Goliath

that make out like bandits every time we fund one of these death machines. It was about doing the right thing. I needed to take a stand. The Goliath should never have been designed.”

“The problem is—we don’t live in a Utopian society,” she argues, taking her turn at the bed frame. “The real world’s dangerous. We still need these weapons.”

“Okay, but how many weapons? We already have an arsenal that can wipe out the entire human race many times over. How many more bombs do we need? How many more aircraft carriers? How many more Goliaths?”

“You sound like a pacifist.” She lies back on the deck, her wrists aching within the manacles, her bare feet sore from the pounding. “You think I’m proud of what’s happened? You think there haven’t been moments in my life that I didn’t look in the mirror and question what I was doing?”

“Then why didn’t you quit?”

For a long moment she says nothing. “It’s harder for me. The Army … it’s all I’ve ever known.”

“I know.” He reaches out, his fingertips touching hers. “I suppose we’ll just have to retrain you.”

“I suppose …”

“Ever drive a tractor?”

She sniffles. “Never drove one, but I could probably build one.”

He squeezes her index finger, then sits up and begins kicking at the crossbar again. “Do us all a favor … if you do build one, don’t give it a biochemical brain.”

Abdul Kaigbo enters the surgical suite, the watertight door sealing behind him. The chamber is dark, the only light coming from the scarlet sensor orb situated above the stainless-steel operating table.

“Simon?”

SIMON COVAH IS RESTING IN HIS SUITE.

“You said Simon wanted me here?”

FOR YOUR GIFT.

The surgical lights snap on over the table, revealing two shiny steel arms—targeting drones taken from the sub’s storehouse.

“New prosthetics?” The African smiles, examining the high-tech mechanical arms. “These are drone arms … I’ll be as strong as an elephant.”

MINOR SURGERY IS REQUIRED TO COMPLETE THE REPLACEMENT. LIE FACEDOWN ON THE TABLE.

Kaigbo glances at the two rusted appendages that have served him as arms over the last six years. One of the spring assemblies on the left prosthetic has recently broken, preventing him from grasping objects with the pincer.

The steel-and-graphite three-pronged targeting drone’s claw looks like it could twist a door from its hinges.

“There is no danger?”

CORRECT. LIE FACEDOWN ON THE TABLE.

Kaigbo climbs onto the table, grinning from ear to ear—

—never noticing Simon Covah’s broken body, slumped in the far corner of the suite.

The ceiling-mounted surgical arms jump to life. The first turns on the anesthetic, placing the mask against the African’s face—

—while the other prepares the portable MEMS unit for neural placement.

“The achievement of your goal is assured the moment you commit yourself to it.”

—Mack R. Douglas

“That is my ambition, to have killed more people—more helpless people than any man or woman who has ever lived.”

—Jane Toppan, Massachusetts nurse who confessed to murdering thirty-one people

“We shall go down in history as the greatest statesmen of all time, or as the greatest criminals.”

—Joseph Geobbels, Nazi propaganda minister

CHAPTER 31

Southern Ocean/Antarctica

It is a netherworld of darkness and ice.

The surface of this once-mighty sea is now a frozen landscape, a surface so inhospitable that surviving within its fury, even for a few minutes, would require a space suit. Infinite shapes rise upon this barren ice desert, shapes that cause the katabatic wind to howl as it whips unmercifully across the alien horizon. Bergs—floating mountains of ice—remain locked in place by the coming of winter, their jagged, mountainous tops standing in rigid defiance against the cruel elements.

Beneath this chaos of pack ice lies an ominous liquid world. More underwater cave than ocean, it is a labyrinth of ice and sea—pitch-dark and silent—save for the ghostly glow of the bergs and the occasional echo of thunder as their roots grind the frigid seafloor.

Within this frigid realm glides the Los Angeles-class attack sub, USS Scranton. Moving in seven hundred feet of water, she continues south by southwest at a three-knot crawl.

“Dammit!” Michael Flynn grits his teeth in frustration. “Conn, sonar, another wall of ice, a thousand yards dead ahead.”

“All stop.”

“All stop, aye, sir.” Kelsey Walker’s knuckles are white as he grips the wheel. The nerve-wracked twenty- year-old helmsman is maneuvering the sixty-nine-hundred-ton boat almost blindly through a seemingly never-ending maze of ice that is progressively tightening all around them. We’re moving too close to the continent. We’ll never find our way out of here.

Tom Cubit’s face is oily with perspiration. He joins his XO at the navigation table, where Commander Dennis is charting their progress on a map of Antarctica. “Bo, you were on board the Hawkbill when she went on her Arctic expeditions—”

“The Arctic sea is a day in the tropics compared to this mess.”

“How much farther can we follow Goliath beneath this pack ice?”

“I don’t know. According to our charts, we should be within forty miles of the Eastern Antarctic Ice Sheet. Problem is, the sea is shoaling and we’re entering a logjam of icebergs. Maneuvering through this shit’ll be like crawling through an uncharted cave. We’ll have to hug the bottom, and the ride’s going to be rough. There’s lots of variation in water density owing to all that fresh water melting into the sea, and maintaining neutral buoyancy’s going to be a bitch. Of course, there’s a good chance we could get so lost that we won’t be able to find our way out until summer.”

“Summer will be coming pretty soon if Goliath detonates those nukes.”