Code to Extinction

by Christopher Cartwright

  Sam wanted to ask, what colony?

  But he didn’t get the chance.

  The pilot shoved the control wheel hard to the right and the aircraft started to roll. Sam had braced, expecting to be thrown downward, but instead, his attacker had rolled to the right – sending Sam’s side of the wing upward.

  This time, the pilot didn’t attempt to level out again.

  Instead, the de Havilland Canada DHC-3 Otter, continued to roll. Against its structural recommendations, and as a tribute to her strong airframe, she continued to roll a hundred and eighty degrees.

  The pilot brought her to straight and level in an upside-down position.

  Sam’s heart raced as the bulk of his body came to rest on top of the wing. Staring downward at the fuselage, he spotted a small cylindrical opening.

  It was the air intake manifold.

  Sam pulled off his shirt and stuffed it into the opening. The engine quickly drew it further inside, until it became wedged hard and all airflow ceased.

  The engine coughed.

  Sam clenched the side of the wing strut with all his might. The pilot, as expected, assumed that the roll had caused the engine to flood the carburetor, and consequently completed the maneuver until they were once again flying straight and level in an upright position.

  The propeller continued to spin, but already it was losing strength.

  With the carburetor starved of air, the engine sputtered and choked.

  And then cut out completely.

  Inside the cockpit, the pilot dipped the nose to maintain airspeed. Unaware of the cause of the engine’s problem and suspecting it to be flooded, he went about setting the fuel mixture to idle cut off and the throttle to wide open while cranking the engine. The idea was to attempt to allow excess fuel to exit the engine through the exhaust. Then, once enough fuel cleared the cylinders and a proper ratio of fuel to air was achieved, the engine would begin firing.

  It probably would have worked, too – if the engine had been flooded.

  If the air intake manifold hadn’t been blocked by me…

  Sam stared at his attacker and smiled.

  The pilot was working hard to resolve the problem. They were losing altitude. The aircraft had a decent glide ratio and already the pilot set a new course directly toward the closest piece of land – the city of Belize.

  Sam grinned and then shouted, “You broke your toy airplane… I guess we’re both going to meet our maker together.”

  “Speak for yourself,” the pilot replied. “See that land up ahead?”

  Sam glanced at the sandy peninsula jutting out into a sea of shallow green and turquoise water. “Yeah, it’s the city of Belize.”

  “I think I can reach it.”

  “You think?” Sam teased.

  “Yeah, I fucking think. Then I’m going to get out and kill you.”

  Sam started to laugh uncontrollably.

  The pilot snapped his head around. “What the fuck are you laughing about?”

  Sam stopped laughing. His jaw was set firm and his piercing blue eyes were fixed on his attacker. “I don’t die that easy. Oh, and by the way, if you glance over your shoulder you’ll notice my friends are right behind us.”

  The pilot glanced over his shoulder and swore. A moment later, he lowered the nose and set up for a landing. At the edge of the city a rocky cliff, thirty feet high, jutted out into the sea. On the other side of the cliff a single road led to the popular southern end of the city, filled with tourists and locals wanting to have a good time.

  Sam studied their glidepath. It was going to be close. Too close for him to be certain they would clear the cliff at all. He glanced at the water. It was still fifty feet below, but as they got closer he might just make it if he jumped.

  He dismissed the idea. The priority was catching his attacker. He needed answers, and right now, the man piloting the aircraft was just about the only person who could provide them.

  Sam held on, and the seaplane gradually approached the land.

  The aircraft crossed the rocky cliff, clearing it by a full three feet. Sam waited. A split second later, its twin pontoons struck land.

  Sam jumped.

  He hit the grass and rolled.

  When he finally stopped, Sam stood up.

  Disoriented, he scanned the area for signs of his attacker. A long line of white scratch marks from the pontoons ran along the blacktop, leading to where the wreckage of the de Havilland Otter rested on the edge of the road some eighty feet farther away.

  From the edge of the crooked fuselage, the pilot was already scrambling out. Sam met his attacker’s eye. The man cursed and then started to run.

  Ahead of him, Tom was already bringing the little helicopter around at a punishing pace, settling into a hover, ready to land.

  Another two hundred feet away, he spotted his attacker entering a bar as if nothing had happened, and his seaplane wasn’t parked in the middle of a resort city street. Sam shook his head to clear it and scrambled to follow the pilot, not waiting for Tom.

  Inside, the bar was rollicking. Despite the hour, party-goers were drinking and dancing as if they were celebrating the ending of the world. Sam pushed his way through the crowd, looking for his target. He was halfway through when he spotted the man opening the back door. Some woman grabbed him and pulled his head down to hers for a drunken kiss. He smiled and set her gently aside. Someone else thrust a beer in his face.

  He kept going, racing to reach the door.

  Sam opened it, and spotted his attacker getting into a cab, which peeled away with a screech of tires. Sam looked around wildly for another cab, but there were none to be seen. The adrenaline surge was over.

  Dejected, he slid down the doorframe to land on his butt.

  He felt something digging into his left hand. What could this be? He opened his hand. He glanced at the contents and smiled. He was still holding his wristwatch. Well, what do you know? It still works.

  Seconds later, Tom opened the door.

  “Where did he go?”

  “He got away.” Sam swallowed hard. “Which means we’re back to square one.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Batagaika Crater, Russia – Gateway to the Underworld

  The old man had once worked deep in the Mir open-cut diamond mine in Yakutsk. In 2004, its seemingly endless supply of gem-quality diamonds ran dry, and the production was forced to close. In 2009, the mine was reopened, but this time with deep underground shafts.

  He told the very few people who asked, that a cave-in at one such mine shaft had caused his left leg to become grotesquely crushed. A local medicine man was able to set his leg so that he could one day walk on it again, but the foot was left a permanently disfigured mess of mangled bone and skin tissue. With a gregarious smile and a once handsome face, he would then hint at the more somber reflections of his past. Telling them that suffering is a good way to pay penance for the mistakes of his youth, and then he would refuse their kindness and continue on his way.

  Because he alone knew the truth.

  It was all lies.

  His leg had indeed been crushed in a mine collapse. But it wasn’t at the underground Mir mine in Yakutsk. The accident had taken place at the end of a very different mine altogether. And there was nothing accidental about the cave-in.

  It was the last week of their extensive mining project, which had taken years to complete. They were all meant to go home to see their families. But they couldn’t, could they? Not anymore. They knew too much. It would be impossible to stop them from revealing secrets the world wasn’t ready to hear.

  When he heard the distinctive sound of dynamite charges being triggered and the shifting of earth beneath his feet, he didn’t try to flee like the rest of the men. Instead, he ran deeper into the tunnel. The entire shaft led nowhere, and it soon became apparent the entire place was set to collapse.

  But deeper still, a ventilation shaft had been bored.

  It led eighty feet to the surface.
He was close. If he had left a couple seconds earlier, he would have reached it without harm. As it was, he’d left it too late. The cave-in continued, like a chain-reaction, until it was over the top of him.

  A single boulder caught his leg as he was climbing into the entrance of the ventilation shaft. It took him nearly an hour to break the stone apart using a chisel and hammer normally used to set dynamite. When he was free, his foot and lower leg were badly damaged.

  He looked up, where the slim light of the night’s sky shined down from the opening of the ventilation shaft. It would have been a struggle to climb had he been uninjured. In his current state, he knew it was closer to impossible.

  But then he had thought about the secret, and he knew he had to escape. He had to live long enough to tell someone, so that his family could be spared. He alone survived through tenacity and sheer will. He had a purpose. He needed to tell a secret.

  It took him three weeks to reach his old home, and when he got there, he discovered that everyone he’d ever loved had been taken from him.

  His secret no longer seemed important to him. He wanted nothing more than to die, but even that seemed too easy a way out for him. So, he continued as he had always done, striving to survive through any means he could.

  Without a family to support him, that means had recently taken him to the Gateway to the Underworld – a massive crater in the frozen heart of Siberia.

  The old man took another step closer. His disfigured foot hurt like hell. It always had, but recently the combination of age and cold seemed to worsen it tremendously. He slowed his pace as he got closer to the dreaded place. He’d been three years old when the massive crater first made its appearance, and in the nearly fifty years since, he and everyone he knew had believed it was evil, the gateway to the underworld.

  Each year, it had claimed more and more of the surrounding land, devouring all vegetation in its path. Those who lived in the closest village of Ese-Khayya, in East Siberia, knew it to be a living, breathing monster from hell. It was growing rapidly, and the foreign scientists who came to study it during the summer months said nothing would stop it. Its very nature meant that it would grow faster and faster each year – until the end of the world.

  He forced himself to smile.

  It had been decades since he’d viewed the place and much had changed in that time. He grew up in the nearby village of Ese-Khayya. Born to a poor family of the local Yakutian tribe that barely eked out a living in the frozen north, he’d dreamed of one day leaving this place.

  As a teen, he’d thought it might be a dinosaur egg, or even an intact skeleton. His imagination was captured by the great lizards for several years. Now an old man of 52, he knew that the secrets of the monstrous crater were more likely to be mammals from 4000-5000 years ago. Perhaps a musk ox or mammoth. One year, the thawing permafrost had disgorged a horse from what the scientists called the Pleistocene. He’d even heard that the walls of the crater showed bands of forests like those that covered the land now, indicating it had once been warmer here.

  Already it was warmer in summer than it had been during his youth. Somehow, in a way he didn’t quite understand, the melting and caving in of the crater meant that it would continue to be warmer each year. He couldn’t wait for that. His bones craved a place where he didn’t freeze for nine months of the year. It was time to put aside the superstitions that had kept him from entering the crater all these decades. This would be the summer he either found a treasure that would allow him to leave this place, or die trying.

  The half of him that clung to the stories he’d been told all his life fully expected to die trying. Either the earth would open and swallow him as it had done when others went to explore the crater, or the denizens of the underworld would capture him and carry him away. But even that was better than to endure another winter here.

  He plodded along beside his oxcart. The crater was only three miles from the village, but no roads went there. His route skirted hills and crossed streams from the closest road, forcing him to spend a night under a canvas in the cart. Today he would gain the edge of the crater, and God help him with whatever came next. He was getting too old to spend a freezing night with no more than canvas to shelter him.

  An hour or two after dawn, he stopped his ox and cautiously approached the edge of the crater. The unstable soil, mixed with frozen moisture, was vulnerable to crumbling. The edges tended to collapse, which was what kept the monstrous gash growing ever deeper and wider. No one knew how deep it would go, but the scientists had said it would likely eat through the entire hillside before it stopped or even slowed. Each year, the more surface that was exposed, the more the crater outgassed the carbon dioxide trapped in the frozen water. That in turn, they said, warmed the area, thawing it more, causing it to collapse more, and warming it more. It seemed to the old man that such a cycle would never end, until the hole reached the very center of Earth, Truly he believed the fiery center to be hell itself.

  He drew a deep breath and paused to look around for perhaps the last time in his life before he would descend into the crater. The landscape was filled with thick vegetation. Dense forests of Dahurian Larch stretched to the horizon in the north. Siberian Pine and deciduous forests composed of birch and poplar species lined the Batagayka tributary of the river Yana to the south. It was beautiful in its own stark way, and he understood that it was only because of the warming of the earth in general that he had these forests to view. Only a small percentage of the trees were older than he was. Some of the scientists had said it was because of deforestation when he was a baby that the crater appeared in the first place.

  He didn’t know. All he knew was that now, only two weeks past summer solstice, was his last chance before winter set in again and it was too cold to make the overnight trip. And that the crater into which he was about to descend was dangerous, treacherous, and his only chance of making a better life for himself. With that final look around, he sighed and picked his way carefully down the steep cliff face, occasionally slipping and reaching in vain for something to slow his slide into hell.

  The interior of the crater looked a little like melting blobs of ice cream. Vegetation couldn’t take hold before the fragile soil collapsed under it. Steep hills inside dotted the lower reaches of the two hundred and seventy-eight feet of depth. Once inside, he despaired of finding anything because the landscape was so broken. Nevertheless, he walked slowly around the nearest wall, examining the surface of the cliff face closely for any hint of a fossil or frozen carcass.

  He became so focused on not missing anything that he didn’t watch where he set his feet. He’d just seen something he wanted to examine more closely when the ground below him shifted and collapsed, throwing him to the side. He staggered, trying to catch his balance, and in the process, twisted his ankle painfully. A thrill of fear went through him. No one would come looking for him if he couldn’t climb out of this place.

  Just once I wish something would go right.

  He sat down right where he was, on the cold, damp ground, and allowed himself to feel sorry for himself for just a few moments. Only a few moments, though, because he knew he’d have to rescue himself.

  To make matters worse, a strange, stinging precipitation began to fall. He huddled miserably by the giant roots of an upturned conifer tree, until he noticed that the downfall pelting him wasn’t moisture at all. Dozens of tiny, clear stones lay near him. He picked one up and held it gingerly between his fingers, bringing it close to his eyes. The stone was minuscule, but very pretty. It sparkled in the weak sunlight.

  No sooner than the old man observed that, he looked up. The sky was a clear blue expanse, with the small stones still falling…out of nowhere. When several hit his face, he hastily looked down again. He caught his breath and carefully examined the stones.

  Could these be… diamonds?

  The idea made him gasp. Was it really this simple? He wished for his fortune to turn, and suddenly he was showered with diamonds?
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br />   The old man staggered to his feet and started to dance a joyful jig, thinking better of it when his weight fell on his injured ankle. Without pausing to analyze the why and how of the windfall, he fell to his knees again and began scooping up dozens of the tiny stones. No one in the village would believe this!

  On second thought, he shouldn’t tell anyone. No, these stones could be dangerous to his health if anyone else knew about them. He felt a prickle on the back of his neck, imagining he was observed. He huddled over his small pile of diamonds and looked up. There… in the bushes at the edge of a crater, he imagined he saw movement. A moment later, a rustle of noise above the ping, ping, ping of the stones gave him even more evidence that someone was watching.

  His attention was snagged by a larger ping close by. He whipped his head toward the sound and was stunned by the sight of a much larger stone lying on the ground about a meter away. He scrambled toward it and snatched it up. He opened his hand, with the stone resting in the center of his palm. He’d never seen one, but he knew beyond a doubt, this was a diamond. A flawless diamond, bigger he thought, than a normal diamond. All his dreams were about to come true.

  He placed the diamond reverently in his watchpocket, a place that had never seen a watch deposited. Then he scooted back to the little pile of smaller stones he’d collected and stuffed two handfuls into his jacket pockets. Fearful that the watcher was human rather than animal, he didn’t want to stay where he was vulnerable to attack. Instead, he searched for a way to climb out of the crater.

  It was difficult going with the cliff sides crumbling half the time, but he finally gained the top several meters away from where he’d left his ox. The patient animal still stood there, munching on what vegetation it could reach. He turned the ox and pointed back toward the village. This time he would walk through the night if he had to. His find was too precious to wait longer than necessary.

  He’d walked for several hours when he encountered the path he’d taken away from the road. It led through a particularly dense area of larch forest. He was watching his footing, loathe to turn his ankle again, when a noise made him look up and his heart skipped a beat.