Eight
The Asp thought Upper Pika Lake resembled a teardrop that had been wept by God, when He had seen the bleakness He had created.
The Asp stood atop a ridge at the teardrop’s broad end. The lake tapered away from him to a point, one and one-half miles distant. To his left, Upper Pika Lake’s south shore consisted of a scree slope of angular boulders that had spalled off the sheer thousand-foot cliff which formed Pika Mountain’s north face.
The mountain’s bulk shaded the lake from a sun that hung low in the sky for all but two months of the year. Therefore, even on this day, less than a week before the summer solstice, the lake’s surface remained a wind-scoured ice sheet.
He crabbed and slid down the steep, rock-strewn embankment to the lake’s western shore. Then he extended one booted foot, and tapped the ice, as tentatively as a child might. His foot rebounded as though he had kicked iron.
Many other high lakes in these mountains were well studied, and often visited, because they were convenient to roads or trails. The sunlit ones thawed early. Wildflower-sprinkled meadows surrounded them. So the government stocked them for recreational fishing. Upper Pika Lake was too high, too inaccessible, and too plain, to have been studied, or visited, often.
Its depth, temperature, and fauna, if any, could only be extrapolated from better-known examples. He had accordingly prepared for a range of possibilities, including ice cover. But among them ice cover was the least welcome.
He searched until he found a boulder weighing perhaps fifty pounds. He pried it from the frozen ground, then heaved it out onto the ice. It thunked the surface, but did not crack it, then skidded, spinning slowly until it stopped twenty yards from shore.
He returned to the Expedition, removed three items, tested each, then backpacked them up to the lake’s western shore.
First, he reassembled the ice augur, a chest-tall battery-powered drill, used by ice fishermen to bore an eight-inch-diameter hole through lake ice. Near shore he cut through the ice with it, and confirmed his boulder experiment. Five inches of ice thickness would support his weight, but the augur would easily penetrate it.
Next, he assembled the costliest item he had purchased in Houston, a proton precession magnetometer. The model he had selected was a four-foot-long yellow tube, with handholds and a digital display screen on its back end, and a larger sensor tube on its front end.
The PPM measured minute disturbances in the Earth’s magnetic field. Steel and other nonferrous metals created such disturbances, so treasure hunters and archeologists used PPMs to locate shipwrecks, and artifacts like anchors and cannons, on the sea floor. More familiarly to him, the oil industry used PPMs to find pipelines buried underground, or laid across the seabed.
The magnetometer he had chosen was watertight and neutrally buoyant, designed to be pushed through the water by a swimming diver. But the magnetometer’s dry weight was light enough, and its sensitivity great enough, that a man could sling it over one shoulder, like a musette bag, then search with it.
He sat on the shore and peered across the ice. The Sheik’s document fixed the point of interest roughly at the lake’s widest point, which was two hundred yards east of the lake’s west bank, where he now sat, and two thousand yards from the lake’s western tip. A tarn, like a spoon, was likely deepest where it was widest. That, too, was consistent with the expectations the document created.
He defined a search grid by mentally noting distinctively colored and shaped boulders visible on the shore, connected the headphones that would announce a magnetic anomaly by a tone, slipped them over his head, then replaced his wool cap. When he switched the device on it blipped in his ears.
Pocketing a handful of pebbles, he set out across the ice through the cold, still morning.
* * *
Forty-five minutes later, stillness turned into howling wind. It forced him to slit his eyes, and he tugged the parka’s hood up over his cap and the headphones that the cap covered. His onshore landmarks vanished in the fog of blown snow.
The cold seeped through the parka, and pessimistic fears seeped in with it. He was in the wrong place. The lake was too large to find the right place. The lake bottom was deeper than the PPM’s range, which in this application was perhaps one hundred feet.
Or, worst of all, the Sheik’s document was a figment of imagination, or a fraud of Satan and of Satan’s Jew minions. He had traveled halfway around the world, and killed two men, for nothing. This entire exercise was a waste of the Asp’s time, and of God’s patience.
Suddenly the Asp stopped, then adjusted his headphones. Had he heard a tone? Or had the wind just changed pitch? He walked forward. The tone weakened. Backward. It strengthened. He reached into his pocket, plucked out a pebble, and dropped it at the spot. Then he walked at right angles to his previous line of march.
After ten minutes, three pebbles on the ice formed a triangle, fifty feet on each side. He walked to the triangle’s center point, tipped the PPM up on end, and consulted the visual readout. The readout confirmed the tones. Within this triangle, the Earth’s magnetic field was minutely disturbed.
That could be because the rocky lake bed at this spot was anomalously rich in nonferrous metallic minerals. It could be because the instrument was miscalibrated, or because he hadn’t used it correctly. Or—he shivered inside his layered clothing, but not from cold—it could be something else.
He switched off the PPM, left it to mark the spot, returned to shore and slumped on its slope alongside the ice augur, gasping. At sea level, the morning’s work would have tired him little more than a seaside jog.
Ten minutes later, he carried the augur, and the remaining equipment case, across the ice to the yellow PPM.
He positioned the augur’s tip so it pricked the ice, leaned his body weight on the machine’s handles like a child riding a bicycle, then pressed the augur’s trigger. Seconds later, God rewarded him with a mound of shaved ice and a neat, tubular hole eight inches in diameter. Lake water welled up through the hole, then spilled out across the ice’s surface.
He repeated the process until he created an opening large enough to pass the item in the case that he had carried onto the ice.
He removed the underwater video camera, then connected it to the coiled, armored optical cable that would in turn connect to the monitor built in to the case.
He checked and adjusted the picture feed, then improvised. The camera comprised a trio of stubby yellow tubes that housed the camera proper, and two spotlights above it. It was designed to be held by a swimming diver, using the pistol grip that protruded from the camera’s belly. The Asp looped and secured the cable with plastic ties, so the camera hung at right angles to it.
Then he switched on the camera lights and paid out the cable until the camera hung ten feet beneath the ice. The cable was one hundred fifty feet long, and alpine tarns like this one were rarely as deep as a hundred feet.
Twisting the cable in his hands, and shuffling his feet, he circled the hole in the ice. He watched the monitor image change as he panned the camera through three hundred sixty degrees.
As he expected, he saw nothing. Tarns like this one, seldom illuminated enough during a year to support photosynthesis, were often sterile. The water was so clear that the translucent ice ceiling scarcely darkened the view.
At thirty feet down, he panned again. Nothing had changed.
At fifty feet, the monitor image still showed nothing.
At sixty feet, he paused, and again panned the camera.
On the monitor, an object appeared, then vanished. The event so startled him that the cable slipped through his gloved fingers, and the camera dropped ten feet. The cable slacked, as though the camera had struck something. When the image stabilized, the monitor view showed just swirling sediment. He pulled up five feet of cable, then panned again, slower. He nearly lost grip again, when a shark’s dorsal fin flashed out of the dimness, across the monitor screen, and disappeared.
He maneuvered the camera again. It was not a shark’s fin, of course, but a stationary object, shaped like a fin, past which the camera had moved.
And that was as it should be.
His heart leapt.
He retrieved the camera, pulling hand over hand, and repacked it.
Then he faced east, and knelt on the ice for midday prayers. Concentration proved difficult. An exhausting, dangerous day lay ahead. But a joyous one.
* * *
He laid out all the gear from the Expedition on the cabin’s floor.
The ice augur, camera, and magnetometer had proven to be wise purchases. The inflatable boat and expensive pole-mounted sonar had supported the alternative assumption that the lake would be thawed. They proved to be costly, irrelevant bulk.
The boxed kit of cheap wireless cameras, which he had bought to form an early warning perimeter, he would replace, unopened, in the Expedition. The kit transmitted its cameras’ images via the internet, to a smartphone. With no cell service here, they were useless.
In hindsight, he should have expected ice. But his cold-water diving had been in the North Sea’s salt water, which remained liquid down to twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. This freshwater lake’s ice would thaw only above thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit.
That arcane mistake had cost only money.
If the Asp made mistakes in this operation’s next phase, they could cripple or kill him.
* * *
The Asp sat stiffly on the ice of Upper Pika Lake alongside the hole he had cut earlier in the morning. He had expanded it, by successive augur borings, to manhole size. His cold-water wetsuit, eight millimeters thick through the torso, restricted his motion, and felt stifling in the dry, sunlit air. But, even with hood, gloves, and dive booties, it would be barely adequate to warm him in this water.
The afternoon sun, shining brilliantly through the thin air at twelve thousand feet, had crept above Pika Mountain.
He studied the plastic printed dive tables he had purchased, as a check against what the dive computer he would wear would tell him.
The thin air at altitude not only admitted brighter sunshine. It increased the danger of decompression sickness, “the bends.” Nitrogen gas in breathed air dissolved into a diver’s tissues as he descended, as the air’s pressure increased with water depth. When the diver ascended, the process reversed. If he ascended too fast, the nitrogen regassified within the diver’s muscles and joints as painful, dangerous bubbles.
A single dive to sixty feet that began at sea level, and continued on bottom for the length of time it took to breathe most of a single tank of air, required a slow, but simple, ascent. As a young instructor, he had guided hundreds of nervous tourists to sixty feet beneath the Red Sea, then safely back to the surface, easily.
But the same dive to sixty feet, that began two and one-third miles above sea level, materially magnified the difference in pressure between depth and surface. That, in turn, magnified the volume of absorbed nitrogen that had to be slowly released from the tissues on the way to the surface.
To avoid the bends at altitude a diver had to spend less time at depth, so that less nitrogen was absorbed, and so that enough air remained to ascend at a safely slow speed.
He had performed hundreds of dives more complex, and more hazardous, than the one he was about to undertake. But never totally unsupported, as he was now. And supported or not, few divers had in fact been on bottom at twelve thousand feet elevation. He rechecked his calculations, then his equipment.
He adjusted his vest-like Buoyancy Control Device’s straps, slipped on his fins, tugged his mask into place. Then he slipped in to the near-freezing water, descended to ten feet, and rechecked his equipment.
He had been apprehensive that, given his breathlessness at altitude, he would burn through his air supply in minutes. But once in the water he realized that the air he was now breathing was compressed to sea level pressure, and so contained more oxygen in a given volume.
He floated there, gorging on the oxygen banquet, compared to the starvation he had been experiencing the last few days. He clung with one gloved hand to the shot line. The shot line was a weighted cord, that he had fixed to the ice above, then had dropped through the manhole. It hung vertically, from the surface to the lake bottom, seventy feet below. Marked at ten-foot intervals, it offered an ascending diver a measure of his depth, and so a measure of his safe ascent rate.
The dive computer integrated into his breathing apparatus provided real-time warnings, so the shot line was redundant for that purpose.
But not for another purpose. He peered up at the ice’s undersurface, a rippled, glowing, crystal ceiling. Contrary to urban legend, no “air gap” existed between a lake’s ice cover, and the water upon which it floated. No mythic space where a lost swimmer, trapped beneath ice, could sneak a breath. Nor could a swimmer break through five inches of ice. A swimmer who could not find open water would die beneath this ice.
So, if he became disoriented, he could follow the shot line back up to the surface.
He descended without incident, sweeping the water with a dive light that was redundant in the clear dimness.
The “shark fin” tip appeared below him, lying flat on the lake bottom at a depth of seventy-one feet, ten feet away from the shot line’s weighted bag. His bottom time was limited. So was his objective. He didn’t pause to inspect the fin, beyond a quick hand swipe across its surface that confirmed its condition. This cold, still, sterile environment had neither corroded it, coated it with silt, nor encrusted it with organic matter.
The fin widened as he swam above it until, sixty feet from its tip, its width had increased to perhaps thirty feet, and it bulged upward.
He played the light across the bulge and found, as expected, two rectangular openings that faced toward the surface. The larger opening was sealed. The smaller opening, as wide as his shoulders and four feet long, was unobstructed. He shined his light into the opening, and found a narrow passage. It extended from the opening inside the great fin, and it appeared clear of obstruction.
Normally, a prudent diver, particularly one diving without a companion, would not enter an unfamiliar, confined space. But these circumstances were not normal. And, so far, everything he had expected to find he had found.
The passage appeared too narrow to be negotiated while wearing his tank and BCD. Even if the space proved large enough, the risk that his equipment could catch on, or entangle with, unseen obstructions was too great.
Therefore, he expended some of his limited time on bottom removing his tank and BCD. He grasped them and held them in front of himself as though they formed a swim practice kickboard. Then he swam through the opening and inched ahead through the dark passage. The passage opened into a wider, taller space after ten feet. Within two minutes his light revealed the object he sought, lying loose. He tucked it into the mesh collecting bag attached to his waist, then retraced his path. He shrugged back into his equipment, returned to the shot line, then ascended, with minutes to spare.
* * *
Back in the cabin he dried off, tended his equipment, and performed evening prayers.
Then he wiped dry the object he had salvaged and turned it in his hands, while he ate his evening meal. The object was the size and shape of a laptop computer, or of a slim, but oversized, textbook. He hefted it, tapped its exterior with a fingernail, then ran a small magnet over it. Stainless steel. The panel that gave access to its interior was hinged halfway along the case, not at the case’s base, like a laptop computer would have been. Steel rings on both edges of the case, at the hinge line, appeared to be anchor points for a missing strap by which it could be carried.
Only the contents interested him. He pressed the release button on the case’s side, and the lid clicked open. The papers and other items inside were arranged within an internal accordion file. They were, like the plasticine accordion file itself, dry and pristine. No perishable rubber seal had kept the case’s interior watertight. The piece was simply machined with the extraordinary precision one expected in Swiss watches.
He ignored the pencils and other hard items, except for a red metal tube, the size of a small hand flashlight. This he removed from its clip, then tucked away in his back pack.
Finally, he lifted out the loose-bound sheaf of laminated papers and leafed through it. The graphics were clear enough, but the text, as he should have expected, required extensive additional attention, before it would mean anything to him. He placed the laminated sheets in his backpack, too, then snapped the case shut, and slipped it into his bulky coat’s oversized side pocket.
He would need additional equipment, and many time-consuming tasks lay ahead.
One task, however, now required immediate attention. He knew that weariness begat carelessness. He also knew that timidity begat failure.
So, despite his exhaustion, he climbed into the Expedition, and drove down the mountain.
It was past midnight when the Expedition’s headlights illuminated the sign announcing the interstate highway’s intersection at Vail.
His phone’s lodging app showed many warm beds available in the town, but he blinked away fatigue.
A portable illuminated sign beside the highway access ramp warned that repairs, west of Avon, would delay interstate highway traffic in both directions, between 10:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m., throughout July. Within America, the government fastidiously warned Americans about trivial inconveniences.
About the genuine danger he posed, America’s government told Americans nothing. Because America had no idea he was here.
He turned the Expedition westbound onto the interstate highway. The road closure didn’t trouble him. He was only going as far as Avon.