”
“Sorry to hear that, Frank. Painful?”
“The only pain is in the ass–every six hours I’ve got to piss in a bottle.” He pointed to a full specimen jar on the bedside table.
“I’m going toward the lab,” said Forte. “I’ll drop it off.”
Ten minutes later Forte was sitting in the office of the young ship’s doctor, Dr. David Nasrallah.
“I’ve been having these pains, Doc,” he said. “Nothing much, but today I noticed that my piss wasn’t the usual color, and I thought maybe I’d better check.”
“Pains? What kind of pains?”
“Well, I feel like a couple of cops with nightsticks have been encouraging me to confess with a kidney massage. But I probably just pulled a muscle.”
“What about micturation? Does it hurt?”
“Yes, now that you mention it, it does. Doesn’t exactly hurt. More like burns.”
“I see. Let’s have a look at your blood pressure, Mr. Forte.”
Forte submitted.
Dr. Nasrallah took it twice.
“What’s it read?” asked Forte.
“It just might set an altitude record,” said Nasrallah gravely. “One hundred and eighty-five over one-fifteen. I’d like you to leave a urine specimen, Mr. Forte, and I’ll get back to you this afternoon.”
“Anything you say.”
Two hours later, as Forte was working in his cabin, there came a knock on the door.
“It’s open,” he called.
Young Dr. Nasrallah walked in, his expression grim.
“Have a chair, Doc,” said Forte, swinging around to face him. He noted the look on Dr. Nasrallah’s face. “Anything wrong?”
“A lot. There must be an epidemic going on here.”
“Epidemic? Of what?”
Dr. Nasrallah forced a smile. “Bad joke. What I meant was, you’re the second in two days.”
“Get to the point, Doctor.”
“Of course. I’m sorry, Mr. Forte, but the results of your urine examination are very disquieting–blood, red cell casts, high albumin, fat bodies–not good at all.”
“That doesn’t mean anything to me,” said Forte shortly. “Say something I can understand.”
“I’m afraid you’re a sick man, Mr. Forte, a very sick man, indeed.”
“Don’t be silly. I feel great except for those little things I mentioned this afternoon.”
“Allow me to disagree. You’re a sick man, and you need immediate attention at a major hospital.”
“I don’t suppose you could maybe confide in me what the hell you think I’ve got?”
“That’s the trouble, Mr. Forte. I don’t know. It could be systemic lupus erythematosus. It could be acute glomerulonephritis. It could be a number of things.”
Ripley Forte leaned back in his chair and regarded Dr. Nasrallah uneasily.
“Are they as bad as they sound?”
“Worse.”
36. CIGARETTE BOAT
21 JUNE 2008
THE PLANE THAT DELIVERED HIM TO HOUSTON TOOK OFF from the Sun King in midafternoon of the eighth. At 5:30 P.M. he checked into TMC’s kidney clinic. He was assigned a private suite outside of which two muscular ex-paratroopers disguised as orderlies were stationed to exclude unwanted visitors. During the evening a troop of consultants, residents, and interns stopped by his room on grand rounds. When they left five minutes later Forte was among them, attired in a long white coat, with a stethoscope stuffed in his side pocket.
An hour later he was in Corpus Christi, where he proceeded to a waterfront warehouse upon which the men and materials he had asked Joe Mansour to send were already converging. By noon the next day, all six fourman teams and their special equipment were aboard a U.S. Navy hydrofoil speeding south to rendezvous with the support ship Stephen F. Austin thirty miles to the southwest of the Sun King and Alamo over the continental slope off Yucatan.
The next fourteen days were a nightmare of back-breaking labor and frustration.
The search had begun six miles ahead of the Sun King, on the evening of June 8. With the Stephen F. Austin serving as mother ship, all the Raynes Rover undersea craft his fleet could muster had been assigned to the task of combing and sifting the seabed inch by laborious inch before the Sun King and the Alamo hove into view. Forte had no illusions that if the submerged bomb were detonated by remote control, the Alamo might somehow be saved. Even at a distance of a hundred miles or more, the enormous iceberg would be upended and smashed into a million pieces by the tsunami produced by the underwater blast of even a small atom bomb. But Forte was hoping that the Russians would want to exact a storybook revenge. Their own flagship Karl Marx had been destroyed by such an atomic blast; they would, Forte hoped, rig their nuclear device to detonate just as the Alamo passed above it. That would be in character, but more important, Forte would have time to find it so long as he managed to stay ahead of the advancing iceberg.
That the bomb was there and that they would find it he never doubted for a moment. And if it were there, the odds, indeed, were against their missing it. The Raynes Rovers swept a swath of seabed fifty meters broad. Magnetometer arrays towed by each submersible detected metal masses as small as tin cans. The strength of the signal, its bearing, and other data were relayed by telemetry to the Stephen F. Austin, where computer analysis filtered out sightings of metal spars, oarlocks, oil drums, and other such jetsam. Everything else had to be investigated.
That was done by a pair of Rovers equipped with nuclear magnetic resonance gear developed by the Brookhaven National Laboratory for Nuclear Research to be used if and when the SALT-IV treaty ever became a reality.
Unfortunately, only one set of NMR gear for use at sea was available, and a multitude of big metallic objects littered the sea floor. Thus Forte and his men were able to gain less than fifteen nautical miles on the iceberg and its escorts before the Rovers entered the Matagorda Trench itself.
The Trench was simple, and they made short work of it. It was only fifty-five miles long and a mile and a half wide. Most important, it was newly excavated, and only two vessels, a motor schooner and a small coastal craft, had sunk there. Both were innocent of any traces of plutonium. Forte’s teams worked on, through Pass Cavallo and into Matagorda Bay, past the line of enormous two-hundred-meter-long floating caissons, right up to the end of the anchorage.
No A-bomb.
During Forte’s futile search, the great white berg had been forging northward along the continental slope toward Texas, on schedule. It had entered the Trench, and in thirty hours it was due to enter Pass Cavallo. The Alamo, having slowed to half a knot, would then be drifting under its own momentum. Twenty-four hours later it would be nudged into its berth. The immense floating caissons were then to be winched into place behind it, and their buoyancy chambers flooded. By then the Sun King would be moored in its special dockyard in Palacios inlet. There, as each pie section was detached, it would be towed back separately to Simonstown Bay, there to await reassembly and another journey north.
On the marshy banks that two years before had been the refuge of heron and water moccasin, muskrat and mosquito, the boisterous, brawny town of Gwillam, Texas, had taken shape. Despite its seven thousand inhabitants, schools, churches, and paved roads, Gwillam was still raw and unfinished. Construction crews worked round the clock to build housing for the technicians who were still pouring in. These specialists would monitor the melting down of the berg, and man the huge pumps to send the pure cold waters coursing toward the parched plains to the north, and install the fifty-meter-high ocean thermal energy conversion units that now stood like great iron sentinels in a line on the edge of the basin, waiting to generate electricity to power the oil-starved industries of the Republic of Texas.