Savage

39

Queen fumbled in the darkness. Her thoughts were muddled by too many sensory inputs that didn’t seem to connect…

The last thing she remembered was getting caught in a fast-moving cross-current.

She jolted, as the physical memory of being tumbled by the subterranean river returned, but then she realized that she was no longer in the water. Instead, she was lying on a hard, flat surface. As the pieces quickly came together, Queen’s heart began racing.

“Aleman, still with me?” Her voice was loud, echoing strangely in the total darkness. There was no answer, and after a few seconds, she realized that this was because she was no longer wearing the glasses. Her face mask and rebreather were missing, too. The air on her face was hot and humid. She sat up slowly, reaching out in every direction to explore her new environment. “Rook?”

A faint scuffing sound echoed out of the darkness. She whirled, rolling onto hands and knees, coming up in a defensive crouch, hands raised to meet the unseen threat.

Damn it. I can’t even tell what direction it’s coming from.

“Right here, babe.”

The wave of relief at hearing Rook’s voice left her almost giddy. “I can’t see. I lost the glasses.”

“No you didn’t.” She felt his reassuring hand on hers. “Better close your eyes.”

She did, though there was no perceptible difference. A moment later, there was a blinding flare of red that seemed to burn right through her eyelids. She scrunched her eyes closed even tighter and covered them with a cupped palm. It took several minutes for her eyes to adjust to the painful brilliance enough to lower her hands and even attempt opening her eyes. The light felt like grains of sand on her corneas. She squinted through watery eyes and found Rook’s smiling face.

“Here,” he said, holding something out to her. “Try these.”

Her glasses. “So that’s where they went.” She slipped them on. The photosensitive lenses were clear, but as soon as they covered her eyes, the virtual retinal display went active in night vision mode, automatically adjusting for the intensity of Rook’s dive light.

“Why didn’t you just give me these in the first place?”

“The glasses work by projecting light directly into your eyes. If you’d put them on, it would have felt like sticking a hot poker in your eyes.”

Rook switched off his light, and in the resulting darkness, she discovered that she was finally able to see. Rook squatted calmly on the floor, eyes looking forward but seeing nothing. His mask and rebreather were also gone, discarded somewhere along the way, and his drysuit looked like it had been dragged behind a truck. Hers did, too. She rose to her feet and took a look at her surroundings.

They were in a cavern, not as large as the original cave they had first entered, but still very spacious. The walls were damp, with rivulets of water running down from above and dribbling from mineral formations that she probably could have named, if she’d spent a few minutes thinking about it. Her attention was drawn to a dark pool that occupied the center of the chamber. It was not the pool that she found so interesting, but rather a pile of stones jutting out from its shore like a dock or jetty.

Curious, she started toward it, realizing only after a few steps that Rook couldn’t see her. She hiked back and took his hand. “Why don’t you use your light?”

“I already saw everything there was to see here. Might as well save the batteries. It sounds like we might be down here a while.”

The comment reminded her that she still didn’t know where she was or how she’d gotten here. “What happened?”

“You got caught in a wicked current. Not sure, but I think your rebreather might have gotten banged up, or maybe you were breathing too fast. You blacked out.”

“Then how did I — why am I not dead?”

“I caught up to you and buddy breathed with you for a while.”

She gazed into his confident but completely unaware eyes. “You weren’t caught in the current, were you? You came after me on purpose?”

“I wasn’t going to leave you. You’re—” he shrugged, and looked a little embarrassed, “you know, kind of important to me.”

Because she couldn’t think of any other way to deal with the overwhelming surge of emotion rising from her chest, she pulled him close, stood on her tiptoes and kissed him.

She might have gone on kissing him, but the sound of someone politely coughing reminded her that they weren’t exactly alone. She turned toward the dock again, and led the still somewhat euphoric Rook along by the hand. “So where are we exactly?”

“I’m not sure where you are — exactly,” the familiar voice of Deep Blue said, “but I think you are somewhere below Lake Victoria, and roughly two hundred and fifty miles from Lake Natron.”

Queen stopped abruptly. “What?”

“It’s hard to be more precise. Even though the q-phone signals aren’t affected by… well, anything… you’re in a three-dimensional environment that we’ve never really had to take into account. That’s the relative distance you would have traveled if you were on the surface.”

She heard Rook laughing and guessed this wasn’t the first time Deep Blue had given this explanation. “How long were we in that river?”

“A while,” Rook said with a shrug. He didn’t hear Deep Blue clarify, “Eight hours and twenty-two minutes.”

“Shit.” That explained why they were talking to Blue instead of Aleman. Evidently, whatever crisis had occupied their remote handler had passed. Now they were the number one priority. “We couldn’t have lasted that long on one rebreather.”

“This place is like the mother of all waterpark rides,” Rook said. “That current shot us out like a cannon. We ended up in a fast moving river. There were air pockets along the way, so we didn’t have to use the rebreather the whole time. Eventually, the river dumped into the lake over there.”

“So this is the end of the road?”

“Not even close,” Deep Blue said, a little too quickly. She could tell he was trying to stay upbeat. “You’re in a massive uncharted cave formation. Something that big is bound to have more than one outlet.”

“If it did, wouldn’t someone have found it by now?”

Even though Rook could only hear Queen’s side of the conversation, he seemed to sense her despair. “Queen, this isn’t a bottomless pit. Think about what we’ve already seen. That cave back there at Lake Natron… the mall? Somebody built that, centuries ago. And I think they were using that lava tube as a sort of superhighway.”

Her pessimistic retort gave way to raw curiosity. “What do you mean?”

“We were trying to figure out why they would build their marketplace there, remember? I think it was there because that was the end of the road… this road. An underground trading route.” He gestured in the approximate direction of the lake. “See that dock? I think this was sort of a transfer station. That lava tube might have been a shallow river before the lake flooded. Or maybe it was a dry road that connected with a river. The point is, if the mall was the end of the road, then there’s a beginning. We just have to find it.”

“He’s right,” Deep Blue said. “A couple of years ago, King found evidence of a vast underground network connecting America and Europe. It’s possible that these caves are everywhere, and that the ancients knew about them and knew how to use them. Maybe this is why there are underworld legends in nearly every culture on Earth.”

Queen relayed this news to Rook.

“Isn’t the underworld the same thing as Hell?” he remarked. She reached out and gripped his hand. “Whatever, right? If anyone can walk out of Hell, it’s us.”

It felt like a lie.

The dock might have been the end of one section of the Ancients’ underground trade route, but it wasn’t the dead end Queen feared. Instead, it seemed to be a sort of crossroads, with not one but five separate passages leading away. Three of them were narrow and seemed like unlikely candidates for Rook’s superhighway, but the other two were wide openings that showed visible evidence of human use — centuries of foot travel, or perhaps pack animals and carts, had worn a ribbon-like groove down the center of each tunnel.

Rook shone his light down each of the tunnels. “Which way?”

“Flip a coin?”

He gave her a reproving look. “Not falling for that again.”

“What?”

Rook shone his light down the passage that led out of the cavern on the wall opposite the lake. “I say we go this way.”

“There’ll be no living with you if you get lucky on the first try.” She leaned close and gave him another kiss, this time just a peck on the cheek. “But I hope you’re right.”

They walked for a while in silence, and in Rook’s case, darkness. The tunnel continued to slope down, deeper into the Earth’s interior.

“What do you think happened to them?” Rook asked after a while.

“The Ancients? Judging by the fact that the mall was underwater, I’d say the answer is obvious.”

Rook made an unconvinced grunt.

“Look at it this way,” she went on. “There are cities today that rely almost completely on imports for survival. When the lake expanded, maybe after a volcanic eruption, and their trade route was flooded, what reason would they have had to stay? They probably were assimilated into other cultures. It’s happened before.”

“So the Ancients might not have been such a big deal after all?”

Queen gazed at him sidelong. In the darkness, he made no effort to hide his naked emotions. He might not even have realized how much his face revealed, but she could read him like a book. Mulamba’s death was weighing heavily on him. He had been desperate to find some evidence that would support Mulamba’s theory and justify the excursion to the Belgian museum, which had ended so tragically.

She thought about telling him to shake it off and soldier on, but decided that maybe it was better for him to wallow in guilt than face the much more immediate and desperate reality. They were trapped underground, hundreds of miles from the only known entrance, with no food and no way of knowing whether the path they were traveling would lead to escape or take them deeper into the unknown.

Twenty minutes later, they found further evidence of human activity: two broken pieces of carved stone that fit together to form a thick disk, with a square hole through the middle like a Chinese coin.

“It’s a wheel,” Rook said, inspecting it with his light. “Someone’s Flintstone-mobile had a blowout.”

Deep Blue was perplexed by the discovery. “Stone wheels would indicate a very primitive level of technology.”

“Do you think people were using this during the Stone Age?”

“Cavemen lived in caves,” Rook replied, unaware of the long distance conversation with Deep Blue.

“It’s a possibility,” Deep Blue said. “But metal working wasn’t a universal discovery. Metal tools were almost unknown in the Americas until the European discovery of the New World. Regardless, this is a significant discovery.”

“Blue says we’ve made a significant discovery,” she told Rook.

“Cool. Does that mean we’ll be famous?”

“More importantly,” the disembodied voice continued, “A wheel means that Rook is right. You’re on a road that leads somewhere. Don’t give up.”

Queen didn’t pass that along. She got the impression it was meant for her ears alone.

The silence settled back over them. Queen wrapped herself in it like a blanket. Conversation would have been an anchor to a reality that she preferred not to think about. This wasn’t like combat, where letting one’s mind wander might prove instantly fatal. This was more like a prison sentence, where the only way to deal with the fatigue and drudgery, and as she soon discovered, the gnawing hunger, was to set the autopilot and mentally unplug.

She knew it had to be even worse for Rook, who was making the same journey in total darkness. From time to time, she had to guide him around unexpected bends in the tunnel. She missed the first one, and he smacked face first into the wall, before it occurred to her that he was walking blind.

The passage rose and fell according to the whim of whatever natural processes had formed it, but the grooved pathway remained a constant. At one point, the road intersected a wide crevasse, and Queen saw more evidence of deliberate human activity. The Ancients had bridged the gap with loose stones, packed together to form an arch nearly thirty feet thick. Queen realized that it was little more than a pile of rocks suspended above the chasm and held together with little more than friction and Stone Age optimism. She balked momentarily, but Rook just walked across it, blissfully unaware of the potential danger. Feeling a little foolish, she raced to catch up with him. The bridge felt solid beneath her feet.

Shortly after crossing, the passage opened up into another large chamber. The well-worn path continued on, but then ended abruptly. The way ahead was blocked by a massive round stone. High stone walls rose on either side — loose pieces of rock that had been fitted together in a manner similar to that used at the bridge. There was a ramp of piled stone rising to the top of the wall, and at its base were openings to what she could only assume were rooms built into the wall. Queen stared at it in awe. The structure reminded her of something from the Lord of the Rings movies — the subterranean Dwarven kingdom of Moria, perhaps — but she kept that to herself to avoid a harangue from Rook. Instead, she just said, “Rook, you need to see this.”

“I already can.” He was squinting as if to sharpen his night vision. “There’s light coming from up there.”

Deep Blue confirmed Rook’s observation. “There’s definitely a light source on the other side of the wall. Your glasses automatically adjust to the ambient light conditions, so you won’t notice it.”

Rook advanced toward the wall, slowing as he reached its base, and then cautiously made his way onto the ramp. Queen stayed close, ready to intervene if necessary, but he became increasingly surefooted with each step. When he reached the top, he came to an abrupt stop, and as she slipped around him, Queen saw why.

Beyond the wall was another world.

Queen had no other words for it.

40

The cavern stretched away to the vanishing point in every direction. The high ceiling was irregular, with glistening mineral deposits reaching to the floor, creating the impression of massive support columns, but this was the least interesting feature of the cave. On its floor, at the base of the wall, was an alien landscape that made even the otherworldly surface of Lake Natron look about as strange as a duck pond.

Her first impression was that it was a forest, but she saw almost immediately that wasn’t right at all. The things that looked at a glance like trees were… She couldn’t really tell what they were, but they definitely weren’t trees. She didn’t even think they were plants. They seemed more like weird multi-colored fungal growths, crawling up stalagmites, throwing out vine-like tendrils that ended in fan-shaped crests.

It was the lights, however, that really got her attention. “What are those?”

The landscape was dotted with little fires. Blue and yellow flames erupted randomly from the midst of the weird forest. Queen lifted her glasses for a moment to look upon the sight unaided. The individual flames weren’t bright but their sum total was enough to cast the entire scene in a perpetual twilight. It’s almost bright enough to read by, she thought.

From their perch atop the wall, they could see that the road continued beyond the gate, but it did not go far. Less than a hundred yards away, the road ended at the remains of a jetty. It was almost identical to the one in the lake, only this time the stone pier extended out into a pool, at the base of a waterfall. It poured straight down out of the cavern ceiling and drained away in a slow moving river that ran parallel to the wall. The river followed the wall for a short distance before turning away into the cavern.

“If you were right about the Ancients using the river as part of their trade route,” Queen said, “then I think our chances of getting out of this alive just got a whole lot better. You up for another swim?”

“Maybe there’s a boat.”

Queen didn’t think that was very likely, but then the underground world was nothing, if not full of surprises. She peered over the edge of the exterior wall. The strange vegetation had grown right up to its base, sixty feet below. “We’re going to need to get down there somehow.”

“Check this out.” Rook knelt down for a moment and came up holding a long wooden rod, tipped with a flat sliver of stone as long as his forearm. “This is an assegai, a traditional African throwing spear.”

He drew it back, striking a javelin thrower’s pose, but the wood crumbled in his grip and the stone head fell at his feet.

Queen laughed. “This is why we can’t have nice things.”

Rook retrieved the spear head and inspected its sharp edges. “This might come in handy,” he said, tucking it in his belt.

Queen realized it was the only tool or weapon they possessed.

They headed back down the ramp and approached the massive stone that barricaded the road. The round stone sat in a long trench. It was apparent that the Ancient engineers had designed it so it could be rolled out of the way, providing access to travelers on the subterranean highway. Wooden rods protruded from the enormous wheel, presumably to give the gatekeepers leverage, but like the spear shaft, these disintegrated when touched. Rook braced a shoulder against one edge of the stone but it refused to budge.

“I don’t think we’re getting through this way,” Queen remarked. “We’ll have to climb down the outside of the wall.”

Rook gave the stone another futile push then admitted defeat. “Why do you suppose they put this here?”

“Why does anyone build a fence? Maybe this place was some kind of border checkpoint.”

“Pretty sophisticated for a forgotten civilization. I think Joe was right about them. I bet we’ve barely scratched the surface.”

“All the more reason for us to get back to the surface,” Queen said. She was a little surprised to discover that she actually meant it. Rook’s optimism was starting to rub off on her. Every discovery they made reinforced the idea that the subterranean world was not merely a hopeless maze of branching caverns created by random acts of nature. It was something that had been charted, developed and utilized by people from a forgotten age.

They returned to the top of the wall and scouted a route down into the wild forest. Because it had been constructed using pieces of stone, rather than large cut blocks, there were ample hand and foot holds, which Queen, an accomplished rock climber, negotiated with the ease of a spider. The larger Rook was less graceful. When he was about halfway down, a rock shifted under his foot and broke loose, unleashing a small avalanche. As he slid down the nearly vertical face, he rolled away from the cascade of falling stones.

Queen dodged away from the rock fall, but quickly moved to Rook’s side. He sat up, spitting dust, and she helped him to his feet. “You keep trashing this place and they’re going to eighty-six you.”

“I should be so lucky.” His hands were scraped and raw, and there was a ragged tear in the right leg of his drysuit. He shifted his weight onto his right foot and grimaced a little.

“You okay?”

“I’ll walk it off. Not like I’ve got a choice.”

As the dust cloud from the avalanche settled, they got their first close look at the strange underground forest. The cavern floor had a thick layer of fine soil, an accumulation of centuries, or perhaps millennia, of decayed organic material, on which grew a dizzying variety of plant-like organisms. Queen examined the nearest of these, first touching it with a gloved finger, probing its texture and pliability. Then she tried tearing off a piece. It was spongy, like the texture of a mushroom, but as tough as leather. As she pulled on it, something moved in the soil nearby. Startled, she hopped back a step.

Beneath the carpet of vegetation, the soil was alive. Worms, as big around as her thumb, wriggled through the dirt, and insects that looked a little like enormous beetles scurried away from the disturbance.

“Shit,” she said. “I hate bugs.”

Long before she had become the deadly Chess Team operator known as Queen, Zelda Baker had been plagued by a veritable encyclopedia of phobias. She had conquered each and every one of these through her own relentless will power and a program of sensory immersion that had pushed those irrational fears to the point where they simply evaporated. But here in this utterly alien environment, fatigue and privation were stirring up some of the old fears. She took several deep breaths, trying to remember the discipline that had enabled her to overcome her perceived weaknesses… but now everywhere she looked, she saw them, thousands of them, millions, a squirming nightmare that lay between her and the river’s edge.

She stripped off her glasses and handed them to Rook. “Take these.”

He did and for a moment, just stared through them in disbelief. “Okay,” he said finally. “Better watch where we step.”

Without the glasses, Queen could make out only large details of the landscape. The strange flames, which reminded her a little of the Bunsen burners she’d used in high school chemistry classes, appeared to be erupting out of the ground randomly, like little geysers of fire. Some jetted ten feet into the air, while others were flickering, as if their fuel source was nearly exhausted. She recalled that one of Mulamba’s goals had been to create a source of energy independence for the African states, by securing underground deposits of natural gas. She also remembered that Bishop and Knight had gone missing while trying to rescue a science team that was doing research into some kind of renewable energy source.

Don’t think about it, she told herself.

The flame jets were an interesting phenomenon, but not unprecedented. An underground coal seam in Centralia, Pennsylvania, had been burning ever since it was ignited in 1962, and that was just one of thousands like it. In the Karakum Desert of Turkmenistan, a massive natural gas deposit had been intentionally set on fire by Soviet geologists in 1971 to prevent the uncontrolled release of methane, after a sinkhole opened up destroying the drilling equipment that had been intended to harvest the gas. More than forty years later, that fire was still burning, earning the site the ominous but very appropriate nickname The Door to Hell.

If that place is the door, then this road must be the Highway to Hell. She almost verbalized the thought to Rook, but the more she thought about it, the less funny it seemed.

They reached the stone pier, and Rook searched the surrounding shore. “No boats.”

“After the way that spear shaft turned to dust in your hands, I’m not sure I’d trust anything the Ancients might have left lying around anyway.”

Rook considered that for a moment, then took the spear head from his belt. “Got an idea.”

He ventured out into the forest and hacked down a plant that looked a little like a yucca, with a long stem that ended in a broad fan-shaped growth. Carrying his prize over his shoulder, he returned to the pier and deposited it in the river. The current caught hold of it and whisked it away. It was still floating on the surface when Queen lost sight of it.

“We can make our own boat.” Rook was grinning. “Lash a few of those together and we’ll have a raft.”

“A raft?” Queen was doubtful. “It sounds like something from a Jules Verne novel. But then so does everything else down here.”

41

King stood in the bow of the Shanghai, as it plowed up the Congo River. Mile after mile of the river vanished under its hull, but little else seemed to change. A liquid treadmill. The Congo was the ninth longest river in the world. It was only about two-thirds the length of the Nile or the Amazon, shorter even than the continuous watercourse of the Missouri-Mississippi river system, but its claustrophobic jungle setting, with only a scattering of settlements on its banks, made the journey seem like an endless Herculean labor. Because of the northward bend in its course, King knew that they were now even further from Kisangani — from Favreau, her hostages and the bomb — than when they had set out from Kinshasa.

The patrol craft had been forced to reduce its speed as the river fractured into braided channels that wove between islands of sediment, which had accumulated over the course of countless millennia. The boat’s pilot had to negotiate a maze of marked channels to ensure that they did not run aground or wander into a dead end.

At midday, King spied movement in the tall reeds on the river bank. He zoomed in on the area and saw something that looked like an enormous black barrel, moving through the bushes. When one end of the barrel opened up to reveal a pink mouth with long white tusks, he realized it was a hippopotamus. He pointed it out to one of the soldiers.

Instead of the indifferent reaction he had expected, the young Congolese seemed agitated. He called out to his comrades, sharing the news of the discovery with them before turning back to King.

“This is a very dangerous animal,” he explained, shouldering his Kalashnikov rifle as if expecting to do battle with the hippo.

King was familiar with the reputation of hippopotamuses. Despite their almost comical appearance and often cartoonish depictions in popular culture, they were considered the most dangerous animal in Africa. Hippos were responsible for more deaths than predatory lions and crocodiles. They were fearless, often attacking small boats, and slashing at helpless swimmers with their razor sharp teeth.

“I don’t think they’ll mess with us,” he told the soldier. “We’re the biggest thing on this river.”

The young man looked unconvinced and muttered a phrase that King didn’t recognize.

“Mokèlé-mbèmbé,” the soldier repeated. “He is ‘the one who stops the flow of rivers.’ There are creatures in the river that would not be afraid of this boat.”

“My father knew a man who was killed by Mokèlé-mbèmbé,” another soldier said.

Deep Blue’s voice sounded in King’s head. “Mokèlé-mbèmbé is the local Loch Ness Monster. For over two hundred years, there have been reports of a river monster in the Congo. Some of the crazier theories suggest that it might be a dinosaur.”

King considered this. It sounded ludicrous, but so did a lot of the things he had experienced firsthand.

“I wouldn’t worry about it too much,” Deep Blue continued. “People have been looking for it for over a hundred years with no success. There are plenty of things that can kill you in the jungle, but dinosaurs aren’t one of them.”

Deep Blue’s assurance notwithstanding, talk of the legendary river creature spread like a plague, with the soldiers relating more second hand accounts of Mokèlé-mbèmbé’s deadly rampages and discussing other monsters King had never heard of. What struck him most was that the soldiers, who seemed unfamiliar with the term ‘dinosaur,’ were describing animals that almost perfectly resembled creatures that had been extinct for more than sixty-five million years.

There was Kongamato, which translated to ‘breaker of boats,’ a flying creature that sounded suspiciously like a pterodactyl. One man’s uncle had been killed by Kongamato. Another soldier claimed to have actually seen Mbielu-Mbielu-Mbielu, an enormous beast that, if his description was to be believed, might have been a stegosaurus, but his story was challenged by another man who said the creature sounded more like Emela-ntouka, a horned animal larger than an elephant, with a beaked mouth and a bony frill around its head — a ceratops.

Deep Blue refrained from further commentary, but soon interrupted with news that was even more disturbing. “King, there’s been a development. Senator Lance Marrs just arrived at the Mombasa airport.”

King excused himself from the storytellers and found a corner of the boat that was marginally more private. “Marrs is free? What about Okoa?”

“No word on Okoa. Marrs was released unconditionally and put on a plane earlier this morning.”

“It sounds like you think that’s a bad thing.”

“As soon as he got off the plane, he started making calls to his colleagues in the Senate. I’m accessing the NSA call logs now. Stand by.” Despite ongoing concerns about invasions of privacy, King knew that the National Security Agency had continued to monitor international telephone calls using its sophisticated SIGINT monitoring network. While the sheer volume of traffic made it impossible to listen to every single call, the transmissions were nevertheless recorded and scanned by the NSA’s supercomputer for keywords that might indicate terrorist plots or other threats. “Okay, this is a call he just made to Roger Hayes, Chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Energy.”

King heard the scratchy sound of background static and then Marrs’ oily voice filled his head. “Roger? It’s Lance.”

“Lance? Damn it, it’s — what time is it? It’s the middle of the night here. I don’t care what it is you need—”

Marrs tried to cut in, but lag time caused the two voices to overlap for a few seconds. “Roger, just shut up and listen. This can’t wait. I need you to draft a resolution demanding the President formally recognize the government of President Patrice Velle of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

“Formally… what?” Senator Hayes still sounded bleary. “Ah, crap. I heard you were involved in that Congo mess. I was hoping you were smarter than that.”

“I’ve been here for the last two days trying to negotiate a solution that will guarantee access to their natural gas reserves. But the situation has changed, and if we don’t act quickly, it will all go to hell. Velle controls the Congo’s natural gas reserves. If we don’t make a deal with him now, he’ll find someone else who’s willing to pay. Frankly, I don’t intend to let that happen.”

“Lance, simmer down. You know these two-bit African dictators never last. If he’s still around in a couple months, maybe then we can talk about formal recognition. No matter what he says right now, eventually he’s going to want what only we can give him.”

“It’s not going to work that way this time. Velle is threatening to destroy the Kivu natural gas reserves if we don’t recognize his government. He can and will make good on that threat.”

King stopped listening. “Shit.”

Deep Blue halted the replay. “Satellite imagery shows Velle’s troops leaving Kisangani. He’s heading for the Lake Kivu region.”

“Velle doesn’t matter. It’s Favreau we need to be worried about. She doesn’t give a rat’s ass about whether the US formally recognizes Velle’s government. She’s got the bomb, and she’s itching to use it.”

“I’m sending Crescent to pick you up.”

“What about Queen and Rook?”

“They’re… occupied.”

King did not like the evasive tone of the comment, but he let it go. Right now, the only thing that mattered was stopping the Red Queen before she could initiate her deadly endgame.

42

David tugged at Felice’s arm. “Come. There is a place where we will be safe.”

The passage through the cave had brought them to a ledge overlooking a vast subterranean plain that was teeming with…

“Dinosaurs,” she muttered, shaking her head. No matter what Bishop and Knight said, no matter what crazy things she herself had experienced, what she was seeing was simply impossible.

David led them along the ledge, which was nothing more than an irregular horizontal fracture in the wall of the cavern, one of many that formed a staircase leading down to the floor. There were a few raptors roaming about on the jagged protrusions below, and when they spied the group, they lifted their heads and stood motionless, watching, probably attempting to gauge whether the moving shapes were dangerous or edible.

The ledge ended abruptly at a steeply sloped debris field, the aftermath of a slide that had occurred at some point in the distant past. There were a few raptors near the lower reaches of the slide, watching them and humming their weird warning. David moved out onto the slide and then started climbing up. Bishop peered into the shadows above, then urged Felice to follow their guide. A short scramble brought them up to a recessed scallop in the cavern wall.

“Can they climb up here?” Bishop asked.

David stared at him blankly, then looked to Felice for a translation.

“What? Oh, sorry. He says he’s hidden here before. It’s safe.”

Her mind was racing.

Dinosaurs!

Dinosaurs were extinct. They had been completely wiped out by an asteroid impact sixty-five million years ago. The disaster had killed off seventy-five percent of all life on Earth, in what scientists referred to as the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction. The asteroid had thrown up a cloud of iridium rich-dust that had settled to form a distinctive black band in sedimentary rock around the planet. Below that band there were dinosaur fossils, but above it, there were not. If even a few dinosaurs had survived that extinction event, their population would have recovered and spread out to new habitats, and the story of that migration would have been recorded in the fossil record. It was not. Dinosaurs were extinct.

Nevertheless, she could not argue with what she was seeing. She lingered at the edge of the recess, staring down at the plain below.

What she saw still boggled her mind. There was a herd of enormous, thick-bodied creatures, as big as elephants, but with twenty-foot long necks and tails that were even longer, calmly grazing on the strange vegetation sprouting from the cavern floor. They were unbothered by the flame jets. Creatures with ridged backs that reminded her of stegosauruses, though she knew they were something different, roamed across the landscape. Every few seconds, dark shapes leapt from the ground in a flutter of outstretched wings, gliding up toward the high ceiling, and dropping back down. The raptors seemed to be everywhere, darting their heads at the ground, as if pecking for insects and worms, and mostly leaving the larger dinosaurs alone. But given their earlier ferocity, she had no trouble imagining a pack of them taking down a juvenile. And out at the limit of her vision, something very large moved, swift and low to the ground, like a lion stalking its prey.

“Okay,” she said. “If the impossible is possible, the question is ‘how?’”

“Is it a question that you have to answer right now?” Bishop said, pulling her back into the shadows.

She hushed him, not for fear of alerting the raptors, but so she could think.

“Habitat and food. They have both down here. Maybe this cave was here sixty-five million years ago. Maybe that’s how they survived.” She shook her head. It was an oversimplified explanation. The Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction had been a lot more than just a huge explosion. The dust cloud from the asteroid impact had shut out the sun for nearly a decade, interrupting photosynthesis and demolishing the foundation of the food web.

“The food web!” She turned to Bishop, eager to share her revelation. “Don’t you see? This place is a self-contained ecosystem. The dinosaurs that survived adapted to conditions here. That’s why they never migrated away.”

She stopped, realizing that even that was a little too simplistic. “An ecosystem begins with producers — plants. But plants need sunlight to grow… unless…” She stepped back out onto the ledge and peered down at the weird vegetation growing in the vast flame-lit plain. “Where did those fires come from?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the dinosaurs are rubbing sticks together.” Bishop pulled her back again.

“Blue and yellow flames,” she continued, still thinking aloud. “Pure ethane burns blue, and methane burns yellow. Those are gas fires, natural gas fires. And they’ve probably been burning for…” She turned to face him as yet another realization dawned.

“Oh, my God. That’s it.” She removed the backpack she’d brought from the expedition camp and unzipped it for the first time since fleeing. As she opened her MacBook Pro laptop computer and booted it up, she could almost feel the irritated stares of the others, but there was no way to explain it simply. The screen lit up, glowing just slightly brighter than Knight’s bundle of chemlights. When the boot sequence was complete, she opened the file containing all the data the expedition had gathered.

She turned the screen so they could follow along. It showed a picture of what looked like pink donut sprinkles on a white background. “This is the bacteria we recovered from the bottom of Lake Kivu. It’s a variant of Escherichia coli that has adapted to the extreme conditions at the bottom of Lake Kivu…” She could see that she was already losing them. “All life forms need energy to live. Normal E. coli, like the kind we have in our intestines, relies on our body temperature to stay alive. The organisms at the bottom of Lake Kivu get their energy from the chemical reactions of volcanic gases filtering up through the lake bottom. They produce their own food supply through the process of fermentation.”

“Fermentation. You’re saying they produce alcohol?”

She smiled, pleased that Bishop understood. He was much more than a grunt, as was Knight. “Exactly. All cellular organisms ingest carbon compounds and convert them into a fuel called ATP, either through respiration or fermentation. Fermentation isn’t as efficient as respiration, but when there’s an abundant food supply, that doesn’t matter as much. A by-product of fermentation is hydrocarbons, like ethanol — alcohol — or sometimes methanol compounds. That’s why decaying organic matter produces methane. It’s what’s been happening at the bottom of Lake Kivu, only the microbes aren’t subsisting on organic carbon. They’re getting it from volcanic outgassing.”

“Okay. What’s that got to do with dinosaurs?”

“For dinosaurs to live down here, to actually thrive down here, requires a complex eco-system.”

“I get that,” he replied. “They have a food chain. Plant-eaters and meat-eaters.”

“It’s more complicated than that. In an ecosystem, energy is lost as it moves from one trophic level to the next, roughly speaking by a factor of ten. It’s like a pyramid where each level is only a tenth as big as the one below it. One meat-eater needs ten times its mass in plant-eaters, and each plant-eater needs ten times its mass in plants. And the amount of available energy in those plants — in terms of calories — is about a tenth of what the plant needs just to survive. On the surface, the plants get that energy from sunlight. If any part of the pyramid is disrupted, the whole system collapses.

“The dinosaurs went extinct because of widespread climate change, probably the result of the Chicxulub asteroid impact, which prevented plants from growing. The food web collapsed.”

Bishop nodded slowly. “So for there to be that many raptors down here, there have to be even more prey animals for them to eat.”

“Right, but the plants are the important thing. They’re the base of the food pyramid.” She crawled back to the edge of the recess and pointed out at the landscape below. “Ordinary plants require sunlight for photosynthesis. Whatever those things are, they’re getting their energy from some other source.”

“The light from the fires?”

“Maybe. They might not be photosynthesizing plants at all, or if they are, they’ve evolved over the last sixty-five million years to be able to use that energy more efficiently. The animals would have had to undergo adaptive changes as well. That’s why they never migrated back to the surface. They might wander out once in a while, but this is their primary habitat. They’ve got everything they need down here.”

She watched the raptors roaming the plain. Those closest to the cavern wall were still motionless, alert to the presence of intruders, but most of the others were busy dipping their heads and scratching at the vegetation, searching for prey. “But it’s the base of the pyramid that matters most. For those fires to be burning like that… the amount of microbial metabolic activity must be off the scale. That’s what we were looking for at Lake Kivu: a bacterial organism that could produce hydrocarbons on a commercially viable scale.”

“What do you mean by that?” Bishop asked.

“We already know how to use microbes to make fuel. They do it naturally. The problem with biofuel production is the same as with the food web. You have to put more energy into a system than you get back from it, not to mention that the land used for growing your fuel crop isn’t available for food production.”

“You think the bacteria in this cave have figured out a way to make fuel more efficiently? Like a closed system?”

“I do. And I’d bet money that the microbes in the soil of this cave are identical to the extremophiles we found in Lake Kivu.”

Bishop pondered the idea for a moment, then shook his head. “As much as I hate to stand in the way of scientific progress, right now our only priority is getting out of here.”

Felice started to protest, but then realized that she had gotten carried away by the euphoria of discovery. She closed the computer and slid it back into her pack.

Bishop nodded and turned to Knight. “I’m going to head back up and see what our friends are up to. Stay here and keep out of sight, no matter what happens.”

That sounded ominous to Felice. “What are you going to do?”

“We need to make them believe that we’re raptor food. I’m going to make sure that they do.”

43

Bishop climbed down to the ledge and made his way through the narrow passage back to the first cavern. As the glow from the gas fires diminished, he cracked a chemlight and kept going. The phosphorescent tube provided enough illumination to negotiate the winding tunnel, but it wasn’t much use in the open darkness of the cavern. He left the glow stick to mark the mouth of the passage, and continued on without any light at all, feeling his way along the wall.

After a few minutes, he spied an irregular circle of daylight, made small by the distance. The entrance. He paused, listening for signs of men creeping through the darkness or raptors lurking nearby. Unlike the movie monster version, these velociraptors did not seem to be hyper-intelligent pack hunters. Their earlier attack had probably been defensive rather than a predatory action. He didn’t doubt that they were deadly, though. Their long talons and sharp teeth were certainly capable of tearing a man to shreds, but he suspected that they would shy away from anything larger than themselves, unless they felt threatened.

Hearing nothing, he kept moving along the wall, until he could see silhouetted figures. There were four of them, and as he got a little closer, he could see that they were sweeping their rifles back and forth, ready to fire at the slightest sign of activity.

Time to stir things up, he thought. He took aim with his M240.

He let off a three-second long burst that felled one of the rebels and sent the others diving for cover. The survivors quickly returned fire, concentrating their shots on the area where they’d seen the muzzle flash. Bishop was already moving from that spot, but the incoming fusillade forced him to go prone and low crawl away from the wall.

More rebels joined the firing line at the cavern mouth, adding to the storm of lead. Bishop let fly with another volley, then rolled to the side and started squirming back toward the wall. There were at least ten shooters now, firing off sporadic shots and shouting back and forth to each other.

A pall of smoke hung in the air above the entrance. Bishop thought he could hear the hum of agitated raptors, but it was almost completely drowned out by the nearly constant sound of rifle fire echoing through the cavern. Rounds smacked into the nearby wall, spraying chips of stone down on him, but Bishop didn’t think the shooters knew where he was. When he reached the base of the wall, he began crawling back the way he’d come.

After about a minute, the incoming fire slacked off. Bishop looked back to see flashlight beams roaming the darkness. The rebels were coming in after him.

So far, so good.

He got up and skirted along the wall until he spied the chemlight marking the passage. Before going in, he looked back to check on the rebels’ progress. He couldn’t see the cave entrance or any of the men, but shafts of light were crisscrossing the darkness.

There was another burst of rifle fire, which told Bishop that the rebels had encountered the pack of stray velociraptors. The battle unfolded in an eruption of noise and light. Bishop heard shouts and screams over the tumult, then he heard something else. A rustling sound, like something crashing through tall grass.

Bishop felt a chilling premonition as the noise grew louder. His plan to lure the rebels into a battle with the velociraptors worked exactly as he’d planned, but he had made a serious miscalculation. The frightened dinosaurs were intent on escaping the mayhem, but they weren’t fleeing out into the jungle. Instead they were going to a place of familiar safety, what Felice had called their primary habitat. The stampede would take the raptors right through him.

This wasn’t the smartest thing I could’ve done, Felice thought as she stood motionless, just a few steps away from a lone velociraptor. The dinosaur seemed to be shivering, puffing up its plumage, as it vocalized with its weird hum.

In the recess at the top of the rock slide, David urged her to come back up, while Knight drew a bead on the raptor with his big rifle.

Why did I do this again?

As soon as Bishop had left, intent on scouting their route back to the surface, Felice had realized that she might not get another chance to acquire a sample of the soil from the cavern ecosystem. Without a word to the others, who would almost certainly have insisted she stay put, just as Bishop had instructed, she had hefted the pack over one shoulder and started down the natural staircase of fallen rocks. No sooner had she reached the cavern floor when a lone raptor darted over to determine whether she’d make a tasty morsel.

Maybe because they looked so much like birds, or perhaps because they had mostly kept their distance instead of relentlessly hunting them down, like the dinosaurs in movies, Felice had assumed that, as long as she didn’t surprise them, the creatures would leave her alone. She had been mostly right.

The raptor began thrusting its head at her, mouth open, displaying the long, sharp teeth that she’d only ever seen in the mouths of fossilized skeletons and computer-generated movie monsters — Spielberg had gotten that much right. The creature didn’t advance, but kept bobbing its head at her, making a soft hissing sound, as if scolding her.

No, she realized. He’s testing me. Trying to see if I’ll put up a fight, or turn and run. I wonder which one will get me eaten.

Before coming to Africa, Felice had read about how to deal with the local wildlife. Some animals would flee from displays of aggression, while others would attack. “Which kind are you, bird brain?”

Size, she recalled, was often a deciding factor.

Felice raised her hands over her head, trying to look as big and menacing as possible, and took a step forward. “Shoo!”

The raptor ran off squawking.

Felice stood there with her arms raised for a few seconds longer, afraid that if she moved, her bladder might let go. Finally, when her legs felt a little less rubbery, she started moving again.

“Felice,” Knight hissed. “Get back up here!”

She ignored him. The hardest part was already behind her. She wasn’t going to turn back now.

It was uncomfortably hot and humid on the floor of the cavern, and in a matter of just a few seconds, she was drenched in perspiration. Some analytical part of her brain connected the humidity to the ecosystem question. Water was a part of the organic metabolic process. The cave was like a gigantic greenhouse, constantly recycling water, air, nutrients and energy.

She headed for a spot where blue flames rose up from the cavern floor. There was a scorched circle about eight inches wide around the fire, but beyond that the vegetation appeared to be thriving. She pushed into the strange growth, vaguely aware of things slithering and crawling away from her footfalls. The air smelled of ozone, the invisible smoke from the burning alcohol, and it occurred to her that the atmosphere might not be safe to breathe.

Close enough.

Felice unslung the pack and took out a specimen tube. With one foot, she gently pushed away the overgrowth to reveal the soil beneath, loose and loamy, and wriggling with insects and fat worms. She would have liked to take a few live samples — compare the DNA of the creatures that had evolved in this environment with their modern counterparts. But she felt like she had already pushed the envelope a little too far. One test tube full of soil from this place would probably be enough to keep her busy for the rest of her natural life. She stuffed the sample into a Ziploc bag, and the bag into her backpack, then hurried back to the base of the slide. She did a quick check to make sure that there weren’t any raptors sneaking up on her, then scrambled up the slide to rejoin Knight and David.

Both men looked like they were having trouble choosing irritation or admiration, but before either could say a word, the sound of gunfire issued from the passage below. The noise was barely audible, muffled by the turns in the narrow passage through to the neighboring cavern.

“Get back,” Knight said. “Away from the edge. Stay out of sight.”

Felice was about to comply, but saw that Knight had laid down at the edge of the recess, aiming his rifle at the mouth of the passageway below. She sprawled out next to him.

“Do you listen to anyone?” Knight said, not looking at her.

She ignored him.

There were more shots, and even Felice’s untrained ear could distinguish the subtle differences in the sounds made by Bishop’s machine gun and the rebel fighter’s assault rifles. After the initial exchange, she heard only the latter, and then silence.

She waited, listening, the seconds stretching out to an agonizing infinity, but there were no more shots.

Suddenly, a raptor exploded out of the passage, and over the edge, tumbling down the slope in a flurry of talons and feathers. Something else emerged onto the ledge right behind it — not a single velociraptor, but three of them, tangled up with another figure.

Bishop.

Felice watched incredulous as Bishop, standing poised on the precipice, stripped the clinging, clawing dinosaurs off his body one by one. He caught one by the throat and with a whip-cracking motion, snapped its neck. A second raptor had its teeth clamped onto his shoulder and was raking his back with the spur-like claws on its hind legs, but with his hands now free, Bishop reached back, closed his fingers around the duck-shaped head, and squeezed until the creature’s eyes burst out of their sockets. A third, which had somehow gotten its legs twisted around the sling of Bishop’s machine gun, tried to bite Bishop’s face, but instead Bishop got his own teeth around the thing’s neck and he bit down hard.

His victory had not come cheap. Raptor talons had flayed skin and torn deeply into muscles. Blood streamed from a dozen gash wounds. Yet that was not the worst of it. As he was fighting, Felice felt as if she was watching him transform before her eyes — Dr. Jekyll becoming Mr. Hyde, Bruce Banner metamorphosing into the Hulk. It was not a physical change precisely, but his human essence being consumed by a darker, bestial entity.

Bishop seemed to sense that she was watching. He turned slowly, letting the dead raptor fall from his jaws. His face was a mask of blood and feathers. He looked like some kind of savage tribal warrior, but his eyes…

His eyes were the same.

Felice breathed a sigh of relief…

That turned into a gasp of horror as a swarm of velociraptors broke from the passage and swept Bishop over the edge.

44

Definitely Jules Verne, Queen thought as the raft slid along the subterranean river.

Rook knelt at the front of the makeshift craft, using a semi-rigid length of plant stalk like the punt of a Venetian gondolier, nudging the raft back to center stream whenever the unpredictable current brought them too close to the bank. Queen sat at the rear, using a broad, fan-shaped leaf like a rudder. Rook had selected two more stalks with their fans still attached to be used as oars, but thus far there had been no need to use them. The current was swift, carrying them faster than they could have walked through the dense vegetation that flourished on the valley floor. Walking wasn’t really an option. The local flora was not the only obstacle they would have faced on foot.

They spied the first creature only a few minutes after their river journey began. Based on its size, Queen had assumed it was an enormous elephant, but then it had raised its small head, which was situated at the end of a neck that was nearly as long its massive body, and she knew that what she was seeing could only be a dinosaur.

She pointed it out to Rook, who in characteristic fashion, tried to conceal his astonishment with a quip. “Whoa. That’s a lot of Bronto burgers. Better keep an eye out for Sleestaks. Those things always gave me the creeps.”

“It’s a Paralititan,” Deep Blue had informed her a few seconds later, the disbelief audible in voice. “An herbivore sauropod from the Cretaceous period.”

“You should go on Jeopardy,” Queen told him.

“As it happens, I was just doing some research on the subject. There have been rumors of giant monsters in the Congo region for years, which has led a lot of folks to believe that dinosaurs might have survived to the present day, hidden in the jungle.”

“Or under it.”

“Those monster legends might indicate that dinosaurs living down here have been able to migrate to the surface from time to time. There’s got to be an exit to the surface somewhere in the Congo Basin.”

“So this is a good thing,” she replied, not completely sincere. “If they’ve been coming and going all this time, why aren’t there more recent fossils?”

“Most dinosaur skeletons are found in deserts,” Deep Blue said, “where the conditions are favorable for preserving and fossilizing the remains. There’s not much of a fossil record at all in the tropics, so we have no idea what kind of creatures might have once lived in Central Africa. The Congo Basin itself is only about a million years old. Most African dinosaur fossils date to more than ninety million years ago, well before the rest of the dinosaurs went extinct.”

“Now we know where they went,” Rook said, “and why the Ancients built that wall. Maybe why they stopped using the underground route, too.”

“An actual lost world.” Deep Blue’s voice held a tinge of wonder. “It might not be what Mulamba was looking for, but a discovery like this will change everything we think we know about the world. And it will change the way the world views Africa.”

Queen wasn’t so sure about that. From a scientific standpoint, the importance of the African continent was already well-established, if not completely understood. It was almost certainly the birthplace of the earliest humans. For most people however, Africa was just a primitive land, inhabited by strange wild animals. What they had found here might just reinforce that belief.

The mind-boggling novelty of the sighting quickly wore off as they spied more dinosaurs, not just Paralititan, but a dizzying variety of the evidently not-quite-extinct creatures. Deep Blue attempted to identify them based on what little was known of dinosaurs living in Africa. The conversation ceased when both she and Rook realized that, if this lost world supported populations of plant-eating dinosaurs, then it almost certainly would contain predators — not the humanoid insect-lizard hybrids that had plagued Rook’s Saturday morning cartoon-fueled nightmares perhaps, but animals much bigger and much more dangerous.

They soon discovered that even the river was not entirely safe. Large reptilian and amphibious creatures swam across their path. For the most part, the animals ignored them or scurried away, but a few were curious enough that Rook laid aside his punting pole and drew his spear head, ready for combat. A massive snake, easily larger than an Amazonian anaconda, trailed in their wake for several minutes, its serpentine body undulating along the surface at an astonishing speed. Queen had no doubt that, if it had chosen to attack, the snake could have crushed the little raft in its massive coils, and then gulped them down whole, but after a while it got distracted by something on the shore and lost interest.

Much sooner than Queen expected, the river brought them once more into territory claimed by the Ancients. The unique topography of the cavern and the wild vegetation hid the structure from view until they were practically on top of it, or more precisely, right under it.

The Ancients had built another enormous wall, but unlike the first, this one intersected the river, spanning its breadth with an arch of carefully fitted rocks. As the raft slid beneath the bridge, Queen saw that the wall was the beginning of something far more impressive than anything they had previously encountered.

The landscape inside the walls was not much different than what lay outside. The dense vegetation had not been stopped by the barrier; if anything, it actually seemed more prolific, possibly because the wall kept out the large grazing dinosaurs. But even the tallest ‘trees’ were dwarfed by what the Ancients had built.

Three-story and four-story structures sprouted up on both sides of the river bank, and behind them were even taller buildings — towers that seemed intent on reaching the very ceiling of the cavern. More bridges spanned the river, along with piled stone piers, where vessels much larger than the little raft could have been moored. As they moved deeper, with no end in sight, Queen realized that this place was not simply another outpost on the Ancients’ trade route.

“This is their city,” she said, breathless. “We found it.”

“If Joe could have seen this…” Rook didn’t finish the thought. The discovery made the Congolese president’s death seem all the more tragic.

“Let’s make sure the world knows about it. About everything.”

She steered the raft toward a nearby pier and hopped off, splashing in the shallows. Rook pulled the little craft further along the pier and toward shore, and then joined her. Together, they clambered up onto the stone dock and made their way into the Ancients’ city.

The ground was thick with the strange plants, and little blue fires burned at random intervals throughout, but the Ancients had laid out their city in a methodical fashion similar to a modern urban grid. Instead of wandering into the city depths, they backtracked, skirting the river until they reached the wall, where they ascended a ramp to walk atop it. Higher up, level with the tops of many of the stone structures, the view was even more impressive. What they could not see however, was a way out.

“This couldn’t have been the end of the road,” Rook said. “They wouldn’t have built this city here, in the middle of nowhere. There’s got to be a way to the surface.”

Queen thought it sounded like he was trying to convince himself as much as her. There could have been any number of reasons to found the city in such a remote location. Most likely some unique natural resource, like gold or diamonds. She decided not to share those ideas with Rook. Unfounded optimism might not help their situation, but at least it kept the mood light. “We’ll walk the wall. If the road continues, there’s got to be another gate. If not, we’ll get back on the river.”

“Better remember where we parked,” Rook said.

The wall curved around the city like the rim of an enormous wheel, most of it hidden by the towering structures in the middle. They soon lost sight of the river, but their attention was drawn to a large hump that sat beside the wall. As they got closer, it became apparent that the hump was a fortress guarding the main entrance to the city. The city gate was broader than the one they had encountered earlier, but with a similar design — a massive rolling stone barrier that could allow or block access. One thing however was very different.

“Uh, oh,” said Rook. “Looks like someone left the door open.”

“They must have abandoned the city when the lake cut off access to the other end of the highway. No sense in closing the gate if you don’t ever plan to come back.”

“Guess not.” He scanned the area outside the walls. “If there’s a road, it’s been completely covered over.”

Queen peered further out, magnifying the distant landscape in her glasses, which she’d taken back from Rook. She saw what he could not. “There’s a wall. Maybe a couple klicks out, but it’s there. I think we’re close to the cavern’s end. I just hope that when we get there, we’ll find the route they took back to the surface.”

“We’ll find it,” he replied, confidently. “We’re good at finding stuff.”

She laughed, but then wrinkled her nose. “God, what’s that smell?”

In the hours that they had spent traversing the subterranean world, they had gotten accustomed to the unfamiliar and unusual smells that filled the hot, humid environment. This odor was very different, and not at all unfamiliar. Rook bobbed his head back and forth, sniffing experimentally, then his face twisted in disgust. “Gross. Smells like a mixture of rotting meat and chicken shit.”

“I guess you would know, farm boy.” Rook had grown up on a farm in rural New England, so Queen didn’t doubt that his olfactory senses were more discriminating than hers. “But I doubt there’s a chicken coop down here.”

She shook her head. “Whatever that is, it’s fresh… well, you know what I mean.”

The smell got worse as they approached the fortress, and when they reached the ramp leading down to the gate, they saw its source. The broad courtyard just inside the city entrance was strewn with decaying carcasses. The remains clearly belonged to very large animals, perhaps even as large as the Paralititan, but the bodies had been torn apart like Thanksgiving turkeys, so that nothing recognizable remained. There were dozens of them, some just bones nearly picked clean, but several looked like recent roadkill, torn open to reveal red meat and pink entrails. There was no vegetation, just an unsightly mass of bone fragments and a gray-white substance that, based on Rook’s identification of the odor, was almost certainly manure.

“Uh, I don’t think I want to meet the guy that lives here now,” Rook whispered.

“Blue, did T. Rex live in Africa?”

“No.” Before Queen could breathe a sigh of relief, Deep Blue continued. “Africa’s version of the Tyrannosaur was Carcharodontosaurus.”

“Car-car… what?”

“It means ‘shark tooth lizard.’ Slightly bigger than T. Rex. If that’s what we’re dealing with, you’d better give it a very wide berth.”

“Nice.”

“What did he say?” Rook said.

“That we’re probably in deep dino shit.” She sighed. “But it looks like shark-tooth is out for the moment, so let’s move while we can.”

They snuck down the wall, Rook gripping the stone spear head, which would have seemed a comical thing to do if it hadn’t been their only means of self-defense. They skirted the base of the wall, but their route could not completely avoid the killing ground. There was still no sign of the beast that called the place home. The only things moving were the carcasses themselves, which squirmed with insect larvae. The stench was overpowering. Queen’s empty stomach roiled with nausea. She fought back a fit of dry heaves with each breath.

They paused beside the gateway, searching for signs of activity. Queen looked to Rook with an inquiring glance, and got a shrug in return. Then, still brandishing his spear head, he moved out. Queen stayed right behind him.

They had gone only a few steps when an oddly familiar sound reached Queen’s ears. It was a deep pop, not much different or louder than the noise made by a book hitting a table top. Isolated as they were, deep underground, any noise was cause for alarm, but this sounded suspiciously like…

“Did you hear that?” Rook whispered, glancing back. He recognized it, too.

Before Queen could answer, the ground seemed to rise up right in front of them. Almost faster than she could comprehend, the creature, which had blended in perfectly with the surrounding vegetation, rose to its full height, towering over them. The creature might not have been a Tyrannosaur, but it looked to Queen exactly like every representation of a T. Rex she’d ever seen in pictures, movies and plastic figurines — thick torso, massive muscular hind legs and tiny forearms that looked almost useless. As it stood, its body tilted forward until its back was almost parallel with the ground, its long tail sticking out straight behind it for balance. Its head, which was larger than Rook was tall, swung in their direction, orienting on the sound of Rook’s voice.

“Yogi’s hairy sphincter!” Rook spun on his heel and grasped Queen’s arm with his free hand. He bolted for the open gate, Queen at his side, nearly outpacing him.

The ground vibrated beneath their feet as the Carcharodontosaurus started after them, pounding the earth with its massive bulk. Queen felt its hot breath on the back of her neck. She told herself it was just her imagination, but then she heard the click of its jaws snapping shut and felt something brush against her hair. It’s right there! Even a moments delay would seal her fate.

Rook pivoted hard to the right as they reached the gateway, pulling Queen out of the way of another chomp. The dinosaur’s momentum carried it forward, skidding through mounds of its own refuse, but it recovered far more quickly than Queen would have believed possible, whipping its tail around for balance as it turned toward them and charged again.

While Queen looked over her shoulder at the rampaging beast, Rook searched for a place to hide. He angled toward the open doorway of a small structure that, like everything else they’d seen, was constructed of rocks stacked and slotted together — a three-dimensional puzzle. They slipped through the portal and headed for the deepest corner of the stone hut.

The hut had no roof, or if there had been a roof, it had long since collapsed, but this was something Queen discovered only once they were inside. The Carcharodontosaurus probably could have easily reached over the top of the low wall and snatched them up in his powerful jaws, but it evidently had little experience hunting prey in its own lair. It tried to follow them through the door.

The beast got most of its massive head through the opening, but Queen and Rook were just out of reach. It reared back, then thrust forward like a striking viper. When its bulky torso slammed into the surrounding door frame, the entire wall collapsed inward.

Queen pressed back even harder into the far wall, as a shower of loose stone fell at her feet. With the resistance of the barrier suddenly gone, the dinosaur shot forward into the middle of structure, crashing to the floor, half buried by the aftermath of its intrusion.

Rook pointed to the huge gap where the wall had been and shouted, “Go!”

Without waiting for Queen, he charged to the predator’s left side, leaping across the uneven pile of stones, while the beast struggled to recover. Its monstrous head started to move, tracking Rook, and Queen saw her opening. She sprinted off the wall and slipped past on the creature’s right.

“Ideas?” she shouted as she chased after Rook. Behind her, the Carcharodontosaurus thrashed free of the hut, tearing down the rest of the structure in the process.

“You mean other than run?” Rook shot back. “Sorry, that’s all I’ve got.”

But as Rook headed for the open gate again, she saw that there was a method to his madness. Out in the open, they might be able to outmaneuver the gigantic beast. Operative word, might, she thought, but given the circumstances, an imperfect plan was better than no plan at all.

Rook slipped around the corner, through the opening, and because Queen was just a couple of steps behind him, she didn’t have time to react when he came to an abrupt stop. She collided with him and bounced back like she’d hit a brick wall. Rook did not appear to have noticed. He was just staring straight ahead in complete disbelief.

“Damn it, Rook.” She sprang back to her feet, poised to resume running. “What the f—”

The curse died on her lips. Until that moment, she would have thought herself incapable of astonishment. She had witnessed dinosaurs walking the Earth. What could compare to that?

A figure was charging toward them. He was drenched in blood, teeth bared in a rictus of pain or fury, perhaps both, howling like some kind of Viking berserker.

But that was not what stunned her into paralysis.

It was the fact that she recognized him.

45

The Red Queen stepped down from her chariot and into the wreckage of what had been, just two days earlier, the camp of the science expedition. The scientists had been looking for a way to transform Lake Kivu’s natural gas reserves into a bounty of cheap energy for the Congo region, empowering the developing nation to rise to an equal footing on the great global game field. Joseph Mulamba was not wrong in believing that the thirteen cubic miles of methane at the lake’s bottom would play a pivotal role in how the game played out. His mistake was in thinking that it was the prize that would go to the victor. Favreau knew differently. The lake was not the prize. It was the pawn that she would maneuver to checkmate her enemies.

General Velle stepped out of the helicopter right behind her and looked with disdain at the burned out husk of a truck that sat in the middle of the camp. The ruined tents had been cleared away to create a landing zone for the helicopter, but the canvas skins along with all the other detritus had been heaped up in a pile at the edge of the clearing. The bodies of the science team were probably there as well, mixed in with the rest of the refuse. A few had escaped into the forest, but a relentless search had run them to ground. The latest report was that the survivors were holed up in a nearby cave. Favreau did not think they would be of any consequence, but she knew better than to leave anything to chance. She had directed General Velle to send more rebel fighters to reinforce the pursuit.

The perimeter of the camp was ringed by a dozen Type 63 armored infantry vehicles, representing most of the fighting force Velle had sent into the Kivu region at her earlier behest. Along with the regular DRC Army troops loyal to Velle, there were fighters representing a plethora of loosely organized rebel groups, some of whom had been operating in the area since the Simba Rebellion of 1964. Most had been rebels in name only, fighting to protect their criminal enterprises — poaching mostly. More often than not, they were paid by corrupt government and military officials, like Velle, to maintain order in the region. The alliance with the rebels had been a critical factor emboldening Velle to make his bid for control of the country. Although he could only count on a small portion of the legitimate military in distant Kinshasa to support him, he fielded a combined army of fighters in the east. Nevertheless, he made no secret of his displeasure at having to move his base of operations to the edge of the country.

“I cannot rule from a tent,” he complained.

Favreau kept a cool expression, though inwardly she was weary of having to explain herself to the pompous officer. “This is where the power is,” she told him, gesturing out to the lake. “If you had stayed in Kisangani, you would have been vulnerable.”

“To whom?”

She patted him on the arm. “General, you must think that I underestimate your importance in all of this. I want you to be the ruler of this country as much as you do. But victory will not be achieved by open war. To win, you must force the Western nations to make your new government legitimate.”

“And why would they not do so? I am offering them exactly what they want, full access to the natural gas reserves.”

Favreau shook her head in a mockery of long-suffering. “General, you do not understand the Western mind. They see you as a thug. Useful to them for clearing away the old regime, but not someone with whom to conduct respectable business. The United States has paid a heavy price for supporting ruthless dictators in the past. The eyes of the world are on them now, and they do not wish to be perceived as fomenting bloody civil wars as a means to securing natural resources and building their empire — especially if it’s true. They will recognize your government only if you give them no choice. They would prefer to cast you as the villain, ride in as the benevolent savior and install their own puppet regime. That is why you must be here. They will not attack here for fear that you will make good on your threat to destroy Lake Kivu.”

Velle grunted, then turned away, joining a group of his toadies. Favreau assumed they would be more sympathetic to his complaints. That suited her purposes as well. There was a lot to do.

She watched as the rest of the passengers debarked from the Mil Mi-8. The Russian-made helicopter could carry up to twenty-four people, and on this trip, every available seat had been filled. In addition to a handful of Velle’s senior officers, she’d brought what was left of her ESI contingent. She had lost some in Kinshasa — killed by the resourceful American operative. She had sent two more to escort Senator Marrs to Mombasa, where he would deliver her demands to his colleagues in the US government. Those men would almost certainly learn that Favreau had been disavowed. The mercenaries still with her — a random draw of Hearts and Clubs — had no idea that they had been declared a rogue element. They probably wouldn’t have cared.

The next to last man out held no allegiance to her or to Velle. Gerard Okoa stepped down from the open hatch and looked at the wrecked camp in dismay. He had said very little during his captivity, which pleased Favreau. Between Velle and Marrs, she’d had her fill of impotent men blustering about not getting the respect they deserved.

She looked past the interim president to the last man off the helicopter, the leader of the Hearts team. “Find a nice safe corner to hide Mr. Okoa. He still has an important part to play.”

As Ace Hearts moved off, she instructed the rest of her men to procure a boat, then went back aboard the Mil to finish her own preparations.

She knelt beside the olive-drab canvas pack that covered the RA-115 and opened its flap, revealing the smooth metal housing of the bomb. It was connected to the helicopter’s electrical system to maintain the quality of its fission core, but its battery backup was fully charged. If it became necessary to deploy the bomb in the lake, it would be fully operational. In its present configuration, however, it would not operate as needed. For the one-kiloton-yield device to ignite the submerged gas deposits, it would have to be at the bottom of the lake. The problem was the signal from the dead-man switch, which had served her so well, would not reach through the four hundred odd yards of water in between.

As she delved into the device’s electronic guts, her satellite phone rang. She glanced over at the caller ID display and saw that it was the phone she’d given to Lance Marrs. She picked up.

“Bon jour, Senator.”

Marrs did not bother with salutations. “Let me talk to General Velle.”

“Whatever you have to say, you may say it to me. We both know that the General is not the one you need to be negotiating with.”

A growl came over the line. “All right, damn it. Look, you’ve got us up against a wall here. We can’t just give in. Our position has always been that we don’t negotiate with terrorists—”

“Please, Senator. We both know that is not true.”

“Yes, we both know, but Joe Public doesn’t, and we have to keep it that way. People are going to ask why we decided to support an illegal military dictatorship over the legitimate democratically elected president, and we can’t very well tell them that it’s because you are threatening to nuke the natural gas reserves, can we?”

Favreau sighed, though in truth, she had anticipated this. “What if President Okoa signed an order, granting General Velle emergency powers?”

“It’s shaky. When Mulamba shows up, that emergency order won’t be worth spit.”

“Senator, I don’t think you fully appreciate the situation. I have given you an ultimatum. Convince your colleagues to do what must be done. I assure you, any political embarrassment will be minor compared to what you will suffer if you fail.”

Favreau ended the call, and stared at the phone for a moment, wondering whether Marrs believed that she would follow through on her threat. It was doubtful that he did. His experience in politics had probably convinced him that no one ever kept their promises, and that threats and ultimatums were almost always a bluff.

Marrs struck her as the sort of man who was foolish enough to think that she was bluffing. As she went back to work on the bomb, she found herself hoping that she would get the chance to show him just how wrong he was.

King studied the military camp, tagging targets and assessing the weaknesses in the perimeter. The enemy forces were clearly not expecting an attack, but what they lacked in discipline, they made up for in sheer numbers. There were more than a hundred of them, and he had just six Republican Guard soldiers.

He recalled something Queen had said. We’re a team. That’s how we win.

She had known as well as he that situations like this sometimes required them to operate independent of each other, but even separated by vast distances, they were still a team, still working together like the pieces on a chessboard to execute the winning strategy. Right now, though, the team — his team, the Chess Team — was exactly what he needed. When the five of them were together, they were unstoppable.

He willed his thoughts back into the moment.

Crescent II had rendezvoused with the patrol boat on the river, much to the astonishment of the soldiers and crew who wondered aloud if the dark boomerang-shaped craft was Kongamato come to destroy them. In a way, he supposed it was true. The stealth plane had shuttled them to a battlefield where the odds of survival were extremely low. If they did survive, they would certainly have one hell of a story to tell.

Crescent had delivered them to a jungle clearing about twelve miles from Lake Kivu, as close as they could get without being detected. A thermal sweep of the area had revealed the location of several rebel patrols. The stealth plane had stayed on station, conducting high-altitude reconnaissance to guide King’s team around enemy forces, until they were within sight of the camp, but it had since been forced to break off for refueling. King had debated waiting for the plane to return to provide surveillance, and if necessary close-air support and a quick exfil, but he had ultimately decided there was nothing to be gained by waiting.

He studied the camp a few moments longer, then outlined his plan to the rest of the team. It was a quick, brutal plan, and if it worked, he would find himself face-to-face with Favreau and her backpack nuke.

She had asked what he was willing to sacrifice to win, and now he had his answer.

He was about to give the order to move out when Deep Blue’s voice filled his head.

And gave him hope.

46

With a bone-shaking jolt, Bishop slammed into the cavern floor amid a flurry of claws and jaws. He felt a flash of something that might have been pain, but his nearly overloaded neurons could no longer distinguish one sensation from another. The strange vegetation that grew right up to the base of the cliff had cushioned his fall, but something hard and heavy had slammed into him. It was his M240; its sling, frayed by the onslaught, had come apart during the fall, and turned his best weapon into a gravity powered projectile. More raptors tumbled down from the ledge. A few actually appeared to be running down the nearly vertical cliff face in defiance of gravity. They landed all around and atop him, and scurried away.

A part of his brain knew the creatures weren’t interested in attacking him, but only in fleeing from the noise and death in the adjoining cavern. That voice of reason however was very hard to hear over the roar of the primal rage beast that Bishop had fought to control every moment of his life. The raptors’ talons had done more than tear his flesh. They had almost completely severed the part of him that was human.

Almost.

He rose to his feet with a howl and started swinging. His fists encountered only empty air. The surviving raptors had all fled out across the cavern floor. He turned, gazing up at the ledge to see if more were coming. There weren’t any more raptors, but something else was coming out of the tunnel, or more precisely, someone. The searching rebels had followed the stampede into the passage. The leader of the small band spotted him and raised his Kalashnikov.

The beast inside urged him to scale the cliff, brave a storm of lead and tear the attackers apart. The human told him to run, not out of fear, but to protect his friends. If he ran, the rebels wouldn’t be looking for the others.

He ran.

As he turned away, he glimpsed Knight and Felice, two prone figures barely visible in the recess high above. He shook his head, hoping that Knight would understand. Don’t fire at them, you’ll give away your position. Stay hidden; I’ll be fine.

A thud somewhere off to his left, and a rifle report a millisecond later. The shot went wide, missing Bishop, but if the gunman knew anything about how to use his rifle, he’d be able to correct his aim. Or he might just get off a lucky shot.

Bishop zigged left for a few steps then right, then left again. Bullets chased him across the plain, but as he increased the distance, the shots became less frequent and less accurate. A few raptors ran along with him, as if hunting him, and perhaps that was exactly what they were trying to do, but he made no attempt to discourage them. If the rebels believed that the dinosaurs had finished him off, maybe it would clear the way for the others to escape. He didn’t dare stop, not yet.

As he ran, putting one foot in front of the other in an almost mechanical rhythm, he felt the rage finally begin to subside. There was still a lot of pain. His anger had anaesthetized him to much of it, and now it was returning with a vengeance. His entire body throbbed with each step. But he didn’t stop.

The velociraptors had finally scattered, and he thought he had seen the last of them. He wasn’t overly concerned about the creatures. They were dangerous, but didn’t exhibit the hyper-intelligent pack hunter behavior that had mischaracterized their appearance in dinosaur movies. Without a mass attack, they would never be able to take him down. Right now, dinosaurs were the least of his—

“What the hell?”

There was something on the horizon, something that didn’t belong in a cave deep beneath the Earth’s surface, especially not when that cave was a time capsule sealed up for more than sixty-five million years. But there it was: a wall of some kind. As he got closer, he saw that the wall was only the beginning. Beyond it lay an entire city.

A noise like an avalanche rumbled out of the ruins. Before he could even begin to process this latest sensory input, Rook ran out of the city gates.

Rook?

Queen came out behind Rook, bumped into him and nearly fell. They saw Bishop and froze in their tracks.

Queen?

I’m hallucinating, he thought. It’s the only explanation.

Then a dinosaur the size of a city bus appeared behind them both.

Please let me be hallucinating.

The Carcharodontosaurus charged. So did Bishop.

Queen felt one of his hands close on her shoulder, then she was hurtling through the air. Rook was swept away in the opposite direction, leaving nothing between the enormous predator and the last person Queen expected to find in the underworld.

The dinosaur snapped its head forward, jaws agape, but Bishop was faster. He broke to the right, avoiding the bite, and as he slipped past, he lowered his shoulder and bulldozed into the monster’s left rear leg.

It should have been about as effective as tackling an oak tree, but Bishop’s timing was uncannily perfect. He slammed into the dinosaur’s foot just as it was rising, and his momentum swept the mighty limb back just enough to trip it up. With its head still lowered, the Carcharodontosaurus did an ungainly face-plant, which twisted into an uncontrollable sideways roll that shook the cavern floor.

“Bishop?” Rook was crouched, the spearhead gripped in his right hand. He grinned like a maniac. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s not polite to drop in without calling first? What if we’d been—”

The dinosaur’s roar cut him off, and suddenly it was back on its feet and coming around for another attack. Bishop was also poised for action. His face was drawn into a bestial snarl, and despite the fact that the monster towered above him, there wasn’t a hint of fear in his eyes.

Even Bishop could not hope to defeat such a beast, but his resolve was inspirational. Bishop wasn’t alone, after all. Queen scrambled back to her feet and began waving her arms. “Hey, asshole. Over here.”

The dinosaur paused, swiveling its gigantic head so that one of its fist-sized black eyes stared at her.

“Shit!” Rook yelled, also waving his arms to distract it. He began jumping up and down. “That was a really dumb idea, babe. No, you stupid gecko, this way! Tasty treat, right here!”

The head tilted in the other direction, and for the first time, the monster seemed to realize that it had found prey that behaved very differently than its usual fare. For just an instant, Queen wondered if they might be able to frustrate it into simply giving up.

Bishop, however, opted for the less subtle approach. He charged again.

With its side-facing eyes, the dinosaur didn’t see his approach. Not that it mattered. Bishop launched himself at its snout, gripping one of its nostril ridges in his hand, and swung himself up onto its head. The Carcharodontosaurus barely seemed to notice. With a flick of its head, it flung Bishop away. Amazingly, Bishop landed cat-like on his feet, and whirled around for another charge.

“Great plan!” Rook shouted, still waving his arms. “We’ll piss it off until it drops dead from terminal irritation.”

Bishop ignored the comment. He ran at the creature again, and once more, the dinosaur with its attention divided between the two shouting figures to either side, did not appear to notice his approach. Bishop got in close and ducked past its stubby forearms, crouching beneath it.

Rook understood immediately and flung the spearhead in Bishop’s direction. Bishop caught the stone flake out of the air, and in a single smooth motion, oriented its sharp tip upward and drove it into the monster’s exposed belly.

The dinosaur let out a deafening shriek and leaped back, thrusting down with its tail for added propulsion. Its entire ponderous mass lifted so high into the air that Queen wondered if it was going to take flight. Instead, it landed with an earth-shaking thump, several yards behind where it had been, its full attention now fixed on the annoying little creature that had just bitten it. Queen saw that Bishop’s hands were coated in fresh blood, but empty. The spearhead remained buried in the dinosaur’s soft tissue.

This is hopeless, Queen thought. “Back to the city,” she called. “We can lose it in there.”

It was the only plan that had a chance of working. They could lose themselves in the streets or hide in buildings made of sterner stuff than the little stone shed where they had first sought refuge. They might even be able to find more weapons. But she didn’t move and neither did Rook. It was all for one and one for all. If Bishop refused to flee, then they weren’t going anywhere, and Bishop, unfortunately, seemed to have lost the ability to understand English.

The Carcharodontosaurus gave another screech and leaped again, this time to the side, thrashing its tail violently, as if to swat at an annoying insect. Huge drops of blood splattered the ground where it had been, but as it landed, Queen saw that it was bleeding from two wounds: the gash in its belly, and some kind of puncture on its torso, just behind its foreleg.

It yelped again, and there was an eruption of blood from its snout. Then, a series of red blossoms sprang up on its right flank and the monster went into a frenzy. Even Bishop yielded ground as the dinosaur started rolling, flinging gobs of blood, as it scratched the air and whipped its tail to drive off whatever was attacking it. Over its agonized shrieks, Queen heard a loud, mechanical sound, similar to the noise she and Rook had heard just before encountering the creature.

The sound of gunfire.

The dinosaur abruptly leapt up and ran for the city gates.

Queen dropped flat when she’d recognized the noise for what it was, but when no further shots came, she got back to her feet. Rook was already up and heading toward Bishop, who hadn’t really moved much at all. The big man just stood there, his chest heaving from exertion, his arms trembling as though he thought the fight might resume at any instant, his eyes…

His eyes were blood red with primal fury.

“Bish?”

He blinked, and as if by magic, his eyes were normal again. The red had simply been blood trickling down from a gash in his forehead.

There was movement in the periphery of Queen’s vision, just beyond Bishop, and when she turned her head to look, her glasses immediately tagged three figures — one with green, and two more in yellow. A name and several lines of information appeared in one corner of the display. The facial recognition software had recognized Felice Carter, an American scientist, formerly with a now defunct bio-tech firm called Nexus, which was itself a division of Manifold…

Queen felt a slight chill at the name and stopped reading, peering instead at the other two figures. One of them was a small wizened-looking African man, lugging, almost dragging, an enormous M240B machine gun that Queen knew belonged to Bishop. The other man wasn’t African, but looked Asian, though it was difficult to tell, since most of his face was obscured by a veritable mummy-wrap of bandages that completely covered one eye. He wore camouflage BDUs and carried a long rifle—

“Knight!” Rook exclaimed, running toward the approaching trio. “Man, you look like I feel.”

Queen gasped. Of course it was Knight. The bandages must have fooled the facial recognition software, she thought. Oh God, what happened to him?

She ran after Rook. It was only when she reached the little group and threw her arms around Knight in a hug that made him wince, that she realized Bishop still hadn’t moved.

47

Felice stared at the display on her computer, amazed at the story it told. At first, it had all seemed unbelievable. These four relentless soldiers finding each other in a cave deep beneath the Congo rain forest seemed unlikely, but now that she studied the map of Queen’s and Rook’s journey, from the shores of distant Lake Natron, everything made sense. Joseph Mulamba had, without realizing it, set them all on the path to this reunion.

Fearing that the wounded Carcharodontosaurus might recover his courage and come after them once more, the group had postponed all discussion until they reached the relative safety of the recess atop the landslide, the vantage point from which Felice, Knight and David had watched Bishop’s mad dash across the cavern floor. The rebel fighters had taken a few potshots from the shelter of the passage, before losing interest and heading back to the surface, leaving the others free to follow Bishop, which had turned out to be a fortuitous decision.

Introductions had been made — Felice had not failed to notice that the two new arrivals were also named for chess pieces — and then Queen and Rook began telling their story. Someone had suggested they link Queen’s q-phone — a functional version of the broken devices that Knight and Bishop had possessed — to Felice’s laptop, and the entire journey had been revealed, with several hours of video and a map of the superhighway used by a forgotten civilization.

The Ancients had established their trade route right through the middle of the subterranean lost world where dinosaurs still roamed. That isolated ecosystem, which skirted the edge of Lake Natron, had been created in the vast spaces left by earlier volcanic activity, and was sustained by unseen extremophile microbes, which turned carbon and carbon dioxide into natural gas compounds that had been burning for millions of years. They provided the necessary energy for the food web. Felice suspected that the archaeologists who would one day study the site would discover that the Ancients had done a lot more than simply pass through the lost world. Had they perhaps learned how to utilize the naturally occurring fuel for cooking and other uses?

When the story was finished, Felice took advantage of the uplink to check the last results from the data she and the science team had collected at Lake Kivu. Most of her suppositions were confirmed. She skimmed over the gene sequence of the extremophile, which was indeed a variant of E. Coli. She would need a laboratory to fully make sense of the information, but it was clear that the organism had adapted to live and thrive in conditions where other microbes would have died. She was eager to compare it with the soil sample from the cavern, and begin experimenting with it under controlled conditions. If her hypothesis was correct, they might very well be able to produce enormous amounts of ethanol using a very small amount of carbon, along with water and carbon dioxide.

Indulging her scientific curiosity took her mind off the horror and misery of everything that happened in the last few days. The respite was brief, though.

“Felice,” Queen said. “Pack up. Time to go.”

While she had been poring over the data, the four soldiers had busied themselves with more immediate concerns, tending to injuries and discussing what would happen next. The joy of their unexpected reunion had quickly given way to a grim solemnity. Felice thought she understood it. They had been through hell. Queen and Rook had suffered the one-two punch of witnessing Mulamba’s death, followed by a nightmare journey without food, water, sleep or hope. Knight had been maimed, and although he refused to stop pushing himself — or perhaps because he had pushed himself this far — he was feverish, probably suffering from an infection that, if not treated, would kill him. And Bishop…

Felice wasn’t sure how Bishop was even able to stand. The raptors had almost torn him apart, but his physical injuries — which didn’t seem to have slowed him down much — were only scratches on the surface, hiding a much deeper wound to his psyche. He had barely spoken since the reunion, and while his teammates seemed to take that in stride, Felice was worried that something had broken inside him.

She slid the computer into her pack and rose as the others began moving down toward the ledge, with Queen in the lead. “What about the rebels?”

“They aren’t going to be a problem,” Queen answered.

The journey back to the surface seemed to take forever. In the glow of chemlights, Felice got her first good look at the upper cave, and saw it as David had first seen it fifty years before. She saw more of the strange vegetation, but she also saw ruins — stone huts constructed in the same fashion as the city of the Ancients. This had once been an outpost, a gateway to their forgotten civilization.

She let out a yelp of surprise when she saw human figures silhouetted at the mouth of the cavern, but the others seemed unconcerned and just kept moving forward. When she got a little closer, Felice realized why. The men standing at the entrance were not rebel fighters but soldiers, wearing the red berets that marked them as members of the Congolese Republican Guard. Except for one man, a Caucasian. Felice recognized him immediately.

It was the man who had once stopped her from destroying the world.

48

If King’s reaction to seeing Felice Carter fell short of astonishment, it was only because he had not thought about her in a very long time. The incident which had begun with her discovery of an elephant graveyard in Ethiopia, and unfolded into a series of deadly encounters with a madman who called himself Brainstorm, seemed like ancient history to him now.

King did remember, of course, and he remembered that, at the time, she had been a uniquely dangerous person. If that was still true, it was a complication he didn’t need right now.

Felice’s presence was not the only thing that put a damper on what should have been a joyful reunion with his teammates, two of whom he had thought dead, and two lost somewhere in the bowels of the Earth.

It wasn’t just that he felt a pang of guilt when he looked at them, though he couldn’t ignore what he saw. Knight’s eye was beyond saving, and while such a permanent and disfiguring injury was a horrible thing to happen to anyone, for Knight, a sniper of unparalleled ability, it verged on catastrophic. Bishop looked like he’d been through a meat grinder. Queen and Rook were relatively sound by comparison, but clearly approaching the limits of their endurance.

He thought of Asya, his own flesh and blood, who had escaped being literally blown apart by a mere quirk of fate.

I was supposed to protect them. Instead, I nearly lost them all.

What weighed on him most heavily though was the knowledge that it wasn’t over yet. He was going to have to ask them to keep going, to reach down into the depths of their souls and soldier on.

“Here’s the situation,” he began. “The enemy is setting up at the science expedition camp — where Knight and Bishop found Miss Carter — about ten klicks from here.”

Knight looked up. “Ten?”

“Geez, what were you guys doing?” Rook said. “Wandering in circles?”

King had also been surprised when Deep Blue had revealed the coordinates of the entrance to the cavern where Queen’s q-phone signal had been pinpointed. If it had been much further away, he would not have risked leaving his forward position to come look for them. As it was, his assault team had endured an hour long run through the jungle, followed by a quick, but decisive firefight with the small group of rebels holding the cavern, leaving them a little more tired and little lighter on ammunition. On the other side of the equation, the team was back together, but he still was undecided about whether or not that was a good thing.

“The enemy numbers approximately one hundred fifty,” King said. “Mostly rebel irregulars, but some lightly armored DRC regular army forces. There’s also a small group of contractors brought in by Executive Solutions…”

Queen made a face and Rook made a noise to go with it.

“… led by a particularly nasty she-devil named Monique Favreau. It’s General Velle’s revolution, but Favreau is the brains of the operation. They’ve got a hostage: President Gerard Okoa. Keeping Okoa alive is a high priority, but not number one. You should know that the ESI mercs are packing an experimental over-pressure ammunition. It’s nasty stuff. One-shot lethal. We’ve seen it before.” He paused a beat. “In Suez.”

Rook was not the first to understand, but he was the first to offer comment. “Fuck. My. Donkey. Ass.”

“Where is it?” Queen asked, referring to the bomb they had lost in Egypt.

“It’s with Favreau, at Lake Kivu. There’s a huge natural gas deposit underneath the lake. This whole situation is a bid to win control of it. Favreau has taken it a step further. She’s threatening to use the nuke to destroy it.”

Felice sat up. “Wait, a nuke? An atomic bomb?”

“A small one, but yes.”

“You can’t let her do that.”

“Obviously.”

“No, you don’t understand—”

Bishop spoke up, and his low quiet voice commanded everyone’s attention. “There’s an enormous bubble of carbon dioxide at the bottom of the lake. If it erupts and comes to the surface, it will suffocate everyone in the surrounding valley. Two million people.” He glanced at Felice as if looking for her approval. She gave it with a grateful nod.

“Right,” King continued. “Favreau probably knows that, and I doubt she cares. But that’s one more reason why we absolutely cannot let that happen.

“She has the bomb wired to a dead-man switch. If we kill her, she lets go and… Well, you’re all smart kids, figure it out.” He stopped as something occurred to him, then he turned to Felice. “If the bomb went off on the surface, would it still pop that bubble?”

Felice shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably not. The region is very volcanically active, but lake eruptions are rare. Evidently it takes a pretty big disruption to trigger a CO₂ release.”

King nodded. “That’s what I’m counting on. Favreau’s been using that damn nuke like an umbrella. Last night, I was as close to her as I am to you now, and I couldn’t kill her because she had her hand on that switch. If she’d let go, a lot of innocent people would have died. But out here, it’s just her and us.” King turned his attention back to the team. “If there’s no other way to stop her, we kill her, and the hell with the consequences. Got it?”

He let that grim possibility hang over their heads for a moment before continuing. “I don’t know about you, but I’d just as soon not get blown all to hell, so let’s talk about how we’re going to take this bitch down.”

As King began outlining his assault plan, Felice booted up her laptop. She still had a wireless Internet connection via the q-phone, and she used it to run a simulation of the possible outcomes of an atomic blast at the bottom of Lake Kivu. Once again, there were no surprises. The computer model confirmed her hypothesis. She planned to tell King about it as soon as he concluded his briefing, but to her surprise, he sought her out.

“I’m a little surprised to see you here,” he said, walking up behind her.

“Likewise,” she replied. “But you know how it is. If you want to save the world, you can’t do it from Seattle.”

He didn’t smile. “It seems to me like someone with your…” He paused, searching for the right word, “condition… would want to avoid high-risk situations. Unless something has changed?”

“As far as I know, I’m still a ticking time-bomb,” she admitted. Like many people with chronic illnesses and disabilities, Felice did not dwell on her life-altering situation and refused to let it define her existence, but she was always aware of it.

Three and a half years earlier, as part of a different — but similarly ill-fated — expedition in Ethiopia, Felice had discovered the fossilized remains of an early hominid life form secreted away among an elephant graveyard, and subsequently been infected with… something. She wasn’t clear on exactly what it was. Her field was genetics, but what had happened to her was better explained by either a theoretical physicist or a spirit medium. The short version was that she had somehow become the host for the living memory of an ancient human ancestor, a consciousness that was linked — psychically or through quantum entanglement, Felice didn’t know which, or if there was even a difference — like a hard-wired connection, to every human being on the planet. If that circuit was overloaded, say by the triggering of Felice’s fight-or-flight instinct in a life-threatening crisis, the result would be the mental equivalent of a power surge in an electrical grid.

King’s concerns were not unwarranted. He had been present when a group of bandits, intent on assaulting Felice had been at the receiving end of such a surge and were transformed into mindless zombies. And that had been triggered merely by the threat of violence.

“I spent two years learning meditation and biofeedback techniques to control my emotions,” Felice continued. “I can enter a trance state at will, completely shut myself off to all external stimuli. Is it enough? Who knows? But I’m not going to let fear of what might happen control me, or keep me from doing something that I feel is important.”

King nodded slowly. “I can’t argue with that.” He took a breath, let it out slowly. “You know what we’re about to do. And you know how it might end. I want you to stay here.”

The request did not come as a surprise. “I get it,” she said. “And you’re right. I’m no soldier. I wouldn’t be of much help.”

“I’ll ask David to stay with you.”

“There’s something you need to know,” she blurted. “Maybe it doesn’t even matter, but I’ve been running simulations on the possible effects of a nuclear explosion at the lake bottom. The research we were doing identified an extremophile as the source of most of the natural gas. If the gas bubble were to erupt violently, it would almost certainly bring some of those microbes to the surface.

“This is an extremely durable and robust organism. It has adapted to survive… no, make that thrive, in extreme environments. Imagine what would happen if it started colonizing on the surface? This rain forest is an all-you-can-eat buffet of carbon. Add to that the boost of CO₂ released from the lake and the fact that atmospheric carbon dioxide has doubled since the last time the lake erupted, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.”

“Worse than two million dead?”

“The microbe turns vegetation into natural gas with a very low flashpoint. It would transform the entire Congo Basin into a flammable swamp. In the short term, that would be disastrous for the people who live here. In the long term, it would spike greenhouse gases even higher, creating a positive-feedback loop. I don’t even want to think about what might happen if the organism escapes Africa, and ends up somewhere like the Amazon.”

“Okay, I get it. It doesn’t change what we have to do.” He turned away, and Felice was left to wonder if she’d made the right decision in burdening him with the additional responsibility. It was a hard thing to have the fate of the world in your hands, but she was starting to realize that it was even harder to accept that sometimes it was out of your hands.

She watched the team make their final preparations. She hadn’t felt this helpless since Ethiopia. There was nothing she could do now to help them succeed.

Her gaze fell on Bishop.

Maybe there was something she could do after all.

She found herself moving toward him, and as she approached, he straightened and turned toward her, awkwardly expectant. She didn’t meet his eyes right away. Instead, she stared at the ragged slashes that crisscrossed his broad, muscular chest. He had thrown away the tattered remnant of his shirt, and now looked like some kind of mighty barbarian warrior. She could not help but be impressed.

Attractive? Hell, yes. The scientist in her recognized him as a prime alpha male specimen, and who was she to argue with biology? But there was more to it than that.

She placed her palms flat against his chest, just as she had done after the first raptor attack. Once more, she felt him recoil ever so slightly, as if her touch might make him vulnerable. Vulnerability, she supposed, was the only thing that truly frightened him.

She lightly touched one of the scabbed over gashes. “Are you all right?”

“I’m a fast healer. And it’s not as bad as it looks.”

At last she was ready to meet his eyes. As close as she now stood to him, he towered above her, and she had to crane her neck to look up at him. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it as the words deserted her. She tried again. “So, listen, I…”

“Yes.”

“What, yes?” she said with a laugh.

“Whatever it is you were going to ask me, the answer is yes.”

“Good.”

His lips curled into something that she recognized as a valiant attempt to smile, then he started to turn away.

“No, wait,” she said, and circled around to face him again. “You need to listen to me. I…”

Damn it, what am I trying to say?

She took a deep breath and looked him in the eyes again. “You are, without a doubt, the strongest, toughest, most bad-ass person I’ve ever met. But there’s something inside you that’s…” The words eluded her once more.

“You’re right,” he said in a quiet, almost embarrassed voice.

“It’s eating at you. You think you can control it, but…”

“I know.”

“I can help you.” When he didn’t respond, she continued. “Believe it or not, I’ve actually got a little experience with this kind of thing.”

He nodded. “King told me.”

“Did he?”

That son of a bitch, she thought. But at least he had saved her the trouble of explaining it to Bishop.

“Okay. Well, the point is, I can help. I want to.”

His eyes stayed locked with hers for several seconds, then something caught his attention and his gaze flicked away. The rest of the team was lining up to begin the mission.

“I have to go.” He knelt and picked up his machine gun.

Felice felt the moment slipping away. “Will you let me help?”

“I already have,” he said in a quiet voice, and then he turned to join the others.

49

As dusk settled over Lake Kivu, Monique Favreau decided she had waited long enough. It would be mid-morning in Washington by now, plenty of time for Marrs’s colleagues to digest her ultimatum and reach some kind of consensus.

She was giddy with excitement. Some would probably want to buy her off, while others would demand military action. Unable to agree, they would choose instead to stall for time by offering to negotiate, but she would give them nothing. They would bow to her will or she would destroy their prize.

The simple act of disconnecting the bomb from the helicopter’s stand-by electrical system felt like a pivotal moment. The battery back-up would keep the bomb primed and operational for a few hours. That was plenty of time to get it in position, but just barely enough to bring it back and plug it in again. That time constraint would set the tone for the negotiations with the Americans. There would be no room for equivocation or stalling.

She carried the device on her back through the camp, to the tent where General Velle had established his command. Okoa was there, seated at a folding table, not bound but under constant supervision from two of her men and a handful of Velle’s soldiers. Favreau ignored the general — the man who would be president — and went instead to the man who, legally speaking at least, had the actual job.

“Mr. Okoa. Your country stands on the brink of civil war. Your leader, President Mulamba, has not returned, and there are rumors that he might be dead.” She had heard no such rumors, and had not heard from the team dispatched to intercept Mulamba in Belgium, but reasoned that if Mulamba were alive, she would have heard about it. “This is a crisis,” she went on, “and demands swift decisive action. You must sign an executive order, granting General Velle special emergency powers to restore order, until a new government can be created.”

Okoa slowly raised his head. He wore an expression of incredulity. “General Velle is the crisis.”

“Let us put aside pretenses. How we came to be here is irrelevant. What matters is how it ends.”

“Why do you need me to sign a piece of paper giving you what you have already taken?”

“For the sake of your people, Mr. Okoa. A formal decree is necessary for reconciliation to begin. General Velle has practical authority, but you must give him legitimate authority to restore the peace.”

Okoa stared at her for a moment through narrowed eyes. His blunt face seemed to tremble with barely restrained anger. He turned to Velle. “It will take more than a piece of paper to make your government legitimate.”

“Not in the eyes of the world,” said Favreau. “The African Union and the United Nations will recognize such a decree as legally binding. They will honor General Velle’s request for monetary assistance and peace-keeping troops, and of course, facilitate the development of the natural gas reserves, for the good of all.”

“Ah, so now we come to the heart of the matter.” Okoa kept his gaze fixed on Velle. “You don’t care what our people want. You desire only to please your foreign masters.” He filled the last words with such contempt that Velle’s face darkened, as if he had just been slapped.

Favreau smiled patiently to hide her annoyance. This was taking much longer than it should have. “Mr. Okoa, all of this posturing is irrelevant. You see this device that I am carrying? You know what it is, do you not? A one kiloton tactical nuclear device. If General Velle’s government is not formally recognized, here and abroad, then I will use this device to blow up the Kivu natural gas deposits. Tonight.”

Okoa’s gaped at her. “Why would you do such a thing?”

“Isn’t it obvious? To win, of course.”

“But you would be destroying the very thing you are trying to possess.”

“The fear of losing something is a weakness. The nations of the West fear losing control of the natural resources of Africa more than they fear having to support the government of a military strongman. You, Mr. President, fear the pain and suffering that will come to your people, even more than you fear losing your own life. To protect them, I think you will sign this paper.”

Okoa’s eyes began moving rapidly, as if searching for some alternative to the awful choice Favreau had set before him. Then, he sagged in defeat. “I will sign. General Velle, you have a formidable ally. I wonder, does she also control you by threatening the thing you most fear to lose?”

Velle’s nostrils flared, but he did not reply. Instead, he slid a folder across the tabletop toward Okoa. Inside, on a sheet of paper, emblazoned with the presidential seal depicting an ivory tusk, a spear and the head of a leopard, was the executive order that would turn the Democratic Republic of the Congo into a dictatorship.

Favreau did not wait to see him sign the paper. This small victory had been relatively easy. Okoa had been able to look her in the eyes and see what she was willing to do. Marrs and the American government might not be so easily swayed.

She turned and left the tent, heading for the lakeshore.

50

Ten figures swam silently through the dark waters of Lake Kivu, stealthily approaching the military camp.

The water felt cool, refreshingly so for Queen, who was still wearing a drysuit. During the long hike through the jungle, the insulated neoprene dive garment had felt a little like wearing a sauna, but with no changes of clothing available, their choice was either that, or as Rook had suggested, fighting naked. It was a tempting thought. The drysuit really was stifling, but the dark color helped her blend with the jungle shadows.

The nearby shore was lit by dim campfires, but in the display of her glasses, she could easily distinguish the Type 63 armored infantry vehicles that formed a semi-circle around the enemy position. The tracked vehicles looked like baby battle tanks, but were designed primarily to shuttle ground forces and provide fire support, courtesy of a 12.7 mm turret-mounted machine gun. Presently, the vehicles were sitting idle, their crews sprawled out on the flat exterior surfaces. Some tents had been erected inside the protective circle and a few soldiers roamed the encampment, but aside from token patrols, there was no security. In the center of the camp, unguarded, sat the Mil Mi-8.

While still thirty yards from shore, the group split into two. King would be leading Rook and four of the guardsmen in search of the bomb and President Okoa. Queen, Bishop and the remaining guardsmen had a different goal.

Knight was somewhere outside the camp, providing over-watch with his sniper rifle. Like the chess piece that was his namesake, he moved and fought indirectly, unconventionally and often decisively. That was what he did best. Or at least it had been. While the rest of the team were nearing the limits of physical and mental endurance, Knight had gone somewhere into the dark territory beyond those limits. His wasn’t just a wound to the flesh. Some soldiers lost the will to live after an injury like his. Queen had no doubt that he could hold it together long enough to finish this mission, but she didn’t allow herself to think about what would happen after that.

She scanned the shore, verifying that there were no enemy troops present, then motioned for the others to follow her in. They low crawled out of the water and crept forward to the edge of the camp. “We’re set,” she whispered.

“Roger,” came King’s voice. “Standby.”

She glanced up the shore and saw the blue icon that marked King moving into position. Stealth was critical. If everything went as planned, they would get in and do what needed to be done without alerting the enemy. That was, of course, the optimal outcome. If they were discovered and the incursion turned into a pitched battle, the parameters for success were a lot looser. They included the intentional detonation of the RA-115 device, which would kill all of them, but neutralize the greater threat to the innocent civilians living along the shores of Lake Kivu.

Several new yellow icons began appearing in Queen’s virtual display. From their two respective locations, King and Queen could now keep track of most of the enemy soldiers as they moved around the camp.

“Set,” King said, after a few seconds. “Let’s do this.”

Queen kept one hand on Asya’s silenced Uzi, which King had given her, and held her other up in a pre-arranged ‘get ready’ signal. The weapon was now synchronized to her glasses, and she used it to sight in on the Congolese soldier wandering past the helicopter. She fired and a few seconds later, he was gone. Her hand came down and she, Bishop and the two guardsmen picked up and hastened forward. They stopped beside a tent, waited a few seconds, then made the final push to the helicopter.

The Mil Mi-8 looked to Queen like an ordinary military chopper — a Huey or a Blackhawk — that had gotten the stretch limo treatment. Behind the typical bubble window cockpit, the cabin morphed into a long fuselage with a series of round porthole windows. The main rotor, jet turbine intakes and tail rotor boom all sat perched atop the main cabin.

Queen and the others ducked down below the right-side landing gear pod and waited again. To get inside, they would need to reach the sliding door on the left side of the aircraft, which was much more exposed.

She crept to the rear of the craft and ducked under the tail assembly. There were just a few yellow icons moving here and there, but no enemy forces in the immediate vicinity. Now or never, she told herself, and stepped out into the open. She moved smoothly down the right side of the cabin and then swung herself up and into the interior.

There were two men inside, big, muscular Caucasians. The facial recognition software identified them as former soldiers and probable ESI mercenaries about a nanosecond before Queen put one silenced round in each man’s eye. She kept moving, sweeping through the cabin like an avenging angel. Maybe in a way, that was exactly what she was, exacting retribution for Joseph Mulamba’s death at the hands of men who belonged to the same murderous organization that had taken his life.

There was no one else in the helicopter.

Bishop came in a moment later, followed by the two guardsmen. The latter trained their Kalashnikovs on the open doorway. Bishop took a moment to check the bodies to make sure that they were as dead as they looked, then headed forward to the cockpit where Queen was waiting. He settled himself into the flight chair.

Everyone in the team had received some aircraft training, but Bishop was the only one of their number with actual time in the seat of a helicopter. Queen watched him study the controls. “You can fly this thing, right?”

His expression was typically unreadable but after looking around for a few seconds, he said, “I need your glasses.”

The request caught Queen off guard, but made perfect sense. Bishop was going to fly an unfamiliar aircraft, in enemy territory, in the dark. He should be the one with both night-vision and high-tech instantaneous computer access. But she had gotten used to the idea of having the glasses on, of being in constant contact with someone who could answer any question, of being able to see what no one else could see. She and Rook never would have survived the journey through the subterranean realm of the Ancients without them.

But I don’t want to give them up, she thought, and thinking that made her realize just how dependent she had become on the glasses. She nearly snarled at the small sign of weakness. She stripped the glasses off and handed them over, along with her synchronized q-phone. “I hope you’ll take better care of them than you did your last pair.”

As she moved back into the cabin to join the guardsman, she heard Bishop say, “We have the helo. Standing by.”

51

King scanned the open ground that separated him from the command tent. He had identified it as such during his initial survey of the camp, but he had no way of knowing if Favreau and General Velle were inside. If they were not, his plan for a stealthy surgical victory was finished. There would be no alternative but to fight.

He watched the tent for a full minute but no one came or went. When Bishop’s voice sounded in his head, reporting that the helicopter was secure, he knew he could wait no longer.

“Let’s go,” he told Rook.

They moved smoothly from the shadows and strode toward the tent. The guardsmen had removed their berets, and in the darkness, he hoped that anyone who happened to be looking in their direction would assume that they were just four more soldiers carrying out camp business. He and Rook could not blend in quite so easily, but they would be exposed for only a few seconds, and once they reached the command tent, it wouldn’t matter anymore.

One of the guardsmen stepped forward and drew back the flap of the tent, allowing King to move inside. As he crossed the threshold, several targets appeared in his virtual display. He brought the Uzi up and trained it on a figure tagged with red. It was General Velle.

It took a moment for the people in the tent to realize what was happening — more than enough time for Rook and the others to move inside. King kept his gun trained on Velle, but behind his glasses, his eyes were scanning the other targets. He identified two of the ESI mercenaries, both marked with red, and Gerard Okoa as well, but there was no sign of Favreau.

Damn it.

Comprehension dawned on Velle’s face, quickly transforming into anger, but before he could open his mouth, King moved forward, thrusting the business end of his Uzi into the general’s chest. “Tell your men to stand down.” King glimpsed movement off to his right, one of the mercenaries going for his weapon. King moved quickly, slipping around Velle’s bulk, putting the general between himself and everyone else.

The implied threat wasn’t enough to stop what happened next. The mercenary got his gun up, and then the tent erupted in violence, noise and smoke.

The mercenary was blasted off his feet by a burst from Rook’s Kalashnikov. The mortally wounded man’s finger had been in the trigger well of his MP5. A second thunderous report sounded and ragged holes appeared in the overhead canopy.

The guardsmen opened fire, gunning down the officers who had been standing to either side of Velle. The other mercenary ducked behind the table, seeking cover, and got off a shot that vaporized an unlucky guardsman, but Rook brought his rifle around and unloaded it in a sustained trigger pull. His bullets tore through the tabletop and stitched up the mercenary’s chest, dropping him before he could fire again.

The fight was over as quickly as it had begun, but King knew that the plan for a stealthy exit was now as dead as the men strewn about the tent. Over the ringing in his ears, he could hear shouts from outside.

Velle had jerked in surprise when the firing started, but the hard steel muzzle pressed to the base of his neck kept him rooted in place. Nevertheless, he remained defiant. “You are all dead men.”

“We’ll live or die together,” King said. “Your choice.”

When Velle did not respond, King gripped his collar and shepherded him through the carnage to the front of the tent. “Rook, open the door so that our friends outside can hear the General’s answer.”

Rook waited until King had Velle in position, and then drew back the flap slowly, keeping himself out of the line of fire. King nudged Velle forward until he was framed in the opening.

“Live or die?”

Just outside the tent, a ring of soldiers had gathered, their weapons at the ready. King could feel Velle quivering with rage, but after several tense seconds, he spoke. “Stand down.”

King didn’t wait to see if the command was heeded. He pulled Velle back inside and nodded to Rook, who let the tent flap fall back into place, hiding them from view.

“Smart decision,” King said. “Now, where’s Favreau?”

“I don’t know who you are,” Velle said, ignoring the question, “But if you put your guns down now, I will let you walk away.”

King swiped the Uzi’s suppressor across the back of Velle’s head, just hard enough to elicit a cry of surprise. “Favreau.”

“She is gone.” It was Okoa. “She left some time ago.”

“Left? Where did she go?”

Okoa shook his head. “I do not know. She had that bomb with her. She said she would destroy Lake Kivu.”

King felt his blood run cold. They were too late.

“She is bluffing,” Velle snarled. “It is a threat to force the United States to recognize my government, nothing more.”

“I do not think she was bluffing,” Okoa countered. “There is a madness inside her.”

“Where is she?” King pressed, giving Velle another meaningful tap with the Uzi.

“She would not do this,” the general persisted. “Destroy the very thing she desires, and kill herself at the same time? It is—” He stopped abruptly, as if recognizing the truth in Okoa’s words.

“Look who just figured it out,” Rook said.

Okoa, who had not moved from his chair during the entire incident, now rose to his feet and circled around to stand in front of Velle. “You know what this woman means to do. She does not care about you or what happens to our people.”

Velle stared back, his earlier anger giving way to uncertainty.

Okoa pressed the point home. “You know what will happen if she destroys the lake.”

The general swallowed nervously. He knew. “She has a boat. On the lake. She left… perhaps half an hour ago.”

On the lake. Half an hour. King’s mind turned over the information, calculating the dire possibilities. “Okay, here’s what’s going to happen. We’re going to walk out of this tent like ducks in a row, and get on the helicopter. You’re going to tell your men to stand aside and let us pass, and then we’re going to find Favreau and stop her. Understood?”

“Wait,” Okoa said, holding up a hand. He kept his eyes locked with Velle’s. “Patrice, for better or worse, you are now the leader of our nation. I have given you that authority and I will not challenge you. The safety of our people is your responsibility now.”

“Why do you say this?”

“Let these people go. Let them save us all if they can. But the country must not lose another leader.” He turned to King. “I have signed an executive order granting General Velle emergency powers. He is the legitimate leader of the country, and I ask you, as a representative of the United States, to recognize his authority. Take the helicopter and do what must be done, but allow the General to leave.”

The request was as much a surprise to King as it was to Velle. “I don’t have time to screw around here. And I don’t recognize his authority.”

“Then recognize mine,” Okoa insisted. “Are you here to help us, or to force us to do your bidding?”

King saw the passionate sincerity in Okoa’s eyes. He released his hold on Velle’s collar and, without lowering the Uzi, stepped around to face the general. The big man’s eyes were still blazing with indignation.

“Tick tock,” Rook murmured.

King turned back to Okoa. “Mr. President,” he enunciated the words, “right now, all I care about it stopping Favreau from blowing up the lake and killing two million innocent people. I can do that with or without any help from the General. The smart play is to bring you both along. I don’t have time to learn how to trust him.”

Okoa did not relent. “Patrice, let them go. I will remain with you, not as your captive but as your partner.”

“I…” Velle’s voice caught. He took a deep breath and then tried again. “I will agree to this.”

Every fiber of his being told King not to trust the man. Velle was a traitor to his own country, a megalomaniac bent on personal glory, willing — eager even — to sell the wealth of his nation and the future of its people to foreigners.

“We could just shoot him,” Rook suggested. “That would clear up this question of who’s in charge.”

King ignored the remark. Like it or not, Okoa was right. The Chess Team had come here to preserve the peace and protect the innocent, but the ultimate responsibility for both rested with these two men.

“Right this minute, the only thing that matters is stopping Favreau,” he said. “General, I’m going to walk out of here and get on that helicopter. If you have dealt in bad faith, whatever happens will be on your head.”

He heard Rook suck in an apprehensive breath.

“Although if we fail,” he continued, lowering the Uzi. “I doubt any of us will be around to regret it.”

Velle stepped away. He was breathing rapidly, almost panting, and still bristling with anger. He looked defiantly at Rook and the guardsmen who still had their weapons trained on him, and then he stalked to the tent flap. He grabbed hold of it with such ferocity that the entire tent shook as he pulled it back.

“Go!” he snarled.

King looked to Okoa once more and saw him nod.

In the long silence that followed, King heard the sound of the helicopter’s engines powering up.

52

Bishop listened to the standoff that was transpiring just a short distance away. He had completed a hasty pre-flight check, but had held off starting the turbine engines until the confrontation was resolved, to avoid revealing their presence. Escaping in the helicopter had always been the trickiest part of the plan. It would take at least a full minute for the turbines to reach optimal take-off power, a minute in which the entire camp would know that something was amiss. One or two well-placed bullets would spell the end of their bid for freedom. King had been counting on using Favreau and Velle as human shields to discourage anyone attempting to destroy the helicopter, but that plan was now dead.

Favreau was going to use the bomb. Bishop didn’t know anything about the woman, but he understood that much about her. If her threat of destruction had been merely that, a threat, a bluff, she would not have gone out on the water. There was only one reason for her to do that.

She had to be stopped.

Two million lives depended on it.

In a moment of absolute clarity, Bishop understood what he had to do.

He slid out of the pilot’s chair and poked his head into the main cabin. “King needs you.”

Queen didn’t hesitate. While she hadn’t been able to follow the confrontation in the command tent, she had heard the gunfire and was already poised for action. Bishop slid the door open and gestured for Queen and the guardsmen to move out.

As she hopped down, scanning the surrounding area, Queen seemed to remember that she no longer had her glasses. “Where is he?”

“He’ll find you,” Bishop said. He slammed the door shut and threw the combat lock.

He half-expected Queen to start pounding on the door, demanding to be let back in, but the only sound he heard was the tense three-way exchange between King, General Velle and President Okoa.

Bishop moved back to the cockpit and started throwing switches in sequence. There was a loud backfire and then the twin Klimov TV3-117 turboshafts started spinning. A low whine filled the aircraft, quickly rising in pitch and intensity as the main rotor began to turn. Bishop felt the airframe shudder with the torque. He tightened his grip on the collective and cyclic controls, and watched the RPMs build.

“Bishop!” King shouted over the din, and Bishop realized he had mentally tuned-out the standoff in the command tent. “We’re outside. Open the door.”

There was an undercurrent of dread in King’s voice. He knows, Bishop thought. Of course he knows. This is exactly what he would do, in my place.

Bishop said nothing. He slowly twisted the throttle, increasing the RPMs, and then, moving his hands and feet in a complex ballet of synchronized activity, eased back on the collective, tilted the cyclic forward, and held the rudder steady. The Mil rolled forward a few yards, and then Bishop felt that indescribable sensation of the ground reluctantly letting go. The helicopter continued forward, picking up speed without gaining any altitude. The right wheel clipped a tent, which was already flapping like a loose sail in a hurricane, and then he was out over the dark waters of Lake Kivu.

The Mil bore as much resemblance to the helicopters he had trained on as a luxury sedan did to a city bus. The controls were the same, as were the basic principles of operation, but there was a whole lot more aircraft to pay attention to. Fortunately, the flat surface of the lake was the perfect place for him to get familiar with it, provided that he didn’t nose into the water. As the helo picked up speed, he increased the collective pitch and started climbing into the night sky.

With each foot of altitude gained, his view of the lake and the surrounding landscape broadened, all of it lit up like daylight in the virtual display of his borrowed glasses. At just a hundred yards, he could make out Ile Idjwi, a long strip of land that bisected the southern half of the lake. He scanned the narrow channel that ran between the island’s western shore and the mainland. Nothing. He didn’t think Favreau would have gone in that direction. For maximum effect, she would head for open water.

He glimpsed a long streak of white on the lake’s surface, diffuse at its western tip, but sharpening to an abrupt point about seven miles east of where he flew. He zoomed in, and the dark object at the head of the wake resolved into the familiar shape of a rigid-hulled Zodiac, similar to the kind used by SEAL teams and professional dive service operators. A lone figure sat at the craft’s stern, operating the outboard engine.

“I see her,” Bishop said.

“I read you, Bish,” King said, and Bishop suddenly realized that it was the first thing King had said to him since he’d taken off. “Now, I don’t suppose you’d like to come back and pick us up so we can do this together?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Bishop replied, wondering if he should elaborate. He wasn’t accustomed to explaining himself, but what he was doing was unexplored territory for him. His way of dealing with problems was to tear through them, obliterate them, and if the problem was bigger than expected, all he needed to do was unleash his volcanic rage.

Bishop felt no rage now. In fact, he didn’t think he had ever felt quite so calm in his entire life.

53

Favreau wasn’t watching the sky, nor was she scanning the surface of the lake ahead. Her eyes were fixed on the display of a portable echo-sounder that showed a depth profile of the lake bottom. One corner of the display showed the actual depth in feet, a number that had been steadily growing larger with each passing second.

1180 feet. Not quite deep enough.

Because Lake Kivu was situated on a volcanic rift, two land masses slowly pulling apart like a spreading wound in the Earth’s skin, it was very deep. Its maximum depth was 1575 feet along the rift, making it one of the deepest lakes in the world. The methane reserves, which were created by microbial reduction of volcanic gasses rising out of the Earth, would be most concentrated in that deep zone.

1300 feet.

The lake bottom was sloping rapidly now. Soon she would be deep enough.

Deep enough to ignite the vast field of dissolved methane and deep enough for her to survive the aftermath.

Monique Favreau was not afraid to die, a fact which had more than once tipped the balance in her favor to avoid that outcome, but neither did she have a death wish. When she had conceived of this plan, she had run the numbers and decided that it was indeed survivable.

A generous estimate, one in which the bomb sank at the rather astounding rate of three and a half feet per second, gave her about eight minutes from the time she dropped it overboard until detonation. In eight minutes, she would be able to travel nearly two miles away from ground zero. That was well outside the blast radius of the device on dry land, and while underwater explosions behaved very differently, she felt confident that two miles was a safe distance. Similarly, the water would shield her from any thermal or radiologic effects. In short, she had little to fear from the bomb itself.

The effects of igniting the methane reserves were more problematic. For one thing, when the gas bubble came to the surface, it would create a suffocating layer over the lake, extending several miles in every direction. That was easily enough overcome with a self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) tank she had appropriated from the Kisangani airport fire brigade, but that was minor concern in comparison to some of the other effects that were likely to occur. For one thing, she had no idea if the outboard would still function in air that was oversaturated with CO₂. Also, there was a very real possibility that the sudden change in the lake’s chemistry might alter the specific gravity of the water to the point where the Zodiac would no longer be buoyant.

These possibilities did not concern Favreau so much as excite her. There was one outcome, however, that she considered unlikely enough to almost be dismissed entirely, namely that Marrs would be able to deliver on her demands. The game demanded that she listen to his dissembling, his request for concessions, for more time to gather support, but in the end she would do exactly as she had promised. She would teach him a lesson he would never forget. She would teach the whole world.

She cut power, allowing the Zodiac to coast forward, and took out her satellite phone, preparing to make that final decisive call. That was when she heard the low hum of a distant engine, which had been drowned out by throaty roar of her own outboard motor. She cocked her head, trying to pinpoint the source of the sound.

The running lights of an aircraft were visible in the sky to the west. Favreau picked out the red and green lights, on the left and right sides, which told her the craft was moving toward her.

It could only be the Congolese air force Mil, but what was it doing out here? Her mind raced with possibilities, none of which boded well. She could easily imagine Velle brokering some kind of deal with Marrs, a deal which required him to take possession of the RA-115 and perhaps even eliminate Favreau in the process.

The engine noise grew louder, rising in pitch as the sound waves piled up on top of her. The helicopter would be overhead in just a few seconds.

She set aside the phone and found the remote for the dead-man trigger, which she waved above her head in one outstretched arm. It was no longer wired to the bomb, but Velle would have no way of knowing that.

If that didn’t frighten him off, it would take only a second to pitch the bomb over the side, and then there would be nothing he could do to stop her.

“What’s he doing?” Queen asked, staring out across the lake at the lights of the retreating helicopter.

King silenced her with a cutting gesture. He knew exactly what Bishop was doing, and it was taking every ounce of his self-restraint to refrain from interfering.

Around them, the soldiers were being roused. Velle had given the order for them to abandon the camp, leave the tents where they were and board the armored infantry vehicles. Busy with the evacuation, the soldiers had ignored the intruders in their midst, allowing King and Rook to move through the camp to where Queen waited. King had warned the others to keep an eye out for Favreau’s remaining mercenaries, but the ESI men had disappeared, possibly secreting themselves aboard the tracked vehicles or simply slinking away into the jungle. The rebel fighters had been told to leave the area, but without motorized transport, their chances of surviving the worst case scenario were slim. This was true for Chess Team as well, but King had already decided that they weren’t going anywhere.

The virtual display allowed him to see what Bishop saw, and he watched in silence as Bishop scanned the lake’s surface, looking for Favreau’s boat.

“I see her.”

“I read you, Bish,” King said, his voice quiet. “Now, I don’t suppose you’d like to come back and pick us up so we can do this together?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” There was a pause then Bishop went on. “If the bomb is still wired to the dead-man trigger, all I need to do is take Favreau out from the air. That will detonate the bomb, but if Felice is right, a blast on the surface won’t be enough to cause the lake eruption.”

“The blast will also knock you out of the sky.” King felt Queen grip his arm. She couldn’t hear what Bishop was saying, but evidently she grasped his intent.

“That’s why it makes more sense for me to do this alone,” Bishop said in an unnaturally calm voice. “No sense in all of us getting killed.”

King felt numb. He wanted to argue with Bishop, tell him that he had a better idea, a strategy that would let them win without such a sacrifice. He considered ordering Bishop to return so that he could go instead. He didn’t have Bishop’s familiarity with the helicopter, but maybe Deep Blue could talk him through it.

I didn’t fight my way across three millennia so Bishop could die on the next big mission.

Even as denial and helplessness raged within him, King realized that he had been wrong. His obsession with protecting his friends had overshadowed what should have been his real purpose: to help them give their lives meaning.

Bishop was about to risk his life to save two million people, and perhaps — if Felice’s estimates were correct — the whole world.

King couldn’t think of anything more meaningful than that. He swallowed down the emotion that was thick in his throat, and whispered, “Godspeed, Erik.”

54

Bishop saw the woman in the Zodiac waving an object over her head. The warning was clear: back off or I’ll blow us all to hell. He looked past her and spotted the familiar olive-drab cylinder of the backpack nuke. The sight filled him with a sense of relief. Favreau hadn’t deployed it yet. If she blew the bomb now, only she and Bishop would die.

“Do it,” he murmured. “Save me the trouble.”

Her wave-off became more frantic, and Bishop knew that what he had to do needed to be done quickly. He eased back on the cyclic, allowing the helicopter’s forward momentum to take it the rest of the way, and used the rudder to maneuver to a stop directly over the little boat. He spun the Mil around until he could just see her through the transparent bubble window beneath his feet. Then, with the same calm detachment that had gotten him this far, he twisted the collective-pitch control, flattening the rotor blades.

The helicopter dropped like a stone and Bishop closed his eyes, waiting for the brilliant light that would—

There was a cacophony of metal crunching and shearing apart, bulkheads twisting, the rotor blades snapping off their axle. The Mil jolted violently and Bishop felt the flight seat collapse beneath him. A spike of pain shot up his spine as he was driven straight down by the sudden stop. His head snapped forward, glancing off the cyclic control stick, and the taste of blood filled his mouth, as his teeth were slammed together, removing a small piece of tongue. The impact left him momentarily stunned, but as that moment gave way to the next and then another, he knew that he had failed.

The bomb had not detonated.

It seemed impossible that Favreau could have avoided the crash without inadvertently releasing her grip on the trigger.

Was the bomb a dud after all? He couldn’t take that chance.

Wracked by pain, Bishop hauled himself up. In that instant, the helicopter started to roll beneath him, and he was thrown sideways into a bulkhead. As he struggled to move again, a wave of cold water blasted him back.

The calm that had guided him through what he had expected to be the last few seconds of his life fell into ruin, as agony and desperation reawakened the beast within.

He pulled himself out of the cockpit and into the half-submerged cabin. Water streamed in through dozens of cracks in the fuselage, but most of it was rising up through the sliding door, which had buckled inward upon impact. The pressure change in his ears told him that the helicopter was already sinking.

Bishop plunged both hands into the water and found the bent metal door. With a heave, he wrenched it out of its track and pitched it aside, then dove down into the water. He kicked away from the submerged aircraft and followed the line of bubbles trailing away from it, clawing his way back to the surface.

The Zodiac floated just a few yards away. The impact of the falling helicopter had evidently caused it to squirt free, like a bean from its husk.

While his kamikaze dive had not quite had the expected effect, it had done significant damage to the rigid-hulled inflatable craft. Though it was still afloat, several of its inner tube-like air cells had collapsed, allowing the lake to pour in.

As Bishop stared at the Zodiac, incredulous, he saw a hand appear on its far side, gripping the air bladder. Another hand fell beside it, and then a bedraggled Monique Favreau hauled herself up and out of the water.

Bishop saw that her hands were empty. She had lost the dead-man trigger in the crash, but the bomb had not detonated.

The bomb.

Bishop’s gaze fell on the canvas pack, still nestled inside the boat, held in place by its own weight. Favreau looked at it, too. Then she saw Bishop.

When their eyes met, her dazed expression hardened into a mask of triumph, and then with deliberate glee, she wrapped her arms around the bomb and lifted it onto the inflatable gunwale. It seemed to hang there for a moment, wobbling indecisively, as if trying to find a balancing point. Bishop waited for Favreau to warn him off with some kind of threat, but she had nothing to say. Instead, she gave it a final shove and sent it plunging into the depths.

Bishop, driven more by feral instinct than rational decision, slid beneath the surface and dove after it. With the water blurring the image projected against his retinas, it took him a moment to locate the olive-drab cylinder, sinking steadily toward the lake bottom. He pulled himself deeper, kicking his legs with the desperate ferocity of an animal fleeing a wildfire — only Bishop was chasing the very thing that would bring the flames.

And somehow, he caught it.

The pressure of the water squeezed his head like a vise, but he gritted his teeth through it and wrapped his arms around the sinking object as if, by simply seizing hold of it, he would fix everything.

There has to be a timer. The thought seemed to come from somewhere beyond him, and for a fleeting instant, he thought it was King, guiding him through what he had to do next. Radio signals don’t travel through water. She must have replaced the dead-man switch with a timer. Or some kind of automatic trigger. You have to disable it.

His head felt like it was going to implode, and his blood was starting to seethe with the buildup of acidic carbon dioxide. Even though he was no longer swimming, the bomb itself was dragging him deeper.

I’ve got to get it back to the surface, he thought, and he spun his burden around so that he and it were aimed upward.

But even with his tremendous strength augmented by primal rage, Bishop could not overcome the laws of physics. His furious kicking slowed the downward plunge, but he could not reverse it.

The timer, repeated the voice. That’s the only thing that matters.

He stopped struggling and instead reached for one of the clips that held the canvas flap in place. It fell away to reveal a red LED display — numbers, but inexplicably they were counting up.

101… 102…

It wasn’t a timer at all. It was a depth-gauge, ticking off the feet as it sought out the bottom of the lake.

He had no idea how to disable it, and no time to figure out.

Think. A depth gauge means it’s set to blow when it reaches a certain depth. So don’t let it do that.

How? I can’t stop it. It’s too heavy.

127… 128…

Favreau had chosen this place for a reason. It had to be the deepest part of lake. If he could get the bomb to shallower waters, even a few feet might make the difference.

Which way?

Favreau had traveled east. He needed to go west. But which way was that?

150… 151…

At the top edge of the virtual display, barely visible through the smear of water pressing against his eyeballs, was a tiny blue icon.

A chess piece.

He turned toward it, and hugging the bomb to his chest, he started kicking as hard as he could.

Something snapped inside his skull — an eardrum rupturing — and a spike of pain shot through his head, but strangely some of the pressure eased.

337… 338…

He no longer even knew what the red digits signified. All he knew was that he had to keep swimming, even though his legs burned and his chest was starting to convulse with the irresistible demand to draw a breath.

The numbers on the depth gauge kept changing and Bishop kept swimming toward the glowing blue chess piece, until he just couldn’t swim any more.

55

As dawn drew near, the eastern sky above the lake turned a haunting shade of purple, and Crescent II glided through it like a Valkyrie, looking for fallen heroes to carry off to Valhalla. In her hold, the Chess Team, minus one, gathered around King, staring at the image displayed on his q-phone. He had patched in the wing cameras so that they could all lend their eyes to the search effort, as the plane flew back and forth across the lake, looking for Bishop.

There had been no flash of light, no explosion and no cloud of invisible death creeping across the lake to suffocate them all. Whatever Bishop had done, he had stopped all of those things from happening.

King had seen it all, at least up to the point where Bishop’s glasses had stopped transmitting. It had happened so abruptly that, even after watching the playback several times, he still wasn’t sure what he was seeing. One moment, there was frantic movement, the backpack with the bomb framed in the foreground, moving slightly as Bishop swam, the bright red digits flashing as they ticked off the change in depth. Then, with the gauge showing 406 feet, the view swirled violently, focusing on nothing at all, and then just a moment later, went off-line. Bishop’s q-phone was still connected to the quantum computer at Endgame headquarters in New Hampshire, but the short-range connection between the glasses and the phone had been severed.

The q-phone showed only a little more movement in the seconds that followed, then stopped altogether. Deep Blue, in a solemn voice, told them that the q-phone was now 1364 feet below the surface.

“What does that mean?” Queen had demanded, even though they all knew exactly what it meant.

“He dropped the phone,” Rook said, with an unconvincing shrug. “Probably when he was swimming for the surface.”

Bishop had been holding his breath for nearly two minutes when the feed went dark. It would have taken him at least that long to swim back up. But King didn’t voice his thoughts.

“He was regenning,” Knight said. Despite being told by everyone that he needed to rest, he had risen from the cot in the medical bay to follow the search. His pallor was improving, thanks to a heavy dose of antibiotics and a regimen of fluid replacement, but he was still weak, feverish and, King thought, possibly delirious.

“Are you saying the cure didn’t take?” Queen asked, full of hope.

“He was standing right next to me when that mortar round hit, but was back up and walking in just a few minutes.”

“Come to think of it,” Rook added, “he was pretty torn up when he showed up in the lost city. But by the time we got back topside, he hardly had a scratch.”

King knew that wasn’t quite true. When he had joined the others at the cave entrance, he had seen Bishop’s wounds for himself. Some of them were bone deep. That Bishop had been able to fight on had nothing at all to do with the rapid healing properties of the regenerative serum Richard Ridley had forced on him, and which had been subsequently purged from his body. If he had been ‘regenning’ as Knight had suggested, those scratches would have healed completely in a matter of seconds. Knight was grasping at straws.

Again, he had not said this aloud, reasoning that, until they found his body, there was no reason not to hope. But after hours of flying back and forth over the location marked by the q — phone, hope was beginning to seem more like self-delusion.

The intercom crackled to life. “We’ve got a radar contact, bearing 230 degrees.”

King walked over to the two-way and depressed the transmit button. “Let’s have a look.”

The plane banked and started off on the new heading, and just a few seconds later, the target came into view, and the ember of hope that the pilot’s announcement had briefly brought glowing to life, fizzled out completely. He keyed the intercom again. “Take us down.”

The plane decelerated and came back around until it was directly over the sighting, at which point the pilot engaged the vertical lift thrusters and started a slow descent. After a quick visit to the weapon’s locker, King hit the switch to lower the loading ramp, and as soon as it was fully deployed, they all walked out onto it.

A blast of spray, stirred up off the lake by the thrusters, eddied back up to drench them, but no one backed away from the edge. A few seconds later, the bottom of the ramp was almost kissing the surface, right next to a partly-wrecked rigid inflatable boat, in which sat Monique Favreau.

Her eyes went wide when she recognized King. “So he was one of yours.” She had to shout to be heard over the roar of the thrusters. “I should have realized. I knew that you would be a worthy adversary.”

King’s only answer was to level the MP5 he’d taken from the dead ESI mercenaries the night before. The overpressure ammunition made it noticeably heavier in his hands.

Favreau stared at the gun and then nodded slowly. “You know how you were able to beat me, don’t you?” She raised her eyes to the others, meeting each gaze in turn. “Sacrifice. You are all pawns that he will sacrifice in order to win.”

“They aren’t pawns,” King said. “They’re family. That’s why we win.”

The roar of the thrusters mostly drowned out the sound of the shot.

The search went on for nearly two weeks. A deep water submersible was flown in, and a magnetometer sweep of the location of the q-phone led them to the unexploded RA-115. Further investigation indicated that the nuke had been set to detonate as soon as it reached 1400 feet depth. Bishop had succeeded in dragging it to shallower waters, preventing it from reaching that critical depth. He had given his life to stop the bomb from detonating and releasing the toxic cloud.

That was the reality that they could no longer deny.

Bishop, that stoic, immovable force they called brother…was dead.