The camera’s sensor adjusted to the sudden darkness and took a moment to reconfigure. When the view became clear again, they all gaped at what they were seeing.
“Is that what I think it is?” Linc said with wonder.
Gomez nodded. “That, my friends, is the largest passenger jet in the world. A double-decker Airbus A380, hidden on a tiny tropical island.”
The wings and fuselage of the gigantic plane stretched out into the jungle, fully intact. It was painted to resemble the surrounding plant life, and it didn’t look damaged.
“How could it have crashed and still look like that?” MacD said in awe.
“Because I don’t think it did crash,” Gomez said. “Let me just check something.”
While the drone maneuvered lower, Raven said, “Although I can’t imagine why, someone could have shipped it here.”
“I doubt it,” Gomez said. “This plane weighs six hundred thousand pounds empty, over a million fully loaded. It would take a mega-sized crane to lift that load. The Indian authorities would have noticed if something that big pulled up to this island, not to mention the huge barge you’d need to haul the airplane here.”
The drone descended until it was below the wings. The camera focused on the massive undercarriage. All twenty-two tires were fully inflated and supporting the plane’s weight. The engines seemed to be in good condition. The tail of the plane was only a few dozen yards from the beach.
Gomez flew the drone around the jet, and Juan could see that all of the trees on the side away from the beach were mature and real. No runway had been cleared in the jungle.
“If this plane wasn’t brought to the island by ship,” Juan said, “and it didn’t crash here . . .”
He looked at Gomez, who shook his head in amazement. “At a bare minimum, the A380 needs three-quarters of a mile of tarmac to safely touch down. Yet here it is without a scratch on it at the edge of a jungle on a tropical island. I don’t know how they did it, but someone landed this plane.”
SIXTEEN
INDIA
Fifty miles southeast of Mumbai on a thousand acres of heavily forested private property sat one of the few surviving remnants of Ashoka’s Mauryan Empire. A magnificent five-story stone fortress had been constructed around a central dome called a stupa, a temple that contained Buddhist relics. To the Nine Unknown, who had conducted their regular meetings at this location for more than two thousand years, it was simply called the Library.
The grounds were patrolled by elite guards paid equally by each of the Nine so that none of them would be beholden to any single member. Intruders were summarily executed, their bodies disposed of so that they were never seen again.
Unlike most forts, the Library had no visible gates. The outer wall, laid out in a perfect square, was one smooth surface for its entire perimeter. The fortress was surrounded by a vast moat that extended into an array of canals leading into the forest.
There were nine carefully hidden entrances, each of which was known only to the guards and one of the Nine Unknown. That way all of them could enter from a different direction without being seen by the others, and no one would see them arriving together.
Romir Mallik’s entrance was a quarter mile south of the fortress. He walked on a narrow dirt path toward the Library with Asad Torkan, who was intently peering at the fort as he tried to figure out how they were going to get in. It was his first time to a meeting of the Nine, and Mallik had withheld the secret of the entrance.
“You won’t even give me a hint?” Torkan asked. He seemed interested in the riddle about how to get in, but he was actually distracting himself about the potential fate of his twin.
Mallik admired Torkan’s effort to remain optimistic ever since they’d lost contact with his brother. But when the yacht reached the coordinates of the Triton Star, they found a U.S. destroyer in the vicinity and abandoned the rescue mission. Mallik assumed Rasul had been either captured or killed. His operation, however, had obviously been a success. The Americans were now fully invested in finding out who was responsible for the attack, exactly as Mallik had hoped they would be.
He smiled at his brother-in-law’s frustration about the entrance to the Library. “You’ll find out where it is soon enough.”
Torkan shook his head and kept looking.
A minute later the path descended to a canal and disappeared into the water. The path rose again on the other side. The width was too far to jump and no bridge spanned the canal. A square stone pillar four feet in height stood next to the path. It was capped with four lion heads, each facing out in a different direction. The only marking was a circle with nine spokes and a swastika in the center, the symbol of the Nine Unknown.
Torkan frowned and pointed to the symbol. “Did the Nazis build this?”
“The swastika is an ancient Buddhist emblem that Hitler corrupted for his own use. Notice that it’s a mirror image of the Nazi version. Its original meaning connotes good luck and harmony.”
“Does it also mean ‘swim’? Because it looks like that’s the only way we’re getting across.”
Mallik shook his head. “We are at the entrance.”
Torkan looked around in confusion, then at the distant fortress. “Here? I thought the entrance was some kind of secret door in the fortress wall that we’d take a boat to. We’re not even close to the wall yet.”
“It wouldn’t be well hidden if was easy to find.”
Torkan again looked at the pillar. “Then that has to be the door knocker.”
“In a way. Press the swastika. You’ll need to push hard.”
Torkan shoved his fist against the symbol. It sank into the pillar, and the four lion heads rose six inches from the top.
Torkan turned to Mallik with a puzzled expression when nothing happened. “Now what?”
“Turn the lion heads a quarter turn clockwise.”
Torkan did as instructed. When they reached a quarter rotation, there was an audible click, and they sank back into the pillar.
At the same time, the water in front of the path began to recede. In a few seconds, waterfalls were cascading over the top of two parallel stone walls that rose from the bottom, four feet apart on either side of the path. An unseen hole was draining the trench between the temporary dams. It looked as if the Red Sea were parting.
Soon it was clear that the path didn’t continue to the opposite bank. Instead, it led down to stairs that disappeared into a tunnel.
“Come on,” Mallik said as he stepped onto the wet stairway. “We’ll only have a minute when the water is completely drained. A float causes the outlet to be plugged again, and the water flowing over the dams will refill the opening quickly.”
He continued down the steps, followed by Torkan, until he reached the bottom level twenty feet below. They walked through a small foyer and then back up a few stairs to a corridor where a stone barrier was rising at the same rate as the water was filling the foyer. Soon the barrier would dovetail into a groove in the ceiling and seal off the corridor. A pillar identical to the one outside stood next to the moving wall.
“Is this how all the entrances work?” Torkan asked as the light from the exterior began to dim.
“I don’t know,” Mallik replied, activating the light on his cell phone to use as a flashlight. “In all my years as a member of the Nine, I’ve never been through another entrance.”
Torkan lit up his own phone, illuminating thousands of years of torch smoke caked on the ceiling, and they walked down the silent tunnel that seemed to stretch into infinity.
It took ten minutes before they saw a faint light that intensified until they reached a well-lit metal gate. A guard carrying an assault rifle was standing on the other side. No ID was requested. The guard recognized Mallik immediately and ordered the gate raised.
Mallik knew every inch of the fort’s interior and led Torkan through
a confusing series of corridors until they arrived at an archway decorated with another swastika. Two armed guards stood outside at attention.
Mallik and Torkan entered the center chamber of the fort directly under the domed stupa. A circular mahogany table sat in the middle. All but one of the nine seats were already occupied, and Mallik took the empty one. A single person stood behind every one of the Nine, since each could bring a lone companion into the Library with them.
Jason Wakefield was seated on one side of Mallik, and Lionel Gupta on the other. Wakefield, who seemed fully recovered from the fake kidnapping attempt that Mallik had set up, shook his hand, then nodded at Torkan. Gupta, on the other hand, didn’t even turn to greet him.
Xavier Carlton, who was sitting on the other side of the table with his assistant, Natalie Taylor, behind him, said, “Romir, good to see you.”
Mallik looked around the room, surprised to see that he was the last to arrive. He patted his pocket to reconfirm that the glass vial was still there. “Am I late?”
“Not at all. We just sat down. I was just introducing our newest member to the rest of the Nine.”
Carlton nodded at Pedro Neves, a Brazilian whose father had passed away six months ago. His family had been gifted with the scroll on diseases and now owned one of the biggest biotech companies in the world.
“Pedro, this is Romir Mallik,” Carlton said. “Bestowed with the cosmogony scroll and now heavily involved in the space industry. And you already know Gupta and Wakefield, who received the alchemy and communication scrolls, respectively.”
Carlton continued with the introductions. Boris Volanski was a Russian who’d inherited the physiology scroll, which had been the basis for the development of martial arts. Volanski now headed a military contracting firm in Moscow.
The last three of the Nine were Daniel Saidon, a Malaysian whose family had built Saidon Heavy Industries, based on the gravity scroll, and owned the Moretti Navi shipyard, where the Colossus ships were built; Melissa Valentine, an American who was the only woman in the Nine and CEO of an internet search firm developed after her ancestors had been given the scroll on the mysteries of light; and Hans Schultz, a banker from Switzerland, who held the scroll on sociology.
“Now that the pleasantries are concluded,” Carlton said, “I have a distinctly unpleasant matter to bring up.”
Mallik’s hand went to the vial again. Something was definitely wrong here. He could sense Torkan tensing behind him.
“As you all know, except perhaps Pedro, our colleague Boris Volanski is quite involved in the Russian arms and mercenary business and provides all of the security for the Colossus Project. In speaking with him earlier today, he gave me some disturbing information. Boris?”
Volanski, a dark-haired man in his sixties, leaned forward. “Through my sources, I found out that a stolen nerve agent shipment was used in the attack on the island of Diego Garcia. I don’t know who is responsible, but I believe they planted evidence to make it look as if the Nine were responsible.”
That set off murmurs around the table. Mallik joined in so that he wouldn’t draw attention to himself.
“How can you be sure?” Melissa Valentine asked.
“Because the chemical weapon used in the failed strike was one I had smuggled out of Russia. It’s a nerve agent called Novichok. I originally thought it went to the bottom of the sea in a shipwreck, but now I know that it was actually stolen from me.”
Mallik’s stomach went cold, but he gave the appearance of being as appalled as everyone else in the room.
“How could the evidence lead back to the Nine?” he asked.
“Not to the Nine Unknown, specifically,” Carlton said. “To Jhootha Island. The ship used to mount the attack was the Triton Star.”
Everyone exchanged worried glances. They all knew the Triton Star was the ship regularly used to supply the island.
“If the Americans were to invade the island and catch us by surprise,” Carlton continued, “they would have everything they need to learn about the Colossus initiative. Then all our work for a new dawn of humanity would be for nothing.”
“This is outrageous,” Daniel Saidon said. “First, the attack on the Colossus 5, then the attempted kidnapping of one of our own, and now this?” More angry grumbling around the table.
Carlton put up his hands to calm everyone. “It’s being taken care of. I’ve ordered the entire island to be erased per our emergency protocol. Even though it continues to contribute to the project, the island has largely served its purpose. By the end of the day, there will be nothing left.”
“Put together, all these incidents are disturbing,” Jason Wakefield said. “I believe that means there’s a traitor in our midst. What are we going to do about it?”
Instead of murmurs, now the table was deadly silent.
Carlton peered intently at Wakefield and said, “In all our two thousand years of history, we’ve never been required to eliminate one of our own. But now it looks like we will have to.”
Carlton turned his head toward Mallik, who froze. But Carlton kept turning until he focused on Lionel Gupta.
“What do you have to say for yourself, traitor?”
SEVENTEEN
JHOOTHA ISLAND
One thing Juan Cabrillo was sure of was that there were no indigenous peoples on the island, at least not anymore. Any organization that could somehow land an intact plane here wasn’t going to allow a few natives to get in their way. The only known missing A380 was Xavier Carlton’s private jet that disappeared eighteen months ago. Now they knew why it had never been found.
While Eddie, Linc, MacD, and Raven readied their gear, Juan had Linda dive the Gator and head to the part of the protective atoll that was nearest to the camouflaged airliner.
He was in the driver’s cupola with Linda when they arrived. The sun shone through the pristine water, playing along an underwater structure that definitely didn’t belong.
“You were right, Chairman,” Linda said. “Caissons are lined up perpendicular to the island as far as we can see.”
She piloted the Gator along a perfectly linear row of huge closely set concrete blocks, each the size of a house, that were resting on the ocean floor where coral had been blasted away. Each caisson was painted in a mottled pattern to resemble the reef so that it wouldn’t be recognized in any photos taken from the sky.
“That must have been how they landed the plane,” Juan said. “And they could double as a pier for the Triton Star.”
“You think these float?”
Juan pointed at a series of valves and hoses connecting the caissons. “All they had to do is pump air in or out to raise or lower it. A permanent pier would have been noticed during one of the Coast Guard’s random checks. If they raised this at night or under thick cloud cover, it would never be seen from the air. Not only that, it looks like it’s still being used.”
A series of parallel lines marred the random growth of algae on the surface of the nearest caisson.
“Tire tracks,” Linda said.
“They must have a vehicle for the cargo transfers. Those tracks can’t be more than a week old.”
“This structure has to be four thousand feet long,” Linda said with awe. “It must have cost a fortune to build. They’d have to ship these blocks in from another manufacturing site and install them at night.”
“Makes you wonder who would go to that much trouble.”
“And why.”
“Let’s find out,” Juan said. “Surface the boat as close to the island as you can get.”
As he got his own equipment ready, Juan told the others about the sunken runway.
“Someone really doesn’t want anyone to know about this island,” Linc said as he checked his P90 submachine gun.
“Good,” MacD said, “then they won’t be expecting us.” Instead of an automatic w
eapon like the others had, he carried a high-tech crossbow. In the stock, it had a small battery-powered cocking motor, which allowed for quick reload. It was the perfect weapon for silent attacks.
“Who was on the plane when it went down?” Raven asked while donning the same set of glasses that everyone else wore. A tiny screen displayed the feed from the drone’s camera.
Eddie answered, “Almost a hundred technology experts who had been attending a convention in Dubai. They were from some of the most prestigious companies and universities around the world.”
The drone feed clearly showed that a few pieces of the plane had been removed, and records revealed they matched exactly with the wreckage that had been found on the shores of Oman and Yemen. Those parts must have been chosen because the serial numbers would have confirmed that the missing airliner had gone down at sea.
“It’s been more than a year since they disappeared,” Gomez said. He was still operating the drone, keeping an eye on the island to make sure they weren’t being observed. “You think any of them are still alive?”
“At least some of them might be,” Juan said. “If the hijackers simply wanted to kill the passengers, they could have picked a lot less expensive way to do it.”
“Keeping them prisoners in huts on a deserted island?” MacD said. “Doesn’t make sense to me.”
“And what does all this have to do with the attack on Diego Garcia?” Raven wondered.
“All valid questions,” Eddie said to Juan with a smile.
“And maybe we’ll be able to answer some of them after we take a little walk around the island,” Juan replied. “Everyone ready?”
They all answered in the affirmative. Linda surfaced only fifty yards from the beach right next to one of the caissons. As usual for the tropics, a rain shower from an isolated cloud was drenching the island.
Juan waited a few minutes for the quick downpour to pass, then led the way out of the hatch and stepped into the water. Here, the top of the caisson was just three feet below the surface.
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