The 6th Extinction

17

“Where’s the damned sun?” Kowalski groaned.

Gray understood the big man’s frustration. He stood in the pilothouse of the massive treaded vehicle and studied the landscape beyond its tall windows. Though it was midmorning, it was pitch-black outside. With the moon already down, bright stars twinkled coldly across a cloudless sky. Occasional ethereal waves of brilliance rolled across the starscape, in hues of emerald and crimson, amid splashes of electric blue.

This dramatic storm of the aurora australis — the southern polar lights — had chased them across the frozen expanse of Queen Maud Land during their overnight trek. The fierceness of the display reflected the severity of the solar flare that compromised satellite communication across Antarctica. Each dazzling dance of the aurora reminded Gray how isolated they were out here.

He studied the terrain for some clue to where they were going. After abandoning Karen and the other researchers at the lone remaining Halley module, Gray and his team had headed east in the large vehicle, trundling across a flat sea of snow and ice. According to the dynamic map display above the pilot’s station, their path paralleled the distant coastline. But out the window, there was no sign of sea or ocean, just a frozen world of white and blue. The only feature that broke up the monotonous landscape rose to the south of their position. A line of black craggy peaks poked out of the ice, marking the tops of buried mountains. Razor-sharp, the crags looked like a row of fangs and were in fact named Fenriskjeften — or the Jaws of Fenris, named after the mythic Nordic wolf.

Conversation drew his attention back to the control deck behind him — and to their host, Stella Harrington, daughter of the reclusive professor they were headed to meet.

“We actually designed our CAAT after the prototype built by DARPA,” Stella explained to her avid pupil.

Jason stood next to her at the helm station, looking at a set of schematics for their strange vehicle. He plainly could not get enough information about their unique mode of transport.

Or maybe it was his teacher.

In her early twenties, Stella was the same age as Jason, with a pixie blond cut, stunning green eyes, and curves that showed even through her heavy wool sweater and thick polar pants. She was also whip-smart, holding a dual master’s in botany and evolutionary biology, a challenging match for Sigma’s resident computer genius.

“I remember seeing a video of that DARPA prototype,” Jason said. “It was one-fifth this size. Can you still travel over water in this larger craft?”

“Why do you think it’s called a Captive Air Amphibious Transport?” Stella teasingly rolled her eyes. “Each individual tread of the belts is made of a buoyant foam, allowing us to travel over both land or sea. And out here, that’s important.”

Jason frowned, glancing out to the frozen expanse. “Why do you need to be amphibious out here?”

“Because we use the CAAT mostly—” She suddenly stopped, perhaps knowing she was speaking too freely.

It had been that way since they boarded. Any conversation was laced with gaps and silences. She still hadn’t told them what sort of trouble her father was in, only that he needed their help.

She looked away, her voice lowering guiltily. “You’ll see.”

Jason didn’t press the matter.

“But the CAAT is still useful over the ice,” Stella continued more confidently. “We can get her up to eighty miles an hour on flat terrain, and her length allows us to forge narrow crevasses.”

Jason studied the schematics. “The vehicle reminds me somewhat of Admiral Byrd’s snow cruiser, the big polar truck built just after World War II. Are you familiar with it?”

Gray remembered seeing a picture of that fifty-foot-long polar truck, capable of carrying a small plane on its back. The photo had been found in Professor Harrington’s files that had been recovered from DARPA’s servers.

“I… I am,” Stella said, again speaking tentatively, as if she were walking on thin ice. “My father believed the CAAT could serve a similar role.”

Jason nodded. “Makes sense.”

The kid cast Gray a surreptitious glance. Gray suddenly realized Jason had been quietly testing Stella, using information from her father’s files to see how open she would be with them.

Maybe he wasn’t so moonstruck after all.

“How many people can this CAAT hold?” he asked.

“We’re specked to carry a twelve-person team, including the bridge crew. But in a pinch, we could squeeze in another six or seven.”

It was why they had to abandon Karen and the others. Gray had seen the cramped quarters down below. It seemed the vehicle’s engine and mechanics took up most of the available space. The crew’s quarter held a tiny mess hall and bunkroom, and Stella had come with a full complement of British soldiers, all armed, expecting they might run into trouble. There was no way the CAAT could carry Karen and all twelve of her fellow researchers.

But that was never an option.

Stella made it clear that Professor Harrington would allow only Gray and his two men to be ferried across Queen Maud Land to his secret base. It seemed the man’s paranoia had only grown worse upon hearing about the attack. Stella had been en route by air when she picked up their radio chatter after Gray escaped from the destroyed base. She promptly turned around and sought out the CAAT, which was already out on the ice for a different mission. She made an emergency landing and rerouted the treaded tank for her rescue mission.

In a small concession, she had left two British soldiers with Karen and the others — along with rocket launchers and heavy weapons — in case the enemy managed to hunt down that roving module. It was the best that could be made of the situation.

Gray joined Jason at the helm. “How much longer until we reach our destination?”

Stella glanced over to the map on the dynamic positioning system above the pilot’s head. She studied it for too long, plainly trying to weigh how much to say.

Jason interceded, applying a boyish lightness to his words. “It’s not like we can tell anyone.”

She kept staring at the map, but Gray noticed the ghost of a smile edge her lips. “I suppose that’s true.” She pointed to the DPS screen. “See that small peninsula shaped like a half-moon? About twenty miles away. That’s Hellscape.”

“Hellscape?” Jason asked, bunching his brows at the ominous-sounding name.

Her smile broadened. “You misunderstand. Not hellscape. It’s Hell’s Cape. As in Cape of Hell.”

“Like that’s much better,” Kowalski commented dourly from across the pilothouse. “You’re not gonna sell a lot of time-shares with that name.”

“We didn’t name it.”

“Then who did?” Gray asked.

Stella hesitated — then finally broke down and spoke freely. “It was Charles Darwin. Back in 1832.”

After a stunned moment of silence, he asked the obvious question. “Why did he name it Hell’s Cape?”

Stella stared at the map, then shook her head. She repeated her noncommittal response from a moment ago. Only now her voice was frosted with dread.

“You’ll see.”

It doesn’t look that bad for Hell.

Jason watched the CAAT grind its way over the last mile toward the icy cape that jutted into the Southern Ocean. By now his eyes had adjusted to the darkness, seeing well by starlight and the glowing tides of the aurora australis in the dark sky.

Ahead, the curve of the shoreline — a mix of blue ice and black rocky cliffs — sheltered a small bay. At the bottom of the cliffs, waves crashed against a beach filled with boulders. This was one of the rare areas of the coastline free of ice.

“So where’s this base?” Kowalski asked.

It was a good question.

Stella stood behind the pilot, leaning down and whispering into his ear. The man slowed the CAAT to a crawl as the vehicle approached the coast. He guided the giant belted treads up to the edge of a cliff—

— and then over it.

“Hold on to something,” Stella warned.

Jason grabbed for the rail along one wall while Gray and Kowalski clutched the edges of a chart table.

The CAAT crept farther out until half its length jutted beyond the cliff. Then it began to fall, its front end tipping forward. Jason tightened his grip, expecting to plunge nose-first down to the rocky beach. Instead, the front treads hit a slope hidden below the precipice. The CAAT teetered, the back end lifting. Then they were trundling along a steep grade made of loose scree, heading to the boulder-strewn beach far below.

He let go of his hold and shifted forward to join Stella.

The slope looked man-made, likely bulldozed into place, made of the same loose stone as the beach. But to the casual passing eye, the construction would be easy to miss, especially sheltered by the curve of the cape.

At the bottom of the incline, the CAAT hit the beach and followed alongside the base of those towering sea cliffs, its treads churning across the sand. Ahead, a cavern opening appeared, cut like an axe blow into that ice-rimed rock face. The CAAT slowed and made a sharp turn toward that dark mouth. Its twin head lamps speared into the blackness. The tunnel ended after only thirty yards, blocked by a wall of cold blue steel. It rose five stories high and stretched a hundred yards wide. Along the edges, the barrier looked cemented into place with concrete.

As the CAAT entered, a massive set of double doors opened in that wall, pulling to either side on tracks. Bright light — blinding after the hours of darkness — flowed out, bathing over them.

“Welcome to Hell’s Cape,” Stella said.

Beyond the wall, a cavernous space opened, floored in steel but with natural stone walls. It looked like a cross between the deck of an aircraft carrier and the world’s largest industrial hangar. Another full-sized CAAT sat parked alongside six smaller ones, each half the size of their big brother. There were also two prop planes fitted with floats being serviced on the other side. Elsewhere, a trio of forklifts moved crates, while overhead a track-and-pulley system drew a shipping container along the roof.

The pilot drove their vehicle into that chaos and drew abreast of its twin, as the giant doors sealed behind them. The CAAT came to a halt with a heavy sigh of its diesel engines.

As soon as they stopped, Stella waved them to the stairs leading below. “Let’s disembark. My father has been anxious to meet you all.”

She led the American team down to the lower level and out a ramp that dropped from the stern. The air was unusually warm, smelling of oil and chemical cleaners. Jason gaped at the sheer size of this installation.

Stella spoke to a thin British officer who had run up to them, breathless, his eyes worried. Once finished, she faced them and pointed across the cavern. “He’s up on the observation deck.”

On the far side of this massive hangar, a giant steel structure filled the entire back end of the cavern. It climbed eight stories, with interconnecting stairs and bridges. The very top level held a row of tall glass windows.

There was something vaguely familiar about the layout.

Gray noted it, too. “Is that the superstructure from a naval ship?”

Stella nodded. “From a decommissioned British destroyer. It was brought here piecemeal and reassembled.”

Similar to the outer doors, the repurposed superstructure had been sealed along all its edges by concrete, like caulking a window into a frame.

“Follow me,” Stella said, turning on a heel. “Stick close.”

As Jason obeyed, he was distracted by her backside.

Kowalski caught him looking and nudged him with an elbow. “Just keep walking, kid. Nothing but trouble there.”

Feeling his cheeks heat up, Jason stared anywhere but at Stella. The group passed through staggered rows of sandbags, stacked waist high, with three machine gun mounts holding American-made Browning M2s, all pointed toward the outer doors.

Overhead, he watched the shipping container pass along the trolley tracks above and vanish into the superstructure. For the first time, he noted that the container had thick windows, like an armored ski gondola. And that a bubble on the underside looked distinctly like a gun turret.

Jason hurried to keep up with the others.

What the hell is this place?

Gray followed Stella through a door into the bottommost level of the steel superstructure. She herded them to a nearby freight elevator and hit the button for the top floor.

As it rose, Gray asked, “How long ago was this place established?”

From his perspective as he crossed the outer hangar, the construction of the British station had a certain slapdash quality to it, like somebody had built it in a hurry.

“Construction started six years ago,” Stella answered. “It’s slow work. We’re still refining and adding to it when budgets and circumstances allow. But the search for this place goes back centuries.”

“What do you mean by—?”

The elevator doors chimed open, cutting off his query.

She waved them out. “My father will explain… if there’s enough time.”

They stepped into what was once the bridge of the former destroyer, with a line of tall windows that overlooked the busy hangar space below. Most of the bridge had been converted and expanded into a group of offices centered around a warm library space. Persian rugs softened the steel floor, while wooden shelves rose on all sides, packed tightly with books. Elsewhere desks and tables held more stacked volumes, along with magazines and scattered papers. He also noted plinths holding various artifacts: chunks of fossils, odd crystalline rocks, older books that stood open, exposing hand-drawn biological diagrams or sketches of animals and birds. The largest tome was a massive volume of fanciful illuminated maps that appeared to be centuries old, the metallic inks glowing from the pages.

The renovation looked more like a museum, like something out of the natural history wing of the Royal British Society.

On the far side of the room, a thin distinguished man with salt-and-pepper hair stepped from a draped alcove between two bookcases. Though he looked to be in his late sixties, he strode briskly toward them. He wore gray pants held up with suspenders, polished shoes, and a starched white shirt. He paused only long enough to pull on a jacket that hung from a chair behind a broad desk that held a steaming tea service on top. He donned the coat quickly and stepped to greet them.

“Commander Pierce, thank you for coming.”

Gray recognized Professor Alex Harrington from the mission dossier. He shook the man’s hand, finding it bony but still with plenty of strength. He suspected this professor spent more time out in the field than in a classroom.

“Stella told me about your troubles over at Halley,” Harrington said. “I imagine our problems are one in the same. Namely Major Dylan Wright, a former X Squadron leader.”

Gray remembered the burly man who had commanded the assault team on DARPA, with his steely eyes and cropped white-blond hair. Back at Sigma command, Kat had identified the leader as Dylan Wright.

“How do you know him?” Gray asked.

“Wright and his handpicked team were assigned as security detail for the base in the early days. Then somebody got to him, or maybe he was a plant all along. I’m guessing the latter because he was always a major arse, came from some aristocratic family that had fallen on hard times, even carried around an antique English hunting pistol. Either way, we started to run into issues here, evidence of sabotage, along with missing files, even stolen samples. About a year and a half ago, he was caught on-camera but eventually escaped with his team, killing three other soldiers in the process, all good and loyal men.”

Gray pictured Director Raffee, executed in his own office.

“If he destroyed Halley,” Harrington continued, “I can’t imagine he’s not gunning for us here, especially picking such an opportune time when communications are down across the continent. And most worrisome, the man knows every detail about Hell’s Cape.”

“Why do you think he would be returning? What’s he after?”

“Maybe simply revenge. The man had always been vindictive. But I think he means to do far worse. Our work here — besides being sensitive and confidential — is very dangerous. He could wreak great havoc.”

“And what’s the nature of your research here?”

“Nature itself, actually.” Harrington sighed, his eyes tired and scared. “It’s best we start at the beginning.”

He stepped to his desk, waving them to crowd around him. He then pressed his palm upon the corner of a glass insert built into the desktop. A 40-inch LCD screen glowed to light, bringing the very modern into this Royal Society museum.

Harrington swiped and tapped its touchscreen surface. With a flick of his fingers, he scattered various photographs across the screen, as easily as if he were dealing physical cards on a game table.

Gray noted the file name that glowed near the top of the screen.

He had seen it before, remembering the acronym stood for Develop and Revolutionize Without Injuring Nature. It was the core conservation philosophy shared by Harrington and Hess. But he stayed silent, letting the professor control the story.

“It all goes back to the voyage of the HMS Beagle and the journey of Charles Darwin through this region. And a fateful encounter with the Fuegian tribesmen of Tierra del Fuego. Here’s an old pencil sketch of that first meeting, near the Straits of Magellan.”

He tapped and enlarged a photo showing the old British sloop and a group of natives in boats.

“The Fuegians were skilled sailors and fishermen, hunting the seas around the tip of South America and beyond. According to a secret journal written by Darwin and kept under guard at the British Museum, the captain of the Beagle obtained an old map that showed a section of Antarctic coastline, along with a hint of a possible region that was free of ice. Seeking to claim it for the Crown, the Beagle sought this location — but what they discovered so scared them that it was forever stricken from the record of that voyage.”

Jason studied the picture. “What did they find?”

“Bear with me,” Harrington said. “You see, Darwin could not let that knowledge completely vanish, so he preserved the map along with his secret journal. Only a select few scientists were ever allowed access to it. Most considered his story too fanciful to be believed, especially as the site would never be found for another century.”

“Hell’s Cape,” Gray said. “This place.”

“For most of the past century, thick ice shelves hid the true coastline. It was only after the recent decades of thawing that we were able to rediscover it again. Even still, we had to use bombs to break loose the remaining ice to reach this place and set up our base. It was only afterward that we came to realize we weren’t the first ones to come since Darwin’s fateful visit. But I’m getting ahead of myself.”

Harrington brought up more maps. Gray recognized the one drawn by the Turkish explorer Piri Reis, along with the chart by Oronteus Finaeus. “These old maps suggest that sometime in the ancient past, some six thousand years ago, much of the coastline may have been free of ice. The Turkish admiral who drew this first map claimed he compiled it based on charts of great age, some dating back as far as the fourth century b.c.”

“That long ago?” Jason asked.

The professor nodded. “During that time, the Minoans and the Phoenicians were astounding sailors, building giant oared warships that plowed far and wide. So it’s possible they had reached this southernmost continent and recorded what they discovered. Admiral Piri Reis compiled his chart from maps secured at a library in Constantinople, but even he suspected some of his most ancient source material might have come from the famed Library of Alexandria before it was destroyed.”

“Why did he think that?”

“He mentions that some of the maps he reviewed in Constantinople had notations that suggested an Egyptian origin. And according to archaeologists, the ancient Egyptians were plying the seas as far back as 3500 B.C.”

“So close to six thousand years ago,” Gray said. “When the coasts may have been free of ice. But what do these charts have to do with Darwin?”

“After returning to England, Darwin grew obsessed with discovering more about what he had encountered at the place he named Hell’s Cape. He collated ancient maps and searched records of great antiquity, looking for any other mention of this place. He also tried to understand its unique geology.”

“What’s unique about it?” Kowalski asked. “Looks like a big cave.”

“It’s much bigger than you can imagine. All of it warmed by geothermal activity. In fact, when Darwin found the mouth of this cavern, it was stained bloodred with iron oxides that steamed forth out of the opening, rising from a boiling sea of iron-rich salt water found deep below. On the other side of the continent you can find a similar geological formation — called Blood Falls — in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, near your American base.”

Gray could only imagine what that ominous sight must have looked like to those Victorian-era men aboard the Beagle.

“Darwin’s obsession overtook his life, so much so that it delayed the publication of his famous treatise on evolution, On the Origin of Species. Did you know it took him almost twenty years after his voyage aboard the Beagle to publish his groundbreaking work? We know it wasn’t fear of controversy that delayed the publication. It was something else.”

Harrington waved his hands over the set of maps. “It was this obsession. Additionally, what he discovered in these caves, I believe, may have even been instrumental in helping him formulate his theory: of species evolving to fit an environmental niche, of survival of the fittest being the driving force of nature. Such a theory is certainly proven out here.”

Gray’s curiosity piqued even stronger.

What is hidden here?

“How large is this cavern system?” Jason asked.

“We can’t say for sure. Ground-penetrating radar is useless due to the miles of ice that cover the continent farther inland. Any such surveys are further complicated by the fact that this system extends beneath the coastal mountains.”

Gray pictured the fanged ridge of the Fenriskjeften crags.

The professor continued. “But we’ve sent drones with radar equipment as far as we could into the system. I estimate that the tunnels and caves could span much of the continent, maybe reaching as far as Lake Vostok, or even the Wilkes Land crater, which opens up some intriguing possibilities about the origins of what we found. And we may have some corroboration of its massive size from historical sources.”

“What historical sources?” Jason asked.

“The Nazis… specifically the head of the German navy at the time.”

“Admiral Dönitz.” Jason cringed as soon as the name left his mouth, inadvertently revealing that they had previous access to some of these D.A.R.W.I.N. files.

But Harrington never responded. Maybe he assumed such knowledge was commonplace. Though Stella did cast the young man a curious glance.

Harrington continued. “Dönitz claimed the Nazis had discovered an underwater trench that tunneled through the heart of this continent, formed by an interconnecting series of lakes, rivers, caves, and ice tunnels.”

Gray recalled Jason sharing the German admiral’s words from the Nuremberg trials, of the Nazis’ discovery of a paradise-like oasis in the middle of eternal ice.

Jason spoke again, more slowly, plainly cautious after his slip-up. “You think the Nazis discovered this cavern system during the war?”

“They weren’t the only ones. Did you know the U.S. government set off nuclear bombs in this area? They claimed they were merely doing atomic testing, but it makes me wonder if perhaps they were trying to clean up a mess, trying to kill something they had inadvertently let loose. It was in that same area that a unique virus was discovered in 1999, one that seemed universally pathogenic.”

Gray remembered how that discovery had intrigued both Hess and Harringon, who described it as the key to Hell’s gate.

“It was Dr. Hess who recognized the unique genetic code found in that virus, something very different from our own. It was a marker that led us to eventually discover this place, though it still took another eight long years to find the mouth of this cavern system.”

“Until the continent melted enough to reveal its secrets,” Gray said.

“Precisely.”

Jason cleared his throat. “But how are you so sure the Germans and Americans were ever here?”

“Because—”

A loud boom shook the world, rattling the windows in their frames. Everyone initially ducked, expecting the worst, but as the superstructure held, Gray ran low toward the row of windows overlooking the giant hangar. He reached it in time to see one of the giant steel doors fall free of its track and crash into the space, flattening one of the parked floatplanes.

Black smoke billowed into the hangar. Shapes in snow-white polar armor rushed through the cover of that cloud.

It had to be Major Wright’s team.

Gunfire erupted.

A couple of British soldiers dropped, but one reached a machine-gun mount and began firing at the enemy. The chugging of the weapon was loud enough to reach the top of the superstructure — until a rocket struck the man’s position with a thunderous explosion.

“Let’s go!” Harrington said, tugging on Gray’s sleeve. “We can’t let them unleash hell upon the world!”

Gray allowed himself to be led to the opposite side of the bridge, chased by the sounds of the ongoing battle below. At the back wall, the professor ducked through the same set of drapes through which he had entered.

Gray followed, drawing everyone with him.

Beyond the drapes, a long passageway extended toward the rear of the superstructure. Their boots pounded along the steel floor. The tunnel ended at a glass-enclosed observation deck on the back of the station. It was attached to the cavern roof. From the gondola parked beside it, this glass-and-steel perch also served as a trolley stop for the overhead track system.

Gray reached the deck at Harrington’s heels.

As the view opened up before him, he drew to a stop, too stunned to move, to speak.

The same could not be said of everyone.

“Okay,” Kowalski said, “now the goddamned name makes sense.”

18

It’s like tracing the steps of a ghost…

Jenna followed Drake and Painter down the sweltering streets of Boa Vista, the capital city of the Brazilian state of Roraima. The temperature was already climbing toward ninety degrees, but the humidity had to be a hundred. Her lightweight blouse clung to her armpits and stuck to her ribs under the backpack slung over her shoulders. She had to keep tugging her shirt down as it tried to ride up from her shorts. She also wore a cap against the bright sun, her ponytail hanging out the back.

Drake and Painter were also dressed casually, as were the two Marines — Schmitt and Marlow — who trailed them, passing themselves off as tourists, a not-uncommon sight in the city. Apparently Boa Vista was the jumping-off point for any adventurous traveler who wished to visit the northern Brazilian rain forest, or the neighboring tablelands of Guyana or Venezuela.

The fact that Boa Vista was a gateway city also complicated their search for Amy Serpry’s last steps. From the forensics on the saboteur’s phone, they knew Amy had received a call from this city. Jenna heard the ringing of that phone in her ears. She flashed back to the woman’s ravaged body in the bed… and to Nikko.

She shied away from this last thought. She hated to abandon her partner in California, but her best chance of helping him was out here, hunting for answers to that monstrous disease.

The team had landed an hour ago, just as the sun was rising. From the air, the city was laid out like the spokes of a wheel. They had traveled by taxi down one of those radiating spurs and were now on foot to reach a small guesthouse off the main road. It lay nestled amid a quiet treelined neighborhood.

“That should be it,” Painter said, pointing toward a quaint colonial-style clapboard hotel midway down the street.

As they crossed toward the guesthouse, Drake silently signaled for the two Marines to drift to either side of the road, to covertly secure a perimeter.

Jenna headed with Drake and Painter toward the hotel steps. A wooden porch ran along the front, supporting flowerboxes bursting with blooms. There was even a small swing, currently occupied by a fat orange tabby, who stretched upon seeing them and paced along its length.

“Must be the proprietor,” Drake said, pausing to give the cat a scratch under the chin.

Caught off guard, Jenna let slip a small laugh, but quickly stifled it, blaming her outburst on the tension.

The hotel was their only concrete lead. While they knew Amy’s last call had originated from this city, they could not isolate it any further. Painter believed the caller had employed a crude satellite mirroring system to hide his or her exact location.

So that meant they had to put boots on the ground in Brazil, employing good old-fashioned footwork, which was fine by her.

Sometimes old school is best.

As Painter pulled open the door to the guesthouse, she adjusted her backpack, running her palm over the grip of the Glock 20 holstered on the underside of her bag. Painter had supplied them with weapons shortly after landing, found hidden in an airport storage locker. He never told her how that had been arranged, and she didn’t care to ask.

Though armed, she still felt naked without Nikko at her hip.

Jenna followed Painter inside, while Drake remained on the porch with the cat. As they approached the reception desk, which was little more than a raised bench, Painter scooped an arm around Jenna’s waist.

An older Brazilian woman, wearing a housecoat and a welcoming smile, stood up from a cushioned chair before a small television and greeted them. “Sejam bem-vindos.”

“Obrigado,” Painter thanked her. “Do you speak English?”

Her smile widened. “Yes. Mostly I can.”

“This is my daughter,” Painter said, drawing Jenna forward. “She is looking for a friend of hers, someone she was supposed to meet in the city. But they never showed up.”

The woman’s face grew more serious, nodding her head at their concern.

Jenna felt a slight pressure on her lower back as Painter urged her to continue. “Her… her name is Amy Serpry,” she said, putting as much worry into her voice as possible, which wasn’t hard.

I am worried…

“My friend has been traveling in the area for the past month, but when she first came here, she stayed at your beautiful hotel.”

With no way to trace the call in any greater detail, Painter had tried to track the last steps of the saboteur, searching bank records, tracing additional phone calls from her home apartment in Boston, even mapping the GPS log recovered from her Toyota Camry. It was like filling in the life of a ghost, bit by digital bit, constructing her steps over the past months.

The investigation also revealed more about the woman’s volatile youth, before she settled into her postdoctoral program and was hired by Dr. Hess. In her late teens, she had been part of a radical environmental movement called Dark Eden, which advocated for a natural world beyond humankind, promoting acts of ecoterrorism to make their point.

Then shortly after 2 A.M. last night, Painter had received a call from D.C. Jenna had been in Painter’s office with Drake at the time, both of them just released from quarantine. Painter had put the call on speakerphone. The woman on the other line — Kathryn Bryant — had made a breakthrough.

We found no hits on her U.S. passport, so we thought she was stateside all of this time. But then I found out she still kept her French passport.

Apparently, Amy had become a U.S. citizen seven years ago, but having been born in France, she still maintained a dual citizenship. Tracing that original passport, Bryant discovered that Amy had taken a flight five weeks ago, paid for in cash, from Los Angeles to Boa Vista. The timing and location couldn’t be a coincidence.

It hadn’t taken long to discover that Amy had used a French credit card, issued from Crédit du Nord, to pay for Internet services at this hotel in Boa Vista.

That thin lead led them to be standing here now, hoping for some additional clue to follow the steps of their ghost.

“I have a picture of her,” Jenna said.

She took out a copy of Amy’s driver’s license photo. Again, Jenna had difficulty looking at that smiling face, knowing the horrors the woman would unleash, remembering the state of her body at that Yosemite cabin.

The proprietor studied the photograph, then slowly nodded her head. “I remember. Very pretty.”

“Did she come with someone?” Jenna pressed. “Or meet someone here.”

“Someone who might know where she is now?” Painter added.

The woman chewed her lower lip, plainly trying her best to recall anything. Then she slowly nodded.

“I remember. A man come at night. He was very…” She struggled for the word and instead forked her fingers and pretended bolts were shooting out of her eyes.

“Intense?” Jenna asked.

“Sim”—she nodded—“but scary, too. Senhor Cruz no like him. He hiss and hide.”

Senhor Cruz must be the tabby out front.

If that nighttime visitor was Amy’s accomplice or boss, maybe the cat was a good judge of character. He certainly had taken a shine to Drake.

Painter stepped forward, pulling out a sheaf of photographs. “Maybe you could recognize him. These are some of Amy’s friends.”

He spread the pictures across the reservation table. They showed various colleagues and associates of Amy’s. But a majority of the photographs came from when Amy was young, from Dark Eden’s old website, which still had pictures of the early members of that group. It was the most likely connection. There was even one that showed a teenaged Amy smiling in a group photo.

The woman bent lower over the pictures, slipping on a pair of reading glasses. She shifted through them and gave each a good look. On the group photo, she tapped one face.

“This the man. He smiles in picture, but not when he was here. He was very”—she glanced up to Jenna—“intense.”

Painter retrieved the photograph and studied the man in the picture. Jenna looked over his shoulder. The suspect had ebony black hair, combed back from a handsome pale face with piercing blue eyes.

“Did you overhear them speaking at all?” Painter asked.

“Não. They go to her room. He leave, but I no see him.”

“And no one else came?”

“Não.”

Painter nodded and passed her a few bills of Brazilian currency. “Obrigado.”

She pushed the bills back with a shake of her head. “I hope you find your friend. I hope she not with that man.”

Jenna patted the woman’s hand atop the bills. “For Senhor Cruz, then. Buy him some nice fish.”

The woman smiled, then nodded, her fingers crinkling the bills off the bench. “Obrigado.”

Jenna headed with Painter out onto the porch.

“Did you learn anything?” Drake asked, waving for Schmitt and Marlow to close in.

Painter sighed. “Someone came to visit her, someone from her past, from Dark Eden.”

Drake glowered. “Then that must be our guy.”

“Who is he?” Jenna asked.

“He was the founder of Dark Eden.” Painter did not sound happy and explained why. “According to all reports, he died eleven years ago.”

Jenna glanced back to the guesthouse.

So it seems we’re still chasing ghosts.

“Isn’t the view beautiful?” Cutter Elwes asked.

Kendall wanted to argue, to lash out, but even he could not find the gumption as he stared beyond the wrought-iron rails of the balcony.

The sun was just cresting the rim of the tepui. The thunderstorm had cleared during the night, leaving the skies a dazzling blue overhead, but mists still clung to the summit, adding to the illusion that this was an island in the clouds. The morning light cast those mists into shades of honey amber and dusky rose. The plateau itself seemed to glow with the new day, glistening in every shade of emerald, while the pond was a perfect reflection of the cloudless sky.

It was tempting to let his guard down in the face of such inspiring beauty, but he remained steadfast. He sat stiff-backed across the table from his host, a breakfast spread between them: a kaleidoscope of colorful fruits, dark breads, and hot platters of eggs and lentils.

No meat… not for Cutter Elwes.

Kendall had picked at the offering, but he had no appetite, his stomach churned at what this day surely held for him. Cutter intended to make Kendall cooperate, to share his knowledge, but he would refuse.

At least for as long as I can.

In the past, few people successfully withstood Cutter, and Kendall doubted that reality had changed. He had envisioned all manner of torture during the night, the fear allowing him little sleep. Any thought of escape — of even throwing himself off this mountain — was dashed by his ever-present shadow.

Even now Mateo’s hulking form stood guard by the balcony door.

Trying to steer the conversation away from what was to come, Kendall eyed his escort. “Mateo… he’s native to these jungles. As is his sister, your wife. What tribe are they from? Akuntsu? Maybe Yanomami?”

From his days searching rain forests and jungles for extremophiles, Kendall was familiar with several of the Brazilian indigenous tribes.

“You look upon them with the eyes of a Westerner,” Cutter scolded. “Each tribe is very distinct, once you’ve lived among them. Mateo and my wife are actually members of the Macuxi tribespeoples. Their tribe is a subgroup local to this region. They’ve lived in these forests for thousands of years, as much a part of nature here as any leaf, flower, or burrowing snake. Their people are also unique in another way.”

“How?” he asked, hoping to keep the conversation along this track.

“The tribe demonstrates an unusual number of twin births, both fraternal and identical. In fact, Ashuu was born in triplet grouping. A very unusual one. She has an identical sister—and a fraternal brother, Mateo.”

Kendall crinkled his brow. Two identical girls and a boy. He had heard of such unusual cases — of women who gave birth to identical twins along with a fraternal third, called a singleton. While births like that did occur naturally, it was more often the result of the use of fertility drugs.

Kendall lowered his voice, curiosity getting the better of him. “Do you think Mateo being born a singleton… could it account for his unusual size?”

“Possibly. Maybe a genetic anomaly secondary to just a strange triplet configuration. But what I find more fascinating is the tribe’s unusual record of multiple births. It makes me wonder if there isn’t some naturally occurring analog to a fertility drug in the local rain forest, some undiscovered pharmaceutical.”

It was an interesting proposition. The rain forests were a source of a great number of new drugs, from a cure for malaria to some powerful anticancer medications. And there were surely hundreds of other discoveries still to be made. That is, if the rain forests continued to thrive, instead of being slashed and burned for farmland or cut down by logging companies.

But this raised another question.

“You know a lot about this tribe,” Kendall said. Even recruited them into working for you. “So how did you gain that level of cooperation? Especially up here. As I recall, most natives fear these tepui.”

“Not so the Macuxi. They revere these plateaus as the home of the gods, believing that the ancient tunnels, caves, and sinkholes are passageways to their underworld, where great giants pass on the wisdom of ages.” Cutter stared beyond the balcony toward the lower forest — toward a vast dark sinkhole that was visible in the daylight. “Maybe they were right.”

Kendall imagined Cutter thought of himself as one of those godlike giants, a keeper of great knowledge.

Cutter continued. “Did you know my great ancestor, Cuthbert Cary-Elwes, was a Jesuit priest? He lived among the Macuxi for twenty-three years and was greatly loved by these people. He’s still remembered in stories, a part of the tribe’s oral histories.”

Kendall suspected the calculating and persuasive man seated across from him had used that past to sway these local tribesmen to his cause. Did he marry Ashuu for the same reason, to cement that bond by marrying into the tribe? Kendall knew how fiercely these natives respected both family ties and old obligations, even debts that spanned generations. To survive in the harsh jungle, a society had to be close-knit, to watch each other’s back.

Cutter stood up abruptly, brushing his palms together. “If you’ve had enough to eat, we should get to work.”

Kendall had been dreading this, but he forced his legs to push himself up. If nothing else, he intended to learn what Cutter planned — then fight him as fiercely as he could.

Cutter led him back indoors and over to an elevator cage wrapped in French wrought iron, like something out of an old hotel. Once Kendall and Mateo joined him inside, Cutter pressed the lowermost button.

Through the bars of the iron door, Kendall watched the floors drop away. They passed through a vast library, then a parlor with a huge fireplace, until finally they reached the ground floor with its cavernous entry hall — but the elevator didn’t stop there.

It continued descending.

Walls of rough sandstone passed by outside, closing around them. They were sinking into the core of the tepui, into that labyrinthine world described by Macuxi myth. The cage fell for another twenty long seconds, then dropped into a brightly lit space.

Kendall’s brain took a few additional snaps of its synapses to make sense of what he was seeing. Gone were any signs of stone walls. Instead, a huge laboratory space opened ahead of him, shining with stainless steel and smooth disinfected, spotless surfaces. A handful of white-smocked workers busied themselves at various stations.

“Here we are,” Cutter said and led Kendall out. “The true heart of Dark Eden.”

Kendall stared at the state-of-the-art equipment. Down one wall ran a long series of fume and flood hoods, intermixed with shelves that held autoclaves, centrifuges, pipettes, beakers, graduated cylinders. Along the other wall stood huge steel doors that hid massive refrigerators or freezers. He also spotted the dark glass door of what must be an incubator.

But the bulk of the central space was made up of rows of workstations, holding multiple genetic analyzers, along with thermal cyclers for performing polymerase chain reactions and DNA synthesizers used to create high-quality oligonucleotides. He also identified equipment for carrying out the latest CRISPR-Cas9 technique for manipulating DNA strands.

This last scared him the most. It was a new technology, one so innovative that a novice could run it, but powerful enough that several research groups in the United States had already used it to mutate every single gene found in human cells. Some had nicknamed it the evolution machine. The potential abuse of that technology in the wrong hands already worried national security agencies, fearful of what might be released as a consequence, either purposefully or by accident.

How long has Cutter possessed this technology?

Kendall didn’t know, but he recognized that this lab far outshone his own in both size and sophistication. Additionally, more rooms branched off from here, expanding Cutter’s research to unknown ends.

Kendall found it hard to talk, his voice cracking. “What have you been doing, Cutter?”

“Amazing things… free from government regulation and far from oversight. It’s allowed me to reach the farthest fringes of the possible. Though to be humble, I would say I’m actually only five to six years ahead of some of your colleagues. But what I was able to achieve already… to create…” Cutter faced Kendall. “And you, my dear friend, can teach me much more.”

Kendall swallowed down his terror. “What do you want from me?”

“In your lab, you created the perfect eVLP, a hollow shell so small that it can enter any living cell. It’s brilliant work, Kendall.” He shook his head with respect. “You should be proud.”

At the moment he felt anything but proud.

“Your creation makes for an ideal Trojan horse,” Cutter said. “Anything could be put inside of it, and nothing could resist it. It’s a flawless genetic delivery system.” A scolding tone entered his voice. “But you engineered that empty shell using an otherworldly genetic blueprint, from something beyond DNA, didn’t you?”

Kendall tried to hide any reaction from Cutter’s intense ice-blue scrutiny. Did the bastard know what he and Harrington had discovered in Antarctica? Did he know the origin of the XNA used to engineer that viral shell?

Kendall decided it was time to take a stand. He straightened his shoulders, refusing to be swayed. “Cutter, I won’t share my technique with you. The method for making that viral shell will die with me.”

Cutter laughed — which chilled Kendall to the bone.

“Oh, no need, my friend. One of your young colleagues was kind enough to send me a sample five months ago, and I was able to reverse-engineer it. I’ve mass produced a supply that could last me years.”

Kendall struggled to keep up with his adversary. “Then… then what do you want from me?”

“It’s more about what I can do for you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I want to help you stop the plague that’s sweeping through California. Since you’ve been under my wing, your synthetic organism has spread, breaking out of its initial containment, pushed far and wide by recent flooding. It won’t be long until it’s everywhere, eating its way across your country — and beyond.”

Kendall had feared such an outcome, but now to hear it come true…

“But there’s no way to kill it,” Kendall admitted in a hushed, frightened voice. “I tried everything.”

“Ah, that’s because you are locked inside a box.” Cutter tapped his own skull. “Sometimes you must crack that shell of established scientific dogma. Look for new or creative solutions. In fact, I’m surprised you didn’t figure it out yourself by now. It’s been staring you and Professor Harrington in the face this entire time.”

Cutter’s words left little doubt that he knew about Harrington’s work. With every statement, hope died a little more inside of him.

“And what do you want in exchange for this cure?” Kendall asked.

“Only your cooperation, nothing more. While I was able to re-create that clever viral shell of yours, I’ve continued to fail to fill it, to turn that empty shell into a living organism.”

Kendall understood his frustration. It had taken his team years of trial and error to come up with that process. Afterward, he refined it personally and kept the technique guarded from everyone. But what weakened his knees now was the fear of what Cutter intended to seed into that viral shell, what he planned to unleash upon the world.

Cutter must have read the trepidation in his eyes and held up a palm. “I swear that what I intend to do will not kill a single human being or creature on this planet.”

Kendall wanted to doubt his honesty, but he knew Cutter was a man of his word. He had a strange sense of honor in that regard.

“But if you don’t cooperate, with every passing hour, the situation will grow worse in California. Soon it may grow beyond even my cure to resolve. Help me and you save the world. Refuse and the world will die by your own hands, by your own creation. That will be your legacy.”

“You swear you have a cure.”

Cutter kept his palm up, staring him in the eye. “I do, and I’ve tested it. It will work, but like I said, there may be limitations if you wait too long.”

“And if I cooperate, you’ll give me this cure, let me share it with the proper authorities.”

“I will. I have no desire to see your creation wreak such havoc. I want to stop it as much as you do.”

Kendall believed him. Despite his dark turn, Cutter remained an environmentalist. He would not want to see the world die. Still…

“Then why did you sabotage my lab?” Kendall asked, some of the heat reentering his voice. “Why kill everyone, and let that virus loose?”

Cutter stared at him as though the answer was self-evident.

Kendall suddenly understood and quailed at the sheer audacity of this man. “You did all of that as simple leverage, didn’t you? To get me to reveal what I know.”

“See, my dear friend,” Cutter said, turning away. “You’re already thinking outside the box. Now let’s get to work.”

But after taking a couple of steps, a cell phone rang from a pocket of Cutter’s safari vest. He plucked it out, spoke briefly in what must be the Macuxi language. The only sign of Cutter’s consternation was a single crease that formed in his perfect forehead.

Once finished, he sighed. “Seems like there is another problem, something that’s followed you down here from California. Somebody has been making inquiries where they shouldn’t be.”

Kendall felt a flicker of hope, but it died as Cutter shook his head, clearly pushing this new worry behind him.

“No matter. It’s a simple matter to quash.”

“The fool can’t be serious,” Painter said on the phone.

He paced outside a café near the central district of Boa Vista. The others were inside getting coffee and breakfast. He had already called Kat to gather as much intelligence as she could about Dark Eden’s former founder, a dead man named Cutter Elwes. While he waited for her to call back, he placed a call to the Mountain Warfare Training Center to get an update.

“It’s gotten bad here,” Lisa said. “Last night’s storm washed contamination well past many of the barriers. We’ve got pockets blooming miles away from the original site, connected by tendrils of die-offs along the drainage routes we weren’t able to successfully block.”

Painter pictured a cancerous black inkblot seeping in all directions across those mountains.

“They’ve pulled the quarantine zone back another twenty-five miles in all directions. Yosemite has been emptied out. It’s only a little after five in the morning here, but at daybreak a more thorough search will commence. Depending on what they find, a decision will have to be made. To make matters worse, more inclement weather is expected to hit over the next three days. Storm after storm.”

Painter had hoped for some break, but that didn’t appear to be the case. Mother Nature seemed determined to confound his efforts.

Lisa continued. “Fearing that this contagion could get a wider and deeper foothold in California, Lindahl has placed the nuclear option on the table. It’s seriously being considered.”

Painter suddenly regretted coming here.

I should’ve known Lindahl would try something stupid like that.

“How seriously is this option being considered?”

“Very. Lindahl already has the support of the team that’s been looking for a way to kill the organism. Their consensus is that the firestorm and radiation from a medium-yield blast could be the best hope. Models are being worked up, and worst-case scenarios are being calculated.”

“What do you think?”

There was a long hesitation before she responded. “Painter, I don’t know. In some ways, Lindahl is right. Something has to be done, or we’ll reach a critical mass out here and we lose everything. If the blast could be controlled to limit the fallout, it might be worth risking it. If nothing else, such a drastic measure could at least knock this agent back on its heels, buy us more time to come up with a new strategy.”

Painter still could not believe such an option was their only viable recourse.

“Or maybe I’m just tired,” Lisa added. “Not thinking straight. Josh has continued to decline. The doctors put him into a medically induced coma in an attempt to control his seizures. And Nikko isn’t doing much better. Like I said, something has to be done.”

Painter ached to reach through the phone and hold her, reassure her. Instead, he had to put more pressure on her. “Lisa, you have to buy us more time. Keep Lindahl reined in. At least for another twenty-four hours.”

“If we have that long…”

“We’ll find something,” Painter promised, but his words didn’t come out as convincingly as he had hoped. “If not our team, then Gray’s.”

“Has Kat heard anything from the others?”

“No, not yet. But she says the solar storm is dying down, and satellite communications will hopefully resume later today. So let’s at least try to hold back that nuclear option until we regain contact with Gray.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Me, too.

He said his good-byes and stepped back to the café door when a bullet clipped his arm and shattered the restaurant window.

He fell to a knee while more rounds strafed the front of the café. Glass exploded over him as he rolled for cover behind a trash bin.

He caught a brief glimpse of his team inside, ducking for cover — he also saw three men in black camouflage burst from the kitchen behind them, assault weapons blazing into the morning diners. Across the street, another trio of assailants came charging, rifles smoking.

Pinned down, Painter had time for only one thought, recognizing the direness of their situation.

Gray, you’d better be having more luck.

19

“Everybody get aboard the lift!” Harrington shouted, as he rushed to the gondola that hung from its tracks alongside the observation deck of the beseiged Hell’s Cape station. “Now!”

Gray had a hard time obeying, his gaze fixed to the dark netherworld beyond this glass-enclosed perch. Floodlights along the backside of the steel superstructure illuminated the immediate area below. But even those powerful xenon lamps failed to penetrate very far into that inky, cavernous blackness.

After fifty yards, the rock floor disappeared into a vast lake. The black surface bubbled and belched a yellowish steam, creating a toxic haze over the water. A higher shelf of wet stone hugged the lake’s right bank. Muddy tread tracks ran from the base of the superstructure out to that natural bridge.

Gray pictured those smaller CAATs parked in the hangar. He now understood the necessity for amphibious craft in the frozen arctic.

“Hurry!” Harrington barked.

The professor had opened the double set of doors that allowed access to the gondola and ducked through them. He crossed to a panel inside and hit a large red button. A siren ignited, blaring loudly, echoing from inside the steel superstructure and beyond.

Gray pushed Kowalski toward the waiting cage. “Go!”

Jason followed them with Stella.

Gray cringed at the noise as he climbed inside. As the doors closed, the din of the emergency klaxon died to a muffled ringing, proving how solidly insulated the gondola was.

“What’re you doing, Professor?” Gray asked. “What’s your plan?”

“To get somewhere safe.”

Harrington pulled a lever and the cage began moving. But the gondola didn’t head back through the superstructure toward the battle being waged in the hangar. Instead, it rode forward, out into that vast cavern.

Ducking a bit and craning his neck, Gray saw the black steel tracks continuing along the cavern roof, supported by trestles in places to create a relatively even run.

“Where are we going?” he asked as he straightened.

“To the Back Door.” Harrington waved ahead with one arm; his other hand remained on the long red lever. “It’s a substation about four miles out. It leads back to the surface, just beyond the Fenriskjeften crags.”

Gray pictured that line of jagged peaks near the coast.

“There’s a radio there,” Stella added. “And a garaged CAAT.”

“So we’re just going to run?” Kowalski asked.

“No.” The professor pointed to the red button he had struck. “I just sounded a general evacuation alarm. The British forces will hold off Dylan Wright’s commandos for as long as possible, but after thirty minutes, they know to run. To get clear of this area.”

“Why?” Gray asked.

“The entire backside of this station is packed full of bunker buster bombs, including an American-made thirty-thousand-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator. It will destroy the base and seal up the mouth of the cavern system, bottling up what’s down here.”

“When’s it set to blow?”

Harrington looked worried.

Stella answered, “It can only be deployed from the Back Door. Only my father has the blast code.”

Gray frowned. So the British forces will flee out the front while we sneak out the back door, blowing everything behind us. What the hell required such a level of security?

Before he could ask, Gray felt a mother of all headaches flaring behind his eyes — but it wasn’t only him.

Kowalski clutched the sides of his head, groaning. “Motherfu—”

Jason leaned on his knees, looking ready to vomit.

Harrington spoke through a tight jaw. “We’ll be through the worst of it in another few seconds.”

Gray breathed deeply, close to losing his breakfast, too. Then slowly the pain subsided; his back molars stopped vibrating in his skull. He could now guess the source of the sudden agony.

“LRAD?” he asked.

Long Range Acoustic Device.

Harrington nodded. “We have a series of sonic cannons pointed continually into the cavern at the edge of the station. As a buffer to keep everything as far back as possible. We’ve found a mix of ultrasonic and infrasonic frequencies to be an effective deterrent down here. Better than guns.”

Gray leaned a hand against the wall, steadying himself, glad the gondola was so well insulated. He could only imagine the raw intensity of that sonic deterrent outside.

Jason pointed between his feet to a glass hatch in the floor. Through the window, a chair could be seen below, bolted inside an enclosed undercarriage canopy. A weapon with a large conical dish was racked in front of the seat.

“That’s another LRAD cannon, isn’t it?” Jason asked.

Stella nodded. “You can also swap it out for a machine gun, if need be.”

“Once we’re beyond the buffer zone,” Harrington warned, “we may need both to protect the lift if we run into any serious trouble.”

Trouble from what?

Out the windows ahead of them, the world was pitch-black. Behind the gondola, the station’s lamp-lit bulkheads continued to recede into the darkness, reflected in the boiling lake. Then the tracks followed a bend in the cavernous tunnel and even that last light vanished.

Harrington stepped to a cabinet and opened a door. From hooks inside hung a row of heavy goggles — night-vision gear. “Put these on. I’m going to extinguish our cabin lights before we attract any attention. Then I’ll ignite our exterior infrared lamps.”

Gray tugged the gear over his eyes as Harrington doused the lights inside the gondola. His goggles picked up the small specks of light from diodes on the conveyor’s control panel, but beyond the windows, the world remained dark. In this sunless and moonless underworld, even night-vision was useless.

Then the professor kicked on the exterior lamps, and beams of infrared penetrated that endless darkness. Though the wavelength was invisible to the naked eye, the goggles turned those beams into the brightest spotlights — illuminating what the darkness had hidden a moment ago.

Gray gaped as the view opened ahead of him.

Kowalski simply shook his head. “Something tells me we’re gonna need bigger guns.”

Jason pressed his palms against the glass, taking in the sights as the armored gondola slowly rode its rails across the roof of this new world.

“Have you ever seen anything like this?” Stella asked.

“No… not like this.”

The cavernous tunnel was tall enough to hold the Statue of Liberty without her torch ever scraping the rows of stalactites that hung from the roof like jagged fangs. Below, a snaking river slowly churned, fogged in steam. All around the gondola, a forest of massive columns formed a maze.

As their cage passed one, Jason noted stone branches jutting up from the pillar and joining the roof like support buttresses. Up close, the pillar’s rough surface appeared strangely corrugated, almost like bark.

Then he looked even closer.

“It is bark,” he suddenly realized aloud, glancing back as the column receded behind him.

“We’re moving through a petrified forest,” Stella said. “Remnants of a lost time when Antarctica was green and flush with life.”

“They’re Glossopteris, semitropical trees,” Harrington said. “Over the past decades, archaeologists have uncovered three such ancient forests on the surface of the continent. Massive petrified stumps with scatters of fossilized leaves around them.”

“But nothing as well preserved as down here,” Stella added with a small note of pride.

Jason remembered a detail about Darwin’s tale of the ancient Fuegian map: how on that chart, this place was marked by a grove of stylized trees. It was that promise of green life in this icy land that drew the Beagle to its ill-fated journey here.

Could this be that forest? Were these petrified trees what the Fuegians had actually drawn on their map?

Fascinated, Jason continued his bird’s-eye survey of the terrain. As he watched the river below, something large humped out of the water and vanished. At first he thought it was a trick of the eye; then another appeared, and another.

“Something’s in the water,” he said.

Gray joined him. “Where?”

Before Jason could point, a large pale crustacean-like spider climbed out of the shallows and up onto a bank. It was the size of small calf, with a pair of large pincers in front and spikes along its carapace. Then those spikes scurried off the creature’s back and appeared to be scouring the black algae from the damp rocks.

A dark shadow swooped down from a hidden nest among the stalactites and landed atop the tips of its clawed leathery wings. A sharp beak speared down and plucked up one of those small feeders, then stabbed down for another.

The larger crustacean defended its young and scrabbled after the attacker, its claws snapping. Avoiding a fight, those wings snapped out again, and with a single beat, the aerial predator burst upward. It flew in a wide arc, passing close to the gondola. It had a six-foot wingspan, its body covered in fine black scales; its head looked crocodilian, except for the sword-like beak.

“That’s a smaller example of the species,” Harrington commented. “We named them Hastax valans, Latin for flying spear. We’ve encountered individuals three times that size. That pale lobster is Scalpox cancer or chiseled claw.”

“What else is out there?” Commander Pierce asked.

“So much more, an entire complex ecosystem. We’re still trying to classify much of it. So far, we’ve identified over a thousand new species, from the lowly Lutox vermem—”

“A type of mudworm,” Stella interjected.

“—to the elephant-sized Pachycerex ferocis.”

Jason could not keep the mix of wonder and horror from his voice. “Amazing.”

Gray knew Harrington’s partner — Dr. Hess — had been scouring the globe for examples of shadow biospheres, looking for radical new forms of life.

Looks like he found it in spades here.

“This is the first environment of its kind,” Harrington declared. “A unique xenobiological ecosystem.”

Jason frowned. “Xenobiological?”

Stella explained, revealing her master’s degree in evolutionary biology. “It’s an ecosystem based on a biological system foreign to the rest of life on this planet. It’s why we established a taxonomic classification system that incorporates an X into all the Latin names, to distinguish the various new species as xenobiological.”

Jason could not take his gaze from the sights below.

Outside the gondola, the flying predator had circled and looked ready to dive again upon that pale Scalpox and its young. It swept low over the water, stirring the mists. From the river — as if drawn upward by its wake — luminous globes the size of bowling balls shot upward. Jason shifted off his night-vision goggles for a moment. The globes scintillated in electric shades in the darkness, reminding him of the bioluminescent creatures found in deep-sea trenches. Only these glowing lures rose from larger bodies hiding underwater: huge eel-like creatures undulating through the river.

The aerial predator flew through a patch of those globular balloons, tangling and snagging them with its wings. Where they touched, flesh sizzled and burned. The Hastax writhed in agony and tumbled into the water. Through the dark surface, Jason watched those monstrous eels close in on their prey.

The attack reminded him of the hunting technique of an anglerfish, which used a similar bioluminescent lure to hunt for food.

Stella named this new predator, her voice frosted by dread. “Volitox ignis.”

Jason had taken enough Latin to guess the translation. “Floating fire.”

“They’re one of the nastier inhabitants down here. With their python-like bodies, they’re very fast underwater, capable of casting out those burning tethers to nab prey out of the air or off the riverbank. They’re also incredibly prolific, giving birth to great volumes of carnivorous young. To make matters worse, their offspring are born with vestigial limbs for climbing onto land. There’s no escaping them.”

“The Volitox are also very intelligent,” Harrington added, looking equally grim. “They hunt in packs, employing a multitude of ambushing techniques. Even our sonic weapons are useless against them.”

Stella scowled. “We lost three men in our early expeditions… before we knew better.”

“It’s a harsh, alien world down here,” Harrington conceded. “The survival strategies that have evolved are clever and terrifying.”

Jason stared down at the waters, gone black again, hiding what lurked below.

Sounds like we could use some clever survival strategies of our own.

“They’re gone, sir,” his second-in-command stated.

“I can see that.”

Major Dylan Wright stared at the empty tracks leading out from the observation deck. Fury heated his face, burning as hotly as the bullet graze across his upper thigh. He had lost two men during the raid, all in a rushed attempt to reach Harrington before he could escape.

Bertram and Chessie, he reminded himself, intending to honor the pair when the time was right. But he still had another fifteen men under his command, looking to him for the next move.

“The bombs,” Dylan asked. “What’s the word from Gleeson?”

His second-in-command, a muscular Scotsman named McKinnon, shook his head. “Looks like the base installed a new system after we left. Gleeson might be able to work out a way to defuse them, but not likely in the next half hour.”

It won’t take Harrington that long to reach the Back Door.

Dylan cursed the fact that his team’s activities were exposed sixteen months ago, requiring a fast escape from Hell’s Cape to avoid capture. It had made the rest of his mission troublesome and problematic. Luckily he had the foresight to rig the ice shelf supporting the Halley station with incendiary bunker busters of his own. Hopefully it had taken out the American team. He pictured the man firing at the Twin Otter, smoking out the plane’s starboard engine. His team had barely made it back to their base. Still, they had maintained their schedule.

Until now…

“I could send a team overland,” McKinnon offered. “We could ambush them out there.”

“If the base upgraded the security here, they would’ve done the same out there.”

Besides, the Back Door substation was on the far side of the forbidding coastal crags. No team could get there in time to stop Harrington from blowing this place to kingdom come.

And that must not happen.

At least not before I’ve completed my mission.

Failure was not a word in his employer’s vocabulary. Cutter Elwes had paid dearly for his team’s services, including placing hefty bribes and pulling the right strings to get his group assigned to the station as a security detail. Since then they had been feeding Elwes intelligence about this place for years, obeying his every instruction.

And now the endgame was in play.

If successful, the windfall for his team would set them up for life.

McKinnon shifted his feet. “What’s the next step?”

He ran various scenarios through his head, staring out into the dark cavern. Harrington had hightailed it out of here, like a fox before his father’s hounds. But Dylan had never failed in a hunt — not on his family’s country estate, and certainly not now.

His palm came to rest on the holstered nineteenth-century Howdah pistol, one of the rare treasures still in his possession, despite the family falling on hard times these past decades. The gun was a double-barrel weapon, over eighteen inches long, loaded with custom-made .577 cartridges and fired with rebounding twin hammers. The pistol dated back to the time of the British raj, when his family once lived as kings in India. Its name—howdah—came from the saddle worn by elephants, and the large-bore weapon had been used back then to defend against tiger attacks or to hunt large game.

He had even tested the gun here, against the denizens of Hell’s Cape.

His fingers tightened on the grip, preparing for yet another hunt through these dark caverns.

“Gear the men up,” he said. “Load the packages into the CAATs. We’re going after them. Top speed.”

“The professor has a good lead on us,” McKinnon warned.

Dylan sneered, appreciating the challenge.

“Then we’ll have to do something about that.”

A heavy silence had settled across the gondola, each passenger lost in his or her thoughts. All the while, Gray watched the mileage indicator click down. They were only a quarter of the way to this secondary station, the Back Door.

He studied the world beyond their meager refuge. With a long way still to go, he wanted as much information as possible before they reached the end of the line.

“So where did this all come from?” he finally asked, breaking the tense silence. “How could this ecosystem have survived down here for so long without any sunlight?”

“I don’t have an answer to your first question,” Harrington said, “but I have my theories. As to how this ecosystem could have survived, the situation here is not all that different from those oases of life found growing and thriving alongside deep-sea hydrothermal vents. No one expected to find life at those depths, in that eternal darkness, at such extreme temperatures. But nature found a way. The same down here, but on a grander scale.”

Harrington waved a hand to indicate the steaming water. “The ecosystem down here is not driven by the sun, or photosynthesis, but by chemicals — by chemosynthesis. It all starts with chemoautotrophic bacteria that feed on hydrogen sulfide or methane, chemicals continually spewing into this cavern system from all of the local geothermal activity. Those bacteria grow into thick mats — serving a similar role as the grasses of the sunlit world above — fueling the web of life found down here.”

Stella cautioned, “But even chemosynthesis cannot fully explain how all this formed. Like my father mentioned, life down here is xenobiological, foreign to anything seen on the surface.”

“How is it specifically foreign?” Jason asked.

“The life found in this ecosystem is not based on DNA, but on a variant using a different genetic backbone, namely XNA.”

Gray had heard the reports out of California, about how the synthetic organism released by Dr. Hess was an organism engineered with XNA, replacing the normal sugar molecule in DNA with some toxic combination of arsenic and iron phosphate. Here must be the source of that unique genetic element.

“Why does XNA make such a difference?” he asked.

“It makes all the difference,” Harrington expounded. “Richard Dawkins described our DNA as selfish, that our genes are driven by evolutionary pressures to multiply themselves above all else. If I had to describe XNA, I would depict it as predatory.”

“Predatory?”

“From our studies of this natural landscape — and verified in labs that have synthetically created versions of XNA — these genes are opportunistic and highly mutagenic, far more than regular DNA, allowing for accelerated evolution. XNA genes are not merely selfish but focused toward total domination. Even the phenotypic expression of those genes reflects that core drive, creating organisms that are extremely hardy, resilient, and highly adaptable. Expose them to any environmental niche, and they will evolve a way to take it over.”

“And Dr. Hess was experimenting with such a volatile genetic code?” Gray asked. No wonder his creation has proven so hard to kill.

“I warned him not to pursue this line of inquiry, or to at least conduct his experiments here, but he would not listen.”

“What was he trying to do?”

“Kendall believed he could harness the best features of XNA, build it into a shell that could be used to vaccinate endangered species — maybe all species — to make them hardier, more adaptable, able to withstand the global forces that are driving us toward this sixth mass extinction.”

“And that’s possible, to incorporate XNA into our DNA?”

“Yes. In labs working with XNA now, they’ve already proven that xenobiological products could replace almost any living organism. So yes, it’s theoretically possible. But there’s also great risk.”

Gray only had to stare out at the savage world below the gondola to recognize that truth. “Professor, you also said you had a theory about how life might have started down here.”

Harrington nodded. “It’s only a conjecture at this point. If I had more time, I might be able to substantiate it.”

“What’s your theory?”

“Do you remember how I mentioned this cavern system might cross a majority of the continent?”

“Through an interconnecting system of rivers, lakes, and ice tunnels.”

“Don’t sound so doubtful. While the surface of Antarctica is frozen and seemingly unchanging, it’s warm and moist miles below, forming marshes and wetlands that have been hidden from the world for millennia. Take Lake Vostok, for example. It’s as large as any of your Great Lakes and twice as deep and has been sealed away for fifteen million years. Then there’s the amount of geothermal activity occurring below the ice. Did you know that one of my colleagues, a glaciologist with the BAS, discovered an active volcano almost half a mile under the Western Antarctic ice sheet, with evidence of lava flowing below? That’s how strange and wonderful the true face of this continent is.”

“So if this cavern system does transverse the continent, how does it explain how this ecosystem originated?”

“If you extrapolate what we’ve successfully mapped so far, the general direction of these tunnels seems to point toward a massive crater on the far side of East Antarctica, in a region called Wilkes Land. It was discovered back in 2006 and measures three hundred miles across. To create an impact crater that size, it’s estimated that the meteorite would have been four times larger than the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. Some believe that impact here may have triggered the earth’s third mass extinction: the Permian-Triassic extinction that wiped out almost all marine life and two-thirds of all terrestrial life.”

“Okay, but why’s that significant?”

“First, that meteoric impact could have cracked this cavern system into being. Then as most of the planet’s species died off, some seed of XNA could have taken root in this empty ecosystem and grown to fill it, preserved in perfect isolation. But this scenario raises one other intriguing possibility.”

“What’s that?”

Surprisingly the answer came from Jason. “Panspermia.”

Harrington smiled. “Very good.”

Gray was familiar with the theory of panspermia, that life could have come to this planet on the back of a meteor, carried from afar to seed this world.

“Keep in mind that it would take a tough and resilient molecule to survive that long journey through the void of space,” Harrington said.

“Like XNA,” Gray said.

“Precisely. But as I said, it’s only a conjecture. Though an intriguing one, I would say. Could this shadowy biosphere be a peek into an alien landscape, or at the very least, an alternate genetic pathway to life?”

Before this could be debated, the gondola rocked as it began to glide down a gentle slope, like an alpine ski lift descending back to earth.

It was too soon to be approaching the substation.

“It’s the Squeeze,” Harrington reassured him.

Gray stared out the window. Ahead, the cavernous tunnel tightened toward a bottleneck. The gondola swept into the narrower passageway. The cage now rode only three stories above the churning river. The banks to either side gave off a soft phosphorescence, that glow seeping into the water’s edges, too, revealing shelves of strange bivalves and flashes of darting shapes in the shallows. Life teemed in those hot waters.

Harrington drew his attention forward. “Earlier you asked how I knew others had discovered these tunnels before our team. Look there.”

The gondola rode around a bend in the Squeeze, and a gray shape appeared ahead, tall enough to scrape the roof. It was the conning tower of a sub. A line of broken stalactites marked the vessel’s passage this far into these narrows. A majority of the submarine’s cigar-shaped bulk was visible above the surface of the river, looking like a beached iron whale.

As their cage drew abreast of the old ship, Gray noted an emblem on the tower’s side.

It was a black cross with a white submarine over it.

“German,” Harrington said. “From the tenth flotilla of the Kriegsmarine.”

A Nazi U-boat.

“These tunnels must’ve been more deeply flooded at one time,” Harrington explained. “From evidence we found, the Germans blasted their way into here with torpedoes, but they could only penetrate so far. Afterward, a roof cave-in sealed the way behind them and was frozen over. Even if the crew tried continuing on foot or by rowboat, I can’t imagine they got very far.”

As the gondola drifted quietly past this somber grave marker, Gray could only imagine the terror of those submariners trapped here. Thankfully, the conning tower vanished into the darkness behind them, and their cage began to rise, climbing out of the Squeeze.

Before it could get very far, the gondola lurched to a stop, swinging from its overhead tracks for a frightening breath. Harrington worked the red lever, trying to get them moving again.

“What’s wrong?” Gray asked.

Harrington glanced back in the direction they had traveled. “Dylan Wright. He must have reached the control box.”

“Can you get us moving again?” Gray asked.

Without his laying a hand on the controls, the gondola began to run backward, returning slowly toward the base.

Wright must be trying to reel us back in.

Harrington reached overhead to a red plastic handle and pulled hard. A loud grinding pop sounded and the gondola swung to a stop again. “I disengaged us from the pulley cable.”

The professor’s eyes shone brightly with terror.

They were now dead in the water.

20

Panicked at the sudden ambush, Jenna huddled behind an overturned table as gunfire ripped apart the café.

A moment ago, a trio of masked men had burst out of the kitchen, rifles at their shoulders. At the same time, the front plate glass window had shattered behind them, blown out by someone shooting from the street.

It was only because of Drake’s fast reflexes she was still alive. As the first shots rang out, Drake had kicked the chair out from under her, then caught her as she fell and rolled her body under him. One of his fellow Marines — Marlow — tipped the heavy wooden table on its side, giving them temporary shelter. His partner, Schmitt, fired at the assailants.

“Painter…” Jenna gasped.

The director was still out on the street.

“On it,” Drake said. “Stay here.”

He shoved up, trying to get a fast glance through the blown-out window. Out on the street, the sudden staccato retorts of a pistol blasted away, in contrast to the louder rifle fire.

Has to be Painter putting up a fight.

“Looks like he’s hurt, pinned down,” Drake reported as he ducked back down. “Malcolm, Schmitt, cover me and hold the fort.”

Not waiting for a response from his teammates, Drake leaped out of hiding. Both Marines kept up suppressive fire as the gunnery sergeant dove headlong out the window.

Jenna reached to her pack, to her own weapon, preparing to help.

As her fingers tightened on her pistol’s grip, the firefight both inside and outside grew more intense. One of the gunmen toppled over a table; the other two dropped behind a counter, firing from a well-protected spot.

Malcolm swore, ducking back into shelter, his ear bleeding.

Jenna rose up and took his place, knowing any sign of weakness, any lessening of return fire, risked the enemy gaining the upper hand and overpowering them. She fired her Glock, driving back a gunman who had been starting to rise.

She took that fraction of a second to survey the café. Bodies littered the floor, blood spreading over the tiles. She noted a few small movements. Some of the half-dozen patrons and waitstaff were still alive.

But it was another movement that held her full attention.

A mirror behind the counter had been shattered by the first volley of rounds, but in the fractured reflection in the remaining pieces, she saw one of the enemy on his knees, reloading his rifle.

There won’t be a better chance…

She fired again toward the position of the first gunman. “Now!” she yelled to the two Marines.

She didn’t have time to explain more, so she simply dashed from behind the table and sprinted for the counter, hoping they would understand.

They did.

Malcolm and Schmitt flanked her, firing at the rifleman who was still an active threat. Under such a sustained volley, a bullet ricocheted off a rim of a metal chair and struck the assailant, knocking him back.

Jenna reached the counter and vaulted high, feetfirst, sliding her hip through the broken plates and scattered utensils on the top. All the while, she kept her gaze fixed on the reflection of the hidden enemy. He had already finished reloading and was rising up to go to his partner’s defense.

As he popped into view, she already had her left leg cocked and snapped a boot heel into his masked nose. His head cracked back with a satisfying crunch of teeth and bone. His body collapsed limply, out cold.

To the side, Schmitt placed a round through the other enemy’s ear as the gunman tried to bring his rifle around.

The sudden cessation of gunplay inside the café left only the ringing in her ears, muffling the firefight outside.

Malcolm stalked low to her side as Schmitt poked his head and shoulder into the kitchen, leading with his pistol.

“All clear back here!” he called out, falling back to them.

Red-faced with fury, Malcolm lifted the muzzle of his weapon toward the cold-cocked man on the floor.

“Don’t,” Jenna said. “We may need him to talk.”

Malcolm nodded.

She kept her Glock on the downed man. “I’ll watch him. Go help Painter and Drake.”

From the escalation of rifle fire out there, they were in trouble.

“They’re flanking us,” Drake said.

Painter recognized this, too. He crouched shoulder to shoulder with the Marine behind a metal trash bin. The shelter barely offered enough cover for the two men as they fired from either side at the trio of gunmen across the road.

Unfortunately, the enemy had a distinct advantage. A row of cars lined the far sidewalk, offering plenty of cover and maneuverability. Their side of the street was a no-parking zone.

Still, if Drake hadn’t come flying out the café window, Painter would likely be dead already.

The gunnery sergeant’s sudden and opportune arrival drove the three assailants from the street and into cover behind the parked cars. But now those three had begun to split up. Two men ran low behind the vehicles, heading left and right along the street, while the third kept up a continuous barrage, the rounds ringing and ricocheting off the trash bin.

Trapped, Drake and Painter could barely move. It would take only another few seconds before the two flanking gunmen reached positions far enough along the road to get a clear, unobstructed bead on them.

“I’ll cover you,” Painter said, slapping in a fresh magazine. “Get back inside. Try to make it out the rear with the others.”

Painter noted it had gone quiet inside the café—but was that a good sign or a bad one?

Then fresh gunfire erupted, blasting out from the shattered window of the café and strafing the row of cars across the street.

Caught off guard, the gunman to the left took a round through the neck, spinning away with a spray of blood. The assailant on the right suffered a similar fate, taking a bullet to the forehead.

The third had dropped low behind an old-model Volvo, plainly recognizing the tides had turned.

Drake rose to his toes, glancing to Painter, to his wounded shoulder. “We got this last one,” he said, getting a confirmatory nod from his two teammates as they climbed out to the street. “This is what Marines are built for.”

Painter knew better than to protest. “Try to take him alive.”

As if sensing his coming demise, the hidden man started shouting — not at them, but from the sounds of it, into a phone or radio, likely calling for help or backup.

Painter caught a few words in Spanish, but the rest was a mix of some unknown native patois. One word in Spanish caught his attention. It was repeated again, more urgently.

Mujer.

Painter tensed, glancing back to the café.

Mujer meant woman.

“Where’s Jenna?” Painter asked, his heart pounding harder.

Malcolm kept his gaze on the Volvo across the street. “Inside. It’s all clear.”

Or maybe not.

Disregarding the threat of the shooter, Painter bolted for the door and rushed inside. He held his pistol up with his good arm and scanned the tables, the bodies, and waded through the aftermath of the gun battle. He checked behind the counter, the kitchen.

A spat of gunfire echoed to him from the street.

A moment later, Drake burst into the café through the front door. His face looked stricken, scared, revealing a depth of emotion beyond the simple concern for a teammate.

“Jenna?” he asked.

“Gone.” Painter nodded toward the street, knowing they had one chance of discovering who had taken her. “What about the third shooter?”

Drake understood the significance of his question, going paler. “He shot himself.”

Dead.

Painter breathed heavily.

Then we lost her.

The world returned to Jenna on waves of pain. Blackness shattered into light that was too bright, sounds too loud. She lifted her head from the rattling floor of a van, igniting a lancing stab that ran from a knot above her left temple to her neck.

Oww…

She bit back a groan, fearful of attracting the attention of her kidnappers. She took a fast assessment of her situation, her heart pounding in her throat. From her vantage, all she could see out the window was the upper floors of buildings sweeping past and the tangles of power lines.

A trickle of blood traced fire down her left cheek.

She remembered the ambush, allowing anger to hold back the terror icing at the edges of her self-control. She had been crouched behind the café counter, watching Malcolm and Schmitt cross to the window and start shooting into the street. The deafening barrage covered the approach of her attacker from the kitchen area. The only warning was a soft honeyed scent.

She turned to find a dark woman with shadowy eyes crouched a yard away, the balls of her bare feet positioned perfectly to avoid the broken glass on the floor — not to avoid getting cut, but in a feral level of stealth.

Before Jenna could react, the woman lunged, her arm sweeping wide whip-fast. The butt of a pistol cracked against Jenna’s skull. Her vision flared brightly, then collapsed into a black hole, dragging her consciousness away with it.

How long was I out?

She didn’t think it was long. Not more than a minute or two, she guessed.

From the front passenger seat, a face turned to peer back at her. Long black hair framed a darkly beautiful face. Her skin was the color of warm caramel, her black eyes aglow. Still, an edge of threat shone through those handsome features, from the hard edge of her full lips to the glassy-eyed menace in her gaze. It was like confronting the cold countenance of a panther in a tree, displaying nature at its most beautiful — and deadly.

Jenna wanted to retreat from that gaze, but she held the other’s stare, refusing to back down. Not that Jenna could do anything more. Her wrists and ankles were secured with plastic ties.

The bright tinkle of a ringtone interrupted the standoff. The woman twisted back around as the driver passed her a cell phone.

She brought it to her ear. “Oui,” she answered, her voice as silky dark as her complexion. She listened for a long breath, then glanced back to Jenna. “Oui, j’ai fini.”

Jenna knew she must be the topic of this conversation. Someone was confirming that she’d been captured, or at the very least that one member of the American team had been grabbed. She strained to eavesdrop on the rest of the conversation, but she didn’t speak French. Still, she could guess who was on the other end of that line.

Cutter Elwes.

Apparently he must have had someone watching that guesthouse, making sure any trail that Amy had left in Boa Vista was continually under surveillance. Or maybe that kindly proprietor was not as kindly as she appeared and had sent word of the Americans who had come calling. Either way, Cutter must have ordered a local team to apprehend one of them, someone he could interrogate to find out how much the world knew about him, about his operations.

As a dead man, he plainly wished to remain in his currently deceased state.

The van fled faster as it broke free of the central district of Boa Vista. Jenna craned over her shoulder, fearful for Drake and the others. Had they survived the firefight? She prayed so, but she held out no hope that they would be able to track or follow her.

She faced around again, recognizing a hard truth.

I’m on my own.

After several more minutes, the van braked hard, sliding Jenna forward a couple of feet. She scooted up. Out the front window spread a rusted slum, the homes densely packed, clearly fabricated from whatever could be scavenged. But this wasn’t her kidnappers’ destination.

An old helicopter rested on a dirt pad. Its rotors already chopped at the air, preparing to depart.

Jenna despaired.

Where are they taking me?

Still in Cutter’s main lab, Kendall stood at the threshold to a neighboring Level Four biosafety facility, where a few technicians labored inside, their suits tethered with yellow air hoses. A moment ago, Cutter had stepped away to take a call. Kendall breathed deeply, still struggling to decide whether to help the bastard or not.

If I don’t, the entire world could be destroyed.

If I do, would the end result be the same?

He balanced on a dagger’s edge, his decision teetering upon one unanswered question: What was Cutter’s plan for Kendall’s synthetic eVLP? He remembered the man’s worrisome description of that perfect empty shell.

A Trojan horse… a flawless genetic delivery system.

Cutter clearly planned on filling that Trojan horse — but with what?

Can I trust him when he says no one would be killed from whatever he planned to engineer into that empty shell?

Kendall’s mind spun around and around, glad for whatever call allowed him the additional time to come to a decision. He used the delay to study the quarantined space before him. Like the main genetics facility behind him, the Level 4 lab contained the latest in DNA analysis and gene manipulation equipment. The back wall held a large refrigerated unit with glass doors. Rows of vials glowed behind that window.

A chill traced up his spine as he tried to imagine what was stored in there. But it was the four adjacent rooms flanking the refrigerator that truly terrified him. Each chamber contained a different piece of medical equipment. He recognized a simple X-ray machine in one room and a CT scanner in the next. The last two rooms held a magnetic resonance scanner for looking deep into tissues and a PET — positron emission tomography — scanner, for developing three-dimensional images of biological processes.

The presence of these pieces of equipment left no doubt.

Cutter had advanced to animal testing.

But how advanced was that testing?

Cutter finally returned, his manner more relaxed, as if he’d had good news. “Looks like we may be entertaining a guest before much longer. But we have much work to do before that, don’t we, Kendall?”

Cutter lifted a curious brow, expecting an answer.

Kendall stared into the BSL4 lab. “And you swear, if I cooperate — if I teach you my technique — that no one will die as a result?”

“I can promise you that what I plan to use this technique for is entirely non-lethal.” Cutter frowned as he must have read the distrust still shining on Kendall’s face. “Maybe I can ease your mind with a short excursion. Won’t take but a few minutes.”

Cutter turned on a heel and headed away.

Kendall hurried after him, more than happy for the additional delay. Mateo followed behind, his ever-present shadow.

“Where are we going?” Kendall asked.

Cutter smiled back at him, a boyish enthusiasm glowing from his face. “A wonderful place.”

Still, as Cutter turned back around, Kendall noted the drawn pull of his left shoulder. He imagined the thick scars binding that side. It was a reminder that despite appearances, that boy was long gone. He died on that African savannah ages ago. What was left was a hard and twisted genius with dark ambitions, deeply embittered at the world.

They exited the main genetic hall and followed a long natural tunnel. Kendall imagined they were crossing toward the middle of the plateau.

Cutter strode along, taking large steps. “We are not so different, you and I.”

Kendall didn’t bother disagreeing.

“We both care for this planet, are concerned where it’s headed. But where you seek to preserve the status quo through your conservation efforts, I believe the world is too far gone. Man is incapable of reversing what its industry has wrought. Our appetites have grown too gluttonous, while our vision has grown narrower and narrower. Conservation is a lost cause. Why save a species here or there when the entire ecology collapses around your ears?”

“It was just such a calamity that I was trying to solve in California,” Kendall countered. “To find a system-wide solution.”

Cutter scoffed. “By attempting to engineer XNA hardiness and adaptability into various species as a whole? All you’re doing is stealing from one biosphere in order to preserve another that is dying.”

Kendall’s back stiffened. So Cutter knew what he had been attempting to accomplish. The scientific term for it was facilitated adaptation, to fortify DNA in order to make a species more resistant to disease or make it more robust to survive in a harsh environment. He refused to apologize for his work. His research had the potential to protect many species against the ravages to come, but his work was still in its early stages. Unfortunately, what he had created so far was unrefined, dangerous, consuming all it touched, destroying any DNA it encountered.

It was never meant to be released.

As anger flared anew, Kendall confronted Cutter. “Then what would you have us do? Nothing?”

Cutter turned to him. “Why not? Get out of nature’s way. Nature is the greatest innovator of all. It will survive us… maybe not in the form that you like or are familiar with. In the end, evolution will fill all those gaps created by a major die-off. All five past extinctions triggered an explosion of evolution afterward. Look at humankind. The dinosaurs had to die so we could rise. It is only through death that new life can grow.”

Kendall had heard this central tenet of Dark Eden often enough to recognize it here. He boiled it down to its essential. “The great extinction holds the promise to bring about a new genesis.”

Cutter nodded. “The beginning of a new Eden.”

From the ardor in the other’s voice, it sounded like he could not wait for that to happen.

Kendall sighed. “There remains a fundamental flaw to your reasoning.”

“And what is that?”

“Extinction is fast. Evolution is slow.”

“Exactly.” Cutter stopped, looking close to hugging him for a moment. “That’s exactly right! Extinction will always outpace evolution. But what if we could speed evolution up?”

“How?”

“I’ll show you.”

Cutter had reached a thick steel door that blocked the tunnel. He pulled a keycard from around his neck. “Conservation must worry less about preserving the life that was, and focus on nurturing what will come next.”

“But how do we know what’s coming?”

“We create it. We direct evolution toward this new genesis.”

Kendall was stunned into silence.

Cutter swiped his card, and thick bolts began to slowly unlock.

“That’s impossible,” Kendall whispered, but even he couldn’t convince himself. Genetic engineering and DNA synthesis were already at that threshold.

“Nothing’s impossible,” Cutter countered, as he pulled open the door. “Not any longer.”

Bright daylight flooded the dimly lit tunnel, accompanied by a sweet mélange of scents undercut with the familiar muskiness of loam and rotted leaf. Drawn by that light, by the fresh air, Kendall followed Cutter gladly out of the passageway and onto a metal scaffolding that protruded from the side of a cliff.

As his boots clanked across the grating, Kendall craned up at the blue sky. The perch was fifteen feet from the lip of what appeared to be a huge sinkhole. The walls had been terraced into various levels of gardens, bursting with orchids, bromeliads, leafy vines, and blossoms of every hue and size. Each tier was connected by a winding road that corkscrewed along the inside walls.

Kendall watched an electric golf cart glide silently along that road, climbing toward their position, passing by gates that opened automatically before it. A triangular yellow sign with a black lightning bolt hung on the neighboring fence, indicating that each level’s barrier was electrified.

Worry dampened his momentary wonder.

Cutter stood to the side, scanning the nearby walls, as if searching for weeds growing in his fantastical garden. “Ah,” he finally said. “Down here. Come see for yourself.”

He opened a gate along the landing’s railing and climbed down a steep set of metal stairs to the stone road winding by at his level. Kendall kept his gaze away from that long central drop. It was so far down that he could barely see the bottom, especially with the morning sun still low on the horizon. Still, he noted what appeared to be the crowns of giant trees down there, possibly a piece of the Brazilian rain forest trapped below.

With great care, Kendall stepped from the steel stairs to ancient sandstone. He retreated from the edge of the road, away from that yawning precipice. On the far side spread a series of raised beds, about ten yards deep. They rode up against the cliffs, merging with the thick cascade of green growth that draped the walls. Narrow walkways crisscrossed those plantings. It all could be easily mistaken for some organic vegetable garden, but Kendall suspected what grew here was something far more insidious and anything but organic.

He noted a string of long-legged ants, each the size of his thumb, parading along the edge of one box.

“Paraponera clavata,” Cutter named them. “Commonly known as bullet ants. Those little buggers got their nickname because their bite is considered one of the worst stings. The very top of the Schmidt sting pain index. Victims compare it to getting shot, and the pain can last for up to twenty-four hours.”

Kendall took a step back.

“I was able to double their venom load.”

Kendall glanced harshly at Cutter.

“A bite from one of these will leave you paralyzed and in excruciating pain. One of my workers accidentally got stung. He broke his back molars from the grinding pain. But that’s not all. Come a little closer.”

No thank you.

Kendall stayed rooted in place.

Cutter picked up a broken piece of a branch. “Bullet ants — like all ants — are ground-locked members of the Hymenoptera order, which includes bees and wasps.”

He poked a reddish-black straggler, which responded by flaring out small membranous wings, all but invisible before. It flew a few inches away, then landed amid its stinging brethren, stirring them up.

“It was easy to return their wings to them,” Cutter said. “Just a matter of splicing in genes from a tarantula hawk wasp. Especially as the two species share the same genetic heritage.”

“You created a chimera,” Kendall finally choked out. “A genetic hybrid.”

“Precisely. I haven’t been able to give them full flight yet, so far just those little buzzing bursts like you saw, but hopefully with time and environmental pressure, nature will do the rest, getting them flying as readily as their waspish cousins.”

“How?” Kendall sputtered for a moment. “How did you accomplish this?”

“It was not all that difficult. You know as well as I that the technology is currently available. It was just a matter of having the will and resources to do it, free of oversight and regulation. You already saw my lab is equipped with multiple stations that use the latest CRISPR-Cas9 technique. A process I’ve refined further, by the way.”

That was chilling news. CRISPR-Cas9 could already engineer any part of a genome with such precision that it had been likened to editing individual letters in an encyclopedia without creating a single spelling error.

“And you’re certainly familiar with the MAGE and CAGE processes developed by George Church.”

Kendall felt the blood drain into his legs. Like CRISPR, those two new techniques — multiplex automated genome engineering and conjugative assembly genome engineering — were sometimes referred to as evolution machines. These two gene-editing technologies were indeed just that, capable of automating thousands of genetic changes at the same time. They could introduce millions of years of evolution within minutes.

MAGE and CAGE held the promise to alter synthetic biology forever, taking it to new heights—but where would those heights take us?

He stared in horror at the row of large ants.

Cutter twiddled the small twig in his hand, seemingly disappointed by Kendall’s reaction. “I read in a piece you wrote last year that you advocate using MAGE and CAGE as tools for resurrecting lost species.”

He was right. These new gene-editing technologies held great promise. Researchers could take the intact genome of a living animal — then start making edits and alterations to the DNA, slowing converting it to the genome of a related species that had gone extinct.

“Start with an elephant and you might be able to resurrect a woolly mammoth out of its genes,” Kendall mumbled aloud.

Not only was it theoretically possible, a Russian had gone so far as to create an experimental preserve in Siberia — called Pleistocene Park — where he hoped to allow these soon-to-be-created woolly mammoths to roam free.

“De-extinction was the word you used in the article,” Cutter said with disdain. “It’s such a sad distraction. To use such promising technology for this narrow preservationist agenda. All you’re doing is choking nature’s ability to respond to the damage wrought by humankind.”

“And this is your answer?” Kendall mocked, waving to the line of marching black ants.

“Only a small part of a larger picture. Where you and your colleagues dwell in the past, looking to de-extinction for salvation, I turn to the future, to prepare for what’s to come with a plan for rewilding.”

“Rewilding?”

“To reintroduce keystone species — animals and plants that have the most impact on the environment.”

“Like your ants.”

“I’ve engineered my creations — all my creations — to be stronger, with the necessary tools to survive us. Along with newer innovations.”

Cutter took his twig and encouraged one of the ants to climb atop its tip. Before it could clamber up and bite him, he flicked it into a neighboring planter box. The ant landed on a wide leaf of a bromeliad and scrambled along its length. Thin wings vibrated in irritation.

Then from a pore in the leaf, a glistening bubble erupted, enveloping the ant in a thick gelatinous sap. The squirming insect fought, but in seconds its legs dissolved away, followed shortly thereafter by the rest of its body. After that, the jelly bubble quickly liquefied, trickling down the inside of the leaf to feed the root ball at the base.

“Here I engineered in a sequence of genes from the carnivorous sundew,” Cutter explained. “Including intensifying its digestive enzymes.”

Kendall’s stomach churned as he turned to stare at the dark garden spread below. “How many others?”

“Hundreds of species. But they’re just the first wave. I also took the step to genetically bind each alteration to sequences of DNA retrotransposons.”

Kendall began to fathom what Cutter intended. Retrotransposons were also called jumping genes, named for their ability to leap between species in a process called horizontal gene transfer. Geneticists had come to believe these jumping genes were potent engines of evolution, passing traits across species lines. Recent studies of cattle DNA showed that a full quarter of their genome came from a species of horned viper, proving that Mother Nature had been shuffling genes for millennia, creating hybridized species since the dawn of time.

But it was no longer just nature.

“This is how you plan to speed up evolution,” Kendall realized aloud. “You intend to use these traits tied to jumping genes to spread what you’ve created far and wide.”

“Each species will be like a seed cast to the wind. One hybrid will lead to two, two to four. In all that shuffling, can you imagine what new species will arise? What new combinations will appear? All of them fighting to survive in this damaged world we created.”

Kendall pictured a great conflagration spreading through the rain forest and across the world.

If Cutter could accomplish so much already, why does he need my engineered armor shell? What does he plan to put inside it?

There had to be another step to this madman’s scheme.

“A new Eden beckons,” Cutter continued, his voice exultant. “We are at the threshold of a new world. A genesis so dramatic we could witness it in our lifetime. I want to share that with you. Will you help me achieve it?”

Kendall faced the raw passion standing before him and did the only thing he could. He had to survive long enough to stop the man.

“Yes… I’ll help you.”

“We have to go after her,” Drake said, stomping back through the carnage left in the wake of the firefight, followed by his two teammates.

Painter knelt over one of the survivors, a young waitress. He had a towel pressed to her side, stanching the blood from a round through the lower abdomen. His own shoulder burned from the bullet that had torn a chunk from the back of his arm. Earlier, Malcolm had quickly bandaged it from a med-kit in his backpack.

The three Marines had already swept the streets behind the establishment, but there was no sign of Jenna.

Painter understood the frustration he heard in Drake’s voice.

In the distance, sirens descended toward this location. They would lose even more time dealing with local authorities.

A groan sounded from behind the counter.

So somebody finally decided to wake up.

Painter waved Schmitt to take his place. “Get a pressure wrap on this woman.”

As the Marine obeyed, he crossed to the source of the noise. A figure lifted his head from the floor. His hands were tied behind his back. Blood soaked the mask that hid his features. It was the gunman who Jenna had cold-cocked during the fight. In their hurry, Jenna’s kidnappers must have believed he was dead, especially from all of the blood.

Painter stepped over and ripped away the mask, earning a satisfying cry of pain. More blood poured from his shattered nose. His eyes were already nearly swollen shut.

“Take him,” Painter ordered Drake.

The sirens were louder now.

He saw that Schmitt had finished securing a tight wrap around the waitress’s belly. She should survive.

“Let’s go,” Painter said and waved everyone out.

Drake and Malcolm headed for the back door, the groggy gunman slung between them. Their SUV waited in the rear alley. It had been moved there by the Marines to facilitate a swift evacuation.

Drake manhandled their prisoner into the backseat. “What if this bastard doesn’t talk?”

Painter used a knuckle to wipe up a drop of the man’s blood from the car seat. “Maybe he won’t have to. But we’ll need help.”

21

Hang in there, Josh…

Lisa sat on an uncomfortable stool in the patient containment unit. She held her brother’s hand, wishing she could shed her gloves and truly touch him. Though he was right here, she felt a gulf between them. And it wasn’t just the barrier of the polyethylene suit that separated them. The medically induced coma had stolen Josh from her: his raspy laugh, his ready joke, his blushing bashfulness in the presence of a pretty girl, his studious frown when hanging on a rope from a cliff face.

All gone.

Josh had been placed on a respirator a few minutes ago as his condition deteriorated. Each inhalation was too sharp, too regular. Off to the side, monitors clicked, hummed, and gently beeped. That was all that was left of her brother’s energetic and full life.

The radio inside her suit buzzed, drawing her back straighter. She girded herself for more bad news. Then a familiar and welcome voice filled her head. She squeezed Josh’s hand harder, as if trying to urge her brother to keep fighting, that Painter would save him.

“Lisa,” Painter said, “how are you holding up?”

How do you think I’m doing?

Tears suddenly sprang to her eyes and ran down her cheeks. She had no way to wipe them away. She swallowed a few times to hide them from her voice.

“It… it’s not good out here,” she said, struggling to hold it together. “Every hour things get worse. I don’t know if you heard, but Lindahl has ordered a nuclear device to be shipped to the mountains. It’s en route and should arrive by this afternoon.”

“And there’s no way to deter him?”

“No. At daybreak, a whole team of surveyors mapped the contaminated areas — or at least those areas actively showing die-offs. It’s worse than the overnight reports indicated. The organism is still spreading, approaching what Lindahl calls critical mass, the point where even a nuclear option might not work. Nuclear scientists are still doing calculations of load and the radiation levels necessary to achieve the highest level of lethality.”

Lisa put as much urgency into her voice as she could muster in her exhausted state. “We need answers to stop this nuclear juggernaut. Or at least, some hope of a solution.”

She stared at Josh’s face, at his waxen complexion.

Please.

“We may have a good lead,” Painter admitted, though he sounded hesitant, plainly worried. He gave her a fast update of his situation in Brazil.

Lisa found herself standing by the end of his story. “Someone kidnapped Jenna…”

She let go of Josh’s hand and turned toward the complex of BSL4 labs across the hangar. Nikko was doing no better than Josh. The dog was on a plasma and platelet drip, growing moribund with every passing hour. In fact, the poor husky would already be dead if not for the herculean efforts of Dr. Edmund Dent. The virologist was using every medical tool in his arsenal to support Nikko and Josh. And while Edmund hadn’t been able to reduce the viral load in his patients, his palliative treatments seemed to slow the progression of clinical signs.

Painter offered one glimmer of hope. “We’re on our way to a facility in Boa Vista run by the Federal University of Roraima and tied to the Genographic Project. For years, they’ve been gathering genetic information from all the various indigenous Brazilian tribes, using autosomal markers to calculate migration patterns and subgroups of the various tribes. They’ve put together an extensive database. With a blood sample from the man we apprehended, we might be able to find out what tribe he belongs to.”

“Why does that matter?”

“Remember those photos Jenna took of the assailants who attacked her at the ghost town near Mono Lake?”

“I remember.”

“It appears that group that attacked us here were of the same native tribe. Makes me wonder if Cutter Elwes hasn’t gone all Heart of Darkness on us out in the rain forest, woven himself into that same tribe and bent them to his will. If we can find that tribe, we might find not only Elwes… but hopefully Jenna and Kendall Hess, too.”

A silvery surge of optimism cut through her dark exhaustion. She took in a deep, shuddering breath. “You have to find something,” she pressed. “Something I can take to Lindahl to halt or delay his plans.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“I know you will. I love you.”

“Same here, babe.”

She wasn’t satisfied with his reflexive response. “Just say it back, so I can hear it.”

He laughed, which stoked that silvery shine inside her. “Not in front of the boys.”

She pictured Drake and his teammates and found a smile dawning on her lips. She heard the same smile in Painter’s voice.

“Okay,” he said. “I love you, too.”

After they said their good-byes, Lisa felt reinvigorated, ready to tackle anything. Her radio buzzed again. She hoped it was Painter, having forgotten to tell her something — anything to hear his voice again — but it was Edmund Dent.

“Lisa, you need to get back to your lab ASAP.”

“Why?” She glanced in that direction. “Has Nikko gotten worse?”

“I was changing a bag of plasma for the big guy, and Lindahl left his radio mike open, broadcasting to the team here. He plans to have the nuclear research team experiment on Nikko. They want to know the effects that radiation will have on the organism when it’s deeply entrenched in living tissue, to calculate a dosage that’s high enough to kill it inside a body.”

“They’re planning to irradiate Nikko?”

“In ever-escalating dosages while taking biopsies of his kidney and liver, to see how much radiation it will take to eradicate the virus.”

All the shining optimism from a moment ago ignited into a fiery anger. Jenna had put her life at risk to help them all, and they planned on killing her dog, torturing him, when the ranger’s back was turned.

Over my dead body.

She rushed to the air lock of the quarantined ward.

“You’d better hurry,” Edmund warned. “I just overheard another order from Lindahl on the radio.”

“What now?”

“He’s commanded the Marine security team to bar you from your lab if you show any resistance.”

That bastard…

She yanked the air lock door open and began the decontamination process. As the jets sprayed the exterior of her suit, she struggled to find a solution, a way of saving Nikko. By the time the green light flashed the all clear, allowing her to exit, she had come up with only one possibility — a gambit that would require great personal risk.

But she would take that chance.

For Nikko…

For Jenna…

She owed them both that much, but a worry nagged at the edges of her resolve as she stepped out of the air lock and crossed the dimly lit hangar toward the suite of BSL4 labs.

How much time did Nikko have? How much time did any of them have?

She knew only one thing for sure.

Somebody needed to find an answer — and fast.

22

“We can’t just keep hanging around here,” Kowalski commented, looking ready to kick the side of the stalled gondola.

Gray understood his teammate’s consternation. He adjusted his night-vision goggles as he surveyed the landscape beyond their small cage in the sky. Their gondola hung four stories above the cavern floor. Dark waters washed against a shore of rock directly below. There was no going back the way they’d come, and the infrared illuminators along the undercarriage of the cage failed to penetrate very far ahead, revealing only a few of the ubiquitous petrified trunks, like pillars holding up the roof.

Who knew what horrors lay beyond that darkness?

Because what was visible here was terrifying enough.

The slow-moving river below churned with hidden life. Sleek fins broke the surface occasionally. He watched a turtle-shell-backed creature lumber through the shallows, its head spiked like the tail of a Stegosaurus. A crocodilian beast slithered on its belly from the algae-covered bank to avoid this hulking trespasser and vanished into the waters. Higher on the shore, clouds of batlike birds, looking little larger than thumb-sized sparrows, swirled up in tidy eddies and whorls, like smoke rising from their guarded nests. As Gray’s eyes adjusted, finer details emerged. Patches of mossy growths sprouted from the algal beds; mists of tiny gnats or other midges swirled among the trunks of the petrified forest; pale white slugs inched up the walls, leaving glowing trails, like slow-moving graffiti artists.

Stella spoke to her father, drawing his attention around. “He’s right.” She nodded to Kowalski. “We can’t stay here. Dylan Wright must know where we are and that we’re trying to reach the Back Door. By now, he must have discovered that you reengineered the bunker busters to be shut out from the main station. After failing to reel us back in, he’ll send a team after us.”

“Through this hellscape?” Jason asked, purposefully mispronouncing the British installation’s name for emphasis.

“He could use our CAATs,” Professor Harrington said dourly. “Come by ground transport. We’re only a mile or so away.”

And three miles from the Back Door, Gray thought.

The older man hooked his arm around his daughter. Fear and worry etched the lines of his face deeper. She leaned into him, just as anxious about her father.

The lights grew incrementally dimmer. At first Gray thought it was his own terror narrowing his vision, but Kowalski swore, tapping at his goggles.

“When I decoupled us from the cable,” Harrington explained, “it cut us off from the power conduit running along the roof. We’re running on a battery charge right now.”

“How long until we’re out of juice?” Gray asked.

“A couple of hours at best.”

Gray gave his head a slight shake. He did not want to be sitting here in the dark, waiting for Wright’s team to discover them trapped in the dead gondola.

“What about that German sub?” Jason offered. “It’s only two hundred yards back. Is there any way we could make it over to that shelter? Perhaps hole up inside there?”

Gray turned to Harrington. “Is that possible? Can we evacuate out of this gondola?”

Stella slipped from her father’s arms and stepped to the hatch that blended into the floor. She tugged it open. A folded wire-and-metal ladder was stored inside. “If you pull that red lever, an emergency escape door will drop below and the ladder will deploy. It should reach the ground.”

“No friggin’ way I’m going down there,” Kowalski said.

Harrington looked like he agreed, glancing apprehensively toward his daughter. Still, he turned and opened another cabinet along the wall. Inside, racked one atop the other, were three rifle-like weapons with barrels twice as thick as those of a 12-gauge shotgun.

“Directed stick radiators,” Harrington explained. “Or DSRs. Built by the American Technology Corporation. They use a stacked series of disks in their barrels to amplify a pulse, producing the equivalent of a sonic bullet.”

Kowalski snorted and mumbled under his breath. “Give me real bullets any day of the week.”

Harrington ignored him. “The DSRs can also transmit speech or in reverse operation, be used as a directional microphone.” He tapped what looked like a rifle sight on top. “I added portable IR illuminators for deployment down here.”

“And these sonic rifles can protect us?” Gray asked.

“Mostly. They’re not as potent as the larger LRAD units, but they’ll send most life-forms down here scurrying away. But you need to be careful. The kinetic recoil of these guns is strong enough to knock you on your butt.”

Gray stepped forward and picked one up, examining it thoroughly. Once done, he passed it toward Kowalski, who looked like he’d been offered a rattlesnake. Jason took the weapon instead.

Stella moved forward and grabbed a rifle for herself.

“She’s a good shot,” Harrington commented with pride. “Bloody things give me migraines if I try to use one.”

Gray hauled out the last weapon, slinging it over his shoulder.

Harrington wasn’t done yet. He stepped over and opened the hatch that led down to the canopied bubble on the underside of the gondola. Dropping to his knees, he reached inside. When he straightened, he had a more familiar weapon in his arms, struggling under its weight.

“I heard what you said earlier,” he told Kowalski. “Thought you might like this instead.”

Kowalski grinned, lifting the M240 machine gun from the professor’s arms. He cradled it like a baby. He then dropped to a knee next to the professor and hauled out a long belt of 7.62x51mm NATO cartridges and flung the bandolier over his shoulders like a deadly scarf.

He stood up, puffing out his chest. “Now this is more like it.”

Jason eyed the folded ladder, looking suddenly less sure of the wisdom of his plan. “So we try to make it over to the German sub?”

“No,” Gray answered. “If found, we’d be trapped inside there. And even if Wright misses us, we’d leave the path open for his team to reach the Back Door first.”

“Then where are we going?” Jason asked.

An old Churchill slogan popped into Gray’s head.

If you’re going through hell, keep going.

He pointed ahead. “We’re going to strike out for that substation, try to reach the Back Door.”

Kowalski’s grin faded back to its usual scowl. “How the hell are we going to do that?”

He had no better answer — but somebody else did.

“I know what we can do,” Harrington said, still sounding none too happy. “But we’ll still have to trek some distance first.”

Hell became all too real, striking his every sense.

Jason descended cautiously down the rungs of the swinging ladder with his DSR slung across his back. Since lowering out of the gondola, the harsh world swallowed him whole.

Each breath brought in the reek of sulfurous brimstone, belched out from the volcanic forces underpinning this world. He could taste the foulness on the back of his tongue, while moist heat burned his skin, drawing beads of sweat from every pore. The silent world now whispered with creaks, croaks, laps of water, and a faint continual buzzing coming from a mix of nattering insects and a vague sense of ultrasonics bouncing off the walls, cast out by the life found down here.

The last set his teeth on edge, tickling the hairs on the back of his neck — or maybe it was simply the fear.

He stared below his feet. Gray and Kowalski had already reached the stone bank of the river. They had their weapons at their shoulders. The IR illuminator atop Gray’s rifle cast out a pool of illumination into the darkness. Kowalski held his machine gun up, its belt of ammunition dragging all the way to the ground.

Jason watched Harrington step off the last rung of the ladder and join the other two men. They spoke in whispers, following the instructions given to them by the professor: In this world of eternal darkness, sound is vision.

It was why the sonic weapons employed here were so effective.

At least I hope they are.

Jason shifted his DSR more securely over his shoulders and continued his descent along the shaking ladder. He eyeballed the river below. He might survive a fall from this height if he hit the water — but getting out alive from that river would be the true challenge.

Harrington had shared another nugget of wisdom before they vacated the gondola: Whatever you do, stay clear of the water.

The ecosystem down here was dependent on that main river and its lakes, all of it fed by geothermally melted ice from the miles of glaciers overhead, and drained under the continent to parts unknown.

Before the gondola had stalled, the professor had educated them about the primordial world down here, how it was mostly amphibious in nature, thriving at that boundary between solid ground and the flowing rivers and pools. Many of the life cycles had evolved to incorporate stages that transitioned between those two extremes: juveniles sheltering along the rocky banks, adults living in the water, or vice versa.

Harrington had described the ecosystem as being stuck in the Carboniferous Period, an era when the topside world was dominated by primordial swamp forests. The professor had noted parallels in the evolutionary pathways taken by the life down here. Only this isolated and insulated world had become stagnant, never experiencing the radical changes wrought upon the world above by the breakup of the supercontinent of Pangaea or by the ravages of meteoric impacts. Still, the highly adaptable XNA genetic matrix had compounded the inventiveness of life dwelling inside this cavern system.

Soft words reached him from below, another warning from Harrington, directed mostly at Kowalski.

“Careful with your gun,” the professor said. “Besides noise, scent is a strong trigger, especially blood. The racket of that weapon and resulting bloodshed could trigger a feeding frenzy.”

Jason pictured the angry thrashing of sharks through spilled chum.

“To your right,” Stella called quietly but urgently from above, drawing his attention in that direction.

At first he didn’t see any threat. The massive bole of a fossilized tree rose twenty yards off. Then a veil of movement caught his eye, wafting around the trunk as if on a slight breeze — but there was no wind down here. He hooked an arm around a rung of the ladder and brought his gun around, clicking on its IR beam. The cone of brighter illumination revealed what Stella’s sharper eyes had picked out.

Around the tree, a tangle of threadlike worms squirmed through the air toward them. Each floated on small parachutes of silken strands. Jason knew how some spiderlings and caterpillars used a similar technique, called kiting or ballooning, using either wind or the earth’s static electric field to hold themselves aloft.

The flotilla drifted toward them.

“Move faster,” Stella warned.

Jason obeyed, trusting her experience. He shouldered his DSR and began clambering more quickly down the ladder. Brought to his attention, he had no trouble continuing to track the threat.

Looking up as he climbed down, he failed to note a lone scout, coasting ahead of the others. The threadlike worm brushed against his cheek and clung there, burning into his flesh like the butt of a cigarette. Stifling a cry of pain, he tried to scratch it away, but the gossamer of silk settled over his skin, as sticky as Super Glue, pasting the larva to his cheek.

He dug harder.

“Leave it!” Stella urged, more loudly now, nearly on top of him. “We must get off the ladder. Now!”

Jason forced his hand back to the rungs, his eyes tearing up from the burning agony. He hurried down. Stella kept right above him. Beyond her body, the drifting mass collided into the length of the emergency ladder. Silk and flesh enmeshed into the steel, coating it thickly. Curls of sizzling smoke rose from the rungs and cables, as the creatures’ corrosive acids reacted to the metal.

One of the individual wires in the tightly corded cable running through the rungs snapped with an audible twang.

Oh, crap…

Jason moved faster, almost sliding his way down now. He was still a good ten yards above the ground when Stella called out again.

“Your left!”

He twisted that way, bringing his rifle around one-handed, responding to the panic in her voice. Something large sprang off the trunk of the neighboring fossilized pillar. The creature must have been perfectly camouflaged as it worked into position, possibly drawn by the earlier passage of the three men.

Wings spread wide as it dove, revealing its nature.

Hastax valans.

A flying spear.

The sharp beak aimed for his chest, moments from impaling him. He pulled the trigger on the DSR, firing out a bullet of sound. The sonic burst struck the beast head-on. The Hastax screamed, its wings seizing up, sending it cartwheeling to the side.

While the spear missed its intended target, the recoil of the gun came close to throwing Jason off the ladder. One foot lost its rung, but his fingers clenched hard to keep himself perched. A glance below revealed the ladder’s end sweeping from shore and dragging into the water as they swung out over the river.

Jason held his breath, waiting for the pendulum to swing them back again — when the cable running down the left side of ladder snapped, weakened by the corrosive acids and stressed by the sudden swing.

Jerked around, he lost his footing entirely but still hung by one hand.

Someone else wasn’t as lucky.

A body tumbled past him.

Stella.

Gray rushed to the shoreline as the young woman splashed into the river, vanishing underwater.

Harrington cried out and waded into the shallows, ready to go to his daughter’s defense.

Gray grabbed and pushed him toward Kowalski. “Stay… I’ll go.”

But he was already too late.

A shape hurtled down from above, dropping feetfirst into the river.

Jason followed Stella underwater.

Gray held his breath, letting two seconds tick past — then both came sputtering up. Stella struggled, her lips barely above water. Jason fought to pull her forward, but she seemed stuck. The young girl’s eyes were wide with terror.

Jason called out. “Something’s got her leg!”

Gray dropped his rifle, bent down, and yanked a dagger from a boot sheath. He sprang from his crouch and shot out over the water, diving smoothly under. His night-vision goggles picked up the glow from the weapon still tangled around Stella’s torso. He kicked toward the light as schools of silvery fish scattered from his path. Small fist-sized shells burst away with whips of tentacles.

He prayed all the marine life remained equally spooked.

He reached Stella and followed the length of her body down to where a knot of leafy vine was bound around her calf. Tendrils of dark blood seeped from her leg. He grabbed a fistful of loose vine near her ankle and sawed at it with his dagger. The razor-sharp edge cut quickly through the vine.

Freed, Stella accidentally kicked him in the side of the head. He didn’t blame her panic. He twisted back to the surface.

“Get the hell out of there!” Kowalski bellowed.

As Stella and Jason splashed for shore, Gray followed, still facing the river. A trio of large shapes humped out of the water, undulating toward them.

Luminous globes rose from the waters, lifted on dark stalks.

He remembered those same gelatinous orbs searing through the wings of the aerial predator, burning with acid fire.

Volitox ignis.

Jason reached the shore, twisting his weapon up and firing. Water cannoned out of the wide barrel, along with a sound that shot past Gray’s shoulder. The passage left his head ringing like a bell struck with a sledgehammer.

Still, the deafening blast did nothing to deter the forms barreling toward Gray.

“Sonics don’t work against that species!” Harrington yelled. “Run!”

With clothes waterlogged and heavy, Gray sloshed toward shore, but he knew one certainty.

I’ll never make it.

Ahead of him, fiery orbs lowered, skimming the water, as if drawn by his flailing efforts.

Then a new series of blasts erupted behind him — coming not from a sonic weapon this time, but from the heavy chugging of a machine gun.

Kowalski fired from shore, but his aim was too high.

The rounds flew over the luminous globes and the hunters below — and struck a dark shape circling several meters above the river. It was the Hastax that Jason had stunned earlier. Bullets shredded its dazed form and sent it tumbling in a spray of black blood down into the waters, crashing amid the hunters.

The Volitox swarmed upon it, possibly first in a defensive reflex at the seeming attack, then in an escalating bloodlust.

Gray reached shore and joined the others.

“That should keep them busy… along with other scavengers,” Harrington said. “But we should take advantage of the situation and get as far from here as possible.”

“Go,” Gray said, breathing hard and clapping Kowalski on the shoulder in silent thanks.

The big man lifted his machine gun and rested its bulk against his shoulder. “Like I said before, give me real bullets any day of the week.”

As a group, they crossed along the bank, cautious of its slippery coating of algae and moss, keeping well clear of the water’s edge.

Gray led with his weapon at his shoulder, flanked by Stella and Jason. Harrington followed, with Kowalski keeping up a rear guard. The professor eyed his daughter’s limp. The woman’s right leg remained shrouded by the severed coil of leafy vine. Her bottom pants leg was bloody.

“Do we need to take care of that?” Gray asked.

Harrington glanced behind them. The group had cleared a spur of rock, putting them out of direct view of the feeding frenzy. “We should,” the professor said, drawing them farther out of the way. “Over here.”

A slab of broken rock served as a seat for Stella. Her father gently unwrapped the vine, drawing bloody thorns, each an inch long, from her skin. Once removed, the muscular coil continued to squirm in the professor’s grip, but Harrington kept hold.

Following the older man’s instruction, Gray cut a seam along his daughter’s pants, then administered first aid using antiseptic and a bandage from a small emergency med-kit taken from the gondola.

“Do we need to worry about poison?” he asked as he worked.

“No.” Harrington lifted the length of vine. “Sugox sanguine is no worse than kelp. Only a little more aggressive.”

“No kidding,” Kowalski commented.

Vine in hand, the professor moved toward Jason.

The kid took a step back.

“Hold still,” the professor said. “Let me see your face.”

Jason turned his cheek, revealing a black gash.

Harrington lifted the writhing plant. Bright red blood dribbled from the cut end. Gray eyed those thorns anew, horror growing.

Had that muscular vine been sucking Stella’s blood?

The professor tilted Jason’s head farther back and hovered a fat crimson droplet over the wound.

What is he—?

From the gash, a fat white larva squirmed out, stretching toward that fresh blood. The professor speared it with one of the vine’s thorns, pulled out the rest of its body, then threw the vine and the impaled parasite into the river.

Jason fingered his wound, his face sickened.

“Do you know about botflies?” Harrington asked.

Jason shook his head and looked like he didn’t want to know.

Harrington elaborated anyway. “Cuniculux spinae are similar, a type of flesh-burrowing parasite. They burn their way deep into tissues and sprout oviparous spines.”

“Oviparous?” Jason asked, looking more pale.

“Egg-laying. The eggs hatch into carnivorous larvae that spread far and wide. After that, they mature into—”

“I think that’s enough of a biology lesson,” Gray said, saving Jason from more details, while helping Stella back to her feet. “Let’s keep going.”

Jason slogged beside Gray. They had been trekking for nearly forty-five minutes, but by his estimate, they had crossed no more than half a mile.

If even that.

“Not much farther,” Harrington said behind them, but Jason wasn’t sure if that was the truth or if the professor was merely trying to convince himself.

During their hike, the tunnel had been steadily descending, falling in a broken series of steps, each no more than a meter high. Waterfalls cascaded from level to level, echoing up and down the tunnel. They were able to follow the banks along the western wall, but a few times, it required winding past stagnant ponds or fording streams by hopping from rock to rock.

Yet, it wasn’t the terrain that slowed them the most.

Life down here continually pressed against their small party, like a steady headwind. The sonic rifles deterred a majority of the larger creatures. But with every step, something squirmed, crawled, or flapped around them. All the while, biting flies continued to plague them, oblivious of their sonic discharges, an ever-present nuisance.

By now, it seemed every breath burned worse than the last.

Every yard harder to cross.

Sweat soaked through his clothes. His eyes felt swollen and on fire under his goggles.

The only bright side was Stella had drifted closer to him, marching at his shoulder, each taking turns keeping his or her rifle up. Initially, she or her father would try to educate them about what they encountered, classifying various species, but eventually it boiled down to a simple question for each new life-form.

Kowalski asked it now. “Should we shoot them?”

Jason stared ahead. Their path was blocked by what could only be construed as flocks of featherless emus, their numbers easily topping two hundred. Each birdlike creature stood on tall thin legs, likely evolved for wading among the series of ponds that dotted the immediate area. A cluster of nests held speckled eggs the size of grapefruits.

“If you move slowly, they shouldn’t bother us,” Harrington said. “They have no natural fear of people. As long as you don’t get too near one of their nests, we should be able to pass unscathed.”

“And if we do piss them off?” Gray asked.

“Avex cano have a flock mentality. They’ll attack en masse. See that hooked claw at the back of their legs. It’s used for gutting prey.”

“But mostly they’re docile,” Stella said. “Even friendly, sometimes curious.”

She demonstrated by stepping near one and holding out her hand. It hopped closer, cocking its head to one side, then the other. Only now did Jason notice it was eyeless. Small nostrils above a long paddle-shaped beak opened and closed.

She reached a little farther and ran her fingertips along the underside of that beak, earning a soft ululating noise from its throat. The sound spread to its neighbors, like a wave traveling outward from a pebble dropped into a pond.

Stepping forward, Stella followed those reverberations, easily passing through the flock, leading the way now. Jason was drawn in her wake, as much by the wonder of it all as his appreciation of the woman before him.

Nearby, an Avex stalked high-legged into one of the ponds, stirring up a phosphorescent wake in its passage, the glow rising from the thick jellylike growth floating atop the stagnant water. The creature scooped up a gullet full of that slime.

“They graze on those bacterial mats,” Stella said. “Very nutritious.”

“I’ll stick to a T-bone,” Kowalski commented, though he stared hungrily at the Avex flock as if trying to judge if they tasted like chicken.

The group passed unmolested, which perhaps is what made Jason let his guard down.

“Stop!” Harrington barked.

Jason froze. He had been about to step over a rock — only to have it sprout jointed legs, hard and chitinous, and scurry to the side. As it turned away, a curled tail came into view, tipped by a trio of six-inch-long stingers. From the glistening dampness to those spines, they must be venomous.

Harrington confirmed this by naming the scuttling creature. “Pedex fervens.”

Or roughly translated: hot foot.

Stella waved him onward.

He continued alongside Gray, but much of the momentary wonder from a moment ago had dried up.

After another long slog across the next hundred yards, the tunnel fell one last time and dumped into a massive space. The group gathered at the mouth of it. The sheer size boggled the senses.

“We call it the Coliseum,” Stella said.

That was an understatement.

The roof was beyond the reach of their meager pool of IR emitters. The walls to either side yawned ever wider, stretching like open arms into the distance. The river they had been following broke into thousands of small creeks, rivers, and streams, turning the place into a massive stony delta. Farther out, large lakes reflected their lamps, revealing the shadows of darker islands.

But closer at hand, the handful of petrified tree trunks that they had previously traveled past became a virtual stone forest ahead. The specimens found here dwarfed the largest redwoods, but instead of being merely trunks, the trees in this gargantuan cavern were perfect stone replicas, including intact branches and tinier stems, weaving an arched, leafless canopy overhead.

It was a fossilized sculpture of an ancient world.

Overhead, strange luminous creatures floated through those branches, possibly held aloft on some internal reservoir of hydrogen gas or helium. They looked like Japanese lanterns adrift on a breeze.

The group entered the vast space, necks craning at the sheer size. Jason had read about the discovery of a trench under the Western Antarctic ice, twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. This space could be its cavernous equivalent.

“Over this way,” Harrington urged.

The professor led them to the right, toward a wide shallow tributary of the delta. He splashed through the ankle-deep flow. Jason followed, but he had to fight the urge to tiptoe through the stream, still wary of the water. He watched for any new threat, while taking cues from Stella, who swept her IR beam ahead of her. He noted a double row of broken pillars, each as thick as Kowalski’s thigh, running alongside their path. At first he thought they were natural formations, but the rows were too uniform. Closer inspection revealed they were actually the stubs of wooden pylons, anchored by mold-blackened steel spikes.

The construction looked too old to be the handiwork of the British.

Stella noticed his attention. “They’re supports for a series of old bridges that fell apart long ago.”

“Who built them?”

Harrington called out, drawing them all forward. The answer — and their destination — lay ahead. It was parked askew, sitting on an isthmus of rock amid this dark delta. The huge vehicle’s bulk stood two stories tall, resting atop massive new tires. A handful of shiny ladders leaned against its side.

“We found it early on,” Stella said. “A team of British mechanics recently got her working again.”

Jason stared in awe.

It was Admiral Byrd’s old snow cruiser.

Dylan Wright stood near the rear ramp of the largest CAAT. Irritated, he adjusted his body armor with one hand; with the other, he kept the long double barrels of his Howdah pistol balanced against his shoulder, prepared to challenge any threat found down here.

A smaller CAAT flanked his own, engines idling. The two vehicles’ headlamps shredded the darkness. On the roofs, Dylan’s teammates manned large LRAD units installed on top. One dish pointed forward, the other backward, ready to be deployed if necessary.

Dylan cursed under his breath as he stared up at the stalled gondola overhead. From its undercarriage, the remains of a ladder hung down.

So Harrington and the others had gone to ground — but where?

The growl of an engine drew his attention behind him. A second small CAAT came rumbling across the river atop its flotation treads, reached the nearby bank of rock, and climbed out of the water, demonstrating the craft’s amphibious nature.

It trundled up to Dylan’s vehicle and came to a stop. A window rolled down. His second-in-command poked his head out.

“The professor’s not holed up in that Kraut sub,” McKinnon said. “We checked it from stem to stern.”

Dylan had sent the Scotsman back to make sure Harrington hadn’t gone into hiding inside the German vessel.

Knowing this for sure now, Dylan faced forward.

Then they truly set off on foot.

Earlier, one of his scouts had found tracks along the riverbank, but Dylan had wanted to make certain someone hadn’t laid a false trail. He couldn’t believe Harrington had the bollocks for such an overland trek.

Seems I keep underestimating you, old man.

Unfortunately, it had also taken his team too long to get the CAATs loaded for the mission — especially after a hidden clutch of British soldiers ambushed his team at Hell’s Cape. In Dylan’s mad rush to reach Harrington at the outset of the raid, he had failed to properly clear the station. A handful of soldiers had gone into hiding, only to waylay his team, pinning them down for a furious ten minutes. Eventually they were dispatched.

Still…

We lost too much time.

But now he would make up for it. Harrington could not have gotten too far on foot. He straightened, shrugging away his irritation, and climbed into his CAAT.

He holstered his pistol and called to the others, “Mount up! Move out!”

Time for the real hunt to begin.

23

“Now this is interesting,” Dr. Lucas Cardoza said, straightening from his hunched position over his computer.

Painter rose from a stool and crossed over to his side.

The Brazilian geneticist headed the Genographic Project in Boa Vista. He was a portly fellow, with dark hair, a thick black mustache, and studious eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses. Cardoza and his team had been collating and recording DNA from the native tribes of South America for the past decade. Using a proprietary algorithm, he compiled the gathered data to trace the ancient migration patterns for hundreds of tribes who made the Brazilian forests their home.

Painter and Drake had joined Cardoza in his office at the Universidade Federal de Roraima, the city’s main university. The researcher had agreed to perform a DNA analysis on the blood sample from the only surviving gunman from the assault at the café. As expected the prisoner, now under police custody, had refused to talk, even tried to hang himself in his cell in a failed suicide attempt. Such a desperate act spoke to the fervency of Cutter’s followers and the tight tribalism among his group.

But what tribe was it?

“I think I might have found something,” Cardoza said, waving Painter closer to his computer.

Drake bent down, too, grumbling under his breath. “About time.”

Painter checked his watch. Jenna had been kidnapped roughly three hours ago. Her captors had a significant lead, and as time ticked away, her trail grew colder. He knew his team only had a narrow window in which to find her. Cutter Elwes had kidnapped her for a reason, likely to question her, to discover what the Americans knew about him. But after that, he would have no further use for her.

Knowing that, Painter had sent Malcolm and Schmitt to the Brazilian air base, prepping for the arrival of their new transport. The aircraft was flying in from a U.S. warship located in the South Atlantic. Kat had expedited all the arrangements, applying pressure through contacts in the Brazilian government and military to gain their cooperation. Also, staying one step ahead, Kat had made provisions to supply additional support to Painter, which was already en route. That was Kat’s main strength: always anticipating what was needed versus passively waiting for orders.

He especially appreciated that now.

We can’t lose any more time.

And not only for Jenna’s sake.

Kat had also shared the news that a medium-yield nuclear device had reached the Mono Lake region and was being readied for deployment. Her assessment of the aftermath was grim. A hundred square miles would be firebombed, while the burst of radiation and fallout could contaminate over four hundred square miles, including all of Yosemite National Park. Worst of all, there continued to be no guarantee such a drastic tactic would eradicate the bioorganism.

So Painter needed answers — and the Brazilian geneticist was their best hope.

“What did you find?” Painter asked.

“I’m sorry this has taken so long,” Cardoza apologized. “DNA analysis has gotten much swifter over the past few years, but the level of details necessary for such a genetic study takes painstaking precision. I didn’t want to make a mistake and send you in the direction of the wrong tribe.”

Painter placed a hand on the man’s shoulder. “I appreciate your willingness to help on such short notice.”

The researcher nodded gravely and pointed to the monitor. “Look at this.”

On the screen glowed multiple rows of vertical grayscale bars. It looked like a bar code, but this code actually mapped the prisoner’s genetic legacy.

“I’ve identified twenty-two markers unique to natives of northern Brazil, which normally wouldn’t help much, as the number of tribes in this area is rather large and their peoples scattered. But this sequence right here—” He circled a group of bars with his finger on the screen. “It’s a unique mutation found in a subgroup of the Macuxi tribe, a tribe within a tribe, if you will. This particular group is notorious for their isolation and inbreeding, including a strange history of multiple births.”

“And the prisoner belongs to this tight-knit group?”

“I’m almost certain.”

It was that almost that made Painter nervous. “How sure are you?”

He adjusted his glasses. “In the ninety-ninth percentile. Maybe a fraction more than that.”

Painter hid a smile. Only a scientist would qualify a 99 percent match as almost.

“Where does this tribe live?” Drake asked, leaning closer.

Cardoza tapped at his keyboard and brought up a topographic map. A red dot appeared about a hundred miles southeast of Boa Vista, deep into the rain forest.

Painter blew out a frustrated breath. That was still a lot of territory to cover. “What do you know about this section of the rain forest?” he asked, hoping for some break.

Cardoza shook his head. “Very little. It’s almost impossible to reach overland due to the fractured nature of that geology. The terrain is broken into deep chasms, choked with vegetation. Few have ever ventured there.”

“No wonder that tribe was inbreeding,” Drake commented.

“Here’s a satellite image of the area.” Cardoza toggled from the topographic map to a panoramic photo taken from low orbit, showing the spread of dense canopy.

It looked impenetrable. Anything could be hidden under that dark green bower, but Painter had a gut instinct.

From reading everything he could about Cutter, Painter had begun to build a profile of the man’s personality. Cutter had a flair for the dramatic, coupled with an ego that would make it hard for him to hide his head in the sand… even when playing dead.

“Can you zoom out?” Painter asked, remembering an unusual feature found on the topographic map.

“Certainly.”

The image widened, panning out to include a larger chunk of the rain forest. The red dot marking the village lay close to the only significant break in that emerald sea. A tall mountain pushed high out of the rain forest to the south. The cliffs were sheer, looking unscalable. Its summit lay shrouded in mists.

“What’s that?” Drake asked.

“A tepui,” Cardoza explained. “A fractured piece of an ancient tableland. The towering plateaus of this region are centers of myths and legends, full of stories of vengeful spirits and lost passageways to the underworld.”

Painter straightened.

And maybe a good place for a dead guy to return to the living.

Drake glanced over to him. “Think that’s the place?”

“If not, it’s close enough to the village marked on the map. We could always drop in on them for a visit.”

Drop in, being the best description.

Painter added, “If we find nothing at that mountain, hopefully someone at that village would know something about Cutter Elwes.”

“Then let’s go.” Drake turned swiftly without a thank-you or good-bye for Dr. Cardoza.

Painter understood the Marine’s haste but took the time to shake the geneticist’s hand. “You may have saved a young woman’s life.”

As he hurried after Drake, he prayed that was true.

Jenna stood at the edge of civilization.

The jungle spread before her, buzzing with insects, whistling with birdcalls, while behind her, the helicopter’s engine ticked and knocked as it cooled in the forest clearing.

A pair of bare-chested natives in stained shorts hand-pumped fuel into the grounded aircraft from giant black barrels. On the far side, hammocks hung from between the trunks of trees, tented with mosquito netting. Piles of cigarette butts littered the forest floor beneath the slings. A pornographic magazine lay atop the mounds, looking quickly dropped, likely after hearing the approach of the helicopter. The air stank of oil, tobacco smoke, and human waste.

She had moved to the edge of the clearing to escape it, imagining what it must smell like when the camouflage netting was drawn back over this festering pit of man’s corruption. Currently the net drooped from the canopy, waiting to be pulled back into place after the helicopter departed, to once again hide this refueling station.

She stared up into the face of the noon sun, at the bluest of blue skies. The heat was blistering, already burning her winter-pale skin, made worse by the appalling humidity. She stepped into the shade of a mahogany tree, drawing the attention of her guard. The pilot had a rifle across his knees and glanced in her direction. Her captors hadn’t bothered to keep her tied up.

Where could I go?

Even if she tried to run, these tribesmen knew this jungle far better than she did and she’d be quickly recaptured.

At the rain forest’s edge, she inhaled the perfume of the jungle, trying to push down her terror. A breeze stirred leaves, bringing the scent of forest blossoms, damp soil, and green life. As a park ranger, she found it hard to ignore the raw beauty here and the miracle of life in all its myriad forms: from the towering trees leading up to the thick emerald canopy, to the whispering passage of a troop of monkeys through the lower branches, even the parade of ants up the bark of her shade tree. She had read how the naturalist E. O. Wilson had counted over two hundred species of ants on a single rain forest tree. It seemed life was determined to fill every nook and niche in this resplendent Eden.

Something larger stirred closer at hand in the jungle, stepping free of the shadows only yards away, startling her.

The ebony-haired woman strode forward, as bare-chested as the men. Her only clothes were a pair of dark brown shorts that blended with her skin. She carried a bow over one arm, with a quiver of arrows strung across her back. Over her shoulders, she balanced the limp body of a fawn. It had a gray head and black legs, with fur of reddish brown. Large black eyes stared glossily out at its former home.

She passed by Jenna without even a glance.

The woman had only been out in the forest for fifteen minutes. She dumped the carcass near the hammocks, leaving it for the two natives who must live at this refueling station. For the woman, it looked like the hunt had not been for meat or skin, but only for the personal sport.

Jenna noted how the men avoided staring at the woman, even though her breasts — which were quite spectacular — were exposed.

The woman slipped back into the blouse hanging from a branch and spoke to the pilot in a low, relaxed voice. Her dark eyes flicked to Jenna, then back to the man before her. The pilot nodded, yelled at the pair of natives, and waved for them to clear their gear out of the way.

Apparently it was time to go.

Minutes later, Jenna was back in her seat in the rear cabin. The rotors spun up to a roar and the helicopter leaped skyward, breaking free of the jungle and out in the blaze of the midday sun. Tilting its nose slightly down, the helicopter sped over that endless expanse of green canopy.

She stared ahead.

A dark shadow rose near the horizon, still a long ways off.

Is that where we’re headed?

She had no way of knowing. All she knew for sure was that whatever waited for her at the end of this trek would not be pleasant. She closed her eyes and leaned back, girding herself against what was to come, missing her usual source of strength and resilience.

Nikko…

But her partner had his own battle to fight.

Lisa wheeled the gurney toward the air lock that led out of her in vivo lab. The one surviving rat stirred in its test cage, coming forward to watch her pass, its pink nose twitching.

Sorry, I can only save one passenger on this sinking ship.

Nikko lay on his side on the cushioned stretcher, barely breathing after the light sedation. His left front leg was splinted stiffly out, hooked to IV lines running to two bags: One contained fluids infused with a cocktail of antivirals and the other held platelet-rich plasma. The bags rested on the cushion next to the dog, waiting to be re-hung on poles.

Nikko’s stretcher was a patient containment transport gurney, sealed tightly under a clear hood with its own oxygen supply, flowing from tanks secured on the underside.

She pushed the gurney into the air lock, waited for the pressure to equilibrate, then as the green light flashed, she nodded to the figure outside. Edmund Dent hauled open the air lock door on his side and helped her draw the gurney into the small conference room at the center of the BSL4 labs.

“We must hurry,” Edmund said. “Don’t have much time.”

She knew this, too.

Lindahl and his cronies had all gone to oversee the arrival of the nuclear device to the mountain base, taking with him the entire team of nuclear and radiation scientists. For a brief window, the lab was mostly empty. The researchers still present were colleagues of Edmund, who had agreed to turn a blind eye to their current actions. They had all met Jenna, knew about her kidnapping and Lindahl’s plan to irradiate the dog.

Still, who knew how long that silence will last under pressure?

Edmund helped manhandle the containment gurney to the main decontamination air lock. A Marine stood guard on the far side. Edmund lifted an arm as the guard turned, as if what they were doing was totally normal.

Lisa entered the air lock alone, leaving Edmund behind to help cover for her. In her wake, he was going to sabotage the air lock into her lab, to delay Lindahl for as long as possible from discovering Nikko had gone missing.

The decontamination process started. Sprays bathed her suit and the outer shell of the gurney, followed by ultraviolet radiation, then another round of spraying and air drying. The entire process took an agonizing twenty minutes.

The Marine outside would glance in her direction every now and then. Lisa avoided eye contact.

Finally the light flashed green, allowing her out. In the anteroom beyond the air lock, she shed out of her containment suit. Sweat pasted her clothes into every bodily crevice, mostly from the heat inside her sealed suit, but also from fear of discovery. She grabbed the gurney’s handles and, with some effort, wheeled it out into the main hangar.

“Ready?” the guard asked.

She nodded. “Thanks.”

Corporal Sarah Jessup — an auburn-haired Marine in a perfectly pressed uniform — had been assigned as Painter’s personal aide. She had come with the highest praise from the base commander.

“You didn’t have to do this,” Lisa said as the two of them whisked Nikko through the cavernous space.

The woman shrugged. “I’m not breaking any rules. Director Crowe was assigned to be my direct superior. He verbally approved your actions. So I’m following orders like any good Marine.” Still, she smiled softly back at Lisa. “Besides, I have a chocolate Lab at home. If anyone ever tried to hurt Belle, they’d sorely regret it.”

Lisa took a deep steadying breath, thankful for the corporal’s cooperation. If Jessup had not agreed and had not arranged to cover this guard shift, stealing Nikko out of the lab would have been impossible.

The corporal had facilitated matters in one other way.

“I set up the temporary quarantine area per your instructions,” Jessup said. “In a place few would think to look.”

“Where’s that?”

Again that soft smile. “Back room of the base chapel. The chaplain has agreed to keep our cover, to deflect any inquiries.”

“You got a priest to lie for us.”

Her smile widened. “Don’t worry, he’s Episcopalian — and my boyfriend. Plus he loves Belle as much as I do… which he’d better or I’d never consider marrying him. Belle and I are a package deal.”

Lisa heard the young love in the corporal’s voice, reminding her of her own postponed nuptials. Missing Painter more acutely, she tamped down an ache in her heart.

She let Corporal Jessup lead the way, knowing this escapade would only buy them so much time. Eventually someone would talk or Nikko’s hiding place would be discovered. Even barring that, the larger nuclear threat loomed over all.

With another storm due to hit after midnight, Lindahl had set a timetable for detonation as early as nightfall.

She pictured a fiery mushroom cloud blooming over these mountains.

Despair settled over her. Someone had to find a way to stop all of this before it was too late.

But who… and most important, how?

For the past two hours, Kendall had labored under the intense scrutiny of Cutter Elwes inside his facility’s BSL4 lab. Both of them were encased in bright white biosafety suits with yellow air hoses coiling up to the wall.

Kendall held up two vials and read the labels.

The small glass ampules contained the essential ingredients for editing genes. With these tools, a researcher could precisely break the double strands of DNA at specific target sites, allowing changes to be introduced. These specific vials were used mostly for transgenic applications: for inserting a foreign gene — called a transgene — into another organism’s genetic code.

Like adding new wings to a bullet ant.

Cutter had plainly been playing God for some time, mixing foreign genes into established species. The act itself was not that shocking. The technology had been around for close to a decade, used to create transgenic creatures in labs all around the world. From bacteria to mice to even a colony of glow-in-the-dark cats. In fact, Cutter’s work here was not all that advanced, especially considering he had access to the latest MAGE and CAGE processes, techniques that could introduce hundreds of mutational changes at once.

Unfortunately, while Cutter’s creations were monstrous, Kendall didn’t have the moral high ground to truly malign his work. At Mono Lake, Kendall had used the contents of these same vials to design his synthetic virus. His creation had also been the result of transgenic engineering. Only the transgenes he inserted were even more foreign, coming from one of the XNA species found in the shadow biosphere beneath Antarctica.

That last detail was critical to his success at Mono Lake. It led to the breakthrough that allowed him to finally crack the key to turning an empty viral shell into a living, multiplying organism.

God, help me… I can’t let Cutter know how I did it.

Cutter returned from the tall refrigerators at the rear of the lab. Through the glass windows, the rows of test tubes and vials glowed. It was the genetic library for his creations — both those in the past and what he wanted to create in the future.

He returned now with two glass tubes, each half full of cloudy solution.

“In my right hand,” he said, lifting that arm, “is the eVLP you engineered. Your perfect empty shell.”

Kendall had already seen proof of Cutter’s claim, spending the first hour in the lab examining his data, making sure the man had indeed recreated the exact same protein shell.

Cutter raised the other tube. “And this is my creation, a prion-sized piece of unique genetic code.”

So this is what the bastard wants to seed into my shell.

Cutter’s use of the word prion was worrisome. Prions were infectious proteins responsible for such maladies as mad cow disease in bovines and Creutzfeldt-Jakob in humans. The clinical symptoms of such infections were invariably neurological in nature, usually affecting the brain. Worst of all, these diseases were incurable and often fatal.

Cutter lifted the vials higher. “Now you must show me how to combine our work. Your shell and my genetic code.” He put the two tubes into one hand and passed them to Kendall.

He reluctantly accepted them. “What does your code do?”

Cutter chided him with a wave of a gloved finger, then pointed to the workstation. “First you show me proof of concept. Show me that your success in California wasn’t a fluke.”

From this statement, Kendall could tell how galling it must be for Cutter to come begging for his help. Rather than accept that someone had accomplished what he could not, he would rather dismiss Kendall’s accomplishment as dumb luck or a fluke. As much as Cutter had been changed after his mauling by a lion, his conceit remained perfectly intact.

“It will still take some time,” Kendall stalled. “I’ll need a complete DNA analysis of your code to find a way to insert it into the shell.”

“It’s already stored on the computer at your station.”

“I’d like to do a complete analysis myself.”

Suspicion lowered Cutter’s left eyebrow. “Why repeat what’s already been done?”

“It’s a necessary part of my procedure. I’ll likely have to alter your code, add a key sequence to unlock that shell.”

At least that much was true.

Perhaps recognizing the logic of his statement, Cutter sighed and nodded. “Then get to work.”

Before the man could turn away, Kendall stopped him. “I’ve agreed to cooperate. Can’t you tell me how to stop the contagion in California?”

Before it’s too late.

Cutter looked like he was actually considering this request. Finally, his eyes settled on Kendall. “I’ll give you part of the solution, if you tell me more about how this key unlocks your shell. I have to say that intrigues me enough to perhaps show a little goodwill.”

Kendall licked his dry lips, knowing he had to tiptoe carefully. He had to give Cutter enough information to be believed — the man was no fool — but not enough to show his hand completely.

Kendall cleared his throat. “Are you familiar with the media attention given to the Scripps Research Institute back in May 2014? After they announced the creation of a living, replicating colony of bacteria that contained new letters of the genetic alphabet?”

Cutter squinted in thought. “You’re referring to them inserting artificial nucleotide bases into a bacterium’s DNA.”

He nodded. It was groundbreaking work. All of life’s diversity on this planet — from slime mold to human beings — was based on a simple genetic alphabet of only four letters: A, C, G, and T. It was from the jumbling of those four letters that the riotous bounty of species arose on earth. But for the first time, the researchers at Scripps engineered a living bacterium with two additional letters in its genetic code: naming them X and Y.

“What about it?” Cutter asked.

“I did something similar,” Kendall admitted. “Using the CRISPR technique, I was able to clip out sections of old viral DNA and replace them with foreign pieces of XNA. It is that exact sequence of XNA genes — and no other — that acts like a key to unlock the shell.”

“Giving life to your creation.” Cutter smiled. “That’s why I kept failing. I didn’t have that key.”

And I hope you never get it.

“I should’ve thought of it myself,” Cutter said. “That viral capsid, that perfect shell… you engineered its unusual configuration by producing proteins from XNA genes. So naturally to insert genetic material into that shell, it might take a specific sequence of XNA markers for the shell to accept it.”

“A key to match the lock,” Kendall said. “That was my breakthrough.”

Or at least part of it.

“Ingenious, Kendall. You impress me.”

“So if you’re satisfied, can you share more details about the cure?”

It was Kendall’s only hope. If he could figure out the solution on his own, then maybe he wouldn’t have to give that bastard the recipe for arming the viral capsid.

“Fair enough,” Cutter agreed. “First, you may remember how I mentioned earlier that the solution to annihilating your creation — to neutralizing it — was staring you and Harrington in the face all along. Like your solution with the key, it’s all about XNA.”

“How so?”

“What you sadly have failed to ask yourselves is why that exotic shadow biosphere has remained encapsulated in Antarctica for millennia, especially when there is an entire world out there almost defenseless against its aggressive and unique nature.”

“What’s the answer?”

“You hand me the key, and I’ll give you that answer… and the method to turn it to your advantage in California.”

Kendall didn’t press the matter, knowing that was as much as he would get out of the man.

Cutter swung away again. “I’ll leave you to your work. We have a guest arriving soon to whom I wish to speak.” He glanced back at Kendall. “But I’ll expect results when I get back. Trust me when I say, you don’t want to disappoint me.”

Kendall watched him leave through the room’s air lock. In the main lab beyond, the hulking figure of Mateo stood guard, making sure Kendall stayed put.

With no other choice, Kendall began his study of Cutter’s unique piece of genetic code, the very material he wanted to insert into Kendall’s perfect genetic delivery system.

But what was it? What was its purpose?

If I could discover that, I might find a way to stop him.

And if nothing else, working on this code would put off the moment when he must eventually tell Cutter the truth: that the key he wanted so badly was out of his reach. Kendall could not reproduce it here. To engineer that key, he would first need the lymphocytes from a singular species in that biosphere. Its XNA was so unique that it couldn’t be synthesized in any lab. It required a living sample to build that key.

But how long can I keep that secret?

For now all he could do was delay for as long as possible.

But to what end? he wondered. Who can help me?

Painter stood on a remote tarmac of the Boa Vista international airport under the blaze of the midday sun. He shaded his eyes with his good arm, watching the skies. His other arm rested in a sling, his wound freshly rebandaged.

The airport lay only two miles outside the city and shared its facilities with Base Aérea de Boa Vista, the local contingent of the Brazilian Air Force. This corner of the grounds was rarely used, as evident from the weeds growing in the cracks in the blacktop. There was no runway, only a parking lot lined by a ramshackle row of old hangars and outbuildings, long gone to seed.

The current air base had moved to more modern facilities on the airport’s far side. But this location served Painter’s needs, as it was far from regular traffic and out of sight of most eyes. A small group of Brazilian airmen guarded the entrance to this area, keeping the curious away.

Drake paced impatiently behind him, while his teammates, Malcolm and Schmitt, lounged in the shade of one of the hangars.

“Here they come,” Painter said, spotting a silver-gray aircraft cutting across that achingly blue sky.

“What took them so goddamned long?” Drake griped.

Painter didn’t answer, knowing it was frustration that had trimmed the Marine’s fuse so short. Drake clearly felt responsible for Jenna’s kidnapping, having abandoned her inside that café. Not that it was his fault, but saying so made no difference. The Marine had an uncompromising code of honor. Still, Painter suspected the true source of Drake’s anxiety was more personal than professional in nature. He and Jenna had grown close during this trial by fire.

Drake joined him, shading his eyes against the sun’s glare.

Across the sky, the blip raced toward them. The plane had flown in from the USS Harry S. Truman, a Nimitz-class supercarrier conducting exercises in the South Atlantic.

As Painter watched, the aircraft’s twin props swung from vertical to horizontal, slowing the plane and transforming it into a helicopter. The craft was similar to its larger brother, the MV-22 Osprey, that had ferried Painter from the coast of California to the Marine base in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. This aircraft was the new Bell V-280 Valor, sometimes called the Son of Osprey because of its smaller, sleeker design. It functioned mainly as a scout plane and could race at close to three hundred knots, covering a range of eight hundred nautical miles.

Perfect for where they needed to go.

The Valor hovered overhead and began to lower. Painter and Drake retreated across the cracked tarmac — or more accurately they were pushed back by the rotor wash from the twin props. The Valor landed as delicately as a mosquito on a bare arm. The noise was not as loud as would be expected, due to the stealth technology incorporated into the design, which muffled the engine’s roar.

The side hatch opened.

True to her word, Kat had sent them additional men; another trio of Marines hopped out, dressed in body armor and helmets. Drake and his teammates greeted their comrades, clasping forearms in a brotherly fashion.

The swarthy leader of the support team strode up to Painter. “Heard you had some trouble, sir,” he said with a slight Hispanic accent. “I’m Sergeant Suarez.” He waved his arm to the two men flanking him, a muscular black Marine with eyes of steel and a red-haired mountain of a man. “Lance Corporals Abramson and Henckel.”

Painter shook each soldier’s hand. “Thanks for your help.”

Suarez faced the aircraft. “The Valor’s a great little bird. It’ll be a tight squeeze aboard her, but we’ll manage.” The sergeant looked up at the blazing sun. “Hot one today, isn’t it?”

He nodded.

And it’ll likely get even hotter… in more ways than one.

24

Gray stood in the front cab of the massive snow cruiser, leaning on the back of the driver’s seat. The wide windshield offered a panoramic view of the passing terrain of the cavernous Coliseum. For the past hour, they had been slowly traversing the heart of this stone delta, working their way through the petrified forest that towered all around.

Presently the cruiser skirted along the edge of a large lake, so wide the far side could not be discerned, even under the blaze of the cruiser’s six headlamps, each the size of a manhole cover. Their path was lit brightly enough that they no longer needed their night-vision goggles.

Fringing the lake grew tall corpse-white reeds, crowned by waving, glowing filaments. Only these plants — or maybe they were animals — would rise on stilted legs and wade farther away as they neared. Stella said the bioluminescent bulbs of the reeds would attract insect life, snaring the unwary in those acidic tendrils.

And it wasn’t only these reeds that avoided the cruiser.

Their blazing passage drew the attention of life down here, but the sheer size and the loud rumbling roar of its engines seemed to intimidate most predators or scatter the more timid species.

Kowalski manned the wheel. Normally riding shotgun with the big man in any vehicle was an unnerving experience, but Kowalski had the most history with driving semis and plainly had some mad skills with the cruiser, already proving his adept talent at maneuvering the monstrous rig through this harsh terrain. The guy might not have much luck with the ladies, but his affinity for engines certainly made up for it.

Clenching the stub of a smoldering cigar in his teeth, Kowalski concentrated on working the gears as he rode the cruiser over a fall of boulders, tipping its fifty-foot-long bulk sideways as the gargantuan tires chewed through the rockfall.

“Careful,” Gray warned.

“Don’t need a backseat driver,” Kowalski grumbled. “Go find out how much farther we have to go. Forget miles per gallon… this thing gets yards per gallon. We’ll be running on fumes before much longer.”

To prove it, he tapped a thick finger on a gauge, showing it approaching an ominous red line.

Not good.

While life down here mostly ignored the cruiser, its lumbering passage stirred up everything in its wake, making it even riskier now to leave its shelter.

As the vehicle climbed free of the boulder pile, Gray left Kowalski to his driving and ducked down a short ladder into the main hold of the rig. The lower space had once been split into two floors, but apparently someone had gutted it long ago into this one big cabin. Still, the original bench seats lined both sides, leading to a rear ramp that could be dropped open to allow troops to bail out the back.

He found Stella and Jason sitting close together, talking softly, discussing what sounded like a biology lesson. He crossed to Harrington, who sat sullenly across the cabin, his elbows resting on his knees, his head hanging.

“Professor,” Gray said, “we’re running low on diesel. How much farther is this Back Door substation?”

Harrington lifted his face, his complexion wan and tired, his eyes glassy with anxiety. It looked like he had aged decades during the journey from Hell’s Cape. “Not far. The Back Door is at the opposite end of the Coliseum. Can’t miss it.”

Something screeched loudly, then struck the top of the cruiser. Claws dragged along the roof — before falling away again.

We’d better reach it soon.

Harrington cast a worried glance toward his daughter — then leaned over, clutched Gray’s knee, and whispered with some heat. “If something goes wrong, you’ll get her out of here.”

“I’ll do my best,” he promised.

His words seemed to offer Harrington little solace. To distract the man, he sat next to him.

Gray motioned to indicate the bulk of the cruiser. “So what was Admiral Byrd doing down here?”

“I think he came looking for a secret Nazi sub base — and found this place instead. All I can say for sure is that he arrived in Antarctica in 1946, a year after the end of World War II. He was accompanied by thirteen ships, over twenty aircraft, and almost five thousand men.”

“Five thousand… why that many?”

“It was called Operation Highjump. The official story was that Highjump was a polar training exercise, coupled with a mission to map the continent, but most of his expedition’s objectives were kept top secret. It led later to a series of atomic blasts down here. I think the bigwigs who oversaw Byrd’s expedition had been trying to bottle this place up. It’s said that Byrd was never really the same after that expedition, that he was a changed man, more reclusive, sickly. Some blamed it on the time he spent alone on the ice years before, but I wonder if it wasn’t this place.”

One only had to stare at Harrington’s haunted, scared eyes to understand what he meant.

“Maybe we should never have found these caverns again,” the professor said. “Maybe we should have heeded Darwin’s wisdom to keep this secret buried and untouched.”

Kowalski hollered from up front. “Better come see this!”

The urgency in his voice drew them all to their feet. They piled up into the front cab. Harrington dropped heavily into the passenger seat.

Past the windshield, a vast swampland blocked the way ahead, flowing with streams, pools, and a scatter of waterfalls. The great petrified forest behind them dwindled down to a handful of lonely sentinels out there. Overhead, stalactites pointed down from the roof.

Across this swampland spread vast fields of the phosphorescent reeds, lighting even the darkness beyond the reach of their headlamps. Strange creatures moved everywhere across this macabre field. Wading birds took off on leathery wings, fleeing the arrival of the growling, smoking beast of a cruiser. Lumbering shadows slumped through the reeds, their presence only discernible by their passage. Along the banks, other creatures slithered, hopped, or crawled out of their way. All the while, screams, caterwauls, and piping songs pierced their steel cocoon, as if life down here continually challenged this noisy trespasser into their midst.

But none of this was what caused Kowalski to call out.

Gray gaped at the sight before him.

My God…

Throughout this flooded savannah moved a herd of massive beasts, a hundred or more in number, each the size of a woolly mammoth. They moved mostly on all fours, though occasionally one would rise up on its hind legs and lumber in an ursine fashion for a few steps, likely surveying its surroundings for danger, before dropping back down. Their faces had short proboscises, like dwarf trunks of an elephant. These prehensile appendages would snatch at the reeds, pulling them up and gnashing them slowly, methodically, like a cow chewing a cud.

“See that moss growing along their flanks,” Stella said.

Gray squinted. He had thought the great shaggy mats hanging from their muscular bodies were fur, like found on mammoths. Only this growth softly glowed in a kaleidoscope of colors.

“We believe the moss has a symbiotic relationship with these beasts, which we named Pachycerex ferocis. The Pachyceri use their body heat to trigger those changes in colors, using it as a way to communicate among the herd.”

“Like fireflies in a meadow,” Jason said, earning a smile from Stella.

Kowalski was less enamored. “Only looks like these fireflies could stomp you to death.” He glanced over to the professor in the neighboring seat. “What about us? Is it safe to continue?”

“Just go slow. The headlamps will likely confuse them enough to let us pass.”

For a species that communicated in soft glows, the herd probably thought the cruiser was yelling at them, like some tone-deaf and deformed member of their species.

“They’ve never truly bothered us in the past,” Harrington continued. “But I’ve never seen such numbers in one place. We’ve spotted a few here and there, and they leave us alone, especially if we stay brightly lit.”

“Maybe it’s mating season,” Stella said. “And this is their breeding ground.”

“In that case,” Kowalski said, “nobody out there better get the wrong idea about us and decide to put the moves on this boxy lady of ours. Getting flattened by a horny elephant is not the way I’m planning on dying.”

“Do what the professor says,” Gray warned. “Move out, but set a cautious pace.”

Kowalski grumbled under his breath as he put the cruiser into gear. They headed through the shallows, making a wide circling arc to stay clear of the deeper pools of the flooded terrain. The Pachyceri meandered out of their path, a few snorting at them, as if rebuking them for the rude intrusion. They rolled past one tall enough to peer into the side of the cab, eyeballing the strangers inside.

“Nosy guy,” Kowalski said, glancing back for approval. “Get it… nosy.”

Stella and Jason both groaned.

Gray kept a watch on the rearview mirrors, making sure none of the beasts decided to challenge them, worried that even the stout cruiser might not survive a full-on assault by one or more of these giant creatures.

As he kept guard, a flash of light caught his attention in the mirror, much brighter than the herd’s glow. It came from farther back, where the petrified forest grew thicker. Then he spotted another set of lights to the left, like a pair of xenon-glowing eyes. And a moment later, a third pair joined the other two.

Gray’s fingers tightened on the seatback in front of him.

“We’ve got company.”

No wonder it took us so long to run these bastards down…

Dylan Wright stood behind the driver of the largest CAAT, staring out at the expanse of swampland and the lumbering herd of Pachyceri. Far to his right, a vehicle blazed a bright trail across the periphery of the glowing herd, a comet arcing along the floor of the dark cavern.

So they got Byrd’s old snow cruiser moving again.

It must have happened after Dylan and his team fled Hell’s Cape a year and a half ago. But it was no great matter. Land-bound, the cruiser could not match the speed and amphibious dexterity of a CAAT, especially the smaller ones.

Plus the odds were stacked in Dylan’s favor: three against one.

Not to mention, his team already outmanned and outgunned their opponents, likely by the same uneven ratio.

Dylan touched his radio’s earpiece. He spoke to the smaller CAATs to either side. “McKinnon, flank right. Seward, head left. Keep them pinned down. I’ll take the big CAAT and run it right up their arses.”

He got affirmations from both men.

“Go!” he ordered, tasting the familiar lust of the hunt in the back of his throat.

Now to end this.

Jason rode shotgun next to Kowalski as the snow cruiser raced across the swamplands, crushing through the reeds, scattering wildlife, while avoiding the larger obstacles in their path, namely the lumbering Pachyceri. The big beasts trumpeted their complaint, trotting out of the way as best they could. Kowalski jackknifed the big rig back and forth to avoid hitting any stragglers — not necessarily out of concern for the animals, but out of fear that a collision would do more harm to their vehicle than to the thick-hided creatures.

The snow cruiser struck a ridge and jolted up, going impossibly airborne for a moment, then crashing back down on its giant wheels.

Jason clutched the arm of his chair, while keeping watch out his window. Across the cab, Stella crouched in a jump seat behind Kowalski, keeping her eyes glued to the left side of the cruiser.

Lights flared out in the darkness to the right.

“Here they come on our starboard side!” Jason yelled, loud enough for Gray to hear down in the lower cabin.

“Over here, too!” Stella echoed.

On both sides, twin spears of headlamps flanked the barreling cruiser, racing about thirty yards out, running faster and more nimbly than their cumbersome rig. The smaller CAATs were plainly trying to get ahead, to slow them down. A larger CAAT trailed, but it was closing fast, its buoyant treads allowing it to skim across this watery landscape.

“We need to go faster,” Jason mumbled under his breath.

Kowalski heard him. “Got it floored, kid. Unless you want to go out and push, this is it.”

Jason shared a worried glance with Stella.

They’d never outrun these hunters.

The flanking CAATs began to squeeze closer, drawing tighter in a pincer move, attempting to cut them off. Gunfire erupted. Rounds pelted the side of the cruiser and chipped the front windshield. The thick glass held — for now. The cruiser had been built for the harsh terrain of Antarctica, to withstand avalanches and icy crashes, but there were limits to its World War II — era technology.

They needed to break free of this snare. It was now or never. The hunters were as close as they dared let them get to the cruiser.

“Get ready!” Jason yelled down to Gray.

Stella pointed ahead and to the left. “Over there… that one!”

Jason nodded and hollered. “Port side! Got a big bull on the port side!”

“Do it!” Gray called back.

Kowalski leaned over the rig’s wheel. “Hold on to your asses.”

Gray had belted himself into the last seat in the cabin, facing the back of the cruiser. Harrington sat on the opposite side, equally secure in place.

The snow cruiser suddenly swung to the side, making a sharp right turn. It lifted up on two tires, rubber squealing across wet rock, teetering precariously as it still spun to the right, swinging its tail end around to the port side.

Gray held his breath, sure they would topple over — but the cruiser finally righted itself and crashed back down to all four tires.

“Now!” he yelled to Harrington.

The professor hit a large black button above his seat.

Bolts blew near the top of the back wall — and the rear door fell open, dropping away to form an exit ramp. The far edge struck the ground, and the ramp got dragged along behind the cruiser, rattling and bouncing across the cavern floor, plowing through shallow puddles or streams.

Harrington bellowed to be heard above the racket of steel on stone and the bugling of the frightened herd outside. “That must be the one!”

The professor pointed to where an exceptionally large Pachycerex came into view out the back door, thundering along, trumpeting its anger. The bull stood a third taller in the haunches than the others. Beyond its bulk, one of the small CAATs raced, still trying to compensate for the sudden maneuver by the large rig.

Gray raised his DSR rifle aiming for the rear quarter of the massive bull Pachycerex. He waited until the pursuing CAAT drew abreast of the beast — then fired.

The recoil of the electric rifle slammed his shoulder. He got enough of a backwash from the pulse to set his teeth on edge. The sonic bullet struck the flank of the bull. He could tell because its hide had been glowing a dark crimson — then suddenly flared in a splatter of blue, as if Gray had fired a paint gun into its side.

The bull roared and reared up on its hind legs, twisting away from the noise and pain. It dropped back to all fours and charged in the opposite direction — straight toward the CAAT racing along that side.

The bull took its wrath out upon this intruder in the herd. It lowered its head and struck the vehicle broadside with a ringing crash of bone on steel. The smaller CAAT got knocked off its treads, going airborne, flipping sideways. It struck the pond’s far bank, landed on its side, and skidded away in a grinding flurry of sparks.

One down.

Knowing they were outnumbered, Gray had come up with this plan to use this harsh world as a weapon, to turn it against these hunters.

Kowalski threw the rig in the direction of that crash, sending the rear end swinging around again. Gray got tossed hard against his seat’s straps, almost losing his grip on the rifle. The cruiser aimed for this new break in the closing snare, intending to burst free.

The lumbering vehicle roared past the crash site. In the distance, the larger CAAT fell back. Gray stared toward those fading headlamps, sensing his nemesis was aboard there.

Bring it on…

Dylan caught a glimpse of a shadowy shape through the dropped rear gate of the snow cruiser. The flare of his headlamps revealed a figure belted inside, holding a long rifle. Though it was too far and too brief a look, Dylan remembered the man from twenty-four hours earlier, seated atop a Sno-Cat, firing up at his Twin Otter, almost taking out the plane.

It had to be that same American.

So the bastard survived… made it to the station anyway.

A trickle of respect flared through him. He now understood why Harrington kept eluding him. The old man had help, someone skilled and competent.

Dylan’s fingers found the butt of his Howdah pistol and tightened on the antique wooden grip, readying for the challenge to come.

The CAAT’s driver slowed as they neared the crash site. The smaller vehicle lay on its side in an island of light, treads still spinning uselessly at the air. The exit ramp had torn open with the impact. Gunfire flashed from inside the cabin.

Someone was still alive, still fighting.

And with good reason.

Through that open hatch, the world of Hell’s Cape — riled and angered by the chaos — pushed into the upended cabin in a riot of flesh and acid. Shadows lurched and crawled and slithered, piling one atop the other, likely drawn by the blood of the injured inside. One man burst out against that deadly tide, stumbling and struggling. Something scabrous and spidery clung to his shoulder and neck. Long legs pierced his flesh, digging a firm hold.

It was Seward, the team leader of that squad. The man fought through the reeds toward the approaching headlights, an arm raised in a silent plea.

“Sir?” the driver asked, still slowing.

Then a huge dark shadow swept across the glowing tops of the reeds and speared the man through the ribs, lifting him off his feet and carrying him away.

Three other men had been aboard the crashed CAAT.

But by now all gunfire had ceased inside.

Nothing to be done.

Dylan turned his attention forward and pointed his arm at the retreating rear end of the cruiser. He still had a mission to complete.

“Keep going.”

Gray guarded the open rear door with his rifle. The back gate was too damaged to close. The end of the ramp bounced and sparked as it was dragged along the cavern floor behind the cruiser. Exposed to the elements, the cabin was at great risk. He fired his DSR at any shadows that came too near, but the rig’s knee-rattling pace, along with its belching fumes and roaring engines, continued to be their best defense.

Then a sharp whistle blast cut through the cacophony.

It was Kowalski, laying hard on the cruiser’s horn.

Now what?

Gray glanced over a shoulder to see Jason and Stella come flying down the ladder from the rig’s cab.

“Kowalski needs you!” Jason called out, then nodded to Stella. “We’ll guard the cabin.”

The young woman reached Harrington’s side. “You should go, too, father.”

“Wait.” The professor had found an old pair of World War II — era binoculars and stared out into the darkness. He lowered them and pointed. “Looks like Wright’s heading away from us.”

Gray turned and saw Harrington was right.

The CAAT’s headlights swung away from the rig, angling to the left, taking the vehicle farther out into the swamplands, toward the darkness at the back of the cavernous Coliseum.

Where’s he going?

Harrington motioned with his binoculars. “I saw something lashed down atop that CAAT. It looked like—”

A tremendous boom blasted away his last words, echoing throughout the cavern, momentarily silencing the screams and cries of the maddening life outside. It sounded far off.

As the thunder rolled away, Gray turned to Harrington. “Was that your bunker busters?”

Dread clutched Gray’s throat.

Had Wright just collapsed the far end of these tunnels?

Harrington’s eyes had gotten huge — but from a different fear. “No. If those big bombs had blown, the blast would’ve been much louder. Would’ve shaken this entire system.”

Then what was it?

The professor answered his unspoken question. “I think Wright set smaller charges, enough to blow a hole through the Hell’s Cape station.”

“Why would he do that?”

Harrington pointed toward the vanished CAAT. “I was trying to tell you… Atop his vehicle, he had a large disk strapped down, partially covered by a tarp. I think it was an LRAD dish. Had to be four times the size of the ones guarding the station.”

Gray stared in the direction of Wright’s trajectory across the cavern, aiming for the deeper sections of this lost world.

He suddenly understood Wright’s plan.

He pictured a hole blasted through the superstructure of Hell’s Cape, exposing this biosphere to the larger world above. If Wright got far enough into this system and swung that large LRAD dish back toward the mouth of these tunnels…

“He intends to flush this world out into the open,” Gray realized aloud, picturing that sonic device driving the creatures of this land toward his newly blasted exit.

Harrington looked sick. “The damage wrought by these aggressive XNA species being set loose upon our established ecosystems would be incalculable.” He shook his head. “Why would anyone do that?”

“The question of why can wait,” Gray said. “For now, we’ve got to stop that from ever happening.”

Stella nodded. “If we could reach the Back Door, set off those bunker busters, and collapse the tunnels at the far end, we could still keep everything bottled up. Regardless if Wright turns on that massive LRAD dish.”

It was their best hope.

The rig’s horn blasted again, now a continuous wail for attention.

Gray pointed to the bouncing ramp, yelling to be heard. “Jason, Stella! Don’t let anything in!”

If Harrington was right, they couldn’t let anything slow them down.

After he got nods from Jason and Stella, Gray rushed toward the front of the rig, drawing the professor in his wake. He vaulted up the ladder and helped Harrington into the upper cab.

Kowalski scowled back at them, letting go of the chain that led to the blaring horn. The wail finally cut off. “’Bout time.” A thick arm pointed forward. “Doc, is that your Back Door?”

The rig’s massive headlamps cut a swath through the darkness, revealing an installation encrusted like a steel barnacle high up the far wall. The gondola cables along the roof dove down to meet this small base, which from its interconnected series of boxy rooms and sealed tunnels could be mistaken for a grounded space station.

“That’s the substation,” Harrington agreed. “We wedged it into a natural crack, a fissure that led almost to the surface. We drilled a tunnel the rest of the way up.”

Creating this rear exit.

“Then we have a problem,” Kowalski said, lowering his arm and drawing their attention to the terrain directly ahead.

Between the rig and the Back Door, a wide tributary cut across their path. The flow churned swiftly, frothing its path through jagged rocks and sharp stalagmites. It looked too deep for the snow cruiser to cross on its own.

But all was not hopeless — or at least not completely hopeless.

“What do you think?” Kowalski asked.

Off to the left, an old wood-and-steel bridge arched over the river. During their passage through the Coliseum, the remains of other spans dotted this watery landscape, likely built by the Americans who first explored through here. It must have been a daunting undertaking.

Gray remembered Harrington’s story of Operation Highjump. No wonder Byrd needed so many ships, aircraft, and manpower. Venturing down here would’ve been like exploring the surface of Mars.

As the cruiser barreled toward the bridge, Gray noticed several of the railroad ties that formed the span ahead had rotted or fallen away long ago. He pictured the ruins of the other bridges.

“Think it’ll hold us?” Kowalski asked.

Harrington chewed his lower lip, plainly searching for some reason to be optimistic. “These old trestles must have been originally engineered to handle the weight and size of Byrd’s cruiser.”

But that was seventy years ago.

Still, Gray didn’t see any other choice. The Back Door still lay three hundred yards off. To reach the station in time to stop Wright, they needed the rig’s speed — along with the relative safety of its refuge.

“We’ll have to risk it,” Gray said. “With enough momentum, we might be able to fly over it before it collapses under us.”

“You’re the boss,” Kowalski said.

The big man got the cruiser moving faster again, using the last of the diesel fumes to eke out more speed.

Gray called to the two below. “Grab something and hold on!”

He considered kicking Jason, Stella, and Harrington off this bus before they risked this dangerous crossing. But to do so would cost them too much time, momentum, and fuel. Besides, if all went to hell, leaving the three of them alone would be no safer than what they were about to attempt here.

Maybe even less so.

“Hold tight!” Gray yelled as the cruiser reached the river and raced for the bridge.

Gray cringed as the front tires hit the first set of wooden ties, but the stout beams held. He let out a slow breath, still bracing himself for the worst. The rig shot out along the span, which stretched fifty long yards ahead.

In the rearview mirror, he watched a couple of planks shatter under their passing weight and fall into the churning maw below. But the massive tires rolled their way across any smaller gaps. It was nothing the rig couldn’t handle. So far speed and momentum were on their side.

Just not luck.

Something fiery shot low over the river, cruising toward them.

Gray caught a glimpse of its source. A pool of light revealed the distant presence of the second of the small CAATs. Apparently it had not followed its bigger brother, but instead had been sent to ambush them.

A figure stood atop that vehicle’s cabin, risking the dangers here, balancing the smoking length of an RPG launcher in his arms.

The fired rocket struck the bridge ahead of them, exploding old ties and rending apart steel.

Unable to stop in time, the snow cruiser hit the blasted gap — and plunged headlong toward the river.