Tyrannosaur Canyon

by Douglas Preston

  "Here it is."

  Masago took a few minutes to scan the folder. It was exactly what he'd requested, the UAV equipped with synthetic aperture radar, multi- and hyper-spectral imagery. He noted with approval the diversion of one SIGINT KH-11 infrared photographic satellite for his mission.

  "And the men?"

  "A team of ten, previously assigned by the National Command Authority from the Combined Assault Group and DEVGU to a branch of the CIA Operations Directorate. They're ready to roll."

  "Were they read in?"

  "These men don't need to be read in, they already deal solely in classified ops. They received your Warning Order but it was pretty vague."

  "Intentionally so." Masago paused. "There is, shall we say, an unusual psychological component to this mission which has just come to my attention."

  "And what might that be?"

  "We may be asking these men to kill several American civilians within the borders of the United States."

  "What the hell do you mean by that?" the general asked sharply.

  "They're bioterrorists, and they've got their hands on something big."

  "I see." The general gazed steadily at Masago for a long time. "These men are psychologically prepared for just about anything. But I'd like an explanation–"

  "That won't be possible. Suffice to say, it is a matter of the gravest national security."

  General Miller swallowed. "When the men are given their patrol order, that should be dealt with up front."

  "General, I will deal with these issues in the way I see fit. I am asking you for assurance that these men are capable of handling this unusual assignment. Now your response leads me to believe I might need better men."

  "You won't get any better men than these ten. They're the best damn soldiers I've got."

  "I will rely on that. And the chopper?"

  The general nodded his grizzled head toward the helipad. "Bird's on the tarmac, ready to fly."

  "MH 60G Pave Hawk?"

  "That's what was requested." The general's voice had grown as cold as ice.

  "The chalk leader? Tell me about him."

  "Sergeant First Class Anton Hitt, bio in the folder."

  Masago flashed an inquiring glance at Miller. "Sergeant?"

  "You asked for the best, not the highest ranking," responded the general, dryly. He paused. "The mission isn't here in New Mexico, is it? We'd appreciate a heads-up if this op's in our backyard."

  "That information falls into the need-to-know category, General." Masago's lips, for the first time, stretched slightly in the semblance of a smile. As they stretched, they whitened.

  "My USAF crew needs a briefing–"

  "Your aircrew and pilots will be given mission cards and coordinates once in the air. The CAG/DEVGU team will receive the patrol order en route."

  The general did not respond, beyond the slight twitch of a muscle in his jaw-line.

  "I want a cargo helo standing by, ready to fly at a moment's notice to pick up a cargo of up to fifteen tons."

  "May I ask the range?" the general asked. "We might have a potential fuel problem."

  "The bird will fly seventy-two percent fueled." Masago slapped the folder shut, slipped it into his briefcase. "Escort me to the helipad."

  He followed the general through the waiting room, out a side door, and across a broad, circular expanse of asphalt, on which sat the sleek black Sikorsky Pave Hawk, rotors whapping. The eastern sky had grown brighter, turning from blue to pale yellow. The planet Venus stood twenty degrees above the horizon, a point of light dying in the brilliance of the approaching sunrise.

  Masago strode over, not bothering to shield himself against the backwash of the rotors, his black hair whipped about. He leapt aboard and the sliding door closed. The rotors powered up, the dust rose in sheets, and a moment later the big bird took off, nosed toward the north, and accelerated into the dawn sky.

  THE GENERAL WATCHED the Pave Hawk disappear into the sky, and then he turned back to the terminal with a shake of his head and a muttered curse. "Goddamned civilian bastard."

  Chapter 2

  AFTER MANAGING TO find each other in the upper canyons, they had hiked all night long, guided by the light of a gibbous moon. Tom Broadbent paused to catch his breath. Sally came up behind him and rested her hand on his shoulder, leaning on him. The badlands stood in silent repose, thousands of small gray hills like heaps of ash. In front of them lay a depression in the sand, with a cracked bed of silt whitened by alkali crystals. The sky had brightened in the east and the sun was about to rise.

  Sally gave the silt a kick, sending up a whitish plume that drifted off. "That's the fifth dry waterhole we've passed."

  "Seems the rain last week didn't extend out this far."

  She eased herself down on a rock and gave Tom a sideways look. "I do believe you've ruined that suit, mister."

  "Valentino would weep," said Tom, mustering a smile. "Let's have a look at your cut."

  She let him peel off her jeans, and he carefully removed the improvised bandage. "No sign of infection. Does it hurt?"

  "I'm so tired I can't even feel it."

  He discarded the bandage and took a clean strip of silk from his pocket, earlier ripped from the lining of his suit. He tied it gently in place, feeling a sudden, almost overwhelming rage against the man who had kidnapped her.

  "I'm going up on that ridge to see if that bastard is still following us. You take a rest."

  "Gladly."

  Tom scrambled up the slope of a nearby hogback, keeping just below the ridgeline. He crawled the last ten feet to the top and peered over the edge. Under other circumstances it would have given Tom a rush to see the magnificent country they had just come through, but this time it only made him weary. In the past five hours they had hiked at least twenty miles, trying to put as much distance as they could between themselves and their pursuer. He didn't believe the man could have tracked them through the night, but he wanted to make damn sure they'd really shaken him.

  He settled in for a wait. The landscape behind him looked devoid of human life, but many low areas and canyon bottoms were hidden; it might be a while before the pursuer emerged into the open. Tom lay on his belly scanning the desert, looking for the moving speck of a man, seeing nothing. Five minutes passed, then ten. Tom felt a growing sense of relief. The sun rose, a cauldron of fire, throwing an orange light that nicked the highest peaks and ridges, creeping down their flanks like slow-motion gold. Eventually the light invaded the badlands themselves, and Tom could feel the heat of it on the back of his head. Still he saw no trace of their pursuer. The man was gone. He was probably still up in Daggett Canyon, Tom hoped, staggering around, dying of thirst, the turkey buzzards circling overhead.

  With that pleasant thought in mind, Tom descended the ridge. He found Sally with her back against a rock, sleeping. He looked at her for a moment, her long blond hair tangled up, her shirt filthy and torn, her jeans and boots covered with dust. He bent down and gave her a light kiss.

  She opened her eyes, like two green jewels suddenly unveiled. Tom felt his throat constrict. He had almost lost her.

  "Any sign?" she asked.

  Tom shook his head.

  "You sure?"

  Tom hesitated. "Not totally." He wondered why he had said that, why a doubt lingered in his own mind.

  "We've got to keep moving," she said.

  She groaned as Tom helped her to her feet. "I'm as stiff as Norman Bates's mother. I never should have sat down."

  They set off hiking down the wash, Tom letting Sally set the pace. The sun climbed in the sky. Tom popped a pebble in his mouth and sucked on it, trying to ignore his growing thirst. They weren't likely to find water until they hit the river, another fifteen miles distant. The night had been cool, but now that the sun was coming up he could already feel the heat.

  It was going to be a scorcher.

  Chapter 3

  WEED MADDOX LAY on his belly behind a boulder, looking through
the 4x scope of his AR-15, watching Broadbent bend over and kiss his wife. His nose still ached from the kick she'd given him, his cheek was inflamed by her vicious scratch, his legs felt like rubber, and he was getting thirstier by the minute. The sons of bitches had been hiking at an almost superhuman pace, never stopping to rest. He wondered how they managed it. If it hadn't been for the rising of the moon and his flashlight he would surely have lost them. But this was good tracking country, and he had the advantage of knowing where they were headed – to the river. Where else would they go? Every source of water they'd passed had been dry as a bone.

  He shifted, his foot having gone to sleep, and watched them set off down the canyon. From where he was he could probably drop Broadbent, but the shot was dicey and the bitch might escape. Now that day had come, he'd be able to cut them off with a quick burst of speed and an oblique approach. He had plenty of country to set up an ambush.

  The key here was not to betray his presence. If they believed he was still following, they would be a lot harder to surprise.

  With the scope of his rifle he scanned the landscape ahead, being careful to keep the lens out of direct sunlight; nothing would give him away quicker than a flash of light off ground glass. He knew the high mesa country well, both from his own exploration and from having spent hours pouring over the U.S.G.S. maps that Corvus had supplied him. He wished to hell he had one of those maps now. To the southwest he recognized the great ridge known as Navajo Rim, rising eight hundred feet above the surrounding desert. Between here and there, he recalled, lay a broken country called the Echo Badlands, riddled with deep canyons and strange rock formations, cut by the great crack in the earth known as Tyrannosaur Canyon. Perhaps fifteen miles ahead, Weed could just barely see, like a line of haze on the horizon, the termination of the Mesa of the Ancients. Cut into its flanks were a number of canyons, of which Joaquin Canyon was the biggest. That led to the Maze, where he had killed the dinosaur prospector, and from there it was a straight shot to the river.

  That was the way they were headed.

  It seemed like a century ago when he had capped that prospector – it was hard to believe it had only been, what, eight days? A lot had gotten screwed up since then.

  He had the journal and was close to unscrewing up the rest of it. They'd be heading for the one trail across Navajo Rim, which meant they'd be hiking southwest through the badlands, crossing near the head of Tyrannosaur Canyon. That formed a kind of natural choke point where several tributary canyons came together, and they'd have to pass through it.

  He could make a loop southward, skirt the base of Navajo Rim, and come back up north to ambush them at the head of that valley. He would have to move fast, but in less than an hour it would be all over.

  He crept down from his vantage point, making sure he wasn't seen, and set off at a fast pace southward through the badlands toward the sandstone wall of Navajo Rim.

  This time tomorrow he'd be boarding that early flight to New York.

  Chapter 4

  AS MELODIE COOKSHANK walked east on Seventy-ninth Street, the museum loomed up before her, its upper-story windows flashing in the early morning light. Sleep had been impossible and she had spent most of the night walking up and down a busy stretch of Broadway, unable to keep her mind from racing. She had stopped for a burger at an all-night eatery somewhere near Times Square, and again for tea in a diner near Lincoln Center. It had been a long night.

  She turned into the service drive that led down to the employee entrance, and checked her watch. Quarter to eight. She had pulled plenty of all-nighters writing her dissertation, and she was used to it, but this time it seemed different. Her mind was unusually crisp and clear – more than lucid. She rang the buzzer at the night entrance and slotted her museum pass through the card-reader.

  She walked through the central rotunda and passed through a succession of grand exhibition halls. It always thrilled her to walk through the empty museum in the early morning, before anyone had arrived, the cases dark and silent, the only sound the echoing of her heels on the marble floors.

  She took her usual shortcut through the Education Department, swiped her card to call the elevator, waited while it rumbled its way to her, and used the key a second time to direct it to the basement.

  The doors slid open and she stepped into a basement corridor. It was cool and silent in the bowels of the museum, as unchanging as a cave, and it always gave her the creeps. The air was dead and always seemed to carry a faint odor of old meat.

  She quickened her step toward the Mineralogy lab, passing door after door of fossil storage: Triassic Dinosaurs, Jurassic Dinosaurs, Cretaceous, Oligocene Mammals, Eocene Mammals – it was like a walk through evolution. Another turn and she was in the laboratory hall, gleaming stainless-steel doors leading to various laboratories – mammalogy, herpetology, entomology. She reached the door marked MINERALOGY, inserted her key, pushed open the door, and felt inside the wall for the light switch. The fluorescent lights stuttered on.

  She stopped. Through the shelves of specimens she could see Corvus was already in – asleep over the stereozoom, his attaché case at his side. What was he doing here? But the answer came as soon as she had asked the question: he had come early to check on her work himself – on a Sunday morning, no less.

  She took a tentative step inside, cleared her throat. He did not stir.

  "Dr. Corvus?" She stepped forward more confidently. The curator had fallen asleep on the desk, head laid on his crooked arm. She tiptoed closer. He had been looking at a specimen under the stereozoom – a trilobite.

  "Dr. Corvus?" She walked over to the table. Still no response. At this, Melodie felt a faint alarm. Could he have had a heart attack? Unlikely: he was way too young. "Dr. Corvus?" she repeated, not managing to get her voice above a whisper. She moved around to the other side of the table and leaned over to look into his face. She jerked back with an involuntary gasp, her hand over her mouth.

  The curator's eyes were wide open, staring, and filmed over.

  Corvus had had a heart attack. She stumbled back another step. She knew she should reach out and see if there was still a pulse in his wrist, do something, give mouth-to-mouth – but the idea of touching him was repellent. Those eyes... there was no question he was dead. She took a second step back, reached out, picked up the museum phone – then paused.

  Something wasn't right. She stared at the dead curator, slumped over the microscope, head on his crooked arm as if he had laid it down in weariness and gone to sleep. She could feel the wrongness of the scene crawling up her spine. And then it came to her: Corvus was looking at a trilobite.

  She picked up the fossil and examined it. An ordinary trilobite from the Cenozoic, of the kind you could buy for a few bucks at any rock shop. The museum had thousands of them. Corvus, who was sitting on the most spectacular paleontological discovery of the century, had chosen that very moment to examine a common trilobite?

  No way.

  A feeling of dread invaded her gut. She walked over to her specimen locker, spun out her combination on the lock, jerked it open.

  The CDs and specimens that she had locked up there at midnight were gone.

  She looked around, spied Corvus's attaché case. She slipped it away from his dangling hand, laid it on the table, unlatched it, rifled the contents.

  Nothing.

  All record of the dinosaur was gone. All her specimens, her CDs, vanished. Like they had never existed. And then she remembered another small fact: the lights had been off when she entered the lab. If Corvus had fallen asleep over his work, who turned off the lights?

  This was no heart attack.

  It felt like a piece of dry ice had just formed in her stomach. Whoever had killed Corvus might come after her too. She had to handle this situation very, very carefully.

  She picked up the museum phone and dialed security. A lazy voice answered.

  "This is Dr. Crookshank calling from the Mineralogy lab. I've just arrived. Dr. Iain Corvus is
here in the lab and he's dead."

  After a moment, in answer to the inevitable question, she said, with great deliberation: "Heart attack, by the looks of it."

  Chapter 5

  LIEUTENANT WILLER STOOD in the doorway of the Disputation Chamber and watched the sun rise over the buttes above the river. The sound of chanting drifted down from the church behind him, rising and falling in the desert air.

  He dropped the butt of his second-to-last cigarette, stomped it out, hawked up a gobbet of phlegm, and shot it to one side. Ford hadn't returned and there'd been no sign of Broadbent. Hernandez was down at the cruiser, making one last call. Santa Fe already had a chopper standing by at the police heliport, flown up from Albuquerque and ready to go – and still the airspace was closed with no word on when it would reopen.

  He saw Hernandez duck out of the cruiser, heard the door slam. A few minutes later the deputy came toiling up the trail. He caught Willer's eye, shook his head. "No go."

  "Any word on Broadbent or the vehicle?"

  "None. Seem to have vanished into thin air."

  Willer swore. "We're doing nothing here. Let's start searching the Forest Service roads off 84."

  "Yeah."

  Willer took a last glance up at the church. What a waste of time. When Ford got back, he'd haul that so-called monk downtown by the short hairs and find out just what the hell he'd been doing out there in the high mesas. And when Broadbent surfaced, well, he'd get a kick out of seeing how that millionaire vet liked sharing a basement cell with a crackhead and eating corn dogs for dinner.

  Willer headed down the trail, his nightstick and cuffs jangling, Hernandez following. They'd grab some breakfast burritos and a couple of gallons of coffee at Bode's. And a fresh carton of Marlboros. He hated the feeling of being down to his last smoke.

  He seized the door handle of the cruiser and was about to jerk it open when he became aware of a distant throbbing in the air. He looked up and saw a black dot materialize in the dawn sky.