Savage

30

Feeling a little like the universe had just kicked him in the face, Rook slumped against a bulkhead. He noted a rivulet of blood creeping out from under the motionless body of Joseph Mulamba, and realized that if he didn’t move, it would eventually pool around his feet.

He didn’t move. There was already a lot of the man’s blood on him, symbolically and literally. What difference would a little more make?

Queen gazed in silent disbelief at the man they had so badly failed. She squeezed her eyes together for almost a full minute, but then she opened them and sat a little straighter.

“Okay. Let’s talk about what happens next.”

“Next? We blew it. Game over.”

“Knock it off,” she said, her tone sharper than usual. “You can have a pity party on your own time. We’ve still got a mission.”

“What mission?” he said slowly, through clenched teeth.

“Helping him…” She pointed to Mulamba’s still form, “… save his country. That’s what we agreed to do, remember?”

Rook took a deep breath. “How do we do that now?”

Queen leaned over the body and searched it, producing the envelope from the Stanley archive. A corner of the yellowed paper was stained dark red. She slipped the folded papers from inside and began reading.

Rook shook his head. He didn’t see the point of chasing after Mulamba’s mythical lost city now. It had been a long shot to begin with, and now that Mulamba was gone, the impact of any discovery they made might be negligible. But as Queen finished reading the first page and handed it to him, he straightened up and began reading aloud.

Rook took the rest of the pages from Queen, who had already finished reading them. These were on different paper. The handwriting was slightly different, though clearly written by the same person.

Rook lowered the papers and looked at Queen with a shrug. “That’s it? A crazy story about a cave and a lake that can turn people to stone? I don’t think that’s what Joe was looking for.”

“You’re right,” Queen said. She stared at Mulamba for several seconds, then reverently crossed his arms over his chest. “He was very brave. I wish this could have been something we could…”

She trailed off and Rook realized she was listening to something that he couldn’t hear. “Aleman? What’s he saying?”

Queen took out her phone and tapped a few commands on the backlit screen. “Okay, you’re on.”

Aleman’s voice was soft, nearly drowned out by the persistent hum of Crescent’s powerful turbofans. “First, I’m really sorry about what happened. It was just bad luck. There’s nothing you guys could have done differently. That probably doesn’t help much right now…” He took a deep breath. “Second, I don’t know anything about this Cave of the Ancients, but I might be able to help you out with the lake.”

“The lake is real?” Rook asked. “A lake of blood that turns people into stone? No way.”

“Way. I read about it in New Scientist. There’s a lake in Tanzania — Lake Natron — where the waters are almost pure alkaline. There’s a bacteria that turns the water red, like blood, but the really creepy thing is what happens to birds that fall into the water. The lake is full of dissolved lime, the same stuff that you use to make cement. The lime destroys organic tissue almost instantly, but in the process, it reacts, to form limestone. There are pictures of these birds that have literally turned to stone. I don’t think Livingstone — no pun there — was making that part up. And it’s about four hundred and sixty miles east of Ujiji, where Stanley met Livingstone.”

Queen’s eyebrows came together, accentuating the angry red Death Volunteers brand imprinted between them. “And if the lake is real, then the Cave of the Ancients might be real, too?”

“It’s worth checking out,” Aleman suggested. “And… it might not be such a bad idea to get off the radar, as it were.”

Rook sighed and tucked the diary pages back into Mulamba’s pocket.

“Hakuna matata.”

31

Asya tried to dodge away from the shot, but succeeded only in getting partly behind one of the Congolese soldiers, who had been guarding the hostages. Favreau’s gun barked, and the unlucky soldier burst apart in an eruption of blood that rained down on the horrified onlookers. Asya stumbled back, as if slapped by an unseen hand, and collapsed clutching her side.

King’s world closed in like tunnel vision. In that instant, he was completely defenseless. Favreau could have turned her gun on him and he would have died without taking a single defensive measure. He saw only Asya, his sister, awash in blood, unmoving.

He reached her side like a man wandering in a fog and knelt down. His hand hovered above her, but he was afraid to touch her, to confirm that this was reality and not a bad dream. But she was breathing and moving. She was still alive, and that was more than he had dared to hope.

Most of the blood was not hers, but some of it was. After devastating the Congolese soldier, the overpressure bullet had kept right on going, punching into Asya’s lower abdomen, just above her left hip. The wound was ugly, a ragged bloody hole as big around as the base of King’s thumb.

Some disconnected analytical part of King’s brain recognized that Asya was alive because most of the bullet’s kinetic energy had been expended in the initial impact with the soldier. There still had been plenty of velocity left in the round, but it had already used up the deadly one-two punch of the powdered heavy metal core. That was of little comfort to King. Asya was not dead, but she was badly wounded, and if she didn’t get immediate medical attention, which he was in no position to provide, then her death would be slow and agonizing.

But the realization that she was alive helped clear away some of the fog. He found Asya’s pouch containing emergency medical supplies — a basic rule of giving aid was to always use the injured person’s med-kit first. The pouch was soaked with blood, but the foil and plastic packaging had kept the inner contents relatively sterile. He tore open a field dressing and pressed it to the wound. It wouldn’t be enough, he knew, but it was a start.

As his tunnel vision diminished, his awareness of the situation in the assembly hall returned. Favreau was still holding both the gun and the detonator, her eyes dancing with excitement.

“What will you do now?” she asked. She wasn’t gloating; the question was sincere. She had made her move, and was now desperate to see what his counter would be.

King was wondering about that, too. If Asya had been dead, he might have just killed the Red Queen and to hell with the consequences. A few hundred dead in the palace seemed like a small price to pay to permanently end Favreau’s psychotic game. But Asya was alive, and that changed everything.

He knew what he had to do.

“Asya, can you hear me?”

Her eyes found his. “Yes. Son of a bitch, that hurts.”

“I need you to hold pressure on the dressing. Can you do that?”

She nodded, winced and then put her hand over the blood-soaked gauze pad.

He slid one arm under her legs, the other around her back and sprang to his feet. Without another glance at Favreau or anyone else, he turned and ran for the exit. There were shouts behind him, but loudest of all was the Red Queen herself, telling her men to let him go. He didn’t count this as a lucky break, and certainly not an instance of mercy on her part. This was a game to her, and she had let him go only because she wanted to play with him more.

He burst through the doors and ran toward the atrium. The battle between his small force of Republican Guardsmen and the army troops loyal to General Velle and Favreau had ended, or perhaps moved elsewhere. He had told the Guardsmen to engage just long enough to provide cover for him to reach the assembly hall, and then to fall back, but there were only six of them and dozens of soldiers. Maybe they were all dead.

There were two ways out of the Palais: the front door, which led out onto the streets of the Gombe commune — territory held by the rebels — or out the back door, where a short jog across the palace grounds would bring him to the river.

“Blue, is that gunboat on its way?”

“Affirmative. Mabuki says they’re a few minutes out.”

“Back door, then…” He fell silent as he saw a group of people emerging from a door halfway between where he stood and the rear entrance. It was Favreau, the enormous bomb slung across her back, leading a small procession that included several of her steroid-infused mercenaries and two hostages — acting President Gerard Okoa and United States Senator Lance Marrs. Favreau guided the group toward the doors. She met King’s stare for a fleeting second, then turned to join the rest of the group.

“Forget the boat. I’m leaving through the front door.”

“King you ca—” Deep Blue caught himself. “Not the front door. Go back into the west wing. There’s another exit at the far end. Stay in the shadows. I’ll guide you through.”

King turned back into the corridor, following the prompts that flashed in the display of the glasses. As he passed through the west exit, he heard the sound of the helicopter, its rotors spinning up for take-off.

The front of the palace crawled with soldiers, many of whom were busy setting up fighting positions for the coming confrontation with General Mabuki’s Republican Guard forces. Favreau might have fled the scene, but the revolution was just getting started.

As the helicopter lifted her into the sky, Monique Favreau flipped a wire-safety clamp over the dead-man remote for the RA-115, closed her eyes and allowed the tension and exhilaration of her confrontation with the relentless American to drain away. He was proving to be every bit the adversary she desired, and she was very much looking forward to their next encounter.

“Where are you taking us?” The demanding voice belonged to Marrs, the politician from the United States. She opened her eyes and fixed him with a withering stare. He recoiled a little, but after a lifetime of getting his way, Marrs didn’t have the good sense to know when to shut up. “Was he right? Is Consolidated Energy behind all this?”

When she saw that her Medusa gaze was not going to silence him, she turned away and tried to ignore him, but he pressed on.

“God damn, it is true, isn’t it? Listen, it’s not too late to fix this.”

“There is nothing to fix,” she said. “Everything is proceeding according to my plan.”

“Bullshit. You’re smarter than that. This little revolution of yours is circling the drain. When the truth about CE’s involvement gets out, and believe me it will, not only will you lose everything you thought you were going to gain, but CE will be finished. You will be finished.”

“How fortunate for you.”

“Are you kidding?” Marrs seemed to be on the verge of an epileptic fit. “Do you know who I am?”

“Aside from a pompous, know-nothing who prostitutes his political influence and licks the boots of wealthy oil billionaires?”

His lips curled in a disdainful sneer. “I’m the next goddamned President of the United States. That’s who I am. Now, let me talk to someone at CE… I’ve worked with Dorian Harrold, though I’m sure he’ll be surprised to hear—”

Favreau hit him. Her open hand struck his jaw, hard enough to shut it and raise a blush on his sallow skin, but it was really just a slap to remind him that, no matter who he thought he was or was going to be, she was in charge. His mouth hung open for a moment in disbelief, then he wisely closed it. She leaned in close. “Nothing you think you know matters anymore. There’s just one thing I want from you. Silence.” She relaxed a little and smiled. “It would be better if you gave me that voluntarily, but one way or another, I will get it.”

Marrs swallowed and fell back in his seat.

She looked away from him and tried to recapture some of the emotional high she had felt earlier, but it was gone, replaced instead by the depressing realization that Marrs was right. She had been outplayed, and now everything was in ruins. Somehow, the American had discovered the connection to Consolidated Energy, a fact that threatened everything and connected her to Mulamba’s abduction. Consolidated Energy and Executive Solutions would survive this by finding a way to disavow everything that she had done, labeling her a rogue agent and making themselves out to be as much the victims as the Congolese. They would cut her loose, maybe even put a price on her head.

Strangely, the idea excited her. She might be on her own now, but she wasn’t alone. She had General Velle and his army, and she had the bomb.

This was, she realized, not a defeat at all. It was a perfect opportunity.

32

King set Asya down in a shadowy recess near the west exit from the Palais and scanned the perimeter. The army forces holding the seat of the Congolese government were mostly clustered near the front entrance, but there were still a lot of troops spread out around the grounds. About fifty yards from where King hid, there was a GAZ Tigr armored vehicle, similar in design to a Humvee, with a gunner manning a DShK heavy machine gun in the top turret and four more soldiers milling about nearby. More vehicles and soldiers were dispersed along the fence line, close enough that slipping between them unnoticed would be impossible. Not that walking out was really an option. Asya needed immediate medical attention.

He checked her wound. The field dressing was soaked through, but Asya continued pressing it against the injury. He took out a fresh dressing and laid it over the top of the first, tying both around her waist to hold them in place. Only then did he look her in the eye. “How are you doing, kiddo?”

“Kiddo? I may be kid sister, but don’t treat me like child.” Her attempt at playful mock-outrage was confounded by a tremor of pain that turned her smile into a grimace.

“I’m going to get you out of here. Stay put.”

“I can walk,” she protested.

“Don’t,” he said, with all the forcefulness his whisper would allow. He turned away before she could argue, and scanned the area once more, tagging targets in the virtual environment.

With grim determination, he settled the cross-hairs on the gunner in the Tigr’s turret and fired a single silenced round. The weapon made a soft huffing noise that went unnoticed by the soldiers at the perimeter. The man behind the machine gun slumped away without making a sound. King moved the Uzi to another target, one of two men on the right side of the vehicle, and took another shot. The soldier went down, and as the other man looked on in surprise, King shifted the muzzle of his weapon and fired again.

As he switched his aim to the pair on the left side, he heard a cry of alarm and saw both men abruptly take a defensive stance. Another target suddenly popped up in King’s display. A previously unnoticed sixth man was climbing out of the Tigr, warning the others of the silent attack.

King took out one of the soldiers, but the other two raised their Kalashnikov rifles and started firing. They clearly didn’t know where he was. They were shooting into the shadows and none of their rounds came anywhere close to him, but the damage was done. Now, everyone was alerted to his presence. The mechanical coughing sound of a suppressed burst startled King, and both of the soldiers he was trying to target went down.

“Got them,” Asya announced through gritted teeth. She struggled to her feet. “Let’s go!”

“Damn it, Asya. Stay down.” He knew she was not going to heed him, and also recognized that he wasn’t going to be able to carry her to the Tigr, especially not with the rest of the Congolese army now looking their way. “Just stay here. Cover me.”

He bolted out into the open, making a bee-line for the vehicle. The movement caught the attention of soldiers on either side, and before he had crossed half the distance, bullets started sizzling though the air all around him. He kept going, and when he got within a few paces of the vehicle, he dove forward onto his belly as if sliding into home plate. Above him, rounds began pelting the armored exterior of the Tigr, but a hasty high crawl got him the rest of the way, affording some cover from the incoming fire on his right. He let loose a burst from the Uzi, pointing in the general direction of the troops to his left, then scrambled through the open door of the Tigr and pulled it shut.

A bullet cracked loudly against the side window, the impact hard enough to gouge out a divot and start a spider web fracture pattern. The armor would stop all small arms fire, but unlike the composite plates that protected the Tigr’s flanks, the bullet resistant coating on the glass was a perishable product. It would lose its effectiveness after prolonged exposure to adverse weather conditions — or a crap ton of bullets. It might slow down a few more rounds, but King wasn’t going to trust it with his life. Keeping his head down, he located the starter switch — like most military vehicles, there was no keyed ignition — and brought the 205 horsepower diesel engine roaring to life.

Without raising his head, King shifted the transmission into reverse. The Tigr started rolling backward. He goosed the throttle a little, holding the wheel steady until the vehicle jolted to a stop with a loud crash that reverberated through the metal frame and nearly shook him out of his seat. Head still down, he moved his foot onto the brake pedal and shifted into forward drive.

The door behind him opened and Asya tumbled inside. “Why don’t you watch where you’re going?” she said, the pain once more robbing her voice of the intended humor. “You just hit national palace. That’s going to cause an international incident.”

“Why don’t you stop being such a backseat driver?” King punched the accelerator, and the Tigr rocketed forward.

There was another shuddering impact as they crashed through the fence, but the Tigr was made of tougher stuff than the barrier, and its momentum carried it through without slowing. As the hailstorm of bullets started to slacken, King finally risked sitting up.

A stand of trees loomed into view. He cranked the steering wheel hard to the right and felt the heavy military vehicle skid closer to the wood line. Resisting the urge to brake, he instead pushed the accelerator harder. The tires threw up a shower of turf but the Tigr responded and veered onto a new course. He could see a paved road ahead, but between them and it was a gauntlet of troops and trucks, all of whom were now targeting the renegade Tigr.

The interior of the vehicle was suddenly filled with the roar of a heavy machine gun. King glanced back and saw Asya, standing upright in the turret, firing the DShK into the mass of troops.

He bit back a curse and focused on the near objective. “Blue, how’s that escape route coming?”

“Sending it to you now.” There was palpable helplessness in the disembodied voice. Deep Blue sounded as frustrated and haggard as King felt. “My satellite imagery for Kinshasa is two hours old, but assuming that the army is redeploying to repel General Mabuki’s attack, the weakest place in their lines will be to the southwest—”

Asya let loose another burst. The thunderous report drowned out the rest. King felt the tires grip pavement and the Tigr picked up speed. He risked a quick glance back and saw his sister’s feet moving back and forth as she swiveled the gun. A haphazard pattern of bloody footprints surrounded her.

“Negative,” King said, turned his eyes back to the road. “I need to get to Mabuki by the most direct route possible.”

He hooked a left turn, onto the broad avenue that paralleled the front of the Palais and the crowd of soldiers assembled there. Several vehicles were already starting to move, their guns flashing. Red tracer rounds were zipping across his path like laser bolts from a science fiction movie.

“King, that will take you right into the lion’s den.”

“Yeah, kinda figured that.”

There was a whooshing sound in his head as Deep Blue gave a resigned sigh, then: “Hard right, now!”

There wasn’t a road, but King saw a vast open plaza with an enormous brick courtyard and a central structure that looked like a UFO trying to break free from the grasp of several enormous concrete hands. King hauled the steering wheel to the right and angled onto the sidewalk between the courtyard and the weird monument. The Tigr jounced over low barriers and other pedestrian obstacles. King swerved to avoid a large bronze statue of a lion. Asya let loose a torrent of Russian profanity that was almost as lethal as the 12.7 mm rounds from the DShk, and sank down out of the turret. She finished with a sharp, “Who taught you how to drive?”

“Watch your language. She’s your mother, too,” King said. She frequently forgot he was fluent in Russian since his passage through the ages. “Now, stay down.”

He was relieved that she was back in the relative safety of the Tigr’s interior, but he knew the chaotic ride was almost certainly aggravating her injuries. If this kept up, he was likely to kill her before he could save her.

“Keep going straight,” Deep Blue said. “There’s a road directly in front of you. Straight shot to Mabuki’s location.”

“Do me a favor and let him know we’re coming in hot.”

“Already done.”

The vehicle suddenly rocked under the impact of a barrage of machine gun fire. A small convoy of Tigrs and tracked APCs tore across the plaza in pursuit. The high caliber rounds punched through the armor with a shriek of tortured metal and continued right through the windshield, scant inches from King’s head. He ducked, but knew that if the next burst hit a little lower, the seat back wouldn’t do much to slow the bullets down, and if the rounds hit something critical, like a fuel tank or the tires, they were equally screwed.

“Straight shot is a no-go!” He lifted up just enough to scan the road ahead, spied a cross street and took the turn, slipping into an urban canyon between two modern looking buildings. The assault stopped, but King knew the reprieve would be short.

“You’re still in the neighborhood,” Deep Blue advised. “There’s a right turn coming up in a hundred yards. Take it.”

A network of glowing lines appeared in King’s glasses, guiding him to the next approaching cross street, which was at an angle slightly sharper than ninety degrees and already a lot closer than a hundred yards. King hauled the Tigr into the turn, clipped the corner and bounced over the curb.

Asya howled another curse as the vehicle slammed down on the road surface, but quickly added, “I’m all right. Keep going.”

King doubted that she was all right, but he also knew that moving forward was the only option. This road was also a straight shot, and before long he saw the headlights of the pursuit rounding the corner. King’s Tigr was probably a good two hundred yards ahead of the soldiers, which wasn’t nearly far enough. The effective range of a DShK was over a mile.

“Right turn, coming up.”

Tracers streaked past, and King decided they wouldn’t make it to the turn. He turned sharply to the right, blasting through a low concrete barrier. Beyond was a bare dirt field that might have been a parking lot for the nearby building. The Tigr’s wheels threw up enormous clots of mud as it fishtailed across the open area, but for the moment they were once more out of the line of fire.

“There’s an exit at your two o’clock. A left will put you back on the straightaway.”

King saw it, and a metal gate blocking it.

What’s one more dent?

The Tigr hit the gate, tearing it off its hinges. In the instant of impact, and too late to do anything about it, King saw something else looming out of the darkness. A seven-ton truck drove into view, blocking his path. He tried to brake and turn away from it, but he was already beyond the event horizon. The left front tire of the heavy truck crashed into the front end of the Tigr and annihilated it.

King was thrown out of his seat and across the interior of the vehicle. He slammed hard against the passenger side door, which crumpled like an empty beer can beneath the truck’s big tires. Locked together in a death embrace, the two vehicles continued forward, shuddering and smoking as momentum fought friction. Friction ultimately won.

Disoriented, King fumbled for his Uzi then remembered that he was not the Tigr’s only occupant. “Asya!”

She lay pressed against the right side, unmoving. He squirmed around, crawled between the seats and into the rear compartment. There was blood everywhere, too much blood…

A burst from a heavy gun startled him, and he twisted around, raising the Uzi. More reports followed — a chaotic orchestra of several automatic rifles and more than one machine gun. A few rounds struck the exterior, but nothing penetrated. He could see movement outside, soldiers swarming out of the transport, surrounding the wrecked Tigr, shooting…

The shooting stopped. A silhouette appeared, framed in the viewport hole. The door handle rattled as someone worked the latch from the outside, and King took aim with the Uzi, ready to fire the moment the door opened.

“Ceasefire!” Deep Blue shouted, and then he repeated the phrase again and again until King safed the weapon and lowered it.

The door swung open and King saw the smiling face of General Mabuki. “That is twice I have arrived in the nick of time to save you. I think I must be your guardian angel.”

King didn’t acknowledge the comment, but instead turned to Asya, pulling her toward him as gently as his urgency would permit. “Help me. She’s hurt.”

The general snapped into action, calling to his men for a medic. “Help is on the way,” he said. “We will save her.”

King checked Asya. Her dressing was still in place, but saturated. One trouser leg was soaked with blood that had run down from the wound. Her skin was unnaturally pale, but she was still taking shallow breaths.

Two soldiers ran up with an old school litter — canvass stretched between two poles — and King gently laid her in the tattered olive drab fabric while another soldier with a red cross armband began assessing her injuries. King watched the medic work for several minutes to make sure he knew what he was doing. Once satisfied, he took a step back to let the man work.

As his focus gradually pulled back, it occurred to him to ask Mabuki what had happened.

“The rebellion has been quashed,” the general said. “When they realized that their leaders had fled aboard a helicopter, the soldiers lost the will to keep fighting.”

King didn’t quite share Mabuki’s excitement. The rebellion in Kinshasa might have been put down, but General Velle still held the eastern part of the country, and Monique Favreau still had a tactical nuclear weapon, not to mention two hostages — one of whom was a US lawmaker. Still, a victory was a victory. He clapped Mabuki on the shoulder. “There’s still a lot of work to do, but at least we got President Mulamba his house back.”

Then King heard Deep Blue’s voice again. “King, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news.”

33

Felice awoke to the sound of screaming.

It was her second rude awakening in less than twenty-four hours. The nightmare reality that greeted her on this occasion was not the frantic chaos of an attack, but instead something far more terrifying: the ominous darkness of the primeval jungle, filled with an inhuman howl of pain.

She sat bolt upright and looked around, trying to find the source of the cry, so she could run the other way. There was movement in the darkness, something moving toward the scream, and for a moment the beast in her belly began to stir again… but no, she was wrong.

Wrong about the absolute darkness… There was a faint green glow, almost close enough to touch.

Wrong about the lumbering shape crashing toward her… It wasn’t a shape at all, but her protector, the man who called himself Bishop.

Wrong about the scream… It was not inhuman at all, but was erupting from the compact form of the man she knew as Knight.

Knight sat hunched over a chemlight. He had removed his bandages and his exposed, raw, oozing flesh glistened in the green light. He had one hand held up to his injured eye, tugging at the metal protruding from it. His scream reached a climax as the shrapnel came free, releasing a gush of ocular fluid, thick with clotted blood. Then his howl changed to something that was almost like laughter.

Bishop reached Knight a moment later, kneeling in front of him and gripping his shoulders. “Damn, Knight. What the hell did you do that for?”

Knight bared his teeth in a fierce grin, but Felice saw that he was shivering. “Damn thing was trying to work its way into my brain. I had to get it out. Felt like my head was going to explode.”

Felice quickly found the med kit and knelt beside Knight. “What’s done is done,” she said, holding the glow stick close to survey the wound. She couldn’t tell if he’d made the injury worse by pulling the splinter out or if it had actually relieved some of the pressure, but one thing was evident: his eye was ruined beyond hope of repair. She tried to act clinically detached as she rinsed the area with saline solution. “But from now on, keep your grubby hands away from it.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Is he okay?” Bishop asked, speaking to Felice as if Knight wasn’t even there.

She placed the back of her hand against Knight’s forehead. “He might be feverish. I can’t tell. It’s so damn hot here all the time.”

“I’m good,” Knight said, sounding almost manic. “Fully mission capable. Drink water, and get back in the fight, am I right?”

Felice turned so that only Bishop could hear her. “Is he always like that?”

Bishop’s head shake was almost imperceptible in the darkness.

Before either of them could say more, an eerie hum reverberated through the woods. It reminded Felice of crowd noise — hundreds, even thousands of people all talking at the same time, their voices blending together into a strange hum. It lasted a couple seconds, stopped, and then was repeated, growing louder and more intense, until it seemed to be coming from everywhere.

“What is that?” Felice asked. “Is that a tank?”

Bishop shook his head as he searched the darkness for the noise’s source. “I don’t know what that is. Get him bandaged up. We might—”

He abruptly brought the M240 to his shoulder, ready to fire. Felice had seen it, too, a hint of movement in the night, the kind of thing that triggered primal fears.

Something lurked in the darkness, just out of sight.

She didn’t see it so much as sense it, disturbing the air with its presence. With a focused effort, she turned her back on the jungle and resumed tending to Knight’s wounds.

The machine gun let loose with a roar that made Felice yelp. The burst lasted only a second or two. The muzzle flash, almost blinding in its intensity, somehow failed to give any illumination. Bishop continued to scan the darkness, jerking the gun back and forth, but did not fire again. For several seconds, all she could hear was a faint ringing in her ears, the lingering auditory assault of the weapon’s rapid-fire report, but then the humming sound returned.

“Hurry,” he urged. “We can’t stay here.”

Felice wrapped a length of Coban around Knight’s head to hold a large gauze pad in place over his eye, and then hastily packed the med-kit and everything else into the rucksack.

“I’ll get that,” Bishop said, but she hefted it onto her shoulder, and then helped Knight to his feet.

“You’re going to have your hands full keeping us alive,” she replied.

He just nodded.

“What’s out there?” she continued. “The rebels?”

“Might be an animal. Or a pack of them. I don’t know.”

She mentally ran down the list of animals that she knew roamed the Congo. “Lions, tigers and bears, oh my,” she whispered to herself. That wasn’t quite right. More like lions, leopards, gorillas and warthogs. Oh my. Yet, none of those, nor any of the other dozens of dangerous animals she could name, felt like a good fit for the thing — or things — moving in the darkness.

Felice kept a hand on Knight’s uninjured right arm. She wasn’t sure if she was doing this in case he stumbled and needed help staying on his feet, or because she felt safer being in constant contact with another person. It was probably a little of both. She would have put her other hand on Bishop’s arm, but he had already moved ahead, and she struggled just to keep up with him. At times, it was so dark that she couldn’t see him — or anything else — at all, and had to simply follow the sound of his footsteps.

The strange droning noise came back from time to time, but if it was the call of a predatory animal, it did not announce an impending attack. After a while, Felice realized that she could see a little better. Dawn was breaking.

What little sleep she had gotten did nothing to refresh her and as they trudged on, fatigue affixed itself to her muscles like barnacles on a ship’s hull. The terror she had awakened to had become a fog of misery, and when Bishop called a sudden halt, it was all she could do to not simply drop to the ground in a fetal curl.

“What is it?” Knight asked. He sounded breathless, as if just asking the question had exhausted him.

“There’s a road here,” Bishop said. “Dirt track. Overgrown and probably not used very often, but it’s there.”

Felice peered ahead, but couldn’t distinguish any difference in the forest’s density. Nevertheless, she felt the fog of hopelessness lift a little.

“Risky,” Knight observed.

“Why?” she asked. A road was something definite, something they could follow without fear of wandering in circles. A road would lead, eventually, to some kind of human habitation, perhaps to a village, where they could make contact with the outside world and get some help.

“They’ve got vehicles,” Bishop explained. “They’ll be using the roads to look for us. But I don’t think we have a choice. We can’t just wander aimlessly around in the woods. We’ll skirt along the edge of the road and see where it takes us.”

The trek — Felice was starting to think of it as a ‘death march’—resumed, and she soon saw a thin ribbon of twilight overhead and off to the left. Before long, it brightened enough to reveal the trunks of the trees through which they were passing. Further off to the left, a clearing with parallel strips of dirt was packed by the repeated passage of four-wheel drive vehicles.

Bishop stopped abruptly, raising one closed fist. Knight froze in place, and Felice followed his example, even though her curiosity was burning. After more than a minute during which Bishop remained statue still, he turned slowly and whispered. “Do you smell that?”

Felice sniffed the air. There was a hint of wood smoke wafting through the jungle.

“Stay here. I’ll check it out.” Without waiting for their assent, Bishop moved off, following his nose.

Knight relaxed from his frozen posture and eased himself to the ground, using his rifle like a walking stick and keeping his left arm tight against his torso. Felice squatted down next to him.

“How are you doing?”

He returned a wan smile. “Believe it or not, I’ve been better.”

She nodded. Humor, even dark humor, was a good sign. “Any fever? Chills?”

“Yeah. But I think the antibiotics are keeping it at bay.”

She laid the back of her hand against his forehead and then drew her hand back in alarm. He was burning up. “How is the pain?”

He made a strangled sound that might have been laughter. “Hurts like a mother — ah, well you know.” He reached up and touched the bandage as if trying to figure out how it had come to be on his face. “The jarheads always say, ‘pain is just weakness leaving the body.’ I guess my weakness must have been twenty-fifteen vision.”

She touched his forearm and gently moved his hand away. Humor was good, but self-pity under these circumstances might be deadly.

“It’s okay,” he said after a moment. “I’ll get an eye patch and talk like a pirate. Girls dig that, right?”

“Depends on the girl, I suppose. Now, if you get yourself a parrot…” Even though his teeth were chattering, his smile broadened and seemed more genuine, so she pressed on. “So, is there a particular scurvy wench you’ve got your eye on?”

“Ha. Yes. And I think she’d actually get a chuckle out of being referred to that way.”

“What’s her name?”

“Anna. Anna Beck.” Knight’s good eye seemed to lose focus for a moment. “We’ve been together… I guess, a couple years now.”

“It must be tough… a relationship, I mean, doing what you do.”

He nodded guiltily, and then started rooting around in his rucksack. Felice took that as a sign that he didn’t want to discuss the topic any longer, but to her surprise, he kept talking. “Actually, before Anna, I don’t think I had been in anything that you could call a relationship. And since I met her on the job, so to speak, I guess we both knew what would be involved.”

Felice wasn’t sure if he was referring to the long periods of separation or the inherent danger of his profession. She knew that military wives had to reconcile themselves to the possibility of losing their loved ones in battle, but she wondered how Anna Beck would react when she got her first look at Knight’s maimed face. Then it occurred to her that Knight was probably wondering that as well.

“Does Bishop have someone at home?”

“Not Bishop. I don’t think he’s ever even been on a date. He’s way too intense.”

“I kind of picked up on that. Just figured it was a Rambo-thing.”

“Bishop makes Rambo look like Ronald McDonald.” Knight took out a cell phone, identical to the one Bishop had crushed earlier in every way but one, namely that it was still intact. He probed it with a finger, held it near his ear and shook it, and then turned it over and began picking at an almost imperceptible seam along its edge. After a few seconds, he succeeded in popping loose the back cover of the phone, exposing its electronic innards.

Felice let the subject go, allowing Knight to focus on what he was doing, but she found her thoughts occupied by the enigma that was Bishop. She had caught a glimpse of the man that lay just under the rigidly held mask of self-control. There was a beast inside him, a monster of rage that he fought with every minute of his life, a monster that, if loosed, would destroy him and anyone close to him.

That was something Felice understood very well. She had her own beast with which to contend.

34

Bishop moved further away from the road but kept it within sight as he tracked the smell of burning wood. Soon, he detected other odors: strange smells that he couldn’t quite pin down, until his stomach rumbled and he realized it was the smell of cooking food.

Further down the road, he heard voices, women talking in a strange unfamiliar language, and small children shouting and laughing. He took that as a good sign. The cook fires might have belonged to a camp of rebels, but he doubted very much that the men pursuing them had brought along their kids.

He slowed his pace and stopped completely when he caught sight of the village. It was little more than a collection of ramshackle huts with concrete walls and thatched roofs, lining the sides of the road. There was a large fuel tank at one end, but there was not a single vehicle anywhere to be seen. Nor was there any sign of modern conveniences: no electric lights, radio antennas or satellite dishes. Bishop was willing to bet that there was no running water either. The smoke rose from makeshift open-air cooking pits outside the huts. The women tending them wore brightly colored dresses and kerchiefs tied around their hair, while the children wore T-shirts and soccer jerseys. The village was primitive, he decided, but not completely cut off from the rest of the world.

He remained there, watching the villagers’ day begin, weighing the choices this discovery presented. He had already decided that he wouldn’t attempt contact with them. There was no way to determine their loyalties, and it would take only one informant to alert the rebels to the presence of outsiders. The question he now pondered was whether to sneak into the village for food, medical supplies and perhaps even a map, or to simply give it a wide berth and keep going.

He had just settled on the latter option when something changed. The children reacted first, leaving their play and running into the huts to tell the adults. A few seconds later, Bishop heard what they had: the rumble of a diesel engine and the creak of a vehicle chassis rocking back and forth on its suspension. A truck creaked into view a few seconds later. It was a mongrel construct of indeterminable make and model, but there was one feature that was easy to recognize. Affixed to a metal post that had been welded to the floor of the rear cargo area, was a beat-up but serviceable PKM machine gun. A man wearing a soccer team logo T-shirt and camouflage trousers stood behind the gun, mostly using it as a handhold to avoid being thrown when the technical—a military term for a civilian vehicle that had been repurposed to serve as a war machine — bounced over ruts in the road. Two more rebel fighters rode in the front. The truck rolled to the center of the village, where it stopped. The man on the machine gun turned the weapon in slow circles, none too subtly letting the villagers know that he could kill any one of them with indifference. The two men in the front got out, their Kalashnikov rifles held at a low ready that was, if not quite menacing, then certainly not friendly.

An older man wearing tattered trousers and a short-sleeved shirt emerged from one of the huts and headed toward the truck. He moved assertively, stamping his bare feet on the ground, but he stopped a respectful distance from the armed men. They spoke what Bishop assumed was Swahili, and while he couldn’t understand a word of it, he got the sense that the old man was reprimanding the young guerillas, but was careful to do so in a way that would not end with his own execution.

One of the rebels laughed, then lifted his head and shouted something meant for the whole populace. The old man took a step forward, raising both hands. The gesture looked to Bishop more like a protest than a surrender. The rebel stepped forward, too, reversing his grip on the rifle and jabbing the stock into the old man’s midriff.

The women of the village let out a wail of protest, but no one moved to assist the old man. The man at the machine gun made a show of racking the bolt on the weapon, while the two dismounted rebels hurried into the hut from which the old man had come.

There was no hesitation in what Bishop did next. On some level, his decision was the product of a strategic calculation, but that was not what drove him. He was ruled by instinct, and his inner voice did not argue.

He chose a path that brought him into the village behind the technical and opposite the crowd of wailing women and frightened children. A few disbelieving eyes turned toward Bishop as he broke from cover, but the gunner did not recognize the importance of their behavior. He was still glowering at the assembled group when Bishop sprang up into the bed of the technical and broke his neck with a savage twist.

Bishop didn’t stop, but instead hopped over the side of the truck and ducked low, keeping it between him and the hut, where the other two rebels had gone. With the coolness of a stalking lion, he padded around the rear of the truck and approached the hut at an angle that kept him out of line of sight of anyone looking out the door.

The old man struggled to rise, his face twisted in pain. When his eyes met Bishop’s gaze, there was something else there, too. Apprehension? Pleading? Bishop couldn’t fathom why the man would be looking at him that way. He was already helping the villagers. There was no time to ask for an explanation. Bishop pressed his back against the side of the hut and waited.

The rebels emerged a moment later. The first man passed by Bishop without even looking in his direction. When the second man emerged, Bishop stepped in front of him and delivered a close in blow that instantly knocked the man unconscious, and then spun on his heel and delivered a roundhouse punch that landed squarely at the base of the other rebel’s skull.

As the second man collapsed in a heap at his feet, Bishop saw the old man moving toward him, shaking his head and repeating a phrase over and over. It didn’t sound like a ‘thank you.’

“English?” Bishop asked.

The man frowned. “Non.” He then said something in what sounded to Bishop like French, but was just as incomprehensible. He gestured at the rebels and then pointed an accusing finger at Bishop.

Bishop fought a powerful urge to simply turn and walk back into the jungle. A little gratitude would have been appreciated, but he understood why the villagers were afraid. It was easy for him to show up and crack a couple of heads, but he would leave, and they would still have to deal with the rebels. There might even be violent reprisals.

The old man turned away from Bishop and addressed the villagers in a loud clear voice. Almost as one, the people began dispersing to their huts. It had sounded like a call to arms, but as Bishop studied the faces, he saw women and children, mostly girls, and a few elderly couples.

“Where are all the men?”

The old man looked at him, as if waiting for the question to be uttered in a language he understood, then pushed past him and entered the hut.

Bishop felt another pang of guilt and helplessness. There weren’t any able-bodied men in the village. Maybe they had all gone off to the city to work, been conscripted by the army or shanghaied by the rebels, who were notorious for kidnapping young boys — anyone big enough to hold a rifle — and forcing them to serve as foot soldiers. They would be indoctrinated and set on a lifelong path of violence.

A few moments later, villagers began to emerge from their huts. Some of the women had large cloth-wrapped bundles on their heads, while others carried baskets and herded small flocks of goats. Bishop spied the old man, likewise carrying a sack full of supplies. “What’s going on? Where are you going?”

The old man gave him an appraising stare for several seconds. Then, as if his actions were answer enough, he turned and joined the procession heading down the road.

“Was it something you said?” a voice called from across the road.

Bishop turned and saw Knight and Felice emerge from the trees. “More like something I did, but I’m not really sure.”

Knight shuffled toward him, but Felice started after the old man. “Hujambo, bwana!”

The man glanced at her, but just as quickly turned away and kept going. Felice shrugged and walked back to join Bishop and Knight.

“Where are they going?” she asked

“To hide in the jungle, I think,” Bishop replied. “Probably afraid of getting caught up in this. I don’t blame them. When we’re gone, they still have to live here.” He pointed at the men on the ground. “And what I did.”

He stopped and cocked his head to the side. He had heard something in the distance, the faint but unmistakable roar of an engine. In a matter of just a few seconds, the noise grew steadily louder. He became certain that there was not just one vehicle, but several. “Time to go.”

“Can’t we take their ride?” Felice asked.

It was a tempting suggestion, but using the technical would mean staying on the roads, and the roads were dominated by the rebel forces. Their only hope of eluding the men who hunted them was to follow the example of the villagers and flee into the jungle. There wasn’t time to explain all that to Felice, so he grabbed her arm above the elbow and hastened her into the trees. As they passed once more into the forest, the first vehicle in a long convoy rolled into the village.

“They’re going to know we were here,” Knight said.

Bishop thought it sounded like an accusation. For Knight, a trained sniper, remaining concealed and leaving no footprints — literal or figurative — was of paramount importance. If Bishop had not intervened during the search of the village, the rebels would have moved on and been none the wiser. Now, whatever lead they had gained on their pursuers was gone. The hunters would know that they were nearby and the search would intensify. He didn’t regret what he’d done. Sneaking around was Knight’s way, not his. If he wasn’t going to take risks to help the helpless, then what was the point of being a soldier? Unfortunately, he knew the risk was not his alone. His impulsive action had put Knight and Felice in danger as well.

“Take her and keep going,” he told Knight. “I’ll try to draw them off.”

The tumult behind them intensified as more vehicles entered the village, and then changed in pitch with the addition of shouted voices. The rebels had found their fallen comrades.

“There’s no time for that. We have to—”

“Look!” Felice’s shout was so loud that Bishop winced, but when he turned to silence her, he saw that she was pointing off to their left. There, standing about fifty yards away was the old man from the village. He waved for them to join him.

Bishop looked to Knight. “Well?”

“I don’t have a better idea.”

They started toward the old man, and as they drew near, he turned and headed deeper into the forest. Despite his advanced years, the man moved with a spry surefootedness that revealed a lifelong familiarity with the savage wilderness. He set an urgent pace, almost faster than Bishop could move while remaining stealthy. Knight also struggled to keep up. He was drenched in sweat, and the heat and rising humidity sapped his strength by degrees.

He quickened his pace just enough to get close to their guide, and hissed, “We have to slow down.”

The old man glanced back and said something in his native language.

He looked at Felice. “What did he say?”

“No idea. I only know a few phrases of Swahili.” She was already winded, but sprinted ahead to the old man’s side. “Parlez vous Francais?”

The old man didn’t look at her, but uttered something in French, which was equally incomprehensible to Bishop.

Felice translated. “He says we will be able to rest soon, but right now they are too close.”

The engine noise faded into the distance, but the shouts of the men spreading out into the forest remained constant. Bishop knew they were leaving a trail a blind man could follow. He wondered if the old man was leading them somewhere specific. Clearly the rest of the villagers had gone somewhere else, and it occurred to him that the old man might not be leading them to a place of safety after all. Perhaps he was simply trying to make sure that they didn’t follow his neighbors, thereby leading the hunters to the villagers’ refuge. Or maybe he was going to lead them back to the rebels and turn them in, to ensure the villagers’ safety.

No good deed goes unpunished, he thought, but that was the kind of thing Rook might say. It wasn’t how Bishop had lived his life. It wasn’t how he wanted to live.

Trust the old man, he decided. But be ready to deal with whatever happens.

They were moving in a straight line. Bishop confirmed it by using tree trunks and other terrain features as visual waypoints, though doing so underscored just how vast and unchanging the forest was. The old man showed no sign of weariness, but Felice seemed to be flagging. Knight just shambled forward like an automaton, his forehead beading with perspiration. Bishop started counting his steps and was able to get a rough idea of how fast they were traveling and how far they had gone — nearly two miles in the half hour since they’d left the village and the road behind.

Another twenty minutes passed before their guide altered course, making an abrupt ninety degree turn to the right. Soon, they arrived at the edge of a narrow creek that cut across their path. The shallow water looked nearly stagnant, more a series of connected puddles than a proper stream. The fetid water reeked of decay and the hum of swarming mosquitoes was maddening in its intensity. However, the creek seemed to be a reference point for their guide. He immediately changed course again and led them parallel to the water.

Bishop sensed a change in the surrounding jungle. It was subtle, so much so that it took him several minutes to identify the difference. The sparse foliage near the stream showed evidence of being trampled. The forest was a place where animal life existed primarily in the canopy of interlaced tree branches — it was the domain of flora, not fauna. But here, at the stream’s edge, the tree dwelling animals, and the few creatures that roamed the forest floor, came together to drink. It was also a place where predators were sure to find easy prey, evidenced by the occasional stripped carcass.

The old man stopped and held a hand out to signal them to do the same. Bishop turned to Felice, who was soaked in sweat and grimacing from the sustained exertion. “Ask him what’s happening,” he whispered.

She rocked unsteadily on her feet, panting to catch her breath, but nodded. In a whisper, she posed the question in French. The man answered in a low murmur without looking back.

“He says we’re close, and that we need to be very quiet now.”

“Close to what?”

She shrugged and passed along the inquiry, but got no answer. Instead, the man gestured for them to resume the journey, but set a glacial pace. Bishop snugged the butt of the M240 into his shoulder and elevated the muzzle, just in case they were being led into a trap.

A few more steps brought them to a marshy lake that seemed to be the source of the stream. It was nestled at the base of a dark cliff and a thin trickle of water fell down its surface to replenish the lake. The man pointed to the dribbling waterfall and then touched his finger to his lips, reminding them of the need for absolute silence.

Bishop now saw that the cliff wasn’t a solid slab of rock, but was instead a hanging wall, jutting out to form a shadowy hollow behind the waterfall.

“Does he want us to hide in there?” Bishop asked, pointing. During heavy rains, the waterfall would probably transform into a raging torrent, completely obscuring the recess, but under the present conditions, it was completely exposed.

The old man shushed him again and continued along the edge of the lake. There seemed little doubt that the cave was his ultimate destination. As they got closer, he struck out across the marsh, but moved slowly to avoid splashing. Bishop silently consulted Knight with a meaningful glance, but the only answer Knight could give was a helpless shrug.

At the mouth of the cave, the old man paused again, and for the first time since encountering him, Bishop saw real apprehension in his face. He’d barely blinked in the face of the assault by the rebels, but now he seemed on the verge of bolting in panic. The emotion was contagious. Felice drew closer to Bishop, and Knight moved up so that they formed a small defensive cluster, ready to face whatever unknown terror lay beyond that trickle of water. But then their guide gathered up his courage, indicated again to the others that they stay silent and crossed the threshold.

Although the woods were shrouded in darkness, even at high noon, the first few tentative steps were like a plunge into the void. The old man advanced, and it took Bishop a moment to realize that the cave went much deeper than he first realized. The circle of light filtering in from outside shrank to nothing, and still they moved forward into the subterranean night.

Unable to see much of anything, Bishop closed his eyes for a moment and tried to focus on the rest of the sensory picture. The cave floor, which had been at first irregular and ankle deep underwater, had given way to bare rock, but now he felt the surface compress under his weight, like grass or moss on hard ground. There was an odd smell, too, similar to the earthy organic aroma of peat, but also a tang of ammonia.

Bats, he thought. We must be right under them.

Despite their best efforts to be quiet, he could hear the faint squish of sodden boots on the cave floor, the creak and rustle of clothes and rucksacks and weapons on their slings.

Then he heard something else. A weird hum echoed from the unseen walls of the cave, rising to a fever pitch in a matter of just a few seconds. It was the same noise they had heard in the pre-dawn darkness.

“Enough of this shit,” Knight rasped.

Suddenly a light flared in the darkness. It wasn’t very bright, but because his pupils had dilated in the darkness, it felt for a moment like someone had stabbed a toothpick in Bishop’s eyes. It was, he realized, just a pale green chemlight, held aloft in Knight’s right hand.

The hum stopped instantly, but then resumed again, this time with an intensity that Bishop could feel vibrating through his bones. The old man let out a yelp of alarm and deftly plucked the glowstick from Knight’s fingers, hurling it away into the darkness.

As the luminescent tube sailed end over end, it revealed the cavern in a series of flashed images that were imprinted like snapshots on Bishop’s retinas. He struggled to make sense of what he was seeing. All of his preconceived ideas about the cavern were wrong.

The cavern was enormous, far too vast to take its measure in the scant light of the glowstick. He realized they had barely left the front porch. There might have been bats overhead — the light didn’t reach that high — but the soft material on the floor was not guano. It resembled Old Man’s Beard, or some other kind of lichen, but it grew in astonishing quantities. It was just a fringe near the wall where they were walking, but further out, where the chemlight had been thrown, it was growing as thick as corn in Iowa.

Yet, that was not the strangest thing he saw.

There were animals moving about in the midst of the lichen, at least a couple dozen of them. They were about the size of farm turkeys, maybe thirty pounds, and looked bird-like, with what appeared to be feathers, or perhaps colorful scales covering their skin. They had heads with flat broad mouths, like ducks or geese. Unlike birds, though, they had long tails — longer than even their bodies — which were standing straight up in the air like antennae. The creatures might have been grazing on the frilly growth or perhaps pecking for insects, but the disturbance had cause them all to lift their heads in alarm and begin their strange ululating cry.

They were not birds.

Bishop had no doubts about that. In fact, even though he was having a hard time believing it, he knew exactly what they were.

In the preceding three years, to prepare for battle with the renegade geneticist Richard Ridley, the individual Chess Team members had participated in an accelerated educational program that included introductory courses in several scientific disciplines. Bishop recognized the animal species, even though most people, thanks to more than a century of erroneous conclusions reinforced by Hollywood movies, would not have.

The creatures he saw, in that momentary flash of the glowstick, were velociraptors.

The cave was full of dinosaurs.

35

Rook gazed in disbelief at the lake and the surrounding area. Although he had read Livingstone’s account and heard Aleman’s confirmation of the surreal phenomena associated with the alkali lake, the reality surpassed his wildest expectations. The lake wasn’t blood red, exactly. In the burning light of the morning sun, it was brighter, with a variety of hues ranging from orange to pink. The opaque surface had the appearance of a terrazzo mosaic, or perhaps a stained glass window in a cathedral, shot through with whitish cracks. At the shore, the natural brown of rock and soil was coated a sulfur yellow in both directions, as far as he could see, and at the cusp where water and earth met, there was a darker band that phased between yellow, green and black. Scattered throughout were shapes that were easily recognizable as birds and other small animals, dead and perfectly fossilized.

“This is like something from a Star Wars movie,” he told Queen. “The prequel trilogy, I mean, with all the CGI effects. I didn’t think I’d ever see anything like this on Earth.”

Queen shrugged. “Didn’t watch them. Looks a little like New Jersey, to me.”

As strange as the immediate landscape was, the real surprise was that Lake Natron was not the lifeless hell pit Rook had imagined it to be. Although there was no evidence of animal life nearby — unless, of course, one counted the petrified remains, just a short distance away, the lake transitioned to a less shocking hue of muddy green and reflected blue sky. Flocks of flamingos stood in the shallows, bobbing their heads down to scoop up mouthfuls of algae rich water.

“Didn’t watch Star Wars?” Rook shook his head in mock-despair. “Well that might explain why you don’t seem to appreciate my witty pop-culture references.”

Humor was his defense mechanism. He had cleaned up and changed clothes on the long flight half-way across the world, but he still felt the memory of blood on his hands. Mulamba’s remains now rested in a sealed body bag aboard Crescent II, which was parked a short distance away. The plane was perfectly camouflaged, as its digital skin projected an exact image of the terrain beneath it, or the jungle behind it. Billions of tiny color cells shrank and expanded to create the image — a technology based on the chromatophores of the common squid. From a distance, or from above, it was invisible. The area surrounding the lake was uninhabited, so there was little chance of someone stumbling across the aircraft.

“Could be that they aren’t as witty as you think.” Queen’s tone was sharp enough that he knew she wasn’t merely being playful. Queen, he knew, had her own way of dealing with loss.

“Touché. So, here we are. What do we do now?”

“Visual recon. We walk the shore until we find the footpath Livingstone described.”

“Livingstone said the path was exposed when the lake water receded. It might be underwater now.”

“Might be,” she replied. Rook got the sense that she wasn’t interested in enumerating all the factors that weighed against them in the search. She cocked her head sideways, listening to a voice inside her head, then added. “Aleman says he can set up a program to discriminate manmade artifacts that might not be visible to the naked eye.”

A second pair of glasses would have doubled the effectiveness of the search, but Rook refrained from making the irrelevant observation. They didn’t have a second pair, so what was the point of saying it? Instead, he fell into step beside her and respected her evident desire for quiet.

They headed south along the western shore. The squat misshapen cone of Ol Doinyo Lengai — the mountain Livingstone’s Masai bearers had named the Mountain of God—smoldered in the distance, churning up natrocarbonatite lava, which reacted with water to give the lake its unique properties. There was no danger from the ongoing eruption, but from time to time, they could feel the ground beneath their feet vibrate with pent up seismic energy.

Without the glasses, Rook knew his contribution to the search would be minimal at best, so he spent most of the trek studying the terrain, looking for clues that might not be visible to Aleman’s software. He tried to see this bizarre landscape as Livingstone might have, or even as the Ancients who laid the path would have. He decided they would not have gone about their choice randomly. A path suggested permanence, a well-traveled connection between the surface world and the cave entrance. Time might have obscured the path itself, but the builders would have chosen the path of least resistance. The hills and mountains they would have chosen to circumvent would not have changed nearly as much, even with the passage of many centuries. That was what he told himself at least. It was something to keep him occupied while Queen brooded.

As they traversed a salt flat with the texture of partially melted ice cream, something caught his eye. There, amid the irregular pattern of mineral mud turned to stone by the passage of time, were a series of depressions, spaced out a couple of feet apart. Each was slightly longer than his hand and looked remarkably like…

“Footprints!”

Queen came over for a closer look. “You’re right. Someone walked through this mud when it was wet.” She paused, listening to Aleman again, and her eyebrows went up in surprise. “These footprints could be over a hundred thousand years old,” she said in an awed voice.

“Get out. Seriously?”

She nodded. “Fossilized human footprints have been found here that date to 120,000 years ago. I don’t know if these are the same ones, but they could be.”

“So these could be the footprints of the Ancients? Maybe this is the footpath Livingstone was talking about.”

“It’s worth checking out.” She stood beside the prints and then began walking toward the lake’s edge, sweeping her gaze back and forth slowly for the benefit of Aleman’s computer program. She stopped with the toes of her boots almost touching the water.

“Careful,” Rook advised. “One touch will turn you to stone.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” she replied without looking back.

“Maybe not, but why take the chance?” He winced even as he said it. Queen wasn’t the kind of person to back down from a dare. “I just mean, touching it probably isn’t a good idea.”

“Aleman says this might be the place.”

“Uh, oh.”

She turned, smiling at him. “Ready to get wet?”

They did not actually have to touch the corrosive and poisonous water. Their drysuits and full-face diving masks formed an impermeable barrier between their skin and the deadly lake, but how quickly the vulcanized rubber would degrade on contact with the highly alkaline water was anyone’s guess. She decided it was best not to trouble Rook with that little detail.

Because there was no predicting what sort of specialized equipment the Chess Team might need while in the field, Crescent’s cargo hold was filled with gear and weapons to meet a broad spectrum of operational challenges in conditions ranging from arctic to undersea.

After suiting up and cross-checking to ensure all seals were intact and that their Daeger LAR VII rebreathers were functioning correctly, Rook and Queen ventured out into the murky red water. It was slow going at first, with the surface creeping slowly up their bodies as they waded through the shallows. The lake bottom was relatively smooth and regular, but because they could not see it, they had to test each step before committing to it. The process was further complicated by their long swim fins, which were perfect for swimming but worked about as well as clown shoes for walking. It was only when the water line was almost to her shoulders that Queen ducked her head down under the water to get a look at what lay beneath the surface of Lake Natron.

Beneath, the water was clear but the opaque red skin that floated at the top shut out nearly all light. Queen, who still wore her glasses under the diving mask was able to see everything clearly, but Rook’s way was lit by a high-intensity LED hands-free dive light clipped to the top of his mask. In its brilliant glow, they quickly found traces of the footpath Livingstone had observed — a series of large flat stones that were laid too precisely to be a random occurrence of nature. They followed it further into the lake until they reached a sheer drop off. The path however, did not end there. Someone had carved out a ramp in the porous lava.

Queen swam out over the edge and lowered herself slowly down the face of the submerged cliff, following the course of the ramp with her eyes. The path curled around in a switchback and continued at a gentle slope across the face of the cliff for about twenty yards, and then seemed to fade out of existence.

“End of the road?” Rook asked.

Even though he no longer had his glasses, Queen heard Rook’s voice just fine despite the fact that they were both underwater. The face masks they wore came equipped with ultrasound communicators, which allowed divers to speak to each other over short distances.

“It should be right here.” She swam closer and probed the cliff face.

What looked like solid stone turned out to be only an accumulation of silt that billowed up at her touch. She continued scooping away handfuls of the fine particles until her fingers grazed the harder lava that formed the cliff face. The beam of Rook’s lamp looked like a solid shaft of light, as it stabbed through the cloud of disturbed sediment. Curiously, when he pointed it into the place where she was digging, the shaft seemed to keep right on going.

Without waiting for the silt to settle out, Queen pushed forward into the space she had scooped out and found herself enveloped in a darkness that even the glasses could not penetrate. The effect was only momentary. The suspended particles were like a blanket thrown over her head, but she kept moving forward until she was clear of the cloud. The night vision function of the glasses kicked in again, and even though she was expecting to find herself in the cave Livingston’s bearer had described, the sight of it nearly took her breath away.

“Rook, you have to see this.”

A beam of light shot past her and then she saw him emerge from the swirling cloud. She knew that he couldn’t see as much as she did, but as he reoriented himself, he played the light in every direction, as if he couldn’t quite decide what he wanted to look at.

There was a lot to see.

The mouth of the cave was set high up along a wall that dropped away beneath them, descending at least fifty yards. The ramp continued diagonally along the wall to the halfway point, then curled around in a switchback that brought it to the cavern floor directly below the opening. The cave itself looked like the inside of an enormous egg, but with several ramps crisscrossing the gently curving walls and connecting the floor of the cave to dozens of passages that perforated the solid lava.

The honeycomb of passages out of the main cavern could have been attributed to naturally occurring fissures in the lava but the ramps were clearly evidence of human artifice. But they were not the only indications of such. Carved into the walls in the spaces between the openings were enormous bas relief sculptures, images of animals — elephants, rhinoceroses, lions and many that looked like creatures from mythology — as well as human figures in elaborate costumes. Queen studied the latter carefully. The facial features were unmistakably Sub-Saharan African.

“I’ve seen something like this before,” Aleman said. Since the q-phone did not rely on line-of-sight radio wave transmissions, his voice was as clear as it had been on the surface. “Hang on a second.”

Queen could almost visualize him furiously entering keywords into an Internet search.

“Those look kind of like the huge stone heads in Mexico,” Rook said, playing his light over the sculptures. He hadn’t heard Aleman’s comment, but Queen saw the same similarity. The carvings bore a striking resemblance to the mysterious Olmec heads, which were believed to be artifacts of the oldest civilization in America. There were conflicting opinions about the heads, but few could deny that the faces — which dated to 900 BC — looked decidedly African.

“There’s a definite similarity to those,” Aleman agreed. “But that’s not what I was thinking of. Okay, here it is. They aren’t an exact match, but the style is very similar to sculptures done by the Edo people, specifically in the Benin Empire of West Africa, from about the thirteenth to the nineteenth century.”

Queen relayed the information to Rook, then added. “Benin makes more sense than Mexico, but we’re a long way from either place.”

“People like to decorate,” Rook suggested. “Regardless, this looks like the proof Joe was looking for: an ancient African civilization.”

“It is interesting,” she admitted. “But this isn’t exactly a sprawling metropolis. I don’t think it’s the slam dunk he was hoping for. Even if this place rewrites the history books, I doubt very much that it will trigger some kind of cultural awakening, and I definitely don’t think it will be enough to stop the civil war in the Congo.”

Rook gave a grunt of grudging agreement. “Still, we’re here. Might as well check it out.”

He stroked through the water and shone his light into one of the passages. Queen swam over to join him and peered inside the opening. There was a short tunnel that opened into a large chamber, considerably smaller than the main vault, but still quite spacious. The floor was uniformly flat, probably smoothed out by ancient workmen, but littered with shapeless lumps of debris. Queen paddled closer and fanned away some of the sediment to reveal a carved stone figurine of a lion.

After uncovering several more just like it, Rook said, “Do you suppose this place was their version of a shopping mall?”

“A trading post?”

“Well, I like ‘mall’ better, but yeah. This was probably their gift shop. I bet if we poked around long enough, we’d find their food court. Maybe we’ll find the ancient African Hot Dog on a Stick?”

“Yeah,” she said, with just a hint of sarcasm. “It might not be a good idea to put anything you find here in your mouth.”

“Okay, think about this. You don’t build a mall, or if you insist, a trading post, in the middle of nowhere. Maybe there was a city here, or up on the surface.”

“We aren’t archaeologists,” Queen said. “The best thing to do is to turn this over to someone who knows what they’re doing. But,” she continued before he could protest, “it can’t hurt to check out some of the other shops.”

Further exploration seemed to support Rook’s shopping center hypothesis, though most of the enclosures contained nothing recognizable. Centuries of submersion in the corrosive lake would surely have dissolved anything organic, and probably most metals, too. If the various chambers had once contained consumer products like clothing, sandals or whatever the ancient people needed for the business of daily life, there was no way to prove it. There was, however, one passage that looked very different from all the others. It was a large opening, much broader than any of the others, situated at the end of the large cavern, opposite the passage back to the lake. Queen had been saving it for last, and after half an hour of poking around in the shops, she decided it was time for one last search.

The passage was nothing like the others. Instead of opening immediately into a closed off chamber, the tunnel continued deeper into the surrounding rock, gently turning and descending in places as it went.

“It looks like you’re in a lava tube,” Aleman told her after a few minutes of travel.

“Does that mean we’re headed toward the volcano?”

“Volcano?” Rook echoed. “Wait, what?”

“It’s unlikely. Not Lengai, anyway. This tube was probably created by a much older, extinct volcano. The whole cave system had to have been formed before Lake Natron. You’re probably safe.”

“We’re safe,” she told Rook. “Probably.”

“Just another ordinary day then,” he muttered.

As the lava tube continued deeper into unknown territory, Queen began to reconsider the appraisal. It was not the threat of volcanic activity that concerned her. The water temperature remained constant, and was perhaps even a little cooler than at the surface. Rather, it was the sense of being on a journey with no end. There was no evidence of human activity in the tunnel, and the further they went from ‘the mall’ the less likely it was that they would discover anything more. At some point they would have to turn back, and the further out they went, the longer the return trip would be.

“I’m calling it,” she said. “Time to head back.”

“No arguments from me,” Rook replied.

He placed a hand against the side of the tunnel and pivoted around. Queen did the same and started kicking back the way they’d come.

Rook hesitated. “Ah, Queen, I think we’ve got a problem.”

She glanced back over her shoulder and saw him still poised along the side of the tunnel, not swimming. He was, however, still moving, sliding further down the passage. She felt a surge of panic even as he stated the obvious. “There’s a current here.”

The flow of the water was gentle enough that, when swimming with it, she had not even felt herself being drawn deeper into the passage. Now, however, there was no mistaking the inexorable pull of the current. In the brief instant that she had stopped to look, it had erased what little progress she had made and pulled her past where Rook was dragging along the wall.

“Damn it.” She resumed kicking, adding powerful overhand strokes, but it was like running in place.

“Grab the wall,” urged Rook.

She did, placing her gloved palms against the curving side of the lava tube and pressing her body against it to create a sort of friction brake. She could still feel the current softly tugging at her, and saw immediately that this would only be a stopgap measure. She couldn’t swim and hug the wall at the same time.

“Okay,” she said, not quite able to entirely mask her rising trepidation. “I’m open to other crazy ideas now.”

“Only one way out of here,” he replied, sounding uncharacteristically grim. “We swim like hell, and hang onto the wall when we—”

Queen didn’t hear the rest. Her grip on the wall failed and the current caught her. She careened along the wall for a few seconds, then the abrasive lava snagged the drysuit and scratched at the casing of her rebreather.

“Queen!” Rook’s light stabbed through the water, searching for her.

He can’t see me.

She fought to get reoriented, but the rush of water and the buffeting impacts with the wall had exponentially increased the difficulty of maneuvering. She tried reaching for the wall again, but in the short distance she’d been swept, the current had gotten stronger. She glimpsed a junction in the passage overhead, another lava tube joining the tunnel like an arterial branch, and as she was drawn under it, she felt a much stronger current take hold of her. She was swept away like a leaf in a hurricane.

36

In 1877, Henry Morton Stanley set out from the junction of the Luabala and Congo Rivers, just below the series of waterfalls that would bear his name for a time. He traveled by boat on a four-week-long, thousand mile journey that brought him to another waterfall, which he named Livingstone Falls, in honor of his other great achievement. The beginning and end of this journey, the longest navigable section of the Congo River, would become Leopoldville in the west, a name later changed to Kinshasa, and Stanleyville — renamed Kisangani — in the east. No road connected the two, and driving between them required a circuitous detour through the country’s southern region. Nearly a century and a half later, the river remained the most direct route of travel between the two cities. The length of time required to make the journey by boat had improved somewhat. Now, a cargo barge, the most common vessel to be found plying the river route, could make the downriver trip in about two weeks. It took slightly longer going upriver, against the current, from Kinshasa to Kisangani.

“I need to be there before dawn,” King had told Mabuki, just eight hours earlier.

He had no doubt that Favreau would head for Kisangani, the seat of General Velle’s rebellion. Although the Red Queen had been forced to flee Kinshasa, King did not believe for a moment that the civil war had been averted, especially now that Joseph Mulamba was dead. If he was to prevent bloodshed on a colossal scale, it was imperative to separate Favreau from her backpack nuke. Rescuing the hostages, which included the man who was now legally the President of the DRC, placed a close second on the list of urgent priorities. Both objectives would require a covert trip into the enemy headquarters in Kisangani, and there wasn’t a minute to waste. As far as Favreau knew, Mulamba was on his way back to reclaim control of the government. When the truth about his death was finally revealed, General Velle would realize just how valuable his hostages were.

The urgency of the situation was not the only factor compelling King to move quickly. He was by nature a patient man. He could not have survived 2,800 years without learning how to be long-suffering. But there had been a few times in his life where he had felt the need to do something — anything — to keep from going completely insane. He felt that way now.

Asya had nearly died, and while the doctor at the university hospital had said the outlook was promising, she wasn’t out of the woods yet. As her brother, King knew he should have been at her side. In fact, he wanted to be at her side, and that was exactly why he knew he had to get moving, to get away from Kinshasa and his stricken sister as fast as possible. If he didn’t — if he didn’t get moving, didn’t stay busy — then the rest of the world would go to hell and he would have to live with the knowledge that he could have done something to make a difference but chose not to.

He could have waited for Crescent II. Queen and Rook were on their way back, and although they were headed for Tanzania, it would have been a simple thing for the supersonic stealth transport to pick him up and take him where he needed to go. But that would mean staying the night in Kinshasa, staying at Asya’s bedside and letting his worry and guilt erode his resolve. He needed to be in motion.

But what he needed and what was possible were two very different things.

The Republican Guard general had laughed at his demand. “It cannot be done. This is not New York City, my friend.”

Flying — on any aircraft other than Crescent II—wasn’t a viable option. General Velle had closed the airspace around Kisangani, and had the ability to shoot down any civilian aircraft that got too close to the remote city. The rebel leader also controlled the entire air armada of the DRC, which really consisted of a pair of Mil Mi-8 helicopters — one of which was currently carrying Favreau across the country.

That left only river travel. Fortunately, the navy had not defected to the side of the rebels. Unfortunately, the navy consisted of eight Chinese made Type 062 Shanghai II patrol craft, only one of which was presently operational.

“At maximum speed, the patrol boat could get you there in two days’ time,” Mabuki went on. “Maybe more. It is a long trip, and the boat is…” He let the sentence fall away, allowing King to reach his own conclusions.

“Two days?”

“Relax.” Mabuki clapped him on the arm. “We have a saying, ‘A bald headed man will not grow hair by getting excited.’”

“What the hell does that even mean?” King replied, exasperated. He knew what it meant. He needed to cross a distance that was just slightly less than that which separated Los Angeles and Dallas, in a country with virtually no infrastructure, where the average person earned about a dollar a day. He could shout and stamp his feet until he was blue in the face, but it wouldn’t change the fact that he was looking at a two day journey to his next objective… if he was lucky.

The journey had begun promptly, at least insofar as the Congolese sailors were capable of promptness. King was joined by a small contingent of guardsmen, which included the members of the strike team that had accompanied him during the raid on the Palais de la Nation. Miraculously, all of them had survived the battle, escaping with just a couple of minor injuries. “The regular Army soldiers,” explained their leader, “do not know how to fight.” King hoped that would be true of the forces under Velle’s direct command as well.

Viewed from a distance, the Shanghai had the profile of a battleship, bristling with gun barrels, and rising to a raked bow in the front. Up close, it was less imposing. 130 feet long, its guns were a pair of 37mm cannons, one fore, one aft, and a 25 mm twin barrel machine gun mounted behind the radar mast. There were no creature comforts. The low slung boat was intended for short patrol missions lasting only a few hours. King and the soldiers would be riding on the open deck, eating only what they could bring along, sheltered from weather and insects by whatever means they could contrive, with no privacy and no concessions to hygiene.

It was nearly dawn before the Shanghai pulled away from the dock in Kinshasa and started upriver. A low white fog covered the water, giving the appearance that the gunboat was motoring through the clouds. King watched their progress for a while, then found an unclaimed section of deck near the bow, draped a thin mosquito net over the rail and down to the deck, careful not to leave any opening, and as the sun rose over the emerald expanse of the rain forest, he drifted off to sleep.

At about the same time that King embarked on his journey to Kisangani, the Red Queen completed hers. The helicopter, which had less than a day earlier carried her from General Velle’s headquarters to the capital city, had brought her full circle. Her intended mission, to negotiate an end to the revolution — an end which would have installed General Velle as the military dictator of the country and pave the way for an exclusive resource partnership with Consolidated Energy — had been thwarted by the news of Joseph Mulamba’s escape. Her subsequent gambit to seize control of the country had ended disastrously. Yet she did not feel, what a famous sportscaster had once called ‘the agony of defeat.’

In fact, she felt energized.

During the long helicopter ride, she had analyzed her situation like the pieces on a chessboard. Although there seemed to be only a few moves left to her — defend, retreat, surrender — she knew that now was the time for a bold, dynamic strategy. The question that had occupied her thoughts for most of the trip was not actually what she would do, but why she would do it.

Her satellite phone had rung just once during the night, a single call from ESI headquarters. She had not answered, nor had she listened to the voice mail message that had been left. She knew that she had been disavowed, cut loose to face the consequences of failure on her own. Consolidated Energy would deny any involvement, and would bide their time for a while, before making another play for the riches hidden beneath the Congo at the bottom of Lake Kivu. The fact that the phone had been silent thereafter was proof enough that she was on her own. She could still win this game, though. She fully intended to, but what would she do with the spoils of her victory?

As she contemplated that question, the answer came to her like an epiphany.

What are you willing to sacrifice to win? Everything.

General Velle was waiting for her when the Mi-8 touched down at the army base. “This is a disaster,” he said by way of a greeting. “You have ruined everything.”

He was trembling with rage, and she knew that the only thing that kept him from lashing out her with anything other than words was his certain knowledge that her death would result in the detonation of the backpack nuke.

“It is a setback,” she countered, coolly. “Nothing more.”

“A setback? My loyal forces in Kinshasa have been defeated. We cannot take the capital without them.”

“Kinshasa is irrelevant.” She turned to the flight crew. “Do not disembark. We will be leaving again as soon as we have refueled.”

“Leaving?” Velle asked, still storming. “And where do you intend to go?”

She returned her gaze to him. “General, you should study your history. You do not rule Africa by capturing cities. You rule by possessing that which everybody else wants. I am going to Lake Kivu, and if you wish to win, then I suggest you begin moving your forces there.”

“Kivu? What is at Kivu?”

The Red Queen allowed herself a wry smile. “Everything.”

37

One of the raptors darted its head forward and snapped the chemlight up in its jaws. The thin plastic tube burst apart in a spray of glowing phosphorescence that splashed the creature’s plumage. The dispersed liquid gave little illumination, returning the cave to near total darkness but the splash revealed the raptor’s location. And its movements. The greenish glob began bobbing up and down as it shot through the inky blackness, straight toward the human intruders.

Bishop hesitated for a moment. The existence of these dinosaurs, while theorized by fringe science for years, was something of a miracle. Killing them would be a shame. But they were also predators, and given the path of the glowing specimen, hungry predators.

Seeing no alternative, Bishop swept his M240 in an arc, spraying lead in the path of the charging raptor. In the muzzle flash, he saw that it wasn’t alone. The glow-stained raptor went down in a flurry of scrabbling limbs and flying bits of lichen, but the rest continued, swarming. Bishop held the trigger down. The creatures moved faster than he could target, and for every one that went down, three more slipped under his barrage. Knight opened fire beside him, but with even less effectiveness. The heavy caliber rounds from his Intervention sniper rifle gouged up chunks of the lichen covered cave floor, but the rate of fire was so slow that he couldn’t track targets with his muzzle flashes. Worse still, the raptors seemed to have no sense of the relationship between the guns’ thunderous reports and the deadly consequences that might follow. If anything, the noise seemed to drive them into a killing frenzy.

We can’t stop them, Bishop thought. With a sweep of his arm, he thrust Felice and Knight behind him, and started swinging the hot barrel of his machine gun like a scythe.

There was a satisfying crunch as his impromptu club swatted one of the raptors out of the darkness. He felt and heard another impact on the backswing, but then something struck his legs and burning claws raked his chest.

He let go of the M240 and swiped his bare hands at the unseen attackers. His fingers closed on coarse plumage and he flung one of the beasts away, even as its sharp talons slashed at his skin. Another one rushed in to take its place.

Bishop matched their primal fury with his own, clawing and biting at anything that came within reach. There was a sound, like cracking ice, inside his mind. He could smell more vividly. He felt faster, or the world was slower. Pain faded, and he became destruction. A life-taking force. When the attacks ceased, he groped blindly for any raptors that might have gone for Felice and Knight. It was only when he heard their voices — not crying in pain or alarm, but urging him to stop — that the animal instinct driving him began to relent.

As the cloud of rage dissipated, he realized that he could see them. Knight had thrown out half-a-dozen glowsticks, surrounding them in a ring of faint illumination. Several raptors lay scattered beyond the circle, broken and torn, some still twitching, but the attack was over. Knight and Felice were unscathed.

Bishop turned slowly until he found their guide, huddled against the wall with his arms covering his head. Bishop’s bloodied fingers curled into claws, as he started toward the old man.

Suddenly Felice was standing in his way, hands outstretched, palms facing Bishop. “Stop.”

“Move.” Bishop’s voice was the low growl of a stalking lion.

“No. Leave him alone.”

He continued forward until her hands were pressing against his chest. He could feel her touch against his bare skin, where his shirt had been torn away by raptor claws. Her skin felt cool on his, and to his complete surprise, he found his rage cooling as well.

“That son of a bitch set us up,” Knight said. His fever made his outrage seem even more intense than Bishop’s. “He knew those things would be here. This was a trap.”

Felice refused to yield. “Why would he do that? He could have just left us back in the woods, but he didn’t.”

“No. He ran us through the jungle until we were exhausted, then brought us here to feed his pets.”

“Ask him,” she persisted. Then, without breaking contact with Bishop, she turned her head to the old man and rattled off a question in French.

It was only then that the old man seemed to grasp that he was the focus of attention. He answered in a deluge of words, strung together in short little outbursts that came out too fast for Felice to translate. When he finally took a breath, he slowed, and she began to explain.

“Yes, he knew about the beasts, but he didn’t bring us here to be killed. They don’t attack unless they are threatened. He thought we would be safe here. If we had stayed silent and not shown a light, we would have been fine.”

“How does he know that?”

She asked him, then interpreted his answer. “He found this cave when he was just a boy. He says his name is David, and he’s been coming here for many years. He says he knows how to move among them without being attacked.” She swung her gaze to Bishop. “What are those things, anyway?”

“Velociraptors.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

“Dinosaurs?”

“Yes.”

“That’s impossible, you know. They didn’t look like raptors.”

“You’ve seen other raptors?”

“I’ve seen Jurassic Park,” she said, her face revealing that she knew how foolish the answer sounded.

“Jurassic Park got it all wrong. Velociraptors were small, not much bigger than turkeys. Actually, most dinosaurs were more closely related to birds than to reptiles.”

“Uh, huh. Wouldn’t have guessed you were a dino nut.” When he didn’t respond, she went on. “I’m no expert on dinosaurs, but I do know a thing or two about evolution. Dinosaurs have been extinct for sixty-five million years.”

“That’s what I thought, too. I guess we were both wrong.”

Felice let it drop. “Whatever they were, they did a number on you.” She gently parted the tattered remnants of his shirt. “Are you hurt?”

“What? No. Just a few scratches.”

“You don’t have to impress me. I already know how tough you are.”

“I’m fine.” And indeed, he seemed to be. Although his clothing was in tatters, the only sign of injury was a crust of drying blood that she brushed away. There were long red stripes on his swarthy skin, which looked no worse than scratches from a frisky house cat. He’d been lucky.

“What I’d really like,” Bishop said, trying to redirect her attention, “is some answers from our friend here. Maybe start with how he found this place.”

David nodded at the translated request and sank down on his haunches. He told them the story of how he, as a young and naïve child soldier fighting with the Simba rebels, had fled into the jungle and discovered the cave behind the waterfall. Though his companions had been killed by the creatures inside, David had never forgotten the amazing discovery, and had eventually returned to explore the cave.

Knight, who had been huddled on the floor in silence, looked up. “And he never thought to tell anyone that he’d found living dinosaurs?”

David returned a blank look, even when Felice had translated the question. “Maybe he doesn’t know the word dinosaure.” She tried again, but this time used the word monstre—monster — but again, the question seemed to perplex the old man.

“I do not understand,” he finally admitted to her. “Why are you asking me about these creatures? Do you not already know of them?”

“We call them dinosaurs,” she explained in French. “But they have been extinct — completely gone — for many thousands of years.” If he didn’t know dinosaurs, he might have trouble grasping the idea of millions.

David shook his head. “No. They are not dead. They have always been here, though few ever see them. They only leave the cave at night, and never come near to the village.”

“It sounds like something from a movie,” Bishop said. “A lost world. It’s incredible.”

“Impossible is more like it. Genetically speaking, it’s just not feasible. Even if some dinosaurs survived the extinction event, they would have undergone evolutionary changes over the course of time.”

“Aren’t there some animals today that are the same as they were back then? I remember reading somewhere that certain shark species have been around for over a hundred million years.”

Felice inclined her head, ceding the point. “Some species seem to show less genetic drift than others. But the odds of something like this happening on land — I don’t just mean surviving, but surviving undetected — are really, really… well, impossible.”

Bishop glanced at Knight, who said, in a weary voice, “We’re kind of used to dealing with the impossible.”

Felice seemed to weigh that, as if she also had some experience with things that couldn’t be easily explained. “Here’s the problem. For a species to survive, it needs habitat and it needs food, and those things are always in flux. When there’s a lot of food, the population will grow until it starts to put a strain on the resources. When that occurs, the population will either migrate or experience a die off. The point is that populations don’t remain stable. If dinosaurs have been around for sixty-five million years, someone would know about them by now.”

“If what David just said is true,” Bishop said, “then a lot of people do know about them. Frankly, the Congo seems like the kind of place where a lot of things might go unnoticed for a long time.”

She shook her head. “I just don’t know if I can reconcile the existence of modern dinosaurs with what I know about evolutionary biology. There’s got to be something we’re missing here.”

“Hang on a second,” Knight said, abruptly. “If the people here already knew about the raptors, then what exactly was it that brought him back to the cave? What was this big discovery that was so important?”

Before Felice could translate the question, a shout echoed through the cavern. Bishop swung his gaze around, seeking out the source. There were more voices, issuing from the direction of the cave entrance, and then the sound of gunfire echoed again in the vast chamber.

The hunters had found them.

38

“Follow me,” David urged.

Felice did not have time to translate, but there was little need for it. Knight gathered up the chemlights and jammed them into a pocket, plunging the group into darkness once more.

Felice grabbed Bishop’s hand. He seemed to shy away at her touch, but she squeezed harder, insistent that they not be separated. He relented, drawing her along as they followed the old man deeper into the cavern.

More sporadic shots were fired, though it was impossible to tell whether the rebels were shooting at anything in particular — perhaps fending off another pack of the strange bird-like animals — or simply trying to flush their prey out of hiding. David moved quickly but at a walking pace. In the eternal night, there were greater dangers than being hit by a bullet, especially since they were already so deep into the cavern that they could no longer even see the entrance.

Walking hand in hand with Bishop was awkward at first. He was clearly unaccustomed to any kind of intimate physical contact, but she refused his subtle efforts to pull away, and soon his reluctance melted away, just as his anger had. She remembered his rage and knew how close he had been to giving in to it completely, murderously, but she had also felt that rage shrink away at her touch.

“Is there another way out?” Knight whispered after several minutes.

She passed the question to David, then gave his answer. “He doesn’t know, but there is a place ahead, where we will be safe.”

“Safely bottled up,” Knight growled.

Felice felt Bishop tensing up again, and gave his hand a reassuring squeeze. A few moments later however, she was forced to release her hold, as David led them into a slot passage too narrow for them to continue to walk side-by-side. As the rock walls brushed against her shoulders, Felice felt the beginnings of a claustrophobia-induced panic, which was only partly alleviated when Bishop laid a gentle hand on her shoulder.

Her fear evaporated quickly, however, when she realized that she could see again.

Though faint at first, she could now make out the passage walls, and when she reached out to touch them, she could see her own fingertips limned in a bluish glow. As the group advanced, the light grew brighter.

“Do you—?”

“I do,” Bishop whispered. “Keep going.”

The passage undulated through the rock in a series of turns. The ambient light grew brighter with each one they rounded, until the passage opened up again, revealing the light source.

For a few seconds, Felice wasn’t sure what she was looking at. At first, she saw only a broad expanse of black, dotted with yellow and blue lights, like stars in the night sky. It appeared the passage had led them back outside, and that they were looking at the Milky Way at midnight, but it was daytime outside, and the ‘stars’ were below her.

“Fires,” Bishop observed.

Thousands of small fires were spread out on the cave floor in every direction, as far as she could see. As she stared at them, she gradually began to distinguish the landscape’s shape — rocky outcroppings, stalagmites, rising and falling hills — as dark silhouettes against the glow of the flames.

Some of the silhouettes were moving.

At first, she thought it might be shadows dancing in the flickering firelight, but the longer she looked, the less likely that explanation seemed.

And when a low hum filled the air, joined by another and another and another, growing in intensity until it sounded like jet engines, she knew that her eyes weren’t playing tricks on her.

This place belonged to the dinosaurs.