“As best as I can tell,” Lelache said, “the ‘index case was that entire first group of miners. They worked and lived as a single shift, bunking in dormitory-like conditions together. The second group of miners had identical working and living conditions.”
Austen considered. “That might provide a clue as to the possible transmission route. If it was airborne, we’d be looking at the entire facility going down. And it can’t be animal-based, as there’s no native flora or fauna down here. It could be spread via fomites – contaminated objects, such as things they touched.”
“I have considered that possibility. After all, both shifts used this same elevator to enter and leave the mine.”
“That’s comforting,” Navarro mumbled. The big man took his hand from where it rested upon the wall and crossed his arms instead.
Lelache smiled thinly. “This elevator was thoroughly decontaminated. As was the entire mine facility, after the two shifts came down sick.”
“Come off it,” Preble’s voice came in, though it was almost swallowed in static now. “Mercury vapors from rare earth processing would do the trick for the symptoms you’re describing. Five’ll get you ten that they didn’t have top-notch safety equipment here.”
“Indeed,” Lelache agreed. “They used safety glasses, helmets, coveralls, and work gloves.”
“What about respirators?” Austen asked. “The pore diameter would tell us a lot. A gas droplet or viral particle would have a tough time slipping through the best made masks.
“As best as I can tell, they used scarves.”
“What?”
“Just that. Traditional Ozrabek scarves, wrapped around the lower part of the face. I don’t think we need to do a pore measurement of two or three swathes of loose woolen cloth.”
“So much for ruling anything out yet.”
“Even if they had better masks,” Lelache pointed out, “Their uniforms left an exposed nuque – what you call the ‘nape of the neck’.”
“Good point. Please, continue.”
“One week ago, entire villages around the area began coming down with the same ‘mine bug’. News got out to the capital. The Prime Minister of Kazakhstan called the WHO in Geneva, who then sought help to investigate.”
“Which is where the CDC made sure I got involved,” Blaine noted pointedly.
“And we are lucky they sent you,” Lelache said dryly. “By the time I arrived and made sure the field lab had been constructed, something even more disturbing happened. Something which shook me to my core.”
The elevator came to a stop with a rough clank. Beyond the elevator car, the mine’s floor stretched off in a bleak, almost lunar splendor. The front bars of the elevator cage rolled up, making a death rattle that echoed off the darkened walls.
Chapter Eighteen
The last echoes of the cage’s roll-up faded away, leaving silence in its wake. To either side, the floor of the pit stretched away for thousands of feet. Pure desolation, open to a single circle of sky above. A chilly moan echoed through the mine as the air around them spiraled up the elevator shaft.
Austen looked to Navarro as they stepped off the elevator platform.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“Right now, I’m thinking about when I was nine,” Navarro replied. “I’d taken up this dare to stay all night inside this deserted house that everyone said was haunted. Frankly, this place looks less inviting.”
For a second, Blaine’s voice came through Austen’s headset. However, whatever he said was lost in an ocean of static. She tried toggling the circuit a couple of times, but never got through to him.
“Too much distance,” Lelache said. “And too much rock between us. They won’t be able to receive either our transmissions, nor our camera footage.”
“Looks like we’re on our own,” Austen said grimly. “Lights on, everyone. It’s awfully dim down here.”
“It only gets darker from here on,” Lelache agreed, as they each toggled their shoulder-mounted lamps. A cheering pool of light formed around them. “Come along, we need to head to the right. That’s where the workers were blasting their way along the quartz vein.”
The soles of each person’s hardsuit made loud crunches as they made their way along the gravel-strewn surface. But the sounds they made were small and tinny, as if they’d been swallowed up by the vastness of the shaft above them.
“Helen, go on,” Austen urged. “What was it that disturbed you about the disease’s progression?”
“The mystery pathogen began showing up in the animals and humans living around the mine,” she replied. “Mass die-offs. Lizards first. Then birds. Finally, in the surrounding villages.”
“Were you able to perform an autopsy on any of the victims?”
“I never even got a chance to visit the villages themselves,” she said sourly. “I only found out about them after the fact. Votorov told me that his men used surplus hazmat suits to investigate and found only dead bodies. There haven’t been any more reports of illness in people or animals beyond a dozen miles in any direction.”
“Sounds like we’re getting very lucky,” Navarro remarked.
“Maybe,” Austen said. “Maybe not. This part of the world is sparsely populated by humans or animals. This pathogen could be so hot that it’s killing hosts faster than it can acquire them.”
“The upshot was that I was unable to perform autopsies,” Lelache said. “I did manage to find some of the dead crows and dissected them. I found their lungs choked with strangely colored fluid. And even stranger markings on their bones.”
Amy Zhao perked up at that. She jogged forward a few steps to walk alongside Lelache. Her black eyes held a piercing look as she spoke to the taller woman.
“Did the markings look like tiny pinpricks?” she asked.
“As a matter of fact, they did,” came the reply. “Those markings made me remember your work. It’s why I requested that you come.”
“Well, Navarro and I didn’t get to attend,” Austen pointed out. “Perhaps you could explain the significance to us.”
“Paleobiology’s a really new field,” Zhao began. “Even so, the theory I presented at the conference is still considered…controversial.”
“I don’t see why,” Lelache said, with a sniff. “Data is data. You looked at the same things others did. Only you saw forest where they only saw trees.”
“Now I really want to hear this.” Navarro said. “It’s rare you find someone who can look at the same thing others see and spot something different.”
Zhao flashed a smile at him. “Last year, a worldwide digitization survey of dinosaur bone finds was completed by the International Association of Paleontologists. The results are available via a centralized web database. I was looking into some bone pitting on a recent find near Shanghai when I turned up something interesting: this same pockmark pattern was turning up again and again.”
“Even in finds outside of China?” Austen asked.
“Everywhere. China, Europe, the Americas. There were pinprick holes in the bones of all reptilian remains. No one noticed this until the tens of thousands of finds from around the globe were cataloged and compared side-by-side.
“I crunched some more data and found other anomalies. I only found ‘clusters’ of pinpricks in finds from the Triassic and Jurassic. Mister Navarro, those are geologic time periods.”
Navarro chuckled. “I’m no scientist, but I do know those were the first two periods known as the ‘Age of the Dinosaurs’. The third and last was the Cretaceous. And you can call me ‘Nick’.”
“Yes, that’s right, Nick.” Zhao blushed again but continued. “But when I got to the remains found during the Cretaceous period, there was only a single cluster. A megacluster. Right smack in the middle of the K-T boundary.”
“Okay, that one I do need help with,” Navarro admitted.
“That’s the ‘Cretaceous–Tertiary’ boundary. Look over here,” Zhao broke away from the group to point to
a grayish-yellow line that ran horizontally through the rock wall next to them. “Did you notice the ‘layer cake’ look of the mine as we took the elevator down here? We weren’t only descending through space – we were going back in geologic time. I was counting the layers, and I’m sure this line here marks the boundary.”
“Boundary of what?”
“Where the Age of the Dinosaurs ended, sixty-five million years ago. Where the Age of Humans dawned. This marks the last major extinction event, where almost every dinosaur species on Earth simply vanished. And that’s where my theory comes in: that an unknown pathogen did its part to wipe out the dinosaurs.”
Austen came up and laid her hand on the same yellowish layer. “You’re saying that a pathogen killed off the dinosaurs? Instead of an asteroid?”
“I told you that her theory was interesting,” Lelache said, with a smirk.
“Not ‘instead of’,” Zhao said. “In ‘addition to’. A poxvirus would do the trick, especially one that was as well adapted to reptiles as smallpox is to us.”
“I thought smallpox made blisters on the skin,” Navarro objected.
“Not all pox viruses affect species the same way,” Austen pointed out. “For example, the Poxviridae family drive insects mad when they’re infected. Instead of blisters, arthropod get little pinpricks along their exoskeleton until they crack–”
Austen stopped.
“You were saying?” Zhao prompted.
“I was saying…that you could be on to something. A virus that raises pinpricks along exoskeletons in one species could pit bone in another.”
“Regard, ici!” Lelache called, from up ahead. “Over here, look.”
Austen, Navarro and Zhao rejoined Lelache, adding their lights to hers. Ahead lay a wide, crudely blasted opening in the rock wall. Austen’s heart gave a thump. It looked all too much like the gaping maw of an animal to her.
Lelache pointed to a sign that had been tacked onto the rock next to the entrance. The sign contained two words, lettered in the Cyrillic alphabet. Next to the words were a zero and a set of numbers separated by slashes.
“That’s the date they started blasting – three weeks ago,” she said. “And the accident rate, which was zero.”
“That’s a little ironic,” Austen said, with a shake of her head. “They were touting their safety record.”
“More than a little,” Lelache agreed. “Because I believe that they stumbled upon something terrible down here.”
“They let loose something from ages past,” Navarro murmured. “Something that should have damn well stayed buried.”
Chapter Nineteen
The ground continued to crunch under their steps as they entered the mine tunnel. In fact, the sound doubled in intensity as it bounced off the high ceiling above. Austen knew that her air supply was rigorously scrubbed before being pumped into her helmet. But even so, her nose tingled with the grit from powdery rock dust.
Navarro stopped every now and again to turn to each side or lean back to make sure that his suit lights caught every detail. The big man seemed to be considering something. After the third time he completed his sweep, Austen finally spoke to him.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
“Trying to figure out what kind of tunnel this is,” he replied. “And to get a handle on how safe it is from a cave-in.”
“What’s the verdict?”
“It appears safe enough for now. Look at the material surrounding us.”
Navarro cast his lights around as he spoke. The walls and ceiling high above were uniformly gray and lumpy. Shapes were rounded and humped up, as if covered in dried oatmeal.
“That’s quick-dry spray concrete,” he explained. “When you’re drilling through hard rock formations, you use this stuff to reinforce a tunnel. It saves you time and gives you more space, since you don’t need to leave as many load-bearing pillars or walls.”
“You seem to know your way around this kind of place,” Lelache ventured. “You have an interesting background, Mister Navarro.”
“I suppose I do. I did a lot of things between leaving the Corps and joining M&B. One was a stint as a structural engineer on an oil derrick. Once, I found a little fossilized trilobite in our core samples, as if hole-punched right out of time.”
“We find those too,” Zhao put in. “From core samples in the South China Sea.”
“Which brings me back to the dinosaurs, and their extinction marked at the K-T layer,” Austen said. “You said that an unknown pathogen did its part to wipe out the dinosaurs. What does that mean, exactly?”
Zhao cleared her throat. “It involves another idea, one as controversial as my own.”
“I don’t think anyone’s dismissing oddball ideas out of hand right now,” Austen said, as they continued down the dark tunnel. “Let’s hear it.”
“It’s called the ‘Christie Theory’. That name refers to a British mystery writer and one of her most popular works of fiction. In it, a man is murdered, and there are many suspects. But no one person committed the murder. In the end, it’s revealed that all of the suspects contributed to the murder.”
Lelache let out a tsk. “Spoiling the ending. Very bad taste.”
“So, much like the ending to that book, those that follow the Christie Theory believe that no one thing ended the dinosaur’s rule over the earth. The asteroid did its part, by killing a few thousand in the blast radius and millions more from the sudden change in climate. Yet if the global population of dinosaurs were weakened by colder weather and the lack of food that followed, they would be ripe for picking by an emerging disease.”
“Interesting,” Austen mused. “There is historical precedence for that, at least in human populations. The decades preceding the Black Death in Europe were noted for abnormally wet and frigid winters. Entire populations had been weakened by hunger and driven to live closer from the cold. It made them ripe for picking when bubonic and pneumonic plague came calling.”
Zhao nodded, now more comfortable with discussing her ideas with the group. “If I had to guess, the dust and gas thrown up by the asteroid impact created the right conditions for a global pandemic. The dinosaurs fell to what we’d call an ‘opportunistic pathogen’. Like the bacteria that causes tuberculosis, it didn’t do any harm when the hosts were healthy. But once immunocompromised, all bets were off.”
“Wouldn’t it cease to be a mystery, then?” Navarro asked. “I mean, shouldn’t our killer bug still be around?”
Before Zhao could answer, a wall of concrete-covered rock loomed up before them. The rough slab of gray came to a halt where an oblong steel door projected from its surface. A steady orange light radiated from a slit window in its upper third.
“This is one of a pair of pressure-sensitive doors installed by the mine workers,” Lelache said. “I later found out that it does not show up on the mine blueprints. Intéressant.”
“Looks like they stole it off an old Soviet submarine,” Navarro quipped, as he stepped up and turned the round hatch wheel.
The big man let out a grunt as he spun the wheel counter-clockwise. A chuff echoed around them as he got the door open. The three women moved inside as he swung the door shut behind them and dogged the wheel.
Inside, the light came from a single electric lamp placed high along one wall. The room inside was surprisingly spacious, with a rack of fire-resistant hazmat suits and crates of equipment and machine tools. A set of benches, table, and an electric griddle lay off to one side.
Across the room, a door hung slightly askew on a broken hinge. A blue-on-white sign with one word painted on it had been nailed to the upper half. Austen stared at the word painted on the door, trying vainly to pronounce the Cyrillic letters.
“Not-ak-ba?” she murmured, before Nick came to her rescue.
“Luckily, I know that one,” he said. “It means ‘Supplies’.”
“The exit’s over here,” Zhao said, as she walked up to an identical door, set directly opposi
te the one they’d used to enter. “Why install an airlock-type system in this place?”
“Safety,” Lelache replied. “The area beyond that door leads to what the miners called the ‘Poison Cave’.”
At her words, Zhao peered cautiously through the slit window. “Sounds ominous. I don’t see anything out there except for a kind of mist.”
“It’s methane. A fair amount of it.”
“How do you know?” Austen asked.
“I was just able to take a peek into the next section before my flashlight began to fail,” Lelache said. “Since I was in a hazmat suit, the filtration system wasn’t as good. It smelled like a match-dipping factory out there.”
“Then this room makes sense. If it’s a methane-rich environment on the other side of this room, there’s an explosion hazard. This room would help wall off any flames or sparks, reducing the likelihood of that happening.
“That also explains what I’m reading up there,” Navarro said, as he pointed to another sign above the second airlock door. “It says ‘Smoking Absolutely Forbidden’. It’s rare to find a no-smoking sign in a former Russian satellite country.”
Austen spared a glance at one of the displays in the corner of her helmet.
“Still have plenty of power for suit lights,” she remarked. “I want to push on. But first, let me get a piece of equipment out of the bag.”
Navarro turned to one side to make it easier for her to reach the pack. Austen pulled out a squarish gray device that fit in the palm of her hand. She caught his questioning glance.
“Handheld mass spectrometer,” she explained. “Should give us a chemical readout of what’s in the next part of this tunnel.”
With a ker-chack, the wheel lock spun and the second airlock door opened. They stepped out into a cavern of drifting mists. The air felt heavier, more charged.
Navarro pointed out that the walls no longer had the protective coating of sprayed concrete. Instead, the roof soared above like the upper vault of a cathedral. Angular slabs of rock made up the chamber, giving everyone the sensation of never quite standing up straight.
The Devil’s Noose Page 9
