LYING FLAT IN THE SAND ONCE AGAIN, KURT PEERED through the gathering dusk to a dry lake bed on the desert floor. A half mile from them sat the two odd-looking jets that had flown over them and a third aircraft of the same type, which they hadn’t seen approach. All three sat quietly up against the right side of what passed as the runway.
From a breast pocket he pulled the compact set of binoculars he’d liberated from Jinn’s dead guard at the bottom of the well. Brushing sand from the lenses, he lifted them to his eyes.
“You were right,” he said. “Not exactly JFK. More like Edwards Air Force Base out in California.”
“Dry lake bed for a runway,” Joe replied, “but what on earth are they doing down there?”
Kurt watched as Jinn’s men poured from holes in the ground like angry ants. They scurried around the three aircraft in a haphazard way. Nearby, a set of trucks idled with black diesel smoke drifting from their exhaust stacks. A trio of forklifts seemed to be staging huge loads of equipment, and a tanker truck was easing out of a tunnel in the rock wall, moving at a snail’s pace.
Joe’s concept of an ant farm seemed more accurate every minute.
“They must have ramps and tunnels everywhere,” Kurt said, watching as men appeared from out of nowhere and then disappeared just as quickly.
“Can you see what they’re bringing in?” Joe asked.
Kurt saw wide cargo doors at the tail ends of the aircraft opening up, but nothing was coming out.
“They’re not here to drop off,” Kurt said. “They’re picking up. Pilots are talking with some sort of loadmaster.”
“So this is moving day.”
“Or D-day,” Kurt said.
“Can you catch the tail numbers off the jets?” Joe asked. “That might help us down the road.”
With the sun down and the light fading fast, Kurt zoomed in on the closest aircraft and squinted.
“White tails,” he said. “No markings of any kind. But I’m pretty sure they’re Russian-built.”
“Can you make out the type?”
“They look modified to me. They have the six-wheeled main landing gear of an An-70, a large tail ramp like a C-130 or other military transport but the shape of something else, they almost look like …”
It hit Kurt all of a sudden. He’d seen the odd-shaped plane two summers ago, fighting fires in Portugal. “They’re modified Altairs,” he said. “Beriev Be-200s. They’re jet-powered flying boats. They land on the water, scoop up a thousand gallons of the stuff, fly off and dump it out over a blaze.”
Joe seemed all the more baffled by this news. “What would Jinn want with a firefighting plane that lands on water? There’s not a l
ot out here that can catch on fire, and there isn’t much water to scoop up and fight fires with if there was.”
As Kurt watched the tanker truck sidle up to the first of the jets, he thought he understood. “This is how they’re getting the microbots to the sea,” he said.
“In the water reservoirs,” Joe said.
Kurt nodded. “There’s a tanker truck hooked up to one of the jets right now, but unless someone put the fuel port in the wrong place it’s not Jet A or JP-4 they’re pumping.”
“So they’re not washing down from here or escaping,” Joe said. “What about the model of the dam?”
He handed the binoculars to Joe. “Take a look beside that line of trucks.”
Joe put the binoculars to his face. “I see yellow drums on pallets,” he said.
“Look familiar?”
Joe nodded. He scanned back toward the aircraft. “I don’t see any of those going onto the planes. Looks like they’re loading weapons and ammunition onto the closest one, and I think I see a couple of ribbed Zodiacs like the SEAL teams use set up in the staging area.”
“Sounds like our friends are headed somewhere a little wetter than here,” Kurt said. “Which really isn’t a bad idea.”
Joe handed the binoculars back to Kurt. “See if you can spot a water fountain down there somewhere.”