Tyrannosaur Canyon

DOUGLAS PRESTON

TYRANNOSAUR CANYON

For my son,

Isaac

PROLOGUE

December 1972 Taurus-Littrow Valley Mare

Serenitatis The Moon

ON DECEMBER 11,1972, the last manned Apollo mission to the moon touched

down at the Taurus-Littrow landing site, a spectacular, mountain-ringed valley at the edge of the Sea of Serenity. The area promised to be a geological wonderland of hills, mountains, craters, debris fields, and landslides. Of particular interest were several curious impact craters that had punched deep holes in the valley floor, spraying breccia and glass across the valley. The mission had high hopes of returning with a treasure trove of lunar samples.

Eugene Cernan was the commander of the Lunar Module and Harrison "Jack" Schmitt its pilot. Both men were ideally suited for the Apollo 17 mission. Cernan was a seasoned veteran of two prior missions, Gemini IX and Apollo 10; while Schmitt was a brilliant geologist with a Ph.D. from Harvard who had been involved in planning earlier Apollo missions. For three days Cernan and Schmitt explored Taurus-Littrow with the help of the Lunar Rover. On their first venture across the lunar landscape, it became obvious to all that they had hit the jackpot, geologically speaking. One of the most exciting discoveries of the mission, and one that led indirectly to the mysterious find at Van Serg Crater, occurred on the second day at a small, deep crater known as Shorty. As Schmitt got out of the Rover to explore the rim of Shorty, he was astonished to see that his boots were kicking through the gray lunar dust to expose a layer of bright orange soil underneath. Cernan was so startled that he lifted his orange reflective visor to make sure it wasn't an optical illusion. Schmitt dug a quick trench and discovered that the orange soil graded down to a brilliant red.

The "Backroom" at Houston excitedly debated the source and meaning of this strangely colored soil, and they asked the two men to take a double-core sample to bring back to Earth. After Schmitt took the core, the two men hiked to the rim of Shorty crater, where they saw that the impactor had blasted through the same orange layer, which lay exposed along the sides of the crater.

Houston wanted to get samples of the orange soil from a second location. For that reason, they placed on the exploring itinerary a small unnamed crater close to Shorty, to be explored on Day 3, which they hoped would have an exposure of the same orange layer. Schmitt christened it Van Serg Crater, after a geology professor he had known at Harvard who wrote humorous pieces under the pen-name of "Professor Van Serg."

Day 3 turned out to be long and grueling. Dust fouled their equipment and hampered their work. That morning, Cernan and Schmitt had driven the Lunar Rover to the base of the mountains ringing Taurus-Littrow to examine a gigantic split boulder named Tracy's Rock, which had evidently rolled out of the mountains eons ago, leaving a trail in the soil. From there the two men explored an area called the Sculptured Hills, finding little of interest. With great difficulty Cernan and Schmitt hiked partway up one of the hills to inspect an odd-looking boulder, only to discover it was a scientific dud, nothing more than a "shocked piece of old lunar crust," which had been thrown onto the hillside by an ancient impact. The two astronauts descended the steep, powdery hillside leaping like kangaroos, Schmitt making noises as he jumped from side to side, pretending he was skiing moguls, joking, "Can't keep my edges. Shhhoomp. Shhhoomp. Little hard to get good hip rotation."* Cernan took a spectacular, low-gravity tumble, landing unhurt in the deep, powdery soil.

By the time they reached Van Serg Crater, both men were exhausted. As Cernan and Schmitt approached, they had to drive the Lunar Rover through a field of football-sized rocks blasted out of the crater. Schmitt, the geologist, thought the rocks looked odd.

"I'm not sure what's happened here, yet," he said. Everything was coated in a thick layer of dust. There was no sign of the orange layer they were after.

They parked the Rover and picked their way through the debris field to stand on the rim, Schmitt arriving first. He described it for Houston: "This is at least a large, blocky rim crater. But even it has the mantle dust material covering the

(*A11 conversations quoted above are from the original transcripts of the Apollo 17 mission, edited by Apollo Lunar Surface Journal tftimi Eric M.Jones. Copyright © 1995 by Eric M. Jones.)

rim, partially burying the rocks. And it's down on the floor, as near as I can tell, and on the walls. The crater itself has a central mound of blocks that's probably fifty meters in diameter-that's a little high-thirty meters in diameter."

Cernan arrived. "Holy Smoley!" he said as he gazed into the visually striking crater.

Schmitt went on. "The rocks are intensely shattered in that area, as are the ones that are on the walls." But as he looked around for orange soil, he saw none, just a lot of gray lunar rock, much of it in shatter-cones caused by the force of the impact. It appeared to be an ordinary crater, no more than sixty or seventy million years old. Mission control was disappointed. Nevertheless, Schmitt and Cernan began collecting samples and putting them in numbered specimen bags.

"These are very intensely fractured rocks," Schmitt said, handling a specimen. "And it comes off in small flakes. Let's get this one, because this will be the best oriented one for documentation. Plus, why don't you get that one you've got inside there?"

Cernan took a sample and Schmitt picked up another rock in his scoop. "Got a bag?"

"Bag 568."

"That's a corner, I think, off the block that Gene documented here."

Schmitt held out another empty bag. "We'll get another sample that'll be from inside the block."

"I can get it with the tongs real easy," Cernan replied.

Schmitt cast his eye about and saw another sample that he wanted-a curious-looking rock about ten inches long, shaped like a tablet. "We ought to take that just as is," he told Cernan, even though it was almost too big for a single sample bag. They picked it up with the tongs.

"Let me hold this end," said Cernan as they tried to maneuver the specimen into the bag. "Let me hold it, and you put the bag on." Then he paused, looking closely. "Well, see that? See the white fragments in there?" He pointed to a number of white fragments embedded within the rock.

"Yeah," said Schmitt, examining the spots closely. "You know, it might be that these might be pieces of the projectile. I don't know. 'Cause it doesn't look like . . . It's not subfloor. Okay. Pin it down."

When the rock was safely bagged, Schmitt asked, "What's the number?"

"It's 480," responded Cernan, reading out the number printed on the side.

Meanwhile, Houston had became impatient with the time being wasted at Van Serg, now that they had determined there wasn't any orange soil there. They asked Cernan to quit the crater and take some 500mm photographs of North

Massif, while Schmitt did a "radial survey" of the ejecta blanket surrounding Van Serg. By this time, Schmitt and Cernan had been out exploring for nearly five hours. Schmitt worked slowly, and during the survey his scoop broke-dust problems again. Houston told him to forget the rest of the radial survey and prepare to close out the site. Back at the Rover, they took one last gravimetric meeting and a final soil sample, did the closeout, and returned to the Lunar Module. The next day, Cernan and Schmitt lifted out of the Taurus-Littrow Valley, becoming the last human beings (at least for now) to walk on the moon. Apollo 17 returned to Earth with a splashdown on December 19, 1972.

Lunar Sample 480 joined 842 pounds of other lunar rocks from the Apollo missions at the Lunar Receiving Laboratory at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Eight months later, with the end of the Apollo program, the Lunar Receiving Laboratory was closed and its contents were transferred to a newly built, super-high-tech facility at the Johnson Space Center, called the Sample Storage and Processing Laboratory or SSPL for short.

Sometime during that eight-month period, before the transfer of the moon rocks to the new SSPL, the rock known as Lunar Sample 480 vanished. Around the same time, all entries related to its discovery disappeared from the computer catalog and hard-copy card files.

Today, if you go to the SSPL and make a query to the Lunar Sample Registry Database under the entry LS480, you will receive the following error message:

QUERY: LS480

?> ILLEGAL NUMBER/NO SUCH NUMBER

PLEASE CHECK LUNAR SAMPLE NUMBER AND TRY AGAIN

PART ONE

THE MAZE

1

STEM WEATHERS SCRAMBLED to the top of the Mesa de los Viejos, tied his burro to a dead juniper, and settled himself down on a dusty boulder. Catching his breath, he mopped the sweat off his neck with a bandanna. A steady wind blowing across the mesa top plucked at his beard, cooling him after the hot dead air of the canyons.

He blew his nose and stuffed the bandanna back into his pocket. Studying the familiar landmarks, he silently recited the names-DaggettCanyon, Sundown Rocks, Navajo Rim, Orphan Mesa, Mesa del Yeso, DeadEyeCanyon, Blue Earth, La Cuchilla, the Echo Badlands, the White Place, the Red Place, and TyrannosaurCanyon. The closet artist in him saw a fantastical realm painted in gold, rose, and purple; but the geologist in him saw a set of Upper Cretaceous fault-block plateaus, tilted, split, stripped, and scoured by time, as if infinity had laid waste to the earth, leaving behind a wreckage of garish rock.

Weathers slipped a packet of Bull Durham out of a greasy vest pocket and rolled a smoke with gnarled, dirt-blackened hands, his fingernails cracked and yellow. Striking a wooden match on his pant leg, he fired up the quirly and took in a long drag. For the past two weeks he had restricted his tobacco ration, but now he could splurge.

All his life had been a prologue to this thrilling week.

His life would change in a heartbeat. He'd patch things up with his daughter, Robbie, bring her here and show her his find. She would forgive him his obsessions, his unsettled life, his endless absences. The find would redeem him. He had never been able to give Robbie the things that other fathers lavished on their daughters-money for college, a car, help with the rent. Now he'd free her from waiting tables at Red Lobster and finance the art studio and gallery she dreamed of.

Weathers squinted up at the sun. Two hours off the horizon. If he didn't get moving he wouldn't reach the ChamaRiver before dark. Salt, his burro, hadn't had a drink since morning and Weathers didn't want a dead animal on his hands. He watched the animal dozing in the shade, its ears flattened back and lips twitching, dreaming some evil dream. Weathers almost felt affection for the vicious old brute.

Weathers stubbed out his cigarette and slipped the dead butt into his pocket. He took a swig from his canteen, poured a little out onto his bandanna, and mopped his face and neck with the cooling water. He slung the canteen over his shoulder and untied the burro, leading him eastward across the barren sandstone mesa. A quarter mile distant, the vertiginous opening of JoaquinCanyon cut a spectacular ravine in the Mesa de los Viejos, the Mesa of the Ancients. Falling away into a complex web of canyons known as the Maze, it wound all the way to the ChamaRiver.

Weathers peered down. The canyon floor lay in blue shadow, almost as if it were underwater. Where the canyon turned and ran west-with Orphan Mesa on one side and Dog Mesa on the other-he spied, five miles away, the broad opening to the Maze. The sun was just striking the tilted spires and hoodoo rock formations marking its entrance.

He scouted the rim until he found the faint, sloping trail leading to the bottom. A treacherous descent, it had landslided out in various places, forcing the traveler to navigate thousand-foot drop-offs. The only route from the ChamaRiver into the high mesa country eastward, it discouraged all but the bravest souls.

For that, Weathers was grateful.

He picked his way down, careful with himself and the burro, relieved when they approached the dry wash along the bottom. Joaquin Wash would take him past the entrance to the Maze and from there to the ChamaRiver. At Chama Bend there was a natural campsite where the river made a tight turn, with a sandbar where one could swim. A swim . . . now there was a thought. By tomorrow afternoon he would be in Abiquiu. First thing he'd phone Harry Dearborn (the battery on his sat-phone had died some days back) just to let him know. . . Weathers tingled at the thought of breaking the news.

The trail finally reached the bottom. Weathers glanced up. The canyon face was dark, but the late-afternoon sun blazed on the rimrock. He froze. A thousand feel above, a man, silhouetted on the rim, stared down at him.

He swore under his breath. It was the same man who had followed him up from Santa Fe into the Chama wilderness two weeks ago. People like that knew of Weathers's unique skill, people who were too lazy or stupid to do their own prospecting and hoped to jump his claim. He recalled the man: a scraggy type on a Harley, some biker wannabe. The man had trailed him through Espanola, past Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch, hanging two hundred yards back, making no effort at deception. He'd seen the same joker at the beginning of his hike into the wilderness. Still wearing the biker head scarf, he followed him on foot up Joaquin Wash from the ChamaRiver. Weathers had lost his pursuer in the Maze and reached the top of the Mesa of the Ancients before the biker found his way out. Two weeks later, here he was again-a persistent little bastard. Stem Weathers studied first the lazy curves of Joaquin Wash, then the rock spires marking the mouth of the Maze. He would lose him in the Maze again. And maybe this time the son of a bitch would remain lost.

He continued scrambling down the canyon, periodically checking his back trail. Instead of following, however, the man had disappeared. Perhaps the pursuer thought he knew a quicker way down.

Weathers smiled, because there was no other way down. After an hour of hiking down Joaquin Wash he felt his anger and anxiety subside. The man was an amateur. It wasn't the first time a fool had followed him out into the desert only to find himself lost. They all wanted to be like Stem, but they weren't. He'd been doing this all his life, and he had a sixth sense-it was inexplicable. He hadn't learned it in a textbook or studied it in graduate school, nor could all those Ph.D.s master it with their geological maps and synthetic aperture C-Band radar surveys. He succeeded where they failed, using nothing more than a donkey and a homemade ground-penetrating radar unit built on the back of an old IBM 286. No wonder they hated him.

Weathers's ebullient mood returned. That bastard wasn't going to spoil the greatest week of his life. The burro balked and Weathers stopped to pour some water into his hat, letting the animal drink, then cursed him forward. The Maze lay just ahead, and he'd enter there. Deep in the Maze, near Two Rocks, was a rare source of water-a rock ledge covered with maidenhair ferns, which dripped water into an ancient basin carved in the sandstone by prehistoric Indians. Weathers decided to camp there instead of at Chama Bend, where he'd be an open target. Better safe than sorry.

He rounded the great rock pillar marking the entrance. Thousand-foot canyon walls of aeolian sandstone soared above him, the majestic Entrada Formation, the compacted remains of a Jurassic desert. The canyon had a cool, hushed feeling, like the interior of a Gothic cathedral. He breathed deeply the redolent air, perfumed by salt cedar. Above, the light in the hoodoo rock formations had turned from electrum to gold as the sun sank toward the horizon.

He continued into the warren of canyons, approaching where HangingCanyon merged with MexicanCanyon-the first of many such branches. Not even a map would help you in the Maze. And the great depth of the canyons made GPS and satellite phones useless.

The first round struck Weathers in the shoulder from behind, and it felt more like a hard punch than a bullet. He landed on his hands and knees, his mind blank with astonishment. It was only when the report cracked and echoed through the canyons that he realized he'd been shot. There was no pain yet, just a buzzing numbness, but he saw that shattered bone protruded from a torn shirt, and pumping blood was splattering on the sand.

Jesus God.

He staggered back to his feet as the second shot kicked up the sand next to him. The shots were coming from the rim above him and to his right. He had to return to the canyon two hundred yards away-to the lee of the rock pillar. It was the only cover. He ran for all he was worth.

The third shot kicked up sand in front of him. Weathers ran, seeing that he still had a chance. The attacker had ambushed him from the rim above and it would take the man several hours to descend. If Weathers could reach that stone pillar, he might escape. He might actually live. He zigzagged, his lungs screaming with pain. Fifty yards, forty, thirty-

He heard the shot only after he felt the bullet slam into his lower back and saw his own entrails empty onto the sand in front of him, the inertia pitching him facedown. He tried to rise, sobbing and clawing, furious that someone would steal his find. He writhed, howling, clutching his pocket notebook, hoping to throw it, lose it, destroy it, to keep it from his killer-but there was no place to conceal it, and then, as if in a dream, he could not think, could not move ...

2

TOM BROADBENT REINED in his horse. Four shots had rolled down Joaquin

Wash from the great walled canyons east of the river. He wondered what it meant. It wasn't hunting season and nobody in his right mind would be out in those canyons target shooting.

He checked his watch. Eight o'clock. The sun had just sunk below the horizon. The echoes seemed to have come from the cluster of hoodoo rocks at the mouth of the Maze. It would be a fifteen-minute ride, no more. He had time to make a quick detour. The full moon would rise before long and his wife, Sally, wasn't expecting him before midnight anyway.

He turned his horse Knock up the wash and toward the canyon mouth, following the fresh tracks of a man and burro. Rounding a turn, a dark shape sprawled in front of him: a man lying facedown.

He rode over, swung off, and knelt, his heart hammering. The man, shot in the back and shoulder, still oozed blood into the sand. He felt the carotid artery: nothing. He turned him over, the rest of the man's entrails emptying onto the sand.

Working swiftly, he wiped the sand out of the man's mouth and gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Leaning over the man, he administered heart massage, pressing on his rib cage, almost cracking the ribs, once, twice, then another breath. Air bubbled out of the wound. Tom continued with CPR, then checked the pulse.

Incredibly, the heart had restarted.

Suddenly the man's eyes opened, revealing a pair of bright blue eyes that stared at Tom from a dusty, sunburnt face. He drew in a shallow breath, the air rattling in his throat. His lips parted.

"No . . . You bastard . . ." The eyes opened wide, the lips flecked with blood.

"Wait," said Tom. "I'm not the man who shot you."

The eyes peered at him closely, the terror subsiding-replaced by something else. Hope. The man's eyes glanced down at his hand, as if indicating something.

Tom followed the man's gaze and saw he was clutching a small, leather-bound notebook.

"Take ..." the man rasped.

"Don't try to talk."

"Take it..."

Tom took the notebook. The cover was sticky with blood.

"It's for Robbie . . ." he gasped, his lips twisting with the effort to speak. "My daughter . . . Promise to give it to her . . . She'll know how to find it. . ."

"It?"

". . . the treasure . . ."

"Don't think about that now. We're going to get you out of here. Just hang

» m-

The man violently clutched at Tom's shirt with a trembling hand.

"It's for her . . . Robbie . . . No one else . . . For God's sake not the police . . . You must. . . promise." His hand twisted the shirt with shocking force, a last spasm of strength from the dying man.

"I promise."

"Tell Robbie ... I... love ..."

His eyes defocused. The hand relaxed and slid down. Tom realized he had also stopped breathing.

Tom recommenced CPR. Nothing. After ten futile minutes he untied the man's bandanna and laid it over his face.

That's when it dawned on him: The man s killer must still be around. His eyes searched the rimrock and the surrounding scree. The silence was so profound it seemed that the rocks themselves held vigil. Where is the killer? There were no other tracks around, just those of the treasure hunter and his burro. A hundred yards off stood the burro itself, still packed, sleeping on its feet. The murderer had a rifle and the high ground. Broadbent might be in his sights even now.

Get out now. He rose, caught his horse's reins, swung up, and dug in his heels. The horse set off down the canyon at a gallop, rounding the opening to the Maze. Only when he was halfway down Joaquin Wash did Tom slow him to a trot. A great buttery moon was rising in the east, illuminating the sandy wash.

If he really pushed his horse, he could make Abiquiii in two hours.

3

JIMSON "WEED" MADDOX hiked along the canyon floor, whistling "Saturday Night Fever," feeling on top of the world. The .223 AR-15 had been field-stripped, wiped clean, and carefully secreted in a crevice blocked with stones.

The desert canyon took a turn, then another. Weathers, attempting the same ploy twice, had tried to lose him in the Maze. The old bastard might fool Jimson A. Maddox once. Never twice.

He strode down the wash, his lanky legs eating up the ground. Even with a map and a GPS he had spent the better part of a week tramping around lost in the Maze. It hadn't been a waste of time: now he knew the Maze and quite a bit of the mesa country beyond. He had had plenty of time to plan his ambush of Weathers-and he had pulled it off perfectly.

He inhaled the faintly perfumed air of the canyon. This was not so different from Iraq, where he had done a stint as a gunnery sergeant during Desert Storm. If there was a place the opposite of prison, this was it-nobody to crowd you, nobody in your face, no faggots, spies, or niggers to spoil the peace. Dry, empty, and silent.

He rounded the sandstone pillar at the entrance to the Maze. The man he had shot lay on the ground, a dark shape in the twilight.

He halted. Fresh hoofprints in the sand headed to and from the body.

He broke into a run.

The body lay on its back, arms by its side, bandanna carefully spread over its face. Someone had been here. The person might even have been a witness. He was on horseback and would be heading straight to the cops.

Maddox forced himself to calm down. Even on a horse, it would take the man a couple of hours to ride back to Abiquiii and at least several more hours to get the police and return. Even if they called a chopper it would have to fly up from Santa Fe, eighty miles to the south. He had at least three hours to get the notebook, hide the body, and get the hell out.

Maddox searched the body, turning out the pockets and rifling the man's day pack. His fist enclosed over a rock in the man's pocket and he pulled it out and examined it by flashlight. It was definitely a sample, something Corvus had pointedly asked for.

Now the notebook. Oblivious to the blood and entrails, he searched the body again, turned it over, searched the other side, kicked it in frustration. He looked around. The man's burro stood a hundred yards off, still packed, dozing.

Maddox undid the diamond hitch, pulled off the packsaddle. Yanking off the manty, he unhooked the canvas panniers and emptied them into the sand. Everything fell out: a jury-rigged piece of electronic equipment, hammers, chisels, U.S.G.S. maps, a handheld GPS unit, coffeepot, frying pan, empty food sacks, a pair of hobbles, dirty underwear, old batteries, and a folded-up piece of parchment.

Maddox seized the parchment. It was a crude map covered with clumsily drawn peaks, rivers, rocks, dotted lines, old-time Spanish lettering-and there, in the middle, had been inked a heavy, Spanish-style X.

An honest-to-God treasure map.

Strange that Corvus hadn't mentioned it.

He refolded the greasy parchment and stuffed it into his shirt pocket, then resumed his search for the notebook. Scrabbling around on the ground on his hands and knees, combing through the spilled equipment and supplies, he found everything a prospector might need-except the notebook.

He studied the electronic device again. A homemade piece of shit, a dented metal box with some switches, dials, and a small LED screen. Corvus hadn't mentioned it but it looked important. He better take that, too.

He went back through the stuff, opening up the canvas sacks, shaking out flour and dried beans, probing the panniers for a hidden compartment, ripping away the packsaddle's fleece lining. Still no notebook. Returning to the dead body, Maddox searched the blood-soaked clothes a third time, feeling for a rectangular lump. But all he found was a greasy pencil stub in the man's right pocket.

He sat back, his head throbbing. Had the man on horseback taken the notebook? Was it coincidence the man had showed up-or something else? A terrible idea came to him: the man on horseback was a rival. He was doing just what Maddox had been doing, trailing Weathers and hoping to cash in on his discovery. Maybe he'd gotten his hands on the notebook.

Well, Maddox had found the map. And it seemed to him that the map would be as important as the notebook, if not more so.

Maddox looked around at the scene, the dead body, the blood, the burro, the scattered mess. The cops were coming. With a great force of will, Maddox controlled his breathing, controlled his heart, calling up the meditation techniques he had taught himself in prison. He exhaled, inhaled, quelling the battering in his chest down to a gentle pulsing. Calm gradually returned. He still had plenty of time. He removed the rock sample from his pocket, and turned it over in the moonlight, then took out the map. He had those and the machine, which should more than satisfy Corvus.

In the meantime he had a body to bury.