Beneath the Ice (24 page)

He moved his eyes from one dial to the next
until he had them memorized. Gleason and Perry had briefed him on
its operation, but he had had little reason to believe he would
actually be seated behind the controls. That was Sarah’s job . . .
Gleason’s job.

He was thankful there was nothing to do but
watch and wait. That meant there was less opportunity for him to do
something wrong. It also gave him time to think about his
situation. Something needed to be done. He held no optimism that
these guys were going to give everybody a lift home.

For the moment the numbers were even, but
the automatic weapons tipped the balances to the bending point. He
had also seen how fast, fluid, and vicious the woman named Tia
could be. And the incident with the man and the knife that left the
thumb of his left hand bleeding drove home the point that the men
were well trained.

Jack glanced up from the dials at the man in
black who stood just to his left. He was a few inches shorter than
Jack and weighed twenty, maybe thirty pounds less, but Jack doubted
the man was anything but muscle. Take away the gun and the knife,
and Jack might have a chance, but for now he could do nothing but
wait.

Then there was another problem. Jack had
been friends with Perry for so many years that he could read his
body language and anticipate almost everything he was going to do.
It had been a brief movement, the merest of tells, but Jack picked
up on it. Perry saw something, something in the area of the empty
shipping crates. Jack had brought his gaze to bear just in time to
see someone peeking over the edge of Hairy’s crate, the lid raised
just enough to allow a pair of pretty eyes to scan the
situation.

So there they were—he with his fanny in a
fiberglass folding chair and one, probably two women hiding in a
crate across the Chamber.

Then he heard it. It was slight, almost
impossible to hear, and Jack would not have noticed it if he were
not waiting for it.

A scraping, soft and subtle. Wood against
wood. If he could hear it then—

Jack stood, stretched, and yawned
loudly.

“Sit down,” the gunman ordered.

“My sitter is broken, pal. I need to
stretch. You know how it is.” Jack spoke louder than necessary. It
was his only hope of distracting the gunman. He caught a glimpse of
the slow-moving container lid.

“I said ‘sit down.’ ” The man’s sour face
darkened and tensed.

“Come on, give a guy a break. A man can only
sit for so long.” Jack stretched his back and took another step to
the side. The gunman’s piercing eyes followed him. As he moved,
Jack let his eyes drift over the man’s shoulders and saw Gwen
emerge from the crate, plastic packing material clinging to her
parka. A second later, Sarah appeared. He didn’t know what they
planned, but he had to keep the guard occupied.

“So how do you get into this line of work?”
Jack asked with a wry grin. “I mean, do you answer a newspaper ad
or go to school for training? Acme School of Terrorism or something
like that?”

“You’re not funny, big guy,” the gunman
said, raising the barrel of the wicked-looking gun to Jack’s chest.
He flipped a switch and a small, red light appeared over Jack’s
sternum. He hadn’t noticed before that the MP-5 was equipped with a
laser marker.

“Now that’s cool,” Jack said. “You could
point out things on a map with a light like that.”

“You’re a trigger squeeze away from death.
Sit down.”

“I don’t think you’ll kill me right now,”
Jack said. He caught a glimpse of Sarah and Gwen moving. He didn’t
look at them, fearing the guard would catch his eye movement.
“Maybe later, sure. But not now. You’d have to answer to your boss,
and she seems, if you’ll forgive me, a little edgy. Maybe she’s not
sleeping well.”

“I’m not afraid of her.”

“Oh, sure you are,” Jack said as if he were
having coffee with the man. “Can’t say I blame you. She’s tough as
nails. I mean, look at what she did to your partner in the Dome.
Wow. One measly mistake and he takes one in the chest. Your boss
may not be much on employee morale, but she sure knows how to
motivate.”

“He screwed up.”

“No doubt about that. Kind of makes you
wonder what the price will be for your screwup.”

“I don’t plan on making any mistakes.”

Jack rubbed his side. “She gave me a couple
of good kicks.” His side ached, and each movement caused him more
pain. He was sure Tia had cracked one or more of his ribs. “It
hurts to breathe.”

“You’re gonna be feeling more pain if you
don’t sit down.”

“Now, now,” Jack said, wagging a finger like
a teacher scolding a child. “Your boss said no one was to be
killed. I heard her. Granted, I was on the floor rolling in pain,
but my ears were still working pretty good.”

The man flipped another
switch on the machine gun. Jack recognized the safety being moved
to the
off
position. He sighed melodramatically. “That’s the problem
with you terrorist types—you have no sense of
hospitality.”

“I’m not a terrorist.”

“A rose by any other name . . .” Jack said
and began to move toward the chair, then stopped abruptly. “Do they
teach Shakespeare in terrorist school? ’Cause I just quoted him,
and you don’t seem all that impressed.”

“My patience is gone, funny man. Now put
your—”

It had taken all of Jack’s discipline not to
look up as Sarah stepped behind the man and swung something long
and dark. He heard a thud and a grunt of pain, then saw the
gunman’s arm drop to his side.

Jack was moving before he had time to think.
In two steps he was in front of the guard, whose face was twisted
in pain. The man started to turn. Jack helped him with a punch to
the side of the head. The gunman went limp and crumbled.

Jack jumped into the air and reached for his
fist. It was on fire. Pain radiated up his arm and into his
shoulder. The movement made his ribs ignite in scorching agony.

“Are you all right?” Sarah asked.

Jack turned to see her standing two feet
away with a crowbar in her hand. “Better than he is.”

“I couldn’t bring myself to hit him on the
head,” Sarah said. “I was afraid I’d kill him. Stupid reasoning, I
know.”

“Not at all,” Jack said. “That whack you
gave him on the arm is gonna leave a mark.”

“Yeah, well that punch you
gave may leave a trace, too,” Gwen
said.

“I think it hurt me more than it did him.”
He shook his hand as if he could throw off the pain. “You guys have
been in that box all this time?”

“Yeah. Not many places to hide around here,”
Gwen said.

“What do we do now?” Sarah asked.

Jack bent and picked up the gun that lay
next to the unconscious man. “Take control of this baby first.
After that, I don’t know.”

A whooshing sound rolled through the
Chamber, and Jack looked up in time to see Tia and Perry walk into
the room. Before Jack could think, Tia raised her weapon. Perry
reached for the barrel, but the round had been fired.

Jack felt the impact in his left shoulder,
then his feet left the ice, and the floor rose to meet him. His
breath was forced from his lungs on impact. The first pain he felt
was from his damaged ribs, then his nervous system caught up with
the event. Pain like a thousand hot nails radiated from his
shoulder. He rolled to his side to see a red fluid spreading out on
the ice like someone had spilled a quart of crimson paint. Then
Jack realized the paint was his blood.

He heard a scream.

He heard his name.

Jack saw Perry’s face hovering over his own.
“Hey, buddy.”

“Hang in there, pal,” Perry said. “I’m here.
I’ll get you fixed . . .”

Jack heard no more.

Robert Jeter had been in politics all his life. He
had never wanted to hold office; he wanted to manage those who did.
That was where the real power was. The man who could sway a king
was a king himself. That had been his philosophy, but now he felt
like the marionette. Someone of great power and influence had just
taken control of his strings.

Jeter had prided himself on his control. At
George Washington University he had graduated in the top one
percent of his class. He knew more about the American political
system than any ten experts combined. He knew how to work
congressmen and senators. He knew how to plan a foolproof campaign.
No candidate he backed had lost, including the man who now carried
the title POTUS—President of the United States.

Richard Calvert was the most powerful man in
the world, and as the one who stood beside him, Jeter was the
second most powerful. No one saw the president without first going
through him. He controlled the appointment book, and if Jeter
blackballed a person, that person would never meet the president
again. Control the gate and he controlled the man behind the
gate.

For the most part, Richard Calvert was
controllable. He played the game, and he played it well. He knew
when to listen and when to turn a deaf ear. A master at
conciliation, he hadn’t seized the presidency; he wiggled into it
in a dance Jeter choreographed.

But Calvert was also a principled man. He
didn’t mind compromise, and he chose his battles well, but certain
things were sacrosanct to him. One such thing was honesty; another
was loyalty. In one day both attributes had come into play.

Jeter knew what was going through his boss’s
mind. He made it his business to know. The president was feeling
that someone was working behind his back. News of the crash had not
reached his ears as it should have, especially since the loss of
life included military personnel and the son of a friend. The
searing look he had given Jeter at the end of the meeting made it
clear that he was blaming his chief of staff. Serious damage
control was needed.

That was just one side of his problem. The
other was Eric Enkian, a man he had met only twice, each time for
mere seconds. Despite the short time, Jeter knew he was deeply
indebted to the man. Jeter came from a poor family. His father had
been a miner in the hellish coal holes of Virginia’s Cumberland
Plateau. When Jeter’s mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, it
had been Enkian who paid for the treatment that saved her life. He
had no doubt his mother would have died under normal care, but
Enkian had arranged for care at a cancer treatment center in
California. Not only had he paid for it, he also had arranged the
travel, rented a home nearby, and allowed Jeter’s father extended
leave so he could be with his wife. That was when Jeter was
sixteen.

A few years later, Jeter received a letter
stating that EA Mining would pay full tuition and expenses to any
college Jeter chose and could enter. While he had been expecting to
spend a few years in a state college, suddenly Harvard, Yale,
Stanford, and others lay before him. He was told it was because of
his high school achievements; he later found out that there were
other reasons.

During his junior year a man from EA Mining
came to visit. He was polite, dapper, and appeared extremely
wealthy. This last fact became clear by the late-model Porsche he
drove and the two large gold-and-diamond rings on each hand. Jeter
rode in that Porsche that day, his benefactor’s representative at
the wheel. As they motored down the freeway, the man asked a
question.

“You see these rings, boy?” the man had
asked. Young Jeter said he did. He hadn’t been able to take his
eyes off of them. “Everything about them comes from EA Mining.”

“They must pay you a lot of money,” Jeter
had said.

“They do, son, but you miss the point. These
are not just pieces of jewelry; they’re reminders. The diamonds
come from our mines in South Africa, the gold from Alaska, the
silver inlay from Nevada. The gold was heated in a furnace made by
materials from our other mines. The material used to polish the
diamonds . . .”

“From an EA-owned mine,” Jeter posited.

“Exactly. Look around the campus,” the man
had said. “Marble from our mines, asphalt parking lots from our
mines, even the chalk the professors use comes from our mines.”

“Are you trying to talk me into going to
work for EA Mining?” Jeter asked. “I’m a poli-sci major.”

“Mr. Enkian knows that. Political science is
an important study. We’re not asking you to work the mines like
your father; we would like you to join us in a different way.”

“What way?”

“You’ll see.”

Ten minutes later, they pulled in front of
the Watergate Hotel, released the sports car to the valet, and
walked into one of the world’s most famous buildings. Jeter
followed the mysterious man into the spacious, world-class
restaurant and was surprised to see his father seated at a table by
the window overlooking the Potomac. It had been over three months
since Jeter had seen him, and he looked different. He looked frail.
The suit fit a little too loosely and hung limply on shoulders that
Jeter remembered as always being broad and strong.

“Dad, what are you doing here?”

“I wanted to see my son.”

Jeter felt ill at ease. Something was wrong.
“What is it, Dad? Are you ill?”

“I’m just getting old,” his father had said.
“Working the mines has taken its toll.”

Jeter’s heart skipped. His first thought was
one that orbited the thinking of anyone who had a family member in
the coal mines: black lung. “You mean . . .”

His father smiled. “No, my lungs are fine.
We use the best safety equipment in the mines, son. I have colon
cancer.” He said it as if he were announcing the purchase of a new
piece of furniture. “The doctors tell me they caught it early, and
that it’s in a good location. They’ll perform surgery in two days.
I’ll go home a couple of days after that. They don’t think I’ll
need a colostomy. That’s good news.”