Charon's landing

probability of Kerikov resurfacing, and now it was happening. Harry’s missing limb twitched again; he could feel it as if it were really there. “You think he’s after revenge?”

Mercer shook his head. “There are too many other things involved, but if I get taken out in the cross fire, I’m sure the son of a bitch won’t shed any tears.”

“Well, it can’t be a coincidence,” Harry said pointedly.

“No, but it could be fate.” The last time he’d squared off against Kerikov, the United States had almost erupted in civil war. He was truly frightened of what would happen this time.

“Tiny, take him to the airport. I’ll watch the bar.” A line like that from Harry would have usually demanded a number of quips, but Tiny untied his apron and tossed it on the bar without comment.

Mercer was almost out the back door following Paul Gordon’s diminutive figure when he turned back to Harry. “If I don’t come back, stay low, will you? He knows who you are too.”

“If you don’t come back, I might as well commit suicide and save Kerikov the hassle of killing me.” Harry looked down at his drink for a moment and when he glanced up again, his eyes were heavy with emotion. “Take care of yourself, Philip.”

It was the first time since they’d met that Harry had used Mercer’s first name, and it sounded so much like a final good-bye that Mercer paused, locked eyes with his old friend, and then nodded almost imperceptibly.

Prince William Sound

Built by Yarrow and Company in 1964 as a Hecla class survey ship for the Royal Navy, the Hope retained her sparse military lines even under coats of garish yellow paint that made her look like an oversized bathtub toy. Her flat bows rode almost perpendicular to the choppy swells, and her stern was equally blunted. She was two hundred thirty-five feet long; two thirds of her main deck supported a three-level superstructure, her squared funnel thrust through the center. There was a helicopter pad on the aft deck, and a garage below the bridge that housed her two yellow Range Rovers. A ten-ton crane angled forward, ready to swing the vehicles to or from shore.

With accommodations for one hundred twenty-three crewmen, she had more than enough space for the twenty-two members of PEAL who crewed her and the up to sixty others who accompanied her on her voyages. Her twenty-thousand-mile range allowed the Hope to cruise anywhere in the world, calling attention to environmental damage. She wasn’t quick, possessing a top speed of only thirteen knots, but the bow thruster running athwartships made her maneuverable. Her three Pax-man Ventura V-12 turbo diesels and her strengthened hull made her safe in heavy ice.

When PEAL had bought her, they had done little to change her interior specifications, leaving in place the two laboratories, the photographic studio, and her large cargo holds. Sea-blue carpet had been laid in all passages and companionways, and her utilitarian gray walls had been repainted in soft pastels of mauve and cream. Many of the interior spaces were covered with posters. The prints ran to a similar theme: entreaties to save rain forests and oceans and endangered species. Pandas and whales were the two most common animals pictured, along with disturbing scenes of industrial pollution spoiling air and water alike.

The most evocative picture hung in the place of honor in the mess hall and was used by PEAL in their ad campaigns. It showed a six-year-old South American Indian boy wearing nothing but a ragged pair of shorts. Behind him, a wall of smoky flames shot high into the air as fire consumed the edge of the Brazilian rain forest. The boy gravely regarded a huge earthmover treading toward him, its driver’s face hidden behind a bulbous gas mask. No caption was necessary.

Because she drew fifteen and a half feet of water, the Hope couldn’t tie up to one of the piers around the town of Valdez. She lay at anchor a few hundred yards offshore and was the largest vessel in Prince William Sound except for the steady procession of tankers running to and from the oil terminal across the bay. She’d approached the coastline only once since arriving in the Sound, so that one of her Range Rovers could be lifted ashore at the ferry terminal.

The ship’s offshore position gave Jan Voerhoven a few minutes to watch his guest being motored to the Hope aboard one of their custom yellow Zodiacs. Despite the bright sun, the air was bitterly cold. An arctic front held all of Alaska in its grip, dropping temperatures fifteen to twenty degrees below normal. The locals were saying that this could be the worst winter in the past quarter century and it was only mid- October. The two men manning the Zodiac were hunched against the frigid gusts blasting across the Sound, their slickers pulled high around their heads, but their passenger seemed oblivious to the weather. He sat stoically in the middle of the inflatable boat, his shoulders squared, his cannonball head held erect. He didn’t even take the precaution of wearing a hat to help preserve his body heat. Voerhoven could easily see the silvered bristles of his crew cut.

Jan Voerhoven had faced nature that way many times in his life, always seeking to feel closer to her, but this man came not to taste nature’s power but to dominate. Even at this distance, Voerhoven could see his arrogance. He looked as though he felt nothing for nature, not her gentle caresses or her harsh torments and seemed almost contemptuous of the cold. Voerhoven felt the bile of hatred building in his stomach, churning and roiling bitterly.

From the time of his very first memories, Jan had always loved the world around him, not the cities and roads and man-made canals of his native Holland, but the natural world, the world of wind and oceans and land. As a boy, he spent hours enraptured by the interplay of the clouds as they ranged above his backyard. He thought nothing could be more perfect than the soil on which he lived. He was ten when he found out it was all a lie.

He learned that his whole country, everything that he’d ever seen in his young life, had been built on land stolen from the North Sea. His teachers had proudly explained that it had been “reclaimed.” Earthen dikes and dams had been built along the coast so that the once fertile seafloor could be drained, cultivated, and developed. The teacher said it was a marvel of human ingenuity and perseverance.

Young Jan saw the creation of Holland as deliberate theft. How could something be reclaimed if they had no claim on it in the first place? At ten, he realized that one of the greatest engineering feats was nothing more than the plundering of an untamed region just for man’s greedy desires. He believed that the Dutch had no right to do what they’d done. He realized that nature had no way of stopping them, no way of protecting her balance as mankind began wrenching her apart.

That day, that very instant, he dedicated his life to pushing the balance back into nature’s favor, to stopping humanity’s unending thirst for the destruction of the planet. He’d been too young to join the beginning of the Green movement that swept Europe, but he kept active during his college years in the early 80s, organizing often violent boycotts and demonstrations while majoring in environmental studies. The halcyon days of his youth were filled with police clashes and tear gas raids, late-night debates and underground newspapers.

He pursued his doctorate more out of an interest in staying around the restless students than any other factor. There was never a doubt that he would teach after receiving his Ph.D., expounding his particular blend of environmental activism and violence. He’d been run from academia four years ago, chased away because his fervent pleas were becoming too radical for even Europe’s liberal academic circles. He was no longer bitter about being censured because that had led directly to the formation of PEAL. Had he still been teaching, he never would have had the time to create the organization that now stood at the brink of eclipsing Greenpeace as the most active environmental group in the world.

The Zodiac was nearing the Hope. Her slick rubber hull knifed through the water with the agility of one of the many otters that lived in the sound. Voerhoven’s thoughts again returned to the man coming to see him.

Voerhoven had dealt with many dangerous people before — neo-Nazi skinheads he’d hired to disrupt his own rallies for greater media coverage, professional arsonists contracted to burn gas stations in Holland and Belgium, and burglary gangs hired to teach PEAL activists how to break into research facilities where animal testing occurred. As fanatical and ominous as these others had been, none could compare to the man approaching the Hope.

Their first meeting had taken place over a year ago. The man had entered PEAL’s cramped office near Amsterdam’s train station, and after the barest introduction, the visitor had laid a bank draft on Voerhoven’s desk.