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.
Chapter 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 Chinese 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.