Black Sun: A Thriller (3 page)

“Where is it?” she asked Oco.

He pointed toward the summit. “At the top,” he said. “Hidden in the trees.”

They climbed the steep angle of the island’s slope, using the trees as handholds. They found the statue at the dead center. A great block of stone with the outline of a man carved into it, a Mayan king in full regalia. In his right hand he carried what looked like a net holding four stones. In his left was an orb of some kind. Hieroglyphic writing was scrawled across the bottom and a great snake twisted across the top, with its large open mouth stretching down as if to devour the king with a single bite.

“Ahau Balam,” McCarter said, reading the title glyphs. “The Jaguar King. Spirit guide of the Brotherhood.”

Oco, who was of Mayan descent, fell silent in awe. McCarter did likewise.

Danielle was more concerned with the danger closing in on them. From the sound she guessed that the helicopter was no more than three minutes away and that the men behind them had to be scrambling down the cliff by now.

“We need to get this information and disappear,” she said. “What do you see?”

McCarter studied the writing, eyes darting here and there. He touched one glyph and then another. He seemed confused.

“Professor?”

“I’m not sure,” he said.

The sound of the helicopter lumbered closer, growing into a baritone roar.

“We have two minutes,” she said. “Maybe less.”

He shook his head in disbelief. “There’s no story here. No explanation. It’s mostly just numbers.”

“Dates?”

“No. Just random numbers.”

Her mind reeled. She couldn’t believe what he was saying.

“Maybe if I—”

She cut him off. “No time.”

She pulled out her camera, snapped off a shot, and then checked the screen. The stone was so weathered that the glyphs didn’t come out clearly. She took another from a different angle, with a similar result. There just wasn’t enough definition.

The helicopter was closing in. She could hear the men on foot shouting as they came down the caldera’s embankment.

“It’s not clear enough,” she said.

McCarter stared at her for a second and then tore off his shirt, dropped to the base of the statue, and pressed it up against the raised hieroglyphs. Holding it there with one hand, he began rubbing fistfuls of the volcanic soil against the surface of the shirt. Oco helped him.

The helicopter thundered by overhead. Slowing and turning.
Looking for a place to land
. She thanked the heavens that there wasn’t one to be found.

She dropped down beside him to help. The shapes of the carving began to emerge, the edges and the details. It looked like a blurry charcoal drawing, but it was working.

As they worked, pine needles, leaves, and chaff began to swirl around them. The helicopter was moving in above, its downwash blasting everything about.

“That’s it,” she said. “No more time.”

McCarter rolled up the shirt and tucked it into his backpack while Danielle grabbed a large stone and began smashing the surface of the statue. The glyphs of the priceless work crumbled under the blows, shards flying like sparks from a grinding wheel.

Suddenly, weighted ropes dropped through the trees, unfurling like snakes.

“Run!” she shouted.

McCarter and Oco took off. Men clad in midnight blue slid down the ropes, crashing through the trees.

Danielle wheeled around, pulling out a Glock 9mm pistol. Before she could fire, two metal prongs hit her in the back, penetrating her shirt. A shock racked her body. She fell forward unable to move or even shout, crashing hard like a sack of flour and convulsing from the Taser.

Lying on her side, she saw Oco go over the edge and McCarter running after him, wires from the Taser darts trailing after him. He managed to dodge them, then lurched suddenly at the hammering of a submachine
gun. A spatter of blood flew and he went tumbling over the steep embankment.

The next moments were a blur. She tried to move, only to have another jolt from the Taser rack her body. As she was rolling on the ground, men surrounded her and zip-tied her wrists behind her back. All around the trees bent and whipped beneath the thunderous symphony of the helicopter’s downwash.

She glanced up. A dark shape filled a gap in the trees. It was a Sikorsky Skycrane, a huge beast, shaped like a hovering claw, with an empty space for a belly where it could secure incredible payloads. Tractor trailers and small tanks could be suspended beneath it. The thing would have no trouble with the stone monument.

Heavy chains dropped from the monster and were secured. The whirling blades roared, the chains snapped taught, and the statue was pulled free.

The man beside her grabbed a radio from his hip. “We have one of them,” he said.

He looked toward the rim over which McCarter and Oco had flown.

“The local boy got away. But the other one’s dead.”

Danielle’s heart fell; the words left her sick.

“Take her out past the mist,” she heard the guard say. “They’re going to drop a basket for her.”

Danielle was forced to stand and then dragged off. As she was pulled past the spot where McCarter had fallen, her legs nearly gave out. McCarter lay unmoving on his side, thirty feet down the steep slope, wrapped awkwardly around a tree. His back was bent at an impossible angle and his eyes remained open, staring lifelessly into the distance. His T-shirt was soaked with blood.

She hesitated, her legs feeling as if they might give out. A shove in the back sent her moving again.

Five minutes later she was in the cabin of the giant helicopter, the carved relic secured in the bay, with McCarter, Oco, and the Island of the Shroud disappearing far behind her.

P
rofessor McCarter lay unmoving on the black volcanic slope. His eyes were open and fixed, staring forward at the oddly tilted landscape. He’d tumbled down the slope of the wooded island, slamming the base of his spine against the tree. The backpack had flown out of his hand, disappearing farther down into the mist. McCarter himself had come to rest looking up the hill, watching as both Danielle and the statue were hauled away.

He lay motionless but not by choice. His body was numb and cold. He couldn’t feel his feet or legs or anything below his waist. He could barely feel the tips of his fingers. He could barely breathe. He couldn’t have called out for help, even if he’d wanted to.

Alone now, fear had begun to grip him. McCarter guessed that he was paralyzed, and to the men up the steep slope from him it must have looked as if he were dead.

He’d been hit in the leg. And though the flow had slowed quite a bit, McCarter had never seen so much blood.

And now he could feel nothing, even as blood followed
the course of gravity and seeped from his elevated leg up his torso and soaked his shirt. It was a strange thing to him: The mind worked, the mind attempted to make the limbs work, and when nothing happened the mind made its conclusions and rendered its report.

For several minutes he lay like that, wondering if his fate or Danielle’s was worse. But instead of his breathing growing weaker and coming to an end, he began to feel a dull sensation in his legs. It wasn’t pain, but an uncomfortable buzzing, like pins and needles.

It grew in shapeless waves and he soon found that he needed to attempt moving, just to fight against it. He rolled to his left and a tactile sense began returning to his hands.

With great effort he managed to untangle himself from the tree. The fact that he was not paralyzed was a great relief; the fact that he was in considerable and growing pain was the opposite. Stiff and weak, he crawled a few feet and then collapsed. He lay there for another minute, face pressed into the soil of the sloping ground, before finally raising his head.

Looking up the hill, he thought he saw a shape standing above him, the outline of a person, a woman.

He blinked to try and focus and the shadow was gone.

He tried to put the image down to his injured state, but it seemed real to him. Real enough that he attempted to scale the hill.

Crawling, he struggled upward, making progress for a few yards. But the slope was too steep for his weakened body, the footing too loose. It crumbled under his hands and he began to slide, first to his original position
and then farther down into the mist. A tumbling, unstoppable descent brought him down to the flatland at the water’s edge, right beside the backpack he’d lost half an hour before.

He looked at the pack tentatively and then pulled it to him, zipping the compartments shut and trying to thread an arm through its straps. Before he could succeed, the sound of movement in the water reached him.

It was Oco wading toward him.

“They took the statue,” Oco said. “In the helicopter. I saw them.”

“I know,” McCarter said. “We need to get help.”

With Oco’s assistance, he wrapped and dressed his wound and then pulled a satellite phone from its watertight container in his pack. He powered it up, giving thanks for the green light that told him the signal was getting through.

In his clouded mind, McCarter tried to remember what he was supposed to say, the acronyms Danielle had briefed him with over and over again. Terms and contingencies he didn’t want to think about, the worst of which had now come true.

He pressed the initiate button and waited for the satellite to link up. An answering voice came on the line, a staff member in a secured communications room in Washington, D.C.

McCarter needed someone of higher authority.

“This is Professor Michael McCarter,” he said. “Attached to Project Icarus. My code is seven, seven, four, tango, foxtrot. We’ve been attacked. Our status is Mercury. Now get me Arnold Moore.”

T
wenty-four hours and five thousand miles from where Professor McCarter had called, Arnold Moore, director of the NRI, waited. For the second time this day, he had bad news to deliver.

The first time had been to a former operative of his named Marcus Watson, who had left the NRI years prior. He now taught at Georgetown and was rumored to be engaged to Ms. Danielle Laidlaw.

Despite all the tact and promises Moore could offer, the meeting had ended in rage. “You had no right to ask her back,” Watson had insisted. “I told you that a year ago. God damn you, Arnold. You find her.”

Marcus had been dead set against Danielle going back to the NRI, and Moore had pushed every button he could think of to convince her to do so. The NRI was where she belonged, but that was not to be explained at a time such as this.

“You know I’ll do everything I can to find her,” he’d promised.

“And what if it’s not enough?” Marcus had said.

Moore had no answer for that. It was a contingency he did not want to consider. His old friend had stormed
off, slamming the door on his way out with such force that it shook the building.

Now, hours later, sitting in the Oval Office, smoothing his unruly gray hair, Moore waited on another old friend: the president of the United States.

Sitting behind the impressively large desk, the president ignored Moore for the moment, signing a series of papers one after the other.

Slightly older than Moore, with dark hair that the newspapers were desperate to prove was dyed, President Franklin Henderson had been Moore’s superior once before, twenty years earlier, when both of them worked at the State Department. They’d remained friends, if distant ones, ever since. Moore kept Henderson’s trust and respect, partially because he made it a rule never to ask his friend for anything—at least, that was, until now.

The president stacked the papers neatly for an aide to retrieve and then looked Moore in the eye.

“Can’t say I’m happy to see you,” the president began. “Every time you come up here you tell us things we don’t want to know. Why don’t you just stay over in Virginia, or better yet retire?”

“Mr. President, this is my retirement,” Moore said. “This is the reward, or perhaps the punishment, for thirty years of government service.”

“Well, from what I remember you’re not much of a golfer anyway.” The smile appeared as he finished, the same easy, confident smile that had touched so many voters during the election. The one that said,
It’s going to be all right
.

Unfortunately, Moore knew better. “Mr. President,
the NRI has a problem. Two, actually—maybe more. By my count they seem to be multiplying.”

The president looked around. “There’s a reason we’re the only ones here, Arnold. I was told you couldn’t give me any kind of prebriefing. I figured it was serious. What are we talking about?”

Moore pulled two sheets of paper from his briefcase. He placed them on the president’s desk. The first was a satellite photo depicting a fleet of Russian ships, steaming headlong through the Pacific toward Alaska. The second had multiple photos inset with text, showing similar movements from the Chinese navy and even a few merchant ships.

“I’ve seen these already,” the president said. “Talked them over with John Gillis this morning.” Gillis was the navy’s chief of staff. “It’s not like the Russians are going to invade Alaska with a couple of cruisers, a dozen destroyers, and a few reconnaissance aircraft. Nor are the Chinese.”

“I realize that,” Moore said. “It’s obviously not an invasion force. If you look carefully you’ll see that both groups are made up of fast ships only, and both began to fan out as they approached this point, here.” He touched the map indicating a spot in the Bering Sea, near the International Date Line.

“Gillis thinks they’re search parties,” the president said.

“I agree,” Moore said. “Which begs the question: What the hell are they searching for? Does the navy have any idea?”

The president glanced at the satellite photo but remained silent.

Moore pressed him; he needed the information. “Mr. President, I can find no evidence that anything went down in that part of the Bering Sea. No distress calls were recorded on the channels we monitor. There are no oil slicks or debris fields visible in the recon photos. Nor any heat spikes on the continuous infrared scans that would indicate an explosion. There is literally nothing to suggest that either side lost an aircraft or vessel of any kind. And yet both sides launched massive search parties within hours of each other.”