“Fermentation. You’re saying they produce alcohol?”
She smiled, pleased that Bishop understood. He was much more than a grunt, as was Knight. “Exactly. All cellular organisms ingest carbon compounds and convert them into a fuel called ATP, either through respiration or fermentation. Fermentation isn’t as efficient as respiration, but when there’s an abundant food supply, that doesn’t matter as much. A by-product of fermentation is hydrocarbons, like ethanol—alcohol—or sometimes methanol compounds. That’s why decaying organic matter produces methane. It’s what’s been happening at the bottom of Lake Kivu, only the microbes aren’t subsisting on organic carbon. They’re getting it from volcanic outgassing.”
“Okay. What’s that got to do with dinosaurs?”
“For dinosaurs to live down here, to actually thrive down here, requires a complex eco-system.”
“I get that,” he replied. “They have a food chain. Plant-eaters and meat-eaters.”
“It’s more complicated than that. In an ecosystem, energy is lost as it moves from one trophic level to the next, roughly speaking by a factor of ten. It’s like a pyramid where each level is only a tenth as big as the one below it. One meat-eater needs ten times its mass in plant-eaters, and each plant-eater needs ten times its mass in plants. And the amount of available energy in those plants—in terms of calories—is about a tenth of what the plant needs just to survive. On the surface, the plants get that energy from sunlight. If any part of the pyramid is disrupted, the whole system collapses.
“The dinosaurs went extinct because of widespread climate change, probably the result of the Chicxulub asteroid impact, which prevented plants from growing. The food web collapsed.”
Bishop nodded slowly. “So for there to be that many raptors down here, there have to be even more prey animals for them to eat.”
“Right, but the plants are the important thing. They’re the base of the food pyramid.” She crawled back to the edge of the recess and pointed out at the landscape below. “Ordinary plants require sunlight for photosynthesis. Whatever those things are, they’re getting their energy from some other source.”
“The light from the fires?”
“Maybe. They might not be photosynthesizing plants at all, or if they are, they’ve evolved over the last sixty-five million years to be able to use that energy more efficiently. The animals would have had to undergo adaptive changes as well. That’s why they never migrated back to the surface. They might wander out once in a while, but this is their primary habitat. They’ve got everything they need down here.”
She watched the raptors roaming the plain. Those closest to the cavern wall were still motionless, alert to the presence of intruders, but most of the others were busy dipping their heads and scratching at the vegetation, searching for prey. “But it’s the base of the pyramid that matters most. For those fires to be burning like that…the amount of microbial metabolic activity must be off the scale. That’s what we were looking for at Lake Kivu: a bacterial organism that could produce hydrocarbons on a commercially viable scale.”
“What do you mean by that?” Bishop asked.
“We already know how to use microbes to make fuel. They do it naturally. The problem with biofuel production is the same as with the food web. You have to put more energy into a system than you get back from it, not to mention that the land used for growing your fuel crop isn’t available for food production.”
“You think the bacteria in this cave have figured out a way to make fuel more efficiently? Like a closed system?”
“I do. And I’d bet money that the microbes in the soil of this cave are identical to the extremophiles we found in Lake Kivu.”
Bishop pondered the idea for a moment, then shook his head. “As much as I hate to stand in the way of scientific progress, right now our only priority is getting out of here.”
Felice started to protest, but then realized that she had gotten carried away by the euphoria of discovery. She closed the computer and slid it back into her pack.
Bishop nodded and turned to Knight. “I’m going to head back up and see what our friends are up to. Stay here and keep out of sight, no matter what happens.”
That sounded ominous to Felice. “What are you going to do?”
“We need to make them believe that we’re raptor food. I’m going to make sure that they do.”
43
Bishop climbed down to the ledge and made his way through the narrow passage back to the first cavern. As the glow from the gas fires diminished, he cracked a chemlight and kept going. The phosphorescent tube provided enough illumination to negotiate the winding tunnel, but it wasn’t much use in the open darkness of the cavern. He left the glow stick to mark the mouth of the passage, and continued on without any light at all, feeling his way along the wall.
After a few minutes, he spied an irregular circle of daylight, made small by the distance. The entrance. He paused, listening for signs of men creeping through the darkness or raptors lurking nearby. Unlike the movie monster version, these velociraptors did not seem to be hyper-intelligent pack hunters. Their earlier attack had probably been defensive rather than a predatory action. He didn’t doubt that they were deadly, though. Their long talons and sharp teeth were certainly capable of tearing a man to shreds, but he suspected that they would shy away from anything larger than themselves, unless they felt threatened.
Hearing nothing, he kept moving along the wall, until he could see silhouetted figures. There were four of them, and as he got a little closer, he could see that they were sweeping their rifles back and forth, ready to fire at the slightest sign of activity.
Time to stir things up, he thought. He took aim with his M240.
He let off a three-second long burst that felled one of the rebels and sent the others diving for cover. The survivors quickly returned fire, concentrating their shots on the area where they’d seen the muzzle flash. Bishop was already moving from that spot, but the incoming fusillade forced him to go prone and low crawl away from the wall.
More rebels joined the firing line at the cavern mouth, adding to the storm of lead. Bishop let fly with another volley, then rolled to the side and started squirming back toward the wall. There were at least ten shooters now, firing off sporadic shots and shouting back and forth to each other.
A pall of smoke hung in the air above the entrance. Bishop thought he could hear the hum of agitated raptors, but it was almost completely drowned out by the nearly constant sound of rifle fire echoing through the cavern. Rounds smacked into the nearby wall, spraying chips of stone down on him, but Bishop didn’t think the shooters knew where he was. When he reached the base of the wall, he began crawling back the way he’d come.
After about a minute, the incoming fire slacked off. Bishop looked back to see flashlight beams roaming the darkness. The rebels were coming in after him.
So far, so good.
He got up and skirted along the wall until he spied the chemlight marking the passage. Before going in, he looked back to check on the rebels’ progress. He couldn’t see the cave entrance or any of the men, but shafts of light were crisscrossing the darkness.
There was another burst of rifle fire, which told Bishop that the rebels had encountered the pack of stray velociraptors. The battle unfolded in an eruption of noise and light. Bishop heard shouts and screams over the tumult, then he heard something else. A rustling sound, like something crashing through tall grass.
Bishop felt a chilling premonition as the noise grew louder. His plan to lure the rebels into a battle with the velociraptors worked exactly as he’d planned, but he had made a serious miscalculation. The frightened dinosaurs were intent on escaping the mayhem, but they weren’t fleeing out into the jungle. Instead they were going to a place of familiar safety, what Felice had called their primary habitat. The stampede would take the raptors right through him.
This wasn’t the smartest thing I could’ve done, Felice thought as she stood motionless, just a few s
teps away from a lone velociraptor. The dinosaur seemed to be shivering, puffing up its plumage, as it vocalized with its weird hum.
In the recess at the top of the rock slide, David urged her to come back up, while Knight drew a bead on the raptor with his big rifle.
Why did I do this again?
As soon as Bishop had left, intent on scouting their route back to the surface, Felice had realized that she might not get another chance to acquire a sample of the soil from the cavern ecosystem. Without a word to the others, who would almost certainly have insisted she stay put, just as Bishop had instructed, she had hefted the pack over one shoulder and started down the natural staircase of fallen rocks. No sooner had she reached the cavern floor when a lone raptor darted over to determine whether she’d make a tasty morsel.
Maybe because they looked so much like birds, or perhaps because they had mostly kept their distance instead of relentlessly hunting them down, like the dinosaurs in movies, Felice had assumed that, as long as she didn’t surprise them, the creatures would leave her alone. She had been mostly right.
The raptor began thrusting its head at her, mouth open, displaying the long, sharp teeth that she’d only ever seen in the mouths of fossilized skeletons and computer-generated movie monsters—Spielberg had gotten that much right. The creature didn’t advance, but kept bobbing its head at her, making a soft hissing sound, as if scolding her.
No, she realized. He’s testing me. Trying to see if I’ll put up a fight, or turn and run. I wonder which one will get me eaten.
Before coming to Africa, Felice had read about how to deal with the local wildlife. Some animals would flee from displays of aggression, while others would attack. “Which kind are you, bird brain?”
Size, she recalled, was often a deciding factor.
Felice raised her hands over her head, trying to look as big and menacing as possible, and took a step forward. “Shoo!”
The raptor ran off squawking.
Felice stood there with her arms raised for a few seconds longer, afraid that if she moved, her bladder might let go. Finally, when her legs felt a little less rubbery, she started moving again.
“Felice,” Knight hissed. “Get back up here!”
She ignored him. The hardest part was already behind her. She wasn’t going to turn back now.
It was uncomfortably hot and humid on the floor of the cavern, and in a matter of just a few seconds, she was drenched in perspiration. Some analytical part of her brain connected the humidity to the ecosystem question. Water was a part of the organic metabolic process. The cave was like a gigantic greenhouse, constantly recycling water, air, nutrients and energy.
She headed for a spot where blue flames rose up from the cavern floor. There was a scorched circle about eight inches wide around the fire, but beyond that the vegetation appeared to be thriving. She pushed into the strange growth, vaguely aware of things slithering and crawling away from her footfalls. The air smelled of ozone, the invisible smoke from the burning alcohol, and it occurred to her that the atmosphere might not be safe to breathe.
Close enough.
Felice unslung the pack and took out a specimen tube. With one foot, she gently pushed away the overgrowth to reveal the soil beneath, loose and loamy, and wriggling with insects and fat worms. She would have liked to take a few live samples—compare the DNA of the creatures that had evolved in this environment with their modern counterparts. But she felt like she had already pushed the envelope a little too far. One test tube full of soil from this place would probably be enough to keep her busy for the rest of her natural life. She stuffed the sample into a Ziploc bag, and the bag into her backpack, then hurried back to the base of the slide. She did a quick check to make sure that there weren’t any raptors sneaking up on her, then scrambled up the slide to rejoin Knight and David.
Both men looked like they were having trouble choosing irritation or admiration, but before either could say a word, the sound of gunfire issued from the passage below. The noise was barely audible, muffled by the turns in the narrow passage through to the neighboring cavern.
“Get back,” Knight said. “Away from the edge. Stay out of sight.”
Felice was about to comply, but saw that Knight had laid down at the edge of the recess, aiming his rifle at the mouth of the passageway below. She sprawled out next to him.
“Do you listen to anyone?” Knight said, not looking at her.
She ignored him.
There were more shots, and even Felice’s untrained ear could distinguish the subtle differences in the sounds made by Bishop’s machine gun and the rebel fighter’s assault rifles. After the initial exchange, she heard only the latter, and then silence.
She waited, listening, the seconds stretching out to an agonizing infinity, but there were no more shots.
Suddenly, a raptor exploded out of the passage, and over the edge, tumbling down the slope in a flurry of talons and feathers. Something else emerged onto the ledge right behind it—not a single velociraptor, but three of them, tangled up with another figure.
Bishop.
Felice watched incredulous as Bishop, standing poised on the precipice, stripped the clinging, clawing dinosaurs off his body one by one. He caught one by the throat and with a whip-cracking motion, snapped its neck. A second raptor had its teeth clamped onto his shoulder and was raking his back with the spur-like claws on its hind legs, but with his hands now free, Bishop reached back, closed his fingers around the duck-shaped head, and squeezed until the creature’s eyes burst out of their sockets. A third, which had somehow gotten its legs twisted around the sling of Bishop’s machine gun, tried to bite Bishop’s face, but instead Bishop got his own teeth around the thing’s neck and he bit down hard.
His victory had not come cheap. Raptor talons had flayed skin and torn deeply into muscles. Blood streamed from a dozen gash wounds. Yet that was not the worst of it. As he was fighting, Felice felt as if she was watching him transform before her eyes—Dr. Jekyll becoming Mr. Hyde, Bruce Banner metamorphosing into the Hulk. It was not a physical change precisely, but his human essence being consumed by a darker, bestial entity.
Bishop seemed to sense that she was watching. He turned slowly, letting the dead raptor fall from his jaws. His face was a mask of blood and feathers. He looked like some kind of savage tribal warrior, but his eyes…
His eyes were the same.
Felice breathed a sigh of relief…
That turned into a gasp of horror as a swarm of velociraptors broke from the passage and swept Bishop over the edge.
44
Underground
Definitely Jules Verne, Queen thought as the raft slid along the subterranean river.
Rook knelt at the front of the makeshift craft, using a semi-rigid length of plant stalk like the punt of a Venetian gondolier, nudging the raft back to center stream whenever the unpredictable current brought them too close to the bank. Queen sat at the rear, using a broad, fan-shaped leaf like a rudder. Rook had selected two more stalks with their fans still attached to be used as oars, but thus far there had been no need to use them. The current was swift, carrying them faster than they could have walked through the dense vegetation that flourished on the valley floor. Walking wasn’t really an option. The local flora was not the only obstacle they would have faced on foot.
They spied the first creature only a few minutes after their river journey began. Based on its size, Queen had assumed it was an enormous elephant, but then it had raised its small head, which was situated at the end of a neck that was nearly as long its massive body, and she knew that what she was seeing could only be a dinosaur.
She pointed it out to Rook, who in characteristic fashion, tried to conceal his astonishment with a quip. “Whoa. That’s a lot of Bronto burgers. Better keep an eye out for Sleestaks. Those things always gave me the creeps.”
“It’s a Paralititan,” Deep Blue had informed her a few seconds later, the disbelief audible in voice. “An herbivore sauropod from
the Cretaceous period.”
“You should go on Jeopardy,” Queen told him.
“As it happens, I was just doing some research on the subject. There have been rumors of giant monsters in the Congo region for years, which has led a lot of folks to believe that dinosaurs might have survived to the present day, hidden in the jungle.”
“Or under it.”
“Those monster legends might indicate that dinosaurs living down here have been able to migrate to the surface from time to time. There’s got to be an exit to the surface somewhere in the Congo Basin.”
“So this is a good thing,” she replied, not completely sincere. “If they’ve been coming and going all this time, why aren’t there more recent fossils?”
“Most dinosaur skeletons are found in deserts,” Deep Blue said, “where the conditions are favorable for preserving and fossilizing the remains. There’s not much of a fossil record at all in the tropics, so we have no idea what kind of creatures might have once lived in Central Africa. The Congo Basin itself is only about a million years old. Most African dinosaur fossils date to more than ninety million years ago, well before the rest of the dinosaurs went extinct.”
“Now we know where they went,” Rook said, “and why the Ancients built that wall. Maybe why they stopped using the underground route, too.”
“An actual lost world.” Deep Blue’s voice held a tinge of wonder. “It might not be what Mulamba was looking for, but a discovery like this will change everything we think we know about the world. And it will change the way the world views Africa.”
Queen wasn’t so sure about that. From a scientific standpoint, the importance of the African continent was already well-established, if not completely understood. It was almost certainly the birthplace of the earliest humans. For most people however, Africa was just a primitive land, inhabited by strange wild animals. What they had found here might just reinforce that belief.
Savage (Jack Sigler / Chess Team) Page 27
