by Graham Brown
She was right, it should have been. He hated everything that had happened, all that had been lost. His heart wanted someone else to blame, but he knew the part he’d played. “What happened to them?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “They stopped reporting about fifty miles from here. And they weren’t headed in this direction at the time.” She looked eastward, the direction she’d led the team in from. “They didn’t know about the Wall of Skulls, they didn’t have the information we had, so how the hell they found this place is beyond me. But apparently they did. After that …” She shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. The natives … those animals … I don’t know.”
Hawker looked around at the carnage, thinking of the men he’d just buried. He hadn’t even counted up their own dead yet. “How many have we lost?”
“All the porters except Brazos, all of Verhoven’s men,” she said. “Polaski, Susan.” She shook her head. “They came in firing. A helicopter first, followed by men on the ground. For a while I thought we’d lost you as well.”
Hawker looked at her. “When I started back here, I was pretty sure I’d find you all dead,” he said. He looked away, thankful that some of them were still alive, but drained by the cost. “We should have never brought these people here. We both knew this was a possibility.”
“I know,” she said. “And that’s on me. But we can’t leave yet. Now that we’re back in control, we have to find what we came here for. We have to finish this.”
He was stunned. “Are you out of your mind?”
“The worst is over, Hawker.”
“The worst is not over,” he said. “Did you listen to Kaufman, were you even here last night? Do you want to see whatever those things were again? Do you want to be here when the natives come storming in, intent on hacking us to pieces? Those threats are still out there. And don’t forget about Kaufman. I don’t care what he says, that son of a bitch has other people hiding somewhere. When they don’t hear from him for a while, they’re going to come looking. You want to wait around for that?”
“Not really, but we still have a job to do.”
“Fine,” he said. “We can take these people out of here and come back with a new team; you can bring a battalion of Marines if you want to. Then you can get whatever the hell you’re after and nobody else has to die.”
“Too late for that,” she said. “Our cover’s blown. And if Kaufman does have partners out there somewhere, they’ll be in and out before we can even get back to Manaus. It’s now or never.”
He needed her to see reason, to see the danger instead of the goal. When he spoke again his tone was more subdued. “You have to understand: we won last night because Kaufman’s people were looking for a different kind of fight. That made them easy targets. We won’t be that lucky next time.”
She hesitated, glancing across the camp to where Kaufman was walking with McCarter and Brazos. “I’m sorry for everything that’s happened here. More than you can know. You probably won’t believe me, but I didn’t want anything to do with this damn expedition in the first place. But in our business you go where they send you and you do what they tell you. And right now I have orders to bring back what we came here for. Regardless of the cost or consequences, remember? Everything we came for is within our grasp. We just have to get back in there and grab it.”
“Grab what?” he asked. He didn’t expect an answer, but she gave him one anyway.
“Somewhere down in that cave,” she said, “there’s a power source. An energy-producing system that we can study and use to create working cold fusion power cells. I’m not at liberty to tell you how it got there, but I promise you it’s not a joke. The crystals Martin brought back were slightly radioactive, our tests proved that they had undergone a low-level fusion reaction. They’d either been exposed to it or were part of it.”
He stood back, shocked. “Why would such a thing be out here?”
“Somebody put it here,” she explained. “That’s all I can tell you. That, and that if we find it, we can change the way humanity lives. Global warming, wars for oil, pollution. We can put an end to all of that. Think of it like the Manhattan Project, only the other way around. We can become life, the healers of the world,” she said, reversing Oppenheimer’s famous quote.
Hawker listened to the words and found his mind reeling. He brought a hand to his temple and rubbed at a stabbing pain.
“Look,” she said, “I know you don’t trust the system. And why should you? They burned you for something, exiled you. I don’t even know what it was; I have a fifty-page file on you and two-thirds of it’s blacked out. But from what I’ve seen, you do what you think is right, even when it costs you.”
“Not always,” he assured her.
“The point is, that’s what I’m trying to do here,” she said. “And if you help me, I promise you, it will be worth it. This is your chance, Hawker. It may be the last chance you ever get. You can change your life and if you look at it from the bigger picture, you can change a lot of lives.”
The bigger picture. It was something he’d always had a hard time focusing on, especially when the smaller, local picture was so painful to see.
“Hawker,” she continued, “I know you want to leave, to take everyone home. But if you go, they will stamp this file closed as a failure and things will be worse for you. Not by my doing,” she insisted. “God knows I owe you my life. But those same people who exiled you, they still run things, and they have an interest in this. And they will want someone to blame. This time exile won’t be enough. They’ll come for you. They’ll hound you.”
He turned away, angry and confused. Tell them to bring it on, he thought, catching the words just before they could escape his mouth. “People are dying out here,” he said. “Good people—our people. You lied and I helped you lie and we walked them, smiling, right into hell. If you don’t think there’s going to be a price to pay for that, then you are sadly in the dark.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” she said. “People I cared about are dead as well. Leaving won’t bring them back. But finishing the job will make their sacrifice have some purpose.”
She gazed into his eyes. “I have to go back in there, Hawker. Whether you want to or not, I have to. I’ll go in alone if you make me. But I’m not leaving here empty-handed.”
He could feel the price getting steeper for both of them. “Before this is over,” he warned, “I think you’re going to wish you had.”
She looked at the ground and then briefly back up at him before turning and marching away, off toward the center of camp.
Hawker shook his head, dropping the piece of equipment he’d found and kicking it across the clearing in frustration. It skipped and rolled and then broke into several pieces. For a long moment, he stared at the shattered remnants as if they held some great meaning.
It took the sound of distant shouting to tear him away.
Professor McCarter was running across the camp, carrying something and waving. McCarter arrived at Danielle first. They spoke briefly before he took her by the hand and led her back toward Hawker. By the time they reached him, McCarter was out of breath.
“We’ve got to go back inside the temple,” he said, panting. “We’ve got to do it now.”
Hawker shook his head in disbelief. “This is like some kind of disease with you guys.”
McCarter didn’t waste time explaining; instead, he held out a bright orange object he’d been carrying: Kaufman’s ELF radio. He turned the volume up.
“Can anybody hea …? Mr … aufman … please answer …” It was Susan Briggs, attempting to reach Kaufman on the low-frequency transmitter.
“She’s alive,” McCarter said. “We can hear her transmission, but she can’t hear ours. She hasn’t responded to anything we’ve sent.”
“Where?” Hawker asked. “How?”
“She’s in the cave beneath the temple somewhere, and if Kaufman’s right, those animals are in there with her. She’ll never m
ake it out on her own. We have to go in and get her. We have to go now.”
Hawker glanced sideways at Danielle; both of them knew what this meant: she would get her chance to explore the cave after all. “You must have nine lives,” he said to her. “Try not to forget which number you’re on.”
CHAPTER 35
In the darkness of the cave beneath the temple, Hawker stood back from the edge of the lake and gazed into the clear water ahead of him. The bottom was lined with a smooth layer of whitish calcite, dotted in random places by pea-sized spheres called cave pearls. And in the glare of his flashlight, everything shimmered as if covered in a coat of wet lacquer.
He redirected his light toward the ceiling, forty feet above. Different formations loomed there: huge stalactites hanging in clumps, great daggers of stone pointed toward them, some of them fifteen feet long, three feet thick at the base. Cutting between them was an angled row of smaller, jagged spikes, like an endless row of shark’s teeth, a formation known as a welt line, and farther off an array of delicate strands called soda straws dangled from an overhang, their tips glistening with moisture.
“Hell of a cave,” he said. The words echoed.
Behind him McCarter, Danielle and Verhoven were reaching the same conclusion. “Sulfur cave,” McCarter said, shining his own flashlight around. “Most caves are formed from limestone, but some are carved from the rock by the effects of sulfuric acid. Lechugila in New Mexico for instance. That might explain the acidic water in the bottom of the well. This water too.”
Hawker scanned the water with his light. He and Verhoven had viewed Lang’s recording several times and they’d heard large splashes. They knew the danger came from the water, but the immediate area seemed to be clear.
“Which way?” Danielle asked.
Hawker pointed. “There’s a pathway on the right; it leads to the other side.”
He clipped his flashlight to the barrel of his rifle. The others followed suit, except for Verhoven, who carried a different weapon—a pump-action Mossberg shotgun lifted from Kaufman’s arsenal. His right hand held the trigger, his swollen left hand duct-taped to the pump, tight enough that he could reload it.
They moved onto the pathway, traveling in a single file and watching the water for any sign of danger. Hawker had the point, with Danielle right behind him. She wore a small backpack stuffed with equipment while a portable Geiger counter strapped to her leg clicked away softly.
“Just a precaution,” she’d explained. “The Martin crystals showed traces of radioactive contamination. So does the soil up above.”
“Thanks for telling us.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s all low level. We’d have to stay here for years to be affected.”
If there was one thing Hawker was sure of it was that they wouldn’t be sticking around that long. He continued on, following the rugged pathway to the dam. The seven pools and the smooth stone of the plaza lay just beyond.
Hawker stopped. “The last images on the recording were of this place. You ready?” he asked Verhoven.
Verhoven nodded. “You know those shells won’t do much beyond a depth of five or six feet.”
“Yeah,” Hawker replied. “But it’ll be a hell of a wake-up call if anything’s down there.”
Verhoven nodded. “I’ll watch your back.”
Hawker moved away, stepping onto the dam, scanning the lake and then turning his back to it. Verhoven took a position at the end of the structure, poised and ready should something come at Hawker from the lake behind.
Hawker stepped up to the first pool, fired two quick bursts into it and then jumped back, waiting for some reaction.
The sound of the gunfire boomed through the cave and echoed back at them from the darkness, vibrating in receding, diminishing waves, but nothing moved in the pool. One down, six to go.
Hawker stepped toward the other pools and repeated the procedure until the entire honeycomb arrangement was clear. It appeared that the pools were empty.
He stepped off the dam and made a quick inspection of the surrounding area. Satisfied, he gave the all-clear.
“Strange formation,” McCarter said. “Seven pools. I wonder: Seven Caves, Seven Canyons.”
Danielle acknowledged him. “And the Place of Bitter Water,” she said.
Hawker aimed his flashlight across the plaza and into the cave beyond. Fronted by the lake, the plaza stretched sideways for at least a hundred feet, with the back edge hard against the cave’s stone wall. On the side closest to them lay the dam and the pools and more open cave. On the far side, the broken trail of the pathway seemed to continue into a deeper section of the cavern. Hawker guessed that would be the way to go.
He brought the beam of his light back across the plaza, toward the path they’d just come down. He stopped. Ripples were moving slowly across the surface of the lake, a surface that had been like glass only moments before. His eyes darted back and forth, as he swung the beam of light through the depths of the cave and back out over the water once again.
“What’s wrong?” Danielle asked.
“Something disturbed the water,” he said. “Went in or came out.”
The dried swaths of blood on the stone showed that both victims had been killed in the open part of the plaza. Not a good place to stand. “Come on,” he said. “We need cover.”
Hawker led them to the back of the plaza, to a spot where the smooth floor butted up against the jagged natural stone of the wall. They pressed themselves against it, with Hawker on the right end and Verhoven on the left and the broad open space of the plaza in front of them. It was a good spot tactically, nothing could come at them from behind, only from the sides and front, and that would leave any attacker open to a withering fire.
“You see anything?” Verhoven asked.
“Just the water.”
Verhoven went to speak again but stopped as muted noise reached their ears, a scraping sound, a raspy scratching, like stone dragged across stone.
Danielle switched off the Geiger counter so they could listen.
“What was that?” McCarter whispered.
No one could say. But their eyes darted around in search of its source, their lights crisscrossing in the dark.
The sound returned. Two long, slow scrapes, preceded by a strangely muted click.
The group fell into utter silence, barely breathing, their eyes straining into the dark.
“What if it’s Susan?” McCarter asked. They had tried to reach her on the radio several times since entering the cave, but to no avail. “What if there was a cave-in and she’s trapped and trying to signal us? Avalanche victims are found like that sometimes.”
Hawker listened as the sounds were heard once again. “It’s not her,” he said.
“Are you sure?” McCarter asked. “It could—”
“The sounds are overlapping,” Hawker said. “There’s more than one source.”
From out of the darkness the scraping noise whispered to them, soft but unmistakable now: click, click, scrape, scrape.
“Where the hell is it coming from?” Danielle asked, her eyes darting back and forth.
It was a fair question. With the strange acoustics of the cave, the noise seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. Click, click … scrape, scrape, click, click.
To Hawker’s left, Danielle and McCarter struggled to keep still. He ignored them, grimly sweeping his field of view. He knew Verhoven would be doing the same, and that, armed and waiting with their backs pressed to the wall, they were in a good position. Whatever was out there, stalking them, crawling from the edge of the lake or moving toward them from the farther depths of the cave, it would have to cross the open ground before it could strike.
“Stay against the wall,” he whispered. “Whatever happens, stay back against the wall and out of our way.”
Click, click, scrape, scrape. Louder this time, closer.
Danielle and McCarter pressed into the stone.
Hawker squinted
into the darkness, waving the light around. To the right side—his side—the plaza ran for sixty feet before the jagged teeth of the cave took over once again. Beyond that, the cave opened up and a long finger of the lake appeared to stretch into the rocky formations beyond. That area offered the only real cover for anything approaching them, but a near-constant watch had caught nothing. “On your side, Pik.”
Verhoven shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
Click, click.
“Has to be.”
Verhoven bristled. “I’m telling you, there’s nothing over here.”
The hollow scraping sound reached them once again, slower and muted. And then there was only silence, more dreaded before long than the sounds that had come before it.
In that lingering quiet they waited, straining for any sign of danger, listening for the faintest sound.
But they saw nothing and heard nothing; there was no movement, no clicking, only the pounding of their hearts, the rhythmic dripping of water in the distance and the unearthly feeling of time standing on end.
The stone floor glistened with moisture and the heavy sulfur fumes lingered in the air, but nothing in the cave was moving.
Hawker scanned to the left, to make sure Verhoven hadn’t missed anything, and then back to the right. What the hell are we missing?
As this question ran through his head, a minuscule flash caught the corner of his eye: a speck of dust falling through the beam of Danielle’s flashlight, flaring incandescently as it passed, like a microscopic shooting star. Only now did he realize their folly. He looked up.
“Move!”
He grabbed Danielle and slung her out of the way as a shadow dropped from the ceiling fifty feet above. The animal hit the ground where she’d been standing, slashing the back of her calf with the sweep of its claws even as Hawker pulled her away. The group scattered, beams of light swaying wildly in the darkness as claws and teeth flashed and strings of vile saliva swung through the air.
The animal spun and lunged at McCarter.
A slug from Verhoven’s shotgun sent it reeling across the floor.
