by Bill Schutt
“But—”
“But this time they went off course—far off course, according to the distress call.”
“And why would your men do that?” Wang asked.
“Apparently, they received orders that superseded my own.”
“But who would have—”
“That’s not important now. What is important is that they discovered a valley—fogbound. For some reason they either decided to land the helicopter—or it crashed. Then they were . . . attacked.”
“By the Yeren?”
“No,” the captain said, then hesitated. “By the earth, or the ground—or something on the ground.”
“By the earth?” Wang repeated, to himself.
“Only parts of their message came through,” Captain Mung said. “It’s difficult to know what really happened.”
“But maybe they—”
“They could not have survived what I heard.”
Wang bowed his head but said nothing.
“We will be leaving this place,” Mung said. His voice belonged to a commander who had just lost seven of his men, including a pair of pilots. “And we will find out who or what attacked them.”
Chapter 13
The Taken
You need the ability to fail. . . . You cannot innovate unless you are willing to accept some mistakes.
—Charles R. Knight
In the igloo
July 12, 1946
R. J. MacCready never heard the tandem-rotored helicopter until it crashed somewhere in the distance. Even muffled by snow and fog, the smashing of steel framing against rock and earth was unmistakable. It also provided the minor favor of allowing him to concentrate on something else—anything else.
Mac flashed back to their own crash only days earlier. Given everything that had transpired since then, the event felt oddly distant—as if it had happened to someone else.
But it didn’t, he thought. I’m the one who got us stuck here. And now Jerry’s—
“All right, cut!” Mac said, shaking his head as if to clear it of the very thought. The cold, hard fact was that Jerry was gone—having done nothing at all that might have provoked his captor.
The Morlocks are completely unpredictable, he thought, realizing that now there could be only one concern—finding Yanni and getting her the fuck out of here.
But is she even alive? Mac wondered. Or are they both gone?
“She’s alive,” he told himself.
Mac moved across the silent interior of the igloo and pressed his hands against the freezing walls, trying in vain to see beyond the mist.
“So whose chopper was that?” he asked himself, before mentally reconstructing what he’d just heard. Six sequential blows—six blades, two rotors. Mac knew the sound of a double-rotor set was consistent with the spare chopper part Alpha had thrown down at their feet. Probably Chinese, he thought, remembering the stamped metal and Hendry’s warning that those guys were swarming over the region like hornets.
What wasn’t swarming, he noticed, were the grass mimics. In fact the entire white horde that seemed to be permanently camped outside the igloo was gone.
Mac approached the slab that served as a door, squinting through the thick, polished ice as he went, but he could detect no movement at all. He put his shoulder to the portal and immediately felt it begin to move. I can do this, he thought, now giving serious consideration to pushing it open and taking his chances outside. The more rational part of his brain decided to wait a few minutes more.
“But where the hell is—” Mac said, his question interrupted by sudden movement. It came from deep within the mist, which swirled upward, displaced by a new wave of grass mimics. There’s something different about them, Mac thought, straining to determine exactly what that could be.
It’s their color, he realized, aware now that many of the blades rushing toward him had a distinctive crimson tint. Mac felt his insides beginning to twist in an all-too-familiar manner. Is that Yanni’s blood?
The answer arrived barely more than thirty seconds later, but for R. J. MacCready those seconds were longer than any hour.
Out of the snowy mist strode one of the Morlocks. It was the same individual, the one they’d been calling Alpha, who’d prevented Yanni from seeing what had taken place in the cavern. Now the grim-faced creature was carrying her on his shoulder.
“You are shittin’ me,” Mac muttered, to himself.
Predictably, the sea of white and red pseudo-grass parted before the Morlock as he advanced toward the igloo entrance, simultaneously closing behind once the giant had passed.
Stopping just shy of twenty feet from the ice prison, Alpha set Yanni down gently and gave her a slight nudge forward. Yanni glanced back for a moment, as if to confirm what she was being asked to do. Then, seemingly without giving it another thought, she began walking toward the igloo.
Mac pounded against the ice—screaming out against the realization that she was being forced to walk into her own execution.
“No!”
Looking quite calm, Yanni responded with a wry smile and a wave of her hand. Then she stepped away from the Morlock and into the seething carpet of grass mimics.
Mac cursed, throwing his weight against the door and pushing for all he was worth. The slab fell forward. By then Yanni was so close that she had to jump back a step to avoid getting her feet crushed by the ice.
Mac threw his arms around Yanni and spun her toward the opening. She responded with a look of surprise at what turned out to be his unnecessary attempt to use his body as a shield. The zoologist had failed to notice that the grass had parted before Yanni, fleeing in such haste that not a single mimic stood within ten feet of them.
“Mac, what on earth are you doin’ out here?”
Before he could reply, a shove from behind sent them both tumbling into the igloo and immediately the Morlock reset the door and slammed it back into place.
“I . . . I thought he was trying to kill you, too.”
“What? I was perfectly safe,” she said. “Take a whiff. I call it Eau de Elephas.”
Mac responded to her joke with unexpected silence.
“Mac, what did you mean ‘kill me too’?” Yanni said, amid a very sudden realization that they were no longer a trio.
Mac turned away from her.
Normally, the friends would have talked for hours about Yanni’s twenty minutes at the corral. Instead, in utter silence, they thought only about Jerry.
1,500 feet above the south Tibetan Labyrinth
July 13, 1946
“Do you see that ledge ahead of us?” the Chinese helicopter pilot asked. He was pointing to the exact spot that Yanni had indicated to Mac, on the day their trek began.
Captain Mung Chen took off his aviator glasses and squinted through the cockpit window. “Yes, take us down lower.”
As the shelf came nearer, the copilot contacted the crew of the second chopper, who put their ship into a slow holding pattern circuit as Mung’s craft went in for a closer look.
The resulting flyby revealed the same low wall of stones that had prevented Mac and his friends from tumbling off the ledge. This time, however, the rocks and snow gave silent testimony to more than the work of a past civilization.
“There’s another helicopter down there,” the pilot said. “Or at least part of one.”
Once again, Captain Mung strained to see, but this time he shook his head. “Where? I can see nothing but those low ridges.”
“Lying at the base of that rock wall flanking the terrace,” said the pilot.
“Nature hates straight lines, sir,” the copilot added. “Those two long shadows in the snow appear to be rotors—and over there, maybe a wheel assembly.”
Now Mung saw them as well. “Ours?”
“Impossible to say from here,” the pilot responded.
“Can you put us down, safely?”
The pilot flashed a brief but confident smile. “I think there is just enough room for both ships, sir.�
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“Good. Inform our sister ship, then take us in.”
Only after Mung had returned to his seat in the cabin did the two flyers exchange looks. “Both ships?” the copilot repeated, somewhat incredulously.
“He was just about to ask us anyway,” the pilot responded. “And you . . . ‘Nature hates straight lines’? Who said that? Certainly not you!”
The copilot shrugged. He knew it was either Buddha or some long-dead English landscape architect. Though he could never quite remember which.
July 14, 1946
The pair of prisoners from New York never heard the new arrivals. The Chinese were a long way off, miles beyond the maze of underground passages and high above a sound-muffling sea of snowy fog.
What they did notice, just before nightfall on the second day after Jerry’s death, was an increase in the activity outside their prison.
“What do you think they’re up to?” Yanni asked.
Mac shrugged his shoulders but remained silent. She had yet to draw anything like a normal response from him.
“Mac?”
Silence.
“You really should eat something,” she followed, although even she had left her food mostly untouched and neither of them had slept.
“Please leave me alone,” Mac said at last. Then he curled up on the ground with his back turned.
Previously, the three prisoners had reluctantly begun sleeping in what Mac referred to as “a thermodynamically efficient position.” Yanni had actually preferred Jerry’s term, spooning, although they were careful not to use that description around Mac.
Yanni approached her friend and lay down behind him. She could sense his shoulders tensing up and he inched himself away from her.
“Good night, Mac,” she said gently. Then, moving to fill the space between them, she placed a hand on his shoulder. Mac allowed it.
“He’s gone, Yanni,” he whispered.
“Shhhh,” she whispered back. “Good night, Mac.”
Mac supposed he should have dropped off into sleep from sheer exhaustion, but it seemed unimaginable to him that his thoughts could stop racing for even a few seconds. He had become so accustomed to stepping into and out of improbable shit storms with Jerry that it had become possible for both of them to let down their guard—even here, among creatures no more predictable than tigers.
Yanni had only recently accepted Jerry as “our kind of stupid,” but she did not know the half of it. Their first mission together had begun in the Pacific, after Jerry received word that “Captain America”—actually a lieutenant jg—and his crew might have survived the total destruction of their torpedo boat. No one at the time seemed willing to believe it. The “proof of life” was a message found by a local fisherman, carved into a coconut. Against a “no-go” decision from their superiors, Mac and Jerry went into freelance mode, eventually stealing a canoe from under the noses of ten thousand Japanese soldiers stationed on the nearby island of Kolombangara. Following a set of cryptic directions and a familiar surname carved onto the shell, they found the grateful lieutenant and most of his crew on a tiny island that Jerry had aptly described as “a pile of sand with visions of grandeur.” Ultimately, Mac took a spearhead in the leg for his troubles—from a friendly native.
“You definitely can’t make this shit up,” Mac later told a less-than-pleased senior officer. Eventually it took a personal call from Captain America’s father to get him and Jerry off the hook for disobeying an order.
Jerry was also present when, during an interlude between missions and while the spear-pierced muscles of his leg healed, Mac met a youthful genius named Tamara, who saw in ants and bees the intelligence of “superorganisms,” and who would certainly have been helpful in figuring out inchworm grass and Morlocks. Mac had noticed only during their first two minutes together that Tamara bore the childhood scars of smallpox. From the instant they began speaking, he could remember only her unforgettable grace, her kindness, her brilliance.
And Jerry was there with him, in that place of tropical beaches and grief, wonder and loss, beauty and regret. He was at Mac’s side when he no longer needed a crutch to walk, was healed to the point of “mission ready” and sailed away, vowing that he would return to the island.
Only three weeks later, the beaches and the forests belonged to carrion-feeders, the island having been overrun by the enemy. Tamara, her family, and more than two thousand civilians disappeared, with less mystery but even more all-embracing thoroughness than Rome’s Ninth Legion.
Jerry had been there to console him.
“Tamara—”
Mac’s arm thrashed involuntarily, just as he began to doze off. “Shhhh,” Yanni whispered again. “It’s all right.”
He’d never spoken to Yanni about Tamara. Back then, he scarcely had time to grasp the fact she was gone when he received word that another of the war’s evils had claimed his mother and sister. Jerry had been there for that, too.
In one way or another, bit by bit, the world had taken everyone Mac loved. There seemed little left to do about it, except to keep everyone else at arm’s length and attend to the job: Save lives, where you can. Keep exploring and writing, exploring and writing.
“Some men can be, and maybe should be, islands,” Mac had recently told Jerry.
Slow to trust and emotionally emaciated, Mac came to regard himself as the human equivalent of a remote island—a place where nature itself veered off into different and unexpected directions. His way of thinking had likewise evolved along its own directions, and perhaps even flourished. It was, he suspected, what had turned him into a think-outside-the-box type of explorer, and so useful to the military.
“Jerry—” Mac’s arm lashed out, awakening Yanni again. She was still there, trying to console him.
“It’s okay, Mac. Try to rest.”
I can’t, he thought, and wondered if it would be possible ever to rest again. He let out a deep breath and felt Yanni’s hand on his shoulder. Somehow Mac knew that she would not remove it. And she did not, even after sleep eventually reached out and took him into its house.
Long past midnight, yet before the phosphorescent world outside came alive, Mac and Yanni were awakened by the loud arrival of several Morlocks outside the igloo.
The pair sat up as the ice door was pulled aside. They saw a blur of movement in the dark and something large was flung onto the ground. Landing with an audible grunt, it became immediately apparent that this late-night delivery was another person, and as the ice door slid closed, the fur-clad figure sat up and shook his head—as if trying to convince himself that what he had just experienced was simply a bad dream.
The man turned to the two silent figures sitting on the floor. He spoke a few words in Chinese, seeming to ask a question.
MacCready, who had only a rudimentary knowledge of the language, tugged at an earlobe as he tried to work out the dialect and the translation. He replied at last, with a short phrase of his own.
Yanni nudged Mac with an elbow. “What’d he say?”
“I think he wants to know where he is.”
“And what’d ya tell him?”
“I think I told him ‘Up Shit Creek.’”
“That’s helpful, Mac,” Yanni said, with a head shake, although she did consider the first sign of a “Mac-like” response to be a welcome improvement.
Their guest needed a few seconds to rough out the meaning of Mac’s slang. Then he sighed and lowered his head into his hands.
Only a day before, the helicopter pilot (whose name was Li Ming) believed that he was prepared for anything. He knew that strange encounters had been part of the region’s mythology for centuries, and after the carved-up remains of a Yeren were actually loaded aboard his craft he began to accept that the old stories about monsters in the hills were not merely warnings, contrived to keep people away. Yet when one of the mythical giants finally stood before him, Li Ming was taken completely by surprise.
In the end, they had been able to land
both of the remaining helicopters on the challengingly small table of flat ground. After Captain Mung’s initial plans unraveled with the disappearance of their third aircraft, Li Ming’s commanding officer had decided to consolidate his remaining force of thirty men. They would explore the mountain pass, leading away from the landing zone—the very spot where an American helicopter had recently crashed, and where someone or something had attempted to hide the wreckage.
Captain Mung’s men set up camp on the improbably located terrace, their tents hidden among the rocks and as far away as possible from the vertigo-inducing cliff. The pilot and four other men were selected to remain behind. They would safeguard the helicopters from intruders and from the engine-degrading effects of the harsh winds and temperature changes.
Li Ming’s first sunrise at the base camp broke clear and relatively warm. Within an hour, Captain Mung, accompanied by twenty-three heavily armed soldiers, marched away from the landing site. Wang Tse-lin, the scientist Mung had evidently coerced into joining the expedition, went along as well.
The two flyers who had safely landed Captain Mung’s “Dogship” watched as the last members of the expedition disappeared around a bend.
“Well, this is going to be fun,” Li Ming mumbled after briefly touring the perimeter of their new home base.
“Would you rather be going with them?” his copilot countered.
The pilot shrugged. “At least we’d be doing something exciting, instead of babysitting a pair of Russian bananas.”
The copilot was just about to express his preference for bananas when Li Ming gestured toward the helicopters. “Which reminds me,” he said, “you should check those safety tethers. I’m sure Captain Mung wouldn’t be pleased to find that a sudden gust caught us unprepared, and that his ride had left without us.”
The copilot nodded and trudged off toward the nearer of the two aircraft, then stopped and shot Li Ming a quizzical look. “Me check the safety tethers? And what are you going to do, stand around here and brood?”
