skies. It was a rare chance for an easy kill and he wasn't about to pass it by.
'Gunners at your stations,' he barked over the intercom. 'Prepare for air-to-air action.'
The five-man crew of the attack bomber were immediately energized as they manned their battle positions. Rather than play the quarry of smaller and quicker fighter aircraft, as was their lot in life, the bomber crew suddenly became the hunter. Captain Negishi mentally computed a dead-reckoning line of the trimotor's path, then eased back on the throttles and banked the bomber in a wide slow turn to the right. The Fokker slipped by beneath them until Negishi eased out of the turn, which brought the bomber around and behind the silver trimotor.
Negishi eased the throttles forward again as the Fokker loomed ahead. With a top speed of two hundred sixteen miles per hour, the Mitsubishi was nearly twice as fast as the Fokker and easily closed the gap.
'Ready with the forward guns,' Negishi ordered as the unarmed plane grew larger in the gunsights.
But the trimotor was not going to pose like a sitting duck. Randy Schodt had seen the bomber first and tracked it as it curled around on to his tail. His hopes that the Japanese plane was just making a harmless flyby vanished when the Mitsubishi took up position squarely behind him and hung on his tail, rather than fly alongside. Unable to outrun the faster military aircraft, he did the next best thing.
The Japanese plane's turret gunner just squeezed the first round from his 7.7mm machine gun when the trimotor banked sharply left and seemed to stall in the air. The gunner's bullets sprayed harmlessly into the sky as the bomber quickly overshot the Fokker.
Negishi was caught completely off guard by the sudden maneuver and cursed as he tried to muscle the bomber back toward the smaller plane. The rattle of machine-gun fire echoed through the fuselage as a side gunner tracked the sudden juke by the Fokker and sprayed a long burst in its direction.
Inside the Fokker, Hunt swore louder at the pilots as crates of artifacts began tumbling around the interior of the plane. A loud crash told him that a crate of porcelain bowls was suddenly smashed by the plane's violent turns. It wasn't until the Fokker banked sharply right and Hunt caught a glimpse out the side window at the Japanese bomber that he realized what was happening.
In the cockpit, Schodt tried every trick in the book to shake the Mitsubishi, hoping that the bomber would abandon the pursuit. But the Japanese pilot was angered by the earlier rebuff and pursued the Fokker relentlessly. Time and again, Schodt would stunt and stall his aircraft to throw the bomber off his tail, causing the Japanese plane to circle around and reacquire the trimotor in its gunsights. The hunter would not give up the chase, and Schodt would soon find the Mitsubishi back on his tail again, until finally one of the gunners found his mark.
The Fokker's rear stabilizer was the first to go, shredded in a hail of lead. Negishi licked his chops, knowing the plane could no longer turn left or right without the control from the stabilizer. Grinning like a wolf, he brought the bomber in close for the kill. As the gunner fired again, he was shocked to see the Fokker once again juke to the right, then pull up in a stall.
Schodt wasn't through yet. With Dave jockeying the throttles on the two wing-mounted engines, Randy was still able to duck and weave away from the Mitsubishi. Once again, the gunfire burst harmlessly into the fuselage, Hunt grimacing as another crate of artifacts was decimated.
Wise to his opponent's tactics, Negishi finally swung the bomber around in a wide arc and approached the Fokker from the side. This time, there was no escaping the gunfire and the Fokker's right wing engine disintegrated under a fury of bullets. A plume of smoke burst from the engine as Schodt shut down the fuel line before the motor caught fire. Jockeying the remaining two engines, he continued to fight with all his skills to keep the Fokker airborne and out of harm's way, but his hourglass finally ran out. A well-placed shot by the Mitsubishi's topside gunner severed the Fokker's elevator controls and effectively ended the flight of the
Without the ability to control altitude, the wounded trimotor began a flat descent toward the ground.
Schodt watched helplessly as the Fokker plunged toward the dusty ground with its wings ajar.
Amazingly, the airplane held its balance, gliding downward, with its nose bent just a fraction forward.
Shutting down the remaining engines just before impact, he felt the left wingtip clip the ground first, throwing the plane into a clumsy cartwheel.
The crew of the Japanese plane watched with minor disappointment as the Fokker rolled across the ground, failing to explode or burst into flames. Instead, the silver trimotor simply flipped twice, then slid inverted into a sandy ravine.
Despite the difficulty in downing the civilian plane, a cheer rang out aboard the Mitsubishi.
'Well done, men, but next time we must do better,' Negishi lauded then banked the bomber back toward its base in Manchuria.
On board the Fokker, Schodt and his brother were killed instantly when the cockpit was crushed on the first roll of the aircraft. Hunt survived the crash, but his back was broken and his left leg nearly severed.
He painfully clung to life for nearly two days before perishing in the jumbled wreckage of the fuselage.
With his last gasp of energy, he pulled the lacquered box close to his chest and cursed his sudden turn of luck. As his last breath left him, he had no idea that still clutched within his arms, he held the clue to the most magnificent treasure the world would ever see.
Part One
Seiche
-1-
The still waters of the world's deepest lake radiate the deep translucent blue of a polished sapphire. Fed by cold ancient streams that are free of silt and sediments, Lake Baikal possesses remarkably crystalline clear waters. A tiny crustacean,
Surrounded by craggy snowcapped peaks to the north and dense taiga forests of birch, larch, and pine to the south, the 'Blue Pearl of Siberia' stretches as a beacon of beauty across an otherwise hostile landscape. Situated in the dead center of lower Siberia, the four-hundred-mile-long crescent-shaped lake curves south to north just above the border with Mongolia. A massive body of water, Lake Baikal is nearly a mile deep in some spots and holds one- fifth of all the fresh water on the planet, more than all of North America's Great Lakes combined. Just a few small fishing villages dot the lake's shore, leaving the enormous lake a nearly vacant sea of tranquility. Only at its southern end does the lake sprawl toward any significant population centers. Irkutsk, a modestly hip city to a half million Siberian residents, sits forty-five miles west, while the ancient city of Ulan-Ude lies a short distance from its eastern shoreline.
Theresa Hollema glanced up from a laptop computer and briefly admired the purple mountains at the edge of the lake, crowned by cotton-ball clouds that grazed their peaks. The Dutch geophysicist delighted in the clear blue skies that so seldom graced her home outside of Amsterdam. Drawing a deep breath of the crisp air, she subconsciously tried to absorb the scenery through all her senses.
'It is an agreeable day on the lake, no?' asked Tatiana Borjin. She spoke with a deep voice in the emotionless manner endemic to Russians speaking English. Yet the gruff tone and a businesslike personality didn't match her appearance. Although she resembled the local ethnic Buryats, she was, in fact, Mongolian. With long black hair, bronze skin, and almond-shaped eyes, she possessed a natural and robust beauty. But there was a deep
