“I heard voices up here and it got me worried.” He indicated the first aid kit and said, “Thought the old man might need this.”
Crust explained that he too had been looking for them. Instead he had found Ted unconscious on the rooftop, blood seeping from the nasty gash on his head. Fearful of moving him, Crust did the next best thing and went to get medical help. Unfortunately, the best he could come up with was the first aid kit.
“You nearly shot me, sister! What are you doing with a gun?”
“Defending myself from crazy Ninjas.”
“People,” Ted said groggily, “this is beside the point.”
“He’s right,” Michael said. “Ted. Tell us what happened?”
“Let’s just say I ran into a problem with your friends from the bridge.”
“The thing I wanted to show you?” Michael said, careful not to give away specifics in front of Crust.
“Gone,” Ted said, wiping the blood from his forehead. “Tell me you had more luck than I did.”
Michael cast a glance at Crust and then thought to hell with it. He reached into his pocket and removed the platinum disc revealing the engraving of the double-peaked karst. Ted was silent for a long moment.
“Are you sure it’s genuine?”
“I’m sure.”
“Then we need to find out where it is.”
“There are over ten thousand peaks in the immediate area,” Kate said. “Just like with the first engraving, it’s going to take time to narrow it down.”
“I don’t think so,” Crust said.
Both Michael and Kate looked over their shoulders. “What do you mean?”
“All you need to do is float, brother.”
“Float?”
“Snag yourself a tube, a kayak, a sheep’s stomach if you prefer. Just float.”
“Why?”
“Because mate,” Crust said pointing at the platinum disc. “This gnarly mountain is about eight clicks down our lovely Li River.”
* * *
Huang and his subordinates watched the LCD screen blip from their safe house. He and his men had easily taken the metal capsule from the rooftop. With the American tagged it had been simple enough to find it. But analysis would have to wait. What Huang hadn’t expected was that after so many years of searching, events would progress so quickly. The American was once again on the move and needed to be followed. Huang reminded himself that this was a good thing. His sources told him that progress was being made with the errant satellite. If the American actually found what he was looking for here on the ground, they would capture both him and the Horten. If not, Huang knew he had already netted sufficient gains to impress his superiors. Either way, the American would lose and Huang would win.
* * *
After a chorus of thank yous and promises of yet another free meal, Crust, still a little leery of Kate and her sidearm, had gone happily on his way. Ted, however, insisted that he had recovered sufficiently from his concussion to continue on. As far as Ted was concerned, he may have been ambushed by the bad guys, but the game was far from over. After picking up several packs of equipment that he had procured after Michael had brought him up to speed the night before, they made their way down West Street to the Yangshuo river docks. The fishermen had already gone home for the evening so renting or bartering a vessel was out of the question. It was clear that if they wanted a boat, they’d simply have to take one.
Michael chose a blunt-nosed, flat-bottomed riverboat of about twenty-five feet in length with a small cabin above deck. As a rule Michael didn’t like to steal, but given the circumstances, he didn’t see the alternative. He managed to get the boat untied and with Kate’s help they quietly poled it into deeper water where the current quickly took hold. Michael had some experience with engines thanks to the Yellow Bomber dune buggy project with his dad, but it didn’t take much to get the motor going. After manually connecting two wires to complete an ignition circuit with the battery, the engine fired after the fourth or fifth attempt. Though it seemed like the motor might be creating more racket than it was thrust, soon there was a tiny froth of water at the stern and more importantly he was now able to steer.
Looking behind them, Michael saw that they had already rounded the bend, any sign of civilization lost to the lush green karsts lording over the river. Ted poked his head out of the cabin and took a seat beside him.
“I take it we’re clear?”
“So far.”
“So what do you say we take another look at what you found out there?”
Michael cast a glance down at Kate below deck as he removed the engraved platinum plate from his pocket. He carefully dipped it in the river, rubbing it with his thumb to remove the dried blood from its surface.
“One condition,” he said.
“Name it.”
“You tell me the whole truth about my father.”
Chapter 33
The sky darkened quickly now, towering limestone peaks throwing black shadows over the landscape. The river was narrower here, maybe a hundred feet across, their tiny boat swallowed by the enormous gorge, the bases of the karsts themselves forming the walls of the winding waterway. The drone of the boat’s engine reverberating off the rock walls accompanied them like an old friend, and though he tried to write the thought off as just another bad memory from high school, Michael felt like they were sailing into the heart of an immeasurable and immense darkness.
“The truth is your dad was a complicated man,” Ted said, toying with the platinum plate between thumb and forefinger. “More than that, he was a driven one. He pushed the recovery of the Horten long after it had lost its luster with management.” Ted looked directly to Kate. “He pushed it even after they took him off the mission.”
“So you’re saying he wasn’t supposed to be looking for it?”
“He wasn’t exactly off the reservation,” Ted said. “The Company gave him some latitude, but yeah, they would have preferred if he’d left the Horten alone for a lot of those years. Until recently that is.”
Michael held the tiller firmly in hand as the hulking karsts sailed slowly past like watchmen to the great beyond. He knew Ted would go on even if he didn’t ask the next question. He asked it anyway.
“What changed?”
“People started dying, that’s what.” Ted took a breath as Kate took a seat a few feet nearer. She was clearly as interested as Michael, if not more so. “Management started to pick up independent reports of what your dad had been telling them all along: that the recovery of the Horten was about more than just finding an old Nazi airplane. That the Horten’s cold fusion reactor was a source of clean energy that could make oil obsolete. That certain fringe groups were not only actively after the Horten, but they were willing to kill for it. And they weren’t willing to kill just anybody. They were willing to kill Americans. The Uruguayan embassy bombing really put one group in particular on the map. They call themselves the Green Dragons. We think they’re an offshoot of an earlier organization that came to prominence in wartime Japan.”
“They’re thought to be an evolution of the samurai groups,” Kate said. “We’ve heard rumors that the group still engages in sword making and, on occasion, in the ritual seppuku suicide ceremony, but none of that really tells us much. Pretty well every social structure in Japan is traced to the samurai in one way or another.”
Ted nodded. “She’s right. Other than that we don’t know a lot. Are the Green Dragons a terrorist organization? A quasi-religious order? Some type of multi-national investment group? We don’t know. What the chatter out there does tell us is that through a series of shell companies they appear to have acquired massive energy interests across the globe. Hydroelectric, coal, oil, even nuclear. They’ve been active since World War II, but they really started to roll in the energy sphere in the eighties, back when Japan was flush with cash.”