Benito said, 'Our divers say there are thousands of them, maybe even tens of thousands, below us.'
Serena realized he was talking about the geophone in her hand. 'It will take them at least six months to map all the underground formations,' she said. 'So we still have some time before they decide where to start drilling. That might give us a chance to stop them.'
'The Russians?' Benito asked.
'Maybe.' She flipped the geophone over and saw the manufacturer's name: Midas Minerals amp; Mining LTD. 'But I know who can tell us.'
3
If Sir Roman Midas loved anything in his life, it was his prized superyacht. Named after his one true love- himself-the Midas had a two-thousand-square-foot gym, two two-person submarines, and two helicopter pads, one for his chopper and one for guests. At 595 feet, the Midas was longer than the Washington Monument was high and, by design, resembled a shining stack of sliced gold bricks. Today those bricks sat atop the sparkling blue waters of the Ionian Sea near the Greek island of Corfu.
Not bad for a Russian orphan turned British tycoon, Roman Midaslovich told himself as he stood on the aft- deck helipad. He watched while a winch transferred the unmarked crate to the awaiting helicopter, its blades whirling for takeoff.
Midas's London-based trading firm, Midas Minerals amp; Mining, had made him the world's richest trader in minerals and metals futures, and his patronage to the art world had won him a knighthood from the queen. It had also made him a top lieutenant inside the Alignment, a centuries-old organization whose leaders fancied themselves the political if not the biological descendants of Atlantis. Utter rubbish, Midas had thought when he first heard the Alignment's claim to have orchestrated the rise and fall of empires across the ages. He alone was responsible for his rise from a Russian orphanage and the mines of Siberia to the trading pits of Chicago. But then the Alignment had orchestrated his entree to the jet set of London and awarded him seats inside some of the international organizations that truly set the world's agenda: the Club of Rome, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberg Group. Now he was a believer.
He waved off the pilot and watched the chopper lift into the sky. Then he turned to see Vadim Fedorov, his number two, standing before him in all his steroid-pumped muscularity. 'They're waiting for you in the decompression chamber, sir,' Vadim said.
'They' were two of the other divers from the Nausicaa extraction, Sergei and Yorgi. As far as everyone else was concerned, they were the only people who had seen the Flammenschwert besides himself and the pilot of the submersible, whom he had already dispatched to the ocean depths. Meanwhile, the helicopter would carry the crate to the airstrip on Corfu, and Midas's Gulfstream V private jet in turn would fly it to its intended destination.
'Is everything set?' Midas asked.
Vadim nodded. 'You were right. They are FSB. Sergei sent a text message to Moscow almost immediately after they surfaced.'
'They never really went away, you know.'
Midas was speaking of Russia's ancient secret police, which, after the czars, had become the Soviet Union's feared KGB. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia's first president, Boris Yeltsin, had dismantled the KGB and renamed it the Federal Security Service, or FSB.
Many deeply disillusioned agents, such as Sergei and Yorgi, had gone into the private security business, ultimately supplanting the mafia in running Russia's 'protection' rackets. Others, such as Russia's former president and prime minister Vladimir Putin, had penetrated the government. Today in Russia, three out of four leading politicians boasted a background in the security forces, and almost every large Russian corporation was run by ex- KGB executives with personal ties to Putin.
Sergei and Yorgi, despite their employment agreements with Midas Minerals amp; Mining, were Putin's men and as such no longer of any use to Midas. 'Tell them I'll be down in a moment. First I owe Sorath a progress report,' Midas said. Vadim nodded.
Midas entered his stateroom and poured himself a drink while he waited for the coded signal to connect. Right now Sorath was just a code name to a voice on the other end of the phone. Midas had no idea who Sorath was or if they had ever met. But all his questions would be answered soon enough.
'This is Xaphan,' Midas reported as soon as a light told him he was on a secure connection with Sorath. 'The sword has been removed from its sheath and is en route to Uriel. A successful test has proved the design is safe for deployment and that the device's criticality formulas are correct.'
'What of Semyaza?' the voice demanded, referring to Yeats.
'Dead.'
'Those were not your orders.' There was anger in the voice.
'It couldn't be helped,' Midas said, and quickly moved on. 'We're on schedule. T minus eight days.'
'Keep it that way.'
The line cut out, and Midas stared at the images of Conrad Yeats on the large flat-panel screen of his computer. He zoomed in on one in particular-of the archaeologist's DNA. There was nothing remarkable about it save for one thing: It spiraled to the left. All indigenous life on earth has DNA that spirals to the right. To the Alignment, that bestowed Yeats with some mystical meaning, as if the freak of nature somehow possessed some lost pieces of Atlantean blood in his genetic makeup.
Midas could care less. He closed the image on his screen and, with a few taps on his keyboard, connected with his trading firm mainframes in London. Then he went down to the lower decks and the yacht's submersible launch bay.
Next to a double-domed 'deep flight' Falcon submarine, designed to fly underwater like a private jet through the air, was the decompression chamber, its hatch wide open, with Sergei and Yorgi waiting for him inside.
Yorgi didn't look too good, his stomach hastily patched where the late, great Dr. Yeats had stabbed him with his own harpoon dart.
'We could have been decompressing instead of waiting for you,' Sergei complained. 'Are you trying to kill us?'
Midas smiled, stepped inside the chamber, and allowed Vadim to close the hatch on the three of them. The air compressor started to hum and raise the internal air pressure to rid their bodies of harmful gas bubbles caused by inhaling oxygen at higher pressure during their dive for the Flammenschwert. The two divers were rubbing their itchy skin and sore joints. They were clearly displaying symptoms of the bends-their lungs alone were unable to expel the bubbles formed inside their bodies.
'I wanted us to decompress together,' Midas said, taking his seat opposite the two FSB men. 'But first I had to see off the Flammenschwert.'
Sergei and Yorgi looked at each other. 'The arrangement was for us to take it back to Moscow,' Sergei said.
'Nyet,' said Midas. 'I have other plans for the Flammenschwert, and they don't involve the FSB.'
'You are a dead man if you betray Moscow, Midaslovich,' Sergei said. 'Our organization spans the globe and is as old as the czars.'
'Mine is older,' Midas scoffed. 'And now it has something yours does not-the power to turn oceans into fire.'
'The deal was to use it in the Arctic and split the oil,' Sergei pressed.
'Like the deal you did with British Petroleum in Russia before you stole their operations and ran them out?' Midas answered calmly as the air inside the chamber started to smell like bitter almonds. 'Fools. Higher oil prices may have fueled your regime, but you don't know how to manage production. So you nationalize it and penalize real producers like me. Now that production has peaked, you have no choice but to stick your noses south into the Middle East and make war. You could have been kings instead of criminals.'
Sergei and Yorgi began to cough and choke. Sergei said, 'What have you done?'
