Cyborg 03 - High Crystal

by Martin Caidin

  BIONICS MAN HUNTS

  THE SECRETS OF THE GODS!

  Hidden deep in the mountainous interior of Peru lie the unexplored remains of an ancient civilization. A civilization capable of erecting a vast, stone highway, smooth as marble, more than two miles above sea level. How could prehistoric peoples achieve this impossible feat? What extrahuman power lies behind it? Could this power be used again today?

  It is Cyborg Steve Austin’s assignment to answer these questions. But his expedition is not alone in pursuing the mysteries of the ancients. Austin’s rivals are vicious in their methods—and evil in their intentions. And all the superhuman abilities of the man-machine may not be enough to preserve the power of the High Crystal!

  CYBORG and OPERATION NUKE, the original adventures of Steve Austin, are also available in Mayflower Books.

  Once rescued from the flaming wreck of a plane, now rebuilt by the incredible science of bionics, special agent Steve Austin has already exercised his superhuman powers in Cyborg and Operation Nuke. Now the man-machine is set to tackle his most awesome challenge yet—the supernatural mystery of the High Crystal.

  Granada Publishing Limited

  Published in 1976 by Mayflower Books Ltd

  Frogmore, St Albans, Herts AL2 2NF

  First published in Great Britain by

  W. H. Allen & Co Ltd 1975

  Copyright © Martin Caidin 1974

  Made and printed in Great Britain by

  Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd

  Bungay, Suffolk

  Cover illustration by Richard Clifton-Dey

  for my redneck brother,

  Jay Barbree

  HIGH

  CRYSTAL

  CHAPTER 1

  The lightning exploded from stygian blackness. Until this moment there had been only distant flashes, glowing the skies in great flickerings, painting ghostly veils of falling rain. The flashes gleamed and as quickly vanished, and where the six men in the high-winged transport had seen a touch of the storm, the visible world again became the deep-red glow and blue-white tiny pools of the instrument panel and the flight deck. But there was no question of the violence through which they tossed and stumbled, the long thin wings flexing wildly in turbulence, the mixed updrafts and sudden down-smashing blows of air making a mockery of control.

  Six men knowing this could be their last flight. No question of their confidence in the big four-engined machine, the powerful turboprops, the sturdy structure. Tried, proven, the deep-bellied Hercules that had worn its name so well for so many years. This crew had flown this same iron bird through squall lines that shattered equipment, gales, thunderstorms, massive fronts, ice and snow and typhoon.

  This storm was different. The airspeed needle swinging crazily from left to right, at one moment showing them in almost a full stall, the next instant a velocity great enough to bend metal. The climb rate swung from one stop to the other—a good thing it was indicating rate instead of actual climb or long before now the wings would have separated, the tail would have twisted, ripped away. Even the altimeter needle slipped across the edge of the normal world. Its indication most reflected the actual events. Flung aloft on a howling stream of air, they shot from 17,000 to some 25,000 feet, everyone clammed into his seat. All of a sudden they hurtled in the other direction, plunging toward the massive crags they knew were below. Up was more acceptable. The storm could throw you just so high and no more. It might spit the entire machine from one of its flanks, but beyond that was safety and smooth flight. Down was another matter. It could be lethal. They shot skyward then, a long moment of false calm, suspended, wings stripped naked of their lift. Just suspended between the forces of the storm; far below, to the sides and above, the ghostly orange-yellow lightning. They knew. Despite whirling propellers, powerful engines, their skill with the controls and their prayers and curses, they had to go down.

  Their heads went tight with the sudden negative pressure. Lap belts and shoulder harnesses dug into flesh as they heaved upward from their seats. Oil and hydraulic pressure readings sagged or went to zero in the sudden negative gravity. Nose down, wings heeled over, the sickening plunge began as they rode an invisible monstrous falling river of air. All about them, ghostly radiance. Slight fingers of blue-white spitting from propellers, from the nose radome, the wingtips, glowing about the big external tanks slung beneath the wings. Static electricity. St. Elmo’s Fire. They were supercharged with electrical forces unable to discharge. They fell, helpless, and they were damn frightened. They watched the altimeter unwind, the rate of descent a warning they could not respond to. A long moment to stare at the yellowish glow of the radar scope, showing a world filled with splotches and crazy lines, telling them of the rivers of rain in front of them. But they already knew that. They ignored the water-filled sky and thought of their drop toward the mountains, bracing themselves for the shock when they broke free of the enormous downdraft and—

  The lightning exploded at them from an unseen place within the greater storm. No time to see the huge bolt coming at them. Too fast. One instant it was not there, in the next blink it seemed all that existed. If they had had the vision to see what had come from powerful but invisible forces, they would have seen a rope of naked, raw energy—a rope of electrons, snapping from its point of generation to their metal craft; energy moving invisibly through air at some twenty-six thousand miles a second. And so it seemed to the relatively slow reflexes of the six men inside the laboring Hercules that one instant there was no lightning and in the next minuscule fraction of a heartbeat it was there.

  No sound; not yet. Radiance beyond human measure bathed metal and cloth and flesh. Then the heat. Forty-five thousand degrees of it. Hotter than the surface of the sun. The reflex of pain mercifully lagged behind the impact of the energy bolt as it assaulted the metal intruder in this savaged space of air. One instant there was an airplane, in the next an explosion and a ball of flaming wreckage quickly shredded and flung away.

  Storms are sometimes capricious. Five men died instantly. Not the sixth. Electrical energy flashed to his side, crashed between his legs, tore the flight jacket from his back, burned away his shoes and, in the space created when the airplane was sundered, exploded his body into the maw of the storm. He was falling, ejected from the airplane. No strong pain. Shock had nearly overwhelmed it. Also fear. The conditioning of training and experience came to the forefront of dim awareness.

  What had happened to the big C-130E . . . had to be lightning . . . there was the blinding flash and—his mind went to the immediate: He was in the air. He was falling. He must react. They hadn’t been that high above the ground. The infrared mapping pass was being flown at 22,000 feet. The peaks below could be anywhere from 7,000 to 19,000 feet. Pull the D-ring. Don’t waste time. His right hand crossed his chest, grasped the metal handle, jerked. Above wind and storm he heard—imagined he heard?—and surely felt springs snap open, as the pilot chute leaped into the wind and dragged the chute behind. Then a sudden booming crack and a wild swing as the canopy blossomed and he was floating down through a maelstrom of wind and lightning and thunder.

  Jagged lightning strikes through the air, exploding like huge flashbulbs to provide momentary vision, revealed the peaks of the Cordillera Vilcabamba as well as others no one had ever seen to the northeast of that range. He knew that swinging into those peaks in the high winds—and he could only estimate his speed across the ground at between twenty and thirty miles an hour—could mangle or kill him. He hoped he would descend to a lesser altitude. His only real chance was to reach the thick jungle—inhospitable as it might be, it was preferable to jagged rock. Another flicker of lightning. A thick carpet of trees loomed before him. But . . . he was puzzled for a m
oment, and then just before he hit he understood the tremendous speed of his descent. He still must be more than two miles above sea level and the air here was still thin and he was coming down too damned fast and—

  He struck the upper branches of a tree with a ground speed of more than forty miles an hour. A sharp gnarled branch cracked the upper bone of his left arm as if it were a twig. He gasped with the pain that became worse as the parachute canopy snagged in the branches and jerked him almost to a stop before his legs struck the ground. Still, if the canopy had not caught he would have smashed into the ground with impact to break his back or fracture his skull, and the tree held the chute so that it did not billow before the powerful winds and drag him across the ground.

  Pain dizzied him but experience and training stayed. With his right hand he released the clasp to separate the chute harness by his left shoulder, giving him some freedom of movement. Despite his helpless arm he managed to extricate himself from the rest of the harness. It was still a drenching rain and the wind at this altitude could freeze him to death within a few hours. He had no sure idea about where he was. Experience and training: use them.

  He removed the survival kit from the bottom of the chute harness. A mercury-cell flasher showed the way to the base of a huge tree where he could sit. The medical kit. Morphine to cut the pain he knew would soon come from the arm. Before the drug hit there should be time to do the rest. Setting the two aluminum sheets from the kit for a splint was clumsy, an agony. He fashioned a sling from shroud lines cut away from the chute. He managed to force down an emergency ration bar for energy. His head reeled from mild shock, pain and the thin air at this altitude. He must be ten thousand feet or higher. He would need rest, sleep. The kit again. A mylar-insulated blanket. Weighed two ounces. He wrapped it about himself, tucked it in. Within minutes he was feeling warmer; the blanket retained 90 percent of his body heat. He formed a poncho over his head with the mylar, made a flap to protect his face from the rain.

  He sat. Unable, despite the morphine, to sleep. It would come slowly but it would come. Sitting with the rain hissing about him, the thunder, he remembered . . . He had landed on a hard surface. Flat. He flicked on the flashlight, moved the beam slowly. He didn’t believe it.

  A road. A highway. In the midst of towering raw peaks and crags in a totally uninhabited high reach of the Peruvian Andes. Impossible. He studied the hard, solid surface. As far as the flashlight would throw its beam, before it was lost in the heavy rains, this impossible highway continued. Wonder faded before the onset of morphine. He switched off the light and leaned back against the tree and fell asleep.

  It took Major Ben “Dutch” Ryland twleve days to work his way down from the mountains. His rations gave out after three days. He lived on small animals he killed with the high-velocity folding .22 rifle from his survival kit. He managed fish twice by aiming carefully into shallow streams when the unknown-to-him but apparently edible creatures swam lazily near the surface. He used the water-purification tablets from his survival kit to assure the potability of the liquid he gathered from streams. On the eighth day he lost the rifle while fording a narrow but swift stream; making the crossing with one arm broken and the other trying to hang onto his precious rifle was too much. He also lost the survival kit. Going under, he found the weight of the kit too much for only one arm; it was either dump the load or drown. His last four days were spent without food. The water he drank, without chemical purification, assaulted his stomach and made him feverish. Heat, insects, pain from his broken arm, no food and the debilitating effects of the jungle waters nearly finished him. He survived because he was strong and stubborn and kept his head. He worked his way due south, stumbling through thick growth and over tangled underfooting until he reached the banks of the Sicuani River. Through his fever he recalled that the river ran generally southeast as it dropped from the mountain regions. If that were so he must follow the river. It was worse travel than before because the jungle was thicker and teeming with insects that bit him, puffed up his eyes. He went along the river bank because it assured him he would not wander in circles in trackless undergrowth. One late afternoon he stumbled into the riverside town of Azul, nestled beneath a looming mountain peak. A native doctor kept him alive as he was transported, feverish and ranting, downriver to the larger community of Ayabaca. Directly across the river by a wooden bridge was a large grass airstrip. Once every three days a small plane landed, bringing in mail and supplies. Alive but still feverish, Ryland was carried to the airplane and strapped in and then flown two hundred and ninety miles to the nearest Peruvian Air Force base. Within an hour a United States Air Force medical team was on hand.

  The search for the missing C-130E had been abandoned a week before, along with the hope for any surviving crewmen. Next morning Ryland was flown from the Peruvian base directly back to the United States, nonstop to the medical facilities of Norton Air Force Base in California, which not coincidentally was the headquarters of the Air Inspector General of the United States Air Force—and site of an unlisted office of JMSIC, Joint Military Services Intelligence Command.

  JMSIC had been sent, in code, a summary of the inchoate ramblings of the feverish Major Ryland. There could be no paved road, highway or any other such work of man where Ryland had landed in his parachute. Well, he was delirious. Maybe so, thought a colonel in JMSIC. But he knew Dutch Ryland and had the highest regard for the major’s skills and judgment, especially when engineering skills and acumen were involved—even when none of these reported things could be (in the face of all evidence) present where they were allegedly found.

  Major Ryland came out of his fever. He was strong, in superior physical shape, and he recovered swiftly. His. memory seemed unimpaired. He stuck to his story. The details were stamped MOST SECRET and distributed to a limited number of government agencies. Among that list was OSO—the Office of Special Operations, catch-all of undercover maneuvering. What Ryland had reported was so outlandish that no other agency seemed willing to consider it—to try to find out what might be there. Something made the major’s roadway. It was surely very old. Maybe ancient, fashioned by devices unknown to present-day technology.

  In a wooded suburb of Washington, D.C., the JMSIC report stopped at the desk of Oscar Goldman, second from the top in OSO. He read the report. There were too many missing pieces in this thing, which upset Goldman’s orderly thought processes. He took his telephone from its cradle, punched in a number. He asked questions, raised his brows at the answers. He replaced the telephone and turned to his dictating machine, spoke for nearly twenty minutes, gave the tape to his secretary to transcribe. He went to the commissary for coffee. By the time he returned, his memo was typed and he’d made a decision.

  Minutes later he was meeting with Jackson McKay, the huge man who ran OSO. McKay read out Goldman for bothering him with such drivel. Goldman waited him out and counterattacked. A good exchange. A method they’d used with each other for years. It brought most everything out of the woodwork.

  JMSIC had officially requested the services of OSO for the investigation. In the end McKay yielded. “Call him,” he said to Goldman.

  “He’s on a fishing trip. A year overdue, I might add. You call him. You’re big boss.”

  “Get out,” McKay told him pleasantly. “You’re in charge of the dirty work.”

  Goldman got to his feet. “It won’t be easy. I’ll lay odds he hasn’t got his caller with him.”

  McKay agreed, but wagered Rudy Wells would be with him and he would have his caller with him. “Use that frequency.”

  CHAPTER 2

  The rod came back, bending at precisely the right angle, and the wrist snapped forward, bringing the rod whistling in response. Steve Austin watched the fly lure whip neatly along the rocky side of the stream before settling where he had aimed on the far side of a clear, deep pool. He turned to grin at his companion, Dr. Rudy Wells—outfitted in a splendid if somewhat garish ensemble of rubberized boots, bright-orange hunting trouser
s and a brighter yellow jacket, all topped with an outlandish hat bristling with flies and lures. He also had managed a pepper-and-salt beard. “I suppose you expect me to applaud.”

  Austin laughed. “You’re jealous, Doc. Also clumsy. Come on, let’s see how fast you can tangle your line.”

  “Well, move to the side and let a pro have at it.”

  Austin moved slowly to the right. He gestured to the pool, where his lure skipped in short dashes across the water. “All those beautiful trout just waiting to leap right into our frying pan.” He turned again to study his line. “Make you a deal. First one to score has dinner cooked by the empty-handed.”

  Wells moved to the edge of the stream, took aim and cast out his line. It went to the side of the pool where Wells had noticed telltale movement just beneath the surface. “A deal.” Both men brought in their lines slowly, cast again, and then a third time.

  Austin’s line snapped taut. “Hey, here comes dinner!”

  “Bring him in first,” Wells challenged, and a moment later shouted himself, as a second trout struck, boiling water and leaping high before he went under. Each man worked his trout with care, moving his fish slowly toward him, ready to dip a net into the water to land the catch. Wells was in the better position to land his and he stepped several feet into the stream, the net poised. He brought his rod up high, positioning the trout just right and—

  A high-pitched electronic whine came from his jacket. A boot slipped on a rock—the net went in one direction, the rod in another, and Dr. Wells in still another, to splash full-length into the stream. The piercing whine continued without letup as he lay sputtering in the water. He raised himself slowly, dripping, to stand wide-legged in water above his knees, and looked quietly at the other man.

  Austin’s face was a tight mask. He turned his back to the doctor and continued working his catch toward him. Wells made no move, waiting. Austin landed the trout, a beauty, at least five or six pounds, then walked slowly from the stream to their small encampment.