The Calm Before The Swarm

ONE

Altai Mountain Range

Siberia

Friday, October 5^th

3:02 p.m. NOVST

(2:02 a.m. PST)

The wind screamed across the sheer granite face of Mt. Belukha. Its peak hid behind a white shark's fin of blowing snow, still five hundred meters above them. There was no sky, only the blizzard that assaulted them from all directions at once and threatened to sweep them from the ice-coated escarpment, upon which the new flakes accumulated in a layer as slick as greased glass. Progress was maddeningly slow as even their crampons and ice axes hardly secured tenuous purchase. They had passed the point of no return hours ago. There was no choice but to continue higher and pray that their ice screws held in the fractured ice. With the ferocity of the sudden storm, a descent under darkness would be suicide.

Four days ago, a chunk of ice the size of an office building had calved from the mountain with the sound of cannon fire and thundered down the northwestern slope. From their base camp in the upper Katun Valley to the south, they had watched in horror as fragments the size of semi trucks lay siege to the timberline, exploding through the wall of evergreens as though it were no more substantial than tissue paper. Two kilometers to the north, and they would have been pulverized to such a degree that their bodies would have been unrecognizable, if they were even found at all. But fear metamorphosed into excitement when the binoculars revealed the mouth of a cave roughly one hundred and fifty meters below the nearer of the twin summits. Lord only knew how long it had been sealed behind the ice.

It had taken several days to plot their ascent to coincide with the ideal weather forecast, which hadn't predicted the freak storm that swept up the valley three hours ago like a tsunami of blowing flakes.

Dr. Ramsey Ladd, Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of Hominid Paleobiology, had to pause to summon the last of his failing strength. His arms and legs trembled as he clung to his axe handle and rope, balanced on his toes. The ledge beneath him couldn't have been more than four inches wide, but it was the largest he had encountered in quite some time. The wind whipped the fur fringe of his parka hood into his face, which felt as though it had frozen solid even with the full neoprene balaclava facemask. Ice accumulated in the corners of his goggles, narrowing his already constricted field of view. It was hard to imagine feeling claustrophobic so exposed on the mountain, and yet his chest tightened to the point that he had to concentrate to keep from hyperventilating the already thin air. He didn't dare risk shifting his weight to glance over his shoulder to confirm that the others were still behind him.

Just fifty more meters, he assured himself, and again forced his trembling body upward.

He nearly sobbed when he hooked his axe over the precipice and hauled himself up into the cave. Every muscle in his body ached. His throat was stripped raw. Ice knotted his lashes and beard, and clung to his chapped nostrils. He crawled deeper into the darkness, away from the blizzard shrieking past the orifice. When he could crawl no more, he collapsed to the granite floor, rolled out of his rucksack, and desperately drank the water from his thermal hydration bladder. His breathing eventually slowed, and he listened from the darkness as the others clambered up with the clamor of axes and crampons and performed the same exhausted ritual.

Saved from the elements, the cave had to be at least twenty degrees warmer. The echo of their slowing exhalations gave some indication of its size, which was far larger than he would have guessed from the valley below. He removed his flashlight from his pack and clicked it on. The beam shoved back the shadows and limned the granite walls.

"My God," Ladd whispered. He stood and turned a complete circle, watching in awe as the beam spotlighted ancient pictographs distorted by a layer of glimmering ice. There were angular lines and abstract representations of stick men and beasts he couldn't immediately identify. "Can you guys see this?"

He heard the clatter of spiked cleats behind him, but couldn't tear his eyes from the wall. The state of preservation was miraculous. He couldn't begin to fathom how old these finger-painted images were.

"Judy?" he whispered.

"The designs are different than any I've seen at the other proto-human sites we've discovered," Dr. Judith Rivale, Professor of Anthropology at The George Washington University, said. She shed her goggles and her mask to more clearly see. Her chestnut bangs were crisp with ice and hung in front of her brown eyes and wind-chafed brow. "I hesitate to even speculate until we're able to accurately date the strata. The level of preservation is so staggering, thanks to the ice, that this could just as easily be a hundred thousand years old as twenty."

She glanced back at the man behind her, whose parka was lined with so much fur he appeared more animal than man.

"Don't look at me," Dr. Carlos Pascual said. As Head of Paleoarchaeology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, he had been called upon to authenticate and evaluate discoveries predating the Upper Pleistocene Era on every continent. Were it possible to be an expert on the inexplicable, he was as close as one could get. "This is all positively modern to me. Whoever painted these did so long after all of the other hominin branches died off."

"Wait a second," Rivale said. She stepped closer to one of the walls and carefully chiseled away a section of the ice with her axe blade. "This can't be right. These markings almost look Sumerian, like an early form of cuneiform."

"Take pictures," Ladd said. "Maybe our Kyrgyz guide has seen more like this elsewhere in these mountains."

Nelson Spears, a doctoral candidate from the University of Pennsylvania who had insinuated himself onto their expedition team, due in large measure to his father's company's financial backing and political connections, removed his digital camera from his backpack and began the process of documentation.

Ladd wandered deeper into the cave. The strobe of the flash distorted the shape of the granite walls, making them appear to alternately expand and contract, and throwing shifting shadows across the smooth stone. At the furthest reaches of his vision, he glimpsed a pyramidal stack of stones. As he neared, it drew contrast and resolved from the darkness. They weren't rocks. Vacant-eyed skulls of all shapes and sizes stared back at him from the column of light. There had to be at least fifty of them. All of their faces were turned outward, so that no matter where he stood, they always seemed to be looking at him. He stepped closer. His beam spotlighted fossilized bones long since absolved of their flesh and aged to the color of rust. Fracture lines coursed through their sloped, elongated craniums like spider webs.

"Get a shot of this," he said.

Once Nelson had taken several pictures from various angles, Ladd carefully tried to lift the uppermost skull, but it wouldn't budge. The pyramid had petrified in that form.

"These are the most remarkably preserved remains I've ever encountered," Pascual said. "Look at this. The flat frontal bone, the prominent brow ridge, the protuberance of the occipital bun, the suprainiac fossa. Some of these are undeniably Neanderthal. And the rest? My God. A combination of archaic and modern human traits? Astounding. Do you realize what we're looking at here? This could be the most important paleontological discovery of our lifetimes."

Another flash illuminated two more pyramids against the rear wall, between which a fissure split the granite. The shadows receded from his beam. As he approached, he realized that it was more than a mere alcove.

The crevice was barely wide enough to allow him passage. His jacket rubbed on the walls with the repeated sound of a quickly drawn zipper. Five meters in, the ceiling lowered and he had to duck. The circle of his beam reached a flat surface ahead, and focused smaller and smaller as he advanced. He felt the subtle movement of air against his face and smelled the damp breath of the planet: the aged scents of crumbling stone, dust, and possibly the trace residues of smoke and something unpleasantly organic. Before he reached the terminus, a hole opened in the ground. He knelt and shined his light down into a smooth chute that descended beyond the light's reach. One side had evenly spaced half-circles of shadow. He had seen similar markings before. They were handholds, chiseled into the stone, smoothed by time and frequent use.

"What do you see?" Rivale asked.

Ladd shrugged in response.

"I'm going down," he said, and swung his legs over the edge.

"Let us belay you. If you fall and hurt yourself, we'll never be able to get you back down the mountain."

Ladd was in no mood to argue. The moment his toes found the grooves, he tucked his flashlight into his coat pocket and started down. Rivale did her best to shine her light onto the primitive rungs. It barely provided enough illumination to navigate the small ledges, which had been carved in a zigzagging fashion. He realized he should have been counting the handholds, but it was too late now. All he could do was continue until he stepped down onto solid ground. Rivale's flashlight was the pinprick of a distant star high above him when he finally stepped away from the wall and into the waiting blackness.

* * *

"Are you all right down there?" Pascual called. His voice echoed around Ladd, who turned and directed his light into the darkness.

"Yeah," he said in little more than a whisper. The cavern was so large that his beam was about as effective as a candle's flame. It diffused to nothingness before it encountered the far wall.

"Ramsey! Is everything okay?" Pascual shouted, louder this time.

Ladd could only nod as he started forward with the clacking sound of his cleats. The cool breeze followed from the tunnel at his back. It waned as he pressed deeper into darkness that grew warmer with each step. Water dripped unseen around him with discordant plipping and plinking sounds, beneath which he heard faint scritching that immediately brought rats to mind. A vile stench permeated his balaclava, forcing him to take several deep breaths through his mouth to keep from retching. Something must have crawled in here to die. He imagined a festering bear carcass crawling with rodents and felt his stomach clench.

The clatter of crampons echoed from the chute behind him.

He drew wide arcs across the chamber with his beam. Petroglyphs spiraled up a cluster of stalagmites, which glistened with the condensation dripping from above. The uneven ground was smooth. Eons of dissolved minerals had accreted into hardened puddles reminiscent of melted wax. The domed ceiling was spiked with stalactites. Bats shuffled restlessly in their shadows. He wondered how they had managed to find their way this deep into the mountain before the ice broke away and revealed the cave.

A light bloomed behind him and stretched his shadow across the floor.

"These aren't as old as the others," Rivale said.

Ladd glanced back to find her scrutinizing the carvings on the stalagmites. When he turned around again, he caught movement in his beam. A quick black blur. Near the ground. There and gone before he could clearly identify it. His skin crawled at the thought of a rat scurrying up his pant leg and nipping into the meat of his thigh. They were filthy, insatiable creatures. It might not be as effective as a flamethrower, but at least he had a flare gun in his pack. If nothing else, the sudden and blinding glare would serve to startle the vermin back into the godforsaken warrens in which they dwelled. He slowed to retrieve it from his pack and felt emboldened with his finger on the trigger, even though he knew he could only use it with the utmost caution for fear of violating the integrity of the site and destroying anything of potential anthropological significance.

"Put that thing away before you end up setting yourself on fire," Pascual said. "This may be little more than a peashooter, but it will definitely ruin a rat's day."

The wan light glinted from the barrel of the Smith & Wesson 22A semi-automatic target pistol in his fist.

"Where the hell did that come from?" Ladd asked.

"My backpack."

"You know what I mean."

"A lot of bad things can happen to an American traveling abroad. I never leave the country without it."

Ladd shook his head and followed his nose toward the rear of the cavern.

"I don't have to tell you, Ramsey, how much a genuine hominin fossil could fetch on the black market. Entire expeditions had been slaughtered for less."

Ladd conceded the point. He just hoped Pascual didn't accidentally shoot him in the back.

The camera flashed as Nelson captured the glyphs for Rivale, and then set about documenting the cave as a whole. Ladd was finally able to take in the magnitude of his surroundings. The cavern was the size of a small warehouse. Natural stone columns connected the ground to the fifteen-foot-high ceiling at random intervals. Petroglyphs covered every available surface. Most of the individual designs were no larger than an inch square. Rivale was right. They looked like the cuneiform on the ancient tablets he had seen, which only served to heighten the sense of surreality. How had a four thousand year old form of writing found its way onto the walls inside a frozen mountain a continent away and, by all accounts, a geological era apart?

Ladd walked around a column and directed his beam into a darkened corner. Dozens of tiny eyes flashed red before the rats fled with an indignant racket of squeals. He had been right about the source of the smell, just not the mechanism of demise. The brown bear was suspended from the ceiling and the walls by a series of ropes, which drew its arms and legs away from its body, spread-eagle. Its hide was stretched beside it from floor to ceiling to tan. The carcass still wore fur on its clawed paws like mittens and socks. Its diminished form seemed disproportionate to its savage head, from which dull eyes stared blankly past him. Its dry tongue protruded from the right side of its contorted jaws. Its neck had been torn open to such an extent that it appeared to be held in place by the spine alone. Connective tissue shimmered silver over its broad chest muscles. There was a massive gap where it had been absolved of its viscera. The sloppy wounds where the rats had helped themselves were readily distinguishable from the gouges where something much larger had stolen bites.

Someone had hunted this bear and dragged it in here. Very recently. And that someone could still be in there with them at this very moment.

"We should get out of here," Ladd whispered.

"Over here," Rivale called.

Ladd spun around at the sound of her voice. She was in the opposite rear corner, silhouetted by the glow of her flashlight, which she focused upon the ground.

"There has to be another entrance," Pascual said from behind him as Ladd crossed the cavern.

His guts tingled. Something was definitely wrong here. The sudden urge to sprint from the cavern nearly overwhelmed him.

He passed a dark orifice filled with shadows impervious to his light on his left. His beam barely penetrated the darkness.

Rivale nearly knocked him over in her hurry to retreat. She had shoved aside a heap of desiccated flowers, leaves, and grasses to reveal a foul puddle of concentrated urine and feces. The brownish-black logs were well-formed and undeniably human.

Someone was definitely living in here. Several people, most likely. One man couldn't haul, hang, and skin a bear. So where were they hiding? And better yet...why?

"I don't like the looks of this," Nelson said. "We shouldn't be in here."

"We can't risk the climb back down after nightfall," Rivale said.

"We can hole up in that cave up there and set off at first light."

"There's another option," Pascual said. He stood in the mouth of the tunnel that branched from the back wall, shining his light deeper into the mountain. "That bear had to weigh at least a thousand pounds. Whoever dragged it in here didn't scale the mountain like we did. There has to be an easier way out."

"We don't know who's in here with us or where they might be," Ladd said.

"You're letting your imagination get the better of you. There's no reason to suspect that whoever's here is hostile. It's probably just a nomadic Kyrgyz tribe riding out the winter. They'd probably even be willing to show us the way out of here."

"This doesn't feel right, Carlos. You saw the bear. It looked like someone had been gnawing the meat right off the bone."

Pascual waved off his concern and started into the stone passage. He was probably right, but Ladd couldn't dismiss his unease so quickly. He had tapped into his survival instincts, which screamed for him to get out of there before it was too late.

Ladd forced his legs to move and followed Pascual. Rivale and Nelson fell in behind him. The clatter of crampons and their haggard breathing echoed in the confines. Nelson flashed the camera repeatedly, more for light than for documentation's sake. The narrow walls were covered with writing. It would have taken lifetimes to carve so many symbols. Ladd hurried to catch up with Pascual as he exited the passage into another chamber. Were it possible, this one smelled worse than the last. The musty, sour aromas of body odor, ammonia, and festering meat made his eyes water.

His cleats made a crunching sound as he stepped from the bare stone onto a more forgiving substrate. He crouched and shined his light at the ground. Sand. He scooped up a handful and allowed it to cascade between his fingers. The grains were small and powdery, as though individually they had no substance at all, like the sand from a tropical beach or the most remote desert. Whatever the case, it definitely wasn't from around here. He again thought of the cuneiform and its Arabian origin as he stood and followed Pascual deeper into the mountain.

* * *

The tunnel opened into a chamber much smaller than the last, perhaps the size of a two-car garage, but the ceiling was much higher. As with all of the others, the walls were covered with the cryptic writing. A mound of sand filled the room, drifted against the far wall, as though a dune had been magically transported into this one cave.

Nelson flashed his camera. Ladd glimpsed what had to be thousands of bats suspended overhead between the stalactites. They wavered from side to side as though blown by a breeze only they could feel.

Their flashlight beams crisscrossed the cave like spotlights at a movie premier, showing them random pieces, but never the whole.

"There's another passage over here," Pascual said.

Ladd turned toward where Pacual stood in the opposite corner, silhouetted by his flashlight, which diffused into another pitch-black corridor.

"How in the world did all of this sand get in here?" Nelson whispered.

"I feel a faint breeze," Pascual called. His voice echoed from the orifice. "At least we know we're heading in the right direction."

Ladd skirted the edge of the dune. His reluctance to walk on it was irrational, he knew, and yet he simply couldn't bring himself to step on any more of it than absolutely necessary. There was something unnatural about it. Not the sand itself, per se, but the fact that it simply shouldn't be here. He felt a swell of relief when he ducked out of the room and into the tunnel.

"Amazing," Pascual said from somewhere ahead, his voice hollowed by the acoustics.

"What is it?"

"You have to see it to believe it."

Ladd wasn't in the mood. The feeling that he needed to get out of this mountain this very second nearly overwhelmed him.

The stone corridor opened into another domed cavern. Pascual stood in the center, directing his light at the walls as he slowly turned in circles. Another dark channel exited the far side.

Ladd followed the beam with his eyes. The walls weren't covered with writing. Hundreds of recesses had been meticulously carved into them instead, small arched shelves separated by a finger's width of granite. They were barely large enough to accommodate the skulls wedged inside them. More shadowed eye sockets than he could count stared directly at him.

"It's an ossuary," Ladd said.

"Of sorts. There aren't any other bones. Only the skulls." Pascual's voice positively trembled with excitement. "Notice anything interesting about them?"

Ladd directed his light at the nearest arch to his left and stumbled backward in surprise.

"Jesus."

"Tell me about it. I've never seen anything like them on a hominin. A Great Ape, maybe, but not on a proto-human."

"What in God's name do you think---?"

"Ramsey!" Rivale shouted from behind him. He spun toward the tunnel leading back to the room with the sand. "Ramsey!"

Something in her voice awakened the panic inside him. He took off at a sprint, made awkward by his crampons. Something was definitely wrong. Everything was wrong. They shouldn't be here. No one was ever meant to be here.

Ladd burst into the cavern to find Rivale kneeling beside Nelson on one of the dune's peaks, waving her hand, palm-down, over the sand. He hurried to her side. She glanced up at him, eyes wide.

"Hold your hand right here. Just like this," she said. "Can you feel it?"

Ladd removed his glove and waved his hand over the ground just as she had. The tip of a reed reminiscent of the stalk of a cattail stood several inches above the sand at a slight angle. Warm air caressed his palm when he passed over it.

"What is it?" he asked.

"I don't know. Nelson found it. And several more just like it."

"At least four more," Nelson said.

"There's something under here." Ladd brushed the sand away from the base of the thin reed, only to find that it extended deeper than he had suspected. The fine grains slid back into place. "What could possibly---?"

"Quit screwing around and just do it already," Pascual said. He shouldered Ladd aside and shoved scoops of sand away from the reed. "For someone in such a rush to get out of here, you're sure taking your sweet time about it."

Ladd glanced back toward the tunnel through which they had initially entered. Suddenly, the prospect of descending the sheer, icy face of Mt. Belukha wasn't nearly as intimidating, even blindly in the darkness and the blizzarding snow.

"Stop, Carlos."

"I can feel something down there."

"For Christ's sake, stop digging! Let's get out of here while we still---"

"What the hell is that? Someone. Give me some more light."

Rivale shined her beam into the bottom of the foot-deep hole as Pascual brushed away the grains that trickled back down the sides. He jerked his hand back and scrabbled away.

Ladd saw a prominent brow over eyelids dusted with sand, the ridge of a slender nose, a pair of lips pursed around the base of the reed.

"It's too late," he whispered.

The eyes snapped open at the sound of his voice.