by Jack Rogan
David bristled. All right, he was riding General Wagner a little, but the man knew how much he hated being called kid. At twenty-four years old, he hardly qualified as a child, and considering he had achieved several advanced degrees while still in his teens, he hadn’t been a kid in a long time.
“General, I use terms like ‘mission parameters’ because I want to make sure I’m understood, and such jargon falls within your comfort zone. If you’d prefer I not use such terms, I’ll do my best to avoid them in the future. Now, to your original question—when things are quiet at the office, I’ve been spending a little time on a pet project of mine which, if it pans out, will absolutely fall under our operational brief.”
“‘If it pans out,’ huh?” Wagner said. “So it’s not pressing then. I’m glad to hear it, because we’ve got a situation I’d like you to look into right away.”
Almost without David noticing it, the sun had hidden behind a bank of clouds, and he shivered now as he paused in front of a brick row house. The whole street had been gentrified ages ago, and remained one of the loveliest in Georgetown. Storefronts were festooned with American flags, shaded by awnings, and marked by antique-scripted signs hanging from wrought iron rods. Non-brick surfaces were painted in dark greens and burgundies and rich creams—only colors that would have been used in Colonial times. People walked their dogs and jogged and pushed baby carriages and actually smiled when they passed each other on the street. In Washington, DC, that was a thing of wonder and beauty.
“What is it?” David asked.
“Something that requires your attention,” Wagner replied.
David paused on the brick sidewalk, wishing he could sip his coffee without dropping the newspaper tucked under his arm. He stepped over to a lamppost to get out of the way of foot traffic.
“I’m listening, General. What, exactly?”
Another heavy sigh. “You’re familiar with the discovery of … Homo floresiensis?”
He said it as if he were reading it from a file, and David knew that was exactly what he was doing.
“The ‘hobbit’ skeleton they found in that limestone cave in Ling Bua. Yes, I’m familiar with it, as I am with every single investigation in Alena’s files. You know that. Three-foot adult female, a separate human species that lived concurrently with what we consider modern humans, as recently as ten thousand years ago. Have they found something else?”
“Mount Kazbek in the Caucasus Mountains, dormant volcano. Ice on the top, hot springs on the bottom. A month ago, a small earthquake opened fissures in the base that revealed an ancient cave system. A number of partial skeletons were found inside that present a lot of similarities to Homo floresiensis.”
David started walking again, aiming for a patch of sunshine ahead. Three blocks farther and he’d be home.
“You’re boring me, General. Anyone can examine those bones—”
“They have horns.”
David held the phone away from his ear and stared at it a second, as though there might be something wrong with it.
“Did you say horns?”
“Vestigial horns, yes. Small pointed protrusions from the skull.”
“Interesting, but I’m not sure why it interests you,” David said. “Where’s the upside for …” He almost said the DOD, but caught himself. The Department of Defense didn’t like their secrets aired on open phone lines. Officially, David worked for the NSF, but he knew where his funding and his projects came from.
“They were cave painters. The paintings indicate that they had some kind of ritualized weapon—there’s obviously an occult component—that could make their enemies … well, the team on-site isn’t sure if ‘melt’ or ‘vanish’ would be a better term, but—”
“You’ve got a team on-site.”
“No,” Wagner said quickly. “There are a couple of U.S. scientists there observing, but I’m talking about the Georgian team. The cave’s on the Georgia side of the mountain, not the Russian side.”
“Uh-huh. Look, have your observers get some hi-res, well-lit shots of all the cave paintings and upload them to the secure FTP. I promise I’ll give them my immediate attention as soon as they arrive, but I haven’t heard a reason yet for me to go to Georgia.”
“Your grandmother—” Wagner began, in protest.
“Is in Croatia, as you well know. And much as she would want to see a little human skull with horns on it, you wouldn’t even have bothered her with this unless you had something more to go on, or she volunteered to go.”
Wagner snorted derisively. “That’s because your grandmother always has something better to do. What’s your excuse, World of Warcraft?”
“Trust me, General. I also have better things to do,” David said, happy to see the flowerpots hanging from the front of the brick row house he shared with Alena come into view. “Now if you don’t mind, my coffee’s getting cold.”
“David—”
He ended the call, silenced the phone, and slid it into his pocket. It was a perfect day for delicious coffee, the morning paper, and a mystery, and he had all three. No way would he let General Wagner pull him away today.
–34– –
Kevonne and Pang were waiting on the beach. Tori caught sight of them before Gabe did. She and the captain had followed the shoreline away from the hidden grotto and come around a spit of dirt and black rock, when Tori spotted the two sailors sitting on a white sand beach about a quarter mile ahead.
“What are they doing just sitting there?” Gabe said, picking up the pace.
Tori hurried to keep up with him. “Waiting for you, obviously. The dead guys aren’t going anywhere.”
Even as she said it, a chill went through her. The words sounded so cavalier, but inside she felt anything but. More than ever before, she felt the weight of someone’s attention on her—that cold, familiar feeling of being watched by some unseen observer. Tori knew it was probably foolish. The trees were more sparse on this side, with sand scattered deep among them, and the only places anyone could really be hiding to observe them were among the half-sunken ships just offshore. She had glanced at the boats over and over as she walked and not seen so much as a hint of movement. No, they were alone, for now. But she wanted off the island in the worst way.
Kevonne jumped up, tapping Pang, who had pulled the audio buds out of his ears for once. He clicked off his iPod as he stood. Pang’s sunglasses were still in place, but something—perhaps finding the dead men, or simply the general sense of unease they all felt—had wiped the smile off his face at last.
“Hey, Captain,” Kevonne said.
“Where are they?” Gabe asked.
Pang nodded a respectful hello to both Gabe and Tori. “This way.”
He went first, and Kevonne hesitated a second before following. His dark brown skin seemed to have a hint of sickly gray. Going back to see those bodies was the last thing he wanted to do. Pang and Kevonne led them to the tree line, where Pang crouched and pointed to a place where the sand had been recently disturbed.
“You said there were footprints or whatever, right?” Tori asked.
Kevonne nodded and pointed farther along the beach. “Down that way. But it’s just what you’d think. A lot of prints from a bunch of different people. Plus, where the sand is soft, you can see where crates were set down and then dragged.”
Gabe stood up straighter. “The guns?”
“Probably. We’ve got a decent trajectory for where they went into the trees at least,” Kevonne said.
Pang shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at them. With his sunglasses hiding his eyes, it was impossible to be sure who he focused on, but she assumed his words were for Gabe.
“We wanted to make sure you got a look at these dead guys first,” Pang said.
Tori made a face, eyes wide. “Gee, thanks.”
No one so much as smiled.
“Let’s go, then,” Gabe said.
Without another word, Pang and Kevonne stepped into the trees, trampling mor
e sea grass themselves. Tori followed, with the captain coming last. When she looked back she saw Gabe glancing around, taking in their surroundings, eyes narrowed. He seemed to be searching for some indication as to what had happened here. Tori ignored him after that, focused on the sailors in front of her. If something in their surroundings was odd or out of place, she wouldn’t notice it unless it was ridiculously hard to miss.
Like the two dead men crumpled on the ground amidst their own blood, for instance.
“Oh,” Tori said, more a sound than a word. She covered her mouth and stepped to one side to let Gabe pass by. Instead, he came to a stop right next to her, eight or nine feet from the dead men.
One of them had been heavyset and bald, with tattoos on his back and arms, and snaking up one side of his neck into a serpentine design over his left ear. He had no shirt, and his copper-hued skin was flecked with dark spots of dry blood. The other corpse belonged to a man short and thin enough to have been a thirteen-year-old boy. Only the sagging of his skin and the roughness of his hands gave away his age. They couldn’t tell anything by his features, because he had no face to speak of.
The little man still held a pistol in his right hand. His heavyset shipmate must have dropped his own gun, for it lay in the brush a foot from his left hand, which was open, palm up, though in death the fingers had curled in like the legs of a crab. They had been dead no more than two days, but already their remains had begun to stink.
Tori looked away.
“These weren’t suicides,” she said quietly. “Not really.”
“What?” Kevonne asked. “You think someone set it up to look that way, like in some cop show, out here on this island in the middle of goddamn nowhere?”
“She’s right,” Gabe said.
Tori glanced at him, saw him pointing at the dead men, but didn’t look herself. She had seen enough.
“Same end result, though,” the captain said. “They must have counted to three or something, then shot each other in the face. Either way, they were set on dying.”
Pang cleared his throat, drawing Tori’s attention. He was nodding. “Okay,” he said, “but why? They didn’t even hold out for a rescue? Couple of wrecks we’ve seen still had lifeboats on ’em, but these dudes didn’t even try to get to them.”
Tori thought about the skulls she and Gabe had seen rolling in the surf in the hidden grotto. She glanced at the captain and saw from his eyes that he must have been thinking the same thing.
“Maybe they were saving each other from something worse than getting shot,” she said.
Kevonne swore. Pang whistled and took off his sunglasses, studying the bodies more closely. Wide-eyed denial was in both their faces.
“Come on, now,” Kevonne said. “Don’t start shit like that. What are you even talking about?”
Pang ran both hands through his hair, glasses dangling from the fingers of his right. “Save the last two bullets for us.”
Gabe crouched and picked up the pistol the tattooed corpse had dropped. He racked the slide, checked the magazine, and popped it back in before he stood.
“They didn’t wait for the last two bullets,” he said. “These guys were in a hurry.” The captain clicked on the safety and slid the gun into his waistband, then gestured to the other pistol, still clutched in the hand of the tiny dead man. “Pang, take that one.”
Pang hesitated, gaze shifting all around, so much fear in his eyes that Tori was glad when he slid his glasses back on. He smiled nervously, but now that she knew the smiles were a mask, looking at him made a little trickle of dread run down the back of her neck.
“I’d rather not, Captain.”
Kevonne swore, bent down, and pulled the other pistol out of the dead man’s hand. The fingers were stiff enough to resist, but Kevonne twisted the gun until it came free. He followed Gabe’s lead, checking the clip, then putting on the safety, but he didn’t bother putting the gun away.
“Can we get the hell away from the dead guys now?” he asked.
Gabe took one more look at the corpses, then nodded. Tori let out a sigh of relief and started back through the trees, leading the way to the beach. The others followed her, but by the time she reached the sand she was nearly running. When she hit the beach, she had expected some of her anxiety to abate, but it did not fade at all. Her pulse throbbed in her ears and she breathed evenly, getting control of herself as best she could. Offshore, a bit more of the sunken ships was visible—the tide had started to go down. Above their heads, the sun had reached, or perhaps passed, its apex.
Tori kept walking, and the guys followed her.
Gabe grabbed his radio off his belt. “Chief, you read me?” he asked.
In a soft whisper of static, Boggs’s voice came back. “I’m here.”
“Any luck?”
“Still checking caves.”
“Come out to the beach, pretty much right opposite the cove where we came in. We’ve got tracks. Should be able to narrow down the search.”
“On the way.”
Tori, Gabe, Kevonne, and Pang waited, adding their own footprints to the ones the crew of the Mariposa had left behind. They talked about trying to go into the trees to meet Boggs and the others halfway, but the captain shut them down. The last thing they needed to do was waste their time wandering around the island looking for one another.
Perhaps fifteen minutes passed before they heard someone approaching, and moments later, Bone emerged from among the trees. He had a thin scratch on his face from a sharp branch or thorn, and he dabbed at the little drips of blood on his cheek with his shirt, as though they were tears.
“Bone?” Gabe said.
The surfer’s eyes had darkened to grim acceptance, his fear not gone but apparently put aside for now.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, Captain,” Bone said. “But good news. We crossed their path on our way to you. The chief’s tracking it back with the other guys right now.”
Before Gabe could reply, his radio crackled.
It was Boggs, announcing that they’d found the guns.
Tori felt a surge of relief and started toward Bone. “Show us the way.”
–35– –
Gabe wasn’t happy when they found the guns. The crew of the Mariposa had tramped through the brush, sometimes carrying and sometimes dragging the thick plastic trunks loaded with assault rifles, illegal ammunition, and exquisitely manufactured semiauto pistols made from nonmetals, which would not be picked up by the typical security scan. The latter weren’t likely to get on airplanes in the U.S.—not after 9/11—but there were plenty of other places where metal detectors were still the safeguard of choice.
Boggs had found the cave directly inland from where the men of the Mariposa had come ashore, maybe a hundred and fifty yards from the beach. According to the chief, this particular cave had no features that distinguished it from the others on the island, so it had to have been chosen for its proximity to the place they’d made landfall. Having never seen the other caves, Gabe only had the grotto to compare it to. This cleft in the base of the hill looked to have been formed by a shifting of the earth—some kind of underground tremor, maybe even a quake. Not that he knew the first thing about earthquakes, really. But since it was more a split in the face of the hill than the sort of cave he thought of, that felt reasonable. More than anything, it looked like the gleaming ebony rock that formed the foundation of the island had cracked open. And if the number of caves was any evidence, it seemed to have cracked open in a great many places.
He wondered if Tori had been wrong about the grotto. Maybe it hadn’t been a storm at all that had broken through into the huge chamber inside that coastal cliff; maybe an earthquake had brought it down. But whatever it was, that chamber—and the weird writing they’d found engraved on parts of the shattered wall—were evidence that some of the caves had been on the island a very long time.
“Gather them up,” Gabe said, staring at the ground.
The weapons were scattered around
the mouth of the cave, discarded or dropped or unpacked but never used. He knelt and picked up an assault rifle. The weapon was light as a feather but he didn’t take that to mean much, since they were built to be lightweight. When he popped the clip, however, he found it empty.
“Shit.”
“This one’s unopened,” Kevonne said, as he and Pang dragged one of the plastic cases out of the cave. It measured about four feet by two feet, black plastic with steel locks, no markings at all.
Two more of the cases had been shoved aside just outside the cave, open, their contents either missing or among the weapons arrayed on the ground. Gabe knew some of the weapons would simply be gone, lost in the hands of the members of the crew of the Mariposa, wherever they had vanished to. The bottom of the ocean, probably. The weapons scattered on the ground would fill maybe two-thirds of a case if they consolidated into one.
Boggs came out of the cave, running a hand over the stubble on his scalp. Sweat beaded up on his forehead and ran down his neck.
“Three more inside, all of them open, but it doesn’t look like they took any guns out of them. Just ammo. Reloading, I’d guess.”
Tori gave a little laugh, just off to Gabe’s right, and he shot her a look. He didn’t like the sound of that laugh; it had the faint edge of crazy in it. But Tori just shrugged her shoulders.
“Yeah, reloading, why not?” she said. “But what were they shooting at, Gabe?”
Who, he thought. Who were they shooting at? But he felt certain Tori’s word choice hadn’t been accidental, so he didn’t attempt to correct her.
“Help me with these,” he told her, getting down on his knees and reaching for the nearest of the weapons. “You want to get out of here, so let’s make it quick.”
As Tori joined him on the ground and started helping him repack the guns that lay scattered around into a single case, Gabe looked up at Boggs and the others.
“Get the rest packed up in there, close the cases, and drag them out here. We’ll have to make two trips back to the cove, I think.”
