The Genesis Plague - Michael Byrnes [64]
Jason concurred.
The engineer adjusted the camera and flipped back to night vision. Before she got the bot moving again, she warned, ‘We’re about thirty-five metres in, and we only have a fifty-metre cable.’
For another five minutes, they all watched in silence as the robot wound through the mountain’s stark bowels. Twice, the engineer needed to swivel the camera sideways to study openings in the wall. But both times, the floodlight revealed dead ends. Along the way, they’d spotted two more surveillance cameras.
Deeper the bot went, until the fibre-optic cable spool nearly emptied.
Then the passage’s repetitive structure changed abruptly. The jagged walls, glowing emerald in night vision, widened before falling away. Only the ground was discernible at the bottom of the screen.
‘What do we have here?’ Jason said, squaring his shoulders.
‘Looks like … a cave?’ The engineer paused the bot and its audio feed went eerily silent. Pushing another button, she said, ‘Let’s try sonar.’
Crawford was locked in constipated silence.
A small panel popped up in the monitor’s lower right corner. Within seconds, the sonar data-capture was complete and a three-dimensional image representing the interior space flashed on the screen.
‘Wow. It’s pretty big,’ the engineer said, interpreting the data.
To Jason, the sonar image resembled a translucent blob. ‘How big?’
It took her a second to put it to scale. ‘Like the inside of a movie theatre.’ She studied the sonar image five seconds longer. ‘It’s not picking up any exit tunnels. Looks like a dead end. Nothing throwing off a heat signature in there either.’
‘So no one’s in there?’
‘Nothing living.’ Her eyes narrowed as she studied the image more. ‘There’s some strange formations along the outer edges of the cave. See here?’ She pointed to the anomalies for Crawford and Jason and they each had a long look at them.
‘Probably just stones,’ Crawford said dismissively.
‘No,’ Jason disagreed. Atop the strange mounds structured like beaver dams, he could make out plenty of orb-like shapes. ‘Those aren’t stones,’ he gloomily replied. ‘If no one is in there, let’s turn on some lights.’
This time, Crawford was hard pressed to protest. He reluctantly nodded. ‘Fine. Do it.’
The engineer clicked off the infrared, turned on the floodlight.
Onscreen, the immense space came to life.
‘My God …’ she gasped.
Jason cringed. The space was indeed a cavernous hollow deep within the mountain. And heaped like firewood all along its perimeter were countless human skeletons.
35
LAS VEGAS
Stokes noted the time again and felt his adrenaline bubble up. Over an hour ago, the assassin Crawford had dispatched to Boston was supposed to have provided a kill confirmation on Professor Brooke Thompson. Twenty minutes earlier, he’d tried to take matters into his own hands by calling the assassin directly. The call had immediately gone to voicemail. That meant the pesky professor could still be alive - a very sloppy loose end.
Looking over at the photo wall, Stokes glared at a framed shot of himself and Crawford, barely men, dressed in full combat gear. Their hands were clasped in a victory handshake. We were so glad to be alive, he thought. The photo was taken the same day US peacekeeping forces had withdrawn from Beirut following the 1982 Lebanon War - one in a long line of Arab-Israeli turf wars.
It was in Beirut that he and Crawford had engaged in their first covert operation together. The CIA had planted them in Lebanon at the onset of hostilities, long before the peacekeeping operation had formally begun. They’d assisted Israeli Mossad agents to take down unsuspecting senior members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. He’d learned immeasurably from the Mossad agents - men unparalleled in their drive and focus, with a centuries-old bloodlust imprinted in their DNA. They were the most cunning killing machines Stokes had ever met.
This same snapshot, however, also reminded Stokes of Osama bin Laden’s 2004 videotape, in which the coward specifically mentioned Beirut as his inspiration for bringing