Hanley looked at him like a buyer eyes a used-car salesman. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

Cabrillo smiled broadly. “And so you should. I need you to play Igor and go rob a churchyard.”

Tamara looked aghast. “You want him to do what?”

“You know,” Max said, shaking his head from side to side. “I have to admit there was a part of me that hoped this piece of the operation wouldn’t pan out.”

“Come on,” Juan teased, “fresh air, open skies, decomposing Norwegians. It’ll be great!”

“What are you two talking about? Decomposing who?”

Max turned to her. “In order for us to rescue the hostages so the Argentines don’t know they’re missing, we have to leave something behind to fool them.”

“But?”

“Once we get them out of the building,” Juan said, “we’ll torch it. All they’ll find are eighteen sets of charred bones. Only a pathologist would know they weren’t the original men and women. We’re just grateful the sizes of the winter-over crews are so small, otherwise we’d need to come up with an alternative.”

“Like what?” Her mind reeled.

“A small nuke, maybe.”

From what she’d seen of the Corporation so far, she wasn’t sure if Cabrillo was joking or not. She wouldn’t be surprised if it were the latter.

He threw her a wolfish grin that told her nothing beyond the fact that she was surrounded by a bunch of swashbuckling adolescents. She looked to Max for guidance. He merely shrugged. She said, “I guess it’s a good thing you were going to use a small one.”

Linda moved to her side, as if she were an anchor in their craziness, and said, “Don’t worry. We do know what we’re doing.”

“I’m glad you do because I sure don’t.”

Hanley left twenty minutes later in an RHIB, towing an inflatable boat. He and his four-man crew shot straight out to sea for about five miles before turning southward, so there was no chance of being spotted from shore. Max brought along a gasoline-powered high-pressure pump he planned to use to excavate the bones. The needle of heated water it threw could be dialed up to four thousand psi, more than enough to melt away the permafrost covering the bodies. As he said when they left, “No picks and shovels for Mrs. Hanley’s favorite son.”

Juan had a decidedly more difficult job today. With the Chinese surveying the bay where the wreck was located, Mike Trono and his team couldn’t resume their work. That freed up the Nomad submersible, with its air lock. The perpetually twilit sky was dark enough to provide visual cover, and the Argentines’ oil rigs and hot-air bubbling system would screen the sounds of his work.