Black Sun

Danielle could feel her anger begi

“We did not exactly act the Good Samaritan,” he said. “But there are reasons for this.”

“And what might those be?”

“Drug smugglers.”

“Which we are not,” she explained.

“Yes,” he said. “It seems to be the case, but we needed to be sure. Several years ago, some men came here with money, trying to buy our silence, while they cut down trees for a dirt runway and took over good lands to grow their drugs.

“As soon as they were entrenched, the kind talk and the money ceased and they became tyrants. But the spirit of the people here is strong. We decided to run them off but it was not easy. Threats were made; some people were harmed,” he said, catching the look in her eye. “Blood was spilled on both sides. We vowed to never let them come back; it is always easier to keep the predator out than to deal with it once you’ve let it through the gate.”

He nodded toward a window, through which blue sky could be seen. “Your plane circling for an hour in the middle of the night and then landing on the lake was very suspicious to us. We had to be sure. Even Saint Ignacio was a soldier before he became a priest. Sometimes that is what we must be as well.”

Danielle relented. Now she felt the fool for judging too quickly. With a history like that, she could guess how their actions might have appeared.

“I understand what you’re saying,” she said.

“And knowing how things looked from your side,” he replied, “I can understand why you lied. But that doesn’t tell me what you’re really doing here. Would you like to explain?”

Danielle uncrossed her arms and sat down. “You probably wouldn’t believe it.”

“Try me,” he said. “Belief is my business.”

“We’re looking for an ancient Mayan ruin called the Temple of the Jaguar. We believe it might be located nearby. And our suspicious”—she glanced at Hawker—“and somewhat foolhardy flight out here was part of that search process.”

“Why didn’t you go back?”

“By the time we’d figured out where we needed to be,” she said, “we were too low on fuel to get back, so we landed on the biggest lake we could find.”

“I see,” Father Domingo said. “And why would you feel it necessary to keep such a thing secret?”

She hesitated, not wanting to lie to the priest again, but not wanting to tell him, either.

It was Father Domingo who spoke first. “Perhaps,” he said, “because you’ve brought something with you that you don’t understand, and you fear both using it and failing to use it. But your greatest fear is what other forces might do if they found it first.”

CHAPTER 49

The Situation Room of the White House was more crowded than the president had ever seen. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of the CIA, the secretaries of state and defense and their aides had filled the sitting areas. Other cabinet members stood in the space around the main table.

The world situation had deteriorated harshly in the past twenty-four hours. In response to the downing of their fighter plane, the Chinese had captured a pair of Russian spy boats in disputed waters and now troops were building up on the border between the two countries.

Because an American vessel had been approached in the same area but had managed to leave the vicinity and escape capture, the Russians were claiming U.S. duplicity. They were lashing out at both nations through every available cha

The Chinese, on the other hand, wanted to know why U.S. and Russian spy boats were in its waters and operating together, as a second round of finger-pointing and paranoia got into full swing.

The president sat in his chair quietly. He glanced through a situation report while the head of the Joint Chiefs explained the particulars using a flat screen monitor.

“… and in addition to that the Chinese have deployed forty divisions on the Russian border; strategic aircraft have been dispersed or launched and parked in racetrack patterns a hundred miles from the borders.”

He clicked the screen and a new satellite photo appeared: a Russian ICBM silo. What looked like steam could be seen escaping from hoses attached to a large, odd-looking tanker truck. “The Russians are making serious preparations, but their activities are balanced, half in Asia, half on the European side.”

A new photo showed mobile SS-20 launchers being dispersed into the countryside. The following one showed the Russian port at Murmansk. The docks were empty, and the cha

“From our point of view this is the bigger problem,” the chief said. “In twenty-four hours, in some of the worst conditions of the season, their entire ballistic missile fleet has put to sea. Not only did we believe this could not be done so quickly, it hasn’t been done since the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

He turned to look at Henderson. “This is a grave sign, Mr. President. The Russians are very serious about things. And I think we should be, too.”

These latest actions were highly unwelcome. And they left the president with a growing dilemma. He believed the Brazil stone was secure and no longer an immediate threat as long as it remained in the Yucca Mountain depository. Sensors placed on and around the mountain had detected no emissions of electromagnetic energy escaping the complex. But neither the NRI staff, the CIA’s newly involved experts, nor Nathanial Ahiga could say for sure what would happen if another super-spike occurred.

Another event like that, in the current state of heightened readiness, might be more than they could afford.

In that sense the incident had been terrible luck. It had led directly to the current predicament—spy satellites destroyed, tensions flaring. One more hour and the stone would have been safely ensconced in the depths of Yucca Mountain and nothing would have occurred.

But in a different sense, he felt it might have been good luck. Had the stone sent forth this burst while still housed at the NRI headquarters in Virginia, or, worse yet, at the begi

The pulse had fried almost every circuit and backup system at Groom Lake, and even the backup systems at Nellis Air Force Base, eighty miles away, had been inoperable for almost five hours.

The president had served in the military and he believed in their professionalism and training. But he feared what the reaction would have been if Washington and most of the East Coast had gone suddenly, utterly dark. It would not have been like the blackout in 2003, where the grid went down but phones still operated, with places with backup power remaining functional and military communications online. It would have been complete darkness, complete silence.

To the western command, five hours without communication would have been incomprehensible. All public television, radio, and Internet feeds gone, nothing but static on the box, no response to calls, no word from either military or civilian perso

He wondered privately if that scenario would have caused the western command to launch some type of counterattack, firing back against anyone anywhere who might have been responsible.