‘Went over every one — Mike did a tap test on every bottle. Nothing in them or on them.’
‘Wiring loops?’
‘Did it myself,’ said Winter. ‘The junction boxes and access points still have their wax seals. The only points accessed were the power and comms boxes, and they’re clean of IEDs.’
Gallen tapped his teeth. Everyone was looking sick. ‘Okay, Ben,’ he said to Letour. ‘I’m clearing us from a security point of view. We’re okay to ascend if you say so.’
Nodding, Letour leaned on the orange button on the console and asked Hansen to haul them up.
The wary voice of the Swedish master on the ship echoed down the line and a slight jerk shook the Ariadne. Then, as they looked at one another, the vessel made imperceptible movements, the shaking stopped and they were moving upwards.
From the various wings of the Ariadne a cheer went up as a loud sigh of relief.
Gallen swapped looks with his three men. They still had a CEO to retrieve.
CHAPTER 63
As the Ariadne rose to the surface at an agonisingly slow rate, Gallen thought through what had to happen next. He wanted to take Ford in a submersible to look for the vessel that had left the Ariadne with Florita apparently on board. But he needed more information on what they might be doing down there.
The technician on the control desk looked up. ‘You Gerry Gallen?’
‘Sure,’ said Gallen, roused from his thoughts.
‘Secure email for you, sir.’
Gallen looked at the email on screen. It was from Pete Morton, telling him to go to the Gmail account he’d set up a week earlier.
The tech left him alone and he accessed the account, opening Morton’s message. There were two panels and a message from Morton: You owe me big time.
The first panel was for the person Gallen knew as Raffa, the documentary director: the panel — a translated file from Syrian intelligence by the look of it — called him Ari Fleischmann, a former IDF Navy commando who had been used by the Mossad in paramilitary work.
The second panel, also looking like a Syrian intel bromide, named a person called Marc Sadinsky — the man Winter had killed. He was a Mossad-trained assassin who had done a lot of work with various navies. There was no bounce for the third of the film crew. But it was confirmed: the crew was Mossad, and they were either dead or gone. But he still had a Frenchwoman who could be useful.
Du Bois was flexi-cuffed to the internal piping of the room he’d left her in. Her lips were white and her face red.
‘Can you turn on the air?’ she croaked.
‘You turned it off, Martina.’
‘It was supposed to be for a few minutes.’
Gallen smiled. ‘They cut the umbilical for the air and power. You’ve got one hundred people breathing from a few bottles of oxygen.’
‘I’m going to pass out,’ she said. ‘How close are we to the surface?’
‘Let me worry about that,’ said Gallen, happy the cocky act had gone. ‘We’re missing one chief engineer. Where’s he?’
‘In the power station, I assume,’ she said.
‘Where’s the power station, Martina?’
‘On the bottom,’ she said. ‘Look, I’m an asthmatic. I need air.’
‘What’s the power station doing on the bottom?’
‘A protest,’ said Du Bois. ‘A publicity event that will shut down Arctic exploitation for the next twenty years.’
‘How so?’
‘As we speak there’s an ArcticWatch statement going to every news desk in the world, and every government in the United Nations.’
‘Saying what?’
Du Bois coughed. ‘That Oasis Energy’s Ariadne has lost her illegal nuclear reactor and it’s currently sitting on the sea bed waiting to be rescued. The statement also outlines how Oasis planned to incorporate nuclear power into its sea-bed rigs — in total secrecy, of course.’
Gallen thought about Negroponte, the secrecy under which he was deployed. ‘How did you know about the nuclear plans?’
‘Raffa and Josh approached me,’ said Du Bois. ‘They came to me through good contacts. They’re environmental extremists and they told me about the Ariadne.’
‘I’m betting this wasn’t your plan?’
‘It was overseen by me, Mr Gerry,’ she said.
‘It wasn’t your idea, Martina.’
‘Maybe not,’ she gasped.
‘The plan?’
‘To drop the power station from the Ariadne, and film it on the bottom. Then broadcast it to the world with the CEO of Oasis watching.’
‘You think that’s all they’re doing?’
‘What else would they do?’ said Du Bois.
‘I think your organisation has been infiltrated by Israel’s Mossad.’
‘How stupid,’ said Du Bois. ‘You expect me to believe that?’
Someone yelled out for Gallen and he broke away, walked to the control desk, a swinging sensation under his feet: they’d stopped their ascent.
‘We have a problem,’ said Letour. ‘Part of the vessel isn’t depressurising — we think it’s the emergency lock, from what we’re hearing.’
Gallen saw a group of Ariadne personnel around the hatchway to the emergency lock.
‘What’s that mean?’
The vessel groaned, a long, whining sound, like bad plumbing.
‘It means that as we ascend the air in the emergency lock expands and blows the thing apart.’
‘That why we stopped?’
‘Hell, yeah,’ said Letour.
Tucker had been jumped by the Israelis, Gallen remembered. ‘Liam,’ he said, ‘you have that card for the emergency lock?’
Checking his pockets, Tucker came up empty. ‘They must have taken it.’
‘The swipe card has been stolen, and the commander is dead,’ said Gallen to Letour. ‘Where does that leave us?’
‘No manual override to get in there and let the pressure out,’ said Letour. ‘The power’s down so we can’t operate the valves manually. We can’t go up, we could blow any second.’
Gallen grimaced: that was the IED, that was the trap. A lock filled with air that would expand as they got near sea level and blow its steel constraints apart.
‘Do we know our depth, even without full power?’
‘Hansen says twenty-two metres.’
‘Can we swim from here?’
Letour shook his head. ‘One hundred people, Mr Gallen. You’d have to retrieve them from Arctic waters and then stabilise them.’
‘If anyone’s got the equipment for that, it would be the Fanny Blankes-Koen,’ said Gallen. Pressing on the mic button, he spoke with Hansen. ‘Letour explained the problem?’
‘Yes, he did.’
‘If we swam off, would you have enough resources on the ship to deal with one hundred exposure cases?’
‘We have enough blankets,’ said Hansen. ‘The transfer of people to the ship is the problem. We’d lose half of you just getting you on board.’
Gallen looked at the emergency lock as it groaned again, this time with a tapping sound.
‘Of course, there is another way,’ said Hansen, clearing his throat.
‘Let’s hear it,’ said Gallen.
Gallen waited at the console with Letour, their ghostly pallor reflected in the half-light of the battery power. The entire complement of the Ariadne was in the staff quarters and the diving rooms. The staff quarters were locked down and the diving room’s hatchways hung open, waiting for Letour and Gallen to run.
The emergency lock let out a high-pitched reverberation and Gallen could have sworn he saw the hatch lock shake.
‘Hansen, this is Letour. Commence ascent, at full power.’