Callsign: King

12.

“Ethiopia?”

There was a brief pause and King could almost envision Deep Blue checking the history of his movements from the record of information transmitted by the GPS tracker in his phone.

It was early morning in Addis Ababa, early afternoon in New Hampshire where the new Chess Team headquarters was situated. After checking out the supplies and rented vehicles-two newer model Range Rovers-that Moses had acquired the previous evening, and meeting the four young Ethiopian men he had hired as assistants-King had made a mental note to avoid using the term ‘bearers’-he had decided it was time to check in with the home office.

“Well, you have been busy. Two different incidents, and you were right in the middle of both. Care to fill me in?”

“Manifold. They’re back in business.” King quickly brought Deep Blue up to speed, starting with Sara’s mysterious text message, and ending with his decision to accompany Felice Carter back to the Great Rift Valley.

“Is this one of the clones?” Deep Blue asked.

“That’s a possibility. I suppose it’s also possible that he had so many projects going under different umbrellas that these guys don’t know their boss is dead. They might operate autonomously and only involve Ridley when they have something worthwhile to report.”

“What do you think they’re after this time?” Deep Blue asked.

“I’m still trying to figure that out. I think this started as a fishing expedition, without a clear goal. They just happened to find something important enough to kill for. But that’s not why I called.”

“Sara.”

King took a deep breath. “I need you to find her for me.”

There was another period of silence before Chess Team’s runner spoke again. “The Ethiopian government is trying to keep this under wraps, but it looks like six bodies were recovered from the hospital.”

Six? There had been five CDC scientists in the lab. His heart fell.

“Five were recovered from the first floor, and another-a male-was pulled from a site of a fire on the fourth floor. No identification on any of them yet.”

Male? Then he remembered the Gen-Y shooter he had killed in Felice’s room; the sixth corpse. “Sara isn’t one of them. She was at the hospital when all this went down, but I didn’t find her. As far as I know, she’s still alive.”

“She hasn’t checked in with the CDC. Could she have been captured by the Gen-Y team?”

“I don’t know.” It was a plausible theory, but it just didn’t feel right. “I can’t imagine what her value to them would be.”

“I’m sorry, King.”

“I can’t think about that right now. I’ve got to focus on Manifold; figure out what they’re up to. But keep looking for Sara, and contact me immediately if you find her.”

“Absolutely.”

King thumbed the ‘end’ button and dropped the phone in a pocket. It was time to go.

He found Felice, now wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt, pacing the floor of Moses’ residence, like a caged animal. She looked up when he entered, an eager, almost hungry expression on her face. “Now?”

“In a minute. First, I need to know about where we’re going. And what you were looking for there.”

“That’s proprietary information. I’m not at liberty to share it with you.”

“In case you weren’t paying attention, you got a termination notice yesterday. I don’t think you have to worry about a law suit from your former employer. But you’re not getting back to that cave without my help, and we don’t go anywhere until you start talking.”

She returned a pensive frown, not so much bothered by his line of questioning as she was the fact that it was yet another delay. “What do you want to know?”

“Yesterday, you said that you learned of this site from…what was the word you used? ‘Esoteric sources’? What did you mean by that?”

“Just that. Instead of relying solely on the verifiable historical record, sometimes we pay attention to local folklore. We don’t necessarily take it at face value, but sometimes a pattern emerges, sort of like clues to a treasure map.” She resumed pacing the room. “Have you ever heard of the legendary lost graveyard of the elephants?”

“Sounds like something from a Tarzan movie,” King remarked.

Felice stopped for a moment, and faced him, her face completely serious. “There’s a reason for that. The elephant graveyard is one of those tall tales that has been circulating Africa for centuries, just like King Solomon’s Mines or the Kingdom of Prester John. Stories like that tend to take on a life of their own after a while.

“According to the myth, there’s a place where all the elephants go when they know they’re about to die. They’re drawn there, like it’s something in their collective subconscious. A lot of dead elephants in one place means a fortune in ivory, just lying there waiting for someone to collect.”

“But elephants don’t really do that,” King said. “I mean, we’d know if they did.”

She nodded. “Scientific advancements, both in the field of zoology and remote sensing, have verified that elephants don’t behave that way. But when you consider that today’s elephant population has been nearly wiped out by poachers and big game hunters, who’s to say that something like that wasn’t the case a few hundred years ago.

“Most of the stories about the elephant graveyard were easily enough disproven, but one lead was promising because of where it led us: the Great Rift Valley. We know that people have been living in the Rift for hundreds of thousands of years. It made sense that, if there were any truth to the story, then it would have originated there.”

“And why was Nexus interested in elephant bones?”

“As I said, the graveyard would be evidence of collective behavior that isn’t evident in modern elephants. Our goal was to compare DNA from elephants in the graveyard with that of modern elephants, and hopefully isolate the genetic markers associated with that behavior. If we could identify the section of the elephant genome associated with intelligence, it would go a long way toward understanding the evolution of human consciousness.”

King pondered her answer. He didn’t get the impression that she was being intentionally deceptive, but her explanation didn’t square with his knowledge of Manifold’s agenda, nor did it explain why they were willing to kill in order to get control of whatever had been discovered. Finally, he asked: “What about the ape skull that you brought back?”

She gave a helpless shrug, her expression indicating that she was even more bothered by that incongruity than he.

“You’ve got to remember something,” he persisted. “Why else would you be so insistent on returning?”

“That’s just it. I have to go back there to find what I lost.”

King considered her answer but he kept coming back to something else she had said. Drawn there… something in their collective subconscious.

Is that what’s happening to her?

And if what she had found in the cave had awakened some kind of link to a collective subconscious-one that could affect human behavior-what did Manifold have planned for it?

He knew he wasn’t going to get those answers from her, and he sensed he was nearing the point where her singular desire to return to the cave would make her less cooperative, more demanding. It was time to get moving.

King drove the lead vehicle, with Felice and Moses as passengers. Felice had not spoken more than a few words since their earlier discussion, and as they drove she simply stared out the window, as if hoping to catch a glimpse of their destination, despite the fact that it lay hundreds of miles to the north. Moses responded to King’s questions, but likewise showed little interest in conversation, leaving King alone with his thoughts, which given the uncertainty surrounding Sara’s fate, was not a good thing.

As he drove, King’s realized that he was scanning the road ahead for signs of an ambush or improvised explosive device placement, habits that had become second nature when he had driven in Afghanistan and Iraq. Ethiopia was no war zone, though there were reports of bandits in remote regions, and intel suggesting a burgeoning Al Qaida presence. After the events of the previous day, maybe a little paranoia was a good thing.

While Moses had been out gathering the supplies for the expedition, King had done some shopping as well. He had contacted a more-or-less trustworthy black-market arms dealer, and purchased a used but serviceable Dragunov SVD, equipped with a detachable PSO-1 scope. It wasn’t his first choice, but Russian weapons were more readily available. The sniper rifle’s accessories package included a bayonet, which he decided would make a decent substitute for his beloved KA-BAR knife. The dealer had delivered the rifle, along with 500 rounds of 7.62 mm and several boxes of 9 mm rounds for the MP-5. King felt a little better prepared than he had upon arriving in Addis Ababa, but knew that surviving possible future encounters would depend more on good luck and good judgment than on firepower alone. And he already felt like he’d used up a year’s worth of good luck.

The day passed uneventfully. They kept to the main highway, traveling north as far as the city of Komolcha, where they ate and refueled, and then traveled east to Semera, the new regional capital of the Afar district. Although there were several hours of daylight remaining, they found lodging and spent the night there. Beyond Semera, there would be little in the way of creature comforts.

Felice seemed to grow more anxious, and more solitary, with each mile traveled. King left her alone. He doubted there was anything more she could tell him, and if there were, it would have to wait until she was ready, until she satisfied the compulsion that was drawing her back to the mysterious cave in the Rift Valley. Moses similarly kept to himself, conversing with the other hired men only to the extent that his duties as translator and de facto expedition manager required him to do so. Like Felice, he also seemed to be in the grip of an external force, not a subconscious homing instinct, but something less specific-the gravity of personal destiny.

King had managed to get the young man to volunteer a little about himself. Moses was a college graduate, but mired in the same economic torpor that kept so many in Africa from rising above the circumstances of their birth. Perhaps, King surmised, he saw the success of this expedition, coming as it did on the heels of the failure of the first, as a way to break that cycle.

That evening, King checked in with Deep Blue, but the conversation was brief; there was nothing to report. No news on Manifold’s activities, and no word from Sara. As troubling as the uncertainty was, no news was good news.

They set out the next morning before sunrise, journeying a short distance east to the village of Serdo, then left the highway, heading north on a dirt track that bisected an otherwise empty landscape. It was like driving across the surface of an alien planet.

The Great Rift Valley was an area of intense volcanic and seismic activity. Stretching from Kenya to the Horn of Africa, a distance of thousands of miles, it was the only place on the planet where the earth’s tectonic plates moved apart on dry land; all other spreading rifts were submerged deep beneath the oceans. Indeed, the northernmost reaches of the spreading zone that had created the Rift had formed the Red Sea, and in time the valley itself would open up into the Gulf of Aden and be inundated, creating an inland sea. The separation of the plates was almost imperceptibly slow, only a few inches every year-with a few infrequent but extremely dynamic exceptions, such as the 2005 eruption of the Dabbahu volcano, which opened a 37 mile long fissure- but the inevitable process had been going on for millions of years, creating a vast field of featureless lava. Yet, it was not the geological activity which had made this part of the Rift unique, but rather a more recent event, relatively speaking. It was here that fossils of the earliest hominids had been found, the ancestors of modern humans. If prevailing theories were correct, human evolution had turned an important corner here.

King didn’t know how the mythic elephant graveyard figured into the tapestry of natural history, but he knew it was no coincidence that Felice Carter had brought back an ape skull.

They drove for hours, road conditions halving the speed they had been able to maintain on the highway, and then early in the afternoon, turned off the road and struck out cross country, their pace further reduced. The distance, according to Moses, was less than a hundred kilometers, but without roads, it would be nearly dusk before they reached their destination.

They saw no one at all; nothing lived or grew in the austere landscape. Nevertheless, King was now fully alert, constantly vigilant for signs of a hostile presence. It seemed likely that Manifold had gotten what it needed from the raid on the hospital, but there was every reason to believe that they might also want to control-or more likely destroy-the source of the genetic material Felice had brought back. He could only hope that, if such were the case, they had already come and gone.

Despite his earlier assurance, as they set out across the roadless landscape, Moses seemed less certain of his ability to find their destination. He claimed to have recognized the spot where the expedition had left the dirt road, and knew the approximate mileage from there to the sight, but in such a vast environment, even a single compass degree of variation might put them miles away from their destination. Without exact coordinates-information Felice had not trusted to memory-even a GPS device would have been useless. But as they traversed the lava field, Felice became more animated, directing him to make course corrections, and King realized that, consciously or not, she was acting as a living GPS, following a powerful and unerring homing instinct.

“How much farther?” he asked, as the vehicle’s trip meter hit 95 kilometers.

Felice, who was now barely able to contain her impatience, squinted through the windshield into the darkening eastern sky, and then pointed. “That ridge. The cave is there.”

They were close, and soon they would be visible to any watching eyes that might be at the site, especially if the falling dusk required them to use headlights. King drove on a few minutes longer until he spied an elevated area. He pulled to a stop and climbed to the highest point.

The plain that butted up against the ridge was as dark and featureless as everything else. Using the scope for the Dragunov, he did a visual sweep and managed to pick out the only man-made objects on the landscape, the camp from the original expedition. Although twilight shadows clung to the site like a shroud, he saw no indication of activity-no light, no movement. For some reason, King wasn’t as relieved by that as he expected to be.

A few minutes later, the beams of the expedition’s headlights illuminated the tattered and burned remnants of the camp. Though only a few days had passed since the events Moses had recounted, the compound looked like the set of a post-apocalyptic movie. Shreds of fabric had snagged on the coils of concertina wire that ringed the compound, and flapped in the breeze like Himalayan prayer flags. Only one of the tents was still standing, looking forlorn amid the wreckage. Two twisted and scorched masses of metal marked the end of what had probably been trucks or SUVs. Everything else was ruined beyond recognition.

Felice seemed uninterested in searching the wreckage. “We need to go to the cave,” she insisted. “There’s nothing in the camp that will be of any use to us.”

Judging by the state of the compound, King was inclined to agree. It seemed very unlikely that any survivors would be found amid the ruins. But where were the bodies?

King shifted his vehicle into drive again, and steered around the wrecked camp, getting closer to the base of the hill. The cave opening was visible, a mere pockmark in the cliff face, and he pulled to a stop a stone’s throw away, but not before Felice threw open her door and jumped out.

“Wait!” King shouted after her. “At least let me break out some flashlights.” He turned to Moses. “Why don’t you have the men set up camp here. I guess Felice and I are going to do a little spelunking.”

Moses seemed inexplicably perturbed, but nodded and jumped out to relay the message to the men in the second vehicle. King took an LED MagLite from his duffel bag, along with the MP5, and hurried to join Felice at the mouth of the cave.

As soon as he stepped through the opening, he knew something was wrong. A vile odor permeated the air; a smell of animal excrement mixed with decaying flesh. The flashlight beam revealed dark streaks on the smooth floor of the passage, as if something wet and greasy had been dragged along its length.

“Was it like this before?” King asked.

“I don’t remember.” Felice’s tone was distant and mechanical, as if she had no idea what he was talking about. She quickened her step and it was all King could do to keep up with her.

A short passage led down to an enormous cavern, the depth and breadth of which was beyond the capacity of King’s flashlight to illuminate. What he did see in the cone of blue-white light was nevertheless awe-inspiring.

When he had first heard the term “elephant graveyard” he had imagined a place where a few dozen, or maybe even a few hundred skeletons would be jumbled together. But this cavern beggared belief. Directly before him was a veritable sea of gigantic bones and enormous, curving ivory tusks, some at least ten feet in length. The skeletons were packed tightly together, as might occur if individual bodies were stacked one atop another prior to decomposition, and stretched in either direction as far as the eye could see. Without knowing how far back the mass of bones went, it was impossible to estimate the number of skeletons, but it was surely in the thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands.

King understood now why the very idea of an elephant graveyard had galvanized adventurers of the Romantic era to risk everything to find such a treasure. “Incredible. There must be thousands of tons of ivory in here. How much would that be worth anyway?”

Felice ignored his question and instead skirted the cramped area at the perimeter of the bones, disappearing into the shadows. King ran to catch her, casting his light down a path that had been cleared in the bones, and found her all but running to a strange structure-something like a shrine, built entirely of elephant tusks-erected in an open area, deep in the heart of the skeleton maze.

She stopped there, and a few seconds later, he reached her side. “Damn it!” he raged. “You can’t run-”

The words died in his throat as something stirred in the shadows. He stabbed the MagLite’s beam in the direction of the movement.

To call what he beheld a man was perhaps too generous. The form shambling toward him was indeed human, but only in the strict biological sense. He was naked, except for a few torn remnants of clothes that clung to his body; it looked as if he had tried to simply tear them away, without comprehending the subtleties of buttons and zippers. His matted hair was caked with dirt and his skin was streaked with filth, some of it likely his own excrement. His face was a mask of dried blood, but despite his feral look, his eyes were lifeless, staring unfocused past King to…

To Felice.

He glimpsed movement his left, and swung the light that direction. Another figure was shuffling from the outer perimeter. Then another, and another…seven in all, at least two of them female, but all uniformly bestial in appearance.

And advancing.

Then his light found something else. More remains, but not elephants and not thousands of years old. Piled up behind the shrine was a mass of bodies, bloated and rotting, but not merely left to decompose. Bones were visible where the flesh of the arms and legs had been torn away…gnawed away.

He brought the MP5 up, but knew intuitively that a mere threat would accomplish nothing.

He turned to Felice. “We need to get out of here, now!”

But even as he said it, he realized that her eyes were also drifting, unfocused. And then, even as he was reaching out to grab her arm, she collapsed, like a sacrificial offering laid before the shrine of tusks.