Abyss km-15 Page 2

  In the blink of an eye a loop of the cable tangled in the other deckhand’s legs and recoiled, lifting the man up over the stern rail and into the ocean.

  “Launch the tender!” Eve screamed. Unzipping her coveralls and peeling them off, she went to the rail where she pulled off her deck shoes, and, mindless of the Fox camera trained on her nearly naked body, dove overboard.

  Don had been shouting something she couldn’t quite make out as she plunged into the warm water of the Stream. She spotted the deckhand about ten feet below, moving incredibly fast to the north along the starboard side of the ship’s hull. He was frantically trying to untangle himself from the cable that was dragging him toward the sea bottom two hundred feet down.

  Kicking hard toward him Eve was caught up in the powerful Gulf Stream, moving in excess of four knots, understanding that if she missed him the first time she would be swept away with no possibility of getting back to him against the current.

  She was a strong swimmer, and had free dived in the U.S. Virgin Islands to the pilothouse of the Rhone in sixty feet of water. But trying to make the angle to reach the deckhand was sapping her strength, tiring her faster than anything she could ever imagine, and for a moment she was frightened for her own survival and nearly hesitated.

  The deckhand looked up toward the surface, a resigned expression on his face, as he stopped struggling and allowed the cable and current to drag him farther down.

  Eve got to the man and grabbed him by the collar of his coveralls. Suddenly he came alive and tried to reach for her, but she pulled out of his grasp and went to where the cable was wrapped around his knees. As the deckhand desperately clutched at her hair, her neck, her arms, she managed to undo the slack cable, and a second later they were rocketing toward the surface, her lungs burning.

  The deckhand convulsed once and then went slack just before they surfaced, and Eve was able to breathe, dark spots in front of her eyes, pinpricks of light flashing off in her brain as her cerebral cortex began to feel the effects of oxygen deprivation.

  Don and a pair of crewmen, as well as Stewart Melvin, their medical officer, had launched the eighteen-foot RIB, the smaller of the Big G ’s tenders, and they were alongside within ninety seconds, the Honda four-stroke holding them against the Stream until the deckhand could be pulled aboard.

  Melvin immediately began CPR as Don hauled Eve aboard. She’d lost her bra and the nipples of her small breasts were so erect they ached, another effect of near drowning.

  Don put a blanket over her shoulders and she looked up. “Thanks,” she said, and then she looked over as the man she’d saved suddenly coughed up a lot of seawater, his eyes fluttering.

  “He belongs to you now,” Don said.

  “No thanks, I’m handful enough for myself,” she said. “What the hell happened?”

  “We’ll know as soon as we haul the cable in, but the impeller and generator are gone. No way we’re going to find them. And Parks is dead.”

  Eve’s eyes narrowed. “He didn’t have a chance. But the cable didn’t snap from the strain.”

  “Manufacturing defect?”

  “I don’t think so, and neither do you.”

  They approached the boat, circling around to the port side davits, which would lift the tender back aboard. The Fox crew was at the rail.

  Don managed a thin smile. “You’ll make the national news. The Queen of the High Seas to the rescue. Maybe it’ll divert their attention from our failure.”

  “Setback,” Eve said under her breath.

  * * *

  Eve had debated sending the Fox crew ashore before the cable was brought aboard and they began their search for the generator set and the answers to what had gone wrong. But science was about openness, not secrets, a creed she had lived by her entire professional career. She wasn’t about to start a cover-up now.

  Bob Taylor, the rescued deckhand, was immediately hustled to the ship’s infirmary. The body of Stan Parks, the other deckhand, had been covered but not moved on the Coast Guard’s instructions. A crewman was hosing down the blood and gruesome bits of viscera, washing all of it overboard through the scuppers.

  Eve hurried to her cabin to dry off and get dressed and when she got back to the winch deck the cable had been brought aboard. Hugh Banyon, the Gunther ’s captain, was holding the mangled end in one of his meaty paws. It was blackened, as if someone had taken a blowtorch to it.

  “That wasn’t cut,” Eve said.

  “No,” Banyon said, looking up.

  “We had a power spike in the system just before it went down,” Don said.

  “It’d take a hell of a power surge to fry the cable,” Banyon said.

  “A direct short could have done it,” Eve said. She was sick at heart about this, especially about Parks’s death. But there was no way the system could have shorted out naturally. They’d designed too many safeguards, much like fuses, against just such an overload. But unless they could recover the impeller-generator they had no way of knowing what had failed, and why.

  She stared toward the west and the smudge of Florida’s coastline. Finding the unit would be next to impossible. The Stream could have sent it almost anywhere to the north along a track that was thirty miles wide.

  The thought struck her that someone had planned it that way.

  She was supposed to fail here. Afterwards what little funding and support she was getting from NOAA would dry up, and it would be over.

  “What do we do now?” Don asked.

  The Fox camera was close, and a boom mike was just above them.

  “Prove that this was sabotage, which makes Stan Parks’s death murder, and look for the money to go all the way.”

  Don was shaking his head. “If you’re right, this thing is out of control. We’re done.”

  “We’re just getting started,” Eve countered.

  May

  Anne Marie Marinaccio and her mob had been cruising southwest along the European Mediterranean coast for the past two weeks, pulling in and docking at places like Iráklion, Palermo, Sassari, Cagliari, then Palma de Majorca. Except for her homeport of Monaco, where her motor yacht Felicity was nothing more than a bit over average, the stunning 402-foot German-built Blohm & Voss was the belle of the ball in just about every marina from Cyprus off the Turkish Coast to Spain’s Costa del Sol. Every player’s dream.

  Finally, two days ago at Alicante she’d gotten tired of the endless, meaningless vacation, the drinking, the outrageous gourmet meals on deck, the stream of business wannabes with their investment schemes — hands outstretched, confidential whispers in her ear, portfolios, facts, figures, projections — and then the string of pretty girls — topless or nude, flawless bodies flouncing around, seemingly everywhere aboard, mindlessly giggling from bed to bed — so she’d sent them all ashore.

  Except for Captain Panagiotopolous and the crew of nine plus two bodyguards, she was alone now with her thoughts, and mostly her gut-gnawing worries. Everything she’d worked for was starting to fall apart, and she’d been like Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

  Anne Marie was a player. Her Marinaccio Group, known simply as the MG, was run from offices in Dubai, but domiciled primarily as a discretionary macro oil futures hedge fund in Mauritius. The MG was valued at $498 billion, but heavily leveraged with actual investments, some through derivatives, of something under $50 billion, which was about three times the amount she’d taken from her investors in a mammoth U.S. real estate scheme six years ago. She’d been forced to leave her estates in the Hamptons, Palm Beach, and the Sonoma wine country to the feds and take her private jet to Dubai, whose sheikhs greeted her and her money — despite her gender — with open arms. She was their kind of wheeler-dealer.

  Tall and fit-looking for a woman of fifty-two, Marinaccio’s undyed salt-and-pepper hair, deep, expressive eyes, and somewhat chiseled features reminiscent of the Redgrave actresses, lent her the aura of success. Heads turned when she entered a room; men were intrigued and their women were
instantly on guard, even if they didn’t exactly know who or what she was. And it pleased her. It was in her nature.

  She was a fighter, too, with a track record to prove it. But the world had gotten much smaller since her days stateside, when she had half a dozen senators in her pocket, along with twice as many representatives, all in on her mortgage-flipping schemes that had racked up some fabulous profits. She’d funded five top-ranked lobbyists who worked both sides of the aisle along with the Americans for Tax Reform to head off increasing scrutiny of the commercial banking industry that was making questionable loans, billions of which Marinaccio Group arranged through dozens of partnerships, mostly in the two prime housing markets — Florida and California.

  She had figured that the boom had to end sooner or later and when it did banks would fail and a lot of important people, who had trusted her to continue making them even richer than they already were, would be seriously hurt. And when she saw it coming, smelled it in the wind on Wall Street, knew it in her gut, she had made one final push — leap, actually — and when she walked she was a multibillionaire, her money safe in the Saudi-run International Bank of Commerce in Prague, in Syria, and, of course, in Dubai, and lately MG’s fortune in Mauritius.

  It was those important people stateside who wanted to get to her. Which meant that for the past six years her travel had been restricted, and lately she had begun to chafe at the bit, thus this trip to test the waters in a way. And to take her mind off her latest set of troubles, because if her oil ventures failed — and there was a more than even chance now that they would, especially because of the money she’d poured into Iraq — the Middle East would be gone for her, leaving her Russia or China, in a worst-case scenario Cuba, or with her friend in Venezuela.

  The Med was calm this afternoon. Standing in the ultramodern and expensively furnished Italian-designed saloon with a glass of Krug in hand, she could see the Marseille skyline far to the hazy north. This morning the captain had asked if they were returning to their berth at Monaco, but Anne Marie had merely shaken her head. She figured she would need at least a few more days to work out her next moves.

  Run? If she did that she would be out of the business, possibly for good. On the surface it wouldn’t be so bad to retire somewhere. She had plenty of money, and when she got back she would begin siphoning even more cash from the fund into a few untouchable private offshore accounts. Her investors, especially some of the Saudis, would send someone after her naturally. But she had the means to fight back, and if need be it’s exactly what she would do, fight fire with fire. But her strike would be harsh beyond measure. It was something her father, one of the original hedge fund managers back in the late fifties and early sixties, would have done.

  “The whole notion of minimizing risk at the expense of reducing profits is a load of pure horseshit,” Thomas Senior stated flatly at his daughter’s graduation from Harvard Business School. Anne Marie had inherited her dad’s tall, slender frame and good looks, along with a few million when the old man had put a 1911A1 Military Colt .45 to his temple and blew his brains out. When he had been alive though the old man had never been shy about offering his opinions whether they’d been asked for or not. Anne Marie, who had followed in his footsteps, first with a BA in accounting from Loyola, her CPA from DePauw, and finally a Harvard MBA, had also inherited that trait.

  “Al Jones got it wrong,” Senior had told the group of MBA graduates gathered around him and his daughter on the Yard. Jones had been the financial wizard who’d created the first hedge fund in 1949, buying assets he thought would go up and selling those that he expected to fall. The man was hedging his bets. “That’s the way the market works when pansies weak in the knees make their trades.”

  “And now?” one of the newly minted MBAs asked politely, even though they all knew what the answer would be.

  Senior looked at them as if he were seeing a bunch of English lit majors who wouldn’t be expected to know the difference between a high-water mark and a hurdle rate or a discretionary macro strategy versus a systematic macro — which in his opinion was no strategy at all. Letting computer software direct your buy-sells was for idiots and cowards.

  “Profits!” the old man roared.

  “At all costs?” the same young man asked.

  And then Senior, realizing that his leg was being good-naturedly pulled, smiled. “Is there any other way?”

  Anne Marie had been proud of her father that afternoon. Senior had been a player right up to the end when the markets crashed in ’87, and although his funds had lost only 10 percent of their NAVs, or net asset values, it was enough because they’d all been leveraged to 90 percent. For every dollar his funds had lost, they’d wiped out nine. And it was over.

  Anne Marie took the bottle of Krug out to the aft sundeck and sat back in one of the chaise lounges, a dark scowl on her features. She was dressed in a white lounging suit and she was aware that she looked good. But she couldn’t keep her mind away from her troubles. Her situation was a lot more complicated, but she was heading toward the same net effect that her father had faced. This cruise had been meant to recharge her batteries, figure a way out, because she sure as hell wasn’t going to put a pistol to her head. But she was lonely now. She’d had three high-profile marriages, the last one to a Hollywood star that had ended six years ago when she had to get out of Dodge and he refused to leave with her. She had her staff, but they couldn’t be counted on to share a confidence; most of them would see it as a sign of weakness, typical for a female, and jump ship.

  The only man she could count on was Gunther Wolfhardt, a former German intelligence officer who Anne Marie had been introduced to by a high-ranking assistant to the UAE’s minister of finance, Sheikh Hamdan bin Rashid Al Maktoum, as a good man to have in one’s employ. Especially in the sort of business ventures that Anne Marie might be interested in pursuing and, of course, because she was a woman in a man’s world.

  As a young KGB lieutenant, Wolfhardt had been a killer for the East when the Germanys were separate countries, and after they’d united, he’d headed farther east, ending up in Prague, where he somehow came to the attention of the Saudis.

  The exact details of why Wolfhardt had suddenly fled the Czech Republic and turned up in the UAE, where he did the royal family favors from time to time, were fuzzy. Nor was Anne Marie interested in finding out. Instead she’d created what she called the special projects division of the MG, and gave Wolfhardt a healthy budget and free reign. Her orders were to fix things that needed fixing. If some investor somewhere got cold feet and wanted to back out, Wolfhardt and his string of freelancers would arrange an unfortunate accident, or perhaps a stroke or heart attack, and even the occasional home or business fire or terrorist suicide bomber.

  Anne Marie had immediately connected with the German because they were of like minds; they were survivors, and nothing else mattered, though there was no love between them.

  But Gunther wasn’t here now, only the two bodyguards he’d arranged for were, so there was no one to talk to. No one to confide in.

  Primarily the Marinaccio Group, with Anne Marie as the sole manager, dealt in oil futures, a lot of the risk propped up by derivatives among the oil suppliers, mostly OPEC and the refineries in the U.S., India, and China. It was nothing more than insider deals between the producers and the users who agreed to set a price and deliver a set amount of oil. The people who pumped the oil were assured of a market, the refiners were assured of a steady supply, and cash could be made on the promises.

  All that had been fine, especially when oil had approached the $150 per barrel mark. But she’d made a few side deals, pumping a lot of the fund’s money into China’s industrial revolution. The higher China’s per capita income rose, because of farmers coming into the cities to work in the factories, the more automobiles and trucks they would need, ergo an increased demand for oil.

  The problems came one after the other: Americans reduced their driving when gasoline hit $4 a gallon and th
ey vastly scaled back their discretionary spending when trips to the mall got too expensive, which sharply cut back the need for inexpensive Chinese products that were increasingly more expensive to ship to the U.S. Although oil dropped to under $100, then $50 per barrel — simple supply and demand — Americans were not returning to their gas-guzzling SUVs, nor were they returning to the malls, and China had to cut back its manufacturing outputs, and curtail building new factories.

  The Marinaccio Group was hemorrhaging money, and Anne Marie had no real idea what to do about it.

  “Be bold,” her father would have advised. “Make an end run.”

  But look where that had gotten him. It was depressing.

  Carlos Ramirez, one of her bodyguards, came from the saloon with a sat phone. He was a small, wiry man with a star soccer player’s physique and the dark complexion of Pelé. He moved with the grace of a jungle cat and never raised his voice. “Sorry to bother you, Ms. Marinaccio, but you have a call.”

  “No calls,” Anne Marie said.

  “I think you need to take this one, ma’am. It’s Abdullah al-Naimi.”

  Anne Marie hesitated for just a beat. Al-Naimi was the deputy director of Saudi Arabia’s chief spy agency, the General Intelligence Presidency or GIP, and first cousin to the Saudi minster of petroleum and mineral resources. The shit was about to hit the fan much sooner than she’d thought it would. The Saudis were not interested in developing Iraq’s oil fields. They didn’t want the competition when the oil began to flow, principally to the U.S. They wanted to squeeze the market as hard as they could for as long as they could. And they definitely did not trust women in business.

  She took the phone and Ramirez retreated back through the saloon. “Mr. al-Naimi, good afternoon. Where are you calling from?”

  “If you look to the northwest you will see my helicopter,” al-Naimi said. “Stop your vessel and prepare for me.”