August 26
6:15 a.m.
For a man that planned every aspect of massive, multimillion-dollar mining operations, a man that controlled everything down to the last bolt, Mack Hendricks had registered an epic lack of foresight — he’d stayed up drinking until two a.m. with Sanji Haak and Veronica Reeves.
That, combined with a five thirty a.m. wake-up time, was an issue. When also combined with a mind-melting hangover, it became a problem, a nonstop reminder that stupid always carries a cost.
Felt like a bomb was going off in his head. Among an endless supply of beer, wine and booze, Kirkland had ordered four bottles of Jäger. Four. Who does that? Correction: Who over the age of twenty-five does that? And then Kirkland hadn’t even shown up to the party, leaving Mack to do shot after shot of the stuff with his miners, a few lab techs, and the tag team father & daughter combo of Sanji and Veronica.
A pounding skull couldn’t dull Mack’s mood, though. He wasn’t going to miss this, not for all the booze in the world. Pain or no pain, why shouldn’t he be chipper? He was about to embark on the defining moment of his career — even if his head had been cut off, there still would have been a smile on his face.
At least he had some extra time to recover. The elevator shaft was so deep it took half an hour to go from the surface to the bottom, or vice versa.
As he traveled down the circular elevator with the morning crew, he reflected on what they had all accomplished together. They’d finished the 3.6-kilometer deep shaft (or, 2.27 miles for Those Who Refused To Learn The Metric System). Not a world’s record, but that didn’t matter. Once they entered the tunnel system and followed it to the Dense Mass, they would be right around 5.24 kilometers — 3.2 miles — below the surface.
Deeper belowground than human beings had ever been.
Digging the vertical shaft would probably prove to be the easy part of this operation. Thanks to Angus’s invention, it was a straight shot down. No crumbling, no subsequent collapses, no problems of any kind. The hard part was all the support structures that went along with it. Kilometers of air ducting and electrical cable, a massive temperature control rig, an elevator system capable of traversing the entire distance — the list went on and on. Angus had invented the drill head, but everything else? That was all Mack’s design.
This mine was a masterpiece.
Twelve men in the morning crew with him. They all wore blue coveralls, yellow mining helmets, clear plastic eye protection. They stood in the flatbeds of a pair of squat battery-powered trucks: six on one, seven on the other. Two of the men had heavy drills at their feet, three-meter bits as thick as a man’s thumb resting against their shoulders. The other men carried shovels, pickaxes, portable lights.
Mack felt pride looking at them: uniformed warriors heading into battle, about to make history.
Down and down the elevator went. Over and over again, they passed by the big lights mounted in the round shaft wall: a glow below his feet, then brightness on coveralls, helmets and tools as the elevator drew even, then strange shadows dipping and stretching as it continued down. They passed by air pumps every few hundred meters. Some pumped out cool air to fight the geothermal heat. Others were pulling air up from below. Cool air fell, of course, but in a shaft this deep, the hottest air was always at the bottom.
Mack checked his handheld air sampler. No traces of poisonous gas. Even with the cool air being pumped into the shaft, the temperature sat at thirty-eight point nine degrees Celsius. The lower they went, the higher that number would go.
Brian Jansson leaned in, trying to see the readout.
“How hot, chief?”
Mack told him.
The big man rubbed his face, spreading sweat. Everyone was sweating already and they were only three quarters of the way down.
“If we had some beer and some women we could call this a sauna,” Jansson said. He looked around at his crewmates. “Get us another big party cooking, eh?”
Out of all the men in EarthCore’s mining crew, Mack liked Jansson the most. He was a skilled and careful worker, and the only time he bitched was to be funny.
“A sauna’s fine, Jansson,” Mack said. “But only as long as I never have to see you naked.”
Jansson did a shimmy like he was posing for the camera. The crew laughed along with him.
The elevator touched down on the shaft bottom. No more jokes; the crew got to work on making a horizontal shaft that would breach into the natural tunnel complex.
There were no permanent lights down this far. That had to wait until the area had been fully cleared. Men set up temporary floodlights that gave steady illumination. Helmet lights bobbed all over, moving in time with the crew’s confident motions.
They drilled long burn holes into the wall, setting them in a pattern to blow rock downward and clear a three-meter space. They loaded the burn holes with explosives and a remote-activated detonator, then gathered up the temporary lights and returned to the elevator. Mack took a head count to make sure everyone was accounted for, then took the cage up a hundred meters. He made sure each man donned air masks connected to a central tank, did a second head count, then detonated the charge.
The blast roared through the mountain. Limestone dust billowed up the shaft like a plume of tan volcanic ash, blinding them for a bit.
Air-filtration units placed up the length of the shaft removed the dust within minutes. Mack watched his handheld monitor, waited until the readout said the air was clean enough to breathe. Then, the men removed their masks and descended again.
The blast had cleared a good ten meters of new tunnel. They had another three or four more rounds of blasting to go before they breached into the natural tunnel complex. Mack was on the bleeding edge of accomplishment, of etching his name in history. Despite the explosion and the heat, his head didn’t even hurt anymore. Adrenaline and pure excitement proved to be a great hangover cure.
The men set to the backbreaking task of hauling loose rock back to the elevator platform. In teams, they lifted big chunks and set them on squat electric flatbed trucks. Smaller chunks were picked up one at a time, with the remnants scooped up on shovels. The trucks moved the rock back down the new tunnel and dumped it on the elevator. No vaporizing here, they’d have to take all of it to the top of the shaft, move it out, then come back down again. The men found spots on the platform among the rubble, either standing between piles or sitting on them. The elevator returned to the top of the shaft.
Each round — blasting, moving the rock to the shaft, riding up, dumping, riding back down — took over an hour.
Three hours after the first blast, Mack’s men drilled the fourth series of burn holes. This would be the one, he knew it. They’d created a little over ten meters of new space.
Angus had provided a sturdy, plastic-coated map. Mack had expected something fancier, maybe a version of the 3-D map on a tablet computer or something, but Angus didn’t have that. The plastic map was quite detailed, though. Figuring out orientation in the 3-D layout sometimes took a bit of time, but truth be told, Mack preferred having a map that couldn’t run out of battery power.
They drilled. They placed the charges. Mack and his men returned to the elevator, did the head count, rode up a hundred meters, donned masks, did the second head count, then detonated the charges.
They heard the explosion, but this time there was something more — a billowing wave of heat roiled up the shaft along with the suffocating dust. Mack felt his skin prickle and burn in sudden, shocked complaint. A paralyzing wave of terror gripped him as the blast-furnace cloud baked him alive. Behind him on the platform first one man screamed in alarm, then another, and another.
The screams tapered off. No one had burst into flames. Still insufferably hot, but if felt like the heat had leveled out. Mack checked the temperature. He started to laugh.
“Hey, chief,” Jansson said through his mask. “What’s so funny?”
Mack held up the gauge for all to see. “Sixty-six point six Celsius, mates. Welcome to hell.”
The men laughed, but not very hard. Behind those goggles, Mack saw scared eyes. He was sure they saw the same thing behind his.
A man held up his hand — Keith Sherwood, youngest guy on the crew. Mack nodded at him to speak.
“Six-six-six, that’s funny,” Sherwood said. “What’s that in actual degrees? And by actual, I mean in American.”
Jansson shook his head sadly.
“For you, that’s about a hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit.”
The ventilators cleared away the dust but made only a tiny dent in the temperature. The handheld unit said the new air contained plenty of oxygen, some hydrogen and higher levels of nitrogen, but no contaminants. Mack pulled off his mask and took a tentative, testing breath. He wrinkled his nose in disgust at a faint yet offensive smell. Something like a combination of rotting fruit and dog shit. He motioned for the other men to remove their masks. Their faces showed instant disgust.
Sherwood took a big breath through his nose, then gagged, then bent at the waist and threw up, much to the amusement of the older men.
Jansson patted him on the back.
“I love the smell of Hades in the morning,” he said. “It smells like victory.”
“You should love it, mate,” Mack said. “It smells just like your breath.”
The men laughed again, louder this time. They were getting used to the heat. Well, as used to it as a man could get. He’d have them clear out this load of rock, then they’d be too exhausted to do any further work. Only so much a man can do in an environment like this.
He lowered the elevator to the shaft floor. He led his men forward.
Together, through headlamp beams turned almost solid from whirling dust, they saw an amazing sight.
They had punched through.
A natural cavern, maybe four times the size of the space they’d created to hold the winch for the elevator and the laser drill. He stepped inside. Some of the men followed. Their lights played along rough tan-green walls, up to a flat sandstone ceiling, and across each other’s sweat-drenched smiles. They all felt the pride of a tough job well done. At the back of this new cavern stood the opening of a natural tunnel. It loomed black and promising.
“Chief,” Jansson said, “we going in?”
Mack wanted to, but this wasn’t the time to rush things. Caution first, always.
“No, I’m afraid not. Kirkland already told me who gets to be first.”
He turned to face the rest of his men.
“All right, boys, let’s clean up this loose rock. Make sure you’re drinking plenty of water, or you’ll pass out down here. Get your job done, but don’t be in a rush. Slow is steady, steady is smooth, smooth is fast. Get to it.”
The men did. Heat like this changed the game; a job they could normally do for five or six hours without a rest now drained them inside of fifteen minutes.
It would only get hotter the deeper they went. The natural tunnel complex was far too large to cool with pumped air. Angus apparently had a solution to the temperature problem, although Mack didn’t know what that was yet. He’d find out when he returned to the surface.
Time to begin phase two, and start exploring the largest tunnel complex known to man.
10:17 a.m.
Katerina didn’t miss her family as much as she had figured. She simply didn’t have time to think about them. She sat at a small desk that belonged to Angus, trying to cope with the pressure bearing down on her from all sides.
“It’s been forty-eight fucking hours, Achmed,” she said. “You’re no closer to figuring out the cause of that aberrant spike. We have to figure this out, there are people in that shaft.”
... and Kirkland will have my head if I go back to him with yet another shoulder shrug, was how the sentence should have ended.
Achmed glared at her. She realized, and not for the first time in the last two days, that he was glaring at her the same way he used to glare at Angus. It hurt her to ride Achmed like this, but she needed answers.
“I can’t see through solid rock,” he said. “How am I supposed to find out what it is? The damn computer keeps cutting out every six hours, how can you expect results with work conditions like this?”
She slapped the desktop.
“No more excuses! No one is going to die on my watch. If the computer is giving you shit and you can’t solve the problem until it works, then start by fixing the goddamned computer. I’ve got other problems and don’t have time to babysit you.”
She could hardly believe those words were coming out of her mouth, but they were, and she meant them. Being in charge wasn’t exactly the dream job she’d envisioned.
Achmed’s face screwed tight with anger.
“I need help,” he said. “You’ve taken the rest of the staff to help you study that meaningless line. If you want me to solve the problem, give me more resources.”
Maybe he was right about that.
“Take Mitchell,” she said. “And Rodriguez. Get it fixed.”
He walked away, already shouting for those two to join him at the main computer.
Achmed had checked the spikes against Mack’s blasting record – they hadn’t been caused by any EarthCore activity. She feared the spikes meant cave-ins somewhere in the natural tunnels, something that would slow the project down and make Kirkland very unhappy.
She returned to her work. Achmed had one mystery, she had another. In addition to the seismic spikes, Kirkland wanted to know the cause of the strange line Dr. Reeves had detected. Katerina had assigned every free person to mapping that line, and the results were shocking.
Four miles downhill and a half mile uphill from where Reeves and Haak had found the phenomenon, the line broke off into two lines that each a took ninety-degree turn south. Both of those new lines reached south for 3.28 miles. At that point, both took a ninety-degree turn toward each other, making a new line, a line that completed a rectangle — a 4.652-mile-long and 3.28-mile-wide rectangle, in which the mine shaft sat almost dead-center.
They had taken to calling it the “Reeves Rectangle.” Who made it? Why? And how on earth did they do it?
Katerina didn’t have any answers. She shuddered — Connell wouldn’t like that, wouldn’t like that at all.
11:52 a.m.
Mack and every miner on staff — even the morning shift — sat on folding chairs in the security staff’s Quonset. They watched in rapt attention as O’Doyle held up a bright yellow formfitting jumpsuit. The suit, supposedly, would allow them to safely explore the caves.
“This is a KoolSuit,” O’Doyle said, his voice bellowing like a drill sergeant’s. “That’s Kool with a K, as in its inventor, Angus Kool. The fabric is a microtubule material that accommodates the flow of coolant throughout the suit. This small backpack unit circulates fluid through the material to regulate your body temperature.”
The morning-shift miners looked beat, drained by the heat. All except for Jansson and Sherwood, who watched O’Doyle’s every move and seemed locked in on his every word. They’d quietly asked if they could pull a double-shift and go down with Mack. He wasn’t crazy about the idea, but the two men were both experienced climbers. Having them along might help identify the safest path, help reach the Dense Mass faster.
O’Doyle gripped the suit in both hands and tried to pull it apart. The man’s muscles bulged and twitched. O’Doyle had an old man’s gut, but a young man’s arms. There was no doubt he was trying his best to rip the suit — the suit stretched slightly, but refused to break.
“The material itself is very durable,” he said. “KoolSuits are also coated with a layer of Kevlar, so they should hold up well while you’re crawling through the tunnels. However, be aware of the dangerous environment. We expect the temperature to exceed two hundred degrees Fahrenheit, which means that if your suit rips in any way, repair it immediately with the patches stored in your backpack. Then alert your supervisor and head for the surface as fast as possible.”
Mack raised his hand. O’Doyle nodded at him.
“That means no tough-guy stuff,” Mack said, turning slowly to address all the miners. “Safety first, always. Any tear, no matter how small, and you get back to the surface. If I see anyone with a tear that they haven’t reported, you are automatically fired. No second chances, no excuses, understand?”
Heads nodded. Mack gestured for O’Doyle to continue.
“Mister Hendricks threatens you with unemployment,” O’Doyle said. “I’ll threaten you with your life. Mister Takachi here has been a combat medic and understands what happens to the human body in dire situations. Mister Takachi?”
Cho Takachi stood up. He pushed his sunglasses up a sweat-sheened nose.
“At the temperatures we expect, any problem could prove fatal,” he said. “Without a functioning suit, you will dehydrate and die in a matter of hours. Do not, I repeat, do not remove your gloves to touch anything. Not under any circumstances. The rocks in the lower tunnel are hot enough to cause second-degree burns on contact.”
He sat. O’Doyle set the suit down on a table. He picked up a pair of yellow gloves.
“The most important parts of your suit are the gloves and the flexi-mask. That is why your suit pockets contain a spare pair of gloves and a spare mask. If a glove tears, undo the wrist seal, remove it, put on the replacement, and make sure the wrist seal locks tight.”
He set the gloves down and picked up what looked like a flimsy piece of plastic wrap — the flexi-mask. He spread it out across his palms and pressed it to his face. It seemed to conform to him, almost to hug his cheeks and chin, eyes and forehead. He lowered his hands. His face looked a little duller, but other than that, he might have had nothing on at all.
“As you can see, the mask covers my face but doesn’t block my mouth or nose. Air that would cook you from the inside out is lowered to breathable temperatures. Do not ask me to explain the tech, because I do not understand it. What I know is you get the benefit of not having to wear a re-breather, and trust me, that is a good thing. The KoolSuit hoods cover your head, neck and ears. This mask covers the rest and automatically locks in with the hood’s material. Mister Hendricks, if you would be so kind as to let me guide you through putting on the suit while everyone watches?”
“I’d love to, mate.”
He stood in front of the men, had no shame stripping down to his boxers while some of the miners hooted and made jokes. All in good fun. Mack did everything as O’Doyle told him to do, obeying every deep-voiced order to the letter. Mack wanted his people to be safe, of course, but O’Doyle also had a tone of command that could not easily be ignored.
As Mack donned the rubbery KoolSuit, careful to make sure every seal was secure, excitement began to wash over him. They had built the camp, they had drilled the shaft, they had blasted their way to the tunnel complex. Now he was preparing for the final step — to explore an area untouched by man. Granted, it was going to be mostly tight tunnels, nothing more to see than limestone walls eroded by millions of years of circulating water, but that feeling of discovery pumped adrenaline through his blood.
The suit felt cool against his skin, effortlessly chasing away the midday heat. He barely felt the mask but sensed the air that he breathed was cooler. He felt something hard in the seat — must be some padding in case people had to sit down on rocks.
“Fits great,” he said. “A bit heavier than I thought, though.”
O’Doyle took his right wrist, held it up for all to see.
“There is a built-in display woven right into the fabric,” he said. “External temp, body temp, a clock with timers, air-quality measurements, it’s all right there for you.”
Jansson raised a hand. O’Doyle nodded at him.
“Pardon me for asking,” Jansson said, “but I don’t see a fly in those pants. How do we pee?”
O’Doyle pointed at Mack’s crotch — Mack suddenly felt a bit uncomfortable.
“Inside your pants is a flexible tube,” O’Doyle said. “Similar to the flexi-mask. Place your penis in the tube and leave it there. Women have a different fitting — you’ll know if you get the wrong suit. I chose not to help Mister Hendricks with his tube, as we’re not even on a first-name basis yet. Trust me, men, you do not want to be whipping out your tallywhacker in air that’s two hundred degrees. EarthCore’s health-care plan will not cover the subsequent sex change requests.”
The miners laughed.
“If the suit feels a bit heavy, that’s because it carries a gallon of water,” O’Doyle said. “If you carried water in an external container, it would wind up being the same temperature as the hot air — which means it would boil away. Bad news. There’s bladders throughout the material, so the water in the suit is kept cool by the suit. There’s a drinking tube in the neck that slides right up inside the mask. Seeing as hydration is so important, the suit will filter your urine and add that water back to the mix.”
The men groaned in disgust.
O’Doyle held up a hand to silence them.
“And now, let’s have a serious talk about poop.”
He grabbed Mack’s shoulders, spun him around to show his backside to the miners. O’Doyle made a fist, rapped his knuckles against the hard pad in the seat of Mack’s suit.
“So that you don’t burn your precious little bungholes, Doctor Kool included a built-in feces processor,” O’Doyle said. “Just squat and go. The suit will take your turds and put them through the world’s smallest little airlock. Believe it or not, men, this suit will even clean up any fecal detritus left on your rectum. In other words, this is the closest I’ve ever been to being so rich I can afford to have someone else wipe my ass for me.”
The men laughed again. Mack, though, did not. It hadn’t crossed his mind, but it made sense: it could get so hot down there that taking down your pants to take a shit might cause skin burns.
The fun was over — time to get going.
“All right, men,” he said. “Mister O’Doyle and Mister Takachi will help you suit up. Thirteen of us need to be dressed and on that elevator as soon as possible.”
12:21 p.m.
Patrick O’Doyle could have crushed Connell Kirkland in a heartbeat. Both men knew it. Physical prowess, however, had little to do with their relationship.
“Two Koolsuits missing,” Connell said.
Patrick nodded once. “Yes sir.”
Connell stared. It was a stare worthy of a CO in any forward combat area, a stare that said, I’m having a hard time processing what a stupid, worthless fuck you are — I trusted you and you let me down.
Patrick had delivered an identical stare many times in his life. As far as “the stare” went, it was always better to give than to receive. Patrick was usually the giver. He was on the receiving end this time, though, and he deserved every miserable, skin-crawling second of it.
Eight years in the marines had taught him that authority was something you followed without question. Eight years, multiple tours and multiple combat engagements had riveted that rule into his soul to the point where it was never forgotten, never unlearned. The marines had also drilled home one more concept: there is no excuse for failure.
“Two KoolSuits missing,” Connell said again. “When did you find out?”
“This morning, as Mister Hendricks prepared to take the first crew into the tunnels. There are twenty-six suits, enough for two full thirteen-man mining crews. We counted off the thirteen that outfit the men currently in the tunnels with Mister Hendricks. After the training session, we did a count on the remaining suits and discovered two were unaccounted for.”
“Unaccounted for. Is that some kind of bullshit military speak for I have no idea how to do my job?”
Patrick winced.
“I’m afraid that’s exactly what it means, Mister Kirkland.”
No beating around the bush. No excuses. The buck stopped here.
Connell was a good boss. A demanding boss who told you exactly what he wanted, then let you figure out how to get that job done on your own. Need resources? He provided them. Needed ideas? He gave them. He was fair, but he also expected success in all things — if you didn’t get the job done, it was your fault and no one else’s.
It wasn’t just failure. It was failing him, failing Connell Kirkland, the man who had basically saved Patrick’s life.
Two years earlier, Patrick had been jobless, let go after twenty-one years of service to his country. Twenty-one years, his entire adult life. Jobless, damn near homeless. Unless you counted living in a flophouse as homeless, in which case he was that, too.
He’d been forgotten. He’d had nothing. He’d had no one. All that service, all that pain and sacrifice, and no one seemed to give a fuck about him. He wasn’t good for killing anymore, so why bother? They had used him up, then discarded him.
He’d grown up an orphan. Never really knew his parents. Foster homes. Growing too big, too soon, with too much anger. Nobody could handle him. School wasn’t his thing. Sports gave some outlet, wrestling, in particular, but he didn’t have the discipline needed to excel. Graduated, but barely — no prospects for a kid with little education, no connections, no family. So, he’d taken the only route possible for many teenagers just like him: he’d enlisted.
The marines gave him the discipline he needed. And as far as anger outlets went, hard to beat hand-to-hand combat training, learning to shoot, burning off all the energy he had and then some. He’d grown up with nothing, but in the service he found his true calling.
Then came deployment.
The service changes a man. So does real combat. Killing. Seeing people you know get killed. The brutality of war, of trying to do your job and also stay alive at the same time.
Three deployments. Twenty-seven confirmed kills. Taking life bothered some of his fellow marines, affected them at a deep level. It didn’t bother Patrick. At all. He didn’t know what that said about him as a person, and he didn’t really care. He was good at it. He was praised for it, rewarded for it. At eight years in he was ready to re-up for a third hitch, work toward his twenty, when his CO had sent him to Washington, D.C., to meet with a man named Murray Longworth.
What Longworth had to say didn’t surprise Patrick. Sometimes, higher-ups in government needed specific things done, things that no one could know about, things that would never be reported on or recorded in any way. They called it “gray work.”
Turned out Patrick was good at that, too.
Patrick O’Doyle became a nonperson. Longworth’s people erased his past, removed all military records, fingerprints, dental records, anything that could tie his corpse — should he die while on mission — to the U.S. government.
He spent a decade traveling the world, killing who they told him to kill. He specialized in jungle work and urban penetration. On three separate occasions, Murray had asked Patrick to volunteer for missions instead of ordering him to go, because it was unlikely the operator would be able to escape after the target was hit. Patrick accepted all three. And all three times, he made it back.
The last of those missions, though, had ended badly. He’d been caught. Tortured. His captors had burned off his ear. Had he talked? He didn’t remember. All he knew was that he’d gotten very lucky — a drone strike had hit the compound where he was being held, caused enough damage and chaos that he’d escaped.
Scarred. Disfigured. He stood out now. Couldn’t blend in. Murray couldn’t use him for gray missions anymore. Too bad, so sad, Patrick, but you’re no longer on the starting squad. Murray had found work for him in the Department of Special Threats, a mostly off-the-books agency that handled crazy bioterror shit. The things Patrick had seen there. Belize. Saskatchewan. Black Manitou Island. A parade of death.
Then the budget cuts. Patrick O’Doyle and his twenty-one years of service were no longer needed. Thank you very much. Here’s a pin and a ribbon, move on. Those eleven years you spent traveling the globe to wipe out the enemies of democracy? Yeah, those don’t count toward your retirement. Have a nice life. Your grateful nation really appreciates your service, just not in a way that will pay the bills.
He had found himself without direction for the first time since he’d turned eighteen. Skills such as avoiding local police, jungle survival and how to kill a man from a mile away didn’t translate into the civilian world. There were no missions, no commanding officers, no orders. He’d had no one to tell him what to do. He’d felt lost.
What did he do for a living? Bagged groceries. Mopped floors. Made barely enough to pay for food and a rent-by-the-month hotel. The indignity of it all. He’d been a soldier, a leader of men, a prized asset. From all that to nothing. A scarred, ugly, lonely nobody. Every day, eating a bullet seemed more and more like the only way out.
Then that woman had found him. So strange. A knockout blonde shows up at the flophouse. Perfect body, perfect face, eyes as soulless as black marbles. She had a plane ticket. Did he want work? Real work? Fly to Denver to meet with Connell Kirkland. Patrick had. The interview lasted about fifteen minutes. Connell hired him on the spot. Big salary. Big responsibility. For the first time in his life, Patrick held a job where the paycheck didn’t come from Uncle Sam.
Structure and purpose. That’s what Connell had given him. And pride. Patrick belonged again. He had responsibility. Connell didn’t care about his past, his scarring, didn’t care about anything other than seeing that his company and his personnel were properly protected.
This man, this lanky, tall man with the dead gray eyes, he had given Patrick his life back. And a future. A retirement plan. Percentages.
All that, and he’d let Connell down.
“Those suits are expensive,” Connell said. His voice remained distant, detached. “Do you have any idea of how much each suit is worth?”
“Yes sir, Mister Kirkland.” O’Doyle snapped off the word sir crisp and loud, exactly as he would have done were he still in the service. “Each suit is worth thirty-five thousand, two hundred and thirty dollars. American.”
Connell nodded. “Very good. As if the price wasn’t enough to piss me off, there’s the small fact that we’re on the side of a mountain in the middle of a fucking desert. I know you well enough to assume that you accounted for all the suits both when we left and when we arrived. Am I correct?”
“Yes sir.”
“As a security chief, you seem to be very good at misplacing things in the middle of a fucking desert, don’t you?”
“Yes sir.”
The air conditioner’s hum and the slow thump of Connell’s fingers drumming on the desktop — ba-da-ba-bump, ba-da-ba-bump — were the only sounds in the trailer. O’Doyle thought Connell looked like a grenade with the pin pulled, ready to explode at any second.
“And the lab accident,” he said. “Tell me again what you found.”
Patrick had already told him. Twice. When you were a failure, Connell liked to make you repeat things.
“A pressure valve may have been tampered with. Looks like something hit it. Could have happened a week ago, could have happened today. That probably let static electricity get into the tank, the tank blew.”
Ba-da-ba-bump, ba-da-ba-bump.
“That happened two days ago,” Connell said. “And you’re no closer to finding out who did it?”
Patrick felt his jaw clenching, his teeth grinding. If he’d been closer to finding out, he would have said so, and Connell knew that. In many ways, this calm-voiced repetition was far worse than being screamed at.
“No sir. I’ve found nothing else.”
“Then look harder. Now get out of my sight.”
Patrick left. So humiliating. Someone was getting the better of him. Someone was making him look like a fool. Someone was making him angry.
He knew he wasn’t the smartest man that ever walked the earth, but he was one of the most tireless and dedicated. Sooner or later he’d find the truth, he’d find the bastard responsible. When that happened, he planned on carving Semper Fidelis into the fuckwad’s chest.
12:40 p.m.
Two missing KoolSuits. Two injured scientists. Sabotage. No, not just sabotage, expert sabotage, as if someone knew the equipment inside and out.
“They wouldn’t,” Connell whispered.
He picked up his cell phone, dialed.
“Milford Valley Memorial Hospital,” a woman answered.
“Angus Kool’s room, please.”
There was a pause as the woman transferred the call. The phone rang five times before someone answered.
“Hello?”
“Angus?”
“No, this is Randy.”
“Connell here. Let me talk to Angus.”
“He’s sleeping,” Randy said.
“So wake him up.”
“The doctor doesn’t want him disturbed,” Randy said. “He’s still feeling a lot of head pain.”
Randy wanted to protect Angus. That’s what friends did for one another. Well and fine, but he was picking the wrong time to exhibit his misguided loyalties.
“I don’t care if his brains are dripping out of his ears. Wake him up right fucking now.”
“Fine, hold on a second.”
After a brief pause, the phone rustled as it switched hands.
“Mister Kirkland, what’s up?” said a sleepy Angus.
“How are you doing, Angus?”
“I was sleeping, that’s how I was doing. What do you need?”
Could he be up to something?
“Just wanted to check up on you guys.”
“Golly, Dad, thanks a bunch, but me and the gang aren’t going anywhere.”
“Fine,” Connell said. “Sorry to wake you.”
Angus hung up without another word. He and Randy were exactly where they were supposed to be. If they were, who had stolen the suits? Who had sabotaged the lab? And how were they getting in and out of camp so easily?
Connell knew the answer: someone in camp was on the take. Someone was getting paid off.
If he didn’t get his people to the Dense Mass soon, that someone else would beat him too it.
And then all of this would be for nothing.
No matter what the cost, Mack Hendricks had to move faster.
12:47 p.m.
“Slow down, Jansson,” Keith Sherwood called out. “You’re descending too fast.”
Brian Jansson looked up from his slightly swinging line, his light playing up the chasm and flashing brightly in Keith’s eyes. Jansson dangled in a sea of black, like a yellow worm on a hook.
“I’ll be sure to be careful, Mommy,” he said. “Been climbing since before you were a single cell of annoying tickling the inside of your daddy’s nutsack. I think I know what I’m doing.”
“Asshole,” Keith murmured under his breath.
He didn’t want to be in this sliver of a tunnel. Rough limestone walls pressed against his body on every side. The suit kept him cool, but he felt the heat on his face, on his eyes. There was no turning around here; to get out you either crawled backward for thirty feet or descended into the chasm.
Keith panned his headlamp on a plastic-coated map. Mack had sent them here. According to the map, several thin tunnels branched off the chasm floor a hundred and fifty feet below. The steep vertical drop might provide a shortcut to the Dense Mass, so it had to be explored.
“Almost to the bottom,” Jansson called up. Keith again looked down into the chasm, only his head peeking over the edge. Janson was farther down now, the equivalent of fourteen or fifteen stories. He looked like a wriggling yellow toy soldier.
“Seems okay,” Jansson said, voice echoing off the dark chasm walls. “Jagged rocks, poor footing, but it looks okay. I’ll—”
A cry of pain. A muffled, brittle snap that echoed up just as his voice had. Keith’s light reached down: far below, Jansson lay on his side. So far away, so small.
“Jansson! You okay?”
A pause.
“Fine,” Jansson said, forcing out the word. “If you don’t count my broken leg.”
Keith felt a new stab of fear. This dark place, so far below the surface, and without Jansson he would be alone …
“Quit fucking around, man.”
“Wish I was,” Jansson said. “My foot slipped on this boulder. Leg’s broken. Left arm might be dislocated, too. Mack’s going to kill me.”
“Hold on. I’ll tie a new line and come get you.”
Keith felt at the chasm edge, hands searching for the best way over.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Jansson said. “You know procedure. If you have rope problems, we’re both stuck here. You can’t pull me up by yourself — go back and get Mack, get help.”
Crawling backward through this tunnel … no one with him …
“You’re crazy,” Keith said. “I can’t leave you here.”
Jansson laughed, a sound choked off by a grunt of pain.
“Goddamn, maybe a rib, too,” he said. “Just go, kid. It’ll take you maybe twenty minutes to crawl back to the others, so I’m looking at an hour all by my lonesome. The sooner you start, the sooner I’m out of here. Until then about all I can do is whack off. Good thing I hurt my left arm and not my right, eh?”
An hour down there, on his own. His batteries would last that long, easy, so he wouldn’t be in the dark. Just the thought of it made Keith’s skin crawl.
“What about your suit? Any rips?”
Far below, the yellow toy soldier felt at his legs, grunted as his good hand searched around.
“I think it’s okay. Fuck, this hurts. Would you go get somebody?”
“Okay, just hold tight.”
Keith closed his eyes, tried to focus. He couldn’t think about himself — every minute he waited was another minute his friend would be in agony. He took a deep breath, then pushed away from the chasm’s edge.
• • •
In minutes, all sound of Keith’s efforts faded away.
Jansson was truly alone.
He gritted his teeth against the pain, pushed himself to a sitting position. It hurt, sure, but he’d felt worse. What was this, the third time he’d broken his leg? The fourth? Just be cool. Sit and wait. Help would be there before he knew it.
He sat still, ears instinctively hunting for sounds, finding none. He hated the quiet, and caves were dead quiet. Not a sound at all, other than your own. You didn’t notice how noisy the world around you was until you came to a place like this. No wind, no creaks, no squeaks, no honks … nothing. A weird feeling, like someone had grabbed nature’s remote control and hit mute. Damn fool thing to get in a hurry and break a leg. He should have been more—
A sound. Something small, echoing.
Click-click, click …
Metal on rock?
He flashed his light upward, toward the tunnel mouth a hundred and fifty feet above. Nothing moved. He waited for the sound to come again, but only silence met his ears. He looked around the chasm bottom, his headlamp following his gaze. Several tunnels, but all very small, probably too small to crawl through. The trip was a waste of—
Another sound. Different. Coming from one of the tunnels leading out from the chasm floor. A hiss, a rattling whisper … the sound of dry, rustling leaves sliding across open pavement.
1:20 p.m.
Mack leaned over the chasm’s edge. His headlamp probed the depths below, illuminated only rock.
“Jansson! Jansson, answer me, mate.”
Nothing but his own voice echoing back.
Keith was right behind him, the passage so narrow Mack couldn’t even turn around to talk. “This is it, Keith? You’re sure.”
“Absolutely. He’s down there.”
Things were going from bad to worse. Once out of that initial natural cavern, Mack had discovered some of the tunnels leading from it were not natural — they’d been chiseled into the rock. So much for being the first people down here. The artificial tunnels seemed to line up with Veronica Reeves’s claims — something that would not make Connell happy when Mack was next able to report back.
But that detail meant nothing compared to this: a missing man.
Mack pulled out the Marco/Polo device and checked the signals. The unit showed only two names:
MACK HENDRICKS
KEITH SHERWOOD
No man down there, no flash of yellow KoolSuit. Jansson’s rope still hung over the chasm’s edge. Mack gave it an experimental tug: it moved easily. That made no sense. The rope was Jansson’s safety line, the way for rescuers to bring him back up. If he was hurt, why would he unhook it?
Mack reeled in the rope, curling the slack into a coil at his right.
He reached the end: the rope had been cut.
A neat slice, machine-press perfect. Something on the end of the rope, something wet.
Something red.
Keith nudged Mack’s foot. “We going down to get him or what?”
Mack stared at the blood beaded up on the nylon sliced end. He leaned a little further over the edge again, letting his light scrub the floor far below. Nothing moved.
“He’s not down there, mate.”
“Of course he is,” Keith said. “Where the hell else could he be?”
“I don’t know. Could you see him after he fell?”
“Yeah, I could see him fine.”
“He’s not there now,” Mack said. “Start moving back, and do it quick.”
“We’ve got to go down and look for him!”
“No, we’re going back to phone up for help. Now move, Sherwood, or I’ll start kicking you in the face to make you move.”
Mack slid backward, working his way out of the thin tunnel.
He hoped O’Doyle knew how to rappel.
1:32 p.m.
Katerina Hayes tried to rub the stickiness from her eyes. She hadn’t slept a wink last night. Neither had most of her lab staff. They hunted for an answer regarding the mysterious, miles-long rectangle that surrounded the campsite and the mine. So far, no rational explanation.
They had hypotheses, sure. Crazy-pants hypotheses. The one that best fit the observed data? A high-powered laser fired from orbit. Ridiculous. When she’d heard that one, she’d been so desperate she actually hoped maybe there was evidence of melted rock, possibly millennia-old scorch marks.
They’d found none of that. She felt like an idiot for making people look.
On the surface, the line was nearly invisible. You could only see it if you knew exactly where to look. If not for the GPR suite, people might have walked over it a hundred times without noticing.
Most of the line’s camouflage came from landslides, water erosion, windswept dirt and sand. Such natural actions had covered most of the line, leaving only split rocks on either side as the only evidence visible with the naked eye.
Extrapolating on a computer erosion model, they had generated an estimate of the rectangle’s age — somewhere around thirteen thousand years old.
Calling it “science on the fly” was an understatement. She and her staff made it up as they went along, dubbing the new discipline “chronogeomorphology”: judging a formation’s age by the erosion on and around it.
And figuring out the Reeves Rectangle was far from her only problem.
She gave her eyes another rub, this one just as ineffective as the last. She wished she was back in Denver with her family. She didn’t want to be in charge anymore, didn’t want to face Connell Kirkland’s disappointment any longer.
But if she had to eat shit, she wouldn’t be the only one munching down.
“Achmed! What’s the status on that latest tremor?”
He rose from his station and shuffled over. His normally dark and beautiful eyes were now just plain dark. Sunken cheeks showed the effects of a few scant hours’ sleep over the past two days. Even his porn ’stache looked somehow tired and limp.
“Tremor is a bit of an overstatement, I think,” he said.
“A pile of shit by any other name still stinks.”
She was pushing him hard and she knew it. The tremors threatened the financial future of this operation, and the lives of the men working inside the mountain. A second aberrant spike on the seismograph, this time only a quarter mile from the main shaft, had thrown the lab into a tizzy.
“The epicenter of the latest occurrence happened closer to the surface, but it was still isolated,” Achmed said. He sighed. “Again, no sympathetic vibrations anywhere.”
Katerina scowled. It was the same story she’d heard before. Small disturbances, from deep underground. They kept happening, and only from the mountain below them — nothing like it from the nearby peaks, which they were monitoring for comparison.
“I need answers,” she said. “You’re the expert on this, and you’ve been working on it for two days. There’s no way you don’t have any ideas. I want a hypothesis. Now.”
Achmed glared at her. Their friendship was gone. Vanished. Dissipated by her demanding position of power.
“You’ve seen the map of this place,” he said. “You know that mountain is so riddled with tunnels it makes Swiss cheese look solid. You want my best guess, Katerina? It’s the same as yours — that blasting has made the entire tunnel complex unstable.”
She’d expected that answer. While they had drilled the main shaft without explosives, carving out the adit and breaching the tunnel complex had required blasting. Normally that would pose little threat to overall geologic stability, but with a massive network of caves anything was possible.
Achmed stared at her, his tired eyes a challenge to refute his idea. She couldn’t challenge it. She looked down.
Kirkland would not be happy.
“What about the seismometer?” she said. “Is it still cutting out every six hours?”
Now it was his turn to look away.
“It is. Every six hours on the dot. And no, I still can’t explain it. Or fix it. We’ve rebooted the computer a dozen times. We’ve recalibrated everything.”
Three days straight of the unexplained malfunction. Settling, possible cave-ins, shitty equipment … she wished Angus had never been hurt in the first place.
“Find me an answer,” she said. “Find it, or you’re fired.”
He shook his head, glared at her. “Don’t worry, Kat. If you’re going to keep being the boss, I’ll save you the trouble and just quit.”
He stood, gave her desk a solid bump with his leg before he walked away.
She was out of time. She had no answers. If she was going to do her job — and do it right — she needed to tell Kirkland to halt exploration entirely until these problems could be solved.
That thought made her sick to her stomach.
“A few more hours,” she whispered to herself. “We’ll figure it out, just a few more hours before I tell him.”
2:23 p.m.
Patrick O’Doyle double-timed it to Connell’s office trailer. This one wasn’t his fault. Anyone could see that. How could he be held responsible for a man disappearing over two miles underground?
He opened the door without bothering to knock. Connell looked up from a pile of paperwork.
“Mister Kirkland, they lost a man in the tunnels.”
Connell’s eyes began to narrow, then relaxed. A strange look crossed over his face. Not a look of concern, exactly — maybe the look of someone who has finally figured out a frustrating puzzle.
“When did this happen?”
“About two hours ago. Mack did the search himself. Said the rope had been cut, and there was blood on it. No sign of the miner.”
“Who is the missing man?”
“Brian Jansson.”
Connell leaned back in his chair, looked up. Calm as calm could be. A thinking man thinking things over.
“Jansson’s been with the company twelve years,” he said.
Patrick wasn’t sure if he was supposed to comment on that, so he kept to the facts.
“He was apparently hurt rappelling into a deep chasm. His partner, Keith Sherwood, went back, got Mack. By the time Mack reached the chasm, Jansson was gone.”
Connell’s fingers drummed the desktop. “I see three possibilities. All bad. The first is that Jansson was stupid enough to wander away after his partner went for help.”
“Not likely, sir,” Patrick said. “Mack is an excellent leader. He’s drilled safety protocols over and over. His men would know to stay put.”
Connell nodded. “I agree. The second possibility is that Jansson is working for the same people who sabotaged the lab. Maybe he faked his injury, and he’s on his way to the Dense Mass, to help someone else drill in from another spot on the mountain. I’m sure you can guess the third possibility.”
Patrick could.
“That the people who sabotaged the lab are already in the caves. They either have Jansson, or they’ve killed him.”
Connell’s expressionless face shifted, twitched. His lip curled into a brief sneer.
“Get your ass down there. O’Doyle. Find out what’s happening. Who are the best three guards you’ve got?”
“Bertha Lybrand, Bill Crook, Lashon Jenkins.”
“Get them suited up. You and Crook find Jansson. Missing man or not, Mack has to keep moving toward the Dense Mass.”
A part of Patrick told him to keep his mouth shut, to just follow orders, but no matter how much he respected Connell, this wasn’t the military. He had the right to speak his mind.
“Mister Kirkland, if we have potential threats in those tunnels, should we really still be worried about the platinum?”
“If someone took Jansson, they took him because they’re trying to jump this claim. If they get there first, then all of this—” Kirkland waved his hand, gesturing to the camp and mountain outside the trailer “—is for nothing. That’s not going to happen. We brought in armed guards for a reason. Are you going to protect the company’s personnel and assets or not?”
He didn’t salute, but Patrick felt his body stiffen, snap to attention. An automatic reaction. Connell wasn’t military, but he was all leader.
“I’ll get him back.” Patrick said. “And we’ll get there first, no matter what it takes.”
He turned and reached for the door.
“One more thing,” Connell said. “Don’t say anything sensitive over the shaft phone. If we’ve been infiltrated, someone could be listening — we can’t trust anyone or anything at this point.”
2:31 p.m.
It made no sense.
Kayla had picked up a call from Connell to Barbara Yakely. Still using those idiotic “secure phones” of theirs. He suspected someone might be trying to jump the claim. He wanted Barbara to find out what company was buying up land around the Wah Wah Mountains. Connell felt positive a spy walked among the camp personnel, possibly working with operatives floating along the camp’s periphery.
But one couldn’t run a covert operation like that without at least some communication, and she’d picked up nothing. The only people on this mountain were herself and the EarthCore staff.
All her instincts told her Connell was wrong, but he was a very sharp man. She wouldn’t dismiss his concerns out of hand. If someone else was working this mountain, her payday could be in jeopardy. She couldn’t assume anything.
Sooner or later, someone would fuck up and she’d figure out what was going on. Patience was the key. The camp below buzzed with activity and confusion. People rushing everywhere. That night would be a good time to sneak in and snag a KoolSuit. She had to find a way down into those tunnels and take at least a limited peek for herself. Any intel she could provide on the tunnel system would increase the price she’d demand when she sold that intel to another company.
Judging by the level of activity, she expected the staff’s fatigue to highpoint around one a.m.
She already knew her approach. A guard named Braxton would be working the north gate at that time. Braxton had a gut, was carrying about twenty pounds more than he should have. He got lazy about two hours into his shift. Instead of walking the north fence line from corner to corner, he turned at the generator and walked back eastward. That meant he didn’t get a good view past the diesel tanks that were just west of the generator. Kayla could crawl close when he was walking away from her, and when he made that early turn she knew she’d have a good thirty seconds to quietly go up and over.
Once inside, she’d get what she needed.
2:54 p.m.
Connell stood next to the elevator cage, old-fashioned phone handset pressed to his ear.
“Don’t think Jansson is a spy, mate,” Mack said, speaking from a similar handset far down at the shaft bottom. “Haven’t known him long, but he seems fair dinkum. Besides, your theory doesn’t make any sense.”
“Did Sherwood actually see the broken leg?”
Connell heard mumbled words: Mack turning to speak to someone else.
“He didn’t. A hundred and fifty feet is a long way to see detail.”
Jansson didn’t seem like spy material to Connell, either, but it was too real of a possibility to ignore. He had to assume the worst while hoping for the best.
“So you’ve got a man who claims he broke a leg, which no one saw,” Connell said. “And your procedure says he’s supposed to stay put, but when you go to get him, he’s gone. What does that tell you?”
Mack was silent for a moment, then answered quietly. “It tells me maybe he was lying. But we have to go after him regardless, Kirkland.”
“Of course we’re going after him.”
Lybrand, O’Doyle, Jenkins and Crook walked onto the circular platform, carrying food, water, batteries, floodlights, even a portable battery-powered generator — everything needed to set up a base camp in the tunnels far below. On top of their formfitting yellow KoolSuits, the four guards had pistols strapped to their belts and machine guns in their hands.
“Guards are heading down now,” Connell said. “O’Doyle will take over the search for Jansson.”
“No,” Mack said. “He’s my man, I’ll lead the search for him.”
The winch rumbled. The cage started down. O’Doyle looked at Connell, gave him a thumbs-up.
Connell pressed the handset tighter to his ear and cupped his hand over the mouthpiece against the noise.
“Mack, listen to me. You have to keep moving toward the Dense Mass, you understand? We have to get there first.”
Another pause. Connell waited. Mack was smart enough that it didn’t need to be spelled out.
“I get it,” he said, voice cold, angry. “No one is taking this from us, Mister Kirkland.”
Connell hung up. He jogged back out the adit, heat-spawned sweat making his shirt stick to his body. He’d barely stepped into the sun before the secure phone in his pocket buzzed with an incoming call.
He answered.
“What have you got for me?”
“Ain’t got squat, honey,” Barbara Yakely said. “No bids of any kind.”
Connell closed his eyes. The sun beat down on his face. The pieces refused to click.
“Check again,” he said. “And keep checking. Someone has to be buying up rights in this area. Someone is making a move on us, Barb, I can feel it.”
“No one has bought any rights in that area since 1945, honey. Ourselves excluded, of course. I had our people check with all of our corporate informants, too, and we can’t find anybody who’s even looking at the site. A few competitors are starting to get curious what we’re doing there, but so far you’re all alone.”
Connell stared off into space. His theory had just gone down the crapper. “I’ll call you if anything turns up.”
He broke the connection. If the competition wasn’t making a move, what was going on in the camp? And, more important, what the hell was going on down in that shaft?
3:11 p.m.
They built this.
Veronica Reeves didn’t know how she knew, she just knew. Veronica sat cross-legged on one corner of the rectangle, turning her head slowly to look down each line. One line spread out and up the mountain, disappearing over the near ridge. The other line, one of the “short” ones, moved outward at a ninety-degree angle from its friend.
What had this meant to the Chaltélians?
The lab dated the rectangle between thirteen thousand and seven thousand years old. Precise figures didn’t matter — the time span did. It was roughly the same time frame for the Chaltélians’ dominance over the Tierra del Fuego area. Too close to be coincidence.
While hidden for millennia, the rectangle was an accomplishment greater than the pyramids and more impressive than Peru’s massive Nazca lines. Egyptians built up. Chaltélians built down. Way down. Impossibly way down. Katerina Hayes — the head scientist now that Angus Kool was gone — couldn’t explain how modern technology could carve a line that deep, let alone figure out how a primitive people did it.
Something extraordinary had happened on this mountain. A mystery worth the attention of Veronica’s entire career, her entire life.
She needed to bide her time a little while longer. Connell couldn’t keep her in camp forever. She wouldn’t need Connell’s funding, not once this story got out. Once the world knew of the rectangle, she’d shut him down faster than students clearing out after the last day of finals.
Then the mountain would be hers alone.
4:41 p.m.
Patrick O’Doyle let the rope hold most of his weight as his booted feet carefully felt out footing on the chasm floor’s treacherous ground. Certainly looked like a good place to break a leg. Jagged rock stuck up all over, like spikes in a Burmese tiger trap. He kept one hand on the rope, the other on his EBR. The weapon’s strap looped over his neck and around his back.
He turned his head, moving the headlamp light across the steep-walled chasm. He saw it almost instantly, a touch of wetness in the forever-arid area. Only a touch — most of it was already dry. Even in the strange lighting, there was no mistaking it.
Blood spatter.
About two feet off the ground and three feet long, horizontal with a slight angle, a center streak of red surrounded by a spray of fine droplets. The victim had been sitting four or five feet from the wall.
Patrick moved to the spot where he figured Jansson had been sitting. More blood on the ground rocks, also dry. He carefully probed the area, then his light fixed on something pale and white.
O’Doyle picked it up, inspected it, then flashed his light rapidly around the chasm, looking for any threat. Nothing there except small, dark areas — the mouths of several tunnels. He started back up the rope with an expert’s speed.
He wanted out of that chasm, and he wanted out now.
5:11 p.m.
News of Jansson’s disappearance spread through the camp, falling on all ears as assuredly as the sun fell on the faces of anyone who stepped outside. When that news reached the ears of Sonny McGuiness, Sonny McGuiness decided he’d had enough.
Hard to spend your 2 percent if you’re dead.
Kirkland had hired him to research, and he’d researched. He’d done a bang-up job of it by all accounts. He’d found several disturbing things that Kirkland chose to ignore. Well, they couldn’t be ignored anymore.
One man was missing.
Angus and Randy in the hospital.
Three more miners hurt. Those didn’t bother him so much, as it was a dangerous business and injuries were pretty much unavoidable. But add all those bad omens together? Too much. Too much by far.
Sonny knew if he said it out loud, it would sound crazy, so he didn’t say it out loud. He knew what was going on — Funeral Mountain was waking up.
He felt it in his old bones. That awful sensation he’d felt on that first day atop this lifeless peak … it had steadily gotten worse. Maybe it made him a coward, but he couldn’t stand it anymore. Something about that strange cave drawing still haunted him, something he couldn’t put his finger on. It added to his unease, to his skin-crawling, asshole-puckering, instinctive desire to leave.
Besides, he still knew about the second entrance. He’d wanted to tell Connell about it, but hadn’t. This was a business, after all, and you couldn’t just give up a sweet tidbit of information like that for free. Connell wanted to play cutthroat? Sonny could do the same.
Maybe he could trade that info for the 2 percent he’d give up the second he left camp. If so, Sonny would find out via a phone call. No face-to-face meeting for that negotiation. Fuck that. He was getting the hell out of Dodge.
Sonny packed his bag. Tomorrow morning he’d talk to Connell, get permission to leave. Connell held the keys to Sonny’s Hummer, just like he held the keys to every vehicle in the camp. Sonny didn’t care; he’d get the keys one way or another. He had to get out. Hopefully, he could talk Cho into leaving with him. The kid had a lot of potential; Sonny didn’t want to see him hurt. Or dead.
Whether Cho came or not wouldn’t stop Sonny, for he knew in his soul that if he stayed much longer, Funeral Mountain would never let him go.
8:15 p.m.
The night air started to chip away the afternoon’s heat but didn’t stop Connell’s sweat-fest. For the second time that day, he stood next to the vertical shaft, once again clutching the phone that ran all the way to the shaft bottom over two miles down.
With guards in the tunnels to hunt for Brian Jansson, Mack had continued toward the Dense Mass per Connell’s orders. Mack had discovered a large cavern — and in it, found something completely unexpected. He’d trekked forty-five minutes back to the elevator shaft in order to call up to the surface himself.
“You’ve got to come down and see, mate.” The excitement in Mack’s voice didn’t quite mask his exhaustion. “I’m not kidding. O’Doyle’s here with me and he agrees. You’d best bring Reeves and Haak, too.”
Connell tried to breathe slowly. He rolled his neck left, then right, trying to loosen muscle made rock-hard by the day’s stress. Was everyone in this camp a fucking idiot?
“That’s a bad idea, Mack. From what you’ve described, if Reeves sees it, she will insist we stop. Completely stop.”
“They need to see it.”
“I’ll decide that,” Connell said. “Get your ass back in those tunnels and keep moving.”
“Mister Kirkland, I’m officially telling you that you can blow it out your ass. You made a deal with Reeves. I’m not moving a muscle until you live up to that deal.”
His fingers squeezed the handset, so tight his knuckles hurt, so tight his hand shook. They were so close. Someone was trying to beat them to the prize, and his goddamn foreman was disobeying orders?
Yes. Because Mack had something Connell did not: ethics. Mack Hendricks was true to his word. The naive prick thought everyone else should be, too.
Connell was the boss, but right now, Mack had control. And, truth be told, Mack was right — Connell had promised Veronica she would be informed of any significant finds. From Mack’s description, it didn’t get much more significant than this.
“All right. If I come down and bring those two with me, will you keep moving toward the Dense Mass?”
“Not without some firepower, mate. I … hold on a second.” Connell heard mumbling voices, then Mack again. “O’Doyle says he’ll send two guards with me, but he wants to wait until all the guards are down here.”
If a goddamn tank would have kept Mack moving, Connell would have found a way to get it down there.
“That’ll have to do,” Connell said.
“Then I’ll keep going. But just me and the guards, I’m not risking another one of my men until we know more. Fair enough?”
“Well, fuck,” Connell said. “If you’re going to give the goddamn orders, maybe you should have my job.”
“I know you’re pissed about the professors, mate, but trust me, you’re doing the right thing. This is bigger than just money.”
Bigger than just money. Maybe Mack should grow out his hair, roll a fucking fatty and reminisce about Woodstock. Money ruled the world — anyone who didn’t understand that was either intentionally deluding themselves, too stupid to see reality or a fucking hippie.
“Let me talk to O’Doyle.”
Connell waited while the phone traded hands.
“O’Doyle here. This is absolutely amazing, Mister Kirkland. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
That tone of voice — childlike glee mixed with pure adult awe.
“I’ve already heard about the sights,” Connell said. “What about Jansson?”
“Whereabouts still unknown. I rappelled into the chasm. I found blood spatter on the wall. Definitely not from someone just falling and bumping their head. Looks to me like a slash wound, one that cut deep. There’s more, but I think it’s best if I tell you in person.”
Connell had warned him about saying sensitive information over the shaft line. What had O’Doyle found? Did he think Jansson was already dead? A slash wound … had someone killed the man?
“Do you think it’s safe to bring the professors down there?”
“Absolutely,” O’Doyle said. “If someone did attack Jansson, there’s a big difference between an unarmed man with a wounded leg and combat vets strapped with automatic weapons. Tell Cho to arm up Mateo Flores, Jimmy Cooper and Pete Braxton so they can come down with you. There’s more than the cavern, sir. I found something else. You need to see it ASAP.” O’Doyle paused, as if he didn’t want to reveal more bad news. “Someone … someone beat us down here.”
Connell didn’t answer. He gazed absently at a rock on the ground. The words didn’t seem to register in his mind. A punch to the stomach. A kick in the balls. A knife in the back.
“Mister Kirkland? Did you hear me?”
“Yeah. How do you know?”
“You’ll see when you get here.”
Connell sighed and hung up. Anger fought defeat for dominance of his emotions. After all his work, all his speed, all his manipulation, someone — somehow — had gotten into those tunnels before EarthCore.
11:02 p.m.
“Katerina, wake up.”
A man’s voice. Someone shaking her shoulder. She lifted her head from the desk, blinking away much-needed sleep. She’d drooled on her paperwork. She wiped it away, got her bearings. Achmed, standing there. He’d woken her.
“What is it?”
“There’s been another spike,” he said.
He seemed more excited than before. No, not excited … agitated. Agitated and afraid.
“I plotted the three most-recent spikes against Angus’s map. I found something.”
Achmed walked quickly through the maze of equipment, leading Katerina to the display that constantly showed Angus’s green and yellow tunnel map. Three red dots glowed softly.
“You want to tell me what …” A yawn paused her sentence. “... what I’m looking at?”
“The initial aberrant spike was 2.34 kilometers below ground zero, 3.02 kilometers away from the main shaft.” Achmed tapped a red dot. It started to blink.
He tapped a second dot. It blinked in time with the first.
“This is the second epicenter,” he said. “It was 1.78 kilometers down, and 1.25 kilometers from the main shaft.” Another tap. “The third spike occurred while you were dozing, about a half hour ago. It’s 0.58 kilometers down, 0.32 kilometers from the shaft.”
Three blinking red dots. Katerina stared at them. A flourish of fear turned her insides cold.
“The tremors are getting closer to the shaft?”
“Not tremors,” he said. “Cave-ins. No question at this point. Here’s where shit gets crazy.”
Again his fingertip tapped the display. A line representing one of the small natural tunnels glowed a brighter yellow than the rest. The line was very close to the first red dot, ended directly under the second. Achmed tapped again; another yellow line pointed away from the second dot, ending near the most-recent epicenter.
“So the cave-ins are occurring in solid rock between existing tunnels?”
Achmed nodded. “Judging from Angus’s map, the space between those tunnels is between fifty and a hundred meters of solid rock. But that’s not all, look at this.”
He rotated the picture so that they were looking straight down on the mountain, as if they were in a helicopter a thousand feet above the peak. He tapped again — a green dot appeared.
She knew what it was. She didn’t want to believe it. She asked anyway, hoping that her brain had made some ridiculous connection that simply didn’t exist.
“The green dot.” Her voice sounded distant, like a bad recording. “What is it?”
Achmed licked his lips. He didn’t want to answer any more than she had wanted to ask. But he did.
“The green dot is the main vertical shaft.”
Katerina’s stomach dropped. The three red dots and the yellow lines weren’t perfectly straight, but the path was clear.
They formed a line.
A line heading for the shaft.
“That’s impossible,” she said.
Achmed nodded. “I know.”
And yet, there it was.
“Tell everyone to stop their projects immediately,” Katerina said. “Everyone is on this, right now. We’re running all of these figures again until someone figures out how you screwed this up.”