He removed his hand from her shoulder.
When she finally summoned the courage to turn around, he was gone.
Again, he hadn’t made a sound.
FIVE
Altai Mountain Range
Siberia
8:12 p.m. NOVST
(7:12 a.m. PST)
The route up the mountain had been easy enough to follow, even under the darkness and the blizzard, thanks to the ice screws that had already been strategically placed for them. With every meter they ascended, Spears felt himself closing in on his son, which only served to amplify his dread. After scouring the region at the base and encountering no evidence of fallen climbers, he knew exactly what they would find in the cave.
His son and the rest of his party were dead.
He knew this on the instinctual level that only a father could. The blame was his to bear. When Nelson had announced the discovery of the skull fragments months ago…the look in his eyes, the excitement in his voice…Spears had finally understood that this was his son’s life mission. Never in Nelson’s largely pampered and unchallenged existence had he shown that kind of passion for anything. What kind of father would he be if he didn’t do everything in his power to make his child’s dreams come true? He had the resources and the connections. A few well-placed phone calls and the deal had been sealed. Perhaps the expeditionary team had been apprised of the conditions behind Nelson’s appointment, but, as per the arrangement, Nelson had been none the wiser. The pure elation in his voice when he had called to share the news that he’d been selected to join the world’s foremost experts on the expedition of a lifetime had been worth every penny. Not since his mother left them when he was barely ten years old had Spears heard his son that happy. And now Nelson was gone. There were no words to explain how he knew this. He just did. If he was going to have to carry the guilt with him for the rest of his life, then he needed to know why. What happened to his son up here on this mountain? That was the one question that would haunt him forever if he didn’t learn the truth right here and now. And if he discovered that someone was to blame, he would spend his remaining days—and his not insignificant fortune—making sure that person was held accountable.
Once Spears and his men reached the cave, they donned their thermal/infrared night vision fusion goggles, which allowed them to clearly see the cavern around them and the heat signatures of any warm-blooded animals that crossed their path. Anything below eighty-one degrees Fahrenheit appeared in shades of black and midnight blue, while above that the scale ascended through lighter blues and purples to reds and oranges, and finally to the brilliant yellow of human body temperature. Everything above one-hundred-two degrees appeared solid white.
They found the first sign of Nelson’s party near the back of the cave. A telltale diagonal spatter across a pyramid of skulls and the wall behind it. An arterial spurt. A puddle of blood was frozen on the stone floor and surrounded by sloppy smudges and palm prints. They followed a broad smear deep into a crevice, where it stopped at the mouth of a vertical shaft.
Spears unpacked his Colt IAR—a nine-pound, compact infantry automatic rifle—and slung the strap around his neck so that it hung against his chest.
“They dragged the body over here and just rolled it off the edge,” Spears whispered.
“They?” Bristow said.
Spears nodded at the ground to his right, where a dozen partial, bloody footprints overlapped. They were faint, but the points of contact from the ball of the foot and the toes were distinct enough to conclude that the feet were bare. And definitely human.
“Cover me,” Spears said.
He swung his legs down into the stone chute and started down the handholds. Every third rung, he glanced down to confirm there were no heat signatures waiting for him. It was a bottleneck, a prime spot for an ambush. As he descended, he tried to visualize what must have happened. To whom did the footprints belong, and why weren’t they wearing shoes? Had the prints been made by whoever killed and dragged the body away, or by several people attempting to haul a wounded comrade to safety?
Spears found his answer at the bottom of the earthen tube. A starburst of blood marred the granite where the body impacted, spattering the ground and the walls. A diminishing smear led deeper into a large cavern that echoed with dripping water. Above him, the ceiling was fuchsia with bats hanging upside down and knifing between the stalactites. The fading footprints guided him to the center of the cavern, where they vanished altogether, leaving him only with the body’s bloody trail, which was little more than a stroke from a nearly dry paintbrush.
His men clattered down the tube and hurried to catch up with him as quietly as they could. What little of their faces showed around their goggles in the ovular gap of their balaclavas glowed golden behind the deep blue cloud of their exhalations.
From the corner of his narrowed field of view, Spears saw the vague outline of what appeared to be the carcass of a bear, upon which several orange rats with flicking tails continued to feast. He didn’t dare risk a better look for fear of losing the trail.
“There’s more blood over here,” Bristow whispered. “Whoever worked this guy over really did a number on him. Christ. There are even spatters on the stalactites.”
“Bristow,” Poole snapped. “A little restraint.”
“Is there a body?” Spears asked, but he needn’t have wasted his breath. Two more steps and the smears where the second set of remains had been dragged intersected his path at the opening of a crevice.
He pulled the IAR over his head, shouldered its short stock, and advanced in a shooter’s stance. The passage narrowed to the point that he was forced to crouch. He moved slowly, watching for the first hint of body heat through the goggles as he neared the terminus. Stealthily placed footsteps joined his from behind. He detected the etchings on the walls from his peripheral vision, but refused to so much as glance away from his sights.
The tunnel opened into a larger room that felt at once disorienting. A mat of what at first looked like snow had drifted up against the far wall, and yet the air was stagnant and warm. There was no breeze to suggest access to the outside world. No, it wasn’t snow. It was sand, clumped and crusted where it had aggregated with the blood. One section was positively black with it. How in the hell—?
Spears stopped dead in his tracks.
“I see them too,” Poole whispered from behind him.
Spears waved his men around and to the left, while he moved to the right until they formed a half-circle around the dune.
Five dark blue plumes rose from various points in the sand like miniature smokestacks, barely warm enough to register in the thermal range. They rose in short bursts, then dissipated into the air. After another moment, they would rise again. They were rhythmic, although each cycled independent of the others.
Spears looked from Abrams to Poole to Bristow and back again, at the nearly identical clouds that bloomed through their masks. Something was down there. Buried in the sand. Something that was still breathing.
He imagined Nelson, buried alive. Unable to move. Terrified. Knowing with grim finality that he was going to die. What kind of monster would do such a thing to another human being? Rage boiled inside of him. Whoever was responsible for this would never again see the light of day.
“Get them out of there,” Spears said through bared teeth.
He prayed his son was still alive down there, prayed for the first time in as long as he could remember.
A screeching sound from his right.
It was a sound he knew far too well. He had heard it in the cargo holds of aircraft carriers, in the rubble beneath bombed buildings where trapped men lay dying, in the tents that served as field morgues where the fallen were stacked like corded wood to be shipped back home.
He watched Abrams and Poole fall upon the sand and begin excavating the loose grains while Bristow covered their backs and the entrance to the cavern through which they had just passed for several beats before turning a
way and following the etched wall toward the sound. Another passage opened in the granite, at the far end of which he saw small orange shapes scurrying past the orifice and leaping up onto teeming columns of their ranks that reached all the way up out of sight. The riot of shrieks and squeals echoed down the tunnel, masking the sounds of digging behind him as he strode directly toward them, rifle at the ready.
The racket abruptly ceased when he reached the end of the passage. Hundreds of whiskered faces turned in his direction. They remained perfectly still, scrutinizing him as he walked toward them. The moment he entered the larger chamber, a shrill chorus of squeals erupted and they fled as one. A glowing orange flood poured outward from the center of the room and crashed against the arched walls. They scurried straight up what appeared to be thousands of alcoves, a massive honeycomb, and disappeared into the recesses. He felt them scurry over his boots and up his legs, but he didn’t bat an eye. His sole focus was on the four bodies suspended by their ankles from the ceiling above a sticky, congealed pool of blood. He was only peripherally aware of the arcs of blood transecting the myriad alcoves and the grinning skulls leering down at him, of the tatters of fabric littering the floor, of the horrible stench of decomposition. The corpses had been hung so that their hands dangled several inches above the floor. What little skin remained was desiccated and leathery, the flesh stripped to the bone in sections. The buttocks and genitalia had been reduced to messes of macerated tissue. Only the hair remained to distinguish the four bodies, but it was enough. Spears would have recognized that unkempt blonde mane anywhere. He had spent the better part of the last decade fighting with his son to cut it.
His son.
Strung up by his heels.
Gutted and bled like a stag from a bough.
The implications struck him like a slap across the face. If these were the four members of the missing expedition, then—
“Fall back,” he said in little more than a whisper. He wrenched his gaze from his son’s remains and sprinted back down the passage. “Fall back!”
He heard a shout and the chatter of automatic gunfire.
All hell broke loose in a maelstrom of color.
* * *
Spears saw the white flashes of muzzle flare through the haze of dust at the end of the stone corridor. Shouts and screams were punctuated by the triple-tap clapping of the IARs. His own weapon seated against his shoulder, he tried to decipher the chaos as he burst into the chamber. Orange rats scurried at the periphery of the dune, squalling as they darted away from the melee. His men were discernible by their darker coloration, their body heat contained by their gear, save for the yellow ovals of their faces. The other bodies in the room stood apart, lithe gold forms with white cores in their skulls, chests, and groins. They darted away from the bullets with acrobatic skill: lunging, diving, ducking, crouching, moving with such speed and agility that they were mere streaks of light.
Spears heard the whir of a carbine and knew one of his men was in trouble.
Bristow shouted something unintelligible as he cast aside his clip and tried to load another.
A golden blur was upon him before Spears could even sight it down and pull the trigger. Bristow screamed and hit the ground on his backpack, his assailant on his chest, its arms rising and falling like striking adders. It buried its face in the crook of his neck, silencing his cries. A pulsing arc of flame-yellow spurted from Bristow’s throat when the golden form jerked its head away and swiveled to face Spears.
He squeezed the trigger and the back of its head exploded like a firecracker, painting the wall behind it with spatters that quickly faded through the spectrum of colors.
“There’re too many of them!” Abrams yelled. He swiveled to fire to his left and then back to his right in an effort to pin his attackers to the rear wall. Spears counted four more of them, but there was no way of knowing how many more of them there might be inside the mountain. “We can’t hold them off forever in here!”
One of them was thrown backward, a white ribbon unspooling from its shoulder. It barely hit the ground before it was back on its feet again, cradling its arm.
Spears stumbled into a pit in the sand where one of them had been hiding and fell to his knees. He swept his rifle across the room to buy enough time to right himself. The bullets strafed the granite with a showcase of sparks. One of the bodies was lifted into the air. It struck the wall and collapsed to its chest. This one made no effort to rise.
A carbine whirred.
“Cover me!” Poole shouted.
He dropped to one knee in an effort to quickly change his clip, but they were on him before Spears could bring his rifle to bear on them.
Poole shrieked as he was driven into the sand with two of them on top of him.
Spears and Abrams fired as one. The air filled with blood in explosions of sunspots and snowflakes. The bodies thrashed and convulsed, dancing in the crossfire, before finally lying still.
“Jesus Christ!” Abrams shouted.
Spears whirled to his right. The lone remaining figure blew past in a blur. He fired a fusillade that peppered the wall behind it as the shape hurtled past him. It disappeared into the passage leading to his son’s remains. By the time Spears reached the tunnel, only darkness waited.
Half of his team was dead. His son was dead. The hell if he was going to allow one of them to escape.
“They just came up out of the sand.” Abrams’s voice cracked when he spoke. “We were digging and all of a sudden…they just…just—”
Spears grabbed Abrams by the straps of his backpack and slammed him against the stone wall.
“Snap out of it, for God’s sake! There’s still one more out there!”
“And Lord only knows how many others.”
Spears shoved him again, turned away, and started down the tunnel.
Fine. If he had to do this by himself, then so be it.
There was no sign of color in the domed cavern. The only source of movement was the hanging bodies, which slowly twirled and shivered back into place, undoubtedly disturbed by the gold shape that had charged through them on its way to the egress on the opposite side of the chamber. Spears blew past his son’s corpse and jogged down the corridor, which constricted as it wound to the right down a steepening slope. He barely identified the pitfall in time to keep from plummeting into the stone chute.
He fired a trio of shots down into the darkness to buy himself the time and space to descend, then scurried down another series of smooth handholds. Twenty meters down, he turned from the wall and stepped into a cavern choked by odd geological formations. The ceiling was barely five feet above his head and positively rippled with bats. The stalactites and stalagmites nearly met, as though he were in some great fanged mouth as it prepared to close. The echo of dripping condensation hinted at standing water ahead and to his right. He wound a circuitous route through what felt like a petrified forest, glancing from one side to the other, prepared to squeeze the trigger at the first sign of a heat signature.
Abrams made a sound like a clap of thunder when he dropped to the ground at the bottom of the ladder.
Spears didn’t risk a glance back over his shoulder. With the speed his adversary had demonstrated, he needed to stay focused on what lay ahead of him. A fuchsia glow drew him forward. It expanded across the floor like an oil spill.
He splashed down into ankle-deep water so warm he could feel the heat through his boots. The ground grew slicker with each step until he was in past his knees. A gentle current tugged at his legs, but he couldn’t tell exactly where the water flowed. The pool was maybe ten meters wide and appeared to become shallower to the sides. The pinkish glare skewed his perception of the surrounding darkness. When he eased out of the water onto the far bank, it took a moment for the aperture of the goggles to rationalize the faint spatters on the cavern floor. He couched and examined them as they cooled from midnight blue to black.
The question mark shape of the ball of a foot and the heel.
> The smudges from the toes.
He followed the direction in which they led with his eyes, then lunged to his feet and into a full sprint, ducking and weaving through the stone slalom, unable to clearly see more than two strides ahead of him.
Splashing water behind him confirmed that he hadn’t lost Abrams.
The roof lowered abruptly, grazing the top of his head and knocking him to his knees. He was going to have to crawl from here and hope the quarters didn’t grow tighter. The footprints were no longer visible. His quarry knew these caves far better than he did. If he had guessed the direction of its flight wrong, it could potentially elude them forever.
A flash of gold in his peripheral vision to the right.
By the time he turned his head, it was gone.
He stared into a tunnel barely wider than the mouth of a fox’s den. The heat signature had definitely come from inside there. Without a second thought, he shed his backpack and shimmied in after it, pushing his weapon across the ground ahead of him. If he didn’t hurry, his adversary would have ample time to turn the tables on him. He dragged himself forward with his elbows and shoved off the walls with his toes as fast as he could until he finally crawled out into another cave.
The walls glittered with quartz. The jagged ceiling was so low that he couldn’t stand fully erect. He eased onward more cautiously now, sweeping his rifle from left to right and back again, his finger tight on the trigger. Stone outcroppings created natural hiding places he was easily able to clear with his thermal vision.
Scraping sounds behind him announced Abrams’s arrival. The nearly silent footsteps told him that Abrams had read the situation exactly as he had. They had their quarry cornered. There was nowhere left for it to run. Abrams would guard his rear in case it somehow got past him, but the dénouement was all his.
The rear wall drew contrast in shades of blue and black. For a second, he feared there might have been a tunnel he missed, until he saw the golden form cowering in a small recess at the foot of the wall, its hands over its face and its knees tucked protectively against its chest as though it could somehow hide behind them.
Predatory Instinct: A Thriller Page 4