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"The last vessel is a supertanker built to carry tremendous amounts of oil, natural gas, and various other fuels." Pitt closed the folder and gazed at Loren. "I heard such vessels were on the drawing boards, but I had no idea they were actually built, and certainly not by Destiny Enterprises."
"The hulls were built in sections and then towed to a secluded shipyard owned by Destiny Enterprises on an isolated fjord on the southern tip of Chile. There, the exterior superstructure and the interior build-out was completed, and the ships furnished and loaded. Estimates state the passengers and crews of the fleet should be self-sufficient, with enough food and supplies to last them twenty or more years."
"Haven't outsiders visited the vessels? Hasn't the news media written articles on what has to be the world's largest seagoing vessels?"
"Read the CIA's report on the shipyard," explained Loren. "The area is heavily restricted and patrolled by a small army of security guards. No outsiders get in or get out. The shipyard workers and their families are housed in a small community ashore without ever leaving the ships or the yard. Surrounded by the Andes, a hundred mountainous islands, and two peninsulas, the only way in and out of the fjord is by sea or aircraft."
"The investigation by the CIA seems cursory. They haven't studied the Destiny Enterprises project in depth."
Loren finished the last sip of her brandy. Àn agent assigned to brief my office claimed the agency did not conduct a major investigation because they saw no threat to United States security or interests."
Pitt stared thoughtfully beyond the walls of the restaurant. "Al Giordino and I were in a Chilean fjord several years ago during a search for a liner hijacked by terrorists. The hijackers had hidden the ship near a glacier. From what I recall of the islands and waterways north of the Straits of Magellan, there are no channels wide and deep enough to permit passage of such gargantuan vessels."
"Maybe they were not intended to sail the seven seas," suggested Loren. "Maybe they were built simply to ride out the predicted cataclysm."
"As fantastic as it seems," said Pitt, attempting to accept the incredible concept, "you're close to the truth. The Wolfs must have spent billions betting on the end of the world."
Pitt became quiet, and Loren could see he was absorbed in his thoughts. She rose from the table and walked to the ladies' room, allowing him time to sift through the conceptions running through his head.
Although he found it difficult to accept, he began to see why the later generations of the Wolf family were genetically engineered.
The old Nazis who'd fled Germany were long gone, but they had left in their place a family of superpeople who would be strong enough to survive the coming cataclysm and then take over what was left of the civilized world and rebuild it into a new one, controlled and directed under their exacting standards of superiority.
The gray granite cliffs of the gorge rose like giant shadows before they were blotted out by the night sky. Below, the blue-white ice of the glacier glittered and flashed from the glow of a three-quarter moon.
The 11,800-foot snow-mantled peak of Cerro Murallon, starlit and cloud-free, soared above the western slopes of the southern Andes before dropping steeply toward the sea, as its chasms became filled with age-old glaciers from a distant past. The night was clear and sharp and the sky ablaze.
Revealed from the light of the Milky Way, a small vehicle darted through the menacing walls of the gorge like a bat scanning a desert canyon for food.
It was fall in the Southern Hemisphere, and light snow had already fallen on the upper elevations. Tall conifers marched up the rugged slopes before stopping at the timberline, where the barren rocks took over and rose to the sharp and jagged mountain summits. There wasn't a man-made light to be seen in any direction. Pitt imagined that the scene in daylight would have been one of majestic beauty, but at ten o'clock at night, the steep cliffs and rocky crags became dark and threatening.
The Moller M400 Skycar wasn't much larger than a jeep Cherokee, but it was as stable in flight as a much larger aircraft, and capable of being piloted down city streets and parked in a residential garage.
The aerodynamic design, with its sloping, conical bow, gave it a look somewhere between a General Motors car of the future and a rocket fighter out of Star Wars. The four lift/thrust nacelles each held two counter-rotating engines, enabling the Moller to lift off the ground like a helicopter and move horizontally like a conventional aircraft at a cruising speed of three hundred miles an hour, with an operational ceiling of 30,000 feet. Lose an engine or two and it could still land safely without discomfort to the passengers.
Even if it suffered a catastrophic component failure, dual airframe parachutes would be deployed to lower the Skycar and its occupants to the ground, undamaged and unhurt.
Sensors and fail-safe systems protected against all errors in the flight mechanisms or computers. The vehicle's four computers constantly monitored all systems, and maintained automatic control on a preset flight path directed by Global Positioning System satellites that guided it over rivers and mountains and through valleys and canyons. The enormously efficient guidance system eliminated the need for a pilot.
Pitt's view of the environment outside the cockpit was limited. He seldom bothered to stare through the canopy. He didn't care to see the plane's shadow under the dim light from the moon whisking over the uneven rocks below, flitting over the tops of the trees, lifting over sharp rises before they could be seen ahead. He especially wasn't interested in seeing how the plane and its shadow almost blended into one. He could watch the flight's path through the virtual reality topographical display, while the automatic navigation equipment flew the Skycar to its preprogrammed destination. Turbulence was dampened by the quick, automatic reaction of the vanes below the engines commanded by the automatic stabilization system.
Pitt found it disconcerting to sit with his arms crossed while the aircraft swept in and
around mountains in the dead of night without the slightest assistance from a human brain and hands. He had little choice but to put his trust in the computer guidance system and let it do the flying. If Giordino, seated next to him, was unduly concerned about the computer failing to avoid collision with the side of a mountain, no trace of it showed in his face. Giordino calmly read an adventure novel under a cockpit light, while Pitt turned his attention to a nautical chart showing the underwater depths of the fjord leading to the Wolf shipyard.
There was no plan to fly at safe heights above the tallest of the peaks. This was a stealth mission. The powerful, efficient rotary thrusters were taking them to their destination well out of sight of radar and laser detection.
Both men's bodies were sweating up a storm inside their DUI CF200 series dry suits, which were worn over radiant insulating underwear, but neither of them complained. By dressing for cold-water diving before the flight, they saved time changing after touchdown.
Pitt punched in a code and read the numbers on the box. "Two hundred and twelve miles since we lifted off the ship at Punta Entrada outside of Santa Cruz."
"How much farther?" asked Giordino without looking up from the pages of his novel.
"A little less than fifty miles and another fifteen minutes should put us in the hills above the Wolf shipyard." The exact landing site had been programmed into the computer from an enhanced photo taken from a spy satellite.
"Just enough time to knock out another chapter."
