The admiral continued to search the room for Shep. “Well, where is the dog?”
Henry was still shaking the admiral’s hand. “In the room where we left him, sir. He’ll be wanting to take a dump by now, I think, sir.”
“Hero,” said Grimes to Henry when they got back to their quarters, “talk to ya?”
Henry already felt that if Kai Grimes wanted a word, it was a good idea to give it to him. It wasn’t that Grimes was dangerous, although he undoubtedly was, but rather that the SEAL’s job was to deal with the terrorists and neutralize the situation. At least, that was the way Hayes had explained it.
Grimes took Henry into his “crib”, as he called it. Henry was surprised to find the SEAL commander had his own communications gear — indeed, the room was crammed with electronics.
“What’s all this stuff, Kai?”
“I just received some faxes from a… friend… in Europe. Actually she used to be KGB. Anyway, I want you to look at them.”
“Why so secret?”
“Propriety,” said Grimes, handing him a folder. “Just see if anyone in there looks like one of your bad guys.”
Henry opened the folder. The first photo showed a very distinguished-looking businessman, apparently caught unawares while leaving an office building. The image was slightly blurred. He flipped past it to see the other faces. None of them looked familiar. But Henry couldn’t close the folder. He kept looking at the businessman in the expensive suit.
“This guy comes pretty close to the leader of the pack. But he didn’t look quite this way. Heavier, maybe.
I don’t know. It probably isn’t him.”
Grimes nodded and took back the folder. “Thanks. Let me know if you want another look.”
Henry asked why Grimes wasn’t including the general in this.
“This is unofficial. Some of these people are, well, VIPs, not suspects.”
“We don’t have any suspects,” observed Henry.
“I’ve had some people work on the polar connection. Some of these guys belong to oil-development groups. Some are free-lancers for them.”
“Fill me in, Kai,” said Henry. “What’s been done about tracking the terrorists from the point where they met me? They had all that equipment with them. It has to be somewhere.”
“Yeah, you’d think so,” The SEAL grinned at him.
“But the bomb erased everything. It took us over twenty-four hours to position a satellite so we could see the area. And we know from what you and the general told us that the group made some effort to cover their tracks when they left the site. So all we can do is guess which way they went. Our sub the Falconer — Trident- type — is scanning the bottom of the ice shelf, looking for any metallic machinery that might have been ditched. Our people think the bad guys must have left that last site and gone straight for the edge of the ice. They’d done their dirty work, so they didn’t need the equipment. It would just slow them down. We figure twenty men might have fit into three helicopters, and all the equipment went into the drink.”
“They had dogs. Buried somewhere?”
“Probably not dumped into the sea. Floaters. Either took ’em along or buried ’em in the snow. I think they’re in the snow.”
The SEAL noticed a blinking light on a phone stacked on top a pile of gear. “Turn around, hero,” said Grimes.
“I need to punch a code.”
Henry turned and waited while the SEAL punched some buttons and muttered briefly into the phone.
Finally he heard Grimes hang up the handset.
“So what do you think the terrorists did after that?” asked Henry, continuing their conversation.
Grimes shook his head. “After leaving the ice? There had to be a ship to pick ’em up. But we’ve turned up nothin’.”
“Could they have refuelled choppers in midair?”
“No way. Where do you get this stuff?”
“Makes sense to me. They’d know you’d soon be looking for ships in the area. How far could a ship get? Hell, they planted that nuke just a day or so before they detonated it.”
“We don’t think they did detonate it,” said Grimes.
“We think the general’s call — back transmission from the site triggered the explosion. A radio broadcast from within a mile of the antenna wire would indicate the thing had been found. It had an auto-destruct.”
“Does the general know that?”
“Sure he does,” said Grimes with a shrug. “But I think the thing was set to detonate before too long anyway. Not his fault, really. Sooner or later, it would have gone off. What’s the diff? Maybe his mistake cost us a few hours of sniffing after their tracks. But maybe he saved lives too. What if a whole crew had been digging for the bomb?”
“That’s true,” Henry said. “Well, I think you oughta check out that refuelling idea. By the way” — he looked at the phone Grimes had just used — “what was the news?”
“Nada, dude,” said Grimes. “Thanks for the look-see. I gotta get to work, now, hero. And you gotta go.”
“Okay, see you later,” said Henry.
He went back to his room. He still hadn’t been told where to walk his dog.
Shep hadn’t waited.
Four
Henry unhappily cleaned up his dog’s mess.
The promises of the admiral were, it seemed, slow to take effect. But, after Henry had finished disposing of the turds and stood up for his rights — made a stink about the stink, so to speak — the situation changed. General Hayes came to Henry’s room personally to tell him that Aft Deck C, the area behind the conning tower, would be reserved for Shep’s walks. He handed over a map of the ship and sniffed the air in the room.
“Well, Henry, I know you’ll excuse me now.”
He stepped out of the room without waiting for a reply.
Although the damage had been done, Shep still needed some exercise, so Henry decided to explore the area Hayes had told him about. He began to wonder if, after all, bringing the dog along had been such a good idea, but, as his mind drifted back to McMurdo and he considered the possibility that the base might become a slag heap if the volcano had its way, he was glad Shep was with him. Shep was, after all, the only family he had.
The dog seemed to know where he was going.
“What did you do, peek at the map?” cried Henry as the dog dragged him towards the main deck.
When he forced open the upper hatchway door marked AFT DECK C, sea spray and wind hit him so hard he nearly fell back through it. Shep pulled hard at the leash. The sheer power of the dog helped Henry hold his own against the wind. He looked around and found nothing but bare deck exposed to the elements. There wasn’t even a handrail at the edge. Henry worried that, if he let the dog run, the malamute might just run off the edge into the sea.
He clutched Shep’s leash tightly in both hands. The sea was churning, with ten- to twenty-foot waves.
Overhead, grey clouds hung low, full of rain. In spite of the high seas, Henry couldn’t feel the motion. It didn’t feel much to him like he was on a ship at sea; more as if he were on top of a skyscraper sticking out of the ocean. Still there was something, a slight roll perhaps, that made him feel uncertain of his footing, almost like a touch of vertigo.
Shep wanted to romp. The wind in his face and the tang of ice in the air reminded him of home. He was loving it. It might have been just instinct, as if he were trying to get the sled over a rut in the ice, or it might have been sheer exuberance, but suddenly he jumped forward and the leash left Henry’s hands.
“Stop, Shep!”