He tossed the wig onto his desk and snatched up the handset of a repro Bakelite phone.
Lang, Juan here. How are you doing?
Apoplectic.
Your normal frame of mind. What's up?
First of, tell me where you are.
Santos, Brazil. That's S+uo Paulo's port city, in case you didn't know.
Thank God, you're close, Overholt said with a relieved sigh. And just so you know, I helped the Israelis snatch a Nazi war criminal from Santos back in the sixties.
Touch+!. Now, what's going on? By the tone of Overholt's voice, Juan knew he had something big for them, and he could feel the first feathery traces of adrenaline in his veins.
Six hours ago, a satellite was launched from Vandenberg atop a Delta III rocket for a low-earth polar orbit.
That one sentence alone was enough for Cabrillo to deduce that the rocket had failed someplace over South America, since polar shots fly south from the California Air Force base, that it was carrying sensitive spy gear which might not have burned up, and that it most likely had crashed in Argentina since Lang was calling the best covert operatives he knew.
The techs don't know yet what went wrong, Overholt continued. And that really isn't our problem anyway.
Our problem, Juan said, is that it crashed in Argentina.
You said it. About a hundred miles south of Paraguay in some of the thickest jungle of the Amazon basin. And there's a good chance the Argentines know because we warned every country on the flight path that the rocket was overflying their territory.
I thought we no longer have diplomatic relations with them since the coup.
We still have ways of passing on something like this.
I know what you're about to ask, but be reasonable. The debris is going to be spread over a couple thousand square miles in bush that our spy satellites can't penetrate. Do you honestly expect us to find your needle in that haystack?
I do, because here's the kicker. The particular part of the needle we're looking for is a mild gamma ray emitter.
Juan let that sink in for a second, and finally said, Plutonium.
Only reliable power source we had for this particular bird. The NASA eggheads tried every conceivable alternative, but it came back to using a tiny amount of plutonium and using the heat off its decay to run the satellite's systems. On the bright side, they so overengineered the containment vessel that it is virtually indestructible. It wouldn't even notice a rocket blowing up around it.
As you can well imagine, the administration doesn't want it known that we sent aloft a satellite that could have potentially spread radiation across a good-sized swath of the most pristine environment on the planet. The other concern is that the plutonium not fall into the Argentines' hands. We suspect they have restarted their nuclear weapons program. The satellite didn't carry much of the stuff a few grams worth, or so I'm told but there's no sense in giving them a head start on their march for the Bomb.
So the Argies don't know about the plutonium? Juan asked, using the colloquialism for Argentines he'd picked up from a Falklands War vet.
Thank goodness, no. But anyone with the right equipment will pick up trace radioactivity. And before you ask, he said, anticipating the next question, levels aren't dangerous provided you follow some simple safety protocols.
That wasn't going to be Cabrillo's next question. He knew plutonium wasn't dangerous unless ingested or inhaled. Then it became one of the deadliest toxins known to man.
I was going to ask if we have any kind of backup.
Nada. There's a team on its way to Paraguay with the latest generation of gamma ray detectors, but that's about all you can count on. It took the DCI and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to convince the President to let us help you that much. I'm sure you realize he has a certain, ah, reluctance, when it comes to dealing with sensitive international situations. He still hasn't come to grips with the whole debacle in Libya a few months back.
Debacle? Juan said, sounding hurt. We saved the Secretary of State's life and salvaged the peace accords.
And damned near started a war when you went toe-to-toe with one of their guided-missile frigates. This has to go ultraquiet. Sneak in, find the plutonium, and sneak right back out again. No fireworks.
Cabrillo and Overholt knew that was a promise Juan couldn't make, so instead Juan asked for details about the exact location at which the missile exploded and the trajectory of its fall back to earth. He pulled a cordless keyboard and mouse from a tray under his desk, which sent a signal for a flat-screen monitor to slowly rise from the desk's surface. Overholt e-mailed pictures and target projections. The pictures were worthless, showing nothing but dense cloud cover, but NASA had given them just a five-square-mile search area, which made the grid manageable, provided the terrain didn't go to hell on them. Overholt asked if Cabrillo had any idea how they were going to get into Argentina undetected.
I want to see some topographical maps before I can answer that. My first instinct is a chopper, of course, but with the Argies ramping up activity along their northern borders that might not be possible. I should have something figured out in a day or two and be ready to execute by week's end.
Ah, here's the other thing, Overholt said so mildly that Cabrillo tensed up. You have seventy-two hours to recover the power pack.
Juan was incredulous. Three days? That's impossible.
After seventy-two hours, the President wants to come clean. Well, cleaner. He won't mention the plutonium, but he's willing to ask the Argentines for their help recovering, quote, sensitive scientific equipment.
And if they say no and search for it themselves?
At best we end up looking foolish, and, at worst, criminally negligent in the eyes of the world. Plus we give Generalissimo Coraz+|n a tidy bundle of weapons-grade plutonium to play with.
Lang, give me six hours. I'll get back to you on whether we're willing hell able to back your play.
Thanks, Juan.
Cabrillo called Overholt after a three-hour strategy meeting with his department heads, and, twelve hours later, found himself and his team standing on the banks of a Paraguayan river, about to cross into God alone knew what.
The Silent Sea
Chapter TWO
THE WILSON/GEORGE RESEARCH STATION
ANTARCTIC PENINSULA
THE SKELETON STAFF OF THE WINTER-OVER CREW COULD feel spring coming in their bones. Not that the weather was much improved. Temperatures rarely rose above twenty below, and icy winds were a constant. It was the growing number of + marks on the big calendar in the rec hall marking the advancing days that buoyed their spirits after a long winter in which they hadn't seen the sun since late March.
Only a few research bases remain open year-round on the planet's most desolate continent, and those are usually much larger than the Wilson/George Station, run by a coalition of American universities and a grant from the National Science Foundation. Even at full staff during the summer months starting in September, the clutch of prefabricated domed buildings atop stilts driven into the ice and rock could house no more than forty souls.
Because of money pouring into global-warming research, it was decided to keep the station online all year round. This was the first attempt, and by all accounts it had gone well. The structures had withstood the worst Antarctica could throw at them, and the people had gotten along well for the most part. One of them, Bill Harris, was a NASA astronaut studying the effects of isolation on human relations, for an eventual manned mission to Mars.
WeeGee, as the team called their home for the past six months, was out of some futurist sketchbook. It was located near a deep bay on the shores of the Bellingshausen Sea, midway along the peninsula that thrusts toward South America like a frozen finger. Had there been sunlight, a pair of binoculars on the hills behind the base was all one would need to see the southern ocean.