Search: A Novel of Forbidden History (54 page)

“The nuclear waste facility that got mothballed?” Marano asked, intrigued.

David explained. “At the time it was being built, the authorities figured the waste they planned to bury in it would stay lethal for at least ten thousand years. So the government pulled together a group of scientists, historians, even science fiction writers, to come up with a way to mark the area as dangerous, to keep people from digging there for a
hundred
centuries. Because they expected entire civilizations to rise and fall, there’d be different languages and cultures. So their question for their experts was: How do we preserve and transmit a message through all those years?” David paused. “Any guesses what one of the solutions was?”

“Start a religion,” Marano said promptly.

“The MacCleirigh Foundation.” Ironwood snorted. “Wouldn’t that be a hoot.” Then he added, thoughtful, “I’d be more interested in
why
it’s important to hide evidence of an early civilization.”

David unbuckled his seat belt and stood up. “While you three figure that out, I’m going to check on Jess.”

“One last thing, kid.” Lyle reached into his parka’s map pocket. “Just because this case is over. Almost over.” He drew out a wallet-sized photograph that David recognized at once, and also knew had to be a copy. The original was in his fake passport with his belongings, in Christchurch.

“Back when this started, I was trying to get a line on you. This was the only personal item in your lab cubicle.”

“Besides a Wolverine mug,” Marano said.

Lyle conceded the point. “Photograph and mug.”

“You thought they’d tell you something significant about me.” David was incredulous.

“It’s called profiling. Standard professional tool.”

“The mug belonged to the guy who had my job before me. He left it in the staff kitchen. I inherited it.”

“But the photograph,” Lyle said. “That is yours. Taken on a family trip, at two twenty-four in the afternoon of July second, twenty-one years ago at Big Bear Lake.”

David rolled his eyes. The air force had gone to a lot of trouble finding that out. For nothing. “January ’94. California. Ring any bells?”

“The Northridge quake.” Marano shot a glance at Lyle, who shrugged. “One of the biggest to hit L.A. at the time.”

“My mother had all our stuff in storage there. The place was under a freeway overpass. The overpass collapsed. We couldn’t get there till two days later. Whole place was roped off, and the bulldozers were already scooping everything up. It was all gone. Walking back to the bus stop, I saw that photo blowing around on the ground. It’s the only thing we had
that survived. Other than that, it doesn’t mean a thing. Just random chance.”

He left them to their unsubstantiated theories.

Nine hours out of Christchurch, the loadmaster dropped the cargo bay ramp, and Antarctica howled into the flying cavern, instantly devouring the last trace of warmth.

David gasped at the sudden change in temperature. The underlying snarl of wind and engines stayed muffled because of his balaclava, his combat helmet, and the white parka hood he’d pulled tightly over it.

“Everything’s normal,” Sergeant Dodd shouted into his ear. Dodd was the Air Commando David was strapped to for the jump. They stood together, well back from the pallet about to be deployed. Two other airmen wore tandem chutes to jump with the two AFOSI agents. Ironwood, to everyone’s surprise, had extensive parachuting experience and had managed to convince the commandos’ leader, Captain Lomas, of his expertise. The big man was jumping solo, as was Jess. She’d taken even less time than Ironwood to convince Lomas of her training.

A green light flashed, and the loadmaster pulled a lever on the side wall. Instantly, the pallet slid down the ramp and vanished from sight. The tandem jumpers walked forward slowly as the first nine solo jumpers ran for the ramp—Ironwood a head taller than the others—and then were swept away, into the blue void.

The tandem jumpers walked backward down the ramp, two pair to each side, holding on to guide ropes until they reached the edge.

David concentrated on breathing the freezing air. The wind tore at his gear. Every sensation was overpowering. He stared up at the wires and conduits of the cargo bay ceiling, saw the fabric insulation ripple in the swirling wind.

“Lean back!” Dodd shouted.

David felt himself falling. Catching sight of the enormous gray tail of the Globemaster. Seeing a quick flash of Agent Marano spinning beside him joined to Sergeant Childress, and faintly hearing her whoop of joy. Then he felt himself roll, and he was looking straight down at black rocks and white snow, icy wind tearing at his face. It was impossible to catch his breath.

Faintly, he heard Dodd shouting, “Look ahead!”

He tried. Saw the huge red umbrellas of the pallet’s cargo chutes far below, but growing larger, larger . . .

David had just enough time to think they were about to collide with those chutes when the ground suddenly swung away and he was looking
straight out to the horizon. Boundless snow, a frozen sea lapping against a jagged black shore, and a blue sky so pure it hurt his eyes to look at it, even through his tinted goggles.

Then the horizon rotated around him, and he dimly realized his chute must have opened. He looked up, and there it was, perfect. So silent, he only heard the vestigial hiss of the explosions in Cornwall. The air felt supremely still, and he knew it was because he was moving with the wind.

More shouted commands from Dodd. “Knees together! Bend your legs!”

The ground was suddenly hurtling toward him. David saw the pallet already down, a half mile away. Between it and the ground below, the other jumpers quickly gathered their chutes. There was a slight upward bounce and—

It was like stepping off a fast-moving escalator. He and his tandem partner took a few quick steps together, and then were still.

“Outstanding!” Dodd exclaimed. A few quick clicks and David was released. He stepped away as his partner shrugged off his chute and began rolling it up.

David looked around, shaking not from cold but from the experience. He closed his eyes for a moment, and was back stuck in traffic on the George Washington Parkway the night this had really begun, when he had gone to the Hay-Adams in D.C. and met Ironwood for the first time. Then he opened his eyes and he was still on the ice of Antarctica, and it felt as if everything that had happened in the past few weeks had happened in that same amount of time—a single blink of an eye.

Then everything changed again as Dodd ran to him and quickly disconnected his reserve chute and harness, pointing urgently to the sky. It was already darkening with the approaching sunset.

David looked up, hearing engines different from the Globemaster’s, to see a black silhouette against blue and the dark specks tumbling from it, spreading apart as they fell, abruptly blossoming into pure white canopies.

They’d won their race by minutes, only to face a war.

“This training you had,” Captain Lomas asked, “was it in the military?”

“Private security,” Jess said. Side by side, they bundled their chutes, both moving quickly, economically. He was reassessing anything he might have been told about her, and she knew why. She’d leapt from the cargo plane like a soldier charging into battle because she knew that was what she was and what she faced. Dropping swiftly, she’d pulled her ripcord with defiance, daring the parachute not to open, then guided it expertly to land six feet from the supply pallet, only two feet farther from it than Lomas.

“Seen action?”

Jess nodded, caught something from the corner of her eye, looked up, and saw another transport plane, other jumpers. So did Lomas. Without further talk, they broke out their knives, quickly slicing at the pallet’s wrapping.

Less than ten minutes later, they were armed and equipped just as Corporal Rothstein—communication and positioning—confirmed they’d landed dead on their coordinates: a flat outcropping on a nameless mountain. However, while they were only eight hundred meters downslope from their planned point of entry, the roundabout path required to ferry their equipment up the rough and rocky incline was almost three klicks long.

Lomas tasked four of his men to take the fastest route, a direct uphill hike, to find and secure the crevasse flagged by the SARGE display. The captain estimated thirty minutes for the advance team’s climb to the crevasse and almost an hour for the second group to reach the POE with the equipment. By then, it would be full-on night. Once all were in place, the demo specialists would plant the charges that should open up a shaft down to the structure. Then it was Mr. Ironwood’s show until the helicopters from the USS
Roosevelt
arrived in two days’ time.

Jess only had one problem with that plan. “Anyone see if the other jumpers had an equipment pallet? I didn’t. They could have landed right on the POE.”

“Then we’ll know where to find them,” Lomas said. He gave the order to move out, and they did.

The commandos carried fifty-pound packs in addition to their basic weapons and survival gear. The agents and civilians had been given smaller thirty-pound packs, and in the -25°F air, that exertion was taking a toll. They’d stopped to rest.

The three-klick path to the point of entry didn’t match Rothstein’s topo maps or satellite photos. The tallest peaks were still useful as landmarks, but the exposed ground between them was all new.

“The maps are eight years old,” the corporal explained to Jess. “The satellite photos are from last year. Terrain’s changed already. There’s barely half the snow that was here last year.”

Ironwood looked at the maps and photos they were comparing. “We know where we have to end up.” He tapped a gloved finger at the POE marked on the topo map. “And we know we’re here.” He tapped again. “So let’s take a shortcut along that new ridge.” He pointed ahead. “Should save a klick or so.”

Corporal Rothstein used binoculars to check the end of the ridge and decided it was passable. Just as they all began to haul on their packs again to continue the trek, Jess heard the hollow pops of distant gunfire.

In seconds, the commandos had slipped out of their supply and survival packs and moved out on the run, ordering the civilians—her and David, and Ironwood, Lyle, and Marano—to stay put until someone came for them.

Five minutes later, before the second group of commandos could have reached the site, a cloud of black smoke rose up past a dark ridge, followed a moment later by an echoing rumble.

“I thought they were going to bomb it,” David said.

Jess realized what was happening. Her stomach tightened. “They’re blasting in.” She felt powerless.

“They’ll loot it first.” Ironwood turned away, arms open in despair and frustration. “All this way, and for what?”

More distant gunfire. Another cloud of smoke and a long rumble.

“Our guys aren’t stopping them, Jack.” Marano turned to Lyle. “We gotta help.”

Jess saw the senior agent struggle with the decision: Follow orders or his gut? She’d faced that, too. She turned to David, but he’d grabbed Ironwood.

“How old is the data in the SARGE database?”

“My version? From 2005. Oh . . . I get it . . .”

So did Jess. Of all of them, David had seen what no one else had. Years ago, when the SARGE database had been created, the ice and snowpack here were thicker by dozens of meters. So SARGE had identified an entry point high on the mountainside as the quickest way into the hidden structure, but with so much impassable ice removed, had another entry point been exposed?

“Right!” Ironwood awkwardly unfolded the printout. Jess had the others kneel to hold the three sheets of plasticized paper on the frozen ground for David to assess. He looked from map to photo to SARGE printout and back again, several times, as if aligning the three different views of the same terrain in his mind, until they came together.

“Here.” David’s finger stabbed the satellite image at a spot less than fifty meters down the steep slope of the ridge they’d been about to cross when the gunfire sounded. “There’s something there. A side tunnel. A shaft. Only a few feet down.”

“A few feet?” Jess said. “Does anyone know how to handle the demo charges?”