Chapter 43
Kurt had expected to dig through the drift to the side of the aircraft, find a door, and open it.
Upon learning that the plane was partially submerged in the lake—embedded would have been a better term—he assumed they would be digging their way through the drifts and cutting into the side of the aircraft, or perhaps climbing on top of it to find an escape hatch.
Joe made the digging and the climbing unnecessary.
Riding his snow machine along the side of the plane, he picked up enough speed to begin floating on the snow once again.
With the snowmobile riding high like a speedboat on the flat water, he’d angled toward the fuselage and raced up the side.
As he neared the top, he began to fishtail to one side, but with some deft handling of the controls, he added power at just the right moment to keep the machine moving and get it back on track.
Skidding to a stop on top of the plane, Joe straddled his machine triumphantly. Flipping his visor up to reveal his smiling face, he shouted down to Kurt, “Now you try it.”
Kurt accepted the challenge, copying Joe’s approach run and speed. Near the top he ran into the same problem Joe had encountered: too much slope and not enough traction. He twisted the throttle a bit too hard, and a rooster tail of snow sprayed out behind him.
The sudden burst of power made the nose of the snowmobile pop up.
For a second it felt like the machine would flip backward, but Kurt leaned forward, pushing his weight onto the handlebars.
The nose came down, the machine surged forward, and quite suddenly he found himself flat and level on top of the aircraft.
Cutting to the right to prevent himself from going back down the other side, he managed to park a few feet from Joe.
“Can’t give you a lot of style points,” Joe said. “But you made it.”
Kurt was glad of it. Now to find a way in. He climbed off the snowmobile and began shuffling through the snow. Joe did the same just off to his right.
They moved forward cautiously, shuffling side to side and kicking the snow off.
At one point Kurt kicked an antenna housing.
Moments later Joe got too close to the edge and found a sheet of ice that threatened to send him sliding down to the frozen lake again.
But nearing the front of the aircraft they found what they were looking for: a depression in the snow, about where the open escape hatch should be.
Kurt kicked at the snow. It began to settle in the middle and was soon descending in equal measure from all four sides of the square-shaped opening of the unsealed escape hatch. When enough snow had gone through, the opening appeared.
“Like sands through the hourglass, so go—”
Kurt stopped Joe from finishing the line with a sharp look.
“I’ll go get our gear,” Joe said sheepishly.
Kurt brushed more snow from the edge and got down beside it. An escape ladder remained in place. Swinging his legs over the edge, he climbed down.
The darkened main deck was an eerie place.
Silent and dormant. The surfaces were gilded in frost; they glittered as the beam from Kurt’s flashlight swept across them.
With the exception of the copilot, who lay on the ground where Ridley had shot him, the dead members of the crew remained strapped in their seats, several slumped forward against their seat belts, one man slumped backward, his frozen face pointed upward, his unseeing eyes open and looking toward the ceiling.
They looked like wax figures without the slightest sign of decay. The computer terminals and control panels in front of them were undamaged, their stations were squared away.
Kurt had been in enough sunken ships that exploring one seemed almost normal to him. But the aircraft was different. It seemed more dormant than destroyed, as if it might come to life again at any moment.
The sound of Joe shuffling along on the top of the aircraft brought his attention back to the job at hand.
Joe appeared in the opening and handed down a large tool case followed by a folder of schematic diagrams and then two saddlebags filled with explosives.
As Kurt took the last bag, Joe climbed down the ladder.
Kurt pointed his flashlight aft. A door beckoned. “Weapons bay is back there. Think you can remove the components yourself?”
Joe feigned a hurt look. “Based on the schematics, I should be able to pull them in five minutes.”
“I’ll leave you to it,” Kurt said. He picked up one of the saddlebags. “I’m going to start placing explosives and collecting dog tags.”
Joe took the tools and the schematic diagram and went through the door. The weapons bay was a cylindrical compartment eight feet in diameter and fourteen feet high. The walls of the cylinder were clear Lucite, allowing the crew to see the working components inside.
Joe worked his way around the cylinder to the aft section of the cargo bay. Here the space was taken up by a twelve-pack of powerful generators capable of creating the huge surges of electricity to power the EAGL.
Joe knew enough about lasers to understand the basics of the system.
Large amounts of electrical energy were pumped thorough fiber optics or crystals doped with exotic materials like ytterbium and neodymium.
The crystals emitted intense beams of light that were focused and aligned by a unit called a waveguide.
The laser’s power was determined by how much energy went into it and how focused the beam was.
One-kilowatt lasers could be used for welding, or to cut through steel forms. Five-hundred-kilowatt lasers could be used to shoot down drones and small aircraft at a distance of several miles.
At maximum power, the EAGL generated five thousand megawatts.
A thousand times the power of those other systems. It did this via a combination of scientific tricks, including shortening the pulse and combining it with other pulses of different wavelengths, all of which could occupy the same space at the same time.
It didn’t burn through an object as much as it vaporized everything in its path and exploded out the other side.
The key to creating and harnessing such devastating power came from the materials used in the diode and the advanced structure of the EAGL’s waveguide.
Once those were removed the rest was just a high-energy but relatively standard laser system.
Reaching the far side of the clear cylinder, Joe found the hatch that would allow him to step inside. Releasing three clamps unsealed the door. He slid it to the right, ducked his head, and stepped inside the cylinder.
From the tool kit, he pulled several work lights, setting them up around him in a way that blanketed the laser unit with light.
Double-checking the schematic, he located the outer panel covering the waveguide unit.
He climbed up two rungs on a ladder attached to the cylinder and took a powered screwdriver to the bolts holding the panel in place.
Twelve screws came out with machined precision. Out of habit, Joe tucked them in his pocket, even though he had no intention of replacing the panel. Putting the screwdriver back in his pocket, he placed both hands on the panel and pulled. It came loose with a click.
He laid it gently on the deck and then looked back inside the compartment. He found a wiring harness and heavy-duty electrical cables on one side. On the other side, an optical comb connected with a dozen bundles of fiber-optic cable could be seen. In the middle…
In the middle there was nothing.
Joe grabbed the schematic and looked over the cutaway diagram once more just to be sure. His shoulders sagged and he shook his head in disgust. Tapping the headset, he spoke his thoughts aloud. “Kurt, we have a problem.”
Getting no response, he tried again. Then he remembered the entire weapons compartment was shielded from electromagnetic waves to prevent interference with the laser’s functionality. That effect went both ways. Keeping signals out and others blocked in.
A quick check revealed more missing components, including the boxes that housed the diodes and the emitter partition. Every item they’d been told to retrieve was already gone.
Joe hopped off the ladder and landed on the deck. Ducking out of the clear cylindrical compartment, he ran forward, leaving the work lights and the toolbox behind, grabbing only the satchel containing the schematics. He needed to find Kurt so he could deliver the bad news in person.