The Mongol Objective Read Online Free Page A

she move the whole table out? No, not without disassembling it. And there had to be at least one more of these things.
    Damn!
    She went back, judged Orlando’s weight, and then bent down. She lifted him, grunting. “Gotta get to the gym more often.” She dragged him toward the door, then stopped to grab two heavy parkas, and, from the table, the keys to the remaining Sno-Cat.
    At least we won’t freeze.
    Outside, assaulted at once by the icy wind, she hauled Orlando by the ankles, the job a little easier on the slick surface. She tugged him toward the isolated garage that was only ten yards away but seemed like a mile, fell, got up and stared into the stinging blizzard, into the night’s black swirling face, to see the flickering lights of the chopper angling toward a distant red light beyond the ice barrier on the sea.
    “Come on, Orlando!” She lugged his body over the threshold into the outbuilding. “Got to get—”
    Just then, the station exploded into a roaring fireball. The force of the blast tore Phoebe free of Orlando’s inert form and knocked her sprawling awkwardly to the floor.
     
    3.
    The lighthouse . . .
    Caleb could see it as if his mind circled the hill from a great height, focusing on the small tower rising out of the morning fog, glinting in the sunrise.
    My lighthouse , he thought. Sodus Point, looking out over the bay, the waves battering the rocky shore in the cold autumn wind. A narrow, rectangular-shaped tower, the 150-year-old lighthouse was anchored to the attached house, his house, where Alexander should be just waking up, Lydia in the kitchen in her terrycloth robe, making Armenian coffee and blueberry flapjacks.
    But why am I seeing this?
    As if in answer . . .
    . . . a black Hummer arrives, slowly pulling up the long drive. At once, the front doors open and two black-clad men burst out. Men with guns. Then the back doors open and two other men emerge.
    One, a shorter, lanky man with a full head of blond hair, wearing a long gray trench coat. The other, meticulously dressed in a blue silk suit with a power tie—crimson—matching the color of his hair, shining like fire in the sun .
    Caleb shuddered with recognition.
    . . . The red-haired man nods after the other man points to the lighthouse.
    He knew the other man too.
    Robert. Lydia’s brother . What is he—?
    #
    Caleb’s eyes flew open and a scream tried to explode through his nearly crushed lungs. The Emerald Tablet!
    He struggled, tried to kick free, to move his arms, even an inch, in this suffocating, dark and frozen tomb. He had seen the tunnel implode just as Henrik Tarn and Andy Bellows were racing for it, still shocked at being betrayed. They disappeared, gruesomely crushed under a massive slab of the collapsing ice shelf, and then Caleb jumped for the only bit of cover—beneath the statue’s head, where the protruding crown offered some degree of protection.
    But it wasn’t enough. He was still sealed up, buried alive. He couldn’t tell, with all the weight and pressure and numbness in his extremities, if anything was broken, but it seemed the statue had deflected the direct impact and left a small air pocket to save him from serious injury.
    So that he could die slowly of exposure.
    In spite of his predicament and the prospect of an unimaginably horrible death, all he could think of was Alexander and Lydia.
    Men are coming for the tablet.
    Was it a vision of the future or something happening right now? Was there anything he could do other than try to go back into the vision and see for himself?
    Robert’s presence there terrified him, even more than that somehow familiar red-haired man. Robert Gregory, Caleb’s brother-in-law, had been frustrated that the Emerald Tablet, the prize the Keepers had sought in the Alexandrian Library’s collection, had been missing when Caleb beat the Pharos’s defenses and found the way inside.
    Robert had never stopped looking for it, and Caleb was sure that his brother-in-law