Catacombs

by John Farris

  If this one had been healthy and of sound wind, it would have overrun her. The best it could manage, as she plunged into barbed brush, was a blunt toss of its hornless head that caught her in the buttocks and hurled her against a tree.

  Her arms absorbed most of the impact. Erika fell in a heap, the bones in her right wrist cracked, the breath knocked out of her, and -lay still.

  When she disappeared from its path, the rhino promptly forgot about her, took a few drunken stagger steps to one side, then continued to bull its way between the trees, growling in rage, terrifying what was left of the resident night life, until it reached the plain again.

  Dimly Erika heard the sound of the Land-Rover's engine at high speed. Moments later there were shots, but the Rover kept going.

  "Erika!" Oliver called, a little after that.

  She tried to rise. The pain in her back wouldn't permit it. Her back muscles wouldn't work at all. She nearly fainted and lay still once more, panting, bleeding, utterly helpless, as Oliver continued to call and beat the brush in his search for her.

  Chapter 15

  WARSHIELD RANCH

  Silverpeak, Colorado

  May 13-14

  Raun Hardie had been moved from the hospital at Talon Mountain several days after her run-in with the fanatical Zola and her hopped-up confederate, and the next morning at five fifteen Jade was at the side of her bed in one of the guest rooms at the ranch, his blue eyes gleaming in the faint light of dawn; he was all business.

  "Time to get started."

  "Wha?"

  "Dress warm. Sweater and jacket. I'll see you outside in five minutes. Don't disappoint me."

  Raun pushed the hair out of her eyes and focused on him, but by that time he was on his way to the door. She looked at the windows, at a thick rime of frost on the glass, shuddered, and thought about ducking under the covers again. But then she remembered, with a twinge of exhilaration, that because of Matthew Jade she was alive and free. And, more than anything else, she wanted to remain free. So she thought she'd better humor him, go along with his plans. Something he'd said about getting into shape...

  Just five minutes later she was on the long roofed front porch of the log ranch house, yawning hard enough to crack her jaws, struggling to run the zipper of her too-tight jeans all the way up. If the jeans had belonged to his wife then she'd been a petite woman, with the bones of a fledgling. The sun was just coming up, there were patches of snow everywhere, it couldn't have been more than thirty-five degrees out. She tried a smile (might as well be friends), and then, looking more closely at Jade, she saw that he was barefoot. It was her first intimation that he was more than just an eccentric, he was a little crazy.

  "Where are we going?"

  "Little hike. That way." He pointed toward the mountain peaks to the west, now tipped with morning gold.

  "Oh. Well, couldn't we have some coffee first? I'm f-freezing."

  "Later," Jade promised. He smiled slightly. "You'll warm up on the trail."

  He started off at a pace that was just short of a jog, went about a hundred yards, then looked back at Raun as if he couldn't believe she wasn't keeping up with him. She was still standing on the porch but, determined to be a good sport, she hastened to join him.

  "How much later?" she asked, already breathless.

  Five miles later, almost all of it uphill. When they reached the high grove of aspen where Lem Meztizo was cooking breakfast over a fire, Raun was half frozen, nursing blisters and a black curse in her heart.

  Jade had walked her and Jade had run her, over short stretches, and he had waited patiently, without expression, his silver-gray bulldogger's Stetson tipped forward almost over his eyes, while she picked herself up several times after collapsing from exhaustion. His apparent indifference to her suffering was bad enough, but he came to seem inhuman: He had feet like horseshoes and the tireless lope of a wolf.

  Often he would become bored with her slow progress and go off and leave her; at least she would lose sight of him through the sapling forests and, feeling discouraged and abandoned, limping, her lungs like a furnace, she would fall down, unable to move. But the power of his steady gaze always aroused her; she would look around until she located him, sometimes in a tree, sometimes mounted on a stack of leaning rocks like the prow of an old schooner, and with only a slight upward tilt of his chin he would have her, witlessly, on her feet and staggering forward.

  Lem fetched a blanket for Raun; she wrapped herself tightly and huddled by the fire. The purity of the air she was breathing had given her a fierce headache. She was trembling so badly she couldn't hold the cup of coffee which Lem offered. He had to hold it for her while she sipped. He said nothing, but she felt his kindness and concern and was grateful.

  Lem Meztizo the Third was a mixed breed of cowpuncher and, apparently, Matthew Jade's only confidant. In contrast to the other two hands who worked the Warshield's five thousand acres and were typical of their kind–the squint watery gaze, the scuffed-to the-bone look–Lem Meztizo had a certain brilliance, the style of an eccentric grandee. He was big enough to match the wild elegance of his Arabian gelding.

  His teeth were lined with gold and he had long peroxided hair, gathered into a ponytail by a mummified tarantula partly entombed in precious stones. Though he carried a paunch he was not a soft-looking man, and he was as light on his feet as a roller-skating bear.

  Raun drank more of the coffee and through her stuffed nose sorted out the odors of a range breakfast steaming over the fire: wheat cakes and eggs and sausage and spicy scrapple. She came slowly alive to the undeniable charm of a wilderness at seven thirty in the morning, sighed in appreciation when Lem placed a heaping plate in her lap.

  She was astounded at her appetite; she couldn't pack the food in fast enough. But her feet were still sore and the curse remained, intensifying whenever she glanced at the oblivious Jade, who was attending to a bump he'd found on a fetlock of one of the cow ponies Lem had brought with him to the high country.

  Raun knew, or thought she knew, what she was in for. She'd blackmailed Jade and of course he resented it, so out of simple malice he would try to break her, make her quit. She stared at the fire and thought that the Irishman who had said "Don't get mad; get even" was her kind of philosopher. She felt a weak stirring of the pride that had been all but forgotten during her months in prison.

  No, she wouldn't quit. Her revenge would be all the richer for this unnecessary torture–and for those desperate years in hiding, the demeaning trial and sentence by the government of the United States. She could handle anything Matthew Jade decided to throw at her.

  "You want me to do what?"

  Raun looked up in shock from the second breakfast she'd been enjoying; across the fire Jade was hunkered down intent on his own meal, eyes on his plate. He didn't look at her.

  "I said we need to work on your legs, build them up. From the photos I've seen we'll be parachuting onto rocky ground."

  "From a plane? Are you crazy? I don't even like to fly!"

  Jade cleaned his metal plate with half a biscuit, popped it into his cheek, and shrugged.

  "It's the only way. But if you have some training, the odds are more in your favor. We'll try to get in half a dozen practice jumps before we leave here."

  Raun put her plate aside and got slowly to her feet. Her knees wanted to buckle. Her lips were white. She looked at Lem, who was frowning, obviously sympathetic to her plight. It was also obvious he was not in a mood to contradict his friend Jade.

  "My father and I didn't get there by parachute. Now look. You'll just have to be reasonable. I'm game for almost anything, but jumping out of airplanes? There has to be another way!"

  There wasn't.

  At five o'clock that evening, the end of a day which to Raun already seemed two weeks long, she and Lem Meztizo met with Jade in his pine-paneled study.

  Raun collapsed into a chair covered with sheepskin while Lem pulled the drapes and Jade put a cassette into the Betamax. On
the screen, Landsat images from the EROS Data Center of the U.S. Geological Survey appeared. They formed a mosaic of that part of Tanzania called the Makari Peninsula, a mountainous area jutting into Lake Tanganyika.

  The western slopes were heavily forested, teeming with animal life, but the summits of the mountains were barren. Along the landward approaches to the peninsula there was almost nothing: no roads, no trees, no signs of human habitation except for a small military post that must have been there for punishment duty. With regard for the difference in temperature, the Makari was Tanzania's Siberia.

  "The easy approach is from Kalemie, in Zaire," Jade explained. "That's just across the lake, by helicopter or boat. But we can't use Zaire as a staging area because of the current regime."

  "A Land-Rover can make it easily," Raun pointed out. She was too tired to sulk.

  "Even if the three of us could pass ourselves off as tourists in Tanzania–which we can't; the borders are closed–we'd never be able to justify our presence in a restricted area. As it is we'll have to dodge patrols most of the day. The Tanzanian Air Force has helicopters and light planes overflying the peninsula."

  "Why? What's so important about the Catacombs? And what's the hurry getting there?"

  "The rates go up after the rainy season," Jade said. Raun lapsed into an unfriendly silence, but her mind was busy.

  She didn't like Jade but she knew the man was no fool; and the U.S. government would not have acted so quickly to have her released if they were not vitally interested in something that was to be found in or near the Catacombs. Urgent plans had been formulated based on meager and ( apparently she was the only one who knew this) false information. It was a farce, a comedy of errors–but parachuting onto African hardpan, risking a broken leg or worse, would be no joke.

  She had tried to tell them part of the truth, that the Catacombs were like a dusty corner in a dull museum, worth the labor of only the most painstaking archaeologists. She remembered very well what she had seen there. No one was paying the slightest attention. What would Jade think now if she told him the true location of the Catacombs? And if she was believed, would she then be expendable? Raun had awakened that morning feeling free, but her freedom, she realized, was conditional. What the government had granted could be snatched away. No, she needed to find a way to put the brakes to their scheme without jeopardizing her pardon. And that might take some time.

  "When are we going?" she asked Jade.

  "We need to be in and out of the Catacombs before the twenty-ninth of May."

  "That's only two weeks!" Raun looked in dismay at the repetitive views of bleak plateau and dry mountain range–hundreds of square miles. The rates go up after the rainy season. She wondered what just one night in that hell would cost her, and swallowed hard.

  "Look, I won't jump. That's final. If you can't get a helicopter to set us down, then-I want to forget the whole thing."

  Jade turned off the Betamax and turned on a lamp. He sat down and packed a corncob pipe with hairy-looking tobacco and got the pipe going. Lem Meztizo stood by the lamp minutely examining a twenty-dollar double-eagle gold piece on a gold chain he wore with a polished leather vest. Away from the range he wore his wealth with fancy pants and silk shirts: bejeweled charms and amulets and magic rings and lucky twenty-dollar gold pieces. After the coin he took out an antique railroader's pocket watch and listened to it chime. He killed time with the attentiveness of a surgeon.

  Raun sensed channels of communication open between the waiting men that she was deaf and blind to. And the waiting grew on her soul like a callus.

  "This isn't a matter of simple cowardice," Raun explained with a tightly drawn smile. "It goes deeper than that. It's–sheer terror, and it's in the bone."

  Jade said mildly, "Nobody's missed you back at the clink. And your look-alike is probably getting bored in deadlock."

  "I see. So that's how you handled it."

  "Our safest bet is a twilight drop from a C-130 overflight. All the equipment we'll need–trail bikes, extra gasoline–can be parachuted in once you've picked our spot."

  "I can't do it."

  Jade whistled between his teeth. "Must be my lucky day," he said. "Except I know–"

  He got up without another word and went to the telephone on his desk, a bulkier instrument than most she'd seen. She had no way of knowing that this was a secure line from the ranch to the NORAD communications center in Cheyenne Mountain, seventy-five miles away. Jade dialed a series of numbers, and hung up.

  Thirty seconds later the phone rang, just once. He picked up the receiver and said, "We have a cancellation."

  "Wait," Raun said.

  Jade glanced at her. She had thought she was going to be okay, stiff upper lip, carry on regardless. But when she tried to smile, her face felt as if it might crack; then the tears came in a flood. She put a hand beside her nose and pressed her cheek hard, and the tears ran between her fingers.

  "Give me–more time."

  "Omit," Jade said over the phone, and hung up again.

  Raun couldn't stop crying.

  "I'm really tired. You wrecked me today. I ache all over, and I–I just can't think anymore."

  His habitually intent expression seemed to soften, or maybe it was the blurring effect of her tears.

  "You could use a good soak," Jade said. He looked almost cheerful. "If you just want to relax after your bath, I'll have dinner sent to your room. Then we'll see you bright and early."

  The use of Jade's hot tub went a long way toward easing the soreness in Raun's body, too long unexercised: He seemed to have a therapist's knowledge of her anatomy, and throughout a day that had been torturous but (in retrospect ) carefully planned, not one muscle had escaped his attention. Lem had taken care of the blisters earlier and, once she was out of the tub, he produced a small miracle named Lee, a Vietnamese woman skilled at massage. Then, in quick order, came a second miracle: a perfect dry martini which Raun enjoyed in small sips while Lee trod with diminutive feet the length of her bare back and legs. At first the massage hurt like fury and then it began to be enjoyable; then she passed into a state of bliss.

  Lee and her husband Ken, who had Americanized his name from Kien, were from the time of the boats. Two of her children had died on the South China Sea, during a long starvation drift southward to Singapore; two others were now in college in the States, their tuition paid by Jade. It was a side of him Raun wouldn't have suspected.

  Ken did the cooking on the ranch. He had been the sous chef at a fashionable Saigon restaurant before the Americans arrived. He had acquired a magical touch with the plain food of the American West: chicken, beef ribs and chili, a thickly textured bread. Stuffed but revived, Raun took her ease on the porch with Lem as the sun was setting, staining the sky the color of iodine. Jade had not appeared for dinner; she wondered where he was.

  Up to a point Lem wasn't reluctant to talk about his employer. He confirmed what Raun already was convinced of: Jade had operated on the dark side of the CIA. Then, as a result of some crucial but unauthorized action he'd taken, a top CIA official had been murdered and another had disappeared. Lem wasn't sure, but apparently they'd been "moles," or Russian plants within The Company. Jade had resigned and returned home to the ranch.

  "I hadn't seen him for, maybe it was eighteen months," Lem reflected. "Didn't hear a word. He'd been gone long stretches before, but I just began to think, maybe this time he's dead. Then he showed up. Matt's an initiate of the Black Wolf Society, that's an Indian thing, and I always have thought of him as half wolf anyway. But that half was near dead; burned out. He told me there'd been some trouble, and he looked to be expecting more, so I got ready for it but nothing ever happened. Later on he said he'd been in Russia, where he went to get himself arrested on purpose. He had to get next to a prisoner in one of those jails nobody ever gets out of alive. This one was called Lefortovo, I think, run by the KGB. He found out what he needed to know. Then he broke out of there and made his way to Finland all by
himself. Soon as he got home, shitfire, the roof fell in at the CIA."

  Raun gazed at the risen, nearly full moon. "How did he escape from an escape-proof prison?"

  Lem said with a gold-edged smile, "You know that old expression, 'been there and back'? Matt's the only man I ever met it truly applied to."

  "I don't understand."

  Lem seemed on the verge of elaborating, but a luxury pickup truck with a lot of chrome on it and a loud radio was driving up to the house. He pushed off from the porch rail he'd been sitting on and sauntered over to greet the visitor, a runty Hopi Indian with a handsome haughty head and curly shoulder-length graying hair. He wore a buckskin jacket and baggy trousers, carried a large carpetbag with him.

  "Hello, John Tovókinpi."

  "Hello, Lem Meztizo."

  "New set of wheels?"

  "The truck belongs to my nephew, Ephraim Rohona. He said that I could borrow it as long as I used the low gear only, turned on all the flashing lights, and drove on the shoulder of the highway, not the highway itself. Then everyone would realize it was me, and stay far away. Have you seen Múte? He has sent for me."

  "He's at the home pasture, updating the herd ledgers. He'll be along. This is Raun Hardie, a friend of ours."

  John Tovókinpi looked closely at Raun for almost a full minute, without a trace of expression. Then he turned and said to Lem, as if he'd forgotten Raun was there, "She is better-looking than Taláwasohu, who I also admired for the purity of her voice. Do you suppose I could have my dinner now?"

  "Right on in, John, Ken will fix you up."

  "Who was that?" Raun asked, when the Indian was out of earshot.

  "John's a Bow Clan sorcerer, one of three or four left among the Hopis, and there are only about five thousand Hopis left anymore. Too easy to push around, I guess, and they've always been fatalists, Matt says, not realists."

  "What's he doing here?"