by Chuck Dixon
“And if that’s keeping her alive, then that’s a good thing,” Jimbo said.
“Easy for you to say,” Renzi answered with a bitter laugh. “You’re not playing house with one of those ugly motherfuckers.”
“That’s all between her and her therapist,” Dwayne said. “Our problem is to get her home no matter what condition she’s in. Me and Jimbo will keep post on the situation until you guys get back.”
“And if things jump off before the cavalry gets here?” Chaz said.
“We’ll deal with that when it gets here,” Dwayne said. Chaz started to respond, but Dwayne held a hand up. “Yeah, as a plan it sucks cock. But this whole job’s sucked from Day One, and I blame myself. We went in on someone else’s mission parameters and rules of engagement. We agreed to shit gear and shit intel, and it’s my fault we’re in the spot we’re in. Now the game changes, and it’s our call on ordnance, rules, and how the job gets done.”
“What do you need from me?” Chaz asked.
“You’ll have forty-eight hours after you get back. You get the Iranians to drive Ricky to the nearest hospital. They can say he fell while hiking. It covers all his injuries. Then you trade favors, reach out to friends, and work your contacts to get us some serious firepower and get your ass back to us as soon as you can.”
“So, we’re going to war,” Chaz said.
“Yeah.”
“We’ll need Hammond,” Chaz said.
Dwayne drew triangles in the dirt.
“He has the contacts and the juice,” Chaz said. “He can smooth the bumps. And he’s good in corners like this. You know that, Dwayne.”
Dwayne drew a couple more triangles in the dirt. He tossed the stick aside and stood.
“Call him when you get there,” Dwayne said.
9
Caroline Tauber
The guttering fire threw dancing shadows up the walls of the cave interior. An old, old, toothless woman crouched dozing in the glow, a stick decorated with feathers and small bones held loose in her hand. Furs and skins lay in messy piles about the fire where, most nights, the usual inhabitants of the cave slept and coupled in varying combinations. But the old crone had chased them all away to stand watch over Caroline by herself.
Caroline sat against the back wall of the cave with wrists bound tight behind her back with strips of leather. Her ankles were secured to a heavy length of log in the same way. She tugged at her bonds, but they only cut her skin. Her wrists and ankles were already torn and raw from the rough sinew thongs. She was weak from hunger and anxiety. Her body was one throbbing ache from the rough treatment at the hands of her captors, but she had no crippling injuries other than fatigue and, she strongly suspected, shock.
She rested her head back against the wall and twisted to one side to take the weight off her wrists and make herself as comfortable as was possible. She could see nothing past the fire and Old Mother fitfully napping there in the smoky gloom. But she could hear the sounds from outside. The tribe was wailing and screaming, and the unmistakable cries of the dying and wounded mixed with the grieving echoed into the cave.
The men who came for her from her own time punished the tribe harshly. The explosions that rocked the cave after they dragged her back inside told her that. She didn’t know who the men were or how many. She could only surmise that her brother had sent them. She only caught a glimpse of men, men in some kind of military dress, moving in the uncertain light of the bonfire. Then the aborigines dragged her back in here and re-tied her wrists and bound down her ankles to the log. They left Old Mother behind to keep an eye on her. In fact, Old Mother hustled them out of the cave, spitting and waving her totem stick.
Caroline heard Miles Kemp’s continuing cries for mercy, followed by the satisfied humming from the tribe. Then came the explosions and shouts, some of them in clear English. She heard the hunting horns being blown and shivered at the sound. The flickering light and stink of wood smoke told her that the village was burning, or much of it, anyway.
Old Mother looked frightened with wide eyes and spoke to Caroline in a wheedling, pleading tone. She clutched at Caroline, pawing at her lime-painted skin. The ancient hag knew the men were of the same type as her captive. Was she begging Caroline to call them off? Maybe she thought they were demons summoned by the newcomers for the purposes of bloody revenge. Caroline could make no sense of the mewling streaming from Old Mother’s spittle-flecked lips. She only wished the stinking old crone would leave her alone.
The explosions and screams died down until the world beyond the cave mouth grew silent before the tribe’s sorrow and rage found its voice. Caroline lay against the wall, her cheek pressed to the cool stone, and waited for whatever came next and thought about how she and Miles and Phillip came to be here.
A hunting party of men found them as they made their way down the slope away from the misty field of the Tube and toward the inland sea.
Was that really only this afternoon?
The first sign that they were not the only humanoids in the region were the horns. They heard the bleats sounding from the trees, bleats answered in kind from all around. Kemp was the first to suggest that they weren’t animal noises but purposeful sounds made by artificial means. Caroline began to text about them when the strange, stout men stepped from the dark of the trees.
At first, the aborigines were an unexpected, but not unwelcome, surprise. The clutch of little dark men stood with spears held casually, not threatening. They seemed to be only mildly curious about the trio of strangers suddenly appearing on their hunting ground. Phillip Worth walked toward them with a smile and extended an open hand in friendship; a gesture that his anthropological studies told him was a universal sign of peaceful intentions.
The leader of the party, a man older than the rest and distinguished by a hood made of feathers and bone draped over his head, sniffed at the hand like a dog might and straightened to regard Phillip with narrowed eyes. He wore the hollow horn of some animal about his shoulder, suspended on a leather thong.
Caroline stood up the slope close by Miles and watched in silent fascination. These were proto-men; higher primates with as much physical resemblance to apes as they had to man. They used tools and wore rudimentary clothing. But their large eyes and pronounced teeth meant they were far from human. And if her calculations were on the mark and they were at 100,000 BC and change, these were not ancestors of modern man. Rather they were a failed evolutionary experiment that died out long before the first Paleo-Indians crossed over from Asia.
She realized that this was a paleozoological discovery of the century. Back in The Now she could lead a team to this valley and direct them to the strata they would need to uncover to find evidence of this lost race of hominids. Only she could never do that. The Tauber Tube was a technology the world could never know about.
Phillip thrust his hand out closer, and the leader took his wrist in a firm grip. Phillip smiled and pumped the leader’s hand. The leader showed his teeth, black and filed to points, in what Phillip mistook as a smile. Phillip showed his own perfectly capped and whitened teeth in response. The little man’s grip was surprisingly strong, and he increased the pressure on Phillip’s wrist. He’d mistaken Phillip’s shake and the baring of teeth for an attempt to escape and pulled hard to bring the young man stumbling toward him. Phillip fell to his knees.
Another hunter lifted a club weighted with a round stone and struck Phillip on the side of the head. As Caroline and Miles backed away, Phillip fell hard to the ground and was surrounded by the hunters who drove the butts of their spears down on him to stop him from rising.
Caroline was the first to turn and run back up the hill with Miles close behind her. She heard a grunt and a crash as Miles fell rolling into the brush but didn’t stop her headlong flight. She raced for the top of the mesa, muttering a prayer that the field was still open. She had no thought beyond that but fleeing; to put this danger far behind her and find the safety of her own time and place and never, ev
er leave there again.
There were sounds and barked exchanges of hunters from the brush to either side of her joined by long blasts from horns. They were cutting her off, getting ahead of her. She’d never make the mesa top. Even if she could reach it, the window for the field to be open could have passed by now. She’d be on coverless open grassland with nowhere to hide.
Ducking into some thick underbrush, she followed a cleft in the hillside made by run-off from rainstorms in the past. The gully carried her down the hill but offered concealment behind its high banks to either side. She made herself move slowly and cautiously. Her pursuers grew quiet as well. She could hear them exchanging hushed words, and the brittle snaps of pine twigs reached her ears. They had her trapped and were only being as quiet as they needed to be before the final rush.
With a hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach, Caroline realized that she would not escape.
The hunters had her ringed and were closing in from all sides. Her mouth and throat were painfully dry. She tried to control her breathing to stay quiet as long as she could. She fumbled in a cargo pocket at the front of her vest and pulled out her wave transmitter. Thumbing it on, she tried to enter words into the tiny keyboard with shaking hands.
HUNTING HORNS MUST HIDE
At least, that’s what she thought she’d texted. What came through was:
HNTGHRNS MST HDE
The brush around her was parted by spear points, and rough, calloused hands dragged her from her hiding place.
THEY LED HER AND Miles down to the beach, their hands bound with thongs and pulled by leashes tied around their throats. Miles was sobbing and could not stop himself. Caroline was numb with fear and dread. Behind them, two hunters pulled a travois across the sand bearing a cargo of Phillip’s head, legs, and arms covered in a swirling haze of flies. They’d left the torso behind. Miles told her later that he witnessed the dismemberment. They held him so he couldn’t turn away. Phillip was alive but unconscious as they chopped at him with obsidian head axes. The lead hunter poked the torso that remained with a stick, jabbing at the yellow Batman symbol and speaking in a low voice. None of them would touch the shirt to remove it even when the leader slashed at them with the stick and snarled orders. They finally left it behind.
Batman was bad mojo to them.
At the village, the entire tribe came from their huts and fires to gather around Caroline and Miles. The settlement was a messy expanse of huts that roughly followed the shoreline. It looked like it could house thousands. The squatty hominids cooed in wonder and barked with a sound Caroline later came to recognize as laughter. They poked at their unwilling guests with sticks and fingers, and the children dared one another to rush forward and brush hands across their clothing and skin. The children were shooed away by the adults, and all grew quiet.
The crowd about them parted and a man painted all in white stepped up to them. He wore a tall feather headdress of what looked like goose and heron plumage. It was decorated with stones and shells, and he wore many ropes of necklaces of the same type. Some of the stones were dull yellow. Others had been polished to a sheen.
Gold.
This shaman, as Caroline guessed he was, also wore some amulets crudely hammered into animal shapes from unrefined gold ore.
The shaman waved a rod over them. The rod was capped by a gourd with pebbles within it. It made a rattling sound as he moved it over Caroline and Kemp in complicated ritual gestures. He hummed tunelessly as he did so with eyes pressed shut. He then turned his attention to the travois and its gruesome cargo. Squatting, he reached out and touched the fabric covering Phillip’s severed legs. He raised his fingers to his nose and sniffed. He turned to the others and hissed a phrase that drew a gasp of awe from the crowd of squat, naked men and women.
Caroline studied their captors. They looked less than human. Their skulls had a pronounced brow ridge, with disturbingly large eyes set deep over flat noses and obscenely broad mouths lined with pickets of black teeth. Their shoulders were wide, and their spines curved forward. Their feet were longer and narrower than was normal, and their fingers ended in knobbed, calloused tips with thick nailbeds. The ears were smaller and set farther back on the head. She continued to think of them as aborigines, but only because she had no other term for them. They were closer to animals than humans, and she knew she was looking at a vanished race of proto-humans. High-order primates with little shared DNA between themselves and their unlucky visitors.
Standing up, the shaman stiffened his body and pointed his stick at Miles and Caroline and called out a long string of what had to be orders. The pair were dragged up the hill toward the cave opening, where the vile hag that Caroline would name Old Mother waited.
They were shoved and yanked into the dark of the cave, where Old Mother and a dozen or so women of the tribe took over. Caroline was brought to the ground by many small hands. She struggled to rise and was swatted across the face with a stick with enough force to make her vision swim. More weight was brought to bear, and she was pressed to the sand and held still. Old Mother straddled her torso and stared defiantly into Caroline’s eyes. She made clucking sounds and reached out a hand. One of Caroline’s captors placed a curved flint blade in Old Mother’s palm. A skinning knife.
Caroline bucked and writhed but was held firm as Old Mother bent over her and used the knife to cut her clothing away. With sure hands, the ancient bitch sliced away her shirt, t-shirt, pants, and panties. The hiking boots stymied them, so they left them in place for now. Old Mother crouched down by Caroline and explored her mouth with filthy fingers that tasted like ash and rancid fat. The clawed hands worked their way down to painfully squeeze her breasts. She fought hard, but the hands of the women yanked her legs apart, and Old Mother put fingers in Caroline’s vagina and rectum. The toothless old woman then sat back to sniff at her hands. She held the hands out, and others leaned forward to sniff and make hushed remarks.
They released Caroline, who leaped up on her feet with hands fisted. The women used growled threats and gestured with stones in their hands to make her back against a wall at the rear of the cave. She stumbled into a heap of objects that clattered under her feet, and the women shrieked in rage and struck at her with fists and stones until she moved to a wall away from their precious pile. She fell on her ass against the rock and looked back to see what was worth getting so damned upset about.
Heaped high in a corner of the cave was a pile of hammered gold plates, tablets, and talismans. The corner was formed by a niche in the stone with a natural shelf of rock upon which sat the crudely hammered figure of a fertility fetish. It was faceless and crouched on stubby, fat legs. The figure had huge orbs representing breasts, as well as a prodigious phallus jutting from its crotch. It had to weigh hundreds of pounds. The golden penis alone would fund her work for a year, she imagined. At its feet were hundreds, possibly thousands more pounds of objects hammered from soft gold.
She turned as she heard Miles pleading softly with the women, as though he might reason with them. They repeated the same ritual they’d performed on Caroline, but Miles was a big man and kept throwing them off until Old Mother brought a stone the size of a baking potato down on his head. Miles went still. He either lost consciousness or was afraid to move. Caroline couldn’t tell which.
Old Mother sliced off his clothes, leaving the boots as the women weighed down his legs and arms. Much was made of his genitals, and the women hissed and whispered and barked as Old Mother stroked the dazed Miles to an erection. She slapped the reaching hands of the others away with a stream of spitting invective.
The old woman and her entourage turned their attention back to Caroline. They took turns touching her and prodding while Old Mother crushed soft stone mixed with water in a carved wooden bowl using a crude pestle made from a limb bone. The Old Mother slathered Caroline with the lime wash using her calloused hand. She worked the mess into Caroline’s hair while the others watched and exchanged whispers and hisses. Old Mother daube
d ashes mixed with gobs of her own spit around Caroline’s eyes using her thumbs. She draped Caroline with necklaces of bone and beads worked from gold nuggets the size of fingertips.
Old Mother sat back and looked on her work with satisfaction. She touched Caroline’s face gently. Caroline stiffened and willed herself not to recoil. For whatever reason, they were honoring her with special treatment. Stockholm Syndrome or not, Caroline was determined not to do anything to piss them off and get her and Miles chopped to bits like poor Phillip.
Miles had his wrists bound behind him and his feet placed on a log, where his ankles were tied with lines run through holes worked in the log. Caroline was bound the same way and left alone as Old Mother and her entourage departed for the daylight, leaving them alone in the golden glow of the fire reflecting off the half-ton of treasure lying ten feet away.
“Miles?” Caroline said in a croak. She worked her mouth and spat, the rank taste of the old crone’s fingers still on her tongue.
“Miles, can you hear me?”
Her answer was a wet sobbing. Miles had his head turned away from her.
“We’re going to get out of here,” Caroline said. “I don’t know how or who’s coming for us, but I know my brother won’t just leave us here. I texted him. He knows our situation.”
Miles may have answered her, or maybe it was only a wordless whine.
“Hang on, Miles,” she said to him in a voice flat and without a hint of anxiety.
Hang on, Caroline, she thought to herself.
She fought down a shiver.
The next morning, after the disastrous raid by the men sent by Morris Tauber, Old Mother came awake as the shaman strode into the cave.
The ancient crone blocked his path and shrieked at him. He shouted back and gestured and glared at Caroline, sitting helpless at the rear of the cave. His face was dark with rage even under the lime wash. His flesh was spattered with the still-drying blood of his tribesmen. Fresh blood trickled from a jagged cut to the outside of his thigh. The mouth of the cave was crowded with curious tribe members anxious to see this argument. Many of them bore scars and burns.
