Threshold

“That’s what I thought, too,” Knight said. “So I had them take thermal shots. Take a look.” He switched the image again. This time, the topographical photo switched to shades of light blue.

“What are we looking for?” Bishop asked.

“Cool spots,” Knight said. “There are three of them.” He pointed to three purple spots on the image. “Here, here, and here.”

“Vents,” Alexander said.

“Why are they purple?” King asked. “The ambient temperature underground is fifty-five degrees. The temperature in the mountains of Turkey in the early summer are what?”

“Weather report said sixty-five,” Queen said.

“So the vents should have appeared as dark blue spots. Not purple.” King placed his fingers on the tablet and zoomed in on one of the purple vents. “So what is heating up the inside of this mountain?”

“Descent beginning in two minutes,” the pilot’s voice said over the intercom. “Better strap in and get ready for a ride.”

“At any rate,” Knight said, “those vents are our way in.” He shut down the tablet and placed it in a wall- mounted locker. He took his seat and strapped in as the pilot gave a one-minute warning.

Their seats had been relocated from the side of the cargo bay and bolted in its center facing the doors. When the Crescent reached its vertical position, the team would unbuckle one at a time and fall out into the open air.

“Here we go, folks,” the pilot said.

The Crescent dipped forward quickly. There was no moment of weightlessness that people experienced with airplane zero G simulations. Instead, intense pressure pushed against their chests as the Crescent quickly reached its top speed of Mach 2, and then surpassed it. With gravity helping the plane’s return to earth, it reached Mach 2.5 and covered the distance in ten seconds.

But the real g-force struck when the Crescent began its ascent. As the plane leveled out and continued pulling up, the seat belt straps pulled tight, crushing the air from their lungs.

As the pressure reached its apex, when each and every member of the team was seeing colors dancing in their vision, the row of seats tilted forward. King knew what it meant. The fresh bolts were coming loose. He tried to speak, but the pressure was still too great.

The Crescent continued its ascent, heading toward a vertical position. As it reached the seventy percent mark, the pressure lessened and King shouted an order into his throat mic. “Open the bay doors now!”

“We’re not yet at a vertical position sir, the draft could throw us off,” the pilot said.

The bolts gave again, tilting the group forward. If they tore free, the team would be flung against the back doors at incredible speed. King had no doubt only Bishop and Alexander would survive the impact.

“The chairs are about to break loose!” King shouted. “Open the doors now!”

The red light above the door immediately turned green and a loud grinding filled the cabin. The doors opened quickly. Wind pounded over them. If not for the goggles over their eyes, seeing would have been impossible.

King felt a slow tilting of the chair as the bolts slid from the floor. Gravity, wind, and g-forces were working against them. With the bay doors open halfway King could see the Turkish mountains shrinking away beneath them.

“Fifteen seconds,” the pilot said.

But they didn’t have fifteen seconds. The chairs were about to break loose, and with the doors now open sixty percent, there was barely enough room to fit. “Duck your head and pull in your legs,” King shouted to the team.

The bolts gave way all at once. As the team fell, they followed King’s orders, ducking their heads and bringing their knees up to their chests. Forty-five hundred feet above the earth, the Chess Team shot out from the back of the Crescent still strapped into a row of chairs like a bunch of teenagers at a carnival death drop.

SEVENTY-SEVEN

Babel

PUSHED AND PULLED by high winds, the row of seats spun madly as it carried the team toward the rocky mountain slope below. They had just seconds to separate and deploy their parachutes. King, who was sitting in the middle of the five man team, shouted his orders.

“Bishop, Alexander, go!”

Both men heard him clearly in their ears. They unbuckled from their seats and rolled away. Seconds later they pulled their chutes and the bench rocketed past them.

Only seconds remained.

“Queen, Knight, go!”

Both were ready, pushing from their seats and pulling their chutes once far enough away. They shot above the bench, and King. With only fifteen hundred feet left, King unbuckled from the bench and shoved off it with his feet. He yanked his cord. As his fall slowed with a sudden yank from his opening chute, he watched the bench finish its fall. It smashed on the mountainside. An explosion of small parts burst from the bench as it folded in over itself.

King cringed. He had no idea what kind of surveillance or security the site had, but they had undoubtedly just announced their skyward approach. He readied himself for an attack, but none came. In fact, the barren mountainside was as quiet and empty as it had been before. The only difference was that it was now rushing toward him.

King bent his knees as he struck, and rolled with the impact. But he was headed downslope and the cool air descending the mountain caught his parachute, dragging him down the steep grade. He spun himself around and planted his boots on the ground. He shot to his feet and dug in, grabbing the lines of his parachute and reeling them in. With the billowing fabric under control, he quickly bunched it up, found a crag in the rocks, and stuffed it in.

He turned back to find the others above him, hiding their chutes as well. With the vent a hundred yards above them, he started up the hill at a run. The others joined him and stopped when they reached the vent.

It was a three-foot hole in the earth, concealed by brush. It descended into darkness, but a tiny speck of light could be seen at the bottom.

“Depth?” King asked.

Knight aimed a laser range finder down the hole. “Two hundred feet.”

“Measure out one-ninety and throw it in,” King said to Bishop, who was uncoiling a large spool of titanium cable.

Bishop lowered the cable into the hole, watching as the spool’s digital readout scrolled toward two hundred feet. He stopped the cable at one hundred ninety and placed the spool on the ground. Using what looked like a miniature staple gun, he fired five titanium staples into the mountainside. Their long barbed tips could support three hundred pounds each. But Bishop didn’t want to risk their lives on what the staples were supposed to do. He fired five more and stepped back. “Good to go.”

King clipped a stop descender onto the line. Its squeeze trigger would allow him to slow his descent by loosening his grip. The counterintuitive function of the device was hard to get used to, but once mastered, it worked without flaw. Of course, that was when rappelling down a cliff face feetfirst. King was descending a vertical stone pipe—head first. He wrapped his feet around the line to keep himself from flipping over and slid into the tunnel. Hidden from the light of day, he reached up and pulled his night vision goggles over his eyes.

The tunnel shot straight down as far as he could see. With wiggle room on either side and a clear shot down, King squeezed his stop descender and plummeted down the hole. The others followed, one by one, spacing out their drops every twenty seconds.

The air grew warmer as King dropped down the pit. And the light ahead grew brighter; so much so that he had to reach up and remove his night vision goggles. Something was down there, he just hoped he wouldn’t find himself dangling above a pit of lava, or a firing squad.