Decipher, p.39
Decipher, page 39
“On behalf of the People’s Republic of China, the People’s Army respectfully declines safe passage for your aircraft and declines the invitation of the United Nations to inspect our facility. You are instructed not to descend from your present altitude. Any attempt to do so will be seen as an act of aggression and you will be fired upon. Attempt no landing at Jung Chang. You will be given five minutes to contact your superiors. However, after that time if you have not deviated from your present flight path you will be fired upon. These instructions shall not be repeated and no dialogue shall be entered into. Over and out.”
Both the team and the marines were pale. Matheson couldn’t stop his foot from shaking. “Jesus fucking Christ, we really are in the middle of World War fucking Three!”
And then came the confirmation they were all dreading. Gant’s voice, firm over the intercom. “Okay, everyone. Suit up. We’ll be over the drop zone in two minutes.”
Scott was the first to get unsteadily to his feet. He gripped the handrail with white knuckles before helping Sarah up, and that was when they heard it. It started off as a low rumble, the groan of electric motors kicking into life, like the landing gear being lowered. But then came the clank. Loud and sharp. Locks being released.
And then came the shaft of light:
A thin sliver at the top of the rear cargo ramp. A white band through which the shatteringly loud roar of the world outside was invading in all its dazzling brilliance.
Scott threw an arm over his eyes as they instinctively welled up with tears. Sarah reacted by pulling her face mask into position and fastening her hood. “Goggles,” she said, muffled through the thick clothing. “Goggles.”
Scott snapped his sunglasses over his eyes and felt for the briefest moment a little safer. But the moment was short-lived as Roebuck came up behind him and clipped on. Scott whirled. All the marines were clipping onto their live cargo. They had suited up into thin white nylon camouflage over the top of their insulated jumpsuits. It meant on the ground they would virtually be invisible amid the snow, while up here they looked like ghosts.
“Okay, Professor,” Roebuck said briskly. “I just gotta clip us onto the line overhead and we’re all set. If you can just step up to this point here for me—atta boy.”
It was like a gangplank out to oblivion, the six short steps before him. Every time the plane lurched Scott would tense up, petrified he was about to topple out. But every time Roebuck sensed the anthropologist’s movement he pulled him back. “It’s okay, Professor, I gotcha!”
“You know, the fabled Inca homeland of Aztlan means ‘the place of whiteness’!”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“Oh yeah!” Scott spouted nervously, watching the spectacular low stormcloud and blizzard rush off into the distance, caught up in the C-130’s slipstream. “There’s this Chilean legend about a magic city on the borders of a mountain lake, the whereabouts of which no one knows. The city’s streets and palaces were made of solid gold. And this golden city, known as the city of kings, would become visible at the end of the world.”
A single shrill klaxon burst accompanied a red warning light just overhanging the ramp. It blinked three times before settling on steady illumination. Scott felt his stomach chum over. That was his cue to take three steps forward onto the vibrating metal ramp. He could feel Roebuck shuffling behind him.
Gant had his arm wrapped gently around November as they edged forward at the rear of the line. Two marines had the nuclear warhead in its box, in front of them, a sled fastened on top. While farther down the line stood Hackett, who was still engaged in hooking up with his marine.
“The visibility out there is appalling, Major!” November complained. “Y’can’t see your hand in front of your face! How’re we supposed to find each other when we land?”
Gant tugged at the hooks of the harness on her back. “This one right here,” he explained, “is attached to an expandable tether, which in turn is attached to me. Even though I’ll be releasing you when we land so we don’t wind up piled on top of each other, we’ll never be more than six to ten feet apart.”
“What about the others?”
“We all have beacons,” he reassured her.
Hackett squirmed with his assigned partner. “I know you have to hug me,” the physicist joked. “But do you have to be so tight?”
“Sir, it’s for your own safety.”
Hackett eyed him up and down. “My mother always warned me that all the nice boys love a sailor. That apply to marines?”
The marine confronted his CO. “Sir, do I have to be partnered with this geek?”
Gant scowled. “Eyes front, soldier!”
“El Dorado? That means ‘The City of Gold,’ or is it the city of the sun?” Scott gabbled breathlessly. He swallowed hard. “In the middle of the Salar de Coipasa is the village of Coipasa. And just north of it live the Chipaya Indians. Their whole language is different from both Quechua and Aymara! The closest linguistic language is Arabic and North African tribal languages—”
“Professor Scott?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re babbling.”
Scott glanced back briefly to check on the others. Directly behind him Matheson couldn’t even make eye-contact, while Pearce and Sarah shifted uneasily on their feet. Maybe he was babbling, but with good reason.
Another klaxon burst.
Scott spun his head around. Green! The light had changed to green! Scott held his breath, readied himself for the sprint forward and realized belatedly that Roebuck had already lifted him clear off his feet and was rushing them out the back.
Slam! Scott’s tongue caught in his throat as the ripcord still attached to the C-130 viciously snatched the parachute out of the pack on Roebuck’s back.
Scott had expected the cold, the sheer freezing terror sapping the very life out of his extremities. But the noise, the utter volume of powerful engines heaving an unnatural hulk through the air combined with the intensity of rushing air, plus the smell of exhaust fumes and the total power of the blizzard pounding at their helpless dangling bodies almost seemed too much to bear.
He could see nothing. No sky, no ground, just a vast wall of swirling whiteness. An emptiness and a void that even God would have trouble filling.
His entire gut seemed to have shifted to a new elevated position in his chest, just down from his windpipe, making it difficult to breathe. The rush of blood in his ears had a voice of its own, like a crowd calling for his execution, and—
Bang! His ankles ached as the sudden stress of the impact shot up his legs and turned them to jelly. The twang of a clip coming undone and a rough shove to the side and Scott found himself coming bodily into contact with the frozen wasteland. There was a compacted, polystyrene sound of snow and ice crushing beneath his weight. He made to roll but found he was skidding uncontrollably across the icy flat.
He tried to yelp but nothing came out as a set of boots landed in his path. He knocked them clean out of the way as he crashed on through before jerking to a halt on the end of his tether.
He lay there, on his back, his chest heaving up and down as he wheezed and coughed, trying to come to terms with what had just happened. He was on the ground and he was alive! He coughed again, bringing up phlegm but it had nowhere to go and he wasn’t taking his faceplate off for anything, so he forced himself to swallow it and went to sit up. In all this gear it was a struggle. As he tried to get his bearings he realized that the blizzard was blasting at such a force the snow was moving horizontally, into him and past him.
Scott groaned as he struggled to get up. But the blizzard was so unbelievably powerful it knocked him straight back on his ass. He tried again, but just couldn’t get a footing. And that was when he felt it. A weak tug at the tether and a distant cry for—
“Help! Professor Scott, can you hear me?”
Scott spun around, trying to figure out which direction Roebuck was calling from, but he couldn’t see a thing. Not a damn thing. He felt the tug again. That was it! That was the direction.
“Lieutenant? Hold on! I’m coming!” He tried to stand again, but the best he could manage was to crawl on all fours until—
Snap! The tether jerked so viciously at his back that it whipped him around and sent a sharp jabbing pain into his hip. He grabbed at the nylon cord and yanked it in an effort to bring on some slack, but all he managed was to get his momentum going again and he found himself rapidly sliding back the way he’d just come.
The ice was cracked and torn all around him, jutting up into the air and clawing at him as he bumped over it. He could hear a scream and then the tether yanked even harder.
Thinking quickly, Scott reached around in his pocket and jabbed the only thing he could find, his gold-plated Parker pen, a gift from his estranged wife last birthday, deep into the snow and ice. And hung on for dear life.
His legs were over a precipice, and dangling from the tether between them, approximately ten feet below, was Lieutenant Roebuck. Stranded on a cliff of blue ice, the distressed officer cried out as he tried to get a footing and struggled to release the parachute, several cords of which were wrapped around his throat.
What he didn’t know was that Scott’s pen was slowly, very slowly forcing its way through the snow and ice leaving a deep scar in its wake.
And there was absolutely nothing the anthropologist could do about it.
Jung chang
AN-YANG SETTLEMENTS—NORTHERN HONAN PANHANDLE—CHINA
Inscriptions on Oracle Bones, literally “chai-ku wen” or “writings on [turtle] shell and [animal] bone” date from around 4000 B.C.E. Ching-hua 4 bone from the reign of Wu Ting speaks of a two-headed snake drinking from the Yellow River and there followed a week of bad weather. A rainbow or a snake with heads at both ends is often found in early Chinese literature and is an ominous sign. On the Yi-pien 3380 bone, dating from 1,300 years later during the Han Dynasty, shrine reliefs at Wu-lizng-tz’u, southwest of Shantung show the same thing. A two-headed dragon in a struggle with the spirits of the wind and rain.
Excerpt from: Tales of the Deluge: A Global Report on Cultural Self-Replicating Genesis Myths, Dr. Richard Scott, 2008
TIME TO SOLAR MAXIMUM: 19 HOURS, 23 MINUTES TIME TO CURRENT SOLAR STORM INTERCEPTION: 4 HOURS, 51 MINUTES
Scott gritted his teeth and bellowed for help as he fought to keep both himself and Roebuck alive. His sunglasses were fogging up. Every time he gasped for breath, steam from his mouth would work its way inside of them and crystallize on the sub-zero surface.
“Help us!” Scott shrieked. “Somebody help us!”
He could hear cracking—a slow metallic sort of cracking and looked down to see the deep indigo ink ooze out from his pen and feather its way through the ice like blood.
“Dr. Scott!” Roebuck yelped, his voice sounding thinner, weaker. “Professor?”
“Hang on in there, Lieutenant!” Scott called back. “That’s an order!”
“The transponder,” Roebuck cried feebly. “Sewn into your left sleeve, top pocket! Activate the transponder so they can track us down!”
Left sleeve? Easier said than done. Scott was holding on by his right hand. He couldn’t reach his left sleeve. He tried folding his arm up and trying to reach the device with his fingers, but it wasn’t happening. He struggled again but all he could manage was a pathetic tickle.
He couldn’t tell Roebuck. Christ, he couldn’t tell the poor bastard. He shot a look over his shoulder. The chasm that had swallowed up the marine was getting wider. If it carried on like that for much longer the ground beneath him would give way too and they’d both be goners. Roebuck was right, he had to get to that transponder. That tiny little black box was all that stood between survival and death.
Scott tugged the fleece neckband down from around his mouth and went for his sleeve with his teeth. The searing cold burnt at his skin as hurricane-force winds blasted ice crystals into his pores. Clawing the fingers of his left hand deep into the snow his muscles ached as he reached over to gnash at the tiny device. Once, twice—five times before he finally hit the switch and a tiny red LED lit up to let him know it was transmitting a homing signal.
“Roebuck?” Nothing. “Roebuck, it’s on! The transponder is switched on!”
Still nothing.
“Lieutenant, answer me!”
“Uh, Professor, I think you better twist your head and take a look at this,” came the muffled response. “We got company.”
Across the ice chasm, rearing up out of snow-covered hides were two darkened figures in full military fatigues. Thick, snowball-sized clumps of snow fell from their equipment as they slammed clips into their rifles and took aim.
They were Chinese.
Roebuck was midway through attempting to take the parachute cords from around his windpipe when he froze. All he could do now was twist in the breeze. He was well sheltered down here, thank Christ. The storm that was sweeping across the chasm overhead was giving the two Chinese soldiers some serious problems, but they stood fast.
They’d been hiding in the snow, these two. Must have crawled up on their bellies to the crevasse. White capes flapped from their shoulders upon which they would have mounded up snow and hidden underneath. One shouted over at them in incomprehensible Cantonese while his partner got on his radio, though try as he might he couldn’t seem to get a signal out.
Roebuck could feel the subtle effects of Scott slipping above him, and tried to relax. “How ya doin’, Professor—?” he yelled out.
“Not—good!” the epigraphist grunted under the strain.
Roebuck tried to peer through the storm beyond the two Chinese soldiers. A little granite. A lot of ice. “We’re in a natural bowl,” he murmured to himself. “They’re isolated.”
Roebuck raised his hand slowly, bringing it up to a surrender posture while easing the parachute cords out and away from his neck. But even that slight movement was enough to send the first of the two soldiers into a screaming frenzy.
“Hey!” Roebuck shouted back, trying to appear reasonable. “I’m just gonna set this down, okay? I just need to set this down.”
The Chinese soldier screamed in total frustration as Scott accidentally kicked chunks of ice off the cliff edge. “Hey, what’s going on?” he demanded. “What’s happening?”
“Nothing you need to worry about, Professor. This guy’s just being an asshole. But that’s okay, he can see we ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
Roebuck pointed to the cords in his other hand. “I’m just gonna let these go. Okay? I’m gonna drop ’em. On three, brace yourself, Professor. One, two … three!”
The Chinese soldier tensed as the cords tumbled from Roebuck’s hand and let the parachute fall a little freer. But the whole contraption was still attached to Roebuck’s back and the slight movement had let a breeze waft in and start to open the material back out. Just like he knew it would.
Almost immediately Scott was screaming.
“I can’t hang on!” he yelped. “Shit, I can’t hang on! What’re you doing down there?”
The Chinese soldier went into fits as his partner continued to try and get his radio to work. He was clearly frustrated. Roebuck held up his hands again.
“It’s okay! It’s okay! I just need to release these straps on the front here, and the one on my back—fast!” He had no idea if the soldier understood or not and he wasn’t waiting around to find out. Instead he just acted on impulse and screamed back at the hollering enemy grunt while Scott bellowed frantically about losing his grip.
One strap to the left, one strap to the right. He reached around to his back, the enemy poised. Tugged at the strap and the parachute fell free …
It fluttered into the ice chasm below and the Chinese soldier breathed a sigh of relief.
Roebuck smiled. The enemy returned the smile. Only to have it drop as he realized the marine had pulled a gun out from behind his back and was aiming straight at—
Bang! The Chinese soldier’s brains splattered in an arc across the sky as the bullet slid straight between his eyes. But not before his partner reacted to what was going on and dropped his radio.
Roebuck went to fire again, but the extreme of hot against freezing cold on his last shot had already breached his weapon—and the Chinese were one step ahead. Their weapons were covered in thermal hoods. Dangling from the tether, Roebuck was a sitting duck; he was riddled with bullets and convulsed from the impacts.
Scott screamed as his grip went and he lurched toward the edge. “Roebuck? Roebuck, are you there?” But the hail of lead continued unabated with one bullet eventually ripping straight through his calf muscle and exploding up into the virgin-white snow. Scott screamed in tormented agony, flailing, tumbling. He was about to drop over the edge when a hand, seemingly from out of nowhere, thrust out, grabbed hold and held him fast.
Scott looked up, terrified, only to realize it was Gant.
The Major raised his finger to his lips for the anthropologist to be silent.
And then just as suddenly as it had started, the hail of bullets ceased.
Silence.
Then a distant voice reported from across the fissure, “Got him, sir.”
Scott glanced over his shoulder just in time to see the second Chinese soldier, his throat slit from ear to ear, tumble over the edge into oblivion.
“Now hold still!” Gant ordered. “Okay, soldier—take your shot.”
Scott was wild-eyed. “What about Roebuck?” he asked.
“The Lieutenant’s dead,” Gant explained matter-of-factly. “There’s nothing you can do. Damn hothead just turned a minor skirmish into an all-out war. First rule of war, you maim the enemy. Maim them, not kill ’em. You want them to expend all their energy trying to get their injured back. They knew what they were doing. That’s why he shot you in the fucking leg. Now we’re slowed down.” He gave the other soldier the thumbs-up.
The marine across the chasm fired a single bullet, snapping the tether in two. Roebuck’s body tumbled end over end into the abyss below, while Gant put his back into it and hauled Scott to freedom.
