‘Hear what? ‘
‘Mr Gallen wants to dive.’
‘Where to?’ said Aaron.
‘The Ariadne,’ said Gallen.
Shaking his head, Aaron raised his phone. ‘Fox and CNN are on their way back and we might make her deadline. I don’t want to risk it — she might just want to make some big point about whales and Inuit and then be led off by the Coast Guard as a martyr.’
‘And what if she’s not?’ said Gallen. ‘I say we do it both ways: let her preach to the TV audience and at the same time we storm the fort.’
Aaron frowned. ‘How?’
‘Use the TV crews as a distraction, stealth onto the Ariadne and take these guys down.’
‘You’ve done this before, I take it?’ said Aaron, chewing his lip.
‘Hell, no,’ said Winter, cracking one of his rare smiles. ‘That’s half the fun.’
Aaron asked Hansen where the nearest navy or coast guard was.
‘The Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Amundsen is three hours away and there’s a US Navy supplies ship in the western Beaufort,’ said Hansen. ‘We’re on our own till they get here.’
‘So,’ said Aaron, looking at Gallen, ‘you’re going to swim down to the Ariadne and just climb aboard?’
‘The Ariadne can see the environment around it with cameras, right?’ Gallen said to Hansen.
Hansen nodded. ‘There’s seventeen external and eight internal cameras.’
Gallen pointed at the control room panel. ‘Show me on here the screen for the main diving lock.’
Hansen pointed to the bottom right screen. ‘If we had communications then we’d see the diving lock on this one.’
‘Same set-up on the Ariadne’s control room?’
‘Yes,’ said Hansen. ‘Identical.’
‘When Du Bois gets connected again for her address to the TV crews, we’ll be connected to the Ariadne. Can we mess with the camera systems?’
‘Mess?’ said Hansen.
‘Can we make one of the screens malfunction?’ said Gallen.
Hansen looked to his comms guru beside him.
‘Sure,’ said the Dane with the curly black hair. ‘I can do this.’
They wrapped and rewrapped their handguns and placed them in black nylon dive bags that would strap to their belts. The dive technicians suited them in arctic dry suits on top of arctic under suits — padded one-piece systems that sat against the body and under the bulky dry suits. The Arctic water temperature was a typical minus 1.8 degrees Celsius — the coldest you could take salt water before it froze — and they would not be using the suits that pumped boiling water between two layers of wetsuit. Those diving systems required umbilicals connected to a mother ship or diving bell and Gallen didn’t want to draw attention to themselves as they approached the Ariadne.
‘You think they were waiting for Mike?’ said Winter, letting the technician from the Fanny Blankes-Koen zip him into his silver-blue suit.
‘I think they were waiting for all of us,’ said Gallen, pulling a Thinsulate bonnet from the undergarment over his head and letting his technician zip the dry suit in place. ‘I had a bad feeling about environmentalists going down there with Florita, and I should have stopped it. I’m going soft.’
‘Wasn’t your call, boss,’ said Winter. ‘These corporate dudes will do anything to get their photo in the papers.’
‘I was a captain in US special forces,’ said Gallen. ‘My men, my call.’
Winter waved that away. ‘Assuming they get their show on primetime TV, what then?’
‘They either give up, or they want to make a bigger point than just talking. I don’t want to wait for the decision.’
‘I brought something with me; I wasn’t going to tell you,’ said the Canadian.
‘What?’
Winter pointed at his backpack, motioned for the technician to get it. Pulling a grenade from the bag, Winter shrugged. ‘Coupla flash-bangs. You never know, right?’
‘You gonna throw one of them in a tin can under the sea? You wanna cold bath, Kenny?’
‘What do you reckon?’ said Winter, smiling at his technician. ‘The tin can strong enough for this?’
The technician looked at the grenade and gabbled something in a northern European language.
‘He saying,’ said the other tech, ‘that maybe the Ariadne strong enough for a bomb, but better hold your ears, yes, ‘cos it will explode the eardrum.’
‘Happy now?’ said Gallen.
‘What’s that?’ said Winter, eyes set on a long contraption mounted on the wall of the dive room.
‘Shark gun,’ said the technician. ‘Just like a spear gun but it has the explosive tips.’
‘Fix me up,’ said Winter, squinting at the weapon.
Gallen made himself breathe deeply for thirty seconds as the tech pulled arctic mittens over his hands and restrapped his G-Shock over his suited left wrist: it showed sixteen minutes on the mission clock — fourteen minutes to get to the Ariadne and be ready for the camera malfunction that Hansen was going to initiate.
He took a few seconds to compose himself: his last dive in Arctic waters had been terrifying enough. Now he breathed through his nose and envisioned smooth breathing, rhythmic finning and being in that diving lock on the Ariadne before the cold properly set in. Then he nodded for the technicians to screw the dive helmets onto the collars of the dry suits.
He gave the thumbs-up and Winter gave him a wink.
‘Relax, boss,’ said the Canadian as his helmet came down. ‘It’s what we do.’
CHAPTER 60
The dive platform on the inside of the port hull receded into surrealist shapes as Gallen hit the water and submerged backwards. The cold hit him like a slap as he let himself go a few feet under and normalised his breathing, checking on the regulator and ensuring he had a proper seal on the helmet’s collar. He gave a tug on the thin line tied to his weight belt and seconds later there was a burst of bubbles and Winter sank to the same depth, where he did his own checks.
‘Okay,’ said Gallen into his mouthpiece as he tapped his G-Shock. ‘We got twelve minutes to Go. Let’s get down there.’
Checking the compass heading he’d been given by the techs, Gallen lined up with the display on his watch and finned downwards, under the starboard hull of the Fanny Blankes-Koen.
‘Now you’ll see what you were missing at that fricking lake,’ said Gallen as they descended into the gloom.
‘I’d forgotten how bad this was,’ said Winter, panting as they left the natural light of the surface. ‘I thought Nova Scotia was cold.’
Keeping their flashlights stowed, they finned downwards for three minutes until the orange-faced gauge on Gallen’s right wrist showed they were on the same plane as the Ariadne: twenty-eight metres.
‘See anything?’ said Gallen, holding his G-Shock to the face plate in his helmet and rechecking the compass heading as he fumbled to activate the watch’s backlight.
‘No, boss,’ came Winter’s rasped voice.
‘Blue Dog to Momma Bear, we have zero visuals. About to head out on two-seven-niner. Please confirm, over.’
Hansen’s voice scratched through the earpiece in the helmet. ‘Affirm that, Blue Dog. We have you on screen. Proceed on your two-seven-niner, over.’
Hitting the backlight again, Gallen lined his shoulder up with the 279 heading on his G-Shock and resumed finning. ‘Should be right there.’
They moved slowly through the blackness, their breathing rasping in one another’s ears; Gallen kept radio silence and fought against his desire to grab the flashlight on his right leg and illuminate the environment. He felt the beginnings of both claustrophobia and agoraphobia creeping in as surely as the cold was now settling on his chest like a bag of cement.