Forsaken

by Michael McBride

  “Morgan said it asked for us.”

  “In a way.”

  “You’ll have to be a little more forthcoming if you want our help.”

  “It painted the same design as the crop circle you were investigating in England on that window right there in front of you.”

  “In pig’s blood,” Tess said.

  “Thank you, Dr. Clarke.”

  “You were watching us?” Kelly said.

  Barnett smiled patiently and placed his hand gently on her shoulder. She looked like she wanted to scream.

  “I was hoping you might be able to connect the dots for me.”

  “If there’s a connection,” Roche said, “I don’t see it.”

  Barnett scrutinized his face for any sign of duplicity before nodding.

  “Then I hope you’ll be willing to help me figure out what that connection is.”

  “You don’t seriously want us to talk to it, do you?” Kelly said.

  “It’s Dr. Clarke’s job to communicate with Subject Zeta—”

  “You named it?” Roche interrupted.

  “How would you propose we refer to it?”

  “In the past tense.”

  “Be that as it may, I hope you will consider assisting her. I like to think that your specialty in particular, Mr. Roche, dovetails with hers. Speaking of which, I wonder if you could offer some insight into this printout, Dr. Clarke.”

  He removed a piece of paper from the breast pocket of his jacket, unfolded it, and handed it to Tess. She held it up, but it was too dark in the cavern to see it, so she took it to her console, set it beneath a small reading light, and turned it on—

  Thud.

  The creature hurled itself against the door one last time before moving to the window, where the reading light limned its spectral features on the other side of the glass.

  Roche was certain he caught a hint of recognition on its hideous face before it retreated into the shadows.

  “It’s a combination of ground-penetrating radar and magnetometer data,” Tess said. “One overlaid on top of the other to give the impression of depth. What you’re looking at here is a subterranean structure roughly a hundred feet underground. Manmade, by the look of it. And filled with water.”

  Roche discreetly studied it from the corner of his eye and did his very best to mask his surprise. Thanks to the Marines, who had taught him cryptanalysis, and the NSA, which had honed his considerable skills to a razor’s edge, the recognition had been instantaneous.

  He looked away from the printout to find Barnett appraising him with open suspicion.

  “You see something, don’t you?”

  Roche glanced at Kelly. She looked so small and scared. He was accustomed to hoarding information and using it as currency to get what he wanted, but it was painfully apparent that he needed to get her as far away from this horrible place as possible. And the sooner, the better.

  “Do you have a blank piece of paper?” he asked.

  Tess eyed him strangely for a moment before tearing a page from one of her lined notebooks.

  He placed it on top of the printout and carefully drew the design of the crop circle on top of it. He’d been right about it being a map.

  It led right to the center of the maze.

  22

  DONOVAN

  Drygalski Mountains,

  2 vertical miles above FOB Atlantis

  “How the hell did you find it out here?”

  Special Agent Rick Donovan had to shout to be heard over the blizzard. The wind blew sideways with such ferocity that he had to stagger to maintain his balance and even then, with the way the storm reduced visibility to mere feet ahead of him, he couldn’t be certain he was walking in anything resembling a straight line.

  “Totally by accident!” Special Agent Nick Sokolov shouted. Only his eyes were visible through his full-face balaclava and beneath the fur fringe of his hood. There was ice in his lashes and on the neoprene over his mouth and nose. “I was on my way to perform routine maintenance and de-icing on the IMCS antenna array when the ground just kind of opened up underneath me!”

  The Iridium Multi-Channel System array provided a data link during times when the main communications satellites were out of range, thus ensuring they never lost contact with the outside world in case of an emergency.

  “How long ago?”

  “Maybe two hours!”

  The call from engineering had been routed to Donovan on the priority channel maybe ninety minutes ago. As both Director Barnett and Chief Morgan were indisposed, it fell to him to run down this lead. If this was indeed what they’d been searching for since their arrival six months ago, then he relished the opportunity to triumphantly pass the good news up the chain, but if Sokolov was wrong and this was just another wild goose chase, he would personally make sure that someone’s head rolled.

  Donovan stopped and shielded his eyes against the blowing snow. If the satellite tower was out there, he sure as hell couldn’t see it, not that he would have been able to anyway with the permanent darkness. He needed a moment to catch his breath. His lungs burned, and his legs positively ached from trudging through the knee-deep accumulation. He had to be careful, though; the last thing he could afford was for any of his subordinates to smell weakness on him. Theirs was a cutthroat business where only the best of the best lasted for any length of time. The consequences of any single man being unable to pull his weight could be catastrophic, especially with the mounting threats they now faced. There were days when he wondered if he might not be happier selling his services to the highest bidder, and then he remembered that his team was the only thing standing between the world at large and the fate that had befallen the scientists at AREA 51.

  “Not much farther!” Sokolov yelled.

  The wind screamed from the sheer granite face of the mountain behind them and whistled from the exhaust vents jutting from its honeycombed interior. He glanced back and caught a glimpse of them before the storm swallowed them once more. Miles of winding ductwork connected them to the opposite side of the mountain, where the former research station once perched high above the ice cap. They should have expanded their search outside the network of caverns and tunnels months ago. Of course, even if they had, the extreme weather might have made it so they never found this lead anyway.

  Sokolov led him up a slick, windswept slope, from the top of which he could see the array off to their right in the far distance and realized that the wind had driven them a full twenty degrees off course without him even noticing. They corrected course and followed the rocky topography along an S-shaped ridgeline that protruded from the snow like a black wave preparing to crash down upon the vast expanse of white. The wind tore straight through their clothing and the flesh underneath, reminding Donovan that regardless of how much of their will they imposed upon this continent, it would never be bent, let alone broken.

  “Down there!”

  Donovan followed Sokolov’s outstretched arm downhill toward where the rocky crest vanished into the snow. He was halfway down the slope before he saw the crevice, the mouth of which was already nearly concealed by a massive drift. Loose talus skittered from beneath him and clattered into the accumulation. He lost his balance and slid a good twenty feet down the decline before righting himself and picking his way more cautiously toward the opening. The sound of the wind blowing across the orifice reminded him of someone back home in West Virginia playing a jug.

  Sokolov skidded to his side and offered him his flashlight.

  “Careful of that first step.”

  Donovan looked at him curiously for a moment before crawling to the edge of the crevice and shining the flashlight inside. The bottom was so far down that he couldn’t initially see it, at least not with the way the ice reflected his beam. He slid his legs inside and braced his upper arms against the sides. He found the ridges Sokolov had chiseled into the ice to climb back out and used them to control his descent.

  The fissure was maybe five feet wide
in the center and tapered to a mere crack at either end. While not as deep as it had initially looked, it was more than deep enough to spare him from the elements. It had to be a good fifty degrees warmer, which, unfortunately, wasn’t saying a whole lot. On the positive side, at least it was still cold enough to keep the carcasses strewn across the ground from thawing.

  There were several different species of seals, penguins, and native birds, or at least what was left of them. The meat had been torn from their breasts and flanks, leaving behind masses of feathers and fur, and largely intact skeletons with beaks, tails, and flippers. The flesh that hadn’t been scavenged was frozen. Most of it appeared to have undergone some amount of decomposition, which suggested it had been down here for some length of time before the eternal night fell and winter commenced in earnest.

  He kicked at what was left of an emperor penguin. This had been another colossal waste of time. And now, not only did he have to trudge all the way back to the mountain and walk several miles in a crouch through the ductwork, he was going to have to write a report detailing how he’d wasted the better part of his day investigating what appeared to be nothing more than the den of some kind of animal—

  His light fell upon the remains of a gray-feathered petrel. Its wings were broken and pinned beneath it, its head flopped backward and frozen to the bare rock. And right there, in the middle of its breast, were the perfectly preserved bite marks of the animal to which the den belonged.

  “Christ Almighty,” he whispered.

  The ridges of the teeth were so undeniably human they might as well have been his own.

  Donovan unholstered his transceiver, which produced little more than screeches of static as he dialed through the frequencies. He wanted to radio in his findings rather than deliver them in person. While the director would be grateful for the news and would likely reward him for finally ascertaining the fate of Hollis Richards, he knew the information would not be well received on a personal level.

  They should have known that Richards would have fled the tunnels to avoid being captured, even if it meant braving the elements. He would have flushed like a pheasant from a cornfield and made a break for freedom. While he had obviously survived out here for some length of time, there was no way on this planet he could have survived the entire winter in this brutal environment.

  Donovan killed the static, holstered his transceiver, and shined his light around him. There was a pile of pelts in one corner and a frozen mound of feces in the other. At a guess, Richards had lived down here for maybe a month, but it was obvious he hadn’t been here in a long time. Wherever his body was now, it was undoubtedly frozen solid and buried under several feet of snow. Donovan doubted they’d ever find it, but at least they could call off the search parties and Barnett could devote all his attention to the task at hand. They could all feel it, a sensation that they were running out of time, and each day brought them closer to the inevitable confrontation with forces they had yet to identify and weren’t prepared to engage.

  Donovan used his cell phone to photograph the cavern and returned it to his jacket pocket. It was the newest and most advanced iPhone in the world, and yet down here it was little more than a paperweight with a handful of pictures from back home and a few games to play when he couldn’t sleep.

  There was nothing more he could do here.

  He followed the howl of the wind and looked up the icy chute. He could barely see the night sky way up there with all the snow blowing past. The notches in the ice were his saving grace. There was no physical way he would have been able to climb out of there had Sokolov not chiseled the toeholds. Had their roles been reversed, Donovan had to admit he probably wouldn’t have had the presence of mind to do so.

  His left hand slipped and he nearly fell.

  “Hey!” he shouted up to the surface. “Give me a hand, would you?”

  Only the wind wailed in response.

  Donovan braced his feet and pulled himself higher. He skipped the ledge that had betrayed him and pushed on until he was able to squeeze his arms through the narrow gap and pull his legs from the crevice.

  There was no sign of Sokolov leading up the steep talus slope, nor were there any tracks in the snow heading toward the antenna array. He turned all the way around—

  Donovan nearly lost his balance when he saw the red spatters across the snow and Sokolov lying facedown in the accumulation, surrounded by a riot of footprints. His survival instincts kicked in and he propelled himself from the orifice—

  It was upon him before he could scream.

  23

  BARNETT

  Surface Access Platform,

  2 vertical miles above FOB Atlantis

  Barnett burst from the door to the power station and braced himself against the elements. The wind hammered him sideways with such force that he could barely maintain his balance on the icy platform, which, despite being heated and continuously sprayed with de-icing agents, was like a skating rink. He shielded his eyes against the blowing snow, but still couldn’t see the Bell V-280 Valor, even though the thunder of its props was all around him. They were short on time, and he needed this bird in the air.

  He had debated calling in some favors and borrowing a special ops unit that could have gotten to Mexico sooner, but he didn’t know what they were up against, which was precisely the nature of the threats his men had been trained to combat. There was no one on this planet he trusted more than Morgan to lead this mission, and not just because of his skill on the battlefield. He had the ability to think outside of traditional parameters and the confidence to make split-second decisions. Morgan and his men were loading the last of their supplies onto the tiltrotor when its silhouette emerged from the storm.

  “How much longer?” Barnett shouted.

  “We’ll be in the air in under five minutes!”

  There was nothing he could do to expedite that timeframe now. The Valor would get them across the Southern Ocean at 300 miles an hour and to a remote airfield in southern Argentina, where a Cessna Citation X would be fueled and waiting. At more than 700 miles per hour, it would make the remainder of the journey in just under nine hours, which was still longer than he would have liked. He was just going to have to hope that his assets on the ground had enough sense to keep their heads down. Then again, it was always possible he was overreacting, but he had to believe that if he knew about the maze and the sleeping god, then so did his unknown adversary. And it was high time he drew this secretive opposition out into the open.

  “What are the rules of engagement?” Morgan shouted. His arctic gear was already white with snow, and his stubble was frozen on his cheeks.

  “We need to know what we’re up against. Do whatever you need to do to get me that information.”

  “What about civilian casualties?”

  “Our adversary has been too careful to attract attention. Its operatives will wait until the site is deserted before making their move.”

  “And our assets?”

  “They need the scientists even more than we do right now. They’ll use any means necessary to beat us to the center of the maze. Assuming they’ve yet to make the same connection as Mr. Roche, they’re going to need those scientists alive to get them through it.”

  “Did you share the route with our assets?”

  Barnett hesitated.

  “No.”

  The last of Morgan’s men jogged past them on the platform, climbed into the Valor, and slid the door closed behind him. They were only going in with four men, including Morgan, since they had to sacrifice weight for fuel efficiency and speed, and could only hope that the enemy didn’t arrive with vastly superior numbers. Knowing what was at stake, however, Barnett found it hard to believe they would take any chances, which meant that the element of surprise was by far the most powerful weapon in his arsenal.

  He hoped it would be enough.

  “You’re not going to tell them, are you?” Morgan asked. “You’re counting on that to buy us some time.�
��

  “The maze is flooded,” Barnett said. “It’ll slow them down.”

  “What about our assets themselves?”

  “We’re just going to have to hope our scientists are as smart as they think they are.”

  “And if they’re not?”

  Barnett watched the propellers tilt into the vertical position. The motor screamed, and the rotor wash assaulted him with a cloud of snowflakes that felt like needles piercing the bare skin of his face.

  “The mission comes first!” he shouted. “You understand the consequences of failure?”

  Morgan nodded solemnly. He knew better than most what they were up against and the fate that would befall them all should any of the secrets even peripherally related to Subject Z fall into the wrong hands.

  He turned, lowered his head against the brutal wind, and jogged toward the Valor.

  “I want to know the moment you’re on the ground!” Barnett shouted.

  Morgan climbed up into the copilot’s seat. The tiltrotor lifted off before he even closed his door. It was barely fifty feet into the air when Barnett lost sight of it in the storm. He whirled and rushed back toward the power station. Even the few minutes he had spent in the elements had chilled him to the marrow, and his legs hurt with the impact from every footfall. There were still preparations to be made on their end and one glaring question for which he needed an answer.

  What was the sleeping god?

  The answer was of no small consequence. They had to figure out exactly what they were up against. And there was only one person who knew for sure, and he was going to get it out of him—or, rather, it—one way or another.

  24

  JADE

  Teotihuacan

  “I don’t like this,” Anya said.

  “Neither do I,” Jade said. She sat on a cot that doubled as a couch beside Evans and leaned closer to the fan perched on the counter beside her. It was so humid that it felt like she could wring a bucket of sweat from her clothes.