by Hugo Navikov
“The what?” Ellie asked with a laugh.
He read further, “The Skeptic Skeptic Society is dedicated to exposing skeptics of paranormal phenomena as ‘the real phonies.’”
“That sounds legit,” Stefan said with complete sarcasm.
“Right? But they’re funding us to go down to the South Atlantic—like way south—to shoot an episode on the …” he trailed off, the look on his face falling from dreamy to disappointed.
Ellie and Stefan waited again, then prompted Ravi with, “Come on! On the what?”
“On, um, the secret civilization living under Queen Mary’s Peak, the cone of the main island’s volcano.” Ravi looked longingly at another piece of paper that had been folded into the main letter. “God, I wish this wasn’t a bunch of bullshit.”
Ellie didn’t feel disappointed, because crackpots and nutters were part and parcel of investigating occult and paranormal topics. For every living dinosaur, there were twenty “secret Nazi installations” or, frankly, “Biloxi leprechauns.” She said, “Why is this getting you down, Rav?”
Ravi looked away from the letter and showed them the front of the enclosed item. “They included a check for us to get started before they would bring us out there. It’s for $100,000.” He turned it back around and gazed at it wistfully again. “It looks so real, though.”
Ellie stood and nipped the paper out of his hand and looked at it. “It really does,” she said, surprised, since she expected it to be hand-written on some paranormal crank’s personal account. But not only was it on thick paper with the name and address of The Skeptic Skeptic Society … it was a cashier’s check.
Now Stefan slipped it from her fingers and looked at it himself. “This was done on real cashier’s check equipment. It may be fake and worthless, but it would look exactly like this if it was real.”
“It’s not real,” Ellie said.
He met the eyes of his compatriots and said, “One way to find out. I’m going down to the bank.”
Ellie and Ravi didn’t ask to come with. They just got their coats.
~~~
The check was real.
“Get the equipment,” Ellie said before they had even left the bank. “The letter says we need to be in Cape Town in two days to get the ship to the island.”
“They don’t have an airport?” Stefan said, more as a statement of unwelcome fact than as a question.
“Guess not. I hope we can get a flight to South Africa on such short notice.”
Ravi laughed and interjected, “With $100,000, I bet we can convince an airline to find it in their hearts to get us some seats.” He pulled out his phone as they walked out into the Atlanta humidity, and thumbed around for a minute. “Yep, KLM can get us there leaving tomorrow. Which is good if we want to get there in time for the boat, ’cause it’s a twenty-hour flight.”
Ellie and Stefan groaned, but this was the opportunity of a lifetime for all of them personally as well as for The Mysterious Investigators. “I’m gonna need like fifteen phone chargers,” Stefan said, “but I guess I can afford it now.”
~~~
Orville “Popcorn” Blum called on a student at the very back of the class, a tall troublemaker wearing one of the snapback hip-hop baseball caps even though school rules specifically banned such headwear inside the building. But Popcorn knew better than to challenge a student in front of his friends in an inner-city high school. Or anywhere else. Two other teachers had been forced to move to other schools after getting their faces pounded in by aggrieved “students,” and Popcorn was intent on not joining their ranks. “Yes, Marvin? I mean, ‘DJ Passport,’ did you have something to add regarding the slope of an angle?”
“It’s ‘DJ Pump-Pump,’ man, and hell, no, I don’t. I been meanin’ to ask forever—why you look like Fat Albert with glasses? A young brother wearin’ a red sweater and talkin’ ’bout X and Y? You an embarrassment.”
Popcorn—a nickname he enjoyed but never told another teacher at this “prison prep” school in deepest, darkest Detroit, let alone a student—was used to this by now. He was sick of it, but after he dumped a $2 million windfall into developing his own hyper-parallel quantum-based neural-net computer system and lost it all, Teach for America was the only job he could get that didn’t involve steaming milk for lattes. “That is an excellent question … which I’m not going to dignify with—”
The heavily scarred wooden door with a metal grill across what used to be a window swung open and a man and a woman, both dressed like Secret Service agents, stepped into the room. The woman asked crisply, “Orville Blum?”
The class exploded with riotous laughter. Literally riotous—they threw their already-tattered textbooks into the air, fell onto the cracked tile floor screaming with mirth, and knocked over desks in their spasmodic throes of disbelief at their teacher’s given name. Popcorn paid them no attention and answered the visitors, “I am he.”
If the students had been laughing before, now they were screaming and gasping for air.
“We represent an interest that would like to hire you to sail to an isolated island and run the technology for a historic scientific mission.”
He had felt excitement at the beginning of that sentence but was crestfallen by its end. He had once had a very bad experience on a research ship and vowed never to do it again, and he told this to the duo.
“We will pay you one hundred thousand dollars,” the man said, “in advance.”
That froze every student in place; money talked even when these kids would listen to nothing else. Popcorn looked at them and their surprised paralysis and, without another word, walked out of the classroom with the two agents. Before he went through the door, however, he called to ‘DJ Pump-Pump’ and said something so foul, so insulting, that Teach for America would have fired him on the spot no matter how desperate they were for bodies at the front of classrooms.
Marvin jumped to his feet and made to rush his teacher, but the female agent had her Glock out before he could take two steps. He immediately stopped cold. Once Popcorn was safely out of the room, the agent holstered her weapon and threw a gang sign at the humiliated student, one she knew would be effective judging by the colors of his clothing.
Popcorn saw this and realized he would have paid a hundred grand to witness it, and he had gotten it for free. Whatever this adventure was, boat or no boat, he was in.
~~~
The Slangkop II was a cargo and passenger ship registered out of South Africa that usually made the voyage from Cape Town to Tristan da Cunha only in spring each year, but Lathrop had been able to convince the vessel’s owners to make an extra trip. It would take five days by ship, which was an insane amount of time where the Organization was concerned, but the weapon couldn’t be yanked up by any helicopter that would fit inside the cargo hold of an airplane like when he and the troops were dropped into the Amazon to get Brett Russell. Besides, he had other assets, just not ones that were as likely to succeed as Russell and his party.
Lathrop had gotten the people Russell had asked for: Ellie White, her two fellow dipstick video documentarians, and the tech whiz-kid Popcorn Blum. Also on the ship, in addition to the twenty or so crew members and Captain Bantu, was Lathrop himself, Commander Crane, and Crane’s half a dozen commandos. Since the Slangkop II was built to carry one hundred Antarctic research station workers all around the South Atlantic in forty-six cabins, carrying just thirteen people in an addition to the crew made for a strangely quiet experience.
“It’s got a gym,” Commander Crane said to Lathrop as they stood on the deck, watching the steel gray water meet the steel gray sky. The entire vista was utterly featureless in every direction. They would be to the island in about six hours, but any sign of Queen Mary’s Peak had yet to appear.
“It has a library, too, not that you’d be interested in that,” Lathrop said. “I don’t know, maybe it has comic books you’d like.”
Crane faux-punched him in the arm like he was being ribbed by an
old pal. You’re not even a moron, Lathrop thought, but decided there was no reason to antagonize the muscle-laden man, who could probably kill him with a single real punch. “So we got a team in there already?”
We? Lathrop shook off the man’s presumption and answered, “As my superiors briefed me—and you, as you were in the room with your eyes open, at the very least—they were able to re-breach the opening that Merco discovered and had sealed to hide the weapon and himself.”
“Merco?”
Lathrop shut his eyes. “Doctor Merco,” he said. “The scientist we’re trying to recover?”
“Oh, right, I thought you meant somebody else.” Crane took a large bite out of one of the creatine energy bars he always seemed to have on his person. “They got in, but nobody’s heard from them since, huh?”
“That’s what they tell me, Commander. Thus, we are staging this incursion as if the earlier one had never taken place. Hence the redundant armory we carry with us. And hence the need for a ship with 10-ton winches. And hence why you and your men are here.” Lathrop didn’t really know why he was bothering to explain to Crane what the man already had been told—it would be lost again, most likely—but Brett Russell was certainly not speaking to someone he (correctly) suspected of still working for the Organization, and it had been almost five full days of dreary isolation. If an albatross had been following the ship, and not one bird or fish had been seen for two days, Lathrop probably would have been talking to that.
“Wait, you said re-breached? Like they had to reopen the mountain to get in again?”
Lathrop would have been more impressed, but Crane was, for all his apelike stupidity, an excellent paramilitary mercenary, and “breached” would be a word contained within his vocabulary of military verbs. “Yes, indeed. Apparently, Merco and whoever he was working with made sure to somehow close up the entry within the volcanic cone. How he did it is a complete mystery, although how where he gained entry was plainly visible to the team there before us as a large scar on the side of the mountain.”
Crane’s eyes narrowed a little, almost as if he were having a thought of some kind. “But, Mister Lathrop, aren’t volcanoes filled with lava? How can you open one up and get—”
“Don’t,” Lathrop said, and pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers. “Just … don’t. Suffice to say that the Tristan da Cunha volcano hasn’t blown since 1961. Besides, Organization scientists believe he went into the side of the volcano and down, perhaps under it. We lost radio contact with the first team as soon as they opened the scar and went in, which would happen if they were underground.”
“And never got out.”
Lathrop nodded. “A month would be a long time to be lounging on the beach on the Organization’s dime if they had gotten out, so yes, one must assume they’re still down there, dead or alive.”
“So … we could be killed, too.”
Is this guy serious? “Well, yes, Crane. If it weren’t dangerous, we wouldn’t need an extraction team with assault weapons and rocket-propelled grenades.” He watched it sink in to the mercenary, and it was more clear than ever why he and his impressive-looking band of soldiers of fortune had been drummed out of Special Ops: a soldier who didn’t know he could die was a soldier who endangered everyone around him. “And please refrain from the use of ‘we’ in this context; I shall be waiting upon the Slangkop for your return with the traitorous Doctor Merco. Probably in the library.”
Crane nodded, then after a moment let out a laugh the cause of which Lathrop was completely unable to discern. Crane said with another faux-punch in the arm, “You like comic books, too!”
~~~
It wasn’t until chow on the second day that Brett Russell ran into his ex-wife. He saw her first, or rather, he recognized her first, since the only way she looked different was that her chestnut hair was longer and, impossibly, she looked even more beautiful. Ellie looked almost straight at him but obviously didn’t realize who he was, probably because of the deep mahogany tan and huge muscles he had acquired after an additional year in the jungles of the Amazon. Lathrop intuited all of this merely by watching the two of them for a few moments, then filed it away in case he needed to use it for leverage of some kind later.
It was only when Lathrop cleared his throat to get the mess hall’s attention and introduced each member of their exploration party that Ellie sat suddenly straight at the table she shared with a tall blond and a short Indian and stared at Brett with her mouth agape. He laughed and gave her a little wave from across the compartment. When Lathrop finished his introductions, he started right into the briefing, but the wide smiles Ellie and Brett shared with each other didn’t stop the whole time.
“Lady and gentlemen, you are all being paid very handsomely to be here. Mister Russell is receiving something more valuable than mere financial reward for his role, but the rest of you are each to be paid one of the bearer bonds secreted in a vault back in Cape Town for your assistance in this affair: ten million dollars each.”
Despite the fact that every man present knew of his (and her) reward, many of them still whistled at the size of their payday. Lathrop would have smiled, but it wasn’t particularly amusing; he encountered people almost every day of his career who received similarly enormous payments for their cooperation with the Organization. And the Organization did pay—the fact that many recipients couldn’t handle that much wealth at once and ended up dead within two years required no effort by Lathrop’s employer. The $130 million that would be paid for this caper would be made back through the auction of Merco’s weapon within one month.
“With this much on the line, I trust you will each listen to the following with the care it deserves, as I have told none of you other than Commander Crane and his compatriots what you are to do for this money.”
He motioned for a slim woman Brett hadn’t seen all day on the ship—he hadn’t seen anyone, really, except for Popcorn, who hadn’t known Ellie at all but was excited to meet her—to come forward with a 55-inch television hooked up to a sleek laptop computer. She handed Lathrop a small remote control and stepped back into the shadows of the galley. In a moment, everyone there had forgotten she was there.
Lathrop turned on the television and, after a few clicks, a computer-generated map of the island appeared on the screen. “In whatever role assigned to you by Brett Russell, who is the leader of the civilian end of this expedition and requested you specifically, you will enter a subterranean area of unknown size in order to locate and retrieve—by force, if necessary—the former Organization scientist Doctor Gaffney Merco. His weapon, the size of which is also unknown, will be extracted with the good doctor and brought back to the ship, whereupon it will return to the mainland for transport back to Geneva, Switzerland. Is anyone here unaware of ‘the Organization’?”
The scowls Lathrop took in told him that everyone was familiar.
“I am a rogue agent of this world cabal, and getting Doctor Merco into my hands will be a great blow against the Organization.”
“Wait,” came a lummox voice from the table where the commandos were seated. It was Crane. “You’re not with them anymore? I thought you said—”
“For God’s sake, shut up, Commander.” He smoothed his tie and regained his composure. “You’ll have to forgive Commander Crane, who is the leader of the paramilitary end of the operation. He has the body of a god but the brain of a developmentally disabled insect.”
“There’s a gym here,” Crane said to the room.
“In any case, one does not advertise that he is ‘on the outs’ with the Organization, as several people on this very vessel can attest,” Lathrop said. “Believe me or don’t, it makes no difference to your role in this mission. I will be paying the bearer bonds and whatever other remuneration I previously arranged with Mister Russell, regardless.”
The burning look in Russell’s eyes made Lathrop very nearly gulp with anxiety, because of course he was lying. If he told the man the truth, Russell might hav
e just killed him in the Amazon on general principles even if it would cost him the opportunity to get the names of those who had ordered the hit on his wife and son, as well as those hired killers who carried out the murders. For this operation, however, that “might” was decisive; Lathrop was forced to risk having his neck broken by Brett Russell or not carry out the instructions of his superiors in the Organization. The latter was much more frightening to consider.
That in mind, Lathrop continued, “We will make landfall tonight. At first light tomorrow, you will proceed to the eponymous mountain of this volcanic island, Tristan da Cunha. There should be an opening in the cone where Doctor Merco and whatever gang of pacifists accompanied him entered the mountain.”
That took everyone in the compartment a moment, even the commandos who already knew about it. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Russell said, his voice louder with each repetition, “they went inside a volcano. From the side? That doesn’t make any sense. Yeah, volcanoes are basically hollow, but they’re not like an upside-down ice cream cone.”
“Of course that’s true with every volcano on Earth … except this one. Somehow—no one in the Organization knew how, or at least they didn’t tell me they knew—Merco discovered an entire subterranean world under the island, and he considered it the ideal place to live out the rest of his days so the weapon couldn’t be found and he couldn’t be forced to share the plans for the weapon with those who had paid for it.”
Lathrop realized he was sounding more sympathetic to the Organization than one who was trying to damage it would be, but he wasn’t terribly concerned about that at this point. What were they going to do, let Brett Russell keep them from their millions? He highly doubted that.
He went on: “Merco entered through the volcano as I have explained, but not before sending a long encoded message to his daughter back in Austria that described what he’d found and what he was doing, both with himself and with the superweapon he had developed and built using Organization funds. That’s how we know where he went.”