Jeffery Deaver - Ice Cold

“It’s a search and recovery for the pilot, that’s all,” the Navy man said. “All anyone needs to know. And it’s no lie. We don’t leave anyone down there if we can avoid it.”

If we can avoid it. That was the important phrase. Truth was, countless pilots and officers and grunts lay in unmarked graves all over the planet, and plenty of them were American.

And not just members of the military, either. Civilians, too. Collateral damage.

Harbison looked at Michaels, who looked back at him and spoke. “Which one of us goes?”

“Both of you,” the guy from Defense said. “Just in case.”

“And Stephens here, he comes along for the ride,” Harbison said, shifting his gaze. “Like last time.”

Everyone nodded. Stephens would form the second half of the search-and-recovery mission. He was the guy who had created and built the CARV, the Cable-controlled Aquatic Recovery Vehicle, an unmanned submersible that would bring the bomb to the surface after Alvin found it.

Alvin had its robotic arms, but they’d been designed to grab comparatively lightweight scientific specimens, and (though Harbison disagreed) the military didn’t trust them to be strong enough to haul the bomb back to the surface. The CARV, on the other hand, had but one purpose: To retrieve lost torpedoes and bombs from the sea floor.

Plus, it had one other advantage: A camera that could transmit along a cable back to the surface. Once Alvin had pinpointed the bomb’s location, the CARV could swoop down, take a look, and do the rest.

Harbison had seen it in action once before, the first time he’d worked with Stephens. He hadn’t been impressed. If Alvin felt like a living creature to him, the CARV was more like a mechanical dog, programmed to fetch.

He raised his gaze and saw Stephens looking at him. There was a glint in the old man’s eyes, but it was buried deep, and no one else saw it.

The second guy from Defense, who’d been silent till now, was the one who said what they were all thinking.

“Well, gentlemen, this is a colossal fuck-up,” he said. “But we dodged a bullet that the thing didn’t hit land. Can you imagine the consequences if that had happened?”

They all could. Harbison snorted.

“I’ve been stationed out there,” the Navy man said. “The California coast. The wind always blows onshore. East.”

Everyone nodded. They all knew the direction of the prevailing winds out there.

“What’s the population within a radius of fifty miles?” Harbison asked.

No one answered. But the Navy man said, “Not to mention the Central Valley.”

Harbison thought about it. The steady winds blowing out of the west, sweeping through the mountain passes of the Coast Range and heading east into the valley.

Some of the most heavily farmed land on the continent.

He looked across the table, and saw the hidden glint again in Stephens’s eyes.

Harbison’s boss asked him to stay after the meeting ended. His expression mixed confusion, anger, and sadness.

“What on earth is wrong with you?” he asked.

Harbison was silent.

“You keep yanking on their tails, eventually they’re going to turn around and bite you.”

“Let them.” Harbison spoke in a savage tone. “Let them bite, and then they can go out and find another pilot as good as I am and ask him to find that bomb.”

“Jack,” the director said, raising his hands. “Listen. I was just—”

But Harbison had already turned his back and was heading out the door.

Twenty-two hundred feet. Still descending.

While they’d been heading down, the sun had set up above. The recovery was being carried out at night, in secret, as everything about this mission had been. Only two Navy ships on the surface, along with the CARV on its tender, all waiting for Alvin to reach its destination.

They were traveling through a dead zone now. Alvin ’s lights barely penetrated the black water, illuminating only a multitude of tiny white and brown and red flecks drifting slowly downward themselves. Harbison knew what these were: The organic remains of leaves, fish, whales. Humans. Whatever had died up above.

It was a constant, endless organic snowstorm that provided a feast for the creatures that inhabited the lightless environment of the ocean floor below. The blind eels, giant white crabs, bulbous-eyed fish with shining fleshy lures where their tongues should be.

“How long?” Stephens said.

Harbison took a deep breath. Even though he was wearing a wool jacket, his skin felt cold.

“Soon,” he said.

Too soon.

The last time it happened.

Another thing the innocent tourists waiting for their ferries didn’t know: The skies above them were filled with B-52s carrying nuclear weapons. These jets crisscrossed the earth at all times of the day and night, preparing for—or forestalling—the next world war.

There was one big problem, though: a B-52 couldn’t fly all the way from the U.S. to Europe on one tank of fuel. It had to refuel in mid-air, coordinating with a KCF-135 tanker jet and connecting its gas tank to a boom dangling from the tanker.

This was a delicate operation at a couple hundred miles an hour, a test of piloting skill. Two and a half years earlier, in January 1966, a B-52 pilot flying over Spain had failed the test. He’d run into the KC-135’s fueling boom, ripping his plane apart and causing the tanker jet to explode.

Everyone on the KC-135 died, as did three of the seven men on the bomber. However spectacular, none of this would have been worth remembering—military pilots and crew died all the time, after all, even when the war was cold, not hot—if it hadn’t been for the B-52’s cargo.

Four 70-kiloton hydrogen bombs had gone down with the wreckage. One of them had fallen into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Palomares, a small fishing town on Spain’s coast.

The Navy had sent thirty-three ships to try to locate the wreckage. But it was Alvin that finally succeeded in finding the bomb more than half a mile down.

Alvin and the CARV, and their pilots and designers, had their moments of fame. But what Harbison remembered most about that time was all the weeks of waiting in Palomares while the Navy narrowed down the search area.

And meeting Adriana, of course.

Depth: 4,260 feet.

They had landed on a ledge protruding from a cliff face. Lit by the beam of Alvin ’s harsh floodlights, the cliff was a steep gray expanse. Here and there rocky spires emerged from the murk, looking half-melted, protean.

This was the midnight zone, where sunlight never penetrated. No plants grew. Nothing photosynthesized. Everything that lived down here ate meat.

Harbison and Michaels had located the B-52’s wreckage, half-buried in silt, three days earlier. It lay on the ledge amid half a dozen outcroppings that pointed like twenty-foot-long stony fingers toward the canyon just beyond.

Now they were back, with Stephens, to watch and wait as the CARV descended, controlled by an operator on its tender. Its cameras would allow it to spot them and then the bomb, and to do its job.

Harbison bent over the controls, maneuvering Alvin between two smokestack-shaped rock promontories. The little sub could easily get caught here, trapped, turning within a few hours into a tomb.

The downed B-52, hidden from his sight for a few minutes, came back into view. Harbison could see the tailfin of the bomb emerging from a tangle of what had once been the jet’s fuselage.

They’d been lucky. Another fifty yards or so west and the ruined jet—and its cargo—would have fallen another mile or more to the bottom of the canyon. And stayed there forever.