The Spy I Loved (27 page)

It was
dangerous enough.

Boat One
with Jenkins and a new fellow, Bryan, had the lead. Bryan had the
look of hired muscle, but came straight from administrative duties
in Ottawa. He seemed glad enough to be there.

Boat One
had the magnetometer. They cruised along at six or seven knots,
heading right for the GPS coordinates recorded by Kimball. Liam was
dressed in a wetsuit, riding in Boat Three. They had four sets of
scuba gear in the following two boats. Another new guy, Edward, was
in the second boat with Ian. Jenkins and Kimball brought up the
rear. Three people would go down, three people would stay on top.
It was their strongest showing so far.

It sent a
certain message. The night aspect of it had its own psychology. It
showed confidence but also a certain urgency.

This site
was not too far from the town of Espanola itself. A straggle of
lights just downstream, denser than the typical cottage-country
shoreline, showed where the town began. There were other boats a
hundred metres downriver, hanging in the prime spots. Red, green
and white lights showed which end was which. To see all three
colours meant it was coming or going. Liam watched his depth
display even as the boys in front adjusted their course and slowed
their speed.

Jenkins
would man (or woman, rather) the boat, keeping dry, so she wore the
earpiece and microphone combination.

Liam saw
her lips move and then Jenkins turned.

“
Yeah—they say there’s something down there.” She looked at
the bottom on their ninety-nine-dollar fish finder—the genuine
article this time. “It’s not very deep, is it?”

If the opposition had any kind of detection equipment and any
kind of manpower, any kind of budget, this should have been a piece
of cake. Only the major coincidence of major components falling in
water had saved them. Even
that
hadn’t lasted long. Following Liam around blindly
as they had been, they had missed the bus on this one.

Liam
throttled back, steered left, letting the current take them past
the first boat as they circled. All boats turned into the current,
something oddly good to see. The nose of Boat One went hunting back
and forth at low throttle in the current. The motor was gunned a
couple of hundred revs, and the bowman dropped an anchor. Carefully
pulling the line taut, with a little throttle from the skipper, she
inched up. The bow finally started to come down as the bowman
pulled and that was about as close as they were going to
get.

Liam
edged his boat into the side of theirs. Ian and Edward’s boat came
around from the right. The three boats were anchored and lashed
together. The motors were shut down and quiet was restored. Using a
minimum of light, the agents in Boat One showed him their findings.
There was definitely something down there. There was a nice little
spike in the radiation count when they passed over it as well. This
was the target.

Keeping
noise and talk to a minimum, leaving on the navigation lights of
Boat One, the three who would be going down quickly pulled on their
rigs. Each gave the equipment a quick safety check. One by one,
they dropped backwards over the side. Turning on their lights, the
divers checked their gauges and then descended into
darkness.

Chapter Eighteen

Liam got
to the bottom first, holding there with his gloved left hand on the
bottom. He had to keep up a steady kick to stay in place. There was
a half an inch of soft squishy stuff, and below that something hard
like clay. In the light, the bottom appeared grey and brown,
decomposed leaf litter and decayed aquatic plants. Something
glittered a couple of metres off to his right. His heart lifted and
then fell when he saw it was one of the ubiquitous beer cans,
coated with a thick fuzz of green algae.

His work
partner Bryan, spear-gun clipped to his belt, pushed in a
fluorescent orange stake and attached a reel and line. There was a
simple padded loop for the wrist and he slipped it over Liam’s
right hand.

Holding
the scanner, metre glowing a dull red with white indicators, Liam
began swimming around in small circles, his arc controlled by the
reel’s built-in clutch and brake system.

He didn’t get far before the needle wavered. The man on his
left, watching closely over Liam’s shoulder, dropped a weighted
flag and pulled up to hover two metres above the bottom. Liam
turned and came back, criss-crossing the target until they were all
sure it was right
there.
His partner and Ian hung in the background,
slowly spinning in place. All three lights were now laying on the
bottom, pointing inwards to Liam’s work area. He stowed the
meter.

Waving
his hand back and forth over the silt and detritus of the riverbed,
Kimball got the loose stuff out of the way. He began to probe
slowly and carefully with a T-handled probe. He gently pushed the
stainless-steel point down into the next layer, the sharp tip
scratching at something metal, very small, just under the
surface.

It took some digging with his dive knife, and he had gotten
down about a foot and a half before they came to the first hard
evidence. This one was big and heavy. There were numerous flecks
and small bits of metal in the muck, some charred but some showing
signs of recent fracture. All of that other stuff
might
have drifted here
on current and wind.

With Ian
standing sentry duty, circling way out and watching for any sign of
intruders, Liam and Bryan followed the anchor line to the surface.
With a few brief words, the suction pump was lowered over the side.
With Bryan guiding the pump on its downward descent, Liam accepted
a three-metre section of hose and then a shorter discharge hose.
The pump was switched on and he went to work clearing their
object.

Going by
all the charred aluminum, smashed and flattened as those honeycombs
of solid-state circuitry were, this was it. This was a part of
EMERALD.

It took a
good twenty minutes to suck up the silt and blow away the mud,
which drifted off in a billowing, impenetrable cloud with the
downstream currents. The fragment appeared to be a pretty big
section of the communications and control module. This was the
brains of the system. When it was mostly exposed in its divot in
the riverbed, Liam took a good hold of the charred mass. Kicking
hard, he gave it a shove. It rocked easily enough. This one might
not weigh much more than twenty or thirty kilograms, going by feel.
Bryan came in close with a net bag, neck open. He laid it on the
bottom. Holding the mouth open with his left hand, he helped Liam
roll and lift the artifact into the bag. Bryan pulled the red
tie-rope to close it.

Quickly
attaching an inflatable lifting bag to a metal ring on the net,
Bryan used his spare regulator to begin filling it. After a quick
glance at his gauge, looking around to see if Ian was still out
there, Liam did the same. The bag swelled impressively. The line
was taut and the cargo shifted slightly on the bottom. Liam waved
off Bryan. Bryan unclipped his spear-gun and eased off into the
darkness. Liam, holding onto the lifting line, put a little more
air into it and then let his spare regulator fall.

They were
going up.

***

When the
airbag surfaced a few feet from the boats, Edward stood up
carefully and shone his light. Seeing the rounded coconut shape of
a man’s head in the water, he tossed over a line to a tired and
grateful Liam.

It took a
couple of minutes for the other divers to bring up the remaining
equipment and a handful of smaller pieces that looked like it might
go with EMERALD. If that indeed was what they had and not just
someone’s old air conditioner. On the way up, a streamer of mud had
fallen off, but it still trailed gobs of mud and stringy
algae.

Liam
climbed aboard. Finding the catch, he wrested the air tanks from
his back. Having done the bulk of the physical work on the bottom,
the other guys would give it that last shove, from a metre down
where it hung on the airbag.

With Liam
and Edward hauling on a short line attached from above, they soon
had their prize aboard the biggest boat. All men and equipment were
accounted for.

“
All right. Return to base.”

For all
intents and purposes, this was now Cabin Seven.

Edward
checked in by radio. All was secure on that end. He grinned, teeth
and eyes flashing in the dim light.

The small
building was now heavily overpopulated. People were waiting to see
what the cat dragged in. As for the neighbours, they hadn’t been
seen in a while. Their boat was at the dock, the boat-trailer was
in the parking lot and their vehicle sat right out front. A
distinct lack of signal on their own snooper-scopes indicated that
the opposition had their own suppression technology going. Either
that or it was too quiet over there. They had further backup in the
form of plainclothes police and people hastily drafted from related
services. The camp was under unobtrusive surveillance. The
observation post was inside a van with smoked windows. They had
been lucky to get a strategic spot in the dockside parking area.
Hastily briefed, their role was to provide security for Cabin Seven
and to keep an eye out for even more suspicious persons.

***

Somewhere
far, far away, on the other side of the world, a technician sat up
a little straighter in his chair. He turned to his shift-mate, a
middle-aged woman of indeterminate nationality. She was frankly
snoozing, left hand across a small pot belly and the right arm
dangling straight down off the shoulder.

He gave
her chair a push. She woke with a gasp.

“
Hey.”

“
What?” She swallowed, seeking the cup and its cold dregs of
sweet, green tea.

The
remains of some black toast and butter lay on a small plate beside
it. She lazily stretched and yawned in her seat. It was broad
daylight outside. In here, time slipped away along with all
external realities, leaving a person with nothing but the data on
the screens and the feedback from their own body. In her case,
working shifts and raising a four year-old was taking its
inevitable toll.

“
Argh.” Turning, she gave him a nasty look that was not
entirely without humour. “What
is
your problem?”

There was a certain inflection, a certain
tone
to it.

“
Have a look at this.” He put his cursor on the timeline at
the bottom of his real-time video feed.

This,
was
Barracuda.

Back to point
A.
He clicked and labeled it for future reference.

The fish,
a semi-autonomous submarine reconnaissance machine, had been lying
in the low weedy growths a few metres away from enemy activity on
the Spanish River. Mottled olive and brown on the upper parts,
sky-grey on the underparts, it was almost invisible in its native
environment. Other fish, no matter how large, tended to give the
thing a wide berth due to electrical and sonic disturbances. It was
big, it was ugly, it didn’t look right and it didn’t smell right,
not even tempting to the largest muskellunge.

The green
dot onscreen was their machine. It sat there still, conserving
power and waiting for their inputs. Its observations of enemy craft
were analyzed, collated and projected as bright red dots on their
screens.

She shook
her head to clear the fuzz from the brain, swallowing tea
quickly.

“
Run that by me again.”

Achmed clicked and the screen went black. The starting frame
was instantly rendered. She watched and listened open-mouthed.
The
Barracuda
had
audio pickup and direction finding capability. Attuned to its
surroundings and locked onto the unique sound of Mister Kimball’s
boat motor, the
Barracuda
had been lying just off the end of the marked
channel approaches at The Pines.

With an
abundance of battery and motor power, it was a simple matter to
shadow the small convoy, rising near the surface to send vertical
bursts of data to the satellite above. Such small craft as the
westerners were using were unequipped to detect a miniature
periscope, the antenna, or the signals emitted.

The
figures of Kimball, Spencer, and the others were more or less
identifiable in certain positions and lighting conditions. Once
you’d been watching them a while, you got to know them, their body
shapes and the characteristic walk. What human eyeballs were doing
now would soon become routine for high-speed, biometric
analysis—assuming someone didn’t have it already.

When the boats slowed and stopped,
Barracuda One
slowed, opened the
ballast tank valves and slowly lowered itself to the bottom.
Heavily insulated in the motor compartment, the thing was
undetectable to hydrophones due to the noise of the subjects’ own
engines. If the quarry shut the motors down, divers in the water
might stand a small chance of detecting
Barracuda.
It would almost have to
be by accident, and visually at that. They were unlikely to do it
by sound alone.