Prime (26 page)

FORTY-THREE

In 1950, the CIA and the Air Force decided to tackle the problem of how
to quickly retrieve personnel who were deep in enemy territory, well beyond the
range of the helicopters of the day and in areas that were too unsafe for a
plane to land. The ultimate product of that endeavor was the Fulton
surface-to-air-recovery-system—STARS—named for inventor Robert Fulton Jr. who
had spent nearly a decade designing and refining the system. It was known more
commonly by the nickname ‘Skyhook.’

Subsequent advances in aircraft design and
stealth technology, as well as improvements to air-tracking radar systems
employed by unfriendly
nations,
had rendered the
Skyhook system effectively obsolete; there were much better ways to rescue
downed pilots and deep-cover agents, much safer and much more pleasant ways.

The principle behind Fulton’s system was
fairly simple. A transport aircraft would make a foray into enemy territory and
airdrop a package containing all the necessary equipment: a harness, five
hundred feet of high-tension rope, and a self-inflating balloon. The man on the
ground would don the harness, connect himself to the balloon and then send it
aloft. The whole process could be accomplished in just a few minutes. Once the
balloon was in the sky, the plane would make one more pass, driving straight at
the balloon. A special trap attached to the nose of the aircraft would snag the
rope and yank the man into the sky.

That was where the really uncomfortable part
began. The first thing the person in the harness would experience was sudden
rapid acceleration—zero to two hundred miles an hour in the blink of an eye.
The elasticity of the rope alleviated some of this effect, but the G-forces
involved were enough to make some people black out. Next,
came
the high-altitude double whammy: freezing temperatures and low air pressure.
While the plane beat a hasty retreat back to friendly skies, the unlucky CIA
asset would experience the equivalent of climbing an Alpine mountain in the
space of a few seconds. Last but not least, there was the spinning; an object
trailed at high speed through the air had a tendency to spin like an
out-of-control kite. This spin could induce dizziness, nausea or even
unconsciousness. Fortunately, there was an easy way to stop the spin: the
disoriented man dangling at the end of the rope needed only to extend his
half-frozen arms and legs, spread-eagling like a body-surfer, until the air
crew in the plane managed to reel in their catch.

Capture and torture by the enemy was almost a
preferable alternative.

Officially, the Air Force ceased using the
Skyhook in 1996. Unofficially, the equipment and the capability to employ the
Skyhook was maintained by the Joint Special Operations Command as a ‘just in
case’ measure.

No one had been especially thrilled by King’s
suggestion that they use the Skyhook to whisk them out of Iran, least of all
King himself, but with time and resources in short supply for the team, and with
secrecy a paramount concern, Deep Blue had signed off on it. There was the matter
of retrofitting Senior Citizen to accommodate the thirty-foot long horns that
would be used to snare the balloon—no simple task since the craft was designed
for super-sonic travel. There was also the question of whether the pick-up line
could hold the weight of six passengers; it was theoretically possible, but the
system had never been used to pick up more than two men at a time.

What was most certainly not in the original
plan was deploying the STARS from inside a moving vehicle while being chased down
a rural highway by half the Iranian National Police force.

In a rare instance of serendipity, the
forward momentum of the Toyota actually made things easier. Like with a kite
pulled along by a running child, the line pulled taut, and the balloon—which was
festooned with blinking infrared lights—cut through the sky in an almost
perfectly straight line, providing an easy target for the pilot sitting at the
controls of Senior Citizen.

Unseen by anyone on the ground, the stealth
plane came from out of the west and streaked across the sky. Even without the
constantly updated GPS coordinates supplied by the mysterious entity known only
as Deep Blue, the pilot would have been able to find the target vehicle simply
by following the string of flashing red and blue lights trailing behind it.

The pilot banked the aircraft to the right,
carved a tight turn in the sky and with his computerized targeting system,
locked onto the balloon. The plane advanced unerringly toward the blinking
lights, and then, with textbook precision, it snared the balloon in the
V-shaped trap.

One at a time, like an unraveling
chain-stitch, the six passengers in the SUV were plucked from their seats. The
empty vehicle cruised forward a few hundred yards before veering off the road
and crashing into a stand of trees. By the time the police cars arrived, the
plane, still trailing the Chess Team plus one, was already several miles away.

Because they were already traveling forward
at about seventy miles per hour, the effect of the sudden acceleration was
considerably reduced, though understandably, this was of little comfort to the
six people dangling daisy-chained from the nose of the aircraft.

King had imagined that being jerked out of
his seat would feel a little like what happened when his parachute opened
during a jump—a sudden bone-jarring snap. He would later reflect that his
erroneous assumption had been for the best; if he’d actually known what to
expect, he never would have gone through with it.

For several long seconds, he struggled through
a barrage of sensory inputs, all of them unpleasant. Biting cold ripped into
him, blasting his face with such intensity that he couldn’t breathe, much less
open his eyes. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew that he was spinning
uncontrollably, but the accompanying disorientation, coupled with the
relentless assault from the wind, confounded his efforts to take any sort of
action to arrest the spin. Mustering his last vestiges of will power, he
unclenched his limbs from the protective fetal curl he had instinctively assumed,
and extended his arms.

The sense of vertigo started to abate after a
few moments, emboldening him to stretch his legs out as well. Now, instead of
corkscrewing through the sky, he felt himself bouncing up and down, buffeted by
invisible currents of air. He felt like he was trying to swim up Niagara Falls,
but there wasn’t a single thing he could do to end the ordeal.

Then, almost without being aware of the
transition, the pervasive Arctic blast and the jarring turbulence stopped, and
he felt something solid beneath him. His face felt like a frozen mask, but he
managed to open his eyes enough to see two men in cold-weather flight suits
dragging him up a metal ramp and into the relatively protected interior of the
stealth transport’s cargo hold.

There was a loud whine and a deep rumble as
the ramp began moving, and then a metallic thump, completely cut off the
howling of the wind.

At first, he didn’t see anyone except the
crewmen, and a wave of panic crashed over him. He tried to ask them for an
update, but the words wouldn’t come out. One of the men said something, a
reassuring comment that barely registered through the lingering fog of the
experience, and then King was wrapped in a heavy blanket. There were other
blankets strewn about the floor of the hold, and after a few more seconds, he
realized that nestled within each of the shapeless heaps was one of his
companions.

He did a quick count.
Five
altogether.

They’d made it.

He huddled his arms around his torso, pulling
the blanket tight, and savored the warm feeling of relief that came with that
realization.

Eventually, they emerged from their cocoons,
imbibed hot beverages supplied by the flight crew and displayed fits of outrage
at the nightmare they had just gone through—some of it was directed at King,
and not all of it was playful. King kept his distance, focusing his attention
on Sasha, who seemed practically comatose; he wondered if she actually understood
that she had been rescued.

When the plane touched down at Incirlik Air Base
half an hour later, and the team members roused themselves and prepared to
disembark. Rook loudly announced that the first thing he was going to do was
kiss the tarmac. Sasha just sat in her seat, staring blankly ahead, as if she
was waiting for further instructions. King gently grasped her arm and coaxed
her to rise.

As they descended the ramp, a van rolled up
and Daniel Parker jump out to greet them. King felt a moment of apprehension at
the sight of his old friend. He had been so focused on the mission in Maragheh
that he had completely forgotten about their earlier tense exchange.

But if Parker was nursing a grudge at having
been cut out of the mission into Iran, he gave no indication. In fact, he
barely seemed to notice King at all. He raced up the ramp and homed in on Sasha
like a moth to a flame, his earnest face concealing none of his eagerness. He
managed to stop himself before crashing into her…or hugging her.

“Sasha!” he said, unable to contain his
excitement. “I did it… Well, you did.
Your program and
al-Tusi’s writings.”

She regarded him like he was crazy. “What are
you saying?”

“The Voynich manuscript!
You solved it!”

For the first time since meeting her several
days earlier, King
saw
something like life in Sasha’s
eyes.

FORTY-FOUR

Incirlik Air Base, Turkey

King had the distinct impression of being a third wheel.
On a unicycle.

Parker had always been an open book
emotionally. He wanted to be alone with Sasha; King could read that in his
friend’s face as clearly as he could discern that Parker was mostly over any
resentment at having been sidelined.

It had been the right decision, but King knew
that one of the burdens of leadership was that you couldn’t make everyone
happy.

As far as Parker’s crush on Sasha was
concerned, King would have happily stepped aside to let his friend try out his
best moves, though he didn’t think Parker stood much of a chance with her.
Where Sasha had earlier appeared indifferent to that kind of attention, she now
seemed to occupy an entirely different plane of reality where Daniel Parker did
not even exist. There was only one thing that mattered to her now: the Voynich
manuscript.

King was also very interested in learning
what the mysterious document had to say, though for a much different reason.

He considered the mission in Iran to have
been only partly successful. Yes, they had rescued Sasha and retrieved the key
to deciphering the manuscript, but one goal had eluded him, perhaps the most
important objective, at least on a personal level. Kevin Rainer was still at
large.

King didn’t think his former CO cared much
about the contents of the book. Rainer’s motives were purely mercenary, but
King felt sure that Rainer’s big paycheck was connected to the matter of
deciphering the Voynich manuscript. Understanding exactly why the man wanted it
might give King the edge he needed to accomplish that one remaining mission
objective.

While the rest of the team had gone off in
search of food, beer, hot showers and a place to crash, King had accompanied
Parker and Sasha to the office where a digital version of the book, with its
secrets revealed at last, was displayed on the screen of her laptop computer.

Parker quickly recounted how he had used the
information from al-Tusi’s treatise along with Sasha’s own deciphering software
to crack the code. Sasha nodded, as if the explanation validated a cherished
belief, but then dismissively turned her attention to the computer.

King glanced over her shoulder and read a few
lines. Deciphered or not, the book was still incomprehensible to him.

“What’s it say?” he asked Parker.

Without taking his eyes off Sasha, Parker
said, “Let me give you some background first. The book was actually written by
two men: al-Tusi and Roger Bacon.”

“Bacon, I know that name from somewhere.”
King could almost hear Rook making a crack, probably in his best approximation
of Homer Simpson, so he quickly added: “Some people think he was the guy who
really wrote Shakespeare’s plays, right?”

“No, that was Sir Francis Bacon. Although the
two men had very similar interests, they lived about four centuries apart.
Roger Bacon was a Franciscan friar who lived in the thirteenth century. It’s
long been thought that Bacon might have been the author of the Voynich
manuscript; now we know it for certain.

“In 1247, Bacon was living in Paris,
lecturing at the University, when he made an unusual discovery. He was
conducting experiments with ground quartz lenses and realized that in addition
to their other properties, the crystal could be made to vibrate at different
frequencies—musical frequencies, like the way a soprano can make a wine glass
vibrate and shatter. Even stranger, he discovered that when they were aligned
with each other and facing in a specific direction, the effect was much
stronger. He repeated his experiments in different places throughout Paris.
When he compared the results, he realized that the crystals were pointing him
toward something.”

“What?”

Parker shook his head. “Bacon didn’t know,
but he decided to share his findings with another scientist; one of the most
learned men in the world at that point in history.”

“Nasir al-Tusi.”

“Bingo. Of course, al-Tusi was a Muslim and
theoretically an enemy, so they had to correspond in secret, using coded
messages. Al-Tusi recreated Bacon’s experiments from Mosul, where he was living
at the time, and based on the results, they were able to triangulate a possible
source for the effect, a place they called ‘the Prime.’”

“Where was it?” King asked.

“They didn’t record the exact location, but
it was somewhere in southern France. The maps of the day weren’t very precise,
and they were relying on the crystal devices to guide them. Al-Tusi journeyed
west, in disguise of course, and they met at the source to conduct further
experiments.” Parker took a deep breath, as if gathering his courage to broach
the next topic. “That was when things got really weird. Bacon began to notice
strange plants, like nothing he’d ever seen before, and he had quite literally
written the book on botany. Eventually, he realized that there was a connection
between the appearance of the plants and the timing of the experiments with the
crystal devices. He tried different frequencies, and he was able to produce
different varieties of plants, as well as lichens, mosses, fungi—all of them
different than anything he or al-Tusi had ever seen before. There was only one
explanation that made any sense; somehow, the plants were being spontaneously
generated.”

“Wait…what?”

“Life from lifelessness,” Sasha said, not
looking away. “They found the source; the Elixir of Life.”

“I guess you could call it that,” Parker
said. “It wasn’t a magical power like the Philosopher’s Stone, but a
combination of being in the right place and triggering the right frequency.”

King shook his head in confusion. “Back up.
Life from lifelessness?
What does that mean?”

“One thing science has never been able to
adequately explain, is where life came from. All life on Earth—every single
living thing down to the tiniest microbe—comes from a living parent organism.
If the theory of evolution is true, then all life probably traces back to one
single organism—an amoeba or something—that got the process started, but no one
can explain how that happened. Scientists have been able to create conditions
where amino acids and protein molecules will naturally occur, but they’ve never
been able to make the final leap—to bring them to life.”

“You’re saying that Bacon and al-Tusi found a
way to do that?
With…what?
Crystals
and music?
Sounds pretty New Age to me.”

Parker however nodded enthusiastically. “It’s
not so farfetched. There have been all kinds of studies to show that music can
influence plant health. It happens at a molecular level. The crystals weren’t
even important. It was the music, or rather the specific harmonic frequencies
that produced the effect. Al-Tusi built his pipe organ so that they could pin
down exactly which musical notes did what.”

“Is it possible that their experiments were
just creating some kind of funky mutations in the plants that were already
there?”

“Maybe.
Even that would be a pretty significant
discovery for the time, but they tried to control for all the variables, and they
were convinced that they were actually giving life to inanimate matter.”

“Okay, let’s say I believe all that. What’s
Rainer’s angle?” King turned his gaze to Sasha. “You were with him. Did you get
a sense of what he wants from all of this?”

Sasha’s eyes remained riveted on the screen,
as if the information there was far more interesting than anything King had to
say. She clicked to the next page, her eyes moving back and forth as she read.

“Black Death,” she said finally.
“The plague.
Guo Kan, the Chinese general who fought with
Mongols, got his hands on an al-Tusi’s
urghan
.
His experiments with it created the organism responsible for the Black Death
outbreak in the fourteenth century.”

“That’s exactly why Bacon and al-Tusi encoded
the manuscript,” Parker added. “It’s a how-to manual for creating new kinds of
life. They were afraid of what might happen if it fell into the wrong hands.”

“I thought that could happen only at that one
special place, the prime location.”

Parker shrugged. “The effect is most
pronounced at the source. They weren’t able to replicate their experiments when
they left the area. But maybe there are other places on Earth with the same
properties. Or maybe it just takes longer to see results; the Black Death
didn’t show up until several decades after Guo’s death.”

King pondered this possibility for a moment
then switched gears. “Does the book say what’s so special about this ‘Prime’
place?”

“Bacon speculated that it might be some kind
of confluence of Earth energy. He had only a vague understanding of what that
meant, but we know there are invisible rivers of geo-magnetic energy called
Telluric
currents that run through the whole planet. Crystals—like
the ones he was using—align themselves magnetically. Maybe that provided the
extra boost needed to start life.”

Sasha shook her head. “The Prime is important
because it is the original source. Every living thing on Earth is
mathematically connected to it.”

There was a hint of mania in her voice, and
King knew he had to tread carefully. He had no idea what she was talking about,
but Parker was nodding.
At least it makes
sense to someone
, he thought.
“So, bottom line, if the
wrong person goes to this Prime place and plays the wrong song, all hell breaks
loose, and that’s a bad thing.
Do Rainer and company know all this?”

Sasha appeared to consider for a moment. “I
don’t think so. That wasn’t the direction they were going. But they understand
that the
urghan
is the key to
deciphering the manuscript.”

King’s hand moved to his pocket where he’d
stashed al-Tusi’s parchment. It was the only one of its kind, aside from the
digital copy he’d sent to Parker.

The Voynich manuscript…the
Prime location…the origin of life on Earth—none of that was really important.
What mattered was that Rainer needed the
information on that parchment, and King knew the rogue Delta operator would
move Heaven and Earth to get it.

When he came for it, King and Chess Team
would be waiting.