The Martian Pendant Read online

  “Anyplace would be best, Bobby, as long as your mother is there.”

  He longed to be reunited with her in Africa, but it was his fervent hope that she wouldn’t take offense at his worming his way into the expedition. It would be easy for her to be hurt and outraged if it occurred to her that she was being used as part of his CIA ambitions. After all, it was his relationship with her that had facilitated his insinuating himself into Security with the Buell Corporation, and being given the task of protecting the department handling the GeoSat project. But it was his love for her that had led him to initially stumble into her project; the windfall for the CIA was incidental.

  On the morning of his flight to Cairo, London was grey and cold, the drizzle compounded by the sooty darkness. As he waited to board, he wondered how long it would take the British to clean up the flues and chimneys that contributed so much to the legendary London fog. Probably, he thought, much longer than the Egyptians have taken to air-condition their buildings. He shivered in his tropical clothes as he waited in the cold wind for the boarding stairs to be wheeled into place. London! A great place to visit and a wonderful city, but it takes some getting used to, he said to himself.

  He slept most of the way to Egypt, landing at the airport in the midday desert heat, thankful he was wearing the light clothing. The smog reminded him of L.A., as did the traffic, although on a smaller scale. In the streets it was almost anarchy. It seemed as if the driver who could honk the loudest and longest had the right of way. After an overnight stay, he was more than happy to board his Egyptian Airlines plane for Dar-es-Salaam. A twin-engine Martin 202, it could, and did, land at every postage-stamp strip along the way.

  When he finally arrived at Dar, he got a cabled message off to his chief at Langley, and another to the exploration base. He knew that added Security was always welcome, and the way had been prepared for him by the people at Buell, just as it had been with Diana, arranging the loan of an employee for the year.

  Max had received Dan’s message from the camp radio operator, volunteering Diana to fly him there, although he failed to give her any other information aside from her passenger being someone in Security. Although eager to get started on the dig, she had planned their weekly mail-run for the next day, but without the extra weight in the rear seat, and his baggage. She complained that because of the usual headwinds, she would need extra cash for fuel to fill the tank for the 300-mile return flight from Dar to their camp near the Kenyan border.

  The first leg was again uneventful, as she flew southeast to the coast. She occasionally reported her position to the camp, a habit that might prove useful should she be forced down. She had no problems with the tower at her destination, permission to land given without comment. Again, she saw that she was being watched by that tall, so-called Afrikaaner. What did he call himself, Willem Krueger? Hastily heading for the post office with the little bag of mail, she saw he was following her progress from his table in the café. Where was her passenger, anyway, she thought irritably. I should have figured that when I needed Security the most, he wouldn’t be around.

  Just then, her mail sack was almost pulled out of her hand, with a familiar voice saying, “Here, let me help you with that.”

  As she turned, ready to defend her mail, she saw Dan’s smiling face. Relieved, she laughed, “Danny! Not the CIA again. You do turn up in the most unlikely places!”

  He couldn’t help an even broader smile, “The pot calls the kettle black. I may be CIA, but I’m also that security agent you’re supposed to pick up. And now you’re a mail and commuter plane pilot?”

  She wanted to kiss him then, but seeing they were being watched, she cautioned him. “The walls have ears around here. And somebody’s watching, someone I don’t trust.”

  “Oh, that tall towhead over there? He introduced himself to me as a British official of some sort. I don’t trust him, either.”

  She added, “He gives me what you Yanks call the creeps. He’s supposed to be from Johannesburg, but his accent, in fact, is all wrong.”

  Dan replied, “These days, accents can be miles off. He probably went to Oxford or Cambridge, just as you did, losing his South African accent in the process.”

  After posting the mail and nervously eyeing the watching Dragunov, she said quietly, “Come on, get your things and let’s get out of here. We have over 300 miles to go in our little plane, and I still have to tank up with petrol.”

  Grabbing the suitcase that had been chained to a table with a lock, Dan replied, “Just lead the way, lady.”

  On the return flight, the engine noise kept their conversation to a minimum, there being no intercom. Behind her in the passenger seat, Dan seemed elated in discovering her, but she could make out only a few words he shouted. One sounded like “Date.” She wanted so much to be alone with him, but shook her head, thinking of the crowded campsite. But still, he would be a good man to have around. Someone she could trust.

  A Closer Look

  That night the Soviet agent reported to his superiors in Moscow. “Another agent is being flown to the American base. He says he is in Security, but I think he is with one of their intelligence services. Military, or even CIA. I’m mailing a couple of photos I took of him. Check your files and give me his identity if you’re able, as soon as possible.”

  Nervously drumming his fingers on his desk, the Soviet agent reflected on his work to that point. He had established a South African identity by falsifying his papers by having the good fortune to fall in with a somewhat needy young woman in the Ministry of Mines in Johannesburg. Through a subterfuge of switching assignment papers for the Minister’s signature, Dragunov, a.k.a. Willem Krueger, was assigned as Deputy Minister for Oil and Mineral Exploration. This was an “at large” office of the Ministry, allowing him freedom as to where he might work.

  When the permit applications for the Oil Cartel’s projected exploratory drilling and that of the Chicago dig were received, they were turned over to him to process. What a windfall, he thought, but his anxiety continued. His fraud was certain to be discovered sooner or later. There had been some Hong Kong Chinese oilmen in Dar recently, enquiring about permits for exploratory wells along the coast. While he was supposed to be co-operative with British interests, Hong Kong still being a Crown Colony, he could never, under the circumstances, be sure whether any Chinese was friend or foe. Either way, his cover might be threatened. There was a training program for Chinese Intelligence Agency Cadets offered by the KGB in Moscow. There, information as to his true identity would easily be available. He decided at length that the safest course to take with the permit process for the Chinese was to delegate it to his assistant, an Englishman, Rodney Kindred, originally from East Anglia. That would free him to pay close attention to the American venture, gathering information first-hand.

  His nervousness subsided as he made plans for the trip. He would use the four-wheel drive vehicle assigned him, a one-man safari. All he would need in addition to suitable wear and provisions would be field glasses, his two-way radio, cameras with film, and weapons--a hunting rifle, certainly, and the handgun he always carried, his Russian copy of the Walther P-38.

  Recruits

  The dissident oilmen, going first to Kenya, deplaned in Nairobi, interested in the Mau Mau uprising there. The plan was to enlist terrorists for use in disrupting the oil exploration over the border in Tanganyika. It would be a difficult mission, persuading the Kenyans to cross the border and then turn them against the people at the dig. But they knew that radicals among the revolutionaries might be persuaded to use violence if they had the right incentive, always short of the expensive and necessary arms and ammunition as they were.

  By 1958, there were few militants in Kenya remaining free, most of them having been killed or imprisoned by the British in the campaign to neutralize the Mau Mau. It was known that some of them had fled to Tanganyika, hiding out among the scattered Kikuyu tribespeople. Even then, they were limited in their terrorist activities by TANU,
whose struggle for freedom was geared to peaceful means, ballots instead of bullets.

  Jeremiah Grant, the de facto chairman of the oil splinter group, had finally been able to contact a small band of poorly armed militants just across the border. The plan was to use bribery, mostly in the form of surplus Lee-Enfield rifles and ammunition. They would be disguised as local herders, setting up on the higher ground to the west of the encampment. Their cover, such as it was, would consist of ten head of cattle that he had purchased.

  The plan was flawed from the beginning. Five men per cow would, even to an ignorant observer, seem a ridiculous ratio. A critical person would also notice that they had little resemblance, except in skin color, to the tall, slim local Maasai.

  In the eroded hills to the west of the dig encampment, in the rapidly cooling twilight, the furtive band of fifty Mau-Mau gathered around their newly established campfires. The Kenyans, all Kikuyus, were miles from their hiding places across the border, and wary of the local Maasai. Two white men were in their midst, one of them Grant. Through his interpreter, Cedric Milford, an old-line settler, he was trying to encourage them.

  “Look, you see no other campfires except where the foreigners have gathered. And their numbers are no greater than your warriors; and some of them are women. With the new firearms I brought you, they will run in terror when you descend on their camp.”

  The leader of the Kenyans excitedly spoke to his men, receiving some comment in return. He then addressed the listening Milford, who turned to Grant. “He says his group only number fifty, and the camp guards have automatic rifles.”

  “Ask him,” Grant replied scornfully, “since when is a Kikuyu warrior not the equal of any three men? Tell him that if he won’t fight, I’ll enlist the Maasai around here to do the job.”

  That did it. The Kikuyu leader spat into the fire, and then turned to Grant, his coffee-colored face further darkened by rage. In broken English, he almost shouted, “You whites think you own us, and before you came, it was the Arabs. Now it’s time the black man shows you. Our revolution will yet force the British out of Kenya, and the lessons taught there will bring freedom from white rule here and all through the rest of Africa.”

  Taken aback, Grant replied through the interpreter, “We Americans sympathize with your wish to become free. We ourselves had to fight the British for the same cause many years ago. That’s part of the reason we’ve supplied you with weapons and ammunition, for your struggle in Kenya. But remember, it works both ways. We help you with the fight in your country, and you help us here. And after winning, we won’t stay, as the Europeans did. You have my word on that.”

  Mollified, the African turned, calling out orders to his band. One-third of the men spread out on the periphery to watch the exploration site while the rest selected spots around the fires for sleeping.

  “One thing,” Grant said, “you’ll need more cattle to make your band look like a genuine group of herdsmen. If you don’t get them, you’ll arouse too much suspicion to be effective when the time comes. Lacking the element of surprise when you strike could make all the difference.”

  Little further exchange was necessary, and they bade the Kikuyus goodbye. Milford explained, “The fierce pride of the these tribesmen has overcome logic. They will stay, their leader said, and await their opportunity to attack. Because most of the foreigners there are white and are robbing their fellow black Africans of their birthright, killing them will be easy. That’s the Mau-Mau way. It appears they regard the people down there as no different than the settlers they murdered in Kenya. Whites will have to pay, they say.”

  With that, the two men clambered into their truck and drove off toward Arusha, the nearest town. There would be good food and drink as well as warm beds there, to salve any pangs of conscience they might have.

  ELEVEN

  The Spaceship

  The final layer of rock was being scraped away from what proved to be the starboard side of the ship. An ecstatic Diana was taking pictures as Dan stood by with the CO2 detector, marveling at the sight.

  “Look,” she said, “the hull material! It’s the same as the fragments we found on the surface, and that of my pendant. There must indeed have been two ships, the other destroyed on landing.”

  As the excavation continued, the very large size of the craft became apparent, as did its orientation along a deep watery fissure in the mix of volcanic rock and limestone.

  On the mound of excavated earth and rock above, Ballard called down, “The diameter of the hull is at least a hundred feet. I can see the nose now, and there’s not a sign of a heat shield, but there is a large streamlined cupola there, apparently housing the flight deck.”

  Diana replied, “Well, you know we showed that this material will withstand at least 2,000 degrees. But that’s just scratching the surface, no pun intended. For this ship’s skin to hold together without a heat shield to burn away in the process, it would have to withstand anywhere between 2,900 and 4,800 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on its speed. We know that meteorites, composed mostly of nickel and iron, melt or burn away at around 2,750 degrees in their plunge to earth. This spaceship obviously withstood the heat generated by entry into our atmosphere, but by what property or mechanism? And, you say no ports for the pilot? There must be openings for tubes of some type that could house instruments to monitor outside conditions and speed. Maybe something like television?”

  Dan replied, “I can’t see any openings for that. But the tolerances could be so small that detecting the edges of hatches and other covered openings could require the use of a microscope. Or, they may have been obscured by mineral deposition long ago. Maybe the nose is like one-way glass.”

  Complete excavation of the starboard side took three weeks, partially because of the size of the ship, but to no small degree due to the need to chip away the surrounding calcareous and igneous rock. Time was also required to rig a camouflaged covering to hide its presence from observation from the air or the surrounding heights. It became evident that security guards would also have to be posted in order to exclude spies or saboteurs. This was ultimately ineffective, of course, due to the make-up of the staff, a fifth of whom would prove to be spies or hires of various sinister groups. So the secrecy, put in place belatedly after GeoSat’s discovery, was practically worthless.

  The last part of the ship to be uncovered was the tail section. There, a spherical housing, obviously for the propulsion system, was mounted on a thick tubular spar extending a hundred feet back from the cigar-shaped body. Again, rather than having exhaust jets to the outside, the power unit appeared devoid even of markings denoting possible openings. The scintillation counter recorded the bulk of the radiation that remained as being over that surface, confirming its function. There were only one other protuberance seen, a streamlined sponson, low on that side, which would prove to have a mate opposite it. There were porthole-like orifices along the length of the ship, not evident until the last few feet were excavated, close to the craft’s bottom, and situated in its forward third. These were too small for even an average-size man to enter, serving most likely as ventilation ports that had been left open. After inspecting them, Diana decided that a slim woman could squeeze through, once the concretions of limestone narrowing the openings could be removed.

  Standing on the top of the ship, she could see the course of the stream supplying the carbonate deposits, flowing from a limestone cavern opened at the end of the ditch they had cut exposing the tail. The stream continued along the belly of the craft and into the low-lying openings. No sign of an exit was apparent, although by then only one side had been uncovered. That the stream had its outflow at some other point was obvious. A cut nearly 200 feet into the earth had been made to reach that underground stream, a limestone conduit more than big enough for a man. She knew creatures would be living inside, fish and crustaceans, probably. It was the thought of reptiles that bothered her, particularly the one that had taken their hapless co-worker Joan. And there were cr
ocodiles in the stream only twenty miles to the north. Could this subterranean system connect the ship to that river?

  Entry

  One of the first projects involved the installation of diesel-powered pumps to maintain the area free of noxious and suffocating gases. The placement of riflemen to keep predators away was also mapped out. Men with jackhammers were turned loose at the ports, one of which was fairly quickly cleared of the soft rock. After the rough edges were sanded until the glassy surface appeared, it was seen that soaping them would make squeezing through easier. The pumps were then used to clear the air and water inside for twenty-four hours before an attempt at entry would be made.

  As none of the other women were interested, Diana determined she would go. When she emerged from her tent wearing only her swimsuit, Max couldn’t help but let out a low whistle, bringing an icy look from her that put him in his place. Dan scowled at Max, but turning to her, concerned more with her safety, expressed his fears about the uncertainty of her getting out, after gaining entry.

  Eager to be first to enter what seemed to be the Martian ship in her story, she reassured him. “Danny, if I’m able to get in, I shall probably be able to get out any time. And with our new cutting torch, we can enlarge the opening with a little work.”

  Ballard looked at her incredulously, cautioning, “We haven’t built the cutting torch yet, and really don’t know if it will work even then.”

  She shrugged that away with a chuckle, “Should I become stuck, I’ll not eat for a day or two and lose a few pounds. Voila! I’m out.”

  Ready for that day’s scheduled entry of the ship when the CO2 level inside was shown to be little more than that of the surrounding air, she gathered her equipment. Ballard assured her that the pumps, placed well above the excavation, would make it safe, should even a venting of that or other gases take place. To be on the safe side, she would take along a portable oxygen tank and mask borrowed from the aid station. Other safeguards were a flashlight, should the power fail to the extension cord she would pull after her, and an intercom, with its wires taped to that line. Food and drinking water, if needed, would be available at the entry port.