“Descend,” Juan said. “I want to see more.”
Gomez dropped the drone into the trees, which they could now see were actually fakes. The trunks, hidden by the canopy overhead, were telephone poles.
The camera’s sensor adjusted to the sudden darkness and took a moment to reconfigure. When the view became clear again, they all gaped at what they were seeing.
“Is that what I think it is?” Linc said with wonder.
Gomez nodded. “That, my friends, is the largest passenger jet in the world. A double-decker Airbus A380, hidden on a tiny tropical island.”
The wings and fuselage of the gigantic plane stretched out into the jungle, fully intact. It was painted to resemble the surrounding plant life, and it didn’t look damaged.
“How could it have crashed and still look like that?” MacD said in awe.
“Because I don’t think it did crash,” Gomez said. “Let me just check something.”
While the drone maneuvered lower, Raven said, “Although I can’t imagine why, someone could have shipped it here.”
“I doubt it,” Gomez said. “This plane weighs six hundred thousand pounds empty, over a million fully loaded. It would take a mega-sized crane to lift that load. The Indian authorities would have noticed if something that big pulled up to this island, not to mention the huge barge you’d need to haul the airplane here.”
The drone descended until it was below the wings. The camera focused on the massive undercarriage. All twenty-two tires were fully inflated and supporting the plane’s weight. The engines seemed to be in good condition. The tail of the plane was only a few dozen yards from the beach.
Gomez flew the drone around the jet, and Juan could see that all of the trees on the side away from the beach were mature and real. No runway had been cleared in the jungle.
“If this plane wasn’t brought to the island by ship,” Juan said, “and it didn’t crash here . . .”
He looked at Gomez, who shook his head in amazement. “At a bare minimum, the A380 needs three-quarters of a mile of tarmac to safely touch down. Yet here it is without a scratch on it at the edge of a jungle on a tropical island. I don’t know how they did it, but someone landed this plane.”
SIXTEEN
INDIA
Fifty miles southeast of Mumbai on a thousand acres of heavily forested private property sat one of the few surviving remnants of Ashoka’s Mauryan Empire. A magnificent five-story stone fortress had been constructed around a central dome called a stupa, a temple that contained Buddhist relics. To the Nine Unknown, who had conducted their regular meetings at this location for more than two thousand years, it was simply called the Library.
The grounds were patrolled by elite guards paid equally by each of the Nine so that none of them would be beholden to any single member. Intruders were summarily executed, their bodies disposed of so that they were never seen again.
Unlike most forts, the Library had no visible gates. The outer wall, laid out in a perfect square, was one smooth surface for its entire perimeter. The fortress was surrounded by a vast moat that extended into an array of canals leading into the forest.
There were nine carefully hidden entrances, each of which was known only to the guards and one of the Nine Unknown. That way all of them could enter from a different direction without being seen by the others, and no one would see them arriving together.
Romir Mallik’s entrance was a quarter mile south of the fortress. He walked on a narrow dirt path toward the Library with Asad Torkan, who was intently peering at the fort as he tried to figure out how they were going to get in. It was his first time to a meeting of the Nine, and Mallik had withheld the secret of the entrance.
“You won’t even give me a hint?” Torkan asked. He seemed interested in the riddle about how to get in, but he was actually distracting himself about the potential fate of his twin.
Mallik admired Torkan’s effort to remain optimistic ever since they’d lost contact with his brother. But when the yacht reached the coordinates of the Triton Star, they found a U.S. destroyer in the vicinity and abandoned the rescue mission. Mallik assumed Rasul had been either captured or killed. His operation, however, had obviously been a success. The Americans were now fully invested in finding out who was responsible for the attack, exactly as Mallik had hoped they would be.
He smiled at his brother-in-law’s frustration about the entrance to the Library. “You’ll find out where it is soon enough.”
Torkan shook his head and kept looking.
A minute later the path descended to a canal and disappeared into the water. The path rose again on the other side. The width was too far to jump and no bridge spanned the canal. A square stone pillar four feet in height stood next to the path. It was capped with four lion heads, each facing out in a different direction. The only marking was a circle with nine spokes and a swastika in the center, the symbol of the Nine Unknown.
Torkan frowned and pointed to the symbol. “Did the Nazis build this?”
“The swastika is an ancient Buddhist emblem that Hitler corrupted for his own use. Notice that it’s a mirror image of the Nazi version. Its original meaning connotes good luck and harmony.”
“Does it also mean ‘swim’? Because it looks like that’s the only way we’re getting across.”
Mallik shook his head. “We are at the entrance.”