15,512 feet below the surface
6:31 p.m.
Connell stood with the others. What the hell were they going to do now?
“So much for walking in standing up,” O’Doyle shouted.
Everyone had to shout to be heard over the river’s roar.
The big man alternated between looking at the violent river and glaring at Mack. Mack chose to not look back. He wasn’t looking at anyone.
Six headlamps played across the roiling surface of an underground river, a band of angry onyx maybe seventy feet wide. The river ripped through a chasm that had towering vertical walls reaching up at least a hundred feet. The walls showed sandwich lines of various petrified sediments, all in shades of gray or red or tan. Up at the top, where their headlamps cast only a dim illumination, a flat sandstone layer sparkled with pristine white gypsum. About fifty yards downstream, the water sprayed up and over and off jagged rocks before vanishing into the cavern wall.
Connell looked at Mack. “Suggestions, Hendricks?”
Mack licked his lips, let his light play off one end of the river, then the other.
“Fucking map didn’t say there was water,” he said. “Dammit.”
He pulled the much-maligned map from his belt, knelt and spread it out across slime-coated stones at the water’s edge.
O’Doyle joined him. Connell walked over as well, limping slightly. Too much time on his feet, too much hard ground had aggravated his old knee injury, the one he’d suffered in the accident that killed Cori. It had acted up before from time to time, sure, but when it did, he popped a few Motrin, then stayed off his feet as much as he could for a few days. The latter wasn’t an option down here.
He grunted as he knelt next to the other two men.
Mack’s yellow-gloved finger tapped a spot on the map.
“See? Doesn’t say it’s a river. Angus should have labeled the damn thing.”
He seemed more interested in avoiding blame than solving the problem.
“That doesn’t matter,” Connell said. “Try to figure out if another tunnel goes over it, or under it.”
Mack stared some more. His fingertip followed this line of tunnels, then that, then came back, then repeated the process. He sighed, took off his helmet, tried to scratch his head through the suit.
“We have to cross,” he said. “There’s tunnels on the other side that will take us to the Dense Mass.”
“Is that right,” O’Doyle said. “Funny, I’ve heard that one before.”
Mack snatched up the map, held it toward O’Doyle.
“If you’re so fucking smart, mate, then why don’t you take over?”
“Maybe I should,” O’Doyle said. “I have no idea how to read that thing, and I’m still probably better at it than you are.”
Connell grabbed the map out of Mack’s hands, slapped it down hard on the rocks.
“Stop talking shit, both of you,” he said. “We have a problem. So let’s solve it. Mack, make sure we need to cross this thing. See if there’s another way.”
Mack nodded, went back to work tracing tunnel lines with his fingertip.
O’Doyle glanced downstream.
“We should rig something so we can go downriver,” he said. “The map says it will take us right to the Dense Mass.”
Connell felt O’Doyle’s desire for that simple answer. Shared it, even — the river was moving so fast they’d reach their destination in hours, if not minutes. But what they both wanted didn’t jibe with reality.
“Those rocks at the mouth would kill us. Look at that current — we’d have no control.”
A continuous, vibrating sculpture: water ripping downstream, hitting those rocks, spraying up high, arcing back down. Hypnotizing in its consistency. Frightening in its power.
Mack nodded. “Kirkland’s right. We have to cross.” He looked up. “We could go back, but I think we’d lose all the time we’ve made so far. And it looks like the other paths we’d take would still bring us to the river, just at a different spot.” He pointed across the water. His headlamp lit up a dark semicircle set into the wall. “The tunnel we were just in continues there. We reach that, and we’re good to go.”
O’Doyle looked up, shook his head, exasperated.
“For fuck’s sake. Mack, give me a climbing harness, then get some rope ready.”
“You got it,” Mack said. He tore off his backpack, clearly relieved that he could do something that would be of use. He removed a climbing harness, tossed it at O’Doyle’s feet.
O’Doyle unsealed his glove, knelt, put his hand in the dark river. Froth splashed up around his arm.
“Like bathwater,” he said.
He stood and started unfastening his KoolSuit.
Lybrand rushed over, face twisting into an angry scowl.
“Just what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
He pulled his right arm free. The limp material hung at his side. His muscles twitched with every movement, fluttering beneath skin marked with a dozen rectangular tattoos — flags. Connell recognized a handful of them: Brazil, France, Iraq, South Korea.
“Crossing the river,” O’Doyle said to her. “I have to tie off a rope so everyone can make it across.”
He pulled his left arm free: Argentina, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Egypt. He pushed the suit down to his waist. More tattoos on his back: Turkey, Australia, Russia, Colombia, Algeria, Afghanistan. The black flag of ISIS. Pakistan. Libya. Others Connell didn’t know. Flags lined up in regimented rows and columns, covering his entire back from below his neck down to his waist and even spreading to his upper arms.
Lybrand stood there, mouth open, a shocked look on her face.
“So many,” she said, her words mostly lost in the river’s roar. “So many.”
Veronica came closer, looked O’Doyle up and down.
“What are you? Poster boy for the United Nations?”
O’Doyle laughed. “Something like that, Professor.”
Mack sprinted to the cave wall, trailing rope. He started hammering a bolt into a crack.
O’Doyle took one of the climbing harnesses and held it under water, cooling it down. Then he stepped ankle-deep into the stream, pushed his suit down to his ankles. The fact that he was now fully naked — save for his there-but-not-there face plate — didn’t seem to bother him in the least.
“I’m into a little T & A as much as the next girl,” Veronica said. “But do you really think now is the time for a striptease? Without your suit, you’ll cook in this heat.”
This heat. Connell blinked at the words. The suits worked so well he’d forgotten about it. He called up the temperature on his wrist display: 200.1 degrees Fahrenheit, 93.3 Celsius. Almost to the boiling point.
O’Doyle stepped into the wet climbing harness and started fastening it.
“Look at the rocks in this river, Professor,” O’Doyle said. “If I hit any of them, it could rip my suit wide open. Fuck me, it’s hot.”
Sweat already covered him head to toe. He’d been naked all of thirty or forty seconds, and it was already dripping off of him.
Connell knelt next to the water. He unsealed his glove, just as O’Doyle had done. He felt the heat on his hand instantly, as if he’d reached into an oven. He dipped his fingers in. It looked like it would be freezing cold, but it wasn’t.
“This water is probably a hundred and thirty degrees,” he said. “You won’t last long in there. You don’t have to do this, we can find another way.”
O’Doyle flashed a reassuring smile. “We have limited supplies, Mister Kirkland. We can’t afford to backtrack.”
Mack returned, coil of orange rope in tow, the end of it reaching back to a carabiner attached to the bolt. He started to hand it to O’Doyle, but Lybrand snatched it away from him, gave him a glare that made him back up a step.
She handed O’Doyle the rope. She stared up at him, eyes wide and full of worry.
He touched her face, smiled at her.
“It’ll be fine,” he said.
He held up the rope for everyone to see, as if he was teaching a class of children.
“This is my lifeline. It’s attached to the wall, but that anchor is a last resort. You need to hold on to it, tight. Play out the slack, but if I’m sucked downstream and I don’t make it across, you need to reel me in just like a big fish.”
He clipped the rope to his harness.
Connell stepped to the water’s edge, picked up the rope. Mack fell in behind him, then Lybrand, then Veronica, each taking some of the slack.
“I’ll be anchor,” Sanji said. Sanji was the last, started wrapping a long loop of rope around his waist.
O’Doyle waded into the stream, arms out to balance against the current. Five headlamps tracked him, his painted body brightly spotlit against the lightless chasm’s blackness. He dropped lower in the water with each slow step, as if descending a steep staircase. The river roiled up around his body.
He looked at Connell. “You ready?” Connell nodded.
O’Doyle’s powerful legs launched him into the river. Connell realized that O’Doyle wasn’t aiming directly for the far side, but rather upstream, well past a rock that jutted out of the river like a shark’s fin breaking the surface just before attack.
The big man shot downstream, arms pumping hard. He tried to turn his body to catch the shark-fin rock, but the current was too fast, too strong — he slammed into the jagged stone like a bird hitting a window pane. He bounced off a bit, stunned, then rolled past the far side.
The rope snapped taut in an instant, yanking the party, sending them stumbling into the shallows. The river, so powerful, they weren’t prepared. Veronica lost her footing on the wet silt and hit the ground hard. Sanji lost his balance, feet sliding on the slimy ground and dropping him on his ass.
The rope pulled Connell, took him two steps in, then three, then four. The river swirled around his shoulders. Mack splashed directly behind him, the water up to the Aussie’s waist. Lybrand grunted and strained. Mack’s feet slipped in the slick silt and he fell face-first into the water, splashing madly as he fought against the shallow’s insistent current.
Less than four seconds after he’d jumped in, O’Doyle’s life lay in the hands of Connell and Lybrand.
The current’s pull yanked Connell another step into the river. Water swirled around his head, in his mouth, up his nose. He coughed, inadvertently relaxed his hold just enough for the rope to whiz through. He clamped down: before the rope stopped slipping, he felt it tear through his KoolSuit gloves, through the skin of his palms and fingers.
He tilted his head back to keep his mouth out of the water. His boots found purchase against an invisible rock. He leaned back, pulled. The river raged against one side of his head, splashing his helmet free, sending it spinning downstream.
Behind him he heard Lybrand growl with effort. Primitive instincts screamed at him to let go of the rope, to get back to shore, but he ignored them. His muscles howled in protest. Something in his back popped with a banjo-like twang of pain: he ignored that as well.
Veronica stood and threw herself on the line, pulling back as hard as she could. Her strength gave Sanji a chance to recover as well; the fat man dug his heels into the silt and rocks with a snarl of fury. He started walking backward, one strong step at a time.
Out in the river, the taut rope began to pull O’Doyle back, the shark-fin rock acting almost as a pulley. He coughed water, splashed to keep his scarred head above the surface.
With the weight of the others behind him, Connell was able to back up a step. Mack tried to stand, but again slipped and fell. His helmeted head bounced off a round rock with a splash and a dull thonk. He instantly went limp and started to float downstream. Connell left one hand on the rope, desperately reached out with his other, snagged Mack by the collar just as the current started to suck the Aussie toward the river’s powerful middle. Mack’s helmet stayed glued to his head.
O’Doyle reached the shark-fin rock. He crawled atop it. The rope sagged. Connell let go and used both hands to pull Mack toward the shore. Lybrand rushed in and helped. Together they pulled Mack clear of the water, dropping his limp body on the slimy rocks. Ignoring the pain from his back and bleeding hands, Connell again picked up the rope.
Water sprayed up around O’Doyle’s feet. He struggled to keep his balance on the rock, bent legs twitching, shoulders jerking. He paused for a moment, then launched himself toward the far shore. He splashed in. Long strokes of his thick arms brought him to the river’s edge, where the current once again slammed hard into jagged rocks.
Still in the shallows, O’Doyle rose on hands and knees, white ass pale in the glow of headlamps.
“Hurry,” Lybrand shouted across the river, fighting to be heard over the endless roar. “Your suit!”
If he heard her, he gave no indication. He tied the rope around a boulder sticking up from ankle-deep water, pulling it taut a foot above the surface before he tied it off.
Lybrand didn’t wait for orders. She scooped up O’Doyle’s suit and stuffed it into her webbing. Into the water she went, backpack and all, not caring in the least as water splashed up around her and her slung rifle alike. One hand over the other, she pulled herself along the rope.
Veronica came next, guiding Sanji. He managed well despite his broken fingers.
Mack regained consciousness. He was groggy and weak, but was able to make it across with help from Connell.
Connell was the last one across. The current sucked at him, wanted to take him and smash him, but with the rope getting across wasn’t that difficult. The hardest part was having no light of his own: the river had taken his helmet, and he wasn’t going to get it back.
As he stepped from the roiling water onto the rocks, his knee and back throbbing, Connell saw that he wasn’t the only one in pain. O’Doyle had his suit back on, but hadn’t put the gloves on yet. He must have smashed his hands against the rocks — a bleeding gash lined his right palm, and the knuckles on his left hand looked like raw hamburger.
O’Doyle leaned close.
“Lybrand told me what you did, Mister Kirkland,” he said quietly. He held out his hand. “Thank you.”
Connell extended his own hand, noticing that his palm — raw and bloody from the rough rope—spilled red droplets onto the wet rocks. They shook hands, ignoring the other’s wounds as well as their own, their blood running together. Connell looked up into the big man’s eyes, realizing this was the first time he’d ever shaken O’Doyle’s hand. Connell also realized, quite suddenly, that it was the first time in years anyone offered him a hand in friendship, not as some business formality.
“You’re welcome. Now, can you finally call me Connell?”
O’Doyle nodded. “You got it.”
Lybrand bandaged their wounds. Connell replaced his torn gloves with the spare pair in his belt. O’Doyle moved the crew farther down the tunnel, until the river’s rage faded to a dull murmur. They found an alcove resplendent in dull brown flowstone glistening with a sheet of slowly trickling water.
“We need a rest,” O’Doyle said. “Two hours. Lybrand, take first watch.”
He lay down and was out instantly. Sleep nabbed them one at a time, all except for Lybrand. Connell nodded off last, watching her stand over the body of her sleeping man, EBR clutched in her hand. Her eyes flicked attentively down one end of the tunnel, then the other.
And up at the ceiling.
Always at the ceiling.
9:01 p.m.
Kayla hated being away from the mountain. Anything could be happening back on that dark peak. An EarthCore helicopter or car, bringing people out, some mountain biker taking a random road simply because it was new … any number of possibilities that could ruin her chances.
Make this quick. Get back as fast as possible.
She got in on the tail end of visiting hours. Milford Valley Memorial Hospital looked clean and well run, despite its small size. Kayla approached the reception desk, behind which sat an overweight nurse with a beehive hairdo and horn-rim glasses. From the look of her, she might have been working that job back in the sixties, when she would have been the epitome of fashion.
The woman — her name tag read “Alice” — glanced up at Kayla but didn’t smile. “May I help you?” she asked.
“I’m here to see Angus Kool.”
The woman’s eyes widened slightly, then returned to normal.
“I’m sorry. We’re not allowing any visitors for Mister Kool.”
“Fine. Then let me see Randy Wright.”
“He’s in the same room,” Alice said. Now she smiled, forced and fake and apologetic. “Doctor’s orders, you see.”
Kayla reached into her purse, fingers tracing along the inside pockets, gracing over multiple IDs.
“I’m Agent Harriet McGuire, FBI,” she said, flipping open her ID badge. “This is a matter of national security. You will take me to that room immediately.”
The beehive woman’s face turned ashen. Her eyes widened, and this time they stayed that way. She looked at the badge, then back up at Kayla.
“But … but you can’t, ma’am.”
Kayla leaned over the desk.
“Take me to that room, or you’ll spend the night in jail.”
The woman’s mouth opened, then closed, then opened again.
“Right now,” Kayla said. “Move it, Alice.”
Alice hopped out of her chair, grabbed a key from a pegboard. She smelled like baby powder and potato chips. She moved quickly down the hall. Kayla followed.
“I assure you, Agent McGuire. I’m only acting on orders from the doctor.”
Alice turned down a left-hand hall, looked back once, then inserted the key into a door marked C-2. Just as she turned the handle, Kayla shoved the woman in her back, sent her stumbling. Kayla reached into her purse, had the little Beretta Nano out before Alice hit the flecked linoleum floor.
Kayla walked in, shut the door behind her.
Two beds, both empty.
Angus, you little prick.
Kayla looked at Alice. “When?”
Behind the horn-rim glasses, the eyes went wider still.
“I … I don’t know what you mean.”
Kayla knelt and reached in the same motion, grabbed a handful of beehive and yanked it down, pulling the woman’s head back. Alice opened her mouth to scream but froze when the cold barrel of a gun slid past her teeth and rested against the back of her throat.
“You fucking sow,” Kayla said. “Thought you’d make a little extra money, did you? Now it’s time to pay the piper. Talk to me.”
Kayla slowly pulled the gun from the woman’s mouth. A thin strand of saliva swung from the barrel.
“They were only here for a few hours,” Alice said in rapid-fire delivery. “We admitted them into this room then he told me to shut the door and he offered me ten thousand dollars to play along and told me to go get the doctor and he paid him, too, and I didn’t think I’d get into trouble and—”
“Shut up,” Kayla said. “When did they leave?”
“Two days after they arrived. He did something to the phone.”
Kayla walked to the phone, which sat on a small rolling table between the two beds. There was no cord in the phone’s jack. Behind the table, she found the phone cord. It ran from the wall jack into a small metal-and-plastic contraption no bigger than a toaster.
You little prick. You little fucking prick. You routed the calls.
“So am I in trouble?” Alice asked quietly.
“That depends. All you have to do is help me.” Alice nodded as Kayla wrote down a number on a scratch pad next to the phone. She handed it to the woman.
“If they come back, you call that number.”
Alice looked over the top of her glasses. “That’s it?”
Kayla nodded. “That’s it.”
“But what about …”
“What about the money? Keep it, just call me if they come back.”
Alice nodded. She stood and held the scrap of paper with both hands, pressed it to her chest.
Kayla left without another word. It was all she could do to keep herself from sprinting to her Jeep.
That little prick Angus was more than she’d bargained for.
9:28 p.m.
The small shovel bit into the stony ground with the sound of metal scraping against unforgiving rock. An inefficient way to dig, but that wasn’t the point.
“Oh, lawdy,” Angus said, shouting the words. “I been diggin’ all the livelong day. Won’t somebody come and help me?”
He glanced at the KILROY WAS HERE sign lying on the ground next to him. Another inch of digging or so, and he could plant it. He wished he could see the look on Connell Kirkland’s face when this sign was discovered. Would have been priceless.
Well, priceless was a relative term. Especially considering how much Angus had spent on all of this shit. First paying Cho to look the other way, then triple that amount for the man to put on fake bandages and a little fake blood. Then, bribing a doctor and that fat, smelly nurse to seal off his room. Any of those things could have gone south, but none had.
Money was a wonderful thing.
He and Dirty Randy had stayed in the hospital for a couple of days, in case anyone from EarthCore showed up. No one had. The fuckers. During that time, Angus set up a relay on his hospital room’s phone, routing any calls to a cell Randy had stashed along with the other equipment.
When Kirkland finally called, Angus had been up on the mountain, two miles north of the camp. The relay had worked like a charm.
That arrogant prick might still be calling, for all Angus knew. He and Randy were too far down to get any signals from the surface.
He knew now that he wasn’t the first person in these tunnels. Some of the tunnels weren’t even natural — they had been chiseled into solid stone. It was disappointing he wasn’t first — even if the last people in them had died off hundreds if not thousands of years ago — but the mystery was still every bit as intriguing. Maybe Reeves’s “Chaltélians” were a real thing after all. Maybe they’d carved out these tunnels with primitive tools. It would have taken centuries. And there was the problem of how those people had managed the heat, but that was the least-important question concerning Angus at the moment.
The most important? What the hell were all those amazing little robots doing down here?
Randy had dubbed them “ALs,” short for “artificial life-form.” The silvery creatures lurked everywhere. The things seemed to be watching, sometimes even tracking Angus and Randy. Angus didn’t know what to make of their behavior, but there was only one way to see what made such clearly advanced machines tick.
Take one apart.
AL tracks dominated this area of the tunnel system, ubiquitous wherever a patch of dry silt covered stone. The tracks were far thicker here than anywhere else they’d seen so far. It seemed like the perfect place to catch one.
Randy would do the catching. Angus was bait. They’d already established that the four-legged robots reacted mostly to movement and noise. Randy lay half-buried under dirt and rocks, motionless, about twenty yards down the tunnel from Angus. They’d rigged a blanket from the ceiling and hoped to use it as a net.
Angus looked at his handheld monitor. It weighed less than a pound but gave an excellent readout with its four-inch display. The unit picked up data from the tiny, five-ounce motion sensors they’d placed about thirty yards down the tunnel. Angus had planned to use the motion sensors to keep tabs on EarthCore personnel, but the devices turned out to be invaluable for gathering observational data on the ALs.
The readout showed a scale map of the tunnels, covering a one-hundred-meter-diameter sphere. Angus stood at that sphere’s center. On the screen, a red dot slowly moved closer. Angus banged the shovel against the wall three times, letting Randy know the system had picked up an approaching AL. They had decided not to use walkie-talkies, as they had no idea how the robots communicated. Radio waves might give away Randy’s location.
Clearly, the ALs were the most advanced robots Angus had ever seen. He theorized they wandered in a loosely programmed pattern, probably utilizing some form of fuzzy logic to maneuver through the tunnels and collect data. Once they had enough info, the ALs likely returned to the surface to pass the info on to their masters — probably for the purpose of creating detailed maps of the tunnels.
Which meant that EarthCore wasn’t the only company after this particular pot of platinum at the end of the rainbow.
Angus wondered if Kirkland knew. If so, Angus hoped it pissed Kirkland off. A lot.
The red dot came closer. Angus gripped the shovel, waiting patiently. Just a few more feet … that’s it … annnnnnd … now!
He slammed the small shovel twice against the wall, tink-tink.
The blip moved a little more, then stopped.
“I got it!” Randy’s voice echoed down the tunnel. “Get over here!”
Angus felt a rush of adrenaline in his chest. He sprinted down the tunnel, feeling oddly like some primitive cave dweller deep into the hunt.
Randy stood over a blanket that seemed to squirm and kick with a life of its own. Long, thin whipping legs poked through the many slashes they’d cut into the fabric. Angus heard the whine of machinery.
“Help me,” Randy said. “Watch out for those feet, they have hooks that look sharp.”
Angus took a step forward, then a step back. He had no idea where to go from here.
“What do we do?”
Randy carefully snatched up two corners of the blanket, lifted them. The AL seemed to know it was in trouble: its wild kicking increased.
“We jump on it,” Randy said. “On one. Three, two—”
“Randy, I—”
“One!”
Randy threw himself into the squirming blanket. Angus did the same before he even knew he was doing it. They rolled the AL tighter in the blanket.
Randy bunched all four corners together, then stood and lifted it.
“Holy cats this is heavy!”
Angus grabbed the bunched-up corners, hefted it. Randy wasn’t kidding — the thing weighed a ton.
“Didn’t expect this much mass,” Angus said.
Randy nodded in agreement. “The way they crawled on the ceiling I assumed they were made from some alloy, maybe aluminum.” He smiled at Angus. “Well, we got it. What do we do with it?”
They both looked at the bag, listening to the whirring sounds emanating from within.
Angus smiled.
“Come on, buddy. You’ve had a biology class before, haven’t you? I think it’s time we had ourselves a good old-fashioned dissection.”