The Elizabethan Secret (Lang Reilly Series Book 9) Read Online Free Page A

bunny rabbit would be viewed by an eight year old. Certainly nothing laudable, even if the instrument had been an evil-eyed, winged assassin. “Business, just dull old business. And I’m having after-dinner drinks with an old friend.”
                  He sure wasn’t going to mention the cigar.
                  “Now put your mother on, will you?”
                  Which, after ”I love you, daddy,“ Manfred did.
                  He and Gurt discussed arrangements for the trip to Christie’s.
                  “I should be home before then. We can come over together.”
                  If the damnably suspicious Scotts can be persuaded by then.

5.
    71o 17’44”N, 156o 45’59”W
    200 Miles off Barrow, Alaska, Arctic Ocean
    At Approximately the Same Time
     
                  Captain First Rank Igor Samanov was understandably proud of the Borei Class nuclear submarine Yuri Dolgoruky. Armed with the new Bulava missiles, she and her one-hundred-nine man crew were more than a match for anything America had afloat, or more accurately, submerged.
                  She had been under sixty meters of ice since leaving the Northern Fleet’s base at Severomorsk three weeks ago, two-and-a-half  weeks of stealthily patrolling just outside the exclusive economic zone set by both the United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea and the 1996 Ottawa Declaration creating the eight member Arctic Council.
                  Originally the Council had been an association of the countries bordering the Arctic Ocean. Its sole function had been debating the supposed effects of global warming on indigenous humans and animals. All of that had changed once the scope of the deposits of oil and natural gas had been discovered and receding ice had raised the possibility of accessibility. Then the Council had become an economic organization. Since, like the United Nations, its actions were subject to veto, it could do little more than bewail the despoliation of the very region it was created to preserve.
                  That was the real reason the Yuri Dolgoruky was conducting what would appear to be a routine military patrol here at the top of the world, cruising between those sea-floor features oceanographers called the Canada Basin and the Chukchi Plateau. The area was suspected of containing the largest single natural gas deposit ever known.
                  When and if the Canadians or Americans started to exploit what could be the greatest national windfall ever, Russia wanted to be the first to know. Once oil rigs were in place, Russia would complain to the Council of the likely adverse environmental impact: Damage to the habitat of bowhead, beluga and narwhales, walruses, seals, the native Inupiat people, and the entire American population of polar bears.
                  Not that environmental preservation was Russian policy, far from it. Crippling the economy of its greatest rival, the United States, was.
                  For years, the American media had trumpeted every oil or chemical spill, every drought, every flood, and any other natural or man-made disaster it could find and no small number it created. If one believed what was on the television screen every night, only a fool would drink the water, breath the unfiltered air, or expose a square inch of skin to carcinogenic sunlight. Revelation that the much-vilified oil and gas companies were about to send the polar bear to join the passenger pigeon into extinction would, the theory went, cause the politicians, always more sensitive to the wind direction than a weather vane, to put a stop to any drilling.
                  If not, the Council would readily pass a resolution condemning the United States’ disregard of the delicate ecosystem. The small Scandinavian members outnumbered the United States and its ally, Canada. The