Armen Gharabegian - Protocol 7

Ever.

The Command Center

Blackburn wasn’t quite as alone as he preferred to be. He could hear the buzz of activity in adjacent rooms, the occasional and unwelcome sigh of a footfall nearby.

This was not like the room of ice where he preferred to work. There was a desk here and a full communications system that linked him with the rest of the world. A great advantage in some ways; a curse as often as not.

A soft female voice whispered in his ear: Takara, reporting in on her way to Corsica.

“I’ve lost them,” she said.

“Damn. The tracker?”

“We’re scanning, but…they may have found it.”

“May have?” This wasn’t what he wanted to hear, Simon Fitzpatrick and a handful of his compatriots, completely off the charts.

“Shall I get back to London?” Takara asked.

“No,” he said. “You have your mission on the island. That’s where you’re needed.” He cut the connection with a sharp gesture and not a single word.

They’re afraid, he told himself. Terrified. Simon’s oldest friend, murdered by an unseen hand. All of them chased by some shadowy government agency, and they don’t even know why. They’ve run to ground. They’re hiding. Cowering.

Whether that was true or not, it didn’t matter. He turned away from the annoying little episode and put his mind elsewhere.

He had far greater matters to deal with.

Fifty Miles from Antarctica

The Spector cut through the blackness of the ocean at blazing speed. Simon sat staring wordlessly at the holo-screen and engulfed in deep thoughts.

I wonder if we’ll find him? he asked himself. What if he isn’t there at all? How will I explain all this-justify it? What if the entire mission was for nothing? He played the worst possible scenarios over and over in his head, accompanied by the discordant rummmmble of the Spector’s engines.

The coordinates scrawled on the back of the envelope still haunted him. They persisted in his mind’s eye as if he had looked at them mere moments before, rather than a week in the past and thousands of miles away. He had not shared the last number in the coordinate sequence with anyone; he knew the last of the coordinates signifying the depth would startle the team. It made no sense. He wondered if it was a mistake. How could the last coordinate be over a thousand feet below the ice? And how did Leon know?

The rest of his team sat in silence as well, each submerged in their own grim worlds. Simon watched as Andrew twiddled idly with the sensor controls and Samantha dozed. Nastasia, both nervous and bored, dug into her satchel and pulled out what seemed to be an asthmatic inhaler. Absent-mindedly, she flipped the mouthpiece’s cover open and closed.

“Oh, wonderful,” Ryan said from his station. “Just wonderful.”

Simon roused himself from his bitter reverie. “What’s up?”

Ryan signed bitterly. “Icebergs ahead,” he said. “Lots of them.”

“What?”

“Blame global warming,” Max said from the console. “The glaciers and permafrost on the continental masses have been calving icebergs at a huge rate; both poles have a ring of icebergs floating around them just offshore. Huge navigational hazard.”

Simon seethed. “And you didn’t think to mention it until now?”

“Well,” Max replied acidly, still not taking his hands from the holographic controls or his eyes from the visual and sensor display, “I’ve been a little busy recently, and I was rather hoping that she would be a bit easier to steer so it wouldn’t be such a task.”

There was a low, deep, monotonous beeping sound-not deafening, but impossible to ignore. A shapeless mass appeared on the sonar display and started pulsing a dark, dull red.

“Ah,” Hayden said, recognizing the tone. “Proximity alert.”

“Apparently I was wrong,” Max said through clenched teeth.

He moved his hands almost gracefully, guiding the Spector ten degrees to the right and a gentle five degrees downward. The red blob of the iceberg drifted away from them on the display, fading out of range.

“Problem solved?” Sam asked hopefully from her seat at the environmental station.

“For the moment,” Max said. “There will be others.”

“Lots more,” Ryan said. “I just upped the range on the forward sonar/radar scans, as far as I could. There’s a goddamn forest of these things. The closer we get to the ice wall, the worse it gets.”

Hayden squinted first at the sonar display, then the front-facing holo-screen. It was difficult to see anything through the unadjusted cameras, even with the high-intensity lights on. “Are we still on target for Station 35?”

Max responded without moving his head, “I’m not sure. My instruments are showing a different depth than the Spector.”

Simon saw Nastasia stiffen in her seat. Her eyes narrowed. She tucked the inhaler into her satchel and looked grim.

Hayden scowled at Ryan and Andrew. “I don’t like this,” he said.

“There must be an explanation for it, Hayden,” Ryan said. “I know you believe the instrument cluster over the jerry-rigged holo-display cameras, but-”

“You don’t understand the amount of sensors this thing has,” Hayden said. “They work independently of each other; then the information is cross-referenced and reanalyzed in a thousand ways before you get a signal. Even in its dumbed-down state, the Spector wouldn’t give a warning signal or suggest a course of action if something wasn’t drastically wrong.” He glanced from one instrument set to another, glowering at the console where he was sitting. “But this data is crazy, Simon. I don’t get it. Feels like we’re in the goddamn Bermuda Triangle.”

Max shook his head, trying to make sense of what was going on himself.

Andrew called from the navigation array. “Guys,” he said, “the computers are freaking out. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“Hayden,” Max said, “I’m going to adjust course, get us back on track using the instruments only.” The team looked on with growing concern as Max navigated the vessel back on course, ignoring the warning signal.

“You’re going to kill us!” Hayden shouted. “You just can’t ignore the information like that! It-”

“Hayden!” Simon snapped. “We made a decision in Chile to trust Max and his experience. He knows what he’s doing.”

I hope to hell you’re right, Max thought silently. Because at the moment, he felt as if they would be very, very lucky if he didn’t drive them directly into a rogue iceberg and kill them all.

“This is what it shows is directly ahead of us,” Max said. “We’re really traveling at a depth of six hundred meters, down from 350. I’m sure of that. I can see that on the front-facing cameras. No digital interference there. And it shows us nothing but clear sea for at least two hundred feet above us, while the instrument cluster shows…chaos.”

Simon shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I. The instrument holo shows icebergs; my eyes see open water. The holo gives six different depths a minute; I see 350 feet. The cluster shows the opening of Station 35 in one place; the map shows the opening in another place. Strap back in.”

The last comment caught Simon by surprise. “What?” he said.

“Strap back in!” Simon clutched at the belt, clicked it shut, and Max pulled the Spector up into a seventy-five-degree tip, as he avoided another iceberg, shot forward past an oncoming chunk as big as a skyscraper and tipped level again.

The entire team stared at the flat-screen, then at the holo, then back at the flat screen again. The black octagonal dot of Station 35 was growing slowly, steadily larger on both. They all frowned or cursed quietly in confusion.