Pandora's Temple

by Jon Land

  To prevent the Crab from joining the other rotting wrecks, McCracken closed the pincers and crashed one into the squid where he thought it might be most vulnerable, nearest the eyes. Impact rattled the creature, but it lurched toward the sub again, this time from the other side. McCracken fended off this attack with a blow from the other pincer while poking at the squid with the free pincer as if it were a spear.

  The monster responded by turning its attention to the pincers themselves, seeing them as the protector of its potential meal. It went for the one on the right first, dipping and then sweeping about to try and catch it in the grasp of its tentacles. McCracken used the left pincer to fight it off and the thing pivoted to that side next.

  After McCracken countered with the right pincer this time, incredibly, the squid altered its strategy to focus on both pincers at the same time. The result was a twisted sea-based pirouette as McCracken used the pincers to parry with the monster in the hope it would ultimately tire of the effort and just swim off.

  And that’s exactly what happened.

  Or at least started to when one of the giant squid’s tentacles got snared on the now-closed pincer on the right side of the Crab. The creature responded instinctively by squeezing harder still with the tentacle, which succeeded only in snaring it even tighter.

  “Not good, boss.”

  “I’m working on it, Sal.”

  He tried to use the second pincer to help free the squid, but the creature was in panic mode now, focusing all its strength, and arms, on its escape. That pincer bent under the intense escape effort, the controls for it seizing up in McCracken’s hands as the joints that allowed for articulation were ravaged by the squid’s desperate attempts to pull free.

  “Any ideas, Indian?” McCracken asked as the submarine bucked and rocked precariously.

  “Just one, Blainey,” Wareagle said, moving toward the craft’s single hatch in the rear of the cabin with the sheath holding his Gerber MK-2 knife in hand.

  CHAPTER 80

  The Mediterranean Sea

  Wareagle swam out through the pressurized hatch wearing a high-tech, much lighter version of the traditional atmospheric diving suit, or ADS, stretched to the limit to accommodate his proportions. Entering the water without such a suit at this depth would have meant instant death due to the pressure. But this particular ADS model had been tested up to depths of thirty-five hundred feet, giving Johnny as much as another thousand to play with even within the cavern.

  The suit might have been pliable, especially when compared to earlier less technologically advanced models, but it still wasn’t constructed with battling a giant squid in mind. The more the thing struggled to free its tentacle from the pincer, the more tightly it seemed to fasten itself to the Crab.

  “Don’t know how much more this thing can take, boss,” Sal Belamo reported, his entire console shaking from the squid’s thrashing about outside. “Few more minutes and our structural integrity might be for shit.”

  “Then it’s up to Johnny.”

  Wareagle had just reappeared within camera and naked eye view swimming toward the monster that continued to thrash about. But at the last moment he veered away, seeming to think of something else, an alternate strategy.

  “That’s it, Indian,” McCracken urged quietly, realizing his thought as if of the same mind.

  Wareagle moved to the pincer assembly itself, swimming around the squid to avoid detection as long as possible. It continued twisting and yanking while he settled into place at the insertion point where the pincers joined the articulated arm itself. Johnny went to work instantly with his knife on the fasteners, couplings, and wiring that connected one to the other.

  Wareagle’s initial efforts succeeded in shedding pieces of the connection with each turn or thrust of his blade. Until one stubborn task forced him to use the knife’s hilt like a hammer to dislodge a stubborn clamp. All at once at that point, the squid’s eyes fastened upon him, reorienting itself to attack with its massive swirling arms.

  Wareagle pushed off at the last possible moment, narrowly escaping its deadly grasp. The squid, seeming to forget it was snared, pushed itself after him only to be reined in by its captured tentacle, leaving it eye to eye with Wareagle from twenty feet apart and jostling the occupants of the Crab.

  Instead of retreating farther, or at least holding at the safe position, Wareagle began propelling himself closer to the creature at a snail’s pace. The squid first lashed at him again with its arms, and Johnny brushed the blows aside with incredibly nimble dexterity given the confines and restrictions of his suit. As he continued his slow approach, never varying from the creature’s line of sight, he began to softly stroke its captured tentacle.

  The squid first seemed to panic but then simply stiffened, its arms lashing about in far less threatening fashion, as if it somehow recognized Wareagle’s intentions. Giant squids were known to possess large brains likely capable of some complex thought. Since not a single one had ever been studied and so little was known about them, though, it was impossible to judge them capable of any level of actual decision making. Yet the creature, to the fascination of everyone inside the Crab, had broken off its attack and taken to following Wareagle’s movements, as if somehow grasping the fact he was trying to help it.

  Its arms continued to brush against him, some of the blows hard and harsh but not enough to impede Wareagle’s efforts. He no longer even regarded the creature, as if pretending it wasn’t even there; if McCracken didn’t know better, he’d say the squid appeared confused, even somehow intimidated by its first real direct encounter with a worthy opponent, and now ally, as well.

  Wareagle continued his labor, working the knife into the assembly connecting the pincer to the articulated arm this way and that until it finally loosened. When his attempts to dislodge it the rest of the way with only his arms failed, he backed off enough to try the task with his legs.

  The pincer came somewhat free, but not enough.

  “Come on, Johnny,” McCracken urged. “Come on. What about using the other pincer, Sal?”

  “I can try, boss, but if I spook that thing again, it just might—”

  “Wait!” Katie said abruptly.

  “Holy fucking shit!” from Captain Seven. “I’m definitely either stoned or dreaming here!”

  Outside the creature had wrapped a pair of its massive arms around the pincer apparatus, suction cups digging into place. Then, as Wareagle backed off, seeming to urge the creature on, it twisted and pulled until the pincer came free in its grasp.

  Captain Seven couldn’t stop shaking his head. “You gotta be fucking kidding me.”

  The squid darted off with its tentacle still snared in the now severed pincer, though not for long given the force of the current and power of the sea to ultimately dislodge it.

  McCracken unbuckled his safety harness and moved to open the hatch for Johnny. “Get ready to get us out of here, Sal.”

  “Easier said than done, boss.”

  McCracken stopped halfway to the rear of the Crab and swung back toward Belamo to the sight of emergency lights flashing everywhere on his console.

  CHAPTER 81

  The Mediterranean Sea

  The Crab began to buck and thrash as soon as Belamo angled it upward back toward the vent, a feeling akin to being rocked by midair turbulence aboard a plane. A regular beeping sounded shrilly in rhythm with the flashing red lights, and McCracken watched Belamo working the controls frantically to keep the craft stable.

  “Hold on, everybody!” he warned, when the sub edged toward the vent and finally entered the plume, riding it upward with the grain this time.

  The Crab burst out from the cavern with the pincers leading on a near ninety-degree-angle pitch. Belamo struggled to level the craft off, the controls fighting him every step of the way, the craft’s stability clearly compromised by the damage done by the giant squid. There were no leaks anywhere McCracken could detect, but the cabin was growing steadily warmer, evidence tha
t the air processors and climate control had been damaged as well.

  “How long to the surface, Sal?”

  “At this rate, between fifteen minutes and never, boss. Power drain’s starting to scare me. I think we lost our generator.”

  “I can handle it,” said Captain Seven.

  “It’s accessible only from the outside.”

  “I can’t fix it. But I’ve got another idea.”

  Moments later, the captain was at Belamo’s side working various controls with a keyboard.

  “Used to be all you had to know was how to hold a flashlight in your mouth and splice wires together. Now, you gotta know how to talk to machines instead and get them to do what you want.” He hit Enter a final time. “There.”

  The exterior lighting died, and the screens all went dark. Inside the cabin, power switched to the auxiliary back-up batteries.

  “Yeah, nice work,” Belamo said with a frown.

  “You bet, since now all the battery power lost to lighting, view screens, and cameras is yours to do with what you please.”

  “Enough to get us to the surface?” asked McCracken.

  “You ask me, it better be,” Sal Belamo told him.

  “What’s our ETA?”

  “Twelve minutes, forty-seven seconds.”

  “Pretty specific.”

  “That’s because it’s all the air we have left.”

  McCracken found himself counting down the seconds when the seas around them brightened and then the surface drew within view. With three minutes to go, the Crab sputtered and nearly stalled; with two, it started to roll into a drop Belamo just managed to correct in time.

  “Come on, baby, come on,” Belamo willed. “You can do this. Don’t let me down.”

  As if in answer to his plea, the craft crested over the surface of the Mediterranean, straining at the seams, with thirty-five seconds to spare.

  “Whoa,” Sal Belamo said, retracting the Crab’s glass panes to open it to the fresh sea air with the craft dead in the water, “that was a close one.”

  The craft was fully able to operate on the surface in the form of a speedboat with speeds ranging up to thirty miles per hour, enough hopefully to keep Sebastian Roy’s forces, certain to be scouring the seas for the Crab, from finding them.

  “We’re not done yet, Sal,” said a hardly celebratory McCracken.

  “Boss?”

  “How’s the communication gear on this thing, Sal?”

  “Good enough to connect to Mars, boss.”

  “Just need to reach New Orleans for starters.”

  “I’m opening the e-mail now,” Leander Levy said from his shop in the French Quarter.

  “You’re going to see video stills of some symbols I can’t identify. Need you to put on your historian’s cap.”

  “I never take it off, old friend. Ah, here they are, taking shape now. Most interest—”

  “What’s wrong, Leander? Why’d you stop?”

  “Because I’ve seen symbols like these before. Last week, just after our meeting. Another client paid me a visit, a man I wish I’d never met in the first place: Shinzo Asahara.”

  McCracken swung toward Katie, locking stares with her as he continued.

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “The same thing I’m telling you. That I’ve never seen anything like these symbols before. That they’re part of no language ever created by man and no civilization on any record.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Not quite,” Levy said. “I was able to finally link the symbols to a man Asahara asked me about more recently.”

  “Don’t tell me,” said McCracken. “Sebastian Roy.”

  “I need to contact Folsom to arrange for pickup and then transport to Spain.”

  “Spain?” Katie asked, as if needing confirmation she’d heard him correctly.

  “We need to get to Sebastian Roy, and we need to do it now, before Asahara and Aum Shinrikyo get there.”

  “What makes you think Roy’ll see us, boss?” Belamo wondered.

  McCracken angled his gaze over to Katie DeMarco. “Because we’ve got something he wants. And I don’t intend on taking no for an answer.”

  “Blainey?”

  McCracken turned toward Wareagle. “He’s got Pandora’s jar, Indian. He’s had it all along.”

  PART FIVE:

  PANDORA’S JAR

  CHAPTER 82

  Tokyo

  Shinzo Asahara stood in the elegant walled flower garden, facing the assemblage of his most loyal soldiers. There were thirty in all, modern-day samurai warriors carefully culled from members of the Japanese military whose personal beliefs had drawn them to Aum Shinrikyo’s extreme politics and goals.

  The night before, Shinzo had lingered long over the still waters of the garden’s pond in the hope his father’s visage might appear. But there was nothing, no sign at all. Or, perhaps, he was too preoccupied to open his mind sufficiently since the attack on Sebastian Roy’s compound would come tomorrow.

  Soft raindrops began to fall, accompanied by a light breeze that ruffled the pond’s calm surface and led Shinzo to return his attention to his men, warriors chosen not only for their prowess and the rigidity of their beliefs, but also for their own histories. Shinzo had made sure to select those with backgrounds of loss dating back to the fateful day atomic bombs had been dropped for the first and only time in human history. It was their fate, their karma, to join him in this quest and finish the job the bombs had started. The wastelands that were Hiroshima and Nagasaki from that day would soon be visited upon all the world.

  This was all fated; it had to be, since no other explanation sufficed for the fact that he now felt certain that Sebastian Roy was actually in possession of Pandora’s jar.

  But not for long.

  “Prepare yourselves,” he said to his warriors, “because tomorrow we end the world.”

  CHAPTER 83

  Pyrenees Mountains, Spain

  “My name is Henry Folsom, Mr. Roy. Also on this call is Ben Yaretz and Cassidy Sing, assistant directors of Homeland Security.”

  Sebastian Roy kept his eyes glued to the screen in anticipation of the helicopter’s arrival, replaying the conversation with the official from Homeland Security in his mind.

  “First, I need you to understand this phone call is totally off the record. It’s not being recorded and as soon as our conversation is over, any trace of it ever being placed or logged will disappear. Am I making myself clear?”

  “I’m a busy man, Mr. Folsom, please state your business.”

  “We have your daughter, Alexandra, in custody, sir. She was captured in the midst of attempting to blow up one your subsidiaries, Ocean Bore Technologies.”

  Roy felt a chill ride up his spine and a flutter in his stomach. “I’m still listening.”

  “Just checking my notes, sir. This is a fluid situation. But we have her, and it has been strongly suggested that she be returned to your custody to avoid any embarrassment or, er, future entanglements.”

  Sebastian Roy’s eyes remained riveted on the scene pictured on the helipad, a phalanx of his security personnel awaiting Alexandra’s arrival under escort by agents of Homeland Security. It had been the third attack on a Roy Industries facility, four including Stuttgart, before his security forces had managed to isolate a photograph of the perpetrator. He looked at Alexandra’s picture with first denial, then shock, and finally recognition of the ultimate denunciation of his power. What was it all worth if his daughter had seen fit to do this, starting the day her actions led to the deaths of her brother and mother? He had moved heaven and earth to find her, but she always eluded him to continue waging her own personal war, backed by an environmental group Roy had traced to a camp in Greenland before eliminating the nuisance they posed for good.

  “The White House,” the man named Folsom had continued, “believes this is a matter best kept quiet, that remains in the family. Your family, sir. I’m sure you agree.”

&nbs
p; Roy said that he did.

  “The men who captured your daughter work outside the system. They’re prepared to transport Alexandra to you. Once they hand her over to your custody, their part in this ends and there will be no record whatsoever of their involvement. You understand what that means.”

  I do indeed, Sebastian Roy thought, as the helicopter appeared on the screen before him.

  CHAPTER 84

  Pyrenees Mountains, Spain

  McCracken felt the helicopter slow to a hover over the helipad and then descend toward the white circle emblazoned on the concrete landing deck below.

  “You up for this, Katie?” he asked the woman seated between him and Johnny Wareagle, their headsets dangling now.

  “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “Not calling me Alexandra. She really did die in that fire. At least, she might as well have.”

  “You’re welcome. Now answer my question.”

  Katie DeMarco nodded. “I’m ready. I just hope you’re right.”

  Wareagle turned from the window, the rotor wash spraying dust and stray bits of foliage everywhere beyond now. “Eight security guards, Blainey,” he said. “Six we can see and two that we can’t. Four more watching from windows inside.”

  “Roy’s got no reason not to trust us.”

  “He doesn’t trust anyone,” Katie snapped. “And he’ll never let you inside.”

  With that, McCracken slapped a pair of chain handcuffs formed of both stainless steel and ordnance-grade polymer onto her wrist and then his own. “We’ll see about that, young lady.”

  CHAPTER 85

  Pyrenees Mountains, Spain

  Sebastian Roy’s security forces, dressed in black commando gear and armed with both Heckler and Koch submachine guns and Beretta pistols, noted the high-tech handcuffs binding McCracken to Katie DeMarco, unsure of how to respond until a slight, well-dressed man slid forward through the grouping of well-armed men.