CHAPTER 2
Professor McCarter lay unmoving on the black volcanic slope. His eyes were open and fixed, staring forward at the oddly tilted landscape. He’d tumbled down the slope of the wooded island, slamming the base of his spine against the tree. The backpack had flown out of his hand, disappearing farther down into the mist. McCarter himself had come to rest looking up the hill, watching as both Danielle and the statue were hauled away.
He lay motionless but not by choice. His body was numb and cold. He couldn’t feel his feet or legs or anything below his waist. He could barely feel the tips of his fingers. He could barely breathe. He couldn’t have called out for help, even if he’d wanted to.
Alone now, fear had begun to grip him. McCarter guessed that he was paralyzed, and to the men up the steep slope from him it must have looked as if he were dead.
He’d been hit in the leg. And though the flow had slowed quite a bit, McCarter had never seen so much blood.
And now he could feel nothing, even as blood followed the course of gravity and seeped from his elevated leg up his torso and soaked his shirt. It was a strange thing to him: The mind worked, the mind attempted to make the limbs work, and when nothing happened the mind made its conclusions and rendered its report.
For several minutes he lay like that, wondering if his fate or Danielle’s was worse. But instead of his breathing growing weaker and coming to an end, he began to feel a dull sensation in his legs. It wasn’t pain, but an uncomfortable buzzing, like pins and needles.
It grew in shapeless waves and he soon found that he needed to attempt moving, just to fight against it. He rolled to his left and a tactile sense began returning to his hands.
With great effort he managed to untangle himself from the tree. The fact that he was not paralyzed was a great relief; the fact that he was in considerable and growing pain was the opposite. Stiff and weak, he crawled a few feet and then collapsed. He lay there for another minute, face pressed into the soil of the sloping ground, before finally raising his head.
Looking up the hill, he thought he saw a shape standing above him, the outline of a person, a woman.
He blinked to try and focus and the shadow was gone.
He tried to put the image down to his injured state, but it seemed real to him. Real enough that he attempted to scale the hill.
Crawling, he struggled upward, making progress for a few yards. But the slope was too steep for his weakened body, the footing too loose. It crumbled under his hands and he began to slide, first to his original position and then farther down into the mist. A tumbling, unstoppable descent brought him down to the flatland at the water’s edge, right beside the backpack he’d lost half an hour before.
He looked at the pack tentatively and then pulled it to him, zipping the compartments shut and trying to thread an arm through its straps. Before he could succeed, the sound of movement in the water reached him.
It was Oco wading toward him.
“They took the statue,” Oco said. “In the helicopter. I saw them.”
“I know,” McCarter said. “We need to get help.”
With Oco’s assistance, he wrapped and dressed his wound and then pulled a satellite phone from its watertight container in his pack. He powered it up, giving thanks for the green light that told him the signal was getting through.
In his clouded mind, McCarter tried to remember what he was supposed to say, the acronyms Danielle had briefed him with over and over again. Terms and contingencies he didn’t want to think about, the worst of which had now come true.
He pressed the initiate button and waited for the satellite to link up. An answering voice came on the line, a staff member in a secured communications room in Washington, D.C.
McCarter needed someone of higher authority.
“This is Professor Michael McCarter,” he said. “Attached to Project Icarus. My code is seven, seven, four, tango, foxtrot. We’ve been attacked. Our status is Mercury. Now get me Arnold Moore.”
CHAPTER 3
Twenty-four hours and five thousand miles from where Professor McCarter had called, Arnold Moore, director of the NRI, waited. For the second time this day, he had bad news to deliver.
The first time had been to a former operative of his named Marcus Watson, who had left the NRI years prior. He now taught at Georgetown and was rumored to be engaged to Ms. Danielle Laidlaw.
Despite all the tact and promises Moore could offer, the meeting had ended in rage. “You had no right to ask her back,” Watson had insisted. “I told you that a year ago. God damn you, Arnold. You find her.”
Marcus had been dead set against Danielle going back to the NRI, and Moore had pushed every button he could think of to convince her to do so. The NRI was where she belonged, but that was not to be explained at a time such as this.
“You know I’ll do everything I can to find her,” he’d promised.
“And what if it’s not enough?” Marcus had said.
Moore had no answer for that. It was a contingency he did not want to consider. His old friend had stormed off, slamming the door on his way out with such force that it shook the building.
Now, hours later, sitting in the Oval Office, smoothing his unruly gray hair, Moore waited on another old friend: the president of the United States.
Sitting behind the impressively large desk, the president ignored Moore for the moment, signing a series of papers one after the other.
Slightly older than Moore, with dark hair that the newspapers were desperate to prove was dyed, President Franklin Henderson had been Moore’s superior once before, twenty years earlier, when both of them worked at the State Department. They’d remained friends, if distant ones, ever since. Moore kept Henderson’s trust and respect, partially because he made it a rule never to ask his friend for anything—at least, that was, until now.
The president stacked the papers neatly for an aide to retrieve and then looked Moore in the eye.
“Can’t say I’m happy to see you,” the president began. “Every time you come up here you tell us things we don’t want to know. Why don’t you just stay over in Virginia, or better yet retire?”
“Mr. President, this is my retirement,” Moore said. “This is the reward, or perhaps the punishment, for thirty years of government service.”
“Well, from what I remember you’re not much of a golfer anyway.” The smile appeared as he finished, the same easy, confident smile that had touched so many voters during the election. The one that said, It’s going to be all right.
Unfortunately, Moore knew better. “Mr. President, the NRI has a problem. Two, actually—maybe more. By my count they seem to be multiplying.”
The president looked around. “There’s a reason we’re the only ones here, Arnold. I was told you couldn’t give me any kind of prebriefing. I figured it was serious. What are we talking about?”
Moore pulled two sheets of paper from his briefcase. He placed them on the president’s desk. The first was a satellite photo depicting a fleet of Russian ships, steaming headlong through the Pacific toward Alaska. The second had multiple photos inset with text, showing similar movements from the Chinese navy and even a few merchant ships.
“I’ve seen these already,” the president said. “Talked them over with John Gillis this morning.” Gillis was the navy’s chief of staff. “It’s not like the Russians are going to invade Alaska with a couple of cruisers, a dozen destroyers, and a few reconnaissance aircraft. Nor are the Chinese.”
“I realize that,” Moore said. “It’s obviously not an invasion force. If you look carefully you’ll see that both groups are made up of fast ships only, and both began to fan out as they approached this point, here.” He touched the map indicating a spot in the Bering Sea, near the International Date Line.