Rajesh and Jack manned the crane, while Hart and Dag climbed below to help set Anna down. Jack closed the outer airlock and then climbed down as well. From there, an oval archway led from the stairs into a vast and darkened structure. Dust motes floated through the beam cast by his LED light as he stood fixed in wonder at the immensity of the area before him. His pulse quickened. The moisture in his mouth dried up with the dizzying array of thoughts coursing through his mind. They were venturing into an eerie world undisturbed for millions of years.
They were on some kind of open platform, with edges that vanished into darkness. The walls had what looked like piping or ducts running in several directions. A central column ran through the center of the structure, all the way to the top. Jack wondered if it was some kind of lift. Like the spokes on a wagon wheel, a series of walkways connected the central column to the rest of the level.
Atmospheric readings appeared on Jack’s OHMD glasses. “Keep your helmets on, folks,” he told them. “The air down here is close to ninety percent nitrogen and nine percent oxygen.” Such a mixture would leave them dead in seconds. By contrast, the Earth’s atmosphere was seventy-eight percent nitrogen, twenty-one percent oxygen and one percent argon.
Swiveling around, Jack spotted what looked like railings fifty feet away. He had wondered whether the structure was right side up or upside down, but now he had his answer. He headed toward the railing and aimed his lights up into the ever-narrowing angle of the USO’s roof. Once again the beams were eaten up by blackness. They had entered near the top of the structure. If there was still that much space left above them, he could only imagine what vastness lay below.
Jack’s boots clanked on a metal surface. Glancing down, he studied the slate-gray floor. After touching the surface with the tips of his gloved fingers, Jack opened the sample case tied around his waist and removed a scraper and a plastic collection tube. The metal was hard, but he managed to peel off a few flecks and push them into the tube. Once it was sealed, he snapped it back into place next to dozens of empty tubes.
It was hard to regard even a simple metal surface without wondering what alien hands had been responsible for manufacturing and then putting it in place.
“Everyone, gather around,” Hart called out over channel one.
Jack watched beams of light from each member spear the murky darkness in every direction as they came together.
“Given the enormous size,” Hart told them, “it’s obvious we won’t be able to cover enough ground if we’re clumped together like a busload of tourists snapping shots of the Eiffel Tower. I think it’s best we break into groups of two or three and maintain constant radio contact. You see anything that looks noteworthy, you call out before you go touching anything.”
“I’ll head in this direction with Gabby and Anna,” Jack said, pointing ahead of him. He turned to Rajesh, who looked uneasy. “Don’t worry, bud, I’ll take good care of her.”
The computer engineer hesitated, looking to Anna, who smiled reassuringly.
“I’m excited to be exploring on my own,” she told Rajesh, who relented.
Grant nodded. “In that case, Dag, Rajesh and I will look for a way down to the lower levels.”
Hart glanced over at Eugene, who had his hands on his hips like an Apollo astronaut. “I guess Buzz Lightyear and I will head to the upper decks and see what we can find.”
“Buzz Lightyear?” Eugene repeated, bewildered. “That’s a compliment, right?”
The others laughed.
“Have fun,” Jack said, as he and Gabby set off.
“Wait for me, Dr. Greer,” Anna pleaded, rolling after them, her illuminated face standing out against the darkness.
They continued for several minutes on the same level, until their lights caught the curved edges of what appeared to be an opening. Jack’s initial estimate put it at twenty feet wide and just as high. The closer they got, the more it took on the distinct shape of a chamber. Over the radio, they could hear the other groups talking excitedly amongst themselves. Eugene was peppering Hart with questions about his SEAL training and whether he’d ever killed a man.
“Switch to frequency two,” Jack told Gabby and Anna, which they did. “If I had to listen to another second of that, I think I’d throw myself over that railing.” He was talking about the one circling the central pillar. Although the very thought of falling through nearly a mile of pitch blackness sent tingles up his vertebrae.
They stood at the mouth of the chamber, spearing rows of containers with their lights, some stacked one on top of another, others toppled over, lying on their sides, lids ajar.
“What do you make of it?” Jack asked, to no one in particular.
“Insufficient data,” Anna said, rolling ahead as she scanned the unusual scene.
A voice with a British accent came onto channel two. “Jack, are you there?” It was Grant.
“We are. You find something?”
“You were right. The central shaft appears to be some sort of lift, although we haven’t the slightest clue how it works.”
“It may not have―” Jack had been about to say ‘power’ when soft red lighting illuminated the chamber. Anna stopped, craning her head upwards.
“Hold on,” he told them. “Did we trip some kind of motion sensor?” he asked Gabby.
“I don’t think so,” Gabby replied. She was standing next to him, her breathing growing louder. “Anna was the first one in and nothing happened until you and I entered.”
Jack grew pensive.
“What do you think it means?”
“It must have been activated by our biosignature,” he said, the implications rolling out before him like a long black carpet.
“And that’s a bad thing?”
This time it was Anna who spoke. “Dr. Bishop, I believe it means that biological life forms once inhabited this structure.”
A rogue thought occurred to Jack, one he kept to himself.
Perhaps they still do.
Chapter 23
It took three refueling stops before Ollie and Mia reached their destination. The final one occurred in Posadas, a city of close to three hundred thousand in northern Argentina. A three-hour flight followed, after which they landed at La Plata airfield, three miles southeast of Buenos Aires. The morning air was more than cool, it was downright frigid. For a brief moment Mia wondered how it could be so darn cold in August, until she remembered once you crossed south of the equator the seasons were reversed.
They had paid for the fuel with Mia’s money. Now Ollie reached into his wallet and pulled out three American hundred-dollar bills and handed them to Gustavo. “This should get you home and then some.”
Gustavo, resigned to his fate, took the money just as he had taken money from the police to rat them out. It was the way business was done among a certain shadier segment of the world’s population. As it turned out, the old cliché that there was no honor among thieves bore more than a little truth.
On legs still stiff from the long flight, Ollie and Mia began a brisk walk in search of a taxi.
“I can’t believe you gave him money after he tried to turn us into the police.”
Ollie wiggled his index finger at her. “Technically, the only one he tried to turn in was you. My arrest would have merely been guilt by association.”
Mia frowned. “Fine, but I still don’t understand.”
“It was hush money. A guy like Gustavo is what the Brazilians call ‘un rato’.” He scrunched up his face and scratched at her with clawed hands.
“Yeah, a rat, I get the picture.”
“Inevitably, he’ll spill the beans about us to anyone willing to pay. With any luck, that three hundred bucks just bought us a decent head start.”
A string of taxis were lined up outside of the tiny airfield terminal. They got into the first waiting car.
“I hope your Spanish is better than your Portuguese,” he said.
She recited the hacker’s address from memory in flu
ent Spanish.
Ollie gave her an impressed look. The driver, on the other hand, was far from pleased. He began waving his hands in the air, speaking rapidly.
“What’s the problem?” Ollie asked, looking annoyed.
“He’s saying that the area is very bad. That we shouldn’t be going there.”
Ollie waved a fifty in front of the driver. “You heard the lady, now let’s get moving.”
The driver’s eyes flitted from the fifty to Ollie and back again. He made the sign of the cross, snatched the bill and started driving.
They headed down Perito Moreno Avenue, a wide and bustling street which featured a large park and football stadium on one side and a shanty town on the other. The taxi turned into a neighborhood lined with three-story red-brick shacks. It made Santarem look like Beverly Hills. Scanning around, Mia was beginning to understand the driver’s hesitation in bringing them here.
“Tell me you still have it,” she said to Ollie, referring to the pistol he’d kept trained on Gustavo for a big chunk of the flight.
He patted his hip with a metallic clank and gave her a wink.
Turned out they were in Bojo Flores, one of the toughest neighborhoods in Buenos Aires. Even worse, they had entered an area of Flores called Villa 1-11-14, the sort of place cops didn’t enter unless riding in an armored car. And yet, for all of its grit, Flores had gained some notoriety recently as the birthplace and stomping ground for Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a man who in 2013 became Pope Francis.
But clearly not all of the country’s residents were so benign. Both before and after World War II, Argentina had had the dubious honor of harboring Nazis in particular and fascists in general. As a result, a large segment of the population spoke German, Italian and in some cases both. After the war, rumors began to circulate that Adolf Hitler had escaped to Argentina. To that end, through the late forties and into the fifties US intelligence agencies—the FBI as well as the CIA—had dispatched agents to South America to investigate the claims. In spite of a lack of evidence, to this day, some continued to believe the Führer had died of old age in an Argentine villa rather than from a bullet to the temple in his Berlin bunker.
Mia and Ollie stepped out of the taxi and into a chilly wind. Her boots scuffed against faded asphalt. At least the streets were paved, a step in the right direction. She scanned the house numbers as the taxi tore off at a high rate of speed.
“Run, rabbit, run,” Ollie said under his breath as he appeared next to her. He pointed. “This must be the one.”
Mia scanned the run-down three-storey building before them. On the roof the tail end of a clothesline was visible and below that a balcony with a set of a grey plastic table and chairs. On the street level, the entrance was flanked with dark passageways, no wider than a few feet. Ahead stood an imposing iron gate and a box on the wall with names and numbers next to it. Above the box was a camera. All of the name plates were empty except for one: Armoni.
“Moment of truth,” Mia said, pushing the button.
They waited for nearly a minute without a response.
“You think maybe he didn’t hear?” Mia wondered.
Ollie stepped in and tried his luck, this time holding the buzzer a few extra seconds.
Still nothing.
Neither of them dared turn on their phones to call or email, since that would risk giving away their location to the authorities.
Ollie cursed and threw up his hands, waving at the camera. “Open up, mate. We’re freezing our balls off out here.” He glanced over at Mia, who didn’t look impressed.
They’d already started to walk away when the intercom sounded.
“Do you have the money?” a distorted voice asked. It was obvious English wasn’t their first language, making it difficult to detect what was.
They headed back. “Yes,” Mia said, reaching into her pocket before Ollie stopped her.
“All three thousand in American currency?”
She looked over at Ollie, confused.
“Uh, mate, we agreed on fifteen hundred. Remember?”
“Three thousand,” the voice replied.
“Oh, come on, Armoni,” Ollie barked. “We just flew four thousand bloody miles to see you. The police were chasing our plane. Don’t do this.”
“Three thousand or it’s off.”
Mia’s spirits fell. After paying for the fuel, she only had twenty-five hundred left and Ollie had given Gustavo everything in his wallet.
“Would you watch my back while I show Armoni the money?” she whispered to Ollie.
His eyebrow went up.
“Just do it.”
Ollie spun around and scanned the long, narrow street. “You’re clear.”
Mia drew closer to the camera and pulled out the amount they had agreed on. “I’m afraid fifteen hundred is the best we can do.” She pouted, nudging her chest as close to the lens as she could. Using sex to get what she wanted wasn’t Mia’s style, but then again, neither was freezing her butt off. Three seconds later, the buzzer on the door sounded.
She pulled open the gate and shoved the money back into her pocket before waving Ollie in. “After you.” Now it was Mia who wore the shit-eating grin.
Chapter 24
Jack knelt down beside one of the overturned containers, studying the translucent pouches that appeared to have spilled onto the floor. He reached out to pick one of them up with his gloved hands.
“Do you think we should wait?” Gabby asked, eyeing the strange hieroglyphs etched into each box.
“We can’t very well call them in every time we stumble on something. Grab a scalpel and a sample bottle, would you?”
Gabby did so, while Anna pushed further into the chamber. It seemed to go on another fifty meters before tapering off along the structure’s eastern bulkhead.
How could they be expected to get any answers to their questions if they weren’t allowed to touch anything? Chief among those questions was whether millions of years ago this city-sized behemoth had flown here on its own, or whether it had been built inside the hollowed shell of the Chicxulub crater.
Jack studied the pouch, reflecting on how much it resembled a blood bag one might find at a hospital or emergency room. Along the top were a series of images strung out in a straight line. If they could speak alien, they would know right away what they were looking at. He squeezed the contents, feeling it crumble beneath his fingers. The stuff inside was dry, holding the consistency of a powder or spice. Jack used the scalpel to slice through the membrane, scooped out a few grams of the dusty substance and deposited it into one of the sample tubes.
Just then Anna returned from inspecting the rest of the chamber. She rolled over at once and picked up one of the pouches, examining it intently. “Dr. Greer, I have counted five hundred and thirty-two containers. I have also recorded similar sets of symbols on every case.”
“Similar?” Gabby asked. “They aren’t identical?”
Anna’s wheels squealed as she turned to face Gabby, her head tilted slightly to one side. “No, they are not identical, Dr. Bishop. It might indicate a variation in the cargo held by each container.”
Gabby turned to Jack. “Any ideas on what this stuff was used for?”
He shook the question away. “Too early to say,” Jack replied, storing the tube back in the kit on his waist. “But whatever this was, they had a hell of a lot of it.”
Commander Hart’s voice sounded over the comms line. “I’m up near the top of the pyramid and there’s something I think you folks should see.”
•••
Jack and the others scaled a series of ramps along the outer bulkhead. They went up four levels before they passed through a high doorway and into what appeared to be the bridge of a ship. The light from Hart’s and Eugene’s suits fused with the soft greenish glow from panels recessed into the walls. Bolted into the floor before each panel stood something that looked like a cross between a bench and a chair.
Up from the center of the bridge rose
the elevator shaft. Like the rest of it, the lift was a closed unit with a single entrance and exit. The remainder of the bridge was illuminated by flickering control panels and holographic displays.
Hart was over by the floating green hologram of a diamond. Upon approach, more and more details began to fill in.
“Well, I guess we can put one question to rest,” Dag said, the bottom of his red beard folded inside his helmet.
“This is no building,” Grant said, finishing Dag’s thought. “It’s a ship. Which leads us to what you might say is the elephant in the room, or at least one of them.”
Ever the protective father, Rajesh was bent over Anna, running a quick diagnostic. “Which elephant is that?” he asked.
Grant pushed his gloves on tighter. “The Yucatán asteroid impact sixty-five million years ago has long been regarded as the prime suspect in the demise of the dinosaurs and many other species. I think it’s rather obvious at this point that that theory is in dire need of retooling.”
Eugene slid back into one of the unusually-shaped console seats. “You’re suggesting that this ship and not an asteroid was what crashed, devastating the planet?”
“As difficult as it may be to accept, I await a more plausible explanation.”
“Do you know the kind of forces such an impact would generate?” Gabby said, her mind working out the math.
Ever the good student, Anna raised an arm. “The approximate forces generated by this structure impacting the earth at twelve miles per second would equal one hundred million Hiroshima bombs.”
Jack’s forehead furrowed. “That’s strange. Prior calculations had estimated the asteroid was nine miles wide and generated a destructive force equivalent to a billion Hiroshimas.”
“But this thing isn’t nine miles wide,” Dag said, scratching his helmet.
“In that case,” Jack said, “could it have been coming in a lot faster than we thought?”
“Which still begs the question,” Eugene said emphatically. “Why didn’t it simply disintegrate? I mean, meteorites that impact the earth are almost always pulverized and thrown up into the atmosphere. It’s the reason we only tend to find little chunks of them spread all over.”
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