The remainder of De Klerk’s testament went on for several more pages. Tucker read through it all, then folded the paper and put it back in his pocket.
“So?” Christopher asked.
He stood up. “Bukolov must hear this.”
38
March 21, 10:10 P.M.
Groot Karas Mountains, Namibia
With Kane leading the way, Tucker and Christopher made it back to the Cathedral. They had barely spoken after reading De Klerk’s letter. As they turned toward the double-barrel tunnels leading out from the cavern, Kane stopped ahead of them and turned. He gazed down the length of the Cathedral, toward the distant walls of sandbags. His ears were up, his posture rigid.
What had he picked out?
“QUIET SCOUT,” Tucker ordered.
Hunched low and padding softly, Kane took off across the former killing floor of the Cathedral. Tucker and Christopher followed, dodging through the forest of stalagmites. Near the end of the cavern, Kane leaped the sandbag barriers and stopped at the shaft leading out to the crooked corridor.
“HOLD,” Tucker ordered softly.
Kane stopped and waited for him.
Tucker took the lead, crawling through the twisting shaft of the corridor. He reached the end, where it straightened out. The slivers of pale moonlight blazed much brighter ahead. Then he heard it—what had likely caught Kane’s attention.
The faint rumble of a diesel engine.
Tucker picked his way along the last of the corridor. He dropped to his belly at the tumble of rocks. He peeked out one of the shining slivers and saw the canyon outside was lit up brightly from the headlamps of a truck parked in the canyon.
From that direction, a voice shouted in Russian.
Then a bark of laughter closer at hand.
A pair of boots stomped up to his hiding spot. A man, dressed in fatigues, dropped to a knee. Tucker froze, waiting for a shout of alarm, for gunfire.
But the soldier only tied up a loose bootlace, then regained his feet.
Tucker heard other men out there, too, moving about or talking quietly.
How many?
Then a deep baritone shouted harshly, gathering everyone back to the truck. A moment later, the timbre of the engine rose, rocks ground under turning tires, and darkness fell back over the canyon.
He listened, hearing the rumble fade slowly into the distance.
They were leaving.
These were clearly Kharzin’s men. Had they come to check out where the Range Rover had stopped for a few hours? Finding nothing here, were they continuing on to where Tucker had parked the booby-trapped vehicle, drawn by the transmitter?
Tucker placed his forehead against the cool rock and let out the breath he’d been holding. Relieved, he made his way back to Christopher and Kane. The three of them hurried back to the waterfall cavern.
Nothing had changed here.
Bukolov was where they had left him. Anya had rolled to her butt and leaned against a stalagmite, her arms still bound behind her. With her chin resting on her chest, she appeared to be asleep.
“How went the search?” Bukolov asked, standing and stretching.
“We need to talk,” Tucker said.
After ordering Kane to guard Anya, Tucker drew Bukolov to the mouth of one of the shotgun tunnels. He recounted their investigation, ending with his discovery of the charnel pit.
“What?” Bukolov said. “I don’t understand—”
“In that pit—staked to the wall of the shaft like a warning—I believe I found De Klerk’s missing pages.”
“What?” Shock rocked through the doctor.
Tucker passed the papers over. “He wrote this message in both Afrikaans and English. He must have been covering his bases, not knowing who might stumble upon that pit later: his fellow Boers or the British.”
“You read it?”
Tucker nodded. “De Klerk was terse but descriptive. About three weeks after they entered these caves, several men began getting sick. Terrible stomach pains, fever, body aches. De Klerk did his best to treat them, but one by one they began dying. In the final phase of the disease, the victims developed nodules beneath the skin of their lower abdomen and throat. These eventually erupted through the skin, bursting. While the British troops laid siege to the cave, De Klerk found himself overwhelmed by patients. As hard as he tried, he couldn’t find the source of the illness.”
“What then?”
“On day thirty, General Roosa ordered the remainder of the cave entrances sealed shut. He had become convinced everyone was infected—or soon would be—by some kind of plague. He was afraid that if the British breached their defenses they would also become infected, and the plague would spread to the outside world.”
“Not an unusual reaction,” Bukolov said. “Paranoia of pandemics ran rampant during the turn of the century. Scarlet fever, influenza, typhoid. It made normally rational men do crazy things.”
“I think it was more personal than that. According to De Klerk, General Roosa had lost his entire family to smallpox. Including his daughter Wilhelmina. He’d never quite gotten over it. According to De Klerk, the symptoms they saw among the men struck Roosa very close to home. It was too much like the pox that killed his family. In essence, the guy lost it.”
“So everyone died here. Despite what the records show, the British never did overrun this cave?”
“That record was likely falsified by the British colonel waging this siege,” Tucker said. “He came to kill Roosa and his men. And after what happened here, the end result was the same. Everyone dead. So the British colonel took credit and chalked it up as a victory.”
“Craven opportunist,” Bukolov muttered sourly, clearly bothered that history was so unreliable and anecdotal.
Tucker continued the story. “Shortly after Roosa and his Boers entombed themselves, the British left. The dead were dropped into the pit and burned along with their clothing, bedding, and personal belongings. Many committed suicide and were burned as well—including Roosa himself. De Klerk was the last man to go down, but before he lowered himself into the pit and put a gun to his head, he gave his diary to a passing Boer scout who discovered their hiding place. De Klerk took care not to contaminate the outsider. This was the man who returned the journals and diary to De Klerk’s widow.”
“And what about what he pinned to the wall of the pit?” Bukolov lifted the sheaf of papers.
“A warning for anyone who came here. On the last page of his testament, De Klerk lays out his theory of this disease. He thinks it was something the men ingested—small white bulbs that the soldiers thought were some kind of local mushroom. He even includes some beautifully detailed drawings. He wrote the name under them. Die Apokalips Saad.”
Bukolov’s eyes shone in the dark. “LUCA.”
Tucker nodded. “So it sounds like your organism infects more than just plants.”
“Not necessarily. You mentioned the worst of the victims’ symptoms were concentrated to the throat and abdomen. The human gut is full of plant material and plantlike flora. LUCA could thrive in that environment very well, wreaking digestive havoc on the host.”
“Does that mean LUCA poses a danger as a biological weapon, too?”
“Possibly. But only on a small scale. For humans to become infected, they would have to eat it or—like here—be confined in a closed space where airborne spores are concentrated.”
“How sure are you about that, Doc?”
“The science is complicated, but believe me when I say this: as a biological weapon, LUCA is virtually useless on the large scale—especially when a thimbleful of anthrax could wipe out a city. But as an ecological threat, a weaponized version of LUCA is a thermonuclear bomb.”
“Then let’s make sure that never happens.”
“In regards to that, I’ve made some progress.”
10:48 P.M.
When Tucker and Bukolov rejoined the others, Anya was awake. Christopher guarded her with his AR-15 rifle, while
Kane kept close watch.
Tucker ignored her and followed Bukolov to his makeshift office set up amid their stack of supplies. From the haphazard scatter of paper, notes, and journal pages, he had been busy.
“It’s here,” Bukolov said and grabbed De Klerk’s old diary from atop one of the boxes.
With the skill of a magician cutting a deck of cards, the doctor opened to the spot where it looked like pages had been cut out. He compared it to the pages Tucker had discovered.
“Looks like a perfect match,” Bukolov said.
Anya stirred, trying to see, to stand. But a deep-throated growl from Kane dropped her back to her butt.
“See. Here’s a crude, early rendition of LUCA in the old diary, a hazy sketch. A first-draft effort. What we had to work from before.” Bukolov fitted a sheet from Tucker’s collection into place. “This page was the diary’s next page. Before it was cut out. The finished masterpiece.”
The page in question depicted a deftly drawn sketch of a mushroomlike stalk with ruffled edges sprouting from a bulb. Colors of each structure were called out in tiny, precise print. Other drawings showed the same plant in various stages of growth.
Bukolov pointed to the earliest of the drawings. “This is LUCA in a dormant stage. A bulblike structure. De Klerk describes it here as a butter-yellow color. His measurements indicate it’s about the size of a golf ball. But don’t let its simplicity fool you. This structure is pure potential. Each cell in the bulb is a blank slate, a vicious chimera, waiting to unleash its fury on the modern world. It reproduces by infection and replication, as invasive as they come, an apex predator of the flora world. But if we could tame it, unlock the keys to its unique primordial genetics, anything could be possible.”
“But first we need to find it,” Tucker said.
Bukolov turned to him, a confused expression on his face. “I already explained where to find it.”
“When?”
“Just a moment ago, when I said, It’s here.”
Tucker had thought the doctor was referring to De Klerk’s diary. “What do you mean, it’s here?”
“Or it should be.” Bukolov stared around the cavern with frustration. “It is supposed to be here. In this cavern. At least according to De Klerk.”
“Why do you think that?”
Bukolov flipped the diary to the page before with the crude drawing of LUCA. “Here he talks about finding the dormant bulbs, but he never says where to find them. He’s a sly one. But see here in the margin of that section.”
Tucker leaned over. He couldn’t read the passage written in Afrikaans, but next to it was a crudely scribbled spiral.
“I always thought it was just an idle doodle,” Bukolov said. “I do it all the time. Especially when I’m concentrating. My mind wanders, then so does my pen.”
“But you think it’s significant now.”
“The drawing looks like water spilling down a bathtub drain.” Bukolov pointed to the torrent of water across the room. “It wasn’t a mindless squiggle. De Klerk was symbolically marking this passage about the discovery of the bulb with its location. As I said, it’s here. Under the bathtub drain.”
Bukolov closed the journal and tossed it aside. “I just have to find it. And now that I don’t have to play babysitter . . .”
With a glare toward Anya, Bukolov picked up an LED lantern and set off across the cavern.
For the moment, Tucker left the doctor to his search. Knowing now that Kharzin’s team was in the neighborhood, he had to prepare for the contingency that Bukolov might fail. His ruse with the booby-trapped Rover would not stop the enemy for long . . . nor did he know how many of the enemy his trick might take out.
He pictured his last glimpse of Felice Nilsson, leaning out the helicopter door, her lower face hidden by a scarf, her blond hair whipping in the wind.
It was too much to hope that she would be caught in that blast.
He had to be ready.
He crossed to the pile of boxes and packs, knelt down, and pulled over the stiff cardboard box holding the blocks of C-4.
“Christopher, can you start measuring out six-foot lengths of detonation cord? I’ll need about fifteen of them.”
Anya stared at them, her face unreadable.
Ignoring her, he calculated the best spots to set his charges to cause the most destruction. If Bukolov couldn’t find the bulbs of LUCA, he intended to make sure no one ever did, especially General Kharzin.
He unfolded the flaps of the box of C-4 and stared inside.
With a sinking drop of his stomach, he glanced again over to Anya. Her expression had changed only very slightly, the tiniest ghost of a smile.
“How?” he asked.
The box before him was packed full of dirt, about the same weight as C-4.
Anya shrugged. “Back at the campsite this morning, after you left. All your C-4 is buried out there.”
Of course, she had known of his contingency plan to blow the cave as a fail-safe and had taken steps to ensure it wouldn’t happen.
But she was wrong about one fact: all your C-4.
He had taken a block of the explosive with him as he hunted for guerrillas and ran into the pack of dogs. Later, he used half of it to rig the Rover. He still had the other half, but it was far too little to do any real damage here.
And now they were running out of time.
If they couldn’t blow the place up, that left only one path open to them: find the source of LUCA before Kharzin’s team returned.
So there was still hope—not great, but something.
Bukolov dashed it a moment later as he returned with more bad news. “I found nothing.”
11:12 P.M.
Fueled by anger and frustration, Tucker tossed the leg of an old broken chair across the cavern floor. It bounced and skittered away, splashing through a standing pool of water. Christopher and Bukolov worked elsewhere in the cavern, spread out, slowly circling the torrent of water falling through the room’s center.
Tucker wasn’t satisfied with Bukolov’s cursory search.
He had them sifting through some of the old Boer detritus and flotsam tossed against the walls by prior flooding.
But it was eating up time and getting them nowhere.
If they had a sample of LUCA, Kane could have quickly sniffed out the dark garden hidden here, but they didn’t. So he left the shepherd guarding Anya.
Christopher and Bukolov finally reached him. They’d made a complete loop of the cavern. He read the lack of success in their defeated expressions.
“Maybe I was wrong about the bathtub drain.” Bukolov stared up at the water cascading through the vortex. “Maybe it was just a doodle.”
Tucker suddenly stiffened next to him. “We’ve been so stupid . . .”
Christopher turned. “What?”
Tucker grabbed Bukolov by the shoulder. “De Klerk was marking the location. It is a drain.”
The doctor looked up again toward the ceiling.
“No.” Tucker pointed to the floor, to where the flood of water flowing down from above either pooled—or drained through fissures in the floor. “That’s the drain depicted by De Klerk. The water must be going somewhere.”
Bukolov’s eyes went wide. “There’s more cavern below us!”
Christopher stared across the cavern. “One problem. If you’re right, how do we get down there?”
Tucker stared across the expanse of the room. “De Klerk has been cagey all along. He wouldn’t have left the entrance open. He would have sealed or covered it somehow.” Tucker circled his arm in the air. “One more time around. We need to find that opening.”
It was accomplished quickly—now that they knew what to look for.
Christopher called him over. “See here!”
Tucker and Bukolov joined him beside a thigh-high boulder not far from the torrent. Excess water sluiced through a four-inch crack under it and vanished away.
“I believe the stone is covering a larger hole,” Christ
opher said.
“I think you’re right.”
With both Christopher and Tucker putting their shoulders to it, they were able to dislodge and roll the boulder aside.
The hole was small, only two feet wide. All three of them leaned over the opening, shining their lights down into the depths. A cavern opened below, its floor about seven feet below them.
Tucker squinted, noting the protrusions sticking up from the floor.
For a few moments, he thought he was staring at a cluster of stalagmites, but they were too uniform, and the beam of his headlamp glinted off a hint of brass beneath a greenish patina.
“What the hell are those?” Bukolov said.
“Those are artillery shells.”
39
March 21, 11:34 P.M.
Groot Karas Mountains, Namibia
Tucker lowered himself to his belly and hung his head through the opening. He panned his lamp around the space. The spread of upright shells looked like some giant’s bed of nails. Turning, he faced the others.
“There’re at least two dozen shells down there.”
“What type of artillery are they?” Christopher asked.
“Can’t be sure. Judging by the size, I’d guess twelve-pounders. British Royal Horse Artillery units used them in their cannons during the wars.”
“Are they live?” said Bukolov.
“More than likely.”
“Why are they here?” Christopher pressed.
Tucker considered it a moment. “I’m guessing because of the black powder inside them. The Boers were probably using the powder in the shells to reload bullets.”
“The Boers had to be resourceful to survive,” Bukolov commented.
So do we.
Tucker shifted around, swinging his legs toward the hole. Somewhere down below must be De Klerk’s dark garden. “Doc, tell me again what to look for. Anything I should be watching for.”
Bukolov shook his head. “I don’t have the time to give you a crash course in botany. Nor have you read all of De Klerk’s notes. I should go with you. Besides, why should you have all the fun?”
Christopher looked unconvinced. “Doctor Bukolov, perhaps you didn’t hear Mr. Tucker correctly. Those shells are live and likely very unstable by now.”
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