Jack Mars - Primary Threat

He could kill someone right now, a lot of someones. And Cayman Island was far away, out of reach for the moment. Stone and Newsam had just sent themselves off with the underwater version of the Donner Party, a frozen suicide mission that could only end in disaster. And there were a bunch of terrorists out there who had already killed innocent people. The men holding that oil rig were bad guys, and no one was going to be bothered all that much if they died.

Murphy’s mind began to race along. Swann and Trudy had been banished to their own office, and that was not necessarily a bad thing. They were both wizards with technology. If their communications weren’t quarantined… a big if, but…

“Murph? What do you want to do?”

Murphy’s eyes were shooting laser beams. His hands could throw flaming fireballs. He was unstoppable right now, the way he’d always been. All these years in combat, and he’d hardly ever seen a scratch. It was amazing how things came together.

“I want a boat,” he said, without realizing he would say that. “I want weapons, I want drone support, and I want guidance across the storm to that oil rig.”

He paused, his mind moving so fast now, pure images, that he could barely articulate the thoughts in words.

“I want to get in the game.”

Luke jumped into the dark hole.

He dropped through a thin sheen of ice into a surreal underwater world. In an instant, the utilitarian, almost locker-room like environment of the dome was gone, replaced by this …

The sea was dark blue, disappearing into the black void below him. Above his head, the ice was a stark bluish white, with glowing rectangles of bright white light marking where the domes were, where the holes had been cut through the ice.

It was an alien place.

He could be an astronaut sailing weightless through deep space.

The most pressing thing he noticed was the cold. It wasn’t the frigid cold of jumping into the ocean during late autumn. It didn’t penetrate him. The dry suit was perfectly effective at keeping out the ice water that would kill him in moments.

In that sense, he wasn’t cold. But he could feel the cold all around him, against the outside of the thick neoprene. His skin felt cold. It was if the cold was alive, and trying to burrow its way in to reach him. If it found a way, he would die down here. It was just that simple.

The only sound he could hear was his own breathing, loud in his ears. He noticed it was fast and shallow, and he concentrated on slowing it down and deepening it. Shallow breathing was the beginning of panic. Panic made you lose your head. In a place like this, it would make you lose your life.

Relax.

Luke put his cylindrical, torpedo-like delivery vehicle into gear, and surged gently forward.

Ahead, the group of divers moved, their headlamps lighting up the dark, casting eerie shadows. Luke half expected a giant shark, a prehistoric megalodon, to suddenly appear out of the darkness in front of them.

As they left the camp behind, he noticed the sea was moving, roiling, and the thick ice ceiling above their heads rippled and surged like land under the effect of a powerful earthquake. He and Ed moved side by side, traveling through the heavy currents, the diver delivery vehicles in their hands doing most of the work.

Luke felt himself being pushed around, he felt the water’s attempts to turn him upside down, or send him reeling into Ed, but he rolled with it and pushed on.

He glanced at Ed. Ed had good trim, his body nearly horizontal, pitched forward just a touch, his head up. Luke could not see Ed’s face beneath his helmet. The effect was alienating. Ed could be an imposter, or a machine.

Murmured voices started to come through the helmet radio. Luke could barely hear them, and couldn’t make out what they said. The sound of his breathing apparatus was much louder than the radio. It was going to be hard to communicate.

He glanced back. The lights penetrating into the darkness from above were fading into the distance. They had already left the base camp behind.

Time entered a strange sort of fugue state. He glanced at his watch. He had set the mission timer just before he had dropped into the water. It had clocked a little over ten minutes since that moment.

They passed the edge of the ice sheet and the ceiling above them became dark, even black, punctuated with moving blocks of ice. Everything went dark now, lit only by their headlamps, and the headlamps ahead of them.

They were already close, and it had happened much faster than he expected.

Steady… steady.

He passed a small device, glowing green in the darkness. It was a metal box, perhaps ten meters to his right. At a guess, it was a meter tall and half a meter wide. There were controls of various kinds along one side. It was small enough and far away enough that he almost didn’t see it at all.

It was a robot, what Luke knew as a remotely operated underwater vehicle, or ROV. It was attached to a thick yellow tether that disappeared into the black distance to the north. The tether was probably its primary electricity source. It probably also contained the wires that controlled it, and through which it sent data back to… where?

It had a large round eye, likely the lens of a camera.

Hadn’t anyone else noticed this thing?

He tried to make a turn in that direction, but his momentum carried him past before he could get anywhere near it. Ed turned to look at him. Luke tried to point to the ROV, but it was well behind him now, and the suit and the equipment were too bulky.

They should go back, grab that thing, and at least inspect it. No one said anything about remote controlled cameras being deployed on this mission. It was sending images to someone.

They needed to cut that tether.

The murmuring inside his helmet grew louder now, but somehow he still couldn’t make out the words. One by one, the headlamps ahead of him winked out, ushering in total darkness.

The first commandos were reaching the shoreline.

Luke glanced back one last time. The lights of the camp were far away, like stars in the night sky. If you got lost, you were supposed to make for those.

The green robot drifted, already far behind, watching him. At this distance, it could be a nothing more than a piece of green bioluminescence.

He reached up to turn off his headlamp. To his left, Ed’s light winked out.

And that’s when the screaming started.

Murphy hated everyone.

He realized the truth of it, he was raging, and he let that rage take him. It was a cold, sick world, and it deserved nothing less than his complete disdain. Disdain and hate. Hate guided him. Hate nourished and sustained him. Hate protected him from harm.

You couldn’t kill officious military dinks that kicked you out of meetings and mocked you with their eyes. That was against the rules. That would land you in jail. But you could kill the enemy.

He steered the small Navy riverine boat through the storm. The boat was not built for Arctic waters, but it would do for one mad kamikaze run.

It was powered by two big 440 brake horsepower twin diesel engines. The hull was aluminum with plate armor. The collars were high-strength solid cell foam. The icy swells here were huge, crashing over the bow. He rammed the boat through chunks of ice, making vicious ripping sounds every time he did. The wind screamed in his ears.

He was in the cockpit, behind an armored wall. A smoke grenade launcher and a big .50 caliber chain gun were mounted up in the bow, ten feet in front of him. The chain gun would rip an armored vehicle to shreds, but he had no idea if it was going to work—it was freezing out here, and salty, frozen water was spraying all over the place. Moreover, this was not a one-man boat—he’d have to ditch the cockpit to get to the gun.