Replica (3 page)

Jack walked to the sheared-off right wing, laying a good twenty yards from the plane's body. Circling the broken airfoil, he silently thanked the pilots for emptying the fuel tanks. The fact that the plane didn't become a fireball was the only good thing about the crash.

Jack made his way to the nose of the aircraft, wedged between two giant teak trees that finally stopped them. He surmised the front fuselage snapped in two just before this piece began its slide into the jungle, leaving rear passengers' half--his half--floating in the surf. Had this not been the case, Jack's fate would have been as bad as the birds that were smeared across the cockpit.

Jack stood and listened carefully.
Voices?

Yes! He heard voices.

C
APTAIN
H
AMMOND WALKED OUT OF
the sea and fell to his knees at the shoreline. He buried his face in his hands and sobbed. A few minutes later, with his breakdown over, he rose to his feet. Not being able to tell if the salt he tasted was from his tears or the seawater, the pilot wiped his hand across his face and walked slowly to the tree line. Smoldering pieces of the airliner littered the jungle floor. A row of seats dangled precariously from a huge rubber tree ten yards in front of him.

Hammond recalled the final seconds of their harrowing ride--the sound of the engines flaming out, the downward drag of the plane as the cockpit alarms went crazy, the bewildered look on his co-pilot's face in the final seconds--the sea getting bigger in the windshield.

Despite his years of flight experience, he was shocked to see the pieces of the plane spread out so far from the water. After all, the plane didn't explode and break up in mid-air. Still, there were fragments everywhere, and he found this odd based on his ditch approach. The last thing Hammond remembered before ditching was seeing the islands that hug the huge coastline of Australia.
This island could be one of several hundred uncharted islands off the mainland.

Hammond heard voices ahead and ran in their direction. Huddled together near a pile of luggage were a half-dozen people who looked like they'd just survived a nuclear bomb blast. Some had clothes hanging in tatters, and several had makeshift bandages wrapped around their wounds. He was relieved to see Tracy Mills, one of the flight attendants.

"Tracy, are you all right?"

Tracy nodded. "Captain. Is there anyone else--"

He looked at the ground as he answered, "I just don't know."

The cockpit sat twenty feet away, turned upright as if it had been dropped from the top of a building. Hammond clambered over to the cockpit, pushing aside debris.

"Help me, Tracy. Help me push this window out."

Hammond yanked on the windshield while Tracy used her foot to push on the window frame. It took every ounce of strength they had but finally, with a decisive crack, the windscreen gave way. The momentum caused Hammond to fall backwards onto the jungle floor.

Regrouping, Hammond went to the open cockpit window and forced himself to look inside.
Oh no!

The scene inside the cockpit made his heart sink. The copilot, First Officer Towson, hung upside down from his twisted seat. Hammond could only identify him from his uniform. The impact had split Towson's head down the middle and a grayish red jelly seeped from the gruesome wound. Hammond choked back bile.

Strengthening his resolve, Hammond reached across and grabbed the radio control. He started to say something into the microphone when he noticed
it.

Below the maze of switches and dials and digital readouts, a huge tangle of wires hung to the floor. Following the tangle of wires to the radio transceiver, he saw now it was hopeless. The radio was totally destroyed. He climbed down from the window and looked at Tracy and the rest of the group. He shook his head.

"Where the hell are we?" someone asked.

Wherever they were, Hammond's impression was this island was an alien, inhospitable place where time had stood still.
He definitely didn't want to be here for very long.

"I'm not sure, somewhere around the Java Sea, maybe the Banda Sea." Hammond said, though he was just guessing.

"Where the hell is that?" another demanded.

"Around Indonesia and East Timor, north of Australia," he answered, more confidently. Though he didn't know where
they
were, at least he knew where those seas were.

* * *

With Captain Greg Beard at the helm, the frigate Kanglour was churning toward a small chunk of land off the coast of the Indonesia. Beard studied the boat's GPS for a moment. This uncharted island was smack dab in the middle of the sector the AusSAR had given Beard hours earlier. This was also a sector that rattled Beard's nerves. Several ships had disappeared in the area over the last year, and Beard had heard some of his colleagues refer to it as The Pacific Triangle, relating it to the western version of the infamous Bermuda Triangle. Beard's superstitious musings were interrupted by his first mate, who hurried to the captain with his field glasses in hand.

"Skipper, there's a piece of a plane fuselage off the east end of the island."

"Can you make out any lettering?"

"Yeah. I'm afraid it's the one."

"Shit. Okay. Is there any sign of survivors?"

"Not so far."

"Get us in closer."

"Aye, Captain."

When the frigate neared the beach, Beard could see the mangled tail end of the jumbo jet rising out of the surf.

Jesus,
he thought,
all those people.

He scanned the surrounding area. Debris floated all around, yet he saw no bodies.
Not one.

* * *

By about two a.m., it had become clear to Buck Johnston and the rest of his team at AuSAR that the plane, if it had indeed ditched, must have done so further north of the mainland. They could do nothing more until sunrise.

Dawn was a somewhat nominal concept as it brought little more than a grey fog to the scattering of islands off the coast. Visibility was limited for the search planes. However, as the day progressed, boat patrols in a score of little islands off Tasmania reported no sightings of the 747. The islands that skirted the mainland were all remote inaccessible places, but too small to disguise an airliner.
Even one in pieces.

It began to look as though the ocean had just swallowed the jumbo jet
completely.
Worse yet, the frigate Kanglour had failed to report back, which left Johnston even more rattled. Besides his concerns for the airliner, two other ships had disappeared in as many years in that same sector, known as
The Pacific Triangle.
Johnson wasn't a gambling man but in this case, he'd stake his life that the plane, and maybe now another frigate, had become the latest victims of the triangle. Despair began to settle around Johnston like a descending mist.

P
ETER
C
ARLSON SAT IN THE
study of his suburban Washington, D.C. home, considering the worn parchment text in his lap. His grandfather had passed the ancient book on to him just hours before succumbing to lung cancer some twenty years ago. Peter was close to his grandfather. After his own father had walked off and left them, the elder Carlson raised Peter himself. Peter's mother had died when he was six. He barely remembered her, so his world revolved around his grandfather. He idolized him, and his life's work.

As Carlson scanned the worn pages, he could see his grandfather was not the quack some of the old man's former colleagues had accused him of being. In fact, the information was as clear as a bell to Peter Carlson.

In 1921, the Tasmanian tiger, a marsupial land cat native to the island of Tasmania, was hunted to extinction by mainland Australia. Though it was widely believed to be the result of over-hunting for sport, that wasn't the real reason they'd hunted the elusive mammals out of existence.

The Chinese had discovered that the liver of the Tasmanian tiger, when ground into a fine paste, could cure everything from impotence to cancer, and more. The Aborigines had been privy to this information for years, having lived for centuries among the animals in the dense jungles of Tasmania. When word got out to the rest of the world, every hunter with a rifle and a week's worth of supplies flocked to the dense jungles off the Australian coast, killing every Tasmanian tiger in sight. Medical companies paid big money to have a cache of Thylacine liver to experiment with and claim as the cure for this or that. It was something akin to the medicine sideshow of the eighteenth century where one elixir would cure all ills. But unlike the medicine shows, these substances from the tiger did indeed work, in the right hands. And therein lay the key;
the right hands.
Mucking up the works were the charlatans out to make a quick buck. Many had substances they claimed to be legitimate, but were usually acquired in the offal at the local butcher shop. Still others had the real thing but mishandled it, rendering it useless.

Enter Dr. Gregory Carlson, a biologist with an obsession about the Tasmanian tiger. In 1954, long after the remaining Thylacine supply dried up, Carlson led an expedition to island of Tasmania, a thousand kilometers south of Melbourne, Australia. Carlson was convinced there were still Thylacine tigers living on the dense, lush island. He planned to capture one, bring it back to the United States, and resurrect the supposedly extinct animal. However, after two months of giant mosquitoes, poisonous snakes and spiders, Carlson returned home, having never sighted the legendary beast. Disgraced and called a fool by his colleagues, Carlson never let go of his dream. In his later years, he reluctantly relented that there were no more Thylacines in Tasmania or anywhere else. However, with the advent of genetic engineering, his impossible dream was theoretically now possible. There was a fetal Tasmanian tiger specimen in the Australian Museum of Natural History. It would be a simple matter of capturing some DNA from the intact organs and cloning it using a close marsupial relative, the Tasmanian devil.

Peter could see, even if his peers couldn't, that Grandpa Carlson was way ahead of his time; genetic engineering was in its infancy at the time of his brainstorm. When he knew his days were numbered, he called his young grandson to his bedside and confided in him:
"If you do one thing in your whole life, Peter, do this. Take my records and study them. This holds the answer that can save thousands of lives. Finish what I cannot."

Now, as Peter Carlson pulled himself back from that long-forgotten time, he knew his grandfather was right. And so Peter had spent nearly his whole life researching mammal genetics with the hope of someday resurrecting a Thylacine, then extracting stem cells and synthesizing them to make a true cure-all formula.

Eventually, he'd read about another scientist in Australia pursuing the same quest. The article in National Geographic was about Michael Whiting's work with the specimen at The Natural History Museum in Sydney. It didn't surprise Peter that someone else had pursued it. Naturally intrigued, he delved deeper into the story and soon learned more than he'd ever expected about recovering DNA from extinct species.
Finally,
there was a chance.

Peter believed the key lie in his grandfather's research. He had written to the museum in Sydney, but the law firm representing it had put him in touch with a curator, who told him there was no such project at the museum. A year later, Peter discovered the true fate of the project, in a science journal. Dr. Whiting had indeed attempted to resurrect the Thylacine from a pup preserved in alcohol. However, midway through the project, they simply ran out of money.

Peter was not surprised, for that had been his experience as well. Despite his faith in his grandfather's conclusions, it was just too expensive. The equipment alone would run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. All his applications for grants had been turned down, and he got no further with private donors.

Throughout the ages, the debate has raged about whether there actually is such a thing as
fate.
Peter Carlson would argue strongly in favor. For just when Carlson was about scrap everything, someone stepped into the picture.

Someone with all the money in the world, and one dying son.

T
HE
A
USTRALIAN
M
USEUM OF
N
ATURAL
History in Sydney, Australia is the largest museum on the continent. Within its walls are some of the most extraordinary exhibits in the world, rivaling even the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. Even though Peter Carlson had been here on several occasions, he never failed to feel awestruck, knowing the secrets held in its walls. Today, however, exiting the taxi, he felt invigorated and oddly at ease, his feet almost weightless on the hot asphalt.

Carlson made his way up the stairs to the main entrance, sweat beading up on his brow. It was already over ninety degrees that morning, but some of the perspiration was no doubt due to nervousness.

After all, it wasn't every day you met the Prince of Dunali.

Carlson stepped inside and heaved a sigh, taking in the cool air of the museum. The first thing to greet Carlson was a gigantic skeleton of the prehistoric fish Eloxothopius. The cadre of bones was part of an exhibit aptly called
Skeletons
, which explored the differences between endoskeletons and exoskeletons.

Across the huge rotunda, Carlson could see the marine exhibit displaying some of the three hundred species of poisonous marine animals native to Australia. Grandfather Carlson had educated his young grandson in the dangers of Australian marine life at an early age. The elder Carlson had narrowly escaped with his life after a Great White shark attack. Two hundred stitches closed the wound above his kidneys and the months of rehab had cost him precious time away from his search for a living Thylacine. Carlson had never forgotten what his grandfather had told him:
Stay out of the water if you go to Australia.