As the replacement gauge was attached, its needle came alive, jerking once, then slowly sliding over to the right.
It came to rest at three hundred thousand barrels.
Stimson felt his skin crawl. Three hundred thousand barrels was roughly what each cell contained before the reservoir was bled into the tanker. But it was impossible for the offloading procedure to overlook one cell, since the design of the system mandated that oil was siphoned from all three cells in concert.
This prevented the possibility of an unbalanced load in the GBS that might cause the platform to list or even pivot, despite its massive weight. For a single cell to retain its oil, someone had to go down in the riser shaft and physically isolate it from the OLS — no small task in itself — then cover his actions from the rest of the bleed crew by disabling both the gauge and its backup system.
Under regular crew conditions such an act would be impossible, but the past few days had been anything but regular.
Stimson didn’t have to speculate any further. That someone had to be Charon.
There were now ten minutes until the detonation.
Stimson caught up to Charon in B-82’s dive room. Charon had just climbed out of a JIM suit and was still soaked in sweat. As Stimson entered, Charon was helping one of the remaining four crew to repair the damaged breathing apparatus and regulator of the second suit. The task seemed incredulous to Stimson; surely there were more important duties to be performed at the moment.
Or maybe Charon was planning some kind of escape.
“I just came from the reservoir control room,” Stimson said, his heart pounding. “What’s going on, Matt? You told me the GBS was dry and sealed before you went down.”
Seeing the look in his commander’s eyes, Stimson knew immediately that he should have reported the problem with the reservoir to Krail or Garner — anyone — before challenging Charon directly. Stimson’s trust in his commander had always been absolute. A part of him wanted to believe that it was just an oversight. That they could delay the detonation, call back the Voyager, and drain the overlooked oil. Or perhaps Charon felt the rig was in no danger at all, so an imbalance in the GBS was thought to be within acceptable risk. Stimson wanted to believe these things as he searched for an explanation, but Charon’s suddenly murderous expression stopped such speculation cold.
Stimson glanced at the second man, a junior-grade lieutenant.
“We’ve still got oil in the GBS cell three still has a quarter million barrels in it.”
“Oh, Christ.” The lieutenant’s face paled.
“Who dropped the ball on that?” The news was clearly a surprise to the man, and for a moment Stimson was relieved to know that any two-against-one confrontation was in his favor.
Stimson returned his eyes to Charon and kept them there.
“Do you have your sidearm, Lieutenant? I need you to help me place Commander Charon under arrest.”
He squared himself in the hatchway, the only exit from the room except for the JIM deployment portal in the deck.
The lieutenant looked down, where a small gear bag evidently contained his pistol. A radio also jutted from the bag and Stimson silently wished he could somehow will it into his hand.
Then the standoff was broken. Even Stimson could not believe the speed with which Charon moved. One moment he was standing there, fifteen feet from Stimson and half as many from the lieutenant, the next he was a whirlwind. Charon grabbed the ungainly JIM helmet on its support chain and pushed it into the lieutenant, driving him against the rear wall. Then Charon was down, rolling, grabbing the gear bag as he careened across the deck. Almost before Stimson registered movement, Charon drew the pistol and fired, hitting the lieutenant in the face before he could recover from the swinging helmet. Then Stimson felt a wrenching pain in his leg as Charon’s heavy boot lashed out, snapping the knee joint.
Stimson fell to the deck with a yelp, banging his head heavily on the steel plating. Eyes closed, he could feel Charon’s legs crushing down on his throat and chest. Then he felt the barrel of the gun, still hot from firing the first round, pressed against his temple.
He opened his eyes, pain flooding up from his lower body. Across the room, the lieutenant lay dead, the heavy JIM helmet still swayed awkwardly on its hoist. The radio lay on the deck several feet away, taunting him.
Still pinned to the deck, Stimson moved his eyes to meet Charon’s.
“Why, Matt?” Stimson whispered. “Why?”
“Trust me, you wouldn’t understand,” Charon said. Then he pulled the trigger.
“Five minutes at my mark,” Charon’s dispassionate voice came to the Hawkbill and the Rushmore exactly on time.
“Mark.”
“Five minutes,” Krail relayed to the scientists.
“Not a moment too soon,” the Hawkbill’s officer of the boat remarked. “The bad weather’s almost on top of us — gusts to fifty knots and cold as a witch’s tit.”
Krail could easily decipher the severity of the growing storm on the basis of the weather data scrolling through the Hawkbill’s computers.
Below the surface, however, the atmosphere was as silent and motionless as it was in any weather. They might as easily have been sitting in drydock in San Diego.
“Don’t worry about it,” Krail said. “Thanks to Macho Man Matt, we’re exactly on schedule. It’ll all be over before you know it.”
Throughout his military career, Scott Krail had cherished these moments — the moments after the forces have been assembled and before the tactical strike, when infinite unlikely possibilities gelled into a unified force, poised to vanquish the enemy. It was a moment of adrenaline and pride, before anything happened, for better or worse, to shatter the silence.
Krail loved this sensation, which he never thought he’d feel again from behind his desk in Arlington. Now, with less than five minutes before the strike was activated, he realized one more thing: he hated that desk.
As the storm arrived over the Gulf of Boothia, a growing fog blanketed the Rushmore’s superstructure while curtains of sleet coated the windows with a thin veneer of ice. Inside, the ship was warm and comfortable. Garner watched as each arm of the detonation array was lit up and confirmed, hovering around the demolition array’s status console like an expectant father. He was constantly in and out of the ship’s radio room, either listening to the communication between the various dive teams or relaying his own instructions to the Phoenix.
According to Carol, the water bombers were enroute and the Sovietsky Soyuz and Des Groseilliers were ready to deploy the containment booms. Zubov and Byrnes were out in the hovercraft, directing the captains of the Phoenix, North Sea, and Vagabond as the side-by-side chain of linked vessels scooped mountains of ice into the wrangling nets with a cautious eye toward the storm that would soon pass over their location.
Garner tried to envision the entirety of the massive operation. By day’s end, the leak would be stopped and the ice collecting could begin in earnest. With a little more luck, David Macadam and his Plasroc would arrive in time to continue the containment without any delays in the process that might free the slick from their tenuous grasp. Garner mentally checked and rechecked each of these arrangements, then he tried to speculate on the most likely problems to disrupt the plan.
Electronics failure was as good as any place to start and there were a lot of lights on the status board. What the SEALS seemed to consider routine was unquestionably the largest concentration of raw explosive C-4 Garner had ever seen. Both Krail and Charon had shrugged off the potential for an uncontrolled nuclear reaction as the canisters along the canyon were detonated. Their assurances, however, were based less on safety concerns than on a reluctance to adjust the plan that had already been set in motion. Garner thought again of Krail’s enthusiasm for detonating the entire site at once and hoped, were these men to err, that it would be on the side of moderation. However the detonation proceeded, Charon’s efforts had been exceptional, and with each passing hour Garner believed the man deserving of some new medal or distinction. He was hard to deal with, cantankerous to the point of being dysfunctional, but they all knew the success of the demolition operation fell directly on his broad shoulders. So far, he had responded to perfection.