The Eye of God: A Sigma Force Novel sf-9 Read online

  Thinking quickly, Gray ripped off his night-vision gear, rushed back to the desk, and opened the bottom drawer. He grabbed the wolf mask and tugged it over his face. He snatched his pistol back off the desktop—just as the door was kicked open.

  As he turned, two men burst inside, submachine guns at their shoulders. Their flashlights blinded him, but the sight of the wolf mask startled them. Fear of its mysterious owner made them pause for a fraction of a heartbeat.

  Gray used it to place rounds in both of their heads.

  As their bodies fell, he leaped past them, stopping only long enough to trade his pistol for one of their weapons. With the mask still over his face, he burst out the door and slid down the stair’s railing to the main floor. Rounds ricocheted around him as he landed hard in the thinning pool of smoke.

  He crouched low as he fled, coming upon a guard running at him.

  The man’s eyes widened as the apparition of a wolf’s head appeared out of the pall before him. Gray cut him in half, firing at point-blank range.

  Only afterward did Gray realize why he’d run into the man.

  The firefight from a moment ago had gone silent.

  The guard had clearly been trying to escape.

  He found Seichan where he had left her. She was up on a knee, disheveled but unharmed. She swung toward him, and it took her a visible extra beat not to shoot him.

  He tugged off the mask and threw it aside.

  She scowled at him. “You truly have to stop wearing disguises, Gray. It’s very unhealthy for you.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll make sure you’re unarmed next Halloween.”

  4:52 P.M.

  Seichan assisted Gray in getting the blanket-wrapped box and satchel down into the steam tunnels. With the smoke down to a heavy haze, she kept watch, but it appeared any surviving guards had fled.

  Searching around, she noted the warehouse was stacked with boxes of dry goods, electronics, car parts, even baby formula. It seemed Batukhan had his fingers into many different pies, including hoarding foodstuffs in a city where many starved.

  She followed Gray below, back into the stink and the heat.

  He managed the box, crawling ahead, while she shouldered the duffel.

  Reaching a side tunnel, she spotted a familiar face shining back at her. Seichan paused, reached to her own head, and tossed over the night-vision goggles. They would be invaluable to a little girl trying to survive in this dark netherworld. But it wasn’t only this one child.

  Beyond the little one’s shoulder stirred more shadows, likely representing hundreds of other kids.

  Seichan pointed back to the ladder, to the wealth lying unguarded above.

  “Ð! Hãy! Nó là an toàn!” she called to them all. Go! Take! It is safe!

  With nothing more she could do, Seichan headed after Gray.

  She might not be able to change the world, but she could at least make this small part of it momentarily a little better.

  21

  November 19, 5:00 P.M. ULAT

  Khentii Mountains, Mongolia

  Jada and the others climbed out of the darkness and into the light.

  With the sun less than an hour from going down, the group had set a hard pace up the forested flank of the mountain. The upper peak blazed with the day’s last light, reflecting off snow and ice. The woods below—a mix of birch and pine—lay in deep shadows as night filled the lowlands.

  Wolves howled out of that rising darkness, accompanied by yipping echoes, welcoming the coming sunset. It seemed the Wolf Fang had not earned its name from its shape alone, but also from what haunted its slopes.

  Beyond the forest stretched the highland meadow they had crossed earlier. It seemed impossibly far below.

  Hard to believe we gained this much elevation.

  Jada thought she spotted movement down there, along the edge of a patch of dark woods, but as she strained to see what it was, it vanished.

  Shadows playing tricks . . .

  Duncan still had his ear cocked to the chorus of the neighboring woods. “The wolves. Will they attack people?”

  “Not unless provoked,” Sanjar said. “And seldom when faced by numbers such as ours. But it is the start of winter, and they are beginning to grow hungry.”

  Duncan plainly did not like that answer. “Then let’s keep going before we lose any more light.”

  “Why?” Sanjar pointed ahead. “We’re already here.”

  Jada swung in her saddle to return her attention forward, to this last island of daylight in the sea of night. They had reached a wide plateau, a giant’s step in the side of the mountain. The snow line began another thirty or forty yards upslope, but she saw no lake.

  “Where is it?” Duncan asked.

  “Around that tumble of boulders to the west,” Sanjar explained and trotted his horse in that direction, dragging them all with him.

  They circled past the old rockslide. It was a narrow squeeze between the pile of boulders and the edge of a steep cliff. Jada eyed the precarious stacking. It looked like an avalanche that had frozen in place, but more likely it had been there for centuries.

  Clearing the rockfall, they saw the plateau spread even wider on the far side. It dropped off to sheer cliffs to the left and rose into a snowy slope to the right. Filling most of the remainder of the space was a two-acre lake, a midnight blue to match the darkening skies, reflecting the few clouds. Its shoreline ran right up to the edge of the ice, suggesting the lake was fed by snowmelt, likely swelling in the spring to pour over that ledge into a glistening waterfall.

  Monk drew alongside her. “If something crashed here, it sure doesn’t look like it now.”

  He was right. It looked pristine, untouched.

  Khaidu had ridden ahead to the lake’s edge. She slid smoothly out of her saddle and walked her overheated horse to the water. Her mount dipped its nose as if to slake its thirst, but then tossed its head back and trotted back several steps. Khaidu steadied the mare with a firm hand on the lead, keeping it from retreating straight over the cliff.

  With a furrowed brow, Sanjar hopped down and handed Khaidu the reins of his own horse. He crossed to the shore and dipped his hand in the lake. He turned and gave them a wide-eyed look.

  “It’s warm . . .”

  Jada remembered the story from the eyewitness, the one who saw a fireball crash here. He had said it set the lake to boiling. It certainly wasn’t now, but Jada pictured the overheated metal slowly cooling in its depths. The lake must not have had time to fully cool back down yet.

  “It’s in there,” Duncan said, clearly coming to the same conclusion.

  “But how can we be sure?” Jada asked.

  Monk jumped off his horse and helped her down. “Looks like someone’s going to have to dive in there and take a look.”

  5:12 P.M.

  Duncan stood in his boxers at the edge of the lake. He shivered in the icy breeze sweeping down from the mountaintop. Having grown up mostly in the southern half of the United States, he was not a fan of cold weather.

  His family had moved almost yearly, across a swath of states: Georgia, North Carolina, Mississippi, Florida. Regularly switching jobs, his father shed his skin like a snake, mostly leaving his two sons to fend for themselves. It was why Duncan and his younger brother had grown so close. After Billy died, with their mother already long out of the picture, Duncan and his father had found themselves with nothing to hold their tiny family together. Unfettered, they spun coldly out of each other’s orbit. Estranged for years now, he didn’t even know where his father lived.

  “Can you hurry up?” Duncan asked, not wanting to dwell on that past.

  Jada knelt by an open laptop. “I just need an extra moment to finish setting up the feed.”

  Besides his boxers, Duncan also wore a headband equipped with a waterproof camera, radio, and LED light. A trailing length of antenna wire attached to a float would wirelessly transmit video back to the laptop.

  “Can you hear me?” she as
ked.

  He adjusted the radio earpiece. “Loud and clear.”

  Jada knew more about the satellite than anyone. She would follow his progress topside and communicate to him in an effort to guide his salvage operation.

  “Then we’re all set here,” Jada said.

  Monk stood beside Duncan. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  “I think it’s too late for that.”

  Duncan waded into the shallows, finding the water warm, welcomingly so. He leaped outward into a shallow dive. After the cold wind above, the water felt downright balmy. In the past, he had done some diving in Belize, where the sea was like bathwater. This was even warmer.

  He set off, swimming with long strokes across the surface, kicking hard. With a lake this large, it could take hours to explore fully, going grid by grid. Duncan decided to narrow his search by playing a kid’s game of hot and cold.

  Or in this case, warm and warmer.

  If the crashed satellite was down there, the waters closest to it were likely to be the hottest. So as he swam, he turned away whenever the water grew cooler and explored the warmest patches by diving deep, sweeping his light along the lake’s rocky bottom. He spotted some plump trout, someone’s lost boot, and lots of sweeping moss.

  Reaching a particularly hot spot in the lake, he took a big breath and dove, kicking his legs high to drive him deep. After he had gone down three meters, with his ears complaining of the water pressure, he spotted a flash below, something reflecting his light.

  “Turn more left,” Jada directed him in his ear, excitement in her voice.

  Following her order, he twisted and kicked himself farther in that direction. The beam lit the waters around him and speared deep to the bottom.

  And there it was, resting in a crater of blasted river rock, surrounded by a halo of slag metal and charred debris.

  The Eye of God.

  It was in utter ruin.

  5:34 P.M.

  Jada felt like crying.

  “There’s nothing left,” she mumbled to herself and to the others.

  Even with the poor reception, which only grew worse the deeper Duncan dove, she could tell there would be nothing to salvage here. The original satellite had been the size of a hot dog vendor’s cart, a beautiful synthesis of theory, engineering, and design.

  She stared at the shaky image on her laptop screen.

  All that was left was a scorched heap of wreckage the size of a minifridge. After the blazing heat of reentry, followed by the blast impact and water damage, all that remained was charred junk. She picked out a few details: a burned horizon sensor, a piece of the solar array melted into the outer casing, a shattered magnetometer. Any hope of recovering significant electronics or data was nil.

  She had to admit that to herself—and to Duncan.

  Needing air, he had resurfaced. He exploded from the lake, sluicing water from the hard planes of his body, his hair plastered to his head.

  But he already knew the truth.

  His face was a mask of defeat.

  She imagined her own looked no better.

  After coming so far, surviving so much . . .

  She shook her head. Worst of all, the wreckage held no hope for answers, no solutions to the catastrophe looming on the horizon.

  Duncan pointed his thumb down. “It’s resting about fifteen feet under me. I’m going to see if I can at least haul it up. I may have to do it piecemeal.”

  She recognized that the guy needed to do something to keep busy, anything to stanch the sense of defeat.

  “I’d better let Sigma command know,” Monk said, removing his satellite phone and stepping away to keep his grim conversation private.

  Sanjar and Khaidu hung near the cliff’s edge, sensing their disappointment.

  On the screen, Jada watched Duncan dive below again, kicking deep, reaching the satellite quickly. He tentatively reached his hands toward the wreckage, perhaps fearing it was still hot. As his fingers touched the outer casing, the image on the screen blacked out.

  Lifting her head, Jada checked the lake. The antenna float bobbed like normal on the surface. She should still be getting feed from below.

  “Duncan?” she radioed. “If you can hear me, I’ve lost the connection.”

  After another thirty seconds of silence, with the chop of the lake from his dive smoothing out, she grew concerned.

  She stood up, half turning and calling to Monk.

  “Something’s wrong.”

  5:38 P.M.

  As soon as Duncan’s fingers touched the wreckage, he felt a familiar tingle in his fingertips, that sense of something pushing back, even through the pressure at this depth. The warm water went cold as he recognized that oily, black feel to the energy signature, the same field as he had sensed emanating from the relics.

  If there was any question about the ancient cross being connected physically to the comet in some way, that was gone now. They clearly must share the same strange energy.

  Dark energy . . .

  He wanted to burst back up and tell Jada, but not without first recovering the remains of the satellite. He grabbed hold and tried to yank it up, but it wouldn’t budge. It seemed to be stuck to the rock beneath. He pictured its metal shell, still molten from the heat of reentry, cooling and fusing to the blasted rock.

  Frustrated, he passed his hands over the surface, noting a gradient to the energy field. It pushed stronger near one end than the other. Probing with his fingertips, he found a crack in the surface, the edge of a steel plate, curled and bent from the force of the impact.

  Maybe I could crack it open.

  He tried using his fingers, but he couldn’t get good leverage. Recognizing the futility and running out of air, he pushed off the bottom of the lake and shot back up.

  As he surfaced, taking in a big gulp of air, he saw Monk splashing into the water, fully clothed, a panic to his actions.

  “What are you doing?” he called to shore, treading water.

  Jada stood behind Monk. She lowered the hands that were at her throat. “We thought you were in trouble! We suddenly lost the feed and you were down there for so long—”

  “I’m fine.” He swam for shore. “Just need some tools!”

  Reaching the others, he began to rise out of the water, but the first frigid breeze drove him back into the warmth.

  “Pass me that small crowbar,” he said. “I’m going to attempt to crack through that hard shell and search inside.”

  Jada passed the length of steel to Monk, still knee-deep in water, who handed it to him.

  “Why?” she said. “Nothing significant could have survived.”

  “I’m feeling an electromagnetic signature off the wreckage. A strong one.”

  Her brow furrowed, her expression doubtful. “That’s impossible.”

  “My fingertips don’t lie. And I’m pretty sure I recognize the unique quality of this energy field.”

  He looked hard at her, lifting an eyebrow.

  “Like the relics?” Her eyes widened. “The skull and the book . . . ?”

  “Same damned signatures.”

  She took a step forward, looking ready to join him in the water. “Can you get the wreckage to shore?”

  “Not all of it. The majority of its shell is melted into the rock. But I think I can break it open and gut out whatever is inside.”

  “Do it,” she said.

  He saluted her with the crowbar and dove back down.

  5:42 P.M.

  With the sun below the horizon but the skies still glowing to the west, Jada crouched by her laptop. For some reason, the feed had resumed after Duncan had surfaced. She again watched him descend toward the wreckage.

  “Duncan, can you hear me?” she radioed, testing their connection.

  He gave her a thumbs-up.

  As he went deeper, the image on the screen grew sketchier, with pixel loss and cutouts.

  Could it be the presence of the wreckage?

  Urging caution, she tol
d him, “I think the energy field off the wreck might be interfering with the feed.”

  Monk shivered next to her in his wet clothes. “Tell him not to touch it. His ungrounded body might have acted like a conduit before and temporarily fritzed his gear.”

  He was right.

  “Duncan, keep back and let me see what you see. Show me where you feel the energy is the strongest, where you want to use the crowbar. We don’t want to damage anything that might prove vital later.”

  Hearing her, he shifted to one end of the crashed satellite and pointed the tip of his crowbar.

  “That end looks to be the main electronics module,” she radioed. “And you’re pointing to the thermal radiation door. If you can get it open, I can try to guide you from up here.”

  Duncan dug the end of the crowbar into a gap in the door.

  “Careful . . .”

  Using the steel bar as a fulcrum, he got his feet on the rock to either side of the wreckage—and heaved down. The thermal hatch resisted his efforts for a few seconds, then ripped away, flipping through the water.

  It took Duncan a moment to swim into proper position to point his camera into the innards of the crashed satellite.

  Again Jada felt a sink of defeat. All the electronics were charred, most of it melted into mounds of plastic, silicon, and fiber optics.

  On the screen, Duncan moved one hand over the inside, still careful not to touch anything. His finger pointed at one square object, a block of steel with visible hinges on one side. Protected by the bulk of the craft, it looked relatively intact. From the urgency of Duncan’s motion, it was clear he was trying to communicate.

  “That must be where the energy is the strongest,” Monk said, looking over her shoulder and apparently reading her mind.

  “Duncan, that’s the gyroscopic housing. If you can, try to keep it intact. It should only have a single fat cable running to it. If you can twist that off, it should lift free as a whole.”

  He gave her another thumbs-up and leaned the crowbar against the side of the satellite. He would need both hands free to pull this off.