Sigma Force 10 - The Sixth Extinction

by James Rollins

  “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

  April 30, 7:20 A.M. AMT


  Boa Vista, Brazil

  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.

  7:45 A.M.

  “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.