Prime

by Jeremy Robinson

  They picked up Casey Bellows on the return trip. Despite the fact that his role in the night’s disastrous events had been peripheral, he shared their sense of defeat. Now, back in the relative safety of the Mandalay op center, there seemed little left to do but lick their wounds.

  Keasling continued to survey the team with a stern look, then turned on his heel and scooted a large blue Igloo cooler into the center of the room. He threw back the lid to reveal several brown glass bottles sloshing about in a bath of ice cubes.

  As if by unanimous accord, the members of the team stared at the offering like it was a crate full of spent nuclear fuel rods.

  Tremblay finally edged forward and picked up one of the bottles. “Samuel Adams Boston Lager. General, I could…” He stopped in mid-quip, as if recognizing that this most definitely wasn’t the time or the place, and instead he commenced distributing the beers. When he had completed that task, he raised his bottle. “To missing friends.”

  Everyone raised their drinks to the toast, but when they finally began to imbibe, it was perfunctory. King just stared at the bottle and shook his head. He raised his eyes to Keasling. “Sir, I’d like a word with you and Deep Blue…in private, please.”

  Keasling regarded him thoughtfully, as if divining King’s intent. “Want to call it quits, son?”

  “I blew it, sir. Three men are dead, and nothing to show for it.”

  “The fact that you made it out of there is a testament to your abilities.” He gestured around the room. “That goes for all of you. So you got your asses handed to you; shit happens. The important thing is that you took the fight to the enemy, and he’s the one that ran. You were ordered to run him down, and that’s what you’ve got to do.”

  King remained unconvinced. “So, we’re just going to watch and see where he lands next, and then go charging into another little shop of horrors? Do we just keep doing that until we finally run out of bodies to throw at him?”

  “If that’s what it takes.”

  Parker spoke up unexpectedly. “Jack, it’s not just about beating him or getting payback. He’s got Sasha. As long as she’s alive, we have to keep trying.”

  King looked like he was about to throw up his hands, but instead he just rubbed the bridge of his nose as if trying to massage away a headache. “Kevin told me something back there; he talked about a paycheck. He’s just the hired muscle. We need to know who’s writing that check and why they need Sasha. Maybe if we can figure that out, we can get ahead of him. That’s the only way we’re going to win this.”

  There was a loud pop as Zelda smacked a hand against her thigh. She shrugged out of her backpack and rooted in it until she produced a laptop computer. “I completely forgot about this. I grabbed it from the room where we ran into Rainer. She was working on it when we walked in.”

  Parker reached out for it, and after a nod from King, Zelda surrendered it. Parker opened the computer and hit the power button, but a moment later he let out a frustrated sigh. “Password protected.”

  “If anyone can figure it out,” King said, “it’s you, Danno.”

  Parker however wasn’t quite as enthusiastic. “Sasha Therion is a mathematical genius and a professional cryptographer. I think her password is going to be a little more complicated than the name of her pet goldfish.”

  “Is there another way to get around it?”

  Parker stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Well, Lew taught me a few tricks… He’s the guy you really want working on this.”

  “Done,” declared Keasling. “It just so happens that Staff Sergeant Aleman has been assigned to the headquarters element of our new team. You should be able to link up with him using the equipment here.”

  “Crack that nut, Danno.” King’s expression was no longer that of a defeated commander ready to tender his resignation or fall on his sword. Whether it was Keasling’s exhortation or Zelda’s revelation, he had a little of his fighting spirit back. “Figure out what that bastard wants, and where he’s going to go next, and just maybe, we’ll be able to get her back.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The password turned out to be child’s play, relatively speaking anyway. Sasha’s user settings were protected by factory-standard security software, which was not in itself unsophisticated. There was no way around the password lock without reformatting the hard drive and overwriting the disk’s contents, and the password options were virtually unlimited, but it had one weakness that Lewis Aleman was able to exploit, and in short order, he opened Sasha’s computer like it was Pandora’s Box. That weakness was that there was no limit to the number of attempts that could be made to enter the correct password.

  Ordinarily, that wouldn’t have mattered. Even with unlimited guesses, it might take a lifetime to physically enter all the possible combinations. A skilled hacker might be able to accomplish the same task in a matter of days instead of decades, but it would nevertheless be a daunting task even for the fastest commercially available computers.

  Deep Blue had given Aleman access to something even better: the National Security Agency’s XT3 Red Storm supercomputer.

  The most time-consuming part of the process involved creating a virtual clone of Sasha’s computer inside the NSA’s system, a procedure that was limited by the download speed of the satellite Internet connection at the safe-house. The cloned version eliminated the laborious chore of manually entering all possible password permutations, or waiting for the laptop’s comparatively ponderous Intel Core processor to run the security subroutine.

  It took all of three minutes.

  Trying to make sense of the contents of the computer took slightly longer; about half an hour altogether.

  “It really is about trying to decode the Voynich manuscript,” Parker announced after scanning the most recently created document files.

  King, exhausted and sporting a veritably mummy’s wrap of bandages over cuts and abrasions too numerous to count, didn’t look particularly impressed. “Alright, Danno, you’ve been talking about this manuscript for a couple days now. What is it?”

  Parker took a breath and affected his best professorial manner. “In 1912, a rare book dealer named Wilfrid Voynich came across a very unique book in a church in Italy. It was an antique, hand written on parchment and illustrated with full color paintings. That was pretty common for books from the Middle Ages, before the invention of the printing press, but what made this book really special was the fact that it was written in cipher text.”

  “Symbols instead of letters? Like the page we supposedly found in Ramadi?”

  “Right. At a glance, you might think it’s just another language or a different alphabet, but the symbols in the manuscript have never appeared anywhere else. Even so, there are ways to break a cipher, and usually the longer the message, the easier it is to crack. All you have to do is figure out which characters appear most frequently, and then compare them to the letters of the alphabet that are most often used, and you’re on your way to breaking the cipher.”

  “Just like Wheel of Fortune; you start with RNLST and E. But what if it’s not written in English?”

  Parker shook his head. “That’s not as important as it might seem. But in the case of the Voynich manuscript, professional and amateur code breakers from all over Europe have been trying to crack it for nearly a hundred years. The fact that no one has succeeded has led many to believe that it’s a fake—a randomly generated message, created by a medieval con man.”

  King frowned. “Okay, for argument’s sake, let’s say that it’s real. What difference does it make? What are we talking here: lost books of the Bible? Templar treasure maps, or something else? What makes this thing so damned important? What makes it worth killing for?”

  Parker took a deep breath. “Remember how I said the manuscript was illustrated? It’s full of detailed drawings, mostly of plants, but other things too, like star charts and animals. The popular theory is that it was a book of herbal or alchemical lore. That would explain why it was coded in
the first place; it’s a book of secret recipes, and who ever wrote it didn’t want those recipes falling into the wrong hands.”

  King nodded slowly. “Secret recipes. Like the formula for some kind of nerve agent?”

  “Or worse.” Parker turned the computer around so that King could see the file he had been looking at. The screen displayed a picture of a badly damaged wooden box with several levers sticking out from the sides. “This was found in a crypt in China. It has markings that are identical to the cipher used in the manuscript. The crypt where they found this thing was hot with a strain of plague bacteria. In fact, the place where they found it might have been ground zero for the Black Death back in the fourteenth century.”

  “Okay, now you have my attention.” King pointed at the image. “What is it?”

  “It’s a musical instrument, similar to an organ. The code isn’t cipher text. It’s musical notation. That’s why no one has been able to crack it. The letters don’t correspond to any alphabet; they’re musical notes.”

  King just stared at him.

  “Sasha figured it all out…well, almost. She couldn’t verify any of her historic suppositions because they wouldn’t let her have outside Internet access, but it all checks out.”

  Parker tapped the screen again. “This is what started it all. Some kind of primitive pipe organ, found in the crypt of a Chinese general who led the Mongol armies that destroyed Baghdad in 1258; it was a war trophy taken from the House of Wisdom.”

  “That was almost a hundred years before the Black Death,” King pointed out. “How could they be connected?”

  “Maybe they’re not, but somebody obviously thinks they are. That’s why they want Sasha to decode the manuscript.”

  King still didn’t appear convinced. “Back up. You said it’s musical notation. What did you mean by that?”

  “Think of it as another layer of code. Each symbol corresponds to a specific musical note—we even use letters to symbolize those, A to G—so music is a form of language. The Voynich notation is obviously more complex, but that could be the difference between octaves or semitones—sharps and flats. I don’t understand it all, but Sasha did. She was in the process of trying to create a virtual copy of the organ when you showed up tonight.”

  “Would that have worked?”

  “The original was badly damaged. There wasn’t enough of it left to even begin guessing how the symbols and notes corresponded. But Sasha was researching someone named Nasir al-Tusi, a Persian scientist and an advisor to the Mongol ruler. Al-Tusi was the Leonardo Da Vinci of the Islamic world. No, scratch that… He was more like Leonardo and Galileo and Isaac Newton all rolled into one. Based on what Sasha turned up, he’s a good candidate for having been involved in the creation of the manuscript. He was also present at the destruction of Baghdad, and he even managed to save some of the documents from the House of Wisdom. Sasha wanted access to al-Tusi’s writings, to see if the plans for the organ were there somewhere, but she never got a chance.”

  King considered this for a moment. “Those documents he saved; where did they go?”

  “A place called Maragheh. It was an astronomical observatory, and after the destruction of Baghdad, the last bastion of science and learning in the Islamic world.”

  “I don’t suppose it’s still around today?”

  “Yes and no. It’s currently undergoing restoration.” Parker clicked a few keys and the picture on the display changed to show an enormous white geodesic dome. “Everything in Sasha’s notes indicates that she expected to find a copy of the plans for the organ in the archives of the Maragheh Observatory. There are thousands of documents there, but hardly any of them have been preserved digitally.”

  “So, the only way to get the specs for the organ is to physically visit this observatory.” It was more a statement than a question, but King’s next inquiry wasn’t rhetorical. “The organ is the only way to decode the manuscript?”

  Parker nodded.

  King’s lips curled into a smile that was both grim and satisfied. “Rainer will have to go to Maragheh. And we’ll be waiting for him.”

  “Jack, there’s a problem. Maragheh…”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s in Iran.”

  King blinked at him. “Oh. I guess that is a problem.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  When he finally found a map that showed Maragheh, King’s first thought was that it wasn’t as bad as he’d first thought. The ruins of the ancient astronomical observatory were located in the remote northwestern part of Iran, only about a hundred miles from the borders with Iraq and Turkey, and at least four hundred miles from Tehran.

  When he’d showed Keasling, the general had just rubbed his forehead as if the news had given him a migraine. “God damned Iran,” he muttered. “Well, it’s not my call. You’ll have to take it up with your new boss.”

  Deep Blue received the news with no discernible reaction whatsoever; one of the advantages to being little more than a disembodied voice was that you could always just hit the ‘mute’ button if you didn’t feel like letting the person at the other end of the line know just how pissed off you were. After a longer than expected pause, Deep Blue said simply: “What do you need?”

  King explained his plan for the team to execute a High Altitude, High Opening (HAHO) jump. Unlike the High Altitude, Low Opening jump that Tremblay and Alpha team had used to get on the ground fast by free-falling most of the way and opening the parachutes at almost literally the last second, at HAHO jump required a paratrooper to deploy his chute at around 25,000 feet, and then glide the chute to a drop zone as far as thirty miles away.

  “That will get you in unnoticed,” Deep Blue replied, “but you’ll still be a good fifty miles from the objective. Let me see if I can’t come up with a better alternative.”

  The mysterious handler didn’t give any details, but directed them to proceed immediately to the airport, where Keasling’s plane would bear them to their next, as yet unrevealed destination. With that, Zelda and Shin packed up what few personal belongings they had accumulated during their time in Mandalay, and buttoned up the safe-house. Forty minutes later, they were in the air, and four hours thereafter, they were on the ground at Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan.

  A five-ton military transport truck, driven by a pair of US Air Force enlisted personnel, rolled out to meet them on the tarmac. Bagram was a primary entry point for Afghanistan, and over the course of his military career, King had spent more than a few days cooling his heels in transitional housing there while waiting for a connecting flight or ground transport to some remote FOB. This time however, they didn’t leave the flight line. Instead, the truck delivered them to one of several non-descript semi-cylindrical hangar buildings along the perimeter of the airstrip; the only noticeable difference about this particular structure was the fact that it was shrouded in darkness.

  With only the beams of the airmen’s flashlights to guide them, they were escorted into the Quonset-hut style hangar and up the boarding ramp of a large aircraft. King suspected it was some kind of stealth plane, but its interior looked more like a cargo transport. When they were all aboard, the ramp closed and the interior space became filled with an escalating whine as the aircraft’s engines started powering up.

  As if to answer the question King knew better than to ask, Keasling gestured airily about the hold. “I know I don’t need to tell any of you that you were never aboard this plane. Officially, it doesn’t exist.”

  “And unofficially?” asked Zelda, beating everyone else to the punch.

  “Unofficially… Welcome aboard the CR-41 SR, stealth reconnaissance and transport aircraft, code named ‘Senior Citizen.’”

  Tremblay snorted disdainfully.

  “Don’t get too comfortable,” the general said, without missing a beat. “Once we’re aloft, we’ll be flying at Mach 2—which should put you at the drop zone in a little less than two hours. That’s how long you’ve got to get ready. Oh, and King…got some C
hristmas presents for you.”

  Keasling gestured to a stack of large plastic containers that were secured to the deck with heavy nylon straps. King immediately went about loosening the straps so he could remove the lids. Inside the containers, nestled in hollows cut from protective foam, was all the equipment they would need for their mission, but this wasn’t just the replacement gear he’d asked Deep Blue to provide. The box held the newest, most cutting-edge—and most expensive—military hardware available.

  One box held five sets of AN/PSQ-20 infrared/thermal night-vision devices, ASIP satellite radio sets with earbuds and lip mics and two ruggedized laptop computers. Another contained a bulky olive drab pack, labeled with stenciled letters that read: ‘STARS.’

  King was impressed with that. Deep Blue had actually signed off on his crazy plan.

  A third was opened to reveal five XM8 carbines equipped with custom sound suppressors—one was also outfitted with an XM320 grenade launcher, and King passed it to Somers, who inspected the weapon almost reverently.

  Beneath the top layer of foam lay dozens of plastic box magazines. These were already loaded with 5.56 rounds for the XM8s. There were also several ammunition cans containing grenades and other ordnance. King picked out a cardboard box that was not rendered in bland military olive green, like the others, and he handed it over to Tremblay.