“Shit,” Kate said.
“Don’t you mean, Heil?” Michael said.
“It was supposed to be a vertical lift, long range stealth bomber,” Ted said. “Or so people think. Nobody’s laid eyes on an intact example.”
Michael noted that hundreds of bats still hung upside down from the underside of the Horten’s fuselage, clustered around a series of three thrusters. What surprised Michael was that despite being covered in guano, the Horten appeared amazingly well preserved. There were no visible rust spots or outward signs of decay, just the bat crap which he suspected was, at most, cosmetic. Michael eyed the Horten’s underbelly.
“There’s got to be a way in.”
“First things, first,” Ted said, pulling out his smartphone. “We need a record of what we’ve found here.”
Michael responded with a step forward, careful not to lose his footing in the calf-deep pool as he moved toward the underside of the airplane. As bats fluttered from their roost, he saw what looked like an egress on the underbelly of the fuselage, the smooth ridges of the gap between the door and its aperture as finely engineered as a classic Mercedes-Benz. Gazing upwards, Michael took another short step, locating the recessed handle that kept the door in place.
He reached up.
“Wait,” Kate said.
Michael paused, arm in the air.
“The plane was hidden here in wartime, remember. It could be booby trapped.”
Michael visually inspected the recessed stainless steel handle. If it had been tampered with he could see no sign of it. There were no external wires, no scratches or signs of forced entry. Of course Michael was the first to admit he was no expert in the art of booby trapping Nazi airplanes. It wasn’t long ago that the notion would have never crossed his mind. But now that he had to seriously consider the possibility that the thing might explode, he found himself rejecting the idea. Put it down to common sense. Explosives tended to destabilize over time. With the care taken in hiding the Horten, he doubted those who placed it here would risk an accidental detonation. They wanted to preserve it, not blow it up. Still, there was only one way to be sure.
“Michael.”
Michael ignored Kate and folded the handle down turning it clockwise. The mechanism was initially stiff but moved easily after the first quarter turn, responding with a smooth click. Michael thought about it for a moment. If he was wrong this would be his last moment of life. This would be when the whole thing went boom. But it didn’t. There was a delay of about a second, and then the hatch opened with a pneumatic whoosh, easing down on a single hydraulically dampened arm as easily as it might have the day it was manufactured. Michael expelled the breath he had been holding, tasting the metallic bitter of adrenalin on his tongue. He scanned the dark interior of the hatch with his headlamp. There was a telescopic ladder bolted there. He pulled downward.
The ladder smoothly extended several feet allowing Michael an easy climb up into the fuselage. Climbing pack tight to his back, his head now in the ladder well, the first thing he noticed was that the air was predictably acrid inside. Taken in conjunction with the absence of cobwebs, Michael had to assume that good old German engineering had prevailed, ensuring that the interior of the aircraft had remained hermetically sealed for decades. He started up the ladder well, his headlamp casting its beam on what he could only assume was the gray metallic interior of the cockpit. Then, finally poking his head into the cockpit above, he simply stopped.
It wasn’t the cockpit itself that threw him. The Horten’s cockpit was what might be expected from an antique aircraft: a cramped space, all dials and switches and two harnessed pilot’s seats. There was a control stick in front of each seat and a facetted windscreen provided a sweeping view over either wing, but again, it wasn’t the cockpit that threw him.
It was the corpse.
Laid out in the rear of the cockpit directly behind the pilots’ seats was a skeletal corpse, a molded rubber oxygen mask still strapped to its skull. The corpse’s hand was outstretched, a shrunken elastic layer of skin pasted over its dead bones. There was no sign of any clothing. Whoever it was had either been naked, or stripped after death. The corpse was lying in an act of supplication, almost as though the victim had begged for mercy in the moments before death.
Michael pulled himself up into the cockpit and once there he could clearly make out a bullet hole in the corpse’s skull. From what he knew of such things, he suspected that the lack of an exit wound indicated a small caliber weapon. In addition to the bullet hole, the blade of a bayonet was broken off at the blunt end and stuck directly through the corpse’s heart.
Then, adjusting his view downward, Michael saw what the corpse held in its hand. Within its cupped mummified fingers were a series of titanium rotors. He couldn’t immediately tell how many of them there were, but he knew exactly what they were for. Without a doubt, they were the missing element to the Purple Sky encryption device he carried in his backpack. As Kate had explained it, each of the three-inch rotors fit on a spindle on the back of the encryption device. They were used to mechanically scramble a message before it was transmitted. But they didn’t matter for the moment. Not right now.
What mattered was the tiny pendant held tightly in the corpse’s other hand. The pendant was small and silver and contained three small stars offset in a larger ring. It looked, Michael thought, like a misshapen face and its very presence filled him with dread. Because Michael had only ever seen one other pendant like it in his life. And it had hung around the neck of his father.
Chapter 41
Jackhammers continued to bite at the armored alcove, but Mobi paid them no heed. He had larger matters to attend to, namely each of JPL’s eighteen mainframe servers which were now under his command. Mobi fired code at them, his every instruction shooting through JPL’s eighty-five-foot antenna and into space at the speed of light. His aim was to shut down the targeting system aboard the DOD’s orbital platforms thereby rendering the weapons useless. Mobi’s concern was that, though the ASAT platforms might try to eliminate the Chinese satellite, the more likely scenario was an indirect hit that would breach the satellite’s core but not stop its reentry. The unknown effect of a cold fusion breach aside, the certain result would be the dispersal of atomized plutonium into the jet stream.
Such a dispersal meant that every man, woman and child on the planet would ingest a dangerous dose of radiation. Mobi knew in his gut there was a better way and if it meant sabotaging the Air Force’s ASAT efforts, so be it. But it didn’t take long for Mobi to grow concerned. There were two reasons for this. The first was another outgoing message to Xiyuan, China. Unlike the other messages, however, this one didn’t emerge from the JPL servers and it wasn’t encrypted. It was simply a routine e-mail sent to a numbered account that got caught and cached in Mobi’s wireless sniffer. The message read, “Problem solved.”
Since the message could have originated from any wireless device in the building, Mobi didn’t have a lot to go on, but he couldn’t say it left him feeling encouraged. It was the second development, however, that actually got Mobi worried: Rand’s men had suddenly stopped making any effort to re-establish communication with their platforms. No test transmissions, no pleas for the system to let them in, nothing. And that, Mobi realized, most likely meant that Rand had quietly transferred control of the platforms back to Colorado Springs.