To those on the Oregon, it looked as though the Lynx’s driver was hell-bent on suicide as the sled flew across the water at fifty miles per hour, shooting for the steel side of a freighter that towered over them like a castle over a pair of riders on a horse.
Juan felt he’d left it a moment too late and instinctively tensed his body for a crushing hit. In fact, his timing was perfect. Just yards shy of the ramp, he eased off the accelerator and let the Lynx slow until it was pushing a heavy bow wave that ate up even more momentum. The craft entered the hull as it began to founder, and then the skids hit the submerged ramp, and she crawled out of the sea with such perfect control that Cabrillo barely had to tap the brakes to bring them to a gentle stop.
There was a half-second pause, when everything seemed still in his mind, before a team began swarming from behind bulkheads and equipment, wading through churned-up water that sloshed across the ramp and still cascaded off the snowmobile like a gundog shedding water after a retrieve. A warning alarm went off, indicating the garage door was closing. Hands reached for Yuri Borodin to move him onto a waiting stretcher. No sooner was he disentangled from Juan’s snowsuit than Juan had flung his helmet aside to check on his friend.
Julia Huxley — Hux or Doc to most of the crew — was already standing over Borodin while an orderly kept the Russian from falling off the gurney. Dressed in scrubs, and mindless of the freezing water in which she stood, the Navy-trained physician first flipped up the visor of Yuri’s helmet.
As if held back by a dam, a wall of blood poured out of the visor opening and down the lower part of his helmet and splashed like a wave across his chest. The helmet had been so tight that whenever Borodin coughed up blood from his punctured lung, it pooled around his jaw and steadily rose with each violent paroxysm. She unstrapped his helmet, certain he had already drowned. But as soon as it came free, dripping more blood into the water still sluicing around her feet, he coughed, spattering her medical face shield and chest.
Juan gave them room as an orderly slapped a scalpel into Julia’s hand. She began cutting away the bulky white snowsuit while another aide prepped an IV, ready to refill Yuri’s nearly drained veins with Ringer’s lactate, as a stopgap until they could get him transfused from the ship’s blood bank.
The heavy-duty arctic gear fell away under Hux’s knife until Yuri’s painfully thin and pale chest was exposed and one arm was laid bare for the IV drip. Froth oozed from the hole in Yuri’s skin every time his chest fought to expel air from his body and seemed to suck back into the obscene little mouth on each inhalation. The rest of his exposed body was a sea of welts and mottled bruises from weeks of beatings.
From the red medical case on a nearby rolling tray Hux grabbed an occlusive patch and tore away the wrapper. This type of battle dressing allowed air to be expelled from the wound but would not let air back in, giving Yuri’s collapsed lung a chance to reinflate. She and her team gently rolled Borodin onto his injured side. This position made it easier for the uninjured lung to function. Only then did she whip the stethoscope from around her neck and check for Borodin’s heartbeat. She hunted across his bruised and whip-scarred chest like someone with a metal detector sweeping a beach. And like the beachcomber, it appeared she hadn’t found what she was looking for.
“BP?” she asked.
“Barely registering,” replied the orderly monitoring the cuff.
“Same with the heartbeat.” Julia looked up to see the Ringer’s were flowing wide-open and knew she could do no more here. “Okay, people, let’s get him to medical.” Her voice had the crisp command of a person who was in complete charge.
She exchanged a glance with Cabrillo, her somber dark eyes telling him everything he needed to know.
“Nyet,”Borodin wheezed. Somehow he levered open his eyes.
“Sorry, no nyetyet,” Hux said, laying a hand on Yuri’s arm. “Let’s move it!”
“Nyet,”Borodin managed to rasp again. “Ivan?” He called to Juan, using his Russian name.
Juan leapt forward so he stood over Yuri’s supine body. “Easy, my friend. You’re going to be okay.”
Borodin smiled a bloody smile, his teeth stained crimson like a shark’s after a meal. “Nyet,”Yuri said a third time. “Kenin.”
“I know all about Pytor Kenin,” Juan assured him.
“Chairman,” Hux said edgily.
“One second.” Juan didn’t want to look at the rebuke on her face. He knew as well as she did that every second counted. He also knew that Yuri Borodin understood this fact even better than them.
Borodin coughed, and the effort seemed to tear something deep within his body. He winced, his eyes screwed tight as he rode a wave of pain. “Aral.”
The word dribbled from his lips.
“The Aral Sea?” Juan asked. “What about it?”
“Eerie boat.”
“I don’t understand.” Juan could see — all of them could see — that Borodin had seconds left.
“What about the Aral Sea and an eerie boat?”
“Find Karl Petrov — Pe-trov—” The syllables came further and further apart. Juan bent down so his ear was barely an inch from his friend’s bloody mouth. “Petrovski.”
The effort to get the name out was the last gasp of a dying man. His skin, if possible, looked even paler, more translucent, like the waxy rind of one of Madame Tussauds dummies.
“Yuri?” Juan called with a desperation he knew would go unanswered. “Yuri?”
Borodin’s Adam’s apple gave one final thrust, one more attempt to speak. With his lung so full of blood, there was hardly enough air to form his dying word. It whispered past his unmoving lips already laced with the icy touch of death. “Tesla.”
Julia pushed Juan out of the way, rolled Borodin onto his back, and leapt atop the gurney so she was astride her patient like a jockey on a horse. She was a curvy though petite woman, but when she started chest compressions she did it with strength and vigor. The orderlies took up positions to guide the rolling stretcher to the Level 1 trauma center within the labyrinthine corridors of the Oregon’s secret passages.
Cabrillo watched them disappear through a watertight door, blew out a long breath, and then moved to an intercom box mounted on a wall. He barely noticed the crewmen securing the boat garage from battle stations.
“Op center,” came the voice of Max Hanley. Not knowing the situation, Max wisely kept his usual repertoire of bad humor and sarcastic remarks to himself.
“Max, get us out of here,” Juan said, as if leaving the scene of the act could somehow bury the fact. “This mission was a bust.”
“Aye, Chairman,” Max replied gently. “Aye.”
CHAPTER FOUR
He sat slouched against the corner of his desk for the next fifteen minutes, his cabin lights dim, his eyes pointed at the floor but seeing nothing. The space had been his home for years. Its current inspiration was the set of Rick’s Café from the movie Casablancaand had been pulled off with some of Kevin Nixon’s Hollywood set-designing friends. Usually it was a place of solace for Cabrillo. Until the phone rang, it was merely a void.
The replica Bakelite phone trilled, and he snatched up the handset before the first ring ended. He said nothing.
“I’m sorry, Juan.” It was Julia Huxley. “I just called it. He’s gone.”
“Thanks, Hux,” Cabrillo said in a monotone. “I know you did all you could.”
He settled the heavy handset back onto its cradle.
From the brief exchange of looks he’d shared with the ship’s physician back in the boat garage, he’d known the inevitability of Yuri’s death but couldn’t motivate himself to do anything until he’d received verification. He’d failed. It didn’t matter that he’d busted Yuri out of the prison and got him to within a mile of the Oregon. Juan blew out another long breath.