Fallout (2007)

“The Sunstar.”

  “Yes.”

  “Old legend, that one.”

  “What’s your opinion?” Fisher asked. “You know the area we’re headed?”

  Jimiyu thought for a moment, biting the inside of his lip. “Yes, very well. Many people have come looking for the Sunstar, but no one’s looked in this place yet.” He shrugged. “Who knows?”

  Fisher didn’t respond. From his expression, Jimiyu seemed to be still considering his answer. “I think it is either lost in the Rift or somewhere in Turkana. Lake Turkana, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “That lake—everyone thinks it is very shallow. Mostly it is, but there are parts that aren’t so shallow.” He grinned knowingly. “If we do not find it here, you and I, we will rent a submarine and look in Turkana, okay?”

  Fisher smiled back. “Okay.”

  30

  GREAT RIFT VALLEY, KENYA

  THEY’D arrived at their campsite—a flat section of beach in a gorge—in the late afternoon the day before, and though there was still four hours of daylight left, they both decided to get a fresh start the next morning. Peter’s coordinates were four miles away, to the northwest. With luck, they could start at dawn, reach the site by midday, and be back to the campsite by nightfall.

  They spent the remaining hours of daylight gathering firewood, and then, as Fisher got the fire started, Jimiyu disappeared into the jungle for an hour and returned carrying what looked like a large rat. It was, in fact, a rat, Fisher learned, but charred over the fire it tasted, predictably, like rubbery chicken. After supper, Jimiyu made coffee in a rust-spotted enamel pot, then tossed the remaining wood on the fire and slung a pair of netted sleeping hammocks from trees along the edge of the beach.

  FISHER eased the strap off his shoulder, shifted the M-14 to his right, and then stopped on the trail and gave Jimiyu a soft tsst. On either side of Fisher the jungle was a thick wall of green. He sat down on his haunches. Jimiyu, walking ten feet ahead, stopped and looked over his shoulder. Fisher curled a finger at him, and he walked back.

  “We’re being followed,” Fisher said.

  “Yes, I assumed so,” Jimiyu replied. “We’re on the border between the Samburu and Turkana tribes. Do not worry; they are simply curious. We are not one or the other tribe, so our presence should not upset them.” Jimiyu smiled and placed a hand on Fisher’s shoulder.

  “Is that a hard-and-fast rule?”

  Jimiyu shrugged. “I see the jungle is not foreign to you.”

  More like an old friend, Fisher thought.

  “Perhaps you are Samburu or Turkana,” the Kenyan said. “How did you know?”

  “Because there’s a pair of eyes watching us. Ten feet to your left.”

  Very slowly, Jimiyu rotated his head to the left and scanned the foliage. As Fisher had said, a pair of white-rimmed brown eyes were peering at them from behind a palm trunk.

  “Turkana,” Jimiyu whispered. He raised a hand to chest level, palm out and said, “Hujambo?” Which means: How do you do?

  The figure ducked out of sight and a few seconds later soundlessly emerged from the jungle ten feet down the trail. The man was wearing denim shorts and a faded red T-shirt bearing the words THE CLASH ANARCHY TOUR 1976. A butcher knife with a rope-wrapped handle jutted from the front belt loop on his shorts.

  “Jambo,” he said.

  Jimiyu stood up and walked forward. The men shook hands and began speaking in rapid-fire Swahili. Most Kenyan tribes, Fisher had learned, speak at least two languages—Swahili and their own native dialect, of which there are more than thirty—and many speak a modicum of English. Jimiyu and the man spoke for another few minutes, then shook hands again, and the man stepped off the trail and disappeared.

  “What’s the verdict?” Fisher asked.

  “He’s Turkana; they and the Samburu have already talked about our presence. As long as we do not hunt here, we have safe passage.”

  “He didn’t want to know why we’re here?”

  “I told him you were a . . .” Jimiyu paused and scratched his head. “The word does not translate so well. I told him you were a spoiled white adventurer.”

  Fisher laughed, and Jimiyu gave a pained shrug. “Apologies. It was a convenience on my part. Better that than try to explain. I also asked about the plane. Both tribes are aware of the legend, but neither have seen any sign of it.”

  THEY walked for another three hours, sometimes on well-worn paths, sometimes on narrow game trails, and other times through the thick of the jungle Fisher navigated via his GPS unit. The purist orienteer in him resented the gizmo, but the pragmatist in him knew it was a necessary evil. With limited time on his hands, a compass was a luxury he couldn’t afford.

  Jimiyu, armed with a long Ghurka knife, sliced his way through the foliage with practiced swings of his long arms, ducking and weaving like a boxer as he stepped over roots and ducked under branches and pointed out various plants and animals beside the trail along with a running, colorful commentary: “Very rare . . . do not touch that . . . not poisonous . . . tasty, but hard to catch . . .”

  At noon they swung back to the northeast, and after another hour’s walk Fisher heard the muffled roar of water through the trees. The landscape sloped downward until they were picking their way along switchbacked hillside. At last the slope evened out, the trees gave way to low scrub foliage, and they found themselves standing at the edge of a cliff.

  Fifty feet below, the river surged down a narrow gorge. The water was a clear blue and in the still pools formed behind the boulders he could see the riverbed covered in smooth, round stones. A hundred yards to their right was a twenty-foot tall waterfall that split into three channels over a jagged rock face before splashing into a pool below.

  Fisher studied the GPS unit. “This is the place.” He lifted his binoculars to his eyes and scanned the length of the gorge, tracking along both tree lines as far as he could see in both directions. “I don’t see anything,” he said.

  “You are not looking in the right place,” Jimiyu murmured beside him.

  “What?”

  Jimiyu raised a bony hand and pointed straight ahead at a thick, vine-encrusted tree jutting from the edge of the cliff. Fisher stared at it, seeing nothing for a full thirty seconds, until finally his eyes detected a too-symmetrical shape hidden in the branches: a straight vertical line, another horizontal, a gentle curve . . .

  Good God . . .

  What he was seeing wasn’t a tree. It was the inverted tail section of an airplane.

  Fisher was dumbfounded. Of course, the brother in Fisher had prayed Peter’s letter had been more than the ramblings of a sick and dying man, but with the thoughts so seemingly incoherent and far removed from the core of the Carmen Hayes/PuH-19 puzzle, he’d also had his doubts.

  But here it was, exactly where the latitude and longitude indicated: a plane. Now seeing it for what it was, Fisher understood how even the Turkana and Samburu, so intimately familiar with the area, had missed it. While the jungle had long ago erased any sign of the impact itself, it was clear the Sunstar had crashed not far from here and ripped through the forest, slowing until the forward half of its fuselage had come to rest perched, hovering, at the edge of this cliff until finally, minutes or hours or days later, physics took over and it tipped over nose first and slid down the cliff face into the river below. Almost six decades of jungle foliage, mold, and lichens had enshrouded the aluminum fuselage, turning it into just another tree trunk.

  Fisher dropped his pack and rifle, then pulled a sixty-foot coil of 10mm climbing rope from his pack. As Jimiyu secured the line to a nearby tree, Fisher looped together a makeshift rappelling rig. He stepped to the edge of the cliff and started down.

  Pausing every few feet to poke through the vines and leaves with his knife, Fisher walked himself down the cliff until the jabbing of his knife returned not the hollow gong of aluminum, but the screeching of steel on glass. This version of Niles Wondrash’s plane, a Curtiss C-46 Co
mmando, had four fuselage windows, starting at the wing and moving forward to the cockpit windows. The cabin door was set behind these, just forward of the tail fin. Fisher saw no wings, and he assumed they’d been sheared off during the crash.

  Now with a point of reference, he scaled upward, again tapping his knife. The windows were set roughly ten feet apart, so . . . He stopped climbing and studied the fuselage, trying to discern angles and shapes until finally he could make out an up-sloping curve he felt certain was the rear vertical fin. He spun his body and wedged his feet into the vines, then began cutting at the foliage with his knife until slowly, foot by foot, a patch of fuselage appeared, followed soon after by an inset hatch handle and a vertical seam. He wedged the point of his knife into the seam and began prying, moving inch by inch as though prying open a paint can. After five minutes of work, he heard a groaning screech of metal on metal. The hatch gave way and fell open. Fisher pushed off, avoiding the swinging metal, then swung back and kicked his legs through the opening and wriggled forward until his butt was resting on the hatch jamb.

  “I’m in!” he called up to Jimiyu.

  On hands and knees the Kenyan leaned over the cliff face and offered him a smile and a thumbs-up. “Be very careful, Sam. Many creatures have probably made that their home, you know.”

  Great, Fisher thought. He hadn’t considered that.

  He pulled the LED headlamp from his belt, settled it on his head, and toggled the ON button. The beam illuminated the opposite cabin wall, its smooth aluminum surface mottled with mildew. He played the light down the vertical shaft of the cabin. The wall and floor were empty. No seats, no storage racks, no nothing. All of that, either knocked loose during the crash or simply loosened by time and gravity, had likely tumbled down the length of the cabin and into the cockpit below. Fisher did some mental measurements: The cliff was roughly fifty feet tall and about ten feet of the plane’s tail had been jutting above the rim of the cliff. The C-46 Commando was seventy-five feet long, which meant the forward fifteen feet of the craft, including the cockpit, was submerged in the river.

  The interior was surprisingly clear of jungle growth. Sealed as it was, with the only breaches probably being the shattered cockpit windows, nothing had had a chance to take root. The Commando was a virtual time capsule. He aimed the headlamp down the length of the cabin, but the walls, having lost their sheen, reflected nothing back. It was like staring down a mine shaft.

  Fisher reeled in the rope below him, bunched it in one hand, then tossed it into the cabin. The loose end gave a hollow ting as it bounced off the aluminum, then there was silence.

  He lowered himself through the darkness, scanning the light over the walls as he went, until finally his feet touched a horizontal surface—a section of the cockpit bulkhead. Stacked in a jumble around him were the Commando’s seats. Through the tangle of braces and armrests and skeletal seat backs he could see the upper curve of the cockpit door opening; a few feet through that, his headlamp beam glinted off water. Just outside the plane’s thin aluminum skin he could hear the gurgle of the river’s current. The stench of mold was pervasive now, stinging his eyes and making it hard to breathe as though the air itself had grown thick.

  It took fifteen minutes to shift and precariously restack the seats enough to allow him access to the cockpit. He lowered himself into a kneeling position, knees braced on either side of the door, rotated the rappelling rig around until it was facing backward, then he lowered himself again until he was lying splayed across the doorway.

  Partially blinded by the glare of his flashlight on the water, which had filled the cockpit to a point just below the windshield, Fisher didn’t immediately see the skulls.

  There were two of them, one on either side of him in the pilot’s and copilot’s seats. Each was devoid of all traces of flesh, save a few desiccated chunks that hung like beef jerky from the facial bones. The torsos, which were submerged from the waist down, were clothed in tatters and in between the strips of fabric Fisher could see glimpses of white bone. Each skeleton hung suspended from its seat back belt and harness, arms dangling and fingertips dipped in the water.

  Fisher scanned the interior, looking for anything that might positively identify the craft or its occupants. Then he saw it, jutting from the pilot’s inside jacket pocket, a brown rectangular package. Right arm braced for support on the cockpit bulkhead, Fisher leaned forward and gingerly removed the package.

  It was oilskin. Fisher opened the folds. Inside was a well-preserved paperback-size leather journal. On the cover in faded, gold-embossed letters were the initials NW.

  Niles Wondrash.

  Fisher rewrapped the journal and slid it into the thigh pocket of his cargo pants. He was about to turn and leave, when he saw the glint of steel behind Wondrash’s seat back. Fisher carefully tore away a section of the seat’s moldering fabric until he could see the object.

  It was a screw-top stainless steel canister, roughly the size of two soda cans stacked atop one another.

  He grabbed it, then turned and started climbing.

  31

  PAPONDIT, KENYA

  “I assume you haven’t opened it?” Lambert said.

  Fisher switched the satellite phone to his left ear and moved out of the sun beneath the low-hanging branches of an olive tree. In the distance, over some scattered kopjes—low, rocky mounds—and forested savanna, he could see the surface of Lake Victoria shimmering blue in the heat. Fifty feet away Jimiyu sat in the Range Rover’s driver’s seat on the shoulder of the road.

  “Which one?” Fisher asked. “The journal or the canister?”

  “The canister.”

  Fisher smiled into the phone. “A mysterious sixty-year-old stainless steel canister I found inside a plane in the middle of the jungle. No, Lamb, I didn’t open it.”

  “Didn’t think so.”

  “As for the journal, the cover looks to be in good shape, but the edges of the pages feel spongy. I think it’s best we wait for Quantico. If I open it, there’s a good chance we’ll lose whatever’s in there.”

  “I agree.”

  “Anything more from Omurbai?” Fisher asked.

  “More of the same, but his speeches are taking on a hysterical tone—the evils of the West, of ‘infidel’ cultures, of technology, and so on. As we’d guessed, he’s sealed the border to all non-Muslims but has extended an invitation to all Muslims who want to, and I quote, ‘partake in the jihad to end all jihads and to live in harmony in the true way of Islam, ’ unquote.”

  “Gracious of him.” Fisher checked his watch. “Jimiyu and I just fueled up, and we’re on our way to the second set of coordinates. I’ll be in touch.”

  FROM Kusa they followed the C19, a heavily potholed road that meandered along the coastline southeast for a few miles before curving northwest into the Winam Gulf Peninsula, then on to Kendu Bay. On both shoulders, scrub grass, freshly green with spring, spread over rolling savanna. Here and there Fisher could see cones of earth rising from the landscape. Volcanic plugs, Jimiyu explained, exposed by erosion.

  Four miles from the coordinates, Fisher’s satellite phone chimed. He answered it and barely got one word out before Aly’s panicked voice came over the line: “Sam, I’m sorry, I didn’t want to tell them, but—”

  “Aly, what—”

  “They said they were going—”

  “Aly, stop, slow down,” Fisher commanded. “What’s happened?”

  There were a few seconds of silence. Fisher could hear her trying to catch her breath. “They came the night after you left. They broke into the house, tied me up, wanted to know where you’d gone. They had knives. They said they would—”

  Fisher clutched the phone tighter. “Did they hurt you, are you hurt?”

  “No, I’m fine, but I told them, Sam. I’m sorry, but—”

  The driver’s side window shattered. Jimiyu cried out and fell sideways into Fisher, who dropped the satellite phone; it clattered across the floorboards and disappeared. The
Rover veered left, off the road, bumped up onto the shoulder, down into a depression, and began tipping onto its side. Fisher reached across Jimiyu’s body, grabbed the wheel, straightened the Rover out, then groped with his foot until he felt the gas pedal and stomped on it. The engine roared. The Rover lurched up the hill.

  “Jimiyu, can you hear me?” Fisher yelled. Using his free hand, he grabbed the Kenyan’s shoulder and shook him. “Jimiyu!”

  Jimiyu groaned.

  A second bullet punched through the rear window and slammed into the dashboard. Fisher ducked down. Somewhere he could hear Aly’s tinny voice calling, “Sam . . . Sam . . . are you there . . . ?” A third and fourth bullet tore through the back window, shattering it and spiderwebbing the windshield. Through the cracks he saw a kopje looming.

  He jerked the wheel to the right, felt the left front tire bump over a rock, then they were tipping, the sky canting through the windshield.

  FISHER forced open his eyes—one of his lids felt glued shut with what he assumed was blood—and looked around. The Rover had rolled once and come to rest on its roof, but the solid-cage construction had kept the interior intact, save his side window, which had shattered with the compression. Through the side window Fisher could see scrub grass. Jimiyu, whose seat belt had been demolished by the first bullet, lay in a heap, wedged between the dashboard and the windshield. Fisher realized the Rover’s engine was still running. He vaguely thought, Gas leak, then Fire, then reached over and switched off the ignition. He undid his own seat belt, then rolled onto his side and reached toward Jimiyu. He found his hand and gave it a squeeze.

  “Jimiyu,” Fisher whispered. “Can you hear me?”

  “. . . es . . .”

  “Stay still, don’t move. Squeeze my hand if you understand.”

  Squeeze.

  “Play dead. They’ll be coming to finish us off.”