The Black Knight Read online

  For the first time in his life, Byron Thomas prepared to commit treason.

  ***

  VII

  The dawn light broke through the four inch vertical window slot, a brilliant halo of light against a perfect blue sky. The light washed across the face of Aaron James Mitchell as he lay on the concrete bed in his cell and thought of the world outside.

  Aaron spent twenty three hours a day locked inside his cell and was escorted by a minimum of three officers for his seven hours’ of private recreation per week. The cell had a desk, a stool and a bed, all of which were forged entirely from poured concrete, as well as a latrine that shut off if blocked. A shower ran on a timer to prevent flooding, as did a sink lacking a potentially dangerous faucet. A polished steel mirror was bolted to the wall, the cell illuminated with an electric light that could only be shut off remotely. In addition, the cell was soundproofed to prevent Aaron from communicating with other inmates via Morse code or by any other means.

  It was going to be tough to escape from the facility, and something of a shame: he had enjoyed the peace, solitude and simplicity.

  Aaron hauled himself off the narrow bed and padded to the window. Four feet tall and yet only four inches wide, the narrow window was designed to prevent inmates from knowing their specific location within the complex because they could see only the sky and roof through them, making it virtually impossible to plan an escape. Inmates exercised in a concrete pit resembling an empty swimming pool, also designed to prevent them from knowing their location within the facility. The pit was only large enough for a prisoner to walk ten steps in a straight line or thirty in a circle. Telecommunication with the outside world was forbidden. The prison contained a plethora of motion detectors and cameras and no less than fourteen hundred remote-controlled steel doors. Guards in the prison’s control center monitored inmates twenty four hours a day and could press a “panic button” that instantly closed every door in the facility should an escape attempt be suspected. Pressure pads and twelve-foot-tall razor wire fences surrounded the perimeter, which was patrolled by heavily armed guards with silent attack dogs. In extreme cases of inmate misbehavior, the center of the prison housed an area known as “The Black Hole”, which could hold some one hundred fifty prisoners in completely darkened and fully soundproofed cells.

  Aaron looked out of the window at the thin patch of sky, his mind turning in the silence. The facility’s location in Colorado gave Mitchell the ability to estimate where his cell was located within the complex due to the light from the rising sun to the east. The lighter edges of cumulus clouds drifting right to left across the blue told Mitchell that he was looking south, as the prevailing winds in the state were from the west. Moreover, ranges of hills to the east of the facility had a tendency to cause warm updrafts of air to disperse clouds during the late morning, further informing Aaron of his location. The final evidence however was a pair of red-tailed hawks he had observed flying back and forth across the sky above the prison. Carrying prey and twigs only one way and not the other, he knew that they were nesting somewhere nearby, and by good fortune he had been able to ascertain that their swooping climbs away toward the south east were aimed at the roof of one of the six watch towers surrounding the facility. A simple mental picture of the facility, combined with all of the evidence, yielded a cell on the southernmost tip of the prison.

  Aaron straightened his posture, forced himself not to slouch in defeat as he washed in the tiny sink and relieved himself in the latrine before taking a shower. There was little rush as the strictly coordinated routine of normal prisons was not a feature in a maximum security unit – he would not normally be allowed out of his cell until after lunch, and then only for an hour of strictly supervised exercise. He wouldn’t be making that appointment, as he would be long gone by then.

  Mitchell had already memorized his location within the state of Colorado, and of the nearby towns he would be required to traverse in order to reach his desired refuge. From Florence he would travel to Penrose, and from there further north through Beaver Creek state park until he could reach the slopes of Cheyenne Mountain, just south of Colorado Springs. It was an irony not lost upon Mitchell that the main route through the state park was named the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial Highway.

  Aaron dressed and waited patiently for the guards to hand-serve a breakfast of powdered eggs and sauce through a shutter on his cell’s steel door. Then, Aaron sat cross-legged on his bed and waited in absolute silence as he calmed his mind and emptied his body of the silent rage that burned within. His time would come in just a few hours, when he was due to meet with his counsellor.

  The silence of minutes turned to hours, Aaron motionless on the bed and in a deep state of meditation. His heartbeat slowed gradually until his mind went into a state of deep relaxation, all sense of time vanished as he explored the deepest neural tracts of his memory, relived moments from his past both distant and recent with complete lucidity. Some haunted him, his long dead parents talking to him it seemed from beyond the grave, but their presence also comforted him and immunized against the confines of the cell surrounding his physical body. Other memories stoked the flame of anger inside him, especially those of Victor Wilms and the voices of Majestic Twelve, they who had used him for thirty years and then abandoned him to die here alone and forgotten.

  His rage seemed to ring like a claxon in his mind, and then he realized that the sound was that of his cell door opening. Aaron drifted from the comforting realm of his dreams back to full consciousness and slowly got to his feet. There were no words, only the opening of a small shutter in the steel door at waist height. Aaron walked across to the shutter, turned his back to it and placed his hands behind his back.

  The gloved hands of a correctional officer closed a set of cuffs around his thick wrists, and then Aaron stepped forward as the steel door was unlocked and then opened before him to reveal two burly officers.

  ‘Keep your back turned,’ one of them snapped, as if Aaron needed telling, his back to the open door.

  Aaron felt more restraints locked into place around his ankles, and then he was turned around by one of the guards.

  ‘Time for your counsel meeting.’

  Aaron allowed himself to be guided out of his cell and turned to walk down the featureless, silent corridors. The sound-proofing of the cells deadened all noise, unlike the rowdy halls of other prisons, and there was no stench of urine and sweat that stained penitentiaries across the United States. Aaron noted that every other cell in the block was sealed, and with no windows there was no way to tell who else was incarcerated within.

  The two guards led him down toward the exercise area, but instead of continuing on they turned down a side corridor and led him toward an interview room located on the southern-most tip of the building. The door to the room was open, and as Aaron was led inside he came face to face with his counsellor.

  Byron Thomas, a graduate of Harvard and regular visitor to Aaron since his incarceration, stood from his seat and waited as Aaron was sat in a steel chair bolted to the floor. His manacles were fastened to steel rings in the floor and on the table before the guards withdrew, pushing the door to the interview room close to the jam for privacy but never shutting it completely.

  ‘Good to see you again, Aaron,’ Byron said in a deep, melodious tone.

  Aaron nodded in silence. Byron was, like Aaron, an African American with an impressive physique, six foot four and with broad shoulders. That one could be a former Special Forces soldier and Vietnam veteran, and the other the inhabitant of dusty libraries and law schools seemed impossible to Aaron, but there it was. The academic and the killer, occupying the same room and yet worlds apart.

  Precisely as planned.

  ‘You have progressed well over the past few weeks, Aaron,’ Byron said as he opened a file and then began to slip out of his jacket.

  ‘It’s peaceful here,’ Aaron replied. ‘I wonder why inmates fear it so much. The solitude is wonderful.’
/>   ‘Most men are not you, Aaron,’ Byron said as he began undoing his tie and pulled a slim, silver object from his pocket that he slid across the table to Aaron’s fingers. ‘People mostly do not naturally enjoy being alone.’

  ‘Fools,’ Aaron replied as he picked up the sliver of metal and turned it expertly in his hands, slipping it into the locking mechanism of the manacles at his wrists and deftly unlocking them. ‘They leech upon the attention of others.’

  ‘Leech,’ Byron echoed. ‘That’s a strong word, Aaron. Do you really despise other human beings so much?’

  ‘Give me a reason not to.’

  Byron quietly slid out of his pants as opposite him Aaron silently unlocked his ankle restraints and stood, removing his gray prison slacks as he moved around the table. Byron walked around to the opposite side and sat down.

  ‘Love, compassion, generosity,’ he said.

  ‘Hate, greed, apathy…,’ Aaron replied, slightly adjusting his voice as he spoke and began putting on Byron’s shirt, pants and jacket.

  ‘… fear, shame, rage,’ Byron continued smoothly as he slid into the prison slacks and began fitting the manacles about his ankles. ‘I don’t care anymore. None of it matters.’

  ‘Everything matters,’ Aaron said. ‘You just have to begin to care about yourself enough to care about the world outside, the people in it.’

  Byrson’s voice darkened, more gravelly now.

  ‘What the hell for? I’m inside for the rest of my life several times over. You think anybody out there cares a damn about me? You think I give a damn about them?’

  ‘And yet you’re progressing well inside this facility,’ Aaron said as he reached into the pocket of Byron’s jacket and removed a small envelope. Inside, beneath the letter it contained, was a fine dusting of gray powder. Aaron dipped his fingers into it and smoothed the powder across his temples, dusting his hair with the soft gray ash. ‘Perhaps, with time, you will find yourself moved to less demanding surroundings.’

  Byron licked his fingers and smoothed his own temples down, smearing away the powder in his own hair before he reached down and placed his hands inside the manacles on the table top. Aaron slipped the slim glasses on as he reached down and quietly clicked the manacles closed around Byron’s wrists.

  ‘Why the hell would I want to move?’ Byron snarled. ‘This place is perfect! I don’t have to listen to idiots like you spouting your psycho-babble to anybody who’ll listen! I don’t have to watch war veterans spat on in the street!’

  ‘The Vietnam War was a long time ago, Aaron,’ Aaron soothed. ‘The people revere and respect our servicemen now.’

  Byron gestured to the cell around them with a hateful grin. ‘Doesn’t look much like that to me, does it?!’

  ‘You’re here due to the murder of several innocent civilians, Aaron,’ Aaron said calmly. ‘Surely you don’t expect to walk the streets with…’

  ‘I expect a goddamned trial!’ Byron screamed as he shot up out of his seat and yanked wildly on the chains.

  The door to the interview room burst open and the two guards rushed in as Byron thrashed and snarled, fighting uselessly against his captors as they wrestled him face down onto the desk.

  ‘If I ever see you in here again, I’ll kill you with my bare hands!’ Byron screamed.

  One of the guards looked up at Aaron as he struggled to keep Byron pinned down, fully occupied with the task.

  ‘Get out of here!’

  Aaron nodded, his eyes wobbling with fear as he hurried out of the interview room and turned down the corridor. Two more guards were rushing toward him and he pointed back toward the room.

  ‘Hurry, they’re struggling with him in there!’

  The guards dashed past, night sticks in their hands as Aaron continued on. The desk sergeant at the first set of gates opened them immediately as a silent alarm, flashing red lights that would not agitate the other inmates, warned him of the unfolding drama back on the block.

  ‘He gone crazy again?’ the sergeant asked as Aaron walked through.

  ‘Can’t stand the solitude,’ Aaron replied as he passed by. ‘Blames everybody but himself.’

  ‘Shouldn’t murder people then, should he,’ the sergeant replied as he filled out a form and passed it to Aaron. ‘Sign here please, doctor.’

  Aaron dutifully signed the form, having practiced the signature in his mind a thousand times. The sergeant compared it to another on file, and then opened the second security gate to allow Aaron to pass through.

  ‘Have a good day, Doc’.’

  ‘You too.’

  Aaron passed through no less than twelve more gates, all manned by security staff who had seen Byron pass through a half hour before. Nobody challenged him, although he was subject to the same rigorous searches as Byron would have been on the way in. There was nothing to find, and ten minutes after donning the Doctor’s clothes Aaron James Mitchell walked out of the prison’s main entrance and into the parking lot.

  The sun was up in the sky now, the fearsome orb flaring in the perfect blue sky. Mitchell inhaled deeply on the air, but forced himself to walk normally as he pulled the doctor’s keys from his pocket and hit the central locking button. A silver Prius’s tail lights flashed nearby and Aaron subtly altered course toward it, conscious of the watch towers arrayed around the prison and the armed guards likely watching him from within.

  Moments later, Aaron drove out of Florence ADX and vanished toward the north.

  ***

  VIII

  McMurdo Sound,

  Antarctica

  ‘Welcome to the bottom of the world.’

  The voice sounded disembodied to Ethan’s ears as he sat in an uncomfortable seat in the shuddering belly of a giant C-130 Hercules aircraft, the loadmaster speaking into a microphone that connected to the headphones Ethan wore to protect his ears from the tremendous roar of the engines.

  Through a small window beside his shoulder Ethan peered out into the frigid atmosphere outside the aircraft. The wing stretched away above him, huge turboprop engines trailing turbulent vapor that glowed in the light of a sun blazing amid a stream of molten metal searing the distant horizon. Far below a featureless canvass of ice fields stretched away into infinity, cast into dark and frosty shadows.

  ‘We’ll make our final approach to McMurdo in the next few minutes,’ the loadmaster said as he walked between them and tugged on their harnesses to check that they were secure.

  Ethan saw his companions jab their thumbs in the air in unison. Hannah Ford, two scientists named Willem Chandler and Amy Reece and their two respective assistants, and twelve Navy SEALs occupied the interior of the aircraft along with their respective equipment, compact vehicles and weapons. The soldiers had been deployed from the Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center at Andros Island in the Bahamas, while the two scientists seemed to have been plucked from some mysterious back room at the DIA.

  Chandler, he had learned, was employed by the DIA as what they called a futurist and was apparently an authority on conspiracy theories, while Amy Reece was an exobiologist and linguistics specialist who specialized in the search for life outside the Earth and the effects of extra-terrestrial environments on living organisms. Between them and their respective assistants, Ethan figured they represented the closest things to an expert opinion on Black Knight that the agency had been able to rustle up at short notice.

  Ethan glanced outside as the Hercules dipped its wing and began a gentle turn. The beams of pale sunlight glowing through the windows into the aircraft’s cavernous interior vanished as they were plunged into darkness. The engine roar subsided enough for Ethan to hear the flaps and undercarriage deploy to the sound of whining hydraulics, the huge aircraft dipping and bouncing in the wintry gales blustering across the vast ice plains. Ethan clenched his harness as a tight knot of anxiety in his guts threatened to eject his breakfast over his boots.

  Through the open hatchway to the cockpit far to his left, Ethan spotted the green glow of
cockpit instruments and a glimpse of twinkling runway lights stretching out into the dark void ahead. The Hercules bumped and gyrated as it descended, and then a thump reverberated through the fuselage as the aircraft touched down on the ice and the pilots deployed the spoilers and threw the huge engines into reverse. The aircraft thundered and vibrated as though it were coming apart at the seams, and then slowed as it turned off the runway and taxied toward a parking spot.

  Ethan breathed a sigh of relief and closed his eyes. He heard the engines whine down as he watched the loadmaster get out of his seat and hit a large red button inside the fuselage. The rear of the Hercules yawned slowly open as a ramp dropped down onto the ice. Half a dozen soldiers, wrapped up in thick Artic camouflage and armed with rifles, strode up the ramp. The loadmaster pointed at Ethan’s group and waved them over.

  Ethan unstrapped himself from his seat and hefted a large holdall onto his back. He then pulled on thick gloves, tightened his thickly padded jacket and pulled the hood tight over his head as he looked about at their bleak surroundings.

  The station owed its designation to nearby McMurdo Sound, which had been named after Lieutenant Archibald McMurdo of HMS Terror, which first charted the area in 1841 under the command of British explorer James Clark Ross. British explorer Robert Falcon Scott first established a base nearby in 1902 and built Discovery Hut, which still stood adjacent to the harbor at Hut Point. The volcanic rock of the site was the southernmost bare ground accessible by ship in the Antarctic, and the founders initially called the station Naval Air Facility McMurdo from its creation in 1956.

  Ethan knew that McMurdo had become a center of scientific and logistical operations in the Antarctic. The Antarctic Treaty, signed by over forty-five governments, regulated intergovernmental relations with respect to Antarctica and governed the conduct of daily life at McMurdo for United States Antarctic Programs. The first scientific diving protocols were established before 1960 and the first diving operations were documented in 1961, with a hyperbaric chamber available for support of polar diving operations.