“There.”
Michael followed Kate’s gaze across the bow of the boat. Perhaps a hundred yards ahead, nestled into a sharp bend of the river sat the double peaked karst rising like the devil’s pitchfork out of the black waters of the Li.
Michael motored forward a few more yards before turning the tiller hard and cutting the engine. They drifted silently to shore, just the hint of the afterglow of a blood-orange sunset illuminating the loamy river bank. Thirty feet up the rough river beach stood the limestone walls of the double peaked karst. Michael hopped off the bow of the boat, pulling the long bowline up the bank to a crooked tree where he tied it off in a clove hitch. Kate followed Michael off the bow, Ted handing off a trio of climbing packs, each complete with a collapsible shovel bungeed to its back panel. Already, what ambient light was left in the sky had given way to a deep navy blue, the evening’s first stars twinkling above.
Michael pulled out his headlamp and turned his attention to the base of the looming karst. The thought of scaling a mountain, though, especially a lush mountain like this one brought back Peru. The kidnappers had abandoned their operation at the last moment and left him to die in that mineshaft. The physical toll as he perched there with burning legs and an aching back, the walls of the shaft pressing in all around him was one thing, and it was horrible. But what was worse was the mental torture. The doubt. What if his father, despite his best intentions, was just too late? It was the doubt that proved to be Michael’s worst demon.
Somehow, though, Michael had been able to summon a deep faith in his own ability to survive and he had hung on. When his desperately relieved father finally poked his head down the shaft, extending his arms downward, Michael wasn’t convinced that he wasn’t hallucinating. It was only the roar of the helicopter when he was dragged out of the shaft that had finally snapped him back to reality. Michael was choppered down the mountain and immediately given medical attention. Dehydration had taken its toll on him, but once he learned just how hard his father had worked to find him, Michael felt ashamed that he had ever doubted him. But despite his love for his dad, he also knew that he never wanted to have to rely on somebody else for his survival. To that end, Michael refused to give up doing what he loved. He camped, he climbed, in fact, he threw himself into it with a vengeance, just as he did the martial arts and every other aspect of his life. Michael made it his mission to do anything and everything to never be the victim again.
Two years after the ordeal, he had attempted a technical assault on a little known Rocky Mountain peak with some friends from college. This time the enemy wasn’t doubt, but bad weather. A storm had prevented them from reaching the summit, but he had learned something from the experience, and no matter how much he tried to suppress it, two things about his current situation gnawed at him: one, you didn’t try to scale several hundred unknown vertical feet in the middle of the night, and two, if you were foolish enough to try, you didn’t do it with people who weren’t climbers.
Michael was willing to throw the first point out the window because he saw little choice. This green karst was the key to what had happened to his father. The second point resolved itself with even less fanfare.
“Unbelievable,” Ted said.
There would be no need to climb the mountain. At least not in a technical sense. In a marvel of Chinese ingenuity, a network of bamboo ladders had been fastened to the rock, all the way up the face of the karst.
Michael remained incredulous. “Let’s rope together just the same,” he said. “It may be a ladder, but it’s a long way to the top.”
* * *
Li Tung toyed with the palm-sized detonator in his wrinkled hand. Despite the gravity of the situation ahead of him, he reasoned that he was nearer to happiness than despair. The American had left from the docks on a stolen riverboat not long before. Now, Li thought, if the risks of the next few hours could be adequately contained, he would be well on the way to achieving his goal. To that end Li quietly replaced the detonator in his pocket. He would remain guardedly optimistic, but cautious, always cautious. There was much yet to be done.
* * *
The bamboo ladder was cool to the touch in the night air. Michael estimated that he was already more than three quarters of the way up the karst, and though he didn’t glance below, he could hear both Kate and Ted on the rungs beneath him. He climbed two more rungs and made his way along a ledge of rock before taking hold of the next section of ladder. Whoever had installed this system had been thoughtful, but the more Michael thought about it, the more the ladders quietly crushed the hope he had felt not ten minutes before. A mountain that people would have seen from a passing boat was one thing, but a mountain so well traveled that it necessitated this kind of infrastructure was something else entirely. Nazi airplanes didn’t stay hidden for decades in well-traveled areas. The odds were just plain against it. And this was an airplane that had been the object of years of searching. To find it here, now, a convenient ladder leading to its final resting place would be beyond absurd.
And yet the platinum plate, the most compelling piece of evidence Michael had yet seen, had pointed here. Michael knew he had no choice but to press on. Reaching the top of the ladder, he stepped onto a rock ledge a couple of feet in width. This time, instead of proceeding along the ledge to what looked like the fourteenth and final ladder, he waited for Kate to show her head. “You ever play that game chutes and ladders?” Michael said.
“You mean the one where you roll the dice and you climb a ladder on the board, but if you hit a snake you go sliding back down?”
“That’s the one.”
“We call it Snakes and Ladders, but yeah, I played it when I was a kid. Why?”
“I don’t know. Fourteen ladders in a row,” Michael said, staring down at Ted below. “I can’t help but think we’re going to hit a snake.”
Chapter 36
Though the door of the alcove rattled in time with his aggressor’s fist, Mobi did his best to remain unperturbed. After twenty minutes of effort he had finally managed to get Quiann to pick up the phone and he wasn’t about to let the big bully outside ruin his moment.
“Hi, my name is Mobi Stearn. I’m a telecommunications engineer here at JPL in California.”
“Who is this that continues to call?” the heavily accented voice demanded.
“Dr. Mobi Stearn,” Mobi said, somewhat self-consciously. “Am I speaking with Dr. Jie Quiann?”
“Yes.”
“I have an urgent matter I’d like to discuss with you, sir.”
“Yes.” Quiann paused. “I see you are calling from Deputy Director Alvarez’s IP address.”
“Yeah. I can explain that.”
“I must speak directly to Deputy Director Alvarez.”
Mobi saw that making friends might be harder than he had anticipated. “Well that’s the thing, sir. She’s held up and I’m kind of your go-to guy here.”
Quiann lowered his voice. “I will speak only to Deputy Director Alvarez.”
Mobi could see the call was going nowhere. If he wanted to save the day he’d have to pull a rabbit out of a hat and he’d have to do it now. “Look, sir, we’ve got a reverse engineered cold fusion reactor with a secondary coil that’s about to spray plutonium over half of California and figuring you to be a nice guy, I’m guessing that isn’t the kind of thing you want to do. Now, I have no idea what kind of encryption algorithms you’ve tried to open COM with that thing and frankly I don’t care. I don’t think that’s the solution. What we need are the original Horten files. Our copies are missing anything to do with the radio gear and if we’re going to crack this thing, I need to start there and I need to start now. So what do you say? You want your next vacation to Disneyland to be in a Hazmat suit or do you want to dance?”