the Calypso. The sound of thunder rippled across the deep. Abruptly, the flames fanned out and seemed to assume the form of a dragon flying through the water toward him. Conrad started swimming as fast as he could.
He surfaced a minute later into the dim predawn light of day, gasping for breath. Finally, as he was on the verge of passing out again forever, his larynx opened, and he coughed up a little water from his stomach as he desperately inhaled the salty air.
His groan sounded like jet engines in his own ears. He was sure he was experiencing some kind of pulmonary embolism from coming up so fast. Several deep gulps of air cleared his head enough for him to scan the horizon for his boat. But it wasn't there. In the distance loomed the silhouette of a mega yacht, its decks stacked like gold bullion in the glint of the rising sun, turning away.
Debris floated around him-the remains of his boat. Poor Stavros, he thought. He swam toward a broken wooden plank to use for flotation. But when he got there, he realized it wasn't wood at all. It was the charred carcass of a bottle-nose dolphin, burned to a crisp.
The horrific nature of the Flammenschwert sank in.
It works. It really turns water to fire.
Conrad stared at the dolphin's blackened rostrum and teeth. He felt some stomach acid rising at the back of his own throat and looked away. All around him were incinerated bottle-nose dolphins, floating like driftwood across a sea of death.
2
Sister Serena Serghetti clutched the metal box containing African rice seeds to her chest as she walked down a long tunnel blasted out of the arctic mountain. High above her, fluorescent lights flashed on and off as she passed embedded motion detectors. Close behind, a choir of Norwegian schoolchildren held candles in the flickering darkness and sang 'Sleep Little Seedling.'
Their heavenly voices felt heavy in the freezing air, Serena thought, weighted perhaps by the tunnel's meter- thick walls of reinforced concrete. Or maybe it was her heart that felt so heavy.
The Doomsday Vault, as it was called when it opened in 2008, already housed more than two million seeds representing every variety of the earth's crops. In time it would house a collection of a hundred million seeds from more than 140 countries here on this remote island near the North Pole. It had been built to protect the world's food supply against nuclear war, climate change, terrorism, rising sea levels, earthquakes, and the ensuing collapse of power supplies. If worse came to worst, the vault would allow the world to reconstruct agriculture on the planet.
But now the vault itself was in danger. Thanks to global warming, the shrinking ice caps had spurred a new race for oil in the Arctic. It was the next Saudi Arabia, if someone could figure out a way to extract and transport all that oil through a sea of ice. A few years earlier, the Russians had even planted a flag two and a half miles below the ice at the North Pole to claim its oil reserves. Now Serena feared they were preparing to start mining.
She passed through two separate air locks and into the vault itself, blinking into the glare of the TV lights. The Norwegian prime minister was in there somewhere, along with a delegation from the United Nations.
Serena knelt before the TV cameras and prayed silently for the people of the earth. But she was aware of shutters clicking and photographers' boots shuffling for better shots of her.
Whatever happened to finding a secret place to pray, like Jesus taught? she wondered, unable to shake a guilty feeling. Did the world really need to see Mother Earth arrayed in high-definition piety 24/7? As if the prayers of the Vatican's top linguist and environmental czar counted more than those of the anonymous humble field laborer whose hands culled the seeds she now held.
But this was a cause greater than herself and her tormented thirty-three-year-old soul, she reminded herself. And her official purpose here today was to focus the world's attention on its future.
As she knelt, tightly gripping the box of seeds, a feeling of dread came over her. What the vault meant, what it was built for: the time of the end, which the Bible had prophesied would come soon. The words of the prophet Isaiah whispered in her ear: God is the only God. He will draw all people to Himself to see His glory. He will end this world. And He will judge those who reject Him.
Not something TV audiences wanted to hear.
She felt a nagging sense of hypocrisy about her performance. A disturbing thought began to bubble up, a thought she couldn't quite formulate. Her dread began to take shape in the words of Jesus: 'If therefore you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has anything against you, leave your gift there before the altar, and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.'
She didn't understand. She had plenty of people angry with her at the Vatican-for being a woman, for being beautiful, for drawing cameras wherever she went-and that was just within the Church. Outside, there were the oil and gas companies she chided, and diamond merchants, and the exploiters of children.
But that wasn't what this word from God was about.
Conrad Yeats.
She fought to push his face out of her mind and felt the slightest tremor as her knees pressed against the concrete floor.
That rogue? That liar, cheat, and thief? What could he possibly have against me? Other than I wouldn't sleep with him?
But she couldn't get his face-his handsome unshaved face-out of her mind. Nor could she forget how she had left things in Washington, D.C., a few years back, after he had saved her life. She had promised to leave the Church and be with him forever. Instead she had stolen something priceless out from under him and the U.S. government, leaving him with nothing.
But Lord, You know it was for Conrad's own good and the greater good.
When she opened her eyes and rose to her feet, she surrendered the box of African rice seeds to the Norwegian prime minister. With solemn fanfare, he opened the box for the cameras, revealing sealed silver packets, each labeled with a special bar code. Then he resealed the box and slid it onto its designated shelf in the vault.
After the ceremony, she went into the main tunnel and found her driver and bodyguard, Benito, waiting for her with her parka. She slipped it on, and they started walking toward the main entrance to the facility.
'Just as you suspected, signorina,' he told her, handing her a small blue device. 'Our divers found it at the bottom of the arctic seabed.'
It was a geophone. Oil companies used them to take seismic surveys of the earth's subsurface in search of oil, in this case the earth two miles beneath the ice and water of the North Pole. Her visit to the Doomsday Vault had been a cover for her to meet with divers who could investigate for signs of drilling.
'So someone is planning to mine the bottom of the Arctic,' she said, watching her breath freeze as they stood before the facility's dual blast-proof doors. Slowly and heavily, the doors opened.
The arctic air slapped Serena in the face as she stepped outside, where a van with tanklike treads was waiting to take her to the island's airport, the northernmost in the world with regular flights. Behind her, the exterior of the Doomsday Vault looked like something out of a science fiction movie, a giant granite wedge protruding from the ice.
The Norwegian island of Spitsbergen had been chosen as the location for the seed vault because it was a remote region with low tectonic activity and an arctic environment that was ideal for preservation. Now oil exploration posed a direct threat to this environment. It would also accelerate global warming's melting of the ice cap, threatening coastal cities around the world.
So why was she thinking of Conrad Yeats?
Something is terribly wrong, she thought. He's in danger.
But she couldn't put her finger on why and blamed her gloomy thoughts on the sweeping vista of endless ice and water spread out before her. It brought back memories of her adventure with Conrad in Antarctica years ago.
