by Jon Land
PANDORA’S
TEMPLE
A BLAINE MCCRACKEN NOVEL
JON LAND
For my readers:
The ride continues
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Bet you weren’t expecting to hear from me again so soon, within six months of my last book, Strong Vengeance, hitting the stands, not to mention with a book that returns our old friend Blaine McCracken to the page! The fact that the page you’re reading may be electronic makes it no less entertaining and maybe it’s even more so, thanks to the wonderful team at Open Road Media responsible for bringing McCracken back from his extended literary hiatus. That team is headed by the great Jane Friedman who has provided me the opportunity to work with wonderful professionals like Stephanie Gorton, Libby Jordan, Rachel Chou, and Mary Sorrick. I’m especially grateful to my agent Bob Diforio for bringing us together and, even more, to the one holdover from past pages like this, my amazing and brilliant editor Natalia Aponte. Natalia was an invaluable partner in making McCracken and Johnny Wareagle’s comeback a successful one; hey, both Blaine and I are getting on a bit these days and you know what they say about old dogs and new tricks.
Speaking of new, I’m eternally grateful to Jeff Ayers for letting me know I was on the right track with Pandora’s Temple and for pushing me to do this book for maybe a decade now. And if you’re wondering how I know so much about deepwater oil rigs, it’s because of Brooke Bovo, who was my guide into that world, every step of the way. Also, thanks again to Mireya Starkenberg, who made sure my Spanish was at least passable. This book required a ton of research involving more helping hands than I can count. So know this, my friends: while some of what you’re about to read stems purely from a writer’s imagination, virtually everything else is the product of fact, not fiction. Even the construction and ultimate fate of Pandora’s Temple itself owes more to facts than it does to mythology. But “What if?” is the question that has driven these McCracken books for a generation, and I see no reason to change that now.
And since you surely don’t either, settle in and let’s get started. “Once upon a time—” Oops! Forgot to tell you to turn the page so Blaine and Johnny can take things from here.
No hero is immortal till he dies.
W. H. Auden
Contents
Prologue: The Abyss
The Mediterranean Sea: 2008
Part One: The Deepwater Venture
Chapter 1: Juárez, Mexico: The present
Chapter 2: Washington: One week earlier
Chapter 3: Juárez, Mexico
Chapter 4: Juárez, Mexico
Chapter 5: Juárez, Mexico
Chapter 6: Juárez, Mexico
Chapter 7: Juárez, Mexico
Chapter 8: Deepwater Venture, Gulf of Mexico: One week later
Chapter 9: Deepwater Venture, Gulf of Mexico
Chapter 10: New Orleans
Chapter 11: New Orleans
Chapter 12: New Orleans
Chapter 13: Crazy Horse, South Dakota: One month earlier
Chapter 14: New Orleans
Chapter 15: New Orleans
Chapter 16: New Orleans
Chapter 17: Greenland
Chapter 18: New Orleans
Chapter 19: Greenland
Chapter 20: New Orleans
Chapter 21: Northern Gulf Stream
Chapter 22: Pyrenees Mountains, Spain
Chapter 23: Pyrenees Mountains, Spain
Chapter 24: Pyrenees Mountains, Spain
Part Two: The Storm
Chapter 25: Deepwater Venture
Chapter 26: Deepwater Venture
Chapter 27: Deepwater Venture
Chapter 28: Deepwater Venture
Chapter 29: New Orleans
Chapter 30: New Orleans
Chapter 31: Deepwater Venture
Chapter 32: Deepwater Venture
Chapter 33: Deepwater Venture
Chapter 34: New Orleans
Chapter 35: New Orleans
Chapter 36: Northern Gulf Stream
Chapter 37: Northern Gulf Stream
Chapter 38: Pyrenees Mountains, Spain
Chapter 39: New Orleans
Part Three: Dark Matter
Chapter 40: New Orleans
Chapter 41: New Orleans
Chapter 42: New Orleans
Chapter 43: Pyrenees Mountains, Spain
Chapter 44: New Orleans
Chapter 45: New Orleans
Chapter 46: New Orleans
Chapter 47: New Orleans
Chapter 48: New Orleans
Chapter 49: New Orleans
Chapter 50: New Orleans
Chapter 51: New Orleans
Chapter 52: New Orleans
Chapter 53: New Orleans
Chapter 54: New Orleans
Chapter 55: New Orleans
Chapter 56: New Orleans
Part Four: The Temple
Chapter 57: New Orleans
Chapter 58: New Orleans
Chapter 59: Houston
Chapter 60: Guangdong, China
Chapter 61: Houston
Chapter 62: Guangdong, China
Chapter 63: Houston
Chapter 64: Pyrenees Mountains, Spain
Chapter 65: Houston
Chapter 66: The Mediterranean Sea
Chapter 67: Athens, Greece
Chapter 68: Athens, Greece: Near 1650 B.C.
Chapter 69: Athens, Greece
Chapter 70: Hiroshima, Japan
Chapter 71: Over the Atlantic Ocean
Chapter 72: Port of Piraeus, Greece
Chapter 73: The Mediterranean Sea
Chapter 74: The Mediterranean Sea
Chapter 75: The Mediterranean Sea
Chapter 76: The Mediterranean Sea
Chapter 77: The Mediterranean Sea
Chapter 78: The Mediterranean Sea
Chapter 79: The Mediterranean Sea
Chapter 80: The Mediterranean Sea
Chapter 81: The Mediterranean Sea
Part Five: Pandora’s Jar
Chapter 82: Tokyo
Chapter 83: Pyrenees Mountains, Spain
Chapter 84: Pyrenees Mountains, Spain
Chapter 85: Pyrenees Mountains, Spain
Chapter 86: Pyrenees Mountains, Spain
Chapter 87: Pyrenees Mountains, Spain
Chapter 88: Pyrenees Mountains, Spain
Chapter 89: Pyrenees Mountains, Spain
Chapter 90: Pyrenees Mountains, Spain
Chapter 91: Pyrenees Mountains, Spain
Chapter 92: Pyrenees Mountains, Spain
Epilogue: Laid to Rest
Washington, D.C.: One week later
PROLOGUE:
THE ABYSS
The Mediterranean Sea: 2008
“It would help, sir, if I knew what we were looking for,” Captain John J. Hightower of the Aurora said to the stranger he’d picked up on the island of Crete.
The stranger remained poised by the research ship’s deck rail, gazing out into the turbulent seas beyond. His long gray hair, dangling well past his shoulders in tangles and ringlets, was damp with sea spray, left to the whims of the wind.
“Sir?” Hightower prodded again.
The stranger finally turned, chuckling. “You called me sir. That’s funny.”
“I was told you were a captain,” said Hightower.
“In name only, my friend.”
“If I’m your friend,” Hightower said, “you should be able to tell me what’s so important that our current mission was scrapped to pick you up.”
Beyond them, the residue of a storm from the previous night kept the seas choppy with occasional frothy swells that rocked the Aurora even as she battled the stiff winds to keep her speed steady. Gray-black clouds s
wept across the sky, colored silver at the tips where the sun pushed itself forward enough to break through the thinner patches. Before long, Hightower could tell, those rays would win the battle to leave the day clear and bright with the seas growing calm. But that was hardly the case now.
“I like your name,” came the stranger’s airy response. Beneath the orange life jacket, he wore a Grateful Dead tie-dyed T-shirt and an old leather vest that was fraying at the edges and missing all three of its buttons. It was so faded that the sun made it look gray in some patches and white in others. The man’s eyes, a bit sleepy and almost drunken, had a playful glint about them. “I like anything with the word ‘high.’ You should rethink your policy about no smoking aboard the ship, if it’s for medicinal purposes only.”
“I will, if you explain what we’re looking for out here.”
“Out here” was the Mediterranean Sea where it looped around Greece’s ancient, rocky southern coastline. For four straight days now, the Aurora had been mapping the seafloor in detailed grids in search of something of unknown size, composition, and origin; or, at least, known only by the man Hightower had mistakenly thought was a captain by rank. Hightower’s ship was a hydrographic survey vessel. At nearly thirty meters in length with a top speed of just under twenty-five knots, the Aurora had been commissioned just the previous year to fashion nautical charts to ensure safe navigation by military and civilian shipping, tasked with conducting seismic surveys of the seabed and underlying geology. A few times since her commission, the Aurora and her eight-person crew had been retasked for other forms of oceanographic research, but her high-tech air cannons, capable of generating high-pressure shock waves to map the strata of the seabed, made her much better suited for more traditional assignments.
“How about I give you a hint?” the stranger said to Hightower. “It’s big.”
“How about I venture a guess?”
“Take your best shot, dude.”
“I know a military mission when I see one. I think you’re looking for a weapon.”
“Warm.”
“Something stuck in a ship or submarine. Maybe even a sunken wreck from years, even centuries ago.”
“Cold,” the man Hightower knew only as “Captain” told him. “Well, except for the centuries-ago part. That’s blazing hot.”
Hightower pursed his lips, frustration getting the better of him. “So are we looking for a weapon or not?”
“Another hint, Captain High: only the most powerful ever known to man,” the stranger said with a wink. “A game changer of epic proportions for whoever finds it. Gotta make sure the bad guys don’t manage that before we do. Hey, did you know marijuana’s been approved to treat motion sickness?”
Hightower could only shake his head. “Look, I might not know exactly what you’re looking for, but whatever it is, it’s not here. You’ve got us retracing our own steps, running hydrographs in areas we’ve already covered. Nothing ‘big,’ as you describe it, is down there.”
“I beg to differ, el Capitán.”
“Our depth sounders have picked up nothing; the underwater cameras we launched have picked up nothing; the ROVs have picked up nothing.”
“It’s there,” the stranger said with strange assurance, holding his thumb and index finger together against his lips as if smoking an imaginary joint.
“Where?”
“We’re missing something, el Capitán. When I figure out what it is, I’ll let you know.”
Before Hightower could respond, the seas shook violently. On deck it felt as if something had tried to suck the ship underwater, only to spit it up again. The rumbling continued, thrashing the Aurora from side to side like a toy boat in a bathtub. Hightower finally recovered his breath just as the rumbling ceased, leaving an eerie calm over the sea suddenly devoid of waves and wind for the first time that morning.
“This can’t be good,” said the stranger, tightening the straps on his life vest.
The ship’s pilot, a young, thick-haired Greek named Papadopoulos, looked up from the nest of LED readouts and computer-operated controls on the panel before him, as Hightower entered the bridge.
“Captain,” he said wide-eyed, his voice high and almost screeching, “seismic centers in Ankara, Cairo, and Athens are all reporting a subsea earthquake measuring just over six on the scale.”
“What’s the epi?”
“Forty miles northeast of Crete and thirty from our current position,” Papadopoulos said anxiously, a patch of hair dropping over his forehead.
“Jesus Christ,” muttered Hightower.
“Tsunami warning is high,” Papadopoulos continued, even as Hightower formed the thought himself.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, we are in for the ride of our lives!” blared the stranger, pulling on the tabs that inflated his life vest with a soft popping sound. “If I sound excited it’s ’cause I’m terrified, dudes!”
“Bring us about,” the captain ordered. “Hard back to the port of Piraeus at all the speed you can muster.”
“Yes, sir!”
Suddenly the bank of screens depicting the seafloor in a quarter-mile radius directly beneath them sprang to life. Readings flew across accompanying monitors, orientations, and graphic depictions of whatever the Aurora’s hydrographic equipment and underwater cameras had located appearing in real time before Hightower’s already wide eyes.
“What the hell is—”
“Found it!” said the stranger before the ship’s captain could finish.
“Found what?” followed Hightower immediately. “This is impossible. We’ve already been over this area. There was nothing down there.”
“Earthquake must’ve changed that in a big way, el Capitán. I hope you’re recording all this.”
“There’s nothing to record. It’s a blip, an echo, a mistake.”
“Or exactly what I came out here to find. Big as life to prove all the doubters wrong.”
“Doubters?”
“Of the impossible.”
“That’s what you brought us out here for, a fool’s errand?”
“Not anymore.”
The stranger watched as a central screen mounted beneath the others continued to form a shape massive in scale, an animated depiction extrapolated from all the data being processed in real time.
“Wait a minute, is that a . . . It looks like—My God, it’s some kind of structure!”
“You bet!”
“Intact at that depth? Impossible! No, this is all wrong.”
“Hardly, el Capitán.”
“Check the readouts, sir. According to the depth gauge, your structure’s located five hundred feet beneath the seafloor. Where I come from, they call that impos—”
Hightower’s thought ended when the Aurora seemed to buckle, as if it had hit a roller-coaster-like dip in the sea. The sensation was eerily akin to floating, the entire ship in the midst of an out-of-body experience, leaving Hightower feeling weightless and light-headed.
“Better fasten your seat belts, dudes,” said the stranger, eyes fastened through the bridge windows at something that looked like a waterfall pluming on the ship’s aft side.
Hightower had been at sea often and long enough to know this to be a gentle illusion belying something much more vast and terrible: in this case, a giant wave of froth that gained height as it crystallized in shape. It was accompanied by a thrashing sound that shook the Aurora as it built in volume and pitch, felt by the bridge’s occupants at their very cores like needles digging into their spines.
“Hard about!” Hightower ordered Papadopoulos. “Steer us into it!”
It was, he knew, the ship’s only chance for survival, or would have been, had the next moments not shown the great wave turning the world dark as it reared up before them. The Aurora suddenly seemed to lift into the air, climbing halfway up the height of the monster wave from a calm sea that had begun to churn mercilessly in an instant. A vast black shadow enveloped the ship in the same moment intense pressure pinned the oc
cupants of the bridge to their chairs or left them feeling as if their feet were glued to the floor. Then there was nothing but an airless abyss dragging darkness behind it.
“Far out, man!” Hightower heard the stranger blare in the last moment before the void claimed him.
PART ONE:
THE DEEPWATER VENTURE
CHAPTER 1
Juárez, Mexico: The present
The black Mercedes SUV slid up to the entrance of the walled compound, chickens skittering from its path in the shimmering heat as it squealed to a halt. Dust hung in the air like a light curtain, adding a dull sheen to everything it touched. A pair of armed guards approached the SUV from either side of the closed gate and tapped on the blacked-out window on both the driver and passenger sides.
“I’m here to see Señor Morales,” said the driver, his face cloaked in the darkness of the interior.
“You’re early,” said the guard, hands closed over the door frame so his fingers were curled inside the cab. A thin layer of dust lifted by the breeze coated both his uniform and face.
“I know.”
“By a full day.”
The driver feigned surprise. “Really? Guess I messed up with my day planner.”
“Then we will see you tomorrow,” the guard said, backing away from the SUV as if expecting the driver to take his leave.
“Sorry, I’m not available then. But if Señor Morales would prefer I take my business elsewhere, I’m sure his competition will be most interested in that business when I visit them tomorrow instead.”
The lead guard moved up against the door again, two others with almost identical black hair and mustaches inching closer as well. “You will honor the terms of your deal.”
“Just what I came here to do, amigo. Now go check with your boss and let’s get on with it,” said the driver.
He was wearing a cream-colored suit and T-shirt that was only slightly darker. The T-shirt fit him snugly, revealing a taut torso and chest expansive enough to strain the fabric. His face was ruddy, his complexion that of a man who’d spent many hours outside, though not necessarily in the sun. His thin beard was so tightly trimmed to his skin that it could have been confused for a trick of the SUV interior’s dark shading. Other than a scar that ran through his right eyebrow and thick black hair sprinkled with a powdering of gray, his only real distinguishing feature was a pair of dark, deep-set eyes that looked like twin black holes spiraling through either side of his face.
