“Stop, stop!” Tom yelled. “The Secretary of Defense wants someone alive.”
The pilot took his thumb off the firing trigger. “Alpha One, cease fire.”
Tom stared at the decimated ground below and wondered if he’d spoken up too late. Was everyone already dead? Then two riders took off.
The pilot dropped their altitude until they were following from only twenty feet above. The two riders followed the line along the top of the mesa, racing from ledge to ledge like professional stuntmen.
The Black Hawk banked to the right of the riders, the downdraft of its rotary blades forcing the riders closer to the edge of the mesa and its 500-foot drop.
The riders had to lean to their right to stop their bikes being blown off the edge.
About five hundred feet ahead, two dark scars in the mesa suggested another large opening to a cave system. If the riders reached them, it would mean they’d have to go after them on foot – not a good option.
Tom said to the pilot, “Don’t let them reach the caves.”
“I’m on it.”
The pilot increased his speed, and banked into a large circular arc, coming to a hover a few feet off the ground in front of the openings to the caves and facing the riders directly. The two following Black Hawks moved in, with one to the side of the riders and another directly behind.
Red dust and debris rained down on the riders. The one in the lead looked like he’d been momentarily blinded. His bike hit a rock and started to fall toward the helicopter to his side. The Secretary of Defense’s pilot – concerned that the rider would be killed – banked to the right and gave him more room.
The instant the helicopter’s downdraft disappeared, the rider, no longer having to lean to the right to correct his balance, started to fall. He corrected it quickly, but in the process, he’d overcorrected and a split second later, his bike was heading straight off the mesa.
Tom swallowed as he watched the bike and rider fall into the darkness below.
The remaining rider slowed his motorcycle. He circled around, with his tire spinning heavily in the sandy red soil. Each of the three Black Hawks was now facing him. The rider’s helmet darted from each helicopter back to the 500-foot drop behind him, as he searched for an escape.
“I’ll be damned,” Tom said. “But I think he’s seriously contemplating suicide!”
The pilot said, “The Secretary of Defense is going to be pissed.”
Tom felt the bile churn in his stomach. He’d already seen her in a bad mood today, the last thing they needed was for this bastard to take his own life.
The rider started to rev his engine. His helmet darting between the helicopter Tom was in and the cliff to their right.
“I’m going to have to take him out if he comes at us,” the pilot said.
“I know.”
A moment later, the rider stopped. He stepped off his bike, letting it fall to the ground next to him and took off his helmet. His hands lifted in the air in surrender.
Chapter Sixty-Eight
The pilot put the helicopter down on the mesa.
The other two Black Hawks didn’t have any room to land, but Sam and the Secretary of Defense had been hot-dropped and were now making their way along the mesa to meet the rider who’d surrendered. Sam still carried his Kalashnikov and the Secretary was unarmed.
Tom swore. The rider was a trapped animal. His response would be unpredictable. Getting this close to the Secretary, he might just be willing to sacrifice his own life to attack her. Tom turned to the pilot. “Can I borrow your handgun?”
“It’s service issued. I’m not supposed to lend it to…”
“I get it. You’re also not supposed to let your Secretary of Defense get herself killed.”
The pilot handed him the pistol.
Tom took it. He glanced at the weapon, a Glock 17. Its box-magazine was full. Being a Glock, there was no safety to remove. “Thanks.”
He stepped out of the helicopter. The rotor blades spun slowly in silence above. He ducked and moved toward the rider. Taking a firing position, he aimed the Glock at the rider.
The Secretary spoke loudly. “Don’t move!”
The rider placed his hands on his head. “I don’t want any trouble. I’ll come with you willingly. But you have to promise me that you will protect me from my boss.”
“All right.” The Secretary smiled as she approached. “We’ll protect you, but we’re going to need answers.”
“What do you want to know?” the rider asked.
“Everything,” the Secretary answered.
The man’s voice was gentle and relaxed, as though he’d been relieved that it was now all over. “All right…”
A second later the rider fidgeted with his hands.
Tom fired three shots in an instant.
The 9x19 mm parabellum left the barrel at the speed of 1230 feet per second. One nicked the edge of the rider’s face, while the other two struck him just above his left eyebrow. The bullets ripped through his skull, rearranging the soft and vulnerable tissue of his cerebellum, before departing in a large exit wound to the back of his head.
The Secretary turned to face him. She didn’t need to check the body. It was obvious before the man hit the ground that he was dead.
“Tom Bower!” she snarled. “What the hell did you do that for? Did I not make myself clear that I needed to take one of the riders alive? I need answers, and you just killed my only source. What do you have to say for yourself?”
“You’re welcome.”
“What did you say?”
Sam bent down and rolled the man over. Still clenched in the rider’s right hand was a Russian Makarov pistol. The rider must have had it stored behind his head somehow, and was in the process of drawing the weapon to shoot her.
Tom smiled. “I said, you’re welcome, ma’am.”
“Thanks, Mr. Bower, for saving my life.” The slightest upward curl formed on the Secretary’s lips. Her eyes were defiant. “But I do wish you hadn’t quite killed him.”
Ten minutes later all three of the Black Hawks were back in the air. They flew west, rising over the escarpment and heading toward the coordinates for the ranch house. As they flew over the broken land, Tom noted a narrow canyon running north and south that looked as though it had been swept clean by a massive river.
“Look at that,” he remarked. “Wonder where the water went?”
They flew on. A few minutes later, Tom spotted something in the distance – a man walking along, out in the middle of nowhere. He was limping slightly. As they flew closer, he turned to look at the helicopter, raised his hands in the air and waved them up and down to his sides.
“He’s in trouble,” the pilot said. “Should we land?”
“I don’t see a weapon. Sure, take us down there,” Tom answered.
Moments later, they were on the ground. The man faced them. His clothes looked disheveled and his face bore the signs of more than a few days of hardship and suffering.
Tom looked at the man and grinned. “Brody Frost?”
“Yeah. How did you know?”
“There’s a woman named Jenn who’s worried sick about you.”
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Sam and Tom rejected the Secretary’s offer to fly them to a major airport, telling her that Ben Whitecloud had graciously offered them a meal and a place to sleep for the night. They were in need of a rest and the old ranch seemed like as good a place as any to achieve it.
As they pulled out their bedrolls, Tom looked at Sam. “What a day.”
“Yeah.”
Tom grinned. “I told you the Secretary would be pissed about the stone.”
Sam nodded. “You want to read the note again to ease your conscience for lying to her?”
He pulled out the note and read it again.
If you want the human race to survive, you need to convince the Secretary of Defense that this container was empty. The Death Stone needs to be removed in secret and examined
by an Astronomer who has no connection with the U.S. Government. He or she will be able to work out what the stone means and what needs to be done.
THEY are watching the Secretary of Defense.
What she did twenty years ago must be kept secret if you want her to live.
If you want anyone to live, you need to look to the stone for guidance. It has all the answers. Particularly the greatest one of all, for which THEY have killed to hide – how to save the human race from extinction.
“All right,” Tom said. “We continue with the plan.”
Over the course of the next two days Elise found them a retired professor of astronomy. The man, Douglas Capel, had once led the astrophysical research team at Mount Graham International Observatory, the largest land-based telescope in the States. He’d once gone up against Congress over the Strategic Defense Initiative known as Star Wars, during the Reagan administration – arguing that space should not be militarized, which suggested he couldn’t be bought by the government. He was retired, and as far as Elise could tell, had never received any government grants for his own research projects. Upon retiring, Capel had remained in Arizona, where he could still visit his precious observatory.
Sam contacted Capel, and the man had agreed to examine the stone. Over the course of the next two nights he and Tom drove the Humvee and the Death Stone the eleven-hour trip to Arizona, keeping off the well-traveled roads, by traveling via the backroads of several Indian reservations.
A total of five days after leaving the steam train behind on Cloud Ranch, Sam finally handed over the Death Stone and the note left by the dying man on board the Gordoye Dostizheniye. Capel was an older man of approximately seventy-five, with a warm and gregarious smile, and the unkempt, casual appearance of a man who knew that it was his intellect that people required, and his appearance made no difference. Despite his age, the man had clearly maintained a sharp edge, keeping up with the progress of the new, highly digital age.
Sam gave him money to hire a laboratory room at the University of Arizona and hundreds of hours on the submillimeter telescope and main binocular telescope at the MGIO site. The man warned him it might take months to have definitive answers, but he was confident he would find them.
They left Capel delighted to have a new project to work on and caught a commercial flight to Anchorage, Alaska, where the Maria Helena was refueling and taking on additional supplies. Back on board the Maria Helena, Sam set Elise the task of finding where the railway system they’d dubbed the Aleutian Portal eventually came out upon the Siberian Peninsula side of the Bering Strait.
Matthew walked into Elise’s office, took one glance at Sam’s hardened expression, fixed over the multiple array of computer screens displaying old railway trains, and said, “I guess the Queen Elizabeth Islands and polar ice caps are going to have to wait?”
Sam said, “Afraid so. Something’s come up.” He then turned to Elise. “The driver we met in the tunnel made a comment about his master owning the train before they’d discovered the Aleutian portal. Any chance we could find the train and the owner?”
“Sure. Do you have a photo of the train?”
“Yeah.” He took out his smartphone and emailed her a few photos. “The lighting’s pretty bad, but you can still make out the main shapes and there’s an image of the detailed coachwork inside what appeared to be the owner’s cabin.”
“Okay, let’s see what we can do with it.”
Elise opened the image Sam had emailed her of the front of the steam train they’d crossed the Aleutian Portal in. It could have been any late nineteenth century steam train, but then again, the carriages were clearly built for royalty.
She copied the image and set the search engine finding any matching shapes. These days the internet had so many images it could take days to scroll through all of them. Google came up with no precise matches, but her Boolean search on her own search engine that entered the Dark Net, returned one single article.
On the first page of the article, was a single red railway steam engine. Sam said, “That’s it!”
The article was written in Russian.
Sam said. “Can your computer translate that for us?”
Elise shook her head. “Only the basics. It’s nowhere near accurate enough to translate the oddities and nuances of the Russian language.”
“All right. I’ll go find Genevieve.”
He returned a couple minutes later with Genevieve and Tom.
Genevieve read the article, translating it to English as she went. “The train was originally made for Prince Aleksandr Baryatinsky in 1872. There’s little information about what the train was used for over the course of the next hundred years. There’s a side note that it was used during the Great War to mobilize people and armaments to the Eastern Front and then later, during World War TWO it was used to cart prisoners to the Gulag camps in Siberia.”
“Anything more recent?” Sam asked.
“In 1992 a wealthy businessman named Leo Botkin purchased the train and spent a fortune returning her to her former glory. Like many of the other oligarchs, his rapid accumulation of wealth occurred during the era of Russian privatization in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. He went on to become one of the richest men in Russia.”
“What did he do?”
“Not much by the looks of things. He owns real estate around the world and enough shares to command voting rights in some of the world’s biggest companies. He was one of the most powerful men in Russia until the early 2000s.”
“What happened then?” Sam asked.
“Nothing. There’s no note about his death. Instead it looks like he simply went into hiding, although from what, I can’t say. He owns a castle in the outskirts of Moscow, but hasn’t been seen there for nearly twenty years.”
“What about his train?”
Genevieve shrugged. “It says the train hasn’t been seen in Moscow for twenty years, but there’s stories of mysterious sightings throughout the Siberian Peninsula. But none of those can be confirmed. They’re mostly local people who have spoken about a mysterious steam train, with heavy smoke billowing from its boiler, seen making its way across the country tracks.”
Sam stared at the image of the train. It was definitely the same one. His eyes then fixed on the image of Leo Botkin. This was the man who had answers. Find him, and we’ll find out the secret to the Aleutian portal and why a gang of arms and drug traffickers were so focused on stealing the Death Stone.
Chapter Seventy
Washington, DC
It had been almost twenty years since she’d seen Leo Botkin.
Today they met at the West Potomac Park, overlooking the Jefferson Memorial. Japanese cherry trees lined the water, their foliage long past their April bloom. She chose the location, but the mere fact he accepted such a conspicuous meeting place in Washington showed how confident he’d become. People would almost certainly recognize him, but they too would be in his pocket.
He approached the park bench she’d been sitting on and pretended to admire the Jefferson Memorial.
“Madam Secretary,” he turned to face her. “May I please share this seat with you?”
“No, you may not.” Her voice was firm and pugnacious. “You can remain standing. I don’t intend to keep you here any longer than I have to.”
“As you wish, Margaret.”
It had been a long time since he’d called her that, too. She was surprised to see that the years had been so kind to him. Time had done little to diminish his intelligent good looks. Over his intense blue eyes, he now wore glasses, but they seemed only to add to his allure. His hair now showed minor graying around the sides, but had maintained its thickness from his youth. The arrogance was still there, too.
“So, the colony’s hiring mercenaries now, are they?”
“A necessary precaution, I’m afraid.” Botkin shrugged. “We are dealing with the ending of the world. It would be foolish to think those who weren’t invited w
ould simply stay out of our way.”
She ignored his narcissistic response. “New evidence suggests the Death Stone might hold the solution to the extinction of the human race.”
“We already have the solution.”
Her piercing green eyes focused on the monument ahead, and she wondered what Jefferson would think if he saw the great leaders of today. “One that doesn’t involve the death of all but a handful of the elite.”
He shrugged. “The Death Stone’s already been destroyed. You made sure of that twenty years ago, didn’t you?”
“You know damned well I never went through with it!” Her jaw was set hard, and her voice full of accusation as she spoke.
“Really?” She could hear the contempt in his voice. “You don’t say?”
“Instead I chose to have it stored away, hidden in a secret vault in the barren Siberian Peninsula. When Sam Reilly told me about a megalithic stone once found in Göbekli Tepe depicting a future comet that was predicted to end the human race, I put it all together. I ordered Ryan Balmain to return the stone so it can be properly examined.” She smiled. “That’s why you sent your pack of wild dogs to come after it once the Gordoye Dostizheniye sunk.”
“And now its buried under a mountain of stone debris.” He spoke with the indifference of a man who’d lost at a social game of cards. “Margaret. The colony has never forgotten what you’ve done for us. There will always be a place inside for you when the time comes. Why don’t you simply accept fate, and return to us?”
“I said it twenty years ago, and I’ll say it again now. I have no interest joining the last survivors of the human race. What possible benefit would I offer in the new world? All I know how to do is conduct war. I pray that if the human race does get a second chance, the first thing the survivors do isn’t prepare for war.”
“So, you’re not with us?”
“If the Master Builders knew about this cataclysmic event and had a solution, I’m willing to bet we’ll find the solution.”
“The Master Builders are dead. They died out more than a thousand years ago. Poor genetics, you see. They lived long lives, but it was a double-edged sword. The genetic trait that allowed them to live extraordinary long lives, rendered them close to infertile.”
The Sam Reilly Collection Volume 3 Page 49