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

American people, or a significant number of them, believed debating societies like the United Nations or the Arctic Council actually mattered and would be more concerned about the country’s “image” than its national interest.
                  Americans were strange people.
                  His thoughts were interrupted by Chief Ship Petty Officer Karov. “Sir?”
                  “Yes?”
                  “The navigation systems are not functioning.”
                  Not surprising. Ionospheric effects frequently rendered both GPS and GNSS navigational satellite signals useless in the polar region because of the relatively low elevation of those satellites to the pole. Complicating matters was the relative uselessness of a compass here. Since true north and magnetic north were not the same, complicated calculations were necessary to reconcile the two, which could be as much as seventy-five degrees apart. And that was if the compass was not subject to spinning or wobbling as was common in these latitudes.
                  Captain Samanov sighed. Although the ship’s sophisticated sonar would prevent it from smashing into any underwater peaks, it could not guarantee the ship would not wander inside the two hundred mile limit. With satellites that could guide a submarine across an ocean without surfacing, take a photograph of something as small as an automobile tag and photograph solar systems invisible to the largest earth-bound telescopes, surely someone could come up with a navigational device that worked in the polar regions.
                  It couldn’t happen soon enough for Captain First Rank Igor. The last thing he wanted was a repetition of the 1981 incident in which the Soviet U137 ran aground only two kilometers from a Swedish Naval base. The captain had claimed navigational error to a more than skeptical world. He had been a school boy at the time but he still remembered the unfortunate commander’s disgrace.
                  He, and Russia, would do whatever had to be done to prevent a reoccurrence of that humiliation.  

6.
    Christie’s, London
    8 King Street, St. James
    19:20 British Summertime
    Three Days Later
     
                  An unseasonable thunderstorm was rumbling its way across the city when the cab stopped to let Lang and Gurt out in front of the four-story town house that had been the London home to the world’s largest auction house of luxury items since 1823. Inventory went from fine art to jewelry to fine wines. In the twentieth century real estate from chateaux on the Loire to plantations on the bayou were added to lots up for bid. The house’s first auction had been held in 1766 when John Christie had held a sale of the effects of an estate.
                  Lang paid the cabbie before stepping out into the downpour. He clutched the auction catalogue in one hand, trying to keep it reasonably dry. Ostensibly merely a listing of the lots to be auctioned off tonight, its artful color photography and descriptions made the book a treasure in itself. Worldwide, these catalogues had an audience, the vast majority of whom would never set foot in any of the house’s fifty-seven offices in thirty-two countries. Even at over fifty dollars each, Christie’s catalogues had a subscription rate any number of magazines might envy.
                  With his other hand, Lang hoisted an umbrella, thankful its spring loading required only the touch of a button. There was a click and the umbrella opened as anticipated. The surprise came when a gust of cold and very wet wind snapped the cloth inside out, leaving Lang holding what, in the blurred light of the street, could have been mistaken for a dead sapling.
                  His reaction was a string of expletives best lost in the wind.
                  Gurt, raincoat forming a canopy over her head,