“Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. This is First Class Petty Officer Hector Gomez of the U.S.S. Delphin.” His words were garbled with that mask on, making him sound like he was shouting from the bottom of a well. “We’ve been attacked with poison gas. It’s killed a lot of sailors. I grabbed an anti-contamination suit and an OBA before it could get me,” he said, pointing to his oxygen breathing apparatus. “I found a bottle of cyanogen chloride. It must have been put into one of the burners.” Part of the sub’s atmosphere control system.
“That would do it,” Holmes said in Lana’s ear. “You know about CK?”
“No.”
“It stops your body’s ability to use the oxygen carried by your hemoglobin. It’s like walking through a desert with a glass of water with your mouth sewed up.”
“I got the cyanogen chloride out of there,” Gomez went on, “but I don’t know if it’s dissipated yet. If you can hear me, please respond. Over.”
“But communication is cut off to the sub, right?” Lana asked Holmes.
“That was the last I heard,” he replied.
“I am out of air!” Gomez shouted.
Lana could see Gomez’s panic in his eyes and rigid body language. Then he started shaking and ripped off his mask. His face was covered in sweat. He took deep breaths, looking around frantically. Neither Lana nor Holmes said a word. She knew they were both waiting to see whether Gomez keeled over.
Seconds passed like hours.
Gomez nodded. “I can breathe.” Then he looked at the dead bodies on the floor all around him. “Where are they? The people that did this?”
“What do we know about this guy?” Lana asked.
“I’m pulling that up right now,” Holmes answered.
Lana watched Gomez, who looked shocked to be alive, still taking in the grisly evidence that surrounded him.
“A mom and dad in San Pedro in LA,” Holmes reported.
“The port.”
“Correct. At a glance here, everything looks right. He has two brothers and three sisters, all living in LA, all upstanding citizens. Nothing noted about them.”
“So does Admiral Deming think he’s in on the takeover?”
“He doesn’t know yet,” Holmes said. “Gomez is the only able-bodied one we’ve seen. But as the admiral said, no one can possibly run that sub on his own. Whoever it is has got to have at least a half dozen, maybe more, qualified officers and senior enlisted missile operators. And it’s possible, not likely, mind you, but possible that Gomez isn’t even guilty, that whoever’s doing this isn’t showing up on camera yet. Maybe they never will. Look, I think you should plan on being out here all day tomorrow.” He meant NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. “I need you for a seven o’clock meeting in the morning.”
“All right, I’ll be there.”
Lana didn’t expect to sleep easily with her mind abuzz from the dire events of the day, and she was right. She dozed on and off, haunted for hours by those dead bodies.
Finally, at four thirty she arose, scrubbed her face with cold water, and logged on again.
What she saw was wrenching. Gomez, or someone, had propped the dead body of the sub’s commander, Captain Hueller, against a chair in full view of the camera. Gomez, she presumed — no, hoped—was scouring the sub for survivors.
Keeping a cap on this “incident” would be very difficult with so many service members dead. But they had to try to maintain the silence. The hackers had yet to make their demands known.
She began to imagine what they might be, each one more dreadful than the one that proceeded it. Many harkened back to last year’s horrors.
Lana told herself to stop, that no matter what she came up with, reality could turn out to be so much worse.
And she was right about that.
Unimaginably worse.
CHAPTER 4
Moscow, so old and so new. And so beautiful. Onion domes and brand-new skyscrapers. Gorgeous cars, like Oleg’s Maserati. Purring like a pussycat as he drove from the heart of the city. Exciting like Pussy Riot punk rock. Like Galina when she took the money from him under the table.
He passed his favorite onion domes of all, the ones with so many colors they looked like frozen yogurt swirls at Creamery Dreamery. Thank you, crazy Orthodox Church. I pray to Virgin, too. But I promise you, Vladimir, not like Pussy Riot.
Could a country be any greater than the new Russia, with its venerable traditions and history? No, not possible. That was what most of Oleg’s friends would have said. His father, Papa Plutocrat, would have shaken his head very slowly, looking very wise, or so PP would have thought, and said that it was true, he and his friends — crony capitalists all — brought Russia to its apogee. Yes, “apogee,” because a wise man would use such a word, and PP had an English-language word-a-day calendar in his private bathroom so he could sound wise and say those three syllables—ap-o-gee—like he was blessing them under an onion dome.
But Oleg knew better. Russia was not so great as it would soon become. In just days. Because he would generate the greatest wealth the world had ever known. So much money his fellow citizens would have untold rubles showering down on them.
He smiled at himself in the Maserati’s rearview mirror. Everything was falling into place. Engineers had reassembled the professor’s prototype, and when they turned it on and saw it sucking those heat-absorbing molecules out of the air in vast quantities, their tongues hung out. And so they had to be killed. Just a joke! Oleg laughed to himself. No, but they did have to be properly rewarded and left in isolated wonder. But better than death.
The days of fossil-fuel haters would soon be over. Conservation was never much fun anyway. Burn all the fuel you want. Drive a Maserati — as fast as you want. AAC will suck out the carbon and combine it with hydrogen and we’ll have—Voilà!—hydrocarbons. More gas. More oil. More money!
Those fossil-fuel companies would pop the bubbly when they found out. Russian ones, that is, because the others? Well, they wouldn’t be drilling so much anymore. They would have other problems. Some would say crises. Especially with their offshore platforms. Make BP in the Gulf seem like Roman candle.
AAC would be earth’s thermostat. World too hot? Okay, whoosh, suck out more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Too cold? Take out less. Auction off nice climates: “And the winner is Great Britain with a bid of 230 trillion rubles.”
God save the Queen.
Think about that. Start droughts, drum up more floods, make haywire weather. Why not? Or be nice and let the world live in peace — as long as you pay proper tribute to your master.
But first the world had to be brought to its senses, especially big boys like the U.S., Europe, and China. Which meant bringing them to their knees. Best position for learning. Ask Federal Security Service. And that was where the submarine came in handy. Very soon Oleg would tell those other Arctic nations to leave the gas and oil and minerals for Russia. And if they didn’t — and, of course, they wouldn’t — there would have to be a terrible catastrophe.
But that was so simple with a sub on your side because the world was already facing an extraordinary threat of a catastrophe of such massive proportions that nobody would even talk about it much publicly. Lots of scientists knew. Galina, good Greenpeace girl, knew, though not what Oleg was up to. The precipice was so well known it even went by an acronym in certain circles.
And when something teeters on a precipice, what does it need? A nudge. That was all. One teensy-weensy nudge. And a sub with missiles could nudge and nudge and nudge. And then everyone would hear the biggest plop in the history of the planet. But what will happen after the plop? Now that would be the most memorable sound of all.