Jeffery Deaver - Ice Cold

Small favors. But that didn’t mean that the citizens of Palomares were free and clear. The reason: Every nuclear weapon came packed with conventional explosives as well as nuclear material. When two of the Palomares bombs hit the ground after a six-mile free fall from the doomed jet, their explosives detonated.

The military claimed that no one was killed by the explosions themselves. What came out later was the fact that a cloud of radioactive material—plutonium dust—was blown hundreds of feet in the air by each exploding bomb and dispersed by the wind over the surrounding farmland.

While farmers, unaware of the dangers, unprotected, continued to till their poisoned fields, teams of American scientists and soldiers in hazard suits dug up countless tons of tainted dirt, which was then shipped to a plant in South Carolina for decontamination.

Of course the residents of surrounding areas were alarmed. Who wouldn’t be? But scientists claimed that the level of exposure couldn’t possibly be harmful. To prove it, the Spanish minister for information and the U.S. ambassador even went swimming off a nearby beach for newspaper and TV reporters.

By the time the first reports of radiation sickness came in, it was too late.

Harbison had met Adriana in the café where she worked in Palomares. Perhaps thirty, she was dark, pretty, lively, with a mass of black hair that she wore pulled back, revealing her high forehead and eyes full of intelligence and merriment.

Adriana knew enough English that, alongside his workmanlike Spanish, they could converse. And she seemed to like him, a rare enough occurrence to be worth noticing.

If he’d told anyone about her, they would have laughed. A summer-camp romance, they would have called it. A fling. Something to enjoy, then forget as soon as you went home.

But for the Alvin pilot, condemned to spend eight or nine months a year out at sea, it was much more.

Day after day, waiting for his mission to begin, he hung around the café, drinking coffee, watching the people come and go, and grabbing Adriana’s few free moments to chat. As the days passed, she took to spending her breaks with him, and then they started to meet in the evenings as well.

They never spent a night together, though. Not once. Every evening she went home to her parents’ farm outside of town. A farm located just two miles from where the explosives on one of the hydrogen bombs had detonated, spewing a plume of radioactivity into a stiff wind.

By the time the lost bomb was found, and Harbison was called to work, Adriana was looking thin and feeling unwell.

By the time he returned, she was in the hospital, already a grotesque scarecrow version of the plump, talkative girl she’d been.

And by the time he was called back to the United States for debriefing, she was dead.

No one ever made the news public, or took responsibility.

Harbison guided Alvin closer to the wreck, which lay between two of the twisted spires. The floodlights showed that its nose, still mostly intact, was pointing upward, while the rest, a jumble of jagged shards, lay around and beneath it.

Something caught his eye. Motion. A human arm and hand, the bones of the fingers and forearm protruding through gray ragged skin, waving in the slight current. Below lay the white blur of a half-skeletal, eyeless face.

The B-52’s pilot.

Harbison saw a sudden, slithering movement. A hagfish rose into the light, the heavy slime that coated its snakelike body catching Alvin ’s floodlights. It stared through the porthole with eyes like holes, and its nightmare mouth, a black cavern ringed by gleaming teeth, gaped at him.

Other hagfish moved in the shadows beneath it. Perhaps a dozen more, writhing in the dead pilot’s midsection, gorging on the unexpected deep-sea bounty of flesh.

Alvin moved forward, leaving the feast behind. Ahead lay the rest of the wreckage and the bomb. It was shaped like a torpedo and composed of black steel that absorbed the light and reflected nothing.

And beyond it, behind one more line of rocky spires, lay the black abyss of Monterey Canyon.

“Okay,” Stephens said, gesturing. “Pick it up.”

But before Harbison engaged the thrusters, he felt an odd vibration tickling the front of his spine. It grew stronger, still not quite a sound, more like the throbbing at the onset of a migraine headache.

“Ah,” the old man said, lifting a hand. “Wait.”

Ten seconds later there came a muffled thud and a brilliant flash of light, just as quickly extinguished, in the middle distance. Alvin jolted where it stood. When it settled, the vibration was gone.

Harbison said, “That was your baby?”

“The CARV, yes.” Stephens gave a shrug. Then he smiled. “Easy enough to plant a limpet mine on it, designed to go off at depth.”

Harbison understood. “Without its cameras, they’re blind up top now.”

The old man smiled. “Yes, blind and panicking. Scrambling around, trying to figure out what happened to their robot sub… and us, too. Blind, deaf, lost.”

Harbison thought about it. “With the deep scattering layer, they won’t even be able to find us on sonar.”

Stephens nodded. “Right now they just think they’re in the middle of a fiasco. By the time they figure out what really happened, we’ll be long gone.” He made a delicate gesture with the fingers of both hands, like a bomb exploding. “And they’ll have plenty of other things to worry about.”

That had been the part of the plan Harbison had heard, though he’d been spared the details. Pick up the bomb. Return unseen to the surface, where they would be met by two boats run by Stephens’s compatriots. Once they’d taken the bomb aboard, they’d sink Alvin over the depths of Monterey Canyon, where it would never be found.

One boat would then head inland to launch the attack. The other, with Stephens and Harbison onboard, would head west, into international waters, to meet up with the larger ship that would carry them to safety.

It was guaranteed that at first the military would have no idea where the two of them had gone, or even if they were still alive. There would be a search, but it was likely that in the long run Harbison would be declared dead, a captain gone down with his ship.

And, as Stephens had said, once the conventional explosives on the hydrogen bomb had detonated, sending a vast cloud of radioactive material over densely populated northern California and across into the fertile Central Valley, the U.S. government was going to have plenty on its hands. By the time the search resumed, their trails would have gone cold.

As close to a foolproof plan as you could devise.

Though, of course, no plan was completely foolproof.

At the end of their conversation in Stephens’s New Jersey office, Harbison had said, “Why?”

The old man had raised bushy gray eyebrows in an answering question. But Harbison knew he understood, and merely waited.

Finally Stephens said, “Fear.”

Harbison was quiet.

“Fear,” Stephens said, “is powerful. Yet you Americans have never felt it here, not real fear, not on your own soil. For you, it’s always someplace else. Everyplace else.” His mouth twisted. “Fear loses wars, especially the ones that last for decades.”

Still Harbison didn’t speak.

“And you?” the old man said.

Harbison was ready for the question. “Revenge,” he said. “Of course.”

And kept his gaze steady.

On a typical mission, his next step would have been to dump ballast and head for the surface. But this time, the bomb securely clasped in Alvin ’s claws—up to the task, as he’d known they’d be—he followed Stephens’s instructions. Using the thrusters to move north, then west, then north again, maneuvering into position over Monterey Canyon in preparation for making their rendezvous at the surface.