by Tom Grace
“Owen, I want you to handle this personally. Look into what they’re doing. If it’s Mir, I want to know why and I want them stopped.”
“I understand,” Moug replied.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
ARCHIPELAGO DE JUAN FERNANDEZ, CHILE
AUGUST 16
Over the past few days, Kilkenny’s travels with Tao had drawn him back and forth across eight time zones and his circadian rhythm was hopelessly disconnected from any sense of place. As a consequence, Kilkenny was already asleep when the U.S. Navy Twin Otter lifted off from the runway in Santiago.
Two navy flight crews had ferried the De Havilland DHC-6 down from the States, arriving at the Chilean capital just ahead of its two travel-weary passengers. The hold of the plane was filled with the equipment Kilkenny had requested to aid in their search.
Before he fell asleep, Kilkenny kept his thoughts centered on the problems at hand. He found comfort in the immediacy of things he could take action on because they helped keep his mind off Kelsey’s situation. But she was there in his dreams, alone in the darkness, hunted by an unseen predator. And Kilkenny was unable to protect her.
His high school swim coach, a wise old Basilian priest, had introduced him to the Prayer for Serenity following a particularly difficult loss. Intellectually, he accepted that some things he could change while others he could not, but still struggled, especially now, with the wisdom to know the difference.
The change in the pitch of the engines roused Kilkenny from his slumber. They were descending. Below, the first glints of dawn sparkled on the blue waters of the Pacific. As the plane banked, he caught sight of the two eastern islands that composed the lonely volcanic archipelago. The third lay a hundred miles farther west.
The larger of the pair was a boomerang-shaped pile of rock roughly thirteen miles long and four miles across at its widest point. Off its southwestern tip lay the smaller Santa Clara Island. They had been known from the time of their discovery by Spanish pilot Juan Fernandez in 1563 as Mas-a-Tierra and Mas-a-Fuera, but the Chilean government had recently renamed the larger island and its distant sibling Isla Robinson Crusoe and Isla Alejandro Selkirk. The four years that Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk spent alone on Mas-a-Tierra provided the inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s epic tale of survival.
Passing over the squat mountainous form of El Yunque—the Anvil—the pilot lined up with the runway for his final descent into Punta de Isla airfield. As soon as the plane rolled to a stop, crewmen disembarked and secured the aircraft. A moment later, the two passengers were given approval to deplane.
“You Tao and Kilkenny?”
The voice—a New Jersey tenor—belonged to a swarthy fireplug of a man in a yellow squall coat, dungarees, and a denim baseball cap with the legend R/V Sea Lion. He wore his black hair long, pulled back in a ponytail, and a bushy black beard covered the lower half of his face.
“We are,” Tao replied coolly.
“Thought as much, you two being the only ones not in uniform and all. I’m Guido Peretti, captain of the Sea Lion. My boss back at Harbor Branch pulled us off our survey to lend you two a hand.”
“We appreciate it. I hope it hasn’t caused you too much trouble,” Kilkenny said, offering his hand.
“Nah. A couple of the eggheads are bellyaching, but when they saw the carrot and stick offered with regard to their grants, they came around. Let’s get your gear offloaded and down to the docks. I was told this was a rush job, so I figured you’d want to get out to sea as soon as possible.”
Peretti shot off a string of rapid-fire Spanish at a group of local young men who stood beside an old Ford pickup. Kilkenny caught the gist of what was said, including some of the profanities. The laborers quickly filled the rear of the truck with a collection of small crates and boxes, then drove off.
“They’ll get all your gear aboard,” Peretti assured them, “but before we head to the launch, there’s somebody I think you’ll want to meet.”
Peretti drove through the small village of San Juan Bautista to a ramshackle home on the outskirts near the beach. At the sound of the jeep pulling up, Salvador Delmar appeared in the doorway, his arms folded across his chest.
“Buenos diás, Salvador,” Peretti called out.
The man nodded, but said nothing.
“Friendly,” Kilkenny opined.
“Oh, he’ll warm up.” Peretti went to the back of the jeep and, from inside a backpack, retrieved a bottle of Havana Club Rum. “I just need to make a proper introduction.”
Delmar grinned at the sight of the bottle and disappeared inside. He returned a moment later with four mismatched glasses that he set on the wooden table on the covered patio.
“Isn’t it a little early to be drinking?” Tao asked.
“Depends on which time zone we’re in,” Kilkenny replied. “I, for one, could use a wee taste.”
“And it would be impolite to refuse the man’s hospitality,” Peretti added.
Tao relented and sipped at the aged Cuban rum. It went down smooth and easy.
“I assume there’s a reason why we’re here, other than the charming company.”
“Qué?” Delmar asked.
Peretti rattled off a short reply. Delmar leered at Tao, his gap-toothed smile two crooked rows of yellowed teeth.
“What did you tell him?” Tao demanded.
“Just that you thought he was charming.”
Tao’s glare turned icy.
“As to why I brought you here, it’s to chat with Salvador. You see, when I found out what you were after, I remembered a story this old fisherman told me a few months back during one of our visits ashore. I’m sketchy on the details, so I figured we’d get it from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.”
Peretti then asked Delmar to tell him about the night that he saw the falling stars.
“Sí, sí,” Delmar agreed, taking another swallow of rum to lubricate his vocal cords before launching into his narrative.
Kilkenny and Tao listened politely as Delmar described what he had seen. From his hand gestures, they gathered that whatever the retired fisherman had seen had crossed the sky from west to east before falling into the ocean. Peretti let Delmar finish his story before asking any questions.
“Gracias, mi amigo,” Peretti said after Delmar answered his last question. He poured the old man another glass, then turned to Kilkenny and Tao.
“One night a few years back, Salvador is out on his fishing boat when he hears what sounds like thunder, ´cept it doesn’t stop like thunder does. It keeps on rumbling. He looks around to see what’s making the noise and he sees five glowing objects falling out of the sky. Now, he’s seen falling stars before, but they were always high up and never made a sound. These stars are noisy and heading right for him. One after another, they hammer into the water, each one closer than the next. One of ´em hits not a hundred meters from his boat and kicks off a wave big enough to knock his boat around and give Salvador a couple nasty bumps and bruises, and that scar on his forehead. At this point, he’s figuring it was a plane, so he starts looking around for anything to salvage.”
“No thought of survivors?” Tao asked.
Peretti shrugged. “The man’s a realist. Anyway, he finds squat, except for these large patches of foam on the surface. Whatever hit the water went right down to the bottom. When he gets back here, he tells his story, but there’s no report of any plane going down. Since he’s got a history with the bottle, most folks figure he was just drunk at the time.”
“And when did he say this happened?” Tao asked.
“On the twenty-third of March, 2001.”
“The day Mir came down,” Kilkenny said. “Can he pinpoint the area where he was that night?”
Peretti asked, and Delmar thought for a moment, then stepped back into his house. He returned and unrolled a sea chart on the table. The age-worn map was covered with notations, cryptic marks regarding his favorite fishing spots. It took Delmar a minute, but then he placed the tip
of a gnarled finger on a mark north of the island. Beside the mark, Kilkenny saw precise notations of longitude and latitude.
“How’d he nail the coordinates?”
Peretti relayed Kilkenny’s question and the old fisherman grinned.
“GPS.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
SANTIAGO, CHILE
“Where are Kilkenny and Tao?” Peng asked as soon as the burgundy sedan pulled away from the airport curb.
The man seated beside him in the back of the embassy car was a few years older and dressed in a suit and tie. The abruptness of Peng’s question struck him as impolite, but he dismissed the younger man’s minor breach of etiquette as a side effect of his current assignment.
“The subjects are on an island a few hundred miles offshore,” the chief of station for Chinese intelligence in Chile replied. “Radio intercepts seem to indicate they are mounting an ocean search of some kind.”
“You have agents on the island?”
“No.”
“No? Are you not aware of the importance of tracking Kilkenny and Tao? What arrangements have been made to maintain the surveillance?”
He is as impatient as an American, the chief of station thought. “None. The most recent communiqué from the ministry indicates that the surveillance has been canceled and requests that you be brought to the embassy immediately upon your arrival.”
“What has happened?” Peng asked.
“I was provided with no further information. Perhaps Directorate Chief Huang will enlighten you when we reach the embassy.”
Certain now that the Foreign Ministry was cloning the drab, windowless conference rooms in every Chinese embassy, Peng sat down and waited for the video call connection to be made. He had expected to see Directorate Chief Huang, to whom he had reported directly while on this assignment, but next to Huang sat Minister Tian.
“This is Peng?” Tian asked Huang.
“Yes, Minister.” Huang replied.
Despite separation by half the globe, Peng felt the minister’s eyes lock onto him as if he were in the room.
“You have uncovered an ugly situation, Peng, one which has infuriated the president and the state council.”
“Oh?” Peng heard the wordless question escape from his lips and regretted the lapse.
“Explain it to him, Huang,” Tian commanded.
“You current assignment was based on an intercepted message and a bit of speculation on my part. The message was encrypted, but we knew the identity of both the sender and the recipient, and the American’s reaction to this message was quite strong.”
“If our leaders’ concern has been aroused,” Peng offered, “I assume that we, too, know the contents of this message?”
Huang nodded. “There is a saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. Watch.”
Huang and Tian disappeared, replaced by a spectacular view of Liberty in orbit above the Earth, its payload bay opened wide with a long robotic arm extending out toward the screen. In the payload bay, an astronaut moved too slowly for the video to be running in normal time. But even in slow motion, the video barely caught the three focused beams of light that quickly flashed across the screen. They speared the doomed spacecraft and the destruction was total.
“A weapon,” Peng said softly as the image faded and Tian and Huang reappeared.
“A most powerful weapon,” Huang concurred. “Our engineering experts have also concluded that an attack by an energy weapon would explain some of the unusual data they received in the brief time before Shenzhou-7 was lost.”
“I would have thought only the Americans capable of such a weapon, but then the attack on Liberty makes no sense.”
“Our initial reaction as well, Peng,” Huang said, having shared the younger man’s confusion. “It was you who provided the key to unlocking this puzzling situation. We have identified the man you discovered following Kilkenny in London and Moscow. His name is Ernst Unger, former German military officer of above average ability, currently employed in corporate security by an American aerospace company.
“A company did this?” Peng was stunned.
“An intensely competitive company,” Tian replied. “And yes, one with the means and the motivation to do what you have just seen.”
Peng thought about his surveillance, and about Kilkenny and Tao on a remote island in the Pacific still searching for answers. “Will we share this intelligence with the Americans? Their loss is as great as ours.”
“In time,” Tian answered calmly, like a Wei Ch’i master who has already projected several moves to an end game. “First, an opportunity has presented itself, and we will take full advantage of it.”
“Peng, prepare to leave as soon as possible,” Huang ordered. “You are to be on the next flight to Hawaii.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
As Sea Lion headed north out of Cumberland Bay, Tao and Kilkenny staked out a section of the stern deck and set to work on the equipment they’d brought with them. Both had changed into jeans and windbreakers; Tao had her long black hair twisted into a tight braid to keep the strands from flying around her face.
“I’ll prep the tanks and fuel cell,” Kilkenny said. “You test the batteries.”
“Aye, sir,” Tao replied, following his lead—this was, after all, Kilkenny’s element.
She opened the first of the cases Kilkenny had indicated and found several battery modules and a handheld tester. The process was straight-forward—connect the tester to the positive and negative terminals.
“Batteries all show a full charge,” Tao reported.
“Anything you need?” Peretti asked as he clambered down from the bridge.
“I have some tanks to be filled,” Kilkenny replied.
“Tanks? I thought you brought an ROV?”
Kilkenny shook his head. “None available for a couple weeks.”
“Might take that long to find your wreckage, if we find it at all.”
“But if we find it sooner, I’ll check it out with the suit.”
“You know, the water out here can get pretty deep.”
“This rig’s rated to five thousand feet. If it’s deeper than that, we’ll commandeer somebody’s ROV.”
Having been pulled off his own project to aid in this search, Peretti knew this wasn’t idle talk. “Five grand—no shit?”
“No shit,” Kilkenny said flatly.
“I’ll send our dive master over to give you two a hand. She’ll hook you up with whatever you need.”
Two hours out, Sea Lion reached the southern corner of her primary search area—an elongated rectangle of ocean covering fourteen square miles. The point Delmar had indicated on his chart lay just inside the corner. The shallowest point in the search area was just over one thousand feet deep. Taking into account the speed at which falling pieces of Mir struck the water and the northerly current running along the coast of South America, the ship’s resident oceanographer plotted a likely descent path for the wreckage.
“Why are we slowing?” Tao asked.
Compared to the quick sprint out to sea, the ship’s speed had fallen to a relative crawl. Kilkenny looked up from the support frame they were assembling and saw two crewmembers at the stern lowering a slender torpedo-shaped instrument into the water.
“Guess it’s time to mow the lawn,” Kilkenny said.
“Excuse me?” Tao asked.
“Run a search pattern. That thing they just dropped in the water is a side scan sonar. Most people call it a fish because it’s hooked to a cable off the stern of the ship and, you get the picture. We’re going to drag the fish behind us underwater, which is why the ship has slowed. If the ship went fast, the fish would be skipping along the surface like a water skier. That reel back there will let out just enough cable to hold the fish about a 120 feet off the bottom.”
“So, metaphorically speaking, how does the ship mow the lawn?”
“When the sonar operator switches the fish on, it’ll paint a thin strip of the
ocean floor about six hundred feet wide—that’s assuming Peretti’s ordered a quick and dirty search of the area. If we were doing a detailed survey, we’d scan a narrower area by putting the fish closer to the bottom. Our search area is a big box and we’re going to drive back and forth over the top of it, one strip at a time, just like mowing the lawn.”
Tao’s eyes narrowed. “A guy must have thought that one up.”
“Probably,” Kilkenny agreed, returning to his work.
By late evening, Kilkenny and Tao had reassembled and tested the HS5000. The atmospheric diving system (ADS)—more akin to a submarine than a conventional diver’s wetsuit—consisted of a high-strength cast-aluminum exoskeleton mated with a transparent three-quarter-inch acrylic vision dome and an external backpack housing the life support, propulsion and communications equipment. Each limb was segmented into separate rigid pieces connected by oil-filled hydraulic rotary joints, allowing the pilot a wide range of movement. The pressure inside the Hardsuit remained constant at one atmosphere—the same pressure found at sea level—eliminating the need for a lengthy post-dive stay in a decompression chamber.
Peretti stood, arms akimbo, studying the bright yellow suit. “Looks like something out of an old science fiction flick.”
“I know the one,” Kilkenny replied. “Forbidden Planet.”
“Well, as the saying goes, I got some good news and some bad news. Which do you want first?”
“Rox?” Kilkenny asked.
“We’ve had enough bad news,” Tao answered. “Give us the good.”
“Looks like Salvador wasn’t too drunk that night and read his GPS correctly.”
“You found Mir?”
“We’re getting some strong returns—a good sign for hard, metallic objects. Spotted three pieces so far.”
“What makes you think it’s Mir,” Tao asked, “other than location?”
“I read a lot when I’m out at sea, and I remember this thing about craters on one of Jupiter’s moons, and how a bunch of them were all lined up, like the moon had been strafed. The astronomers didn’t know what to make of this until a few years back, when Shoemaker-Levy smacked into Jupiter.”
