Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [239]
Allison sighed, folded her arms.
Steve said, “Hey, I’m not going to lie. I think it’s kinda cool you’re worried about me, but there’s nothing to worry about.”
“Really? Here, look at this.” Allison walked to the nightstand, grabbed her purse, and came back. She rummaged inside for a moment, then pulled out a folded sheet of paper. “Jan e-mailed me this.” She handed it to him.
Though only an artist’s cutaway rendering, it was detailed enough to show the facility’s main level, two sublevels, and far below that, through layers of brown and gray “rock,” a blue horizontal stripe labeled “water table.”
“Where did she get this?” Steve asked.
“She Googled it.”
“Ally, there’s a lot more to the place than this … cartoon.”
“I know that. I’m not stupid.” She got up, walked to the balcony window, and stared out.
“I didn’t mean that,” Steve said. “I don’t think you’re stupid.”
“So is Jan wrong? Are you telling me nobody at that place worries about this stuff?”
“Of course we do. It’s serious business. We all know that. The DOE has—”
“The what?”
“Department of Energy. It’s done years of research on this. Spent tens of millions just on feasibility studies alone.”
“But that documentary—it kept talking about these rifts in the ground. Weak spots.”
Steve hesitated. “Ally, I can’t really talk about—”
“Fine, forget it. I’ll just stop worrying. How’s that?”
Allison could feel him standing there, staring at the back of her head. He would be wearing that scolded-puppy-dog look and have his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans. She let the silence hang in the air. After thirty seconds, he said, “Okay, if it’s that important to you—”
“It’s not that that’s important to me. It’s you.”
Arms still folded, she turned to face him. She forced some tears into her eyes. He held out his hand to her. “Come here.”
“Why?”
“Just come here.”
She stepped over to him, to his hand. He said, “Just don’t tell anybody I talked about this stuff, okay? They’d throw me in jail.”
She smiled and wiped a tear from her cheek. “Promise.”
The Panamax cargo ship Losan was three days from its destination, having made the bulk of the Atlantic crossing on calm seas and under clear skies. Losan’s captain, a forty-seven-year-old German named Hans Groder, had been the box ship’s master for eight years, having spent ten months out of every one of those years at sea. A tougher schedule than his previous job—captain of a German Navy Type 702 Berlin-class replenishment oiler—but the pay was much better and the stresses much fewer. Better still, Losan was a blue-water ship, a nice change for Groder after twenty-two years of navigating the labyrinthian waters around Eckendorf and Kiel Naval Bases. Such a pleasure to simply point one’s bow into the Atlantic and steam away with hundreds and thousands of feet beneath your keel and not a speck of land on your radar. Of course, on his more introspective days Groder indulged that sense of melancholy all sailors and soldiers felt once they’ve left military life behind, but on balance he enjoyed his life and the autonomy it allowed. He answered to only one man, the owner, not a chain of stuffed-shirt flag officers who wouldn’t know the difference between a chock and a cleat.
Groder strolled across the bridge and glanced at the radar. There wasn’t another vessel within twenty miles. Their nav radar wasn’t the most powerful in the world but was sufficient for their purposes. For a watchful captain and crew, twenty miles was plenty of time to adjust course and give fellow travelers a wide berth. Groder walked to the windows and stared out across the foredeck, going through his instinctive scan of the stacked bulktainers. They’d experienced some shifting, most of the time due to those damned propane tanks. Packed four to a container, they were secure enough, but their shape lacked the user-friendly geometry of crates and pallets. It could be worse, Groder knew. At least the damned things were empty.
71
LATER, GERRY HENDLEY