A flood of cool air rushed out, but from a standing position they could see nothing. Michael immediately laid down, focusing his headlamp into the depths, but still he could see only shadows. Michael didn’t like it. The hole reminded him of the mineshaft. But he was close to finding his father. So close, he could taste it. “Pass me the rope,” he said.
“Michael,” Ted said, tossing him a walkie talkie, “There are other options here.”
“Pass me the rope. I’m going in.”
• • •
THE FLAT-BOTTOMED BOAT moved slowly down the river, not much faster than the current. Huang wanted it that way. In his view the American was on to something. And if this was the case, the worst thing he could do was get in the way, at least before he had led him to the prize. On this matter Huang was convinced — better to be the vulture moving in to feed after the kill than the leopard risking life and limb to make it. Add to that, the technical situation with the satellite appeared to be well on its way to resolution. Though not strictly his purview, Huang had it on good authority that the mole in the American Space Agency was providing actionable intelligence. The fallout from the situation would soon be contained. Still, Huang could feel the tension building up among his men. Yes, patience was good, but if the American didn’t make his move soon, Huang knew that he would have to act. For now though, he would follow. The time to lead would come.
• • •
THE CAVERN WAS as dank as it was enormous. An extra long six–hundred-foot top rope secured above, Michael had descended less than forty feet and already the Petzl descender was warm in his hand. As the cave opened up around him like a bell jar, he only hoped that he had enough rope to get to the bottom. He carried an extra three hundred feet of line with him, and though more rope would have been ideal, truth be told Michael was impressed that Ted had been able to gather the climbing equipment he had. It was all new, top of the line stuff, making his descent into the depths of this cavern a lot more secure than it might have been.
He had descended at least a hundred feet now, the LEDs in his headlamp glistening off the wet cavern walls. And though those walls had expanded dramatically around him, Michael still could not see bottom. He was, in every sense of the word, dropping into the abyss. The aluminum descender he held in hand had heated up to the point that he decided to give the mechanism a rest. He eased up on his grip, the descender’s jaws crimping the line, and Michael slowly came to a stop, bouncing gently on the rope like a human yo-yo.
Surveying the space around him with his headlamp’s beam he saw only darkness. The cave was big, so big he suspected that the entire double karst was hollow: porous limestone that had succumbed to the gentle flow of water over millennia, yielding the enormous cavern in which he now found himself. He reached up and rotated the bezel of his headlamp, clicking it off. Then there was nothing. The only sound was the murmur of the elastic rope singing ever so quietly with his movements like a loose bass string. Michael was so entranced by its low murmur in the echo chamber of the cave that, for a moment, he didn’t recognize the flapping. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, came the high pitched squeal.
Michael knew what it was. He felt the wind rush by his face even before he switched on his headlamp. Bats. A storm of them engulfed him. Michael had no particular loathing of the winged creatures, but contracting rabies or histoplasmosis wasn’t on his agenda either. He fanned his right arm and simultaneously gripped the descender, releasing its crimp on the rope. He felt the warm furry mammals brush by his ears and face. Like wall-to-wall carpeting, they were everywhere. Fortunately their presence was fleeting. It took several seconds, but by then Michael had dropped through the worst of them and slowed his descent back to a crawl.
Michael checked his face and neck with his free hand. He felt no cuts or abrasions, meaning a trip to the hospital for a painful series of rabies vaccinations was unlikely. More to the point, as the remaining bats flew lazily around him, he reasoned that their very presence pointed to another entrance to the cave, perhaps an entrance large enough to bring in an aircraft. Michael gripped the descender, squeezing it tightly. As the rope raced through it, he knew he was testing the limits of his equipment, but found he didn’t care. All that mattered now was that he get to the cavern floor.
The bottom snuck up on him like a hammer. Michael thought he saw a flash of something, an amorphous expanse of organic steel, and like that his feet slapped down and he was bending his knees to absorb the impact as he landed in a pool of water. The water was little more than calf deep and he quickly recovered. He then unclipped his harness, reasonably certain that the tingle in his spine had been caused not by his rough landing, but by the object he had viewed from above.
Though every fiber of his being compelled him to look upon the object, he took a moment to reflect. The aircraft was after all the reason he was here. It was the reason his father had spent a lifetime in China, and it was, in many ways, his last best hope of finding the man who had given him life. And so, hoping against hope, Michael cast his glance up at the amorphous expanse of aluminum above. And in that moment he understood. He understood the pull the plane must have exerted on his father and others like him. He understood why nations had covertly fought to find it for so many years. And he understood, clearly for the first time, what he had to do. Reaching into the pocket of his cargo shorts, Michael pulled out the encrypted two-way radio Ted had given him and pressed the talk button. “Drop on down,” he said. “The water’s fine.”
40
WITHIN MINUTES KATE and Ted had descended to the watery cavern floor, where they now stood alongside Michael, quietly amazed by what they saw. The aircraft was a flying wing: stealth technology from a bygone era. Like its blueprint, the bat-winged plane looked to have a wingspan of about sixty-five feet. It appeared amorphous not by design, but due to the decades-old accumulation of bat guano covering its surface. The underside of the plane was, however, clear of guano, and it was from this perspective that it began to take shape. Its fuselage stood perhaps seven feet above the cave floor on a tricycle landing gear. What appeared to be vertically mounted jets or thrusters poked out from its underbelly, suggesting that the plane was in fact capable of vertical take off. A metallic surface of a matte titanium gray sloped up forming a low cockpit between the wings, a swastika adorning the flat nose of the aircraft. It was a perfect life-size version of the blueprint — a crap-covered, decades-old, Nazi bomber.
“Shit,” Kate said.
“Don’t you mean, Heil?” Michael said.
“It was supposed to be a vertical lift, long range stealth bomber,” Ted said. “Or so people think. Nobody’s laid eyes on an intact example.”
Michael noted that hundreds of bats still hung upside down from the underside of the Horten’s fuselage, clustered around a series of three thrusters. What surprised Michael was that despite being covered in guano, the Horten appeared amazingly well preserved. There were no visible rust spots or outward signs of decay, just the bat crap which he suspected was, at most, cosmetic. Michael eyed the Horten’s underbelly.
“There’s got to be a way in.”
“First things, first,” Ted said, pulling out his smartphone. “We need a record of what we’ve found here.”
Michael responded with a step forward, careful not to lose his footing in the calf-deep pool as he moved toward the underside of the airplane. Bats fluttering from their roost, he saw what looked like an egress on the underbelly of the fuselage, the smooth ridges of the gap between the door and its aperture as finely engineered as a classic Mercedes-Benz. Gazing upwards, Michael took another short step, locating the recessed handle that kept the door in place.
He reached up.
“Wait,” Kate said.
Michael paused, arm in the air.
“The plane was hidden here in wartime, remember. It could be booby trapped.”
Michael visually inspected the recessed stainless steel handle. If it had been tampered with he could see no sign of it. There
were no external wires, no scratches or signs of forced entry. Of course Michael was the first to admit he was no expert in the art of booby trapping Nazi airplanes. It wasn’t long ago that the notion would have never crossed his mind. But now that he had to seriously consider the possibility that the thing might explode, he found himself rejecting the idea. Put it down to common sense. Explosives tended to destabilize over time. With the care taken in hiding the Horten, he doubted those who placed it here would risk an accidental detonation. They wanted to preserve it, not blow it up. Still, there was only one way to be sure.
“Michael.”
Michael ignored Kate and folded the handle down turning it clockwise. The mechanism was initially stiff, but moved easily after the first quarter turn responding with a smooth click. Michael thought about it for a moment. If he was wrong this would be his last moment of life. This would be when the whole thing went boom. But it didn’t. There was a delay of about a second, and then the hatch opened with a pneumatic whoosh, easing down on a single hydraulically dampened arm as easily as it might have the day it was manufactured. Michael expelled the breath he had been holding, tasting the metallic bitter of adrenalin on his tongue. He scanned the dark interior of the hatch with his headlamp. There was a telescopic ladder bolted there. He pulled downward.
The ladder smoothly extended several feet allowing Michael an easy climb up into the fuselage. Climbing pack tight to his back, his head now in the ladder well, the first thing he noticed was that the air was predictably acrid inside. Taken in conjunction with the absence of cobwebs, Michael had to assume that good old German engineering had prevailed, ensuring that the interior of the aircraft had remained hermetically sealed for decades. He stared up the ladder well, his headlamp casting its beam on what he could only assume was the gray metallic interior of the cockpit. Then, finally poking his head into the cockpit above, he simply stopped.
It wasn’t the cockpit itself that threw him. The Horten’s cockpit was what might be expected from an antique aircraft: a cramped space, all dials and switches and two harnessed pilot’s seats. There was a control stick in front of each seat and a facetted windscreen provided a sweeping view over either wing, but again, it wasn’t the cockpit that threw him.
It was the corpse.
Laid out in the rear of the cockpit directly behind the pilots’ seats was a skeletal corpse, a molded rubber oxygen mask still strapped to its skull. The corpse’s hand was outstretched, a shrunken elastic layer of skin pasted over its dead bones. There was no sign of any clothing. Whoever it was had either been naked, or stripped after death. The corpse was lying in an act of supplication, almost as though the victim had begged for mercy in the moments before death.
Michael pulled himself up into the cockpit and once there he could clearly make out a bullet hole in the corpse’s skull. From what he knew of such things, he suspected that the lack of an exit wound indicated a small caliber weapon. In addition to the bullet hole, the blade of a bayonet was broken off at the blunt end and stuck directly through the corpse’s heart.
Then, adjusting his view downward, Michael saw what the corpse held in its hand. Within its cupped mummified fingers were a series of titanium rotors. He couldn’t immediately tell how many of them there were, but he knew exactly what they were for. Without a doubt, they were the missing element to the Purple Sky encryption device he carried in his backpack. As Kate had explained it, each of the three-inch rotors fit on a spindle on the back of the encryption device. They were used to mechanically scramble a message before it was transmitted. But they didn’t matter for the moment. Not right now.
What mattered was the tiny pendant held tightly in the corpse’s other hand. The pendant was small and silver and contained three small stars offset in a larger ring. It looked, Michael thought, like a misshapen face and its very presence filled him with dread. Because Michael had only ever seen one other pendant like it in his life. And it had hung around the neck of his father.
41
JACKHAMMERS CONTINUED TO bite at the armored alcove, but Mobi paid them no heed. He had larger matters to attend to, namely each of JPL’s eighteen mainframe servers which were now under his command. Mobi fired code at them, his every instruction shooting through JPL’s eighty-five-foot antenna and into space at the speed of light. His aim was to shut down the targeting system aboard the DOD’s orbital platforms thereby rendering the weapons useless. Mobi’s concern was that, though the ASAT platforms might try to eliminate the Chinese satellite, the more likely scenario was an indirect hit that would breach the satellite’s core but not stop its reentry. The unknown effect of a cold fusion breach aside, the certain result would be the dispersal of atomized plutonium into the jet stream.
Such a dispersal meant that every man, woman and child on the planet would ingest a dangerous dose of radiation. Mobi knew in his gut there was a better way and if it meant sabotaging the Air Force’s ASAT efforts, so be it. But it didn’t take long for Mobi to grow concerned. There were two reasons for this. The first was another outgoing message to Xiyuan, China. Unlike the other messages, however, this one didn’t emerge from the JPL servers and it wasn’t encrypted. It was simply a routine e-mail sent to a numbered account that got caught and cached in Mobi’s wireless sniffer. The message read, “Problem solved.”
Since the message could have originated from any wireless device in the building, Mobi didn’t have a lot to go on, but he couldn’t say it left him feeling encouraged. It was the second development, however, that actually got Mobi worried: Rand’s men had suddenly stopped making any effort to reestablish communication with their platforms. No test transmissions, no pleas for the system to let them in, nothing. And that, Mobi realized, most likely meant that Rand had quietly transferred control of the platforms back to Colorado Springs.
Mobi couldn’t control the platforms if they were running them out of Colorado. What was worse, his screen showed a new high velocity object in near Earth orbit confirming his deepest fears. Despite his best efforts, they had launched a missile. Mobi was so dismayed that he barely registered the jab of the steel jackhammer as it bit up through the concrete floor. Less than forty seconds later the first warhead hit.
42
MICHAEL CROUCHED IN the Horten’s cockpit, staring at the leathery corpse caught in its final act of supplication. There had been suffering, even torture, that much was clear. He didn’t want to imagine his father’s last moments like this. Not if he didn’t have to. Kate pulled herself into the cockpit, finally breaking the silence.
“It’s not him.”
“His pendant, it’s exactly the same.”
Kate shook her head. “Look at the pelvis.”
Michael redirected his gaze to the corpse’s groin. From the way it lay half on its side the area was mostly hidden, the bones covered in an elastic translucent skin.
“It’s female,” Kate said.
“Are you sure?”
“See how wide the hips are? This was a woman. A tall woman by the looks of her. But a woman. Not only that. The degree of decay is way off. Whoever this was has been here for years, most likely decades, not months.”
Kate reached for the corpse’s outstretched hand, but Michael beat her to it, pulling the handful of titanium rotors out of the skeletal outstretched palm and dropping them in his pocket. Kate was right. He had allowed his emotions to get the best of him. Even if the pendant was the same, there was no way this was his father. Still there was a connection. There had to be. Recovered from his initial shock, Michael took a second look around the cockpit, and as he did, he made note of a significant feature that he had missed in his initial shock.
The capsule.
Behind a low open hatch on the rear bulkhead of the fuselage was a metal capsule like the one they had found at Chen’s. It was perhaps fifty percent larger, and it was difficult to see the whole thing, but it was obvious that this area behind the hatch was more than a hiding place. It was the reactor room.
“Kate?”
Michael stepped over the corpse and bent down low, climbing into the reactor room. It was pitch black in here, even darker than the main cockpit where Ted’s headlamp in the cave below had provided the occasional flash of light. But Michael’s headlamp burned strong and he was able to see that the capsule was solidly mounted to the floor and connected to the rest of the aircraft through a series of anodized ducts. The whole assembly looked like a silver spider poised to strike.
Kate entered the reactor room behind him. Casting his glance back at her, Michael noticed a length of ducting running out of the capsule and along the reactor room wall to a hinged metallic surface with a recessed handle. Michael twisted the handle and what looked like a communications console eased out of the wall.
“You know what that is?” Kate said.
“I can make a pretty good guess.”
Michael pulled the console out from its recess revealing an empty bracket. He then removed the green anodized box from his backpack and slid it onto the bracket. It was a perfect fit. He inserted the jumble of output wires from the encoding unit into the communication console’s reciprocal socket.
“Purple Sky,” Michael said.
With the installation of the rotors, Michael thought, they would have a full transceiver. But something else was also becoming clear to Michael. It hit him with the same force as those long hours in the mineshaft he had spent hopelessly waiting for his father to rescue him. As the corpse on the cockpit floor had so painfully demonstrated, there were no guarantees. No guarantees the transceiver would work and no guarantees that he was any closer to finding his dad. If anything the whole mess was beginning to feel like a dead end. He had located the Horten, but he hadn’t found his father and he didn’t know if he ever would. The thought sent a chill down Michael’s spine; a chill so real that when Ted poked his head into the reactor room, an unseen gunman holding the barrel of an MP5 submachine gun firmly against the base of his skull, Michael could honestly say that he expected as much.
Lethal Circuit (Michael Chase 1) Page 18
