Primary Threat. Джек Марс

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СКАЧАТЬ was a long sectional couch along one wall, its high back blocking where there would normally be small oval windows. There were two recliners facing it, and between the couch and the chairs, a heavy wooden table, like a coffee table, bolted to the floor. Even stranger, directly across from the sofa was a large flat-panel television, blocking where the other row of windows should be.

      Stranger than that, from where Luke was sitting on the couch, to his left was a thick glass partition. A glass door was carved into the middle of it. On the other side of the partition was another passenger cabin, this one with seating more typical of a small passenger jet. And strangest of all, two men were seated inside the cabin, discussing something and looking at the screen of a laptop.

      The glass partition was apparently soundproof, because the men seemed to be speaking normally, and Luke couldn’t hear anything they were saying. The men were both crew-cutted and of military bearing, one wearing a jacket and tie, and one wearing a T-shirt and jeans. The man in the T-shirt was big and well-muscled.

      “It’s an SST,” Swann said. He was sitting on the couch with Luke, just on the other side of Trudy Wellington, who sat between them, poring over documents on her laptop. The plane’s very existence seemed to excite Swann in a way that Luke didn’t quite understand.

      “Supersonic, but not a fighter plane. A passenger jet. Since the French gave up on the Concorde and the Russians gave up on the Tupolev, no one on Earth will even acknowledge working on supersonic passenger jets.”

      “I guess someone’s been working on this one,” Luke said.

      Murphy, sitting in one of the recliners, gestured with his head at the glass partition.

      “I’m wondering who the monkeys are behind door number three.”

      Big Ed Newsam, slouched like a large mountain in the other recliner, nodded slowly. “You and me both, man.”

      “Never mind about that,” Swann said. He pointed at the TV screen across from the couch. The screen was currently showing an image of an airplane, skirting the northern border of the United States above the state of Michigan. Data along the bottom showed altitude, equivalent groundspeed, and time to destination.

      “Look at those numbers. Altitude 58,000 feet. Groundspeed 1,554 miles per hour, roughly Mach 2, twice the speed of sound. We’re in the air a little more than thirty minutes, and we’ve got only two and a half more hours to go. Absolutely mind-blowing for a jet this size, which I’d guess is about the same profile as a typical Gulfstream. Can you imagine the thrust this thing must put out to overcome the drag? I didn’t even hear a sonic boom.”

      He stopped for a second and looked around.

      “Did you hear anything?”

      Nobody answered him. Everyone else seemed to have their minds on the destination, the mission, and the mysterious nature of the two men in the other room. How they were getting to the mission was beside the point. To Luke, the plane was just another big boy toy, probably overpriced.

      But Swann loved his toys. “Notice something about our flight path. We’re on our way to the Alaskan Arctic, and by far the most efficient way to get there is by crossing into Canada and moving diagonally north and west across their heartland. But we hug the border instead. Why?”

      “Because we like inefficiency?” Ed Newsam said, and smiled.

      Swann didn’t even catch the joke. He shook his head. “No. Because if we cross into Canada, we have to explain to them what this thing is that’s moving twice the speed of sound above their airspace. They might be one of our closest allies, but we don’t want to tell them about this plane. That tells me it’s classified.”

      “As a practical matter,” Trudy said, without glancing up from her computer, “we’ll have to cross into Canada at some point. Alaska isn’t attached to the rest of the United States.”

      Swann stared at Trudy.

      “Ouch,” Ed said. “Geography lesson. That had to hurt.”

      “Can we talk about something else?” Murphy said. “Please?”

      Luke looked at Trudy Wellington, sitting next to him. She was curled up on the sofa in a customary pose for her, legs curled under her. She could be sitting on her couch at home, eating popcorn and about to watch a movie. Her curly hair was hanging down, and her red glasses were at the end of her nose. She was scrolling through a screen.

      “Trudy?” Luke said.

      She glanced up. “Yes?”

      “What are we doing here?”

      She stared at him. Her owlish eyes went wide in surprise.

      “Best guess,” he said. “Who are the terrorists, what do they want, why did they hit an oil rig, and why now?”

      “Is that going to help you?” she said. “I mean, with the mission?”

      Luke shrugged. “It could. We seem to be in the dark about everything, and no one seems interested in enlightening us even a little bit.”

      “Or talking to us, for that matter,” Murphy said. He was still staring at the men on the other side of the glass.

      “Okay,” Trudy said. “I’ll give you the easy part first. Why hit an oil rig and why now. Then I’ll do a very hazy guess about who they are and what they want.”

      Luke nodded. “We’re all ears.”

      “I’m going to assume no prior knowledge,” Trudy said.

      Ed Newsam was slouched so low in his chair he looked like he might slide off onto the floor. “That’s probably the safest assumption I’ve heard all day.”

      Trudy smiled. “The Arctic Ocean is melting,” she said. “People, countries, the media, large corporations, they’re all debating the long-term effects of global warming, or whether it even exists. The consensus among the vast majority of scientists is that it’s happening. No one has to agree with them. But what can’t be denied is that the polar ice caps, which have largely been frozen since the beginning of recorded human history, are now melting, they’re doing it quickly, and at an accelerating pace.”

      “Scary,” Mark Swann said. “The end of the world as we know it.”

      “And I feel fine,” Murphy added.

      Trudy shrugged. “Let’s not go there. Let’s just stick with what we know. And what we know is that each year, the Arctic Ocean has less ice on top of it than the year before. Soon, possibly within our lifetimes, it’s not going to freeze over anymore at all. Already, the ice cover is thinner, and covers less of an area, for less of the year, than at any time we know of.”

      “And this means…” Luke said.

      “It means the Arctic is opening up. Shipping lanes that never existed before are going to open for traffic. On this side of the world, we’re talking about the Northwest Passage that runs between Canadian islands, and which Canada considers inside its sovereign territory. On the other side of the Arctic, we’re talking about the Northeast Passage, which hugs the northern coastline of Russia, and which Russia considers its territorial waters. In particular, when the ice opens for good, the Russian Northeast Passage will become the shortest and fastest shipping route between factories in Asia and consumer markets in Europe.”

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