Chapter 15

Randall Babcock was Michael Hawthorne's good friend from their years together at the University of Washington. Mike majored in geology and geophysics; Randall majored in education. After graduation, Mike moved east to Colorado's School of Mines for post-graduate studies, ultimately earning a Master of Science degree in Geophysics.

Randall did his post-graduate studies at Western Washington University in Bellingham, a seaport city just under the Canadian border. Randall got his Master of Education degree and accepted an administrative position at Bellingham High School, where he later became assistant Principal.

He married a young elementary school teacher and they had two children. One day she discovered the allure of internet chat rooms, found romance with a California surfer dude, and ran off with the two children for fun times in the California beach scene. Randall was shattered. He had no idea she was that unhappy. He was left with a car payment, a stiff mortgage, and child support payments.

Disillusioned and bitter, he applied for a position at Boise State University's college of education to get away from the coast and reminders of what he'd lost. Boise was his hometown, home of his parents, and many of his childhood friends still lived in the area. He leased a bachelor apartment in Boise's historic north end and set about rebuilding his life. He had no romantic interests and no desire to rekindle a love interest. His nights and weekends were heavy with loneliness.

Ekaterina Khostov came to the United States as a young girl when her parents were assigned embassy duty in San Francisco. She studied at an exclusive private girls school in San Jose and graduated cum laude with a degree in languages and literature. When her parents were recalled during the breakup of the Soviet Union, she elected to remain behind. She married an assistant professor in San Jose, but remained childless.

She was approached by an older gentleman one summer weekend while attending a faculty social function. He explained that he was a good friend of her parents, and asked if she would meet him for a social lunch one day soon. She readily agreed; she found him both charming and overflowing with stories of her parents, their friends, and current news of events in her home town of Volgograd where her parents had recently retired.

Their friendship was enhanced when he invited Katya and her husband to dinner on several occasions where he continued to charm the young couple with his stories and wit.

One day Gervasii asked Katya to join him for lunch; afterward, as they sat chatting over coffee and dessert, he asked if she would be interested in some translation work using her language skills. A year of translation work grew into more serious research and translation projects, and that grew into interview and information gathering.

Each assignment was more challenging, and more lucrative. She received compensation, expenses, and lavishly generous bonus payments with each successful completion. Before long she found herself caught up in a heady schedule of conventions, trade shows, and industrial visits which at first bordered on, and then actively centered upon industrial espionage. In time she'd become a key player in Nikogda Snova and its global network.

Life with her husband had grown confining and dull; his disappointment that no children had blessed their union, and his resentment of her spiraling income and frequent trips away for days at a time led to separation and divorce. Katya was actually glad to be free of her confining marriage. She found herself charmed and seduced by Gervasii's urbane charm. The older man was wealthy, sophisticated, and exciting. Katya was a beautiful adornment on his arm.

Poor Randall never had a chance. It was a warm, early summer day as he strolled along the Boise River greenbelt to the rose gardens in the park behind the Boise Art Museum on Capital Boulevard, a few blocks south of the state capitol building.

He was startled to find one of the most beautiful women he'd ever seen walking alongside him as they came to the rose plantings. He'd not noticed her approach, but she was impossible to ignore now that she'd come alongside.

"The roses, they are so beautiful, are they not?" she smiled to him as she bent down to inhale the scent of a brilliant pink bloom.

"Uhhh, yes ... yes, they are," Randall stammered, caught off guard. "It's only been a few weeks since they started blooming. They're all fresh and in full bloom now."

"Ahh ... they are my favorite flower. Do you come here often?"

"Oh, yes, most every weekday. I work just over the footbridge, along the green belt, at the University."

"Oh, a professor! How good for you!"

"No, just an assistant, but I do enjoy being here, yes."

They continued to stroll around the squares and rectangles of the plantings, enjoying the riot of colors and scents. Randall admired her tall, slender form, her tanned complexion, and her rich black hair that cascaded to her shoulders in glistening soft curls. Her eyes glowed with friendly greeting, reinforced by her generous and warm smiles.

"I am new to your city; I have a research project that will keep me here for some time. Can you suggest places unique to your area that I should visit before I return to San Francisco?"

Randall knew many such places. Over the next two weeks he and Katya were together during every free moment. His loneliness was forgotten; his time and attention were focused completely on her.

"Tell me, Randall, you attended the University in Seattle; did you have good friends there?"

"Not many. I was not from that area, of course. But I was lucky. A good friend, whose parents were close friends with my parents, started at UW with me. We saved money by sharing an apartment and a car. We had four good years there; lots of good times."

"Oh, that was fortunate. Do you see him from time to time now?"

"Oh, not for a long time—until just recently. He became a geologist, actually a consulting geophysicist, and his work took him all over the world. Then he had the worst thing happen. He got stranded in Antarctica several months ago and very nearly died. But that's all behind him now. He got out and his injuries healed. Actually, it's odd you should ask. He's back here in Idaho now, spending the summer and resting at our family cabin in Silver City."

Arrangements

Michael was worried that it could be difficult to arrange a way back to Siple Island, but he had no idea just how nearly impossible it was proving to be. It was simply too far across the hostile southern ocean threatened with icebergs and ravaged by the planet's fiercest and most unpredictable storms.

"Damn it!" he raged to himself. "It must be possible. There are trawlers that fish down there, and sometimes a crazy yachtsman decides to circumnavigate the entire damned continent, and research vessels make frequent trips. Why can't we get a lead on something?"

He scoured the internet for some way to get a ride; the few leads he'd followed up on proved to be wildly unaffordable. There was an adventure expedition company with its own private camp on the ice, the only permanent privately-operated facility allowed for many years. A flight and adventure ski trek to the south pole listed at $65,000, and you provided your own gear.

He'd considered chartering an airplane or a trawler. A twin-engine Otter could make it from the tip of South America with special long-range tanks. Such flights had been made before, but it was too dangerous and expensive. The trawlers that fished the area during the short tooth-fish season were huge, and chartering one for his purposes was not possible. Smaller, private trawlers or yachts seemed too dangerous. Stormy seas and icebergs made the venture unfeasible.

He was both amazed and alarmed at how much money the agency had committed to charter the New Zealand ship to drop him on Siple Island for his initial ground survey. "Damn, that must have cost the taxpayers a king's ransom," he mused. "It must be sweet to have unlimited hidden funds to throw around like that!"

Later at the kitchen table, while nursing another mug of hot coffee, he spilled his frustrations to Steve.

"No luck running anything down. No leads at all. Here it is, early August, and we need to be moving, getting set up. But I can't locate a ride of any kind, sea or air. Any ideas?"

Steve had also been considering the problem. He'd let Mike do the computer work, but he had been trying to find alternatives, some way to turn agency assets to their own advantage without tipping their hand. Even though the deputy director had been pacified, held at arm's length, that didn't mean he would turn a blind eye to the group's actions.

"Sea. It's got to be by sea. If we fly, there's too much chance we'll be stranded there if something goes wrong. I think you've forgotten something, too. How are we going to hand off that crate of crystals to our friends?"

Mike smiled. He'd been waiting for this question.

"Not so much of a problem as you might think. We fit it with a beeper and drop it over the side at the edge of the ice shelf. They home in on the beeper and take it home. Sort of like a UPS package drop."

Steve rocked back in his chair and stared at Mike:

"Are you serious?"

"Yep. Trust me."

"Okay, smart guy. Explain how that works!"

"No problem. Didn't you wonder how their swimmer teams go out and harvest the protein they use? The krill?"

"Not especially, no. I just assumed they had it worked out. It didn't occur to me to wonder how."

Mike smiled in return. "I guess that's the difference between a spook and a scientist, then. You look for motives, I look for methods. Okay, here's how they do it. Dee'rah showed me. They go out in teams of five or six swimmers to harvest a catch. Two swimmers pull a long woven tube, sort of like a huge cotton picking sack, except it is closely woven like a fine net. The other three or four swim ahead, focusing 'herding energy' to cause the krill to bunch up in tight knots. The net swimmers scoop 'em up. When the net's full, they gather around and focus again, compressing all that krill down into a compressed block, like a cube of protein. Relay swimmers take that cube back to the sea tunnel that leads to their habitat. Simple!"