Tales From the Black Chamber (31 page)

“Ho-o!” John shouted. “Woo! Yeah!” said Anne and Claire.

Rafe plotted a red line through Mercury and Fomalhaut.

“Can you flip that around so the compass points are normal?” said Anne. “It'd be much easier to use as a guide if so.”

“Your wish, madame …” said Rafe, and seconds later a color copy came out of a printer.

“All right,” said Anne. “I think we got it. Let me just hit the books a little bit to figure out what to draw around the lines.” She had covered two pages of a legal pad with notes and sketches when she was overwhelmed by the smell of food. She looked up.

“Oh my God, that smells good. What is it?”

Claire looked up from a surveyor's map of eastern Mongolia. “Steve stocked the galley from a bunch of awesome restaurants. I think it's steak for dinner tonight.”

Well, if we're going out, we're going out in style
, Anne thought, smiling. “Sounds wonderful. I'm famished.”

The food was outstanding, and their conversation was animated, inconsequential, and funny, as they all were happy to shrug off the oppressive foreboding with the aid of several bottles of a rich Zinfandel.

Around eleven Eastern Time that night (they hadn't reset any clocks), as they were still sitting at the table chatting, a phone rang. Silence fell; it was a death knell.

John stood up and answered the plane's phone.

“Hello?… Oh, man. Let me put you on speaker.” He hit a button.

“Mike, you there?”

“Yep,” came Mike's voice.

“Why don't you repeat what you just said.”

“Okay, we think the Destroyer made landfall about eight hours ago. Joe says it's right on track, geographically. It's in the Sakha Republic—also called Yakutia. About an hour ago there was a burst of panicked radio and phone activity from Ese-Khayya, a town of about three hundred people about four hundred miles inland from the Arctic Ocean. Then nothing at all.

“Two more towns got hit, but not wiped out. Let me try and pronounce these things. Boronuk and Verkhoyansk. The latter, incidentally, is the coldest inhabited locale on the planet. In case that comes up on
Jeopardy!
. The only phone calls we've had intercepted and translated through NSA basically claim some sort of horrible weather system swept into town and destroyed most of it, killing almost everyone.”

“Don't play the audio, Mike,” said Claire, yanking on her ring.

“No, no. I heard it, and even in Russian or Yakut or whatever the heck it was … not good. Fortunately, there isn't a lot else out there in terms of people. At least until the thing gets near Yakutsk in about seven hours, which is a bit east of the tracking path but has a population of about two hundred forty thousand.”

“After that, just towns called Aldan and Amazar, still in Russia. Then Beijicun in China, Makho in China, Ignashino in Russia again, then Derbur in Inner Mongolia—that's China. Then some villages called Gen He, Erui Zuoqi, Yetulihe, and Tulihe. Then towns called Shangkuli and Hailar and Monggon Qulu and Yimin. Then it crosses into Mongolia, where you get to say hi.”

“Jesus,” said Steve, shaking his head.

“Joe's sending the more precise estimate of its path on the computer. He's got a zippy little graphic that shows about where it is along the line.”

“What's the timeline look like?” asked Rafe.

“You'll be landing around 18:00 Eastern tomorrow, which is six a.m. the next day local time. It should cross the Mongolian border around nine a.m.”

“So we'll have about three and a half hours on the ground before showtime,” said John.

“Yes,” said Mike. “And if, God forbid, it gets by you, it'll be in Qinghe eight hours later.”

“Okay, thanks, Mike,” said John. “Take care of your family, ok?”

“Will do. Go get it.”

The click from the phone's disconnecting was the only sound in the plane for some time.

John turned to Anne. “So, Anne, do we have a plan?”

“Getting there, yes. Your guess is as good as mine if it'll work.” She downed the rest of her glass of wine.

“We've got faith in you. Hey, Steve, you have any dessert back there?”

“Oh yeah. Hazelnut-infused crème brûlée.”

“Awesome,” said John, standing. “Come on. You get that, I'm going to break out some port and brew some coffee.”

“I don't know …” said Claire.

“Hey,” smiled Rafe, “eat, drink, and be merry.”

“For tomorrow …” Claire left the thought hanging.

John said, “C'mon, Claire. It's horrible. But if we can stop it, it'll have killed fewer people than your average African civil war.”

“African civil wars bum me out, too, John.”

“Yeah, but Latin American border wars make you want to salsa!” said Rafe, cracking Claire up.

“Fine, fine,” Claire said. “Bring on the port, coffee, and crème brûlée. I'll choke it down.”

“Back to our last topic,” said Rafe. “Worse movie sidekick: Short Round or Incredibly Gay Robin in
Batman & Robin
?”

17

Anne slept poorly. She couldn't decide whether it was the rich food, the wine, or the impending apocalypse. She showered, dressed for the outdoors, and got back to work on her books. Steve brought her a tray with coffee, a sweet roll, quiche, a cinnamon scone, and some deliciously salty Smithfield ham.

“Steve, if we do keep the world from ending, I'm going to have to go on a serious diet. Thank you,” she smiled.

“Hey, nothing but the best. Gotta keep the protein and caffeine coming. The carbs are just a bonus.”

“A delicious one. Cheers.” She raised her coffee cup to him.

The day passed quickly, Anne thought. Mike Himmelberg called in from his safe house with another damage report. Yakutsk had been hit. There were hundreds, maybe thousands dead. The Destroyer continued relentlessly along its path.

Anne studied while everyone else alternately played cards or morosely watched the blip estimating the Destroyer's position. They ate another good lunch and an early dinner, and stared out the window as the landing gear touched down on a Mongolian grassland, and the plane rumbled to a bumpy stop. Everyone checked his or her watch. Six twenty-two—p.m. on the east coast of North America, a.m. there in the land of Mongols, Manchus, and Khans.

“Ready?” asked Steve, rhetorically. They all thanked the pilots and climbed off the plane quickly, taking all their gear with them. When they were done, the pilots took off for Ulan Bator, where their flight plan had them landing in a few hours. They'd refuel and return at noon local time. No one was quite clear what the contingency plan for failure was, if anyone survived. Chase the monster in the plane to China, risking being shot down by the J-11s of the 7th Fighter Division out of Zhangjiakou Air Force Base? Or high-tail it for the Southern Hemisphere, hoping to survive the potential nuclear exchanges? Or figure that's too far to go in the amount of time left, and risk being shot down on an unauthorized flight to Tibet or somewhere else in the Himalayas unlikely to be devastated? Steve reported there were two mountain-infantry brigades in Tibet, but nothing of likely strategic importance to the Russians, Indians, or U.S., with Chengdu being the most likely nearby military target. The Black Chamber agents had talked vaguely and indecisively among themselves about the options, but they'd never brought them up to the pilots, who still believed this was a simple, discreet CIA/NSA operation.

Anne set her satchel of books on the ground next to the pile of Home Depot lumber with which they hoped to stave off the eschaton. Steve handed over her UMP and a Velcro belt with extra magazines. She slung the gun over her shoulders and secured the belt, then picked up the yellow legal pad she'd covered during the flight. Anne turned around to see what the others were doing and was a little unnerved to find they were all looking at her. Steve and John had slung futuristic-looking Belgian assault rifles on their backs, Rafe cradled his equally science-fictiony Tavor rifle, and Claire held an evil-looking SPAS-12 combat shotgun, yet for all their lethal implements, they looked vulnerable and small under the enormous Mongolian sky.

John smiled. “What's the plan, Anne?”

Anne took a deep breath. “Okay, first step is to take GPS readings and find out where we think the thing is coming through, as exactly as possible.”

“I'm on it,” said Rafe, pulling out a pocket GPS system that looked very classified to Anne's untutored eyes. He began walking off to the east.

“Second thing is to schlep these posts, tools, bags of flour, and jugs of distilled water over to wherever he calculates.”

“Got it,” said John and Steve, grabbing the heavy fifty-pound bags of flour.

Claire and Anne grabbed the ends of some eight-foot posts and carried them along. Eventually all the gear made it to the point where Rafe had stuck a long stick in the ground.

“Okay, part the third. We dig a post hole here for—let me check.” Anne flipped through her notes then examined the sigils on the posts until she found the one she wanted. “
This
post. It has to be mounted so that the Aleph is facing north directly in the thing's path. Then, let's see,
these
two need to be mounted say, fifty yards away to the northeast and northwest so that they form a right angle. Then these two, here, have to continue the V arms northeast and northwest out to a hundred yards. So they'll be …” she flipped through her notes, “a hundred and forty-one point five-five yards apart.” Seeing their gapes, she smiled a little. “Approximately. It doesn't have to be bang-on exact. I mean, if you can do sixty
sazhen
, two
arshin
, that'd be great, but I think our Russian wizard will forgive us if we're a couple inches off here or there.

“Okay, on the middle posts, the Greek letters need to be facing each other across the V. There's a theta and a chi. And on the last ones, the Slavonic letters face south. That's these squiggly things,” she said, pointing to a
on one post and a
on another. “Okay, I think we want the theta post facing east, and the chi facing west. And the backwards three with a tail goes on the northeast point of the V and the octopus with a walking stick goes on the northwest point.”

“So everybody grab a shovel,” said Steve.

“You got it. Except me. Consistent with our lifestyle of international intrigue, I'm going to be spreading damp flour on the ground.”

An hour later, they had the stakes in the ground at the right points, and two hours later Anne had finished drawing a giant circle of moist flour which intersected the V at its vertex and the two posts fifty yards out, then added concentric circles a foot inside and a foot outside them. Carefully comparing her work to the printout of the star chart, as exactly as she could, she laid three lines across the circles corresponding to the lines on the chart connecting the planets invisible behind the sky above them. Last, she crafted letters and words in several alphabets in the odd wedges formed between the circles by the angled lines.