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

  Again, as his fingers touched the housing, the feed went dead.

  Jada shared a look with Monk—then they both stared toward the lake. If Jada’s theories of dark energy were correct, Duncan could be about to wrestle with the very fires that fueled the universe.

  Be careful . . .

  5:44 P.M.

  Running out of air, Duncan fought both the satellite and his own revulsion. Stubborn piece of—

  He wasn’t prone to swearing, but between the melted slag that trapped the gyroscopic casing and the repellent touch to its energy field, it felt as if he were trying to unscrew a pickle jar while his fingers squirmed in electrified gel.

  As soon as he had popped the hatch in the back of the satellite, the EM field had surged stronger, pushing like steam out of its scorched interior, rising from this steel heart. When he touched the housing, his fingertips felt as if they were pushing through mud. The energy field resisted him, or at least it registered as such to his magnetic sixth sense.

  When his fingers finally made contact, it was indescribable. During his training as an electrical engineer, he’d brushed against a live wire or two. But this was no bite of copper. It was more like touching an electric eel. The energy had a distinct living feel to it.

  It set his hairs on end.

  Finally, with a savage twist of its half-melted cabling, he broke the housing free. He lifted it out, as if removing its power core, and kicked off for the surface, anxious to be rid of it.

  Reaching the surface and fresh air, Duncan breathed heavily and kicked for shore. He carried the gyroscopic housing in one large hand, as if palming a basketball, a ball he was more than happy to pass off to a fellow player.

  5:47 P.M.

  Jada waited for Duncan at the edge of the lake, carrying a blanket in one hand. As he reached the shore, he shoved up, dripping wet, his tattoos bright against his chilled flesh, covering his shoulders and down his arms.

  Clicking off his headlamp, he fell into shadows. Focused on the laptop, she hadn’t realized it had already gotten so dark. Night did not waste any time falling at these elevations.

  Duncan waded out of the lake. She traded her warm blanket for his steel prize.

  “Why is this so important?” he asked, his teeth chattering a bit.

  “I’ll show you.”

  She moved to her makeshift desk, basically a flat boulder holding her laptop, and placed the housing down.

  She explained, “If this is giving off the same electromagnetic signature as the relics, it must be tied to the comet’s corona of dark energy. If I could get this to a lab and properly study it, I might be able to get some real answers.”

  She glanced significantly at Monk.

  “On it,” he said. “Kat will get us back to the States by the fastest route possible.”

  Jada spoke as he raised his satellite phone. “We’re already this far east. It’ll be quicker to reach my labs at the Space and Missile Systems Center in L.A. I’ve got everything I need to do a complete analysis there, plus access to engineers and techs familiar with my research. If there are any solutions to our problems, my best chance to discover them is there.”

  Monk frowned, as if disagreeing with her, but that was not the source of his consternation. It was his satellite phone. “Can’t get any signal now . . .”

  “Might be the energy given off by this thing,” she realized aloud. She pointed him toward the neighboring rock pile. “Try farther away. I’ll have to figure out a way to insulate this if we’re going to travel by air.”

  Duncan crouched next to her, back in his clothes after drying off. “I ran a hand over the remainder of the wreckage after yanking that thing out. I couldn’t feel any trace of the energy left in the satellite. It all seemed to be emanating from that housing.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Why?”

  “This is the heart of the Eye of God, its very namesake.”

  She shifted her attention back to the housing. She searched along its sides until she found a small latch and undid it. With great care, she broke the case open, the two halves hinging apart to reveal what it protected.

  Duncan leaned closer.

  Seated inside, reflecting the glow from the laptop, was a sphere of quartz about the size of a softball. Though you couldn’t tell from looking at it, the sphere was virtually flawless.

  “This is the gyroscope that spun in the heart of the satellite,” she explained. “We used it to measure the curve of space-time around the earth during our experiment.”

  “But why is it charged with energy now?”

  “I’ll need to do a hundred tests to confirm it, but I have an idea. As it was spinning out there, measuring the curve of space-time, it monitored the wrinkle that formed. I believe the stream of dark energy that created that wrinkle flowed along that crease and poured into the eye of the only observer.”

  “The crystal sphere.”

  “Turning it into a true Eye of God.”

  “But how does that help us?”

  “If we could—”

  A strange whistling noise drew both their eyes—followed by a thunk of something striking flesh.

  Khaidu sank to her knees, her back to the cliff.

  Her hands found her belly.

  And the steel arrowhead sticking out from there.

  22

  November 19, 5:55 P.M. ULAT

  Ulan Bator, Mongolia

  Vigor paced around the conference table in the hotel suite, his heart thudding tiredly, his eyes sore. For the past hour, he had been balanced between jubilation at Gray’s recovery of the relics and frustration at his inability to solve the eight-hundred-year-old mystery.

  The focus of everyone’s attention rested in the middle of the table: the macabre sailing ship made of bones and tanned skin.

  Vigor had spent a solid hour with magnifying loupe in hand, poring over the relic that they had recovered from the Aral Sea. He could still smell the salt off the tarnished silver box sitting next to it, a bitter reminder of the loss of his friend.

  Josip had sacrificed everything to uncover this artifact.

  And to what end?

  After an hour of study, Vigor had come to no firm conclusions, except a deep respect for the artisan. The rib bones of the hull had been boiled and bleached to make them easier to carve. Intricate waves had been scrimshawed into them, along with a plethora of fish, birds, even seals, the latter of which frolicked in the sea and leaped high out of the water. The sails were rigged with twisted human hair and ribbed in the traditional manner of Chinese junks of the Song dynasty, an era that matched Genghis Khan’s time period.

  But what did it all mean? Where was this bread crumb supposed to lead them? To solve that, he had a laptop open on the table, where he had been researching anything and everything that might offer a clue. But he had hit dead end after dead end.

  Everyone around the table looked to him to solve this mystery, but maybe it was beyond him. He wished for the hundredth time that Josip were here. He needed his friend’s mad genius now more than ever.

  Gray spoke up, seated beside Seichan. “Since it’s a Chinese ship, it must be pointing to somewhere in China.”

  “Not necessarily. Genghis was a great admirer of the science and technology of the nations he conquered. He absorbed and incorporated whatever he found, from Chinese gunpowder to the compass and the abacus. He certainly would appreciate such boat-making skills.”

  “Still, it is a fishing boat,” Gray continued, pointing out the details of the scrimshaw. “Doesn’t that suggest the hiding place is somewhere along the Pacific Ocean or the Yellow Sea?”

  “I agree. And that coast does mark the easternmost reach of Genghis’s empire.”

  Josip’s earlier words played again in his head.

  I believe Genghis had instructed his son to turn the entire known world into his grave, to spread his spiritual reach from one end of the Mongol Empire to the other.

  His friend was right. Genghis’s hea
d had been ceremonially buried in Hungary, representing the westernmost reach of his son’s empire. Then the bone ship was hidden in the Aral Sea, marking the western edge of Genghis’s conquered territory. So it only made sense that the next spot would be along that eastern edge.

  There was only one problem, and Vigor voiced it aloud.

  “If we’re right, that’s nearly a thousand miles of coastline. Where do we even begin to look?”

  Rachel stirred on the opposite side of the table. “Maybe we need a break. To clear our heads and start again fresh.”

  “We don’t have the time to spare,” Vigor snapped back at her, but he regretted his tone immediately and patted her shoulder in apology as he passed by her while continuing to pace.

  Something kept nagging at him and wouldn’t let him sit still. Then contrarily, the stitch in his abdomen flared with every step, making it harder to think.

  Maybe Rachel is right. A little rest might be a good idea.

  Gray frowned and tried talking it out. “They buried his head in Hungary, and I guess, because the ship is made of rib bones and vertebrae, it represents his chest.”

  “Or more likely his heart,” Vigor corrected, that nagging feeling flaring as he said that.

  “Head and heart,” Kowalski mumbled. He was sprawled on a neighboring couch, an arm over his eyes. “Guess that means all we have to do is find this guy’s feet.”

  Vigor shrugged. That actually sounded right.

  Head, heart, feet.

  Josip’s words repeated yet again.

  . . . spread his spiritual reach from one end of the Mongol Empire to the other.

  Vigor stopped so fast he had to steady himself on the back of an empty chair. He suddenly realized that it wasn’t Josip’s words that he should have been paying attention to.

  “You smart, crazy man,” he mumbled. “I’ve been such a fool.”

  No wonder Josip had looked so full of regret as he died. It wasn’t because his friend couldn’t finish this journey—though that was likely part of it—but because he had recognized the lack of understanding in Vigor’s eyes.

  “He figured it out!” Vigor exclaimed.

  “What do you mean?” Rachel asked. “Are you talking about Father Josip?”

  Vigor placed his palm over his heart, feeling it beat. Josip had taken that same hand and put it on his own bloody chest—not just to say good-bye, but to communicate in the only way he could at the end, to offer a clue before he died.

  “Head, heart, feet,” he repeated, patting his own chest as he emphasized the middle note of the chorus. “We’ve been looking at this all wrong.”

  Rachel shifted straighter. “How?”

  “The head marked the boundary of his son’s empire, representing the future of the Mongol Empire after his death. The heart embodied the empire of Genghis’s own lifetime, of his present. What we need to be looking for next is a marker where Genghis first put his feet down and made a name for himself, symbolizing his past.”

  “Head, heart, feet,” Gray said. “Future, present, past.”

  Vigor nodded, slipping back to his chair in front of the open laptop. “Genghis didn’t instruct his son to spread his body from one end of the empire to the other geographically. He wanted it spread from his empire’s past to its future.”

  Rachel reached over and squeezed his arm. “Brilliant.”

  “Don’t use that word yet.” He tapped at the computer. “Right now I’m feeling rather stupid since Josip all but told me this before he passed away. And we still have to use this knowledge to discover where to continue the search.”

  “You’ll figure it out.”

  Vigor brought up a map that showed the spread of the Mongol Empire during Genghis Khan’s reign.

  “Here you can see the extent of Genghis’s empire,” he said, “stretching from the Pacific to the Caspian Sea, but the darker oval in northern Mongolia represents the great khan’s original territorial base.”

  He tapped that spot on the screen.

  Gray looked over his shoulder. “That’s still a lot of territory to cover.”

  “And it’s landlocked,” Vigor added. “As you can see, his original territory did not extend to the Yellow Sea or the Pacific.”

  Everyone stared over at the ship, while Vigor kept his nose close to his laptop’s screen, bringing up more research files on the region.

  “Then why leave a ship as a clue?” Gray asked, nodding to the relic.

  Vigor zoomed in on the map and pointed to a large body of water at the northern edge of that darker oval.

  “Because of that,” he explained. “Lake Baikal.”

  “What’s the significance of that particular lake?” Gray squinted at the crescent-shaped body of water. “Do you know anything about it?”

  “Only what I’m looking at now,” Vigor said and summarized aloud. “It’s the oldest and deepest lake in all the world. It holds over twenty percent of the world’s fresh water. To the ancient Mongol people, it was a major source of fishing . . . and still is today.”

  Gray stared closer at the scrimshaw. “Then I understand the fish carved on the boat’s hull, but what about these frolicking—?”

  “Seals?” Vigor asked, with a triumphant smile. He sat back and let them see the picture on his laptop, of a dark sleek shape sitting atop a rock. “Let me introduce you to the nerpa. The world’s only breed of freshwater seal and—”

  “Let me guess,” Gray said, cutting him off this time. “They’re only found in Lake Baikal.”

  Vigor’s smile widened.

  Gray’s satellite phone rang. He glanced at the screen. “It’s Sigma command.” As he headed away to take the call in private, he pointed back to Vigor. “Learn everything you can about that lake.”

  “Already on it.”

  Vigor paused long enough to look heavenward.

  Thank you, my friend.

  6:18 P.M.

  “And you’ve heard nothing from Monk?” Painter asked over the phone.

  “Not a word.” Gray had moved over to his bedroom for privacy, but also not to disturb Vigor’s investigation into Lake Baikal.

  “I’ve tried reaching him for the past ten minutes,” Painter said. “But there’s been no answer. The last update from his team was when they were heading out on horseback into the mountains.”

  “It’s getting dark out here,” Gray offered. “Maybe he’s busy setting up camp.”

  Painter sighed in tired exasperation. “I had hoped to consult with Dr. Shaw before they settled in for the night.”

  “Why?”

  “I just received a final assessment from the crew over at the SMC in L.A. I told you about the physicist who was monitoring the gravitational anomalies that Jada had first noted in the comet’s path.”

  “Right. You mentioned something about them changing.”

  “Growing, in fact. They’ve confirmed that these tiny changes are incrementally increasing in direct proportion to the comet’s approach toward Earth.”

  “You’re not concerned about the comet hitting us, are you?”

  It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility. In 1994, the Shoemaker-Levy comet collided into Jupiter, and sometime next year, a comet was likely to smash into Mars.

  “No,” Painter said, “the comet will pass close in astronomical terms, but it has no chance of striking us. But that doesn’t mean we’re out of danger. We’ve been tracking NEOs for the past day.”

  “NEOs?”

  “Near-Earth objects. We’ve been monitoring any asteroids that might pose a risk of shifting earthward due to the stirring of the comet’s energy through our neighborhood. Its trajectory has already shaken up the cosmic game of billiards out there, resulting in the recent meteor showers.”

  “Along with what happened in Antarctica.”

  “Exactly. That was why I wanted to consult with Dr. Shaw. She understands these gravitational anomalies better than anyone. The consensus out of the SMS is that the increasing flux could trigger th
e mother of all meteor showers as the comet reaches its closest pass by the earth. And NASA is monitoring some very large rocks beginning to respond to those deviations.”

  Gray heard the dread in the director’s voice. “Is there anything we can do to stop this?”

  “The physicist at the SMC believes that Dr. Shaw would be the best one to answer that question. He’s growing to believe that there must be a reason these anomalies are growing larger in direct relation to its approach toward Earth. He thinks there must be something here on the planet that the comet’s energy is responding to.”

  “Jada seemed convinced of the same,” Gray conceded, suddenly glad he had agreed to search for the stolen relics. “She thinks this ancient cross we’re hunting for might have been sculpted out of a piece of that comet when it last appeared. That it could still retain some of its dark energy, and that the two—the cross and the comet—are entangled at the quantum level.”

  “Then we need to find that artifact.”

  Gray offered a bit of hopeful news. “We may have a solid lead for once. Vigor is working on it right now. But as a precaution, can you get Kat started on arranging transportation for our group?”

  “Where?”

  “To Russia, to a lake near its southern border called Baikal. It’s about three hundred miles north of where we are now.”

  “We’ll get on it. That short a distance should only take a few hours of travel, but you’d better still hurry. We only have forty-eight hours remaining until the events pictured by the satellite come true.”

  Recognizing the urgency, Gray finished his call and returned to the others. As he stepped into the room, he found everyone gathered around Vigor and his laptop.

  “What?” he asked.

  Vigor swung to him. “The more I look into Lake Baikal, the more I’m convinced that’s the correct spot.”

  Rachel smiled over, flushed with excitement. “We may even know where on Lake Baikal to look.”

  “Where?” He shifted to join them.

  “First of all, legends say that Genghis Khan’s mother was born on an island in that lake.”