“The conclusions were based on hard scientific evidence and they were wrong. We put Mariner Nine into Mars’ orbit. It photographed the whole planet. We all wondered how we could have been so wrong. Mars was anything but dead, it was dynamic. It had volcanoes that were—that are—pouring hundreds of millions of gallons of water in gaseous form into its atmosphere every day. There’s a place on Mars called Nix Olympica, one of the so-called mysterious features that’s always been described as bright-ringed. They got some good shots from a couple of thousand miles out with Mariners Six and Seven. No doubt at all about the bright ring. Then Mariner Nine got some close-ups of this bright ring. Know what it turned out to be?”
Rudy Wells spoke up. “A volcano that was about fifty thousand feet high and bigger than the whole state of Missouri.”
“Right. They also found a canyon, like the Grand Canyon, that stretched along the Martian equator. Three thousand miles long, seventy or eighty miles wide and four miles deep. And evidence of running water in the past. And proof the icecaps had water instead of just carbon dioxide in them . . . it’s a long list. Point is that even when we’ve had hard scientific observation and apparent proof, we’ve ended up with the yellow stuff all over our faces. Which also means, Oscar, that I don’t buy fast conclusions either way, including the validity of suppositions such as Mr. von Daniken’s.”
Goldman stood and stretched. “All of which, Steve, only confirms that you’re the man for this job. And Rudy, because of his own studies and special interest in the field, and because he’s a doctor.”
“I still don’t see why it’s so important for me to make this trip,” Steve said.
“Powers of observation, for one thing. You’re a trained geologist. You know what to look for. You don’t, as you’ve just indicated, draw hasty conclusions. You reject unsupported answers as nothing more than speculation. Yet you have an open mind. We believe this roadway reported by Major Ryland also has potential for getting a lead to something else. Optics. Incredible development of optics by a race that’s been lost for unknown thousands of years. They’re referred to as the Caya. You won’t find references to them in books of the scientific establishment, but they are supposed to have come from the same area where Ryland found that road.”
“Then send Ryland back. He’s the one with actual experience in the area.”
“But he lacks your experience,” Goldman said. “You’ve commanded an expedition to the moon. You’re a fine engineer. And you have your, well, built-in advantages that I hardly need to detail. They could be rather vital in the event of any trouble.”
“Such as?”
“Well . . . someone—we don’t know who—doesn’t want us to go back there. Apparently when they brought Ryland down that river to Ayabaca, to the airstrip, he was feverish. He talked about what he’d seen. No one knew anything about such a road and there didn’t seem to be any interest. But we’ve now confirmed that there is very strong interest, that somebody else is looking for what we’re trying to find . . . the trail to optics development of so long ago. And perhaps the key to the remarkable energy source that created these mysterious roadways and moved the blocks to such heights.
“I had a meeting set up for you two and Ryland for this Thursday. He’s been in the base hospital at Norton since he came back here.”
“Well, what happened?” Rudy Wells asked. “You talk as if he’s not here anymore.”
“He’s not. Two nights ago someone worked his way into the base hospital, got into Ryland’s room, and shot him four times through the head.”
CHAPTER 4
They called it The Annex. Over the first range of peaks to the west of the Bionics Laboratory that nestled on the eastern slope of the Rockies, due north of the Air Force Academy. The Annex was new to the laboratory, and had been built for the specific purpose of developing and testing different weapons and systems for one man. Steve Austin. Cyborg.
Oscar Goldman had arranged for a Grumman Gulfstream II to be waiting at Jackson Hole Airport in Wyoming. They left the chartered helicopter, boarded the jet and were handed off with top priority from one air-traffic-control center to the next. They were only on the ground one hour before Steve and Dr. Wells were in the modification center of the Bionics Laboratory.
“We’re going to load you,” Goldman told Steve. “When you finish in here, call me and we’ll meet at the Annex. I want you to try out your new devices as soon as possible. Tomorrow morning you’ll meet the three who are going with you.”
It was strange for Steve to work on the weapons that would be incorporated within his bionics systems without Marty Schiller. The huge yet gentle man had been . . . Steve forced from his mind the sudden picture of a nuclear fireball swelling over ocean waters, knowing that inside that vaporizing hell was his friend. Stick to now, he told himself.
Jim DiMartino was his new boy. He knew Jim, but not well. He’d worked for the CIA, was one of the first in the paratrooper strike team of the Air Force before being recruited by Goldman for OSO weapons specialization. DiMartino came into the modification center only minutes after Steve and Rudy Wells had entered the classified area.
His approach was straightforward.
“I don’t know much about your mission, Colonel. I get specs and fit them.” He walked across the center as he spoke, unlocking a wide cabinet, and returned with three deer rifles. DiMartino gave them each a rifle and held one for demonstration.
“I understand your trip goes under civilian classification, strictly nonmilitary. I don’t know where you’re going, but it means no military hardware. However, you’re not expected to go without rifles—the area, wherever it is, has everything from fourteen-foot snakes to alligators or cayman, to puma and jaguar. Also wild boar, chance of wild dogs. Maybe some unfriendly natives.”
“What’s been done to these?”
“They’ve been modified. Most deer rifles of this sort hold six to eight rounds in a clip. You’ll have two each of those.” He pulled a long clip from his back pocket. “You’ll also have a couple of these for each piece. Thirty-six rounds of thirty-thirty and if you press right here”—he demonstrated the release—“this piece is full-automatic. Remember the old M2 carbine? This is three times as effective. When you’re around some trouble the suggestion is to insert the small clip and keep the piece on semiauto. The muzzle velocity also is greater than even a deer rifle’s. This baby spits.”
Steve reached out for the long clip, slammed it in, armed the rifle; his finger stabbed the hidden release and in one motion he spun around and fired. Slugs ripped into the dummies on the far side of the room. Four hammering bursts, the clip was empty, three dummies were cut almost in two. Steve nodded to DiMartino. “Smokeless ammo.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What’s that extra band by the muzzle?”
“Silencer attachment.”
DiMartino started bringing out the arsenal. Personal knives cut to Bowie size, only half the weight but twice the strength and with superior balance. Special machetes, lighter than usual, sharp as razors, that wouldn’t chip at the weak point of the blade thanks to a carboloy alloy. He went through the mixed supplies—equipment and weapons. Every man to pack one of the new long-barreled, lightweight .38 revolvers developed for the Air Force but also manufactured with no identifying military marks. Couldn’t always have a rifle around, but one could strap on a .38 with hip or shoulder holster and get to it quickly with a spring-loaded release. The ammunition for the hand guns ran the gamut from standard issue to explosive rounds and long-burning tracers. Also: thin, strong rope, medical kits, water-purification kits, survival manuals, radio equipment—redundancy in everything. Even a fold-down personal crossbow that attracted Rudy Wells. He stunned DiMartino and Steve when he dropped in six metal bolts and snapped out the bolts almost as fast as a man could fire a semiauto rifle by repeatedly squeezing the trigger. “Where,” Steve asked, “did you learn to do that?”
“Long time ago, against certain game, especially v
armints, I figured it was time to give the opposition a break.” Wells patted the crossbow. “You can run out of bolts and you’re still in good shape. With that Bowie knife and some string I can make bolts from just about anything that grows in a forest.”
“You’re hired, personal bodyguard,” Steve told him.
Wells then asked DiMartino for a couple of telephoto scopes . . . “for obvious reasons and because I can start a fire with one of them. A regular Boy Scout, that’s me.”
DiMartino told him that, as soon as they finished, “I’m to take you into the medical lab. Everything should be ready for you by then. Shots, I mean. Mr. Goldman wants everybody who’s going to get theirs tonight.”
“They’ll be asleep,” Wells reminded him.
“Goldman says to roist them out of bed no matter what time it is. I’ll take you to their rooms when you’re ready.”
“What a way to introduce myself.”
After performing his unpopular duty, Rudy Wells went off to find Steve in the bionics lab. He wasn’t surprised to see Oscar Goldman hovering over the elaborate chair in which Steve rested while Art Fanier, bionics systems expert who had been on the Cyborg project from its beginning, was carefully unscrewing Steve’s left eye. With all he had seen and shared with Steve Austin since that terrible crash in the California desert, with all his experience as a flight surgeon, he still found it unnerving to watch this man yield up parts and pieces of his body.
He moved closer to the chair, to see more clearly and to listen to Goldman’s conversation. “One of your group will be equipped with a number of cameras. Normally that would be enough to cover us. Not now, not after what happened to Ryland. We’ve got to anticipate something not so different occurring again. Which means, Steve, if you find something of significance to photograph, I want you to use the eye-camera. That way, so long as at least you get back, we’ll have something of what we went after.”
Silence as the implications of Goldman’s words were absorbed. Then Fanier leaned forward with a small suction disk in his right hand. He steadied his arm against the chair. He hesitated a moment. “Can you keep your eyelid back?” he asked Steve. “I can use the clamps if—”
“Keep going.”
Fanier placed the end of the suction disk against the lens of the refractory ceramic eyeball that filled the left eye socket. When he judged the pressure to be exact against the lens, he rotated the disk handle in his fingers. To the left, Goldman and Wells watched intently as the lens slowly turned. There was a hint of sound, for which Fanier had been waiting. Holding the suction clamp, he now withdrew his hand from Steve’s face; at the end of the suction disk was a small cylindrical tube. He placed a padded basin beneath the tube as he carried it to an immaculate workstand. He transferred the tube to a plastic plate where another tube of the same size waited. Then he moved an electrified magnifying glass over both tubes. “Steve? Anytime you’re ready,” he called to the man who now had a hole in place of a left eye.
Steve stood beside Fanier as the technician worked with miniaturized tools. His fingertips, huge and stubby and ridged with pores, broke down the tube into a tiny camera.
“The equipment you’ve had in your eye, Steve, has been considerably improved,” Fanier explained. “You had the capability of visible light or infrared film with a speed up to two-hundredths of a second. Anything over four feet was automatic infinity-focusing.”
Steve nodded, waiting for Fanier to continue.
“What we’ve done is increase the cartridge capacity. You used to have twenty exposures, now you have thirty-two. The film size is the same.” He nudged a cartridge no larger than a fly. “Everything else has been modified. Not so much a new design as an across-the-board improvement.”
“All I need is my union card.”
“The film now takes its exposures at about two-hundred-fiftieth of a second. Same light-sensitive cells attend to the exposure. If you remember, Steve, the old film was Six-X. We’ve gone up another 50 percent on the ASA rating . . . One more thing. We’ve sort of pulled off a little miracle with the film. I said there were thirty-two exposures. There are thirty-two exposures, but each one is split into normal light and IR light, so we’ll get sixty-four pictures back. All clear, Steve?”
“Clear. Screw it back in.” He turned and went back to the chair, waiting. He knew the rest of it. To activate the camera he pressed against the side of his head, where a trip switch was imbedded beneath the plastiskin that had been built around his once-shattered eyesocket. This released the shutter mechanism. To take a picture he merely blinked his eye. This had taken some extra doing for a while. The muscles had been severely bruised, there had been atrophy of the natural internal system and . . . he pushed it from his mind.
When Art Fanier finished inserting the new camera into his left “eye,” Steve found himself impatient to finish the job. He had never really become accustomed to opening parts of his body for the strange and at times lethal devices which were as much a part of him as his bionics systems. Bionics . . . cybernetics . . . cyborg . . . words to them. To him a way of life.
CHAPTER 5
“This will be our last meeting. Your equipment is ready for boarding. We’re sending you to Lima by commercial jet. You’ll fly from Denver to Los Angeles and pick up a straight-through flight to Lima. We’ve arranged a charter flight from there to Ayabaca—the airline will be a Convair turboprop and should take about ninety minutes.”
Goldman studied the group in front of him. The five who would make the expedition to track down the mystery of the energy behind the enigmatic highway discovered by the now-deceased Major Dutch Ryland . . . not to mention the forces behind his death.
Steve Austin, Dr. Rudy Wells, Dr. Harold Jennings, aroheologist. Phil Wayne, electronics specialist, optics craftsman, photographer. Aaron Mueller, State Department representative.
“You’ve all met,” Goldman continued. “You’ll get to know one another during this meeting and on your flight to Peru. Once you’re in Ayabaca you ad lib, but understand now that Steve Austin heads this expedition. Mr. Austin is boss-man.”
Goldman looked over his audience. The State Department man, Mueller, was clearly annoyed at the deception implied in the civilian designation, but said nothing. “The matter of Major Ryland. Until his death we had figured this mission for nothing more than a grueling movement in the field. The area surrounding and involving the Cordillera Viloabamba is one of the most dangerous and treacherous in the world. It’s bad enough and challenging enough. But now we have this new element. You know Major Ryland was flown by air ambulance to Norton Air Force Base in California. We wanted him there for its excellent medical care and to give us a secure place to find out from him what happened after he bailed out and found his mysterious highway.
“Before you ask the question, no, neither OSO nor the Air Force maintained any special security for Ryland. There wasn’t any good reason for it. Aircraft have flown over the area before. The C-130 in which Ryland was an electronics and surveillance systems officer has been used for years in many parts of the world, often in response to other governments’ requests to map isolated areas or areas with special weather or terrain problems. Whatever was photographed or radar-recorded was to be given to the government of Peru.
“Obviously, what Ryland found in the high country is what brought on his death. On the face of it, it’s difficult to figure. You know reports of mysterious roads in South America aren’t new. But consider again briefly what Ryland saw. A road more than thirteen thousand feet up where there’s never been any evidence of human inhabitants. Then there’s the composition, the nature of the road . . . well, any surface as ancient as this must be, that has a marblelike consistency, has to be of interest. And Ryland did mention, in his interrogation in the hospital, that the road surface likely was not marble but rock fused through some enormous energy. And the shape of the rock . . . the great pieces of stone were not precut to fit and matched together. Not in this road—if it is a road. The
rest Ryland reported is in your papers.”
Goldman paused for a drink of water, cleared his throat. “Now, you know how Ryland made it back. Keep in mind that when he was held at Ayabaca for a rescue aircraft he was feverish. He rattled around in that fever and they couldn’t keep him quiet. What he had to say could be expected to pique someone’s interest. But enough to cause his death? It doesn’t seem to add up. And when you consider that someone might have come all the way from Peru to California and—”
“Or,” Rudy Wells broke in, “ordered the job done by phone.”
“Right, but in any case the question is what in those hills could induce someone to go to all that trouble, to commit murder? We immediately ran a thorough check. Our counterpart in Peru is Colonel Simon Viejo of Peruvian Army Intelligence. He sent people into Ayabaca. The only item that could be considered out of the norm was some trading activity under way with some companies from Europe. Their visits to Ayabaca are sporadic, and it could be coincidence they were there. Could be.
“We do know the search for an unusual energy beam, of what nature we don’t know, has been under way in South America for many years. How huge rocks were ever brought to heights of ten to seventeen thousand feet by a people, or by different groups of people, who didn’t use the wheel, is still a matter of conjecture.
Cyborg 03 - High Crystal Page 4
