After slicing open the remaining air bladders ringing the boat, they opened the sea cocks. The RHIB began sinking by the stern, dragged under by her heavy engines. They waited aboard her even after she slipped under the surface, making sure she settled on the bottom. The current had pushed them south another quarter mile, but they needed to ensure the boat stayed under. The bottom of the river this close to the bank was a jumbled snarl of rotting trees. They tied off the bow painter line to one of the more sturdy limbs and then started northward, propelled through the water by near-silent dive scooters.
Fighting the current, it took them the better part of two hours to reach the border, and another two until they judged it safe to surface. The scooters' batteries were on their last bit of power and the rebreathers nearly depleted. But they'd made it.
The men took a break before starting out on the six-hour slog back to the elevated hut they had slept in thirty-six hours ago. There they had stashed a small aluminum boat with a motor that they had towed into place with the RHIB.
When they reached base, Mike set himself against a tree and promptly nodded off. Juan envied him. Though Trono had been closer to Jerry than Cabrillo, Mike wasn't shouldering any guilt for his death. Just sorrow. Mark Murphy, with his love of all things technical, studied the power cell.
Juan moved a little ways off and pulled a satellite phone from a waterproof pouch. It was time to check in.
Juan, is that you? Max Hanley asked after the first ring. He could picture Max sitting in the Oregon's op center since the mission began, downing cup after cup of coffee and chewing on the stem of his pipe until it was nothing but a gnarled nub.
The phones were so heavily encrypted that there was no chance of them ever being listened in on, so there was no need for code phrases or aliases.
We got it, he replied with such weariness it sounded as though he would never recover. We're six hours out from waypoint Alpha.
I'll call Lang right away, Hanley said. He's been bugging me every twenty minutes since you started off.
There's one more thing. Cabrillo's tone was like ice over the airwaves. Jerry paid the butcher's bill on this one.
There was almost thirty full seconds of silence before Max finally said, Oh, Jesus. No. How?
Does it really matter? Juan asked back.
No, I guess it doesn't, Max said.
Juan blew a loud breath. I tell you, buddy, I'm having a real hard time getting my mind around this.
Why don't you and I take off for a few days when you get back? We'll fly down to Rio, plant our butts on the beach, and ogle a bunch of hard bodies in string bikinis.
Time off sounded good, though Cabrillo didn't particularly relish the idea of leering at women half his age. And he knew that after three failed marriages, Max wasn't really on the prowl either. Then Juan remembered the crashed blimp and Mark's suggestion to give closure to the families of men who'd perished on her. That was what his soul needed. Not staring at pretty girls but offering a bunch of strangers a little peace of mind after fifty years of wondering.
I like the concept, Juan said, but we need to work on the execution. We'll talk about arrangements when we get back to the ship. Also, you might as well go into my office. In the file cabinet should be Jerry's last will. Let's get that ball rolling right away. He didn't have too much love for his ex-wife, but he did have a child.
A daughter, Max replied. I helped him set up a trust for her, and he made me the trustee.
Thanks. I owe you. We should be home by dawn tomorrow.
I'll have the coffee waiting.
Juan replaced the phone into its pouch and sat back against the tree, feeling like he was feeding every mosquito within a fifty-mile radius.
Hey, Chairman, Mark called a few minutes later. Check this out.
What have you got, Juan crawled over to where Mark sat with his legs bent like pretzels.
You see this here and here? He pointed to two tiny indentations on the glossy metal surface.
Yeah.
These correspond with two matching holes in the nylon carrying harness. They're bullet strikes fired up at us from when we took off in the chopper.
Those were nine-millimeter from point-blank range, Juan said. Barely made a mark. That thing is as tough as NASA boasted.
Okay, but look at this. Mark struggled to turn the seventy-pound cell over so the top was facing up and then pointed at an even deeper pit gouged into the satellite fragment.
Juan gave his weapons expert a questioning look.
Nothing matches it on the harness. That was put there before we got our hands on it.
Something the Argentines did to it?
Mark shook his head. We watched them dig it up, and it was out of our sight for only a few minutes before they loaded it into the pickup. I don't recall hearing a shot. You?
No. Could it have happened when the logs slammed into the truck?
I don't think so. I have to do some calculations to be sure, but I don't think there was enough energy in the collision to cause something like this. And remember, the truck flipped into muddy ground. There wasn't anything hard enough and small enough to cause such a smooth divot.
A flash of understanding struck Cabrillo. It happened when the rocket blew. More than enough energy there, right?
That's the answer, Mark replied as if he'd known that all along, but there was little triumph in his voice. The problem is this is the top of the power cell. It would have been protected from the explosion by both the rocket's vertical speed and the bulk of the cell itself.
What are you saying?
I'm not sure. I'd love to do some tests on this back aboard the Oregon, but we're turning it over to some CIA flack in Asunci+|n. We'll never get answers.
What's your gut telling you?
The satellite was intentionally shot down by a weapon that only two countries in the world possess. Us
And China, Juan finished.
The Silent Sea
Chapter NINE
HOUSTON, TEXAS
TOM PARKER NEVER KNEW WHAT HE WAS GETTING himself into when he joined NASA. In his defense, he'd grown up in rural Vermont, and his parents never had a television because the reception on the side of the mountain where they raised dairy cows was terrible.
He knew something was up on his first day at the Johnson Space Center when his secretary placed a beautiful blown-glass bottle on the credenza behind his desk and said it was for Jeannie. He'd asked her to explain, and when she realized he had no clue as to Jeannie's identity she'd chuckled and said cryptically that he'd soon find out.
Next came a pair of hand-painted bellows delivered anonymously to his office. Again, Parker didn't know what this meant and asked for an explanation. By now, several other women in the secretarial pool knew of his ignorance, as did his supervisor, an Air Force Colonel who was a deputy director in the astronaut-training program.
The last piece of the puzzle was an autographed picture of a man in his mid- to late fifties, with receding red hair and bright blue eyes. It took Parker a while to figure out that the signature was that of Hayden Rorke. Internet research was at its infancy then, so he had to rely on a local library. This lead him to eventually discover that Rorke was an actor who played a NASA psychiatrist named Alfred Bellows who was continually vexed by astronaut Anthony Nelson and the genie he'd found on a beach.
Dr. Tom Parker was a NASA psychiatrist, and the I Dream of Jeannie jokes never stopped. After almost ten
