Moon Mask

by James Richardson

  “Where do you even start?” West asked, his Brooklyn accent strong. He sat between Gibbs and O’Rourke who both dozed on the opposite side of the cabin. Garcia sat beside Raine while Murray occupied the co-pilot seat in the cockpit along with Lake.

  “At the beginning,” Nadia replied automatically, not really listening to anyone else as she navigated into a powerful search engine which had been developed by DARPA. In a matter of seconds she had a list of websites which claimed to hold census data for Argentina dating back to the mid sixteenth century. She quickly weeded out the obvious commercial sites that had sprouted up in recent years since the boom in interest in plotting out family trees. She clicked on a link that ended in ‘.gov.ar’ which opened onto the homepage of the Archivo General de la Nación, Argentina’s General Archive of the Nation. Raine, fluent in Spanish, took the computer off her lap and scanned through the text.

  Established in 1821, Archivo General de la Nación absorbed dozens of historical archives, libraries, church and provincial records, amassing them all into one place. Raine quickly navigated through the website.

  “I presume we do not have a second name for this ‘Abubakar?’” Nadia asked.

  “Afraid not,” Raine replied. “But I’m guessing that the child of an Egyptian and a Selk’nam Indian wouldn’t go unnoticed.”

  Across the hold, Gibbs stirred and opened his eyes. Bleary for a second, they suddenly snapped onto the laptop on Raine’s knees.

  “What the hell!” he snapped. “I told you, no com equipment! West, you’re supposed to be watching him!”

  “Sorry boss,” West grumbled.

  Raine held up his hands in surrender. “Whoa, keep your panty-hoes on Gibbsy,” he said. “I wasn’t looking at Playboy or-”

  “Give the computer back to the Rusky,” Gibbs said firmly. Raine saw his hand drift to his sidearm and a flare of rebellion made him want to hold on to the machine just to piss the man off. But causing trouble wasn’t going to help King and Sid so he slowly placed it back on Nadia’s lap.

  “Sorry,” he said insincerely. “I just figured that doing something more than taking a cat-nap might be useful.” The dig at Gibbs was obvious and his face twisted in fury but Nadia cut him off.

  Her hands had been running across the keypad at incredible speed, almost a blur, ignoring the exchange and finishing Raine’s search, but in a flourish, she jabbed the return key and announced: “Shakir Adjo.”

  “Shakir Adjo,” King read the name off the computer embedded into the bulkhead opposite him. Bill operated it under the archaeologist’s direction to prevent him from trying to use the internet to call for help.

  King’s hunch had paid off. Accessing Argentina’s Archivo General de la Nación, he had pulled up the files for settlements in the Patagonian region from the year that, according to the Kernewek Diary, Abubakar had returned to the area. From Emily Hamilton’s descriptions, Abubakar and his wife, Kénos, sounded as if they were head-over-heals in love with one another. Even though their wedding, he could only assume, had been a bizarre conglomeration of Muslim and local customs and therefore most likely not recorded, the strong presence of Christian missionaries in the area would have seen to it that even pagan and heathen births were recorded.

  He had then scanned through a list of recorded births from the period he had surmised the Egyptian had returned to Patagonia, from around 1713 onwards. Most of the names were heavily influenced by the predominant Spanish settlers. Except for one. Shakir Adjo.

  “It doesn’t list the name of the parents,” Bill said accusingly. “And you said the diary doesn’t mention Abubakar’s second name. How can you be so sure that this is his child?”

  Sid now sat beside her boyfriend, allowed to join in with the investigation. Bill’s lackey had cleaned the cut on her cheek and applied a couple of paper stitches. Now, her dark eyes shone with intelligence as she scanned the digitalised version of the archaic birth record. “We may not know his second name,” she replied, “but Shakir Adjo is a popular Arabic name. If you look at the names on the other records, they’re mostly things like José or Hernando, influenced strongly by the Spanish explorers and missionaries to the area which interbred with the natives. There wouldn’t have been very many people of Arabic descent in Patagonia back then. Or now, I imagine.”

  “Plus,” King added, “Abubakar hid a clue in his own son’s name.” Bill frowned but Sid’s face lit up with understanding.

  “Adjo,” she realised.

  “It’s Egyptian,” King told Bill. “It means ‘treasure’.”

  “He gave his son a surname which he himself never had,” Sid said. “A map of names-”

  “Which leads to the map itself,” King concluded. Despite himself, he felt a twinge of enjoyment, even excitement. “All we have to do is follow that map.”

  “Now we have a name, it should be a relatively simple process to chart the family’s movements,” Nadia said in her usual calculating manner. Her eyes never left the screen as she spoke and her delicate fingers ran over the keyboard with robotic precision, never a key out of place.

  She quickly set up a flowchart template on a basic office document, a series of boxes linked with arrows. In the two at the top she typed ‘Abubakar and Kénos’, linking it to a box below it in which she typed ‘Shakir Adjo, Son, Born 1715.’ From there sprouted off two more branches and she input the name of Shakir’s son and daughter, and then his wife, before branching again to their children and so on. A complex diagram literally grew from the tiny acorn of an obscure Egyptian name into the mighty oak of a family tree. The closer to the present the tree came, the more complex the information that was held about Abubakar’s descendants: birth, marriage and death certificates, places of residence, military service records, even digitalised copies of last wills and testaments.

  After sometime, Raine peeled his gaze away from the screen and glanced across the hold at Gibbs. His puckered face stared back at him with a menacing glower and, in response, Raine couldn’t help but fire him one of his winning grins. Then he shifted his gaze to the other members of the team. They all looked battered and bruised following the explosive events in Jamaica and the hollowness in their eyes revealed the pain of losing team mates. But these were the best of the best. They had lost comrades before and they would do so again. They betrayed no sense of grief or anger but Raine knew the turmoil of emotions that were churning around inside each of them.

  “Hey,” Garcia said from beside him, his accent betraying his Latino roots. “That thing you did with the bike. It was pretty damn cool.”

  Raine nodded his appreciation. Such simple praise from men such as these was an honour. It meant that despite whatever rumours they had heard about the convicted traitor, they had seen him in action now and judged him a worthy warrior. He felt a sudden longing for that sense of camaraderie and shifted his gaze to O’Rourke. The big man remained silent, his eyes meeting his for only a second before flicking away under the bitter scrutiny of Gibbs who then refocused all of his attention on him. Raine could practically feel the malice rolling off of him in waves.

  There were only three of them alive now, him, Gibbs and O’Rourke. And despite whatever ruling a military court had made on him, whatever sentence he had received and now the pardon he had been granted, he knew that only those two other men had any right to judge him. And their verdicts scared him. They had been there. They had seen what he had done.

  The icy moment was broken when Nadia announced: “I know where the map is.”

  “Hernando Gruber Adjo,” Sid read off the sheet of paper on which King had spent the better half of two hours scribbling down Abubakar’s family tree on. She glanced at the proceeding boxes. “What a mix,” she commented.

  Over the subsequent years since Abubakar settled in Patagonia and married an Indian woman, his bloodline had blended into the Hispanic settlers and, shortly after the end of World War Two, even German.

  “So this guy,” Bill said, po
inting to the computer screen which displayed a forty three year old birth certificate, “is a mixture of Egyptian, Selk’nam Indian, Spanish and German bloodlines?”

  “That’s right,” King nodded.

  “And you’re sure this is the right guy?”

  It was a best guess really. There were, he had worked out, currently six living descendants of Abubakar scattered around Argentina, Chile and Brazil. One had even immigrated to New Zealand.

  “As is the custom in most societies, important family heirlooms usually get passed down through generations via the first born son. I’m also figuring that the name ‘Adjo’ corresponds with this. It hasn’t been filtered out through marriage like you might expect can happen when we’re looking so far back in time. So,” he traced his index finger along the line on the family tree which he had highlighted. “I followed the map’s passage from Abubakar down the line of first born sons. Luckily for us, each generation had a male born into it, carrying on the family name. Follow the path and we come to this man. Hernandez Gruber Adjo; the forty three year old owner of a youth hostel in the town of El Chalten, Patagonia, Argentina.”

  He looked Bill straight in the face and didn’t dare show any of his misgivings. He and Sid were only alive right now because they were useful. If he let on to the fact that he was making some pretty massive leaps here and it turned out that he was wrong, that the map was passed into another branch of the family generations ago, both he and Sid would be dead.

  “That’s where we’ll find Abubakar’s part of the map,” he said firmly.

  Bill stared back at him, his gaze calculating. Eventually, he turned away and headed up into the cockpit. Already en route to the Patagonian region, King nevertheless felt a shift in the pit of his stomach as the plane banked towards its new destination.

  They were running out of time.

  33:

  World’s End

  Laguna Viedma,

  Argentina

  The Black Cat dropped down through the crystal clear Andean air, banking towards the long line of mountains that stretched down the backbone of the South American continent. Running through rainforests and deserts, the incredible line of mountains approached their final destination in the ice fields of Patagonia. Their jagged peaks towered around the black plane as it dropped into them, surrounded on all sides. Winter in the southern hemisphere dropped sheets of pure white snow upon them, broken only by grey outcrops of rock.

  The flying boat banked into a wide valley, its shadow passing over the remote and isolated settlement below like some stalking bird of prey. Looming above the town, the iconic summit of Cerro Chaltén, renamed Mount Fitz Roy for the captain of the famous H.M.S. Beagle, stood like an ancient citadel belonging to the legendary Giants of Patagonia. Long since explained by science as being members of the Selk’nam tribe whose average height was greater than their European ‘discoverers’, the legend nevertheless enticed the imaginations of those who dared to venture into the wild and haunting lands at world’s end.

  There were no airfields or landing strips anywhere near the town of El Chaltén and so the Black Cat ploughed on through the valley, catching only limited interest from those below. It climbed over a mountain ridge, out of sight of the settlement, and then dived steeply towards the fifty mile long blue expanse of Laguna Viedma. Its hull splashed into the frigid waters of the glacial lake, sending up an enormous spray as the pilot wrestled with the controls, bringing the plane around the three mile long terminus of the Viedma Glacier.

  From above, King had seen the enormous tongue of sprawling ice carving its way through the mountains, unstoppable and impenetrable. But now it loomed above them, dwarfing the Black Cat, sheer cliffs of glistening blue and white ice. With a torturous wrenching sound, an enormous chunk of the glacier calved away from the terminus. It slammed into the lake with far more force than the plane’s touch down, giving birth to yet another ice berg which slowly drifted deeper into the lake, constantly feeding it.

  “Hold on,” the pilot’s voice warned as the powerful ripple caused by the calving ploughed into the flying boat’s hull. The plane slid down the edge of the wave and bounced over the preceding, smaller ripples until the water was still once more.

  Then, all King could do was sit silently as the pilot headed towards the deserted shore and lined up with a jetty ordinarily used to ferry tourists out to the glacier. It was empty, the ferry nowhere to be seen, possibly undergoing maintenance during the winter months before the tourist boom of the summer.

  With the whirring of gears, the rear loading ramp of the plane descended, coming almost level with the rickety wooden jetty.

  “Let’s go, Ben,” Bill barked.

  His body felt leaden as he rose to his feet. His hands and feet had been untied and he considered making a move against the mercenaries but forced himself not to. The time wasn’t right and, now, he feared it would never be right.

  “I said, move it,” Bill snapped.

  He turned and breathed in the fresh and clear mountain air blowing gently in through the rear opening before looking at Sid. Her lovely big eyes locked onto his, pleadingly.

  Don’t leave me, they seemed to say.

  But he didn’t have a choice. Bill’s lackey roughly grabbed his arms and hauled him towards the two motorbikes locked in front of the loading hatch. He struggled weakly against him, looking over his shoulder at Sid the whole time. He wondered if he would ever see her again.

  I’ll be back for you, he silently vowed with a weak smile. She seemed to understand. Words weren’t necessary but he couldn’t leave without saying something to her.

  “I love you.”

  “Good,” Bill cut in before Sid could voice her response. “Then you’ll remember what I told you.”

  How could he forget? It was clear to King that Bill was worried. When he had landed in Jamaica, he’d had eight men in his team. Now, all he had was two; the pilot and the unnamed lackey. An escape plan had quickly formed in his mind. Once they were on solid ground, two against three weren’t such bad odds. Maybe an opportunity would arise and he and Sid could get away, alert the authorities.

  But such hopes had been quickly dashed when Bill announced that Sid would be staying on board the Black Cat with the pilot while he and his lackey took King into town to find the map. He’d be checking in with the pilot every fifteen minutes. If the pilot didn’t hear from him, he was ordered to shoot Sid in the head, no questions asked.

  With a sense of dread clutching at his heart, King mounted one of the bikes behind Bill’s minion. Then, on another bike, Bill kicked the ignition, twisted the throttle and shot off at startling speed, up the incline of the ramp and onto the jetty. King’s driver lurched after him, King casting a final glance over his shoulder at Sid.

  His obsession had got her into this. Now he had a new obsession.

  He wouldn’t stop until he got her out of it.

  The two bikes raced along the jetty then hit the shore, tearing up a steep rutted track which led away from a cluster of abandoned sheds before joining the main highway. The air was cold, shockingly so following the sauna of Jamaica, and it bit into King’s exposed hands and face as the bikes hurtled along at shocking speeds. The scenery shot by in a blur, the lake to their left, a line of grey and white mountains to the south. Ahead lay another barrier of snow-capped peaks, the sprawling, snake-like body of another glacier burrowing through them in the distance.

  Veering around to the right, the lake was cut off from view behind them by the line of mountains as the road followed the meandering waters of the Rio de las Vueltas and began descending towards the village of El Chaltén.

  Built in the eighties in response to Argentina’s border disputes with Chile, El Chaltén was little more than a scattering of ugly box-shaped prefabs dotted upon the beautiful landscape, nestling at the foot of Cerro Fitzroy. In fact, Mount Fitzroy and its surrounding peaks and glaciers were the settlement’s only lifeline, the entire village ex
isting now solely to service hikers, climbers and backpackers. It was virtually cut off from the modern world, devoid of cell phone reception and broadband, the local hostels relying on expensive and slow satellite link ups to allow their guests to attempt to keep in touch with the modern world. Hundreds of miles from the nearest major town by rutted, pothole infested roads, El Chaltén existed in a state of near total seclusion and isolation, far from civilisation, far from the short arm of the law, and far, far from help.

  Not exactly the best place to mount a daring escape, King thought darkly as the bikes slowed on the outskirts of town. King thought he saw Bill speak into his radio, checking in with the pilot he presumed, and realised, his hopes sinking further still, that it had taken roughly fifteen minutes to ride from the lake to the village.

  “Damn,” he cursed under his breath. Even if he could escape from Bill and his henchman, would he make it back to the plane before Sid was murdered?

  With a growl, the bikes started forward again, rolling menacingly around a sharp corner upon which sat a grocery store. A group of young people, backpackers judging from their clothes, exited the store carrying boxes of cheap Vino Tinto. To either side of the road sat independent little buildings, most of them remarkably smart yet looking little more than wooden summerhouses like he had seen in gardens back in Oxford. How they kept out the cold, King could only guess, yet they had been put to good use, some being used as restaurants and bistros, others as telephone cabinas. One even housed a small bookshop.

  They continued up the main street, passing another, smaller corner shop to the right before finally coming to a halt outside of the largest building King had yet seen, this one constructed out of bricks and mortar and standing three stories high. A large yellow overland truck, a Scania lorry which had been converted into a giant passenger vehicle, sat on the main drive, its cab tilted forward while its driver worked on its engine. Another lorry, painted blue and white, was parked next to it.