The Charlemagne Pursuit cm-4 Read online

  He decided a visit was in order. Night would come quickly, certainly by five, so he needed to take advantage of what daylight remained.

  He left the inn armed, three rounds left in the gun. He estimated that the temperature was in the low twenties. No ice, but lots of dry snow that crunched like cereal beneath his boots. He was glad he'd bought the boots earlier in Aachen, knowing that he was headed into some rough terrain. A new sweater beneath his jacket kept his chest extra warm. Tight leather gloves sheathed his hands.

  He was ready.

  For what?

  He wasn't sure.

  STEPHANIE WAITED FOR HERBERT ROWLAND TO ANSWER HER question about what had happened in 1971.

  "I don't owe those bastards a thing," Rowland muttered. "I kept my oath. Never said a word. But they still came to kill me."

  "We need to know why," she said.

  Rowland inhaled oxygen. "It was the damnedest thing. Ramsey came to the base, picked me and Sayers, and said we were going to Antarctica. We were all special ops, used to weird things, but this was the strangest. That's a long way from home." He savored another breath. "We flew to Argentina, climbed aboard Holden, and stayed to ourselves. We were told to sonar-search for a pinger, but we never heard a thing until we finally went ashore. That's when Ramsey donned his gear and dove into the water. He came back about fifty minutes later."

  "What did you find?" Rowland asked, helping Ramsey from the frozen sea, his grip tight on one shoulder of the dry suit, lifting man and equipment onto the ice.

  Nick Sayers tugged on the other shoulder. "Anything there?"

  Ramsey slipped off his faceplate and hood. "Cold as a Siberian ditch digger's fanny down there. Even with this suit. Hell of a dive, though."

  "You were down nearly an hour. Any depth problems?" Rowland asked.

  Ramsey shook his head. "I stayed above thirty feet the whole time." He pointed off to the right. "The ocean juts a long way up there, straight to the mountain."

  Ramsey removed his underwater gloves and Sayer handed him a dry pair. Bare skin could not stay exposed more than a minute in this environment. "I need to get this suit off and my clothes back on."

  "Anything there?" Sayers asked again.

  "Some damn clear water. Place is full of color, like a coral reef."

  Rowland realized they were being ignored, but he also noticed a sealed retrieval bag clipped at Ramsey's waist. The bag had been empty fifty minutes ago. Now it held something.

  "What's in there?" he asked.

  "He didn't answer me," Rowland whispered. "And he wouldn't let me or Sayers touch the bag."

  "What happened after that?" she asked.

  "We left. Ramsey was in charge. We made some more radiation checks, found nothing, then Ramsey ordered Holden to head north. He never said a word about what he saw on that dive."

  "I don't get it," Davis said. "How are you a threat?"

  The older man licked his lips. "Probably because of what happened on the way back."

  Rowland and Sayers were taking a chance. Ramsey was topside with Commander Alexander, playing cards with some of the other officers. So they'd finally decided to see what their compatriot had found on the dive. Neither of them liked being kept in the dark.

  "You sure you know the combination?" Sayers asked.

  "The quartermaster told me. Ramsey's been throwing his weight around and this ain't his ship, so he was more than happy to help me out."

  A small safe lay on the deck beside Ramsey's rack. Whatever he'd brought up with him after the dive had rested inside for the past three days while they'd left the Antarctic Circle and found the South Atlantic Ocean.

  "Keep an eye on the door," he told Sayers. He knelt and tried the combination he'd been provided.

  Three clicks confirmed that the numbers worked.

  He opened the safe and spotted the retrieval bag. He slid it out and felt its rectangular contours, eight by ten or so, maybe an inch thick. He unzipped the top, slid out the contents, and immediately recognized a ship's logbook. On the first page, scrawled in blue ink with a heavy hand, was written MISSION STARTING OCTOBER 17, 1971, ENDING____________________ . The second date would have been added after the sub docked back in port. But he realized that the captain who'd made those entries would never get that chance.

  Sayers came close. "What is it?"

  The compartment door swung open.

  Ramsey stepped inside. "I thought you two would try something like this."

  "Stick it up your ass," Rowland said. "We're all at the same grade. You're not our superior."

  A smile curled on Ramsey's black lips. "Actually, I am here. But maybe it's better you went ahead and saw. Now you realize what's at stake."

  "You're damn right," Sayers said to him. "We volunteered, just like you, and we want the rewards, just like you."

  "Believe it or not," Ramsey said, "I was going to tell you before we docked. There are things to be done and I can't do them alone."

  Stephanie wanted to know, "Why was it so important?"

  Davis seemed to understand. "It's obvious."

  "Not to me."

  "The logbook," Rowland said, "came from NR-1A."

  MALONE CLIMBED THE ROCKY PATH, LITTLE MORE THAN A THIN shelf that zigzagged every hundred feet up the wooded slope. On one side, wrought-iron stations of the cross spanned out in a solemn procession, on the other the vista below steadily grew into a panorama. Sunshine bathed the precipitous valley, and he noticed, in the distance, deep jagged gorges. Bells far away announced midday.

  He was headed for one of the cirques, circles of high precipices set into mountainous pockets, accessible only by foot, common in the Pyrenees. Beech trees sustained the slopes, stunted and twisted, their bare snowy branches interlaced in misshapen knots. He kept watch on the uneven path but noticed no footprints, which meant little given the wind and swirling snow.

  A final semicircular sweep and the monastery's entrance, perched on the cirque, rose ahead. He paused for a breath and enjoyed another wide-flung view. Snow, refrigerated by cold gusts of wind, swirled in the distance.

  Tall masonry walls stretched left and right. If what he'd read was to be believed, those stones had borne witness to Romans, Visigoths, Saracens, Franks, and the crusaders of the Albigensian wars. Many bat stevetles had been fought for this vantage point. Silence seemed a physical presence, which gave the place a solemn mood. Its history probably lay buried with the dead, the true record of its glory etched neither in stone nor in parchment.

  Brightness of God.

  More fiction? Or fact?

  He walked the remaining fifty feet, approached an iron gate, and spotted a padlocked chain.

  Great.

  No way to scale the walls.

  He reached out and gripped the gate. Cold seeped though his gloves. What now? Scour the perimeter and see if there was an opening? Seemed like the only course. He was tired, and he knew this stage of exhaustion well-the mind easily became lost in a maze of possibilities, every solution meeting a dead end.

  He shook the gate in frustration.

  The iron chain slithered to the ground.

  FIFTY-THREE

  CHARLOTTE

  STEPHANIE DIGESTED EXACTLY WHAT HERBERT ROWLAND HAD said and asked, "You're saying NR-1A was intact?"

  Rowland appeared to be tiring, but this had to be done.

  "I'm saying Ramsey brought the logbook back from the dive."

  Davis threw her a look. "I told you the SOB was deep in this."

  "Was it Ramsey who tried to kill me?" Rowland asked.

  She wasn't going to answer, but saw Davis was not of the same mind.

  "He deserves to know," Davis said.

  "This is already out of hand. Do you want more?"

  Davis faced Rowland. "We think he's behind it."

  "We don't know that," she was quick to add. "But it's a distinct possibility."

  "He was always a bastard," Rowland said. "After we got back, he's the one who sucked up all the benef
its. Not me or Sayers. Sure, we got a few promotions, but we never got what Ramsey managed." Rowland paused, clearly fatigued. "Admiral. All the way to the top."

  "Maybe we should do this later," she said.

  "No way," Rowland said. "Nobody comes after me and gets away with it. If I wasn't in this bed, I'd kill him myself."

  She wondered about the bravado.

  "I took my last drink tonight," he said. "No more. I mean it."

  Anger seemed an effective drug. Rowland's eyes were ablaze.

  "Tell us everything," she said.

  "How much do you know about Operation Highjump?"

  "Just the official line," Davis said.

  "Which is total garbage."

  Admiral Byrd brought six R4-D aircraft with him to Antarctica. Each was equipped with sophisticated cameras and trailing magnetometers. They launched from a carrier deck using rocket propulsion bottles to assist in takeoff. The aircraft spent over 200 hours in the air and flew 23,000 miles across the continent. On one of the final mapping flights, Byrd's plane returned from its mission three hours late. The official account was that he'd lost an engine and had to limp home. But Byrd's private logs, returned and reviewed by the then chief of naval operations, revealed a different explanation.

  Byrd had been flying over what the Germans named Neuschwabenland. He was inland, headed west over a featureless white horizon, when he spotted a bare area dotted with three lakes separated by masses of barren reddish brown rocks. The lakes themselves were colored in shades of red, blue, and green. He noted their position and the following day dispatched to the area a special team, who discovered that the lake water was warm and filled with algae, which provided the pigmentation. The water was also brackish, which indicated a connection to the ocean.

  The discovery excited Byrd. He was privy to information from the 1938 German expedition, which had reported similar observations. He'd doubted the claims, having visited the continent and knowing its inhospitable nature, but the special field team explored the area for the next few days.

  "I wasn't aware Byrd kept a private log," Davis said.

  "I saw it," Rowland said. "The entire Highjump operation was classified, but we worked on a lot of things when we returned and I got a look. It's only during the last twenty years that anything about High-jump has been revealed-most of it false, by the way."

  She asked, "What is it that you, Sayers, and Ramsey did when you returned?"

  "We relocated all the stuff brought home by Byrd in 1947."

  "It still existed?"

  Rowland nodded. "Every bit. Crates of it. The government doesn't throw anything away."

  "What was inside them?"

  "I have no idea. We simply moved them, never opened anything. And by the way, I'm concerned about my wife. She's at her sister's."

  "Give me the address," Davis said, "and I'll have the Secret Service make contact. But it's you Ramsey's after. And you still haven't told us why Ramsey considers you a threat."

  Rowland lay still, both his arms connected to intravenous bags. "I can't believe I almost died."

  "The guy we surprised broke into your house yesterday while you were out during the day," Davis said. "I'm guessing he screwed with your insulin."

  "My head is pounding."

  She wanted to press harder but knew that this old man would talk only when ready. "We'll make sure you're protected from here on. We just need to know why it's necessary."

  Rowland's face was a kaleidoscope of twisting emotions. He was struggling with something. His breath came ragged, his watery eyes fixed in a disdainful stare. "The damn thing was dry as a bone. Not a water smear on any page."

  She registered what he'd said. "The logbook?"

  He nodded. "Ramsey brought it up from the ocean in the bag. That meant it never got wet before he found it."

  "Mother of God," Davis muttered.

  She now realized. "NR-1A was intact?"

  "Only Ramsey knows that."

  "That's why he wants them all dead," Davis said. "When you let that file go to Malone, he panicked. He can't have that get out. Can you imagine what that would do to the navy?"

  But she wasn't so sure. There had to be more to the story.

  Davis stared at Rowland. "Who else knows?"

  "Me. Sayers, but he's dead. Admiral Dyals. He knew. He commanded the whole thing and gave us the order of silence."

  Winterhawk. That's what the press called Dyals, referring to both his age and his political leanings. He'd long been compared to anotheraging, arrogant naval officer who also eventually had to be chased off. Hyman Rickover.

  "Ramsey became Dyals' favorite," Rowland said. "Got assigned to the admiral's personal staff. Ramsey worshiped the man."

  "Enough to protect his reputation, even now?" she asked.

  "Hard to say. But Ramsey's a strange bird. Doesn't think like the rest of us. I was glad to be rid of him after we got back."

  "So Dyals is the only one left?" Davis asked.

  Rowland shook his head. "One more knew."

  Had she heard right?

  "There's always an expert. He was a hotshot researcher the navy hired. Strange guy. We called him the Wizard of Oz. You know, the guy behind the curtain who nobody ever saw? Dyals himself recruited him, and he reported only to Ramsey and the admiral. He's the one who opened those crates, all by himself."

  "We need a name," Davis said.

  "Douglas Scofield, PhD. He liked to always remind us of that. Dr. Scofield, he called himself. None of us was impressed. His head was so far up Dyals' ass he never saw daylight."

  "What happened to him?" she asked.

  "Hell if I know."

  They needed to leave, but first there was one more thing. "What about those crates from Antarctica?"

  "We took everything to a warehouse at Fort Lee. In Virginia. And left it with Scofield. After that, I have no idea."

  FIFTY-FOUR

  OSSAU, FRANCE

  MALONE STARED DOWN AT THE IRON CHAIN LYING IN THE SNOW. Think. Be careful. A whole bunch isn't right here. Especially not the clean snip in the chain. Somebody had come prepared with bolt cutters.

  He removed the gun from beneath his jacket and pushed open the gate.

  Frozen hinges screamed out.

  He entered the ruin over crumbling masonry and approached the diminishing arches of a Roman doorway. He descended several crumbling rock steps into an inky interior. What little light existed filtered in with the wind through bare window frames. The thickness of the walls, the slant of the openings, the iron gate at the entrance all indicated the rudimentary times in which they were created. He stared around at what was once important-half place of worship, half citadel, a fortified locale on the outskirts of an empire.

  Each exhale vaporized before his eyes.

  His gaze continued to rake the ground, but he saw no evidence of others.

  He advanced into a maze of columns that supported an intact roof. The sense of vastness disappeared upward into shadowy vaults. He wandered among the columns as he might among tall trees in a petrified forest. He wasn't sure what he was looking for or what he expected, and he resisted the urge to be taken in by the spooky surroundings.

  From what he'd read on the Internet, Bertrand, the first bishop, made quite a name for himself. Legend attributed many wonders to his miraculous powers. Nearby Spanish chieftains routinely left a trail of fire and blood across the Pyrenees, and the local population was terrified of them. But before Bertrand they surrendered their prisoners and retreated, never to return.

  And there was the miracle.

  A woman had brought her baby and complained that the father would not support them. When the man denied any complicity, Bertrand ordered that a vessel of cold water be placed before them and he dropped a rock inside. He told the man to take the stone from the water and, if he was lying, God would give a sign. The man lifted the stone but his hands came away scalded, as if boiled. The father promptly admitted his paternity and made proper amends. For his
piety Bertrand eventually acquired a label-the Brightness of God. He supposedly shunned the description but allowed it to be applied to the monastery, apparently remembered by Einhard, decades later, as he drew up his last will and testament.

  Malone left the columns and passed into the cloister, an irregular-roofed trapezoid lined with arches, columns, and capitals. Roof timbers, which appeared to be new, seemed to have been the focus of recent restorations. Two rooms led off the right side of the cloister, both empty, one with no roof, the other with collapsed walls. Surely once refectories for the monks and guests, but only the elements and animals now possessed them.

  He turned a corner and advanced down the short side of the gallery, passing several more collapsed spaces, each dusted with snow from either empty window frames or open roofs, brown nettles and weeds infecting their recesses. Above one door a faded carved image of the Virgin Mary stared down. He glanced beyond the doorway into a spacious room. Probably the chapter house where the monks had lived. He stared back out into the cloister garden at a crumbling basin with faint leaf and head decorations. Snow engulfed its base.

  Something moved across the cloister.

  In the opposite gallery. Fast and faint, but there.

  He crouched and crept to the corner.

  The long side of the cloister stretched fifty feet before him, ending at a double archway with no doors. The church. He assumed that whatever was to be found would be there, but this was a long shot. Still, somebody had cut the chain outside.

  He studied the inner wall to his right.

  Three doorways opened between him and the cloister's end. Arches to his left, which framed the windy garden, were all severe, bearing scarcely any ornamentation. Time and the elements had taken their toll. He noticed one lonely cherub that had survived, bearing an armorial shield. He heard something, from his left, in the long gallery.