Lethal Circuit (Michael Chase 1)

by Guignard, Lars

  Green limestone karsts towered above them as they followed Ester’s squeaky bicycle down the narrow dirt berm between rice paddies. Here, in the country, men and woman practiced agriculture as generations had before them. The rice, green in flooded mud flats, was still planted seedling by seedling, and it still needed to be tended by men and woman standing up to their thighs in muddy ooze. There was the odd nod to modern contrivance here and there: one man rode what looked like a paddle wheel equipped tricycle in the mud; another wore a “Nirvana” t-shirt, Kurt Cobain’s mug peering up from the rice shoots, but all in all, this pocket of paradise offered no hint of the modernity that lay just beyond its dew drop gates. It was a timeless China, a place of such serene bucolic wonder that it almost seemed self-evident that the weight of the world had never touched it and never would. Michael silently reminded himself that every place, no matter how beautiful, had its secrets, and it was the pursuit of those secrets that had led him here.

  With this in mind, Michael forced his mind back to the inscriptions rimming the capsule. Though varied in shape and appearance, they consistently returned to the motif of what looked like a broken horn, or in the lexicon of the regional topography: a crooked limestone karst. Of the sixteen engravings, the image of the crooked karst was repeated four times and for that reason, both Michael and Kate had agreed it was as good a place to start looking as any. Kate had shown Ester a digital photo of one of the engravings and Ester had vowed to take them there. It had been that simple.

  Regardless, even with a one-stop destination, Ester apparently had too much of the tour guide in her system to completely shirk her duties. She happily pointed out the sights along the way. There was the Moon Hill, a karst with a perfectly round opening naturally occurring at its peak. Not far beyond it was an ancient carved wooden bridge where the villagers were said to catch magical fish. Then came a cave spawning a tale of a hidden jade Buddha followed by a bend in the stream that was once home to a nesting dragon right out of the Chinese Brothers Grimm. Michael was convinced that the next sight would involve three Panda bears, porridge, and a hungry girl with long golden hair lost in the forest. Instead, Ester simply dismounted her bicycle.

  Ester said, “This is the place.”

  Michael immediately looked up. He saw it right away. They had stopped in a shadow at the base of what looked to be a crooked karst. It wasn’t a perfect match to the inscription, but it wasn‘t unlike it either and Michael reasoned that the next thing to do would be to thoroughly search the area. He thought Kate could accompany him and perhaps Ester could watch the bikes, but before he could articulate his plan, Ester began to speak.

  “I knew this crooked mountain from long ago. This is the place my mother lived.”

  It was then that Michael noticed several grave stones marking the sight, a tiny entrance to what appeared to be a limestone cave, visible through the thick foliage. A small brook ran close to the path here and Michael noticed that the karst, covered in emerald green trees, rose so steeply that standing in the shadow at its base as they were, the mountain was more like a skyscraper than any kind of natural formation. Once Michael had laid his bike in the grass, Ester continued.

  “When my mother was a small girl the Japanese soldiers came to our village. The soldiers were not good men. They gathered the men from the village to work on the railroad. The women, they made to work in the lady’s trade in Guilin. Do you know the lady’s trade? How do you say it, the brothel?”

  “Yes,” Kate said. “The brothel.”

  “My grandfather and grandmother brought my mother here to hide from them. They hid here in the caves inside this mountain for many weeks. Grandfather fished from this river and Grandmother brought water from those stones. They all lived in a cave, but for my mother, life was good.”

  Kate smiled and Ester continued.

  “Then the Japanese Colonel came. He was relaxing, taking his vacation in our Yangshuo mountains and he saw my grandfather catching fish. He knew that all the men were brought to Guilin, so he knew my grandfather could not be here. This made the Japanese Colonel very angry. He threatened to shoot my grandfather with his pistol. Then he saw my grandmother.”

  Ester looked away.

  “My grandmother had told my mother to stay very still in the cave. But the inside of the cave had many tunnels. My mother climbed to the top of this mountain to see why my grandmother had gone outside.” Ester pointed to a crag up the hill, an opening just visible in the cliff above. “She did not hear what my grandmother said to the Colonel, but the next moment there was a loud bang and my grandfather fell backwards into the stream. The Colonel took my grandmother by her long hair and led her away. My mother never saw her again.”

  Kate moved in and hugged Ester warmly, even as Michael stood inert, caught in the awkward zone between empathy for Ester’s plight and intimacy with a total stranger. Michael was, after all, no stranger to pain. He had lost, or at least he had thought he’d lost a father. Now he wasn’t so sure, but it didn’t mean he didn’t know Ester’s suffering. He may well have known it better than Kate. But that was beside the point. They had found what appeared to be the crooked karst. It was time to dig deeper.

  20

  MOBI’S EXCITEMENT AT the launch of the Chinese spacecraft had quickly morphed into something more closely approximating terror. Because the sky was falling. Literally. For reasons known only to the Chinese, the satellite had been launched into geosynchronous orbit above the continental USA. And that orbit was degrading. Rapidly. Alvarez told him that within hours after the launch it had become evident that the Chinese had lost control of their bird. There was chatter amongst the usual sources. There was a conspicuous silence on the diplomatic front. And perhaps most importantly, there was evidence, hard evidence from the Goldstone deep space antennae array, that the object was slowly but surely moving closer to Earth. At its current rate of orbital decay it would violently reenter the atmosphere within forty-six hours. How the cold fusion reactor would behave under the stresses of reentry was anybody’s guess. It might go pop or it might incinerate a city.

  To compound the problem, it wasn’t just the cold fusion issue that had Mobi concerned. The Chinese satellite was also believed to contain a secondary power source consisting of an isothermal coil and one hundred thirteen kilograms of enriched plutonium. True, these were only the Department of Defense’s estimates of what the satellite had onboard, but if they were even close to correct, an uncontrolled reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere would magnify the disaster.

  The icing on the cake as far as Mobi was concerned was that it had been made very clear to him that he was to tell no one and do nothing until he received further instruction. And that’s where Mobi drew the line. As far as he was concerned, Rand and Alvarez were the ones who had brought him into the loop. If they’d wanted someone to do nothing, they should have gotten another engineer.

  Given Mobi’s familiarity with the system, it didn’t take him long to find a backdoor into JPL’s Horten file. What shocked him was what he found when he got there. Instead of thirty-year-old notes on a historical oddity, Mobi was dumbfounded to discover that the file contained current engineering plans for a modern day reactor. The Horten cold fusion project which was, according to everything he’d ever read, mothballed in the eighties, was here, rendered in living color, the latest materials technology incorporated into its design. Whatever else it was, the Horten was an active project.

  What this meant was that neither Deputy Director Alvarez nor Rand had been straight with him. From Rand he expected it; Mobi doubted you got to be an Air Force Colonel without keeping secrets, especially an Air Force Colonel who suffered a brutal five day interrogation at the hands of the Chinese. But from Alvarez it was something else. She was a scientist, not a soldier. If she knew about the project she should have told him. After all, this wasn’t the kind of secret that didn’t have consequences. Lives were at stake. If the information in the Horten file was even indirectly applicable to the Chin
ese satellite, then Mobi might just have the tools he needed to avert a disaster. He decided that he’d deal with assigning blame later. All that mattered now was that he scour the data for some clue as to how to keep that bird in the sky.

  21

  ESTER’S EMERALD GREEN karst turned out to be a dead end. Though it was similar to the engraving on the capsule, when the engraving was superimposed over a photo of the real thing on Kate’s iPhone, it became apparent that the crooks in their peaks didn’t match up. In addition, the base of the real karst was wider. Regardless, they had entered the narrow opening of the cave on their hands and knees to be sure. There were a few charred animal bones and a fire pit on the damp dirt floor, but other than the narrow tunnel to the rock outcropping above, not much else. It was readily apparent that though what had happened here was tragic, it wasn’t what they were looking for.

  After looping back to Yangshuo on their bicycles, Michael had to admit that in spite of their failure, he’d had an invigorating day. It was true, Ester’s story had been sad, but Yangshuo's siren song landscape had been perfect, too perfect to merely shrug off. Under less pressing circumstances, Michael could imagine nothing better than a hot burger, a cold beer, and a long night’s sleep to end the day. As it was, however, there was still work to be done and after parting ways with Ester he found himself seated beside Kate at a busy café, reexamining the contents of Larry’s mobile phone. The video message was exactly as he had remembered it — his father standing in a cell halfway between a gray metal table and a tubular chair reciting a number which they now knew to be a waypoint. As before, a battered metal door was visible in one corner, but that was it. Kate checked it again, but other than the single video clip, the phone was empty. No agenda, no to do list. Nothing.

  “I had Six’s tech team run the last incoming call. It went to a Kowloon cell tower before bouncing across forty-four different servers on six continents. They’re working on it, but it looks like another dead end.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Michael said. “We have the engraving. That’s what we need to be looking at.”

  Kate was quiet as their waitress arrived, gently placing a glass bottle of Coke and a fruit smoothie on the teak table. A green karst rose above them, West Street just beginning to buzz with the evening dinner crowd, the first stars visible in the twilight.

  “It’s not enough.”

  “Not enough? You ever hear of Google Earth? It’s the twenty-first century. Your people don’t have topographical maps, satellite images we can compare this to?”

  “If it were only that simple.”

  “It is that simple. Pull out your iPhone.”

  “Did you forget the last time I pulled out my iPhone?” Kate said. “Unless there’s no alternative, we need to use hardwired ISPs. Besides, we’ve already tasked satellites over the area. What we need is ground-based photography. It’s all in the angles. We need a profile of the very top of the karst. The crook.”

  “So search databases. It’s not like this area hasn’t been photographed before. A photo of exactly what we’re looking for has to exist. We just need to find it.”

  “And we will,” Kate said. “Six is running through all known photographs of the region as we speak. But it takes time.”

  Michael cast his glance toward the jade green Li River where the cormorant fishermen were plying their trade. It was the most ingenious way of catching a fish that Michael had ever seen. They made the birds do the work. Literally. The fishermen sat on bamboo rafts shining lanterns into the river. They each held a cormorant tethered by a thin rope with a brass ring around its neck. When the fish showed up in the river, attracted by the light, the cormorant would dive in and catch it, happily giving up its catch for its master. Michael had to wonder whether the birds ever got to eat, but he admired the fishermen’s ingenuity just the same.

  “See those guys down there with the birds?”

  “The cormorant fishermen? They’ve been doing it that way forever. They say one guy with one good bird can feed his whole family.”

  “So maybe we should take a page from their book.”

  “You want to go fishing?”

  Michael took a pull on his Coke, the old glass bottle worn from being refilled a thousand times. “I want to work smart,” Michael said. “Those fishermen, they probably couldn’t catch a fish on their own if their life depended on it. But the bird, the bird knows how. If the Horten is hidden in these hills, it’s been here for a long time, but someone’s got to know about it. Maybe not Ester, but someone. Let your people work their satellite maps; we need to find someone who remembers where this thing is. We’ve got to find our bird.”

  Michael thought the analogy was apt, but more importantly, he believed it. As lovely as Yangshuo was, he had come here to find his father. They had a job to do and he wasn’t going to blow any more time wandering around without a well-reasoned strategy. They needed to find somebody who knew, a living memory to the location of the Horten. Michael reasoned that if he and Kate put their heads together, they could generate some idea as to where to find this person. But instead of an idea, they got an invasion.

  “Hi Ho, Mates!”

  Michael peered up from his drink to see Crust and crew fly in on rollerblades and broomsticks.

  “Was hoping we’d find you here,” Crust screamed as he did a pirouette around the table and plunked down in a free chair, Song and the Frenchman in tow. “We did Yangshuo on skates and tubes.”

  “Skates and what?” Michael asked, certain that tubes was some kind of backpacker vernacular for smoking the local weed.

  “Skates and tubes,” Song chimed in. She tossed her broomstick through the air like a spear, watching it land on the other side of the street, dead in the middle of a pile of inflated inner tubes. “We rode the current halfway down the river. You poke the broomsticks to keep clear of the buffalo.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “The river’s full of them,” Crust said, “always swimming from this side to that. How you doing, Kate?”

  The Frenchman smirked. “Kate, I think, is good.”

  Kate smiled. “I’m all right.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Crust said. “The thing is, I’m feeling bloody marvelous.”

  “Are you now?”

  Crust leaned back in his chair, and started unlacing his blades, Song and the Frenchman following his lead. Kate had a sly look on her face as though she knew what would be coming next.

  “I thought you guys weren’t into the whole Guilin Circuit?” Michael said.

  “Not into the Guilin circuit? My God, my American friend. Life itself is the nectar we poor pilgrims pull from the Guilin Circuit.” Crust stood up on his chair, taking a step above it onto the rough hewn teak table, thrusting his arms into the twilight like a burly messiah. “I have come to Guilin and learned to live.”

  On cue, Song and the Frenchman bent down on the ground on one knee like Knight’s Templar serving their one true king. Michael wasn’t quite sure how to react to the spectacle before him, but from the looks of Kate’s even response, she’d seen it all before.

  “A tad short on coin, Mr. Crust?”

  Crust immediately got down from the table, seating himself respectfully before them, his knights following suit.

  “A smidge. Johnny Dole’s caught in the post again.”

  Michael raised an eyebrow, but Kate seemed to know exactly what Crust was saying.

  “Are you two waiting on Johnny as well?”

  “We are, my lady,” Song and the Frenchman said in unison.

  A moment passed, just long enough for Crust’s broad smile to quiver, before Kate uttered the magic words. “Then let’s eat.”

  DINNER WAS A kaleidoscopic dream. Michael began the meal anxious to get back to work, but somewhere between a fettuccini Alfredo, several more Tsingtao Lagers, and a sampling of desserts, his anxiety morphed into a sense of general well-being. The atmosphere at the table combined with all manner of folk parading up an
d down West Street, the soft warm air, and the simple fact that Jimmy Buffett was crooning away, in China, seemed to catch up with him all at once. Unwilling to fight the sensation, Michael simply sat back and listened to Crust’s raspy voice drone on.

  “Now I’ve ridden some fine beasts in my time, some exemplary beasts, but none compare to the Bactrian humpback.”

  “You mean a whale?” Song asked.

  “A camel, of course, my good Madame. Depending where you are, you might be tempted to consider a dromedary, but don’t do it. It’s the Bactrian you want. The Bactrian pulls out all the stops.”

  “Is that the one with one hump or two?” Kate asked.

  “One big one. But it’s got nothing to do with the humps. When you’re talking camels it’s all personality. A Bactrian will go to the wall for you. He’ll let you ride him as long as you see fit and give you a lick of the tongue when you’re done. But a dromedary, those buggers are a mean lot. And stubborn. They’d just as soon spend the day sniffing shit as walking anywhere with you between their humps. Of course, when they decide to go, they can really move, but all the hemming and hawing in the interim; it’s not worth the stress.”

  “So do you do that a lot?” Michael said. “Transcontinental camel travel?”

  “When time and geography permit,” Crust said, taking another pull on his beer. “What you’ve really got to watch is that the big fellow doesn’t lick your knickers. You go home with camel slobber on your private parts and there’ll be hell to pay with the wife.”

  Kate snorted, trying to contain her laughter. “Please, Crust. You with a wife?”

  “It remains a possibility. When I settle down and make something of my life.”

  “You’ll never settle down.”

  “You mean I’ll never make something of my life.”