August 25
The excitement had returned in a big way, but it couldn’t entirely eclipse Veronica’s smoldering disgust. Massive was the only word she could apply to the discovery — the Wah Wah find was simply unmatched in depth and impact.
So why did she feel like a transgressor? Like a grave robber? She’d dug at dozens of sites, unearthed the remains of literally hundreds of human beings. So why was this plateau any different? Veronica couldn’t answer that nagging question, but she wasn’t going to let that stop her.
This would make her a household name. Carl Sagan. Jane Goodall. Neil deGrasse Tyson. Marie Curie. That kind of fame. That wasn’t why Veronica had gone into science — that’s not the trade you choose if mass popularity is your goal — but now that it was here, she was going to embrace it. The Cerro Chaltén find had given her a tiny taste of that fame. This? This was altogether on a different level.
The fact that a nine-thousand-year-old culture from Tierra del Fuego had migrated to North America (or perhaps the other way around, she didn’t know) was stunning in itself. The fact that the mysterious culture remained alive in the late nineteenth century seemed shocking, unbelievable, the kind of story that belonged in supermarket tabloids rather than scientific papers. But at this point, there was no doubt: the burial of the Benjamin camp was so similar to the Cerro Chaltén massacres that Veronica knew the same culture was responsible for both.
With Sonny’s help, she’d pieced together the story of the Benjamin camp massacre. Benjamin’s crew had spent months blasting, hauling out rock, then blasting some more. The Chaltélians must have decided the miners were attacking, or perhaps had offended some aspect of their religion. Whatever the cause, the mining sparked an all-out assault. The Chaltélians even destroyed the mine, causing a cave-in that filled the shaft with tons of rock. To the outside world, no trace of the mine remained.
In addition to human remains, she and Sanji excavated pickaxes, dishes, tools, guns and a dozen other common implements of the Old West. They’d even found the remains of two horses. At least they thought there were two — dismembered, scattered bones made it difficult to be sure.
The carnage wasn’t limited to just the plateau. Sonny had discovered an old trail leading from the plateau down the mountain. With the portable GPR suite, Sanji had scanned the trail and the area around it. About a hundred and fifty meters from the massacre site, he discovered another victim — and his horse — butchered and buried in rocky soil, presumably where they’d fallen while trying to escape.
The body count so far: at least eight. People, that was. She wasn’t counting horses just yet.
Veronica brushed dirt off a human skull, careful not to disturb bits of mummified skin and hair. The skull had been split open, probably with a rock. Large scratch marks lined the interior of the brain case. It looked as if someone had jammed a knife in an open wound and violently stirred the brain. She sighed with amazement and disbelief at the violence of this lost culture.
She heard a commotion farther down the trail. She looked up from her brush and skull toward Sanji, who lightly slapped at the GPR monitor. He seemed confused. So did the two EarthCore men with him. They shrugged their shoulders as they tweaked the controls.
Veronica gently set the skull down, then carefully made her way down the rocky trail to the men.
Sanji looked up at her, perplexed.
“The machine appears to not be working,” he said.
“No sir, it’s working just fine,” one of the technicians said.
“It doesn’t go straight down,” Sanji said. “That is not possible.”
Veronica looked at the display, saw the reason for their confusion. Brown indicated disturbed earth: there was a vertical line of it going down, with solid black — the color for undisturbed earth — on either side.
Sanji was right. It had to be some kind of malfunction.
“Guys,” she said, “what’s the scale on this?”
The technician pointed to a scale icon at the bottom of the display.
“One inch of what you see here equals a half mile.”
Sanji brushed dust from his hands, shook his head.
“Exactly,” he said. “So according to that display, the brown line goes a mile deep, even past the bottom edge of this machine’s range.”
Veronica leaned closer to the display, scanning for any yellow anomalies. There weren’t any.
“So according to this, we’re looking at a shaft that goes down at least a mile?”
“No, not a shaft,” Sanji said. “A meter-wide line. We’re standing on it. According to the machine, the line runs straight out from us in both directions.”
Had the Chaltélians dug a trench, maybe? Perhaps something symbolic?
Veronica stood straight. She looked down the slope for a moment, taking in the camp and its blue buildings below, the valley beyond, the heat-hazy Frisco Mountains beyond that.
She looked to her left.
She stared, not sure if her eyes were playing tricks on her, showing her an idea generated by the GPR display’s line.
She looked right.
No tricks. It wasn’t her imagination.
How could she have not seen this before?
A line. Not on the ground, but in the rocks that straddled that line. Big boulders looked like halves of the same rock, as if the line itself split them in two, letting the halves fall back on either side. In some places massive boulders simply stood tall like giant limestone bookends waiting for books, a meter space between them.
The display said the line beneath her feet was a mile deep. A mile or more. A mile vertical. As for the horizontal, it was longer than that. Much longer.
She looked down at Sanji, who also stared numbly along the length of the line. He saw the same thing. They stood there, two highly trained scientific minds, trying to come up with a single idea of what it all meant.
• • •
By the time Connell finished up for the day, the sun had set, the moon had risen and the temperature outside his air-conditioned trailer was about the same as it was within. He stared up at the cloudless night sky. The moon blazed so bright it almost hurt his eyes. Stars sure didn’t look like this from his Denver apartment. So bright. So clear.
He headed for the men’s latrine. If it weren’t for ol’ number-one and number-two, he might not leave his admin trailer at all. Biology, man. No way around it.
The latrine was on the other side of the mess Quonset. As he approached the mess hall, he heard music and laughter coming from inside. Good. His people deserved it. When Mack had brought the good news that afternoon, Connell had placed an order for beer and booze. It was time for the staff to celebrate.
The primary vertical shaft was complete.
He’d canceled the evening shifts, called every building in camp and told everyone to stop working. Everyone except him, of course. And Katerina. Filling in for Angus Kool was a job that didn’t have enough hours in the day as it was.
People had been surprised he’d called for a party. So had he, truth be told. He wasn’t managing things from an office in Denver anymore. He was here. He saw firsthand the effects of stress and lack of sleep. He’d been there when Angus and Randy had been taken to the hospital. He’d been there when that same helicopter had evacuated three injured miners after a small tunnel collapse.
Being in camp meant he couldn’t tune people out as assets, as statistics, as pieces to be moved on a chessboard. He saw the pain. He saw the sweat. He saw the blood. He saw the effort. In person, people were … well … they were people.
It was beginning to dawn on Connell just what a mega-prick he’d become since his wife’s death.
AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” blasted from inside the mess hall. Shadows bobbed as people moved by windows, making the light that hit the ground shimmer as if alive. Connell walked past without looking in.
As he approached, two men walked out, laughing with each other and swaying a little bit. The bigger of the two saw him. He thumped his buddy’s shoulder, pointed at Connell. The smaller one nodded.
“Hey, Mister Kirkland,” the smaller one said. “You coming to the party?”
Connell started to simply say no and keep walking, but he stopped. He didn’t have to have a long conversation with these men, but he didn’t have to blow them off, either. He’d done too much of that for too long.
“Just a bio-break,” he said.
He was surprised that he recognized their faces; he’d seen their picture in their employee records. That shouldn’t have surprised him at all, he supposed, considering how long he’d spent choosing the camp staff. He’d picked people based on their performance records and lack of filed complaints. He’d wanted hard workers, people who didn’t bitch, people who didn’t try to milk the system.
“You’re Sherwood,” he said to the little one. “And you’re … Hanson, is it?”
“Jansson,” the big one said in a slight Swedish accent. He seemed delighted Connell had recognized him. The two men stumbled over, offering their hands. Connell shook them, already regretting his choice to stop and talk — how long would this take?
“Brian Jansson. Nice to meet you, Mister Kirkland,” Jansson said. “I mean face-to-face and all. You really put in a lot of hours in that trailer.”
“I suppose I do.”
“Thanks for the party,” Sherwood said. “Mack said you sprung for the beer and all.”
“My pleasure.”
Sherwood had a baby face. No surprise, considering he was the youngest person in the camp. Strong kid, though, with a wiry body built from a life of physical work. Jansson was Connell’s age, but looked a decade older.
“Are you two done for the night?”
Jansson nodded sadly. “Yah, Mack kicked us out. Not because we’re drunk, though.”
“Which we are,” Sherwood said. “Totally.”
Jansson lightly cuffed him on the shoulder.
“We’re the early shift,” he said. “Mack wants us to have plenty of sleep. First thing tomorrow morning we blast into the natural tunnel complex. After that, he says we’ll reach the Dense Mass in a day or two.”
“That’s what he told me as well,” Connell said. “We’re almost there. Well, gentleman, you get your sleep. Nature calls.”
He nodded a good-bye and again headed for the latrine. He was almost to the door of the men’s latrine when the women’s opened, and Veronica Reeves stepped out, moving fast with her eyes cast down.
Connell stopped. She kept coming.
“Watch it,” he said, the words coming out far harsher than he meant.
She looked up, surprised, reactively put a hand on his chest to keep from bumping into him. She removed the hand as if he were somehow repulsive to the touch.
“Excuse me,” she said. “I didn’t see you.”
“That’s because I’m not lying on the ground.”
Her face scrunched in confusion.
He felt stupid.
“Because you were staring down,” he said. “I was trying to make a joke.”
Her eyes met his. He had the feeling she was more looking through him than at him.
“Remember when I told you you’d make a shitty comedian?”
He laughed. “Yeah, I do. How’s the GPR equipment working out for you, Doctor?”
“Just call me Veronica, okay?”
She seemed upset, angry. She seemed … distant, which was weird because he didn’t know her at all.
“All right,” he said. “How’s the GPR equipment working out for you, Veronica?”
She looked off in the distance, up the mountainside, perhaps toward the plateau that held her discovery.
“Fine,” she said. “We uncovered fascinating stuff. Achmed looked at the results, figured out there used to be a tunnel entrance at that plateau. It was destroyed, though. Someone must have used enough dynamite to level a building. Achmed figures a quarter mile of tunnel collapsed. He said the settled rock is too unstable to safely dig through.”
Connell nodded politely. Achmed had told him the same thing earlier that day.
“Doesn’t matter now that the vertical shaft is complete,” he said. “We’re in, we don’t need another entrance. If you’re happy with your results, I’m happy. EarthCore wants to take care of your needs.”
She glanced at him, briefly, then her gaze again wandered back up to the plateau.
It had been so long since Connell had spoken to a woman about anything other than business. Too long, he knew. He didn’t really remember how to do it anymore, but he felt compelled to keep talking to her, maybe find out what was wrong.
“All those bodies getting to you or something? I know they would get to me.”
She nodded. “Everything’s fine. I’m just a little distracted, that’s all.”
He thought of what she’d found, what Sonny had learned of the mountain’s history.
“So strange an ancient culture could make it almost to the twentieth century, and they’re unknown,” he said. “In this area, I mean.”
She pursed her lips, thinking.
“A little, sure. If the tribe mostly lived in the caves, perhaps only came out to hunt, they could have stayed hidden for a long time.”
It seemed odd to think of primitive people hiding in caves while railways steadily snaked across the continent, connecting both coasts for the first time, while telephone wires were starting to spread across American cities, while the first vaccinations were taking place. And yet, based on what Veronica had found, that seemed to be the case.
If people had stayed hidden from the modern world through the 1880s, how long did they last after that?
He thought of the platinum knives, the double-sickle blades that stayed razor sharp for centuries.
“They couldn’t still … well, you know.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Still be down there, you mean?”
He knew it was a stupid idea, but he nodded anyway.
“No chance,” Veronica said. “In the caves there’s no sunlight, and no sunlight means no food. To support a population of any size, they’d have to come out regularly to hunt and gather, yet aside from the massacre scene, there’s no trace of them. You’d have to have a culture that completely hid their existence not only from miners, not only from the native tribes that dominated this area for centuries, but also the hikers, campers, climbers, hunters, mountain bikers, ecologists, surveyors, geologists and other scientists who study the area, and—”
“I get it,” Connell said. “Lots of people.”
She nodded. “And never a sighting or any sign of these people that someone might have reported along the way. Bigfoot has been spotted more, and he doesn’t even exist, know what I mean? Once upon a time they could have stayed hidden, but there’s just too many people now, too much technology. Plus, Angus’s fancy-pants map doesn’t show any current openings to the outside, so there’s that.”
He supposed that all made sense.
“Then what happened to them? Where did they go?”
She crossed her arms. “Well, well, well, Connell Kirkland — are you telling me that you’re even the tiniest bit curious about something other than money?”
“Sometimes I get bored of visualizing myself as Scrooge McDuck swimming through pools of gold coins.”
She smiled. “You’d look good with a top hat and a monocle, I admit.”
Well hey, look at that. Maybe he wasn’t so bad at jokes after all.
“So what, then?” he asked. “Did they just leave? Maybe they thought more White Men would come or something, so they headed out across the desert?”
“Possible, but those knives are so unique you’d have to think some would survive. If not intact, at least someone would have reported on them somewhere. Same thing at Cerro Chaltén — no knowledge of the knives anywhere.” She tilted her head toward the mountain’s peak. “What I think happened up there is they watched the miners for a while. They saw what dynamite was, learned how to use it. Not exactly rocket science to light a fuse. They killed the miners, planted the dynamite, ran a fuse back into the tunnels, then blammo. They sealed themselves in.”
It sounded almost cartoonish, like the Coyote getting blown up by a trap he’d set for the Road Runner. Sizzling fuses, boxes labeled TNT, and colorful, comedic explosions. Only there was nothing funny about a million tons of collapsing rock.
“What did they do then?”
“They died,” she said. “From Angus’s map, a good mile of that tunnel collapsed. Maybe it was more than they bargained for, I don’t know. Maybe a bunch of them died in the cave-in, the rest starved to death. Maybe they sliced each other up with those knives.” She glanced off, bit her upper lip. “God knows they loved to use them.”
An awkward silence followed. The look in her eyes, it seemed … haunted. Connell felt compelled to say something, just to fill that void.
“You really think it’s possible for a culture to kill itself off like that?”
“Has happened before,” she said. “Many, many times in history. Trust me — I’m an anthropologist.”
She forced a smile.
He forced one of his own.
“Well, if you’ll excuse me—” he held up the first two fingers of each hand, curled them twice “—Veronica—” he lowered his hands “—I must use the little boys’ room.”
Her nose wrinkled.
“Did you just make air quotes for my name?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because you asked me to call you that. I was trying to be funny. Again.”
She shook her head, then the corners of her mouth ticked up, just a little. A smile. A tiny one, yes, but a real smile.
“When I said you’re not good at it, I was wrong,” she said. “You’re horrible.”
“You don’t say.”
“I do. I’m joining the party. You coming?”
He shook his head.
“Couple of hours’ work left. No rest for the wicked.”
“Too bad,” she said. “Tomorrow’s the big day. I guess I’ll see you then. Later.”
She walked away. He watched her.
He caught himself looking at her ass. Looking at her ass, and thinking of that little smile.
“Nope,” he said quietly. “Nope-nope-nope. You haven’t done shit in five years. Everything is on the line, so why start now?”
As he entered the latrine, he realized there really wasn’t a good answer to that question.