The Descent

'Jeff Long has achieved something that has so far evaded both high-caste genre writers and literary colonisers: he has returned science fiction to its original vigour and – while maintaining all the headlong readability we associate with the form – made it a worthwhile moral tool again. The Descent is SF for the 2000s, from a writer who simply won't be told what he can't do. There should be more like it' M. John Harrison

'A tour de force. A subterranean realm so expertly realised and credible, we feel it has existed all along. A dark, pervading, benighted beauty. If Kim Stanley Robinson's Martian colonists had headed down instead of up, this is the world they would have found' James Lovegrove

'Without question, the best thing I've read so far this year. Long proves himself to be a wonderful storyteller. A stunning tour de force' Peter Crowther

'This flat-out, gears grinding, bumper-car ride into the pits of hell is one major takedown of a read. Long writes with unearthly force and vision. What emerges is a War of the Worlds against a world that can't lose. A page-burner of a book' Lorenzo Carcaterra

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Fiction

Angel of Light The Ascent Empire of Bones

Non-fiction

Outlaw: The Story of Claude Dallas

Duel of Eagles: The Mexican and US Fight for the Alamo

THE DESCENT

Jeff Long

Copyright © Jeff Long 1999

All rights reserved

For my Helenas,

A Chain Unbroken

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is a fairy tale that writers are recluses quietly cohabiting with their muse. This writer, anyway, benefited from a world of other people's ideas and support. Ironically, ascent informed important moments in The Descent 's genesis. The book began as an idea that I presented to a climber, my friend and manager, Bill Gross, who spent the next fifteen months helping me refine the story. His genius and encouragement fueled every page. Early on he shared the project with two other creative spirits in the film world, Bruce Berman and Kevin McMahon at Village Roadshow Pictures. Their support made possible my 're-entry' into New York publishing. There a mountaineer and writer named Jon Waterman introduced me to the talents of another climber, literary agent Susan Golomb. She labored to make the story presentable, cohesive, and true to itself. With her sharp eye and memory of terrain, she would make a great sniper. I thank my editors: Karen Rinaldi for her literary candor and electricity, Richard Marek for his dedicated grasp and professionalism, and Panagiotis Gianopoulos, a rising luminary in the publishing world. I want to add special thanks to my nameless, faceless copy editor. This is my seventh book, and I only learned now that, for professional reasons, copy editors are never revealed to writers. Like monks, they toil in anonymity. I specifically requested the best copy editor in the country, and whoever he or she is, my wish was granted. My deep appreciation to Jim Walsh, another of the hidden minds behind the book.

I am not a spelunker, nor an epic poet. In other words, I needed guides to penetrate my imaginary hell. It was my father, the geologist, who set me roaming in childhood mazes, from old mines to honeycombed sandstone structures, from Pennsylvania to Mesa Verde and Arches national monuments. Besides the obvious and well-used inspirations for my poetic license, I'm obliged to several contemporary works. Alice K. Turner's The History of Hell (Harcourt Brace) was stunning in its scope, scholarship, and wicked humor. Dante had his Virgil; I had my Turner. Another instructor of the underworld was the indispensable Atlas of the Great Caves of the World, by Paul Courbon. 'Lechuguilla Restoration: Techniques Learned in the Southwest Focus,' by Val Hildreth-Werker and Jim C. Werker, gave me a 'deeper' appreciation of cave environments. Donald Dale Jackson's Underground Worlds (Time-Life Books) never quit amazing me with the beauty of subterranean places. Finally, it was my friend Steve Harrigan's remarkable novel about cave diving, Jacob's Well (Simon and Schuster), that truly anchored my nightmares about dark, deep, tubular realms.

The Descent was informed by many other people's work and ideas, too many to list without a bibliography. However, Turin Shroud , by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince

(HarperCollins), provided the basis for my own Shroud chapter. 'Egil's Bones,' by Jesse L. Byock (Scientific American, January 1995), provided me a disease to go with my masks. Unveiled: Nuns Talking, by Mary Loudon (Templegate Publishers), gave me a peek behind the veil. Stephen S. Hall's Mapping the Next Millennium (Vintage) opened my mind to the world of cartography. Peter Sloss, of the Marine Geology and Geophysics Computer Graphics at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, generously displayed his state-of-the-art mapmaking. Philip Lieberman's The Biology and Evolution of Language (Harvard) helped me backward

into the origins of speech, as did Dr Rende, a speech language pathologist at the University of Colorado. Michael D. Coe's Breaking the Maya Code (Thames and Hudson), David Roberts's 'The Decipherment of Ancient Maya' (Atlantic Monthly, September 1991), Colin Renfrew's 'The Origins of Indo-European Languages' ( Scientific American, October 1989), and especially Robert Wright's 'The Quest for the Mother Tongue' (Atlantic Monthly, April 1991) gave me a window on linguistic discovery. 'Unusual Unity' by Stephen Jay Gould (Natural History, April 1997) and

'The African Emergence and Early Asian Dispersals of the Genus Homo' by Roy Larick and Russell L. Ciochon (American Scientist , November-December 1996) got my wheels seriously spinning and led me to further readings. Cliff Watts, yet another climber and friend, guided me to an internet article on prions, by Stanley B. Prusiner, and gave medical advice about everything from altitude to vision. Another climber, Jim Gleason, tried his damnedest to keep my junk science to a minimum, all in vain I'm afraid he'll feel. I only hope that my plundering and mangling of fact may pave some amused diversion.

Early on, Graham Henderson, a fellow Tibet traveler, gave my journey direction with his observations about The Inferno. Throughout, Steve Long helped map the journey, both on paper and in countless conversations. Pam Novotny loaned me her Zen-like patience and calm, in addition to editorial assistance. Angela Thieman, Melissa Ward, and Margo Timmins provided constant inspiration. I am grateful to Elizabeth Crook, Craig Blockwick, Arthur Lindquist-Kliessler, and Cindy Butler for their crucial reminders of a light at the end of the tunnel.

Finally, thank you, Barbara and Helena, for putting up with the chaos that finally came to order. Love may not conquer all, but happily it conquers us.

BOOK ONE

DISCOVERY

It is easy to go down into Hell...; but to climb back again, to retrace one's steps to the upper air – there's the rub....

– VIRGIL, Aeneid

1

IKE

The Himalayas,

Tibet Autonomous Region

1988

In the beginning was the word. Or words.

Whatever these were.

They kept their lights turned off. The exhausted trekkers huddled in the dark cave and faced the peculiar writing. Scrawled with a twig, possibly, dipped in liquid radium or some other radioactive paint, the fluorescent pictographs floated in the black recesses. Ike let them savor the distraction. None of them seemed quite ready to focus on the storm beating against the mountainside outside.

With night descending and the trail erased by snow and wind and their yak herders in mutinous flight with most of the gear and food, Ike was relieved to have shelter of any kind. He was still pretending for them that this was part of their trip. In fact they were off the map. He'd never heard of this hole-in-the-wall hideout. Nor seen glow-in-the-dark caveman graffiti.

'Runes,' gushed a knowing female voice. 'Sacred runes left by a wandering monk.' The alien calligraphy glowed with soft violet light in the cave's cold bowels. The luminous hieroglyphics reminded Ike of his old dorm wall with its black-light posters. All he needed was a lash of Hendrix plundering Dylan's anthem, say, and a whiff of plump Hawaiian red sinsemilla. Anything to vanquish the howl of awful wind. Outside in the cold distance, a wildcat did growl...

'Those are no runes,' said a man. 'It's Bonpo.' A Brooklyn beat, the accent meant Owen. Ike had nine clients here, only two of them male. They were easy to keep straight.

'Bonpo!' one of the women barked at Owen. The coven seemed to take collective delight in savaging Owen and Bernard, the other man. Ike had been spared so far. They treated him as a harmless Himalayan hillbilly. Fine with him.

'But the Bonpo were pre-Buddhist,' the woman expounded.

The women were mostly Buddhist students from a New Age university. These things mattered very much to them.

Their goal was – or had been – Mount Kailash, the pyramidal giant just east of the Indian border. 'A Canterbury Tale for the World Pilgrim' was how he'd advertised the trip. A kor – a Tibetan walkabout – to and around the holiest mountain in the world. Eight thousand per head, incense included. The problem was, somewhere along the trail he'd managed to misplace the mountain. It galled him. They were lost. Beginning at dawn today, the sky had changed from blue to milky gray. The herders had quietly bolted with the yaks. He had yet to announce that their tents and food were history. The first sloppy snowflakes had started kissing their Gore-Tex hoods just an hour ago, and Ike had taken this cave for shelter. It was a good call. He was the only one who knew it, but they were now about to get sodomized by an old-fashioned Himalayan tempest.

Ike felt his jacket being tugged to one side, and knew it would be Kora, wanting a private word. 'How bad is it?' she whispered. Depending on the hour and day, Kora was his lover, base-camp shotgun, or business associate. Of late, it was a challenge

estimating which came first for her, the business of adventure or the adventure of business. Either way, their little trekking company was no longer charming to her.

Ike saw no reason to front-load it with negatives. 'We've got a great cave,' he said.

'Gee.'

'We're still in the black, head-count-wise.'

'The itinerary's in ruins. We were behind as it was.'

'We're fine. We'll take it out of the Siddhartha's Birthplace segment.' He kept the worry out of his voice, but for once his sixth sense, or whatever it was, had come up short, and that bothered him. 'Besides, getting a little lost will give them bragging rights.'

'They don't want bragging rights. They want schedule. You don't know these people. They're not your friends. We'll get sued if they don't make their Thai Air flight on the nineteenth.'

'These are the mountains,' said Ike. 'They'll understand.' People forgot. Up here, it was a mistake to take even your next breath for granted.

'No, Ike. They won't understand. They have real jobs. Real obligations. Families.' That was the rub. Again. Kora wanted more from life. She wanted more from her pathless Pathfinder.

'I'm doing the best I can,' Ike said.

Outside, the storm went on horsewhipping the cave mouth. Barely May, it wasn't supposed to be this way. There should have been plenty of time to get his bunch to, around, and back from Kailash. The bane of mountaineers, the monsoon normally didn't spill across the mountains this far north. But as a former Everester himself, Ike should have known better than to believe in rain shadows or in schedules. Or in luck. They were in for it this time. The snow would seal their pass shut until late August. That meant he was going to have to buy space on a Chinese truck and shuttle them home via Lhasa – and that came out of his land costs. He tried calculating in his head, but their quarrel overcame him.

'You do know what I mean by Bonpo,' a woman said. Nineteen days into the trip, and Ike still couldn't link their spirit nicknames with the names in their passports. One woman, was it Ethel or Winifred, now preferred Green Tara, mother deity of Tibet. A pert Doris Day look-alike swore she was special friends with the Dalai Lama. For weeks now Ike had been listening to them celebrate the life of cavewomen. Well, he thought, here's your cave, ladies. Slum away.

They were sure his name – Dwight David Crockett – was an invention like their own. Nothing could convince them he wasn't one of them, a dabbler in past lives. One evening around a campfire in northern Nepal, he'd regaled them with tales of Andrew Jackson, pirates on the Mississippi, and his own legendary death at the Alamo. He'd meant it as a joke, but only Kora got it.

'You should know perfectly well,' the woman went on, 'there was no written language in Tibet before the late fifth century.'

'No written language that we know about,' Owen said.

'Next you'll be saying this is Yeti language.'

It had been like this for days. You'd think they'd run out of air. But the higher they went, the more they argued.

'This is what we get for pandering to civilians,' Kora muttered to Ike. Civilians was her catch-all: eco-tourists, pantheist charlatans, trust funders, the overeducated. She was a street girl at heart.

'They're not so bad,' he said. 'They're just looking for a way into Oz, same as us.'

'Civilians.'

Ike sighed. At times like this, he questioned his self-imposed exile. Living apart from the world was not easy. There was a price to be paid for choosing the less-traveled road. Little things, bigger ones. He was no longer that rosy-cheeked lad

who had come with the Peace Corps. He still had the cheekbones and cowled brow and careless mane. But a dermatologist on one of his treks had advised him to stay out of the high-altitude sun before his face turned to boot leather. Ike had never considered himself God's gift to women, but he saw no reason to trash what looks he still had. He'd lost two of his back molars to Nepal's dearth of dentists, and another tooth to a falling rock on the backside of Everest. And not so long ago, in his Johnnie Walker Black and Camels days, he'd taken to serious self-abuse, even flirting with the lethal west face of Makalu. He'd quit the smoke and booze cold when some British nurse told him his voice sounded like a Rudyard Kipling punchline. Makalu still needed slaying, of course. Though many mornings he even wondered about that.

Exile went deeper than the cosmetics or even prime health, of course. Self-doubt came with the territory, a wondering about what might have been, had he stayed the course back in Jackson. Rig work. Stone masonry. Maybe mountain guiding in the Tetons, or outfitting for hunters. No telling. He'd spent the last eight years in Nepal and Tibet watching himself slowly devolve from the Golden Boy of the Himalayas into one more forgotten surrogate of the American empire. He'd grown old inside. Even now there were days when Ike felt eighty. Next week was his thirty-first birthday.

'Would you look at this?' rose a cry. 'What kind of mandala is that? The lines are all twisty.'

Ike looked at the circle. It was hanging on the wall like a luminous moon. Mandalas were meditation aids, blueprints for divinity's palaces. Normally they consisted of circles within circles containing squared lines. By visualizing it just so, a 3-D architecture was supposed to appear above the mandala's flat surface. This one, though, looked like scrambled snakes.

Ike turned on his light. End of mystery, he congratulated himself. Even he was stunned by the sight.

'My God,' said Kora.

Where, a moment before, the fluorescent words had hung in magical suspense, a nude corpse stood rigidly propped upon a stone shelf along the back wall. The words weren't written on stone. They were written on him. The mandala was separate, painted on the wall to his right side.

A set of rocks formed a crude stairway up to his stage, and various passersby had attached katas – long white prayer scarves – to cracks in the stone ceiling. The katas sucked back and forth in the draft like gently disturbed ghosts.

The man's grimace was slightly bucktoothed from mummification, and his eyes were calcified to chalky blue marbles. Otherwise the extreme cold and high altitude had left him perfectly preserved. Under the harsh beam of Ike's headlamp, the lettering was faint and red upon his emaciated limbs and belly and chest.

That he was a traveler was self-evident. In these regions, everyone was a pilgrim or a nomad or a salt trader or a refugee. But, judging from his scars and unhealed wounds and a metal collar around his neck and a warped, badly mended broken left arm, this particular Marco Polo had endured a journey beyond imagination. If flesh is memory, his body cried out a whole history of abuse and enslavement.

They stood beneath the shelf and goggled at the suffering. Three of the women – and Owen – began weeping. Ike alone approached. Probing here and there with his light beam, he reached out to touch one shin with his ice ax: hard as fossil wood.

Of all the obvious insults, the one that stood out most was his partial castration. One of the man's testicles had been yanked away, not cut, not even bitten – the edges of the tear were too ragged – and the wound had been cauterized with fire. The burn scars radiated out from his groin in a hairless keloid starburst. Ike couldn't get over the raw scorn of it. Man's tenderest part, mutilated, then doctored with a torch.

'Look,' someone whimpered. 'What did they do to his nose?'

Midcenter on the battered face was a ring unlike anything he'd ever seen before.

This was no silvery Gen-X body piercing. The ring, three inches across and crusted with blood, was plugged deep in his septum, almost up into the skull. It hung to his bottom lip, as black as his beard. It was, thought Ike, utilitarian, large enough to control cattle.

Then he got a little closer and his repulsion altered. The ring was brutal. Blood and smoke and filth had coated it almost black, but Ike could plainly see the dull gleam of solid gold.

Ike turned to his people and saw nine pairs of frightened eyes beseeching him from beneath hoods and visors. Everyone had their lights on now. No one was arguing.

'Why?' wept one of the women.

A couple of the Buddhists had reverted to Christianity and were on their knees, crossing themselves. Owen was rocking from side to side, murmuring Kaddish.

Kora came close. 'You beautiful bastard.' She giggled. Ike started. She was talking to the corpse.

'What did you say?'

'We're off the hook. They're not going to hit us up for refunds after all. We don't have to provide their holy mountain anymore. They've got something better.'

'Let up, Kora. Give them some credit. They're not ghouls.'

'No? Look around, Ike.'

Sure enough, cameras were stealing into view in ones and twos. There was a flash, then another. Their shock gave way to tabloid voyeurism.

In no time the entire cast was blazing away with eight-hundred-dollar point-and-shoots. Motor drives made an insect hum. The lifeless flesh flared in their artificial lightning. Ike moved out of frame, and welcomed the corpse like a savior. It was unbelievable. Famished, cold, and lost, they couldn't have been happier.

One of the women had climbed the stepping-stones and was kneeling to one side of the nude, her head tilted sideways.

She looked down at them. 'But he's one of us,' she said.

'What's that supposed to mean?'

'Us. You and me. A white man.'

Someone else framed it in less vulgar terms. 'A Caucasian male?'

'That's crazy,' someone objected. 'Here? In the middle of nowhere?'

Ike knew she was right. The white flesh, the hair on its forearms and chest, the blue eyes, the cheekbones so obviously non-Mongoloid. But the woman wasn't pointing to his hairy arms or blue eyes or slender cheekbones. She was pointing at the hieroglyphics painted on his thigh. Ike aimed his light at the other thigh. And froze. The text was in English. Modern English. Only upside down.

It came to him. The body hadn't been written upon after death. The man had written upon himself in life. He'd used his own body as a blank page. Upside down. He'd inscribed his journal notes on the only parchment guaranteed to travel with him. Now Ike saw how the lettering wasn't just painted on, but crudely tattooed.

Wherever he could reach, the man had jotted bits of testimony. Abrasions and filth obscured some of the writing, particularly below the knees and around his ankles. The rest of it could easily have been dismissed as random and lunatic. Numbers mixed with words and phrases, especially on the outer edges of each thigh, where he'd apparently decided there was extra room for new entries. The clearest passage lay across his lower stomach.

'"All the world will be in love with night,"' Ike read aloud,'"and pay no worship to the garish sun."'

'Gibberish,' snapped Owen, badly spooked.

'Bible talk,' Ike sympathized.

'No, it's not,' piped up Kora. 'That's not from the Bible. It's Shakespeare. Romeo and

Juliet.'

Ike felt the group's repugnance. Indeed, why would this tortured creature choose for his obituary the most famous love story ever written? A story about opposing clans. A tale of love transcending violence. The poor stiff had been out of his gourd on thin air and solitude. It was no coincidence that in the highest monasteries on earth, men endlessly obsessed about delusion. Hallucinations were a given up here. Even the Dalai Lama joked about it.

'And so,' Ike said, 'he's white. He knew his Shakespeare. That makes him no older than two or three hundred years.'

It was becoming a parlor game. Their fear was shifting to morbid delight. Forensics as recreation.

'Who is this guy?' one woman asked.

'A slave?'

'An escaped prisoner?'

Ike said nothing. He went nose-to-nose with the gaunt face, hunting for clues. Tell your journey, he thought. Speak your escape. Who shackled you with gold? Nothing. The marble eyes ignored their curiosity. The grimace enjoyed its voiceless riddles. Owen had joined them on the shelf, reading from the opposite shoulder. 'RAF.'

Sure enough, the left deltoid bore a tattoo with the letters RAF beneath an eagle. It was right side up and of commercial quality. Ike grasped the cold arm.

'Royal Air Force,' he translated.

The puzzle assembled. It even half-explained the Shakespeare, if not the chosen lines.

'He was a pilot?' asked the Paris bob. She seemed charmed.

'Pilot. Navigator. Bombardier.' Ike shrugged. 'Who knows?'

Like a cryptographer, he bent to inspect the words and numbers twining the flesh. Line after line, he traced each clue to its dead end. Here and there he punctuated complete thoughts with a jab of his fingertip. The trekkers backed away, letting him work through the cyphers. He seemed to know what he was doing.

Ike circled back and tried a string in reverse. It made sense this time. Yet it made no sense. He got out his topographical map of the Himalayan chain and found the longitude and latitude, but snorted at their nexus. No way, he thought, and lifted his gaze across the wreckage of a human body. He looked back at the map. Could it be?

'Have some.' The smell of French-pressed gourmet coffee made him blink. A plastic mug slid into view. Ike glanced up. Kora's blue eyes were forgiving. That warmed him more than the coffee. He took the cup with murmured thanks and realized he had a terrific headache. Hours had passed. Shadows lay pooled in the deeper cave like wet sewage.

Ike saw a small group squatting Neanderthal-style around a small Bluet gas stove, melting snow and brewing joe. The clearest proof of their miracle was that Owen had broken down and was actually sharing his private stock of coffee. There was one hand-grinding the beans in a plastic machine, another squeezing the filter press, yet another grating a bit of cinnamon on top of each cupful. They were actually cooperating. For the first time in a month, Ike almost liked them.

'You okay?' Kora asked.

'Me?' It sounded strange, someone asking after his well-being. Especially her.

As if he needed any more to ponder, Ike suspected Kora was going to leave him. Before setting off from Kathmandu, she'd announced this was her final trek for the company. And since Himalayan High Journeys was nothing more than her and him, it implied a larger dissatisfaction. He would have minded less if her reason was another man, another country, better profits, or higher risks. But her reason was him. Ike had broken her heart because he was Ike, full of dreams and childlike naïveté. A drifter on life's stream. What had attracted her to him in the first place now disturbed her, his lone wolf/high mountains way. She thought he knew nothing about the way people

really worked, like this notion of a lawsuit, and maybe there was some truth to that. He'd been hoping the trek would somehow bridge their gap, that it would draw her back to the magic that drew him. Over the past two years she'd grown weary, though. Storms and bankruptcy no longer spelled magic for her.

'I've been studying this mandala,' she said, indicating the painted circle filled with squirming lines. In the darkness, its colors had been brilliant and alive. In their light, the drawing was bland. 'I've seen hundreds of mandalas, but I can't make heads or tails out of this one. It looks like chaos, all those lines and squiggles. It does seem to have a center, though.' She glanced up at the mummy, then at Ike's notes. 'How about you? Getting anywhere?'

He'd drawn the oddest sketch, pinning words and text in cartoon balloons to different positions on the body and linking them with a mess of arrows and lines.

Ike sipped at the coffee. Where to begin? The flesh declared a maze, both in the way it told the story and in the story it told. The man had written his evidence as it occurred to him, apparently, adding and revising and contradicting himself, wandering with his truths. He was like a shipwrecked diarist who had suddenly found a pen and couldn't quit filling in old details.

'First of all,' he began, 'his name was Isaac.'

'Isaac?' asked Darlene from the assembly line of coffee makers. They had stopped what they were doing to listen to him.

Ike ran his finger from nipple to nipple. The declaration was clear. Partially clear. I

am Isaac , it said, followed by In my exile/In my agony of Light.

'See these numbers?' said Ike. 'I figure this must be a serial number. And 10/03/23

could be his birthday, right?'

'Nineteen twenty-three?' someone asked. Their disappointment verged on childlike. Seventy-five years old evidently didn't qualify as a genuine antique.

'Sorry,' he said, then continued. 'See this other date here?' He brushed aside what remained of the pubic patch. '4/7/44. The day of his shoot-down, I'm guessing.'

'Shoot-down?'

'Or crash.'

They were bewildered. He started over, this time telling them the story he was piecing together. 'Look at him. Once upon a time, he was a kid. Twenty-one years old. World War II was on. He signed up or got drafted. That's the RAF tattoo. They sent him to India. His job was to fly the Hump.'

'Hump?' someone echoed. It was Bernard. He was furiously tapping the news into his laptop.

'That's what pilots called it when they flew supplies to bases in Tibet and China,' Ike said. 'The Himalayan chain. Back then, this whole region was part of an Oriental Western Front. It was a rough go. Every now and then a plane went down. The crews rarely survived.'

'A fallen angel,' sighed Owen. He wasn't alone. They were all becoming infatuated.

'I don't see how you've drawn all that from a couple of strands of numbers,' said Bernard. He aimed his pencil at Ike's latter set of numbers. 'You call that the date of his shoot-down. Why not the date of his marriage, or his graduation from Oxford, or the date he lost his virginity? What I mean is, this guy's no kid. He looks forty. If you ask me, he wandered away from some scientific or mountain-climbing expedition within the last couple years. He sure as snow didn't die in 1944 at the age of twenty-one.'

'I agree,' Ike said, and Bernard looked instantly deflated. 'He refers to a period of captivity. A long stretch. Darkness. Starvation. Hard labor.' The sacred deep.

'A prisoner of war. Of the Japanese?'

'I don't know about that,' Ike said.

'Chinese Communists, maybe?'

'Russians?' someone else tried.

'Nazis?'

'Drug lords?'

'Tibetan bandits!'

The guesses weren't so wild. Tibet had long been a chessboard for the Great Game.

'We saw you checking the map. You were looking for something.'

'Origins,' Ike said. 'A starting point.'

'And?'

With both hands, Ike smoothed down the thigh hair and exposed another set of numbers. 'These are map coordinates.'

'For where he got shot down. It makes perfect sense.' Bernard was with him now.

'You mean his airplane might be somewhere close?'

Mount Kailash was forgotten. The prospect of a crash site thrilled them.

'Not exactly,' Ike said.

'Spit it out, man. Where did he go down?'

Here's where it got a little fantastic. Mildly, Ike said, 'East of here.'

'How far east?'

'Just above Burma.'

'Burma!' Bernard and Cleopatra registered the incredibility. The rest sat mute, perplexed within their own ignorance.

'On the north side of the range,' said Ike, 'slightly inside Tibet.'

'But that's over a thousand miles away.'

'I know.'

It was well past midnight. Between their cafe lattes and adrenaline, sleep was unlikely for hours to come. They sat erect or stood in the cave while the enormity of this character's journey sank in.

'How did he get here?'

'I don't know.'

'I thought you said he was a prisoner.'

Eke exhaled cautiously. 'Something like that.'

'Something?'

'Well.' He cleared his throat softly. 'More like a pet.'

'What!'

'I don't know. It's a phrase he uses, right here: "favored cosset." That's a pet calf or something, isn't it?'

'Ah, get out, Ike. If you don't know, don't make it up.' He hunched. It sounded like crazed drivel to him, too.

'Actually it's a French term,' a voice interjected. It was Cleo, the librarian. 'Cosset means lamb, not calf. Ike's right, though. It does refer to a pet. One that is fondled and enjoyed.'

'Lamb?' someone objected, as if Cleo – or the dead man, or both – were insulting their pooled intelligence.

'Yes,' Cleo answered, 'lamb. But that bothers me less than the other word,

"favored." That's a pretty provocative term, don't you think?' By the group's silence, they clearly had not thought about it.

'This?' she asked them, and almost touched the body with her fingers. 'This is favored? Favored over what others? And above all, favored by whom? In my mind, anyway, it suggests some sort of master.'

'You're inventing,' a woman said. They didn't want it to be true.

'I wish I were,' said Cleo. 'But there is this, too.'

Ike had to squint at the faint lettering where she was pointing. Corvée , it said.

'What's that?'

'More of the same,' she answered. 'Subjugation. Maybe he was a prisoner of the

Japanese. It sounds like The Bridge on the River Kwai or something.'

'Except I never heard of the Japanese putting nose rings in their prisoners,' Ike said.

'The history of domination is complex.'

'But nose rings?'

'All kinds of unspeakable things have been done.' Ike made it more emphatic. 'Gold nose rings?'

'Gold?' She blinked as he played his light on the dull gleam.

'You said it yourself. A favored lamb. And you asked the question, Who favored this lamb?'

'You know?'

'Put it this way. He thought he did. See this?' Ike pushed at one ice-cold leg. It was a single word almost hidden on the left quadricep.

'Satan,' she lip-read to herself.

'There's more,' he said, and gently rotated the skin.

Exists, it said.

'This is part of it, too.' He showed her. It was assembled on the flesh like a prayer or a poem. Bone of my bones / flesh of my flesh. 'From Genesis, right? The Garden of Eden.'

He could sense Kora struggling to orchestrate some sort of rebuttal. 'He was a prisoner,' she tried. 'He was writing about evil. In general. It's nothing. He hated his captors. He called them Satan. The worst name he knew.'

'You're doing what I did,' Ike said. 'You're fighting the evidence.'

'I don't think so.'

'What happened to him was evil. But he didn't hate it.'

'Of course he did.'

'And yet there's something here,' Ike said.

'I'm not so sure,' Kora said.

'It's in between the words. A tone. Don't you feel it?'

Kora did – her frown was clear – but she refused to admit it. Her wariness seemed more than academic.

'There are no warnings here,' Ike said. 'No "Beware." No "Keep Out."'

'What's your point?'

'Doesn't it bother you that he quotes Romeo and Juliet? And talks about Satan the way Adam talked about Eve?'

Kora winced.

'He didn't mind the slavery.'

'How can you say that?' she whispered.

'Kora.' She looked at him. A tear was starting in one eye. 'He was grateful. It was written all over his body.'

She shook her head in denial.

'You know it's true.'

'No, I don't know what you're talking about.'

'Yes, you do,' Ike said. 'He was in love.'

Cabin fever set in.

On the second morning, Ike found that the snow had drifted to basketball-rim heights outside the cave's entry-way. By then the tattooed corpse had lost its novelty, and the group was getting dangerous in its boredom. One by one, the batteries of their Walkmans winked out, leaving them bereft of the music and words of angels, dragons, earth drums, and spiritual surgeons. Then the gas stove ran out of fuel, meaning several addicts went into caffeine withdrawal. It did not help matters when the supply of toilet paper ran out.

Ike did what he could. As possibly the only kid in Wyoming to take classical flute

lessons, he'd scorned his mother's assurances that someday it would come in handy. Now she was proved right. He had a plastic recorder, and the notes were quite beautiful in the cave. At the end of some Mozart snatches, they applauded, then petered off into their earlier moroseness.

On the morning of the third day, Owen went missing. Ike was not surprised. He'd seen mountain expeditions get high-centered on storms just like this, and knew how twisted the dynamics could get. Chances were Owen had wandered off to get exactly this kind of attention. Kora thought so, too.

'He's faking it,' she said. She was lying in his arms, their sleeping bags zipped together. Even the weeks of sweat had not worn away the smell of her coconut shampoo. At his recommendation, most of the others had buddied up for warmth, too, even Bernard. Owen was the one who had apparently gotten left out in the cold.

'He must have been heading for the front door,' Ike said. 'I'll go take a look.' Reluctantly he unzipped his and Kora's paired bags and felt their body heat vanish into the chill air.

He looked around the cave's chamber. It was dark and freezing. The naked corpse towering above them made the cave feel like a crypt. On his feet now, blood moving again, Ike didn't like the look of their entropy. It was too soon to be lying around dying.

'I'll come with you,' Kora said.

It took them three minutes to reach the entranceway.

'I don't hear the wind anymore,' Kora said. 'Maybe the storm's stopped.'

But the entry was plugged by a ten-foot-high drift, complete with a wicked cornice curling in at the crown. It allowed no light or sound from the outer world. 'I don't believe it,' Kora said.

Ike kick-stepped his boot toes into the hard crust and climbed to where his head bumped the ceiling. With one hand he karate-chopped the snow and managed a thin view. The light was gray out there, and hurricane-force winds were skinning the surface with a freight-train roar. Even as he watched, his little opening sealed shut again. They were bottled up.

He slid back to the base of the snow. For the moment he forgot about the missing client.

'Now what?' Kora asked behind him.

Her faith in him was a gift. Ike took it. She – they – needed him to be strong.

'One thing's certain,' he said. 'Our missing man didn't come this way. No footprints, and he couldn't have gotten out through that snow anyway.'

'But where could he have gone?'

'There might be some other exit.' Firmly he added, 'We may need one.'

He had suspected the existence of a secondary feeder tunnel. Their dead RAF pilot had written about being reborn from a 'mineral womb' and climbing into an 'agony of light.' On the one hand, Isaac could have been describing every ascetic's reentry into reality after prolonged meditation. But Ike was beginning to think the words were more than spiritual metaphor. Isaac had been a warrior, after all, trained for hardship. Everything about him declared the literal physical world. At any rate, Ike wanted to believe that the dead man might have been talking about some subterranean passage. If he could escape through it to here, maybe they could escape through it to there , wherever that might be.

Back in the central chamber, he prodded the group to life. 'Folks,' he announced, 'we could use a hand.'

A camper's groan emitted from one cluster of Gore-Tex and fiberfill. 'Don't tell me,'

someone complained, 'we have to go save him.'

'If he found a way out of here,' Ike retorted, 'then he's saved us. But first we have to find him.'

Grumbling, they rose. Bags unzipped. By the light of his headlamp, Ike watched their pockets of body heat drift off in vaporous bursts, like souls. From here on, it was imperative to keep them on their feet. He led them to the back of the cave. There were a dozen portals honeycombing the chamber's walls, though only two were man-sized. With all the authority he could muster, Ike formed two teams: them all together, and him. Alone. 'This way we can cover twice the distance,' he explained.

'He's leaving us,' Cleo despaired. 'He's saving himself.'

'You don't know Ike,' Kora said.

'You won't leave us?' Cleo asked him. Ike looked at her, hard. 'I won't.'

Their relief showed in long streams of exhaled frost.

'You need to stick together,' he instructed them solemnly. 'Move slowly. Stay in flashlight range at all times. Take no chances. I don't want any sprained ankles. If you get tired and need to sit down for a while, make sure a buddy stays with you. Questions? None? Good. Now let's synchronize watches....'

He gave the group three plastic 'candles,' six-inch tubes of luminescent chemicals that could be activated with a twist. The green glow didn't light much space and only lasted two or three hours. But they would serve as beacons every few hundred yards: crumbs upon the forest floor.

'Let me go with you,' Kora murmured to him. Her yearning surprised him.

'You're the only one I trust with them,' he said. 'You take the right tunnel, I'll take the left. Meet me back here in an hour.' He turned to go. But they didn't move. He realized they weren't just watching him and Kora, but waiting for his blessing. 'Vaya con Dios,' he said gruffly.

Then, in full view of the others, he kissed Kora. One from the heart, broad, a breath-taker. For a moment, Kora held on tight, and he knew things were going to be all right between them, they were going to find a way.

Ike had never had much stomach for caving. The enclosure made him claustrophobic. Just the same, he had good instincts for it. On the face of it, ascending a mountain was the exact reverse of descending into a cave. A mountain gave freedoms that could be equally horrifying and liberating. In Ike's experience, caves took away freedom in the same proportions. Their darkness and sheer gravity were tyrants. They compressed the imagination and deformed the spirit. And yet both mountains and caves involved climbing. And when you came right down to it, there was no difference between ascent and descent. It was all the same circle. And so he made swift progress.

Five minutes deep, he heard a sound and paused, 'Owen?'

His senses were in flux, not just heightened by the darkness and silence, but also subtly changed. It was hard to put words to, the clean dry scent of dust rendered by mountains still in birth, the scaly touch of lichen that had never seen sunshine. The visuals were not completely trustworthy. You saw like this on very dark nights on a mountain, a headlight view of the world, one beam wide, truncated, partial.

A muffled voice reached him. He wanted it to be Owen so the search could be over and he could return to Kora. But the tunnels apparently shared a common wall. Ike put his head against the stone – chill, but not bitterly cold – and could hear Bernard calling for Owen.

Farther on, Ike's tunnel became a slot at shoulder height. 'Hello?' he called into the slot. For some reason, he felt his animal core bristle. It was like standing at the mouth of a deep, dark alleyway. Nothing was out of place. Yet the very ordinariness of the walls and empty stone seemed to promise menace.

Ike shone his headlamp through the slot. As he stood peering into the depths at a tube of fractured limestone identical to the one he was already occupying, he saw nothing in itself to fear. Yet the air was so... inhuman. The smells were so faint and

unadulterated that they verged on no smell, Zen-like, clear as water. It was almost refreshing. That made him more afraid.

The corridor extended in a straight line into darkness. He checked his watch: thirty-two minutes had passed. It was time to backtrack and meet the group. That was the arrangement, one hour, round trip. But then, at the far edge of his light beam, something glittered.

Ike couldn't resist. It was like a tiny fallen star in there. And if he was quick, the whole exercise wouldn't last more than a minute. He found a foothold and pulled himself in. The slot was just big enough to squeeze through, feetfirst.

On the other side of the wall, nothing had changed. This part of the tunnel looked no different from the other. His light ahead picked out the same gleam twinkling in the far darkness.

Slowly he brought his light down to his feet. Beside one boot, he found another reflection identical to the one glinting in the distance. It gave the same dull gleam.

He lifted his boot. It was a gold coin.

Carefully, blood knocking through his veins, Ike stopped. A tiny voice warned him not to pick it up. But there was no way...

The coin's antiquity was sensuous. Its lettering had worn away long ago, and the shape was asymmetrical, nothing stamped by any machine. Only a vague, amorphous bust of some king or deity still showed.

Ike shone his light down the tunnel. Past the next coin he saw a third one winking in the blackness. Could it be? The naked Isaac had fled from some precious underground reserve, even dropping his pilfered fortune along the way.

The coins blinked like feral eyes. Otherwise the stone throat lay bare, too bright in the foreground, too dark in the back. Too neatly appointed with one coin, then another.

What if the coins had not been dropped? What if they'd been placed? The thought knifed him. Like bait.

He slugged his back against the cold stone. The coins were a trap.

He swallowed hard, forced himself to think it through.

The coin was cold as ice. With one fingernail he scraped away a veneer of encrusted glacier dust. It had been lying here for years, even decades or centuries. The more he thought about it, the more his horror mounted.

The trap was nothing personal. It had nothing to do with drawing him, Ike Crockett, into the depths. To the contrary, this was just random opportunism. Time was not a consideration. Even patience had nothing to do with it. The way trash fishermen did, someone was chumming the occasional traveler. You threw down a handful of scraps and maybe something came, and maybe it didn't. But who came here? That was easy. People like him: monks, traders, lost souls. But why lure them? To where?

His bait analogy evolved. This was less like trash fishing than bearbaiting. Ike's dad used to do it in the Wind River Range for Texans who paid to sit in a blind and 'hunt' browns and blacks. All the outfitters did it, standard operating procedure, like working cattle. You cultivated a garbage heap maybe ten minutes by horse from the cabins, so that the bears got used to regular feeding. As the season neared, you started putting out tastier tidbits. In an effort at making them feel included, Ike and his sister were called upon each Easter to surrender their marshmallow bunnies. As he neared ten, Ike was required to accompany his father, and that was when he saw where his candy went.

The images cascaded. A child's pink candy left in the silent woods. Dead bears hanging in the autumn light, skins falling heavily as by magic where the knives traced lines. And underneath, bodies like men almost, as slick as swimmers.

Out, thought Ike. Get out.

Not daring to take his light off the inner mountain, Ike climbed back through the slot, cursing his loud jacket, cursing the rocks that shifted underfoot, cursing his greed. He heard noises that he knew didn't exist. Jumped at shadows, he cast himself. The dread wouldn't leave him. All he could think of was exit.

He got back to the main chamber out of breath, skin still crawling. His return couldn't have taken more than fifteen minutes. Without checking his watch, he guessed his round trip at less than an hour.

The chamber was pitch black. He was alone. He stopped to listen as his heartbeat slowed, and there was not a sound, not a shuffle. He could see the fluorescent writing hovering at the far edge of the chamber. It entwined the dark corpse like some lovely exotic serpent. He lashed his light across the chamber. The gold nose ring glinted. And something else. As if returning to a thought, he pulled his light back to the face.

The dead man was smiling.

Ike wiggled his light, jimmied the shadows. It had to be an optical trick, that or his memory was failing. He remembered a tight grimace, nothing like this wild smile. Where before he'd seen only the tips of a few teeth, joy – open glee – now played in his light. Get a grip, Crockett.

His mind wouldn't quit racing. What if the corpse itself was bait? Suddenly the text took on a grotesque clarity. I am Isaac . The son who gave himself to sacrifice. For love of the Father. In exile. In my agony of Light. But what could this all mean?

He'd done his share of hardcore rescues and knew the drill – not that there was much of a drill for this one. Ike grabbed his coil of 9-mm rope and stuffed his last four AA batteries into a pocket, then looked around. What else? Two protein bars, a Velcro ankle brace, his med kit. It seemed as if there should have been more to carry. The cupboard was pretty much bare, though.

Just before departing the main chamber, Ike cast his light across the room. Sleeping bags lay scattered on the floor like empty cocoons. He entered the right-hand tunnel. The passage snaked downward at an even pitch, left, then right, then became steeper. What a mistake, sending them off, even all together. Ike couldn't believe he'd put his little flock at this kind of risk. For that matter, he couldn't believe the risk they'd taken. But of course they'd taken it. They didn't know better.

'Hello!' he called. His guilt deepened by the vertical foot. Was it his fault they'd put their faith in a counterculture buccaneer?

The going slowed. The walls and ceiling grew corrupt with long sheets of delaminating rock. Pull the wrong piece, and the whole mass might slide. Ike pendulumed from admiration to resentment. His pilgrims were brave. His pilgrims were foolhardy. And he was in danger.

If not for Kora, he would have talked himself out of further descent. In a sense, she became a scapegoat for his courage. He wanted to turn around and flee. The same foreboding that had paralyzed him in the other tunnel flared up again. His very bones seemed ready to lock in rebellion, limb by limb, joint by joint. He forced himself deeper.

At last he reached a plunging shaft and came to a halt. Like an invisible waterfall, a column of freezing air streamed past from reaches too high for his flashlight beam. He held his hand out, and the cold current poured through his fingers.

At the very edge of the precipice, Ike looked down around his feet and found one of his six-inch chemical candles. The green glow was so faint he had almost missed it.

He lifted the plastic tube by one end and turned off his headlamp, trying to judge how long ago they had activated the mixture. More than three hours, less than six. Time was racing out of his control. On the off-chance, he sniffed the plastic. Impossibly, it seemed to hold a trace of her coconut scent.

'Kora!' he bellowed into the tube of air.

Where outcrops disturbed the flow of wind, a tiny symphony of whistles and sirens and bird cries answered back, a music of stone. Ike stuffed the candle into one pocket. The air smelled fresh, like the outside of a mountain. Eke filled his lungs with it. A rush of instincts collided in what could only be called heartache. In that instant, he wanted what he had never really missed. He wanted the sun.

He searched the sides of the shaft with his light – up and down – for signs that his group had gone this way. Here and there he spotted a possible handhold or a shelf to rest upon, though no one – not even Ike in his prime – could have climbed down into the shaft and survived.

The shaft's difficulties exceeded even his group's talent for blind faith. They must have turned around and gone some other way. Ike started out.

A hundred meters farther back, he found their detour.

He had walked right past the opening on his way down. On the return, the hole was practically blatant – especially the green glow ebbing from its canted throat. He had to take his pack off in order to get through the small aperture. Just inside lay the second of his chemical candles.

By comparing the two candles – this one was much brighter – Ike fixed the group's chronology. Here indeed was their deviation. He tried to imagine which pioneer spirit had piloted the group into this side tunnel, and knew it could only have been one person.

'Kora,' he whispered. She would not have left Owen for dead any more than he. It was she who would be insisting on probing deeper and deeper into the tunnel system. The detour led to others. Ike followed the side tunnel to one fork, then another, then another. The unfolding network horrified him. Kora had unwittingly led them – him, too – deep into an underground maze.

'Wait!' he shouted.

At first the group had taken the time to mark their choices. Some of the branches were marked with a simple arrow arranged with rocks. A few showed the right way or the left way with a big X scratched on the wall. But soon the marks ended. No doubt emboldened by their progress, the group had quit blazing its path. Ike had few clues other than a black scuff mark or a fresh patch of rock where someone had pulled loose a handhold.

Second-guessing their choices devoured the time. Ike checked his watch. Well past midnight. He'd been hunting Kora and the lost pilgrims for over nine hours now. That meant they were desperately lost.

His head hurt. He was tired. The adrenaline was long gone. The air no longer had the smell of summits or jetstream. This was an interior scent, the inside of the mountain's lungs, the smell of darkness. He made himself chew and swallow a protein bar. Ike wasn't sure he could find his way out again.

Yet he kept his mountaineer's presence of mind. Thousands of physical details clamored for his attention. Some he absorbed, most he simply passed between. The trick was to see simply.

He came upon a glory hole, a huge, unlikely void within the mountain. His light beam withered in the depths and towering height of it.

Even worn down, he was awed. Great columns of buttery limestone dangled from the arched ceiling. A huge Om had been carved into one wall. And dozens, maybe hundreds, of suits of ancient Mongolian armor hung from rawhide thongs knotted to knobs and outcrops. It looked like an entire army of ghosts. A vanquished army.

The wheat-colored stone was gorgeous in his headlamp. The armor twisted in a slight breeze and fractured the light into a million points.

Ike admired the soft leather thangka paintings pinned to the walls, then lifted a fringed corner and discovered that the fringe was made of human fingers. He dropped it, horrified. The leather was flayed human skins. He backed away, counting the

thangkas. Fifty at least. Could they have belonged to the Mongolian horde?

He looked down. His boots had tracked halfway across yet another mandala, this one twenty feet across and made of colored sand. He'd seen some of these in Tibetan monasteries before, but never so large. Like the one beside Isaac in the cave chamber, it held details that looked less architectural than like organic worms. His were not the only footprints spoiling the artwork. Others had trampled it, and recently. Kora and the gang had come this way.

At one junction he ran out of signs altogether. Ike faced the branching tunnels and, from somewhere in his childhood, remembered the answer to all labyrinths: consistency. Go to your left or to your right, but always stay true. This being Tibet – the land of clockwise circumambulation around sacred temples and mountains – he chose left. It was the correct choice. He found the first of them ten minutes later.

Ike had entered a stratum of limestone so pure and slick it practically swallowed the shadows. The walls curved without angles. There were no cracks or ledging in the rock, only rugosities and gentle waves. Nothing caught at the light, nothing cast darkness. The result was unadulterated light. Wherever Ike turned his lamp beam, he was surrounded by radiance the color of milk.

Cleopatra was there. Ike rounded the wing and her light joined with his. She was sitting in a lotus position in the center of the luminous passage. With ten gold coins spread before her, she could have been a beggar.

'Are you hurt?' Ike asked her.

'Just my ankle,' Cleo replied, smiling. Her eyes had that holy gleam they all aspired to, part wisdom, part soul. Ike wasn't fooled.

'Let's go,' he ordered.

'You go ahead,' Cleo breathed with her angel voice. 'I'll stay a bit longer.'

Some people can handle solitude. Most just think they can. Ike had seen its victims in the mountains and monasteries, and once in a jail. Sometimes it was the isolation that undid them. Sometimes it was the cold or famine or even amateur meditation. With Cleo it was a little of all of the above.

Ike checked his watch: 3:00 A.M. 'What about the rest of you? Where did they go?'

'Not much farther,' she said. Good news. And bad news. 'They went to find you.'

'Find me?'

'You kept calling for help. We weren't going to leave you alone.'

'But I didn't call for help.'

She patted his leg. 'All for one,' she assured him.

Ike picked up one of the coins. 'Where'd you find these?'

'Everywhere,' she said. 'More and more, the deeper we got. Isn't it wonderful?'

'I'm going for the others. Then we'll all come back for you,' Ike said. He changed the fading batteries in his headlamp while he talked, replacing them with the last of his new ones. 'Promise you won't move from here.'

'I like it here very much.'

He left Cleo in a sea of alabaster radiance.

The limestone tube sped him deeper. The decline was even, the footing uncomplicated. Ike jogged, sure he could catch them. The air took on a coppery tang, nameless, yet distantly familiar. Not much farther, Cleo had said.

The blood streaks started at 3:47 A.M.

Because they first appeared as several dozen crimson handprints upon the white stone, and because the stone was so porous that it practically inhaled the liquid, Ike mistook them for primitive art. He should have known better.

Ike slowed. The effect was lovely in its playful randomness. Ike liked his image:

slap-happy cavemen.

Then his foot hit a puddle not yet absorbed into the stone. The dark liquid splashed up. It sluiced in bright streaks across the wall, red on white. Blood, he realized.

'God!' he yelled, and vaulted wide in instant evasion. A tiptoe, then the same bloody sole landed again, skidded, torqued sideways. The momentum drove him facefirst into the wall and then sent him tumbling around the bend.

His headlamp flew off. The light blinked out. He came to a halt against cold stone.

It was like being clubbed unconscious. The blackness stopped all control, all motion, all place in the world. Ike even quit breathing. As much as he wanted to hide from consciousness, he was wide awake.

Abruptly the thought of lying still became unbearable. He rolled away from the wall and let gravity guide him onto his hands and knees. Hands bare, he felt about for the headlamp in widening circles, torn between disgust and terror at the viscous curd layering the floor. He could even taste the stuff, cold upon his teeth. He pressed his lips shut, but the smell was gamy, and there was no game in here, only his people. It was a monstrous thought.

At last he snagged the headlamp by its connecting wire, rocked back onto his heels, fumbled with the switch. There was a sound, distant or near, he couldn't tell. 'Hey?' he challenged. He paused, listened, heard nothing.

Laboring against his own panic, Ike flipped the switch on and off and on. It was like trying to spark a fire with wolves closing in. The sound again. He caught it this time. Nails scratching rock? Rats? The blood scent surged. What was going on here?

He muttered a curse at the dead light. With his fingertips he stroked the lens, searching for cracks. Gently he shook it, dreading the rattle of a shattered lightbulb. Nothing.

Was blind, but now I see .... The words drifted into his consciousness, and he was uncertain whether they were a song or his memory of it. The sound came more distinctly. 'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear. It washed in from far away, a woman's lush voice singing 'Amazing Grace.' Something about its brave syllables suggested less a hymn than an anthem. A last stand.

It was Kora's voice. She had never sung for him. But this was she. Singing for them all, it seemed.

Her presence, even in the far depths, steadied him. 'Kora,' he called. On his knees, eyes wide in the utter blackness, Ike disciplined himself. If it wasn't the switch or the bulb... he tried the wire. Tight at the ends, no lacerations. He opened the battery case, wiped his fingers clean and dry, and carefully removed each slender battery, counting in a whisper, 'One, two, three, four.' One at a time, he cleaned the tips against his T-shirt, then swabbed each contact in the case and replaced the batteries. Head up, head down, up, down. There was an order to things. He obeyed.

He snapped the plate back onto the case, drew gently at the wire, palmed the lamp. And flicked the switch.

Nothing.

The scratch-scratch noise rose louder. It seemed very close. He wanted to bolt away, any direction, any cost, just flee.

'Stick,' he instructed himself. He said it out loud. It was something like a mantra, his own, something he told himself when the walls got steep or the holds thin or the storms mean. Stick , as in hang. As in no surrender.

Ike clenched his teeth. He slowed his lungs. Again he removed the batteries. This time he replaced them with the batch of nearly dead batteries in his pocket. He flipped the switch.

Light. Sweet light. He breathed it in.

In an abattoir of white stone.

The image of butchery lasted one instant. Then his light flickered out.

'No!' he cried in the darkness, and shook the headlamp.

The light came on again, what little there was of it. The bulb glowed rusty orange,

grew weaker, then suddenly brightened, relatively speaking. It was less than a quarter-strength. More than enough. Ike took his eyes from the little bulb and dared to look around once more.

The passageway was a horror.

In his small circle of jaundiced light, Ike stood up. He was very careful. All around, the walls were zebra-striped with crimson streaks. The bodies had been arranged in a row.

You don't spend years in Asia without seeing a fair share of the dead. Many times, Ike had sat by the burning ghats at Pashaputanath, watching the fires peel flesh from bone. And no one climbed the South Col of Everest these days without passing a certain South African dreamer, or on the north side a French gentleman sitting silently by the trail at 28,000 feet. And then there had been that time the king's army opened fire on Social Democrats revolting in the streets of Kathmandu and Ike had gone to Bir Hospital to identify the body of a BBC cameraman and seen the corpses hastily lined side by side on the tile floor. This reminded him of that.

It rose in him again, the silence of birds. And how, for days afterward, the dogs had limped about from bits of glass broken out of windows. And above all else, how, in being dragged, a human body gets undressed.

They lay before him, his people. He had viewed them in life as fools. In death, half-naked, they were pathetic. Not foolishly so. Just terribly. The smell of opened bowels and raw meat was nearly enough to panic him.

Their wounds... Ike could not see at first without seeing past the horrible wounds. He focused on their undress. He felt ashamed for these poor people and for himself. It seemed like sin itself to see their jumble of pubic patches and lolling thighs and randomly exposed breasts and stomachs that could no longer be held in or chests held high. In his shock, Ike stood above them, and the details swarmed up: here a faint tattoo of a rose, there a cesarean scar, the marks of surgeries and accidents, the edges of a bikini tan scribed upon a Mexican beach. Some of this was meant to be hidden, even to lovers, some to be revealed. None of it was meant to be seen this way.

Ike made himself get on with it. There were five of them, one male, Bernard. He started to identify the women, but with a rush of fatigue he suddenly forgot their names altogether. At the moment, only one of them mattered to him, and she was not here.

The snapped ends of very white bone stood from lawnmower-like gashes. Body cavities gaped empty. Some fingers were crooked, some missing at the root. Bitten off? A woman's head had been crushed to a thick, panlike sac. Even her hair was anonymous with gore, but the pubis was blond. She was, poor creature, thank God, not Kora.

That familiarity one reaches with victims began. Ike put one hand to the ache behind his eyes, then started over again. His light was failing. The massacre had no answer. Whatever had happened to them could happen to him.

'Stick, Crockett,' he commanded.

First things first. He counted on his fingers: six here, Cleo up the tunnel, Kora somewhere. That left Owen still at large.

Ike stepped among the bodies, searching for clues. He had little experience with such extremes of trauma, but there were a few things he could tell. Judging by the blood trails, it looked like an ambush. And it had been done without a gun. There were no bullet holes. Ordinary knives were out of the question, too. The lacerations were much too deep and massed so strangely, here upon the upper body, there at the backs of the legs, that Ike could only imagine a pack of men with machetes. It looked more like an attack by wild animals, especially the way a thigh had been stripped to the bone.

But what animal lived miles inside a mountain? What animal collected its prey in a

neat row? What animal showed this kind of savagery, then conformity? Such frenzy, then such method. The extremes were psychotic. All too human.

Maybe one man could have done all this, but Owen? He was smaller than most of these women. And slower. Yet these poor people had all been caught and mutilated within a few meters of one another. Ike tried to imagine himself as the killer, to conceive the speed and strength necessary to commit such an act.

There were more mysteries. Only now did Ike notice the gold coins scattered like confetti around them. It looked almost like a payoff, he now recognized, an exchange for the theft of their wealth. For the dead were missing rings and bracelets and necklaces and watches. Everything was gone. Wrists, fingers, and throats were bare. Earrings had been torn from lobes. Bernard's eyebrow ring had been plucked away. The jewelry had been little more than baubles and crystals and cheap knickknacks; Ike had specifically instructed the trekkers to leave their valuables in the States or in the hotel safe. But someone had gone to the trouble of pilfering the stuff. And then to pay for it in gold coins worth a thousand times what had been taken.

It made no sense. It made even less sense to stand here and try to make it make sense. He was not normally the type who couldn't think what to do, and so his confusion now was all the more intense. His code said Stay , like a sea captain, stay to sort through the crime and bring back, if not his wayfarers, then at least a full accounting of their demise. The economy of fear said Run. Save what life could be saved. But run which way and save which life? That was the excruciating choice. Cleopatra waited in one direction in her lotus position and white light. Kora waited in the other, perhaps not as surely. But hadn't he just heard her song?

His light ebbed to brown. Ike forced himself to rifle the pockets of his dead passengers. Surely someone had batteries or another flashlight or some food. But the pockets had been slashed and emptied.

The frenzy of it struck him. Why shred the pockets and even the flesh beneath them? This was no ordinary robbery. Stopping down his loathing, he tried to summarize the incident: a crime of rage, to judge by the mutilations, yet a crime of want, to judge by the thievery. Again it made no sense.

His light blinked out and the blackness jumped up around him. The weight of the mountain seemed to press down. A breeze Ike had not felt before brought to mind vast mineral respiration, as if a juggernaut were waking. It carried an undertone of gases, not noxious but rare, distant.

And then his imagination became unnecessary. That scratching sound of nails on stone returned. This time there was no question of its reality. It was approaching from the upper passageway. And this time Kora's voice was part of the mix.

She sounded in ecstasy, very near to orgasm. Or like his sister that time, in that instant just as her infant daughter came out of her womb. That, Ike conceded, or this was a sound of agony so deep it verged on the forbidden. The moan or low or animal petition, whatever it was, begged for an ending.

He almost called to her. But that other sound kept him mute. The climber in him had registered it as fingernails scraping for purchase, but the torn flesh lying in the darkness now evoked claws or talons. He resisted the logic, then embraced it in a hurry. Fine. Claws. A beast. Yeti. This was it. What now?

The dreadful opera of woman and beast drew closer. Fight or flight? Ike asked himself.

Neither. Both were futile. He did what he had to do, the survivor's trick. He hid in plain sight. Like a mountain man pulling himself into a womb of warm buffalo meat, Ike lay down among the bodies on the cold floor and dragged the dead upon him.

It was an act so heinous it was sin. In lying down between the corpses in utter blackness and in bringing a smooth naked thigh across his and draping a cold arm across his chest, Ike felt the weight of damnation. In disguising himself as dead, he let

go part of his soul. Fully sane, he gave up all aspects of his life in order to preserve it. His one anchor to believing this was happening to him was that he could not believe it was happening to him. 'Dear God,' he whispered.

The sounds became louder.

There was only one last choice to make: to keep open or to close his eyes to sights he could not see anyway. He closed them.

Kora's smell reached him upon that subterranean breeze. He heard her groan.

Ike held his breath. He'd never been afraid like this, and his cowardice was a revelation.

They – Kora and her captor – came around the corner. Her breathing was tortured. She was dying. Her pain was epic, beyond words.

Ike felt tears running down his face. He was weeping for her. Weeping for her pain. Weeping, too, for his lost courage. To lie unmoving and not give aid. He was no different from those climbers who had left him for dead once upon a mountain. Even as he inhaled and exhaled in tiny beadlike drops and listened to his heart's hammering pump and felt the dead close him in their embrace, he was giving Kora up for himself. Moment by moment he was forsaking her. Damned, he was damned.

Ike blinked at his tears, despised them, reviled his self-pity. Then he opened his eyes to take it like a man. And almost choked on his surprise.

The blackness was full, but no longer infinite. There were words written in the darkness. They were fluorescent and coiled like snakes and they moved.

It was him.

Isaac had resurrected.

Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore... and you waited with beating heart for something to happen?

– HELEN KELLER, The Story of My Life

2

ALI

North of Askam, the Kalahari Desert, South Africa

1995

'Mother?'

The girl's voice entered Ali's hut softly.

Here was how ghosts must sing, thought Ali, this Bantu lilt, the melody searching melody. She looked up from her suitcase.

In the doorway stood a Zulu girl with the frozen, wide-eyed grin of advanced leprosy: lips, eyelids, and nose eaten away.

'Kokie,' said Ali. Kokie Madiba. Fourteen years old. She was called a witch.

Over the girl's shoulder, Ali caught sight of herself and Kokie in a small mirror on the wall. The contrast did not please her. Ali had let her hair grow out over the past year. Next to the black girl's ruined flesh, her golden hair looked like harvest wheat beside a salted field. Her beauty was obscene to her. Ali moved to one side to erase her own image. For a while she had even tried taking the small mirror off her wall. Finally she'd hung it back on the nail, despairing that abnegation could be more vain than vanity.

'We've talked about this many times,' she said. 'I am Sister, not Mother.'

'We have talked about this, ya'as, mum,' the orphan said. 'Sister, Mother.'

Some of them thought she was a holy woman, or a queen. Or a witch. The concept of a single woman, much less a nun, was very odd out here in the bush. For once the offbeat had served her well. Deciding she must be in exile like them, the colony had taken her in.

'Did you want something, Kokie?'

'I bring you this.' The girl held out a necklace with a small shrunken pouch embroidered with beadwork. The leather looked fresh, hastily tanned, with small hairs still attached. Clearly they had been in a hurry to finish this for her. 'Wear this. The evil stays away.'

Ali lifted it from Kokie's dusty palm and admired the geometric designs formed by red, white, and green beads. 'Here,' she said, setting it back in Kokie's grip, 'you put it on me.'

Ali bent and held her hair up so that the leper girl could get the necklace placed. She copied Kokie's solemnity. This was no tourist trinket. It was part of Kokie's beliefs. If anyone knew about evil, it had to be this poor child.

With the spread of post-apartheid chaos and a surge in AIDS brought south by Zimbabweans and Mozambiquans imported to work the gold and diamond mines, hysteria had been unleashed among the poor. Old superstitions had risen up. It was no longer news that sexual organs and fingers and ears – even handfuls of human fat

– were being stolen from morgues and used for fetishes, or that corpses lay unburied because family members were convinced the bodies would come to life again.

The worst of it by far was the witch-hunting. People said that evil was coming up from the earth. So far as Ali was concerned, people had been saying such things since the beginning of man. Every generation had its terrors. She was convinced this one had been started by diamond miners seeking to deflect public hatred away from themselves. They spoke of reaching depths in the earth where strange beings lurked. The populace had turned this nonsense into a campaign against witches. Hundreds of innocent people had been necklaced, macheted, or stoned by superstitious mobs throughout the country.

'Have you taken your vitamin pill?' Ali asked.

'Oh, ya'as.'

'And you will continue taking your vitamins after I'm gone?'

Kokie's eyes shifted to the dirt floor. Ali's departure was a terrible pain for her. Again, Ali could not believe the suddenness of what was happening. It was only two days ago that she had received the letter informing her of the change.

'The vitamins are important for the baby, Kokie.'

The leper girl touched her belly. 'Ya'as, the baby,' she whispered joyfully. 'Every day. Sun come up. The vitamin pill.'

Ali loved this girl, because God's mystery was so profound in its cruelty toward her.

Twice Kokie had attempted suicide and both times Ali had saved her. Eight months ago the suicide attempts had stopped. That was when Kokie had learned she was pregnant.

It still surprised Ali when the sounds of lovers wafted to her in the night. The lessons were simple and yet profound. These lepers were not horrible in one another's sight. They were blessed, beautiful, even dressed in their poor skin.

With the new life growing inside her, Kokie's bones had taken on flesh. She had begun talking again. Mornings, Ali heard her murmuring tunes in a hybrid dialect of Siswati and Zulu, more beautiful than birdsong.

Ali, too, felt reborn. She wondered if this, perhaps, was why she'd ended up in Africa. It was as if God were speaking to her through Kokie and all the other lepers and refugees. For months now, she had been anticipating the birth of Kokie's child. On a rare trip to Jo'burg, she'd purchased Kokie's vitamins with her own allowance and borrowed several books on midwifery. A hospital was out of the question for Kokie, and Ali wanted to be ready.

Lately, Ali had begun dreaming about it. The delivery would be in a hut with a tin roof surrounded by thorn brush, maybe this hut, this bed. Into her hands a healthy infant would emerge to nullify the world's corruption and sorrows. In one act, innocence would triumph.

But this morning Ali's realization was bitter. I will never see the child of this child. For Ali was being transferred. Thrown back into the wind. Yet again. It didn't matter that she had not finished here, that she had actually begun drawing close to the truth. Bastards. That was in the masculine, as in bishoprick.

Ali folded a white blouse and laid it in her suitcase. Excuse my French, O Lord. But they were beginning to make her feel like a letter with no address.

From the moment she'd taken her vows, this powder blue Samsonite suitcase had been her faithful companion. First to Baltimore for some ghetto work, then to Taos for a little monastic 'airing out,' then to Columbia University to blitzkrieg her dissertation. After that, Winnipeg for more street-angel work. Then a year of postdoc at the Vatican Archives, 'the memory of the Church.' Then the plum assignment, nine months in Europe as an attaché – an addetti di nunziatura – assisting the papal diplomatic delegation at NATO nuclear nonproliferation talks. For a twenty-seven-year-old country girl from west Texas, it was heady stuff. She'd been selected as much for her longtime connection with U.S. Senator Cordelia January as for her training in linguistics. They'd played her like a pawn, of course. 'Get used to it,' January had counseled her one evening. 'You're going places.' That was for sure, Ali thought, looking around the hut.

Very obviously the Church had been grooming her – formation, it was called – though for what she couldn't precisely say. Until a year ago, her CV had showed nothing but steady ascent. Blue sky, right up to her fall from grace. Abruptly, no explanations offered, no second chances offered, they'd sent her to this refugee colony tucked in the wilds of San – or Bushman – country. From the glittering capitals of Western civilization straight into the Stone Age, they had drop-kicked her to the rump of the planet, to cool her heels in the Kalahari desert with a bogus mission.

Being Ali, she had made the most of it. It had been a terrible year, in truth. But she was tough. She'd coped. Adapted. Flourished, by God. She'd even started to peel away the folklore of an 'elder' tribe said to be hiding in the backcountry.

At first, like everyone else, Ali had dismissed the notion of an undiscovered Neolithic tribe existing on the cusp of the twenty-first century. The region was wild, all right, but these days it was crisscrossed by farmers, truckers, bush planes, and field scientists – people who would have spied evidence before now. It had been three months before Ali had started taking the native rumors seriously.

What was most exciting to her was that such a tribe did seem to exist, and that its

evidence was mostly linguistic. Wherever this strange tribe was hiding, there seemed to be a protolanguage alive in the bush! And day by day she was closing in on it.

For the most part, her hunt had to do with the Khoisan, or Click, language spoken by the San. She had no illusions about ever mastering their language herself, especially the system of clicks that could be dental, palatal, or labial, voiced, voiceless, or nasal. But with the help of a San ¡Kung translator, she'd begun assembling a set of words and sounds they only expressed in a certain tone. The tone was deferential and religious and ancient, and the words and sounds were different from anything else in Khoisan. They hinted at a reality that was both old and new. Someone was out there, or had been long ago. Or had recently returned. And whoever they were, they spoke a language that predated the prehistoric language of the San.

But now – like that – the midsummer night's dream was over. They were taking her away from her monsters. Her refugees. Her evidence.

Kokie had begun singing softly to herself. Ali returned to her packing, using the suitcase to shield her expression from the girl. Who would watch out for them now? What would they do without her in their daily lives? What would she do without them?

'...uphondo lwayo/yizwa imithandazo yethu/Nkosi sikelela/Thina lusapho iwayo...'

The words crowded through Ali's frustration. Over the past year, she had dipped hard into the stew of languages spoken in South Africa, especially Nguni, which included Zulu. Parts of Kokie's song opened to her: Lord bless us children/Come spirit, come holy spirit/Lord bless us children.

'O feditse dintwa/Le matswenyecho....' Do away with wars and troubles....

Ali sighed. All these people wanted was peace and a little happiness. When she first showed up, they had looked like the morning after a hurricane, sleeping in the open, drinking fouled water, waiting to die. With her help, they now had rudimentary shelter and a well for water and the start of a cottage industry that used towering anthills as forges for making simple farm tools like hoes and shovels. They had not welcomed her coming; that had taken some time. But her departure was causing real anguish, for she had brought a little light into their darkness, or at least a little medicine and diversion.

It wasn't fair. Her coming had meant good things for them. And now they were being punished for her sins. There was no possible way to explain that. They would not have understood that this was the Church's way of breaking her down.

It made her mad. Maybe she was a bit too proud. And profane at times. With a temper, yes. And indiscreet, certainly. She'd made a few mistakes. Who hadn't? She was sure her transfer out of Africa had to do with some problem she'd caused somebody somewhere. Or maybe her past was catching up with her again.

Fingers trembling, Ali smoothed out a pair of khaki bush shorts and the old monologue rolled around in her head. It was like a broken record, her mea culpas. The fact was, when she dove, she dove deep. Controversy be damned. She was forever running ahead of the pack.

Maybe she should have thought twice before writing that op-ed piece for the Times suggesting the Pope recuse himself from all matters relating to abortion, birth control, and the female body. Or writing her essay on Agatha of Aragon, the mystic virgin who wrote love poems and preached tolerance: never a popular subject among the good old boys. And it had been sheer folly to get caught practicing Mass in the Taos chapel four years ago. Even empty, even at three in the morning, church walls had eyes and ears. She'd been more foolish still, once caught, to defy her Mother Superior – in front of the archbishop – by insisting women had a liturgical right to consecrate the Host. To serve as priests. Bishops. Cardinals. And she would have gone on to include the Pope in her litany, too, but the archbishop had frozen her with a word.

Ali had come within a hair of official censure. But close calls seemed a perpetual state for her. Controversy followed her like a starving dog. After the Taos incident, she'd tried to 'go orthodox.' But that was before the Manhattans. Sometimes a girl just lost control.

It had been just a little over a year ago, a grand cocktail gathering with generals and diplomats from a dozen nations in the historic part of The Hague. The occasion was the signing of some obscure NATO document, and the Papal nuncio was there. There was no forgetting the place, a wing of the thirteenth-century Binnerhoef Palace known as the Hall of Knights, a room loaded with delicious Renaissance goodies, even a Rembrandt. Just as vividly she recalled the Manhattans that a handsome colonel, urged on by her wicked mentor January, kept bringing to her.

Ali had never tasted such a concoction, and it had been years since such chivalry had laid siege to her. The net effect had been a loose tongue. She'd strayed badly in a discussion about Spinoza and somehow ended up sermonizing passionately about glass ceilings in patriarchal institutions and the ballistic throw-weight of a humble chunk of rock. Ali blushed at the memory, the dead silence through the entire room. Luckily January had been there to rescue her, laughing that deep laugh, sweeping her off first to the ladies' room, then to the hotel and a cold shower. Maybe God had forgiven her, but the Vatican had not. Within days, Ali had been delivered a one-way air ticket to Pretoria and the bush.

'They coming, look, Mother, see.' With a lack of self-consciousness that was a miracle in itself, Kokie was pointing out the window with the remains of her hand.

Ali glanced up, then finished closing the suitcase. 'Peter's bakkie? ' she asked. Peter was a Boer widower who liked to do favors for her. It was always he who drove her to town in his tiny van, what locals called a bakkie.

'No, mum.' Her voice got very small. 'Casper's comin'.'

Ali joined Kokie at the window. It was indeed an armored troop carrier at the head of a long rooster tail of red dust. Casspirs were feared by the black populace as juggernauts that brought destruction. She had no idea why they had sent military transport to fetch her, and chalked it up to more mindless intimidation. 'Never mind,' she said to the frightened girl.

The Casspir churned across the plain. It was still miles away and the road got more corrugated on this side of the dry lakebed. Ali guessed there were still ten minutes or so before it got here.

'Is everyone ready?' she asked Kokie.

'They ready, mum.'

'Let's see about our picture, then.'

Ali lifted her small camera from the cot, praying the winter heat had not spoiled her one roll of Fuji Velvia. Kokie eyed the camera with delight. She'd never seen a photograph of herself.

Despite her sadness about leaving, there were reasons to be thankful she was getting transferred. It made her feel selfish, but Ali was not going to miss the tick fever and poison snakes and walls of mud mixed with dung. She was not going to miss the crushing ignorance of these dying peasants, or the pig-eyed hatreds of the Afrikaaners with their fire-engine-red Nazi flag and their brutal, man-eating Calvinism. And she was not going to miss the heat.

Ali ducked through the low doorway into the morning light. The scent surged across to her even before the colors. She drew the air deep into her lungs, tasting the wild riot of blue hues on her tongue.

She raised her eyes.

Acres of bluebonnets spread in a blanket around the village.

This was her doing. Maybe she was no priest. But here was a sacrament she could give. Shortly after the camp well was drilled, Ali had ordered a special mix of

wild-flower seed and planted it herself. The fields had bloomed. The harvest was joy. And pride, rare among these outcasts. The bluebonnets had become a small legend. Farmers – Boer and English both – had driven with their families for hundreds of kilometers to see this sea of flowers. A tiny band of primeval Bushmen had visited and reacted with shock and whispers, wondering if a piece of sky had landed here. A minister with the Zionist Christian Church had conducted an outdoor ceremony. Soon enough, the flowers would die off. The legend was fixed, though. In a way, Ali had exorcised what was grotesque and established these lepers' claim to humanity.

The refugees were waiting for her at the irrigation ditch that led from the well and watered their crop of maize and vegetables. When she first mentioned a group photo, they immediately agreed that this was where it should be taken. Here was their garden, their food, their future.

'Good morning,' Ali greeted them.

'Goot morgan, Fundi,' a woman solemnly returned. Fundi was an abbreviation of umfundisi. It meant 'teacher' and was, for Ali's tastes, the highest compliment. Sticklike children raced out from the group and Ali knelt to embrace them. They smelled good to her, particularly this morning, fresh, washed by their mothers.

'Look at you,' she said to them, 'so pretty. So handsome. Now who wants to help me?'

'Me, me. I am, mum.'

Ali employed all the children in putting a few rocks together and tying some sticks into a crude tripod. 'Now step back or it will fall,' she said.

She worked quickly now. The Casspir's approach was beginning to alarm the adults, and she wanted the picture to show them happy. She balanced the camera atop her tripod and looked through the viewfinder.

'Closer,' she gestured to them, 'get closer together.'

The light was just right, angling sidelong and slightly diffuse. It would be a kind picture. There was no way to hide the ravages of disease and ostracism, but this would highlight their smiles and eyes at least.

As she focused, she counted. Then recounted. They were missing someone.

For a while after first coming here, it had not occurred to her to count them from day to day. She had been too busy teaching hygiene and caring for the ill and distributing food and arranging the drill for a well and the tin sheeting for roofs. But after a couple of months she had grown more sensitive to the dwindling numbers. When she asked, it was explained with a shrug that people came and people went.

It was not until she had caught them red-handed that the terrible truth surfaced. When she first had come upon them in the bush one day, Ali had thought it was hyenas working over a springbok. Perhaps she should have guessed before. Certainly it seemed that someone else could have told her.

Without thinking, Ali had pulled the two skeletal men away from the old woman they were strangling. She had struck one with a stick and driven them away. She had misunderstood everything, the men's motive, the old lady's tears.

This was a colony of very sick and miserable human beings. But even reduced to desperation, they were not without mercy.

The fact was, the lepers practiced euthanasia.

It was one of the hardest things Ali had ever wrestled with. It had nothing to do with justice, for they did have the luxury of justice. These lepers – hunted, hounded, tortured, terrorized – were living out their days on the edge of a wasteland. With little left to do but die off, there were few ways left to show love or grant dignity. Murder, she had finally accepted, was one of them.

They only terminated a person who was already dying and who asked. It was always done away from camp, and it was always carried out by two or more people, as quickly as possible. Ali had crafted a sort of truce with the practice. She tried not to

see the exhausted souls walking off into the bush, never to return. She tried not to count their numbers. But disappearance had a way of pronouncing a person, even the silent ones you barely noticed otherwise.

She went through the faces again. It was Jimmy Shako, the elder, they were missing. Ali hadn't realized Jimmy Shako was so ill or so generous as to unburden the community of his presence. 'Mr Shako is gone,' she said matter-of-factly.

'He gone,' Kokie readily agreed.

'May he rest in peace,' Ali said, mostly for her own benefit.

'Don't t'ink so, Mother. No rest for him. We trade him off.'

'You what?' This was a new one.

'This for that. We give him away.'

Suddenly Ali wasn't sure she wanted to know what Kokie meant. There were times when it seemed Africa had opened to her and she knew its secrets. Then times like this, when the secrets had no bottom. She asked just the same: 'What are you talking about, Kokie?'

'Him. For you.'

'For me.' Ali's voice sounded tiny in her ears.

'Ya'as, mum. That man no good. He saying come get you and give you down. But we give him, see.' The girl reached out and gently touched the beaded necklace around Ali's neck. 'Ever'ting okay now. We take care of you, Mother.'

'But who did you give Jimmy to?'

Something was roaring in the background. Ali realized it was bluebonnets stirring in the soft breeze. The rustle of stems was thunderous. She swallowed to slake her dry throat.

Kokie's answer was simple. 'Him,' she said.

'Him?'

The bluebonnets' sea roar elided into the engine noise of the nearing Casspir. Ali's time had arrived.

'Older-than-Old, Mother. Him.' Then she said a name, and it contained several clicks and a whisper in that elevated tone.

Ali looked more closely at her. Kokie had just spoken a short phrase in proto-Khoisan. Ali tried it aloud. 'No, like this,' Kokie said, and repeated the words and clicks. Ali got it right this time, and committed it to memory.

'What does it mean?' she asked.

'God, mum. The hungry God.'

Ali had thought to know these people, but they were something else. They called her Mother and she had treated them as children, but they were not. She edged away from Kokie.

Ancestor worship was everything. Like ancient Romans or modern-day Shinto, the Khoikhoi deferred to their dead in spiritual matters. Even black evangelical Christians believed in ghosts, threw bones for divining the future, sacrificed animals, drank potions, wore amulets, and practiced gei-xa – magic. The Xhosa tribe pinned its genesis on a mythical race called xhosa – angry men. The Pedi worshiped Kgobe. The Lobedu had their Mujaji, a rain queen. For the Zulu, the world hinged upon an omnipotent being whose name translated as Older-than-Old. And Kokie had just spoken the name in that protolanguage. The mother tongue.

'Is Jimmy dead or not?'

'That depends, mum. He be good, they let him live down there. Long time.'

'You killed Jimmy,' Ali said. 'For me?'

'Not kilt. Cut him some.'

'You did what?'

'Not we,' said Kokie.

'Older-than-Old?' Ali added the Click name.

'Oh ya'as. Trimmed that man. Then give to us the parts.'

Ali didn't ask what Kokie meant. She'd heard too much as it was.

Kokie cocked her head and a delicate expression of pleasure appeared within her frozen smile. For an instant Ali saw standing before her the gawky teenaged girl she had grown to love, one with a special secret to tell. She told it. 'Mother,' Kokie said, 'I watched. Watched it all.'

Ali wanted to run. Innocent or not, the child was a fiend.

'Good-bye, Mother.'

Get me away, she thought. As calmly as she could, tears stinging her eyes, Ali turned to walk from Kokie.

Immediately Ali was boxed in.

They were a wall of huge men. Blind with tears, Ali started to fight them, punching and gouging with her elbows. Someone very strong pinned her arms tight.

'Here, now,' a man's voice demanded, 'what's this crap?'

Ali looked up into the face of a white man with sunburned cheeks and a tan army bush cap. 'Ali von Schade?' he said. In the background the Casspir sat idling, a brute machine with radio antennae waving in the air and a machine gun leveled. She quit struggling, amazed by their suddenness.

Abruptly the clearing filled with the carrier's wake of red dust, a momentary tempest. Ali swung around, but the lepers had already scattered into the thorn bush. Except for the soldiers, she was alone in the maelstrom.

'You're very lucky, Sister,' the soldier said. 'The kaffirs are washing their spears again.'

'What?' she said.

'An uprising. Some kaffir sect thing. They hit your neighbor last night, and the next farm over, too. We came from them. All dead.'

'This your bag?' another soldier asked. 'Get in. We're in great danger out here.'

In shock, Ali let them push and steer her into the sweltering armored bed of the vehicle. Soldiers crowded in and made their rifles safe and the doors closed shut. Their body odor was different from that of her lepers. Fear, that was the chemical. They were afraid in a way the lepers were not. Afraid like hunted animals.

The carrier rumbled off and Ali rocked hard against a big shoulder.

'Souvenir?' someone asked. He was pointing at her bead necklace.

'It was a gift,' said Ali. She had forgotten it until now.

'Gift!' barked another soldier. 'That's sweet.'

Ali touched the necklace defensively. She ran her fingertips across the tiny beads framing the piece of dark leather. The small animal hairs in the leather prickled her touch.

'You don't know, do you?' said a man.

'What?'

'That skin.'

'Yes.'

'Male, don't you think, Roy?' Roy answered, 'It would be.'

'Ouch,' said a man.

'Ouch,' another repeated, but in a falsetto. Ali lost patience. 'Quit smirking.'

That drew more laughs. Their humor was rough and violent, no surprise.

A face reached in from the shadows. A bar of light from the gunport showed his eyes. Maybe he was a good Catholic boy. One way or another, he was not amused.

'That's privates, Sister. Human.'

Ali's fingertips stopped moving across the hairs. Then it was her turn to shock them.

They expected her to scream and rip the charm away. Instead, she sat back. Ali laid her head against the steel, closed her eyes, and let the charm against evil rock back and forth above her heart.

There were giants in the earth in those days... mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

– GENESIS 6:4

3

BRANCH

Camp Molly: Oskova, Bosnia-Herzegovina

NATO Implementation Forces (IFOR)/

1st Air Cavalry/US Army

0210 hours

1996

Rain.

Roads and bridges had washed away, rivers lay choked. Operations maps had to be reinvented. Convoys sat paralyzed. Landslides were carrying dormant mines onto lanes laboriously cleared. Land travel was at a standstill.

Like Noah beached upon his mountaintop, Camp Molly perched high above a confederacy of mud, its sinners stilled, the world at bay. Bosnia, cursed Branch. Poor Bosnia.

The major hurried through the stricken camp on a boardwalk laid frontier-style to keep boots above the mire. We guard against eternal darkness, guided by our righteousness. It was the great mystery in Branch's life, how twenty-two years after escaping from St. John's to fly helicopters, he could still believe in salvation.

Spotlights sluiced through messy concertina wire, past tank traps and claymores and more razor wire. The company's brute armor parked chin-out with cannon and machine guns leveled at distant hilltops. Shadows turned multiple-rocket-launcher tubes into baroque cathedral organ pipes. Branch's helicopters glittered like precious dragonflies stilled by early winter.

Branch could feel the camp around him, its borders, its guardians. He knew the sentinels were suffering the foul night in body armor that was proof against bullets but not against rain. He wondered if Crusaders passing on their way to Jerusalem had hated chain mail as much as these Rangers hated Kevlar. Every fortress a monastery, their vigilance affirmed to him. Every monastery a fortress.

Surrounded by enemies, there were officially no enemies for them. With civilization at large trickling down shitholes like Mogadishu and Kigali and Port-au-Prince, the

'new' Army was under strict orders: Thou shalt have no enemy. No casualties. No turf. You occupied high ground only long enough to let the politicos rattle sabers and get reelected, and then you moved on to the next bad place. The landscape changed; the hatreds did not.

Beirut. Iraq. Somalia. Haiti. His file read like some malediction. Now this. The Dayton Accords had designated this geographical artifice the ZOS – the zone of separation – between Muslims and Serbs and Croats. If this rain kept them separated, then he wished it would never stop.

Back in January, when the First Cav entered across the Drina on a pontoon bridge, they had found a land reminiscent of the great standoffs of World War I. Trenches laced the fields, which held scarecrows dressed like soldiers. Black ravens punctuated the white snow. Skeletons broke beneath their Humvee tires. People emerged from ruins bearing flintlocks, even crossbows and spears. Urban fighters had dug up their own plumbing pipes to make weapons. Branch did not want to save them, for they were savage and did not want to be saved.

He reached the command and communications bunker. For a moment in the dark rain, the earthen mound loomed like some half-made ziggurat, more primitive than the first Egyptian pyramid. He went up a few steps, then descended steeply between piled sandbags.

Inside, banks of electronics lined the back wall. Men and women in uniform sat at tables, their faces illuminated by laptop computers. The overhead lights were dim for screen reading.

There was an audience of maybe three dozen. It was early and cold for such waiting. Rain beat without pause against the rubber door flaps above and behind him.

'Hey, Major. Welcome back. Here, I knew this was for someone.'

Branch saw the cup of hot chocolate coming, and crossed two fingers at it. 'Back, fiend,' he said, not altogether joking. Temptation lay in the minutiae. It was entirely possible to go soft in a combat zone, especially one as well fed as Bosnia. In the spirit of the Spartans, he declined the Doritos, too. 'Anything started?' he asked.

'Not a peep.' With a greedy sip, McDaniels made Branch's chocolate his own.

Branch checked his watch. 'Maybe it's over and done with. Maybe it never happened.'

'O ye of little faith,' the skinny gunship pilot said. 'I saw it with my own eyes. We all did.'

All except Branch and his copilot, Ramada. Their last three days had been spent overflying the south in search of a missing Red Crescent convoy. They'd returned dog-tired to this midnight excitement. Ramada was here already, eagerly scanning his E-mail from home at a spare duty station.

'Wait'll you review the tapes,' McDaniels said. 'Strange shit. Three nights running. Same time. Same place. It's turning into a very popular draw. We ought to sell tickets.' It was standing-room only. Some were soldiers sitting behind laptop duty station computers hardwired into Eagle base down at Tuzla. But tonight the majority were civilians in ponytails or bad goatees or PX T-shirts that read I SURVIVED OPERATION JOINT ENDEAVOR or BEAT ALL THAT YOU CAN BEAT, with the mandatory 'Meat' scrawled underneath in Magic Marker. Some of the civilians were old, but most were as young as the soldiers.

Branch scanned the crowd. He knew many of them. Few came with less than a PhD or an MD stapled to their names. Not one did not smell like the grave. In keeping with Bosnia's general surreality, they had dubbed themselves Wizards, as in Oz. The UN War Crimes Tribunal had commissioned forensics digs at execution sites throughout Bosnia. The Wizards were their diggers. Day in, day out, their job was to make the

dead speak.

Because the Serbs had hosted most of the genocide in the American-held sector and would have killed these professional snoops, Colonel Frederickson had decided to house the Wizards on base. The bodies themselves were stored at a former ball-bearing factory on the outskirts of Kalejsia.

It had proved a stretch, the First Cav accommodating this science tribe. For the first month or so, the Wizards' irreverence and antics and porno flicks had been a refreshing departure. But over the year, they'd degenerated into a tired Animal House schtick, sort of like M*A*S*H of the dead. They ate inedible Meals Ready to Eat with great relish and drank all the free Diet Cokes.

In keeping with the weather, when it rained, it poured. The scientists' numbers had tripled in the last two weeks. Now that the Bosnian elections were over, IFOR was scaling down its presence. Troops were going home, bases were closing. The Wizards were losing their shotguns. Without protection, they knew they could not stay. A large number of massacre sites were going to go untouched.

Out of desperation, Christie Chambers, MD, had issued an eleventh-hour call to arms over the Web. From Israel to Spain to Australia to Canyon de Chelly and Seattle, archaeologists had dropped their shovels, lab techs had taken leave without pay, physicians had sacrificed tennis holidays, and professors had donated grad students so that the exhumation might go on. Their hastily issued ID badges read like a Who's Who of the necro sciences. All in all, Branch had to admit they weren't such bad company if you were going to be stranded on an island like Molly.

'Contact,' Sergeant Jefferson announced at one screen.

The entire room seemed to draw a breath. The throng massed behind her to see what KH-12, the polar-orbiting Keyhole satellite, was seeing. Right and left, six screens showed the identical image. McDaniels and Ramada and three other pilots hogged a screen for themselves. 'Branch,' one said, and they made room for him.

The screen was gorgeous with lime-green geography. A computer overlaid the satellite image and radar data with a ghostly map.

'Zulu Four,' Ramada helpfully pinpointed with his Bic. Right beneath his pen, it happened again.

The satellite image flowered with a pink heat burst.

The sergeant tagged the image and keyed a different remote sensor on her computer, this one fed from a Predator drone circling at five thousand feet. The view shifted from thermal to other radiations. Same coordinates, different colors. She methodically worked more variations on the theme. Along one border of the screen, images stacked in a neat row. These were PowerPoint slides, visual situation reports from previous nights. Center-screen was real time. 'SLR. Now UV,' she enunciated. She had a rich bass voice. She could have been singing gospel. 'Spectro, here. Gamma.'

'Stop! See it?'

A pool of bright light was spilling amorphously from Zulu Four.

'So what am I seeing here, please?' one of the Wizards bawled at the screen next to

Branch. 'What's the signature here? Radiation, chemical, what?'

'Mostly nitrogen,' said his fat companion. 'Same as last night. And the night before that. The oxygen comes and goes. It's a hydrocarbon soup down there.'

Branch listened.

Another of the kids whistled. 'Look at this concentration. Normal atmosphere's what, eighty percent nitrogen?'

'Seventy-eight-point-two.'

'This has to be near ninety.'

'It fluctuates. Last two nights, it went almost ninety-six. But then it just tapers off. By sunrise, back to a trace above norm.'

Branch noticed he wasn't the only one eavesdropping. His pilots were dropping in,

too. Like him, their eyes were fixed on their own screens.

'I don't get it,' a boy with acne scars said. 'What gives this kind of surge? Where's all the nitrogen coming from?'

Branch waited through their collective pause. Maybe the Wizards had answers.

'I keep telling you, guys.'

'Stop. Spare us, Barry.'

'You don't want to hear it. But I'm telling you...'

'Tell me,' said Branch. Three pairs of eyeglasses turned toward him.

The kid named Barry looked uncomfortable. 'I know it sounds crazy. But it's the dead. There's no big mystery here. Animal matter decays. Dead tissue ammonifies. That's nitrogen, in case you forgot.'

'And then Nitrosomonas oxidizes the ammonia to nitrate. And Nitrobacter oxidizes the nitrate to other nitrates.' The fat man was using a broken-record tone. 'The nitrates get taken up by green plants. In other words, the nitrogen never appears aboveground. This ain't that.'

'You're talking about nitrifying bacteria. There's denitrifying bacteria, too, you know. And that does leak above ground.'

'Let's just say the nitrogen does come from decay.' Branch addressed the one called

Barry. 'That still doesn't account for this concentration, does it?'

Barry was circuitous. 'There were survivors,' he explained. 'There always are. That's how we knew where to dig. Three of them testified that this was a major terminus. It was in use over a period of eleven months.'

'I'm listening,' Branch said, not sure where this was going.

'We've documented three hundred bodies, but there's more. Maybe a thousand. Maybe a whole lot more. Five to seven thousand are still unaccounted for from Srebrenica alone. Who knows what we'll find underneath this primary layer? We were just opening Zulu Four when the rain shut us down.'

'Fucking rain,' the eyeglasses to his left muttered.

'A lot of bodies,' Branch coaxed.

'Right. A lot of bodies. A lot of decay. A lot of nitrogen release.'

'Delete.' The fat man was playing to Branch now, shaking his head with pity. 'Barry's playing with his food again. The human body only contains three percent nitrogen. Let's call it three kilograms per body, times five thousand bodies. Fifteen thousand kgs. Convert it to liters, then meters. That's only enough nitrogen to fill a thirty-meter cube. Once. But this is a lot more nitrogen, and it disperses every day, then returns every night. It's not the bodies, but something associated with them.'

Branch didn't smile. For months he'd been watching the forensics guys bait one another with monkey play, from planting a skull in the AT&T telephone tent to verbal wit like this cannibalism jive. His disapproval had less to do with their mental health than with his own troops' sense of right and wrong. Death was never a joke.

He locked eyes with Barry. The kid wasn't stupid. He'd been thinking about this.

'What about the fluctuations?' Branch asked him. 'How does decay explain the nitrogen coming and going?'

'What if the cause is periodic?' Branch was patient.

'What if the remains are being disturbed? But only during certain hours.'

'Delete.'

'Middle-of-the-night hours.'

'Delete.'

'When they logically think we can't see them.' As if to confirm him, the pile moved again.

'What the fuck!'

'Impossible.'

Branch let go of Barry's earnest eyes and took a look.

'Give us some close-up,' a voice called from the end of the line.

The telephoto jacked closer in peristaltic increments. 'That's as tight as it gets,' the captain said. 'That's a ten-meter square.'

You could see the jumbled bones in negative. Hundreds of human skeletons floated in a giant tangled embrace.

'Wait...' McDaniels murmured. 'Watch.' Branch focused on the screen.

'There.'

From beneath, it appeared, the pile of dead stirred. Branch blinked.

As if getting comfortable, the bones rustled again.

'Fucking Serbs,' McDaniels cursed. No one disputed the indictment.

Of late, the Serbs had a way of making themselves the theory of choice.

Those tales of children being forced to eat their fathers' livers, of women being raped for months on end, of every perversion... they were true. Every side had committed atrocities in the name of God or history or boundaries or revenge.

But of all the factions, the Serbs were the best known for trying to erase their sins. Until the First Cav put a stop to it, the Serbs had raced about excavating mass graves and dumping the remains down mine shafts or grating them to fertilizer with heavy machinery.

Strangely, their terrible industry gave Branch hope. In destroying evidence of their crime, the Serbs were trying to escape punishment or blame. But on top of that – or within it – what if evil could not exist without guilt? What if this was their punishment? What if this was penance?

'So what's it going to be, Bob?'

Branch looked up, less at the voice than at its liberty in front of subordinates.

For Bob was the colonel. Which meant his inquisitor could only be Maria-Christina Chambers, queen of the ghouls, formidable in her own right. Branch had not seen her when he came into the room.

A pathology prof on sabbatical from OU, Chambers had the gray hair and pedigree to mix with whomever she wanted. As a nurse, she'd seen more combat in Vietnam than most Green Beanies. Legend had it, she'd even taken up a rifle during Tet. She despised microbrew, swore by Coors, and was forever kicking dirt clods or talking crops like a Kansas farmboy. Soldiers liked her, including Branch. As well, the Colonel

– Bob – and Christie had grown to be friends. But not over this particular issue.

'We going to dodge the bastards again?'

The room fell to such quiet, Branch could hear the captain pressing keys on her keyboard.

'Dr. Chambers...' A corporal tried heading her off. Chambers cut him short. 'Piss off, I'm talking to your boss.'

'Christie,' the colonel pleaded.

Chambers was having none of it this morning, though. To her credit, she was unarmed this time, not a flask in sight. She glared.

The colonel said, 'Dodge?'

'Yes.'

'What more do you want us to do, Christie?'

Every bulletin board in camp dutifully carried NATO's Wanted poster. Fifty-four men charged with the worst war crimes graced the poster. IFOR, the Implementation Forces, was tasked with apprehending every man it found. Miraculously, despite nine months in country and an extensive intelligence setup, IFOR had found not one of them. On several notorious occasions, IFOR had literally turned its head in order to

not see what was right in front of them.

The lesson had been learned in Somalia. While hunting a tyrant, twenty-four Rangers had been trapped, slaughtered, and dragged by their heels behind the armed trucks called Technicals. Branch himself had missed dying in that alley by a matter of minutes.

Here the idea was to return every troop home – alive and well – by Christmas. Self-preservation was a very popular idea. Even over testimony. Even over justice.

'You know what they're up to,' Chambers said.

The mass of bones danced within the shimmering nitrogen bloom.

'Actually I don't.'

Chambers was undaunted. She was downright grand. '"I will allow no atrocity to occur in my presence,"' she quoted to the colonel.

It was a clever bit of insubordination, her way of declaring that she and her scientists were not alone in their disgust. The quote came from the colonel's very own Rangers. During their first month in Bosnia, a patrol had stumbled upon a rape in progress, only to be ordered to stand back and not intervene. Word had spread of the incident. Outraged, mere privates in this and other camps had taken it upon themselves to author their own code of conduct. A hundred years ago, any army in the world would have taken a whip to such impudence. Twenty years ago, JAG would have fried some ass. But in the modern volunteer Army, it was allowed to be called a bottom-up initiative. Rule Six, they called it.

'I see no atrocity,' the colonel said. 'I see no Serbs at work. No human actor at all. It could be animals.'

'Goddammit, Bob.' They'd been through it a dozen times, though never in public this way.

'In the name of decency,' Chambers said, 'if we can't raise our sword against evil...' She heard the cliché coming together out of her own mouth and abandoned it.

'Look.' She started over. 'My people located Zulu Four, opened it, spent five valuable days excavating the top layer of bodies. That was before this goddam rain shut us down. This is by far the largest massacre site. There's at least another eight hundred bodies in there. So far, our documentation has been impeccable. The evidence that comes out of Zulu Four is going to convict the worst of the bad guys, if we can just finish the job. I'm not willing to see it all destroyed by goddam human wolverines. It's bad enough they engineered a massacre, but then to despoil the dead? It's your job to guard that site.'

'It is not our job,' said the colonel. 'Guarding graves is not our job.'

'Human rights depends –'

'Human rights is not our job.'

A burst of radio static eddied, became words, became silence.

'I see a grave settling beneath ten days of rain,' the colonel said. 'I see nature at work. Nothing more.'

'For once, let's be certain,' Chambers said. 'That's all I'm asking.'

'No.'

'One helicopter. One hour.'

'In this weather? At night? And look at the area, flooded with nitrogen.'

In a line, the six screens pulsed with electric coloration. Rest in peace, thought

Branch. But the bones shifted again.

'Right in front of our eyes...' muttered Christie.

Branch felt suddenly overwhelmed. It struck him as obscene that these dead men and boys should be cheated of their only concealment. Because of the awful way they had died, these dead were destined to be hauled back into the light by one party or another – if not by the Serbs, then by Chambers and her pack of hounds, perhaps over and over again. In this gruesome condition they would be seen by their mothers

and wives and sons and daughters and the sight would haunt their loved ones forever.

'I'll go,' he heard himself say.

When the colonel saw it was Branch who had spoken, his face collapsed. 'Major?' he said. Et tu?

In that instant, the universe revealed depths Branch had failed to estimate or even dream. For the first time he realized that he was a favorite son and that the colonel had hoped in his heart to hand on the division to him someday. Too late, Branch comprehended the magnitude of his betrayal.

Branch wondered what had made him do it. Like the colonel, he was a soldier's soldier. He knew the meaning of duty, cared for his men, understood war as a trade rather than a calling, shirked no hardship, and was as brave as wisdom and rank allowed. He had measured his shadow under foreign suns, had buried friends, taken wounds, caused grief among his enemies.

For all that, Branch did not see himself as a champion. He didn't believe in champions. The age was too complicated.

And yet he found himself, Elias Branch, advocating the proposition. 'Someone's got to start it,' he stated with awful self-consciousness.

'It,' monotoned the colonel.

Not quite sure even what he meant after all, Branch did not try to define himself.

'Sir,' he said, 'yes, sir.'

'You find this so necessary?'

'It's just that we have come so far.'

'I like to believe that, too. What is it you hope to accomplish, though?'

'Maybe,' said Branch, 'maybe this time we can look into their eyes.'

'And then?'

Branch felt naked and foolish and alone. 'Make them answer.'

'But their answer will be false,' said the colonel. 'It always is. What then?' Branch was confused.

'Make them quit, sir.' He swallowed.

Unbidden, Ramada came to Branch's rescue. 'With permission, sir,' he said. 'I'll volunteer to go with the major, sir.'

'And me,' said McDaniels.

From around the room, three other crews volunteered also. Without asking, Branch had himself an entire expeditionary force of gunships. It was a terrible deed, a show of support very close to patricide. Branch bowed his head.

In the great sigh that followed, Branch felt himself released forever from the old man's heart. It was a lonely freedom and he did not want it, but now it was his.

'Go, then,' spoke the colonel.

0410

Branch led low, lights doused, blades cleaving the foul ceiling. The other two Apaches prowled his wings, lupine, ferocious.

He gave the bird its head of steam: 145 kph. Get this thing over with. By dawn, flapjacks with bacon for his gang of paladins, some rack time for himself, then start it all over. Keeping the peace. Staying alive.

Branch guided them through the darkness by instruments he hated. As far as he was concerned, night-vision technology was an act of faith that did not deserve him. But tonight, with the sky empty of all but his platoon, and because the strange peril – this cloud of nitrogen – was invisible to the human eye, Branch chose to rely on what his flight helmet's target-acquisition monocle and the optics pod were displaying.

The seat screen and their monocles were showing a virtual Bosnia transmitted from base. There a software program called PowerScene was translating all the current

images of their area from satellites, maps, a Boeing 707 Night Stalker at high altitude, and daytime photos. The result was a 3-D simulation of almost real time. Ahead lay the Drina as it had been just moments before.

On their virtual map, Branch and Ramada would not arrive at Zulu Four until after they had actually arrived there. It took some getting used to. The 3-D visuals were so good, you wanted to believe in them. But the maps were never true maps of where you were going. They were only true to where you'd been, like a memory of your future.

Zulu Four lay ten klicks southeast of Kalejsia in the direction of Srebrenica and other killing fields bordering the Drina River. Much of the worst destruction was clustered along this river on the border of Serbia.

From the backseat of the gunship, Ramada murmured, 'Glory,' as it came into view. Branch flicked his attention from PowerScene to their real-time night scan. Up ahead, he saw what Ramada meant.

Zulu Four's dome of gases was crimson and forbidding. It was like biblical evidence of a crack in the cosmos. Closer still, the nitrogen had the appearance of a huge flower, petals curling beneath the nimbostratus canopy as gases hit the cold air and sheared down again. Even as they caught up with it, the deadly flower appeared on their PowerScene with a bank of unfolding information in LCD overprint. The scene shifted. Branch saw the satellite view of his Apaches just now arriving at where they had already passed. Good morning, Branch greeted his tardy image.

'You guys smell it? Over.' That would be McDaniels, the eight-o'clock shotgun.

'Smells like a bucket of Mr Clean.' Branch knew the voice: Teague, back in the rear pocket.

Someone began humming the TV tune.

'Smells like piss.' Ramada. Blunt as iron. Quit horsing around, he meant. Branch caught the front edge of the odor. Immediately he exhaled.

Ammonia. The nitrogen spinoff from Zulu Four. It did smell like piss, rotten morning piss, ten days old. Sewage.

'Masks,' he said, and seated his own tight against the bones of his face. Why take chances? The oxygen surged cool and clean in his sinuses.

The plume crouched, squat, wide, a quarter-mile high.

Branch tried to assess the dangers with his instruments and artificial light filters. Screw this stuff. They said little to him. He opted for caution.

'Listen up,' he said. 'Lovey, Mac, Teague, Schulbe, all of you. I want you to take position one klick out from the edge. Hold there while Ram and I take a wide circle around the beast, clockwise.' He made it up as he went along. Why not counterclockwise? Why not up and over?

'I'll keep the spiral loose and high and return to your grouping. Let's not mess with the bastard until it makes more sense.'

'Music to my ear, jefe,' Ramada approved, navigator to pilot. 'No adventures. No heroes.'

Except for a snapshot he had shown Branch, Ramada had yet to lay eyes upon his brand-new baby boy, back in Norman, Oklahoma. He should not have come on this ride, but would not stay back. His vote of confidence only made Branch feel worse. At times like this, Branch detested his own charisma. More than one soldier had died following him into the path of evil.

'Questions?' Branch waited. None.

He broke left, banking hard away from the platoon.

Branch wound clockwise. He started the spiral wide and teased closer. The plume was roughly two kilometers in circumference.

Bristling with minigun and rockets, he made the full revolution at high speed, just in case some harebrain might be lurking on the forest floor with a SAM on one shoulder

and slivovitz for blood. He wasn't here to provoke a war, just to configure the strangeness. Something was going on out here. But what?

At the end of his circle, Branch flared to a halt and spied his gunships waiting in a dark cluster in the distance, their red lights twinkling. 'It doesn't look like anyone's home,' he said. 'Anybody see anything?'

'Nada,' spoke Lovey.

'Negative here,' McDaniels said.

Back at Molly, the assemblage was sharing Branch's electronically enhanced view.

'Your visibility sucks, Elias.' Maria-Christina Chambers herself.

'Dr. Chambers?' he said. What was she doing on the net?

'It's the old chestnut, Elias. Can't see the forest for the trees. We're way too saturated with the fancy optics. The cameras are cued to the nitrogen, so all we're getting is nitrogen. Any chance you might snug in and give it the old eyeball?'

Much as Branch liked her, much as he wanted to go in and do precisely that –

eyeball the hell out of it – the old woman had no business in his chain of command.

'That needs to come from the colonel, over,' he said.

'The colonel has stepped out. My distinct impression was that you were being given, ah, total discretion.'

The fact that Christie Chambers was putting the request directly over military airwaves could only mean that the colonel had indeed departed the command center. The message was clear: Since Branch was so all-fired independent, he had been cut loose to fend for himself. In archaic terms, it was something close to banishment. Branch had fragged himself.

'Roger that,' Branch said, idling. Now what? Go? Stay? Search on for the golden apples of the sun...

'Am assessing conditions,' he radioed. 'Will inform of my decision. Out.'

He hovered just beyond reach of the dense opaque mass and panned with the nose-mounted camera and sensors. It was like standing face-to-face before the first atomic mushroom.

If only he could see. Impatient with the technology, Branch abruptly killed the infrared night vision and pushed the eyepiece away. He flipped on the undercarriage headlights.

Instantly the specter of a giant purple cloud vanished.

Spread before them, Branch saw a forest – with trees. Stark shadows cast long and bleak. Near the center, the trees were leafless. The nitrogen release on previous nights had blighted them.

'Good God!' Chambers's voice hurt his ears.

Pandemonium erupted over the airwaves. 'What the hell was that?' someone yelled. Branch didn't know the voice, but from the background it sounded like a small riot breaking out at Molly.

Branch tensed. 'Say again. Over,' he said.

Chambers came back on. 'Don't tell me you didn't see that. When you turned your lights on...'

The comm room noised like a flock of tropical birds in panic. Someone was yelling,

'Get the colonel, get him now!' Another voice boomed, 'Give me replay, give me replay!'

'What the fuck?' McDaniels wondered from the floating huddle. 'Over.' Branch waited with his pilots, listening to the chaos at base.

A military voice came on. It was Master Sergeant Jefferson at her console. 'Echo

Tango, do you read? Over.' Her radio discipline was a miracle to hear.

'This is Echo Tango, Base,' Branch replied. 'You are loud and clear. Is there a situation in development? Over.'

'Big motion on the KH-12 feed, Echo Tango. Something's going on in there. Infrared

just showed multiple bogeys. You say you see nothing? Over.'

Branch squinted through the canopy. The rain lay plasticized on his Plexiglas, smearing his vision. He angled down to give Ramada an unobstructed view. From this distance, the site looked toxic but peaceful.

'Ram?' he said quietly, at a loss.

'Beats me,' Ramada said.

'Any better?' he spoke into his mouthpiece.

'Better,' breathed Chambers. 'Hard to see, though.'

Branch moved laterally for vantage and trained the lights on ground zero. Zulu Four lay not far ahead, nestled among stark spears of killed forest.

'There it is,' Chambers said.

You had to know what to look for. It was a large pit, open and flooded with rainwater. Sticks floated on top of the pool. Bones, Branch knew instinctively.

'Can we get any more magnification?' Chambers asked.

Branch held his position while specialists fiddled with the image back at camp. There beyond his Plexiglas lay the apocalypse: Pestilence, Death, War. All but that final horseman, Famine. What in creation are you doing here, Elias?

'Not good enough,' Chambers complained over his headset. 'All we're doing is magnifying the distortion.'

She was going to repeat her request, Branch knew. It was the logical next step. But she never got the chance.

'There again, sir,' the master sergeant reported over the radio. 'I'm counting three, correction, four thermal shapes, Echo Tango. Very distinct. Very alive. Still nothing on your end? Over.'

'Nothing. What kind of shapes, Base? Over.'

'They look to be human-sized. Otherwise, no detail. The KH-12 just doesn't have the resolution. Repeat. We're imaging multiple shapes, in motion at or in the site. Beyond that, no definition.'

Branch sat there with the cyclic shoving at his hand.

At or in? Branch slipped right, searching for better vantage, sideways, then higher, not venturing one inch closer. Ramada toggled the light, hunting. They rose high above the dead trees.

'Hold it,' Ramada said.

From above, the water's surface was clearly agitated. It was not a wild agitation. But neither was it the kind of smooth rippling caused by falling leaves, say. The pattern was too arrhythmic. Too animate.

'We're observing some kind of movement down there,' Branch radioed. 'Are you picking any of this up on our camera, Base? Over.'

'Very mixed results, Major. Nothing definite. You're too far away.'

Branch scowled at the pool of water. He tried to fashion a logical explanation. Nothing above ground clarified the phenomenon. No people, no wolves, no scavengers. Except for the motion breaking the water's surface, the area was lifeless.

Whatever was causing the disturbance had to be in the water. Fish? It was not impossible, with the overflowing rivers and creeks reaching through the forest. Catfish, maybe? Eels? Bottom feeders, whatever they were? And large enough to show up on a satellite infrared.

There was not a need to know. No more so than, say, the need to unravel a good mystery novel. It would have been reason enough for Branch, if he were alone. He yearned to get close and wrestle the answer out of that water. But he was not free to obey his impulses. He had men under his command. He had a new father in the backseat. As he was trained to do, Branch let his curiosity wither in obedience to duty. Abruptly the grave reached out to him.

A man reared up from the water.

'Jesus,' Ramada hissed.

The Apache shied with Branch's startle reflex. He steadied the chopper even as he watched the unearthly sight.

'Echo Tango One?' The corporal was shaken.

The man had been dead for many months. To the waist, what was left of him slowly lifted above the surface, head back, wrists wired together. For a moment he seemed to stare up at the helicopter. At Branch himself.

Even from their distance, Branch could tell a story about the man. He was dressed like a schoolteacher or an accountant, definitely not a soldier. The baling wire around his wrists they'd seen on other prisoners from the Serbs' holding camp at Kalejsia. The bullet's exit cavity gaped prominently at the left rear of his skull.

For maybe twenty seconds the human carrion bobbed in place, a ridiculous mannequin. Then the fabrication twisted to one side and dropped heavily onto the bank of the grave pit, half in, half out. It was almost as if a prop were being discarded, its shock effect spent.

'Elias?' Ramada wondered in a whisper.

Branch did not respond. You asked for it, he was thinking to himself. You got it.

Rule Six echoed. I will permit no atrocity to occur in my presence. The atrocity had already occurred, the killing, the mass burial. All in the past tense. But this – this desecration – was in his presence. His present presence.

'Ram?' he asked.

Ramada knew his meaning. 'Absolutely,' he answered.

And still Branch did not enter. He was a careful man. There were a few last details.

'I need some clarification, Base,' he radioed. 'My turbine breathes air. Can it breathe this nitrogen atmosphere?'

'Sorry, Echo Tango,' Jefferson said, 'I have no information on that.'

Chambers came on the air, excited. 'I might be able to help answer that. Just a sec, I'll consult one of our people.'

Your people? thought Branch with annoyance. Things were slipping out of order. She had no place whatsoever in this decision. A minute later she returned. 'You might as well get it straight from the horse's mouth, Elias. This is Cox, forensic chemistry, Stanford.'

A new voice came on. 'Heard your question,' the Stanford man said. 'Will an air-breather breathe your adulterated concentrate?'

'Something like that,' Branch said.

'Ah hmm,' Stanford said. 'I'm looking at the chemical spectrograph downloaded from the Predator drone five minutes ago. That's as close to current as we're going to get. The plume is showing eighty-nine percent nitrogen. Your oxygen's down to thirteen percent, nowhere close to normal. Looks like your hydrogen quota took the biggest hit. Big deal. So here's your answer, okay?'

He paused. Branch said, 'We're all ears.' Stanford said, 'Yes.'

'Yes, what?' said Branch.

'Yes. You can go in. You don't want to breathe this mix, but your turbine can. Nema problema.'

The universal shrug had entered Serbo-Croatian, too. 'Tell me one thing,' Branch said. 'If there's no problem, how come I don't want to breathe this mix?'

'Because,' said the forensic chemist, 'that probably wouldn't be, ah, circumspect.'

'My meter's running, Mr Cox,' Branch said. Fuck circumspect.

He could hear the Stanford hotshot swallow. 'Look, don't mistake me,' the man said.

'Nitrogen's very good stuff. Most of what we breathe is nitrogen. Life wouldn't exist without it. Out in California, people pay big bucks to enhance it. Ever hear of blue-green algae? The idea is to bond nitrogen organically. Supposed to make your

memory last forever.'

Branch stopped him. 'Is it safe?'

'I wouldn't land, sir. Don't touch down, definitely. I mean unless you've been immunized against cholera and all the hepatitises and probably bubonic plague. The bio-hazard's got to be off the scale down there, with all that sepsis in the water. The whole helicopter would have to be quarantined.'

'Bottom line,' Branch tried again, voice pinched tight. 'Will my machine fly in there?'

'Bottom line,' the chemist finally summarized, 'yes.'

The pit of fetid water curdled beneath them. Bones rocked on the surface. Bubbles breached like primordial boil. Like a thousand pairs of lungs exhaling. Telling tales. Branch decided.

'Sergeant Jefferson?' he radioed. 'Do you have your handgun?'

'Yes sir, of course, sir,' she said. They were required to carry a firearm at all times on base.

'You will chamber one round, Sergeant.'

'Sir?' They were also required never to load a weapon on base unless under direct attack.

Branch didn't drag his joke out any longer. 'The man who was just on the radio,' he said. 'If he proves wrong, Sergeant, I want you to shoot him.'

Over the airwaves, Branch heard McDaniels snort his approval.

'Leg or head, sir?' He liked that.

Branch took a minute to get the other gunships positioned at the edges of the gas cloud, and to double-check his armament and snug his oxygen mask hard and tight.

'All right, then,' he said. 'Let's get some answers.'

0425

He entered from on high with his faithful navigator at his back, meaning to descend at his own pace. To go slowly. To winnow out the perils one by one. With his three gunships poised at the rear like wrathful archangels, Branch meant to own this blighted real estate from the top down.

But the Stanford forensic chemistry specialist was wrong. Apaches did not breathe this gaseous broth.

He was no more than ten seconds in when the acid haze began sparking furiously. The sparks killed the pilot flame already burning in the turbine, then, sparking more, relit the engine with a small explosion beneath the rotors. The exhaust-gas temperature gauge went into the red. The pilot flame became a two-foot wildfire.

It was Branch's job to be ready for all emergencies. Part of your training as a pilot involved hubris, and part of it involved preparing for your own downfall. This particular mechanical bankruptcy had never happened to him before, but he had reflexes for it anyway.

When the rotors surged, he corrected for it. When the machine started into failure and instruments shorted out, he did not panic. The power cut out on him.

'I've got a hot start,' Branch declared calmly. Fed by an oxygen surge, the bushing above their heads held a fiery bluish globe, like St. Elmo's fire.

'Autorote,' he announced next when the machine – logically – failed altogether. Autorotation was a state of mechanical paralysis.

'Going down,' he announced. No emotion. No blame. Here was here.

'Are you hit, Major?' Count on Mac. The Avenger.

'Negative,' Branch reassured. 'No contact. Our turbine's blown.'

Autorotation, Branch could handle. It was one of his oldest instincts, to shove the collective down and find that long, steep, safe glide that imitated flight. Even with the

engine dead, the rotor blades would continue spinning with the centrifugal force, allowing for a short, steep forced landing. That was the theory. At a plunging speed of

1,700 feet per minute, it all translated into thirty seconds of alternative.

Branch had practiced autorotations a thousand times, but never in the middle of night, in the middle of a toxic forest. With the power cut, his headlights died. The darkness leaped out at him. He was startled by its quickness. There was no time for his eyes to adjust. No time to flip on the monocle's artificial night vision. Damn instruments. That was his downfall. Should have been relying on his own eyes. For the first time he felt fear.

'I'm blind,' Branch reported in a monotone.

He fought away the image of trees waiting to gut them. He reached for the faith of his wings. Hold the pitch flat, the rotors will spin.

The dead forest rushed at his imagination like switchblades in an alley. He knew better than to think the trees might cushion them. He wanted to apologize to Ramada, the father who was young enough to be his son. Where have I brought us?

Only now did he admit his loss of control. 'Mayday,' he reported.

They entered the treeline with a metallic shriek, limbs raking the aluminum, breaking the skids, reaching to skin their souls out of the machine.

For a few seconds more their descent was more glide than plummet. The blades sheared treetops, then the trees sheared his blades.

The forest caught them.

The Apache braked in a mangle. The noise quit.

Wrapped nose-down against a tree, the machine rocked gently like a cradle in rain. Branch lifted his fists from the controls. He let go. It was done.

Despite himself, he passed out.

He woke gagging. His mask was filled with vomit. In darkness and smoke, he clawed at the straps, freed the facepiece, dragged hard at the air.

Instantly he tasted and smelled the poison reach into his lungs and blood. It seared his throat. He felt diseased, anciently diseased, plagued into his very bones. Mask, he thought with alarm.

One arm would not work. It dangled before him. With his good hand he fumbled to find the mask again. He emptied the mess, pressed the rubber to his face.

The oxygen burned cold across the nitrogen wounds in his throat.

'Ram?' he croaked. No answer.

'Ram?'

He could feel the emptiness behind him.

Strapped facedown, bones broken, wings clipped, Branch did the only other thing he was able to do, the one thing he had come to do. He had entered this dark forest to witness great evil. And so he made himself see. He refused delirium. He looked. He watched. He waited.

The darkness eased.

It was not dawn arriving. Rather, it was his own vision binding with the blackness. Shapes surfaced. A horizon of gray tones.

He noticed now a strange, taut lightning flickering on the far side of his Plexiglas. At first he thought it was the storm igniting thin strands of gas. The hits of light penciled in various objects on the forest floor, less with actual illumination than through brief flashes of silhouette.

Branch struggled to make sense of the clues spread all around him, but apprehended only that he had fallen from the sky.

'Mac,' he called on his radio. He traced the communications cord to his helmet, and it was severed. He was alone.

His instrument panel still showed aspects of vitality. Various green and red lights twinkled, fed by batteries here and there. They signified only that the ship was still dying.

He saw that the crash had cast him among a tangle of fallen trees close to Zulu Four. He peered through Plexiglas sprayed with a fine spiderweb. A gracile crucifix loomed in the near distance. It was a vast, fragile icon, and he wondered – hoped – that some Serb warrior might have erected it as penance for this mass grave. But then Branch saw that it was one of his broken rotor blades caught at a right angle in a tree.

Bits of wreckage smoldered on the floor of soaked needles and leaves. The soak could be rain. Rather late, it came to him that the soak could also be his own spilled fuel.

What alarmed him was how sluggish his alarm was. From far away, it seemed, he registered that the fuel could ignite and that he should extricate himself and his partner – dead or alive – and get away from his ship. It was imperative, but did not feel so. He wanted to sleep. No.

He hyperventilated with the oxygen. He tried to steel himself to the pain about to come, jock stuff mostly, when the going gets tough...

He reared up, shouldering high against the side canopy, and bones grated upon bones. The dislocated knee popped in, then out again. He roared.

Branch sank down into his seat, shocked alive by the crescendo of nerve endings. Everything hurt. He laid his head back, found the mask.

The canopy flapped up, gently.

He drew hard at the oxygen, as if it might make him forget how much more pain was left to come. But the oxygen only made him more lucid. In the back of his mind, the names of broken bones flooded in helpfully. Horribly. Strange, this diagnosis. His wounds were eloquent. Each wanted to announce itself precisely, all at the same time. The pain was thunderous.

He raised a wild stare at the bygone sky. No stars up there. No sky. Clouds upon clouds. A ceiling without end. He felt claustrophobic. Get out.

He took a final lungful, let go of the mask, shed his useless helmet.

With his one good arm, Branch grappled himself free of the cockpit. He fell upon the earth. Gravity despised him. He felt crushed smaller and smaller into himself.

Within the pain, a distant ecstasy opened its strange flower. The dislocated knee popped back into place, and the relief was almost sexual. 'God,' he groaned. 'Thank God.'

He rested, panting rapidly, cheek upon the mud. He focused on the ecstasy. It was tiny among all the other savage sensations. He imagined a doorway. If only he could enter, all the pain would end.

After a few minutes, Branch felt stronger. The good news was that his limbs were numbing from the gas saturation in his bloodstream. The bad news was the gas. The nitrogen reeked. It tasted like aftermath.

'...Tango One...' he heard.

Branch looked up at the caved-in hull of his Apache. The electronic voice was coming from the backseat. 'Echo... read me...'

He stood away from the earth's flat seduction. It was beyond his comprehension that he could function at all. But he had to tend to Ramada. And they had to know the dangers.

He climbed to a standing position against the chill aluminum body. The ship lay tilted upon one side, more ravaged than he had realized. Hanging on to a handhold, Branch looked into the rear cavity. He braced for the worst.

But the backseat was empty.

Ramada's helmet lay on the seat. The voice came again, tiny, now distinct. 'Echo

Tango One...'

Branch lifted the helmet and pulled it onto his own head. He remembered that there was a photograph of the newborn son in its crown.

'This is Echo Tango One,' he said. His voice sounded ridiculous in his own ears, elastic and high, cartoonish.

'Ramada?' It was Mac, angry in his relief. 'Quit screwing around and report. Are you guys okay? Over.'

'Branch here,' Elias identified with his absurd voice. He was concussed. The crash had messed up his hearing.

'Major? Is that you?' Mac's voice practically reached for him. 'This is Echo Tango

Two. What is your condition, please? Over.'

'Ramada is missing,' Branch said. 'The ship is totaled.'

Mac took a half-minute to absorb the information. He came back on, all business.

'We've got a fix on you on the thermal scan, Major. Right beside your bird. Just hold your position. We're coming in to provide assistance. Over.'

'No,' Branch quacked with his bird voice. 'Negative. Do you read me?' Mac and the other gunships did not respond.

'Do not, repeat, do not attempt approach. Your engines will not breathe this air.' They accepted his explanation reluctantly. 'Ah, roger that,' Schulbe said.

Mac came on. 'Major. What is your condition, please?'

'My condition?' Beyond suffering and loss, he didn't know. Human? 'Never mind.'

'Major.' Mac paused awkwardly. 'What's with the voice, Major?' They could hear it, too?

Christie Chambers, MD, was listening back at Base. 'It's the nitrogen,' she diagnosed. Of course, thought Branch. 'Is there any way you can get back on oxygen, Elias? You must.'

Feebly, Branch rummaged for Ramada's oxygen mask, but it must have been torn away in the crash. 'Up front,' he said dully.

'Go up there,' Chambers told him.

'Can't,' said Branch. It meant moving again. Worse, it meant giving up Ramada's helmet and losing his contact with the outside world. No, he would take the radio link over oxygen. Communication was information. Information was duty. Duty was salvation.

'Are you injured?'

He looked down at his limbs. Strange darts of electric color were scribbling along his thighs, and he realized that the beams of light were lasers. His gunships were painting the region, defining targets for their weapons systems.

'Must find Ramada,' he said. 'Can't you see him on your scan?' Mac was fixed on him. 'Are you mobile, sir?'

What were they saying? Branch leaned against the ship, exhausted.

'Are you able to walk, Major? Can you evacuate yourself from the region?' Branch judged himself. He judged the night. 'Negative.'

'Rest, Major. Stay put. A bio-chem team is on its way from Molly. We will insert them by cable. Help is on the way, sir.'

'But Ramada...'

'Not your concern, Major. We'll find him. Maybe you should just sit down.'

How could a man just disappear? Even dead, his body would go on emitting a heat signature for hours more. Branch raised his eyes and tried to find Ramada wedged in the trees. Maybe he'd been thrown into the funeral waters.

Now another voice entered. 'Echo Tango One, this is Base.' It was Master Sergeant

Jefferson; Branch wanted to lay his head against that resonant bosom.

'You are not alone,' Jefferson said. 'Please be advised, Major. The KH-12 is showing unidentified movement to your north-northwest.'

North-northwest? His instruments were dead. He had no compass, even. But

Branch did not complain. 'It's Ramada,' he predicted confidently. Who else could it be out there? His navigator was alive after all.

'Major,' cautioned Jefferson, 'the image carries no combat tag. This is not confirmed friendly. Repeat, we have no idea who is approaching you.'

'It's Ramada,' Branch insisted. The navigator must have climbed from the broken craft to do what navigators do: orient.

'Major.' Jefferson's tone had changed. With all the world listening, this was just for him. 'Get out of there.'

Branch hung to the side of the wreckage. Get out of here? He could barely stand. Mac came on. 'I'm picking it up now, too. Fifteen yards out. Coming straight for you. But where the fuck did he come from?'

Branch looked over his shoulder.

The dense atmosphere opened like a mirage. The interloper staggered out from the brush and trees.

Lasers twitched frenetically across the figure's chest, shoulders, and legs. The intruder looked netted with modern art.

'I've got a lock,' Mac clipped.

'Me too.' Teague's monotone.

'Roger that,' Schulbe said. It was like listening to sharks speak.

'Say go, Major, he's smoke.'

'Disengage,' Branch radioed urgently, aghast at their lights. So this is how it is to be my enemy. 'It's Ramada. Don't shoot.'

'I'm vectoring more presence,' Master Sergeant Jefferson reported. 'Two, four, five more heat images, two hundred meters southeast, coordinates Charlie Mike eight three...'

Mac cut through. 'You sure, Major? Be sure.'

The lasers did not desist. They went on scrawling twitchy designs on the lost soldier. Even with the help of their neurotic doodles, even with the stark clarity of his nearness, Branch was not sure he wanted to be sure this was his navigator.

He ascertained the man by what was left of him. His rejoicing died.

'It's him,' Branch said mournfully. 'It is.'

Except for his boots, Ramada was naked and bleeding from head to foot. He looked like a runaway slave, freshly flayed. Flesh trailed in rags from his ankles. Serbs? Branch wondered in awe.

He remembered the mob in Mogadishu, the dead Rangers dragged behind Technicals. But that kind of savagery took time, and they couldn't have crashed more than ten or fifteen minutes ago. The crash, he considered, perhaps the Plexiglas. What else could have shredded him like this?

'Bobby,' he called softly.

Roberto Ramada lifted his head.

'No,' whispered Branch.

'What's going on down there, Major? Over.'

'His eyes,' said Branch. They had taken his eyes.

'You're breaking up... Tango...'

'Say again, say again...'

'His eyes are gone.'

'Say again, eyes are...'

'The bastards took his eyes.' Schulbe: 'His eyes?'

Teague: 'But why?'

There was a moment's pause.

Then Base registered. '...new sighting, Echo Tango One. Do you copy...'

Mac came on with his cyber-voice. 'We're picking up a new set of bogeys, Major. Five thermal shapes. On foot. They are closing on your position.'

Branch barely heard him.

Ramada stumbled as if burdened by their laser beams. Branch realized the truth. Ramada had tried to flee through the forest. But it was not Serbs who had turned him back. The forest itself had refused to let him pass.

'Animals,' Branch murmured.

'Say again, Major.'

Wild animals. On the edge of the twenty-first century, Branch's navigator had just been eaten by wild animals.

The war had created wild animals out of domestic pets. It had freed beasts from zoos and circuses and sent them into the wilderness. Branch was not shocked by the presence of animals. The abandoned coal tunnels would have made an ideal niche for them. But what kind of animal took your eyes? Crows, perhaps, though not at night, not that Branch had ever heard of. Owls, maybe? But surely not while the prey was still alive?

'Echo Tango One...'

'Bobby,' Branch said again.

Ramada turned toward his name and opened his mouth in reply. What emerged was more blood than vowel. His tongue, too, was gone.

And now Branch saw the arm. Ramada's left arm had been stripped of all flesh below the elbow. The forearm was fresh bone.

The blinded navigator beseeched his savior. All that emerged was a mewl.

'Echo Tango One, please be apprised...'

Branch shucked the helmet and let it hang by the cord outside the cockpit. Mac and Master Sergeant Jefferson and Christie Chambers would have to wait. He had mercy to perform. If he did not bring Ramada in, the man would blunder on into the wilderness. He would drown in the mass grave, or the carnivores would take him down for good.

Summoning all his Appalachian strength, Branch forced himself upright and pressed away from the ship. He stepped toward his poor navigator.

'Everything will be okay,' he spoke to his friend. 'Can you come closer to me?' Ramada was at the far edge of his sanity. But he responded. He turned in Branch's direction. Forgetful, the hideous bone lifted to take Branch's hand, even though it lacked a hand itself.

Branch avoided the amputation and got one arm around Ramada's waist and hoisted him closer. They both collapsed against the ruins of their helicopter.

It was a blessing of sorts, Ramada's horrible condition. Branch felt freed by comparison. Now he could dwell on wounds far worse than his own. He laid the navigator across his lap and palmed away the gore and mud on his face.

While he held his friend, Branch listened to the dangling helmet.

'...One, Echo Tango One...' The mantra went on.

He sat in the mud with his back against the ship, clutching his fallen angel: Pietà in the mire. Ramada's limbs fell mercifully limp.

'Major,' Jefferson sang in the near silence. 'You are in danger. Do you copy?'

'Branch.' Mac sounded violent and exhausted and full of worries high above. 'They're coming for you. If you can hear me, take cover. You must take cover.'

They didn't understand. Everything was okay now. He wanted to sleep. Mac went on yelling. '...thirty yards out. Can you see them?'

If he could have reached the helmet radio, Branch would have asked them to calm down. Their commotion was agitating Ramada. He could hear them, obviously. The more they yelled, the more poor Ramada moaned and howled.

'Hush, Bobby.' Branch stroked his bloody head.

'Twenty yards out. Dead ahead, Major. Do you see them? Do you copy?'

Branch indulged Mac. He squinted into the nitrous mirage enveloping them. It was little different from looking through a glass of water. Visibility was twenty feet, not yards, beyond which the forest stood warped and dreamlike. It made his head ache. He nearly gave up. Then he caught a movement.

The motion was peripheral. It pronounced the depths, a bit of pallor in the dark woods. He glanced to the side, but it was gone.

'They're fanning out, Major. Hunter-killer style. If you copy, get away. Repeat, begin escape and evasion.'

Ramada was grunting idiotically. Branch tried to quiet him, but the navigator was in a panic. He pushed Branch's hand away and hooted fearfully at the dead forest.

'Be quiet,' Branch whispered.

'We see you on the infrared, Major. Presume you are unable to move. If you copy, get your ass down.'

Ramada was going to give them away with his noise.

Branch looked around and there, close at hand, his oxygen mask was dangling against the ship. Branch took it. He held it to Ramada's face.

It worked. Ramada quit hooting. He took several unabated pulls at the oxygen. Seizures followed a moment later.

Later, people would not blame Branch for the death. Even after Army coroners determined that Ramada's death was accidental, few believed Branch had not meant to kill him. Some felt it showed his compassion toward this mutilated victim. Others said it demonstrated a warrior's self-preservation, that Branch had no choice under the circumstances.

Ramada writhed in Branch's embrace. The oxygen mask was ripped away. Ramada's agony burst out in a howl.

'It will be okay,' Branch told him, and pushed the mask back into place. Ramada's spine arched. His cheeks sucked in and out. He clawed at Branch. Branch held on. He forced the oxygen into Ramada like it was morphine. Slowly, Ramada quit fighting. Branch was sure it signified sleep.

Rain pattered against the Apache. Ramada went limp.

Branch heard footsteps. The sound faded. He lifted the mask. Ramada was dead.

In shock, Branch felt for a pulse.

He shook the body, no longer in torment.

'What have I done?' Branch asked aloud. He rocked the navigator in his arms. The helmet spoke in tongues. '...down... all around...'

'Locked. Ready on...'

'Major, forgive me... cover... on my command...'

Master Sergeant Jefferson delivered last rites. 'In the name of the Father, and of the Son...'

The footsteps returned, too heavy for human, too fast.

Branch looked up barely in time. The nitrous screen gashed open.

He was wrong. What sprang from the mirage were not animals like any on earth. And yet he recognized them.

'God,' he uttered, eyes wide.

'Fire,' spoke Mac.

Branch had known battle, but never like this. This was not combat. It was the end of time.

The rain turned to metal. Their electric miniguns harrowed the earth, chopped under the rich soil, evaporated the leaves and mushrooms and roots. Trees fell in columns, like a castle breaking to pieces. His enemy turned to road-kill.

The gunships drifted invisibly a kilometer out, and so for the first few seconds Branch saw the world turn inside out in complete silence. The ground boiled with bullets.

The thunder caught up just as their rockets reached in. Darkness vanished utterly.

No man was meant to survive such light. It went on for eternity.

They found Branch still sitting against his shipwreck, holding his navigator across his lap. The metal skin was scorched black and hot to the touch. Like a shadow in reverse, the aluminum behind his back bore his pale outline. The metal was immaculate, protected by his flesh and spirit.

After that, Branch was never the same.

It is therefore necessary for us to marke diligently, and to espie out this felowe... beware of him, that he begyle us not.

– RUDOLPH WALTHER, 'Antichrist, that is to saye: A true report...' (1576)

4

PERINDE AC CADAVER

Java

1998

It was a lovers' meal, raspberries plucked from the summit slopes of Gunung Merapi, a lush volcano towering beneath the crescent moon. You would not know the old blind man was dying, his enthusiasm for the raspberries was so complete. No sugar, certainly not, or cream. De l'Orme's joy in the ripe berries was a thing to see. Berry by berry, Santos kept replenishing the old man's bowl from his own.

De l'Orme paused, turned his head. 'That would be him,' he said.

Santos had heard nothing, but cleaned his fingers with a napkin. 'Excuse me,' he said, and rose swiftly to open the door.

He peered into the night. The electricity was out, and he had ordered a brazier to be lit upon the path. Seeing no one, he thought de l'Orme's keen ears were wrong for a change. Then he saw the traveler.

The man was bent before him on one knee in the darkness, wiping mud from his black shoes with a fistful of leaves. He had the large hands of a stonemason. His hair was white.

'Please, come in,' Santos said. 'Let me help.' But he did not offer a hand to assist.

The old Jesuit noticed such things, the chasm between a word and a deed. He quit swabbing at the mud. 'Ah, well,' he said, 'I'm not done walking tonight anyway.'

'Leave your shoes outside,' Santos insisted, then tried to change his scold into a generosity. 'I will wake the boy to clean them.'

The Jesuit said nothing, judging him. It made the young man more awkward. 'He is a good boy.'

'As you wish,' the Jesuit said. He gave his shoelace a tug, and the knot let go with a pop. He undid the other and stood.

Santos stepped back, not expecting such height, or bones so raw and sturdy. With his rough angles and boxer's jaw, the Jesuit looked built by a shipwright to withstand long voyages.

'Thomas.' De l'Orme was standing in the penumbra of a whaler's lamp, eyes shrouded behind small blackened spectacles. 'You're late. I was beginning to think the leopards must have gotten you. And now look, we've finished dinner without you.' Thomas advanced upon the spare banquet of fruits and vegetables and saw the tiny bones of a dove, the local delicacy. 'My taxi broke down,' he explained. 'The walk was longer than I expected.'

'You must be exhausted. I would have sent Santos to the city for you, but you told me you knew Java.'

Candles upon the sill backlit his bald skull with a buttery halo. Thomas heard a small, rattling noise at the window, like rupiah coins being thrown against the glass. Closer, he saw giant moths and sticklike insects, working furiously to get at the light.

'It's been a long time,' Thomas said.

'A very long time.' De l'Orme smiled. 'How many years? But now we are reunited.' Thomas looked about. It was a large room for a rural pastoran – the Dutch Catholic equivalent of a rectory – to offer a guest, even one as distinguished as de l'Orme. Thomas guessed one wall had been demolished to double de l'Orme's workspace. Mildly surprised, he noted the charts and tools and books. Except for a well-polished colonial-era secretary desk bursting with papers, the room did not look like de l'Orme at all.

There was the usual aggregation of temple statuary, fossils, and artifacts that every field ethnologist decorates 'home' with. But beneath that, anchoring these bits and pieces of daily finds, was an organizing principle that displayed de l'Orme, the genius, as much as his subject matter. De l'Orme was not particularly self-effacing, but neither was he the sort to occupy one entire shelf with his published poems and two-volume memoir and another with his yardage of monographs on kinship, paleoteleology, ethnic medicine, botany, comparative religions, et cetera. Nor would he have arranged, shrinelike and alone upon the uppermost shelf, his infamous La Matière du Coeur (The Matter of the Heart), his Marxist defense of Teilhard de Chardin's Socialist Le Coeur de la Matière. At the Pope's express demand, de Chardin had recanted, thus destroying his reputation among fellow scientists. De l'Orme had not recanted, forcing the Pope to expel his prodigal son into darkness. There could be only one explanation for this prideful show of works, Thomas decided: the lover. De l'Orme possibly did not know the books were set out.

'Of course I would find you here, a heretic among priests,' Thomas chastised his old friend. He waved a hand toward Santos. 'And in a state of sin. Or, tell me, is he one of us?'

'You see?' de l'Orme addressed Santos with a laugh. 'Blunt as pig iron, didn't I say? But don't let that fool you.'

Santos was not mollified. 'One of whom, if you please? One of you? Certainly not. I

am a scientist.'

So, thought Thomas, this proud fellow was not just another seeing-eye dog. De l'Orme had finally decided to take on a protégé. He searched the young man for a

second impression, and it was little better than the first. He wore long hair and a goatee and a fresh white peasant shirt. There was not even dirt beneath his nails.

De l'Orme went on chuckling. 'But Thomas is a scientist also,' he teased his young companion.

'So you say,' Santos retorted.

De l'Orme's grin vanished. 'I do say so,' he pronounced. 'A fine scientist. Seasoned. Proven. The Vatican is lucky to have him. As their science liaison, he brings the only credibility they have in the modern age.'

Thomas was not flattered by the defense. De l'Orme took personally the prejudice that a priest could not be a thinker in the natural world, for in defying the Church and renouncing the cloth, he had, in a sense, borne his Church out. And so he was speaking to his own tragedy.

Santos turned his head aside. In profile, his fashionable goatee was a flourish upon his exquisite Michelangelo chin. Like all of de l'Orme's acquisitions, he was so physically perfect you wondered if the blind man was really blind. Perhaps, Thomas reflected, beauty had a spirit all its own.

From far away, Thomas recognized the unearthly Indonesian music called gamelan. They said it took a lifetime to develop an appreciation for the five-note chords. Gamelan had never been soothing to him. It only made him uncomfortable. Java was not an easy place to drop in on like this.

'Forgive me,' he said, 'but my itinerary is compressed this time. They have me scheduled to fly out of Jakarta at five tomorrow afternoon. That means I must return to Yogya by dawn. And I've already wasted enough of our time by being so late.'

'We'll be up all night,' de l'Orme grumbled. 'You'd think they would allow two old men a little time to socialize.'

'Then we should drink one of these.' Thomas opened his satchel. 'But quickly.'

De l'Orme actually clapped his hands. 'The Chardonnay? My '62?' But he knew it would be. It always was. 'The corkscrew, Santos. Just wait until you taste this. And some gudeg for our vagabond. A local specialty, Thomas, jackfruit and chicken and tofu simmered in coconut milk...'

With a long-suffering look, Santos went off to find the corkscrew and warm the food. De l'Orme cradled two of three bottles Thomas carefully produced. 'Atlanta?'

'The Centers for Disease Control,' Thomas identified. 'There have been several new strains of virus reported in the Horn region...'

For the next hour, tended by Santos, the two men sat at the table and circled through their 'recent' adventures. In fact, they had not seen each other in seventeen years. Finally they came around to the work at hand.

'You're not supposed to be excavating down there,' Thomas said.

Santos was sitting to de l'Orme's right, and he leaned his elbows on the table. He had been waiting all evening for this. 'Surely you don't call this an excavation,' he said.

'Terrorists planted a bomb. We're merely passersby looking into an open wound.' Thomas dismissed the argument. 'Bordubur is off limits to all field archaeology now. These lower regions within the hillside were especially not to be disturbed. UNESCO mandated that none of the hidden footer wall was to be exposed or dismantled. The Indonesian government forbade any and all subsurface exploration. There were to be no trenches. No digging at all.'

'Pardon me, but again, we're not digging. A bomb went off. We're simply looking into the hole.'

De l'Orme attempted a distraction. 'Some people think the bomb was the work of Muslim fundamentalists. But I believe it's the old problem. Transmigrai. The government's population policy. It is very unpopular. They forcibly relocate people from overcrowded islands to less crowded ones. Tyranny at its worst.'

Thomas did not accept his detour. 'You're not supposed to be down there,' he

repeated. 'You're trespassing. You'll make it impossible for any other investigation to occur here.'

Santos, too, was not distracted. 'Monsieur Thomas, is it not true that it was the Church that persuaded UNESCO and the Indonesians to forbid work at these depths? And that you personally were the agent in charge of halting the UNESCO restoration?' De l'Orme smiled innocently, as if wondering how his henchman had learned such facts.

'Half of what you say is true,' Thomas said.

'The orders did come from you?'

'Through me. The restoration was complete.'

'The restoration, perhaps, but not the investigation, obviously. Scholars have counted eight great civilizations piled here. Now, in the space of three weeks, we've found evidence of two more civilizations beneath those.'

'At any rate,' Thomas said, 'I'm here to seal the dig. As of tonight, it's finished.' Santos slapped his palm on the wood. 'Disgraceful. Say something,' he appealed to de l'Orme.

The response was practically a whisper. 'Perinde ac cadaver.'

'What?'

'Like a corpse,' said de l'Orme. 'The perinde is the first rule of Jesuit obedience. "I belong not to myself but to Him who made me and to His representative. I must behave like a corpse possessing neither will nor understanding."'

The young man paled. 'Is this true?' he asked.

'Oh yes,' said de l'Orme.

The perinde seemed to explain much. Thomas watched Santos turn pitying eyes upon de l'Orme, clearly shaken by the terrible ethic that had once bound his frail mentor. 'Well,' Santos finally said to Thomas, 'it's not for us.'

'No?' said Thomas.

'We require the freedom of our views. Absolutely. Your obedience is not for us.'

Us, not me. Thomas was starting to warm to this young man.

'But someone invited me here to see an image carved in stone,' said Thomas. 'Is that not obedience?'

'That was not Santos, I assure you.' De l'Orme smiled. 'No, he argued for hours against telling you. He even threatened me when I sent you the fax.'

'And why is that?' asked Thomas.

'Because the image is natural,' Santos replied. 'And now you'll try to make it supernatural.'

'The face of pure evil?' said Thomas. 'That is how de l'Orme described it to me. I

don't know if it's natural or not.'

'It's not the true face. Only a representation. A sculptor's nightmare.'

'But what if it does represent a real face? A face familiar to us from other artifacts and sites? How is that anything other than natural?'

'There,' complained Santos. 'Inverting my words doesn't change what you're after. A

look into the devil's own eyes. Even if they're the eyes of a man.'

'Man or demon, that's for me to decide. It is part of my job. To assemble what has been recorded throughout human time and to make it into a coherent picture. To verify the evidence of souls. Have you taken any photos?'

Santos had fallen silent.

'Twice,' de l'Orme answered. 'But the first set of pictures was ruined by water. And Santos tells me the second set is too dark to see. And the video camera's battery is dead. Our electricity has been out for days.'

'A plaster casting, then? The carving is in high relief, isn't it?'

'There's been no time. The dirt keeps collapsing, or the hole fills with water. It's not a proper trench, and this monsoon is a plague.'

'You mean to say there's no record whatsoever? Even after three weeks?'

Santos looked embarrassed. De l'Orme came to the rescue. 'After tomorrow there will be abundant record. Santos has vowed not to return from the depths until he has recorded the image altogether. After which the pit may be sealed, of course.'

Thomas shrugged in the face of the inevitable. It was not his place to physically stop de l'Orme and Santos. The archaeologists didn't know it yet, but they were in a race against more than time. Tomorrow, Indonesian army soldiers were arriving to close the dig down and bury the mysterious stone columns beneath tons of volcanic soil. Thomas was glad he would be gone by then. He did not relish the sight of a blind man arguing with bayonets.

It was nearly one in the morning. In the far distance, the gamelan drifted between volcanoes, married the moon, seduced the sea. 'I'd like to see the fresco itself, then,' said Thomas.

'Now?' barked Santos.

'I expected as much,' de l'Orme said. 'He's come nine thousand miles for his peek. Let us go.'

'Very well,' Santos said. 'But I will take him. You need to get your rest, Bernard.' Thomas saw the tenderness. For an instant he was almost envious.

'Nonsense,' de l'Orme said. 'I'm going also.'

They walked up the path by flashlight, carrying musty umbrellas wrapped against their bamboo handles. The air was so heavy with water it was almost not air. Any instant now, it seemed, the sky must open up and turn to flood. You could not call these Javanese monsoons rain. They were a phenomenon more like the eruption of volcanoes, as regular as clockwork, as humbling as Jehovah.

'Thomas,' said de l'Orme, 'this pre-dates everything. It's so very old. Man was still foraging in the trees at this time. Inventing fire, fingerpainting on cave walls. That is what frightens me. These people, whoever they were, should not have had the tools to knap flint, much less carve stone. Or do portraiture or erect columns. This should not exist.'

Thomas considered. Few places on earth had more human antiquity than Java. Java Man – Pithecanthropus erectus , better known as Homo erectus – had been found only a few kilometers from here, at Trinil and Sangiran on the Solo River. For a quarter-million years, man's ancestors had been sampling fruit from these trees. And killing and eating one another, too. The fossil evidence was clear about that as well.

'You mentioned a frieze with grotesques.'

'Monstrous beings,' de l'Orme said. 'That is where I'm taking you now. To the base of Column C.'

'Could it be self-portraiture? Perhaps these were hominids. Perhaps they had talents far beyond what we've given them credit for.'

'Perhaps,' said de l'Orme. 'But then there is the face.'

It was the face that had brought Thomas so far. 'You said it's horrible.'

'Oh, the face is not horrible at all. That's the problem. It's a common face. A human face.'

'Human?'

'It could be your face.' Thomas looked sharply at the blind man. 'Or mine,' de l'Orme added. 'What's horrible is its context. This ordinary face looks upon scenes of savagery and degradation and monstrosity.'

'And?'

'That's all. He's looking. And you can tell he will never look away. I don't know, he seems content. I've felt the carving,' de l'Orme said. 'Even its touch is unsavory. It's most unusual, this juxtaposition of normalcy and chaos. And it's so banal, so prosaic. That's the most intriguing thing. It's completely out of sync with its age, whatever age that may be.'

Firecrackers and drums echoed from scattered villages. Ramadan, the month of Muslim fasting, had just ended yesterday. Thomas saw the crescent of the new moon threading between the mountains. Families would be feasting. Whole villages would stay up until dawn watching the shadow plays called wayang, with two-dimensional puppets making love and doing battle as shadows thrown upon a sheet. By dawn, good would triumph over evil, light over darkness: the usual fairy tale.

One of the mountains beneath the moon separated in the middle distance, and became the ruins of Bordubur. The enormous stupa was supposed to be a depiction of Mount Meru, a cosmic Everest. Buried for over a thousand years by an eruption of Gunung Merapi, Bordubur was the greatest of the ruins. In that sense, it was death's palace and cathedral all in one, a pyramid for Southeast Asia.

The ticket for admission was death, at least symbolically. You entered through the jaws of a ferocious devouring beast garlanded with human skulls – the goddess Kali. Immediately you were in a mazelike afterworld. Nearly ten thousand square meters – five square kilometers – of carved 'story wall' accompanied each traveler. It told a tale almost identical to Dante's Inferno and Paradiso. At the bottom the carved panels showed humanity trapped in sin, and depicted hideous punishment by hellish demons. By the time you 'climbed' onto a plateau of rounded stupas, Buddha had guided humanity out of his state of samsara and into enlightenment. No time for that tonight. It was going on two-thirty.