“Treasure hunters?” Pulaski asked dubiously.
“I didn’t say they were right,” Mark replied on the defensive. “I’m only saying they were real.”
“This is all well and good,” Cabrillo said, backing away from the ruined cockpit and its grisly occupant. “I’ve marked the location on the GPS, but we’ve got a mission to perform.”
“Give me five minutes,” Mark pleaded.
Juan thought for a second. Nodded.
Murph grinned his thanks. He crawled through the opening where the gondola’s door had been ripped off when the airship crashed into the jungle. To his left were the two pilots’ seats and controls. To the right was the cabin proper. It had the neat economy and efficiency of a travel trailer. There were two bunk beds, a tiny galley with an electric burner, and a dozen storage lockers. He opened each in turn, rummaged around for any clues, and moved on when all he found were clots of mildew and mold or old surplus mess kits the men must have used to make their meals.
In one locker he found the metal remains of a climbing harness. The webbing and ropes had dissolved to goo, but the steel remained unchanged over the years. He knew instinctively that they had used the gear to lower one of their own out the gondola for ground reconnaissance. He finally hit pay dirt when he opened the rusted remains of a coffee can that had been left on the little dinette table.
He cursed himself for not realizing its significance immediately. The can would have tumbled to the cabin floor when the blimp crashed. There was no way it should be on the table unless someone had placed it there. A survivor. Inside, he discovered a white rubber sheath about six inches in length. It took him a moment to realize it was a condom. By the feel of it, there was something stuffed inside—papers, most likely—a final log entry? The open end had been knotted shut.
After sixty years lying out here, this wasn’t the time or place to open it. He would need the preservation equipment on the Oregon if he had any chance of learning more. He carefully sealed the prophylactic in a waterproof pouch and tucked it into his fanny pack.
“Time’s up,” Juan said. The jungle was so thick that his voice was disembodied, yet he stood only a few yards away.
“I’m done.” Mark emerged from the gondola. With a last look back, he vowed to find the names of the men who had crashed here and inform their surviving relatives.
FOUR
WILSON/GEORGE RESEARCH STATION
ANTARCTIC PENINSULA
THE WINDS HAD PICKED UP, SO THE SKY SCREAMED OVER the domes, carrying with it curtains of blowing snow. Such was the oddity that was the planet’s most isolated continent that much of it, though snow-covered, is considered a desert, with only trace amounts of precipitation. The peninsula saw far more snowfall than the interior, but it was possible the flakes raking the facility had fallen hundreds of years ago.
This wasn’t yet the storm they were anticipating, just a subtle reminder that, no matter what, humanity is an interloper here.
Andy Gangle woke with a screaming headache. It wasn’t the dull pain of too much time staring at a computer screen. Rather, it was the sharp stab of drinking something too cold too quickly, and no matter what he did—like pressing chemical hand warmers to his temples, as if to defrost his brain—nothing helped.
Not the darkened room, not the pain tablets he’d dry-swallowed moments after being struck with the crippling agony. Despite his vehement need for privacy, a low moan escaped his white lips, a plaintive, albeit unintended, call for help. He lay curled in a fetal position on the sweat-soaked tangle of sheets and woolen blankets. Opposite Gangle’s bed, and staring down since his arrival, was the iconic image of Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out at the camera.
He’d won that picture in an eighth-grade science contest, and it had stayed on his wall through high school and had a place of honor in a succession of dorm rooms. It was a little tattered, but whenever he was troubled he would look at the photograph and find the absurdity in whatever was bothering him. If Einstein, with the burden of knowing his equations had helped decimate two Japanese cities, could laugh at the world, then there was nothing going to stop Andy Gangle.
He looked at it now and felt nothing but rage. A blinding rage fueled by the unmitigated agony searing his brain. What did Einstein know of burden? Andy thought. He’d made his mark in physics as a young man and spent the rest of his life doddering around. To hell with him. To hell with them all. Moving faster than he thought possible, Gangle uncoiled his gawky limbs, leapt from the bed, and clawed the poster from the wall. Clear tape adhered four little triangles of paper to the wall, but the rest came off in a sheet. Savagely, Andy tore at the poster, ripping at it with his fingers and teeth, damp confetti falling to the linoleum-tiled decking.
Gina Alexander was passing by Andy’s door on the way to her place in the kitchen, thinking that in five days, if the weather held, a big beautiful C-130 Hercules airplane would land on the ice runway a quarter mile inland from the station and that she’d be out there waiting for it. Next stop Chile, then Miami, then . . . what?
She didn’t know. Coming to Antarctica had been cathartic, and her time here had put the pain of her husband’s betrayal and their divorce into a locked corner of her heart, but she didn’t know what would come next. She hadn’t thought that far ahead. She considered the possibility of moving closer to her parents, but the very idea of living in a place called Plant City, Florida, grayed her hair and made her fingers curl with imaginary arthritis.
A sound coming from Andy’s room as she passed by had a reptilian quality, a dry, rasping hiss, like a monstrous snake or some giant lizard. She paused in midstride and listened. It did not come again. The thought of knocking on Andy’s door and asking if he was okay came and went as fast as her mind could process it. If Andy Bug-eyes was having a problem, that was just too bad. He’d alienated the entire team with his odd behavior, and Gina was a firm believer in “you reap what you sow.”
A minute later, she was greeting a few of the science types, as she warmed the griddle and dropped the first batches of bread into the restaurant-grade toasters.
It would have behooved Gina to check on Andy or tell Greg Lamont, the station commander, what she’d heard.
Andy had discovered a way to dull the pain in his head. It had happened in the frenzied seconds when he was shredding the poster. In his enraged fit to see it utterly destroyed, his coordination was off just enough so when his teeth clamped down on a section of paper, his incisors nipped the flesh to the side of his index fingernail. The blood was a warm combination of copper and salt, not unpleasant, but unexpected in that as soon as it touched his lips the pain spiking behind his eyes dimmed, like an industrial light-bulb goes from glaring white to just an amber glow and then fades to nothing.
The morsel of flesh, as he chewed it, was rubbery, like a pencil eraser that had hardened over time. He contemplated what he was doing, as his finger dripped blood. He brought his hand up to his face, staring in fascination at the patterns the blood made as it dribbled across his skin. He waved his hand to make lines of blood across his palm. He giggled, dipping his finger into the blood and writing on the wall, red smears on clean white plastic. He wrote letters, formed them into words, into a concept he should have seen all along. It was so simple, so perfect. He admitted the line he’d written was crudely formed, blood not being as easy to work with as paint, but the meaning was perfectly clear.
Mime Goering for crow Nicole.
Some instinct, some sense of self-preservation buried deep in his brain, told him to clean himself before he went to find what he needed to carry out his plan. With his finger wrapped in masking tape from his desk and the worst of the blood wiped from his lips, Andy Gangle checked that the hallway was clear and stepped from his room.
FIVE
JUAN HELD UP A HAND WHEN HE HEARD THE DISTINCT sound of approaching helicopters. The noise was muted by the jungle canopy, and he couldn’t hope to spot them through the dense foliage that hung over the g
round like a living shroud. But the best hunters in the world can spot the tiniest movement in the riot of vegetation, and he had no doubt that these were military choppers. They didn’t have that refined sound of executive helos built to deliver the pampered. These sounded raw, stripped down to the bare essentials in order to pack in as many men and as much gear as possible. Yet the human eye perceives motion better than pattern, so the men waited, crouched along the game trail until the sound faded. Ominously, in the direction they were heading.
“What do you think, Chairman?” Jerry Pulaski asked.
“Our welcoming committee has arrived. Let’s make sure they don’t have time to set up the party.” Juan checked the handheld GPS. “The trail is taking us slightly east of where we need to go. Time to hoof it cross-country. Same formation.”
By staying low, the men could duck under the thicker leaves and fronds, though Jerry, with his six-inch height advantage, found himself at a disadvantage in the jungle. After ten minutes, razor-sharp leaves had cut his face as though he’d been shaving with a month-old razor, and insects dove at him with the abandon of kamikaze pilots, in their hunger for such an easy meal.
To add insult to already injured bodies, the terrain started to rise. They were heading into foothills of mountains they’d seen on the recon photographs. And the smell of burning brush was growing stronger. The slash-and-burn logging operation was only a few miles away.
Juan did the best he could blazing a trail through the underbrush, and when he spotted what looked to be a large opening ahead he made the mistake of rushing through rather than checking it out first. He stepped onto a dirt road at the very instant a semitrailer went roaring past, its engine beat muffled by the bend it had just rounded. Had Juan emerged a second later, the driver would have seen him though not in time to brake.
Cabrillo froze, windmilling his arms to prevent himself from taking a final step under the empty timber hauler’s massive tires. The stakes used to contain the logs the big rig hauled down to the river flashed inches from his face, and the vortex they cut through the soggy air threatened to suck him into the hurtling steel.
And then it was past in a cloud of dust. Juan took what could have been his last step and exhaled a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Training then bypassed the fear and shock, and he dove flat onto the deeply rutted road on the off chance the driver glanced at his rearview mirror. Cabrillo lay prone until the truck rumbled out of sight, then dodged back undercover.
“Close one,” Murph remarked unnecessarily.
Juan knew his subordinate was teasing him but didn’t rise to the bait.
When they were sure no more trucks would roar out of nowhere, the team dashed across the road in a tight pack, with Mike Trono trailing a hastily cut branch to obscure their boot prints.
Safely hidden on the other side, Juan withdrew the gamma detector from his pack. The piece of electronics was military grade, meaning it was as simple as the builders could get it. The machine itself was a matte-black box about the size of an old tape recorder. There was a simple on/off switch, one red light, and a clear panel that showed a single needle. When the red lamp came on, the machine was detecting gamma rays, and by sweeping it through three hundred and sixty degrees and watching the needle the user would learn in which direction the source lay.
Juan turned it on. The detector chirped once to tell him it was working, but the indicator light remained dark. They were still too far from the downed power cell to detect the trace amounts of gamma rays it emitted.
They started slogging higher into the hills, crossing and recrossing the same haul road as it switchbacked up the mountain. The smell of smoke was no longer an ethereal wisp carried on the breeze. The air was slowly filling with it, and white clouds clung to depressions in the land like noxious gas from a chemical attack.
Mark suggested flagging down the next truck they saw to ask for a lift and was only half joking. Juan knew the men were getting tapped out and decided that once they had the NASA cell in the shielded harness, they would find someplace to lay up for the night and make their way down to the boat and the hell out of Argentina the next morning.
It was noon when they reached the crest of the mountain. They approached it cautiously, on their bellies, so as not to show movement to anyone in the valley beyond. What greeted them was a scene out of hell.
What had once been a lush primeval forest was now a barren wasteland of mud and brush many miles across. Burn piles as tall as haystacks gave off towering pyres of smoke and fire while yellow excavators lumbered across the landscape, whole trees caught in their mechanical jaws. Amid the chaos, like ants, were men, moving from grove to grove, their saws keening, then straining, as they bit through timber that had taken generations to grow.
Off to the team’s left, the clear-cutting was spreading like a cancer up the flanks of a mountain that had already been scarred with yet another recurving haul road. Something caught Juan’s attention. He handed the gamma detector to Mark Murphy, grabbed binoculars from his pack, and checked that the angle of the sun wouldn’t reflect off the lenses before putting them to his eyes.
In the distance he could see a flattened area halfway up the hill that was used to load logs onto the semis. There was an aluminum-sided construction trailer and several specialized timber-industry vehicles: grapple-claw crawlers and log skidders with cleated-steel tires. Just beyond sat the two choppers they had heard earlier, their rotors sagging in the afternoon sun, their camouflage-paint scheme nearly matching the jungle behind them.
Soldiers were assembled in a loose parade formation while two other uniformed men—officers, he assumed—were talking with a small group of loggers. At their feet lay a charred scrap of metal. Juan couldn’t make out details, but it didn’t take a great intuitive leap to guess it was a fragment of the downed rocket or its payload. As he watched, the civilians repeatedly pointed up the mountainside as if indicating that something important had happened near its summit or just beyond.
“What’s going on?” Mike asked.
“The party’s getting started,” Juan said grimly.
“I got something,” Mark said, sweeping the gamma ray detector.
“Where?” Juan demanded.
“Over there.” Mark pointed. “Signal’s weak, but it’s definitely where the Argies are having their little powwow.”
Juan imagined the events leading up to this particular tableau. When the rocket exploded and rained debris across the jungle, something landed in the clearing and was recovered by the loggers. They dragged it to the staging area to show the foremen, who called in the military to investigate. At this moment, they were telling the soldiers that another piece of debris had crashed at or near the top of the mountain.
MAJOR JORGE ESPINOZA of the Ninth Brigade liked orders. He liked receiving them, he liked giving them, and he liked to see when they were carried out. The nature of the orders never bothered him. Told to march through a swamp for seven days during the training for his coveted maroon beret or burn a hamlet of indigenous farmers to the ground, it made no difference. He carried out both with utter determination and dedication. In his years of military service, he’d never once questioned if his directives were moral. That played no part in his reasoning. Orders were given. Orders were executed. There was nothing else.
His men saw him as the perfect leader, one unfettered by emotion or doubt. But in his private moments, Major Jorge Espinoza admitted to himself that there were orders he preferred over others. He’d enjoyed slaughtering villagers a lot more than spending a week chest-deep in a leech-filled swamp.
His was a military family that had served Argentina for four generations. His father had been a Colonel in Intelligence during the glory days when the Generals ran the country. He had regaled his sons with stories about what they did to enemies of the state, of helicopter flights laden with bound dissidents over the icy South Atlantic. They made a game of heaving them though the open door from a thousand feet. The object was to
throw the second man onto the frothing splash of the first, and so on with the rest of the prisoners.
It was the psychopath’s version of ring toss, but Jorge never saw it that way.
He had been too young to see action when the British retook the Islas Malvinas, but had been trained by combat veterans and had been an exemplary soldier ever since. When the Ninth Brigade was formed after General Corazón led the charge against the weak former President, Jorge Espinoza had been one of the first to volunteer. His training was no easier than that of the younger enlisted men he now commanded, and for that he had forever gained their loyalty.
He was now the deputy commander of the entire brigade under General Philippe Espinoza, his father, who had come out of retirement for the position. Any rumors of nepotism were silenced by the sheer ruthlessness and efficiency with which the younger Espinoza carried out his duties.
And he was a commander who liked to lead from the front. Which was why he was here, deep in the Amazonian region of his country, talking to lumberjacks about something they had seen crash near their work site. The wreckage they had shown him certainly looked like part of the American rocket. It was made of lightweight aluminum, carefully riveted so not the slightest imperfection showed on its surface. The edges were torn as if by an explosion, and there were score marks on the white paint.
The junta saw the recovery of any piece of the rocket as potential to embarrass the United States. They didn’t know what the payload had been. NASA claimed a weather satellite, but the Generals in charge couldn’t ignore the chance that its purpose was espionage.