Lethal Circuit (Michael Chase 1)

by Guignard, Lars

  It was a tiny splash really. Nothing to get excited about. But someone must have taken notice. Because the powerful spotlight which illuminated the Horten began a slow arc over the cave wall. Michael and Kate lowered their profile as much as possible, doing their best to blend into the rock. It seemed to work at first because the spotlight passed right over them. Then the beam retraced its path backward, shooting past them again before returning to bathe them in a white focused light. Michael knew his hearing was back because he clearly heard the Cantonese chatter drifting up from the cave floor below. Whatever the merits of laying low, they didn’t much matter now. They had been discovered.

  46

  MOBI’S EXTRACTION FROM the alcove was brutally efficient. Within minutes of being subdued he was transported to a glass walled holding cell. They had cuffed his hands, but there had been no interrogation, only Rand and Alvarez arguing heatedly outside the cell. Mobi could hear nothing of course as the cell was completely sound proof, but what surprised him was that he didn’t care. What he cared about was following up on his hunch — a hunch that told him that he had just wasted a whole lot of time barking up the wrong tree.

  If Quiann was trying to get Mobi off track it would be something simple. As far as Mobi knew, Quiann had no way of knowing he would contact him. Therefore if Quiann had wanted to mislead Mobi, it had to be done quickly. After all, the data had arrived soon after Mobi had phoned. There wasn’t a lot of time to alter it. Quiann would have wanted Mobi to believe the data was real, yet he didn’t want it to be real. That meant the changes would be slight, yet significant. And a rigorous scientist like Quiann was nothing if not a perfectionist. Even if engaging in an act as of subterfuge, Mobi assumed Quiann would go for the elegant solution. Simple, but systematic. To Mobi, it suggested one thing: that the damage could be reversed. But if his premise held, if the data stream had been altered, the bigger question was how to bring it back to its natural form. Mobi considered this point as the glass door to the cell slid open behind him.

  “Mobi?” Alvarez said softly.

  Mobi didn’t react, but simply stared at his reflection in the glass wall, his thoughts churning.

  “Mobi, it’s me.”

  Mobi heard the Deputy Director this time around, but continued to stare at his reflection.

  “Mobi, damn it, I’m the only thing standing between you and the three hundred forty-two pages of the Patriot Act. Talk to me.”

  “You know there’s somebody sending messages out of this facility.”

  “I’m the one who told you about it.”

  “That person would need access.”

  “Of course.”

  “That person might even want me to waste my time with Quiann.”

  “Mobi,” Alvarez said, uncomfortable with the suggestion, “whatever you’re thinking you need to put that aside for the moment and focus.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you can still help.”

  Mobi looked to Alvarez. He didn’t want to doubt her, but it didn’t change the fact that he did. Regardless, she was right. He could help. Even if he wasn’t sure which side he would be helping. “Quiann wasn’t square with us,” Mobi finally said.

  “What do you mean not square? Why?”

  “The why I’m not sure, about,” Mobi said, eyeing his reflection in the glass, “but the how is obvious.” He turned to Alvarez. “And I know how to fix it.”

  47

  FROM THE MOMENT the spotlight found them on the cave wall, it was clear to Michael that there was only one course of action — to come down. The man with the Uzi submachine gun below had an unobstructed line of sight and what was more, there was nowhere to go. The cave wall above the ledge was too smooth to climb. A brief glance at Kate had confirmed that her thinking matched his and they scaled the slippery cave wall back down to the cave floor. Their circumstances, however, had rapidly deteriorated since their descent. Both Michael’s and Kate’s hands had been bound behind their backs with plastic zip cuffs. They stood upright, chest deep in the cave water, held hostage by a muscular Uzi wielding man in the Zodiac.

  Kate was silent, but she didn’t have to speak. Michael could tell that she recognized their captor’s Tiger-Snake tattoo just as he did; he was another Tiger Snake Boy. Shortly after they reached the cave floor, a compressor had been turned on and the rubber tubes beneath the Horten had begun to inflate. Four men fit the pontoons together with a tubular steel frame. As the pontoons took on a cylindrical form, the Horten actually rose above them like a water bug skating on a pond. A roughly circular fifty-foot hole had been blasted into the cave wall from the river front. How the Horten had gotten into the cave was still a mystery. It could have been sealed in with a similar explosion years ago or it could have come through an as yet unseen tunnel. But how it was going to get out was obvious. One look at Kate told Michael that she, like he, understood exactly what was going on. The Tiger Snake Boys intended to float the Horten downriver.

  It was a good plan, Michael thought, if getting a Nazi war plane out of a bat cave was on your to do list. Not fool proof maybe, but good. A cry of protest erupted from Michael’s right and he redirected his attention to the farthest corner of the cave. There, where the newly blasted cave opened to the river, Ted was being forced into the second Zodiac by two gun wielding men. Several shouts of protest were followed by a short growl as the Zodiac’s twin outboards purred to life. The man at the helm made a quick turn forcing Michael to stand on his toes to avoid swallowing the second Zodiac’s wake.

  “Where are they taking him?” Michael said.

  His words were answered by a sudden silence. The compressor had been shut down. Apparently the machine’s work was complete because the Horten had risen so high on its inflatable pontoons that it was actually floating now, drifting toward where they stood at the bow of the boat. Michael listened carefully as the men who had been working to inflate the pontoons waded back to the Zodiac, each carrying a three-quarter-inch polyethylene tow rope. He could hear the receding purr of the second Zodiac, but not much else as silence enveloped the cave. Michael knew it was the calm before the storm. The quiet might last another minute or two, but it wouldn’t last forever. You didn’t blow a hole in the side of a mountain just to enjoy the view.

  “Kah!”

  Michael recognized the Cantonese word for “Go” and felt the twin Yamaha outboards snort to life. A second man grabbed them by their collars and within a few seconds the bow of the Zodiac swung gently around pulling Michael and Kate with it. They soon lost their footing, hanging from the bow of the boat in the deeper water, barely able to hold their heads above the surface. Michael was so cold his body was numb now. He felt the slack in the polyethylene ropes being taken up as the Zodiac moved forward, churning the dark cave water behind it. The Horten was no doubt floating behind them, but Michael directed his attention to keeping his head above water as they steered toward the newly blasted hole in the cave wall.

  One thing Michael had learned from Peru was that in the long run, you had no idea what curves life might throw at you. You could plan, you could visualize, but in the end, you had no idea. Michael had done almost everything wrong when he was captured on that mountainside in the Andes. He had wept, he had screamed, and he had panicked. And yet, when it was all over, the one thing that he had done right was to not lose faith in himself. Even in his darkest hour, when he was clinging to that ledge in the mineshaft, he had told himself that he would make it out alive. Even if his father didn’t save him, even if nobody saved him, he would survive. It might have been misguided, but he credited this blind faith with saving his life. Now, thousands of miles away and many years later, he suspected he was going to need to tap that same faith again.

  “Kate?” Michael said.

  “Yeah?”

  A wave came up and swamped both their heads as the Zodiac slowly motored out of the cave into the open water of the river. Michael struggled to get his head back above water.

  “When I had
you in that submission hold back on the plane, when you were lying on the cargo floor, how did you know I wouldn’t break your neck?”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “How did you know?”

  “It doesn’t matter now.”

  “Everything matters.”

  “Because,” Kate said.

  “Because why?”

  Kate gulped down a breath. “Because you’re not a killer, Michael.”

  A second wave crashed over the bow and submerged them both. They must have hit a whirlpool because this wave didn’t recede. Instead, it became more vicious, white water sucking them down. Michael felt the powerful arm that was holding him struggle to retain its grip, but it did no good. Kick his feet how he might, Michael couldn’t keep his head above water. His body was numb, his world nothing but liquid blackness. Starved of oxygen, the roar of the river displaced his every living thought, until finally, when rescue came, Michael couldn’t be sure if he was living or dead.

  “MR. CHASE.” THE name was heavily accented but clear.

  “Mr. Chase,” the voice said again.

  A pair of strong arms fished Michael from the river, dragging him into the boat. Kate was already sitting there, waterlogged and breathing heavily. Michael sucked in the night air. They were several hundred yards down river from the cave, the Horten bobbing faithfully behind. Shaking the water out of his eyes, he peered sideways at the dignified old man who had spoken his name. Michael recognized the man from the limousine outside Chungking Mansion. He didn’t have to be a mind reader to see that Kate recognized him too, and however much she might try to hide it, she didn’t look happy at the turn of events. She looked afraid.

  “Allow me to formally introduce myself,” the old man said, offering Michael a towel. “My name is Tung. Li Tung.”

  48

  MOBI STUDIED THE Chinese satellite’s trajectory on Mission Control’s overhead display, both Rand and Alvarez silently waiting on what he had to say. When Mobi thought about it, he didn’t know if he could trust either one of them, but it didn’t matter. He was on planet Earth’s side tonight. Politics be damned.

  “Quiann reversed the stream.”

  “I’m not following,” Alvarez said.

  “Quiann didn’t want me to decode it, so he reversed the stream.”

  “If he didn’t want us to have the data,” Alvarez said, “then why send it at all?”

  “Because he was scared. Scared I was going to find a way to contact it anyhow.”

  Rand was unimpressed. “If your boy doesn’t start making sense in the next five seconds, he’s back in his cage.”

  “Mobi,” Alvarez said, “for you own sake, speak clearly, from the beginning.”

  “Okay, here goes. Quiann wanted me to fail. I don’t know why, but he did. He sent me a mirror image of the data. Combined with a common cipher it proved to be a simple but effective cloak. But now, looking at the data stream the way it was meant to be seen, now I get it. I can stop that satellite from falling out of the sky.”

  Mobi sat down at his work station, quickly entering his password with his tightly cuffed hands. He hit a key and the data stream appeared on the overhead screen.

  “Look. All those scrolling numbers are just two things. The Chinese saying to their spacecraft, ‘We’re down here, please talk to us,’ and the spacecraft calling back, ‘I’m all alone up here, why don’t you talk to me?’ And both sides are doing it again, and again, and again.”

  “And you have to lock yourself in a closet to figure that out?”

  “Well, yeah. It didn’t make sense until I figured out that Quiann cooked the data. Now look at this.” Mobi went to work on the keyboard, the numbers on the screen realigning into their mirror image.

  “So?”

  “So watch when I factor out the noise.” Mobi hit a key and again the numbers on the screen changed, cycling through a series of permutations, before finally settling like the wheels on a slot machine. “There.” Mobi grinned proudly. “Quiann disguised it as well as he could on such short notice, but now that it’s been turned around and cleaned up, you can see there’s a subroutine buried in the loop.” Mobi pointed, jerking both cuffed hands. “The digits in the middle. Those are the clear-code. They would have been designed to reboot the system in the event of a problem.”

  “So do it,” Rand said

  “What do you mean do it?”

  “Send the code.”

  Mobi just looked at Rand. “I can’t send the code.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This thing’s a closed system. This is just a window. Not a way in. The Chinese have to send the code.”

  The corners of Rand’s mouth turned up into the same nasty smile Mobi now knew well. “Perfect. The Chinese have to send the code.”

  “Is there a problem?” Mobi asked.

  “No, no problem unless you consider the fact that as of fourteen hundred hours today we confirmed a massive explosion at China’s Jiuquan South Launch Center. Preliminary intelligence indicates sabotage. Probably an inside job. Even if the Chinese could communicate with that thing, their facility has been destroyed. There’s nobody left to send squat.”

  49

  BLACK KARSTS ROSE like sentinels from the riverbank. By Michael’s estimate they were now several miles down river, but there had been little talk and no change in their circumstances. Michael and Kate were kept cuffed at the bow of the Zodiac until finally the helmsman eased them around in a wide arc lining up the load they pulled with a gravel boat ramp on the riverbank. Michael could just see the black boxy form of a tractor trailer with all but its front wheels backed into the water. Then, a flash of light from the riverbank was returned by a like signal from the Zodiac.

  As they neared the bank, Michael saw men up to their waists in the water. The helmsman shut the twin outboards down, their four-stroke purr replaced by an electric hum as the engines hydraulically tilted up from the water. A moment later the bow of the boat ran gently ashore. The men in the river wasted no time taking hold of the tow ropes, guiding the inflatable pontoons supporting the Horten up onto the back of the submerged tractor trailer. The Horten was now sideways, its wings lined up with the length of the trailer. The men pulled tie straps from a large utility chest and began securing the fuselage down.

  “Off,” the sinewy helmsman said.

  Michael glanced at Kate, who rose, stepping off the Zodiac’s inflated rubber bow onto the muddy river bank. Michael got up as well, his wet clothes clinging to him in the night air. Then, Tung’s stocky enforcer marched them at gunpoint to the tractor trailer which unceremoniously belched smoke and black soot as its diesel engine turned over. Michael risked a glance back at the Zodiac where Li Tung and one of his lieutenants were deep in discussion. He gained only a sharp tap from the barrel of the Uzi. Redirecting his gaze ahead, Michael watched as the big truck pulled slowly forward, the Horten rising from the river like a behemoth from the deep.

  • • •

  MEANWHILE, HUANG BRISTLED at the indignity of it all. He had made it safely up the top rope to the peak of the karst. His backup team had greeted him as planned. And then, in one short moment, his entire operation had fallen apart. It started with the explosion below. The whole peak shook. At first Huang feared an earthquake, but he soon realized that what had befallen him was no natural disaster. He immediately dropped to the ground bellowing out an order for his men to do the same, but it wasn’t enough. Before the rumbling from the explosion had even subsided, Huang saw the muzzle flash. He knew at that point he was foolish not to have expected it. There had always been other forces at work in China. It was a wonder they had not interfered earlier.

  Huang ordered his men to retreat, but by the time the words had left his mouth, the bullets were already flying. The assault appeared to originate from the south side of the peak. His agents attempted to return fire but their assailants were well covered behind the rocks. With nowhere to run, his men were sitting ducks. And Huang wo
uld have been too if not for a simple piece of luck. He was still wearing his climbing harness. Rolling to his side, Huang was able to clip back into his top rope and lower himself over the far edge of the cliff. There he had found a rock outcropping in the lee of the karst. And there he had patiently waited while his men were slaughtered above.

  • • •

  MICHAEL WAS RUNNING on pure adrenaline. All he could say for certain was that both his and Kate’s hands were zip cuffed behind their backs as they rumbled down the road in the rear cab of an eighteen wheeler towing a Nazi airplane. Tung’s sinewy enforcer held the wheel while another member of the Triad crew rode shotgun. Apart from these few facts, the only other thing that was clear was that time was running out. Michael was thinking big picture, spy style now. If the Chinese satellite was still in the sky, it wouldn’t be there for long. The boys in tech needed to find the clear-code. And if they found it, Michael needed to send it. Regardless of his personal motivations, that was his mission now. That was why he was here.

  It was for this reason that Michael knew it was time to act when their truck slowed, rattling to a stop alongside an open fire on the road. Craning his neck toward the driver’s side window, he was able to see that they had pulled up beside a corrugated tin shack home to several men drinking tea around their roadside campfire. Tung’s enforcer removed the keys from the ignition, clipping them to his belt, and along with his wiry companion, they opened the vehicle’s doors to exit the cab. But before Michael was able to even formulate a plan he felt Kate’s feet on his back shoving him forward. He tumbled ahead, face first into the long gearshift between driver and passenger seats, unable to break his fall thanks to his tightly cuffed hands.