Alex had nothing to do, just paced back and forth on the patio, occasionally biting on her right index fingernail, so unsettled she couldn’t even sit down. How much longer would they have to wait? Were they still going to find the passengers alive? Or just piled up in a superficial mass grave somewhere? If the UNSUB had taken the plane to get a hold of nine neuroscientists, what about the rest of the people? What had become of them? If satellite scans failed, what other means would she have to find the missing XA233? Has she been wrong all this time, focusing on Russia? Had she been wasting time and people’s lives on her obsession with V? Damn waiting… There were too many questions and not enough answers, and it pissing her off. I hate this powerlessness shit, she thought. Now I’m almost like Lou, I just wanna shoot whoever took that damn plane.
“Hey, I got us a crew,” Lou said cheerfully, coming out in the backyard with some papers in his hand.
They gathered around him hastily. Finally, some damn news.
“OK, here it is,” Lou said, showing them his notes. “We have a crew of fourteen standing by, with two choppers, ready to fly in when we call them. They didn’t seem overly preoccupied with operating behind the Russian border.”
“American?” Alex asked. “Or Japanese?”
“American. There’s an American military base in Wakkanai, at the northern tip of the Japanese islands. These guys, Dark Ravens they’re called, are a contractor with troops over there. Starting tomorrow morning at 0600 they’re on the clock, and that’s costing us $160,000 a day, whether we use them or not.”
“Whoa,” Alex said.
“Doesn’t matter,” Blake dismissed her reaction to the cost of the operation. “I just wish we knew where to tell them to go.”
“Will fourteen be enough?” Alex asked, thinking of Lou’s estimation of potentially fifty armed forces working for the UNSUB.
After a quick moment of silence, he frowned a little, and then replied, “They’ll have to be.”
…38
Dr. Adenauer sat on a lab stool, hunched over the tile-covered table, rubbing his forehead obsessively. He couldn’t do what they asked; yet he had to. There was no way out. All these people were there, enduring captivity because of him, so if his soul was going to burn in the hell of his conscience, then so be it.
He stood and walked toward the cot where Declan Mallory lay, breathing shallowly and sweating profusely. The heat was unbearable; it was getting hotter from one day to the next, and that made it even worse for Mallory. Every breath he took must have been excruciatingly painful, regardless of the improvised pain medication they’d been able to offer. Luckily, so far there didn’t seem to be any evidence of internal bleeding, a common side effect of the type of trauma he’d been subjected to.
Dr. Adenauer summoned everyone to join him around Dr. Mallory’s cot.
“There’s no other option,” he spoke, his voice heavy with the burden of conscience. “We have to increase the strength of the compound.”
“No, you can’t do that!” Gary Davis said. “They’re people, for God’s sake; you can’t test that on people! You could kill them!”
Dr. Adenauer rubbed his creased forehead again.
“Don’t you think I know that?” he snapped. “I haven’t been able to think of anything else. But what you fail to understand is that if they decide we’re worthless to their… their quest for this drug, they will kill us all. All of us, including the hundreds of others who were on that plane. Everybody.”
His words fell heavy, bringing deafening silence with them. He knew he was right, and he knew he was the one who needed to make the difficult decisions the rest couldn’t stomach.
“Can’t we at least find a way to test safely?” Gary Davis insisted. “Can we ask for lab rats?”
That made sense; Adenauer had to admit, although the precise dosing of the compound in their makeshift lab would probably pose some issues. It did make sense, nevertheless.
He approached King Cobra, who was watching them from a distance, with his eyes half closed, succumbed to the heat.
“Tell your boss we need lab rats,” Adenauer said firmly, “and by that I mean rodents, not people.”
…39
Despite the very late hour, none of them felt anything but eager anticipation. Alex had been so anxious to get there after receiving the call, that she didn’t even replenish her coffee. She’d just grabbed her jacket and left, waiting for Blake and Lou with her engine running, muttering “C’mon, c’mon,” every ten seconds.
Now the three of them stood in front of DigiWorld’s huge screens, squinting hard and trying to see what the operator was saying.
“We’ve brought you here,” the operator said, “because we’ve captured an image, a ghost as we call it. See? It’s right here.”
They stared some more, but were unable to discern anything.
“It's a faint haze, almost thin as clouds, but the haze shown on the image is displayed in a pattern compatible with that of a plane,” the operator clarified. She looked very young for her job, but seemed sure of herself.
“Where?” Alex asked.
The operator moved her mouse and circled a certain area on the huge screen that showed a stretch of forested land with small puddles of water, maybe a swamp.
“Right here, see? This is where we think we have what we call a ghost pattern.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that while it’s not really the discernible image of a plane, this haze has a few points in common with the plane’s shape. It’s almost as if we captured the ghost of the plane… that’s why we call these types of images ghost patterns. They look like wisps of thin cloud. Umm… they look just like how ghosts are shown in the movies, but match the pattern, the shape of our search subject, the 747–400.”
She touched a few keys and grabbed the image of a 747–400 from a library of images. Then she rotated it a little around the horizontal and vertical axes, positioning it at a certain angle, then overlapped it on top of the ghost pattern she was seeing.
The screen flickered green dots where the two images matched. There were twelve green dots on the screen, blinking.
Blake was holding his breath. “What does this mean?” he asked, pointing at the screen.
“It means we’ve found your plane, Mr. Bernard. It’s hidden under something, it’s shallow, not buried deep, yet still hidden somehow. Because the plane itself is hollow, not solid, the resonance scanner sees it as a ghost pattern rather than a solid, well-contoured shape. But it’s there.”
“Bring the satellite to focus on that area, as close and high-res as possible,” Alex said. “Give me maximum zoom; let’s see what we can learn about that place. Lou,” she turned toward him, “can you see if there are any drones in Japan we could use? Maybe that military base has some?”
“I’m on it, boss,” he replied, yanking his cell phone out of his pocket and taking a few steps away to make his call without disturbing anyone. “If I remember correctly, NanoLance had a testing program in place in Japan, a dual research project on fully automated UCAVs. I happen to know some people,” he added with a wink, “I’ll make some calls.”
“Where exactly is this place?” Alex asked.