Exodus 2022 (5 page)

“There’s a good reason.”

“Given lame half-answers to our written and verbal queries.”

“There’s a good reason.”

“Added people—very high-priced people—to the payroll without explanation.”

“There’s a good—”

“And, you’ve dropped the ball on the biggest deployment in Erebus history.”

“I haven’t dropped the ball. Just set it aside for a couple of days.”

“You dropped the ball,” Kate said flatly. “We’ve heard reports from some of your team leaders that you seem…unfocused. Disengaged.”

Beck wondered who in his convoy was saying such things.

“I’m concerned,” said Kate. “Father is concerned.”

Father is concerned.

Beck waited to make sure she was finished. 

“Why do you still call him Father?” he asked. “Makes you sound like you have a stick up your ass, you know?”

Collins stifled a laugh. Kate glared, shook her head. “Fine, Sheldon.”

She ripped her coat from the troll’s arm. “Great. You want to sit up here in the sticks and screw off, fine. Makes my job a lot simpler.” She started up the stairs, bodyguard behind.

“There’s a reason,” said Beck, calling after her, “for everything I’ve done. For the delays. For the specialists on the payroll.”

Kate paused. “
What
reason?”

He pointed to the sunlit corridor at the far end of the hall. “It’s all in the War Room.”

Kate resumed climbing. “I don’t have time for games, Sheldon.”

“It’s no game, Kate. We’ve found something. Something you need to see.”

Kate stopped again. Squinted at him. “
Found
something?” she said dismissively. “On the way back from the sim?”

“That’s right.”

“What?”

Beck took a breath. “A phenomenon. Something we can’t explain.”

Kate stared. “Sounds like more bullshit to me.”

Beck stared back. “We found something, Kate. Something extraordinary. Please. You’ve come this far. You can spare ten more minutes.”

Kate looked from her bodyguard to her brother to her watch. “Ten minutes,” she said.

She stepped from the stairs, and Beck led the group to the War Room, where pictures of Joe Stanton already filled wall-sized screens.

JOE STANTON LAY
in the warm sunshine on the boulder overlooking Haro Strait and drifted into a dream.

It was a very strange dream.

I’m flying
, Joe thought, as he fell through open sky—fell at great speed, then leveled off and soared, in perfect control, over a deep canyon.

I’m flying.

It was a glorious feeling, followed by shock, as he realized the truth.

Not flying. Swimming.

There were fish. Schools of fish. Above. Below. On the right. On the left. Joe laughed.

Ella, lying against Joe’s chest, heard him laugh, and smiled, relieved that he was having a peaceful dream.

Fish!

Joe dreamed that he was zooming among schools of big, fat, beautiful fish. Fish that flashed like polished mirrors in the deep.

Feels like I’m flying
, Joe thought. And it did. 

So great was his speed and maneuverability in the water, so graceful and powerful was his body, so perfect his control, that it
felt
like he was zooming through the air, the finest, most gifted stunt pilot in the world. The most agile, nimble hawk ever to pirouette through the sky.

I’m flying…through the water.

Stanton focused on the fish, and the dream became stranger still.

Click!

The shimmering silver skin of the huge chinook salmon to his right disappeared, and Joe perceived the creature’s skeleton and internal organs.

Click!

The skin reappeared. Joe gasped.

Click!

The school of herring flashing near the surface—directly overhead—became a school of skeletons.

The image lasted only a second, but the information revealed in that “snapshot” was astonishing. Joe could see everything. Every detail in every single fish: gills, brain, heart, liver, kidneys, intestines, stomach. The contents
within
each stomach.

He knew the number of fish in the school: three hundred eighty-two. He knew where they were going.

It’s a miracle
, Joe thought.

He wanted to stop and consider what he was seeing. But it was not to be. His speed was too great.

And now he found that he was no longer in control of his actions, that his dream was turning dark.

Click!

A jolt of adrenaline traveled the length of his body, like a blast of electric current. His limbs twitched and his heart thumped in his chest.

Ella felt Joe’s body quiver and tense. Heard him cry out: “No!”

She dropped her book. Spun around. Caressed his face. “Joe. Sweetie? Joe? You okay?” 

He couldn’t hear her. He was deep underwater now, zooming toward a huge drifting shape. A shape he somehow recognized.

Click!

Skeleton. Brain. Lungs. Internal organs. 

Heart.

Heart?

The heart’s not beating. The heart is still.

“No!” Joe twisted and writhed, twitched and moaned. His face paled and a slick glaze of sweat coated his forehead.

“She’s dead!” he cried, his voice a guttural, strangled gurgle. A sound Ella barely recognized.

She gripped him by his shoulders. Shook him. “Joe! It’s me! You’re having a bad dream. Wake up.”

Joe stirred, and suddenly people up and down the beach were yelling.

For a moment, Ella thought they’d heard her worried cries and were yelling at her. But everyone was staring at the water. Pointing and smiling and cheering.

“Whales!” someone shouted. And Ella saw them.

Joe rose slowly to a sitting position and shook off his nightmare.

“Whales,” said Ella, holding Joe tightly, clutching his hands in hers. She didn’t like how cold his hands felt. 

Tourists up and down the beach snapped pictures as a pod of orcas rolled through the sunlit channel.

A park ranger stepped from the lighthouse and trained a pair of binoculars on the pod.

“It’s just like yesterday,” said Ella, glad that Joe was awake, glad to have something to look at and talk about to take his mind off his nightmare and the day’s events.

Joe was silent as he watched the whales. “Yesterday?” he said at last. “What’s like yesterday?”

“Well…the whales,” Ella replied. “Only, not quite as good, right? Had front-row seats yesterday. You especially.” She glanced up and down the beach. “How many of these people have ever touched a whale, huh?”

Joe’s body went so completely still that Ella let go of him and scooted around so that she could get a better look at his face. It was a face lined with worry and fear.

“Joe?” She took his hands and he stared past her. The whales were moving away now, steadily, in formation, soon to vanish around the point.

Joe said, “Talk about yesterday.”

“When we saw the whales,” said Ella. “You know. When we were kayaking. They came up under our boats. They were all around us. You touched one.”

Joe kept his eyes on the whales. They rolled on, finally disappearing from sight. The tourists turned back to the lighthouse, and the excited chatter faded.

Ella held Joe in her arms again. After a long time, she said, “Sweetie…are you not remembering what happened yesterday?”

“Not a bit of it,” he replied, shaking his head. “Nothing.” He sounded close to tears.

Ella squeezed his hand. “It’s gonna be fine. You’re gonna be fine. But I think we better head for the ferry.”

“Yeah. I think you’re right.”

COLLINS PLACED HIS PALM FLAT
against a sleek black pad set into the wall, and the War Room’s beefy metal blast door slid open. The darkened room was spacious, solemn as a chapel, and bathed in the cool machine glow of high-def monitors and wall-sized screens. Soft classical music accompanied the faint hum of servers and the tapping of keyboards.

An immense glowing table dominated the center of the room——a giant touch screen that Beck and his team used to display charts, maps, and theaters of war, and to manipulate troop and resource placement. One of Beck’s IT architects had dubbed the table “The Palantir” after the magical seeing stones in
The Lord of the Rings
. The name had stuck.

Technicians—some standing, some seated in large comfortable chairs—worked at stations around the room. 

Kate stepped from the shadows, joining Beck alongside the Palantir, and a hush fell over the room, which was something, considering that the chamber was already library-quiet. Rustling stopped. Whispers ceased. Even the server-hum seemed to fade. A stifling, invisible tension replaced the sound, as if Kate were a storm cloud about to unleash lightning. Backs straightened. Screens refreshed. And everyone became suddenly, extraordinarily focused on the tasks before them.

A blonde woman looked up, unsmiling, from the flickering, ever-changing surface of the Palantir—the shimmer from the table reflected in her glasses—and addressed Beck directly. “He was kayaking,” she said, in a crisp Slavic accent. “Joe Stanton—that’s the subject’s name—was on the water for at least three hours yesterday.”

“Was he
in
the water?” Beck asked. He stepped to a wall of glass, where Joe Stanton’s Facebook images filled multiple screens. “Did he dive?”

“Still checking,” said the woman. “But not that we know of. Would you like to see when he cracked up?” 

Beck looked surprised. “What do you mean? You have that?”

A lanky, pony-tailed computer technician standing at a console behind the blonde replied. “Yes Sir. Somebody recorded Stanton blowing his gasket and posted it on YouTube early this morning—just after the incident.”

“Show me.”

The technician, whose name was Brandon, tapped some buttons and a jittery image of the motel parking lot and the Breakwater sign appeared on one of the larger screens. In the foreground, an elderly man was trying to restrain a deranged twentysomething who was screaming and clutching his head.

“Stop shouting!” the older man yelled. Then, to someone out of frame: “Call 911!”

Beck recognized the younger man as Joe Stanton, from the Facebook pictures, though Joe’s face here was a mask of anguish and pain.

“Lorna G,” Joe growled. “Lorna Gwin!”

“Call the damn police!” the old man yelled to someone off-screen. “Now!”

“They murdered my little girl!” Joe Stanton screamed—and the amateur video bobbed and jumped.

“What little girl?” asked Kate.

“Jesus,” muttered Collins, “Dude’s whacked.”

“Who
is
that?” Kate asked impatiently. “What are we watching?”

Beck stared at the drama on-screen and didn’t respond.

Brandon paused the video.

“Is that it?” asked Beck.

“He stumbles around and sets off a car alarm,” said Brandon, “but there are no more mentions of the little girl.”

“
What
little girl?” demanded Kate.

“Lorna Gwin,” Beck replied. “This is the fourth guy in a row—that we know of—to freak out and scream this kid’s name.”

“Well, who is she?” Kate sounded curious and irritated at the same time.

“We don’t know.”

A man and woman stepped from the shadows behind Beck and joined the group as if they belonged there.

“Dr. Phelps, Dr. Edelstein,” said Beck, “welcome. I’d like you to meet my sister, Kate Lerner.”

“Nick Phelps,” said the man, a fit-looking fiftysomething guy with sandy hair and a neatly trimmed beard. He extended his hand to Kate and received a cold stare in return.

“Dr. Phelps is a professor of neuroanatomy,” said Beck, “from MIT. Janice Edelstein is a professor of oceanography at Woods Hole.”

Edelstein was a little older than Phelps and had a pleasant, intelligent face framed by thick gray hair, cut short. She smiled at Kate but made no attempt to shake her hand. 

 “They’re still getting up to speed,” said Beck.

“On what?” Kate asked. “Why are they on our payroll?”

Beck sighed. “Professors, you’ll have to excuse my sister. Beneath her brusque, blunt exterior she’s actually quite rude and demanding.”

Kate glared at the professors. “What do
they
have to do with Erebus?” She waved at the monitors. “What does
that
have to do with Erebus?”

“Getting to it,” Beck replied.

He signaled the computer tech, and snapshots of three different men—healthy, vigorous guys in their late twenties or early thirties—filled the top row of monitors.

“The divers we lost in the Bering Sea,” said Kate, stepping closer to the screens and zeroing in on the first two men. “Why are their pictures here? And who’s this other one?”

Beck tapped the images one at a time. “John Galbreth. Andy Stahl. Brad Whittaker,” he said. “Whittaker was a gillnetter out of Yakutat.”

“Was?”

“Died about a week ago.”

“From what?” Kate asked. She studied Whittaker’s pictures, some with very recent time stamps. He looked perfectly healthy. A man in his prime.

“Same thing that killed Galbreth and Stahl,” said Beck. “We think so, anyway. You read the report on how our guys died?”

“Skimmed it,” said Kate. “They were running security checks on the Sedco Forex TLPs.”

“Right,” said Beck. “Tension leg platforms,” he explained, in response to Phelps’s puzzled expression. “TLPs are deepwater oil rigs. They’re potential terrorist targets. Feds stepped up security on oil platforms after 9/11, but the Coast Guard doesn’t have enough assets to watch everything. They pay Erebus to help.

“The guys were fairly deep. Checking the tendons—the cables—that connect the TLPs to the seafloor. Separate platforms, two miles apart.”

Beck turned to the glowing Palantir table, and brought up charts of the Bering Sea.

“The TLPs are here, and here,” he said, pointing at the screen. “South southeast of Nunivak. These were routine dives. Nothing out of the ordinary. Not for our guys.