Callsign: King - Book I (A Jack Sigler - Chess Team Novella)

by Robinson, Jeremy; Ellis, Sean

  “You’ve got to remember something,” he persisted. “Why else would you be so insistent on returning?”

  “That’s just it. I have to go back there to find what I lost.”

  King considered her answer but he kept coming back to something else she had said. Drawn there…something in their collective subconscious.

  Is that what’s happening to her?

  And if what she had found in the cave had awakened some kind of link to a collective subconscious—one that could affect human behavior—what did Manifold have planned for it?

  He knew he wasn’t going to get those answers from her, and he sensed he was nearing the point where her singular desire to return to the cave would make her less cooperative, more demanding. It was time to get moving.

  King drove the lead vehicle, with Felice and Moses as passengers. Felice had not spoken more than a few words since their earlier discussion, and as they drove she simply stared out the window, as if hoping to catch a glimpse of their destination, despite the fact that it lay hundreds of miles to the north. Moses responded to King’s questions, but likewise showed little interest in conversation, leaving King alone with his thoughts, which given the uncertainty surrounding Sara’s fate, was not a good thing.

  As he drove, King’s realized that he was scanning the road ahead for signs of an ambush or improvised explosive device placement, habits that had become second nature when he had driven in Afghanistan and Iraq. Ethiopia was no war zone, though there were reports of bandits in remote regions, and intel suggesting a burgeoning Al Qaida presence. After the events of the previous day, maybe a little paranoia was a good thing.

  While Moses had been out gathering the supplies for the expedition, King had done some shopping as well. He had contacted a more-or-less trustworthy black-market arms dealer, and purchased a used but serviceable Dragunov SVD, equipped with a detachable PSO-1 scope. It wasn’t his first choice, but Russian weapons were more readily available. The sniper rifle’s accessories package included a bayonet, which he decided would make a decent substitute for his beloved KA-BAR knife. The dealer had delivered the rifle, along with 500 rounds of 7.62 mm and several boxes of 9 mm rounds for the MP-5. King felt a little better prepared than he had upon arriving in Addis Ababa, but knew that surviving possible future encounters would depend more on good luck and good judgment than on firepower alone. And he already felt like he’d used up a year’s worth of good luck.

  The day passed uneventfully. They kept to the main highway, traveling north as far as the city of Komolcha, where they ate and refueled, and then traveled east to Semera, the new regional capital of the Afar district. Although there were several hours of daylight remaining, they found lodging and spent the night there. Beyond Semera, there would be little in the way of creature comforts.

  Felice seemed to grow more anxious, and more solitary, with each mile traveled. King left her alone. He doubted there was anything more she could tell him, and if there were, it would have to wait until she was ready, until she satisfied the compulsion that was drawing her back to the mysterious cave in the Rift Valley. Moses similarly kept to himself, conversing with the other hired men only to the extent that his duties as translator and de facto expedition manager required him to do so. Like Felice, he also seemed to be in the grip of an external force, not a subconscious homing instinct, but something less specific—the gravity of personal destiny.

  King had managed to get the young man to volunteer a little about himself. Moses was a college graduate, but mired in the same economic torpor that kept so many in Africa from rising above the circumstances of their birth. Perhaps, King surmised, he saw the success of this expedition, coming as it did on the heels of the failure of the first, as a way to break that cycle.

  That evening, King checked in with Deep Blue, but the conversation was brief; there was nothing to report. No news on Manifold’s activities, and no word from Sara. As troubling as the uncertainty was, no news was good news.

  They set out the next morning before sunrise, journeying a short distance east to the village of Serdo, then left the highway, heading north on a dirt track that bisected an otherwise empty landscape. It was like driving across the surface of an alien planet.

  The Great Rift Valley was an area of intense volcanic and seismic activity. Stretching from Kenya to the Horn of Africa, a distance of thousands of miles, it was the only place on the planet where the earth’s tectonic plates moved apart on dry land; all other spreading rifts were submerged deep beneath the oceans. Indeed, the northernmost reaches of the spreading zone that had created the Rift had formed the Red Sea, and in time the valley itself would open up into the Gulf of Aden and be inundated, creating an inland sea. The separation of the plates was almost imperceptibly slow, only a few inches every year—with a few infrequent but extremely dynamic exceptions, such as the 2005 eruption of the Dabbahu volcano, which opened a 37 mile long fissure— but the inevitable process had been going on for millions of years, creating a vast field of featureless lava. Yet, it was not the geological activity which had made this part of the Rift unique, but rather a more recent event, relatively speaking. It was here that fossils of the earliest hominids had been found, the ancestors of modern humans. If prevailing theories were correct, human evolution had turned an important corner here.

  King didn’t know how the mythic elephant graveyard figured into the tapestry of natural history, but he knew it was no coincidence that Felice Carter had brought back an ape skull.

  They drove for hours, road conditions halving the speed they had been able to maintain on the highway, and then early in the afternoon, turned off the road and struck out cross country, their pace further reduced. The distance, according to Moses, was less than a hundred kilometers, but without roads, it would be nearly dusk before they reached their destination.

  They saw no one at all; nothing lived or grew in the austere landscape. Nevertheless, King was now fully alert, constantly vigilant for signs of a hostile presence. It seemed likely that Manifold had gotten what it needed from the raid on the hospital, but there was every reason to believe that they might also want to control—or more likely destroy—the source of the genetic material Felice had brought back. He could only hope that, if such were the case, they had already come and gone.

  Despite his earlier assurance, as they set out across the roadless landscape, Moses seemed less certain of his ability to find their destination. He claimed to have recognized the spot where the expedition had left the dirt road, and knew the approximate mileage from there to the sight, but in such a vast environment, even a single compass degree of variation might put them miles away from their destination. Without exact coordinates—information Felice had not trusted to memory—even a GPS device would have been useless. But as they traversed the lava field, Felice became more animated, directing him to make course corrections, and King realized that, consciously or not, she was acting as a living GPS, following a powerful and unerring homing instinct.

  “How much farther?” he asked, as the vehicle’s trip meter hit 95 kilometers.

  Felice, who was now barely able to contain her impatience, squinted through the windshield into the darkening eastern sky, and then pointed. “That ridge. The cave is there.”

  They were close, and soon they would be visible to any watching eyes that might be at the site, especially if the falling dusk required them to use headlights. King drove on a few minutes longer until he spied an elevated area. He pulled to a stop and climbed to the highest point.

  The plain that butted up against the ridge was as dark and featureless as everything else. Using the scope for the Dragunov, he did a visual sweep and managed to pick out the only man-made objects on the landscape, the camp from the original expedition. Although twilight shadows clung to the site like a shroud, he saw no indication of activity—no light, no movement. For some reason, King wasn’t as relieved by that as he expected to be.

  A few minutes later, the beams of the expedition’s head
lights illuminated the tattered and burned remnants of the camp. Though only a few days had passed since the events Moses had recounted, the compound looked like the set of a post-apocalyptic movie. Shreds of fabric had snagged on the coils of concertina wire that ringed the compound, and flapped in the breeze like Himalayan prayer flags. Only one of the tents was still standing, looking forlorn amid the wreckage. Two twisted and scorched masses of metal marked the end of what had probably been trucks or SUVs. Everything else was ruined beyond recognition.

  Felice seemed uninterested in searching the wreckage. “We need to go to the cave,” she insisted. “There’s nothing in the camp that will be of any use to us.”

  Judging by the state of the compound, King was inclined to agree. It seemed very unlikely that any survivors would be found amid the ruins. But where were the bodies?

  King shifted his vehicle into drive again, and steered around the wrecked camp, getting closer to the base of the hill. The cave opening was visible, a mere pockmark in the cliff face, and he pulled to a stop a stone’s throw away, but not before Felice threw open her door and jumped out.

  “Wait!” King shouted after her. “At least let me break out some flashlights.” He turned to Moses. “Why don’t you have the men set up camp here. I guess Felice and I are going to do a little spelunking.”

  Moses seemed inexplicably perturbed, but nodded and jumped out to relay the message to the men in the second vehicle. King took an LED MagLite from his duffel bag, along with the MP5, and hurried to join Felice at the mouth of the cave.

  As soon as he stepped through the opening, he knew something was wrong. A vile odor permeated the air; a smell of animal excrement mixed with decaying flesh. The flashlight beam revealed dark streaks on the smooth floor of the passage, as if something wet and greasy had been dragged along its length.

  “Was it like this before?” King asked.

  “I don’t remember.” Felice’s tone was distant and mechanical, as if she had no idea what he was talking about. She quickened her step and it was all King could do to keep up with her.

  A short passage led down to an enormous cavern, the depth and breadth of which was beyond the capacity of King’s flashlight to illuminate. What he did see in the cone of blue-white light was nevertheless awe-inspiring.

  When he had first heard the term “elephant graveyard” he had imagined a place where a few dozen, or maybe even a few hundred skeletons would be jumbled together. But this cavern beggared belief. Directly before him was a veritable sea of gigantic bones and enormous, curving ivory tusks, some at least ten feet in length. The skeletons were packed tightly together, as might occur if individual bodies were stacked one atop another prior to decomposition, and stretched in either direction as far as the eye could see. Without knowing how far back the mass of bones went, it was impossible to estimate the number of skeletons, but it was surely in the thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands.

  King understood now why the very idea of an elephant graveyard had galvanized adventurers of the Romantic era to risk everything to find such a treasure. “Incredible. There must be thousands of tons of ivory in here. How much would that be worth anyway?”

  Felice ignored his question and instead skirted the cramped area at the perimeter of the bones, disappearing into the shadows. King ran to catch her, casting his light down a path that had been cleared in the bones, and found her all but running to a strange structure—something like a shrine, built entirely of elephant tusks—erected in an open area, deep in the heart of the skeleton maze.

  She stopped there, and a few seconds later, he reached her side. “Damn it!” he raged. “You can’t run—”

  The words died in his throat as something stirred in the shadows. He stabbed the MagLite’s beam in the direction of the movement.

  To call what he beheld a man was perhaps too generous. The form shambling toward him was indeed human, but only in the strict biological sense. He was naked, except for a few torn remnants of clothes that clung to his body; it looked as if he had tried to simply tear them away, without comprehending the subtleties of buttons and zippers. His matted hair was caked with dirt and his skin was streaked with filth, some of it likely his own excrement. His face was a mask of dried blood, but despite his feral look, his eyes were lifeless, staring unfocused past King to….

  To Felice.

  He glimpsed movement his left, and swung the light that direction. Another figure was shuffling from the outer perimeter. Then another, and another…seven in all, at least two of them female, but all uniformly bestial in appearance.

  And advancing.

  Then his light found something else. More remains, but not elephants and not thousands of years old. Piled up behind the shrine was a mass of bodies, bloated and rotting, but not merely left to decompose. Bones were visible where the flesh of the arms and legs had been torn away…gnawed away.

  He brought the MP5 up, but knew intuitively that a mere threat would accomplish nothing.

  He turned to Felice. “We need to get out of here, now!”

  But even as he said it, he realized that her eyes were also drifting, unfocused. And then, even as he was reaching out to grab her arm, she collapsed, like a sacrificial offering laid before the shrine of tusks.

  13.

  The Indian Ocean, 200 miles southeast of Mogadishu, Somalia

  It’s like the Brugada incident all over again, Sara thought.

  Two years ago, in order to find a cure for a lethal retrovirus that threatened the very survival of the human race, she had left the familiar environs of the research lab, joined a team of lethal Spec Ops warriors, and HALO jumped out of a stealth aircraft into the middle of a free-fire zone.

  This felt a lot like that.

  Except without Jack.

  She and Fulbright had boarded a transport plane in the early hours of the morning following their escape from the hospital, and traveled to Mogadishu, where she was introduced to a team of commandos ostensibly running pirate interdiction operations.

  Somalia was a shock to her system. It was everything she had expected Addis Ababa to be; dirty, primitive, a constant assault on her senses. Even sequestered as she was at a highly fortified military style base, surrounded by massive Hesco barriers that looked like the building blocks of an ancient pyramid, the sounds and smells hammered at her. Only her unyielding sense of purpose, in this case, focusing on getting ready to accompany Fulbright in the raid on the floating Manifold lab, allowed her to shut out some of the tumult.

  Now, thirty-six hours after arriving in Mogadishu, she was being whisked under the tepid waters of the Indian Ocean. Like the rest of the team, she clung to the exterior of a commercial variant of the Mark VIII Mod 1 Swimmer Delivery Vehicle. The SDV looked like an enormous black torpedo, and had originally been designed to covertly ferry an entire US Navy SEAL dive team and all their gear, to water-borne objectives.

  Sara didn’t think Fulbright’s team were Navy SEALs. She hadn’t asked, but her impression was that they were private security contractors, working for the CIA. That probably meant that there were at least a few former SEALs on the team, doing the same job, but presumably for better pay. She had mixed feelings about that. It seemed to be the way things were done in the modern age, but as a civil servant herself, and a close friend of many military personnel, she was uncomfortable with the idea of a paramilitary force that was ultimately motivated only by greed.

  She had put these concerns aside in order to focus on the intensive training that would prepare her to accompany the assault team. A certified SCUBA diver, she felt comfortable underwater, but much of the equipment was unfamiliar to her. The team employed Drager LAR-V rebreathers, which utilized carbon scrubbers and a small bottle of pure oxygen to recycle a diver’s air in a closed-circuit. The device, worn on the chest, was about the size of a large lunch box, considerably lighter and less bulky than traditional SCUBA tanks. Sara spent nearly two hours getting used to the rebreather, while being towed around by the SDV. The
re hadn’t been time for more than that. The SDV and its future passengers had been loaded aboard a heavily armed support ship, and the mission had gotten underway.

  From that point forward, Sara had simply allowed herself to be carried along, quite literally as was now the case, by forces beyond her control. Her expertise counted for nothing; she was just another piece of equipment the team had to lug around. The passage from the support ship to the target vessel seemed to take hours. In total darkness, enveloped in the soup-warm waters of the Indian Ocean, it was all she could do simply to stay awake.

  She knew they had arrived at their destination when the DSV’s humming screws stopped turning and the submersible coasted to a stop, but even then, there was nothing to do except wait for Fulbright to give the signal to surface.

  Despite her earlier bravado, she was dismayed by the knowledge that, perhaps less than a hundred feet away, people were being killed. It was easy to be sanguine about the death of terrorists and criminals when it took place thousands of miles away; less so, she had discovered from personal experience, when it was happening right in front of you. She had to keep reminding herself that these were the people who had brutally executed her friends, and that given the chance, they would have done the same to her.

  The assault team went in from two locations on opposite sides of the vessel. Their movements were guided by a remote surveillance aerial vehicle—a drone—that identified targets and relayed the information in real time to the shooters. With suppressed weapons and night-vision goggles, Fulbright’s team visited swift and silent death on the Manifold security team. Less than ten minutes later, Sara felt a tapping on her arm, and knew that the bloody part of the job was finished.

  She surfaced to find herself facing a wall of steel. The research ship, which had looked so small and insignificant in satellite imagery, appeared massive up close. Fulbright bobbed next to her, a red-lensed flashlight casting an eerie glow on the dark water and revealing an aluminum scaling ladder hanging from the side of the vessel. Following his lead, Sara scrambled up the ladder, clinging tightly to the rungs, lest her neoprene clad feet lose purchase on the slippery metal. Fulbright was waiting for her at the top, and offered a steadying hand as she clambered over the side rail.