EXOSKELETON II: Tympanum (8 page)

2

Saturday, 9 May (8:42 a.m. EST – Antarctic Circle)

McHenry washed down the last bite of his breakfast with a swig of bug juice, a cool-aid-like drink that could double as a cleaning agent. They were closing in on their destination, and it would soon be time to violate every instinct of self-preservation that he had as a submarine captain. They’d reveal their presence to every ship in the area. He felt reassured, however, that a carrier group was on its way, and that other friendly subs were sleeping nearby.

There must be some genuine worry in Washington about whatever was making the noise. If he had to guess, it was a piece of lost scientific apparatus – scientists sent devices up in balloons all the time, many of which get blown out to sea, and then fall in the water and sink into the deep. It just seemed to him that exposing an attack sub was an overreaction. They should’ve sent a surface exploration team.

A young sailor entered the mess hall and approached McHenry. “We’re in position, cap’n,” he said.

McHenry followed him through a maze of tight walkways and ladders to the sonar room. He stopped at a consul where his best sonar tech tapped away at a computer.

“What’s the status, Finley?” McHenry asked.

“Located the source, same position as yesterday,” Finley explained. “The sounders and detectors are in the lock and ready to be deployed.”

“How long will we be vulnerable?”

“The array will be in passive mode until we get to depth,” Finley explained. “As for active time, that depends on how many images you want.”

“We’ll see what they look like,” McHenry said. “We aren’t leaving until we have what we need – we don’t want to do this twice. Let’s get the show on the road.”

Finley pushed a button. “Load-lock filling.” Thirty seconds later he said, “Bay hatch open, winch unwinding, turning on bay camera.” He clicked a button on the computer monitor opening a video frame. A mess of cords and pulleys appeared on the screen.

“Don’t tangle anything,” McHenry warned.

“Just have to do it in the right order. The source goes first,” Finley explained and pointed to the screen as a white, beach-ball-sized, faceted sphere, lowered by cable out of sight and into the dark. He clicked another button. “And now the detector array.”

The device resembled a large chandelier, with detectors in place of lights. “How much line do we have?” McHenry asked

“Five hundred meters,” Finley answered. “Should be enough to get some good images. With our drift, we’ll get a few perspectives.”

If we’re lucky
, McHenry thought. He knew there was going to be some complex motion involved with the operation. The currents in the southern seas were notoriously strong and unpredictable. He worried that deeper crosscurrents might produce slack in the cables, resulting in a whiplash effect. The whole thing could end up on the ocean floor, and there was no retrieving it from that depth. But it didn’t matter: his orders were to take whatever risks necessary to get the images. Loss of equipment and, by implication, lives, were acceptable risks in this mission. It was an internal conflict for him, the risk versus his curiosity. A similar anxiety was evident in the eyes around him.

“Everything is in position,” Finley informed.

“Turn it on,” McHenry ordered. “Let’s see what this is all about.”

Finley clicked a few buttons and typed parameters into the computer control program. “Detectors active. Standing by to energize the sounding source.”

“Do it,” McHenry said without hesitation. He was curious to see how the new active sonar imaging system performed. The
North Dakota
was filled with new, unproven equipment that was touted as “advanced.” For him it was just another source of worry.

Finley clicked a button and said, “We’re in active mode and collecting data.”

A minute later an image formed in the data acquisition window.

“This is a direct overhead view,” Finley explained. “Looks like there’s an object at about 1,500 meters. The depth to the sea floor is 4,000.”

McHenry stared at the gray-toned image. It looked like a sphere suspended in the water.

Finley clicked a button labeled Color Enhancement, and the image reformed with stunning clarity, a blue-green sphere over the darker background of the seafloor.

The sphere seemed to have a bulge on one side. “How big is this thing?” McHenry asked.

“About 25 meters in diameter,” Finley answered.

Stunned, McHenry said, “That’s enormous. How can that thing survive at that depth?” He knew no one had the answer. There were no known structures of that size that could survive the hydrostatic pressures at that depth – unless it wasn’t hollow.

“We need a profile shot,” McHenry said and grabbed a communicator device from his pocket that resembled a small cell phone. He pressed a button and spoke into it, “Get us to max depth, and 200 meters east of our current position. Go slowly – one knot.”

“We have another 100 meters on the array. Shall we go to max depth on that as well?” Finley asked.

“Yes, drop it when we’re stationary,” McHenry replied. “Take images as we move.”

Finley nodded and said with apparent hesitation, “They might be blurred.”

“Do it. The more data we have the better. We’ll get better images when we’re stationary.”

The first new image formed on the screen.

“That’s not too bad,” Finley commented.

The coloring made the object look very spherical, with no evidence of a bulge. A few minutes later, the next image appeared and the asymmetry was on the opposite side.

“That’s odd,” McHenry said, twisting his head to view the screen from a different angle.

The next image showed the bulge in the same place, but more pronounced. And the next even more pronounced, and slightly tapered.

A few minutes later, McHenry was informed that they had reached the desired location, and Finley turned to look at him.

“Lowering the array to maximum depth,” Finley informed.

Finley repositioned the array and took an image. At first, what came up on the screen was baffling. But they quickly figured it out: the bulge was a misperception caused by their angle of view from above. It was actually a long stem that propped up the sphere from below.

“How far does that thing go down?” McHenry asked.

Finley responded by color-enhancing the image. The answer was obvious.

“The son-of-a-bitch goes all the way into the floor,” McHenry gasped. “That’s another 2,000 meters.”

“Twenty-five hundred, sir,” Finley corrected, and looked at him wide-eyed.

“How in the hell was that constructed?” McHenry asked, again knowing there wasn’t an explanation. “We have the images?”

Finley nodded.

“Go silent and pull up the array,” McHenry instructed. “Then get the data ready for transmission. We’re getting the hell out of here.”

They’d again have to risk detection by taking the
North Dakota
to transmission depth to send the image files. He wondered if his superiors in Washington were expecting what they were about to get.

3

Saturday, 9 May (12:03 p.m. CST – Southern Illinois)

Will shuddered as he passed the Marion maximum-security prison. The cold blue structures of the complex were unimpressive from the highway, but the razor wire glittering in the sunlight like strings of tiny mirrors reminded him of what was inside. At the time, it was the closest he’d ever come to hell. Marion Prison was as close to being a corrections facility as a slaughterhouse was to being veterinary clinic. He was convinced a well-behaved person might emerge criminally insane from such a place. He’d started along that track during his short stint there.

Twenty minutes later he passed the exit for Cordova, Illinois, where he’d spent six years of his life as a university physics professor. His thoughts turned to his ex-fiancé, Pam. They’d been engaged and living together for a year when he’d been arrested. The anger of her betrayal still burned in his chest. She’d turned on him the instant she learned of the allegations that he’d raped and tried to murder a teenage girl. It was the most cutting, irreversible insult that could be leveed upon a person. And her betrayal had affected the trial: it probably put the jury over the edge to convict him.

He took a sip of soda and chewed ice to get his thoughts to dissipate.

A few minutes south of the Cordova exit, the billboards and trees thinned out. To the west, a mile off the highway, the light poles of the football stadium he’d visited the night of the arrest loomed above a dense grove of pine trees. It was the crime scene. It was strange how different everything seemed in the sunlight. During the past two years his mind had made it out to be a much darker place. But there was darkness in everything, from the most beautiful tropical beach where a mother’s child had drowned, to the magnificent house where a man comes home to find his family murdered. The sunlight couldn’t hide such things. Each place was different for everyone.

He steered his thoughts to something more positive. Baton Rouge would be a welcomed change. The night before he’d dreamt of crawfish and gumbo – a stark difference from his usual nightmares. Escaping the unseasonably cool Chicago spring would also be a plus, and his new abode was touted as a vacation resort.

He shifted in his seat, gripped the steering wheel tightly, and tilted his head sharply to the left and right, stretching his neck muscles. His new arrangement was not sustainable: how long did the FBI plan to keep him there? He had no legal or operational knowledge of how to engage in an investigation. He’d only been trained to keep himself safe.

He suspected the FBI had given him the mobile phone more to track him than to contact him. He’d play along for the time being. After the Israeli’s warning, it was best he went off the grid for a while. But the isolation would serve a purpose other than keeping him safe. A feeling of urgency was building in him to explore his new abilities and the hidden world to which they’d given him access. The current situation would give him the opportunity to do this.

A road sign indicated that Memphis was 245 miles south. He’d stop there for the night.

4

Saturday, 9 May (1:10 p.m. CST – Baton Rouge)

Zhichao Cho trembled as he stared at the package on his desk. He could hardly believe it had taken so little time to acquire. His stomach twisted with the idea that maybe they hadn’t gotten everything.

He turned the heavy box so he could access the seams, cut the packing tape with a utility knife, and tore open the flaps. Each item he extracted had been carefully wrapped in plastic, and he arranged them on the table in three piles: bound documents, file folders, and two data storage drives. It was the latter that captured his interest.

Dates and numbers were written in red marker on a piece of paper taped to the top of each drive. The latter indicated the number of the treatment room in which the video had been recorded. He extracted the one with the earliest date from its case, and connected a cable between it and his laptop. A few seconds later he started the first video.

Cho squealed in delight when the first image appeared. It was the first time he’d seen a subject inside an operational Exoskeleton. Before he’d acquired Syncorp, the company had provided him with still images for demonstration purposes. They never had access to actual treatment footage. That information was highly classified and only available to authorized government personnel.

The video showed an overhead view of a man inside a horizontally oriented Exoskeleton positioned a few feet above the floor. The time rolled at the top right of the screen: the recording had started at 6:33 a.m. After about a minute a door opened and a middle-aged man and a young blonde woman, both dressed in white coats, rolled in carts filled with tools and gadgets. When they reached the Exoskeleton, a bundle of tubes and cables lowered from the ceiling. They connected them to receptacles on the carts, and the man grabbed a device that looked like an electric toothbrush and pressed a button on its handle. The device responded with a high-pitched whine that he immediately recognized. They were
dentists
.

The ensuing torture was nothing like he had ever seen. The dentists carried out procedures without anesthetics, and he found himself envying them. Cho had carried out some fairly gruesome things himself during his rising years in Chinese intelligence, but nothing under such extreme and controlled conditions. What he was witnessing was how it was supposed to be done.

For over two hours, the drilling and screaming was interrupted only to allow the subject to regain consciousness after passing out. Cho yawned, and then stood and stretched his legs as the video continued. What was he supposed to be looking for? The video had been deemed important for some reason. Did he miss it?

He walked away from the desk to a counter where an electric teapot steamed away. He selected a bag of green tea from a jar, put it in a cup, and filled it with hot water. When he returned to the computer, the blonde woman was on the floor and the dentist was standing over her, trying to help her to her feet.
What the hell happened? Did she pass out?

He reset the video to the point when he’d gone for tea. The man backed away from the subject and let his assistant take over.

The woman selected an instrument and approached the subject, but before she even touched him, her head spontaneously jerked to the side and she fell to the floor, landing hard. It looked unnatural, as if she’d been struck on the side of the head.

Cho replayed the scene a dozen times. This was what he was supposed to see.

He went the computer keyboard and navigated to the file folder with the video files. The file names indicated they were all footage of the same subject: Number
523
.