Earthcore

Chapter Seventeen

Mack made an early start of it. Some of the men hadn't partied all that hard the night before and they'd turned in early, exhausted from yet another double shift. Those men he awoke at 6:30 a.m. He hadn't made it to bed himself until just after 4 a.m. He had the satisfaction, however, of being the last one drinking.

A grade-A bitch of a hangover pounded at Mack's skull. Not that anyone could tell from looking at him. He was bright and chipper as he woke the early shift. He was about to embark on the defining moment of his career — even if he'd been decapitated, his head would still be smiling.

He had finished a staggering 2.3-mile deep shaft. A new world's record, a feat of engineering that — in his humble opinion, at least — rivaled anything on Earth. It wasn't just digging the shaft, which was surprisingly easy with Angus's laser drill head, it was all the support structures that went along with it. Miles of air ducting, miles of electrical, miles of temperature control, an elevator system capable of traversing the entire distance — the list went on and on. And it was all by his design.

It was a masterpiece.

As he accompanied the men down the monotonous twenty-minute elevator ride to the shaft floor, he could hardly wait for the ultimate triumph — breaking into the massive tunnel complex.

He checked his handheld air sampler, complete with thermometer (another of Angus's handy inventions). The digital readout reported 102 degrees Fahrenheit.

"If we had some beer and some women we could call this a sauna,” said Brian Jansson. “Get us a big party cooking, eh?"

Mack laughed. Out of all the men in the mining crew, he liked Jansson the most. The Finlander was a skilled and careful worker, and the only time he bitched was to be funny.

"As long as I never have to see you naked, Jansson,” Mack said. The crew laughed as the elevator touched down on the shaft bottom. They set about their work.

They drilled long burn holes into the wall, setting them in a pattern to blow rock downward and clear a ten-foot-high tunnel. They loaded the burn holes with explosives and a remote-activated detonator, then took the elevator up three hundred feet. Mack made sure each man donned air masks connected to a central tank, then detonated the charge. Limestone dust billowed up the shaft like a plume of tan volcanic ash, blinding them for a few minutes.

Large, noisy air-filtration units spaced up the length of the shaft removed the dust within minutes. Those same filtration units helped keep the shaft's temperature at a tolerable level.

The blast had cleared a good thirty feet of new tunnel but failed to punch through to the existing complex. They were close, though — he felt it. Excitement pulsed through his muscles and tickled the inside of his stomach, making him forget his throbbing head.

The men set to hauling the tons of loose rock back to the elevator platform. The heavily laden elevator rose to where men at the top waited to clear away the debris. Mack and his crew had to repeat the process four times to clear the loose rock. Three hours after the first blast, the men relaxed as the elevator platform ascended with the last debris pile. While it rose, Mack guided another series of burn holes. Men at the top cleared the platform and the elevator returned. Once again Mack took his crew up to three hundred feet, then detonated the second charge.

Again they heard the cacophonous rumbling, but this time there was more — a billowing wave of heat roiled up the shaft along with the suffocating dust. Mack felt his skin prickle and burn in sudden, shocked complaint. A paralyzing wave of terror gripped him as the blast-furnace cloud soared upward with scorching temperatures. Behind him on the platform first one man screamed in alarm, then another, and another. Mack knew with sudden horrifying certainty that he was cooking alive. He held his breath and shuddered, waiting helplessly to burst into flames.

The screams stopped suddenly. While still insufferably hot, the temperature leveled out. Mack grabbed for his handheld unit: it read 152 degrees Fahrenheit. In a matter of seconds, the temperature had soared fifty degrees.

"It's okay everyone,” Mack yelled through the mask. “We're safe, just relax."

The ventilators cleared away the dust, but made only a tiny dent in the temperature. The handheld unit said the new air contained plenty of oxygen, some hydrogen and higher levels of nitrogen, but no contaminants. The unit showed a green light for breathing. Mack pulled off his mask and took a tentative, testing breath. He wrinkled his nose in disgust at some faint yet offensive smell. Something like a combination of rotting fruit and dog shit. He motioned for the other men to remove their masks. Their faces showed instant disgust. Fritz Sherwood, at twenty-two the youngest of the mining crew, puked on his shoes, much to the amusement of the older men.

Jansson put his hands on his hips and took a deep, chest-swelling breath. “I love the smell of Hell in the morning,” he said. “It smells like victory."

"You should love it, mate,” Mack said. “It smells just like your breath.” The men laughed; Mack felt the tension level instantly drop a few notches. He lowered the elevator to the shaft floor. The men carefully crawled through the loose rocks, lights from their helmets making clearly defined dust cones that bobbed along the rough walls. Within twenty feet, the tunnel expanded suddenly, opening into a wide, dry cavern. Their lights played along the rough tan-green walls, up to a flat sandstone ceiling, and across each other's sweat-drenched smiles. They all felt the pride of a tough job well done. At the back of this new cavern stood the opening of a natural tunnel. It loomed black and promising, but Mack let no one explore further.

The men hauled loose rock back to the elevator shaft, but after barely fifteen minutes they started to fatigue. No exploring could be done until they found a way to deal with the temperature. Angus supposedly had something lined up, but Mack had yet to see what it was.

They cleared a path into the natural caverns. They found spots on the platform among the rubble, either standing between piles or sitting on them, and Mack took the exhausted men back to the surface. It was time to go to phase two, and start exploring the largest tunnel complex known to man.

"Yes, Achmed,” Katerina Hayes said in a condescending manner. “I see it's an aberrant spike, but that doesn't explain what caused it, now does it?"

Achmed glared at her. With Angus and Randy gone, she was now in charge. It hurt her to ride him like this, but she needed answers. Only now did she understand why Angus was always such a prick — Connell Kirkland demanded results, and producing those results was now her responsibility.

Just as she had taken Angus's place, Achmed had assumed Randy's duties. Those duties included finding the cause of small, unexplained seismograph spikes. Katerina had checked the spikes against Mack's blasting record — they hadn't been caused by any EarthCore activity. She feared the spikes meant cave-ins somewhere in the natural tunnels — something that would slow the project down, and would make Connell very unhappy.

"How am I supposed to find out what it is?” asked an exasperated Achmed. “I can't see through solid rock. And the damn computer keeps cutting out every six hours, how can you expect results with work conditions like this?"

"Listen, we have men down there! You fix the damn computer, and you find out what's going on. No one is going to die on my watch, you got that? I've got other problems to worry about."

Achmed's face screwed tight with anger and he turned back to the computer. She walked back to her tiny desk. She didn't have time to worry about Achmed's feelings. Earlier in the day, Dr. Reeves had brought in GPR data on a mysterious line that penetrated deep into the ground. Connell, of course, demanded and immediate explanation.

Katerina had assigned every free person to mapping that line, and the results were shocking. Four miles downhill and a half-mile uphill from where Dr. Reeves and Dr. Haak had found the phenomenon, the line took a ninety degree turn south.

Both of those new lines reached south for 3.28 miles. Exactly 3.28 miles. At that point, both took a ninety degree turn toward each other, making a new line, a line that completed a rectangle — a 4.652 mile-long and 3.28 mile-wide rectangle, in which the mine shaft sat almost dead-center. Who made it? Why? And how on earth did they do it?

Katerina didn't have any answers. She shuddered — Connell wouldn't like that, wouldn't like that at all.

Mack and the rest of the miners watched in rapt attention as O'Doyle held up a bright yellow form-fitting jumpsuit. The suit, supposedly, would allow them to safely explore the caves.

"This is a KoolSuit,” O'Doyle said, his voice bellowing like a drill sergeant. “That's Kool with a ‘K,’ as in its inventor, Angus Kool. The fabric is a microtubule material that accommodates the flow of coolant throughout the suit. This small backpack unit circulates fluid through the material to regulate your body temperature.

"The KoolSuits are coated with Kevlar, so they should hold up well while you're crawling through the tunnels. However, be aware of the dangerous environment. We expect the temperature to exceed two hundred degrees Fahrenheit, which means that if your suit rips in any way, repair it immediately with the patches stored in your backpack. Then immediately alert your supervisor and head for the surface as fast as possible.

"Without a functioning suit, you will dehydrate and die in a matter of hours. Even with the suit, make sure you are not underground for more than five hours at a time, or you may suffer blistering on your face, which is the only exposed skin area on your body. Do not, I repeat, do not remove the gloves. The rocks in the tunnel are hot enough to burn skin on contact. You are most likely to rip the gloves, if you rip anything, so each suit comes with a spare pair packed in the belt. If your gloves tear, undo the wrist seal, remove the gloves, put on the new ones, and make sure the wrist seal locks tight."

Mack shook his head in mild amazement. This was more like being in a science-fiction movie than a dig. The suits would let them explore the tunnels despite the incredible and life-threatening geothermal heat.

As Mack donned the rubbery KoolSuit, excitement washed over him. He was about to explore an area untouched by man. Granted, it was going to be mostly tight tunnels, nothing more to see than limestone walls eroded by millions of years of circulating water, but that feeling of discovery pumped adrenaline into his blood.

Mack and the afternoon shift, six men who were a little less hungover than their coworkers, suited up and headed for the shaft elevator. The suit gave him the chills on the surface, where the temperature was only 110 degrees. In twenty minutes they'd reach the shaft bottom and head for the tunnels, ready to take those first steps into the unknown.

Connell's stare bore into O'Doyle's skull like a hot poker going straight through the eye socket into the brain. O'Doyle could have crushed Connell in a heartbeat, and both men knew it, but physical prowess had little to do with their relationship. Connell was the boss. Connell was authority. In O'Doyle's strict world, authority was something you followed without question. Ten years in the Marines had riveted that rule into his soul to the point where it was never forgotten, never unlearned. The Marines had also drilled home one more concept: there is no excuse for failure.

A failure was exactly what O'Doyle felt like. Connell was a good boss, a demanding boss who gave specific orders and who expected those orders to be followed to the letter.

Only a year earlier O'Doyle had been jobless, let go after twenty years of service to his country. He'd spent the last fifteen years of that career as a hit man for the government, traveling the world to snuff out the enemies of democracy. O'Doyle excelled in jungle work and urban penetration. Often his superiors didn't expect him to return, but he always made it back. And at the end of his twenty years they retired him.

He had found himself suddenly without direction for the first time since he'd turned seventeen. Skills such as avoiding local police, jungle survival, and weapons expertise didn't translate into the civilian world. Out on his own there were no missions, no commanding officers, no orders. For the first time in twenty years, he had no one to tell him what to do, and he felt lost.

It was only three months after his “retirement” that he received a call from Connell. O'Doyle flew to Detroit, the ticket paid for courtesy of EarthCore, and interviewed for the job of chief of security.

O'Doyle had jumped on the offer, and in the subsequent months proven himself to be a tireless and reliable employee. Until now.

"You're telling me, Mr. O'Doyle, that we're missing two KoolSuits?” Connell's voice slowly rose in volume and temper, as different from his normal cold tone as summer from winter.

"Yes sir,” O'Doyle said, eyes fixed on the back wall. “We discovered it this morning as Mr. Hendricks prepared to take the first crew into the tunnels."

"Do you have any idea how much each of those suits is worth?” Connell asked, his voice creeping toward a shout.

"Yes sir, Mr. Kirkland,” O'Doyle said, snapping off the word sir with the authority of a salute. “Each suit is worth $35,230."

Connell's vocal volume continued to climb. “As if the price wasn't enough to piss me off, there's the small fact that we're on the side of a mountain in the middle of a fucking desert! I know you well enough to assume that you accounted for all the suits both when we left and when we arrived, now isn't that so?"

"Yes sir."

"As a security chief, you seem to be very good at misplacing things in the middle of a fucking desert, don't you?"

"Yes sir."

Connell's eyes blazed wide with anger. “As long as I've got you here,” he said, “why don't you tell me what you found out about the accident."

O'Doyle swallowed hard, feeling a trickle of sweat roll down his temple. He felt his boss's stare grow harsher, more intense.

"Certain restraining bolts in the separator machine's cylinder mechanism appear to have been loosened,” O'Doyle said. “With the pressure of the device and the massive RPMs it was only a matter of time before the bolts worked loose and the spinning cylinder hit the sides of the machine. When that happened it tore itself apart."

The air conditioner's hum and the slow thump of Connell's fingers drumming on the desktop—ba-da-ba-bump, ba-da-ba-bump—were the only sounds in the trailer. O'Doyle thought Connell looked like a grenade with the pin pulled, ready to explode at any second.

"Find out what the hell is going on around here,” Connell growled. “Now get out of my sight."

O'Doyle was out the door in less than two seconds. His body vibrating with fury. Failing Connell hurt.

O'Doyle fought to keep his own anger down. Someone was making him look like a fool. He knew he wasn't the smartest man that ever walked the Earth, but he was one of the most tireless and dedicated. Sooner or later he'd find the truth, he'd find the bastard responsible. When that happened, O'Doyle planned on carving Semper Fidelis into the fuckwad's chest.

Two missing KoolSuits. Two injured scientists. Sabotage. No, not just sabotage, expert sabotage, as if someone knew the equipment inside and out.

"They wouldn't…” Connell whispered. His fingers drummed the desktop once, then he picked up the phone and dialed.

"Milford Valley Memorial Hospital,” a woman answered.

"Angus Kool's room, please."

There was a pause as the woman transferred the call. The phone rang five times before someone answered.

"Hello?"

"Angus?"

"No, this is Randy."

"Randy, Connell here. Let me talk to Angus."

"He's sleeping,” Randy said.

"So wake him up."

"The doctor doesn't want him disturbed,” Randy said. “He's still feeling a lot of head pain."

"I don't care if his brains are dripping out of his ears. You wake him up right fucking now, Randy."

"Fine, hold on a second."

After a brief pause, the phone rustled as it switched hands. “Mr. Kirkland, what's up?” said a sleepy Angus.

Connell's fingers drummed the desktop, ba-da-ba-bump, ba-da-ba-bump. “How are you doing?"

"I was sleeping, that's how I was doing,” Angus said. “What do you need?"

Ba-da-ba-bump, ba-da-ba-bump.

"Just wanted to check up on you guys."

"Well, we're not going anywhere,” Angus said.

"Fine,” Connell said. “Sorry to wake you."

Angus hung up without another word. Angus and Randy were right where they were supposed to be.

So who was responsible for all the trouble?

Chapter Eighteen

"Slow down, Jansson,” Fritz Sherwood called through the narrow tunnel. “You're descending too fast."

Brian Jansson looked up from his slightly swinging line, his light playing up the chasm and onto Sherwood's face. He dangled in a sea of black, like a yellow worm on a hook.

Jansson answered in a condescending tone. “Ya, ya, ya. I'll be sure to be careful, Mommy."

"Asshole,” Fritz murmured under his breath. He didn't want to be in this sliver of a tunnel. Rough limestone walls pressed against his body on every side. There was no turning around here; to get out you either crawled backward for thirty feet or descended into the chasm. Fritz panned his headlamp on a plastic-coated map. At Mack's orders they'd followed a tiny offshoot of the main tunnels, an offshoot that led to this chasm. According to the map, several thin tunnels branched off the chasm floor which lay 150 feet below. While too small for hauling ore, the tunnels might allow a shortcut to the Dense Mass, provided they were big enough to crawl through. If any of the tunnels showed promise, Mack would send more men for a full exploration.

"Almost to the bottom,” Jansson called up. Fritz looked down into the chasm, only his head peeking over the edge. He hoped he wouldn't have to make that descent.

"It looks okay,” Jansson called. “Very jagged, poor footing, but it looks okay."

All at once a jangle of equipment, a cry of pain, and a muffled, brittle snap echoed through the narrow, high-walled chasm. Fritz's light weakly illuminated Jansson's prone body far below.

"Jansson! You okay?"

A pause.

Jansson's voice echoed up from below. “Yeah, I'm fine if you don't count my broken leg."

"Quit fucking around, Jansson."

"I wish I was. My foot slipped on this boulder. Leg's broken. I think my arm might be dislocated, too. Can't move the fucking thing. Mack's going to kill me."

"Hold on, I'm coming down."

"Don't be an idiot! You know procedure. If you have rope problems we're both stuck here. You can't pull me up by yourself — go back and get Mack and some help."

"You're crazy,” Fritz called. “I can't leave you here."

Jansson let out a short laugh. “Oh ya, what's going to happen to me?” The laugh ended with a grunt of pain.

"But it'll take me twenty minutes just to crawl back,” Fritz said. “You'll be down there for almost an hour."

"Good, I've been wanting a little privacy to spank the monkey.” Jansson let out another laugh. “Thank goodness I hurt my left arm and not my right. Now get going, this thing hurts like a bitch."

"Is the suit ripped?"

Jansson gently ran his hands up and down his leg. “No, it's intact,” he called up. “Fuck, this hurts. Would you go get somebody?"

"Okay, just hold tight,” Fritz said, his voice echoing in the still chasm. He slid backwards, pushing his way through the tunnel that was no bigger than an air vent.

In minutes, all sound of Fritz's efforts faded away, leaving Jansson alone. Jansson pushed himself to a sitting position and gritted his teeth against the pain. He'd felt worse. What was this, the third time he'd broken his leg? The fourth? It was no big deal. All he had to do was sit and wait. Help would be there before he knew it.

He sat still and quiet for fifteen minutes, ears instinctively hunting for a sound and finding none. He hated the quiet, and caves were dead quiet. Not a sound at all, other than your own. You didn't notice how noisy the world around you was until you came to a place like this. No wind, no creaks, no squeaks, no honks… nothing. It was a weird feeling, like someone had grabbed nature's remote control and hit ‘mute.’ Damn fool thing to get in a hurry and break a leg. He should have been more—

A sound disrupted his thoughts. He flashed his light upwards, toward the tunnel 150 feet above. Nothing moved. He waited for the sound to come again, but only silence met his ears. He looked around the chasm bottom, his headlamp following his gaze. There were several tunnels, but all very small, probably too small to crawl through. The trip was a waste of—

He heard it again. This time clearly. The sound of dry, rustling leaves across open pavement. His eyes darted to each tunnel entrance as the sound grew louder.

Mack leaned over the edge of the chasm. His light probed the jagged rocks, but illuminated only rock.

He cupped his hands and shouted. “Jansson! Jansson, answer me, mate."

Nothing.

Fritz was right behind him, the passage so narrow Mack couldn't even turn around to talk. “This is it, Fritz? You're sure."

"Absolutely,” Fritz said. “He's down there."

Mack pulled out the Marco/Polo device and checked the signals, but the unit showed only his name and Fritz's.

"He's not answering. I don't see any movement.” Mack noticed that Jansson's rope still hung off the ledge, dangling into the chasm below. He gave it an experimental tug — it moved easily. Mack prepared to hook his climbing rig to the rope, preparing to descend, then stopped himself.

Why isn't he still tied to it? If he's hurt, why would he unhook it, knowing full well we have to pull him up?

Frowning, Mack started pulling up the rope. He reeled in almost 150 feet: he stopped as he reached the end.

The rope had been cut.

Mack looked at the rope's neatly sliced end. His light played off a thin line of something wet. He touched it with his gloved fingers, then held the fingers up for a closer inspection.

It looked like blood.

Claim jumpers? Could there be some crazy claim jumpers down here?

Fritz nudged Mack's foot. “We going down to get him or what?"

Mack stared at his fingers, at the rope's cut end. He leaned over the edge again, his light carefully scanning the chasm floor. Nothing moved. “He's not there, Fritz."

"Not there? Where the hell else could he be?"

"I don't know,” Mack said. “Could you see him after he fell?"

"Yeah, I could see him fine."

"Well he's not there now. Start moving back, and do it quick."

"We've got to go down and look for him!"

"We're not going down there right now, mate,” Mack said. “We're going back to phone for help.” Mack slid backward, working his way out of the thin tunnel. He'd already sent men back to the shaft bottom to phone up and report the missing man.

He hoped O'Doyle knew how to rappel.

Katerina Hayes tried in vain to rub the sleep from her eyes. She hadn't slept a wink last night and neither had most of the lab rats. The staff hunted for an answer regarding the mysterious, miles-long rectangle that surrounded the campsite and the mine. So far there were no answers.

The best guess revolved around an incredibly high-powered laser fired from orbit — and that was a joke. They'd found no burn marks or melting of any kind. On the surface the line was nearly invisible — you could only see it if you knew exactly where to look. If not for the GPR suite, people might have walked over it a hundred times without noticing.

Most of the line's camouflage came from landslides, water erosion, windswept dirt, and sand. Such natural actions had covered most of the line, leaving only split rocks on either side.

Extrapolating on a computer erosion model, they had generated estimates of the rectangle's age. The current estimates fixed the rectangle at between seven thousand and thirteen thousand years old.

Calling it science on the fly was an understatement. The staff made it up as they went along, dubbing the new discipline chronogeomorphology—judging a formation's age by the erosion on and around it. She guessed they might shave another two or three thousand years, but not much more than that. The computers handled most of the work now, leaving her to worry about other must-solve problems.

"Achmed! What's the status on that latest tremor?"

Achmed rose from his station and sluffed over. His normally dark and beautiful eyes were now just plain dark. Sunken cheeks showed the effects of only two hours’ sleep in the past two days.

"I wouldn't exactly call it a tremor, Katerina,” he said with an angry, tired voice.

"What would you call it?” Katerina asked with audible frustration. She was pushing him hard and she knew it. The tremors threatened not only the financial future of this operation but the lives of the men who worked the shaft. A second aberrant spike on the seismograph, this time only a half-mile from the main shaft, had thrown the lab into a tizzy.

"The epicenter of the occurrence happened closer to the surface, but it was still isolated,” Achmed said with a sigh. “Again, no sympathetic vibrations anywhere."

Katerina scowled. It was the same story she'd heard before. “Dammit, Achmed, I need answers.” She leaned toward him, her eyes flashing with intensity. “You're the expert on this, and you've been working on it for two days; there's no way you don't have any ideas. I want a hypothesis. Now."

Achmed glared at her. Their friendship was gone. Vanished. Dissipated by her demanding position of power.

"There are many caves in this area,” Achmed said. “Some of them are probably unstable. My best guess is that the aberrant spikes are cave-ins."

She'd expected that answer. While they sank the shaft without explosives, drilling the adit had required blasting. Normally that would pose little threat to overall geologic stability, but with a massive network of caves anything was possible. The blasting could have damaged the natural structure enough to cause subsequent settling and cave-ins.

She stared at Achmed, who looked at the floor, defeated. She knew why. Cave-ins meant that the structure wasn't sound. That meant lives, and dollars, were at stake.

On top of his spike problem, Achmed still couldn't figure out why the seismograph simply dropped out for five minutes at 11:19 a.m., just as it had every six hours for almost three days straight.

They had to identify the spikes and verify the stability of the entire mountain. If they couldn't, Katerina would have to stand before Connell Kirkland and tell him to halt exploration. Somehow she didn't think he'd like that suggestion.

O'Doyle double-timed it to Connell's office trailer. He wasn't going to take any shit this time, this time it wasn't his fault. Anyone could see that; how could he be held responsible for a man disappearing over two miles underground?

He knocked quickly and opened the door without waiting for a response. Connell looked up from his piles of paperwork.

"They lost a man in the tunnels,” O'Doyle said. Connell's eyes began to narrow, then relaxed. A strange look crossed over his face. O'Doyle guessed it was a look of concern, although he'd never seen Connell concerned about anything.

"When?"

"About an hour ago. They searched right away, then sent someone back to notify us, but it took them forty-five minutes to hike back to the bottom of the shaft and call up the news."

"Who is it?"

"Brian Jansson."

"Was he troublesome at all?"

"Not that I know of, sir. Apparently he was hurt. His partner went for help, and when help arrived Jansson was gone."

Connell's fingers drummed the desk. “I see three possibilities, none good,” he said. “The first is that Jansson was stupid enough to wander away after his partner went for help."

"Not likely, sir. Mack's men wouldn't do that."

Connell nodded. “I agree. The second possibility is that he's working for the same people that sabotaged the lab. Maybe he faked his injury, and he's on his way to the Dense Mass, to help someone else drill in from another spot on the mountain. I'm sure you can guess the third possibility."

"That the saboteurs are in the caves, and they've got Jansson."

Connell pointed his finger at O'Doyle. “You get down there and find out what's happening. Who are the best guards you've got?"

"Lybrand, Bill Cook and Lashon Jenkins."

"Take them down with you. I want our man found. And put Lybrand with the miners, they have to keep moving towards the Dense Mass — if someone is trying to jump this claim, we can't afford to wait."

"Yes sir,” O'Doyle turned and reached for the door.

"And don't say anything sensitive over the shaft phone,” Connell said. “We can't trust anyone or anything at this point."

Kayla's brow furrowed in confusion. She'd picked up a call between Connell and Barbara Yakely. Connell suspected someone might be trying to jump the claim. He wanted Barbara to find out what company was buying up land around the Wah Wah Mountains. Connell felt positive a spy walked among the camp personnel, possibly working with operatives floating along the camp's periphery.

That made no sense to Kayla. No one could run a covert operation like that without at least some communication, and she'd picked up nothing. The only people on this mountain were herself and the EarthCore staff.

All her instincts told her Connell was wrong, but he was a very sharp, very successful man, and she wouldn't just dismiss his concerns. If someone else was working this mountain, her payday could be in jeopardy. Her $3.5 million estimate would shrivel to nothing. That meant she couldn't assume anything.

Sooner or later, someone would fuck up and she'd figure it all out. Patience was the key. Patience. The camp was alive with activity and confusion. That night would be a good time to sneak in and snag a KoolSuit. She had to find a way down into those tunnels and take at least a limited peek. Any intel she could provide on the tunnel system would increase her price.

Judging by the level of activity, she expected the staff's fatigue to highpoint around 1:00 a.m. That would be the perfect time.

Six more miners donned KoolSuits and loaded up with supplies of food, water, batteries, floodlights, and even a generator — everything needed to set up a base camp in the tunnels far below. Drenched with sweat, Connell watched them tramp into the adit as he talked on the phone with Mack, who was down at the base of the elevator shaft.

"I don't think he's a spy, mate,” Mack said. “I know the man, and besides, that doesn't make any sense."

"Did Sherwood actually see the broken leg?"

"No. Sherwood followed procedure. When Jansson said he was hurt, Sherwood came right back to get help."

"So now you've got a man who claims he's broken a leg, which no one saw, and when you go into that cavern he's gone. What does that tell you?"

Mack was silent for a moment, then answered quietly. “It tells me that maybe he was lying,"

"That, or someone moved him,” Connell said. “Now listen close. Six more miners are on the way down along with O'Doyle and Lybrand. O'Doyle will take over searching for Jansson. You take Lybrand and the six new men and continue on. She's there for your protection. We may be in a situation where time is vital. We have to reach that Dense Mass first. Do you understand?"

"Yes sir, Mr. Kirkland."

Connell checked his watch, hung up and quickly walked town the trail to the Jeep. From there he drove to the administration trailer. He walked through the door just as the bulky cellular rang.

"Hello, Barbara,” Connell answered. “What have you got for me?"

"I ain't got squat, honey,” Barbara said in her sandpapery voice.

"Well, someone has to be buying up rights in the area,” Connell said. “Someone is making a move on us, I know it."

"No one has bought any rights in that area since 1945, honey. Ourselves excluded, of course. I had our people check with all of our corporate informants, too, and we can't find anybody who's even looking at the site. A few are starting to get curious what we're doing there, but so far you're all alone."

Connell stared off into space. His theory had just gone down the crapper. “Thanks Barbara. I'll call you if anything turns up."

He broke the connection. It wasn't the competition. So what was going on in the camp? And, more importantly, what the hell was going on in that shaft?

They built this.

She didn't know how she knew it, she just did. Veronica sat cross-legged on one corner of the rectangle, turning her head slowly to look down each line. One line spread out and up the mountain, disappearing over the near ridge. The other line, one of the “short” ones, moved outward at a ninety-degree angle from its friend.

What had this meant to the Chaltelians?

The lab dated the rectangle between twelve thousand and seven thousand years old. Precise figures didn't matter — the time span did. It was roughly the same time frame for the Chaltelians’ dominance over the Tierra Del Fuego area. Too close to be coincidence.

While hidden for millennia, the rectangle was an accomplishment greater than the pyramids and more impressive than Peru's massive Nazca lines. Egyptians built up. Chaltelians built down. Way down. Impossibly way down. The depth stumped Katerina. It didn't seem possible to dig a trench that deep today, let alone thousands of years ago by primitive people. Yeah, and that's what they said about the pyramids at one time. Hell, some people still said that about the pyramids. Somehow Veronica doubted alien involvement in Egypt — or Utah, for that matter.

Something extraordinary had happened on this mountain. A mystery worth the attention of her entire career.

She needed to bide her time a little while longer. Connell couldn't keep her in camp forever. She wouldn't need Connell's funding, not once the story got out. Once the world knew of the rectangle, she'd shut him down faster than students cleared out after the last day of finals.

Then the mountain would be hers alone.

Chapter Nineteen

O'Doyle's feet gingerly touched the chasm bottom. He let the rope hold most of his weight as he carefully watched his footing on the treacherous ground. Certainly looked like a good place to break a leg; jagged rock stuck up all over like spikes in a Burmese tiger trap. O'Doyle kept one hand on the rope, the other on his H&K. The weapon's strap looped over his neck and around his back.

He turned his head, moving the headlamp light across the steep-walled chasm. He saw it almost instantly, a touch of wetness in the forever-arid area. Only a touch — most of it was already dry. The chasm's zero humidity dried things out in a hurry. Even in the strange lighting, there was no mistaking it.

A splatter pattern of blood.

O'Doyle examined it. About two feet off the ground and three feet long, horizontal with a slight angle, a center streak of red surrounded by a spray of fine droplets. The victim had been sitting four or five feet from the wall.

He moved to the spot where Jansson probably sat. There was more blood on the ground rocks, also dry. He carefully probed the area, then his light fixed on something pale and white.

O'Doyle picked it up, inspected it, then flashed his light rapidly around the chasm, looking for any threat. He started back up the rope with an expert's speed. He wanted out of that chasm, and wanted out now.

When Sonny heard the news of Jansson's disappearance, he made up his mind once and for all. It just wasn't worth it. The rest of these idiots could delude themselves all they wanted, but not Sonny McGuiness. No way.

He'd researched as Connell requested. He'd found several disturbing things that Connell chose to ignore. Well, they couldn't be ignored anymore. One man was missing, two more sat in the hospital. It sounded crazy, but Sonny knew what was going on.

Funeral Mountain was slowly waking up.

Sonny could feel it in his bones. That awful feeling he'd had from the first day on Funeral Mountain was getting worse. He couldn't stand it any more. He'd lose his percentage — but he'd just have to make it up somewhere else. Dead men can't count cash. Something about that strange cave drawing still haunted him, something he couldn't put his finger on. It added to his unease, to his instinctive desire to leave.

Besides, he still knew about the second entrance. He'd wanted to tell Connell about it, but just couldn't — that bit of information was too tasty to give up for free. Maybe he could cut a deal with Connell: give up the second entrance in exchange for keeping one percent of the mine's profits. Maybe, maybe not, but he'd make that deal via a phone call, because he was getting the hell out of Dodge.

Sonny packed his bags. Tomorrow morning he'd talk to Connell and get permission to leave. Connell held the keys to Sonny's Hummer, just like he held the keys to every vehicle in the camp. Sonny didn't care; he'd get the keys one way or another. He had to get out. Hopefully he could talk Cho into leaving with him — the kid-doctor had a lot of potential, and Sonny didn't want to see him hurt or dead.

Whether Cho came or not wouldn't stop Sonny, for he knew in his soul that if he stayed much longer, Funeral Mountain would get him as well.

The night air started to chip away the day's heat, but didn't stop Connell's sweat-fest. He stood at the adit mouth, clutching the phone that ran all the way to the shaft bottom over two miles away. What Mack told him over the phone didn't help to cool him down.

With more miners in the tunnels to hunt for Brian Jansson, Mack had continued toward the Dense Mass per Connell's orders. Mack had discovered a large cavern — and in it found something completely unexpected. He'd trekked forty-five minutes back to the elevator shaft in order to call up to the surface.

"You've got to come down and see it, mate,” Mack said, the excitement in his voice not quite masking his exhaustion. “I'm not kidding. O'Doyle's here with me and he agrees. You'd best bring the professors, too."

"Are you nuts, Mack?” Connell said, drawing stares from workers hauling loose rock out of the adit. “You know what those two will do if they see it."

"What they do doesn't matter, Mr. Kirkland. You made a deal."

It was all Mack needed to say. He was right. Connell had promised Veronica she would be informed of anything they found, and he would keep his word, despite the fact that Mack's new discovery might give her the ammunition she needed to shut the mine down completely.

"Okay,” Connell said. “I'm coming down with the professors. Any sign of Jansson?"

"Not a lick, mate. We're going to set up our first base camp in the new cavern, then I'm going to take the fresh hands back to explore the tunnels around the chasm where Jansson disappeared. We've got six men there now, but they don't think they can cover the area in a reasonable amount of time."

"But I told you to press forward, Mack."

"Yes sir, you did,” Mack said. “But according to the maps Angus made, there's about thirty small tunnels in that area. The men there say the tunnels are difficult to navigate, which is slowing them down. It's my opinion we need to focus all of our manpower there. O'Doyle just told me he went into the chasm and found blood — Jansson's hurt, sir, and if he's still alive his time is running out."

Connell leaned against the adit wall, his fingers drumming lightly on the rough limestone, ba-da-ba-bump, ba-da-ba-bump. He wanted Mack to press forward, but he couldn't keep asking him to abandon one of his men.

"Let me talk to O'Doyle.” Connell waited while the phone shifted hands.

"Mr. Kirkland?” O'Doyle said.

"Yes."

"This is absolutely amazing. I've never seen anything like it."

"I've heard all about the sights, Mr. O'Doyle, what about Jansson?"

"Nothing yet, sir, but we're looking. It's slow going when it takes forty-five minutes just to reach the phone."

Connell heard something in the man's voice, as if a detail remained unclarified. “What did you find, Mr. O'Doyle?"

"I rappelled into the chasm. I found a blood streak on the wall."

"What did you make of it?"

"It was two feet up from the floor. It's a splatter pattern. Definitely not from someone just falling and bumping their head. Looks to me like a slashing wound, one that cut deep."

"You think it's Jansson's?"

"Unless someone else down here is bleeding, yes. There's more, but I'd rather tell you in person. I don't think I should say anything else over this line.

Ba-da-ba-bump, ba-da-ba-bump.

"O'Doyle, is it safe to bring the professors down there?"

"Yes, sir, it's safe. We've got plenty of firepower. If someone did attack Jansson, there's a big difference between an unarmed man with a wounded leg and four trained guards armed with automatic weapons. Look, Mack insists on searching for Jansson, sir, but you need to get down here ASAP.” O'Doyle paused, as if he didn't want to reveal more bad news. “Someone… someone beat us down here,” he said finally.

Connell didn't answer. He gazed absently at a rock on the ground. The words didn't seem to register in his mind.

"Sir?” O'Doyle said. “Did you hear me?"

"Yes, I did. How do you know?"

"You'll see when you get here,” O'Doyle said.

Connell sighed and hung up. Anger fought defeat for dominance of his emotions. Someone, somehow, had reached the caverns before EarthCore.

It wasn't over yet. He pushed defeat from his mind and focused on the anger. He'd put too much time into this project to let someone else walk away with the prize.

"Katerina, wake up,” Achmed said, shaking her shoulder gently. She lifted her head from the desk, blinking away much-needed sleep. Achmed ignored the small puddle of drool sitting on her paperwork.

"What is it?” she asked, rubbing her eyes as she sat up.

"There's been another spike,” Achmed said. Excitement poured from him, as did concern. The latter quickly brought Katerina fully awake.

"What's got you all fired up?"

"I tried plotting the three spikes against Angus's map. I was trying to see if I could identify a certain line of weak tunnels. I entered the data for the three spike epicenters and found something.

Achmed walked quickly through the maze of equipment, leading Katerina to the computer that constantly displayed Angus's green and yellow tunnel map. Three red dots glowed softly.

"What am I looking at?” Katerina asked. Achmed worked the mouse and the keyboard.

"The initial aberrant spike was 2.34 kilometers below ground zero, 3.02 kilometers away from the main shaft.” The first red light started to blink.

"This is the second one,” Achmed said, still tapping keys. The second light began to blink. “It is 1.78 kilometers down, and only 1.25 kilometers from the main shaft. The third one happened while you were dozing, only an hour ago. It's 0.58 kilometers down, 0.32 kilometers from the shaft."

"The tremors are getting closer to the shaft?” Katerina asked.

"Not tremors, cave-ins,” Achmed said with excitement. “I'm now positive those are cave-ins, but that's not all — look at this."

A line representing one of the small natural tunnels glowed a brighter yellow than the rest. The line was very close to the first red dot, and ended directly under the second. Achmed tapped again; another yellow line pointed away from the second dot, ending near the newest spike marker. The red dots seemed to be connecting the yellow lines, making one long line where before there had been only separate tunnels.

"So the cave-ins are occurring between existing tunnels?"

Achmed nodded.

"How much space do the red dots represent?"

"It's impossible to tell, they're just epicenters,” Achmed said. “But judging from Angus's map, if the cave-ins do connect the existing tunnels, we're talking between fifty and a hundred meters of solid rock each time. But that's not all, look at this."

Achmed rotated the picture so that they looked straight down on the red dots and the bright yellow lines. He tapped the keys and a new flashing green dot appeared.

"What is that?” Katerina asked.

"That's the main shaft,” Achmed answered.

Katerina felt her stomach drop. The three red dots and the yellow lines weren't perfectly straight, but the path was clear.

They formed a line.

A line heading for the shaft.

Chapter Twenty

Connell's forty-five minute walk from the elevator shaft to Mack's discovery had a few rough spots, but wasn't that difficult. He'd left Bill Cook to guard the base of the elevator shaft. Cook was a thick man, a younger, bigger version of O'Doyle, and would have slowed them down. Lashon Jenkins was tall but skinny, a wiry, athletic man with mocha-colored skin and intelligent eyes.

In some places the caves forced Jenkins, Connell, Veronica, and Sanji to crawl on their bellies, KoolSuits skidding along dirt and rocks, but for the most part they were able to walk comfortably upright. The caves were little different from the adit — a long stretch of rough, unremarkable stone walls.

The big cavern itself, however, was a completely different story. Connell hated to admit it, but he felt just as amazed as everyone else by the place the miners had quickly dubbed “Picture Cavern.” The massive space easily ran the length and width of a football field. The ceiling arched high overhead, as if the cavern were a small domed stadium. Powerful flood lamps lit up the flat, dirtless stone floor. Something was imbedded dead-center in the cavern's arching roof, something not natural. It was possibly the size of a beach ball, but there was no way to get at it without constructing elaborate scaffolding to reach the hundred-foot ceiling. Besides, no one cared about the ceiling — the walls held everyone's attention.

"What do you make of it, Dr. Reeves?” Connell asked the glassy-eyed Veronica.

"I don't know,” she said quietly, as if she were in a church. “I saw drawings in Cerro Chaltel, but nothing like this. We couldn't check this far underground without something like these KoolSuits. I don't understand it, I don't know how people could survive in this heat long enough to create all of this."

They stood shoulder-to-shoulder, staring in awe at the brightly colored carvings and paintings that covered every last inch of the sprawling stone walls.

Veronica Reeves basked in Nirvana.

At Cerro Chaltel, drawings were sparse, spread so far across the endless tunnels that each one was like discovering a lost treasure. With each drawing she had moved closer to understanding the Chaltelians’ writing. She was convinced they had a written language — not just pictographs, but actual words. When her workers at Cerro Chaltel discovered another crude, priceless drawing, Veronica would rush to the find, hoping each time it would be the Chaltelian Rosetta Stone.

Down here, under the Wah Wah Mountains, things were different. An unbelievable amount of painted and carved pictures filled the walls. Up to a height of about twelve feet, art covered almost every square inch of space, not just once, but twice. The first set of pictures were regimented, cultured carvings. The second set were wild, multicolored, primitive paintings, drawn like graffiti atop the carvings. The combination created a chaotic, electric feel.

"This is amazing,” Sanji said, his voice a reverent whisper.

The carvings showed a level of stoneworking skill that defied imagination. Forgotten symbols dominated the ten-inch by ten-inch relief carvings. Smooth edges and perfect curves proved a tribute to the abilities of long-dead artisans.

Some clearly recognizable images, like junipers, mountains, and animals, illustrated scenes from the desert above. Other images were unknown, their meanings lost. She smiled at a picture clearly illustrating the Wah Wah mountain range from a distance. The carving, easily the largest one in the cavern at ten feet wide by eight feet high, was a photorealistic relief of the peak above them. The skill was phenomenal. The mountain carving looked perfect, right down to identifiable landmarks. Work that detailed, that exquisite, must have taken decades to complete.

While the carving quality boggled the imagination, the paintings looked like Cro-Magnon cave drawings; primitive by any standard. Perfectly preserved in the hot, dry cave, the bright, angry colors of the paintings showed many unrecognizable figures — probably the Chaltelians’ myths and religious icons.

"Why would they cover such wonderful carvings with such crude drawings?” Sanji asked, eyes wide with wonder.

The difference between the carving and painting skills pushed Veronica to an immediate conclusion. “The paintings seem almost like vandalism,” she said. “It's like there are at least two distinct cultures down here. One became very good at working stone, and another that came after possessed only rudimentary ability."

"But the low-quality work is on top,” Sanji said. “The paintings are on top of the carvings. I would think the culture would get better as time wore on."

"My first guess is that the Chaltelian culture was taken over by barbarians, for lack of a better word,” Veronica said. “Or, possibly, what I consider to be the Chaltelian culture is actually the barbarians, and another group, an older group, made the carvings."

"So the paintings are some kind of defacement?"

"I don't know,” Veronica said. “I'm seeing a lot of repetitive symbols, both in the carvings and in the paintings. If the cultures are separate, they are similar. Possibly the succeeding culture incorporated elements of the predecessor."

"I do not see any repetitions,” Sanji said, sounding like an excited schoolboy. “Show me."

"Look here,” Veronica said. “See this carving of this round creature with all the tentacles? It's obviously some sort of a god or deity representation. If you look around, you'll see them everywhere."

Sanji's face lit up with recognition. “Oh, yes! I have been seeing that image in other places around the cave. I have been running from one side to the other like a silly tourist, but I have seen it."

"Take a few steps back with me,” Veronica said. They walked backwards, still facing the wall. As they backed up, a larger image started to dominate their vision. It was large, almost fifteen feet high and a bit longer across. Bold black outlines framed brilliantly bright reds, oranges, and yellows. The picture's angry vibrance resonated despite its primitive quality.

Sanji's face showed confusion, then sudden understanding as the image blended into a cohesive pattern. Dark orange covered the circular body while reds and yellows dominated the extended arms. At least she guessed they were arms. Or tentacles, or some equivalent.

"Their god again?” Sanji asked.

"That would be my guess,” Veronica said. “Or at least it's one of their gods. The barbarians may have incorporated elements of Chaltelian religions, but who knows?"

She knew some piece of information was missing. Something that could make sense of all this. The missing pieces bothered her in a way she couldn't identify. She wondered if it was the dank feeling of dread permeating the place that haunted the edges of her mind. It was the same feeling she'd felt on the surface, but down here it was almost overpowering.

Sanji walked away to another image that caught his interest. Veronica continued to stare up at the large tentacle god. If that's what it was, a god, then she could understand the tribe's violent, brutal nature. The image on the wall reeked with anger and aggression. If it was a god in the pantheon of these lost people, than it had to be a god of war.

Or, perhaps, a god of evil.

Connell held the sign in his shaking hands. Fury swept over him, clouding his mind. Anger this strong, this pure, rarely came his way. Only once before could he remember feeling this utterly enraged — when he'd learned his wife's murderer had been exceedingly drunk.

The sign was simple; a small, thin piece of plywood little bigger than a sheet of typing paper. A stake pointed out the bottom. Painted on the sign was a curved, cartoon head of a little man, his nose peeking over a line that hid the rest of his body. His fingers also hung over that line. Two expressionless black dots represented eyes. A simple message adorned the back of the sign.

Kilroy was here.

"Where did you find this?” Connell said through clenched teeth. He kept his voice down, so as not to draw the attention of Veronica and Sanji. They were exploring the Picture Cavern, the tall Lashon close by, looking everywhere for any sign of danger.

"Lybrand found it dead center in the middle of the Picture Cavern,” O'Doyle said. “It was wedged into a crack in the rock floor."

"Did anyone else see it?"

"Only Mack. Lybrand immediately brought it to me and I stashed it away."

"Is there any chance that one of the others put it there before she and Mack arrived?"

"Of course it's a possibility, sir, but I doubt it. She walked point and was the first one in the Picture Cavern. She's armed and kept everyone else behind her, including Mack."

"Could Jansson have put this here?"

O'Doyle mulled over the question. “I suppose he could have, but according to Angus's map none of the tunnels from the chasm lead to the Picture Cavern. Besides, he couldn't have brought the sign with him, or Mack would have seen it. There's not exactly any hiding space in these suits."

Connell looked at his own bright-yellow, form-fitting KoolSuit. The things clung so tight you could tell a man's religion. He glanced back at O'Doyle, who looked like a muscle-bulging superhero in the tight yellow outfit, the Hulk with a beer belly. Jansson couldn't have slipped the sign past Mack. Someone else beat EarthCore into the caverns, and that someone was a smart ass who wanted Connell to know he'd been beat.

Kilroy was here.

"This sign rings a bell,” Connell said. “Do you know what it means?"

"Allied forces, especially U.S. forces, saw that image all over Europe as they liberated the continent from the Nazis in World War Two. No one ever found out who was responsible. Forward allied forces pushed back the Germans, and many times this sign would be waiting. Someone was so bent on being a joker they actually crept across enemy lines and painted graffiti."

O'Doyle looked over his shoulder, making sure that no one was near. “I've got something else.” He reached into an ammo pouch and pulled out a small, pale object.

At first glance Connell thought it was a stone or a piece of hard, dried food. Then in an instant he recognized the object. He managed to keep an expression of neutrality despite his revulsion.

Although it was dried as if it had been dropped into a dehydrator, there was no mistaking a severed human thumb.

The nail looked remarkably undamaged. Just behind the nail, however, where the first knuckle starts, the thumb stopped. Dirt, sand, and even one small pebble stuck to the stump. A thin piece of bone protruded past the flesh, a dull white in the poor lighting of the cavern.

"Where did you find this?” Connell hissed.

"Down in the chasm where Jansson turned up missing.” O'Doyle's fingers flexed on the handle of his H&K. “I think it was cut off during a struggle. Someone bagged Jansson, then removed his body."

"We have to get everyone to the surface,” Connell said, striving to keep his voice calm. “Why on earth did you let everyone come down here?"

"We needed people to help find Jansson,” O'Doyle said, eyes flitting up one end of the cavern and down the next. “Besides, you said it was urgent we continue toward the Dense Mass. Don't worry, Mr. Kirkland. We have plenty of firepower down here, and Lybrand is under specific instructions not to let the miners out of her sight."

Connell stared at O'Doyle with a sudden, sinking feeling. The man wanted to shoot something. Anything. Anything that could have remotely been responsible for this action. O'Doyle wanted that enemy to show itself.

"Mr. O'Doyle, where are all of our people? How far are they from the elevator?"

"Lybrand, Mack, and the six fresh miners are exploring the tunnels around the chasm,” O'Doyle said in his rapid-fire military tone. “I'd say they're about twenty-five minutes away from the elevator. The five remaining miners from Mack's morning crew are probably already there, waiting to head up. You, me, Lashon and the professors are the only ones in the Picture Cavern. Except for Jansson, all crew are present and accounted for."

Connell quickly did the math. The Picture Cavern was forty-five minutes from the elevator shaft, Mack's party was closer to the shaft, only twenty-five minutes away. Mack's crew could get back and head up, then send the elevator back down just about the time Connell and the others reached the shaft. From there it would still be a twenty-minute wait. But if there was some danger, at least Mack's party would get back to the surface.

"Get everyone back to the elevator,” Connell said. “And do it now. I want all of our people back immediately."

Something was very wrong within the narrow stone tunnels and sprawling caverns, and Connell's instincts told him it was only going to get worse.

Mack moved in a half crouch, helmeted head scraping lightly against the stone ceiling. They were exploring the last of the tunnels that led from the chasm where Jansson had disappeared. Mack's anger accompanied his exhaustion — they were running out of places to look.

"How you holding up, Mr. Hendricks?” Lybrand asked. She always stayed only a step behind him, surprisingly agile in the narrow tunnels. Fritz and two more miners followed Lybrand.

"No worries,” Mack said, but in truth his thoughts held nothing but worries.

click-click… click

"Hey,” Mack said. “Did you hear that?"

"I did,” Lybrand said. “What is it?"

Up ahead, something moved.

Mack's anger instantly vanished, a blank stare replacing his focused thought process. What he saw railed against all he knew. They were well over two miles underground, for crying out loud. No animals lived that deep.

But he'd seen it. He'd seen something move.

Something that wasn't human.

The word spider popped into his head, although he didn't have time to count the legs. He'd only seen it for all of a second, maybe two, as it darted through the circle of light cast by his headlamp. It flashed in the light, leaving a definite impression of metal. A two-foot-long, shiny spider.

"Did you see that?” He asked Lybrand, who stood rigidly with her H&K pointed down the tunnel.

"Yes,” she whispered. “What the fuck was it?"

"You got me, mate."

"I saw it, too,” Fritz said. “Looked like a big silver bug."

The group stood rock-still. They crouched over slightly at the waist; the ceiling wasn't quite high enough to allow them to stand, not quite low enough to force a crawl. The tunnel suddenly seemed darker, more enclosed — like a trap.

A sudden burst of walkie-talkie static made them all jump.

"Lybrand here,” she said into the handset.

"This is O'Doyle,” the other voice called. “Report back to the cavern immediately.” He sounded scratchy, faint, and full of static. The walkie-talkies had a pitifully short range in the tunnels.

"Any sign of Jansson?” she asked.

"Not yet. Report back immediately. The second the elevator touches down, you send everybody back up, including Bill Cook, and have them send the elevator back down the second they reach the surface. You guard the elevator shaft. We'll catch up to you a few minutes before it touches down again."

"Got it,” Lybrand said, then put the walkie-talkie back in her belt. “Okay everyone, we're out of here, let's move."

"But we haven't found Jansson,” Fritz said. “We can't just leave! What about those silver bug things?"

Lybrand nodded. “I don't know what those are, but we've been ordered out, so let's move. There's some danger down here, Fritz. I'm sure we're coming back down later."

Part of Mack wanted to support Fritz, argue to stay down and continue the search for Jansson. Another part of him, a much stronger part, wanted to get the hell out of there. Things weren't supposed to be able to live down here. Even if they were, he doubted they looked like spiders.

Two-foot-long, shiny spiders.

Mack turned his crew around and they headed back for the cavern, much faster than they'd come.

While O'Doyle gave his orders, Veronica and Sanji walked along the Picture Cavern's far edge, an amazed Lashon in tow.

"Let me get this straight,” Lashon said in his deep baritone voice. “You're saying that this room is one big textbook?"

"I think so,” Veronica said. She looked about the room, wondering why she hadn't seen it immediately. The ten-by-ten relief carvings covered the majority of the Picture Cavern's space. Thousands of them tiled the walls with even rows of perfect illustrations. A juniper tree here. A tribesman with a spear there. Cactus. Grasshoppers. Tentacle gods. Mountains. A wolf. A bow. Arrows flying. Everything that could possibly make up life in this area of the world was represented in one place or another along the walls.

Sanji stared dumbly. “Oh my goodness. This isn't religious at all. This is a classroom."

"So it seems,” Veronica said. “We are very deep in the mountain, after all, and we can only assume that the culture somehow lived down here. We know their visits to the surface were limited — some of them possibly never saw the surface at all. It's possible they used these carvings to teach their children what things looked like up on the surface."

"But how did they live down here?” Sanji asked. “It's 170 degrees Fahrenheit. We can only tolerate this temperature with the KoolSuits. You are suggesting that people lived their entire lives down here?"

"Maybe the climate was different,” Veronica said. “Maybe thousands of years ago it wasn't this hot at all. Is it possible they had some genetic or dietary way to deal with the temperature? Eskimos have so much blubber in their diet they build up huge body-fat percentages; it helps them tolerate very cold temperatures. Maybe the Chaltelians had a similar adaptive strategy."

"If it is dietary, what do they eat?” Sanji asked. “It would have to be something not yet seen. If it was genetic, they would be radically different from any human we've seen, but it is possible they have some mutation that would have allowed them to tolerate such high temperatures. Doubtful, but still a possibility. Such a mutation would have allowed them to exploit this environmental niche."

Veronica stared at the carvings. The pictures were starting to take shape in her mind, adding to her understanding. “It looks as if they read right to left, and bottom to top.” She touched a tile representing a tentacle god. Her fingers cast strange shadows from the light of her helmet-lamp, making the tentacle god seem to wriggle with life.

"I think they read via groupings,” Sanji said. “Like we use sentences to convey one idea, they use groups."

"What do you mean?"

"See this tiny, patterned line around this set of four pictures?” Sanji said, pointing to the wall. Veronica's eyes widened as she registered the many patterned lines connecting the boxes into various groups.

"Yes, you see it now,” Sanji said with a smile. “These grouped pictures tell a complicated little story. Look at the first picture.” Sanji pointed to a tentacle god standing at the mouth of a cave. “See the clouds? Anytime they wanted to represent the surface, they put in clouds. Now see the next picture?” He pointed one carving to the left, a beautiful work showing a tautly muscled tribesman carrying a spear. Veronica followed the next group to the left — the tribesman plunging the spear into a tentacle god. The next picture disturbed her greatly; three tentacle gods holding the distinct crescent knives, hacking away at the tribesman, cutting him to pieces.

"Looks like they're some bad motherfuckers,” Lashon said.

Veronica absently rubbed her chin. “So this is a story of what happens if you go against the tentacle gods’ will."

All three headlamp beams illuminated the second to last picture. They could see the detail; a severed hand flying through the air, tentacle gods wielding the crescent-knives, the expression of pain and horror on the tribesman's face. The last tile showed the tentacle gods burying the tribesman's remains. Veronica felt as if she'd been punched in the stomach.

"It's a punishment,” Veronica said. “What they did to the miners and what they did at Cerro Chaltel. It's their religion. Someone transgresses against the tribe, the tribe slaughters the transgressor. They hack them to bits, then bury them. The tribesmen acted out the will of their gods.” She felt sick with discovery. A piece of the puzzle she'd labored on for five years was finally answered — she now knew why the tribes wreaked such havoc.

"So this appears to be some of their laws,” she said. “I wonder what law Jessup and the miners broke?"

"That one seems obvious.” Sanji walked to another carving. “Look here, see these top four rows? All of the picture groups start with a tribesman or animal at the mouth of a cave. And the next picture shows that individual moving into the caves."

Veronica followed the picture groups to the left — each one showed the tribesman or animal being hacked to pieces by the tentacle gods. Her eyes scanned the wall, examining the “punishment” carving groups. Many seemed repetitive; mostly tribesmen, who were perhaps Plains Indians — Utes or Hopis, maybe — moving into the caves before being butchered.

"So it was sacrilege to come into the mountain if you were not part of the tribe,” Sanji said. “Death was the punishment for such a transgression."

"Gives me the willies,” Lashon said. “The mountain is holy ground, and anybody who comes inside is killed. Think about it. Aren't we transgressors, too?"

No one answered.

O'Doyle strode toward them, gun in hand. Lashon straightened up and stood at attention. O'Doyle's voice sounded deep and commanding. “We have to leave immediately, professors."

"What for?” Veronica said. “We're in the middle of something very important."

"We're returning to the elevator as fast as possible,” O'Doyle said politely. “There's danger down here and Connell wants everyone back at the elevator shaft ASAP."

Veronica's hands went to her hips. “Well, I really don't care what Mr. Kirkland said! He can't just boss us around, you know. He can't make us come back."

O'Doyle let out a tired sigh. “Maybe Mr. Kirkland can't order you or make you,” he said, his voice still polite. “But he can order me. And I assure you, professors, I can make you obey."

She was about to say something indignant when Sanji firmly gripped her elbow and pulled her toward the tunnel leading back to the shaft. Veronica cast a quick glance at Sanji, who returned the gaze and simply shook his head “no.” She opened her mouth to speak once more, then looked at O'Doyle's grim demeanor and shut her mouth. She let Sanji lead her out of the Picture Cavern.

The figures danced across the computer screen in front of Katerina and Achmed. Both scientists stared in bewilderment, then shook their heads.

"That's impossible,” Achmed said.

Katerina shook her head in denial of what her eyes told her. She thought for a moment, pondering the results and what it meant if they were accurate. It was mind-boggling — and entirely unacceptable.

"How long did it take us to run that equation?” Katerina asked.

"Thirty-five minutes."

"Can we shorten it up at all?"

"We can't,” Achmed said. “If we think there's a mistake in these results, we have to reenter everything from scratch, assume we made an error in the entry somewhere."

Katerina pondered that option. If the data was accurate, she needed to alert Connell immediately. But it just didn't make sense. There was no way the data could be accurate. It was a mistake. It had to be. “Run it again,” she said. “And let's make sure we do it right this time."

Kayla slid silently through the shadows. A strong breeze blew sand across the camp. The canvas covering the Quonset huts rolled with soft flapping noises.

She knelt next to the miners’ hut, sitting perfectly still, eyes slowly scanning the area. People were moving, but they were all preoccupied with their tasks. They'd been here long enough that no one bothered to look around anymore — the camp had become familiar to their eyes.

Kayla watched the limited camp traffic for five more minutes, then slid to the hut's rear window and peaked in. Six miners inside, every last one of them sleeping so soundly they might as well have been passed out. Kayla smiled, amazed at the ease of it all. Without O'Doyle and Connell around, discipline slacked off considerably. She probably wouldn't have even risked this excursion if O'Doyle wasn't in the tunnels. The miners’ expensive KoolSuits sat in limp piles on the floor or draped over tables.

Kayla watched for a few more minutes. Nothing moved. She slowly opened the hut's back door and slid inside. Six sleeping men. She could kill them all if she wanted to. Kill them all without a noise. But she wasn't there to kill anyone.

She quietly gathered up a KoolSuit and slid out of the hut. They'd certainly miss the suit. This time O'Doyle might even search the hills and find her warren. But she needed only a peek into the tunnels, and that was the last bit of information she needed before selling to the highest bidder. She'd try and penetrate the tunnels in a few hours, perhaps at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., her last action on this mission. If she could get in, great; if not, she was still in her Land Rover and out of the area by 6:00 a.m.

And a few hours after that, the bids would start rolling in.

Chapter Twenty-one

Achmed and Katerina were bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, and more than a little exhausted, but they knew they hadn't made a mistake. They'd checked the figures twice, and for the second time the equation produced the same results.

"Holy shit,” was all Katerina could say.

"Yes,” Achmed said quietly, eyes wide and fixed on the screen. “Holy shit."

It made no sense. No sense at all. But that wasn't the point right now. Why or how didn't really matter—when was obvious, and it demanded instant action.

Katerina turned and bolted from the lab, Achmed close behind, their fatigue evaporating in a flash of urgency. She screamed to a guard to bring a Jeep around. They jumped in, and sped off toward the adit opening. It would take them at least twenty minutes to reach the adit, including the time spent on foot getting up the slope. At the adit was the shaft phone, the only way to reach Connell.

She grabbed the driver's walkie-talkie and radioed a message ahead to the guard at the adit mouth. Hopefully he could pass on the message in time.

Kayla watched the two scientists burst from the lab, hop in the Jeep and make a beeline for the mine. The expressions on their faces screamed of something seriously wrong. She picked off their message to the guard at the mouth of the adit. Katerina Hayes wanted everyone out of the mine pronto. But why? Cave-in? Underground water? Poison gas? Kayla didn't know. She couldn't pick up any signals from inside the mine, as they were using that direct-line phone. What went on inside that mountain remained a mystery to her.

Things were certainly getting interesting.

Despite Sanji's slow pace, Connell's tired party made it back to the elevator shaft in only forty minutes. Connell stopped dead in his tracks when he saw not only Lybrand, but Mack and Fritz Sherwood as well.

Mack lay exhausted in the powdery dirt, looking like a bomb-blast victim, an H&K resting across his chest. Fritz leaned against the edge of the elevator shaft. His face had a grayish pallor, like that of a sick man.

Lybrand just looked embarrassed.

O'Doyle looked at the two prone men, then at Lybrand. “I told you to send them up,” he said in a quiet, angry voice. “I was very specific."

"They wouldn't go,” Lybrand said. “They insisted on waiting until everyone got back, in case someone found Jansson."

"That's my man that's lost down here,” Mack said. “I'm not leaving him behind."

Connell stepped forward, brushed past O'Doyle, and stared down at Mack.

"He's not your man, he's my man,” Connell said. “You're all mine, you all work for me, and if you ever disobey another order you'll find yourself on a plane back to Australia faster than you can think."

"I was with him when he was hurt,” Fritz said. “I have to be the last one down here, that's the least I can do."

Connell turned on him. “What you can do is pack your bags. I need Mack, I don't need you. You're fired."

Fritz started to speak, but looked too damn tired to protest. He leaned his head back against the rock and closed his eyes.

The elevator door's light changed from an “up” arrow to a “down” arrow — it was on its way. Connell checked his watch: twenty more minutes until he could get everyone to safety. Everyone had to just sit tight until then, and they'd all go up together. With everyone safely on the surface, Connell would rethink the situation. Jansson's disappearance, more importantly the severed thumb, hammered home a fact he'd missed for a long time — no amount of money was worth risking lives. He had placed the importance of finding the Dense Mass over his people's safety. Connell now realized how screwed up he was, how he'd let self-pity warp his priorities. He didn't like the revelation, not one bit.

Maybe Jansson was a spy, but probably not. Either way, someone got to Jansson, then dragged him away. O'Doyle said there was no doubt Jansson was dead — the blood splatters on the wall made that quite clear. Whoever took out Jansson wouldn't hesitate to kill again. Connell had to get his people out of there. Then he would reorganize, come down with a fully armed, fully rested, and fully prepared team. The delay could cost him the Dense Mass — but it also might save lives.

The surface phone buzzed loudly.

Connell grabbed the black handset mounted on the wall. “Kirkland here."

"Mr. Kirkland, this is Bill Cook,” the voice answered. “I'm up at the adit mouth. We just got a radio message from Dr. Hayes. She's on her way up here now to talk to you directly."

"What was the message?"

"She said to get everyone out of the mine immediately,” Cook said. “She said it was urgent."

Connell's grip tightened on the handset. The knot in his stomach tightened as well. He suddenly realized he had to piss very badly.

"Tell her we're already doing that, Mr. Cook. And get her on the phone the second she arrives. And do not, I repeat, do not send anyone else down, is that clear?"

"Yes sir, Mr. Kirkland."

Connell hung up. Veronica, Sanji, Lybrand, O'Doyle, Mack, Lashon, and Fritz all looked at him. Their lives were in danger, and it was his fault. Connell checked his watch. Something bad was brewing, all right. He just hoped it would stay away for another eighteen minutes.

From far above, he heard the faint, hollow, metallic echoes of the descending elevator.

Sonny now understood how a rabbit felt just before the bobcat's fatal bite. He lay on his bunk, shaking. Fear festered in his gut like a worm in the bottom of a tequila bottle, white and soft and disgusting.

That creeping feeling, the one that had grown steadily worse ever since he'd arrived at Funeral Mountain, was now so intense he could barely stand it. But he was safe inside the Quonset hut. Wasn't he?

The image of the crude cave drawing popped unbidden into his head. It meant something, but what? What did it mean to Anderson and the other geology students back in 1942? Sonny wondered if the students felt as he did now. He wondered if Jessup's people had felt it — and ignored it.

Sonny's eyes bolted wide and his breath locked up tight. Jessup. The newspaper article. The cave drawing's significance suddenly slammed home with the weight of an avalanche.

Sonofabitch.

He sat up in his bed, eyes darting about the room like prey trying to spot a lurking predator. Sonny threw on his backpack and ran for the door. Screw the Hummer, screw the money, and screw that sonofabitch Kirkland. He'd send for the Hummer later, it didn't really matter at the moment. He had enough supplies in his backpack to get him to Milford. That trip would be a stupid venture for most people, but after forty years in the desert he knew he could make it easily. Sonny pushed open the door of the hut with one hand, the other hand furiously thumbing the Hopi charm on his belt.

Katerina and Achmed gasped for breath as they reached the adit. Normally the short walk up the path was strenuous but manageable. Sprinting up the incline, however, was a different story.

Cook handed the phone to her when she reached the top, Connell already waiting on the other end. The first load of miners was walking out of the adit — the elevator was already heading back down.

"Mr. Kirkland!"

"What's the news, Dr. Hayes?"

"Oh my god! Get everyone out of there now!"

"We're doing that Dr. Hayes, but the elevator only moves so fast. Calm down and tell me what's going on."

Katerina stooped over at the waist, one hand on a knee and the other holding the handset to her ear. She took a big breath and tried to control her heaving stomach. “Those anomalies we talked about. You remember?"

"Of course I do."

"Well, there was another one since you went below. Achmed and I ran some numbers on the readings. The time between the epicenters and the readings match data for tunneling through that same amount of rock. We're almost sure the anomalies were cave-ins caused by open-face blasting and natural fall-away. The path heads straight for the top of the shaft! There's no question, it's not a natural occurrence!"

Connell paused. “Tell me that again so I know I heard you right, Dr. Hayes. And this time in English."

Katerina took a deep, pulling breath, then answered. “The cave-ins weren't natural. They were man-made. Someone is digging their way out of the mountain, and they're coming straight for the shaft."

Connell huddled Mack, Veronica, Sanji and Fritz near the edge of the elevator platform. Veronica and Sanji stood nervously, while Mack and Fritz just lay in the powdery silt. Fritz was sound asleep, apparently unconcerned with his recent firing. Connell couldn't blame Fritz and Mack; they'd been in the scorching tunnels for over twelve hours, crawling, climbing, searching.

O'Doyle, Lybrand, and Lashon stood twenty feet farther down the tunnel, their backs to the others, their guns ready to fire. They blocked any access from the caves to the elevator.

"Connell,” Veronica said loudly. “Would you please tell us what the hell is going on?"

"It's probably nothing, Dr. Reeves,” Connell said, staring up the elevator shaft and checking his watch for the tenth time in the last two minutes.

"Nothing? Oh, then maybe you can tell me why there are armed guards with machine guns pointing down the tunnel?"

Connell sighed. Might as well tell them, they'd find out eventually. “A miner, Brian Jansson, came up missing, as you already know. We have reason to believe there's someone else down here. This other party may have hurt or even killed Jansson. We have to get everyone to the surface and now."

Veronica said nothing, perhaps suddenly realizing how precarious their situation could be. Over two miles underground there was only one way to safety. For once at least, Connell noted, she stopped talking.

The elevator echoes were louder now, a sound marking the teasing promise of safety. He checked his watch, then looked back up the elevator shaft. Far up the shaft, he thought he could see the bottom of the elevator.

Katerina, Achmed, and Cook sprinted through the adit toward the shaft mouth. Her legs screamed and her breath came in burning gasps — she'd have to get in shape when all this was over. She'd spent too much time in a lab parked on her behind.

She felt the rumble before she heard the horrible, grinding noise of falling rock. She tried to stop, but lost her footing on the loose gravel and fell hard. Her knee took most of the fall, sending hot pain shooting up her leg. She looked up to see Achmed clumsily hit the ground, then spring back up. Cook helped her to her feet and they started forward again.

Strange noises shot down the narrow adit toward them. The sound of hammering on rock and metal filled the air. Other sounds filtered through as well, sounds she couldn't quite place, sounds that chilled her soul. If she hadn't already been sprinting forward with the others, she would have turned and run the other way.

That would have been the wisest choice she ever made, but for Katerina Hayes, it was already too late.

The din of the lowering elevator drowned out all sound from the top of the shaft. Connell heard nothing except the grinding of gears and squeaks of metal. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Nothing that is, until the snap.

The group had been nervously talking among themselves, waiting for the elevator to arrive. The “snap” was a sudden, painfully sharp screech of metal that echoed incessantly through the long shaft. Conversation ended instantly. A brief second passed where all seemed to wait, turning to look up the elevator shaft, to see the cause of the noise.

Connell saw the danger first. The elevator was on its way, all right, but quite a bit faster than normal and tilting to one side, lightly scraping against the smooth shaft wall with a blazing orange stream of sparks.

"Run!” Connell screamed, turning and sprinting away from the shaft. For once nobody said anything; they just turned and bolted down the tunnel in a mad scramble for safety.

O'Doyle and Lashon waited until Connell, Veronica, Mack, and Sanji passed their position. Just as they turned to follow them, O'Doyle looked back and realized they were one head short.

"Fritz!” O'Doyle screamed. Fritz was still asleep, oblivious of the noise and the danger. His eyes fluttered open and he weakly lifted his head. O'Doyle started forward, but the younger Lashon was much faster, sprinting the twenty feet to the elevator with long, powerful strides.

The elevator, cut free from its supporting cable, twisted on the way down. One side caught the wall; the elevator flipped and tumbled down the shaft, filling the tunnels with the horrid, deafening screech of metal on rock. Amplified by the narrow space and rock walls, the painful noises sounded like a demon erupting from hell.

"Lashon, no!” O'Doyle shouted, but it was too late. Just as the tall man reached Fritz and threw an arm around his waist, the elevator slammed into the bottom of the shaft. Five tons of metal hit the ground at terminal velocity, smashing like a bomb blast. The ground shuddered. Bits of rock crumbled from the ceiling. Everyone hit the deck — some voluntarily, while some simply fell from the impact tremors. Thick clouds of dust and dirt billowed forth from the bottom of the elevator shaft, filling the tunnel with choking darkness.

Kayla trained her binoculars on the adit mouth. No sign of the guard and the two scientists. She panned back down to the camp, seeing nothing out of the ordinary. The exhausted-looking miners were filtering back into their Quonset. Almost everyone remained asleep, except for four guards who patrolled diligently, fully-automatic HK416 rifle with 30-round magazines at the ready.

Apparently playtime was over. She'd be extra careful if she had to go into the camp again. It had all been fun and games, but now if she made one mistake and someone opened up with one of the H&Ks, she'd be dead in a second. That had made the game much more challenging. She panned back to the adit. Something interesting was going on in there. Something interesting indeed.

Katerina hadn't quite reached the end of the adit when it happened. The blow to her knee slowed her. She felt a jagged chip of limestone grinding away under her skin, and she couldn't keep up with Achmed and the guard.

Up ahead the guard saw something, yelled in fear, then let loose with the H&K. The roar of automatic weapon fire tore through the air. The deafening sound filled the small tunnel, so loud that she put her hands to her ears and screamed, her eyes closed and her face scrunched in fear and confusion. The firing stopped suddenly — a splatter of something hot and wet hit her face. She wiped it away, then opened her eyes.

It was blood.

She stared at her red-smeared hands. She didn't know if it was the guard's blood or Achmed's blood and she never got the chance to find out. A noise up ahead drew her attention back down the adit. A noise like dead leaves rattling across concrete.

The way it moved. It was something that would take her mind several seconds to comprehend, to accept.

She didn't even have that long.

A crescent-shaped platinum knife flashed out, slashing her abdomen and nearly cutting her in half. She gasped in fear, at least tried to, but it was impossible with her diaphragm separated from her lungs. She hit the ground, eyes still fixed on the horrible, flashing, waving thing that was killing her.

Through her binoculars, Kayla watched a small, metallic shape crawl from the adit mouth. It looked like a spider, but with only four legs. She adjusted the focus, trying to identify the strange creature. As she gazed in confusion, multicolored lights seemed to flash from inside the adit.

The spider moved aside, and Kayla's jaw dropped in astonishment, confusion, and fear. Bizarre creatures, each slightly bigger than a man, rushed out of the adit, past the spider, and spilled down the mountain, soft bodies and boneless limbs giving them a graceful, fluid movement. She couldn't say they ran, because the word running wasn't exactly right. Perhaps flowing was a more fitting description. Hundreds of them poured down the incline with speed and purpose, racing towards the camp. Their colors flashed brilliantly in the night, lighting up the ground before them with an angry, multicolored intensity, oranges and reds and yellows playing off the rocky limestone slope and dirt path.

They looked like a thick, glowing medicine ball with tentacles, three on the bottom that acted as legs, three on the top — juxtaposed above the spaces between the lower tentacles — that looked like arms. The top tentacles, the arms, held long, strangely curved metal objects, obviously some kind of knife.

She was speechless. Thoughtless, in fact, as she watched them hit the camp like a tidal wave. The first guard barely saw them coming, he managed a single burst from his H&K, and then they were on him, hacking and cutting and tearing.

His shots alerted the other guards, one of whom hit the general alarm. Every light in the camp instantly burst on to the accompaniment of a blaring Klaxon. The remaining guards on duty ran toward the shots, weapons at the ready.

The guard who'd hit the alarm turned the corner of the lab just as four of the flowing, flashing creatures reached the building. The guard stared, frozen. They moved so quickly he never even got a shot off. They swarmed on him like piranha, obscuring him from her view. Body parts and great gouts of blood flew through the air, splattering an alarming red against the building's white walls.

From his vantage point at the main gate, Cho watched in horror as the sickening, glowing creatures hacked Frank Hutchins into a dozen pieces, his blood splattering in long streaks against the white lab building walls.

Jessup's demons, he thought with clarity he found odd, considering the insane situation that danced before his eyes. He wasn't crazy after all — they're real.

The main gate was the camp's farthest point away from the mine adit. Cho hid behind a boulder, cringing at the way the creatures lit up the night, glowing and pulsing like some twisted, squishy string of Christmas lights. The way they moved, so fluid, so boneless, like no living thing he'd ever seen, except maybe for a jellyfish or a sea slug.

The Klaxon blared. Cho waited, hoping some miracle might allow Frank to emerge alive from the horrific pile of demons. Blood flew. Cho watched in dumbstruck awe as one of Frank's feet tumbled across the sand.

Jesus, Frank.

Cho opened up on full automatic. The demons shuddered under the attack, quivering in instant death throes, and fell to the ground in lifeless heaps.

Hundreds of the things raged through the camp. The bizarre conflict was already over. Cho's brief battle with his fight-or-flight response ended quickly. He turned and sprinted out the main gate and down the sloping road.

It was only a few flashes of red, yellow, and orange that let him know something was behind him. Still running, he threw a glance over his shoulder but couldn't get a good look at it.

Cho turned and ran backward, firing on full automatic. Screaming, he emptied the magazine into the glowing thing, but it kept coming. It whip-snapped a glowing tentacle — something metallic flew through the air. He ducked, but felt a slicing pain in his shoulder.

His H&K was empty, the trigger making useless clicking noises. The thing was still coming, now only ten feet away. Cho pulled his pearl-handled .45 and squeezed off three rounds — all hits. Whatever the hell it was, it dropped in a lifeless heap on the sandy ground, its mysterious light instantly fading away, leaving a boneless gray corpse behind. He turned and ran before the thing even stopped twitching.

He only made it about two hundred yards when his vision grew spotty. He slowed and looked at his shoulder — blood covered his entire arm, glistening in the moonlight. He stumbled, tried to catch himself, but fell to the ground. His head smacked loudly into a rock.

He lay still.

They swarmed over the camp, pouring in, around, and over buildings. Screams, male and female, filled the night air along with the creatures’ odd sounds. Odd, angry, aggressive sounds. It reminded Kayla vaguely of screeching car tires on hot summer asphalt, but with many different pitches and tones.

The guard barracks burst open. The off-duty guards, dragged from sleep by the blaring Klaxons, came out firing. They ran toward the oncoming mob, firing on full automatic all the way. Somewhere in her mind, it surprised Kayla that the things could be hit, could bleed, could fall in a lifeless heap on the desert floor. Something flew through the air and smashed the forward guard's head like a rotten melon. He dropped instantly, body jittering in the throes of death, a fist-sized rock buried in his skull.

The guards stayed together in a loose line for as long as they could, but within seconds the creatures swarmed over them like army ants. The hacking began.

Kayla lost count, both of dead EarthCore people and of the things that had poured from the mountain. Isolated gunfire continued for several minutes, as did the creatures’ screeches. Human screams, so prevalent in the first few minutes of the conflict, quickly died out.

Someone made it into the equipment shed. A Land Rover ripped through the garage door in a splintering cloud of wood and metal, camp lights flashing off the green paint and the blue EarthCore logo. One of the creatures stood defiantly in the vehicle's path, tentacles waving in psychotic scarlets and murderous yellows. The Land Rover plowed into the creature, which splattered on the grille like a water balloon dropped from twenty stories up. Impressions of gooey orange blood registered in Kayla's brain, but she couldn't be sure of the color under the garish camp lights. The Land Rover turned hard to the right, heading for the downslope gate, trying to escape the camp. The creatures hurled rocks at the vehicle. A dozen or more bounced off every side like wind-driven hail. One finally hit the front windshield, shattering it.

The Rover swerved violently toward the diesel fuel tank. Kayla watched in awe as the Rover smashed through the tank's walls, sending ten thousand gallons of diesel splashing through the camp.

She didn't know how long the battle went on. Gunfire echoed through the camp as someone fought desperately for life. A last human scream punctuated the chaos — the gunfire ceased.

The creatures’ clicks and screeches dominated the night's roaring sounds. They freely moved through the camp, setting fire to everything that would burn — including the spilled gas. Flames shot into the night sky as the creatures tore down the light poles and knocked down walls. As they attacked every structure, the Klaxons dropped off one by one until the alarm vanished, leaving only the crackling fire and the creatures’ strange noises. Flickering orange lit the camp. Kayla watched, barely able to believe what she saw, as the creatures screamed their victory to the night. They crowded near to the flames; so close they had to be blistering from the raging heat. They continued to scream, the sounds of hundreds of tires skidding across open pavement. Kayla sat in her camouflaged warren, paralyzed, unmoving. But the show was far from over.

Explosions ripped from the equipment shed as vehicles succumbed to fire. The diesel fuel continued to burn, still the brightest light in the camp. There were more of the creatures now, hundreds of them, their soft bodies moving to and fro in the demolished camp. The creatures butchered the human corpses, cutting them up into smaller and smaller pieces, then burying the diced remains.

After what could have been minutes or several hours — Kayla had lost all concept of time — the fires began to die down. The creatures seemed sluggish, tired perhaps, but they continued to work. They tore down the blackened Quonset huts, burying the pieces deep in the desert sand.

The first rays of sun illuminated the morning sky with a light the color of a glowing coal. As a unit, the creatures headed for the slope, dragging their dead along with them. Most moved very slowly, some so weak they had to be dragged up by others. They tackled the incline and entered the adit. Kayla watched in rapt attention, unable to look away as they slowly moved out of sight. When the last one disappeared into the adit, she turned her attention back to the camp.

But there was no camp. Kayla lowered her binoculars; with normal sight she could barely tell there had ever been a camp at all. With the binocs, she could see the lumpy remains of a few buildings, the diesel tank's sand-covered concrete footing, here and there a small piece of torn metal reflecting the morning sun. But for the most part the camp had simply ceased to exist.

She wondered if she should move farther away from the camp, but she knew the monsters hadn't seen her. That much was obvious — they destroyed everything and everyone in sight, but they'd never come for her. She decided to keep her location — they'd missed her once, if they came out a second time, they'd likely miss her again.

Her mind finally clicked back into gear. Opportunity? She'd come to the desert looking for it, and now here it was. Much more opportunity than she'd ever dreamed. Screw the South Africans, screw the Russians, and screw the platinum. They offered only money, and money couldn't buy her what she wanted most in the world.

She didn't know what, exactly, she had just witnessed, but she knew damn well no one had witnessed it before. What were those things, some kind of monster? An experiment? Aliens? They couldn't be aliens — what race intelligent enough to use space travel would use knives to attack automatic weapons? Whatever the creatures were, they were primitive. And, in truth, it didn't matter what they were, not for her purposes, anyway.

Because whatever they were, they were her ticket back into the NSA.

Kayla felt joy wash over her. She flipped on the COMSEC unit and jammed all frequencies. She programmed it to break jamming every fifteen minutes and do a five-second scan of all frequencies — if someone made it out of camp, they'd probably call for help. For her sudden and inspired plan to work, she had to make sure no one got away.