The Citadel Read online

  The sky was clear and the wind had died down. The weather report from High Jump Station written down by his copilot looked good, but Vannet had long ago learned that the Antarctic was one place where weather reports could be counted on about as far as the report itself could be folded into a paper airplane and thrown. The only constant in the weather here was change-and the change was usually for the worse.

  Vannet wasn't sure who the captain-Whitaker was his name-worked for. All he knew was that four months ago he had been ordered to do whatever the man said. Captain Whitaker had been here waiting to receive their cargo every time they'd landed at the Citadel-the code name they knew for this unmarked location. Today even Whitaker was going out with them. If anyone was remaining behind, Vannet knew not and cared even less. It was their last flight from the Citadel, and successfully completing it was his only concern.

  Vannet shifted his gaze back to the "airstrip." The plane sat in a large bowl of ice surrounded on three sides by ice ridges and intermittent, towering mountains punching through the thick polar cap; the strip pointed toward the one open side. The bulky MARS with four turboprop engines mounted on its wings was a powerful aircraft, and Vannet felt confident in its abilities. Bracketed over the plane's pontoons were sets of skis that allowed them to negotiate the 2,000 meters of relatively level ice and snow that these people called a runway. He would be damn glad to never see this place again.

  "Closing the ramp," the loadmaster announced in Vannet's headset. In the rear of the plane the back ramp lifted from the thin, powdery snow as hydraulic arms pulled it up. Descending from the top of the cargo bay came the top section of the ramp. Like jaws closing, the two shut against the swirling frozen air outside. The heaters fought a losing battle against the cold as they pumped hot air out of pipes in the ceiling of the cargo bay, ten feet overhead.

  Vannet turned to Captain Whitaker. "We're all set, sir."

  Whitaker simply nodded and clambered down the steps to take his seat in the rear.

  "Let's do it," Vannet told the copilot. Carefully, they turned the nose straight on line, due south. As Vannet increased throttle, the plane moved, slowly gathering momentum as the propellers and skis threw up a plume of snow behind.

  Vannet waited until he was satisfied they had enough speed, and then pulled in the yoke. The nose of the MARS lifted, and the plane crawled into the air. Once he reached sufficient altitude to clear the mountains, Vannet banked hard right and headed west. In the distance, out the right window, the ice pack that hugged the shore of Antarctica could be seen as a tumbled mass of broken sea ice that extended to the horizon.

  Vannet turned the controls over to his copilot. Four hours and they'd be at High Jump Station, the temporary sprawling base established under the auspices of exploring Antarctica; they would refuel, and then he and his crew and passengers could begin the long stop-filled flight back to their home base in Hawaii. After four months down here they were more than ready to see loved ones and bask in the sun.

  The whole mission had turned strange after the initial order to support Operation High Jump, a massive exploration of Antarctica by the military. Almost their entire squadron had received the tasking and deployed south. But on arrival at High Jump Station, a cluster of Quonset huts set next to another ice runway on the shore of a large ice-covered bay, their plane had been detached from the others and given this strange mission to support Captain Whitaker and the Citadel. They'd been warned, in no uncertain terms, that they were not to discuss the mission with anyone.

  "I've got the beacon clear," the copilot informed Vannet.

  As long as they kept the needle on the direction finder centered, they'd come in right on top of High Jump Station. That was another odd thing. They'd flown every mission on instruments in both directions, never once using a map, not that there were any maps available. As any good pilot would, Vannet had a rough idea where the Citadel was located, using both flight time and azimuth, but he certainly couldn't pinpoint it, and if it weren't for the radio beacons, they could easily become lost.

  Satisfied all was going well, he kicked back in his chair to take a quick nap. He was going to need the rest since he was the primary pilot for the longer ten-hour leg from High Jump Station to New Zealand.

  Three hours later he was awakened by the copilot. He could feel the plane descending, and looking out of the cockpit, saw the cluster of huts and tents and mounds of supplies that was the land-based hub of the Antarctic High Jump Expedition. Out the right window he could see the massive form of Mount Erebus, an active volcano dominating the horizon. Below lay the Ross Ice Shelf, the edge more than five hundred miles from its origin at the foot of the Queen Maud Mountains.

  The copilot swung them around on approach. As soon as the skis touched the ice runway, he reduced throttle and used the flaps to break the plane. It was a long slow process as they slid down the strip, and Vannet watched carefully as his copilot struggled to keep them on a straight line. They finally slowed enough so the copilot could taxi the plane over to where several other smaller C-119 aircraft were parked along with a cluster of fuel trucks.

  As they came to a halt, the copilot kept the engines running, which was against normal regulations during refueling, but they had all learned that regulations developed outside of Antarctica rarely worked well in this forbidding climate. They needed to keep the engines running to keep heat flowing to the cargo bay, and more important, to prevent them from seizing up if allowed to cool too much.

  Vannet looked out the window as anonymous figures in bulky cold-weather clothing hooked hoses up to the fuel points and began pumping the precious liquid in.

  He noted a man dressed in a red parka standing in the shadow of a parked C-119, simply staring at the plane. For some reason, Vannet felt uncomfortable with that. He turned his head upon hearing a tap at the cockpit door. Captain Whitaker stuck his head in.

  "Anxious to get home, I suppose?" he asked.

  "Damn right," Vannet replied. "In two days we'll be back in the sun and surf."

  Whitaker nodded. "Have a safe flight. You and your men did a great job. My superiors will be forwarding letters of commendation for you and your crew to your headquarters."

  That was the least they could do, Vannet thought, to pay them back for spending four months living isolated in a damn Quonset hut buried under the snow at High Jump Station and flying a load every time the weather cleared. "I appreciate that."

  Captain Whitaker disappeared down the stairwell, and the loadmaster slammed shut the personnel door behind him. Vannet looked out the window. The man in the red parka was gone. He looked about and then spotted the man walking next to Whitaker, heading toward a C-119 whose engines were also running.

  Vannet turned to his copilot and navigator. "Do we have clearance to go?"

  The navigator's face split in a wide grin. "We have clearance, and the weather looks good all the way to New Zealand, sir."

  "All right. Let's go home."

  They turned their nose into the wind and powered up. Soon the seaplane was in the air and over the ice-covered Ross Sea. New Zealand was ten hours away, due north.

  Vannet piloted the first three hours, as they slowly left the white ice behind and finally made it over clear ocean, specked with small white dots far below, indicating icebergs. At that point, Vannet turned the controls over to his copilot and got out of his seat. "I'm going to take a walk in back and get stretched out."

  Vannet climbed down the stairs. The loadmaster and his assistant were lying on the web seats strung along the side of the plane, sleeping. The eighty engineers that they had supplied for four months were stretched out in every available spot, everyone trying to catch some sleep.

  Vannet walked all the way to the rear, where the ramp doors met, rolling his head on his shoulders, shaking off the strain of three straight hours in the pilot's seat and carefully stepping over slumbering bodies.

  His mind was on his wife and young daughter waiting for him in Honolulu, when the number
two engine exploded with enough force to shear the right wing at the engine juncture.

  The MARS immediately adopted the aerodynamics of a rock, rolling over onto its right side. Vannet was thrown up in the farthest reaches of the tail as the plane plummeted for the ocean from 25,000 feet. He blinked blood out of his eyes from a cut in his forehead and tried to orient himself. Men were screaming and there were jumbled bodies everywhere.

  Vannet's primary thought was to try and crawl back up to the cockpit, but his legs wouldn't obey his mind. There was a dull ache in his lower back and no feeling below his waist. He scrambled at the cross beams along the roof of the aircraft with his hands, trying to pull himself forward, climbing over other men at times.

  Vannet was twenty feet from the front of the plane when the surface of the water met the aircraft with the effect of a sledgehammer slamming into a tin can. Vannet was crushed into the floor, and was dead well before the remains of the aircraft began sinking under the dark waves.

  Area 51, Nevada

  28 May 1949

  The man who had been in the front seat of the car outside of Bethesda Naval Hospital picked up the phone on the first ring. "Vandenberg here."

  The voice on the other end was distorted by both distance and scrambler. "This is Lansale. The final link has been severed. The Citadel is secure."

  "Did you receive the last package?"

  "Yes, sir. A ground convoy brought them in, but I don't understand why-"

  The man cut him off. "It's not your place to understand. Did you secure them?"

  "Yes, sir. They're in the base."

  "The men in the convoy?"

  "Taken care of."

  "Excellent."

  CHAPTER 1

  Oahu , Hawaii

  The Present

  The woman gasped and the man stopped what he was doing.

  "You don't like it?" he asked.

  "Like it?" Tai reached down and unstrapped her leg from the weight he had attached to her ankle. "It's killing me." She slowly stretched out the bandaged limb. She looked at the Velcro strap with the two weights attached and then added a third. She strapped it back on her ankle.

  "I thought it was killing you," Vaughn noted.

  "No pain, no gain," Tai said as she got to her feet and looked down the beach. Vaughn stared with respect at the slender woman of Japanese descent. Her short dark hair was plastered to her head with the sweat from her efforts. They were on the north shore of Oahu, far from the tourists in Waikiki. The first day Tai had been released from the hospital she insisted on hitting the beach, managing to walk about twenty yards in her casts before collapsing. Now she was running five miles. With weights on her ankles. They had just come one way over three miles, so he knew it was going to be even farther today as they turned to head back. She had switched the weights from her hands to her ankles, as was her routine.

  With a sigh, Vaughn set out after her as she began to lope down the beach. Three inches taller than her, at slightly over six feet, Vaughn also had a slender build. His hair was beginning to turn prematurely gray, flecks appearing here and there, the result of living in the covert world for too many years.

  Now he and Tai were so deep under, he wasn't sure where they were. Their handler, Royce, wasn't even sure who he worked for. He'd reported them killed in action three months ago when they'd stopped the Abu Sayif terrorist group in its attempt to attack Oahu with nerve gas sprayed from the deck of an old World War II submarine.

  Vaughn kept pace with Tai, but when they got within a half mile of the bungalow they were living in, he picked up the pace. She spared him a glance as he went by, then lowered her head and churned her legs harder. Vaughn felt slightly guilty for passing a woman who was only three months removed from intensive care, but over the time they had spent together, he'd learned she wanted no slack cut, nothing but his best effort. He saw the small path through the jungle that led up to the bungalow Royce had gotten for them and turned onto it. He came to an abrupt halt as soon as he saw Royce standing there, waiting, leaning against his old Land Rover with a battered leather briefcase in his hand.

  "Been a while," Vaughn said.

  "Where's Tai?" Royce asked.

  Vaughn jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "She'll be along in a second."

  "So you two are bonding?"

  Vaughn wasn't sure how to take that, given the deadpan way Royce said it. "We're getting back in shape."

  "Good. Because something just happened."

  Vaughn turned and looked over his shoulder as he heard Tai coming down the path. She slowed to a walk when she saw Royce. He'd only stopped by a couple of times in the three months, judging their improving condition but not saying anything.

  Neither Tai nor Vaughn had been anxious to press Royce for more information about the mysterious Organization he worked for, not after it had tried to kill them several times after using them on a covert mission against the Abu Sayif terrorists. They didn't know if the Organization was working for the U.S. government, as they were told when initially recruited, or some other government or entity. The real problem had been learning that Royce didn't know either. He worked through cutouts, a link that only knew the links on either side but nothing further. And Royce was now their cutout.

  "So what happened?" Vaughn asked, now that Tai was present.

  "I just received a letter from a dead man," Royce said, holding up the briefcase. "Actually a letter from a man who was murdered by the Organization. The letter directed me to a package. And there was more than just a letter in the package." Royce nodded toward the cottage. "Come inside. I'll explain and show you."

  They followed him in. Royce placed the briefcase on the small kitchen table. Through the surrounding trees, one could catch glimpses of the ocean and the surf pounding the north shore. "The man who sent me the letter-he used to live here," Royce said. "For many, many years. Although he was traveling most of the time. Doing Organization business."

  "He was your Hawaiian cutout," Tai said. A statement, not a question.

  Royce nodded. "His name was David Lansale. He'd been in the OSS in World War II. He recruited me into the Organization. I worked for him along the Pacific Rim for many, many years. Then he decided it was time to retire."

  Vaughn glanced at Tai. He sensed what was coming. He could tell by her face that she could too. And Royce noted the exchange. He smiled wanly "Yes, I know. A bit foolish to think one could retire from this life. But you do it long enough, get burnt-out enough, when someone dangles a carrot in front of you, you just might jump for it, even though you know better."

  "Lansale jumped?" Vaughn asked.

  Royce shrugged. "Jumped might be a bit strong of a word. I think he knew his time was up and he took the chance that maybe, just maybe, what the Organization was offering was real." Royce reached out and tapped the briefcase. "But obviously he also had strong doubts or he wouldn't have led me to this."

  "Tell us what happened to him," Tai said as she wiped the sweat off her face with a towel.

  "Short version," Royce said. "Three months ago-while we were in the midst of our little operation against the Abu Sayif-David 'retired.' He got on a private, unmarked jet with a group of other 'retirees' out at Kaneohe Marine Air Station. The jet took off heading west, for their island paradise retirement. It went down in the ocean, no survivors. No one was supposed to know about it, but I managed to track it through Space Command's eyes in the sky."

  "Some retirement your group has," Vaughn said. He stared at Royce. "No wonder you got us on your side. You don't have much to look forward to, do you?"

  "I suspected as much," Royce said. "Neither of you have much to look forward to either, especially considering you should be dead."

  "Was he your friend?" Tai asked, which earned her a surprised look from both Royce and Vaughn.

  After a moment's reflection, Royce nodded. "Yes."

  Tai continued. "And his death was part of the reason you kept us alive and want to use us to find out what the Organ
ization really is."

  Royce nodded once. "Yes. That's partly it. It was probably the thing that pushed me over the edge. But there have been many things over the years that just haven't added up. And even David was suspicious of it all. Most of the time we seemed to be doing the right thing, but once in a while…" Royce's voice trailed off.

  Vaughn had been recruited by Royce right after he led a disastrous hostage rescue mission with his Delta Force team in the Philippines. A mission where his brother-in-law was killed under his command. Tai had also been recruited in a similar manner-except she'd been sent undercover by the Defense Intelligence Agency to try to infiltrate the Organization to learn more about it, a move that had almost cost Tai her life when she was uncovered. Both of them now existed in a void. Thought to be dead by all except Royce.

  "The letter?" Vaughn asked, trying to get him back on task.

  "It was sent FedEx, but apparently held by a bank until yesterday to be delivered today," Royce said.

  "Why the delay?" Tai asked.

  Royce sighed. "I think David had it delayed in case he really did end up on that island. To give him time to cancel it being sent and cover his ass." He tapped the briefcase. "The letter directed me to a safety deposit box at the same bank where I found this." He opened the top of the case and pulled out several folders. Royce shook his head as he placed them on the table. "The funny thing is, I got most of this material for him. He sent me to St. Louis, to the National Personnel Records Center, a couple of years ago to do some digging. He didn't tell me what he was really looking for, just the bits and pieces." He indicated the table. "Which we now have here. A puzzle that I think we should solve to get a better idea of who and what the Organization is."

  Vaughn sat on the open windowsill, feeling the slight ocean breeze stir.